Thus did Eric Gill sign his letters to Bede Jarrett, the English Dominican Provincial between the wars. I hope to show that he was saying something true about himself.

But it is presumptuous of me to write about him, and especially here in New Blackfriars, which is a development of the Black- friars in which he first published so many of his essays. Blackfriars has also given us many personal witnesses to Eric Gill’s character and shape of mind — David Jones, John O’Connor, Walter Shew- ring, Desmond Chute and a number of others. So there is an element of the absurd in my appearing here. I have tried to get rid of the absurdity in so far as I am able by assembling some of the available evidence about Mr Gill, and especially of course from his Autobiography.

Since the publication last November of Dr Yorke’s book, the name of Gill has frequently appeared in all sorts of places. There have been several exhibitions of his work. There has been a sale at Sothebys. He has become someone talked about in the art world. I wonder what E. G. would have thought about that. When I read some of the reviews of Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit I wondered whether the Gill they portrayed was in fact recognisably the same as the Gill described by those who knew him, or indeed as Dr Yorke recognised him.

The Times reviewer wrote that ‘it is certainly true that the literature relating to Gill has up to now been mainly superior hagiography. And Gill’s confreres have most noticeably played down the eroticism’ (3 December 1981).

The study of the question of authority within religious institutions has been inadequate, from both theological and sociological perspectives. McKenzie has explained the inadequacy of theological studies as being due to ‘the emphasis placed on authority and the fervour in defending it’ and, according to Kokosalakis

Clearly, the Church like any other social institution, is in dialectical relation with the society in which it exists. If we are to establish the causes of a change in the attitudes towards religious authority we must begin by considering firstly the social changes which have taken place not only in the global society but also within the Roman Catholic community itself, and secondly, those changes which are the direct result of some immanent force within the institution itself.

Advances in science and technology have vastly expanded man’s knowledge and thereby his mastery over his physical and social environment. Additionally, developments in communications have provided him with an amount of information which greatly exceeds his own personal experience; in particular, the introduction of the television interview has exposed many authority figures to public scrutiny for the first time. Both factors have contributed to a de-sacralisation of authority whereby its origin has become de-mystified and its power is no longer considered to be-taboo. In addition there has been a process of democratisation in many institutions in society.

Most people would agree that there are differences between Christian hope and Marxist hope. But where do these differences lie, and how are they to be specified? According to one widely accepted account, Marxists entertain high hopes for the future of the world, convinced that nothing can stand in the way of their realization. Christians, on the other hand, entertain no such hopes. They are prepared to tolerate, or endure, the state of the world as it is, hoping only for a future ‘beyond’ all futures, an eternity that will redress the tragedy of time.

Two years ago over 2000 delegates from all the dioceses and Catholic national organisations, including 42 bishops, 255 clergy and 150 religious men and women and 36 ecumenical observers attended the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool. For those of us who were there it was a remarkable experience of an open, sharing, participating, listening, celebrating Church, a veritable conversion experience. Back in our local patches it is difficult to retain the sense of exhilaration and commitment with which we left Liverpool two years ago. Was it, then, all a load of froth, an irrelevant, euphoric interlude to cheer us up? Was it, as I asked before the Congress ‘a damp squib or pentecostal fire’? (New Life, Winter 1980). Did it represent a new Spring or was it a false dawn? The official report of the Congress provides us with the opportunity to recall the expectations aroused by the Congress and reflect on some of its outcomes. In this article I propose to attempt three tasks: firstly, to review Liverpool 1980; secondly, to consider the place of the National Pastoral Congress in the long process of renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales since the Second Vatican Council; and thirdly, to reflect on the contemporary situation in the light of the Congress, the message from the bishops to the local Church in the light of the Congress (The Easter People), and developments which have been stimulated by it since.

The importance of Gill’s political writings lies in their linking of two major traditions of response to industrial capitalism, that of libertarian socialism and that of Catholicism. In the line of Morris and Kropotkin he is a significant figure; in the history of modem English Catholicism, a major one.

Industrialism in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe can be seen as consisting of two basic phases. In the first industrial revolution there was a breaking of the traditional vertical links between social strata and a tendency for them to polarise into selfconsciously opposed classes. In the second wave of the industrial revolution the horizontal links of family, workplace and voluntary association which had survived are weakened or broken. A basic strand of socialist thought was preoccupied with the first development. It tended to welcome the polarization of social classes and to stress the conquest of state power and state control of industry as the agent of the liberation of individuals. In their very different ways, anarchists and catholics were as responsive to the second as to the first development of industrialism. Attention to the disruption of horizontal relations of work and domestic life produces an hostility towards, at least a scepticism about, the role of the state, of centralization, and of the mass-organization of work. Issues of control and quality of life predominate, whether the focus is on the family, the individual, or group of workers.

