At the end of my previous article I proposed to examine, in this one, whether religion might not be able to offer a therapy for South Africa’s manifold neuroses, which it is beyond the power of politics to provide. The only symptom of neurotic condition which I discussed in that article was colour prejudice. There is another, related, symptom which is if anything more prejudicial to a healthy society, and that is a general devaluation of ‘the liberties of the subject’; at least it is something more disturbing even to a conservative Englishman with a long tradition of civil liberties, free association and freedom of speech in his blood. These excellent microbes seem to have been almost totally extracted from the blood stream of white South Africa; and the fault does not seem to lie simply with the governing Nationalist Party. This Party has simply been much more ruthlessly effective in giving its actual and potential rivals a treatment of repression which it experienced itself from its opponents before it came into power. It has profited by, rather than induced, an endemic lack of concern for individual liberty. It is an ironical situation, and to underline the irony, I would like to quote from the political reminiscences of Dr D. F. Malan, the first Nationalist Prime Minister after the last war.

As a result of an educational system no longer the prerogative of the clergy, a multiplication of fields of study, a great diffusion of culture, improved communications, and more rapid social transformations, we live in an age in which man is more ready to criticize and to challenge standards hitherto accepted. Individual persons, political institutions, schools of artistic style, humanist ethical movements, racial and national groups, women’s and youth organizations, economic blocs—all are more conscious of their differentiations within a highly complex society and demand that their freedom and autonomy be recognized, refusing to be dictated to by religious leaders or state authority. The accelerated pace of change in modern life, the movement of populations to the towns, their lack of social roots or stability, overt and subconscious advertising, heavy work, group pressure, mechanical and psychological noise, the shock to routine thinking consequent upon emigration deprive man of the solitude and peace needed for constructive thinking, while technological advance makes man seem less in need of God’s help for his daily bread, and so more ready to pick holes in traditional religion, amidst the heightened fascination and lure of the world.

The present religious choice is not simply between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor between Christianity and Natural Religion. It is a choice for or against God. Open, popular, organized and widespread, atheism is no longer hidden and exceptional, but, buttressed by polity and culture, constitutes the world’s most urgent problem.

When theologians grumble and growl and commissions sit, a mere schoolmaster might have the sense to leave a book like this alone. It is true that the same theologians who bare their teeth at the little eccentricities of the Dutch Catechism have not, through the long years of damage, waved our own aloft shrieking for the faggot, an omission which anyone really interested in education must find it hard to forgive. Even without such unchristian, carping thoughts, an educator not hooked on the ancient catalogues of angelic powers might well go in to bat for the Dutch simply on the grounds that they have produced the right educational approach.

It is not only its approach that I welcome, the content is often of immediate interest and importance to the schoolmaster, e.g. the section on ‘The faith to which one is bred’ in which are discussed the problems of child education and eventual personal acceptance and conversion that are built in to the practice of infant baptism. The views expressed endear the authors to me, but more yet the manner in which the problem is discussed in the light of the experience of the reader and the attempt to initiate trains of thought—and so it is not the content so much as the catechism’s significance in education that I intend to discuss.

Other catechisms in use have not shown much interest in thought, only in answers—sometimes accompanied by dogmatically phrased ‘reasons’ in lieu of thoughtful discussion, but, with some less convincing answers, the bald statement alone without discussion or context.

In the traditional interpretation mankind is a unity because it is, so to speak, a genealogical tree of which each man’s personal life is a branch. I suggest rather that the unity of mankind must be thought of as a unity in history, a unity in a play with one plot in which each man has a rôle. Just as Aquinas conceived of a biological intention of nature presupposed to all personal intentions, and of the propagation of mankind as presupposed to all personal lives (and therefore in a position to taint them); so we must conceive of an intention of history, which I call its plot, underlying every man’s personal life in so far as that life is a rôle in the total play. Just as a man, on Aquinas’ picture, is to some extent determined by an intention of nature even before he begins to take personal charge of his life, so too man’s life must receive sense from the part it plays in the whole play, even before one judges of the success or non-success of the way he personally played that part.

