The branch of Wodehouse’s work which compels the attention of the historian more than any other, is his treatment of the communications media. Whatever criticism can be made of his choice of themes of which he had little experience and less contemporary knowledge, it must be acknowledged that he surveyed the media men, women and fashions with a perpetual eye to their nature and changes, their strengths and their phoniness. He also remained as vigorous in his power of parody and satire as he had ever been; and his increasing sophistication lent additional bite to his analyses with the advancing years. Naturally the problem of his place as a historical witness increases with the improvement in his writing. We can go to old Blumenfeld in The Inimitable Jeeves for a naturalistic presentation of the New York theatre manager of 1920, specifically because it is almost a line-by-line portrait of Erlanger. On the other hand, what is to be said of his much more professional and much more savage Barmy in Wonderland, written thirty years later? Certainly Wodehouse, in attacking the exploitation and commercialism of the theatre, was drawing on a lifetime’s knowledge, and some of the material presented might have more to do with 1938 than 1948. One could not have the confident reliance on detail with which one turns to the road show passages in Jill the Reckless. But as an insight on tendencies, attitudes, practices, responses, in the world of the New York theatre in his lifetime, it deserves the higher accolade we give to the artist whose eye sees deeper into an epoch than a mere reporter can hope to do.

It has been conventional to describe theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’. We might, however, care to shift from the private sphere of understanding to the public sphere of language and call theology ‘watching one’s language in the presence of God’. Either way Christian theology must show itself to be truly Christian. It should seek understanding in the light of Jesus Christ. It should watch its language in the presence of the God-man.

Using either version of theology, what might we say about the New China and the recent Chinese experience? What insights and reflections does faith in Christ suggest about the era and the nation on which Mao Tse-tung has put his stamp? Where can belief in the Crucified and risen Jesus take its stand vis-a-vis contemporary China?

When asked to confront Christ and Mao’s China I have no short or easy answer to give. Let me single out two themes (suffering and the emulation of heroes), and then conclude by listing some major points of comparison and contrast when we bring together the two figures themselves, Jesus and Mao.

First of all, suffering. Over twenty years ago Father Robert W. Greene’s Calvary in China appeared. In 1937 he had begun his missionary career in China. He was imprisoned after the Communist victory in 1949, put on trial in 1952, and then expelled from the country.

Prague was once, and in time no doubt will be again, a crossroads of ideas, a carrefour of cross-fertilisation between Christians and Marxists. The effect upon such theologians as J.B. Metz and Jurgen Moltmann would not be difficult to demonstrate. In many respects now, so pervasive have a certain basic Marxist agenda and vocabulary become, Christians can no longer formulate their ideas or decide their course of action without more or less explicit reference to Marxism. This is particularly true in Latin America. It is noticeable also in Vatican documents on social policy—for example in the paragraphs on liberation in Pope Paul’s lengthy statement “Evangelii nuntiandi”, published some three weeks before the Declaration on Sexual Ethics, but, in contrast with the latter, destined to drop immediately into that oblivion of indifference reserved by conservatives and radicals in the Catholic Church for all utterances from Rome except those on sex. On a wider front, however, through the spread of sociology and allied disciplines as well as in response to urgent political situations, Christianity—and certainly Catholicism—has, willy nilly, absorbed a considerable amount from Marxism in the past twenty years, and sometimes even shown great critical resilience in the process. Doubt has remained, on the other hand as to how much a Marxist loyal to his atheism could learn from dialogue with Christians, or indeed as to how much serious work a Marxist would be ready to put into the study of Christian source-texts, in comparison anyway with the mushrooming industry of Catholic Marxologists.

There has been much discussion recently about the ordination of women to the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Most writers on this subject agree that there are no theological reasons why women may not be admitted to the priesthood, and so the debate is conducted between prejudice on one side and sentimentality on the other. I do not see how it can be denied that there are many pastoral ministries, including preaching and counselling, where the effectiveness of women ministers would be very great; nevertheless, I believe that there are important theological considerations which tell against the ordination of women to one of the central ministries in the Church, the celebra-of the eucharist.

