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The Power of Symbols in Religion and Culture
By F. W. Dillistone
New York, Crossroad, 1986. 246 pp. $14.95.

Criticism and the discussion of important issues related to the understanding of human life have, in recent years, been so couched in language of impenetrable complexity that it would seem that it is essential, in order to gain a hearing at all, to cultivate complexity and obscurity. In some cases (for example, Jacques Lacan), this is raised to a recognized operative principle. If authors are understood at all, they have failed in their manifest duty.

Several years ago, I introduced a new course on symbolism. Necessarily, in preparation, I had to re-read and to read a great deal of writing on the subject. I was a little startled (reflecting, perhaps, my own willingness to accept obscurity as equivalent to profoundity) to discover that the writings of F. W. Dillistone (Christianity and Symbolism and The Structure of the Divine Society), for all their simplicity and lucidity, were among the most useful of all the many things written on the subject. I not only learned a great deal, I had my faith in lucidity and clarity reaffirmed.

After a sabbatical of some years length doing biography, Dillistone has returned to his earlier subject and the virtues of his earlier work are seen in this one as well. His latest work does not represent any basic change in the position he has already set out so well. It is, rather, a distillation of his thought on the subject. As such, it represents a true introduction to symbolism and to his earlier, fuller writings.

The book has three parts. After an introduction given over to the definition of key terms, Part One gives examples of basic symbolic forms, Part Two summarizes the theories of some dozen writers of the recent past, and Part Three discusses "Symbolism in Social History."

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Dillistone does not offer an elaborate theory of symbolism. Rather, he begins by a characteristically sensitive account of how symbols have in fact worked. He selects several basic "visual and dramatic" symbols (body and food, the land, clothes, light and dark, fire and water, blood and sacrifice) and describes them, not simply as anthropological phenomena, but as elemental ways of being related to or thinking about the world.

This provides him with the resources for the final section, which contains the core of his purpose. For many, to think symbolically is to think falsely. This characterizes the positivist and the literalist alike (and there is a good chapter on "The Literal and the Symbolic"). For Dillistone, to think is to think symbolically. Since human beings work with elemental symbols that all share, there is a common enterprise that enables him to bring a large and gracious sympathy to the symbolic activity of other religions without sacrificing the integrity of his own or his commitment to it. He explores a number of the basic symbolic motifs of the Bible and of the Christian tradition. "Christ, God's symbol of integration; Christ, God's symbol of conciliation." Christianity, or, rather, Christ, is not so much a rival among symbolisms as their fulfillment.

The weakest part of the book (which is not much of a weakness) is Part Two. To summarize the work of twelve important thinkers in fifty-two pages passes the bounds of possibility. The summaries are lucid and fair. They can serve as an introduction and guide to reading, but they are no substitute for the originals. The authors summarized are all elder statesmen, dead or in their advanced years. There is nothing here of contemporary work on the subject. This is not altogether a weakness; I judge that a great deal of this work is quite misguided (which may only reflect my age). Some of it, even among the French, makes a positive contribution (see, for example, Dan Sperber's Rethinking Symbolism), and all of it has to be taken into account, since it is the work of our own day.

This should not suggest that the book is a graceful summary of old ideas; the resources in it are more solidly new than much that is currently fashionable. The French, and their American followers, have discovered the weaknesses and the conditioned vagaries of language and, therefore, of the other modes of symbolism. Out of this, they generate vast, explanatory systems (or critical methods that are anti-systems) that tend rather to demolish than to contribute to understanding. Obsessively, they abolish meaning and the possibility of meaning. There is little possibility of making a way forward from such analyses. Dillistone returns us to the roots of our symbolic activity, to our defining origins. Disciplined and perhaps a little humbled by the stringencies of the French, we can use what he has here reminded us of in ourselves to make a new move toward a properly devout humanism.

I can recommend this book as an elementary introduction to symbol-

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ism and add that many of the deceptively simple statements, accessible to the beginner, require long and patient meditation by the expert.

John W. Dixon, Jr.

The University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina