‘Tell me you definition of politics and I will tell you your politics.’ The real breakdown in communication between radical and conservative is about the nature of politics itself, and I find this breakdown acute in reading Bernard Bergonzi’s article.

A radical politics summons and activates fundamental belief about the nature of human relationship and tries to sustain this commitment through the detail of actual debate; if it is truly radical, its detailed involvement is controlled by this commitment to an alternative version of man in society. A conservative politics is not convinced that politics is basically about belief; it is itself suspicious of political activity, as inevitably corrupt and crude, intellectually suspect, and rationalises this suspicion by making politics a ‘science’ or an ‘art’, a matter of efficiency or running the machine, a dirty but necessary business, or a career like any other. Because it is not gripped by the conviction that politics activates belief, it is liable to be quickly disorientated when it meets other, opposing beliefs; it is driven back on its own bases, hesitant and self-doubting. A conservative politics shows, for reasons that can be argued and understood, the paradox of a deep failure of belief in itself, as anything more than a technique.

Mr Bergonzi seems to me to illustrate most of these points. For him, politics leaves out a good deal of human activity, as his second paragraph makes clear. This, instantly, is the conservative definition: politics as the actual processes of local and national government.

The problems involved in human communication in the complex and complexifying modern world, stretching as they do from the cybernetical sciences of ‘communication theory’ on the one hand across to the re-iteration of the modern cinema, theatre and novel that communication is well-nigh impossible on the other, are so complicated and so apparently insoluble, that one might be inclined either to pretend that they do not exist, or to deny their importance, or even to make derogatory reference to the ‘fashionableness’ of the theme of non-communication. To do all of these three things, but especially the last, is to ignore the human moral duty to comprehend and to extend our communicational relations. In considering the subject of indirect communication in these articles, those forms of communication that is to say which are fundamental to any adequate understanding of human intercourse, we have not to pretend that immense problems do not exist, nor simply to decry the popularity of the modern stress upon non-communication, but bravely to make a few inroads. The problems we sketch here are like those mirrors to which Kierkegaard compared his own works; if an ape looks in, no saint can be seen looking out.

In the present articles I want to consider indirect communication from five different points of view. They come from thinkers as different from each other as it is possible to imagine. We shall consider communication in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Claude Levi-Strauss. It will at once be noticed that we have to deal with an idealist, two ‘existentialists’, a phenomenologist and a ‘structural’ anthropologist.

It has been generally accepted in recent years by strategists that the possession by each of the two Great Powers of nuclear weapons, of sufficient destructive power to cause unacceptable destruction to the opposing side, has constituted a deterrent to either side against the use of these weapons – and a deterrent also against aggression generally, whenever there was a fear that this might lead to the use of nuclear weapons. As long as the cold war seemed to be forming the world into two blocs of opposing nations grouped round the major nuclear powers, some calculation of the risk of nuclear war entered into the strategic calculations in most areas of conflict, thus restraining the use of violence and the spread of war.

For a time, there seemed to be some hope of stability in this situation. Of course there was always the risk of war by accident, and the danger of a technical breakthrough in the arms race which would destroy the symmetry of the balance; but if only these dangers could be overcome, there seemed to be some prospect of a stable bi-polar world. Consequently, all the attention of the politically involved peacemakers focussed on means of slowing down or stabilising the arms race between the major powers, and of improving safeguards against the risk of war by accident.

So much has been written in recent months on the problem of family limitation that one must hesitate before adding to the mountain of literature. Yet the situation is desperate: as Catholics try to observe the recent teaching, marriages are wrecked and the toll steadily mounts of those who formally leave the Church, or lapse, or give up the sacraments, or live with a constant sense of bad conscience. Meanwhile we find ourselves isolated on this issue not only from the rest of the secular world – this in itself would not disturb us – but from other Christian bodies; and on a matter on which the New Testament has little to say.

