Virtue is not in fashion. Not even the word appears in most catechetical or theological writings. For us today it carries a musty smell of moralizing; it suggests a puritanism which we have good reason to mistrust, for we no longer want the prohibitions and obligations imposed on us by society to be the immediate criteria of our conduct. Even when it is the prohibitions and obligations imposed on us by the Church which are in question, we no longer feel that the quality of our Christian lives is to be judged according to our capacity to conform to the patterns of behaviour imposed on us in this way.

This is, however, not the only reason for our mistrust of virtue. We also react against its suggestion of the cultivated soul, the ideal of the ‘righteous man’ whose virtues are his adornment. And that is indeed what virtue meant at the beginning of our culture: the Greeks were so taken by virtue because it was the spiritual equivalent of physical beauty. Against this, on the one hand, we feel that this ideal is too self-centred: other people and the mystery of being and of the world seem to become mere pretexts or instruments for our personal perfection. On the other hand, we have also learned to distrust the clear conscience: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre have all, in their turn, unmasked the illusions of the cultivated soul. And Christians have reason not to turn deaf ears to these voices,

The points of growth and strain in our personal lives are usually those situations in which we have to fuse together our insights and our duties, or to put it differently to reconcile obligations and calls. These are the points where every Christian has to become in some sense his own theologian, within the terms of the New Testament promise that the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. While most priests are very conscious of not being professional theologians, yet they do develop by pastoral experience a rule of thumb theology in which the insights of grace, mother wit, what the Bishop said, and scraps from the textbooks mingle. Now it is surely regrettable that so little has been done to close the gap between academic theology and this kind of empirical wisdom which often enough needs rethinking and reshaping but which has qualities which are not always flourishing in an academic atmosphere. My own personal tension is not one of pastoral insight grappling with theological analysis but rather of another double focus—for as priest I must strive to see the people among whom I live as so many persons each besieged by grace, yet as an anthropologist I must see them at the level of the masks of culture and the bonds of society.

Before becoming a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers I studied social anthropology, and did field work in Angola. At the present time I am in the Diocese of Makurdi, Northern Nigeria, and after experience as a bush curate, I have been given the work of making a study of the Tiv people on whom there already exists an extensive but in several ways incomplete documentation. Here, I am trying not so much to discuss missionary work in the Diocese or Tiv religion and social structure, as work out on paper my own theologizing of my work.

This paper could well have been called Christianity and Materialism, but since it is concerned with arguing, from the Christian side, for a more materialistic interpretation of Christianity than is usual, the present title seems more appropriate. It is addressed, however, not merely to Christians but to all those who are interested in bringing together the values inherent in Communism and in Christianity, without detriment to either and to the enrichment of both.

Two things are to concern us. Firstly, how far it is possible (or indeed necessary) for a Christian to be a genuine materialist—even in some sense an atheist—without departing from traditional Christian belief in God; and secondly, how far it would be possible for a Marxist to believe in God, even to be a member of a Christian Church, without betraying his materialist philosophy and the political humanism to which he is committed. These questions could probably be dealt with more easily amongst either Christians or Marxists alone, but whilst much valuable progress is to be made in that way, it is also important that both sides should be able to discuss this matter together. To facilitate and further such dialogue is precisely the purpose of this contribution.

What I want to be able to show to Christians is how necessary it is for them, if they are to be true to Christ, to appreciate and absorb the value of an atheistic materialism such as that of Marx; and in doing this, to show to Marxists that Christians,

Those who cannot conceive of change in the Church’s attitude to contraception rely, according to Mr Dummett’s February article in New Blackfriars, on two main lines of argument. One is described as the ‘Where do we draw the line ?’ form of argument—if contraception is lawful, then perhaps so also are sterilization, abortion, sodomy, masturbation, fornication or even adultery. The other argument is also of the same form (though Mr Dummett does not so describe it) for it asks ‘Where do we draw the line?’—if the Church’s moral teaching is untrustworthy here, how can we be sure that it is to be trusted on any other subject ?

