The discussion of Eliot’s cultural lineage has frequently assumed a simple opposition between the rival claims of English domicile and New England descent. Eliot’s writings have themselves encouraged this tendency. Overtly, they require us to observe the landscapes of London and rural England, or the family snapshots of haut-bourgeois Boston. The St Louis of Eliot’s childhood, which furnished the name of his memorable persona (Prufrock-Littau, Hugh Kenner informs us, was the name of a local furniture store), and the image of the river as ‘a strong brown god’ which opens Dry Salvages, rarely occurs as the scenario of the poems. Indeed, the stage-direction prefixed to this poem demonstrates Eliot’s usual attitude towards his mid-western patrimony, distracting our attention from the unsavoury effects of the Missouri mise-en-scene (‘the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops’) to the properties of a more condign birthright.

Yet Eliot’s mid-western origins are not merely a matter of ‘background’; they are a central part of the meaning of his poetry. The complexity of his personality has its sources and resources in the complex negotiation of a complex and contradictory inheritance. But the personal equilibrium salvaged from this inheritance—the spiritual cement for this ‘familiar compound ghost’—owes much to that temporary settlement effected by Eliot’s family in the boom conditions of nineteenth-century St Louis. If the Mid-West is absent as the overt content of Eliot’s poetry, it presides throughout as a determining context of experience, embodied in the very forms of that experience, in the stances and attitudes assumed by the poet.

The title that I have chosen for this article is far from being a gimmick designed to lure anyone with an eye for the unusual. Some years ago I tried to put together a paper entitled Theology of Leisure. I should like to think that the present title is a more precise attempt to tackle the same question that still lies at the back and bottom of my mind.

Leisure, of course, defies definition. A glance at The Concise Oxford Dictionary will verify the fact. What I call leisure other people receive good salaries for doing, and consequently they call it work. I have long nourished, for instance, a secret ambition to be an inspector for Diners Club or a member of the British Board of Film Censors.

Moreover, when one does attempt a clear definition of leisure, one is inevitably caught up in sociological technicalities which simply describe leisure activities as they exist in today’s society, without going on to probe the creative human values inherent in leisure as such. For this one has to turn not to the sociologist but to the poet, the philosopher and the theologian.

The most extreme advocates amongst those who favoured ‘sacerdotalism’ if not theocracy, John Henry Newman was ‘deeply introspective, constantly self-concerned, tirelessly self-recording’. Subsequently he possessed a weak social conscience. In later life, Newman acknowledged that ‘he had never considered social questions in their relation to faith, and had always looked upon the poor as objects for compassion and benevolence’. On this indifference, E. B. Burgum comments that ‘there was no writer of the period, who wrote with a more complete unconsciousness of their existence in state or church’.

Parliamentary reform, educational changes, local government development, the Factory Acts, democracy’s progress, industrialism’s and technology’s dubious side-effects left Newman unstirred. Writes H. L. Stewart: ‘The famine in Ireland, the vast selfishness of the Corn Laws, Chartism, the opium war in China—how a Hebrew prophet would have dealt with them! But one would gather from Newman’s sermons that the social passion of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah had no place in Christianity’.’ Newman was as unconscious as Darwin upon the Beagle of great movements outside the Church. C. F. Harrold comments :

So now we know. Hans Küng’s massive criticism of the critics of his views on infallibility reached me with the newspapers announcing that the Pope was to proclaim a Holy Year. It was the same week in which sensational headlines about the Lambton case gave way to the reassuring news that the heart of the establishment was sound: fox-hunting, hard-riding Anne would really marry her stalwart and even more hard-riding Mark.

The juxtaposition is hardly fair. The announcement of Anne’s engagement may well have been timed without regard for less edifying events in high places. And Kiing’s worst enemies only find fault with him for his purely intellectual activities. Nor would the most narrow-minded curialist conceive the Holy Year as a counterblast to one theologian’s suspect views on infallibility. But institutions under attack have a way of seeking the support of the simple masses by providing them with an occasion for junketings: a marriage in England, a jubilee and indulgences in Rome.

