The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.

At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.

One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?

Not all the discussion between progressive and conservative wings in the Church is about doctrine and liturgy. As the Humanae Vitae affair revealed there are growing areas of disagreement on questions of morality. Though the ones I want to write about are found in acute form in Roman Catholic circles where there is a sharper clash between individual and authority, they are also frequent wherever any strong doctrine of revelation, particularly of a fundamentalist kind, prevails. This essay aims simply to elucidate some of the questions which do not always get properly examined in the heat of debate and to analyse some of the presuppositions behind popularly held and taught views which lay some claim to being representative of ‘traditional Christian morality’. Not infrequently the views of serious moral thinkers are dubbed ‘situation ethics’ or ‘purely subjective morality’ and by being so labelled are accounted suitably disposed of along with the rest of the contents of the bin marked ‘new theology’. There is a risk that more than garbage is disposed of in this way. I want in this essay to do a bit of ‘cool looking’ at some of the presuppositions of the supporters of ‘traditional Christian morality’ (self-styled) and also to look at a problem that crops up frequently in these discussions: what can be reckoned as specifically ‘Christian’ in a moral view which does not understand moral imperatives to have been delivered timeless and eternal in some earlier period of history?

This is not a time to be digging the old entrenched positions a little deeper and then defending them, so it is worth noting with caution that each of the terms in this title trails with it a long history of old battles and rigid attitudes. In any case, the old certainty about the meanings of the words we use is one of the new uncertainties.

There is even an implicit assumption hidden in the order in which the terms are used traditionally. We take it for granted, perhaps, that tradition is rooted in scripture, and that the community is first formed, and then grows, by a causal combination of these two prior factors. This view holds that the people of the Old. Testament and of the New were ‘People of a Book’, who were formed by the scriptures which they accepted. They had a clear tradition, as well, handed down to them from the very beginning : ‘It was of importance that this tradition should be preserved without deformation; and fidelity to the received tradition was the ultimate assurance that the doctrine proposed was genuine.’ A little later in the same article the function of tradition as a vital factor in the formation of the community is explicitly stated: ‘… the spirit indeed taught the Church, but communicated no new word beyond that which Jesus had incarnated and uttered. The content of the revelation, once Jesus no longer dwelt on earth, was secured only by the faithful preservation and transmission of the word among his followers. Tradition must therefore be included among the constitutive elements of the primitive Christian community.’

The division between East and West on which most of us have been brought up, is gradually losing its significance and relevance in the face of a very much sharper division of mankind—between rich and poor countries. Among the rich are all the ‘white’ countries and Japan. They make up one quarter of the world population and share between them 90 per cent of the world’s income. This leaves 10 per cent for the other three-quarters. On average, an American earns in one week a little under what an Indian earns in one year. An Englishman earns the same amount in about two and a half weeks. This imbalance is far greater today than it has ever been before. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the ratio of wealth between the richer and the poorer countries was of the order of five to one. Now it is twenty-five to one.

One could argue that in a world of plenty, in which all were able to satisfy their basic needs and aspirations, such a gross disparity was intolerable. But the point is that the majority of those living in the poor countries are not in a position to satisfy the most fundamental of their needs and aspirations in terms of food, shelter, clothing and employment; whereas we, in the rich countries, having quite lost sight of the distinction between what is fundamentally necessary and what is superfluous, are increasingly brain-washed into thinking that the most unnecessary novelties are vital to our well-being.

The purpose of this article is to examine the poems of R. S. Thomas and to attempt some exegesis of them from a theological point of view. So far as I know, this has not been attempted before. Naturally enough, the poems of this writer have already received considerable attention from a literary viewpoint, and critics and reviewers have established certain of their more obvious characteristics : their spare diction, their rich imagery, their hardness to the touch, the quality of perfection in some of the lyrics, their frequent mood of anger or near despair. The fact that the writer is a priest with a small country parish in Wales is, of course, always registered. It accounts for his concern with the countryside, with the difficult relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the land, for his concern with the past, present and future of the people of Wales. Doubtless there is much more to be done here. In this article however we shall not be doing it. Our purpose is rather to enquire into some of the underlying structures of Christian thinking which the poems reveal, and what their significance may be for the Christian believer who is trying to think through the meaning of his faith. Whatever ,else may be uncertain about R. S. Thomas, it is clear that he does not reveal his deepest thoughts and feelings easily. We shall have to look beneath the surface for the heart of what he is saying.