Both arguments, it seems to me, presuppose the asking and answering of a more fundamental question: to what extent can lines be drawn at all when moral issues are at stake ? The encyclical takes its stand on ‘what is called the “objective” moral order laid down by God’, and reminds parents that ‘they are not free to define an honest course of action in any way whatsoever that they choose (modo omino proprio ac libero), since they are bound, on the contrary, to act in accordance with the plan of the divine creator’ (para. 10). This again, it seems to me, presupposes a fundamental question: what sort of ‘objectivity’ is here being referred to, in what sense has God indeed got a ‘plan’ ?

The title of this paper expresses a certain wilful, or at least studied, ambiguity. What Catholic crisis? you may ask; or, more realistically, which Catholic crisis? Upon the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July last year, there was a single point of agreement between those Catholics who welcomed the papal letter as a major contribution, in Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s memorable phrase, for stemming ‘the Gadarene slide into American morality’, and those other Catholics who recognized it at once as yet another offering for that ever-growing catena of documentary embarrassment which the Holy See, in a kind of reverse Peter’s Pence, has generously provided in the course of the last 150 years. The nearly unanimous response—one of the notable exceptions being the author himself, if we are to believe some observers—was that we were now on the threshold of a new crisis, of faith, of authority, what you will, which would reduce the dimensions of the Modernist crisis, 1894-1910, to something resembling a parochial squabble between the vicar and the mothers’ union.

There are others, on both the ecclesiastical right and left, who would hold that the present crisis in the Church is simply chapter two, or the logical outcome of that earlier one, that the problems at the heart of the modernist controversy have re-appeared, sometimes in rather new garb, and that we must once again face them and come to terms with them.

In his ‘Reflections on the February Editorial’ (New Blackfriars, April, 1967) Father Cornelius Ernst suggested that in the context of ecclesiological analysis the notion of institution should not be restricted to ‘its narrower, governmental sense’ of legitimated offices and procedures which, however initiated, are formally constituted, but might be more usefully employed in the wider sense of the term ‘familiar to sociologists and social anthropologists’. If I have understood him correctly, his argument is that to confine the term to formally ‘instituted’ institutions, while denying it to ways of thought and action which although equally established as usages have not been established formally, is to lend countenance to dubious oppositions between the formal and explicit on the one hand, and the informal and implicit on the other. As an example of such an opposition he cites that between ‘institutional Church’ and ‘persons’. He suggests that if such distinctions as this are taken as expressing fundamental dichotomies, they may entail ‘damaging oversimplification’.

In the context of this interesting theme, a brief and inevitably cursory note by a social anthropologist on some of the ways in which the notions of institution and institutionalization have been used in his field may be of some small value.

Dr John Marsh, in his excellent Penguin commentary on St John’s gospel, remarks that ‘the gospels read so very much like historical narratives of what took place that it requires effort not to treat them exclusively as such, but to understand them as much more concerned to indicate what was going on in the narrative provided’ (p. 52). One must make the same effort when faced with the differences between the four gospels: these are not simply re-editions, revisions, expansions of one basic ‘life of the historical Jesus’. As Dr Marsh puts it:

This is well said, and nowadays commonly recognized. But is it enough? Is one merely shifting from the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ facts, to the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ theological ideas? To shift from thinking of gospellers as biographers to thinking of them as theologians seems still to perpetuate the idea that the gospels are four examples of one type of writing.

Since the advent of Vatican Council II initiated by the late Pope John XXIII, indeed of blessed memory, there has been a great transformation within the Roman Catholic Church in its attempt to renew itself. Traditional Catholic patterns of thought and attitudes of mind have been under severe criticism, challenge and analysis. Indeed, a reformation from within has taken place. As a consequence there has been theological development, a revaluation in biblical exegesis and an attempt to show how the Church in its mission is relevant to the problems and the needs of contemporary society.

It was during this process of self-examination and aggorniamento that the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, ‘On Human Life’, appeared, in July 1968. The impact of the encyclical was enormous upon the Catholic world and the world at large and so began the debate, discussion and division of opinion within the Church.

Countless numbers of Catholics who were looking forward to a modification in the traditional teaching on birth control were deeply disappointed. The Holy Father had spoken and it was forbidden.

