His contribution to the inaugural issue, "Auden: The Quality of Doubt," opens by commenting on the "religiosity of tone" in the poet's account of the 1930s, that "low dishonest decade" when men's ideals went so fatally awry. But Kristol goes farther. Putting the point "more bluntly than the poetry permits," he finds in Auden's recent poems a concept of sin — the "permeating fact of evil" — that belies all social attempts at the regeneration of mankind.

"A Christian Experiment" in the next issue is a review of Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone's novel about a Marxist revolutionary who becomes a Christian revolutionary. Rebutting Thomas Mann's dictum that "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms," Kristol proposes quite the opposite: "Our political destiny is on the way to being formulated in religious terms." If Silone's novel is a failure, he concludes, the fault lies in its lack of the "acute awareness of subsistent evil," so that the religious theme is reduced to a mere "romantic sentiment," a fatal "revolutionary innocence."

Kristol's final article in Enquiry, "The Moral Critic"(1944), is a review of Trilling's book on the English novelist E.M. Forster. It opens with a discussion of Trilling's earlier essay on Eliot's "Idea of a Christian Society," where Trilling had quoted Matthew Arnold's maxim about the function of criticism: "to praise elements that for the fullness of spiritual perfection are wanted." By that criterion, Trilling judged the prevailing "liberal-socialist ideology" to be sadly wanting — which prompts Kristol to observe that Trilling's own work, by contrast, "partakes of the normal religio-ethical tone so consistently set forth by men like Maritain, Niebuhr, [Christopher] Dawson." But it is Kristol, not Trilling, who cites these theologians, pleased to find this religio-ethical tone in the writings of a man he so much admires.

There was nothing in the young Kristol's background — he was all of 22 when he wrote the first of these articles — to account for his interest in religion, let alone theology. Indeed, there was much to tell against it: family, friends, schooling, radical politics, and, above all, a secular culture where religion represented something retrograde, even dangerous. It was quite on his own that Kristol read those theologians, took seriously such unfashionable ideas as sin, and gave expression to them in the unlikely medium of a journal of radical thought.

It was in an even unlikelier setting, the army in World War II, that he continued his self-education, plunging, as he said, into "theological literature with an ecumenical interest." After serving in the infantry in Germany, he was transported, after VE Day, to Marseille to await shipment to the Far East. When that was forestalled by the dropping of the atom bomb over Japan, he filled out the remaining year of his military service in Marseille as chief company clerk, with two German prisoners of war attending to the routine duties of the office. Brushing up on his French, he enthusiastically read a score of magazines and books featuring not only the popular French existentialists but also the prolific Catholic theologians. It was, he would fondly recall, "a kind of postgraduate sabbatical."