What will happen to him if he is psychoanalysed? Will he lose his moral and religious convictions? Will he remain faithful to his previous commitments ? Will he still be Paul, Peter or John as we knew him before? These are the questions asked by friends and relatives of the person undergoing an analysis. Whether it is the doctor, the friend, the husband or wife, the parents, the spiritual director or religious superior, everyone has the feeling that from now on the person being analysed will escape them in some way and that he will enter the domain of a secret and mysterious power of which they have not the key … and that with a bit of luck he could become a balanced individual!

This desire to know ‘what it’s all about’ is all the more ardent because psychoanalysis does not fall into the usual categories of medicine. With medicine, the moralist and the believer consider that they can keep within their own domain: the doctor is concerned with curing the body and eliminating suffering; the Christian is concerned with judging moral conduct and speaking on the meaning of suffering. But with psychoanalysis, these yardsticks are of no use, so the argument goes, because the whole personality of the individual is radically questioned.

This uncertainty is inevitable. Indeed, psychoanalysis will be dead on the day that it is put to the service of some institution whether it be educational, economic, political or religious. It is concerned with something else: a truth which goes beyond the analyst and the analysed.

Once again the expatriate pundits are out in force penning their solutions to the African Church’s problems. Having successfully surveyed the catechists and being shortly to publish the results of marriage enquiries, they are now turning their not inconsiderable, if at times inconsiderate, powers of persuasion to propagating alternative forms of ministry. Few would question the statistical evidence: the shortage of professional priests in Africa, both indigenous and expatriate, is becoming increasingly critical. Less evident, however, is the long-termed suitability and theological soundness of the proposed panacea, the ‘peasant priesthood’. ‘A priest in every village’ as there used to be until recently in parts of Spain and Italy, is the experts’ cry. Prima facie they have a case. Africa not only has been, is and will be for the foreseeable future, a pre-eminently rural society, but it is also government policy in many countries to create and centre development at the level of small-scale communities. For the moment these villages are merely mass-centres. There can be up to thirty or more of these outstations—the real parishes in sociological and theological terms—dependent upon one canonical parish. They are the occasional object of spasmodic, sacramental sorties, organized by an understaffed, overworked central mission. It seems to make sense then, pastorally speaking, that each community have a resident priest and consequently Sunday Mass. Most of these villages already have a catechist, more often than not a local man with much good will but little formal training. Their traditional role as teachers of religion, part-time sacristans and full-time watchdogs of faith and morals is changing.

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:

Che sàrà, sàrà,

Whatever will be, will be,

The future’s not ours to see,

Che sàrà, sàrà.

The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.

We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.

Most studies of the British electorate agree that Catholics tend to support Labour. Indeed, Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver argue that Roman Catholics are the group least likely to vote Conservative. However, with a few notable exceptions Catholics have not made a great contribution to Labour politics. This failure can be explained by a variety of factors, primarily the insistence by Church leaders in the past that, as a minority, Catholics ought to organize defensively to protect their own interests, particularly the schools. Hence the formation of the Catholic Federations as a response to the educational policies of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Governments. Some Catholics in this period were also mesmerized by the chimera of a Catholic party similar to the German Centre Party, and it is highly significant that the Salford Diocesan Federation received overtures from the right-wing British Labour Party in 1911, which had been formed ‘to promote by constitutional methods the welfare of the working class, and to secure real Labour representation’. Ecclesiastics were suspicious of state socialism and ideological politics in general and hostile to the secularists and anarchists on the fringe of the Left. Bishop Vaughan declared in 1883 that the doctrines of socialism were the outcome of Satan’s teaching, and that ‘terrorism, incendiarism, violence, and murder are lawful weapons whenever it is judged that this will advance the cause of socialism’. Finally, most of the Catholic working class were Irish, or of Irish extraction, abjectly poor, and unlikely to possess the necessary property or residential franchise qualification, so consequently Catholics were under-registered until after the implementation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

The discussion of Eliot’s cultural lineage has frequently assumed a simple opposition between the rival claims of English domicile and New England descent. Eliot’s writings have themselves encouraged this tendency. Overtly, they require us to observe the landscapes of London and rural England, or the family snapshots of haut-bourgeois Boston. The St Louis of Eliot’s childhood, which furnished the name of his memorable persona (Prufrock-Littau, Hugh Kenner informs us, was the name of a local furniture store), and the image of the river as ‘a strong brown god’ which opens Dry Salvages, rarely occurs as the scenario of the poems. Indeed, the stage-direction prefixed to this poem demonstrates Eliot’s usual attitude towards his mid-western patrimony, distracting our attention from the unsavoury effects of the Missouri mise-en-scene (‘the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops’) to the properties of a more condign birthright.

Yet Eliot’s mid-western origins are not merely a matter of ‘background’; they are a central part of the meaning of his poetry. The complexity of his personality has its sources and resources in the complex negotiation of a complex and contradictory inheritance. But the personal equilibrium salvaged from this inheritance—the spiritual cement for this ‘familiar compound ghost’—owes much to that temporary settlement effected by Eliot’s family in the boom conditions of nineteenth-century St Louis. If the Mid-West is absent as the overt content of Eliot’s poetry, it presides throughout as a determining context of experience, embodied in the very forms of that experience, in the stances and attitudes assumed by the poet.