A talk given in a retreat for eucharistic ministers in November 1988.

Sooner or later, in Christian ministry, we find we are having to talk to somebody about death, their death or the death of a loved-one, and we are not going to do this very well if we have avoided thinking about death ourselves, avoided asking ourselves what death means—or should mean—for the Christian.

In St Peter’s, Rome, there is a statue by Michelangelo. We have all at least seen photographs of it at some time or other. It is a pieta. That’s to say, a statue of the dead Christ with his mother. We see the broken bloody corpse of Christ lying gently in the arms and lap of his grief-stricken mother, his head facing upwards, his torn limbs drooping down. The statue tells even the most casual tourist a simple story: this is a mother holding the dead body of her son.

But Michelangelo’s Pieta does far more as well. It shows the deep trusting relationship that existed between the mother and the son. How many of us who have seen it cannot be moved by the face of Mary? She is truly beautiful and in a strange way serene. Her skin soft, gentle and warm. And in her beauty she shows her grief. In her tenderness is shown her pain. In the motherly embrace of her dead son is shown her great grief. The agony and joy of being a mother cry out at us from the stone.

Michelangelo uses other images to heighten our understanding and our empathy. We see, hidden under her garment, the gentle curve of her breasts—breasts which sustained life in the early months of her baby son. But above all there is the gaze of Mary into the face of her son—that gaze of total pity, total loss, total love.

Art inevitably reflects the virtues and vices of the culture that produces it. This article treats of the American cultural crisis as reflected in American art and then discusses the moral and religious implications of this crisis.

Martha Bayles, in her Atlantic Monthly article ‘The Shock Art Fallacy’ (Feb., 1994, p. 20), affirms that “Obscenity as art is everywhere. ... Never before in the history of culture has obscenity been so pervasive.” She calls attention to a Spin magazine jeans advertisement in which a young man brandishes a handgun over the caption “Teaching kids to KILL helps them to deal directly with reality.” In the Whitney Museum Bayles finds a photographic display of penises in one room and a row of video monitors showing “transgressive” sexual practices in another. The compulsion to shock dominates popular music, movies, television, publishing, talk-shows, stand-up comedy, and video games. Whatever the cultural bomb-throwers seem to think, Bayles avers that this does not mean we cannot be shocked. Obscenity, she affirms, is shocking. The Supreme Court defined obscenity as the depiction of “sexual conduct” in a “patently offensive way” lacking “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” This definition, because it focuses exclusively on sex while exempting material possessing “serious artistic value,” is irrelevant to our present situation.

Education and schooling are not the same thing. Education, correctly understood, is a lifelong process. Schooling occupies our young days. Although it is a generalisation, I think it is true to say thal modern schooling is the product of the Industrial Revolution.’ Education, by contrast has a longer pedigree. We have schooling because an industrialised nation requires skills best imparted by a schooling process. Recent education reforms (1988 onwards) — particularly under the influence of Toryism — have tried to cement schooling to current economic theory.

The Catholic Church cannot afford to dedicate too many of her resources to reinforcing a particular economic or social theory. Indeed, history shows that the Church has demonstrated wary resistance to such trends. A turning-point arose at Vatican II. In the Decrec Gravissimum Educafionis we read: “Holy Mother Church … is under an obligation to promote the welfare of the whole life of man.” (In modern — politically correct — speech, we would say person, of course). Many, though not all, diocesan education departments concentrate on schooling. This falls under the spell of a myth. The myth suggests that schooling educates. Reality suggests that schooling may open avenues, but education is a most complex process. As the Church slowly climbs out of the shadows of medievalism, we are discovering the need for broader minds, broader concepts of formation. Trends are gradually changing.

There are obviously two groups of structuralists. There are the original quiet ones, led by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, and the new noisy ones, propagating ‘neo-structuralism’ with its political message.

