The difference between Catholics that comes out very plainly in recent writing on the Resurrection (New Blackfriars, October and November 1977, pp 453-461 and 506-515) prompts questions and reflections about the nature and extent of the diversity of belief that exists within the Catholic communion. This is particularly urgent and apposite at the present time, in England, as Catholics seem to be moving, slowly but inexorably, towards some degree of communion with the Anglican Church—long mocked as the home of incompatible beliefs. As Cardinal Hume said, in his address at Church House, Westminster, on 1st February 1978:

That avowal of ignorance—which is also clearly a word of hope— must seem to many Catholics even now very like an admission of defeat. Surely, they will say, the one thing that Roman Catholics can be clear about is what diversity of doctrinal emphasis and difference of practice are permissible. How is it possible that, on any but trivial and peripheral matters, there can be a serious question about this? Do we not already know, have we not always known, what doctrinal differences we cannot permit—far less desire—within the communion of the catholica? How can a cardinal archbishop ask such a question?

After much thought and prayer I have come to the decision that I am free as a Catholic priest to marry. I have come to this after long years of wrestling with myself and of pondering both the pastoral and missionary needs of the Church and the basic nature of the Christian priesthood, marriage and freedom. I have for years argued persistently for a major change in the Church’s position in this regard, a change which I see as absolutely crucial for the wider effectiveness and coherence of the aggiornamento set in motion by Pope John. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that in this matter as in others one cannot go on indefinitely simply affirming in print and in speech a point of view completely at odds with the structured ordering of one’s own life. There comes a moment when it is morally necessary to pin oneself to the truth and importance of what one has affirmed to be true and important.

I have been a priest for twenty-two years. I accepted the obligation of celibacy at ordination without questioning because I wished to be a priest and this was the law of the Church, and I have kept it. In the cheerful, zealous, withdrawn atmosphere of a seminary it did not seem much of a problem. I was even convinced for a time that I did not want to marry, but for many years now I have wanted to very much. So this decision is first of all a response to an honest sense of my own need. Yet at present I am living happily with my mother; I have many dear friends, and I am extremely busy as a university lecturer and writer. I have certainly not come to this decision out of loneliness or depression or because I have lost interest in the Church or the Catholic priesthood. Quite the contrary.

Those who take their stand on their own, or others’, religious experience sometimes claim that unsympathetic critics can be dismissed simply with the plea that their lack of experience disqualifies them from offering any kind of useful critique. Ninian Smart, in his essay Understanding Religious Experience, shows that such a claim need not be regarded as compelling. It is possible for us to have a certain theoretical Understanding of situations of which we have no experience, no “existential understanding”, and this theoretical understanding, even if it is not adequate for all purposes (it will not make a man a mystic, for instance), may still be quite adequate for some kind of philosophical comment to be made. If the mystic then seeks refuge in the further claim that his experiences are so transcendent as to be utterly inexpressible and incomprehensible to the rational mind, even so we are still entitled to ask whether they are truly totally inexpressible and incomprehensible. If they were, then it is unclear that the mystic himself is in any better position than his critics, and, like Cratylus, he ought to confine himself to waggling his finger and give up the attempt to communicate anything to anybody, himself included. But if mystical experiences or their objects are not totally beyond reach of reason and language, then there is at least some common ground between the mystic and his critics, and at least some basis therefore for non-mystical comment on mystical experiences.

There is a moment in Twelfth Night when Feste, the Fool, calls upon Malvolio, who has been shut up in a dark cell as a dangerous madman. Feste, to render himself the more credible as a prison visitor, puts on a parson’s gown and a parson’s voice and, announcing that he is Sif Topas the curate who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic, counsels him with words of learned but wholly irrelevant comfort. Malvolio, in frustration at this pastoral nonsense, most violently asserts that he is in no way mad, so the pretence clergyman agrees to test the prisoner’s wits by posing some deep question. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?’ From that encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world we expect in a renascence man, Malvolio answers that the philosopher held ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Ruthless as if he were conducting a seminar, the Fool then asks him: ‘What think’st thou of his opinion?’ Malvolio rather carefully replies: T think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion’. But at this the clergyman seems quite convinced that Malvolio is indeed mad, declaring as he hurries away, ‘thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits’.

