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.

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

Of the many works which comprise the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canonical scriptures in Pali, none has had greater appeal to the Buddhist, whether monk or layman, than the Dhammapada. It is the favourite vademecum of the devout Buddhist. The reason for this is mainly the fact that it is a small work which contains in concise, epigrammatic form ‘the concentrated essence of the religion’.

The Tipitaka is a collection of the traditionally accepted canonical texts of the Theravada (also called Hinayana), the form of Buddhism which with local variations is dominant in South-East Asian countries—Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia—and is therefore known as the Southern School of Buddhism, which is one of the two main branches of the religion, the other being the Northern School, the Mahayana, which once flourished in India, whence it spread into Tibet, Nepal, China, Korea and Japan, in which countries it counts large numbers of adherents.

I have talked to many women around the United States who are establishing themselves in church positions hitherto exclusively male. They represent the principal Christian denominations and Judaism. Ages range from grandmothers to college students. Some reject the revolutionary label. But what they are doing adds up to a radical revolution. They are reformulating mankind’s most basic assumptions : not just the relationships between the sexes, but the notion of human nature itself, the notion of sin, the very notion of God.

Age is a factor in attitude. The younger women tend to more belligerency. But also important is the level of resistance of their churches to opening up the three male preserves: ruling, sanctification (ministration of the sacraments) and teaching. Women in Protestant denominations which give them some openings as rulers, ministers and theologians, are irked by tokenism but believe they can surmount it if they keep their cool. The higher resistance of Episcopalianism and Roman Catholicism is producing a strident, angry response.

One often hears it said, and it is even more often accepted, that it is right to despise the masses. The majority of mankind, it is argued, are subject to a basic shortness of vision and a fundamental inertia which make it necessary for someone else—a dictator, a power elite, a superior—to administer their affairs. On this view the passivity of the mass of people has to be offset, if man is to advance, by being manipulated by the competent, talented few. Progress in history and the growth of civilisation are the work of an oligarchy, while the people constitute merely the raw material out of which history is made.

On the other side a number of thinkers have espoused the cause of the polloi. History is the vicissitudes of common folk, and nothing nobler can be contemplated than the numberless multitudes who shape the world’s destiny.

It would seem difficult for a Christian to adopt either of these views for his understanding of the Church. If, on the one hand, the Church is thought to consist primarily in the clerical elite, it is hard to see why Christ took such pains to identify himself with the unspectacular masses. If, on the other hand, the Church’s history is seen as the development of the sensus omnium fidelium, it is not easy to explain the cult of exceptional members who are thought to have advanced the spread of Christianity more significantly than any others, and it is even less easy to explain the emphasis placed on the role of the hierarchy in the preservation of God’s truth.

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Mr William Frerking took me to task for some comments which I made on the famous question which Glaucon poses to Socrates in The Republic. He said a number of wise and sensible things. But none of these had any bearing on my argument. I must first assure Mr Frerking that I do not have the strange conception of happiness which he seems to attribute to me; and then try to show that such a view of happiness is by no means implied by what I wrote in my article.

Mr Frerking expresses surprise that nowhere in my article do I offer a definition of happiness. There are two reasons for this: first, that I do not think that the term ‘happiness’ is susceptible of exact definition; and second, that my conception of happiness, unlike that attributable (at least on one interpretation, as we shall see) to Mr Frerking, is just the same as that which is ordinarily current. Still, misunderstanding has evidently arisen; so it may be as well for me to try to spell out roughly what I, and I believe most other people, mean by happiness. Happiness, as Aristotle rightly suggests, is a state one seeks for its own sake, and not as a means to some other state.

The notion of ‘chance’ as a cause of the universe has fascinated many minds and nearly always it has been associated with its primeval beginnings. Milton, in Paradise Lost, especially Book II, line 890, et seq., paints a picture of the primeval chaos across which Satan is about to begin his journey from Hell to seek out Man and his earthly paradise.

‘Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mast’ry, and to battle bring
Their embryon atoms; they around the flag
Of each his faction, in their several clans,
Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,
Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sands
Of Barca or Gyrene’s torrid soil,
Levied to side with warring winds, and poise
Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,
He rules a moment; Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns; next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.

