Commenting on the recent presence in Cairo of the Egyptian Minister to the Holy See, The Times has twice alluded to the probability of some joint action by the Vatican and Islam with regard to the formation of a common front against the dangers of Communism. That some form of general rapprochement is under consideration can indeed hardly be doubted, since only last November the possibility of this was mentioned by the Holy See itself in an announcement made by the Congregation de Propaganda Fidei. This announcement was not, however, any new or sudden departure, but can be best understood if it is regarded merely as a further step in a process that plainly appears as steadily developing during recent years.

Since the Catholic and Islamic Faiths jointly account for a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants, the growth of friendly understanding between the leaders of both is of profound importance, and the details of such growth are of much significance. Islam itself has been described as a sounding-box on which an event occurring in one place immediately affects the whole. This is particularly true of Cairo, capital of Egypt, since political happenings there have speedy repercussions among the various Muslim states of the Arab League, whilst also influencing Islamic opinion as a whole, because Muslim students from all over the free world are numbered among those attending at the great University of Al Azhar, one of the main centres of Mohammedan religious thought and teaching today as it has been for ages past.

In his inspiring and moving reflections on the church in Latin America Jon Sobrino can speak of that church as an identifiable and representative community; identifiable in the struggle against poverty and injustice, representative of many different sections of society:

In England there are obviously Catholics who are living an option for the poor, without necessarily appealing to the example of Latin America. During the last few years I have witnessed the commitment to the homeless at Mary and Joseph House in Central Manchester; kept in touch with efforts to improve race relations in Leicester; seen the diversification of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work for the poor at the east end of Newcastle; and been drawn into what seems to be an unceasing quest on behalf of the third world by Justice and Peace groups in Nantwich and Surrey. But, despite such options for the poor in different parts of the country, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church as ‘an identifiable and representative community’ will take an option for England’s poor.

An American newspaper has described the attack on Abyssinia as the wickedest war in history. And indeed few wars have seemed less excusable or aroused more universal disgust. Apart from all questions of British interests involved, and apart from the hypocrisy suggested by such an attitude (for it is undeniable that Britain has repeatedly done much that Italy is doing to-day), nothing could be better calculated to offend the sentimental-sporting instincts of the British public of 1935 than the spectacle of a well-equipped modem army with planes, bombs, tanks and (it seems) poison-gas invading a primitive, independent African state.

But though sentiment may give, up to a point, a trustworthy indication of objective right and wrong, it is in the light of dispassionate reasoning and the unbiassed examination of facts that the ethics of Italy’s attack must be scrutinized. What is to be said of it in the light of Catholic teaching? The ethical aspect of the conflict (which the Christian knows to be the most fundamental one) has received insufficient attention.

I have often wondered how Communists can make their faith acceptable to their reason. Granted that in most cases the emotional forces released by their mystique leave little room for reasoning, yet man is a rational being and ultimately everybody is driven to rationalise, in however haphazard a manner, and thus to justify to himself the faith that is in him.

Most difficult of all to rationalise must surely be the ultimate foundation on which the whole structure of the Communist party rests, I mean belief in Stalin’s infallibility. And let it not be said that to use the term ‘infallibility’ is an exaggeration. Members of the Communist party are expected to hand themselves over entirely to its cause, to consider its claims as overriding those of any human tie, any interest, any personal conviction, and to be ready to sacrifice for it all they have or are, even their life. And for them this life is the end: they cannot be buoyed up by the expectation of any future reward, they cannot esteem this short present life of theirs as nothing compared with a future eternal life. They are pledged to an oboedientia cadaveris which for them is not a mortification of the will which brings its rewards, quite irrespective of whether the order obeyed is in itself right or mistaken, whether it will or will not further the end aimed at. Success—earthly success—is, for the Christian, suspect; for the Communist it is the only possible criterion.

For the Communist to hand himself over body and soul (as we would say) to the directives of the party can therefore only seem justifiable to himself, because only by following them does he think that success can be achieved. And the directives of the party are in the last resort of course those that are validated by Stalin. The course steered by Communism may be a zig-zag: it is for Stalin to say when the ‘zig’ is right, and when the ‘zag’. He is always right, unquestionably, because infallibly right.