This absurd interlude seems to many, I suspect, a paradigm of theological talk. A madman and a fool disputing about the soul, and as if this were not itself at sufficient remove from reality, disputing about whether the human soul might animate a bird. I should like to suggest to you, however, that while this dialogue may very well present an unkind parody of the manners both of the student of religion and of the believer, its satire does not, even glancingly, touch the theologian’s enterprise.

I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.
I bed in a fish puddle.
Down here the sky is always falling....
I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and molluscs,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk’s bride.

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (The Colossus) is a complex dramatic monologue, a seven-part narrative in which a psyche struggles towards birth, in ‘the city of spare parts’ which is the world. It draws for its imagery on that teenage suicide attempt fictionalised in The Bell Jar and on the experience of actual childbirth, so that at times the speaker is mother, at times child, and frequently both. Its main literary sources are the Brothers Grimm and Theodore Roethke’s early poetry, particularly Praise to the End (1951). Its heroine is a Cinderella or Snow-White princess in nightmare exile among incomprehensible and uncomprehending powers. The second chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence offers an extended commentary on this poem, ‘trying to foster the reader’s possession of poetic meaning, while endeavouring to discuss universal truths about the dynamics of human personality as seen by “philosophical anthropology”.’ For this enterprise he asks the reader’s patience, ‘ignoring for the moment certain problems of the concepts and theories I shall be using’.

In fostering our possession of poetic meaning he glosses the above lines (from section 4, ‘The Beast’) as follows: ‘For “marry” here, I believe, we may read “identify”. Her concept of marrying belongs to the infant’s primitive belief that Mummy and Daddy virtually eat one another in marriage’; ‘a cupboard full of fragments of impingement—memories of her father and fragments of the mother’s “male element”;’ ‘Hairtusk is maleness, again, her father’s penis.’

Ernst Troeltsch is not one of the more accessible of twentieth century theologians as can be seen from a bibliography of his works translated into English which appears at the end of Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, translated and edited by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, Duckworth, London, 1977, £12.50. Whether the translation of the four papers presented in this volume will make him more popular is rather doubtful as he here shows himself at his most heavy and turgid mainly because he writes in abstractions about methodologies. When Troeltsch does discuss issues and authors he is usually concerned with Protestant theology in the Nineteenth Century and it sometimes seems very dated (as in ‘Half a Century of Theology: a Review’ [1908]). This book, however, aims to introduce Troeltsch to a wider public particularly in Germany where he has never had much impact and this volume, curiously, is a translation of the original German including introductory articles by the English editors. These three articles by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye are tremendously helpful in giving an overall view of Troeltsch and his place in modern theology.

Troeltsch is important, it would seem, mainly as a philosopher of religion rather than as a systematic theologian. He is at his best when discussing theological methodology, but when he tried to do straight theology, as in the article ‘The Significance of the Historical Jesus for Faith’ (1911), the effect could be disastrous. In this article Troeltsch assumes at the outset that traditional orthodox dogmatics had crumbled by the beginning of this century and that no one who was at all sensitive to modern intellectual sensibilities could accept the doctrine of the incarnation and that Christ had done anything concrete to redeem or save mankind. Salvation, whatever that might mean for Troeltsch, comes directly to the individual from God and, he says, is a matter of personal experience.

In some, perhaps most, cultures metaphysics and mysticism belong together. Even in our own society organizations which bear the name ‘metaphysical’ are likely, an examination, to be found to be concerned primarily with more or less mystical and esoteric doctrines and practices. But it is still typical of the Anglo-Saxon academic world that philosophers have, on the whole, not been frightfully eager to; tangle with mystics, nor mystics with philosophers. As a result of this it has been lamentably easy for philosophers to assume that they know what mystics are saying, without bothering to verify their allegations, and for a whole trend of spirituality to thrive off a naive rejection of the ‘God of philosophers’ in favour of the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and God knows who else’.