I should like to question strongly the assertion made in Fergus Kerr’s article Priorities in Religious Life (October 1973), and repeated from the essay by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, that: ‘What is distinctive about religious life is that religious consent to live according to the evangelical counsels, but in community. That is the difference’.

I would maintain that what is distinctive about religious life is that religious undertake to live in consecrated celibacy, and I think that the writer of the article referred to implies this when he says, in his third section: ‘It is time, too, that there were religious communities to demonstrate that men and women can live together in consecrated celibacy,’ alluding to the fact that the cradle of the Dominican Order, Prouille, was by St Dominic’s legislation a double community (but there was a good deal more to that story!)’

If community, if living together, why celibacy? Surely this is contrary to the idea of community taken in its most radical and absolute form, which is the ideal the writer seems to be advocating. If celibacy is still to be maintained and consecrated even in the most ‘communitarian’ situation, this must surely be because it is prior to the ideal of community, and of the essence of religious life?

I freely admit that, historically, this has not always been considered so. There have been cases, such as that of the Order of Knights Templar, where the Church accepted as an authentic religious vocation a way of life combined with the married state, and I would not wish to suggest that the life of married clergy is not a religious vocation; I submit, however, that consecrated celibacy has come to be the defining characteristic of ‘religious life’ as we understand it in our era, and that participation in a formal ‘religious community’ is secondary to this.

It was Tertullian who coined the phrase, anima naturaliter christiana. This means that in the innermost depth of every human being there is alive a sort of natural religion with its standards of true and false, good and evil; it means that man is pre-programmed to a sense of wonder and awe before the mystery of his existence and meaning within the universe.

Plays, like The Glass Menagerie and A Streztcar Named Desire in this essay, often imply this basic truth of man's openness to the transcendent when a man's dreams are seen to surpass both his personal resources and those of his society for their attainment, yet dream he must. In fact, his dreams may become more real for him than any other reality of his historical condition, bearing witness to that reality which underlies human awareness and, nevertheless, transcends human definition.

Sometimes the dream is associated with madness when a man, tragically deluded about the meaning of his life, destroys himself in his attempt to force reality to conform to the shape of his illusions. There is a profound pathos in a man's faithful response to a destructive illusion, to the wrong dream : even this, however, is perhaps better than no dream at all. In any case the theatre in general and Tennessee Williams's Glass MenaEerie and Streetcar in particular reveal much about man and the quality of his dreams; they reveal how much man and his society can be transformed for better or for worse by them.

A strict ascetic mystic belonging to a religious reform movement in the heady atmosphere of counter-reformation Spain; a writer of treatises on the techniques of contemplative and mystical prayer; esoteric, strict, demanding, even dry and humourless—strange for a close intimate of the great Teresa, so human, witty and compassionate—but undoubtedly at the same time a man consumed by the love of God. This is most probably the image conjured up by the name of John of the Cross.

And yet he is also well known, even famous, for his poems—you will find them tucked in at the back of Professor Allison Peers’ magisterial presentation and translation of the Complete Works, though you will also find them published in the Penguin Classics series. What sort of poet is he? A real poet, or one of those religious versifiers who present their ideas on the life of prayer in this superficial, yet attractive, form for the sake of their simpler listeners? There were many of these to be found in 16th Century Spain.

A real poet many will claim; but those who take this side of him seriously and acclaim him as one of the peninsula’s greatest poets are more likely to be found amongst the unreligious, the secular, students of Spanish literature than amongst those who follow his doctrine.

John of the Cross was indeed a poet of stature, together with being most of the other things mentioned; but not many people have attempted to present this so that it can be seen as a whole, so that we can get what he has left to posterity in perspective.

‘Who are you? Without waiting for a reply people answer for themselves. All Communists and atheists regard me as a militant reactionary. All reactionaries regard me as a Communist and almost an atheist. All churchmen think I am a sectarian; all sectarians regard me as a churchman. Every ignoramus thinks me an intellectual; every intellectual regards me as a social reject and member of the Proletariat. Every Russian thinks me a Jew; every Jew regards me as a Russian’ (1966).

‘One (fellow prison) inmate called me Don Quixote ... I am a Don Quixote because he is the prototype of all revolutionaries and friends of truth. Dostoievsky wrote: “If God in the Last Judgment calls on Humanity to render account of what good it has done, it could hand him with tears Cervantes’ Don Quixote”’ (1970).

