Whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, history surely is. ‘We do not’, said A. J. P. Taylor somewhere, ‘understand the present by the past, but the past by the present.’ For an historian this is courageous, for an anthropologist it would be trite. Even at undergraduate level, social anthropology teaches one to see how often the appeal to history is just the excuse for, or the indictment of, the present; what Chesterton, I think, called ‘the democracy of the dead’, the influence of an acknowledged tradition on decisions, may prove to be the most rigged of ballots. Perhaps this way of seeing things is partially a result of the pre-selection of anthropologists; certainly a remarkably high proportion of us do seem to have undergone some sharp uprooting, whether of country, or faith, or family ties, between infancy and early maturity, and hence are especially sympathetic to rejections, or reshapings of the past, on the part of others. Clearly enough, there are continuities in our lives and our societies which, even though they need reshaping, also need to be honestly interpreted; and I think that what Professor Monica Wilson has given us in Religion and the Transformation of Society is such an honest interpretation of southern African society as a whole, and, more closely, of Nyakyusa society in particular, and also, impressively though unintentionally, of Monica Wilson’s own understanding of life. It seeks, to be sure, to interpret societies which, more than most, experience the torment of unrealized change; yet the impression of the author’s personality which remains after reading, as that of one whose very fulfilment has been through the conscious seeking of continuities and the willing acceptance of change, is stronger than that given by many garrulous autobiographies. Perhaps, therefore, it may be legitimate to sketch out her life and work a little more fully than this book does.

One of the words we learned at school about the Eucharist was ‘transubstantiation’ : we were given to understand, quite rightly, that the use of this word marked off Roman Catholic belief here from what had traditionally been Protestantism, and that the Council of Trent had declared the word to be used very suitably by the Church. Another thing we learned at school was that a consecrated host looks like bread, tastes like bread, but is not: we are sometimes told, again quite properly, that this phrase puts into popular form what Trent asserted.

I reject what Trent said. I don’t believe in transubstantiation and I think that a consecrated host is still bread, bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread. I want to show you why I hold these views. What I have to say is derived from a book I am writing, and I obviously can do no more than give you a brief glimpse of some of its contents. I have not written my book to deny the eucharistic presence: but I have written it to try to persuade people that the ways we talk about it are misleading and empty; and to suggest some better ways. It will be on the negative part of the book that I shall be dwelling for a good part of the paper, expounding and criticizing first the views found in Trent, then the views found in certain authors today, particularly in Holland. As you will know, one of the many bickerings between the Dutch and the Vatican concerns the eucharistic presence: my contention is that both sides are saying basically the same thing and that both sides are wrong.

Unless we candidly acknowledge, and begin to repair, the shortcomings in our own Christian life, our deeply-pondered schemes for ‘social reconstruction’ are in danger of misfiring. The danger in these war-time social plans of ours is that we over-emphasise the planning element and spend our time talking about how we are going to act in the future without attempting to put our principles into action here and now. Consequently when the time comes for setting our schemes before, a waiting world we shall have nothing more concrete to offer than the distillations of our academic ponderings. Such vagueness will stand little chance of survival against the more practical methods employed by such opponents as the Communist Party. Unless we realise that our plans must ‘be set in motion now and not kept till the end of the war, and unless by the end of the war we have a plan already coping in practice with the problems not only of the intellectual, but of that more influential body, the working class, we are going to be left like dogs baying at the moon while the community falls victim to the tender mercies of the Marxist propagandists. All this because we have talked too much and acted too little.

A second danger lies in regarding our plans as nothing more than ‘emergency measures.’ By definition, such plans fall into disuse the moment they have served their purpose, which in this case is to prevent chaos and disorder after the strain of war. This implies an attitude towards social reform that arises from a misconception of the causes of social injustice. If totalitarianism, and that alone, were the cause of all social evil, then indeed we need only trouble to destroy that and the world would be righted.