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis is an important symptom that this situation is changing.

Most of the contributions are not concerned directly with the philosophical issues posed for philosophers as such by mysticism. Intuition and the Inexpressible by Renford Bambrough tackles the logical problem of ineffability; Nelson Pike and George Mavrodes discuss the epistemological status of mystical experiences. But otherwise most of the essays are concerned with clarifying the methodology of investigation of mysticism, and with developing and studying the concepts needed for such investigation.

The ten contributors were left entirely free to choose their own topic and tactic; it is all the more impressive that a certain coherence definitely emerges from their various essays. Almost all the essays contain some kind of attack on two much loved doctrines: first, the belief that, underlying the diversity of expression to be found in mystical writings, there is either a single or at most a few varieties of essential mystical experience; and secondly, the belief that it is, in principle, fairly straightforward to disengage the essential experience or experiences from their interpretative garments.

The ‘Catholic Left’ in Britain, during its short life, showed little interest either in spirituality or in political activity outside journalism. There are quite good reasons for these omissions, but it is interesting to find that they are not repeated in the practice of leftwing Catholics in Latin America. Action and spirituality, and the tension between them, are important themes of Sheila Cassidy’s account of her experiences in Chile, and her story is all the more interesting because she is so patently not a Catholic left groupie.

The personality which comes through this book is very much that described by Michael Hollings in his introduction: ‘enthusiastic . . . efficient, impetuous, starry-eyed, down-to-earth, practical, emotionally uninhibited, politically a child’. The rambling and occasionally gushing narrative almost makes one forget at times that its author was obscenely tortured with electric shocks by the Chilean secret police.

These qualities also give the story an appealing freshness. It is almost a classical adventure story, in which the author became involved largely by accident. No political or religious motives took Dr Cassidy to Chile. She had got to know a Chilean medical student during her own studies, and one of Chile’s attractions was the chance to gain surgical experience with less night work than in Britain. Dr Cassidy spent two years in Chile before returning to England to see her dying father, and a further two from the beginning of 1974. The military coup against the Allende government took place towards the end of the first period and Dr Cassidy’s imprisonment occupied the last two months of the second.

Several recent publications focus on the question of religious experience; two of them are particularly devoted to wooing the reader to share the experience of the Catholic ‘charismatic movement’, three of them represent the first published results to emerge from the work of the Religious Experience Research Unit founded in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy. Since the problems raised by them overlap to some extent, it seems worth while to treat all five books together in a series of articles.

For all its deceptively quiet style, This Promise is for You brings to light the tensions inherent in what we may call the ‘benign’ wing of Catholic Pentecostalism. There are those who are prepared to state fairly bluntly that Catholic Pentecostalism is something quite new, and that it shows up traditional piety as being, basically, ineffective, and this no doubt corresponds to the experience of the pioneers of Catholic, as of other brands of, Pentecostalism. There are occasional hints of this in Abbot Parry’s book, especially on p. 100, where he warns the reader (who is invited to use the book as a course of preparation for ‘baptism in the Spirit’) that “we are on the brink of changing a tangible, familiar, realistic, ‘normal’ life style, for an act of faith in an unseen God”. This is the kind of language we should associate with those who treat a conversion to the ‘charismatic movement’ as being, for practical purposes, a man’s first serious conversion to Christ (which of course it may be in some cases).

But on the whole Parry is concerned to re-assure the reader that the ‘charismatic movement’ is very much in line with traditional piety, that there are no distinctively ‘charismatic’ virtues, that it is not particularly about ‘odd’ manifestations, that ‘baptism in the Spirit’ may be a gradual process, not a sudden experience, that none of it depends on going to any special kind of prayer meeting, and so on. The continuity with ordinary Christian life is stressed rather than the discontinuity.

Literary criticism seems to be in an odd cul-de-sac at present. Two recent works by widely-esteemed critics can serve as pointers to a persistent paradox. In reviewing together the latest offerings of Barbara Hardy and Raymond Williams I don’t intend to do ‘justice’ to each volume individually, but to suggest, by their juxtaposition, a curious state of affairs: the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of ‘literature’—its importance within an educational apparatus and as the focus of a political project, and yet a concomitant sense that neither critic, or approach, has much to say about why anyone might actually continue reading poems and novels anyway. As a link, or diversion, I also glance at an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work still largely unappreciated—his criticism of Brecht’s poems.

Barbara Hardy entitles her book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry. Almost every word here invites comment, but the most provocative is “advantage”. The ‘advantage of lyric in itself is its concentrated and patterned expression of feeling. This advantage is negatively definable: the lyric does not provide an explanation, judgment or narrative; what it does provide is feeling, alone and without histories or characters.’ (p.1). The absence of history and explanation is frequently noted, and approved; an interesting example is the quoting (p.5) of Quiller-Couch’s cut-down version of Emily Bronte’s long poem Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle: in Q’s version ‘virtually all we are left with is the intense lyrical evocation of Hope’ and this turns a narrative of tyranny and physical imprisonment into a lyric of ‘spirit tormented by flesh’ (p.6). Specific response becomes transmuted into metaphysical universality.

After a quick breakfast, the long wooden table is cleared and wiped clean, ready to receive the corpse of the victim, a poor ignorant innocent. Little light enters the musty kitchen where all the meals are taken together. Through the side door near the orange tree, heavy with fruit (like a Christmas tree with the bulbs switched off) dark, agitated shadows can be seen. The early morning sun is just beginning to draw out a thin sweat. A band of young campesinos, brandishing various tools of destruction, like conspirators planning their attack on a hated dictator. Suddenly with a cheer they break up and head off in search of the appointed offering. There is a pagan gleam in their eyes, a wild joy as the pig with its front trotters tied together, is dragged by its hind legs through the grass to the execution spot. The string is then removed as a jeering circle is formed around the creature, a large meat knife catching the morning light, an axe, someone with a small revolver. Meanwhile the wood collected earlier has been piled up to make a fire, the flames of which are now licking upwards, crackling; and a huge bowl containing oil is placed over the fire in preparation for the chicharron to be fried. The pig watches these pro ceedings with unease and while the boys are lost in their own excitement it spies a gap and makes a bolt for freedom, heading downhill and through a hole in the fence. The fence, however, is no guarantee of political immunity; the boys chase after it, one grabbing its tail and a fierce struggle ensues (amid panic stricken squeals) to get the pig back through the hole in the fence. The revolver is placed by its head, fired and echoes in a shout of glee from the boys which dies almost as rapidly as the pig’s legs give way: it is all over.

The article on Celibacy which appeared in the March issue of New Blackfriars was written last October and followed up by the rest of my book In Filial Disobedience, published by Mayhew-McCrimmon in June. Since March I have received a good deal of comment, both favourable and unfavourable, and in the light of this it has seemed worth while to add a final piece responding in particular to the major objections raised very seriously and kindly by some people. Could a priest really be morally justified in rejecting the Church’s law of celibacy with all the canonical consequences this entails? I have given my reply to that question the form of an article in the Summa Theologica. It is, hopefully, my last public contribution to the debate. This is not the most important subject for the Church today by any means, and yet it is a very important one both for its own sake and because it affects so many others. It is the key to a more flexible restructuring of the ministry. Yet if there is one thing which has grown in my mind in the last months it is the conviction that a law of so massive a nature, so tenaciously maintained by Rome with such powerful sanctions, cannot be defended or criticised primarily in terms of pragmatic pastoral advantage and disadvantage, whether in Europe or in Africa. It must be regarded primarily as a semi-doctrinal statement and one profoundly significant for the understanding and the misunderstanding of holiness.

Videtur quod. It seems that a secular priest may not marry.

Jesus was celibate. A priest should imitate Jesus as closely as possible because of his calling to be another Christ. In the words of Cardinal Hume, ‘Our Lord was celibate. Whatever reasons were important to him, I want to make mine’. (Searching for God, p. 52).

