Whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, history surely is. ‘We do not’, said A. J. P. Taylor somewhere, ‘understand the present by the past, but the past by the present.’ For an historian this is courageous, for an anthropologist it would be trite. Even at undergraduate level, social anthropology teaches one to see how often the appeal to history is just the excuse for, or the indictment of, the present; what Chesterton, I think, called ‘the democracy of the dead’, the influence of an acknowledged tradition on decisions, may prove to be the most rigged of ballots. Perhaps this way of seeing things is partially a result of the pre-selection of anthropologists ; certainly a remarkably high proportion of us do seem to have undergone some sharp uprooting, whether of country, or faith, or family ties, between infancy and early maturity, and hence are especially sympathetic to rejections, or reshapings of the past, on the part of others. Clearly enough, there are continuities in our lives and our societies which, even though they need reshaping, also need to be honestly interpreted; and I think that what Professor Monica Wilson has given us in Religion and the Transformation of Society is such an honest interpretation of southern African society as a whole, and, more closely, of Nyakyusa society in particular, and also, impressively though unintentionally, of Monica Wilson’s own understanding of life. It seeks, to be sure, to interpret societies which, more than most, experience the torment of unrealized change; yet the impression of the author’s personality which remains after reading, as that of one whose very fulfilment has been through the conscious seeking of continuities and the willing acceptance of change, is stronger than that given by many garrulous autobiographies. Perhaps, therefore, it may be legitimate to sketch out her life and work a little more fully than this book does.

What are the motives which make a man wish to write his autobiography? Notoriety, fame, money—these are end products They don’t dictate the decision to write, the impulse to construct an artistic form which will be the shape of one’s own life. We might, perhaps, start by saying that to write an autobiography is a form of self-discovery through the necessity of having to shape and frame one’s life. This affords a measure of control which is also a liberation; we can write the past out of our system by re-living it. But perhaps it is more our sense of the present or an ever diminishing future which hastens our pen. From this vantage we must feel that our life has a kind of totality about it which makes it more than just ‘our life’. It makes a representative gesture, giving our memories and reflections more than a confessional interest. We must have a deep conviction that our constantly repeated first person singular is on easy terms with the first person plural. Looking at these suggested motives for autobiography—-the ordering of experience, the self-discovery, the liberation, the belief that your impressions will hold good for others —we see how little they differ from the motives behind any piece of imaginative writing. There are reasons for thinking that writing an autobiography is closer to writing fiction than to writing history. And if it is a novelist himself who should write his autobiography, a man whose life has already furnished a whole house of fiction—then I think rather odd things begin to happen, particularly if that novelist is Graham Greene.

When it was announced some while ago that Greene was engaged in writing his autobiography, it seemed entirely fitting. Here was a novelist whose life seemed hardly less eventful than his works. The table of contents came readily to the mind’s eye.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’ But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.

Mansfield Park is the novel in which religious concern is most apparent and not only in the crucial fact of Edmund’s ordination. Yet even here critics have avoided admitting that the chief effect of of the book is to assert the primacy of religion over ethics.

Marx spent most of the years 1843 and 1844 in Paris, having been expelled from Germany. During this period he produced three essays, two on the Jewish question and one on Hegelian philosophy in Germany, as well as the more famous Paris Manuscripts. My aim in this essay is to present a puzzle which arises about the argument which Marx proposes in these writings as to the relation of religion and politics, and to suggest a possible partial explanation and some possible implications of the occurrence of this puzzle.

We may start by making clear Marx’s intention in the writings in question, particularly the three essays. He is concerned to warn the Jews against those who say: ‘Give up your religion, which marks you off from all of us; you cannot merit the privileges of modern political life unless you agree to shed your religious distinctiveness, at least where your politics is concerned.’ Marx tells the Jew to inquire carefully into the real conditions of life in modern society. If he does so he will see that shedding his distinct religion will in no way help him to overcome the defects of his real, concrete existence: he will still live a narrow, isolated life, in enmity rather than co-operation with his fellows. This sphere in which we live our concrete, day-to-day existence, Marx calls Civil Society, and he contrasts it with the State, or political sphere; together, the two spheres go to make up what I shall call ‘modern society’. This name refers not precisely to any actual historical society but to an ‘ideal type’ to which post-Revolution France and the post-Independence United States of America would be close empirical approximations.

