When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’

This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.

Not long ago I found myself on a platform, organized by the Young Publishers’ Group, together with Sir Robert Maxwell, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, and Sir Basil Blackwell, speaking on the problem of censorship. It was a horrifying experience, because the nature and outcome of the meeting were predetermined. It was predetermined by the intolerant dogmatism of ‘enlightenment’. Those who spoke against censorship resorted to facile declarations combined with facetiousness, as if any objections to complete permissiveness could only be ridiculous. On the other side individuals tried to be serious: but they were so selected and set side by side that they were made to appear to discredit one another. In any case, the amount of time available to each was so limited that no one could begin to say anything relevant or meaningful. I could myself have talked for an hour on the subject, in the endeavour to point out some dangers, and some fallacies, by which time I would have but nibbled the edge of the problem of hate in culture. But it was evident that the gathering did not want anything of the kind. It did not really want the issue debated. It wanted merely a ratification, by a kind of circus, of its own ‘enlightened’ prejudices.

Often, thus, what seems to be a real debate is really nothing of the kind. Some time ago The Guardian ran a series on the permissive society. I wrote an article and sent it as a contribution. It was rejected—and I came to find that the series was not even planned and produced by the feature editorial staff. It was organized by the advertising staff, in combination with a television project. Here we glimpse the vested interests behind ‘permissiveness’. If one does get an article published it is often so badly cut as to be unrecognizable —an experience I have had with both New Society and The Times.

Poverty is not the real problem of the modern world. For we have the knowledge and resources which could enable us to overcome poverty. The real problem—the thing which creates misery, wars and hatred among men—is the division of mankind into rich and poor.

We can see this division at two levels. Within nation states there are a few individuals who have great wealth and whose wealth gives them great power; but the vast majority of people suffer from varying degrees of poverty and deprivation. Even in a country like the United States, this division can be seen. In countries like India, Portugal or Brazil, the contrast between the wealth of a few privileged individuals and the dire poverty of the masses is a crying scandal.

And looking at the world as a collection of nation states, we see the same pattern repeated. There are a few wealthy nations which dominate the whole world economically, and therefore politically; and a mass of smaller and poor nations whose destiny, it appears, is to be dominated.

The significance of this division between the rich and the poor is not simply that one man has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear and more houses than he can live in, while others are hungry, unclad and homeless. The significant thing about the division between rich and poor nations is not simply that one has the resources to provide comfort for all its citizens, and the other cannot provide basic services. The reality and depth of the problem arises because the man who is rich has power over the lives of those who are poor, and the rich nation has power over the policies of those which are not rich. And even more important is that our social and economic system, nationally and internationally, supports these divisions and constantly increases them, so that the rich get ever richer and more powerful, while the poor get relatively poorer and less able to control their own future.

I have been reading an 84-page pamphlet called ‘Artukovitch, the Himmler of Yugoslavia’, by three New Yorkers, called Gaffney, Starchevitch and McHugh. Artukovitch was Minister of the Interior, 1941 to 1945, under the dictator Pavelitch in the independent state of Croatia. Very few people have heard of him, yet if his story were told with remorseless candour, we would have a picture not only of Croatia twenty years ago, but of all Christendom in our century. Everything that the New Yorkers relate should be already known to us, except for one startling paragraph. It is an extract from a memoir by Artukovitch himself. After describing how he escaped to Austria and Switzerland in 1945, he goes on:

So evidently we in Ireland, had sheltered this notable man for a whole year. He was not, like Eichmann, a humble executive, but himself a maker of history, dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox. He himself in the spring of 1941 introduced and signed the laws, which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. He established the twenty concentration camps, in which they were exterminated. Why do we know so little about his sojourn among us ?

We pray for a good death and a perfect end in every service of Compline. When is death (thanatos) good (eu-) ? Every man must answer this according to his definition of goodness. Does goodness depend merely on the absence of pain in the sufferer or of grief in the spectators? Death is such a negative subject that to make it good one must see some positive content of love, compassion, even bravery and perhaps immortality set around it, within it and beyond it. Only then is death euthanatos (the good death).

Dictionaries define euthanasia as ‘gentle easy death’, but euthanasia is a euphemism which like a shroud hides the reality. When the sprightly old lady died in her sleep no one would call it euthanasia, but it is. If a man had a stroke and sank slowly and gently without pain to death in a couple of days and the doctor gave only one brandy, no one would accuse him of assisting euthanasia.

At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.

