The problems which biblical criticism creates for Catholics cannot be disposed of so summarily as Michael Dummet thinks. He dismisses “ most modern Catholic Biblical exegesis” on the grounds that it is “dishonest”, in the sense that exegetes arbitrarily postulate ancient literary forms among which they proceed to classify parts of the New Testament they cannot take literally, without their having to admit that such parts are thus either fiction or fraud. The dishonesty lies in claiming texts as divinely inspired while refusing to take them at face value. It seems to me, however, for a start, that Mr. Dummett goes wrong on two important matters of fact.

First, as to pseudonymous writing, it is just not true that exegetes have invented the existence of such literature in order to place a document such as the Second Epistle of St. Peter within a well-known ancient literary convention, i.e. the convention of writing letters as if they were being written by some famous man already deceased. Not only was there an abundance of such pseudonymous writing in the ancient world at large but evidence for it exists in Judaism as well as in early Christianity. In spite of much research and speculation (see Kummel, page 362 for bibliography), many questions remain unanswered, particularly about the motives of such writing. The principle of pseudonymous writing was not generally questioned, though cases of forgery and fraud were certainly denounced. It should not be lightly assumed that New Testament writings are pseudonymous, but there are no grounds for asserting that pseudonymous writing was necessarily dishonest, less still for asserting that as a literary convention it never existed or was soon forgotten (think of the apocryphal Christian literature of the second century and later).

During the recently celebrated women’s liberation year, the cry—and indeed a just cry—was for equal rights with men in those social and economic areas where male dominance reigns. For the same work, the same wages, no matter the sex; in marriage, equality of status and the same rights, for both husband and wife; in general social benefits, no difference between men and women. The Church for countless centuries, despite the relative franchise it gave to women in its very early days based on a universalistic ethic, has been an impregnable bastion of male power. No wonder the call for female liberation has penetrated into the traditional churches, especially the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The result so far is not very encouraging. Admittedly women are allowed to do more than in former years and are often strongly represented in local Church councils, but to become a priest, and therefore eventually a bishop remains a strictly tabooed function for women. In the Free churches, the interdict has been removed in modem times but few women have in fact been ordained and even fewer have reached positions of prominence as Church leaders.

But if women’s cards are poor in bidding for equality in function and leadership, they have a very good hand in their general support of the church. Their attendance and devotion are out of all proportion to the position they occupy in the hierarchical structure. At Mass on Sundays, on weekdays, coming out of a Baptist or Anglican Church, who predominates? Always the answer is females. This phenomenon which appears so widespread invites curiosity and enquiry. The parish priest wonders about it and seeks schemes to restore the balance, for example by providing, as was the custom, men’s clubs and boys’ clubs, and getting men to do masculine things in and around the parish.

I had better begin my review of Mary Douglas’ Implicit Meanings by justifying my title, which might otherwise seem unjustly sneering. If we like to divide human activities into “work” and “play”, fashion parades are distressingly both and neither. People strain for the glory of leisure. Can fashion then be linked with art and sport as an exacting celebration of the human capacity for spontaneous creativity? It lacks surely their moral pretensions, appealing with crude honesty to envy, vanity, and the pursuit of the ephemeral. Yet in the concept of fashion and the event of the fashion parade are certain resemblances to the presuppositions of social anthropology, particularly as expressed in the work of Professor Douglas. They remind us sharply that culture is something made by people, and that choice can bring change, indeed that change should be seen as part of the nature of culture. Again, each set of fashions must, like a culture, have a certain internal consistency, partly explicit, partly implicit. Then, in fashion as in culture, the distinctions which we can make readily enough between the aesthetical, the ethical, and the utilitarian become difficult to apply in practice. Culture, like fashion, is first tailored to the human body and then in turn affects our perception of it.

This metaphor criticises, as well as elucidating, social anthropology. Inevitably, social anthropology tends to stress the autonomy and specificity of cultures, and thus tends to blur our perception of the underlying unity of human nature. Inevitably, too, social anthropology is attracted to the analysis of the more elaborate and formal patterns of human doing and thinking, kinship terminologies, the etiquette of gift exchange, ritual and mythology, neglecting the more formless and unspecific aspects of human behaviour.

When a stage work of exceptional length and complexity not only survives for 100 years, but grows in popularity despite virtually insoluble problems of presentation, it is appropriate to mark the centenary by asking why this should be. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, is spread over four evenings and the uncut music requires between 14 and 16 hours for performance. To say that the appeal of the work reflects a general hankering after the larger than life merely touches the surface of the matter and it is necessary to grasp the extraordinary richness of The Ring. Apart from its musical grandeur it has a notable intellectual content, a wide emotional range, a potent symbolism and a capacity to involve the spectator in ways which he may hardly realise during or after the performance.

The literature concerning Wagner in general and The Ring in particular is very extensive and different commentators have sought and found different kinds of evidence for pronouncing the cycle a work of genius and a landmark in Western cultural achievement. English speaking commentators have been prominent beginning with Bernard Shaw who published his handbook to The Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite, in 1898. This is now felt to be a curious mixture of good sense and nonsense, the latter arising from Shaw’s own attitudes and limitations. He was a social crusader and a dramatist who felt that stage works must have a serious underlying purpose even when dressed up as comedies, and the message of the piece should be perfectly clear. It is hardly surprising that he saw the first three parts of The Ring as an intricate but perfectly comprehensible allegory concerning the evils of capitalism, the exploitation of the poor and the mechanism of revolutionary change. His detailed analysis, though ingenious, now seems over-tidy and glib.

It is difficult to differ in one’s immediate reactions from the critical consensus on Peter Levi’s Collected Poems. The general impression is of a competent body of verse produced largely independently of the various ‘movements’ contemporary with it, descended in its early phase from Spender, derived in its later style from Eliot, and marked by an obscurity arising, as Colin Falk recognised, from the absence of “an authenticating life…whose depths and anxieties get smoothed over…without being built up into the poetic structure”. Obscurity of this kind is not part of the difficulty characteristic of much significant ‘modem’ poetry: a problem of complex and contradictory things said and shown, often overburdening the signifier, in an already allusive and elliptical discourse. Levi’s obscurity is, rather, part of a process of exclusion and elision, a smoothing over which deprives his work of a memorable presence.

To ascribe this as most reviewers have done to the limitations of Levi’s imagination is an inadequate explanation. What is needed is some discrimination, however cursory, amongst obscurities: a distinction between that obscurity which is symptomatic of innovation and gives major works their multivalent character; and the indeterminancy of works where a lack of depth and conception make their resonances finally unmeaningful and insignificant.

Levi’s obscurity, I want to suggest, arises from a conceptual naivete. His desire to smooth over conflict results in a suppression of contradictions that is made possible by his belief in an immanent, essential spiritual unity. This influences a mode which, in avoiding argument, is often either sententiously preachy or passive; either distanced from the problem in its generality—“O Great God what is human life like?”—or immersed indistinguishably in the problem itself—“I think England is prison of a kind/and in that prison I am blank wall”.