The anguish of individual souls is matched by the physical suffering of whole nations that live in continual hunger. The problem is recognised at last but its vast scale is not always appreciated: on February 6 the Population Reference Bureau in Washington reported that if present trends continue the world population will more than double – that is, there will be over 3,500,000,000 extra mouths to feed – by the end of the century. None of us can grasp a number of such magnitude, so let us put the issue another way. In more and more countries the infant who survives his first few weeks is nearly certain to reach maturity; since the great majority of mankind marry and have children, it follows that if the average family contains only four children the population will almost double with each generation; and it is then only a matter of simple arithmetic to work out how long it will be before there is insufficient standing room on our planet and we shall literally have filled the earth.

My prevision of the papacy’s more or less immediate future differs from that of R. H. Benson, the Roman Catholic H. G. Wells, in his two novels Lord of the World and Dawn of All, by being neither eschatological nor ultramontane. To save prognostications about an institution’s future from being mere fiction one should try to control them by some consideration of its past. So I will begin my essay in fortunetelling by a glance at an earlier post-conciliar papacy, and thus try to set up a contrast between the papacy after the two councils of the Vatican and the papacy after the two councils of Constance and Bâsle/Florence in the fifteenth century. It is generally recognised that this episode of Church history is of special relevance to us today. It is discussed by Hans Kung in Structures of the Church), by Paul de Vooght in Les Pouvoirs du Concile et L’Autorité du Pape au Concile de Constance), and by Olivier de la Brosse in Le Pape et le Concile ... àla Veille de la Reforme). Without of course wasting our time by reviving the old papalist-conciliarist controversies of that epoch, we can profitably enquire why in the event they were so sterile, and whether in fact they have ever been satisfactorily resolved, and if not, whether we are today on the threshold of such a resolution.

Here, almost literally at randon, is a paragraph of print from the front page of a Catholic newspaper:

‘(Sunday) is a day primarily for Mass, then for relaxation and for good works. The precept of servile work was first enunciated to give an opportunity for relaxation so that people might be able to worship God and to be with their families.’

There is nothing very startling about this statement for a Catholic, but it’s worth considering the effect of it on someone outside the Church. What kind of sensibility does it show at work? There is a marked tendency to categorization, to begin with: Sunday is divided neatly from week-days and then subdivided between Mass, relaxation and good works. The language has a stiff remoteness: ‘good works’, ‘precept’, ‘enunciated’ have a period flavour, and so does ‘servile work’, which the Catholic eye takes in and slides over automatically. But the stiffness is a matter of feeling as well as language, as the final message makes clear: Sunday was enunciated by precept as a day of rest so that people could worship God and be with their families. What kind of concern is it which arranges worship and rest by precept, under pain of serious sin ? What validity is there in the implicit assumption that worshipping God is done better relaxed than driving a bus? Is worshipping God a special activity, in its own category, apart from working or even from being with one’s family ?

Mr Terry Eagleton made, in his article The Language of Renewal in the October issue of New Blackfriars, some criticisms of certain things I had said in How Corrupt is the Church? in the August issue. I am not replying in any polemical spirit: for I think that much is gravely wrong inside the Church, and that, in seeking to see what is wrong, we are all of us peering through a fog; and so I hope that what I wrote will be both criticised and supplemented. All the same, some clarification on my part may promote fruitful discussion.

Mr Eagleton accuses me of ‘accepting and reinforcing a whole social status quo’; and, in this, he regards me as representative of the defects of progressive thought. I should like to rebut this accusation. I might, indeed, claim the highest conceivable authority for the presumption with which he saddles me, that we shall have the poor always with us; but perhaps this would be a misapplication of our Lord’s words. I must, however, repudiate his implication that I regard class division and the inequitable distribution of wealth as desirable. I do not: my views are rather strongly egalitarian. But what I was concerned to suggest was how Christians should behave within a society of which inequality and class division are features. I do not say, what Mr Eagleton attributes to me, that these are the inevitable conditions of human life: but I do say that there is no immediate prospect of their disappearing, at least from Western society.

In giving the fullest account ever of attitudes to contraception throughout the history of the Church, Professor Noonan has done us all a service and written an important and valuable book. His perception and industry are admirable; so, I would add, is the intellectual and physical stamina which has brought him across so vast a Sahara of human folly. He does not disguise his opinion that the tradition is open to change, but his account contains a wealth of texts and references that provide matter for the reader’s verdict without dictating it. I should like to pick out some of the themes in his story – some only, by no means all – and reflect on them.

