There is a story about two monks who lived long ago and who had taken a vow never to touch a woman. One day they were walking together through the forest, when they came to a clearing. Through the middle of the clearing ran a stream, rather wide and deep, and at this season rather turbulent. By the banks of the stream stood a pretty girl, obviously in some distress because she wanted to cross the stream but was afraid to. Hardly pausing in his stride, the elder and taller of the two monks picked her up in his arms, waded through the water, set her down safely on the further side, and walked on without waiting for her thanks. The younger monk was astounded. He crossed the stream—with some difficulty, because he was smaller—and then bounced along behind his companion, seething with suppressed criticism. At last he could stand it no longer. Catching up with the other, he said, in a voice that showed how deeply scandalized he was, ‘Brother—your vow!’ The elder monk looked round at him in surprise, and then said, rather sharply, ‘What! Are you still carrying that girl?’

Of our Lady above all people it can be said that her spirituality consisted in eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.

A similar concept of character to John Bayley’s was presented by Iris Murdoch, in an influential essay called ‘Against Dryness’, published in Encounter in 1961. Her approach is more overtly philosophical: she argues that in the face of the failure of traditional liberal philosophy to develop an adequate concept of man, the novel can give us a full sense of the uniqueness and mysteriousness of human personality. She finds these qualities exemplified in the great novelists of the nineteenth century, particularly the Russians, and contrasts their kind of novel with the typical fictional modes of the twentieth century: the ‘journalistic’ novel of accumulated fact and information, a degenerate descendant of literary naturalism, which is often a formless, inflated daydream; and the ‘crystalline’ novel of dry aesthetic concentration, which is more concerned with an ideal of form than with conveying the variousness of reality. A normative note emerges at the end of Miss Murdoch’s essay:

There is a clear consonance between Iris Murdoch’s ideas and John Bayley’s, and, again, the contrast between these ideas and the characteristic utterance of the Continental or American avant-garde is striking.

Both sociologists and philosophers are becoming more and more aware that a man’s personality is formed by the interplay between himself and his society. If he is transplanted into a different society or different culture at a sufficiently formative period of his life, then that culture will determine the directions which he takes in many fields of thought and activity; if, on the other hand, such a transplantation takes place when he is too rigidly (or firmly) fixed in the ways of a different society, he may be unable to communicate with or relate to the members of his new society, and remain a frustrated member of his old group, from which he is now separated. Examples of both these situations are easy to find among European immigrants to the United States. In more primitive societies where there are less universal conventions and systems of protection, the involvement of the individual within his group, and his dependence on it, are even more obvious. Today the Coca-Cola and Kleenex culture is worldwide; the traveller’s cheque and the passport will provide a fair measure of financial and legal protection the world over. Group loyalties and so group particularism, strong as they may be, need to be less extreme than in primitive times. The psychologists will tell us that a sense of belonging is a crucial factor for psychological stability, but in Hebrew times real belonging to a group was a condition of survival. This was one element which generated the way of thinking which was first characterized by H. Wheeler Robinson as that of the ‘corporate personality’.

It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.

It is well known what confusions and misunderstandings have arisen in the history of Christianity by translations from one language into another. They can be worse when attempts are made to translate religious literature from a European language into languages of peoples with cultures very different from ours, such as the peoples of Africa. I have recently come across an illustration of this in a C.M.S. hymn book in Zande (Buku Aimina, The Religious Tract Society, London, n.d.). I shall present a few specimens of translations into this Central African language of familiar verses as examples. Before doing so I should say that Zande is a tonal language and that the translations are made to conform to English metre and to be sung to the English tunes. This in itself is enough to render the hymns more or less meaningless. I am not trying to make fun of the missionaries, for whom I had great respect, but I must say that I am astonished at their attempts not only to translate hymns to be sung to a foreign system of notation but also to translate them, where possible, literally. Thus:

This would have sounded quite remarkable to an ordinary Zande (one who was not an instructed Christian convert).