Already last year this process of degeneration was apparent in France. Le Monde for the 30th November had a special section of comment and opinion called: ‘Was structuralism killed by the movement of May?’ Its general conclusion seems to be that it was.

With the publication of Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, a series of essays from various hands, published late last year, it is apparent that the work of the original structuralists cannot be brought together into any meaningful synthesis. Their key concepts are meanwhile being misapplied.

It may seem incredible that such a promising idea as the original concept of structuralism can have been side-tracked so soon, long before any adequate understanding of what it was has penetrated into our discussions in this country.

Yet it is the case. Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? is only the last, and poorest, attempt to give a unity to something which defies unification. In the last two or three years we have seen appear Clefs pour le Structuralisme, by Jean-Marie Auzias (1967); Comprende le structuralisme, by J-B. Fages (1967); A Quoi sert la Notion de ‘Structure’ ? by Raymond Boudon (1968); Le Structuralisme (in the series Qtie sais-je?) by Jean Piaget (1968); and last and most formidable of all, Claude Lévi-Strauss ou la ‘Passion de I'Inceste'.

The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.

The Romans can, with some justification, claim the credit for having introduced the most important legal and religious concept of war into the history of human thought. Thereby they made a very notable contribution to the historical development of international law. To the Romans we owe the idea of the ‘just and pious’ war which has for centuries characterized and influenced the thinking of Western Christendom about the place and practice of war. The idea is still with us today. Like the conception of natural law, the story of the ‘just and pious’ war is that of successive contents flowing though an ancient concept.

In the Rome of the kings it was the function of a special college of priests, the fetiales, to carry out the somewhat elaborate religious and legal procedures, the Jus fetiale, determining the declarations of war and peace between the Roman people and their enemies. The jus fetiale formed part of the Roman jus sacrum, and thereby imported a moral and legal element, over and above that of religion, into the formal procedures of establishing peaceful and hostile relations between Rome and other political communities. The task of the fetiales was to determine whether the duties owed to Rome by her neighbours had been violated, i.e., whether or not Rome had been wronged. These wrongs were well established and defined in Roman religiolegal thinking and formed part of the substantive content of the jus fetiale. These wrongs constituted the causes of ‘just and pious’ wars, to the Roman mind.

When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.

This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.

This document was composed by the Dominican friars who have been imprisoned in Sao Paolo since 1969. It is the outcome of their joint reflections and those of other Christian prisoners with them. It falls into three parts: a meditation on the role of the Church in the world (extensively summarized here), an account of conditions in Brazil, and a consequent justification of the revolutionary position they have adopted.

The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, continuing in time the presence, mission and work of Christ in the world. Jesus Christ came to make salvation a reality, and his whole life, including his death and resurrection, was a witness of love. The mission of the Church is to continue this living witness of love, and the Church is essentially missionary, sent to the world to witness to Jesus Christ among men.

The Church cannot exist on the fringe of the world; it is in the world and has to be constantly present to the world, since it is there that its mission lies, as light to the world, salt of the earth, the leaven in the dough. This is why the Council produced a Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.

I should like to record something of the result of an experience which I had from 1961-1964. I was working as a schoolmaster in Ghana for that time. The school was in routine and academic syllabus an imitation of European, mainly English, practice but we were fortunate in being far removed from the main centres of European expatriate concentration. To be precise we were 130 odd miles from Accra and 70 odd from Akosombo which were the nearest and most accessible European centres. In a town of 10,000 inhabitants throughout our stay at most 40 were expatriates, at the least 20. They included from two to four priests, the Presbyterian missionary and his wife, the two mission doctors and their team of from four to six nurses. This situation could mean virtual isolation in a tiny social world where contacts with Africans and adaptations of ways to theirs were kept to a minimum, or it could provoke a more or less natural interchange between African or expatriate which the circumstances made easy and spontaneous, rather than condescending, folkloristic or exotic. It would be untrue to say that it did not involve a conscious decision, but the decision was an easy one.