‘Only people who do nothing make no mistakes’ (1966).

These are the words of Anatol Levitin, pen-name Krasnov, spoken with typical irony. He has been the Don Quixote of Russian church life, tilting at windmills, putting tactless pen to paper on every burning issue. Bom in Baku in 1915, his father a Jew baptised into Christianity, he became a school teacher. He was ordained deacon in the small ‘Living Church’ which co-operated with the regime, until in 1944 he joined the Patriarchal Church as a layman. Like thousands of others, he spent the years 1949-56 unjustly in a labour camp. After his release he wrote regularly for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and was co-author of a history of the Living Church, but because of his criticisms he lost his teaching job in 1966 and found work as a church caretaker.

In a letter of November 1837 proclaiming the beauties of Agnese Schebest to his friend Rapp, Strauss declared ‘Her speech, too, is thoroughly noble and intelligent’. It is common for a man to note in others his own defects, and particularly common for a clergyman to notice such defects, but Strauss here seems to be admiring a virtue others thought to be his own. George Eliot, for example, in 1858 at her second meeting with Strauss remarked that he spoke ‘with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language’. And it has become a commonplace of Strauss criticism in this century to praise the honest purpose of the Life of Jesus. This huge work, like the short attacks on the foxy Schenkel, was ‘directed against counterfeiting’. Strauss was ever striving to state the truth of a matter.

But is honesty enough? Was Strauss’ achievement merely, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, and Karl Barth approvingly quoted, ‘uncertain truthfulness?’ To the opening sentence of Schweitzer’s appraisal in the Quest, ‘Strauss must be loved in order to be understood’, Barth, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, put the caution: ‘This can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure’. He is not, perhaps, quite consistent enough in his statement of the truth to command our awed respect.

Barth’s explanation of the uneven quality of Strauss’ work was that he came across a great practical problem almost by accident, by a chance of mood. The problem was that of the relation of revelation and history. And Strauss himself admitted that he was not always ready to deal with it: I am too much dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied’. His discovery and its disturbing effects made him ‘probably the best-known and influential theologian of the Nineteenth Century in non-theological and non-church circles’.

Thus George Moore, Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, bespectacled version of the modem moral philosopher. In Jumpers, Stoppard has managed to do with contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy what he did earlier in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Bead with modem literary criticism—to make of an academic discipline a playing field for his sport, and of its preoccupations so much grist for the artist’s mill. Stoppard’s wit draws the finest of lines between the serious and the outlandish; and his irreverence makes for good fun—at the expense of his earnest protagonist. But George wins us, albeit the way a warm puppy wins us; and we can summon a measure of sympathy for his plight. George moves in a world where all his colleagues benignly presume that intelligent people outgrow belief in God; and so, he feels defensive about his commitment to a deity fashioned of old by the philosophers.

It really does not matter to most believers today, I suppose, that the onus for proving the existence of God has passed to them. Believers are not so interested as they used to be in cornering the adversaries in the labyrinth of the Five Ways. What the believer may feel, however, is a certain social onus, as he rubs shoulders with that large company, now in the ascendancy, who look upon him as they might look upon a curious fossil unearthed in a Palestinian excavation.

That the tide has turned and the believer has ridden out with it to an exile in a foreign land characterizes the current Christian Sitz im Leben. Our poets sensed, three and four generations ago, that this would be the climate of the twentieth century.

Every culture has its images of evil and its personifications of wickedness. The English-speaking world possesses a literature and dramatic tradition rich in devils. There are deceivers, troublemakers, outlaws, corrupters, traitors, chiselers, killers, monsters, parasites, criminal masterminds, and endless other variations of human wickedness and malice.

The Anglo-Saxon world’s literature and drama is also rich in foreign devils. Among the foreign devils the Italian villain is the perennial favourite. From the Age of Elizabeth to the present, the Italians have supplied the drama and literature of the English-speaking world with more foreign devils than any other people. Other nations have supplied foreign devils; however, no nation has supplied them as consistently as Italy.

