Any discussion of authority in the Church today must start from the fact that authority in the political sense has become a dirty word. To adapt a saying originally coined by Sir William Harcourt in 1889 and given wider currency by the future King Edward VII in 1895, we are all anarchists now. There was a time when authority was given the benefit of the doubt: unless there was glaring evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that those in authority knew what they were doing and thus commanded our obedience; and even if the matter was analysed further and it was admitted that authority could make mistakes, it was thought better that the wrong decision should be made and applied immediately than that any decision should be deferred until it might be too late. Today our assumptions tend to work the other way. We assume that those in authority will lurch from blunder to blunder, and we no longer see any great virtue in muddling through: it is apt to be a messy and expensive business.

This cannot be put down simply to a widespread cynicism alleged to exist as part of a supposed far-reaching malaise affecting the whole of our national life today. Indeed, there is some justification, if not for cynicism, at least for scepticism: our governments since the war seem to have been singularly unable to avoid leading us into one economic crisis after another, and when we are encouraged to swallow yet another dose of deflationary medicine we cannot help wondering if this cannot do more than alleviate the immediate symptoms of our economic ill-health.

I love man. He is wild and lost and searching, searching. O God how he searches. He searches for the woman that will understand him. He searches for the more-than-woman that will understand the very thing in man that woman never understands, his passion for the absolute. He desires to be woman as well as man in his search: desires a maturity in his metaphysical passion whereby it will be able to shed that adolescence that seems to be built right into it. The most precious thing in man, the spark, seems fated to intellectualize the world, so that out of the live fire of his mind he peoples the world with immutable essences, so that he loses himself, his fire, transmuting it into dead cool planets of conceptual thought. And the concepts once formed have a terrifyingly long life. They continue to encircle him and constitute his mental universe long after big changes in human living have rendered them useless. He has to project himself all around, because he cannot believe in himself, cannot come to himself. I love him as he circles round and round the agony and promise of himself that he cannot enter; as a woman loves the man whom love has made talkative, parading before her his achievements because he cannot expose himself. And she waits for the moment of tears, of dissolution, of the truth of man. I love this conscious treasure that dare not own the treasure of consciousness.

‘The proposition that is closest to the very centre of our common faith is that he who loses his life shall save it. It applies not only to the material dispositions of our egoism, but to the spiritual universe we construct to secure ourselves against uncertainty.’ I am an inveterate optimist, and one of my current optimisms is the thought that, just because it is now being forced to embrace the truth of that proposition, English Catholicism may be on the verge of an exhilarating breakthrough. We English catholics are apt to envy more favoured countries than our own, where bishops, priests and people were better prepared for that burgeoning of new life in the Church to which the Vatican Council stands as mid-wife. In many places ecclesiastical structures were already more flexible, liturgical and ecumenical sensitivity was already awakened, pastoral practice was less heavily complacent. And yet—is there not a danger (I am ridiculously overgeneralizing in order to try to focus the point I want to make) that, because of these things, the aggiornamento in such countries might entail little more than an envigorating rearrangement of the ecclesiastical furniture? In our own country, where structures were so rigid, where clergy and devout laity tended to live (with the ‘catholic half’ of their minds) in unruffled isolation from so many of the real issues that rack humanity and the Church of Christ, where theology hardly existed until recently, where ‘pastorale’ is significantly untranslatable, where liturgical immobility made Pius XII’s application of the brakes in 1958 look like dangerous novelty—in this country we are certain to be spared a superficial renewal.

Terry Eagleton’s article, The Limits of Liberalism, in the April number of New Blackfriars is as important as it is absorbing. In it he acknowledges that Mrs Rosemary’s Haughton’s book, On Trying to be Human, represents ‘the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition—the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships’ (p. 353), and he seeks to bring it into contact with another ‘important contemporary Christian tradition’, the radical one, which has been articulating itself in a series of articles in New Blackfriars but which was risking becoming closed in on itself. More significantly still it promises to bring the debate between these two traditions, the liberal and the radical, to issue beyond the rhetoric of mere labelling, so enabling and compelling us to choose between them. The importance of the article to all those engaged in the debate and concerned with the exigencies of contemporary Christian commitment is therefore clear.

Terry Eagleton’s contention is that Mrs Haughton’s affirmation and exploration of ‘the meaning of being human for a Christian’ is gravely deficient in that it systematically excludes ‘wider (and arguably deeper) connections of this immediate focus’ (p. 353). He devotes the bulk of his article to criticizing Mrs Haughton for attributing a distorted primacy to the spirit, the inward, the personal, with a consequential devaluation of the flesh, the external, the social and the political, and this on account of a misconception of the relationship between the two.

It has not been easy to decide on a suitable title for this address. The phrase ‘significant life’ has been chosen in preference to ‘role’, ‘function’, or even—wilder flights, these—‘inner life’ or ‘soul’. The point has been to indicate a perspective (rather than to frame a policy) for our common life of study at Blackfriars, and to propose it for inspection and reflection (not for instant discussion). I am conscious that many of my hearers this evening have had to listen to me before, sometimes for many years, and it is hardly likely that they will hear anything new from me today; and yet there would seem to be some value in publicly rehearsing, with some ceremoniousness, views which are intended to elicit positive attitudes of assent or dissent, to contribute to a common if differentiated consciousness. With this in mind, I have upon careful consideration determined to speak with as much honesty as I am capable of; the time has really passed, if it ever existed, for triumphalism of any form, conservative or progressive. What is offered is a ‘Here I stand’, like Luther’s; but it is not necessarily, not yet, anyway, an ‘I can do no other’, provided someone shows me how. Those of my hearers who are not Dominicans have at least done us the honour of sharing our erratic pilgrimage, and I must suppose that they too will not be without concern for an attempt to sketch out its horizons, if hardly to plot its future course.

The coincidence of the opening of a gargantuan international exposition at Montreal and of a new cathedral at Liverpool is provocative of questions about the relationship of architecture to society and of the sacred to the secular. In some ways an international exhibition like Expo ‘67 is to our century what the building of a cathedral was to an earlier one—lots of people and fun and a tempting opportunity for architectural gymnastics on a universal scale.

That, in terms of cost at least, is what such an exhibition is; and ever since Paxton’s Crystal Palace patrons and designers have seized their chance. But Expo ‘67 has another dimension. By the manmade islands, near the tense and justified hilarity of rival national displays, is the building of Habitat, permanent housing of an aggressively experimental kind. The units are piled up with a cubist exploitation of spaces between and through and over them. They are homes. They are extravagant; they cost per home about ten times what we would spend on local authority housing. Yet it all seems reasonable.

It seems reasonable because an exhibition is a chance to make innovations and experiments unhindered by a realistic budget. And that is one of the few ways in which experiments on a big scale can be made. (Otherwise the costs escalate, as in aircraft development.) In this case the designer can try out a social experiment: exploring ways of additively building up a group of homes individually expressed, the reverse of the tall slabs of storage for people with which we have become familiar.