Is Brian McNeil serious (new Blackfriars Oct 1976) or is he casting his bread upon the waters in the hope of seeding a good argument? When someone suggests that theological insight or clarification can be made through an examionation of symbols and their legitimation, the sociologist in me immediately pricks up his ears. Mr McNeil’s argument on the place (or rather the lack of place) of women in the eucharistic liturgy provokes the ambiguous reaction of mild sympathy followed by profound disagreement.

I agree with him that the fact that there were no women included among the Apostles indicates little in the way of church structures and how the ministry should be organised. I agree with him that the symbolism of sacramental action should be ground grounded (or “earthed” as he puts it) in our own experience as human beings. I also agree, somewhat off the main subject, that the practice of concelebration adds little to, and indeed probably detracts from, the symbolic communication of the eucharist. It seems little more than a clerical pageant more designed to emphasise the separation of the ordained ministry from the ordinary faithful and to imply a minimisation of the priesthood of the people of God (one president of the eucharist is enough): the other ordained ministers should be identified with the assembled people. However, I profoundly disagree with his conclusions, be they never so tentative, and indeed with his overall argument.

Mr McNeil concludes that women, though possibly eligible for other forms of ministry, have no place presiding over the eucharistic liturgy. He arrives at this position through the application of two principles of legitimation for the sacramental symbols employed in the eucharist.

First, two reprints, one of an undoubted classic, Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God, in Donald Attwater’s excellent translation, with a relatively new introduction by Dorothy Day. This must be the most attractive English edition available now. It may be doubted whether Cardinal Suenens’ A New Pentecost? will survive the test of time, but it is likely to endure long enough to justify its new paperback edition. (For a review of the original edition, see New Blackfriars, November 1975).

There is also an anthology of the Cardinal’s dicta compiled by his devoted biographer, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ways of the Spirit, and this makes a pleasant book to dip into, and could be used as an aid to meditation.

The SPCK offers us a new edition of Bishop Appleton’s One Man's Prayers, revealing a generous and trusting spirituality, expressed in simple prayers which many might find helpful on occasion.

John Gunstone, The Beginnings at Whatcombe is a lucid and readable account of the growth of one of the more convincing communities to emerge from the “charismatic movement” in this country, and offers wise advice about the difficulties of living together in community without simply fleeing to naive supematuralism.

In the true sense of the word of course there can never be enough saints. Luther, I have heard, said that the only thing that matters is to be a saint. Simone Weil is even more uncompromising: “it seems to me that saintliness is. if I dare say so, the minimum for a Christian” (Seventy Letters, ed. Rees, 1965, p. 175). It is simply a linguistic oddity that English and German among others have tended to separate the word ‘saint’ or its equivalent from ‘holy’, whereas the Romance languages keep one word to describe the holy person and to mark out those whose saintliness the Church has formally recognised. In England the word may even take on a dismissive air: one hears from time to time the quite unashamed remark. “I don't pretend to be a saint”, as if unsaintliness were a perfectly reasonable and acceptable state of mind, which we can in any case do nothing about, a condition perhaps that one has been born with, as who should say, “I don't pretend to be very clever’’. A booklet published by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul innocently answers the question whether its members are “near-saints’’: “Certainly not. God knows, they are ordinary Catholics, real men who (let it be said with the utmost humility) are trying to do God’s will”. Saints as are of course extraordinary—that is why we feel we need a special word for them; and I suggest that part of their difference is in their greater human reality, or rather that they are more fully human (whole) by being holy.

“This unaccountable, heterodox, bad priest” was the accepted verdict of Catholic scholarship on Alexander Geddes almost seventy years ago. Amid the modernist crisis that view was understandable particularly in the British Catholic Church which had struggled for respectability and acceptance during the previous half century. Geddes seemed a disturbing unmannerly radical. But today in a Church more concerned with social justice and freedom, with ecumenism and scholarly integrity, we can come to a more charitable balanced conclusion. For Geddes was undoubtedly a talented scholarly priest of liberal imagination and provocative manner. Persistent ill health especially some severe form of rheumatism, gave his wit a bitterness which he effectively employed against any species of privilege, political or religious intolerance. In his desire for conciliatory dialogue between Churches, authentic local liturgies, and a more responsible and responsive ecclesiastical authority, he was a thoroughly modem churchman.

The life of Geddes may be briefly recounted. Born into a poor Catholic family in Banffshire in 1737, educated at Scalan and in Paris, he was ordained in 1764. Following a brief chequered career in Scotland, during which he acquired an LL.D from the University of Aberdeen, he lived in London from 1780 to his death in 1801. Free from pastoral demands he was able to devote himself to the intellectual life. His cosmopolitan life and training made him very much a child of the Enlightenment. His extended visits to France, 1758-64, 1766-69 and 1783, together with his continuous reliance on aristocratic patronage ensured that result. Well acquainted with Presbyterianism and educated within the Gallican tradition in the Paris of the philosophes, Geddes was associated with several leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. By nature gregarious, he freely associated with all denominations; Presbyterians, Anglicans, Unitarians and Quakers.

When people become religious believers, when they talk about their religion or engage in verbal activity in practising it, what are they doing? Although he does not believe that a simple, unqualified answer can be given to this question, Patrick Sherry thinks that it is important, that certain ideas of Wittgenstein are a help in trying to answer it and that a proper answer raises problems of truth and justification which are often ignored: “Let us then ask ourselves what pictures and concepts are used in religion and theology: we want to know how doctrines are related to the world— what is their subject matter and what kind of description are they trying to provide? Now it is unlikely that we will be able to reach a simple answer to such questions, because so-called ‘religious language’ is of many different kinds ... even putatively ‘descriptive’ or ‘fact-stating’ uses of religious language are of many types (p. 18)... We need to ask how and why the religious ‘universe of discourse’, which supposedly structures the believer’s experience, ever arose in the first place (p. 45) ... There are three tasks which need to be tackled if we are to produce a viable Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. These are to characterise the language-games and forms of life of religion by explaining their place in our lives and experience, to relate them to other language-games, and to deal candidly with the problems of truth and justification.

It is difficult to differ in one’s immediate reactions from the critical consensus on Peter Levi’s Collected Poems. The general impression is of a competent body of verse produced largely independently of the various ‘movements’ contemporary with it, descended in its early phase from Spender, derived in its later style from Eliot, and marked by an obscurity arising, as Colin Falk recognised, from the absence of “an authenticating life…whose depths and anxieties get smoothed over…without being built up into the poetic structure”. Obscurity of this kind is not part of the difficulty characteristic of much significant ‘modem’ poetry: a problem of complex and contradictory things said and shown, often overburdening the signifier, in an already allusive and elliptical discourse. Levi’s obscurity is, rather, part of a process of exclusion and elision, a smoothing over which deprives his work of a memorable presence.

To ascribe this as most reviewers have done to the limitations of Levi’s imagination is an inadequate explanation. What is needed is some discrimination, however cursory, amongst obscurities: a distinction between that obscurity which is symptomatic of innovation and gives major works their multivalent character; and the indeterminancy of works where a lack of depth and conception make their resonances finally unmeaningful and insignificant.

Levi’s obscurity, I want to suggest, arises from a conceptual naivete. His desire to smooth over conflict results in a suppression of contradictions that is made possible by his belief in an immanent, essential spiritual unity. This influences a mode which, in avoiding argument, is often either sententiously preachy or passive; either distanced from the problem in its generality—“O Great God what is human life like?”—or immersed indistinguishably in the problem itself—“I think England is prison of a kind/and in that prison I am blank wall”.