This has nothing to do with the intentions of Jesus: the fact that he included no women among the Twelve is fundamentally irrelevant to the question of whether women today should be admitted to the priesthood, and not because of changed social conditions (that argument is merely one version of the fallacy that man has ‘come of age’ in the twentieth century), but rather because of our changed understanding of how, the Church stands in relation to Jesus as her founder. Even if Jesus did intend to found a Church, we have no warrant to suppose that he drew up detailed blueprints for its structures: and as it appears much more probable that he had no such intention, but exercised a ministry wholly within the parameters of contemporary Judaism, the question of what he would have thought of women priests becomes purely speculative. Further, it is in any case clear that the relation of the threefold ministry as it developed in the second century to the ministry of the Twelve is extremely distant; since the Twelve could not be replaced in their most important function, that of eye witnesses of the ministry and the resurrection appearances of Jesus (cf Acts 1 :2 If), the sense in which bishops or popes may be said to be their successors according to a pipeline model of apostolic succession is far from obvious.

Psmith, Journalist is history; and it is crusade. But it also has its place as the best novel Wodehouse had written to date. Psmith was the god from the machine; but he was also the god who made the machine. Instead of leaving a good idea to rot in the background of the failure which The Prince and Betty in the American edition is (and there is even less to be said for it in the English one), Wodehouse had hacked his material into shape, introduced his god to bring it to life, and maintained a splendid pace alternating excitement and humour. He had simultaneously been working on another social document, appropriately named Something Fresh, analysing the almost Byzantine absurdities of English country-house drones and the snobbery of their servants which helped to maintain them. It it important to stress that this, the first view of Blandings Castle, is in fact an extremely hostile one. We must view Wodehouse as the disciple of Conan Doyle in social attitudes to some degree; and just as Holmes is frequently employed to show up the effete aristocrats and immoral millionaires, Wodehouse time and again returns to the theme of resolute and hardworking young men and women as a foil to aristocratic drones. In both cases, it is the bourgeois attack on the privilege and non-productivity of the aristocracy. In this sense Wodehouse, both in relation to Britain and to America, was in 1915 very much a figure of that eminently bourgeois phenomenon which the Americans have termed Progressivism. Wodehouse was seldom quite so pointedly hard-hitting as he was in Something Fresh. But the argument continues to be made, pleasantly, yet firmly.

The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.

From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).

Clive James, reviewing Seamus Heaney’s third collection, remarked: ‘Soon people are going to start comparing him with Yeats’. Which was characteristic of James, since he didn’t actually make the comparison but could claim first credit for it if necessary. C. B. Cox, reviewing the second collection, was less circumspect: ‘Major poets are as rare as the phoenix, and it is possible that since 1960 only one has emerged in these Islands. He is Seamus Heaney’. In the first Annual Yeats Lecture, in 1940, T. S. Eliot offered a variation on his own attempt to define the difference between a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet:

Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier; and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows us beauty and significance not before perceived.

This emphasis on the notion that ‘a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it’ (Eliot, ‘What is Minor Poetry?’) is peculiarly apposite to Yeats—at least in Yeats’s own view, since, despite Leavis’s contrary judgement, Yeats intended his Collected Poems to be read together and ordered the poems accordingly: each was to find its place within the pattern of the whole. If we compare Heaney with Yeats at all, this might be a starting-point since a similar patterning intention seems to be at work in at least three of his collections so far. It is an overall pattern in Heaney’s poetry that I want to present—which precludes any very close commentary on individual poems.

It is with a certain circumspection that a Marxist enters the kind of debate represented by the articles of Denys Turner, Brian Wicker and Terry Eagleton on the problems of morality, Marxism and Christianity. This is not because he any longer fears that guilt by association which was once so characteristic a feature of (Stalinist) ultra-leftism by which anyone who even passed the time of day with a ‘petit-bourgeois idealist’ was automatically suspect and probably a class traitor, but rather because, in entering such a discussion, the Marxist simultaneously acknowledges that there is a discussion to be had—something real is at stake—and also his relative inadequacy to participate in it. This sounds like conceding defeat immediately but is intended to echo Terry Eagleton’s schematic but accurate map of the Marxist tradition—on the one hand a neo-Hegelian idealism stemming from the work of Lukács, fully equipped with a humanist ideology, and on the other the structural-scientific work of Althusser, programmatically anti-humanist—and thus to indicate right from the start that the English Marxist at least is bound to be caught wrongfooted. He is bound to look back and see that a Christian-Marxist dialogue was easier all round under the old socialist humanist regimé, but equally the Marxist is newly aware of the inadequacies of that theoretical past, the errors which led to irrationality in theory and defeat in practice and the correction of which are, for him, the primary theoretical concern. Marxism is now establishing for itself a new rigour the central thrust of which is towards the purging of eclecticism from itself and the preclusion of united fronts with other discourses at the level of theory.