If the Spirit speaks to the listening people of God in the events of history, as well as in Scripture, then the events of this time seem to indicate that a renewed search for the springs of Christian spirituality is probably the most urgent task placed by the Spirit before the churches.

The visible church is the listening people. It is not all the people who listen, but it is an identifiable collection of those people who are supposed to be listening to God and acting on what they hear, and who indeed have pledged themselves to do so—though in some cases rather casually, or with extensive reservations. The people must listen to the breathing of the Spirit, even if the message be only whispered, but at this time it rises even to thunder.

At any time in the history of Christianity it would be taken for granted that the personal pursuit of holiness, or the imitation of Christ, or the experience of the Spirit, are indispensable to the Christian life. The emphasis is different under these three headings, but all definitions of how Christians deepen and increase their be done in the assembly of God’s people, by virtue of incorporation in Christ, with all the others who share that membership, but it also takes for granted that this is a personal matter, in which each one must strive and search, often apparently alone. The task and its rewards may belong to the whole, but they also belong to each member. The need for holiness is not new, but it is being newly demanded, with renewed urgency.

In the past two centuries an emphasis on individual holiness at the expense of a sense of social and political responsibility was an easy refuge for good people who wanted to be Christians without rocking the boat too much.

During the nineteen-thirties T. S. Eliot steadily extended his interests as a literary critic to larger social and cultural questions; the process can be traced in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and his editorials in The Criterion. This interest culminated in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. It is one of his strangest books, where profound insights are interwoven with the most superficial observations, and where seemingly firm statements are then qualified out of existence within a paragraph or so. The book’s excessively tentative title is characteristic; Eliot says many interesting things about culture but he never succeeds in defining it. In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs and styles of living, as opposed to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free; any discernible form of social organization above the merely biological level will have its accompanying cultural modes, however odd they may seem to the observer. And as anthropologists have shown, seemingly primitive peoples can often produce very complicated cultural forms. So that when Eliot laments the decline of culture in the twentieth century and contemplates a possible future ‘of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture’ he cannot be using the word in the anthropological sense, since if organized human life persists at all it is bound to have its accompanying cultural forms. Clearly, Eliot is here using the word in a more particular, value-bearing sense, which is closer to the Arnoldian usage.

Even in our present state of enlightenment it is relatively uncommon to find a novelist who can treat the physical climax of a love affair so brusquely—‘A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.’ It is the more remarkable if the girl stretched on the bed has not only engineered the loss of her virginity and purchased a small Toby jug —now in the author’s possession—but is actually a divine enigma. Place such a episode in the shadow of a West Country cathedral in the middle years of Victoria’s reign and it becomes as ironic as it is pleasing.

It has been my recent experience on belatedly reading The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman to realize that there is something to be said for not reading books when they first appear. There is the chance that one may more easily recognize the development of a coherent attitude, and it is the essence of my discovery that John Fowles is writing a more unambiguously religious novel than has been generally appreciated. Primarily, his treatment of his material differs in a marked degree from the methods of such writers as Graham Greene, Salinger or Mauriac, in that he creates in his characters a dimension of allegorical potential which cannot be precisely distinguished from their ordinary humanity. It appears to be a new approach, and one that stands—if at some remove—in the line of Bunyan and the medieval Morality. Throughout The Collector, Fowles’ first book, the allegory is implicit and muted; and this, I think, is an attitude one would expect in a writer who had still to establish his narrative powers and was perhaps less than fully aware of the ultimate direction of his abilities. In his preface to the new edition of The Aristos Fowles tells us that his purpose in The Collector was to ‘attempt to analyse through a parable some of the results’ of what he sees as a ‘confrontation’ between ‘the Few and the Many’.

Sunday evening service in a West Riding town forty to sixty years ago was not very much different from the scene in the church at Sandymount on Bloomsday. For the priests it marked the end of a quite heavy Sunday, the climax of a by no means easy week. Two Masses in the morning with a sermon at each, fasting from midnight perhaps until 1 o’clock, baptisms and children’s service, rosary—or Vespers—or Compline, another sermon, and Benediction. On the Saturday five or six hours’ confessions. In this town as in many others of its kind, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, all the time left over from church services and absolutely necessary meals and rest, was spent in house to house collecting. The parish priest might reserve to himself the task of counting or he might share it with the curates, thus lengthening the weekend’s work to Monday midday. For some this might be followed by recreation on the golf links and dark murmurings with other clerical companions about the tyranny of parish priests. For the rest of the week, two hours of every day would be taken up with Mass and Office, there would be at least one evening service with a sermon, perhaps a confraternity meeting, instruction of converts (most of them marrying Catholics), a weekly visit to the school, visiting both of the sick and well (the latter being questioned, if necessary, about attendance at Mass and Easter duties). A conscientious priest might use some of the time left over to prepare his sermons.