In a recent lecture, Fr Edward Yarnold discussed the place of the theologian in the university. He mentioned the salutary effect of contact with other disciplines on the university theologian, the value of the ecumenical setting which a university provides for theology, and, in particular, the view, proposed by the 1952 Faith and Order Conference at Lund, that theologians should make for the centre of the Christian faith where they are united, and, working from that centre, justify their divisions. On this last point, however, Fr Yarnold registered misgivings, for, he asserted, ‘Theology is not a study which can be pursued with detachment: it requires faith’. He argued the issue with care on the principle that a living theology can only arise from a living tradition, and he went on to discuss the consequences of this viewpoint and draw out its advantages.

At the same time, Fr Yarnold was aware that some theologians, while sympathetic to what he had to say about a living tradition in theology, would want to question the role he ascribed to faith: ‘Some theologians—I speak of my own country, but the cap may fit other heads—have thought that this need for commitment is incompatible with scholarly objectivity and freedom of conscience’. For them, in other words, commitment, or faith, threatens the integrity which academic theology requires. They feel that faith would prejudice the detached course which this theology has to take if it is to be true to itself as academic. They would make a distinction between academic and commitment theology.

One of the words we learned at school about the Eucharist was ‘transubstantiation’ : we were given to understand, quite rightly, that the use of this word marked off Roman Catholic belief here from what had traditionally been Protestantism, and that the Council of Trent had declared the word to be used very suitably by the Church. Another thing we learned at school was that a consecrated host looks like bread, tastes like bread, but is not: we are sometimes told, again quite properly, that this phrase puts into popular form what Trent asserted.

I reject what Trent said. I don’t believe in transubstantiation and I think that a consecrated host is still bread, bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread. I want to show you why I hold these views. What I have to say is derived from a book I am writing, and I obviously can do no more than give you a brief glimpse of some of its contents. I have not written my book to deny the eucharistic presence: but I have written it to try to persuade people that the ways we talk about it are misleading and empty; and to suggest some better ways. It will be on the negative part of the book that I shall be dwelling for a good part of the paper, expounding and criticizing first the views found in Trent, then the views found in certain authors today, particularly in Holland. As you will know, one of the many bickerings between the Dutch and the Vatican concerns the eucharistic presence: my contention is that both sides are saying basically the same thing and that both sides are wrong.

I share Phil Beisly’s uneasiness about aspects of my ‘Faith and Revolution’ article. In particular, he seems to me right to fasten on a serious obscurity of relationship between, on the one hand, the ‘extreme’ testing of Christian commitment I delineated, and, on the other hand, the ‘normative’ values, life-forms and practices of the Christian faith as we familiarly know it. He also raises an acute point about how the notion of the Church as intensifying ordinary revolutionary practice is to be squared with Christianity’s permanently critical stance to the world. But if the image of the Church as super-revolutionary vanguard won’t quite do, neither will the image of the Church as Cambridge literary critical seminar. Beisly and I share a belief in Christianity’s ‘critical, negative, transcending role’: the problem on which my article focused was the specificity of that Christian critical transcendence, in an historical epoch where other creeds, and Marxism above all, advance similar and serious claims.

That still seems to me a reasonable question to raise: a real question, rather than one merely generated by a self-absorbed terminology. And the difficulty can’t be evaded by a simple replacement of a Marxian conceptual framework by another, equally ideological set of formulae: the hypostasized absolutes, at once generously ‘concrete’ and emptily self-definitive, of a Leavisian concern with ‘life’. That this self-enclosed Leavisian terminology is ideological seems to me self-evident. One doesn’t need to plough back far into the last decades of the nineteenth century to uncover at least some of the roots of that curious coupling of ordinary English anti-intellectual empiricism with an assertive, often contentless transcendentalism which, in part at least, characterizes the Leavisian ideology.

When the editor first suggested that it might be useful to have a short, article introducing some of Noam Chomsky’s ideas, I agreed, and was about to begin when John Lyons’ book appeared and made the exercise rather redundant. His introduction is unquestionably the most lucid and coherent account of Chomsky’s linguistic work that we have, and I thought it would be pointless to write at that time an article which would in effect be little more than a paraphrase of its topic sentences. There are, however, a few things that might be said about recent trends, not dealt with by Lyons, which are needed in order to complete an outline understanding of the contemporary scene in generative linguistics; also a few critical comments, from someone a mite less sympathetic to the Chomskyan approach than Lyons is, might be helpful to anyone wanting to reach an evaluation of this field. Hence the following remarks. But first, some background, and a review of what Lyons does say.