The image of the Church was already a complex one in the years leading up to Vatican II, whether one thinks of the picture portrayed in theological writing or of the meaning glimpsed, and perhaps apprehended, in day-to-day living, in personal prayer and in worship. But within the complexity there was in Catholic theology and practice a special stress upon the priesthood in the Church, and therefore upon the Church as a sacral, hierarchical institution, endowed with a fullness of priestly powers : of order (magisterium) and jurisdiction. This sacral-bureaucratic view came to fullest expression in Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, in which order precariously maintained a primacy of honour over jurisdiction. Bishop De Smedt took a fresh and critical look at the same image when he denounced triumphalism, clericalism and juridicism in a speech he made at the Council. Freedom and fraternity were not the only fundamental Christian values to come into their own again; the stress on the living Word of God and his coming into expression in the scriptural word, and the shift towards existential modes of thinking in response to the demand of faith seeking knowledge in us and for us, in and for our time, called into question a static, clerical-priestly and authoritarian Church.

The ten years after the Council have been a testing time for us all, and not least for the priests of the Church. There has been a spate of theological writing about ministry and priesthood, verging indeed, at popular levels, on the narcissistic and obsessional. Too little of it has seen that behind the question of the ministry there stands a more fundamental, christological question about the meaning of Christ’s priesthood. The more welcome, therefore, to Fr Sabourin’s study of Christ’s priesthood and the history that led up to it.

The story which Wodehouse seems to have regarded as his funniest —with some reason—concerned a detective novelist, but ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ was primarily satire on ghost stories with subordinate satires on mysteries and slushy romance. The opening is almost appalling in its realistic reply to the normal ghost story beginning:

As the story develops it raises the question of environment and change of predominant literary influence to which Wodehouse adverts in several Mulliner stories. Environmentalism was in many ways fashionable in Wodehouse’s youth and early maturity—the America of his day was still looking respectfully at the shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner when it read history—and while Wodehouse apparently concedes much to the environmentalist he was a little slower in picking up the unconscious influences of his surroundings than most writers. Apart from occasional lapses into American usages, verbal or social, the main impact of America on him is, as I have tried to imply earlier, a fairly subtle and largely undetected one. Orwell saw American effects on Wodehouse in terms which suggest a parallel between Wodehouse and the classic American immigrant: the home country is vivid in the memory, but frozen with virtually no allowance for change from the date of departure. But in fact Wodehouse made long sojourns in England before World War II.

In an important article in Gregorianum, now reprinted separately, Fr Francis Sullivan has invited us to take yet another look at the Pentecostal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’, suggesting a new avenue of approach, using St Thomas’s teaching on the mission of the Holy Spirit in la q.43.

At the outset, let me confess to a growing conviction that, in the long run, the Catholic Pentecostal Movement (under whatever name it may wish to be known) will be seen to have contributed most to the Church by goading a surprising number of Christians, and even some theologians, into taking a renewed interest in the various traditions we have in the Church concerning the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Whatever reservations one may (or, perhaps, should) have about Catholic Pentecostalism, this, at least, is surely a good thing.

Sullivan subtitles his essay, ‘A Catholic Interpretation of the Pentecostal Experience’. He begins by offering a working definition of ‘the Pentecostal experience’ as ‘a religious experience which initiates a decisively new sense of the powerful presence and working of God in one’s life, which working usually involves one or more charismatic gifts’. Members of Pentecostal Churches, he reminds us, would add ‘experience marked

In point of technique, the great triumph of the Wodehouse novels was in the use of first-person narrative. It is curious how little he in fact used the first person. As Usborne has noted, the novels consist of Laughing Gas (1936) which, involving a switch of personalities, really needs something like this, Love Among the Chickens (where Wodehouse was very nervous about it) and the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. The stories told by the Oldest Member, Mr Mulliner and the Drones Club Crumpet have very little action by the narrator: from time to time the Oldest Member plays a small part in one of his own stories (although on the only occasion when Mr Mulliner does so, to any degree, in ‘George and Alfred’, the result is poor). The Ukridge short stories give a good deal of action to Corky. The Reggie Pepper episodes brought out the weakness and strength of the technique. Wodehouse brooded on the problem when writing his first Jeeves novel:

What he came to do was to capitalise on this, turning the novels into a series of shock discoveries, part thriller, part increase of psychological perceptions. Usborne very properly notes the great debt to Conan Doyle at this point (ibid., 152-3). The model is clearly The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle’s one unflawed Holmes novel. If Wodehouse learned from Moriarty that an absent Aunt Agatha could be far more effective than her presence, he also drew the lessons on how to keep the Holmes figure off-stage for much of the action, especially when the mysteries loomed darkest.