Anyone assisting at Mass in the Chapel of the Fathers of the Assumption in Paris on a May morning in the year 1865 might have observed the frail, slightly mis-shapen figure of a woman, bowed in prayer. On enquiry he would have learnt that her name was Antoinette Fage, the directress of an orphanage run by some charitable ladies, a Tertiary of St. Dominic, and a recent penitent of the Assumptionist Père Pernet. He would have required unusual prescience to have discerned in this small delicate woman, already in her forty-second year, the Foundress of a Congregation that would spread to two Continents before the end of the century.

Left a virtual orphan at the age of thirteen by the death of her mother, her spine permanently injured in an accident during her childhood, Antoinette grew tip in an atmosphere of sorrow and suffering. Thus early she learnt her first lessons in resignation to the Divine Will. ‘It was His Holy Will that I should suffer anguish of mind, sadness of heart and extreme bodily pain so that I might the more easily enter into the sufferings of others and minister to them,’ she said in later years.

Antoinette was cared for by kind friends until site was old enough to earn her living with her needle. In 1850 she joined a dressmaking establishment, and it was about that time that she first became acquainted with the Dominican Fathers. Of a naturally religious nature, gifted by God with remarkable qualities of heart and mind, yet with a highly-strung temperament and a want of confidence in her own powers, she needed the direction of a master of the spiritual life. For the next fourteen years she was to find in Père Faucillon, O.P., such a director.

What are the motives which make a man wish to write his autobiography? Notoriety, fame, money—these are end products They don’t dictate the decision to write, the impulse to construct an artistic form which will be the shape of one’s own life. We might, perhaps, start by saying that to write an autobiography is a form of self-discovery through the necessity of having to shape and frame one’s life. This affords a measure of control which is also a liberation; we can write the past out of our system by re-living it. But perhaps it is more our sense of the present or an ever diminishing future which hastens our pen. From this vantage we must feel that our life has a kind of totality about it which makes it more than just ‘our life’. It makes a representative gesture, giving our memories and reflections more than a confessional interest. We must have a deep conviction that our constantly repeated first person singular is on easy terms with the first person plural. Looking at these suggested motives for autobiography—-the ordering of experience, the self-discovery, the liberation, the belief that your impressions will hold good for others —we see how little they differ from the motives behind any piece of imaginative writing. There are reasons for thinking that writing an autobiography is closer to writing fiction than to writing history. And if it is a novelist himself who should write his autobiography, a man whose life has already furnished a whole house of fiction—then I think rather odd things begin to happen, particularly if that novelist is Graham Greene.

In the land of our fathers there are many strangers. They have drifted away from their homes, across the sea, into the New World which they held to be ‘undiscovered’. Why did they seek a new land, and why did they leave their own? Why did they leave behind the soil from which they were born; why did they break away from the womb to which they belong?

With their minds disconnected—and freed—from the earth, they could master the forces of nature. And so they took possession of the land that seemed so empty, so much there for the taking, because no one claimed it. They did not know that man does not naturally possess the land to which he belongs; he does not say: T own this soil’. For how can we own the soil from which we are born and to which we will return? Is not man’s life encompassed by the earth and her dark forces, as in a wider dimension from which things and deeds receive their meaning?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’

But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.

Georges Simenon writes detective stories, many featuring the amiable Inspecteur Maigret, almost too human to fit the traditional image of the sleuth. Simenon may be read more for atmosphere than for thrills, for Maigret's Paris, or the provincial towns of many non-Maigret stories; the weather mostly wintry with long evenings, the interest in trains, back streets, canals, bars, the small homes of small people in small worlds. And among these I find even more intriguing those with a Belgian scene, the Meuse, the industrial zone around Liege where young Simenon began as a reporter on the local press. Here are his native tow-paths and backyards, alleys and impasses, and a certain quality of mud, of earth and water and the two compounded.

Simenon does not normally set out to retail experiences that demand a transcendental world, least of all that purveyed by the Church. Where religious detail slips in it is seldom more than part of the narrative, handy description—as far as the author is concerned echoes from childhood, and usually no more than that for the characters too. Churchgoing is something children do and it is good for them; subsequently a minority elects to remain in this church sub-culture and becomes a characteristic feature of Sunday mornings.

When Hans Küng attacked infallibility as it has been understood in Roman theology until recently, he was accused by no less a theologian than Karl Rahner of being in effect a liberal Protestant. But the majority of friendly critics were more inclined to ask what all the fuss was about. Nobody took this theory of infallibility seriously any longer. There were undoubtedly situations where Church and Pope had to take a stand and, if the promises of the Church’s endurance were to mean anything, this must mean infallibility in teaching: the Holy Spirit would guarantee the Church’s freedom from error on such occasions. But they were rare enough and a ‘sensitive exegesis’ could always take care of out-dated definitions.

Charles Davis, a little earlier, had chosen to leave the Church because he could not accept the current explanation of papal claims, the present ‘structures’ which prevent even the most sympathetic bishops from treating their subjects with charity or even justice. But Gregory Baum and others were at hand to show that this brilliant young theologian was still too much entangled in nineteenth-century apologetics.

‘What is the use of being a good man—I do not mean what is the use to others, but to oneself? Would not the ideal state, from one’s own point of view, be to have the power to injure others for one’s own benefit to any extent at all, without being injured in turn oneself? Suppose, like the man in the fairy story, I were able to make myself invisible at will. If I had this power, and abstained, out of conscientious scruples, from all the indulgence in robbery and seduction for which my talent gave me the opportunity, would I not be mad? All our moral education seems to be based on the principle that the consequences to an agent of his being morally bad are unfortunate to himself; but few seem to assure us that to be bad is in itself to be unfortunate—and when they do so, their assurances carry little conviction. And if it is only a matter of consequences, the ideal aim in life, for a man of enlightened self-interest, would seem to be to find some means of enjoying the immediate fruits of being wicked while avoiding the unfortunate consequences. It may be objected that this would be difficult; but then most worthwhile achievements are difficult. Is there any indication that the good man is somehow, just by virtue of being good, more fortunate than the bad? We would dearly like to believe this, but cannot find any adequate reason for doing so. It is no use saying that men and gods will ensure that the good man is rewarded and the bad man punished; since men can always be put off by flattery and bribery, if not by deception; and the gods by sacrifices. Let us take a stark and extreme case: the contrast between a bad man, with all possible worldly goods, honoured among men as though he were good; and a good man, regarded as bad and, in consequence, poor and persecuted, hated, mocked, and finally enduring an agonizing death by being impaled. Who is going to say that the good man in this case is more fortunate than the bad?’

A wise Dublin theologian recently reminded me of Whitehead’s doubts about the unity of creation. Whitehead noted that on a fine blue day he could wake up conscious that all nature was harmonious and one. But when, stepping into the street, he was attacked by a large nasty dog, nature became suddenly at least two.

Joyce hated and feared dogs, yet in Ulysses, a cur—the one which bounds like a hare, trots like a pony, trips like a buck, rears up like a bear, lopes like a calf, roots like a pig, claws like a panther, sniffs like a dog—becomes Joyce’s symbol of protean interconnections among disparate species. Simple changes of verb link animals together.

Joyce, whose word-play was sometimes unashamedly childish, chose a dog for his symbol because of what dog spells backwards. When we speak of Joyce’s sense of unity we speak of his sense of God. This is not to force Joyce back into the Church—though we should remember that, asked when exactly it was he had left the Church, Joyce replied, ‘That is for the Church to decide’. Joyce’s faith was peculiar and its motives may have been more literary than religious, but I am concerned here not with his salvation but with the idea of unity which his later works, especially Finnegans Wake, express.

The recent coadjutor appointment in Nottingham diocese met with some criticism. I could sympathize with the critics—and with the chosen candidate. However, the situation was more than an example of non-consultation about episcopal selection. Clouds of debate and confusion around the freshly-embroidered mitre obscured something deeper, farther back in time.

For some years, the Ordinary of the diocese has been a target of comment for allegedly rigid views and activities. In particular, his stance on Humanae Vitae (H. V.) was strict in its expectations of what priests should teach about the encyclical. Five priests were suspended on the issue. In 1968 and 1969, widely-reported arguments and public meetings were held in the diocese about H. V. and its aftermath.

I chaired one of these meetings in March 1969. It was attended by four hundred people. Many of them were for liberal interpretations of H. V. and against the Bishop’s sanctions on priests who did not accept his line. Some in the audience were supporters of the growing Renewal Movement. Many more people were concerned about the need for an articulate but critical lay voice in the Church. I directed part of my summing up at the meeting to these groups. I suggested that, perhaps, enough had been said and done locally about H. V.; that attention should be turned to more important, if less exciting, issues. The example I offered was the manner of appointment of Bishops. I said that, in Nottingham, discussions or protests about this would be too late after a retiral or death. As far as I am aware, nothing was done from that time in 1969. Yet when Mgr McGuinness was appointed in 1972, the protest was strident.

Cajetan rightly observes that in these words our Lord, describing the way and state of the Spirit, described also the way and state of the spiritual man. Now, since Christ our Lord, the very truth, declares most plainly that this is the case of everyone who is born of the Spirit, we should conclude that the state of the spiritual man, as formed by the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, cannot be explained in any better way than by the similitude here employed by our Lord.

Note, therefore, that this text lays down three conditions for the state of the spiritual man.

The journals give the quantities of wrong,
Where the impatient massacre took place,
How many and what sort it caused to die,
But, O, what finite integers express
The realm of malice where these facts belong?
W. H. Auden

Man is conceived in aggression: too often, he dies in it.

The sexual act may be enhanced by its manner, exalted by its intent, transfigured by its context. But the instinct that impels to its performance is the aggressive instinct.

It is a primitive instinct, in the neutral sense that it strikes to the roots of our nature. In the past as in the present, it is often a necessary compulsion: the tribe of the timorous hunter was a hungry tribe.

Drives deeply rooted perpetually seek an outlet. But to find an outlet they must first be canalized. Therefore aggression seeks initially a focus, an object.

Now the world is full of objects; yet we direct aggression on our kind. It is on people rather than on things that we inflict violence. As the lover craves response from the beloved, so does the aggressor from his victim. The shattered window does not whimper; the smitten plane tree does not bleed. But the ravished woman whimpers. And the thrashing body bleeds. Thus does aggressiveness achieve its terrible catharsis.

I should naturally wish to welcome Phil Beisly’s taking up of the standing invitation implicit in a volume of essays entitled Criticism as Dialogue. The notion of‘dialogue’, as used in my book, is intended to work on several levels, sometimes in senses specifically stressed in the book, but of course including just the sort of ordinary dialogue that Mr Beisly has entered into.

Or has he? Obviously, the sine qua non of ‘dialogue’—on any level —is a real meeting of minds; and, unfortunately, I don’t feel that there is much of this going on in Beisly’s article. To this, though, it must be added that, for all the recent drum-rolls for ‘dialogue’ (now increasingly relapsing into anathemas and ‘confrontation’) genuine dialogue is as rare as it is exacting; and most of what claim to be dialogues these days turn out to be either monologues by proxy or bandwaggoning unconditional surrenders.

Actually, Beisly does not pretend to have much use for ‘dialogue’ anyway—at any rate in the field of criticism; and is especially unkeen on ‘Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical’. He is convinced that ‘metaphysical concepts are not enlargements of criticism but constrictions inimical to it’. And he recoils from the idea of a Christian criticism concerned to elicit or test or nourish such concepts. ‘To be a critic is enough’ (367; 379). Now (‘enough’?—enough for what?), such attitudes might well occasion a genuine encounter of fundamentally differing approaches to literature—i.e. might themselves give rise to a form of critical dialogue. But Beisly avoids such dialectical traps, by dispensing with any such encounter. My book has three—I hope, carefully argued—chapters (out of six) on these problems; and, whilst Beisly’s opening paragraphs, expressing his ‘sense of radical disagreement’ in these matters, raise the question ‘what do we say to the various stages of his’—(my)—‘argument?’, they could hardly be said to indicate these ‘various stages’, still less to ‘say’ anything about them, beyond the fact that he disagrees.

‘Batter my heart, three-Personed God’, wrote the poet John Donne. However, it has been the mind, not the heart, which has been battered by this most unfathomable of all mysteries. Centuries of long and painful battering of Unitarian hammer on tritheistic anvil eventually forged a statement which expressed the mystery: three persons in one nature. And ever since the Council of Florence there has echoed down the centuries a thunderous ‘So what?’. For the riddle of the Trinity is not merely that of the Three-in-one, but the revelation of it. Not ‘how?’, but ‘why?’. What is its relevance?

Karl Rahner, in his Theological Investigations, is exaggerating only slightly when he notes:

Jesus of Nazareth is said to be the sacrament of the saving grace of God and of man’s response to God in that grace. In himself Jesus is the encounter between God and mankind, the Immediator of man and God, the Word of God made world and history, man in his concrete dimensions and the total nexus of his relationships taken up into God. According to the apostolic preaching, in him alone, in his ‘name’ alone, is there the means of passing from a lethal situation into the possibility of survival. If men are going to pass from the world that is doomed to death, that can only be by entering into him, into his name, by in some way becoming him, by living out the biography of the one who, alone, no longer belongs to the dead past. Living it out, amongst other ways, sacramentally. Sacramentally we put on Christ, we are conformed to Christ, we are made one body, one spirit, with him.

When the editor first suggested that it might be useful to have a short, article introducing some of Noam Chomsky’s ideas, I agreed, and was about to begin when John Lyons’ book appeared and made the exercise rather redundant. His introduction is unquestionably the most lucid and coherent account of Chomsky’s linguistic work that we have, and I thought it would be pointless to write at that time an article which would in effect be little more than a paraphrase of its topic sentences. There are, however, a few things that might be said about recent trends, not dealt with by Lyons, which are needed in order to complete an outline understanding of the contemporary scene in generative linguistics; also a few critical comments, from someone a mite less sympathetic to the Chomskyan approach than Lyons is, might be helpful to anyone wanting to reach an evaluation of this field. Hence the following remarks. But first, some background, and a review of what Lyons does say.

It is quite remarkable how Chomsky’s name has become a vogue word in intellectual circles. He is known about, sometimes, even when his discipline, linguistics, is not. To an academic linguist, of course, this can be embarrassing. I suppose it is always the way when a teenage discipline catches everyone’s attention through a famous practitioner: one does not know whether to be grateful, because of the publicity to the subject, or furious, because of the over-simplification and polemic which publicity invariably brings. In Chomsky’s case, in this country, the popular awareness of the man dates from the mid-sixties.

When God created all things in His Wisdom, we are introduced to His work in three stages because we cannot understand all the works of God at once. So God instructs us about these elemental things which happened before men existed on this world, and He tells us that in the beginning of His creation He created the good things, the basic things, the things which could, as it were, contain all the other things that He wanted to make. On the first day He created the Light, and on the second day He created the Heaven, and on the third day He created the Earth and the Sea and all the things which grow on the earth. All these things are the good things. God said so and it is so.

Then there was the second stage in God’s creation. God could have left these things to grow; the seeds of life were in the earth. They were given on the third day and all seems to be complete; but it was not enough for God. More than the seeds of life were needed for them to prosper. It was not good enough that they should be just good. Things need more than the seeds of life if they are to live; they need the blessing of God, if they are to be fruitful. The work of the second three days was the work of blessing what was already good. On the first day God created light, but on the fourth day He made the stars which shine in the light.