I would suggest, indeed, that this notion of a plot in history more truly expresses the nature of man than any genealogical or biological concept. For if, in some unimaginable future, intelligent animals were discovered on some other planet who belonged to some quite different branch of the biological tree, nevertheless, because they were intelligent animals, it would in principle be possible for us to communicate with them, for us to affect each other’s culture, and for us to grow into having one history with them.

One of the most welcome features of the contemporary Christian scene is the drive towards ecumenism. This is not only because of the potential achievement of a single united Church which alone makes sense but because the gradual removal of these virulent, self-inflicted wounds of denominational partisanship is likely to free Christians to face alternative urgent challenges. The picture is sombre and no one who really cares about the Christian faith can have any doubts that the majority of our fellow human beings find organized religion as we have known and practised it an irrelevancy. We have now reached the stage when we can no longer take refuge behind stoutly held rationalizations that this massive withdrawal of interest is the responsibility of every one except ourselves. Such anodynes are no longer effective because no one outside the Christian circles believed in them before and now we, too, have rejected them. Stripped of our customary but gradually ineffective defences, we find ourselves in a whirlpool of multitudinous and often contradictory ideologies, explanations and solutions for our difficulties. Like a person who is recovering from concussion, the Christian Church is experiencing the world round it with hazy, dimmed and often blurred reactions desperately longing, at times, to return to the tranquillity of unconsciousness.

Apart from a certain number of discreet and limited meetings between Christians and Marxists, it was not until comparatively recently that these discussions came to the public notice. There was a Catholic participation at the Semaines de la Pensee Marxiste in early 1964 and then a reciprocal Marxist presence at the Semaines des Intellectuels Calholiques at the beginning of the following year. From France, the lead in this field has now passed to Germany, and more precisely to Austria, where in the spring of 1965, the Paulusgesellschaft, an association of German-speaking Catholic university teachers, organized a meeting specifically devoted to a dialogue between Christians and Marxists from both West and East Europe. There have since been two more meetings of this nature; the most recent, in 1967, was held at Marienbad in Czechoslovakia.

Of course, the idea of a meeting between Catholics and atheist movements (of which Marxism is presently the most important) was mentioned quite clearly in 1963 by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris. He there made a distinction, since become familiar, between static theories condemned by the Church and the movements inspired by these theories, but which evolve in time. He said: ‘In as far as these movements are in accord with sound principles of reason and are a response to the just aspirations of the human person, who would refuse to recognize in them elements that are positive and merit our approval? It could happen that certain meetings with a view to practical co-operation that had up till now appeared inopportune or sterile, could now produce real advantages or at least contain the promise of such for the future.’

In 1960 one person in ten in the United States was non-white. Today it is one in nine. By the end of the decade it will be one in eight. Of persons under fourteen today it is one in seven. Of persons under the age of one it is one in six.

The American race problem is too large to be swept under the carpet. In fact it is of such a size as to influence the whole course of world politics: for if one thing is clear in this turbulent world it is that the major source of conflict of the latter half of this century will be the race/poverty problem and that America will, in one way or another, be at the hub of it.

Already in America the situation is being polarized to the extent where it is becoming more and more rare for white and black people to do anything together. This was my conclusion after two years in the U.S.: first in the liberal, nearly all white, peaceful university town of Madison, Wisconsin, and secondly in the West Side ghetto of Chicago where no other white people lived and where the crime rate was one of the highest in the country. And since leaving America twelve months ago I have seen the process of polarization accelerate at an astonishing rate. All my white and Negro friends agree that they see no alternative in sight to an escalating number of major explosions that will make Newark and Detroit look like tea-parties.