We are constantly being told there is a ‘crisis of authority’. Catholics in particular are always talking about authority and worrying about it, in fact they seem to have a sort of obsession about it—for or against. But they aren’t the only ones who worry, it affects all aspects of public and private life. It affects, naturally, the idea of what kind of leadership—if any—Christians can give at a time like this, in a society like ours. Does the ‘crisis’ mean that the possibility of leadership has gone, at least for the time being? Is there any sense in Christians trying to shore up the crumbling walls of authority?

In order to answer questions of this kind we need to ask two others, which we seldom do ask because we take the answers for granted. These questions are first, What is authority? and secondly, What kind of society do we live in?

It’s important to see exactly what we mean by authority, otherwise we are likely to waste a lot of time talking at cross-purposes.

Authority is primarily to do with community, in fact it is an essential ingredient of community. We tend to think of authority as synonymous with power, or government. Authority may involve the exercise of governing power, but that is not its nature.

I would like to begin by reminding you of an episode in the history of modern philosophy in this country which is not altogether without significance, and that is the revolt against the Hegelian absolutism which one associates with such writers as Bosanquet and Edward Caird by a very powerful collection of thinkers at once philosophical and theological, of whom perhaps the best known in philosophical circles is the late Professor A. E. Taylor and in theological circles that profound and passionate writer Peter Taylor Forsyth. I mention Taylor and Forsyth together. I knew Taylor: I did not know Forsyth personally, but to judge from the latter’s biography there was very little temperamental kinship between the two men. But both Taylor and Forsyth had this in common, that they welcomed Kant’s intense moralism. I well remember Taylor saying to me: ‘You know, MacKinnon, Kant is a very great moralist indeed. The Hegelian criticism of him is largely irrelevant. Hegel was a man without a conscience and could never understand anyone who took the moral struggle as seriously as Kant did’. Forsyth, too, in his writings found in Kant’s intense moralism—his insistence on the inescapable demand of the moral law—a rock firm to withstand the moral frivolousness that he supposed to be ultimately implicit in the Hegelian attitude; and certainly if any of you have read Bosanquet’s book, Some Suggestions in Ethics (a book well worth reading) you will agree, I think, that Bosanquet does leave little foothold for an ultimate moral seriousness—for the kind of almost existential engagement that seems involved in moral choice.

This essay explores the political and legal problem of legitimate wars in relation to the theological question of justice and peace. It begins by charting a brief genealogical account of how in the modern era the Christian ‘just war’ tradition was formalised and thus drained of much of its substantive and practical context.

The essay also examines and rejects a number of contemporary attempts to use ‘just war’ theory in order to legitimate modern warfare. The argument is that both neoconservative realism and political liberalism instrumentalise the ‘just war’ tradition to defend and extend central state power. Christian pacifism has a compelling critique of realism and liberalism, but it fails to offer a genuinely transformative ontology and politics.

The essay concludes by calling for a metaphysics of peace that can resist the modern primacy of violence and make real the divine promise of a harmoniously ordered cosmos.

This article is a study of how Augustine's ethics of belief shaped his arguments against unbelief and its legacy in using coercion to settle disputes. After considering the arguments for belief presented by Augustine, the article studies how these were shaped by his understanding of the problem of evil and how the Fall influenced free will. What is noted to be of benefit in Augustine is that he offers arguments in favor of belief, and is convinced that he has shown unbelief to be based on unsound reasoning. By way of contrast, a number of theologians (such as Tertullian, John Calvin, and those under the heading of Reformed Epistemology) are considered who do not believe that arguments are necessary to support belief or reject unbelief. These are contrasted with Augustine and it is argued that they have significant shortcomings in this respect. However, the article concludes that Augustine could have gone farther in supporting the claim that it is clear that God exists, and his own shortcomings have been used to justify coercion in religious belief. If common ground is to be achieved this problem must be corrected and an adequate foundation for clarity must be established.