Having once berated (by letter) the present editor of New Blackfriars for feeding his readers on the ersatz provender of bloated book-reviews, I find myself involved in the same offence. My excuse is that I have rarely read a book which has aroused in me such ambivalence of reaction as Dr Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols. My hope is that this extended reviewed will encourage other people to read this book, which it would be unjust to ignore totally, and pernicious to accept entirely. The book is of significance in both anthropology and theology; is it perhaps the turn of an intellectual tide, a theological anthropology moving in to the vacuum left by secular theology?

This, I believe, is the author’s intention: to carry out a counterrevolution in the social sciences, so that anthropology and sociology, whose origins were so deeply rooted in the wish of the French positivists and British agnostics to reveal and shatter the foundations of faith, will now become instruments for demasking the social causes of all religious attitudes including atheism, agnosticism and indifference, and for indicating the social patterns which favour faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This intention does credit to Mrs Douglas as a Christian, and the examination of ethnographic material which it has provoked reveals her brilliance as an anthropologist. Underlying it all, however, is, I consider, an appalling error, or paradigm of errors. But let us see what she has to say.

When I was saying goodbye to Michel Butor on the southbound platform of Durham station some months ago, I asked him if he did not feel that student activity on the violent left, in France and elsewhere, had already reached a peak, and that what students really expected from teachers was not discussion towards reform, but a reason for order. There was, he replied, nothing more repugnant to him than the teaching of order to the young (I was very much reminded of Camus’s embarrassed proclamation to a group of students when asked to address them on some serious topic, I would rather preach passion to you’) and the only valid thing to tell them was to explore and risk. I had been full of Camus and limits when I asked the question, having only a few months before lectured on L’Homme révolté to an audience of African students on Camus’s depiction of the pitfalls of millenarian revolution, its constant history of over-reaching and failure; and I had been roundly rebuked by nearly all the expatriate professors—European and American—on the staff of that African university: in their view, what might have been a careful indication of ‘brakes’ in Britain or Europe could be only a counsel of cowardly despair in modem Africa, where the first lesson needed was revolt.

Butor clearly felt this about France, too, but whatever one’s views about the events of May, 1968, and the legend it has left behind it, in the most conspicuous case of Nanterre it seems to me that the reasonable limits of revolt were crossed long ago.

On the face of it, the ‘neo-modernist’ aesthetic is radically atheistic. (I borrow the term from Frank Kermode’s essay Modernisms, in Innovations, edited by Bernard Bergonzi.) For example Jean Alter has pointed out that in Robbe-Grillet’s world everything is meticulously present except that which is associated with God. Wallas, in Les Gommes, on the lookout for ways of finding his correct route without giving himself away, asks for the post office but not the cathedral: for the town has none. The island in Le Voyeur has a cinema, a café, a garage and a hotel, but no church. In L'Immortelle the religious manifestations are treated simply as tourist attractions, having no religious meaning. Now, the absence of all reference to religion, despite the meticulous rendering elsewhere of visible detail, is itself highly unrealistic. It points to the real message of Robbe-Grillet’s apparently neutral and value-free fiction; namely the discontinuity between human beings and the material environment. There can be no ‘complicity’ between man and the world for ‘les choses sont les choses, et l’homme n’est que l'homme’. (Pour un Nouveau Roman.) In so far as religion, and the objects associated with it, exist for the sake of establishing some rapport between the world and the people God has put in it, religion for Robbe-Grillet is simply a false trail, a cul-de-sac. The whole apparatus of symbolism, sacraments and prayer is therefore ignored, as something of no account in a fiction that concerns itself with life as it really is.

