Less than ten years ago the ‘exhaustion of political ideas’ was widely proclaimed. At least in the Western World the differences dividing parties of the left and right seemed to be getting less and changes of government only made for a little more or a little less emphasis on economic planning and welfare. One of the most renowned of American political scientists wrote at the end of the 1950s:

In the space of a few years, however, the atmosphere has changed. The collection of essays edited by Erich Fromm under the title Socialist Humanism well summarizes the change in outlook; here are thirty-six articles, most of them written specially for the book, affirming unequivocally that men can and should create their own world, that elitism is not inevitable and that work can be a creative activity. Of course, a book written by so many hands and claiming, at least on the dustjacket, to cover Marxism, Gandhi, Renaissance humanism, existentialism, Utopia, history, science, dialectic, psychoanalysis, freedom, alienation, justice, labour, welfare, ethics, law, Christianity, technology, and revolution, must at times be exasperating.

If we were to take a look at human society of some four and a half centuries ago, say, about the year 1500, we should see there a world that was still largely sacral. The whole of life was bound up with religion, the Church, the Sacerdotium, penetrating into every department of human life, and in the civil order the Imperium itself was regarded as sacred. The Sacerdotium may have been corrupt and the Imperium tottering but men still thought of the whole of society as sacred. Even the very processes of nature by which millions of men and women gained a painful livelihood were nearer to magic in their minds than we usually like to think they were. Nature was largely unpredictable, afflicted with mysterious calamities and marred from time to time by what were called ‘Acts of God’.

On the other hand, there was an immense surge of new life throughout Europe. Men had rediscovered the ancient literature of Greece and Rome and were luxuriating in it. For more than a hundred years Italy had flowered with a new art in paint and stone, whose products we still admire. Great new buildings were going up, but above all, men felt that they were new beings. They were throwing off’ the restrictions of the old sacral order and were finding themselves, discovering new powers to which they could see no limit. Nature itself was being freed from the bondage of magic and within a hundred years Galileo would demolish the old picture of the cosmos and take the music out of the spheres.

Having recent experience of the activities of several missions in part of ex-British Africa, I read with great interest Elizabeth Power’s article ‘Black Nuns in Africa’ (New Blackfriars, December, 1966, and the subsequent exchange between her and Sr Anne Gregson, February, 1967) and, more recently, the correspondence about mission strategy in East Africa (August, 1967).

My work demanded that I should liv e with rural Africans in their huts and learn to speak their language. I spent most time in the diocese of one particular society of Roman Catholic missionaries, but I also saw a little of the work of three other Roman Catholic missionary societies and four Protestant ones. There were marked differences between these different missions, in their resources of finance and personnel, in their organization and the amount of responsibility they gave to Africans, in what they thought it proper for missionaries or Europeans to do, and in what they thought Christianity is concerned with.

I had for a long time thought it would be interesting to know about the way of life and attitudes of African nuns, but the first African nuns I saw on the central mission station could only observe from a distance. Even those who were teachers had been trained to keep their distance from visitors so I could not speak to them. The missionaries took pains to point out to me that the African nuns had clothes in greater quantity and quality, better housing and bedding, and a more adequate and better balanced diet than nearly all rural African women.

The way reputations get off the ground is nearly always something of a mystery, and the reputation of Fr Karl Rahner is a more than usually interesting case. It must by now be so internationally complex that some aspects of it deserve consideration in their own right. The appearance of an English translation of volume III of the Theological Investigations may perhaps be taken as an appropriate occasion to look at this reputation in the light of some of the diverse activities on which it is based. For the pieces collected in this volume on the Theology of the Spiritual Life, which range in interest and difficulty from a sort of exalted pamphlet on the ‘Apostolate of Prayer’ to an absorbing and exacting introduction for a book of verse by a fellow Jesuit, are a reminder of the many claims upon a theologian who has never been allowed, or at least taken, time to write a single sustained work of theology. The very fragmentary character of his written achievement, the limitations within which it moves, and the yawning gaps it leaves behind it are, granted Rahner’s undoubted intellectual calibre, a singular testimony to the situation for the theology of the spiritual life today. It is a testimony all the more eloquent for being that of a man who, whatever his professional qualifications, establishes himself in the mind as first and foremost the dedicated priest. When, in an essay on the priestly existence reprinted in this volume, he says (p. 258) ‘even leaving aside for the moment the general question whether it is not the case that every existentially significant truth cannot be genuinely transmitted from one person to another unless it is possessed by the teacher not merely intellectually as a proposition but as something existentially realized by him’, we feel confident that this is the one question he is never really able to leave aside.

The basic reason why it is so difficult in practice to give an account of philosophy’s aims and method is undoubtedly that there is no agreement among philosophers themselves about what they are trying to do and how; and this means that they often find it as difficult to explain themselves to each other as to those whose home is in other disciplines. This is especially so when the philosophers in question belong to different traditions. It is well known that philosophers today fall broadly into two camps, those who belong to the Englishspeaking tradition of analytic philosophy which was born of a reaction against Hegel at the beginning of this century, and those who remain if not in the Hegelian, then at least in the Cartesian tradition and who are now represented primarily in France and Germany. I suppose that we may add as a third group the neoScholastic philosophers of the seminaries and Catholic universities, who at least until recently represented a revival of the medieval tradition, but are now being more or less absorbed by the first two groups (and especially the second) according to their physical location and that of the universities in which their staff are trained.

To each of these traditions there corresponds an attitude towards philosophical aims and methodology which may be associated with a turning-point in the history of philosophy.

The new approaches in religious education which are still a controversial issue in this country, certainly did not have to wait for Vatican II, even though the Council and its teaching has been one of the major factors at work. The pioneers of the movement, as of so many others in the contemporary scene, can be traced to the beginning of the present century, and to continental biblical scholars who were not content to let the fruits of their studies remain in academic isolation. Rather they quickly saw the need to communicate their new theological thinking to the youngest members of the Church, so that gradually the content of traditional syllabuses of religious instruction was transformed. At the same time began the introduction of more child-centred methods of presentation of the Christian message under the influence of contemporary educational changes in the teaching of secular subjects.

These two factors, content and methodology, are often confused, not only (and understandably) by parents and priests necessarily remote from the professional field of education, but also, and more regrettably, by the teachers themselves. It is these who arc rapidly losing confidence in their own abilities to cope, and it is this predicament that brings them in such numbers to the wide range of courses being held up and down the country.

In so far as the main aim of such teachers is to find a ready-made syllabus, complete with well-tested answers to their particular problems, this is, I feel, regrettable. Good teaching of religion, as of any subject in the curriculum, is of necessity ‘do-it-yourself’; only the teacher on the spot, knowing the children, their backgrounds, their particular abilities and interests, can effectively adapt the content of any syllabus to their needs.