Norman Mailer has been travelling the lecture circuit with Stokely Carmichael this winter. At dinner one evening, a friend of mine tells me, Mailer said he had begun the tour expecting to support ‘Black Power’ in a general way, but introducing a few cautionary phrases. After the first question period, he realised that he was ‘way to the left of Stokely.’ Many white liberals react like this, criticizing Black Power for its betrayal of the radical ideals they have associated with the civil rights movement. Non-violence is one of these vicarious ideals: very few white Americans are non-violent for themselves, their right to defend themselves or their families has never been called into question. But they had admired Martin Luther King for loving his enemies and turning the other cheek. Now they were hearing Stokely Carmichael’s voice, growing testy at constant requests for reassurance saying ‘I have never rejected violence’. He has two tones of voice, one for white living rooms and one for black crowds and the same words have different overtones. He has a standard response to a question about violence. It goes something like this. ‘If you don’t mess with me, I’ll leave you alone’. Pause. ‘But if you move to strike me, I’ll break your arm.’ Then, on a rising tone, ‘and I might break the other one too.’ When this is greeted by wild cheers, whites come away pretty shaken.

The fact is that the white liberal does not live way to the left of Stokely, he just feels that way.

Rhodesia today is an unhappy country. It is unhappy in its divisions, its rulers and the direction they have taken; unhappy in the international ostracism its white citizens have brought upon it and in the kind of friends they are making abroad; unhappy too in that its human and moral problem has been made a bone of political contention in Britain; unhappy especially because its Christian citizens by and large differ so little from the rest in their social attitudes and aims that Christianity seems irrelevant to the solution of the basic problem.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that Rhodesia should become the centre of a controversy that is assuming international proportions. Its problem is very much a problem of our time: a problem of acceptance of and adjustment to new social patterns and unities which conflict with habits of mind and living acquired in the past and the expectations they have engendered. To those who have enjoyed a dignified and stable existence with a comfortable standard of living, far-reaching social change, however inescapable in the long run, appears as a threat to their own and their children’s security and, if this security has been won by their own enterprise and effort, as an unjust undoing of their achievement. When the required change is one of the integration of two groups of people so different in cultural background, experience and present attainment as are the two major racial groups in Rhodesia – the Africans and the Europeans

Mr Roe’s book comes as something of a surprise; not because of its contents or its presentation, but simply because it has not been done before. Of all the comparative literature theses of the ‘Jones in France’/‘Dupont in England’ variety, it is natural to expect that someone would have examined the role of Lamennais in this country. From any point of view, he is one of the greatest names in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. He lived in England for awhile (a crucial while: it led to his much controverted decision to take orders), and had many English connections and admirers. No matter: Mr Roe has done the job very well indeed, though, as he is careful to warn us himself, he has been more concerned with the effect of Lamennais upon England, as exemplar, than with the influence of English ideas upon Lamennais.

By the development of current religious and political ideas in his own person, Lamennais offered to English observers the essence of certain key notions in religion and politics which were otherwise diffused throughout the pages of books and periodicals and the actions of very different groups of men. He was one of the most articulate exponents of the renascent Bourbon legitimism with de Bonald and Chateaubriand in the days of the Drapeau blanc and the Conservateur.

Fr Fergus Kerr (Slant g, June-July, 1966) presents as self-evident the proposition that ‘theology is primarily a way of talking about man', and supports this with the historicist description that ‘every major breakthrough in our understanding of God issues from an equivalent breakthrough in our understanding of man’. Our anthropology has undergone a revolution, so it is plain that our theology must, if it is to survive, undergo an equivalent revolution. It might at first appear that Professor William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School is the man to work the revolution. After the New Reformation and the New Morality, the New Essence of Christianity? He is certainly aware that ‘all our theology, even our essences of Christianity, must be done afresh in every generation’, and makes a brave attempt at this doing afresh. I want to say something here of how brave the attempt is and why I think that it ultimately fails to engineer the revolution. The kind of thing that Fr Kerr and Professor Hamilton presume about revelation and theology is perhaps easiest conveyed by suggesting that the case of the prophet Hosea has become our paradigm. Hosea’s understanding of his own condition, of his continuing love for the unfaithful Gomer, led him to understand the continuing love of Yahweh for the unfaithful Israel. Hosea’s longing for the return of his wife was not a longing for this or that aspect of her character but a longing for the woman herself, for Gomer. So Hosea thinks of Yahweh’s redemptive hope for Israel as a promise for the whole people. In this his theology differs radically from that of Amos and Isaiah whose experience led them to speak in terms of a remnant of the people having a share in the kingdom. Hosea has first of all made an effort to understand his own situation and has then been able to understand something of God. He has made his experience into a sign for the whole society of Israel. As Kerr says: ‘God reveals himself in a new light to people who have gained some new insight into what they are’.

Raymond Williams strives to unite fidelity to tragic realities with an absolute secular revolutionary faith. On the social plane this leads him, as we have seen, to a highly problematic, indefinitely recessive, conception of ‘total redemption’ – and to attendant moral risks. And, so long as ‘so absolute a conception’ of some actual social future is envisaged, it is proper to ask how much is included in this conceptual absoluteness. There is a story about a conference of French writers, soon after the last war, in which a Marxist, discussing the mastery of human suffering under socialism, was asked what he thought of the problem of, for instance, a child run over in a traffic accident. His reply was that, in a truly socialist society, there would be no traffic accidents. It is not necessary to approach these problems with a similar ingenuousness in order to recognize the pertinence of such simple questions. Social injustices aside – and can we really envisage an era when all injustice and alienation will belong to the past? – accidents will never be wholly avoidable (at any rate, there will always be floods and earthquakes). It surely cannot be mere pedantry, or paralysis, that continues to find such problems to the point.

There would of course be no such problem if the theoretic future were not called upon to redress past and present actualities so absolutely. But in that case the whole imaginative universe of the ‘total redemption of humanity’ by revolution – and the whole moral calculus going with it – would wither away.