Not long ago I found myself on a platform, organized by the Young Publishers’ Group, together with Sir Robert Maxwell, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, and Sir Basil Blackwell, speaking on the problem of censorship. It was a horrifying experience, because the nature and outcome of the meeting were predetermined. It was predetermined by the intolerant dogmatism of ‘enlightenment’. Those who spoke against censorship resorted to facile declarations combined with facetiousness, as if any objections to complete permissiveness could only be ridiculous. On the other side individuals tried to be serious: but they were so selected and set side by side that they were made to appear to discredit one another. In any case, the amount of time available to each was so limited that no one could begin to say anything relevant or meaningful. I could myself have talked for an hour on the subject, in the endeavour to point out some dangers, and some fallacies, by which time I would have but nibbled the edge of the problem of hate in culture. But it was evident that the gathering did not want anything of the kind. It did not really want the issue debated. It wanted merely a ratification, by a kind of circus, of its own ‘enlightened’ prejudices.

Often, thus, what seems to be a real debate is really nothing of the kind. Some time ago The Guardian ran a series on the permissive society. I wrote an article and sent it as a contribution. It was rejected—and I came to find that the series was not even planned and produced by the feature editorial staff. It was organized by the advertising staff, in combination with a television project. Here we glimpse the vested interests behind ‘permissiveness’. If one does get an article published it is often so badly cut as to be unrecognizable —an experience I have had with both New Society and The Times.

A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.

‘Of course you English Dominicans have had a terrible time recently, losing relatively more priests than anyone else.’ My journalist friend’s job is to know facts and comment on them, and he was saddened at our dilapidated state. So I thought I’d look at the figures. The result is surprising, remembering that in 1860 there were 25 priests, and in 1960, 148.

Here are the figures. They include all who left for any reason, but exclude those in South Africa who never worked as priests in Britain. The ten-year periods are those during which religious profession was made; they are therefore the ‘years of formation’. The figures are of priests only and omit all those who left before ordination.

I am not concerned in this paper to talk about Beowulf for its own sake. I want to take Beowulf as an example of a more general point that seems worth making about literature and in particular about literary studies. It is a point I cannot make directly because if I expressed it in a series of propositions I should be misunderstood. I want to take a number of questions raised by Beowulf, some of which have been discussed in their own right by a series of scholars and with some of which I shall have to take issue: I am not, however, concerned with this or that interpretation of the poem but much more with pointing out certain difficulties in the way of understanding it that do not seem resolvable by conventional methods. I do not believe that these problems are confined to Beowulf but that they are part of the necessary business of understanding any literary work. The difference lies in this: Beowulf is a marginal work from the frontiers of literacy and the beginnings of English society, unlike the works most of us get worked up about which are much more central to our language and our way of life. We must beware of committing what the late R. G. Collingwood called the fallacy of precarious margins—that is arguing from marginal cases as though they were central, but it does seem that marginal situations—as the late Ludwig Wittgenstein has so brilliantly shown—have a power to point to things we take for granted without questioning in more central, more ‘normal’ situations.

The only way to find out about the experience of a prayer meeting is obviously to take part; all I can do in these pages is to drop a few hints, in the hope that they will stir a chord or two, so that something will get across.

People sometimes talk as if prayer were a purely human act; but this is not Christian doctrine. Prayer is the act of the believer, the one who says T live now not I but Christ’ (Gal. 2, 20). It is only in Spirit and Truth that we can offer prayer to the Father (John 4, 23). It is because Christ prays, that we, in the same Spirit, can pray. Prayer is a divine activity in which we, by grace, participate. (On all this, see Herbert McCabe’s very lucid account in Doctrine and Life, August 1970.) It is always ‘the Spirit and the Bride’ who prays (cf. Apoc. 22, 17); we can only pray because God himself gives us prayer (as the Lord taught St Catherine expressly). All prayer, in so far as it is true prayer, is ‘infused’; the contemplative is the one who knows it by experience. In our prayer groups, therefore, we aim to pray with the prayer that God himself gives us.

Now as we become more and more sanctified, our prayer too becomes more and more attuned to the prayer of Christ. That is what we aspire to. But we must avoid two antithetical traps. On the one hand, we must not assume forthwith that anything we utter at a prayer meeting is automatically underwritten by God; we may on occasion get a ‘witness’ of some kind to assure us that our prayer is truly willed by him, but that is a different matter. The other trap is to sit and wait until God actually forces something out of us. Dom John Chapman used to reiterate: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ We must start where we are. There may be a great gulf set between our ‘own’ prayer and that of the Spirit, but both are important.

Until the publication last year of the Motu Proprio and the Directory by the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales mixed marriages looked very different to different people. It depended where you stood. In fact there can be few states of life which appeared so different according to viewpoint.

If you were an average Roman Catholic priest or bishop brought up in the One True Church with a firm Catholic tradition, they were a major problem. More than half your marriages were mixed and the majority of the non-Catholic partners were merely nominal Christians. One of your primary concerns must have been that the Catholic partner continued to practise his or her faith and the children were brought up as Catholics. The Catholic Church in this country has been the only major Church which has increased in numbers in recent years, and, apart from the Irish immigration, the children of mixed marriages have probably accounted for the largest part of this increase.

If you were an average Anglican priest or bishop brought up in a firm Anglican tradition, mixed marriages with Roman Catholics were a minor, but very sharp, problem. You came across few of them where the Roman Catholic practised his religion, but the ones you did meet showed that ‘One True Church of Christ’ at its most intransigent, intolerant of the conscience of the Anglican partner. You were tempted to be as intolerant in return, leaving the couple as bewildered and unhappy pawns of a different colour trying to make love in the middle of an ecclesiastical game of chess.