Wittgenstein once said (to M.O’C Drury): ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life’. I do not think Wittgenstein meant to point to some personal hang up Musical experience is at once very important to those to whom it is important at all and very difficult to talk sense about. It is not quite impossible to do this, but impossible to do it consistently. One thinks of the remarks on music in Cocteau’s Rappel a I’Ordre or Stravinsky’s Conversations where remarks which illuminate sit cheek to jowel with remarks that merely obscure. Or, to take a more academic example, what is one to make of the fact that the same man, Donald Tovey, wrote the brilliant essay on Schubert and Loewes’ setting of Erlkönig that so illuminates the whole world of Lieder, and the utterly wrongheaded paper on Mozart’s fortieth symphony? It is then no disparagement of Hamish Swanston to say that his article, A Redeeming Occasion, in the March number of New Blackfriars, whilst full of interesting ideas, adds up to a general thesis about opera that must be rejected.

Dr Swanston likes opera. His taste is good, or at any rate I like most of the same things he does. He sees, what I am sure is just, that Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner are in quite a different category from other composers of opera. He would add Beethoven, on the strength of Fidelio, to this select company—here I strongly disagree but more of that in a moment. Going to one of this select group of operas is a redeeming occasion in the strict theological sense and Dr Swanston does not hesitate from a final conclusion that opera at this level ‘has itself become a way of theologising’. Here I am sure, he is quite wrong but to say why I find difficult because I do not think going to the opera, even to different performances of the same opera, is one kind of experience about which general conclusions can be made.

The not unimpressive degree of agreement which prevailed as regards theory and practice among British social anthropologists between about 1940 and the later fifties was produced by a variety of factors, including of course the opportunities for fieldwork in the British colonial empire, on which the sun was unobtrusively, but inexorably, setting. Other factors were the relatively high degree of cordiality between the small number of leading social anthropologists, almost all of whom had been in some way influenced by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and who found it possible to teach and organise research on the basis of what was called ‘structural-functionalism’, a workable synthesis (to simplify slightly) of Malinowski’s fieldwork methods with Radcliffe-Brown’s stress on the classification of social structures. The range of interests of structural-functionalism was unduly narrow, myth and ritual being treated as supporting adjuncts to the social institutions on which attention was focused, and both linguistics and oral literature were very largely ignored. Much of the theoretical basis of structural-functionalism was also of the sort that survives by not being questioned; if ‘the function of exogamy is to increase the solidarity of kin groups’, are those kin groups which allow endogamy therefore lacking in solidarity, how does one measure solidarity, and if exogamy (or any other social institution) cannot be explained as useful, what sort of explanations do we give?

The turning away from the structural-functional orthodoxy would have come anyway, with the end of the colonial era and the increase in number of social anthropologists, but it is only fair to point out that the new directions of social anthropology in Britain from 1960 onwards did grow out of work done by the leading apostles of structural-functionalism.

It is the contention of Professor Geach in ‘Omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 7-20, called GP in what follows, that ‘no graspable sense has ever been given to this sentence [‘God can do everything’] that did not lead to self-contradiction or at least to conclusions manifestly untenable from a Christian point of view’ (GP 7-8). In the still more recent ‘An irrelevance of omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 327-33, called GIOP in what follows, he continues to maintain a thesis of that kind: ‘any thesis that gives a plausible interpretation of the sentence ‘God can do everything’ is a thesis involving both inherent logical difficulties and conclusions hard to reconcile with traditional Christian belief’ (GIOP 327), and ‘sense is not to be made of “God can do everything” ‘ (GIOP 332). His contention, as the present paper will show, will not in fact survive straightforwardly logical criticism owing nothing essential to any arcane points of detail peculiar to philosophical theology.

Reasonably dismissing some other possible ways of understanding ‘God can do everything’—which should rather be put as ‘There is nothing that God cannot do’—Professor Geach brings his main batteries against a position held by many catholic theologians, St Thomas Aquinas among them. According to that position ‘ “God can do so- and-so” is true just if “God does so-and-so” is logically consistent— there may be consistently describable feats which it would involve contradiction to suppose done by God’ (G P 9’s italics). In view of that restriction which G P rightly emphasises, Aquinas advanced the thesis

It is of course, a fruitless—if interesting—speculation, to ask oneself what would have happened to Christianity if the camera had been invented during Christ’s lifetime. Most of us probably find it pretty well impossible to picture Divinity trapped between the stiff pages of a family album or to conceive of a God crying out on a cross while, a few yards away, someone discards a flash or fiddles with a light metre. As we actually experience it, the problem arises in muted form, and is largely a matter of reconciling noble architecture, the tourist industry and religious sentiment. We have all seen those glossy volumes with coloured plates of pilgrim multitudes, a white figure with hand blessingly uplifted and that better-looking, younger nun, smiling instamatically over her own viewfinder. Granted then that the camera create; curious problems of credibility, it is perhaps not too outrageous to suggest—at least very tentatively— that if this medium had existed two milennia ago Christianity as we know it with its mystery and its historicity simply would not have happened.

If, however, there had been a photographic record dealing with the beginnings of Christianity, I believe that an American, Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, would have been better equipped than most people to salvage something meaningful from a past that we have magnified and isolated, and interpreted repeatedly into the patterns of our preconceptions. Quite recently her work has been on view at the Hayward Gallery and in March 1974 The Sunday Times ran an illustrated article on the exhibition in its supplement and asked several well-known critics to give their opinions.