Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”:

Having described the new approach to the empty tomb narratives (NEW BLACKFRIARS, July 1977), we must next investigate what some Catholic theologians now believe about the gospel narratives about appearances to the disciples of the resurrected Jesus. As before, we limit our enquiry to The Common Catechism, and to the recent books by Walter Kasper and Hans Kung.

Hans Küng in fact says almost nothing about the appearance narratives themselves. He behaves here like the most traditional scholastic theologian. He develops his view in opposition to that of the distinguished young Catholic exegete Rudolf Pesch, and indulges in a good deal of speculation about the metaphysics of the risen body. He leaves aside all detailed reference to the gospel texts.

As far as the speculation goes, Kung starts from the assumption that the Resurrection is “essentially a work of God on Jesus” (p. 349): that is to say, he is in no doubt that the Resurrection is something that happened to the crucified Jesus—it was not something that happened in the minds and hearts of the disciples. Kung cannot be accused of subjectivising Easter or of reducing it to any kind of human discovery or projection. Since the Resurrection is “an act of God within God’s dimensions”, Küng believes that it cannot be described as a historical event, as he says, “in the strict sense”:

One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.

In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.

I start with a quotation from the “Point of View” of the Church of Ireland Gazette for August 19th.

In this article I shall take the Gazette’s language and speak of the English “document” and the Irish “report” to avoid confusion. The Document appears to agree with Dr. Palley former Professor of Public Law in Queen’s University, Belfast. She contrasts the “majority of Protestants” who are “descendants of as the settlers” with “the majority of Irishmen, for the most part Roman Catholics”. Possibly Professor Beckett, who has recently retired from a history chair in the same university may be rather more reliable. I quote from the Appendix he supplied to the Irish Report of 1975.

In the true sense of the word of course there can never be enough saints. Luther, I have heard, said that the only thing that matters is to be a saint. Simone Weil is even more uncompromising: “it seems to me that saintliness is. if I dare say so, the minimum for a Christian” (Seventy Letters, ed. Rees, 1965, p. 175). It is simply a linguistic oddity that English and German among others have tended to separate the word ‘saint’ or its equivalent from ‘holy’, whereas the Romance languages keep one word to describe the holy person and to mark out those whose saintliness the Church has formally recognised. In England the word may even take on a dismissive air: one hears from time to time the quite unashamed remark. “I don't pretend to be a saint”, as if unsaintliness were a perfectly reasonable and acceptable state of mind, which we can in any case do nothing about, a condition perhaps that one has been born with, as who should say, “I don't pretend to be very clever’’. A booklet published by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul innocently answers the question whether its members are “near-saints’’: “Certainly not. God knows, they are ordinary Catholics, real men who (let it be said with the utmost humility) are trying to do God’s will”. Saints as are of course extraordinary—that is why we feel we need a special word for them; and I suggest that part of their difference is in their greater human reality, or rather that they are more fully human (whole) by being holy.