Vol. 4 No. 17 · 16 September 1982
pages 5-6 | 3344 words
Armadillo
Christopher Ricks
- Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent by Donald Davie
University of Notre Dame Press, 154 pp, £11.85, June 1982, ISBN 0 268 00852 3
- These the Companions by Donald Davie
Cambridge, 220 pp, £12.50, August 1982, ISBN 0 521 24511 7
Donald Davie’s critical arguments are often happily reminiscential, and his reminiscences are often happily argumentative, so the difference in kind between these two admirable books doesn’t make for any great difference of temper. The critical essays which make up Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent are an act of making good; they fulfil the promise and they repair the deficiencies of Davie’s earlier book on Dissent and culture, A Gathered Church. The recollections gathered as These the Companions are an act of making permanent, with such permanence as time has; they fulfil a promise often made and often kept in Davie’s poems but which these days asks, too, for the expatiating element of prose: the exercise of ‘the faculty of pious memory’.
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Letters
Vol. 4 No. 19 · 21 October 1982
From Nicolas Walter
SIR: In his review of Dissentient Voice (LRB, Vol.4, No 17), Christopher Ricks quotes at length Donald Davie’s attack on E. P. Thompson’s assimilation of the terminology of ‘Dissenting Protestantism’ or ‘Old Dissent’ with the ideology of atheist humanism, but he doesn’t comment on the factual status of Davie’s statement: ‘There truly is a point at which Believer and Unbeliever part company; there truly is not, as Thompson and many thousands suppose, a continuous band of sentiment and opinion all the way from Belief to Unbelief.’ The fact is that Davie is wrong about this fact. Perhaps there really should be, but there truly is not, a point at which Belief and Unbelief part company; perhaps there really should not be, but there truly is, a continuous spectrum all the way from extreme Belief to extreme Unbelief. This may irritate a tough and tidy-minded Believer like Davie as much as it irritates a tough and tidy-minded Unbeliever like me, but there is no doubt about what people actually think out there in the real world, whether you rely on public-opinion surveys or on private conversations. It might be more accurate to say that there are two spectra, of Belief and of Unbelief, which overlap so far and so much in the middle that there is a sort of no man’s land where moderate Belief and moderate Unbelief, of radical Christians and religious Humanists, are virtually indistinguishable, where the death-of-god Believer and the spirit-of-the-universe Unbeliever actually outflank one another, and where what they have apart is less important than what they have together. Thompson and many thousands are right about this fact, and it is one of the great sources of strength of radical thought in this country.
Nicolas Walter
Rationalist Press Association, London N1
