The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.

However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.

‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).
‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).
‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).
‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).

The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.

This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.

A Chilean Jesuit priest who is also an expert on agricultural economics, Gonzalo Arroyo was a technical adviser on problems relating to agricultural reform for the ten years previous to the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, and is one of the founders of the world-wide movement called Christians for Socialism. Now living in exile, he gave this interview last June. Here, utilising in his argument methods proper to the Theology of Liberation, he gives his reasons for believing this world-wide movement is going to be of rapidly growing importance in the uncertain years ahead.

Q. In your opinion, what are the principal problems facing mankind?

A. I shall restrict myself to the five which seem to me the most crucial.

1. The ecological problem, that is the problem of conservation and renewal of natural resources like water, soil, air and forests which capitalist industrialisation does not manage to take seriously, subject as it is to the dictates of the frantic race for production and consumption.

In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature. Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious. He suggested that ‘the profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction’ and he proposed ‘Francis as a patron saint for ecologists’. The article sparked off a good deal of interest. Richard Means, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, took up the point and expressing fundamental agreement with White on the religious aspect of the crisis, put forward pantheism as the basis of a solution. While there is a superficial attraction in pantheism as a foundation of the unity of reality, ultimately it destroys the diversity of creatures through a fusion in the All and it makes change, finitude and even evil, intrinsic to God Himself. Francis A. Schaeffer, Director of L’Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland, submitted the proposals of White and Means to a detailed analysis. In conclusion he rejected both : ‘So pantheism is not going to solve our international ecological problem. St Francis’s concept, as presented by Lynn White, is not going to solve it—the concept that everything is equal and everything is spiritually autonomous. Romanticism is no solution because ‘firstly, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and secondly, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man’.

Marx denied that he was a moralist. But it can hardly be disputed that anyone who thinks seriously about certain matters which have to do with morals—the nature and causes of wrongdoing and suffering in human society, and how they may be remedied—must come to grips with his arguments. To put the matter bluntly, any responsible intellectual who is not a Marxist must at times ask himself just why he is not; and in what follows, I shall try to explain why I am not. To cope with the whole range of Marx’s writings, one needs to be a specialist; those who are not so may well be, as I am, deeply indebted to David MacLellan for his admirable summary, supported with copious quotations, of the main features of Marx’s thought. For better or for worse, anyway, my Marx will be largely Marx as McLellan presents him.

It is fundamental to Marx’s thought that human relationships, and consequently the whole web of institutions which make up society, are determined by the material circumstances in which men live and work; and consequently that if you change these material circumstances, you will change human ideas and behaviour at large. This thesis is generally labelled ‘historical materialism. Now the word ‘determined’ may be understood here in a relatively strong or a relatively weak sense. If it is taken in a strong sense, the thesis is that, given the material circumstances and the means of production prevalent in a society, its members cannot but behave very much as they do. (It would appear to be incorrect to ascribe to Mans a rigid determinism applying to the details of every individual action.)

‘Communism is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be such—Marx, 1844.

Whether marxism poses for itself solutions to the riddles of history, or whether, more narrowly, it is a science of social formations and their transformation, or some combination of the two—these are central issues of contemporary marxist theory. They are focussed in the debate over the work of Althusser, and over the ‘neo-hegelianism’ of the earlier Lukacs, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School and others (for present purposes I shall collectively describe this latter position as Critical Theory). It is in this context that the old disputes over the relation between the earlier and the later work of Marx remain so important, for they have implications for the orientation, scope and purchase of the tradition as a whole.

Reflexion on these issues is prompted by two recent collections of marxist essays. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s Studies in Critical Philosophy (New Left Books, £3.25) provides for the English reader essential material for the assessment of the claims of critical theory, Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble’s From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed & Ward, £5.50) is an attempt to establish the unity of ‘the total Marx’, without falling back on the critical theory tradition. In both texts, however, there are surprisingly similar lacunae and areas of fuzziness, especially over the definition and analysis of human needs. This is a concept basic to the marxist tradition but one which has rarely been satisfactorily investigated, or its crucial and awkward significance grasped (Mascolo, Meszaros, and Kolakowski not withstanding). It is on this question, and the related ones of the objectivity and universality of marxist theory, that I shall concentrate.

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.

Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.

The last assembly we held before the coup was impressive. It was a sequel to an assembly which the administration had called several days before to inform us that our stock of raw material was down to zero; that with the truck owners’ strike there was no way of bringing the stock of ingots reserved for us in Concepcion; that we’d have to consider seriously the prospect of a halt in production. The news was badly received.