Brian Wicker has written a very curious book. A rough summary of its contents will indicate the obvious sense in which it’s curious: the second part consists of six critical studies, of Lawrence, Joyce, Waugh, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Mailer; the first, theoretical, part includes an analysis of metaphor and analogy in relation to Saussure and Chomsky, a comparison of homopathic and contiguous magic with myths and fairly-tales, an excursus on causality in science linked with comments on angels and ecology, and a chapter that brings together discussions of religious language, Whitehead and Teilhard, and the differing narrative structures of Old and New Testament stories. It’s a brave author and publisher who can expect a readership for such a work. But it’s the kind of argument that links these components that I find really curious, since I remain very unclear just what Wicker is arguing for. There are two major difficulties: the overall argument seems to be trying to establish a kind of natural theology, a queer kind of proof that God exists, though Wicker’s formulations of his case never quite commit him to this; and secondly some of his basic arguments seem to me so dubious that, given my respect for Wicker’s previous work, I can only conclude that one of us is deeply muddled but remain uncertain which.

Perhaps Fr Weisheipl rather labours the point that it isn’t enough to see St Thomas in a ‘speculative perspective’, that he should be studied with ‘historical method’ as well as ‘philosophical acumen’. Surely, that can be presumed. Can it, on the other hand, be presumed right from the start that to us readers as well as to the author St Thomas’s doctrine seems ‘sublime’ and his insights ‘transcendental’ (pp. 1-2)? Such encomiums would surely come better further on in the book. Fortunately there is, in fact, far more sense than rhetoric in this work, and far more history than exercise of philosophical or theological ‘acumen’; neither of which is really Fr Weisheipl’s forte. And as a historian—or better, as a biographer—he has done a very good job. Indeed I would say that he has written the best biography in English, and probably in any language, of our greatest theologian.

His aim was the large one of presenting ‘a rather full picture of the life, thought, and works of Thomas’, but his special achievement is to give the most complete and reliable account so far available of Thomas’s external existence, including in this of course the chronology and circumstances of his writings. And this is a great achievement. The subject bristles with problems and difficulties. To be sure, the background and setting of Thomas’s life are fairly well documented, intertwining as this does with the history of three great institutions whose official records are preserved: the Dominican Order, the University of Paris, and the Papacy. But such records do not, of course, interpret themselves except to the scholar’s eye, and it is often a very delicate matter to assess the exact meaning of this or that technical term (studium, for example, in its various official or semi-official connotations) or the relative importance—relative to St Thomas—of this or that contemporary movement or event or series of events.

It hasn’t needed an economic crisis to make shareholders and taxpayers in Britain realise that the motor car industry is tottering on the brink of virtual financial collapse and ruin. Poor management, lack of efficiency, overmanning, a deficiency in new ideas and inability to respond to competition, are just some of the reasons for this failure. Excuses are even more abundant. The well worn oil crisis theme is dragged in at every available opportunity (even though it occurred several months ago and does not appear to have affected the sale of foreign vehicles). Allegations are made of overseas competitors ‘dumping’ their products on to the British market (this frequent ploy is used where responsibility is not taken for self-inflicted inflation with its accompanying non-competitive and higher prices). Industrial disputes are blamed, Communists are seen under every factory bench, even inflation itself is used as a scapegoat. But in offering these, and a host of other excuses, including all but the weather, what none of those connected with the motor car industry is prepared to admit is that they are collectively and directly responsible for the state of affairs in which they currently find themselves.

It was the first Vatican Council which suggested that a suitable method for a deeper appreciation and understanding of an article of faith was to employ analogy. In making such a suggestion, the Fathers made it quite clear that it was a mistaken view to claim that because a doctrine was a mystery there could be no further theological reasoning employed for a furtherance of understanding (as if to say ‘a mystery is a mystery is a mystery’). Following their example, I would like to suggest that a current appraisal of the Catholic Church in Britain can be aided by use of another British institution, that of the British motor car industry. The comparison of the two institutions will stress similarities, rather than differences, although of course the latter do exist.

If we ask what differentiates most Americans from non-Americans, if we want to define American culture qua outlook and values transmitted by family, school, associates, etc., which perpetually underlie these peoples’ approach to problems, moulds their intelligence and stirs their will-power, we must consider their past and their environment, as well as the living molecules of that culture itself. The very question may seem to be inappropriate, but not to a foreigner who has lived here for an appreciable time.