The Italian devils possess that mixture of qualities which enable us to recognize them as both descendants of Lucifer and precursors of The Godfather. Sinning against God and society, they are in conflict with their origins. They display an awesome satanic grandeur in their fiendish attempts to control or to destroy the lives of others.

The Italian devils are an essential part of the English-speaking world’s centuries-old image-making of Italy. The literary and dramatic tradition of the Italian devil has undoubtedly preconditioned the English-speaking world’s relations with Italians, clerics and laymen. The Italian devil of the criminal monk tradition, affirmed from the Age of Elizabeth to the Age of Victoria and the present, continues to cast his sinister shadow over the Vatican.

It is of course, a fruitless—if interesting—speculation, to ask oneself what would have happened to Christianity if the camera had been invented during Christ’s lifetime. Most of us probably find it pretty well impossible to picture Divinity trapped between the stiff pages of a family album or to conceive of a God crying out on a cross while, a few yards away, someone discards a flash or fiddles with a light metre. As we actually experience it, the problem arises in muted form, and is largely a matter of reconciling noble architecture, the tourist industry and religious sentiment. We have all seen those glossy volumes with coloured plates of pilgrim multitudes, a white figure with hand blessingly uplifted and that better-looking, younger nun, smiling instamatically over her own viewfinder. Granted then that the camera create; curious problems of credibility, it is perhaps not too outrageous to suggest—at least very tentatively— that if this medium had existed two milennia ago Christianity as we know it with its mystery and its historicity simply would not have happened.

If, however, there had been a photographic record dealing with the beginnings of Christianity, I believe that an American, Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, would have been better equipped than most people to salvage something meaningful from a past that we have magnified and isolated, and interpreted repeatedly into the patterns of our preconceptions. Quite recently her work has been on view at the Hayward Gallery and in March 1974 The Sunday Times ran an illustrated article on the exhibition in its supplement and asked several well-known critics to give their opinions.

Sociology is not a universally beloved human science. It may have gained prestige in some quarters in recent years but it has enemies and opponents, who believe that in the long run sociology does more harm than good. During the past year the Chilean generals removed it with good reason from the universities and have declared null and void all degrees heretofore awarded in the subject. In some of the ways in which it has developed during the past half century, it can rightly be called a science of debunking. The movement in part started with Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) who made it his task to explain the non-rational, non-scientific nature of ideologies, and similarly much in thought and action that is said to be based on the obvious, the rational, and the true. In a different direction, sociological surveys have pricked other kinds of bubbles, and by the use of statistics, interviews, and other ‘factual’ devices, they have been able to mirror the gap between the ideal and the real, between the image and what actually occurs, between social intention and social achievement. One contemporary example can be seen in the analysis of local government. The procedures and decisions that are made by the authorities are very far from being democratic, very far from taking into account the wishes of those for whom measures are enacted. An examination of the activities of the local town hall along with the experiences of those who are governed by it allow one to assume that Pareto was right—even in the heart of a country priding itself as being democratic, government is indeed carried out by an élite, professional or elected.

The subject of the ordination of women to the representative priesthood of the Church is often discussed in terms of objections and meeting objections. The quick exchange and the tension involved in differing considerations can often be helpful and constructive; but I have chosen simply to consider the idea of women priests in itself, in a positive way. One may very well agree with the Anglican bishop, Trevor Huddlestone, that the theological arguments against the ordination of women ‘simply don’t hold water’; and one may also take the view of the novice master of an anglican monastery, that the argument of the twelve apostles all having been men is New Testament a similar view, and yet prefer simply to think about a priesthood of men and women in and for itself.

One other point of introduction is this, that any open discussion on the matter, and any public consideration of it, should, to be safe, have the support and purification of private self-examination. For the issues involved touch us at levels deeper than our reason; and if discussion becomes highly charged emotionally, as it sometimes does, then it is fairly certain that the people concerned have not privately come to terms with their feelings; we need to discover by ourselves what we feel about the subject, not only what we think, and not only what we think we ought to feel. In this way we can both discover our motives and work out our reasons. Doubtless the two should converge, but they do so to some extent in a divided, not yet perfectly integrated, human nature. A person can have a case for or against the ordination of women which in itself is flawlessly reasoned but which covers a subconscious motive or feeling of very dubious quality.