It is no exaggeration to say that there is a revolution afoot in the field of social welfare. In recent decades there has been much radical re-thinking; principles which previously had been tacitly accepted, in some cases for a century or more, have become the subject of an increasingly severe and telling criticism. Experimental ventures are breaking new ground almost daily, and, though at present few have been running for a length of time or on a scale sufficient to yield more than marginal results, they are nonetheless proving that an urgent need exists for still further research and new endeavours.

Among the few which can claim a significant and definitive breakthrough, both in terms of success and in relation to other existing techniques and structures, is the Ladyeholme Association. This has been working in London for the past seventeen years and has achieved a 75 per cent success rate in re-integrating with society families and the remants of families which, for one reason or another, have dropped out of general society and into a twilight region of (semi-) destitution; for example, the unmarried mother and her children, the ex-prisoner and his family, the mentally ‘recovered’ in search of a home, the prostitute escaping the trade but needing shelter and moral support, the socially unstable of almost every sort. It is a mistake to believe, as so many of us do, that existing social services are doing enough in this deceptively simple field; for the most part, the problem has either been ignored or aggravated by inadequate ‘answers’.

The statement by Enoch Powell last May had all the inevitability, if none of the elegance, of the climax to a Greek tragedy. It was inevitable that a man who had already made frequent use of the rather tawdry rhetoric of largely fictitious statistics about the ‘flood’ of immigrants and who fancies himself as a poet should begin to talk about rivers of blood. Just as bad a parody of Greek tragedy was represented by the chorus from the respectable press. From pompous phrases about ‘dangerous nonsense’ in the Economist to the somewhat more tart strictures of The Times leader, the respectable press offered no insight into the significance of Mr Powell’s speech, but merely demonstrated its own moral rectitude and an incredible belief in the power of pure liberal reason. Many commentators appeared to believe that the fact that some of the dockers had mis-spelled their slogans proved their impotence. But many of the saints and many of the S.S. were near-illiterate. If intellectuals wish to contribute to the fight against racialism they must do so not by proving that racist myths are myths (that is old hat) but by analysing the nature of English racialism to see more clearly how it can be fought. In particular we must decide whether racialism in England is an aberration of individuals and groups or whether it is something essential to our society, whether England is or is not ‘racialist’.

It has traditionally been one of the central tasks of theology to determine man’s relationship to God in his state of redeemed sinfulness. The various solutions put forward in answer to this question contributed greatly to the divisions of Western Christendom as we now know it. The controversy has nearly always turned on the question of what role man can play in his own redemption. For Luther man could only be said to be righteous on account of the merits of Christ imputed to him while he in himself always remained a sinner. Trent gives an somewhat milder form of the doctrine of Simul Justus et Peccator in attributing to man an actual righteousness by which he can make redemption his own through works. Much of the discussion is a matter of terminology, as Hans Kung has shown in his book on Barth’s doctrine of justification. Such discussions seem at their liveliest when a need is felt to return to a more theocentric theology. Luther felt that the Roman Church was turning man away from God with her doctrine of merit and so glorifying man. He felt called to remind the Church that nothing is possible without the grace of Christ and that man can never claim any righteousness of his own. The tendencies to which Luther objected can be said to have been repeated in the ‘reductionist’ theologies of Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher. The present interest of Catholics in the teaching of Marx and the theology of ‘Secular Christianity’ would certainly have seemed to him as it does now to Barth, as further examples of the reprehensible tendency to anthropocentric religion.

Three dissimilar books illustrate three aspects of that search for renewal which now characterizes so much of the life of the Church.

The Church in Transition (Geoffrey Chapman, 16s.) by Desmond Fisher, a Roman Catholic journalist, is a popular account of that great upheaval which would probably have come in any case but which was largely set in motion by Pope John. There are in most churches good simple believers who ask not in any obstinate spirit of opposition to all change, but in all innocence, ‘Why can't we just go on as we are?’ There are many books which we might put into their hands, but this is one of the clearest and best. It describes in lucid terms the preparations for the second Vatican Council and the subsequent events. Mr Fisher recognizes the importance of the Council, but sees clearly that it is only a beginning. ‘Vatican II proved the truth of the old tag—Ecclesia semper reformanda.’ ‘The aggorniamento is for all time and it must go on.’ But this work will not go on unless not only ecclesiastics but lay people are involved in it, and its ideas penetrate the thinking of Roman Catholics everywhere.

