I want to take one aspect of the theology of the eucharist and try to show how a shift in our understanding of this leads to a corresponding shift in our understanding of the society in which we live. The aspect I have chosen concerns the presence of Christ in the world.

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST

We must begin by being quite clear about one thing. If Christ is simply absent from human history since Easter Day, then there is no such thing as Christianity. There are people for whom Jesus of Nazareth is simply an historical memory. Such people may acknowledge his nobility of character, respect the force of his ethical teaching: but they are not Christians. It is clear from the New Testament that what constituted the primitive Church was the consciousness of this community that it only existed, as a community, in the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ. To put the point another way: to tell people, on the basis of the New Testament, how they ought to live, does not constitute the preaching of the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ. To announce to a society that its attitudes and structures are negative and inhuman, and to tell it that things ought to be otherwise, is hardly good news. It is a depressing statement of what most people are dimly aware of anyway. The witness of Christianity is only the announcement of good .news if its primary statement concerns the here-and-now availability of the resources with which to revolutionize human society in the love of God.

It is the somewhat tentative conclusion of this article that there are three different, though related, notions of hell in Christian tradition. A first might be called Hell as Sheol (since this was what the Hebrews called it) or Hell as Hades (which was the Greek tran-lation). Another is Hell as Gehenna, the hellfire of the New Testament. And a third is something I shall call Hell as Tartarus for reasons which will later appear.

Sheol

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. These phrases account for over a third of all the Old Testament references to Sheol. Well over half of the remaining references explicitly couple Sheol with death as parallel concepts.

Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’. But at one period of his life, when he had lost both Joseph and Benjamin,

The comments by Martin Green in the October Mew Btackfriars editorial, Raymond Williams’s article (November) and the appearance of Terry Eagleton’s book1 mark, perhaps, a new stage in the debate about the ‘catholic left’. Beyond the mud-slinging and the taking to the ramparts (useful though such antics have been recently in helping to publicise the importance of the catholic left as a distinctive movement); and also beyond the appeal to history (Donald Nicholl in the Clergy Review, August 1966) and to received notions of church structure (Michael Dummett in Mew Blackfriars, December 1965) we now come to a fundamental problem. The definition of this problem is difficult, and can be approached from a number of points of view. But I think the basic question the catholic left has to answer is this: is the commitment to a political order, the concern with the restructuring of the human community, part of a homogeneous continuum which will simply inaugurate the kingdom of God as its final term, or is it rather a means by which the essentially gratuitous character of the kingdom can be most clearly revealed by having the obscuring clutter of merely human obstacles removed ?

Perhaps I may begin a review of Mr Eagleton’s book by registering one note of disagreement with Martin Green. This is that I feel he is trying to evade a problem, when he speaks of the need to ‘attune’ ourselves to war and peace simultaneously.

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.

Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.

‘It is evident’, wrote Thomas Carlyle a century ago, ‘that an old order of things is breaking up into fragments; and men watch it, as they watch all wrecks, fearfully’. Nothing could be more apt than this when applied to London today. For we see a city in dissolution, a city that has got out of hand.

The problem is so vast. The idea that the problem is solely one of traffic does not bear a minute’s examination; traffic congestion is a convenient scapegoat, an excuse for not doing anything, a reason for doing the barest minimum (the odd traffic roundabout here, the odd fly-over there). These muted attempts to solve traffic congestion savour of a sop to the conscience, just as the cornflake packets posing as architecture are acts of tardy defiance against a chaos that was predicted by Ruskin and Carlyle with ineffable accuracy.

Had there been no war, had the population remained static, then London might have tottered on for a century more or so, with its prisons disguised as Gothic castles and its abatoirs as Venetian palaces, and its churches built for little more than £4,000 (including fittings and furnishings). However, such was not to be. As Matthew Arnold wrote in another context, ‘For what wears out the life of mortal men? ‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;’

In an age when people ask whether God is better visualised as ‘up there’ or ‘in here’, it could be relevant to recall the medieval and Augustinian approach, which claimed that the best way to think of God was necessarily as that on which the intellectual structure of man is modelled – mens, notitia, amor or even memoria, intellectus, voluntas. In other words, the Trinity. For if a Christian holds in the first place that man is made in the image and likeness of his creator, then one can speculate about the original on the basis of the copy. ‘For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.’

The traditional formula still had validity in the period of William of Saint Thierry because man was even then conceived as being sympathetically in accord with the universe around him, and with God. A divine quaternity related him to the four elements, the four humours, and so on, and divine trinity, in the same way, related him to the nature and the persons of God. It was apparently not difficult for twelfth century people to see themselves as part of the landscape, in an almost Chinese sense, nor was it difficult for them to see themselves as involved in the matter of God, ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin’.

We have already considered William’s treatment of the vindication, as he calls it, of the three faculties of man by the three persons of the Trinity, memory, reason and will, each being taken as his own by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively.