Although it is now over a year since the Lady Chatterley trial took place, the issues it raised continue to be absorbing for anyone interested in the relation between literature and morality. And only now, perhaps, when the angry dismay of those who disapproved of the verdict and the somewhat shrill jubilation of those who welcomed it have both subsided, can one look at those issues in a dispassionate spirit. So I make no apology for opening this paper with a consideration of some key aspects of the trial, before I pass on to other and more general questions. Reading through the Penguin volume, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, which contains a transcript of most of the proceedings, one is struck by the frequency with which the defence witnesses came into collision with the judge or prosecuting counsel over the fundamental meanings of words. Mr Richard Hoggart, for instance, puzzled and irritated the prosecuting counsel by insisting on giving to the word ‘puritanical’ its full historical significance; while Mrs Joan Bennett and the learned judge found themselves quite comically at cross-purposes about what they meant by ‘marriage’. Another witness, Mr Raymond Williams, has since suggested that these clashes were inevitable when literary and legal minds had to meet on ground chosen by the latter; and no doubt he is right in finding them unedifying. Nevertheless, certain of these disagreements are, I think, fruitful if properly considered, and this is particularly true of the profound and sustained disagreement about the significance of the word ‘moral’, which formed a continuous undercurrent to the trial, intermittently manifesting itself in the witnesses’ evidence, and the speeches by counsel and the judge. This disagreement became more overt in the public controversy that followed the trial, notably in the correspondence columns of The Times.

After a war, a housing shortage. This is, of course, inevitable. There is no labour to spare for building when men are all fighting or making munitions, yet weddings are even more frequent than at other times and babies continue to be born. An increase in population is not met by any increase in dwellings. On the contrary, destruction is going on all the time. Throughout England in the last war bombers were razing homes to the ground or were making them uninhabitable. Repairs had practically ceased. Anyone looking for a house after the war found dry rot and woodworm rampant; found, too, that in empty houses broken windows had gone unrepaired, no painting had been done. Again and again, a young couple cheered by seeing a cheaply priced house were told by their surveyor that to make it habitable would cost more than the purchase price.

In 1946 we were looking for a flat in London: success was deemed almost impossible, but by great good luck—and a large premium—we got what we wanted in Kensington. All around us were empty houses, mostly damaged in the blitz, surrounded by delightful gardens run wild and with boards proclaiming that they were for sale. But soon we saw at night in houses with no gas, electricity or water, the faint light of candles moving from window to window: squatters had arrived from London’s East End, claiming for themselves the right to a home. ‘Communist influence’, intoned the daily papers in solemn notes; but it did seem possible that these families, like ourselves, had only wanted a place to live in. They had neither the luck nor the cash to get it in any other way.

It has been widely acknowledged that Dr Hans Kiing’s The Council and Reunion (fluently translated by Cecily Hastings in a Sheed and Ward Stagbook) is one of the most important of the vast flood of publications released by Pope John XXIII’s announcement of his intention to summon an ecumenical council. So far, however, this acknowledgment has not been accompanied by any serious examination of the book, at least by Catholic reviewers in England. Its reception has been generally favourable, even rapturous (see The Clergy Review, January 1962, p. 33); but there seems to have been a marked disinclination to enter into detailed discussion. What is particularly unfortunate about this is that the book has become to some extent the manifesto of a party; there is sufficient evidence, though not in print, so far as I know, that a resolute opposition to the book among certain Catholics has been able to take shape in silence. It seems to me that silent opposition and vocal enthusiasm form a particularly vicious combination; and surely the best way of releasing what tension there is is to look at Rung’s book critically.

Criticism ordinarily implies detachment; yet it might be claimed that here if anywhere detachment is out of place. What could demand a more passionate commitment than the reform of the Church? The critical detachment which we shall try to practise here, then, is not a detachment from the profound reforming purpose of Kiing’s book or indeed of the Council itself; but it will be a serious attempt to find a standpoint which is neither simply ‘conservative’ nor simply ‘progressive’, nor for that matter simply ‘middle of the road’.

It is normal today to defend the right of one state to make war against another by comparing a war against aggression with a private individual’s exercise of his right of self-defence. If I have a right to live, it seems that I must have a right to protect my life against violent and unjust attack; it is probable that in order effectively to protect myself I may have to use violence, even such as to cause the death of the aggressor in a case of extreme necessity. If an individual can do this, then clearly an organized group can do the same, and this implies the use of an army by a state. Such an army would be used as an individual uses his fists or his sword or his gun in a lawless land; it would be used to protect the life of the country in an internationally lawless world.

Such is the commonsense approach to the justification of war today; and such, if we make allowances for the lack of theological refinement, is the current Catholic view of the just war. It depends for its cogency on an extension of the rights of the individual to the rights of the state.

It may cause some surprise, therefore, to those who regard Saint Augustine as the main source of the just war tradition to find that not only is such a line of reasoning absent from his writings, but that it is in fact directly contrary to his teaching.

In his treatise on Freewill, he states clearly that an individual has no moral right to kill an assailant in defence of life, liberty or honour. A law permitting such killing may well be objectively reasonable, since it permits the lesser of two evils; it is a lesser evil for a robber to be killed than for a good man to be killed.

The ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign has focussed the attention of the more favoured countries on the glaring inequalities that exist in the world today between nations. There is much talk of ‘one world’, and with the immense speeding up of communications, physically speaking, this concept is now real. But the world is divided into two camps as clearly as when Disraeli wrote about the ‘two nations’ in Victorian England. On the one hand, there are the ‘provided for’, those who enjoy this world’s goods and live in plenty and luxury; and on the other hand, the ‘have-nots’ who stagnate in want and are familiar only with the fear of hunger, sickness and death. Far from being filled up, the gap between these two groups is growing wider, for prosperity breeds prosperity, and want engenders want.

The amount of actual hunger and under-nourishment in the world is difficult to calculate, for under-developed countries have underdeveloped statistics. And scientists differ about what actually constitutes under-feeding in terms of calories and so on. This has led at times to exaggeration. It does not seem at all true, as is sometimes claimed, that two out of three people in the world go to bed hungry. The best evidence, produced by Dr P. V. Sukhatme of FAO in May 1961, estimates the proportion as between ten and fifteen per cent, that is to say between 300 million and 450 million of the inhabitants of the world. Malnutrition is also a scourge of the less developed countries and leads to diseases such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, beriberi, etc. The same report puts the number of those suffering from under-nutrition and malnutrition as fifty per cent of the world’s inhabitants.

A man is an animal with a sun inside him. That there is such an anima in the animal is clear from evidence, early and late. The cave paintings stand witness to its creative force. Plotinus recognized as the birthright of all an inner ‘sunlike’ eye; Sir Thomas Browne said that ‘we live by an invisible sun within us;’ and Picasso has claimed that he has a sun in his belly.

Artists strikingly testify to this signet of humanity because as ‘makers’ they leave in the world enduring traces of its radiant power. Man is a creative creature. (I use the term, to ‘create’, as it is commonly applied to the arts.) As artist he is privileged to bring new things into existence, endowing substance with singular and personal form. ‘Seen’ into existence by one man, they may be seen thereafter by all.

This anonymous gift of sun, outside the strictly animal order and indicating an extra dimension, generates questions. Where did it come from? Why is it there?

Speculation, unless of the philosophical variety that provides in itself the pleasure and the end, is not fashionable. The present moment, transient and isolate, provides sufficient stuff to engage all our attention. The artist concentrates on the empirical problem of seeing that the fabulous goose in his possession continues to lay the golden eggs. Though he may suffer ‘the disinclination of the sophisticated mind’ (de Lubac) to consider the source of his gift, the question is not extraneous. It is a question of life and death, like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here?’ By pressure of necessity it asks itself at unexpected moments. It has the vitality of a hydra; cut off one head and it confronts you with another.

There took place in May the canonization of Martin de Porres, the mulatto, seventeenth-century, Dominican laybrother of Lima. We do not know for certain whether he was, by his coloured mother, of African or of Indian blood; the fact that he was usually called a mulatto, not a mestizo, rather suggests the former, and one may think there is something African about his laughter and gentleness. We do not even know for certain whether he was, technically, a laybrother, or simply a familiaris in the priory; he certainly took vows, but he seems always to have been referred to as a donatus, and the legislation of the Order at the time (for instance at the Chapters of 1580, 1642, and 1647) seems officially to have excluded half-castes from receiving the habit. But these details are of little significance by comparison with what he was in himself. The important thing is that he belonged to the class of the despised and the underprivileged. He was illegitimate, brought up in poverty, a coloured man; he spent his life doing chores. But he overcame all this by the sheer breadth of his charity. The Acts of the General Chapter of 1642, three years after his death set it on record that at his death ‘clergy and people came in great crowds, and kissed his feet and hands with tender devotion’. We know that he died at the moment that the words of the Creed were being sung: Et homo factus est, He became man. That is perhaps the great significance for our time of his long-awaited canonization. He had penetrated to the ultimate humanity of men, past the barriers of pride and cruelty, of oppression and resentment.

There are many approaches to the problem of juvenile delinquency and its causation, but in a rough and ready fashion it is possible to divide these approaches into two main groups. On the one hand are those who see delinquency as stemming from personality disturbances or emotional conflicts, and on the other are those who view delinquency as coming from relatively normal personalities which have been exposed to an ‘abnormal’ environment such as a deviant sub-culture in which the individual learns to be a non-conformist as others learn to be conformists.

If one is to judge from recent writings in criminology, the conflict between these two approaches is still quite intense. This is unfortunate, for apart from vested interests and professional pride there is no real reason why the two approaches should not be regarded as complementary. That I have taken sub-cultures as my theme in this article does not mean that I consider this approach to be more fundamental or more fruitful than others, still less does it mean that I consider it to be the only one. It does mean, however, that I think that it is necessary to stress the wider social factors, the part played by society as a whole, in the delinquency equation and to draw attention to the fallacies of attributing all delinquent responses to inadequate socialization and of viewing deviant behaviour as typically coming from biological impulses breaking through the restraints imposed by culture.