The Production Committees met immediately, and obtained unanimity quickly: except for workers of this plant, nobody was going to stop production. We’d get the raw material to Santiago—cost what it may—and that was that.

The determination was made and it was firm; we communicated it to the administration who gave us the green light, though it took a while to put together the means to realise it. . . .

Once we had obtained the transport to fetch the raw material, we convoked an assembly to inform all the workers of our success and ask for volunteers to accompany the trucks. Everyone knew what was involved—a long journey and a perilous one, most of it on our own time, with no bonus. The truck owners and right-wing terrorist groups were sniping at anything that moved along the roads, dynamiting bridges and railway tracks. The response was tremendous —just about everyone volunteered; the selection proved difficult.

The first thing to be clear about when speaking of religious poverty is that we are using a metaphor, an equivocation. Religious poverty, whatever its exact form, is a certain renunciation of material goods voluntarily undertaken. On the moral level, therefore, it has only a superficial resemblance to actual poverty, the indigence of the people who are poor in the social sense. For actual poverty is not voluntary and its result is to reduce the person who suffers it to a kind of powerlessness, a slavery. The poor are by an inevitable social logic in the power of the rich. They have very little control over the course of their own lives. The poor in our industrial cities for instance are reduced to the exercise of that little bit of illusory freedom that is handed out to them by the rich in the form of choice of different brands in the supermarket, choice of programmes on TV, the unpredictability of the bingo game or the betting shop, the promise of something new in the amusement arcade where working-class housewives can be seen any day of the week trying to increase their housekeeping money playing the fruit machines. Economic poverty is one term of a relationship within society and not a mere simplicity of life. It is the foundation of other kinds of poverty: powerlessness to maintain local community in the face of council planners and property developers; educational deprivation; a ruined environment, and so on.

Poverty, then, is something suffered at the hands of other people and therefore worlds apart from a condition of life freely undertaken. The poor are not masters of their own lives. The religious, however, is a master of his own life. It is a matter of free choice from the outset.

A novel about Russia written by an English novelist is something of a rarity, particularly when it is written by an English novelist who spoke Russian fluently and lived in Russia for many years. Maurice Baring’s reputation as a writer is in fact based largely on a knowledge of Russian life and literature which he exploited with considerable skill and shrewdness for at least the early part of his literary career. He was one of the first English writers to introduce Russian life and literature to the general reading public of Edwardian England. From 1904 until 1914, he spent much of his time in Russia writing the series of articles and books, which began with a review of the original production of The Cherry Orchard and detailed reports on the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution, and culminated years later with the first edition of The Oxford Book of Russian Verse.

Glossolalia can be produced with great ease—hence the title of this consideration of it. The interesting question is why people choose to engage in this form of pseudo-language, and this can at least be partially answered by describing its essential features, how people become glossolalists, and some of the conditions that favour it.

Anomalous speech is not so uncommon as is often supposed. Speech ingredients are used in ways ranging from the rudimentary to the highly sophisticated in both secular and religious contexts. The pseudo-languages of spells, incantations, games, nursery rhymes, and scat-singing for instance; those attributed to spirits and Martians; and those sometimes invented by children and adults can be located on such a continuum. What they have in common is that, unlike language, their meaning is not found in the conventions either of their internal organisation or of their relationship with the perceived world. Tongue-speaking in religious contexts is an improvised language of the same kind.

It is clear that the early Christians expected the coming of the Kingdom almost at once, and equally clear that it has not come. This long period of waiting has caused a number of problems for the Christian church and it is intended here to consider some of these and the way they were solved until recently in the Catholic church.

A number of them are those which are inevitable in an organisation that goes on a long time. The original spirit of the movement is replaced by routine. Rules and regulations are drawn up. Early practices lose their meaning—this is particularly true of liturgy—but, since they continue, new meanings are invented for them. A clear example of this is the old rule of eating fish on Fridays. When the original connection with fasting was lost people began to argue that it was about establishing one’s identity in an alien environment. The history of the Mass and the complicated meanings attributed to the most trivial and accidental details are another obvious example.

In the same way a form of organisation develops which, as time goes on, becomes increasingly complicated and unwieldly. A special class of people, the clergy, grows up for running it, all with a career structure and rewards of their own and their established place in wider society—and so a gap forms between the clergy and the other members of the church.

The view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn projected in the press, both popular and literary, in the bourgeois countries is of some kind of embattled Western liberal, who, amid the severities of ‘totalitarianism’, continues resolutely to articulate the values that underpin the Free World. We do not see him treated as a Russian socialist who after decades of official dogma is conducting a genuine struggle to come to terms, artistically, with recent Soviet history, to deal with real problems of common life and its valuation in a transitional society. Nor is he even shown to be the author of a certain kind of typically Russian social novel discernibly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—but always as the Scourge of Communism.