When I opened this series of Dominican conversations some months ago now, I suggested that angels were worth studying not only in their own right but for the light they throw on the human condition. I want now in this concluding paper to apply this suggestion to our final topic, evil in angels. This paper will, therefore, consist of two main parts: In the first part I want to indicate how St Thomas analyses evil in angels, while in the second part I want to show how this analysis clarifies the root of evil in ourselves.

Turning, then, to our first concern, I want to help you pick a way through the often dense wood of St Thomas’ thinking by as it were blazing those trees which serve as so many markers of the way through. These turn put on inspection and in reflection not to be as numerous as first appears. In fact St Thomas’ thinking on evil in the angels continues to be what we have already seen his thinking on other aspects of the angels to be: the sustained and rigorous pursuit of the implications of certain basic metaphysical principles or axioms. The sheer intellectual energy, brilliance and yet economy, therefore even the spare beauty of this argumentation is brought out by Fr Kenelm Foster’s summary in Appendix 2 on Satan, (in Volume 9 of the Gilby bi-lingual edition of the Summa). I cannot emulate that tour de force here, it would be out of place, and so I shall attempt to supply my own thread through the labyrinth.

Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.

Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.

Nobody could be more kosher than Jaakko Hintikka in the bracing climate of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In the festschrift recently offered to him, nevertheless, Dagfinn Follesdal evidently thought nothing of writing as follows: “Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world”. A few pages further on he writes: “Heidegger’s analyses of the many ways in which we may relate to the world . . . anticipate in many respects some of Wittgenstein’s later analyses of forms of life”. That last statement, of course, implies a somewhat controversial reading of Wittgenstein’s later work. The only point here, however, is that, for an analytic philosopher, such statements as those just quoted represent an unprecedentedly positive assessment of Heidegger’s work. This is of particular interest to students of recent theology, both Protestant and Catholic, where, for better or for worse, Heidegger’s influence has been considerable.

Scandinavian philosophers have always been well placed, culturally and linguistically, to mediate between the analytic and the phenomenological camps into which philosophers are still largely divided. Roughly speaking, the genealogy of the analytic line begins with Frege (1848 - 1925) and runs through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap to such philosophers as Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett. The alternative line descends from Hegel (1770 - 1831), deviates by reaction into Kierkegaard and Marx, and is disseminated diversely through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to such contemporaries as Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas.

The large parish of San Jose Obrero on the outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital, contains a cross-section of the city’s poor. On one side of the Avenida San Pedro which runs down the middle of the parish are four storey blocks of flats, a memorial to a democratic Chile in which elected civilian governments built housing for the working class. These flats look across the avenue on the vast expanse of small, poorly constructed wooden huts which are the typical homes of Chile’s poor. This huge poblacion, as these areas are called, contains some 150,000 people who moved in to take this land and build their flimsy huts during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

Living in one of these wooden huts among the people are four Chilean sisters. While teaching three mornings a week in a local primary school to make a living the sisters concentrate their time on supporting the network of Christian communities which have been growing in their area. In the immediate chapel which is the primary focus for their work (it is one of the eight such chapels in the parish) they now have four fully developed adult communities and one youth community, each of which has about 20 members. As well as that there are looser groups organised around the chapel: six groups of family catechetics in each of which some eight or nine couples attend weekly meetings for two years as part of the obligatory diocesan programme before First Communion; two groups of preparation for Confirmation in each of which about 20 teenagers attend a weekly meeting, again for two years as the only way in which they are permitted to receive Confirmation; two groups of parents who want their child baptised and who must attend a series of eight talks, and finally two groups involved in an experimental catechetics for which the catechists take their themes from the experience of the local people rather than using the diocesan course.

Sharratt has taken the place for which the name of his father predestined him. In Blackwell’s English Literature department his book, if book it is, fits squarely on the shelves, or interlopes roundly, between the texts ascribed to Shakespeare and the works produced by Shaw. Physically, at least, it has the shape and weight of a book. Legibly printed, fondly designed, it also has a marvellous photograph of the Author on the jacket. Apparently taken on a motorway lay-by one misty Kentish dawn, perhaps on his daily jog, he is at first blush gazing truculently out into the far distance. On second inspection, however, like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, he turns out to have his eyes slanted resolutely upon oneself — his reader, the innocent eye, his hypocrite lecteur. To go by her latest communication Dame Helen Gardner isn’t going to like Reading Relations. To drop some more illuminating names, the other waiting space into which this little parallelepiped so engagingly enters is the clearing between Terry Eagleton and Gabriel Josipovici (Marx and Nietzsche, or if you prefer: Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes).

For a start, the very idea of a book, with an author, has become questionable. In 1969, in a journal rejoicing in the name of Man- teia, Roland Barthes wrote of “the death of the Author” (I don’t say that he was the first to do so). The story goes roughly as follows. Once upon a time, in the pre-modem cultures, the responsibility for a narrative was assumed by a relator, a shaman or a seanachaidh, whose “performance” might be admired, but whose “genius”, “originality”, etc. if such concepts had existed, would have counted as a defect and embarrassment

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.