The tradition that the third gospel was written by Luke the doctor dies hard. We may realize that the ‘Luke the doctor’ of Colossians 4, 14 is not necessarily the same Luke as the one to whom the gospel is attributed (just as there is no shadow of an indication that the Mark of the second gospel is any of the Marks mentioned in the Acts and the Epistles). We may know that all attempts to show that the author of the third gospel used medical language collapse, simply because there was no such thing as technical medical language in those days. Yet there remains a sympathy with human suffering and appreciation of the many-sidedness of men’s characters, a power to make a penetrating yet kindly assessment which is often —rightly or wrongly—associated with the medical man, the Dr Camerons or even the Dr Findlays of this world. But Luke is no country doctor from the highlands or the valleys, and it is because of this that his special preoccupation with rich and poor is especially significant to Christians of an affluent society brought face to face with poverty.

Luke stands out among the other New Testament writers by a certain grace and dignity. The gospel of Mark, on which a large part of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels is based, is undisguisedly Kleinliteratur, stories told uncomplicatedly in simple, popular form, without literary pretension; he writes the sort of Greek which was probably spoken by the lower classes in the cities of the Roman empire.

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.

I should like now to sum up the discussion so far, trying to show that what I have been saying does not depend only on what to many will seem a queer and barbarous jargon. To put it in other words: the triumphalist, because he lacks the insight social studies give, does not realize that not only do other minds exist but other kinds of authority, other patterns of government and social living which he does not know. Every one of them has a right to participate in the Church. No one has the right to say that what exists now is the only pattern and must be accepted as a condition of entry. What is the triumphalist pattern? Their pope is a Lord Chief Justice dispensing authoritative justice in a court of law. A man who must be guarded by strict rules of laesae majestatis lest the law be brought into disrepute. The sort of man who reproached Peter Damian when he criticized the late pope, St Leo IX, for recruiting a gang of ruffians to fight the Normans for him under all the trappings of a Holy War. He received the unanswerable reply, We don’t call David a saint for his relations with Bathsheba. But it takes more than commonsense to silence a triumphalist. In the case of a secular judge, one can see that rules of laesae majestatis are essential.

On 16 December 1966 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted three important instruments concerning human rights. These were the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both adopted unanimously; and also an Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was adopted by majority vote. The adoption of these texts represents one more step in the slow, but on the whole steady, progress towards an International Bill of Rights. When this project was first mooted after the Second World War, it was realized that at least three distinct stages would be necessary. First, there would have to be broad international agreement on the rights to be enjoyed by every human being. Secondly, States would have to accept a definite legal obligation to afford these rights to all persons within their jurisdiction. Thirdly, there would have to be provisions for enforcement.

These proposals sound simple enough, but it is as well to realize how revolutionary they were at the time and how many and serious are the obstacles that still have to be overcome before they can be implemented.

Traditional international law was a legal system applying essentially between States, although it made provision also for what the International Court of Justice has called ‘instances of action upon the international plane by certain entities which are not States’. Such instances have been performed by a miscellaneous collection of entities including the Holy See, the Sovereign Order of Malta, international institutions such as the United Nations and the Specialized Agencies, and even rebels granted belligerent status without yet having been recognized as States.

Every man of sense who has had to fill up a form in which there is a space labelled ‘race’ must have been tempted to write down ‘human’. That ‘Caucasian’ (an echo of a long obsolete ethnological theory) or ‘Negro’ should be required answers has profound moral and political significance in our time. It represents the enchantment of the intellect by a myth comparable in its power and in its forbidding consequences to the myth of antisemitism. The follies and cruelties that go with this enchantment are well known and need not be listed. We may well suspect that the spell that binds so many cannot be broken by argument, that time spent in examining the sophistries of racialist theory (resting for the most part on a radical confusion of phenotype with genotype) is time wasted. But Christians at least have a duty to examine their consciences and their presuppositions, both in order to correct their attitudes and in order to know how to witness to the truth in the world of our day.

What we do in unavoidable ignorance of how things are may be excusable or perhaps meritorious, even in those cases where a knowledge of how things are would have prompted us to quite other courses.

