Fables and Symbols—II

Extract

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.