There is a loud cry of complaint. Women have a sense of betrayal, of having been subjected to male purposes in a world where they are forced to play an inferior part. Now many of them feel that the time has come to rise up and conquer this world, man’s world, and make it their own. Battle is joined, the revolution has commenced. But how can the war of the sexes ever be won ? If it is a battle it is one without real victory, for man and woman can never be anything but related, opposite but related—as right and left, day and night, heaven and earth. Women can certainly become as rational as men, they can think their thoughts, do their jobs, wear their clothes . . . unisex even returns the compliment and polarity is dissolved. So women can become as men. They can become specialists, technicians, breaking down universality into the particular, the whole into the isolated part; specializing as men have done, have had to do, in order to produce such a successful society. Women feel underprivileged, they have been left behind. They are still amateurs— inefficient, for only specialization makes for real efficiency. Women improvise, they tend to make do with what is to hand. They often go about things in a devious way which drives men mad. They seem so content to act from within the contingent. They are like Levi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleurs’, they do a variety of jobs with the limited means available. Many women do perform daily a balancing act quite illogical in its demands and immeasurable in its productivity. Of course there is the state, or the kibbutz, to release mothers for more serious business, the public rather than the private sector. There, like men, they can chart their advancement, calculate their progress and earn money. Women may have invented agriculture, cooking, pottery, weaving, in fact most of what makes life tolerable, but that was a long time ago. Now the mere job of living should take care of itself, women want more important work to do, they want to be anywhere but at home.

The renewal of sacramental theology in the past fifty years or so has depended considerably on a recovery and development of the primitive insight that the primary and primordial sacrament is Christ himself, whose sacramentality is the ground and the culmination of all human existence in the world in time. It is because we are as we are (and it is good, ‘very good’, that we are as we are), because basically if not most interestingly we are men in virtue of a shared flesh and blood, unable to communicate or be men except as such, even with and before God, that we enact our human and our Christian existence sacramentally. We interpret ourselves to ourselves, discover what it means to be who we are and so find how to become who we are, by projecting ourselves on and realizing ourselves in external nature. By our bodily creativity, in words and symbols and the extraordinary variety of human art-forms we are able to make sense of our life in the world, to make its flux and chaos precisely meaningful, to focus the whole in a perceptible sign which in contracting the immensities allows us to live amongst them as those who are at home there. And the Jewish-Christian tradition at its classical moments has maintained that a particular history has redeemed us more deeply into our bodies, into being more authentically at home in our flesh and blood and sexuality, in our passions and emotions and instinctual drives.

A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.

To the generation of philosophers brought up in England in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War it seemed as though the Mind-Body problem had been (in the current jargon) not solved but dissolved. Where the previous generation had toiled at the old Cartesian task of constructing a material world out of, or on the basis of, mental entities, our generation discovered that the mental entities themselves had been eliminated. The notion of sense-data used by Moore and Russell had been shown in Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be incoherent. ‘J. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia’ appeared on the Oxford lecture list in Trinity Term 1948. Austin’s principal target was just that dichotomy between sense-data and material objects from which the whole problem seemed to be derived. He directed attention to the variety of locutions in which ‘look’ can figure: ‘He looks a good sport.’ ‘He looks as if he were going to faint.’ ‘They look like ants.’ ‘They look like Europeans.’ It looked as if statements about how things look could not be the record of a subclass of mental events called visual experiences.

Mental events as such were gradually being eliminated. Wittgenstein’s views, already rumoured before the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, seemed to require that, where Ryle had taken twinges, aches, itches and flutters had been for Ryle the only honest citizens of the interior state. Much of the odium that he heaped on claimants to mental existence like acts of will, judgment, understanding or perceiving was aroused by the comparison of the latter to their notable disadvantage with the former, whose claim to be genuine occurrences was unchallenged. But here was Wittgenstein apparently challenging it.

This paper asks some questions about man and nature from one point of view, that of an interest in the city. It puts forward a few current concepts of the city with emphasis on recent social studies. It asks to what extent the making of cities and living in them is ‘natural’ to man; to what extent they have always been a deliberate statement about man’s relationship to the world of nature (is there a conflict here ?); and it tries to show the direction in which cities are developing and the degree to which these developments may be said to enhance and enrich experience or to impoverish and destroy it. It is a personal statement and is not in any way an attempt to give a critical summary of current sociological, planning and artistic critiques of the city.