As a Jew with a profound regard for the Kerygma of Christ, I attended many lectures and ‘Teach Ins’ within the Catholic community on Humanae Vitae and it was strange to observe that not on any single occasion did I hear a Catholic speaker or member of an audience ask the basic question; what does Jewish religion that is Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism teach on birth control? In view of the fact that the Church claims to be the new Israel, the completion of the old Israel, I was puzzled as to why this vital question was never asked.

The large number of conferences, books and articles that now centre on the nature of the priesthood seem proof of a general disquiet on the part of both priests and laymen. From the Netherlands comes the edition of the papers on this subject given at a congress in Lucerne in 1967 (News Bulletin of the Institute for Inter-European Sacerdotal Exchange at Maastricht, April, 1968, Vol. 2, Nos. 1/2); the March number of Concilium, also emanating from Holland, is devoted to the subject. It has even been suggested in certain quarters that a campaign of agitation is being organized by a small group of rebellious priests and theologians operating from the Netherlands, which is responsible for the open letter signed by 260 French priests last November and for the resignation en bloc of the twelve executive councillors and regional representatives of the Mission de France in March this year. Both events are concerned with the same problem and reflect ideas aired at the Lucerne Conference. The 260 priests state that they have come to believe that the clerical status imposed upon priests with the style of life and human relationships which it implies is one of the biggest obstacles to the revelation of Christ in the modern world. The worker-priests, for their part, have resigned because of the failure of the French bishops to recognize that the role of the Mission de France implies a third form of pastoral ministry different both from that of the religious orders and that of the secular ministry.

In the literature that survives from the ancient world Augustine is unrivalled, except perhaps by Cicero, for the range and intimacy of his writings. The lovely folio pages of the edition published in Paris by the Benedictines of St Maur from 1679-1700, still the most recent more or less complete edition of the extant works, contain by far the greater part of the titles catalogued after Augustine’s death by his disciple Possidius. Certainly enough has survived for us to see the personality and ideas of Augustine unfold over more than forty years, from the first flush of conversion at Cassiciacum, expressed in the almost adolescent idealism of the Soliloquia and the De beata vita, until his death at Hippo in 430, with the last chapters of the De civitate Dei completed some years before, and the Retractationes cut short, as scrupulosities should be.

The Confessions were written in the earlier part of this period. In book seven Augustine tells us that he finally rid his mind of the lees of Manichaeism by his reading ‘certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin’ (vii 13: I have cited throughout the paragraph divisions of the Maurist edition, without the chapter divisions of the editio princeps). In book eight Augustine is converted to Christianity by reading St Paul. But the conversion has still a Platonic element, for Augustine describes his experience in the garden at Cassiciacum partly in language that Plotinus had used to describe the soul’s ascent to the beautiful.

Just over a year ago, a sample copy of an English course textbook, New Junior Crown (for third graders) by William C. Clark, was submitted to the Mombusho (Ministry of Education) in Tokyo for approval. To obtain teachers’ reactions to the course, the Ministry sent out a hundred copies of New Junior Crown and asked for their views. A group of left-wing teachers, the New English Research Association, found a number of things in the book tendentious and inaccurate, not from the point of view of English idiom or grammar, but from what was purveyed to the pupil as ‘the Japanese way of life’. Each lesson showed an American family, the Browns, on a tour of Japan, and in Lesson Eleven they were taken to ‘The Grand Shrine at Ise’. The New English Research Association had already pointed out that Mr Clark seemed intent, in other lessons, on glorifying the Emperor-system and over-simplifying religious issues; but in Lesson Eleven he had really gone beyond the mark. After tipping a Shinto priest two thousand yen, the Browns were invited into the shrine, where some dances were performed for their benefit. ‘Now let’s go to the Inner Shrine’, the lesson went on, ‘it’s the most sacred place in Japan. I want it remembered as the high point of your trip. ... A thick white curtain was in the entrance. The Browns stood reverently before the curtain. How peaceful everything was. They prayed for peace in the world.

To review Dr Leach’s Reith Lectures, A Runaway World, is not a straightforward task. It is not possible to take up the many points on which they invite comment or provoke disagreement without first defining one’s position towards the blanket disapproval with which they were greeted when originally delivered, and noting the implications of this opposition. The lectures were meaty and intentionally provocative: contrary to their author I think they make better reading than listening simply because there is too much to take in by the ear alone: which makes it all the sadder that so much comment was lavished on them as radio talks and so little in their printed form. Reith Lectures have, of course, proved controversial in the past but none has provoked quite the response these did, and this must, at least in part, be explained by timing and the topic.

