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Holy, Holy, Holy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Extract

There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs. (D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Phoenix edn., p. 203).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1963 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Honest To God, by John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich; SCM Press; 5s.

2 It may be interesting to plot some family-relationships here. Dr. Robinson's chief sources are all Germanic: Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Bultman. In his prison letters Bonhoeffer writes with enthusiasm of W.F. Otto's The Homeric Gods; Otto (W.F., not Rudolf) belonged to Heidegger's circle, and a later collection of essays by him has the significant title, Die Gestalt und das Sein. Tillich often quotes Nietzsche with approval; and Heidegger has an important study of Nietzsche's ‘Gott ist tot’ in Holzwege, and more recently has produced a two-volume collection of studies on him. E. Fink, who once studied under Heidegger, has a fine book on Nietzsches Philosophieren, as well as a remarkable study, Spiel als Weltsymbol, on the Dionysiac reversal of a Platonic ‘beyond’. Bultmann's Heidegger has admittedly no more than a family-relationship with the Heidegger of Sein and Zeit, and an even more distant connexion with the later pretation. Heidegger is the major contemporary representative of a movement of German thought since Hegel; see e.g., K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Marx und Kierkegaard, or J. Hommes, Zwiespältiges Dasein. Feuerbach, of whom Dr Robinson makes use, has an important place in this movement. It seems possible that Dr Robinson does not wholly realize how potent a beast he is trying to demesticate and Anglicize.

3 It is typical of the Existentialist ‘dropping of the object’ that verbs which ordinarily take objects, direct or indirect, are continually used absolutely; cf. ‘give ourselves to the uttermost’, p. 49—give to whom?