If we were to take a look at human society of some four and a half centuries ago, say, about the year 1500, we should see there a world that was still largely sacral. The whole of life was bound up with religion, the Church, the Sacerdotium, penetrating into every department of human life, and in the civil order the Imperium itself was regarded as sacred. The Sacerdotium may have been corrupt and the Imperium tottering but men still thought of the whole of society as sacred. Even the very processes of nature by which millions of men and women gained a painful livelihood were nearer to magic in their minds than we usually like to think they were. Nature was largely unpredictable, afflicted with mysterious calamities and marred from time to time by what were called ‘Acts of God’.

On the other hand, there was an immense surge of new life throughout Europe. Men had rediscovered the ancient literature of Greece and Rome and were luxuriating in it. For more than a hundred years Italy had flowered with a new art in paint and stone, whose products we still admire. Great new buildings were going up, but above all, men felt that they were new beings. They were throwing off’ the restrictions of the old sacral order and were finding themselves, discovering new powers to which they could see no limit. Nature itself was being freed from the bondage of magic and within a hundred years Galileo would demolish the old picture of the cosmos and take the music out of the spheres.

Brian Wicker’s new book is important not only because of the analysis which he gives of our historical present and of the potencies within it but also because of the sources on which he calls to establish his analysis and the terms in which he calls on them. They are terms particularly congenial to the literary imagination, for one reason because they suggest a renewed life for poetry. Briefly, Mr Wicker argues that it would be a mistake to see our historical moment as one in which a conception of the sacred is fighting unequally against the secular actuality, or in which secularism must be accepted by Christians as a providential subversion of myths no longer acceptable to reason. On the contrary, he says, the most rational account of our condition, both existential and essential, is one in which a conception of the sacred will be not only preserved, not only renewed either, but remade. His account of this may bring unease both to those who think there is only one way to talk about the sacred and to those who think it retrograde to talk about the sacred at all.

In speaking in such terms he is of course speaking from within a cultural dilemma whose nature he recognizes; our society in so far as it is opting for ‘secularism’ is opting to sit on one horn of the dilemma; for its refusal of the sacred is not only a refusal of a ‘meaning’ in and for life but an inability to participate fully in the world of meaningful presences and activities.

When George Steiner announced The Death of Tragedy, in 1961, it was already somewhat unclear whether tragedy was said to be dead or dying, or in fact on the way to being reborn. Since then, Leo Aylen’s Greek Tragedy and the Modern World has challengingly affirmed the possibility of actual equivalents to Greek tragedy in our time. And now Raymond Williams flatly entitles his own critical diagnosis: Modern Tragedy.

These questions of course extend far beyond the theatre. Ultimately they concern the entire substance of our culture, and especially our age’s increasing estrangement from religion. For Tragedy — whether Greek, mediaeval, Elizabethan or neo-classical – has, typically, sprung from societies rooted in religion; although the greatest moments of tragic art were precisely those moments when received beliefs stood under radical historical challenge. To ask why traditional tragic forms have increasingly been abandoned in the theatre of our time is thus, to raise questions we might otherwise not even be able to formulate about our epoch’s relations to religion – and about the resources of humanist faith.

Raymond Williams’ confrontation of these questions seems to me crucial, in several ways. Unmistakably at the growing-point of humanist consciousness, his work is at once a critique of tragic theory, a socio-critical map of modern tragic literature, and a reassertion in depth of revolutionary imperatives in the face of objections to revolution truly wrestled with. Significantly, the book concludes not with any theoretical summing up but with an actual drama of revolution.

I want to take one aspect of the theology of the eucharist and try to show how a shift in our understanding of this leads to a corresponding shift in our understanding of the society in which we live. The aspect I have chosen concerns the presence of Christ in the world.

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST

We must begin by being quite clear about one thing. If Christ is simply absent from human history since Easter Day, then there is no such thing as Christianity. There are people for whom Jesus of Nazareth is simply an historical memory. Such people may acknowledge his nobility of character, respect the force of his ethical teaching: but they are not Christians. It is clear from the New Testament that what constituted the primitive Church was the consciousness of this community that it only existed, as a community, in the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ. To put the point another way: to tell people, on the basis of the New Testament, how they ought to live, does not constitute the preaching of the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ. To announce to a society that its attitudes and structures are negative and inhuman, and to tell it that things ought to be otherwise, is hardly good news. It is a depressing statement of what most people are dimly aware of anyway. The witness of Christianity is only the announcement of good .news if its primary statement concerns the here-and-now availability of the resources with which to revolutionize human society in the love of God.