One has often been asked by incredulous, though well-meaning, people—and almost apologetically—‘Why did you become a Catholic?’ The suggestion being that there must be some explanation to account for such a strange, even a remarkable, lapse from rational behaviour on the part of one supposed to be some sort of scientist. The question is not well put. I suppose that none of us can say truthfully and certainly why we do anything. It would be better to ask not why, but how, did a man become a Catholic; and this is the question I shall attempt to answer, so that next time I am asked why I became a Catholic I can just hand over this number of New Blackfriars. Perhaps even more alarming and difficult to give a direct answer to is the question: ‘When were you converted?’ Perhaps I had better deal with that one first.

Some people, it would seem, have peculiar notions about what is called ‘conversion’, as though it were some sudden and dazzling experience (it may be with some people; I do not know). So, we are led to suppose, this is what happened on the road to Damascus, but if that dramatic incidence, that traumatic vision, occurred as described, we might recollect that Paul was a highly religious Jew, and so was Jesus, a Jew preaching unto Jews in the tradition of Jewish thought and expression. And we might also bear in mind that when we read that Augustine was converted by Ambrose that Augustine was a Neo-Platonist and was already, so to speak, half-way there. So, if we may compare little things with big things, we come to me, which is embarrassing, but obviously I cannot talk about myself without some ‘I’s and ‘me’s.

The title of Volume 52 of the new English version of the Summa Tkeologiae, ‘The Childhood of Christ’, could be misleading if it suggested a biographical work. As Fr Potter remarks it is ‘essentially a theological treatment of some Gospel events’, and these are predominantly pre-natal, though they include Christ’s manifestation to the shepherds and the magi and his circumcision. St Thomas is concerned, in most of this treatise, to bring together two realms of thought of very different importance and authority, namely orthodox Chalcedonian Christology and the accepted genetics and embryology of his time. The latter have, of course, been completely superseded by later biological research, and the reader is therefore repeatedly confronted with the question of the manner and degree in which St Thomas’s arguments need revision and reassessment, though this has little bearing on the strictly theological, or at any rate on the strictly dogmatic, aspects of the matter. Fr Potter devotes a little space to these considerations in his appendix on ‘Jesus in his mother’s womb’; one might have wished for more, even at the expense of inflating the volume and its price. It is, in fact, remarkable how little attention seems to have been paid by theologians to the embryological and obstetric aspects of the Incarnation in recent years; medieval theologians did not feel that reverence necessitated this kind of reticence. The only modern work that I know on the subject is The Mother of God: Her Physical Maternity, a reappraisal (River Forest, 111., 1964) by Fr Cletus Wessels, O.P., though A.

My reactions to all priests and monks are based partly on my own early memories of my convent school and on my father’s healthy anti-clericalism. ‘Feudal barons . . . that’s what they are, nothing but feudal barons’, he used to roar about the Irish bishops of the thirties and I think he still would have said it had the rooms been bugged and the threat of the salt mines hanging over him. Still, he realized that you couldn’t, at that time (and possibly even now in Ireland), beat City Hall or rather the Archbishop’s House and so he sent me to the care of the nuns. I have written about my hatred of their mixture of hypocrisy, snobbery and sanctimonious smugness elsewhere. All I can say on the credit side of my attempted brainwashing is that its harshness was like Commando training in that nothing, I feel, will ever be quite as bad again. My school days left me with the shaky idea that the Almighty was a Furious Old Man for most of the time and that there just might be a hell, so I went to Mass on Sundays to pacify him and I gabbled daily prayers as if presenting a shopping list.

Years in England practising as a psychiatrist diluted whatever bits of bogus religion I had left. This worried me at first, so conditioned was I to the crackles of hellfire if you didn’t go to Mass. I was a reluctant unbeliever and so I tried to do something about it. I mentioned my doubts to a priest in Confession and he said ‘Its your age’ (I was 31 at the time!). I felt just as indignant as most women patients do when their doctor rakes this up when he doesn’t know really what’s the matter with them. Feeling that there ought to be a sort of spiritual clinic where people like myself could bring their symptoms of accidie and religious ennui I even went back to my old enemies, the nuns, because a friend told me that a day retreat might help me. It didn’t. I was put into a small room and given a boring little book written by an old Jesuit whose fertile output gracing the Irish church book-stands must make him the Harold Robbins of the holy book world.