Two extreme conclusions about sex were drawn in the early Church. One denied that it was a matter for legislation among the redeemed; the other obliged the redeemed to abstain from it under pain of sin. The outrageous consequences of the former opinion made it less dangerous than the latter, in favour of which there were texts enough in the New Testament which, taken out of context, could be cited. The curiously lame replies of the orthodox Alexandrian theologians to this encratism appealed less to Scripture than to the contemporary philosophy of Stoicism, which conceived legitimate sexual activity in purely procreative terms, and drew strict analogies with agriculture and stock-breeding. For Christians to use sex in such a way was, theologians contended, legitimate; its use inspired by passion was sinful; and any use of it where procreation was impossible (as in pregnancy) or prevented (by drugs) removed the one bulwark against the rigorist objections, and so was also wrong.

‘Time was’, wrote William, ‘when the corrupt love of the flesh had its masters, who were so skilled in their subject that the most famous of them was constrained, even by the lovers and companions of his depravity, to recant by praising the opposite of what he had originally taught’. The reference to Ovid is clear enough. The Ars Amatoria, to a monastic mind of the twelfth century, is the testament of a pastmaster in corruption and perversity, of a persistent follower of the bent of fallen nature, which is away from God, back to the flesh, and downward to the earth.

The due order of nature, for William, is the upward direction that fire takes, for the soul is created to look heavenward, to rise in pure spirituality and be identified with God whose image it is. And it is meant to spiritualise the body, and carry it in that same upward direction – as far as that is possible on earth – aiming at least toward some position between earth and heaven. If heaven is unattainable before death, at least one can strive to be lifted up from the earth. But fallen man, with such as Ovid for his guide, is only too prone to cleave downward, to the flesh, to the earth, and to corruption. And this is the opposition that William traces in the first chapter of his Nature and Dignity of Love, the work which was called Anti-Masonem in the middle ages, on account of its avowed attack on the Ars Amatoria.

The Foreword to the original edition of Hans Küng’s Strukturen der Kirche is dated May 1962; the new Foreword to the English translation is dated March 1965. Apart from a Preface by Cardinal Cushing and some paragraphs from Pope Paul’s striking speech at the opening of the second session of Vatican II, no changes seem to have been made for this English edition. One might have expected that a book written on the structures of the Church before the Council had met at all would date painfully after three sessions of the Council and the enormous upheaval in the life of the Church which has accompanied them; and this might seem especially likely for an author whose writings are always ‘conversational’ (or should one say ‘dialogical’), contributions to a continuing debate, or even sometimes publicist, more concerned to change other people’s ideas than to explore ideas in depth. Indeed Küng’s own writings, including this book, have played a considerable part in the upheaval, and no future history of Vatican II will be able to ignore the impact of The Council and Reunion, especially on the English-speaking world.

It must then clearly be said that Structures of the Church retains real value and interest even today. This is not to say that a good deal of the rather longwinded book (358 pages in English) has not now outlived its immediate interest, the first part in particular. The general thesis of the book, for instance, that the ecumenical council by human convocation is the representation of the Church as ecumenical council by divine convocation, should by now be familiar to Küng’s more popular presentation of the thesis in The Living Church;

The Catholic psychiatrist can justly feel that the Ramsey Committee’s findings are likely to make harder rather than easier his present work in the moral setting in which he conceives it: because mainly of the indeterminate, even muddled, attitude taken up by the Committee towards the status of the foetus and the psychiatric possibilities in the mother; because secondarily no understanding is shown of the present difficulties of the Catholic psychiatrist confronted with the demand for termination.

In speaking thus frankly, there is no intention to impugn the Committee’s breadth of vision, constructive desire or sincerity. The writer has the Committee’s chairman, Professor Ramsey, as a personal friend and wise and far-seeing administrative colleague. Acquainted also with the other two Oxford dons on the Committee, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, and with the Committee’s psychiatrist, Portia Holman, he knows all three of them for their humane concern. These characteristics pervade the Report. The first two chapters sum up admirably the reasons for the present importance of abortion; the history of British legislative concern for the question abutting in the two currently relevant statutes and their successful assailment by Alec Bourne, the gynaecologist; and that of Christian canonical concern from Tertullian onwards, including the period of distinction (never, it seems, one of essential nature but only of ground for varying the penalty for infanticide), between foetus animatus and foetus inanimatus. The Committee concludes Chapter II with the affirmation that the subject is a proper concern for the law on the primary ground, which any Catholic will endorse, that every human being has the right to life unless his unlawful act forfeits it.