It is quite remarkable how Chomsky’s name has become a vogue word in intellectual circles. He is known about, sometimes, even when his discipline, linguistics, is not. To an academic linguist, of course, this can be embarrassing. I suppose it is always the way when a teenage discipline catches everyone’s attention through a famous practitioner: one does not know whether to be grateful, because of the publicity to the subject, or furious, because of the over-simplification and polemic which publicity invariably brings. In Chomsky’s case, in this country, the popular awareness of the man dates from the mid-sixties. I recall talking to a number of puzzled academics, in the spring of 1969, who could not understand why anyone should have queued in the rain to hear someone speak at Oxford, or queue without getting in at University College London, that same year. In common-rooms at that time, everyone seemed to be claiming his work to have particular significance to them—psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, educationalists, biologists—even, sometimes, linguists.

Man is conceived in aggression: too often, he dies in it.

The sexual act may be enhanced by its manner, exalted by its intent, transfigured by its context. But the instinct that impels to its performance is the aggressive instinct.

It is a primitive instinct, in the neutral sense that it strikes to the roots of our nature. In the past as in the present, it is often a necessary compulsion: the tribe of the timorous hunter was a hungry tribe.

Drives deeply rooted perpetually seek an outlet. But to find an outlet they must first be canalized. Therefore aggression seeks initially a focus, an object.

Now the world is full of objects; yet we direct aggression on our kind. It is on people rather than on things that we inflict violence. As the lover craves response from the beloved, so does the aggressor from his victim. The shattered window does not whimper; the smitten plane tree does not bleed. But the ravished woman whimpers. And the thrashing body bleeds. Thus does aggressiveness achieve its terrible catharsis.

Violence against the person is of two kinds, physical and psychic. The first is widely deplored: the second is hardly recognized as violence. Yet it is all but universal. Daily we inflict violence on one another. Hourly we crucify our fellows.

In the Apostles’ Creed the Christian professes to believe ‘in Jesus Christ who was crucified, dead and buried, descended to hell, on the third day rose from the dead... ‘; the Catholics are told by the Fourth Lateran Council that Jesus Christ ‘descended into hell, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven’; the Anglicans are taught (Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 3) that ‘it is to be believed that Christ went down into hell’; and the Lutherans accept (art. 9 of the Formulae Concordiae) that ‘the entire Christ, God and man, after his burial descended to hell, overcame the devil, destroyed the power of hell, and deprived the devil of his prestige’.

For once there is a doctrinal unity among the Christian confessions. But what is the Descent to me, a Christian of the twentieth century?

Shall I drag you before the Inquisition, threatening eternal damnation if you refuse to submit to the collective teaching of the Christian Churches?

But why should anyone want to force us into believing that Christ did indeed descend into hell when neither hell nor descent seem to have a real place in our lives?

Besides, it will not prove difficult to get acquitted of such charges of unbelief. It is easy to relegate abstract and fanciful religious information to the colourful mythological flourishing which Christianity appears to have picked up on its journey through religious traditions from all over the world. Is there not also that grave warning from St Paul against man’s tendency to leave his proper abode, concerning himself proudly with the affairs of the divine, or bending too eagerly over the hideous and dark places at the unapproachable centre of existence?

‘Batter my heart, three-Personed God’, wrote the poet John Donne. However, it has been the mind, not the heart, which has been battered by this most unfathomable of all mysteries. Centuries of long and painful battering of Unitarian hammer on tritheistic anvil eventually forged a statement which expressed the mystery: three persons in one nature. And ever since the Council of Florence there has echoed down the centuries a thunderous ‘So what?’. For the riddle of the Trinity is not merely that of the Three-in-one, but the revelation of it. Not ‘how?’, but ‘why?’. What is its relevance?

In the attempt to make the Trinity relevant one is beset by problems which appear insoluble. The most obvious of these is the danger of falling into the error of ‘tritheism’.