Religious experience is thickly overlayed by theological speculation and the reality of God is further and further submerged beneath theories that fruitlessly attempt to forge a connection between the Invisible and ‘ordinary’ things, between ‘the living ascended glorified personal Christ and lifeless impersonal objects, bread and wine’, as it was put recently in this magazine. Making sense of this sort of discussion is often difficult, because what is actually disputed is the very experience that the doctrine was formulated to express, the experience of God’s presence in things, which, indeed, sinks beneath the weight of words spoken about it. We are increasingly left with the empty shell of a splendid worship from which God himself has retreated.

Of course, many aspects of our faith are well served by serious questioning, but that does not always entitle us to unrestrained reflection. Sometimes speculation obscures its object instead of clarifying it, and the mind creates for itself a vacuum where once there was the immediacy of response: for example, when we begin to believe that a demonstration is required to confirm a reality that can, in truth, only be encountered. Is it not a most peculiar ability of the mind, a strange inclination towards self-destruction, to wonder about the factuality of the world, to wonder about the reality of the forest, or the person we love, or the God we inescapably find in our path ? Perhaps the mightier the experience the less we feel able to cope and the more we feel called to doubt. By putting such things in question they are indeed rendered questionable, and we are confronted with the frustrating task of proving that there is a reality that corresponds to the ideas in our mind.

Social Darwinian optimism assesses a poet in terms of his ‘advance’ or ‘development’—thus the conventional blurb’s claim that Seamus Heaney’s ‘power is, if anything, stronger than before’. The immodesty of Faber’s claim might obscure one’s sense that something more subtle, and less inevitably even, is taking place in Heaney’s third book. The book shows, for instance, the elements in his work as he assimilates himself into a variety of forms and tones of voice, some of which are modish, others achieved deftly but with creditable hesitation. In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem indicated Heaney’s capacity to formulate that revulsion which seems to be a fairly basic constituent of man’s relation to nature; (of the ‘gross- bellied frogs’).

Cardinal Heenan’s pastoral letter on the importance of retaining Catholic schools even at an increased financial burden to the Catholic community has provoked these reflections on religious education.

The bible or major talking point in religious education today is the Schools’ Council Working Paper 36 put out by the Project on Religious Education in Secondary Schools based on the University of Lancaster. Many teachers, including Catholic teachers, have been working on this project. The fundamental premiss of much of the thinking of this group, and of such pioneer groups such as the SHAP working party on world religions, is that an adequate understanding of religion can only be achieved in the context of learning not only about the child’s own religion (if he has one) but also about other major world faiths. The rationale for this stance varies from one apologist to another: we live in ‘one’ world; we are part of a multireligious society—these are commonplaces. A more valid reason is, perhaps, that we have now reached a stage of self-consciousness in the West such that, even those souls who are naturally religious, let alone the majority who are not, are no longer content with understanding religion only from the inside: they seek also to understand it from the outside, from the stance of the anthropologist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and the philosopher. Another important movement in a related field is that which seeks to understand how schools can best perform the task of the moral education of children.

These new approaches to religious and moral education have made their impact on Catholic education as much as anywhere else. Cardinal Heenan assumes, somewhat naively, that the purpose of Catholic colleges is to produce teachers capable of teaching the Catholic religion to Catholic children in the context of a Catholic school. There are different ways of understanding this proposition as can be seen by recent disputes in the field of catechetics.

Of course, a serious question deserves a serious answer, but is importance necessarily associated with solemnity, especially if the problem is unlikely to be solved in the immediate future? Might it not be possible or even desirable in such a situation to relax, if only for the moment, and treat the problem neither indifferently nor lugubriously, but with a certain degree of panache or even irresponsibility—for our own sakes, if nobody else’s? Such thoughts were prompted by reading through one particular controversy among English-speaking Catholics during the eighteenth century. At the time, many Catholics were dissatisfied with the attitudes and laws of the Church, not least on the issue of celibacy. Furthermore, these critics, no doubt largely influenced by the temper of the time, regarded themselves as liberal and enlightened in their own religious approach. How then were they to regard the clerical ‘vert’?