The whole conception of the Reith Lectures assumes a hierarchical public opinion with a narrow apex definable largely in terms of who knows who but predominantly drawn from certain professions and the public service and the so-called quality newspapers, transmitting downwards through the universities, the colleges of education to eventually the secondary modern schools, the right opinions and the tolerated areas of disagreement. Quite suddenly in the last three years this hierarchical structure has started to break up and voices quite outside the old establishment, more strident, much less informed, but sometimes more passionately concerned have started to make themselves heard and been shown to carry weight.

It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.

The problem of Christ and world religions is both significant and urgent. It is significant because the very universality of Christ is at stake in the current dialogue among the great religions of the world. The problem is urgent, because, now that the old solutions no longer hold, we must find a new answer to the problem. The whole Church is everywhere on the move and so is seeking out new paths; and in this particular case what she is looking for is a response that is free at once of the exclusiveness that has sometimes unhappily characterized the end of syncretism. We have now, I believe, reached a turning point in the history of Christianity: even Vatican II has already considered other religions as paths to salvation.

In the first part of this paper I wish to speak of three aspects of the confrontation of Christ by Hinduism, and in the second part I shall try to conclude the discussion by showing what a confrontation of Hinduism by Christ might suggest.

My first section could be entitled: ‘‘The Misunderstanding’, for we cannot deny that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism. All the historical exceptions only prove the rule of what the Abbé Monchánin called ‘the great misunderstanding’. I should like to begin by quoting a proverb known in many languages which asks: ‘What is the first requirement if you want to teach Gopal Sanskrit?’ A rationally minded person would immediately answer: the first requirement is that you know Sanskrit.

It has often occurred to me that if all the books which have been written in the recent past about ‘modern Ireland’ were laid end to end, it would be a very good thing. Certainly the Irish cannot complain of under-exposure. Constantly looked upon as something rather strange and yet attractive, this island has, especially in the past five years or so, been the subject of a considerable number of critiques, both external and internal, which are frequently united by nothing more substantial than the deliberate desire to misunderstand what it is the Irish are up to, and why. In addition, the illusion—created partly by the country’s useful geographical isolation, and partly by the mistaken belief that we speak the English language—that Ireland is a subject which can be rapidly and conveniently assimilated, encourages superficiality. It is difficult to know which is the more offensive: the kind of book which portrays Ireland as a country ruled by the expertly-wielded clerical black thornstick, straining to escape from its thraldom to alcohol and internecine warfare, or its alternative, the book about the brave new Ireland striding manfully into the twentieth century and in the process of escaping the various forms of thraldom already mentioned because it has at long last learned to embrace liberal, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon virtues.

I. Speaking to Willing Ears

First of all, let me speak on behalf of the Third World, and thank those of you who represent the Haslemere Group for the Declaration which you are transforming into a programme of thought and action. I assure you, in my capacity as a man of the underdeveloped world, that your vision could not be clearer nor your attitude more courageous. This is what I have already said in Manchester, at the Manchester Student Congress, organized by the Student Christian Movement.

I have come here to co-operate with you; to urge you on in your effort in spite of the obstacles before you. I have come here to testify to the truth of the theme of this Conference.

I will try to show you quickly how the underdeveloped world is being crushed by a triple violence.

II. The Triple Violence against the Underdeveloped World

1. Internal colonialism, which means established violence

Taking Latin America as an example, when people ask me if I think our Continent is threatened by violence I feel that the question is looking ahead to the possible, eventual violence of those who are now oppressed, whereas it does not take into account the already existing violence of the oppressors—a small privileged group whose wealth is maintained at the expense of the misery of million of their countrymen.

Those who are unfamiliar with Latin America may think I am exaggerating; they may think I am being demagogic, or deliberately provocative.

Psychologists working in the field of human development are understandably reluctant to make predictions. They prefer to work backwards, attempting to explain later behaviour in the light of earlier experience, but always aware of the multiple factors involved in the human situation and of the unreliability and inaccuracy of what has been recorded, often in retrospect. Reliable studies on a large enough scale are few and far between, especially in this country, while the increasing social and geographical mobility of the general population makes any longitudinal study over the years increasingly difficult to carry through.