The subject is a vast one. I cannot therefore give more than a few leading ideas on the general theme of art as it was used and understood in the Middle Ages. We could hardly begin from the early Christian artists and follow the history of painting, sculpture, music, stained glass and so on through the Byzantine period right up to the Renaissance. It is an inspiring and vast history, until modern times very much overlooked, but now studied in great detail through a whole library of volumes.

I should like first to deal with the general characteristics, because so often people have supposed that the lack of realism displayed by the artist of the Middle Ages represented a lack of skill. The earlier age of Greek and Roman sculpture reached an extremity of realism to be seen in such popular figures as the Venus of Milo, every detail of the human figure, every fold of the loosely falling clothes described in stone with a finesse of observation which today is called photographic. And later as the Middle Ages passed into the Renaissance we find the same accurate observation and skilful representation, culminating in the pathetic marble of Michel Angelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s at Rome. In between these two triumphant periods the Christian artists seem to have been like children unobservant of details and incapable of any but the crudest representation. The modem man trained in an age of photography and extremes of technique tends to measure all art by the accuracy with which the painting or the statue represents the natural object it depicts.

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.

As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.

I have written this paper on the basis of the hunch that there is something very misleading about the relationship, as Marx sometimes describes it, between the scientific analysis of society and morality. I have the hunch, also, that many of Marx’s followers have been misled in the way one would expect them to be, given his false clues. I should say, however, that this suspicion of confusion concerns more what Marx and his followers call by the name ‘morality’ than what they offer as a method and a substance for the analysis of society. This misleading confusion is that Marx and subsequent Marxists more or less explicitly define their stance as scientists by way of contrast with the status the moralist or moral theorist is, on their view, supposed to have. I shall not discuss in any detail the various ways in which this false contrast has been made out. Rather I shall mention some guiding lines of thought which lead to it.

The hypothesis which I will offer as an alternative to this contrast is simply that it would best serve both clarity and the history of moral thought if we were to agree on the following proposition: Marxism, as the science of society is, if a true science, nothing but morality and morality nothing but Marxism. Hence, the judgments about how to act which may be based on the results of that science, if true, are moral judgments. If, however, the science has produced more than trivially false results it is nothing but vice to act, or want to act on the judgments about acting which are entailed by them. The question, therefore, whether Marxism is or is not identical with morality is, to my mind, an empirical question, to be settled one way or the other by reference to the very same facts which show it to offer either crucially true or else false statements about contemporary society.

In the first part of this paper, I suggested something of the nature and justification of our current questioning of authority in the Church, and tried to indicate the relevant scriptural criteria for evaluating the issues. Towards the end of this first part, brief reference was made to some of the actual questions being raised in the present crisis of authority. A great many of these deal with what we could call ‘outward’ and disciplinary matters. But there are others which belong more directly to the realm of doctrine, where teaching authority comes in. These would seem to give rise to a more serious inner sense of anguish than many of the others, since they penetrate more deeply into the inmost reserves of our Christian commitment.

It should be noted that the more disciplinary difficulties date mainly from the Middle Ages, whereas the doctrinal are more peculiar to the post-Reformation Church. Of course, heretics were burned in the Middle Ages, but the theory at least was that this took place because they were a threat to the social cohesion of the Christian world. It was only when the Church was progressively robbed of her grip on society, from the sixteenth century onwards, that there was added the intense preoccupation with a demand for a thorough-going conformity of conscience all along the line, even in detail, in matters of doctrine, according as these were examined, decided and prescribed entirely from above.

The argument / have with Barker is by now played out, at any rate over “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” (New Blackfriars, June 1975). From the start I knew that that article had its shortcomings. But it is, essentially, corrigible. I think I know what I wanted to say in it, though I acknowledge that what I wrote did not always say it. Barker, however, has a habit of regarding what I write as just a very extended parapraxis, all the surface deficiencies being but symptoms of the fact that what I want to say is, literally, unspeakable. The very fact that I should want to put down these deficiencies of formulation to subjective conditions of production would itself be symptomatic of the degree to which I am held in thrall by the ideology which is the true author of what I wrote— the ideology according to which “subjects” (e.g. Denys Turner) are the authors of, among other things, texts. All this would be by the way were it not that, in Barker’s view, it is its captivation by the ideology of “the subject” which is the chief ideological element in Christianity and the chief reason why Marxist science cannot debate Christianity. For the ideological nature of Christianity makes it the (potential) object of Marxist science, not a discourse it can debate with on equal but different terms.