There were planned programmes of corporate English settlement in North America, not unlike the traditional pattern of human migration. But by far the greatest number of settlers came to America either as nuclear families and individuals, or, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, as distinctive sub-groups which had deliberately differentiated themselves from their earlier national ethos. Among these latter were the English Congregationalists or neo-Calvinists and the German Mennonites. Such groups set up townships or village colonies which for a time— and in a few cases up till now retained a corporate character. But they were different from all earlier migratory enterprises in that the dominant factor that formed them as groups and brought them to the the new lands was religion, and a very particular kind of Christianity. They came because they had been persecuted at home, and they looked for a place where they could establish their own versions of the city of God on earth in peace and freedom from their enemies. Thus the word or concept ‘freedom’ was written on the sails and in the hearts of many of the early European immigrants.

This passage takes us into the prison cell where Albert Camus’ Outsider awaits his execution, watching the changing colours of the sky in the daytime, and looking out for the stars at night. The chaplain had come before but he had refused to see him. He did not believe in God, and now, with the little life that was left to him, the question whether God existed or not had no importance. So he released everything inside him, and shattered the priest’s hopes of doing anything for his ‘soul’.

During his life, Meursault had decided to do certain things and against doing other things, and all this time, he had been waiting for this moment, and the guillotine which was now very near. The priest with his talk about God and the after-life and divine justice, was merely an irksome interruption.

‘I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an after-life’, the priest in Camus’ story persists. Of course he had, but it was no more significant ‘han wishing he could swim faster or that he had a better-shaped mouth. The memory of Marie, and those fleeting hours on the beach when they swam out into the deep water, clambered onto the raft and lay down together under the scorching sun: these were the only things worth having now. As for a life after the grave—well, all he wanted was a life in which he could remember this one on earth. The priest continued on the subject of God.

In attempting to deal with the traditional problem of evil Christian theologians have had recourse to the presentation of theodicies. The two most influential kinds (though advocates of either can agree on some points) have been the Augustinian and the Irenaean and today the latter is the most popular largely as a result of its exposition by Professor John Hick. I have no distinctive theodicy to offer, nor am I sure either that one can be offered or that the Christian is bound to offer one. Perhaps, after all, what Alvin Plantinga calls a ‘defence’, coupled with an appeal to mystery is in order. I do, however, find the Irenaean theodicy in Hick’s form difficult to accept and am therefore disturbed to find it currently so influential. In what follows, and in the briefest possible manner, my aim is to indicate why others should feel the same.

The problem of evil is a problem for the theist. According to theism the following propositions are true:

The problem is how to square acceptance of these propositions with the acceptance of the facts of evil. By ‘evil’ here is meant (a) moral evil [viz. morally undesirable actions of human agents who frequently inflict suffering and harm on each other], and (b) natural evil [viz. pain producing events in the world of nature and undesirable though not necessarily pain producing natural events and states of affairs].

Our editor has learned much about torture in recent years. Had he not done so, I doubt whether he would have had the ingenuity to think of inviting me to reply to Bill Mathews’s defence of Bernard Lonergan in the light of Fergus Kerr’s review of thirteen other people’s reflections on Lonergan’s Method!

When we mounted that symposium at Maynooth from which Looking at Lonergan’s Method emerged we had a quite specific purpose in view. On the one hand, we believed that Method in Theology was far too important to be ignored. On the other hand, we knew that it would receive plenty of adulatory attention from those who have been so profoundly influenced by Lonergan’s work that they seem incapable of doing more than uncritically restating Lonergan’s position in Lonergan’s categories. We felt that there was room for a collection of essays which did Lonergan the honour of taking him sufficiently seriously to attempt critically to come to grips with some of the fundamental issues raised by Method (a similar attempt, by a group of Texan theologians, can be found in the Spring 1975 number of the Perkins Journal). It is, I think, a measure both of the importance of the issues, and of the perceived power of Lonergan’s contribution, that scholars as internationally distinguished, and from such varied cultural, philosophical and confessional backgrounds, as Hesse, Jossua, Pannen-berg and Torrance, should have agreed to take part in this enterprise. One shows respect neither for the issues, nor for Lonergan’s contribution to their clarification, if one simply leaps to his defence, as Bill Mathews tends to do, without—apparently—attempting first to understand the standpoints from which other scholars offer a critical response to his achievement.