It was rather as one had supposed. The massive show of solidarity with the CDU in the last election presented by German Catholicism in all its shapes and forms was the last outing before being trundled into the Church History Museum. Much has happened between the General Election last October and the local North-Rhine Westphalian elections in July. Rumour had it that an anonymous article which appeared in the March number of Wort und Wahrheit was written by none other than Bernard Hanssler. Wort und Wahrheit is a periodical that tends to reflect episcopal opinion; Bernard Hanssler is the priest in charge of the Central Committee of German Catholicism; the article was entitled ‘The end of political Catholicism’.

Dr Günther Schreiber has recently suggested that catholic authorities have recognised that some basic re-thinking of the official political attitudes of German Catholicism was necessary. His analysis of the situation raises considerable doubts about the motives behind this reappraisal. It has been much more a defensive reaction to the inevitable break-up of the Adenauer ideology than a genuine attempt to think out for instance, the implications of the Second Vatican Council; much more a withdrawal from a position that was distasteful to democratic opinion, than a realisation of what the church’s presence in a modern society might mean. The North-Rhine Westphalian elections were heralded by a pastoral letter stressing the neutrality of the church towards the political parties.

For an order of Preachers the written word is as essential a means of communication as the spoken word. The monthly editorial comment in New Blackfriars is one of a considerable variety of styles of literary communication practised by the English Dominican Province, and one which is closer to oral preaching than other styles since it must make its impact on the immediacies of a rapidly changing historical life. If such contemporary comment is to be effective, it must try to stimulate and provoke consciences, and so to inform them in a personal life of faith. A monthly comment which merely pronounced ‘timeless truths’ would be irrelevant. It is plain that a concern for the significance of the present moment is exposed to dangers very similar to those of pulpit preaching; audacity may slide into rashness. An editor must have a discriminating awareness of his audience, for the Comment is part of a two-way communication taking place over a period of time with an audience free to enter into discussion with the editor or to abandon it. It would be surprising if remarks made within a context of discussion built up in this way were not to appear eccentric or outrageous when presented in selective quotation with sensational headlining to a quite different audience; and it would be improper to assess these remarks in isolation from a total context which includes not merely a single month’s comment but a whole continuing debate conducted over months and years in the pages of a monthly periodical.

Norman Mailer has been travelling the lecture circuit with Stokely Carmichael this winter. At dinner one evening, a friend of mine tells me, Mailer said he had begun the tour expecting to support ‘Black Power’ in a general way, but introducing a few cautionary phrases. After the first question period, he realised that he was ‘way to the left of Stokely.’ Many white liberals react like this, criticizing Black Power for its betrayal of the radical ideals they have associated with the civil rights movement. Non-violence is one of these vicarious ideals: very few white Americans are non-violent for themselves, their right to defend themselves or their families has never been called into question. But they had admired Martin Luther King for loving his enemies and turning the other cheek. Now they were hearing Stokely Carmichael’s voice, growing testy at constant requests for reassurance saying ‘I have never rejected violence’. He has two tones of voice, one for white living rooms and one for black crowds and the same words have different overtones. He has a standard response to a question about violence. It goes something like this. ‘If you don’t mess with me, I’ll leave you alone’. Pause. ‘But if you move to strike me, I’ll break your arm.’ Then, on a rising tone, ‘and I might break the other one too.’ When this is greeted by wild cheers, whites come away pretty shaken.

The fact is that the white liberal does not live way to the left of Stokely, he just feels that way.

Englishmen curious about the New Morality, and fatigued by the well-known but amateurishly incompetent exposition it has suffered from certain domestic divines, are benefited by the publication here of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (SCM: 1966; 25s). The author is professor of social ethics at the Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been active in ethical debate since the days when the Old Morality was the Newest thing around.

Dr Fletcher, if I understand him correctly, repudiates the Old Morality because it is legalistic. It takes the form of a code, a list of commandments which assign an invariable moral value to certain acts. The circumstances attending these acts may, it is granted, slightly modify their morality. But the ultimate and over-riding source of good and evil is the very nature of the acts. Against such a view Fletcher urges that no action is good or evil in itself. It cannot be judged in isolation from its meaningful and meaning-giving context of circumstances. The morality of any action is correlative to the love it expresses. Admittedly there are many deeds which are usually sinful (e.g., abortion, lying, arson, extramarital intercourse). This is not because they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they most often embody selfishness, exploitation of one’s neighbour, and irresponsibility. In certain extraordinary circumstances these actions might so bespeak commitment and caring and sincerity that, viewed in their contextual totality, they would be adjudged good and virtuous. Since morality is not intrinsic to acts, we can never resort to inflexible ethical laws or norms.