ABSTRACT
Philip Rieff is a social philosopher, the most conservative of the troika that philosophize in the therapeutic mode. Accepting the putative "fact" that religion is dead, Rieff revives the discussion of the importance of god-terms in a manner which links the post-Freudian concern with faith with the higher criticism of the nineteenth century. The great achievement of the higher critics was to trace a path between the Scylla of dogmatic literalism and the Charybdis of rational disbelief by altering our expectations of the veridical character of the Bible. The effect of Matthew Arnold's performance as a higher critic is to poeticize religion and to sacralize poetry, as we can see in the famous passage about the future of poetry. If the Therapeutic According to Rieff is in the tradition of the higher criticism, it is an advance upon, its original inspiration. Rieff comes to the higher criticism through an analogous Judaism/Jewishness which searches out the spiritual law in t.