The Church today is engaged in a great crisis of self-examination. It is looking at its claims, its traditional role, its theology. It is revising its rituals. This reforming effort is intended to bring Christian worship fully into the twentieth century. But, alas, the zeal for coming up to date proceeds without recourse to one of the most relevant critical techniques which this century has produced, I mean sociological comparison. Hence some naivété in the religious reformer about his own role. He seems not to suspect how much his views are the product of his secular environment. Nor does he consider whether the faithful are free to follow his proposals, though they also must be constrained by their own social environment. More important, he does not seem to foresee any difficulty in abolishing some forms of worship and retaining others. Whereas, if the sociological dimension has as much power as I think it has, King Canute had more chance of saying which pebbles should remain dry.

Here is another of those radical-theology desacralizing books from the continent, this time translated from the French (Structures of Christian Priesthood by Jean Paul-Audet, Sheed & Ward, London 1967, pp. 200, 14s.). The author is a French-Canadian Dominican, a distinguished biblical scholar still at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. The general theme is broadly similar to that of Fr Robert Adolfs’ The Grave of God, but less challengingly expressed: namely, that the pastoral ‘structures’ (blessed word!) of the Church unfortunately took a wrong turning in Constantine’s time or even earlier and now need de-institutionalizing back to something more like the apostolic age. Interwoven is an argument against obligatory celibacy for the priesthood, which it will be easier to leave to the end of this article for separate consideration.

The first two-thirds of the book take the form of historical evidence about Christian ecclesial organization in the first century or so. The evidence is marshalled from the New Testament and the early Fathers. What it shows (according to the author) is that our Lord’s own ministry’ was that of a travelling prophet, heralding a message (a kerygma) to the general public and imparting instruction (a didache) to his close followers. The twelve apostles were chosen and trained to imitate this mobile ministry of the word. Thus was set the pattern for the early Church, which at first was quite flexible; small local communities of a few dozen people meeting in somebody’s private house. Thus the ‘base-community’ (local Christians) was identical with the ‘liturgical assembly,’ and our author reckons that there were no ‘sacral persons’, nothing like the Jewish priesthood, at first.

Has the Roman Catholic Church now come round in favour of revolution? It is in South America that the question arises above all. The multiplication of facts and declarations which provoke the question often incline one to give an affirmative answer. In order to see what’s what, it might be useful to review certain recent events that have been particularly noteworthy.

Most recent declarations rest on paragraphs 30 and 31 of Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical Populorum Progressio: ‘3o. There are certainly situations in which injustice cries to heaven. When entire populations, deprived of the necessities of life, live in a dependence that prevents them from exercising any initiative or responsibility, or from making any cultural advance or taking any part in social or political life, the temptation to remove such insults to human dignity by violence is great. 31. We know, however, that revolutionary insurrection—except in the case of manifest and prolonged tyranny that attacks fundamental rights of the person and endangers the common good of the country—engenders new injustices, brings in new imbalances, and involves new ruins. A real evil is not to be combated by a greater misery.’

These two paragraphs have in general been received as a faithful expression of the traditional thought of the Church. The new factor here is therefore not at the level of thought or of expression; it lies in the welcome it has received and in the way in which it has been interpreted at the hands of a Christian public that is as inclined to justify ‘revolutionary insurrection’ now as it was formerly to discourage or condemn it.

The intention of this paper is to test the hunch that there must be some correlation between theory of language and theory of community. Why this seems worth doing should come out in the course of the paper. It should be said that it was meant to fit between a paper by Raymond Williams and one by David Cooper, in a symposium on the theoretical basis of a ‘common culture’.

Raymond Williams writes: ‘We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode’ (Culture and Society 1780-1950, Penguin edition, p. 322).

We have to unlearn the dominative mode in social relationship. That programme is part of a complex argument, the whole of which I have no intention of spelling out here, in my crude orthography. But the point of the case is that the line of writers and thinkers studied in Williams’ book, the tradition he presents there, from Burke and Cobbett down to George Orwell, is a tradition of criticism of, and protest against, the official ideology and the prevalent consciousness of our society: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties.

La Pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin was first published at Paris in 1962. It has been admirably translated by René Hague and forms an authoritative commentary. It is authoritative because Père Lubac had been a close friend of Père Teilhard de Chardin for over thirty years and had discussed his thought with him and because it is by Père Lubac with his clarity and his gift for understanding other viewpoints than his own.

In his first chapter ‘The Essential Core’, Père Lubac distinguishes between two groups of Père Teilhard’s writings ‘the first in which the line of thought is still scientific or, one might prefer to say philosophical, is developed from the data of experimental science; the second, more strictly mystical and religious, is often explicitly based on the data of Christian revelation. Central to the first is The Phenomenon of Man, to the second Le Milieu Divin.’ Inevitably Père Lubac places his emphasis on the group that centres on Le Milieu Divin and attempts to penetrate ‘to the heart of Teilhard’s mystical teaching’. In what sense was Père Teilhard a mystic?

