Brian Wicker’s new book is important not only because of the analysis which he gives of our historical present and of the potencies within it but also because of the sources on which he calls to establish his analysis and the terms in which he calls on them. They are terms particularly congenial to the literary imagination, for one reason because they suggest a renewed life for poetry. Briefly, Mr Wicker argues that it would be a mistake to see our historical moment as one in which a conception of the sacred is fighting unequally against the secular actuality, or in which secularism must be accepted by Christians as a providential subversion of myths no longer acceptable to reason. On the contrary, he says, the most rational account of our condition, both existential and essential, is one in which a conception of the sacred will be not only preserved, not only renewed either, but remade. His account of this may bring unease both to those who think there is only one way to talk about the sacred and to those who think it retrograde to talk about the sacred at all.

In speaking in such terms he is of course speaking from within a cultural dilemma whose nature he recognizes; our society in so far as it is opting for ‘secularism’ is opting to sit on one horn of the dilemma; for its refusal of the sacred is not only a refusal of a ‘meaning’ in and for life but an inability to participate fully in the world of meaningful presences and activities.