‘The king kisses the hands of my lady Abbess’, rang the cry across the convent walls. The year, 1602, and the occasion, a hunting trip made by Henri IV in the neighbourhood of the Cistercian foundation of Port-Royal. The abbess in question was just eleven years old, and pattens had to be found for her to stand on to receive the king properly. It was not the abbess he came to see, though, but her father, Antoine Amauld, who to all intents and purposes controlled the abbey of Port Royal. His daughter, Jacqueline, was only nine when she took her vows in October, 1600, though the request addressed to Rome for her to be made at once coadjutrix of the abbess described her as seventeen. Under these inauspicious circumstances of flagrant royal patronage and deception of the papal authority began the startling career of Angélique Arnauld and the two institutions of Port-Royal which were the most significant phenomena in the religious history of the ‘great century’ in France.

It is useful to be reminded how this purest of all the religious movements of the seventeenth century began in an atmosphere of simony and corruption, because it goes some way to explain the lazy monastic ideal against which Mère Angélique, a very vigorous, shrewd and forthright French version of St Teresa of Avila, later rebelled, and it also gives us some inkling of the family strength of the Arnaulds and their connections, which enabled Port-Royal to stand up to the Archbishop of Paris and the royal incursions under Louis XIV as long as it did.

The problem of politics is essentially the problem of reconciling personal relationships to public or impersonal human relationships. For we all feel a tension between the two. We begin life almost wholly within a context of personal relationships – with parents or parental substitutes who present themselves to us as individuals. It is only gradually that we discover a wider world or relationships with people who are not members of the family – that is to say, people not familiar to us. Slowly, as childhood proceeds our original personal relationships are surrounded by a rarefied and less know-able but ever-expanding ‘atmosphere’ of unfamiliar humanity. This ‘atmosphere’ of impersonal humanity can only be partially explored, and has for the most part to be taken for granted. Of course, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between those whom we know in a real, personal way and the surrounding mass of humanity which we can know only in a notional, impersonal way, but just as the familiar air of Birmingham or Bermuda gradually thins out as we go upwards, until we come to a point where we quite obviously need some artificial means for continuing to breathe there at all, so we gradually come to a point, in the exploration of our human surroundings, where we need to set up some artificial, institutional framework if we are to carry on living in that rarefied atmosphere. That is to say we need to set up a political order and to develop a political consciousness.

‘Tell me you definition of politics and I will tell you your politics.’ The real breakdown in communication between radical and conservative is about the nature of politics itself, and I find this breakdown acute in reading Bernard Bergonzi’s article.

A radical politics summons and activates fundamental belief about the nature of human relationship and tries to sustain this commitment through the detail of actual debate; if it is truly radical, its detailed involvement is controlled by this commitment to an alternative version of man in society. A conservative politics is not convinced that politics is basically about belief; it is itself suspicious of political activity, as inevitably corrupt and crude, intellectually suspect, and rationalises this suspicion by making politics a ‘science’ or an ‘art’, a matter of efficiency or running the machine, a dirty but necessary business, or a career like any other. Because it is not gripped by the conviction that politics activates belief, it is liable to be quickly disorientated when it meets other, opposing beliefs; it is driven back on its own bases, hesitant and self-doubting. A conservative politics shows, for reasons that can be argued and understood, the paradox of a deep failure of belief in itself, as anything more than a technique.

Mr Bergonzi seems to me to illustrate most of these points. For him, politics leaves out a good deal of human activity, as his second paragraph makes clear. This, instantly, is the conservative definition: politics as the actual processes of local and national government.

The Catholic psychiatrist can justly feel that the Ramsey Committee’s findings are likely to make harder rather than easier his present work in the moral setting in which he conceives it: because mainly of the indeterminate, even muddled, attitude taken up by the Committee towards the status of the foetus and the psychiatric possibilities in the mother; because secondarily no understanding is shown of the present difficulties of the Catholic psychiatrist confronted with the demand for termination.

In speaking thus frankly, there is no intention to impugn the Committee’s breadth of vision, constructive desire or sincerity. The writer has the Committee’s chairman, Professor Ramsey, as a personal friend and wise and far-seeing administrative colleague. Acquainted also with the other two Oxford dons on the Committee, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, and with the Committee’s psychiatrist, Portia Holman, he knows all three of them for their humane concern. These characteristics pervade the Report. The first two chapters sum up admirably the reasons for the present importance of abortion; the history of British legislative concern for the question abutting in the two currently relevant statutes and their successful assailment by Alec Bourne, the gynaecologist; and that of Christian canonical concern from Tertullian onwards, including the period of distinction (never, it seems, one of essential nature but only of ground for varying the penalty for infanticide), between foetus animatus and foetus inanimatus. The Committee concludes Chapter II with the affirmation that the subject is a proper concern for the law on the primary ground, which any Catholic will endorse, that every human being has the right to life unless his unlawful act forfeits it.

In 1825, while still at Oriel, Newman brought out his Life of Apollonius of Tyana which he had first written as an article in the now forgotten Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In it he examined the claims made on behalf of a remarkable first-century contemporary of Jesus whose birth was accompanied by portents of various kinds, who quickly achieved great fame as an ascetic and philosopher, to whom many miracles and exorcisms were attributed and who, after a holy death at an advanced age, ascended, so it was claimed, bodily into heaven and was afterwards seen by certain persons who had entertained doubts about the future life. The first full account of this extraordinary person was written by a certain Philostratos, one of the smart literary set which foregathered in the salon of the Empress Julia Domna whose husband, one recalls, had trouble with the Scots and died at York. This accomplished woman had got hold somehow of the Memoirs of a disciple of Apollonius called Damis. She handed them over to Philostratos inviting him to write up a biography, making use as occasion demanded of any other sources available. This he did and his work is still extant. Newman’s study, as also his Essay on Miracles which appeared in the same year, was given over to a large extent to refuting the claims made on behalf of Apollonius. This was a perfectly legitimate undertaking but it raises the question: here you have two contemporary figures of whose existence we can have no reasonable doubt and about whom certain writings have come down to us (Justin also calls the Gospels Memoirs).