It was suggested in the first part of this essay that in the modern period concentration by critics and others on the importance of the poetic symbol has had consequences that are unexpected and sometimes unfortunate. We are constantly being told in the most intellectually refined ways that the poet’s function is different from that of the moralist or the philosopher; however, constant repetition is bound to suggest that the poet’s role bears some analogy to theirs.

I want in this second part to look at the history of the literary symbol and the changes in its involvement with religious symbolism and belief. In doing so it will, I think, become obvious that just as the post-Romantic critic has, by exalting the symbol run the danger of simply offering, with a ritual gesture and a whiff of incense, a paraphrasable content, so the modern theologian has tended to reduce and translate symbolism on the assumption that what is for salvation must be expressible in immediate historical and social terms (Christian Marxism, aspects of the translated liturgy, the New English Bible, etc.). It is to be suspected that this is another version of the fallacy which would see the image as a mirror-image of some ordinary human experience.

This is surely bound to fail, but the need to attempt to make some connections has become irrepressible. In this first article, then, I want to use Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the present state of British culture to introduce some quotations from The Dialectics of Liberation. What I am getting at here can emerge, if ever it does at all, only as we proceed. The point is that there is something wrong with British culture: what Anderson refers to as its ataraxy, its imperviousness to certain disturbing ideas; and there is a chance that the utopian dimension evoked once again by some recent thinking may prove quickening and liberatory. In a second article I want to bring out the ambivalent connections between the work of Herbert Marcuse and that of Martin Heidegger. Finally, in a third article, it should be possible to relate all this to the English literary-critical tradition and to the classical moment in Catholic theology.

Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, first published in 1959 and now widely available as a paperback, has recently been hailed as a ‘classic’, to which ‘all critics of English philosophy owe a great debt’. This salutation of another orthodoxy (that by the standards of a revolutionary and internationalist political consciousness English philosophy is trivial, after all) comes in an important essay by Perry Anderson in the fiftieth issue of New Left Review (July-August 1968). This is the most persuasive and thorough-going offer of new bearings for the critique of contemporary British culture that has so far been made.

Those who cannot conceive of change in the Church’s attitude to contraception rely, according to Mr Dummett’s February article in New Blackfriars, on two main lines of argument. One is described as the ‘Where do we draw the line ?’ form of argument—if contraception is lawful, then perhaps so also are sterilization, abortion, sodomy, masturbation, fornication or even adultery. The other argument is also of the same form (though Mr Dummett does not so describe it) for it asks ‘Where do we draw the line?’—if the Church’s moral teaching is untrustworthy here, how can we be sure that it is to be trusted on any other subject ?

Both arguments, it seems to me, presuppose the asking and answering of a more fundamental question: to what extent can lines be drawn at all when moral issues are at stake ? The encyclical takes its stand on ‘what is called the “objective” moral order laid down by God’, and reminds parents that ‘they are not free to define an honest course of action in any way whatsoever that they choose (modo omino proprio ac libero), since they are bound, on the contrary, to act in accordance with the plan of the divine creator’ (para. 10). This again, it seems to me, presupposes a fundamental question: what sort of ‘objectivity’ is here being referred to, in what sense has God indeed got a ‘plan’ ?

‘In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person or the like; and I must put all my fervour in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone; like a stick in the hands of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him.’

St Ignatius’s ideals about the nature of authority were derived from sixteenth-century Spanish culture and although perhaps not quite so drastically expressed today, his view of the Superior/Subordinate relationship still constitutes a central element in the thought pattern of many participants in the modern debate in the Church. This dialogue should be of interest to social psychologists, because it illustrates one of the recurring themes of that discipline, the forms of authority and people’s perception of them.

Before the war, Kurt Lewin and his associates Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White tried to compare the effects of three kinds of adult leadership on the behaviour of a group of American boys. The setting for the experiment was a number of small ‘clubs’, ostensibly set up to carry out a variety of craft and recreational activities, and the adult leaders of the clubs were described as Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez-faire.