‘What is the use of being a good man—I do not mean what is the use to others, but to oneself? Would not the ideal state, from one’s own point of view, be to have the power to injure others for one’s own benefit to any extent at all, without being injured in turn oneself? Suppose, like the man in the fairy story, I were able to make myself invisible at will. If I had this power, and abstained, out of conscientious scruples, from all the indulgence in robbery and seduction for which my talent gave me the opportunity, would I not be mad? All our moral education seems to be based on the principle that the consequences to an agent of his being morally bad are unfortunate to himself; but few seem to assure us that to be bad is in itself to be unfortunate—and when they do so, their assurances carry little conviction. And if it is only a matter of consequences, the ideal aim in life, for a man of enlightened self-interest, would seem to be to find some means of enjoying the immediate fruits of being wicked while avoiding the unfortunate consequences. It may be objected that this would be difficult; but then most worthwhile achievements are difficult. Is there any indication that the good man is somehow, just by virtue of being good, more fortunate than the bad? We would dearly like to believe this, but cannot find any adequate reason for doing so. It is no use saying that men and gods will ensure that the good man is rewarded and the bad man punished; since men can always be put off by flattery and bribery, if not by deception; and the gods by sacrifices. Let us take a stark and extreme case: the contrast between a bad man, with all possible worldly goods, honoured among men as though he were good; and a good man, regarded as bad and, in consequence, poor and persecuted, hated, mocked, and finally enduring an agonizing death by being impaled. Who is going to say that the good man in this case is more fortunate than the bad?’

Ever since the Second Vatican Council it is being increasingly realized that experiment and adaptation are continuing conditions of the life of the Church. But what precisely is an experiment in this context ? Karl Rahner has recently tried to answer this question and he concludes that since history as such is not really open to experimentation in the scientific sense, experiment must have a different meaning in the two contexts, and so the Church can learn nothing useful from a study of scientific experiments. In support of this view Rahner points out that an experiment in the Church is an event in the Church itself and so changes the Church, while no scientific experiment changes the physical world. Thus the meaning of experiment is quite different in the two cases.

In this he compares the subject of one activity with the object of another so the result is naturally misleading and unfruitful. The logical comparison shows a close similarity that deserves further study: just as a scientific experiment does not change nature, neither does an experiment in the Church change human nature; but just as a successful experiment in science is a stage in the growth of the understanding of the natural world by the scientific community, so a successful experiment in the Church is likewise an irrevocable stage in its onward spiritual pilgrimage.

In view of this close similarity it is not surprising that Rahner’s account of the place of experiment in the life of the Church is much closer to scientific experience than he recognizes and thus a further exploration of the analogy may prove useful.

Georges Simenon writes detective stories, many featuring the amiable Inspecteur Maigret, almost too human to fit the traditional image of the sleuth. Simenon may be read more for atmosphere than for thrills, for Maigret's Paris, or the provincial towns of many non-Maigret stories; the weather mostly wintry with long evenings, the interest in trains, back streets, canals, bars, the small homes of small people in small worlds. And among these I find even more intriguing those with a Belgian scene, the Meuse, the industrial zone around Liege where young Simenon began as a reporter on the local press. Here are his native tow-paths and backyards, alleys and impasses, and a certain quality of mud, of earth and water and the two compounded.

Simenon does not normally set out to retail experiences that demand a transcendental world, least of all that purveyed by the Church. Where religious detail slips in it is seldom more than part of the narrative, handy description—as far as the author is concerned echoes from childhood, and usually no more than that for the characters too. Churchgoing is something children do and it is good for them; subsequently a minority elects to remain in this church sub-culture and becomes a characteristic feature of Sunday mornings.

Yet Simenon stands for something good. I have not combed his works to draw out loose hairs of self-sacrifice or the pursuit of values, but they are there. Monsieur Maigret is good with a comfortable home-loving Gallican middle-class goodness that stands while the world of crime revolves. This goodness has its temporal reward—the adequate recompense of an apartment managed by a faithful helpmate. Mme Maigret is a patient wife who cooks meals and keeps them warm and bears with her husband’s professional irregularities.

Jesus of Nazareth is said to be the sacrament of the saving grace of God and of man’s response to God in that grace. In himself Jesus is the encounter between God and mankind, the Immediator of man and God, the Word of God made world and history, man in his concrete dimensions and the total nexus of his relationships taken up into God. According to the apostolic preaching, in him alone, in his ‘name’ alone, is there the means of passing from a lethal situation into the possibility of survival. If men are going to pass from the world that is doomed to death, that can only be by entering into him, into his name, by in some way becoming him, by living out the biography of the one who, alone, no longer belongs to the dead past. Living it out, amongst other ways, sacramentally. Sacramentally we put on Christ, we are conformed to Christ, we are made one body, one spirit, with him.