Old attitudes die very hard even in so out of the way a place. Many of the Europeans did choose to huddle together to lick over each other’s sense of isolation endlessly; contacts with Africans were kept to a minimum, formality of occasion was encouraged, any crossing over of racio-customary lines was seen as daring and by no means habit-forming.

There is now general agreement that Christians, in virtue of their Christian commitment, should engage in social and political action, particularly on behalf of the poor and oppressed. That is the presupposition behind liberation theology. At the same time the conviction persists that social and political action is not properly religious action, but, strictly speaking, only the consequence or overflow of religion into a non-religious, secular sphere. Hence the felt necessity, especially on the part of those with religious authority, to qualify the acceptance of liberation theology with frequent warnings that the Christian religion should not be reduced to social and political action.

More widespread among ordinary religious people is the manner in which the perennial need for reflection becomes a devaluing of social and political action in favour of interior contemplation as alone truly religious. People are urged to withdraw at regular intervals from their social involvement, which is dubbed external activity, in order to find God once more in the properly religious activity of personal, meditative prayer. The religious life is seen as the inner life in contrast to the outer life. The locus of the Transcendent and of religious experience is identified with the realm of interiority. To work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed may be demanded by religious faith, hope and love. It is applied religion, but it is not of the essence of religion, which is found in the inwardness of union with God.

This tendency of the Christian religion has been strongly reinforced by interest in the Eastern religions.

Spain in the Eighteenth century was in two minds about the economic thought of the Enlightenment reaching it from other parts of Europe. The first half of the century has been aptly characterised as a period of ‘ideological hesitancy’, but in the second half the hesitancy came to an end. The liberal cause, and its main instruments the Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais, made great strides. Political economy, then a brand new science, was welcomed by the liberal statesmen like Jovellanos and Campomanes who flourished under Carlos III. Their primary concern was that Spain might lose heavily if she were too slow getting into the new international market economy, and they regarded works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as important guides to the industrial and commercial policies Spain should pursue.

Others were more cautious. Intellectuals trained in the Aristotelian tradition were often more concerned about the moral quality of the new economics, and about the moral costs of pursuing the kind of policies that flowed from it. These are concerns which today, after a further two hundred years experience of market economy, are even more alive now than they were then. It is worth reflecting on whether these critics were entirely the reactionary flat-earthers they are customarily dismissed as being. History is written by the victors, and the Enlightenment won this engagement, so it is only to be expected that in our standard accounts the Aristotelian opponents of the Enlightenment come out badly.

At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.

It is noteworthy that in 1943, when the whole world was embroiled in war, the Holy See issued an Encyclical letter on Biblical studies and the opportune means of promoting them. Much stress is laid on new efforts, certainly, but also on new preoccupations, new investigations, new orientations, in a word, on the changed conditions of Biblical study, ‘for deeper archaeological research has given rise to new questions offering occasion for a closer investigation of the subject’. Indeed, we are urged to pay close attention to archaeological findings; ‘Archaeology’, or its equivalent, is referred or appealed to some six or seven times and unquestionably holds a high place among the many endowments expected of those whose duty it is to make known the Biblical authors’ meanings.

And so a note on some recent Biblical archaeology will not seem out of place.

Writers on Biblical archaeology like to refer to ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ evidence about Biblical narratives; and it is usually said that very few finds bear directly on the Bible, whereas the indirect contribution is very rich. But this division into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ seems fruitless and unessential; rather should we say that any little information, from any source whatever, however tenuous, if it throws light on the sacred text, is to be highly prized, and ‘receives an added and nobler dignity, a consecration as it were, when it is used to shed a brighter light on divine things’. It is true no doubt that we must widen the term ‘Archaeology’ and bring in considerations of topography, history, and in fact anything illustrative; possibly ‘sacred antiquities’ would describe better that ensemble of findings which help us to know the mind of the inspired writer and the way in which he expressed it.