ABSTRACT
Those on the New Left who are in revolt against empty rituals do not readily see themselves walking in the footprints of Wycliffe and of ardent Protestant reformers. Yet if we can make the leap from small exotic cultures to our European religious tradition, we can make the easier transition between antiritualism in a secular and in a religious context. We are then able to see that alienation from the current sodal values usually takes a set form: a denunciation not only of irrelevant rituals, but of ritualism as such; exaltation of the inner experience and denigration of its standardised expressions; preference for intuitive and instant forms of knowledge; rejection of mediating institutions, rejection of any tendency to allow habit to provide the basis of a new symbolic system. In its extreme forms antiritualism is an attempt to abolish communication by means of eomplex symbolie systems. We will see, as this argument develops, that it is a viable attitude only in the early, unorganised stages of a new movement. After the protest stage, onee the need for organisation is recognised, the negative attitude to rituals is seen to conflict with the need for a coherent system of expression. Then ritualism re-asserts itself around the new context of sodal relations. Fundamentalists, who are not magical in their attitude to the Eueharist, beeome magical in their attitude to the Bible. Revolutionaries who strike for freedom of speech adopt repressive sanctions to prevent return to the Tower of Babel. But each time this movement of revolt and anti-ritualism gives way to a new recognition of the need to ritualise, something has been lost from the original cosmic ordering of symbols. We arise from the purging of old rituals, simpler and poorer, as was intended, ritually beggared, but with other losses. There is a loss of articulation in the depth of past time. The new sect goes back as far as the primitive church, as far as the first Penteeost, or as far as the Flood, but the historical continuity
is traced by a thin line. Qnly a narrow range of historical experience is recognised as antecedent to the present state. Along with celebrating the Last Supper with the breaking of bread, or the simplicity of fishermen-apostles, there is a squeamish selection of ancestors: just as revolutionaries may evict kings and queens from the pages of his tory, the anti-ritualists have rejected the list of saints and pop es and tried to start again without any load of history.