Now, if Alter is right, Robbe-Grillet’s deliberate and calculated refusal to include anything to do with religious activity shows that his aesthetic is not ideologically neutral, but critical. It keeps its distance from the world of ‘bare facts’, takes up a stance towards them.

Cape Ann in Massachusetts is one of the more plentifully documented areas of the country in tourist literature and in books of local colour and history. Details of historical and literary interest are carefully noted in brochures and guide maps. Kipling’s Captains Courageous and James B. Connolly’s Gloucestermen are rightly remembered. Summer visits of minor New England literary figures are duly recorded, and reference is ubiquitous to the Reef of Norman’s Woe off the Magnolia side of Gloucester Harbour, immortalizing Longfellow’s ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’. Yet one looks in vain for any notice of Cape Ann’s most distinguished literary event, T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, despite his explicit note preceding the poem: ‘(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)’ I found a recent visit to the museum of the Cape Ann Scientific, Literary and Historical Association in Gloucester no more rewarding. Apart from a few of his published books, the Sawyer Free Library in the same town has only a small collection of photos of Eliot and a drawing by his sister. Even the detailed and very readable Saga of Cape Ann of Melvin Copeland and Elliott Rogers (1960) passes the poem over in silence, though it does speak of the danger to navigation offered by the rocks from which Eliot named the third of his Four Quartets.

I took advantage of updating sessions in Zambia last summer to put the following question to Zambian and missionary priests that I met: ‘Has your training really prepared you for your ministry?’

The question was deliberately ambiguous; training could be interpreted as spiritual, pastoral or theological. The question was put to eighty-eight priests, and it is revealing that nearly all of them singled out the theological side of their training for criticism. This criticism was certainly not ambiguous : forty regarded their theological formation as mostly irrelevant to their ministry, compared with eleven who considered it useful preparation; the other thirtyseven refrained from making any clear-cut statement, but suggested drastic modifications.

The quasi-unanimous reproach was that their theology had been one-sidedly academic and intellectual, aimed at furnishing their minds with answers to out-dated European questions, rather than at making them messengers of a living Gospel that would be Good News to the people they were sent to.

This sentiment of frustration is a symptom of a much wider problem. A young missionary or African priest, on the completion of a six- or seven-year course of study from which he rightly expected some sort of competence, complains that he has nothing effective to tell his community in his homily, no compelling News to announce to the school children in the period of Religion, no direction to offer to a people puzzled by a rapid social change, no contribution to make to the development of the country.

With all its attendant weaknesses, the current popularity of drawing parallels between the findings of animal ethologists and human behaviour may well prove to be a fruitful aid to our understanding of the human condition. I would like to take one rather commonplace example: It frequently happens in ethology laboratories and poultry farms that a group of hens meet each other in a fairly confined space for the first time. In the case of grown birds which are strangers, a series of single combats is engaged in, with each bird pairing off with every other in a way which to the casual glance appears random. Actually, what is developing is a ‘peck-order’ in which the leader of the flock can peck any other hen without herself being pecked, the second hen can peck all but the top hen, and the rest are arranged in a descending hierarchy ending with a hen which is pecked by all, but pecks no one. The amount of aggressiveness shown in the contests varies with different individuals, but once the peck order has been determined, pecking starts to decrease, as individuals recognize their superiors, and eventually simply raising or lowering the head can be sufficient to register dominance or submission respectively.

‘Europeans say’, I remarked to Cosmas Daudu, ‘that a man with several wives cannot bring up his children properly.’ ‘That is not so’, he retorted, ‘my father had eight wives. In the evening, he would gather us round the fire, and begin to ask us what we would do, if things happened in this way or that. If we just tried to agree with him, he would not be pleased with us. He wanted us to think everything out carefully.’ I did not offer any more of the empirical and ill-informed wisdom of Europe. Some time later, I heard Gosmas himself defending monogamy, ‘For in the beginning God made one man and one woman in the garden there.’

