An article by Fr Kevin T. Kelly recently published in The Clergy Review under the title ‘A Positive Approach to Humanae Vitae’ is an attempt at making a dispassionate evaluation of the teaching of that Encyclical on birth regulation. The attempt is successful, in that the article correctly weighs up the teaching of the Encyclical against the other statements of the Magisterium which immediately preceded or followed that Encyclical.

The untasty dish served by Pope Paul in 1968 is at last being made palatable; the trouble is that, in the process, the ingredients adduced from more savoury sources are changing the nature of the dish. Contraception, admittedly, remains evil. It is no longer, however, intrinsically evil; that is to say, it is no longer a type of action whose evilness cannot be exorcised by circumstances and that admits of no case in which its performance could be squared with God’s Will and man’s good. Contraception is now evil ‘in the premoral sense’. Like killing, which remains evil even when the total action of which it is a part makes it legitimate to take another man’s life, so is contraception: the total action can be a moral good and so legitimate the inclusion of contraception, without for that reason denying its premoral evil character.

The pastoral guidance given by Fr Kelly is in keeping with his assessment of the morality of contraception: ‘If a couple accept Humanae Vitae in the sense suggested in this article, then if they are using some form of contraception they ought to admit that what they are doing is not fully in accord with the objective demands of God’s Will for them’.

Hazlitt has had a fair amount of modern critical attention, but not enough of it has been concerned with rescuing him from the drab category of ‘minor Regency prose’ and establishing him where he belongs, as one of the most extraordinarily intelligent writers of his period. Perhaps the difficulty has been in part one of genre. One dominant definition of the English essay form, as a belletristic set- piece concerned to charm, composed of the casual meanderings of a liberal, off-beat, impressionist mind, fits a little of Hazlitt’s work accurately enough; but there seem good reasons why critics who feel comfortably at home with Lamb, Stevenson and Belloc might feel less at ease with Hazlitt’s writings as a whole. His liberalism is allied with a trenchancy which has been attacked as intemperate and bellicose; and this is perhaps one reason why a book like Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, to my mind an inferior product containing hardly a single disturbing judgment, has assumed predominance over works with a sharper edge—Political Essays, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker.

Hazlitt’s trenchancy springs from his radicalism; and it is worth calling the abrasive force of that radicalism to mind, with its controlled combination of moral indictment and caustic irony. There are his comments on the Quarterly Review, for instance:

The challenge which faced all Greek intellectuals alike, can be reconstructed in the form of a dilemma. Either some way of fixing a descriptive meaning for the language of moral evaluation had to be found, or, in the absence of any such method, moral and political virtue would have to be taught as a way of living well in a world where prescription was the basis of morality. In either case the fact remained that virtue would have to be taught.

Those who, like Plato and Aristotle, opted for the first alternative were faced with the problem generated by their adherence to the old assumption: namely that the descriptive meaning of moral evaluation was discoverable only in terms of some social order, some polis, to be a good member of which was to be a good man. But the very fact that it was now problematic what one’s polis was, meant that the search for moral knowledge had to be seen as the proper object of some specialized form of enquiry into the question, that is, of what those social roles and relationships are, to understand which is to understand how the good man acts. Thus it is that if political virtue can be taught it also needs to be taught. It can be taught because everyone knows what the universal virtues of the political life are, and that they are virtues—for, as Thucydides had emphasized, even bad men justify their vices in the language of those virtues.

Can you say a prayer prayerfully with words in it you don’t understand? Yes, because for centuries Greek Christians have done precisely that. Wilfully, day in day out, they have asked God to give them epiousion bread in the Our Father. Every attempt to understand this word is more or less guess-work, so that after nineteen centuries of saying the Lord’s Prayer, we are still at square one. Square one being the statement of Origen, early in the third century, that we don’t know what epiousion really means, because it was never used by Greek writers, nor does it exist in common speech, and seems to have been made up by the evangelists.

This is a very extraordinary state of affairs. Jesus expressly repudiated meaningless and repetitive phrases, and supplied his disciples instead with this simple and straightforward prayer that everyone can understand. And then somehow or other it first appears in Greek with one quite unintelligible word. And it is an important word. For we are asked to pray for bread; but what sort of bread?— plain brown bread, spiritual bread, eucharistic bread, or food in general, eschatological food and drink, or what? The only qualifying word is this epiousion and we don’t know exactly what it means.

Social Darwinian optimism assesses a poet in terms of his ‘advance’ or ‘development’—thus the conventional blurb’s claim that Seamus Heaney’s ‘power is, if anything, stronger than before’. The immodesty of Faber’s claim might obscure one’s sense that something more subtle, and less inevitably even, is taking place in Heaney’s third book. The book shows, for instance, the elements in his work as he assimilates himself into a variety of forms and tones of voice, some of which are modish, others achieved deftly but with creditable hesitation. In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem indicated Heaney’s capacity to formulate that revulsion which seems to be a fairly basic constituent of man’s relation to nature; (of the ‘gross- bellied frogs’).