The comments by Martin Green in the October Mew Btackfriars editorial, Raymond Williams’s article (November) and the appearance of Terry Eagleton’s book1 mark, perhaps, a new stage in the debate about the ‘catholic left’. Beyond the mud-slinging and the taking to the ramparts (useful though such antics have been recently in helping to publicise the importance of the catholic left as a distinctive movement); and also beyond the appeal to history (Donald Nicholl in the Clergy Review, August 1966) and to received notions of church structure (Michael Dummett in Mew Blackfriars, December 1965) we now come to a fundamental problem. The definition of this problem is difficult, and can be approached from a number of points of view. But I think the basic question the catholic left has to answer is this: is the commitment to a political order, the concern with the restructuring of the human community, part of a homogeneous continuum which will simply inaugurate the kingdom of God as its final term, or is it rather a means by which the essentially gratuitous character of the kingdom can be most clearly revealed by having the obscuring clutter of merely human obstacles removed ?

Perhaps I may begin a review of Mr Eagleton’s book by registering one note of disagreement with Martin Green. This is that I feel he is trying to evade a problem, when he speaks of the need to ‘attune’ ourselves to war and peace simultaneously.