Theology is a deeply conservative discipline, which is why the panic that breaks out immediately at the threat of new questions must always seem so exaggerated to people trained in other fields of study. Any new approach is usually rejected at first on the grounds that there is no evidence for it. As soon as the exponent of the new approach has shown that there is indeed evidence for his interpretation he is at once accused of reducing all the evidence to fit his thesis, and of wanting to reinterpret the whole of Christianity in function of his new insight. Finally, when he shows that he has no such intention, he is told that what he has found out has been well known all along. The new approach is first rejected because it is impossible, then because it is illegitimate, and finally because it is old hat.

Gerd Theissen has undertaken a sociological analysis of the earliest phase of Christianity, which he defines as “the renewal movement within Judaism brought into being through Jesus and existing in the area of Syria and Palestine between about AD 30 and AD 70” (p. 1). Far from enjoying august and exalted status as Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn, as the blurb proclaims him to be, he is (at the time of writing) still fully employed as a school-teacher. He gives lectures as a Privatdozent, for which of course he receives no salary. He thus has neither the leisure nor the technical apparatus to armour his research with the impenetrable shield of erudition and argument behind which most theological work is conducted. In fact, as he writes in the Preface, “the work came into being while I was involved in teaching religion and German, and is addressed to readers who are also involved in practical work of this kind”.

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.

at the REQUIEM MASS at Blackfriars, OXFORD, on 26th January 1978

That is a paragraph, without any editing, which Cornelius set down in a notebook in July or August 1972 (to judge from internal evidence). The exercise book is labelled “Meaning in theology”: the first draft, probably of the book that we so much wanted him to write. He covered some twenty pages, in his slightly backhand italic script. His notes become increasingly cryptic and private. The text breaks off with the aphorism: “No human affirmation without negation”.

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.

York Minster has always provoked mixed feelings. When I first saw it as a schoolboy, and wandered around it with my father, looking at as much of the stained glass as we could see (not all of it having been put back after the Second World War) and making rough jokes about some of the classical oddities inserted by Sir Albert Richardson or his eighteenth century predecessors, I came away with a lasting impression of gloom. It now seems a false impression, though there are many people in York who regret the recent changes that have effaced that brooding presence. But what is also certain is that the Minster has undergone a spectacular piece of renewal and that the exploration of it is a new and exciting experience.

It is not just the structural transformation, devised and supervised by Bernard Feilden and his professional colleagues, fundamental and important in the development of the science of restoration as it is; it is not just the cleaning and restoration of the whole Minster so that it shines like new (even the crumbling west facade, probably the main victim of an enthusiastic facelift); it is not just the new role of the Minster in attracting a vast increase in the number of tourists to the city, so that the Minster now welcomes, as tourists and worshippers, more people in a year than ever before; it is also very much the fact that the nature of the investigation and restoration—and the presence in the chapter of some outstanding scholars as well as the founding of the new university of York whose outstanding department is history—has sparked off a massive investigation of both the Minster itself as a historical document and the mass of documentation available in York, in archives now carefully preserved.

Some time ago, a television programme dealt with the state of affairs in Uganda—a country that has gripped the news media for a long time. It gave the impression that the army and police were instrumental in the horrors perpetrated against the population. The police and army were set up in Uganda, as in other countries, by the colonial powers to defend the population from violence and crime at home, and aggression from outside the country’s boundaries. In so doing, the colonial powers transplanted their own institution of social control.

What was intended to help the local population has become in fact in Uganda, for example, an institution of violence, aggression, crime and exploitation of the very people it was supposed to protect. Hopefully, Uganda is an extreme case but it is not the only country in Africa where governments act in a like manner. Thus one of our western institutions, established for the good of the community has become quite the opposite of what was really intended.

The army and police are not in fact the only ones to have gone this way. Throughout the years that I spent living and working in the rural areas of East Africa, I constantly came into contact with doctors, nurses and other members of the medical profession working in hospitals and clinics run by the Government or the missions. One constantly heard the same story from doctor or nurse, man or woman, black or white, government or mission employed that they were frustrated. Desperately sick patients would be brought to them only to die after a short period in hospital.