Today probably the majority of practising Roman Catholics in England would identify themselves as English, even if their origins are not altogether English, but how deep are the English roots of this English Catholic community? The answer to that question is important because the self-understanding of any community depends, to some degree, on its understanding of its own history. Twenty years ago it was almost universally assumed that the English Catholic community was dwindling away at the end of the eighteenth century and only saved from extinction by the ‘second spring’— the great influx from Ireland and the flow of well-educated Anglican converts in the nineteenth century. Now it is known that Irish immigrants went where Catholics were in industry already, but detailed studies are needed of how so many English Catholics came to be in those places. In the May number of Recusant History’ I have done one such study for a place in the heart of industrial England, Walsall, within reach of Oscott, between 1720 and 1824, using evidence from a variety of local records. I now want to point tentatively to some elements in the situation there that have parallels elsewhere.

The first is memories of the Civil War. After defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 Charles the Second took refuge in woodlands in and around the parish of Walsall from the Presbyterian party who dominated the borough after the war and during the Commonwealth. In 1715 and 1751 the Presbyterian Meeting House there was wrecked by a mob who in 1750 celebrated Oakapple Day, the anniversary of the Restoration of Church and Throne in 1660, by hanging and burning an effigy of King George the Second with an orange in one hand and a bunch of turnips in the other.

In the course of the past twenty years René Girard has offered us a theory of the structure of human desire. Because desire is something very fundamental, his hypothesis is far-reaching and it gives us many original and, I believe, plausible results. However, not everything is explained and put into a new light because of a new insight into the structure of human desire. Thanks to Girard’s hypothesis, I think we can see how many apparently very varied things may have much more in common than we thought, and sometimes we can even perceive much better why there are differences and what they are. But even I, who have restricted myself in the three articles on Girard which I have published in New Blackfriars’ mainly to expounding his hypothesis, consider that hypothesis to be less embracing than Girard himself sometimes seems to think.

Nevertheless, although any debate on Girard’s hypothesis is welcome, precisely because it helps us to see what is valuable and what is not, and although it is a pleasure to see Charles Davis in the July/August issue of New Blackfriars contributing to this debate, the attitudes which Davis brings to the debate make constructive discussion difficult. It seems to me that Davis feels akin to the postmodern position which assumes that a universal and unifying vision of reality is impossible and that it is doubtful whether reality is a unity; that perhaps there are more realities than one at the same time. Holders of this view can thus only be suspicious: ‘Suspicion, critique, uncovering: all can be turned upon oneself’ (p. 327) in a never-ending process. I myself feel closer to those attempts which, like Girard’s, try to dismantle the boundary fences between the various disciplines, constituting a parallel movement to postmodernism.

To look at Wittgenstein’s influence on our contemporary religious thought raises all sorts of problems. The first is that, as a philosopher, he gave little attention to religion; his main writings contain no more than a few enigmatic references here and there. Nevertheless it is hardly possible to pick up a book on philosophical theology (in English at least) which does not refer to him. That might perhaps be explained by the pervasive influence that he has exerted on philosophical thought generally. But we must recognize that the leads which emerge from his thought in both periods of his philosophical activity seem to be predominantly negative. He offers two successive challenges to us to examine the ways in which we use language and what we communicate in doing so, each of which seems radically to question the language of theology.

The first came in the Tractatus, when he set out to show that the method of formulating the problems of philosophy rests on a misunderstanding of the logic of language (Preface). He was concerned, as Pears puts it, ‘with the general theory of factual language, and with the general theory of reality which he believed that he could deduce from it.’ The structure of reality determines the structure of language, and the structure of language is such that ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak on that one must be silent’ (Preface). He was not prepared, like the logical positivists, to deny the existence of mysteries of which he did not think it possible to speak; ‘We feel that even if all questions in the field of scholarship are answered the problems of our lives are still quite untouched.

When, in the mid-1930s, T.S. Eliot was asked whom he considered the most influential English writer, he replied: ‘Christopher Dawson’. Such a statement may cause surprise, if not disbelief. For Christopher Dawson, whose centenary is celebrated this month, is today a largely forgotten figure and his once influential books seem everywhere to be gathering dust. The reasons for this will be better understood by considering Dawson’s work in the wider context of his intellectual development. Only then will it be possible to reassess the strength of his scholarship and to highlight the relevance that his vision might still hold today.

Dawson is frequently associated with that group of writers and intellectuals who continued the tradition of Chesterton and Belloc to mark the English Catholic ‘revival’ of the 1930s. To some extent this tendency is understandable, since much of Dawson’s work was in fact aimed at making Catholicism intellectually accessible to a largely Protestant or secularized audience. But his association with Chesterton and Belloc can also be highly misleading, for, unlike the latter’s militant and prolific writings, there was nothing apologetic or polemic about Dawson’s work. Indeed, its fairness and serenity came as a breath of fresh air to the Catholic scholarship of the twenties and thirties, even inviting the respect and praise of non-Catholic contemporaries like Dean Inge, Sir James Marriott and H.A.L. Fisher.