Père Lubac’s eighth chapter is entitled ‘Scientist, Prophet and Mystic’. In it he describes Père Teilhard as a scientist of the first order. This is perhaps a simplification. From the time of his scholasticate and his first unfortunate association with Mr Dawson and the Piltdown Skull, Père Teilhard’s primary subject of study was prehistoric archaeology and it was this that finally made his name in China.

People are beginning to realize that some of the ideas put forward since the Council have roots which go back to the Modernist movement at the turn of the century. Since Modernism was condemned by Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907, with unexampled severity, this raises some interesting questions. The history of Modernism is in for reappraisal and already the field is bristling with budding experts, mostly French and American. I am no expert and the views I express here are open to revision.

Modernism once seemed to me an interruption, almost an irrelevance, in the development of ideas in the Church. The link between the liberal Catholics of the nineteenth century and the general attitude which emerged at the recent Council is clear enough. The Council has reversed the views implicit in the famous Syllabus of Errors (1864); it has decided that ‘Christendom’ has gone for ever, that the Church must stop trying to govern the world and learn how to serve it. ‘A free Church in a free State’ has been enlarged into ‘a free Church in a free World’—an updated version, surely, of views first promoted by the unfortunate Lamennais and pursued with more caution by Montalembert and Lacordaire in France, the editors of the Rambler (Acton, Simpson, Newman) in England, and others elsewhere.

This element in the Second Vatican Council is the one most apparent to the world, which welcomes it, and perhaps it may be called Pope John’s line, for his view was pastoral: how to make the Gospel available to the modern world was his deepest concern and a favourite word was convivenza, which he preferred to ‘co-existence’.

The basic reason why it is so difficult in practice to give an account of philosophy’s aims and method is undoubtedly that there is no agreement among philosophers themselves about what they are trying to do and how; and this means that they often find it as difficult to explain themselves to each other as to those whose home is in other disciplines. This is especially so when the philosophers in question belong to different traditions. It is well known that philosophers today fall broadly into two camps, those who belong to the Englishspeaking tradition of analytic philosophy which was born of a reaction against Hegel at the beginning of this century, and those who remain if not in the Hegelian, then at least in the Cartesian tradition and who are now represented primarily in France and Germany. I suppose that we may add as a third group the neoScholastic philosophers of the seminaries and Catholic universities, who at least until recently represented a revival of the medieval tradition, but are now being more or less absorbed by the first two groups (and especially the second) according to their physical location and that of the universities in which their staff are trained.

To each of these traditions there corresponds an attitude towards philosophical aims and methodology which may be associated with a turning-point in the history of philosophy.

Dr Jenson rightly noted at the beginning of his review that the book was not a survey of contemporary theology in general. But I do not think he should have gone on assuming, against all the evidence provided by the book itself, that it was intended to be such. Perhaps the original title I suggested to the publisher, Problems in Modern Theology, would have been less misleading to him. He observed that I had hardly said anything about contemporary Roman Catholic theologians, and that I had left out a great many important Protestants; he might further have observed that a large part of the book (Chapters 2, 3 and 9), deal very little with ‘theologians’ in the usual sense of the world.

He might also have adverted to my own clear statement on page 9 as to what the book was about. I recognized that the chapters did not represent a single sustained argument; but I claimed that they were united by a single purpose: ‘to point out a number of fundamental and mutually related mistakes—philosophical, historical and practical—by which it seems to me that much contemporary theology is vitiated’ (italics restricted to the present context). Two claims are involved in this: (a) that there is a cluster of related propositions and arguments propounded by some influential modern theologians; (b) that these are erroneous. The first claim laid on me the task of accurate exposition of some of the work of some of the theologians influential at the present time.

‘Eat up your dinner’, my mother used to say. ‘Think of the starving millions in China.’

That was before 1949. When 1949 came round, no one bothered to tell me what had happened. The ploy simply changed to ‘Think of the starving millions in India’.

Even at that age I knew there was something funny about this argument. Whether I ate my dinner or not, the starving millions weren’t going to get a whiff of it.

It is interesting, especially after nearly two years in China, to look back and laugh at my mother’s trick. More interesting, though, to realize that the new generation in the West has still not grown out of thinking in my mother’s terms.

‘What is to be done about Vietnam?’ people say, in intervals between working at their meaningless jobs, or keeping up with the Joneses. ‘And what about India?’ And now that the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China, such people might add ‘And poor China. . .’.

There is no end to the ‘problems’ that confront Western suburban man. He revels in solving (in his head) the population explosion, the bomb, famine and flood, war. It seems to be little more than a game, an entertainment to take his mind off himself, off the apparently insoluble problems of his own society.