What did Paul have to say about the resurrection, Geoffrey Turner asks (New Blackfriars, April 1977), as he goes on to say that I have suggested that “Paul had a simple spiritual experience”. Well, if that is the impression that I have left, I must try to make myself a little clearer.

Geoffrey Turner appeals to I Cor 15 and interprets that reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to Paul in terms of Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles of the Damascus road experience. Is it so obvious that this move is legitimate? Admittedly it has frequently been made, at least since the middle of the second century when readers of the New Testament were first in a position to turn from one text to another and begin the process of harmonising the different accounts which it is one of the major effects of modern New Testament studies to bring into question. We need to remind ourselves, however, that Luke shows no knowledge of any of Paul’s letters. In fact the picture of Paul that Luke gives in Acts is remarkably unlike the picture that emerges from Paul’s own letters. The account that one man gives of another would of course differ a good deal from a self portrait, but the differences between Paul’s own theology and Luke’s account of it in Acts are so obvious and numerous that we must reckon with the possibility, and even the likelihood, that Luke did not have much access to Pauline material. Methodologically, if we are to be cautious, we must leave open the possibility that the Lukan accounts of the Damascus road experience were not derived from Paul himself but were Luke’s reconstruction of what must have happened.

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.

But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.

We cannot believe just what we please just when we please; however, there is no doubt that it is sometimes the desires, fears and convenience of persons and groups, rather than the relevant evidence, which determines what they believe about things. I want to say something on this topic, before directly discussing ideology.

Anthony Trollope’ novel The Warden is a story about an elderly and inconspicuous Anglican clergyman named Harding, who has for many years enjoyed a comfortable stipend as warden of a hospice for paupers. During the time when the hospice and the wardenship have existed, the sum allotted to the paupers has remained the same; but the overall income has considerably increased, and this has been entirely for the benefit of the warden. A young reformer named Bold has drawn attention to the anomaly, and intends to go to law about the matter. The archdeacon of the diocese, a domineering and self-opinionated man who is the very antithesis of the warden in character, regards Bold’s interference as an affront to the Church, and an attack on the very fabric of society. In fact legal advice is taken, and a skilful lawyer is hired by the ecclesiastical establishment, who makes it clear that Bold cannot win his case. But Mr. Harding is unable, now the injustice of his position has been pointed out, to retain the wardenship; there now seems to him to be a kind of intrinsic inequity about his station in life, which no assurances about his legal position can allay.

“This unaccountable, heterodox, bad priest” was the accepted verdict of Catholic scholarship on Alexander Geddes almost seventy years ago. Amid the modernist crisis that view was understandable particularly in the British Catholic Church which had struggled for respectability and acceptance during the previous half century. Geddes seemed a disturbing unmannerly radical. But today in a Church more concerned with social justice and freedom, with ecumenism and scholarly integrity, we can come to a more charitable balanced conclusion. For Geddes was undoubtedly a talented scholarly priest of liberal imagination and provocative manner. Persistent ill health especially some severe form of rheumatism, gave his wit a bitterness which he effectively employed against any species of privilege, political or religious intolerance. In his desire for conciliatory dialogue between Churches, authentic local liturgies, and a more responsible and responsive ecclesiastical authority, he was a thoroughly modem churchman.

The life of Geddes may be briefly recounted. Born into a poor Catholic family in Banffshire in 1737, educated at Scalan and in Paris, he was ordained in 1764. Following a brief chequered career in Scotland, during which he acquired an LL.D from the University of Aberdeen, he lived in London from 1780 to his death in 1801. Free from pastoral demands he was able to devote himself to the intellectual life. His cosmopolitan life and training made him very much a child of the Enlightenment. His extended visits to France, 1758-64, 1766-69 and 1783, together with his continuous reliance on aristocratic patronage ensured that result. Well acquainted with Presbyterianism and educated within the Gallican tradition in the Paris of the philosophes, Geddes was associated with several leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. By nature gregarious, he freely associated with all denominations; Presbyterians, Anglicans, Unitarians and Quakers.