CRITIC'S PHILOSOPHY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 738, 4 September 1953, Page 12

CRITIC'S PHILOSOPHY

TOWARDS FIDELITY, by Hugh I’A. Fausset; Victor Gollancz. English price, 15/-. R. FAUSSET well known as a literary critic and reviewer, has attempted in this meditation to express his philosophy of life for the benefit of a friend whose humanist faith has failed her in a time of trouble. Tentatively

and with considerable wisdom he weaves together different threads of knowledge and insight-to make a lifeline, ag it were. The book is written in a spirit of quiet goodwill, and may well have been of value to the person for whom it was first conceived; but how valuable it may be to the unintimate reader, one finds difficult to assess. Mr, Fausset leans heavily upon Buddhist and Hindu theology. And like Jung he is ultimately one who regards all spiritual experience as the expression of complementary opposites. Thus his approach to the problem of evil (the problem which most oppressed his confidante) is nearer to that of Christian Science than that of the main current of Western thought. For him, faith is a hold-all; faith in the Father-Mother-Ged and "an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many." The most unsatisfactory section of the book is that which discusses Christian belief. The unyielding materialism of Christian dogma, like that iron-grey stone of which Dante wrote, repels Mr. Fausset-an understandable situation. But to cite the ecstatic statements of Christian saints as evidence to support a view according to which the Incarnation is mythical, seems entirely unjustifiable; though one may readily: grant that the ‘knowledge and love of God is possible to the Buddhist as to the Christian. Mr. Fausset is plainly a sincere and earnest deist, He tends, however, like Jung and the Gnostics, to embrace all beliefs simultaneously. To a man in the pains of death Mr. Fausset’s belief would hardly give consolation.

James K.

Baxter