When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’

This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.

To the generation of philosophers brought up in England in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War it seemed as though the Mind-Body problem had been (in the current jargon) not solved but dissolved. Where the previous generation had toiled at the old Cartesian task of constructing a material world out of, or on the basis of, mental entities, our generation discovered that the mental entities themselves had been eliminated. The notion of sense-data used by Moore and Russell had been shown in Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be incoherent. ‘J. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia’ appeared on the Oxford lecture list in Trinity Term 1948. Austin’s principal target was just that dichotomy between sense-data and material objects from which the whole problem seemed to be derived. He directed attention to the variety of locutions in which ‘look’ can figure: ‘He looks a good sport.’ ‘He looks as if he were going to faint.’ ‘They look like ants.’ ‘They look like Europeans.’ It looked as if statements about how things look could not be the record of a subclass of mental events called visual experiences.

Mental events as such were gradually being eliminated. Wittgenstein’s views, already rumoured before the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, seemed to require that, where Ryle had taken twinges, aches, itches and flutters had been for Ryle the only honest citizens of the interior state. Much of the odium that he heaped on claimants to mental existence like acts of will, judgment, understanding or perceiving was aroused by the comparison of the latter to their notable disadvantage with the former, whose claim to be genuine occurrences was unchallenged. But here was Wittgenstein apparently challenging it.

There is much more in this paper about angels than about Christ; but I am sure that you will forgive me this disproportion. Christ, so it seems, is already well known to us: we can take him for granted. But angels are new—there is news in talking about angels: they excite our curiosity.

At our disposal are numerous scholary treatises in which Christ’s personality is analysed and this nature is dissected in its several components. About Christ we may think we know almost everything there is to know. But angels. . . ?

Of course, we know they have not really got wings like birds, and that in fact they must be quite different from the naked babies that tumble from the skies in our baroque paintings. But what else is there to say?

To be fair only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning ending in the present debilitated condition. Before that they were the objects of much serious speculation. Were they material or pure spirits; what sort of knowledge did they have; could they have intercourse; how many of them were there; etc. ? Indeed, angels were dissected too: Fr Cipolla (Brother Onion) treasured in a box a ‘penna dell’hgnolo Gabriello’ which was left behind on the occasion of the archangel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin (II Decamerone VI 10, 370)—supposing, of course, that Boccaccio is a reliable witness.

But alas, for us this wealth of information is buried in the past, unavailable because we do not even know how to make it appear relevant. The break with the past is pretty well complete: angels have been lost definitively in a welter of tinsel and feathers.

The most distinctive and controverted doctrine of the Pentecostals is that of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’. This was the hallmark of the original Pentecostal movement, as it still is of all Pentecostal-inspired renewal in all the Churches, including, most recently, the Roman Catholic.

Essentially, the doctrine is this: after conversion (and ‘water baptism’), there remains a second blessing, associated usually with the laying on of hands, in which one receives the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, experiencing for oneself what the first disciples experienced at Pentecost. Some manifestation, usually tongues, is expected; indeed, strict Pentecostals demand it—‘no tongues, no baptism in the Spirit’. Thereafter a person should increasingly realize in his life that he has been ‘endued with power from on high’, he will know that he is ‘led by the Spirit’, he will expect to receive and, when necessary, to perform miracles, especially healing. The whole doctrine rests on an appeal to texts like Mark 16, 17-18, and the obvious passages in Acts (all the texts that respectable commentators like Chrysostom have had to explain away).

I have already argued that we must take the Pentecostal challenge seriously, though expressing some doubts about the propriety of ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’. Here I shall simply examine what they call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. Without wishing at all to devalue the experience, I think it is essential, at least for us in the traditional Churches, to consider how far their doctrine of it is theologically and exegetically sound, and what precisely is the spiritual and psychological significance of the experience. Something must also be said about the gift of tongues.

The gospel begins with the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance, in view of the impending arrival of the Messiah who is to execute an eschatological baptism of judgment, in Spirit and fire.

The question of Anglican orders is often thought to be a mere side issue in the dialogue between Canterbury and Rome. In one sense this is true: even were Rome to recognize the validity of Anglican orders, it would not bring about reunion, as the example of the Orthodox clearly shows. Yet in another sense the question is important; for it involves nothing less than the recognition by Catholics of the true ecclesial character of the Anglican Communion. It was recognition of this fact which led the editor of this journal to commission a full-length review article of the writer’s Stewards of the Lord and to select Fr John Coventry, S.J., one of England’s leading Catholic ecumenists, for this important task. The present writer is honoured by this selection and is happy to respond to the editor’s offer of space for a reply. The review article unhappily contains serious misunderstandings as well as misrepresentations of the book’s argument. These make a reply essential—not in any spirit of personal self-defence, but in the interest of the issue itself.

When Mr Southern produced The Making of the Middle Ages in 1953, he illustrated it with photographs and was praised for the way he scooped up such a revealing collection of personalities and instances. Now in his new general work on Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, the photographs have been displaced by graphs and tables, and the selection of ‘moments’ in the life of the medieval Church is disclaimed in favour of a study of the interplay and tension between medieval society and its Church, and of a study of the continuous adaptation of the institutional modes by which the medieval Church attempted to satisfy the changing requirements of society. All too often ecclesiastical history lapses into the history of the organization and life of the Church as seen from the inside, and no doubt this is the image which the phrase ‘Church history’ evokes in many minds, but what is here studied is the history of the Church looked at from the viewpoint of society at large. Already by the ninth century western Church and society were so closely identified that those outside the Church were usually outside society also, but there is no risk of confusion here if one grasps the fact that throughout the medieval period elements in the Church continually tried to tune its responses to changing social demands.

This book is structured according to a pattern of threes. Each of the five essays which form its core is planned in relation to the differences which separate a primitive age (c. 700-c. 1050) from an age of growth (c. 1050-c. 1300) and an age of unrest (c. 1300- c. 1550). Each essay is unquestionably a masterpiece. That on Byzantium and the West pursues the double theme of Rome as the source of western unity and the source of division in Christendom as a whole. The essay on the papacy shows theory evolving in relation to social change.