I have no objection in principle to this apparently high-handed procedure, analogous as it is to the Freudian habit of giving Freudian explanations of the critics of Freudian theory. After all I myself argued (“Marxism, Christianity and Morality”, New Blackfriars, April 1977, p. 191), that the mark of any science is its capacity not merely to explain what ideology fails to explain but also to explain why ideology cannot explain what it fails to explain.

“Christian epistemology links mystic knowledge to language. God has spoken,” Michel de Certeau writes (M.F., p. 114) Two extended metaphors for the economy of this speech act are common in the tradition. In the first, God is Speaker, Christ is the Spoken Word, the Verb grafted upon this world (M.F., p. 150) and the Spirit is the breath (pneuma) which makes this communication possible. In the second, the Spirit is explicitly linked to the writing of the Spoken Word. God is Writer and creation is His book. Certeau, as we will see, examines both these metaphors (with the economies of revelation and redemption that they imply). The speech act is fundamental to his understanding of history, creation, subjectivity and the practices of daily living. And yet, as a thinker who draws upon and develops the poststructuralism of Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida (to name only a few), this privileging of the voice is somewhat at odds with poststructural denunciations of the author and critiques of the metaphysics of presence subtly organised around the hierarchy of speech over writing.

In the whole vast field, of the social sciences, there can hardly be a more neglected subject than the sociology of Catholicism, that is to say, the study of the structure and of the life-processes of the Catholic Church, with the means and methods usually applied by sociologists to other societies or associations. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The Catholic Church is an organization to which it seems well-nigh impossible to assume an objective and unprejudiced attitude. To the classical Protestant she is the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, the devil’s most dangerous death-trap; to the atheist, whether liberal or communist, she is the main bar to progress, a hateful anachronism; to the Catholic she is a dear mother, and indeed the very Body of Christ. In so far as sociology is a scientific pursuit, a pursuit of the truth without favour or disfavour, the Church of Rome must be one of the most difficult objects to handle. Nevertheless, it is and remains surprising that she has never been properly studied by sociologists. After all, even the Protestant and the atheist cannot close their eyes to the fact that she is in all probability both the oldest and the most numerous social body in our western civilization, and even the Catholic cannot gainsay the fact that if she is the Gate of Heaven, she is necessarily at the same time a human society, showing human, even secular, aspects besides her religious and transcendent traits—aspects which are no less worthy of attention than the others.

Towards the end of his many sided life Fr Vincent wrote “God knows how much I have striven and prayed to mend the shattered unity of Christendom”, words that may seem strange to those who only knew him in his later days, for he had developed other interests. But a study of his writing shows him to have been among the early Catholic ecumenists and to have kept up his interest throughout his life. His labours in this field span the formative years of the movement which is one of the glories of the Church in this century. Indeed it is plain that he not only laboured but suffered in the cause of Reunion -as it was known, and sometimes dreaded by many of his contemporaries.

In retrospect he traced his interest to lessons learnt at his mother’s knee, where he acquired “his first desire, never since quenched of seeking to love, even more than to convert, his separated brethren”. The uphill path he trod not only shows that ecumenism did not begin with Vatican II but how he dealt with problems that are still with us. While Prior at Woodchester, in the first years of the century, he was in correspondence with Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was host to his Cotswold neighbour, the Rev Spencer Jones, Rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, who became a leading Anglo-Catholic after the publication of his classic England and the Holy See. He was also writing in the early issues of The Lamp, a paper edited by Fr Paul Wattson, who after his reconciliation was to promote the Unity Octave through it for almost half a century.