Between November 1927 and January 1929 there appeared in the pages of the then Blackfriars a series of articles under the name of Alexander Michaelson. They were mostly biographical vignettes in which the author recalled famous friends and acquaintances of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties: Browning, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Wilde, Beardsley. Alexander Michaelson was the pseudonym of Mark Andre Raffalovich, a wealthy man of letters and benefactor of the Church and, in particular, of the Dominican Order. Five years after the appearance of the last Blackfriars essay he died at the age of seventy-four. His family were Russian emigre Jews who had settled in Paris the year before his birth in 1864. There he had been brought up in the world of the salon; Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson, Ernest Renan, Sarah Bernhardt were among the visitors to the Raffalovich’s house.

In 1882 he was despatched to England, with his former governess as housekeeper, to complete his education. Instead of going up to university, the young man sought introductions to the literary and artistic men of the day. He would write articles on authors he admired, publish them in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, and send copies to their unsuspecting subjects. Thus he met R. L. Stevenson, Swinburne and Meredith. Others he met more conventionally; but almost always his friendships were marked by precociousness on his part.

His acquaintance with Wilde turned sour. Wilde reviewed a book of Raffalovich’s verse; it was not so much a bad review as a mocking one, and in the published correspondence which ensued Raffalovich was made to look more of a fool. And, of course, there was Wilde’s stinging wit which so aptly showed up pretension. The story went about of how Wilde and some friends, having been invited to lunch, arrived at Raffalovich’s front door and asked the butler for a table for six.

Literary criticism seems to be in an odd cul-de-sac at present. Two recent works by widely-esteemed critics can serve as pointers to a persistent paradox. In reviewing together the latest offerings of Barbara Hardy and Raymond Williams I don’t intend to do ‘justice’ to each volume individually, but to suggest, by their juxtaposition, a curious state of affairs: the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of ‘literature’—its importance within an educational apparatus and as the focus of a political project, and yet a concomitant sense that neither critic, or approach, has much to say about why anyone might actually continue reading poems and novels anyway. As a link, or diversion, I also glance at an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work still largely unappreciated—his criticism of Brecht’s poems.

Barbara Hardy entitles her book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry. Almost every word here invites comment, but the most provocative is “advantage”. The ‘advantage of lyric in itself is its concentrated and patterned expression of feeling. This advantage is negatively definable: the lyric does not provide an explanation, judgment or narrative; what it does provide is feeling, alone and without histories or characters.’ (p.1). The absence of history and explanation is frequently noted, and approved; an interesting example is the quoting (p.5) of Quiller-Couch’s cut-down version of Emily Bronte’s long poem Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle: in Q’s version ‘virtually all we are left with is the intense lyrical evocation of Hope’ and this turns a narrative of tyranny and physical imprisonment into a lyric of ‘spirit tormented by flesh’ (p.6). Specific response becomes transmuted into metaphysical universality.

I want to take up the challenge made by Brian Davies in a recent article, in which he argues that natural theology remains unscathed at the hands of contemporary theological criticism. I shall try and show that his optimism is largely unfounded, firstly, by showing the confusions in his own arguments, and then by indicating some grounds for a more widespread dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of natural theology.

For both Davies and myself, the natural theologian is one who holds that the proposition ‘God exists’ is a respectable assertion that can be rationally sustained without recourse to a priori acceptance of God’s existence, or any kind of special revelation. As Davies notes, such an approach contrasts strongly with Liberal Protestantism, and in particular Barth and Tillich, who insist that there is no justification or foundation for Christianity in the sense understood by natural theology. Barth’s own attitude is well expressed in his masterly summation of ‘Church Dogmatics’, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”. Davies will have none (or very little) of this and spends some time attacking both Barth and Tillich. His first target is, however, Alasdair MacIntyre, or at least the Alasdair MacIntyre of ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief. MacIntyre suggests that natural theology is incompatible (in the sense of trying to provide a proof) with the idea of freely accepting the love of God and that, paradoxically, the success of such arguments would be as destructive of religion as the sceptic holds their failure to be. For MacIntyre, the justification for religion is not to be discovered in the search for foundations, but by elucidating more fully what is involved in religious belief.