Meanwhile, theories of child-rearing abound, varying not only from generation to generation but also according to the school of thought involved; more important, large sections of the population remain more or less untouched by such professional advice, even at the level of the popular women’s journals, so that the mores of regional subcultures persist, despite the attempts of teachers and social workers with what are now recognized as essentially middle-class professional goals and expectations.

Nevertheless, one factor on which there is increasing agreement is the importance of the earliest years, of the pre-school period spent largely within the family setting. What evidence there is suggests real differences at work within the range of social class, which will facilitate or hamper the work of formal education during the next ten or more years the children will spend in school. What these differences really are, and how they can be met without distorting or destroying what is valuable at each level, still remains a matter of conjecture.

There are obviously two groups of structuralists. There are the original quiet ones, led by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, and the new noisy ones, propagating ‘neo-structuralism’ with its political message.

Already last year this process of degeneration was apparent in France. Le Monde for the 30th November had a special section of comment and opinion called: ‘Was structuralism killed by the movement of May?’ Its general conclusion seems to be that it was.

With the publication of Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, a series of essays from various hands, published late last year, it is apparent that the work of the original structuralists cannot be brought together into any meaningful synthesis. Their key concepts are meanwhile being misapplied.

It may seem incredible that such a promising idea as the original concept of structuralism can have been side-tracked so soon, long before any adequate understanding of what it was has penetrated into our discussions in this country.

Yet it is the case. Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? is only the last, and poorest, attempt to give a unity to something which defies unification. In the last two or three years we have seen appear Clefs pour le Structuralisme, by Jean-Marie Auzias (1967); Comprende le structuralisme, by J-B. Fages (1967); A Quoi sert la Notion de ‘Structure’ ? by Raymond Boudon (1968); Le Structuralisme (in the series Qtie sais-je?) by Jean Piaget (1968); and last and most formidable of all, Claude Lévi-Strauss ou la ‘Passion de I'Inceste'.

I am sometimes asked how I reconcile being a monk with my involvement in movements devoted to the Alternative Society. I think we should turn that question upside down. A monk is ipso facto involved in the enterprise of the Alternative Society, and the wonder is that so few seem to realize it.

After all, what do we mean by the alternative society? We mean, I take it, that we have glimpsed, far away, a vision of what it might be like for man to be free; a dream of human society in which love is all you need, in which death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more (that’s from the Apocalypse, actually). And not only that. We have decided to stake all on that vision, that dream. We have committed ourselves to living as if man were really like that, as if society could really live by love alone. We have let ourselves be subverted by utopia, and can never be the same again.

And that is the definition of the Church, and most especially of the religious orders. The Church is, according to the Second Vatican Council, the present sign and nucleus of the future kingdom, the new creation; and religious orders are in particular called to live their whole lives as a witness to this future, this Utopia.

John Noonan’s long history of contraceptive practice and prohibition demands and merits a second reading—a cautious one. For all the intelligence and careful research that has obviously gone into it, still it has its gaps and misreadings, some of them by no means peripheral to the author’s overall picture of an ‘evolving’, ‘developing’ ecclesiastical doctrine of love and marriage and the Church’s consequent attitudes toward contraception. One of the wider gaps is the failure to consider a man named Nicole Oresme; and one of the more serious misreadings is of St Thomas Aquinas.

Noonan proposes that Martin le Maistre—a late fifteenth-century layman of considerable standing and reputation in the University of Paris—was the first theologian to make the ‘modern’ breakthrough. Prior to him the Augustinian insistence, found also in St Thomas, on procreative purpose as the only justifying motive for conjugal intercourse held all but exclusive sway. Marriage was rarely or only secondarily thought of in terms of love, and where love happened to be encouraged it was not the kind that had to do with sex. Sex as a biological function productive of the child, well and good (for the most part); but as an expression of love, as an experience of joy and pleasure, no—on pain of at least venial sin. But with le Maistre we have ‘the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic approach to marriage’. His ethics offer reasons justifying conjugal intercourse other than procreation and even suggests (though hesitantly) venereal pleasure as a licit motive.