Membership of the mainstream denominations in the UK has gone down since 1980 by half-a-million to seven million, and is likely to drop by another half-a-million before 1990. And membership of sects and non- Christian religions in the UK is going up and up.

We would be fools if we ignored the message being given to us by those now well-publicised figures from the latest edition of MARC Europe's UK Christian Handbook. On 20 September Cardinal Hume, lecturing in Dublin, spoke of the Pope's call to the European Bishops’ Conferences to re-evangelise Europe. The Cardinal thinks that times are more auspicious for evangelising the old continent, for now in Europe there is a ‘dawning of a realisation that we are entering a new phase of history’. Europeans are discovering the limits of human reason: ‘the age of Enlightenment has evidently run its course’.

The investigation that culminated last July in a letter from the Vatican to Professor Curran, criticising the distinction made by him and many others between ‘infallible’ and ‘non-infallible’ Church teaching and initiating his removal from his post at the Catholic University of America, has been one of the most hotly discussed events to have happened in the modern American Catholic Church, has been written about throughout the Catholic world, and has troubled many theologians. We are publishing this translation of an article by Bernhard Haring, ‘Moral zwischen gesetz und Lebensnot’ (which appeared in the German Church magazine Christ in der Gegenwart in August), because its author, who taught Curran in Rome and in March accompanied him to the Vatican for ‘informal dialogue’, has such a close knowledge of this theologian’s thinking, which in some places has been misrepresented. The text has been updated where essential.

Who is Charles Curran? And what was the ‘Curran affair’ about? Curran is a diocesan priest from the diocese of Rochester in the State of New York. He gained his Licentiate in Theology in Rome, at the Gregorian University, and took his Doctorate in Moral Theology in Rome, at the Academia Alfonsiana, where I taught for many years. I was one of his teachers but not his moderator. He wrote his doctoral thesis about Conscience and Intelligence according to Saint Alphonsus of Liguori (1696—1787). Like Alphonsus, but paying special attention to the human sciences, Curran set out to study conscience as challenged by the call to discipleship but as also influenced by clearly perceived values.

The Medea—in a Japanese version—performed outdoors—after dusk—in the neo-Classical courtyard of the Old College Edinburgh—late in what had been a cold and wet August: was it worth buying a ticket for that—even if Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth had been the sensation of the 1985 Festival? After all, that had been indoors, and the Shakespeare play had been part of my mind for over forty years. You had to choose between Greek and German, in my day, at a Scottish grammar school, and I had opted for German (entirely because I feared the principal Classics master). But then—I understand Japanese as little as I can follow spoken Greek, and would not that be the case for nearly everyone in the audience? We should all be relying on the eloquence of gesture, lighting, tone, and perhaps music. It seemed advisable, for all that, to study the text in advance of the performance. What follows is an attempt to capture my reading of the Medea. For the first time in my life I found myself gripped by the greatness of the play. I used, and am quoting, Philip Vellacott’s translation for Penguin Classics, and my interpretation is wholly dependent on a marvellous essay by Bernard Knox.

Like the man who gathered from the vicar’s sermon on sin that ‘he were agin it’, one gathers from reading the literature that ‘creativity’ is something to be approved of. Exactly what this creativity consists in, however, and how it relates to the concept of divine creation on the one hand, and the spheres of art and work on the other, is far from clear. It is the purpose of what follows to investigate these relationships.

The terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, as opposed to more mundane alternatives such as ‘making’ and ‘productivity’, seem to be used in many contexts because of the positive feel they carry over from the idea of divine creation. It is much harder, for example, to disagree with an activity called ‘wealth creation’ than to object to the same process labelled ‘making money’. ‘Creation’ and ‘creativity’ are thus not merely neutral, descriptive terms; they alter our attitude to the activities that they designate. To designate an activity ‘creative’ is—for good or ill—to legitimate it, not just to describe it.

In some cases, however, the activity so legitimated is less obviously wholesome than is divine creation itself, and the designation then serves to conceal dubious aspects of human behaviour. In such a case, the use of language acquires ideological overtones. In what follows I shall examine three examples of the use of the idea of creation, or the use of the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, in recent literature. In the first two I shall detect tendencies towards such a descent into ideology. The examples chosen are deliberately extreme in order to make my point.

TIME: the present.

SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.

Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.

Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.

Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!

Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?

Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.

Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.

July 18th 1986 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the event has been widely commemorated both in writing and in exhibitions, both alike often focussing on the heroism of the men of the International Brigade who made the cause of the Spanish Republic their own. Less attention has been paid to the fact summarized by Professor Adrian Hastings in his recent History of English Christianity 1920—1985 that ‘probably at no other moment in 20th-century history has the English Catholic community, as such, taken up so strongly a political position, and to such effect’ (p. 325). The largely uncritical endorsement of the rebels’ claim to be engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church in Spain against a threat vaguely and frighteningly characterized as a ‘Communist-anarchist dictatorship’ was powerfully and passionately sustained, and the nationalists’ atrocities, for instance at Badajoz on August 15th 1936 or (at the hands of their German supporters) at Guernica in April 1937, either brushed aside or denied.

Of course, the cause of this enthusiasm lay in the appalling actions that accompanied the revolutionary situation of July 1936. The lapse into chaos defined for the nationalists by the murder of the right-wing deputy Calvo Sotelo on July 13th inevitably increased the readiness to welcome the military pronunciamento long in preparation, by social groups feeling their future threatened by the quickening pace of social change. The moderate socialism of Prieto was rapidly being taken over by the radicalism of Largo Caballero, and the fundamental, seemingly intractable issue of agrarian reform tackled no longer by legislation but by spontaneous occupation of land long denied to the landless.