The process by which the enduring reputation of one writer emerges among many of (at the time) apparently equal merit is mysterious. We do not so much change our minds as discover them; no dramatic reversal is involved but a gradual enlightenment makes it clear that (as in the present case) David Jones is such a figure. The supreme quality of his art (using the word in its inclusive sense, for it would be impossible, so closely related is the technique of his drawing to that of his use of words, to say that David Jones is an artist who also writes, or the reverse) has long been apparent to an inner circle of his friends, which included T. S. Eliot; but he has never at any time been a widely read, still less a fashionable writer, nor is he ever likely to become so, for his work is too fine and subtle and learned for popular taste. To ‘discover’ David Jones is to enter an elite.

It was for a time possible for my generation to persuade ourselves that ‘the late Yeats’ was a different and incomparably better poet than ‘the early Yeats’ in order to justify what was really a change in ourselves and not in the poet. In the case of David Jones nothing of the kind would be possible. In the current number of Agenda there are several pieces of recent writing (or recently completed, for David Jones has a habit of laying aside pieces of work for years and then getting them out and working over them) but these are not technically different from, or necessarily better or worse than, In Parenthesis, his poetic novel, or epic poem, of the first World War.

During recent years, a great deal has been written about Newman as an historian, but, somewhat surprisingly, comparatively little on his deeper understanding of history. This, of course, is a vast subject with many different aspects. In spite of an essential scepticism about the possibility of a philosophy of history, Newman himself did indulge in occasional excursions into this dangerous field, but because he was basically a religious thinker, he ultimately saw history in the light of his belief in a divine revelation. Faith enabled the Christian to see the reality beyond the shadows, the works of divine providence and the manifestations of the sacramental principle. This is the theological background to the apologetic contrast which he made between the nature or permanence of the Church on the one hand, and shifting or temporary human organizations on the other. It is also significant that his historical realism in the context of the nineteenth-century belief in progress, was the result of a theological, in fact an eschatological, position.

There are, however, two particular lines of thought which are of more than specialized interest; the situation of the Church in the world and the role of the individual. The more accurately the history of the world was investigated and put into shape, the more it evidently appeared to advance according to fixed laws both as regards time and place, but this did not interfere with individual responsibility (Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (O.S.), p. 189). Throughout his life, Newman was convinced of the fundamental significance of the individual like the Liberal Anglicans whose philosophy of history was firmly grounded on that ultimate historical reality, the individual will.

In 1942 Fritz Redl put forward a paper in which he considered group formation around a central person. He formulated ten categories and one of these seems of especial interest when we consider the formation around Christ at the time of the Last Supper.

One might have thought that the apostolic group would have fallen into Redl’s fourth category, that of a group which has ‘The central person as a love object’. Tentatively it is here suggested that this was not the case and that the apostolic group might more fittingly be considered as falling into Redl’s fifth category, that of a group that has ‘The central person as the object of aggressive drives’.

It must be stated at the outset that the suggestions put forward by Redl concerned a group in which there was recognition of the aggression that was prevalent. For the purpose of this article it is assumed that the apostolic group not only gave no overt sign of their aggression but it is likely that it was so repressed that they did not even know it was there.

1. Introduction—the present malaise

One of the effects of the Council has been a clearing of the intellectual atmosphere to the point where honesty is tolerated even when it runs counter to deeply rooted taboos. Dr Victor J. Pospishil, priest of the Byzantine Rite Catholic diocese of Philadelphia, has published an appeal for a profound reform in the marriage discipline of the Roman Communion: Divorce and Remarriage. Towards a New Catholic Teaching (Burns & Oates, London, 1967). A canonist with experience in tribunal work, Dr Pospishil presents a convincing case for a reform in present discipline which would allow for the extension of the power of the Church to dissolve those marriages which are ratum et consummatum, sacramental marriages consummated by the sexual union of the parties. As he points out, these are the only marriages excluded from this power in the Church at present.