The period since the promulgation of the Constitution on the Liturgy has seen, in this country as in every other, a considerable number of alterations in the ceremonies of the mass, the most obvious of which has been the introduction of English. These changes have been received with a mixture of enthusiastic approval, quiet acceptance and strongly expressed antipathy. But the time is overdue when we should have stopped asking: ‘Are the changes going well?’ and should have begun to ask: ‘Are we reforming the liturgy?’.

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that, whereas the nature of liturgical reform and the radical principles that must be kept in mind in working towards the goal have been clearly stated in various documents promulgated by the Vatican Council, they have not yet been sufficiently received into the general consciousness, with the result that there is still a danger that we shall fail to achieve the task set us by the Council. This failure would not consist simply in nonachievement. Now that the whole question of reforming the liturgy has been explicitly raised in the minds of all church-going catholics, misconceptions concerning the goal and the radical principles of reform will, in turn, give rise to false ideas about the nature of the liturgy and, indeed, of the church herself. Once fundamental mistakes are made, it is too late to say: ‘Let’s start again; we will forget the past two years’. History moves one way, and takes an inexorable toll of wrong decisions.

In the month of April, 1957, I was in Israel and thanks to a letter of introduction from a Dublin Jewish friend, spent part of an evening with the Chief Rabbi, an old Dubliner, Dr Herzog. I told him that I would be passing through Rome the following week and hoped to have a brief audience with Pius XII. I explained that the purpose of this interview was to present to the Pope a book I had written on St Joseph ten years previously, but which was dedicated to His Holiness ‘to commemorate his charity to the stricken Jews of Europe’. Dr Herzog became quite enthusiastic about Pius XII. He was very proud to have been received in audience by him, rather exceptionally on a Sunday morning, and told me that the audience lasted a full half hour. ‘Take my blessing to him’ the old patriarchal Jew repeated and this I promised to do. When I did so a week later I recalled the fact that Jews the world over seemed very grateful to the Pope for the help he had given them. We were speaking in French and the Pope ended the brief interview with words I translate as I wish I could have done more’.

I had been a member of a Dublin Christian-Jewish society at the time of the ‘Final Solution’ and had kept a fairly constant curiosity about the attitude of Jews to Pius XII since that time. With the exception of occasional remarks in the Israeli press and a rather silly comment in Gerald Reitlinger’s otherwise dignified and scholarly work, this attitude was more sympathetic than that of Jews to any previous Pope.

Karl Stern writes in The Flight from Woman of a male-female polarity which runs through life, and suggests that it is a kind of ultimate, ‘anchored in the absolute’. One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘two principles’, a male and female polarity at the heart of things. To Lawrence the work of the male is to actualise, to bring into being, the turbulent potentiality of the Flesh, a disturbing darkness which is prior to rationality, morality and value, and which is ambivalently savage and tender.

This conviction that there is an area of dionysiac darkness and force within men, to be tapped, to be entered, a further resource of power beyond the polite liberal enclosures of conscious awareness, may go back to the nineteenth century to Schopenhauer (who believed in and feared it) and Nietzsche (who affirmed it) but it is a twentieth-century creed, confirmed by Freud and by the shock with which men have recognised their own violent depths. What are we to do? The familiar answer is that we are to accept the dark, this female pre-rational source, as the really ultimate thing which defines us as what we really or intrinsically are. So – obviously – this is what we ought to be. The hunger for extreme situations, for shock, for the perverse, which one meets for example in Antonin Artaud or in Genet, is a sign of this almost metaphysical belief in a deeper passional ground to which we must break through by violence, abandoning the tight restrictive world of morality and conduct.

This note is provoked by some recent discussions in New Blackfriars and elsewhere, which have been about making the presence of Christ effective in the world in terms of social justice. It is not enough, we are rightly told, to preach in a vacuum; a pointless activity if no-one is listening. Social action means, if it is to go beyond isolated individual benevolence, political action: the point is made both in the Editorial and in Mr Eagleton’s article in the December 1965 number. In a general way, I agree with this position, but there seem to me several implications in it that need to be examined.