Now, on reflection I think Cosmas had the better of the two arguments, and the main object of this article is to claim that many of the difficulties with which Catholic moral theology finds itself occupied just now can be solved only (by ‘solved’ I don’t mean neatly weighed and measured, but rather made meaningful in a wider context) by adopting Cosmas Daudu’s approach, which seems to me not a precedent-seeking fundamentalism, but rather an awareness of the essentially symbolic nature of Christian ethics, and their orientation to the unity of mankind in the love of God. Or, to put it a little differently, Oscar Wilde’s witticism about the Bible beginning beautifully with a man and woman in a garden but ending with the Book of Revelations is really quite sound exegesis, since the end of the Book of Revelations does take up the theme of marriage, presented by Genesis as at the root of the bliss and woe of Everyman and Everywoman, and show it as the transcendent sign of reintegrated mankind at the wind-up of history.

We have become used since the Renewal began to seeing the Church slashed at by those who belong to it and might easily take the remark at the end of Father Hibbert’s article, ‘Christian Materialism’ (New Blackfriars, May, 1969), to be only a further, though notable, instance. There is something Christians will be hindered from doing, the article ends by saying, ‘until the Christian Church has put its house into better order and made it look less like what Christ himself referred to as “a den of thieves” What is it that cannot be effectively done at present? Christianity has just been stated to be ‘radically a materialist humanism’ and also ‘something more’. ‘For Christians it is essential to nurture, cultivate and explore their “more”, so that they may be able to offer something in their own right to the world’ (p. 431). It is this nurturing, cultivating and exploration that cannot be effectively done while the Church is like a den of thieves. It might reasonably be taken to be part of what Father Hibbert is implying, that the propagation of some such version of Christianity as his is hindered while the Church is like this.

At the risk of appearing as one of the wicked, I am drawing attention to the meaning of Father Hibbert’s materialism. I shall also mention again, but not ambitiously explore, his something more. The following passage shows us plainly the meaning of the materialism but the other thing darkly.

The contention that Coleridge’s rejection of Rousseau’s ‘Reason’ as a political principle is based on a deep-seated prejudice can be clearly established if we analyse further the roots of his own political position. Just as his plea for more adequate communication of truth is ultimately a petition for administrative reform, the nature of ‘truth’ itself being analysed at this stage only in terms of the difference between what is self-evident and what must be demonstrated (55f), so his definition of politics is ultimately a reduction to ‘administration’, to how things ‘ought to be managed’ (214). That this conveniently forgets that politics is also about policies, i.e. about morality—a position that Coleridge will otherwise argue for—is clear from the use of the term ‘political’ in his criticism of Cartwright: that he ‘confounds the sufficiency of the conscience to make every person a moral and amenable Being, with the sufficiency of judgment and experience requisite to the exercise of political Right’ (207). This position has its epistemological roots in his distinction between the ‘truths’ of science and the ‘probability’ of facts of experience (158)— a distinction which holds politically, provided one genuinely acknowledges the equal validity of quite different ‘experience’. The practical outcome of Coleridge’s position is a politics which can meet an argument that the expenditure on one naval operation to destroy nine French ships could have provided instead £100 for 2,000 poor families or built a new town in every English county, by the response: ‘These men know that it is not practicable’ (244).

The debate on aid to less-developed countries has recently been concentrated in the fields of private charity and government contribution. In the field of private charity there has been an extension of the 1 per cent idea, and schemes have proliferated—Third World First, 1 per cent Group, Good Friday appeal, St Andrewstide appeal. These are all designed to overcome one of the main disadvantages of appealing for money from the individual—the enormous cost of collection. In the field of government contribution the debate has settled in the field of multilateral v. bilateral aiding. The important point at issue here is to ensure that the aid does not become a political football.

The debate as it has been conducted, chiefly by men of good will of left-wing persuasions, has left aside the question of how private investment could be integrated or used for the development of the less-developed countries. The words that go round are those of moral obligation and what is right rather than the efficiency and profitability of the products of the development process. There is a lack of trust in the products of the capitalist system, a feeling that it cannot work fast enough or fairly enough to be able to augment the direct efforts that can be undertaken by direct transfer without receiving anything back.