Naturally, it is easy for the champions of the Western bourgeoisie to appropriate Solzhenitsyn to their own ideological purposes (along with many other ‘dissident intellectuals’): do not, after all, the demands most often raised by the ‘cultural opposition’ such as those for freedom of speech and of publication—the civil rights most cherished by the intelligentsia—have the very appearance of ‘liberal’ demands? This mystification is easy to dispel. Noticeably, the Western press only reports the activities of the intellectuals: widespread factory occupations, food riots, work stoppages, street demonstrations, and the storming of the party headquarters in Novocherkask by local factory workers (all of which took place when Kruschev announced rises in meat and dairy prices in 1962, the year of Solzhenitsyn’s first publication) are not reported in the West with such alacrity. And in any case, as Harding remarks, freedom of speech is by no means a liberal call in the Russian context: by raising demands which the state bureaucracy dare not satisfy, the intellectuals must eventually consider the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and a means of achieving this, and thus their dissent falls within the dynamic of permanent revolution.

The not unimpressive degree of agreement which prevailed as regards theory and practice among British social anthropologists between about 1940 and the later fifties was produced by a variety of factors, including of course the opportunities for fieldwork in the British colonial empire, on which the sun was unobtrusively, but inexorably, setting. Other factors were the relatively high degree of cordiality between the small number of leading social anthropologists, almost all of whom had been in some way influenced by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and who found it possible to teach and organise research on the basis of what was called ‘structural-functionalism’, a workable synthesis (to simplify slightly) of Malinowski’s fieldwork methods with Radcliffe-Brown’s stress on the classification of social structures. The range of interests of structural-functionalism was unduly narrow, myth and ritual being treated as supporting adjuncts to the social institutions on which attention was focused, and both linguistics and oral literature were very largely ignored. Much of the theoretical basis of structural-functionalism was also of the sort that survives by not being questioned; if ‘the function of exogamy is to increase the solidarity of kin groups’, are those kin groups which allow endogamy therefore lacking in solidarity, how does one measure solidarity, and if exogamy (or any other social institution) cannot be explained as useful, what sort of explanations do we give?

The turning away from the structural-functional orthodoxy would have come anyway, with the end of the colonial era and the increase in number of social anthropologists, but it is only fair to point out that the new directions of social anthropology in Britain from 1960 onwards did grow out of work done by the leading apostles of structural-functionalism.

The Sleeping Lord brings together all that has been printed, sporadically, of David Jones’s work since The Anathemata was published in 1952, except The Narrows (in the Anglo-Welsh Review, Autumn 1973) and The Kensington Mass (Agenda, special issue, 1974). These nine pieces are described as ‘fragments’, but the word can hardly be used here in the sense in which it is applied, for example, to the fragments of Ennius (I choose Ennius because that dogged old hexametrist is specially dear to David—what would he not give to have half-a-dozen complete books of Ennius discovered?). There is nothing broken or incomplete in anything that is built into this work. The last piece, it is true, from The Book of Balaam’s Ass, starts with a ragged edge, but the context is restored and the continuity reestablished in a very few lines.

The collection falls into four parts: an introductory poem, A, a, a, Domine Deus, which comes close to, but leaves a loophole from, despair; then four sections, The Wall, The Dream of Private Clitus, The Fatigue, and The Tribune’s Visitation, which have in common (to put it crudely for the moment) an imperial Roman setting; then comes The Tutelar of the Place, which may be read as a prayer against the imposition of order at the cost of diversity and personality; and this acts as a natural bridge to the two ‘Welsh’ sections, The Hunt and The Sleeping Lord. Finally, Balaam’s Ass, which comes as an addendum : differing considerably in style, scale, and feeling from the preceding poems, and yet, in spite of its position in the book, serving as a link between David’s earliest and latest work.

In this article I want to draw attention to one particular argument used by some modern Protestant theologians, an argument concerning the verifiability and falsifiability of Christian belief. This argument consists of an appeal to the Pauline idea of justification, but the difficulty which the argument raises concerns the meaning which is given to ‘justification’. The concept of ‘justification’ can acquire rather different meanings from the contexts in which it is used; that is to say, the meaning which ‘justification’ has on any particular occasion depends on the character of the position which it is being used to attack. Let us look at some of these positions in order to see what differences of meaning ‘justification’ may have.