In 1784, Charles Henry Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published A Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester where he had previously served as chaplain, giving his reasons for joining the Anglican Church. This pamphlet, first published in Philadelphia and reprinted in London about three months later, was particularly successful because it was, to use the publisher’s phrase, written in ‘a spirit of moderation and liberality’. Wharton was answered by, among others, John Carroll, the first American Bishop, and William Pilling in A Caveat addressed to the Catholics of Worcester (London, 1785). Pilling in turn was answered by a former Benedictine, John Hawkins, in An Appeal to Scripture, Reason, & Tradition which supported Wharton’s Letter, while Joseph Berington replied in his Reflections addressed to The Rev. John Hawkins (Birmingham, 1785).

Two years ago, under the pretext of reviewing a motley collection of books, I offered some reflections on the play dimension of life and spirituality. Now, two years later, a little sadder perhaps if no wiser, I want to take up my cudgels again, on a similar pretext. In 1970 I suggested that one of the crucial issues, often veiled by the more popular conservative-progressive polarity, is that of Tradition—a glance at the behaviour of children revealing a close relationship between tradition and play. In various ways Tradition is again the issue raised by the books under consideration this time.

Mauss’ General Theory of Magic, already quite a classic, but now for the first time translated into English, and Furst’s collection, Flesh of the Gods, demonstrate how far experience is socially determined—to such an extent, it appears, that sorcerers in some societies, even though they are aware of the sleight of hand and other tricks involved in their own practice, nevertheless remain convinced of the validity of the whole magical system within which they operate.

Flesh of the Gods is a collection of essays by American ‘ethno- botanists’ on the ritual use of drugs in tribal societies. There are some signs that ethnobotany is a bit of a tribal religion itself (there is a kind of credo by R. Gordon Wasson), but all the same much of the material presented here is quite interesting. One thing that emerges over and over again is that members of a drug-using culture spontaneously all have the same, and the expected, experiences, often with no prompting from the shamanistic leader; outsiders, however, taking identical doses of the drug in an identical setting, experience nothing of the sort.

One consequence of this is, of course, the possibility of building up utterly self-contained and invulnerable systems of self-delusion. Such seems to be Mauss’ verdict on magic, though he recognizes its social significance. Although there may be much talk about experiences, in fact there is a tendency towards ritualization and formalism, the emphasis being on form rather than content.

Mr Taha is a model of Muslim piety and exercises a strict control over his household. A family joke has it that he once suffered severely from scruples on discovering that he had eaten some jam which had become fermented. As a member of a distinguished landowning family of Azerbaijan he has never had to work and has spent most of his life as a kind of gentleman scholar, leading an austere existence and devoted to prayer and such pursuits as collecting Old Korans. My impression is that, through leading this withdrawn life, he has allowed himself to become an isolated personality. A timid and nervous man, with a thin ascetic face, he betrays a tendency towards extreme excitability when discussing matters that involve his deepest convictions. On one such occasion I noticed that his features became distorted by his attempts to control his feelings and the veins on his forehead stood out. His family commented on this to me afterwards and said that he had not spoken at such length nor so vehemently for many years. It was evident that though they obeyed him externally he sensed that they were not with him in spirit. Consequently he no longer spoke about what was closest to him, which is to say that he hardly spoke at all. The visit of a Christian priest was like the breaking of a dam. Almost as soon as I arrived in Tabriz I was invited to his house—he is a relative of my Iranian friends—and hints were dropped that religion would be discussed.

We arrived at his house about the middle of the morning and after leaving our shoes at the bottom of the stairs were shown up to a long saloon which occupied a substantial part of the first floor, an arrangement which I understand is typical of the better class houses of Tabriz. The saloon has four large windows looking out over the garden which, during the hot hours of the day, are shielded by bamboo mats suspended from the exterior of the frame, so that however hot and glaring it may be outside, the room is shadowed and cool.