An old problem reconsidered

Sacramentally we enter upon the life of Christ by the rites of initiation, or rather by the single but modulated initiation-rite of baptism-confirmation. In those Churches where Christian initiation (rightly or unfortunately) has come to be divided into two rites separated by a more or less lengthy interval of time, there has always been a serious problem about how to speak of confirmation, a problem that has compromised attempts at an effective catechesis of the sacrament and, incidentally, often created something of an embarrassment in speaking of the place of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. Only a very few theologians have felt able to deny that a baptized, unconfirmed person is a Christian.

The recent coadjutor appointment in Nottingham diocese met with some criticism. I could sympathize with the critics—and with the chosen candidate. However, the situation was more than an example of non-consultation about episcopal selection. Clouds of debate and confusion around the freshly-embroidered mitre obscured something deeper, farther back in time.

For some years, the Ordinary of the diocese has been a target of comment for allegedly rigid views and activities. In particular, his stance on Humanae Vitae (H. V.) was strict in its expectations of what priests should teach about the encyclical. Five priests were suspended on the issue. In 1968 and 1969, widely-reported arguments and public meetings were held in the diocese about H. V. and its aftermath.

I chaired one of these meetings in March 1969. It was attended by four hundred people. Many of them were for liberal interpretations of H. V. and against the Bishop’s sanctions on priests who did not accept his line. Some in the audience were supporters of the growing Renewal Movement. Many more people were concerned about the need for an articulate but critical lay voice in the Church. I directed part of my summing up at the meeting to these groups. I suggested that, perhaps, enough had been said and done locally about H. V.; that attention should be turned to more important, if less exciting, issues. The example I offered was the manner of appointment of Bishops. I said that, in Nottingham, discussions or protests about this would be too late after a retiral or death. As far as I am aware, nothing was done from that time in 1969. Yet when Mgr McGuinness was appointed in 1972, the protest was strident.

A wise Dublin theologian recently reminded me of Whitehead’s doubts about the unity of creation. Whitehead noted that on a fine blue day he could wake up conscious that all nature was harmonious and one. But when, stepping into the street, he was attacked by a large nasty dog, nature became suddenly at least two.

Joyce hated and feared dogs, yet in Ulysses, a cur—the one which bounds like a hare, trots like a pony, trips like a buck, rears up like a bear, lopes like a calf, roots like a pig, claws like a panther, sniffs like a dog—becomes Joyce’s symbol of protean interconnections among disparate species. Simple changes of verb link animals together.

Joyce, whose word-play was sometimes unashamedly childish, chose a dog for his symbol because of what dog spells backwards. When we speak of Joyce’s sense of unity we speak of his sense of God. This is not to force Joyce back into the Church—though we should remember that, asked when exactly it was he had left the Church, Joyce replied, ‘That is for the Church to decide’. Joyce’s faith was peculiar and its motives may have been more literary than religious, but I am concerned here not with his salvation but with the idea of unity which his later works, especially Finnegans Wake, express.

When Hans Kiing attacked infallibility as it has been understood in Roman theology until recently, he was accused by no less a theologian than Karl Rahner of being in effect a liberal Protestant. But the majority of friendly critics were more inclined to ask what all the fuss was about. Nobody took this theory of infallibility seriously any longer. There were undoubtedly situations where Church and Pope had to take a stand and, if the promises of the Church’s endurance were to mean anything, this must mean infallibility in teaching: the Holy Spirit would guarantee the Church’s freedom from error on such occasions. But they were rare enough and a ‘sensitive exegesis’ could always take care of out-dated definitions.

Charles Davis, a little earlier, had chosen to leave the Church because he could not accept the current explanation of papal claims, the present ‘structures’ which prevent even the most sympathetic bishops from treating their subjects with charity or even justice. But Gregory Baum and others were at hand to show that this brilliant young theologian was still too much entangled in nineteenth-century apologetics.

The latest critic of Church structures, more particularly of the papacy, is Fritz Leist. Angry as he is and in deadly earnest as the above were in deadly earnest, he is not a young man. He will be sixty in 1973.