Paul gave the first peculiarly Christian exposition of the idea of ‘justification’ in his letter to the Romans, though he had previously used the idea in a more rudimentary fashion in his letter to the Galatians. Paul used the idea to distinguish Christianity from any other form of religion, particularly that of Judaism. He says that justification, i.e. the state of being righteous which allows us to stand before God without fear of condemnation even though we are technically still sinners, comes through faith and not through works of the Law (the Jewish Torah). In so far as we try to justify ourselves before God by performing pious practices and carrying out morally good behaviour, we will not succeed either in performing these works successfully or in being judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.20). But in so far as we abandon any attempt to make ourselves righteous before God, in so far as we accept that God makes us stand uncondemned, we will be judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.21-6).

Going to a performance of any opera anywhere—well, almost any opera and almost anywhere, not Lucia di Lammermoor, not Glyndebourne—is for me an entrance upon an occasion. An entrance I may make at each performance. An occasion not to be experienced by those who sit amidst contraptions which without a by-your-leave or a letter of introduction thrust the entire chorus and orchestra of La Scala into one’s withdrawing room, and which are yet quite unable to bring Parsifal’s heavenly voices descending from the ceiling.

This sense of occasion belongs not nearly so much as is popularly believed—by those, for example, who covered the great concrete staircase of the Metropolitan at Lincoln Center with rich red cloth—with chandeliers and plush of a vanishing past, but rather is to be discerned in a common expectation of audience and players and singers. ‘It does me good to come here’, said my mother during the interval of a recent Covent Garden performance, T don’t often see so many people looking cheerful. It is not what television suggests to me that the world is like these days’.

Not that opera is to be thought escapist. Contrariwise. The 19th Century convention, for example, of a plot moving along by quick melodramatic incident, like falling in love or shooting a man down, with, before and after the incident, extended arias of comment and interpretation, seems to me not a whit artificial but exactly like the processes of my ordinary living.

It is the contention of Professor Geach in ‘Omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 7-20, called GP in what follows, that ‘no graspable sense has ever been given to this sentence [‘God can do everything’] that did not lead to self-contradiction or at least to conclusions manifestly untenable from a Christian point of view’ (GP 7-8). In the still more recent ‘An irrelevance of omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 327-33, called GIOP in what follows, he continues to maintain a thesis of that kind: ‘any thesis that gives a plausible interpretation of the sentence ‘God can do everything’ is a thesis involving both inherent logical difficulties and conclusions hard to reconcile with traditional Christian belief’ (GIOP 327), and ‘sense is not to be made of “God can do everything” ‘ (GIOP 332). His contention, as the present paper will show, will not in fact survive straightforwardly logical criticism owing nothing essential to any arcane points of detail peculiar to philosophical theology.

Reasonably dismissing some other possible ways of understanding ‘God can do everything’—which should rather be put as ‘There is nothing that God cannot do’—Professor Geach brings his main batteries against a position held by many catholic theologians, St Thomas Aquinas among them. According to that position ‘ “God can do so- and-so” is true just if “God does so-and-so” is logically consistent— there may be consistently describable feats which it would involve contradiction to suppose done by God’ (G P 9’s italics). In view of that restriction which G P rightly emphasises, Aquinas advanced the thesis

Knowledge that the author of a book between one’s hands died before its publication inevitably affects one’s judgement of it. At first reading, the late Dr Jean Buxton’s Religion and Healing in Mandari seemed to me to lack complete integration as a book, to be rather a collection of extremely interesting and thoughtful chapters loosely strung together. Further reading, however, has suggested to me that this impression is a superficial reaction to a remarkable quality in the book, its capacity to give attention to several different themes in succession, or rather, to give each theme its own value in the overall pattern of Mandari thinking and doing, without either isolating it from the whole, or giving the totality an imposed, schematic unity in the service of some favourite formula. Dr Buxton refused to see Mandari reality as a collection of bits and pieces or as a shapeless mass or as a geometrical pattern.

The Mandari are a people of the southern Sudan, numbering, when in the nineteen-fifties Dr Buxton did her fieldwork among them, some 15,000. They are linguistically and culturally different from the Dinka and Nuer, even though in the present century they have undergone considerable influence from the latter. Dr Buxton had already described their social institutions in her earlier Chiefs and Strangers; her theme here is in fact wider than the title suggests, since, in so far as a central theme gradually emerges from the rich and fascinating material here presented, it is how the Mandari order and arrange in a rational way what they see and experience. Nothing is in the mind which is not first in the senses, said the old scholastics; or, as an excited disciple of Chomsky exclaimed: ‘The human mind exists’. Dr Buxton would have accepted both these statements; but it is her merit that she has shown how they apply to an obscure, poor and non-literate people in the circumstances of the culture they have formed and the environment which dominates them.