In one of the exchanges between Fergus Kerr and William Mathews on Lonergan, Kerr describes Lonergan’s treatment of literary language in Method in Theology as ‘jejune and unsatisfactory’, as lacking in ‘delicacy and inwardness’; a ‘lacuna’ in his sytematic exposition (New Blackfriars, February 1976, p. 60). This may seem a little harsh given that Lonergan’s overarching concern in that book is not literature but a viable method for contemporary theology. But even as a convinced Lonerganian, I believe Fergus Kerr, in reporting somewhat uncritically the findings of what is, overall, a bad book (Looking at Lonergan’s Method), has picked out a weakness or blind spot in Lonergan’s philosophical awareness. There can be no doubting the somewhat wooden and—the word is inescapable— external character of Lonergan’s pronouncements on literary language and, I would add, on art generally. William Mathews tends to agree, though he adds a tantalizing qualification: ‘I agree with Fergus Kerr that Method is seriously deficient in its treatment of the poetic but unlike the Republic, I believe that poets and dramatists will be welcomed in Lonergan’s theological democracy’ (New Blackfriars, August 1977, p. 367). Mathews lets the matter rest there, but I should like to take up and elaborate his suggestion (or what I take to be his suggestion) that Lonergan’s basic cognitional theory, or transcendental method, can be shown capable of integration with the nature and function of literary language, for it is surely a sound test of any account of how language functions that it can explain how and why poetry affects us as it does.

That there has recently been an eruption of opinion on the nature of myth in the New Testament is scarcely a matter of surprise. For too long we have been content to use words in one context as if they had no significance in any other. The significations of “myth” are legion, and current debate about myth in the New Testment must remain quite pallid until definitions are agreed: which is not something anyone familiar with the history of myth could possibly think imminent. But if “myth” is certainly the most notorious of lightly-used and little-comprehended terms, “symbol” and “metaphor” are no more respectable. Both are related to myth, which speaks typically through received symbols of one kind or another, and which rests upon the imagery of metaphor. Giambattista Vico defined metaphor long ago as “a fable in brief’, and certainly the notion that myth grows out of metaphor, and the related notion that metaphor summarises myth, are both familiar enough to students of literature. And the notion that the literal reading of metaphor in the Bible is the source of much of the mythologising that some now wish to see reversed is familiar enough to students of the New Testament. The difficulties that might be involved in that reversal, however, must give us pause. It is in illumination of some of these difficulties, rather than in any attempt to solve them, that this paper is offered.

Readers of New Blackfriars will remember that last March Fr Adrian Hastings contributed an article on Celibacy, in which he declared that he had come to the decision that as a Catholic priest he was free to marry. He has now followed this up with a book, containing the original article published in New Blackfriars and some other articles on kindred subjects together with an account of his life, showing the background of experience which has led to this decision. This little book is, in fact, an Apologia pro Vita Sua, and as such it seems to me extremely impressive. When a person comes to such a decision, it is natural to ask, what are the motives behind it, conscious or unconscious, and to what extent he can be called a balanced personality. In this book the answer comes through with extraordinary clarity. It is written with transparent sincerity, with humour, intelligence and a profound sense of Catholicity. I do not think that any unprejudiced reader could question that this decision has been reached after mature reflection by one whose life has given him a singularly close connection through his experience in Africa with the issues involved, who has seen their implications for the whole Church and has had the courage to challenge the present system of the Church, which imposes celibacy on the clergy, by the witness of his personal life.

As the wife of an Anglican priest, and an Anglican myself it was with particular personal interest that I read Fr Adrian Hastings’s article on celibacy (New Blackfriars March 1978), in which he described how he had come to the decision that he was free as a Catholic priest to marry. My understanding of the church and the priesthood coincides with that of most Roman Catholics, except that I have always had difficulty in understanding what it was about priesthood and marriage that made them incompatible. In spite of this, and in spite of my undoubted support for Fr Hastings’s position, I want to draw attention to the disadvantages of a married priesthood. For me the practical and social side-effects are not theoretical but constitute part of my everyday experience. From this experience, and from my reflection on it for ten or more years, I have come to the conclusion that the clergy family plays a part in the ‘domestication’ of the church. By this I mean the tendency of the church to be a tame and cosy club shoring up the status quo rather than a prophetic and critical institution within society. I do not believe that having a married clergy causes the ‘domestication’ of the church; rather it upholds it and reinforces it. Thus, the erastianism of the Church of England, with its married clergy, is well known, but in the past all denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, with its celibate clergy, have taken up a similar conservative stance, associating themselves with the powerful in a divided society.

The past decade has seen a quickening of intellectual life among Italian Dominicans of the Roman Province, leading to certain initiatives and achievements which deserve to be better known than they are to Dominicans outside Italy and to others interested in the work of the Order. I refer to the activities of the group of friars, whose centre of operations is the splendid old “studium” of their Province at Pistoia, near Florence, who produce the excellent bi-monthly review Vita Sociale and have revived and wonderfully transformed the old historical journal of the Italian Dominicans, Memorie Domenicane. It is to this latter production that I want, in these brief notes, to draw attention; and along with it, to two important books from the same Pistoian workshop dealing-in; very different ways and in one case, it is true, only indirectly-with that same turning-point in the history of Catholicism, and indeed of western culture as a whole, on which the historical research that has gone into the new Memorie Domenicane (= M.D.) has tended to concentrate—the turning-point indicated in phrases like ‘the rise of humanism’, where this term is taken to signify a typically non-medieval outlook expressed in a new form of culture whose ‘rise’ coincided inter alia with the decline of medieval scholasticism. It need hardly be said that such a use of terms begs many questions, but that it answers to some historical reality needn’t be doubted; it being surely unquestionable that Petrarch and Erasmus, though separated by nearly two centuries, were ‘humanists’ in very much the same sense, and that this entailed in both of them a strongly critical attitude to the scholastic culture and mentality.