‘We piped to you, and you did not dance.’ And when people do dance, we tend to look down disapprovingly from our upper window, like the worthy lady Michal. She remained barren, and so do we.

It has perhaps become commonplace to say that ours is an age which has forgotten how to play (eutrapelia a forgotten virtue, and all that). There are even therapists to teach us how to play! But somehow, the Church seems to go on, doing all things in moderation and busily turning the Lord’s wine back hto water.

Now the books under consideration—admittedly a rather heady mixture—are all about wine, or attempts at wine.

Richard Neville in Play Power (the book was previously to be called Flower Power) offers us his, in many ways attractive, version of ‘the underground scene’. He admits to being himself only halfliberated, so perhaps he won’t mind another half-liberated person venturing to offer some comments from a slightly different angle. Richard Neville’s background is political, and his interest in play power is as a form of political movement (when I first met him, he confiied rather shamefacedly to still writing letters to the New Stateman). Earnest protest movements suddenly caught fire (turned into wine), and became parties, games; people began to preach revolution, not because it was important, but because it was fun. People began to have confidence just to ‘do their thing’ (which is highly revolutionary in its implications). The whole thing became ‘turned on’.

The logic of the word ‘salvation’ involves the idea of a person or situation from which the subject of salvation is saved. There are a variety of models used in the Bible for describing such a situation or person; I choose to use that of slavery. Apart from other considerations, this model is useful in that it connects the idea of situation to that of person: slavery is always slavery to. Salvation is thus the setting-free of someone from slavery to someone else. In the Bible the paradigm case of salvation is the setting-free of the Israelites from their slavery to Pharaoh. Ultimately, however, in the Gospel, salvation becomes the setting-free of man from his slavery to the devil.

So much by way of defining how I intend to use the word ‘salvation’. I wish now to question our contemporary experience as to how far it contains anything which this model of salvation can help us to interpret. Do we experience a need which could be called the need for salvation? And if so, how does it show itself? What are the characteristic forms of the need for salvation today? Where, in our multi-storeyed modern society, does it show itself most clearly? To indicate at the outset the way in which I intend to deal with this question, let me say that it is in the sphere of language, or more generally that of communications, that I discern the clearest evidence of this need.

Consider the following. They are passages quoted in an article by W. A. de Klerk (a well-known Afrikaner novelist and playwright) in the recently published ‘Beweging Uitwaarts’ (‘The Movement Outward’), a collection of critical essays by de Klerk, Johan Degenaar and Martin Versfeld, that is at present causing quite a stir in Afrikaner cultural circles.

Although, if we are to grasp at all the fundamental reasons behind the falling number of confessions, we must not only trace the development of the sacrament but also try to look at the theological principles involved, this could easily divert us away from the urgent problems of the moment into a tedious and complex historical survey. To avoid this we shall restrict ourselves to quoting a suggestive conciliar text, drafted more than eleven centuries ago. In 813 the Emperor Charlemagne, as part of his programme of ecclesiastical reform, summoned a number of councils. One of these met at Chalon, and the following is one of its canons:

‘Some say that sins ought to be confessed only to God but others believe that they are to be confessed to priests: both of which are practised within the Church not without great fruit. And so let us confess our sins to God in so far as he is the Remitter of sins . . . and according to the institution of the apostle, let us confess our sins to one another, and let us pray for one another that we may be saved. And so confession which is made to God cleanses sins; but that which is made to the priest, teaches us how these same sins are cleansed. For God, who is both the author and dispenser of salvation and health, frequently offers this by the invisible ministry of his power, frequently by the work of physicians.’ (P. F. Palmer, Sacraments and Forgiveness, p. 157.)

The exact interpretation of this canon is difficult and need not delay us. It is clear, however, that a tension was felt to exist between the confession of sins to a priest and the direct repenting of them in the sight of God. It is clear that this tension is still with us and underlies the falling number of confessions.