The City as Experience

After some weeks of reading in preparation for writing this paper I was preparing to make a concentrated start on it one evening. It happened that I had cause to visit a friend in a local hospital that same evening. The journey was short, through a decaying industrial/ housing part of the city. The hospital itself is entered through an arch over a narrow carriage way, unaltered since horse and carriage days as witnessed by the width of the opening and the stone cart tracks leading into a cobbled yard; the hospital building, an agglomeration of bits and pieces from the last 100 years or so. The pub next to the hospital, on a Friday night, is crowded and noisy and a refuge for both patients and staff.

Since 1967 considerable impetus has been given to group prayer in the Catholic Church, by the Catholic Pentecostal Movement in North America. This movement began as largely a lay movement of spiritual renewal in Catholic university circles in the U.S.A. It has connexions with the Spanish-born cursillo movement, whose aim is to bring Catholics to a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus (the evangelical terminology is deliberate), but it actually derives from the encounter with interdenominational Pentecostalism. It received massive and sensational publicity, and grew with amazing rapidity, spreading throughout the States, and penetrating into Canada. In 1969 it was cautiously approved by the U.S. hierarchy, and has also been enthusiastically recommended by one or two individual bishops.

Although it is a very variegated phenomenon, running right through it is the insistence that all Christians can and should claim ‘the promise of the Father’ in what they, with other Pentecostals, call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. That is to say, people who are already believers in Christ call down upon themselves or upon each other an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, ‘just as it was in the beginning’ at Pentecost. The usual procedure is for someone who has already had the experience to lay hands on one who is seeking it, with prayer; it is believed that this will result in a sudden or gradual unfolding of the person’s life in Christ into the charismatic manifestations, usually beginning with tongues, followed in due course by prophecy, interpretation, healing, or some such supernatural endowment or ministry.

Between the promoters of the present discontents and the revolutionaries of the heroic early nineteenth century there seems to be one great difference: the refusal of detailed prescription for the society of the future. Our world is to be violently overthrown, but when we enquire what is to replace it, the answers are usually expressed in terms of a vaguely existentialist adventure, an undefined project thrust into the future, where love and risk will combine to create the millennium.

Older Utopias were vastly more specific. In fact it was almost a diagnostic feature that they had to be: either to carry the reader’s narrative interest, as in More’s Utopia or Wells’s The World of William Clissold (a book my provincial 1930s childhood fed on avidly), or to permit the social scientist to roam untrammelled in the realms of gold because his real appetite was a true romantic one for the poetry rather than the mechanisms of a new society. One who attempted to combine both poetry and mechanism was Charles Fourier, a prolific writer who has recently been expensively reprinted, more, I should imagine, for his impact on surrealism than for any residual value he may possess as a social analyst. Fourier was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out and died in 1837, after dabbling in a number of vaguely financial callings, and publishing endless works on the evils of industrialism and how they should be remedied.

Liturgy is a great thing for sending people to sleep. It does not matter how archaic a word or phrase in the liturgy is, or obscure or even downright nonsense, it can still be said, provided it is said or sung often enough. Witness the remarkable lines of some popular hymns. This is even true of such an exalted thing as the Lord’s Prayer, which has been said somewhere in the liturgy from the earliest times.

Englishmen still say ‘hallowed’ long after the word has gone out of current use, largely because Englishmen have always said ‘hallowed’ since at least the days of King Alfred. This is not an English eccentricity. The Greeks have always recited the Lord’s Prayer with the word epiousios, which is known to have been unintelligible to second-century Christians. Nobody then and nobody since has ever heard of this word in any other context, and nobody is really sure what it means. And yet for century after century the Greeks have gone on saying it.

If this is so of single words, it is more so with whole phrases. The meaning of the line ‘lead us not into temptation’ is no less obscure than epiousios. The words themselves do not present any difficulty, but taken together they seems to imply something that is quite unthinkable. Are we really meaning that God would lead us into temptation, if we didn’t pray to him not to ? This certainly troubled the early Latin Fathers when they were engaged on providing a satisfactory translation for the Western Church. They frequently softened the shock by inserting something like: ‘do not suffer us to be led into temptation’ (ne patiaris nos . . .). But the novelty wore off, and as this cushioning interpolation was not in the Greek, St Jerome stuck on ne nos inducas . . . , and the Western Church was quietly lulled off to sleep by the liturgical anodyne of centuries of repetition.