In the first place, should we not be careful to avoid the kind of implicitly totalitarian attitude that gives supreme importance to the political order at the expense of every other kind of human activity? One recalls Nkrumah’s amiable motto: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom . . .’ On the whole, one would have thought Christians would avoid this particular trap, but I can imagine some eager Christian radicals, so intoxicated with the discovery that in battling in the political arena they are doing Christ’s work, that they exaggerate the importance of that particular way of doing it. On a basis of respect for persons, one needs to recognise that there are many admirable people in this world, who contribute a great deal to society, but to whom politics means nothing at all: many, but by no means all, of them are women.

Saint Benedict’s Rule, which was the most basic piece of government in the lives of thousands of medieval Christians, visualises the good life as a return to paradise, a return made possible through the merits of the Redeemer, and essentially an imitation of His life. The lost image of God was found again when the novice heard the voice of his master, calling clearly for the first time: ‘If today you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts’. The Redeemer has put everything at the novice’s disposal in the church and, more specifically, in the monastery. The monastery is a quintessence of the church in its life of community, its consecration to the one thing necessary, and its gradual preparation for the fulness of the beatific vision.

The ideal groundwork for Saint Benedict’s theology of conversion was already in existence, already a tradition, in Augustine’s teaching of a divine image deformed at the fall, and in constant process of reformation until the final union with God whose image the soul is. There is a catena from Saint Paul . . . ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed, so that the image may be reformed by Him who formed it.’ ‘When the vision of God is perfect, the soul’s similitude to God will be perfect also. Now we see in a glass darkly... We are transformed from glory to glory in the same image. This is happening from day to day in those who strive after God.’

Theologies have always differed from age to age and from region to region. Since theology is the intellectual articulation of man’s response to the Word of God, and both response and articulation are conditioned by the historical and cultural circumstances within which they take place, this differentiation is as right as it is inevitable. In the age of the great Christological controversies Alexandria and Antioch had each a special contribution to make: Alexandria a deep apprehension of the underlying unity of God the Word through all states, activities and experiences, Antioch an equally necessary emphasis on the real and full humanity of Jesus. Eastern and Western Christianity have differed in their starting point for an approach to the mystery of God since the days of Tertullian, the West starting from the unity of the Godhead and the East from the Three-foldness. Provided that the unity of the faith is preserved, such variations in theological tradition are an enrichment for the Church.

In a time when the question of the African personality is a sharp and even agonizing problem for the majority of politically, socially and culturally conscious Africans, it is natural that the question of a peculiarly African theology should arise. African self-awareness seems to take on a special, and philosophical, turn among those who have been educated through the medium of French, and it is notable that it has been the Congolese bishops who have called most clearly and ringingly for an indigenous African theology.

The formula ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’ expresses the long-acknowledged belief that the liturgy is didactic. One major concern of the present liturgical renewal is to make the liturgy more expressive of the gospel message which it proclaims. This problem is one of communication, authenticity, and meaningfulness. But another fundamental problem also warrants serious attention. What should the expressed message be? What truths ought the liturgy to communicate? The effectiveness of liturgical teaching is one problem; the propriety and value of the content of that teaching is another. It is precisely at this point that theology reverently and respectfully asks permission to judge the liturgy. Theology urges the need of an inverted formula, ‘lex credendi, lex orandi.’

Liturgy, as rite, is a pattern of sacred behaviour, and as such evolves more slowly than theology. The latter is constantly pushed onward by man’s desire to know, while liturgy is sedentary, conservative. Not that liturgy never reflects the changes in theological thinking. Just as theology has developed, so liturgy has gradually evolved. The really primitive residues in the mass, for instance, are few and short. In fact, liturgy can at times even seem to outrun theology. The unpreparedness on the part of a few professional theologians and bookish bishops at Vatican II for changes demanded by missionaries and pastors is ample proof of it. Nevertheless, liturgy ordinarily prefers calm repetitiveness, while theology at its best continually longs for new discovery and readjustment.

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.