There is no doubt that a profound malaise with respect to the ecclesiastical discipline on Christian marriage exists in the Western Church today, a malaise which expresses itself in many ways. There is an ever-increasing number of petitions for nullity or dissolution, and in many cases diocesan tribunals are ill-equipped to handle formal (nullity) cases. The escape provided in the Western Church for people in non-viable situations for the past few centuries is, under present circumstances, clearly inadequate.

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.

As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.

One of the fundamental problems that any critique of Capitalism must face is that such a critique should, if successful, isolate features of a capitalist society that are specifically ‘capitalist’ from, for example, general features of industrial societies. This problem is most acute in the case of the human implications of the system. After all, the quality of life of an industrial worker does not differ as greatly between the United States and the Soviet Union as ideology, official and unofficial, would have one imagine. Indeed an examination of numerous features of American and Soviet society reveals strong similarities in social organization, and the distribution of power and income. The existence of such similarities has sometimes led observers to conclude that a process of ‘convergence’ is taking place; that as the Soviet Union becomes increasingly industrialized and wealthy, and as technical change takes place in both countries, the systems continually produce similar solutions to similar problems.

In an extreme form such a view can become a kind of technological determinism. The vast and complex technology of our time determines for us power and social relationships and there is little we can do to change them. In such an extreme form this is akin to a rather crude Marxism, but one that logically applies the idea that the social structure is largely determined by the structure of production even to societies in which, officially, the means of production are in the hands of the people. However, even if one admits a larger role than this for political and social choice, there are clearly bounds on the social reforms and reorganizations that would be consistent with the continued working of the industrial system.

Dr Lake’s achievement over the past ten years or so has been considerable. He has not limited himself to his own clinical work, but has built up the Clinical Theology Centre in Nottingham and led a team of doctors and clergy in organizing seminars throughout the country. It is he more than anyone else who has alerted the clergy in this country to the need for the right kind of personal relationships in pastoral work, and to the psychological blockages which too often present barriers. This book, based on his teaching booklets but going well beyond them, will spread his influence even more widely. Our chief feeling must surely be one of gratitude to Dr Lake, and to the publishers for a splendid piece of book production. One might almost say the book is too well produced. Such a massive volume gives the impression of being a definitive text, and such a bold attempt at synthesis makes criticism seem niggardly. All the same, it would be no service to Dr Lake if readers were to accept his writings uncritically, for he is working in a field where several disciplines intersect, and where development is continuous, so that mutual criticism is a condition of life.

The first doubt concerns the title Clinical Theology itself. This is not just a quibble about words. What is the book really about, theology or psychiatry? Dr Lake has been criticized for not being sufficiently rigorous either in his theology or his psychiatry, according to one’s point of view. The sub-title, A theological and psychiatric basis to clinical pastoral care makes the intention clearer.

I should like now to turn to a particular example and a particular pontificate, that of Gregory VIII. Gregory is, of course, the triumphalist’s hero: what history text-book is there that hasn’t its section on the Gregorian reforms? It seems to be scarcely noticed that these ‘reforms’—the division of the Church into two castes, a clerical caste with a duty to rule the laity, whose function it was to fight in causes the clergy considered worthy—are very largely what has come under attack at Vatican II and since. Nothing is more striking, I think, than the present Pope’s repudiation of one of the more notorious of Gregory’s friends, Cardinal Humbert, and his Constantinople ex-communications in 1054. Now the fact that certain policies could be reforms in the late eleventh century, yet be abuses nine hundred years later, is not in itself surprising. But in the case of Gregory there are important lessons to be learnt and important questions to be asked.

But there is the question of means too, and there is a limit to the degree to which valuable consequences can excuse bad thinking and evil actions. Gregory, it seems to me, was guilty of both. The sickening frequency with which in his correspondence the quotation ‘cursed be the hand that abstains from blood’ is found cannot be excused with a reference to troubled times. Plenty of men of goodwill were just as shocked at the time. Again Gregory’s attempts to make the Sardinians and Corsicans acknowledge that they belonged to the patrimony of Peter and must pay the pope a tax are not in themselves very important.