‘(Jesus’ audience) thought that the Kingdom would be a place like the old kingdom of David, with armies and a king’s throne. Jesus knew that it was not a place, but the action of God ruling over our hearts.’ So John Hargreaves, though it is perhaps unfair to pick on him, for similar pronouncements can be found in hundreds of popular, and indeed scholarly, theological writings. It is the way most of us were brought up to think. Perhaps it is the right way of thinking, but there are, I think, increasingly good reasons for feeling unsure about that. When the Jews talked about ‘the kingdom’ (without further qualification) they certainly were not thinking of some invisible operation: they meant the Roman Empire. The ‘Kingdom of God’ on the lips of Jesus may well have referred to something equally tangible—to a world order, not a concept. He may well have been speaking not of the invisible activity of ‘grace’ in the ‘soul’, but of a kingdom, however spiritual, with visible, material attributes. A recent writer on the Fourth Gospel, for instance, has interpreted the scene before Pilate in these terms:

It is likely enough that if some Catholic controversialist of the early seventeenth century had been discussing the merits of various contemporary poets, he would have extolled Crashaw and Southwell, deplored Donne, and vacillated in his opinion of Alabaster according to whether the gentleman was imprisoned in England for the Faith or had returned to the Anglican Church and a wife after differences with the Inquisition. Blame or approval would have been a matter of ‘party’ loyalty; not of poetry. The position was honourable enough in time of adversity but one we should attempt to outgrow. Such a simplistic attitude to religious belief is almost certainly an important factor in accounting for the intellectual and emotional poverty of religious art. One has heard the remark that dismisses Sutherland because he has lapsed, as if integrity as an artist depended on Easter Communion. It is tempting to inquire how many of the great figures of the Renaissance were certifiably in a state of grace.

Thus it comes about that in March 1971 we lost one of the very few religious poets of our time and it is doubtful whether anyone noticed. She herself would not have been surprised:

I cannot imagine anything nicer
Than to be struck by lightning and killed suddenly
crossing a field As if somebody cared.

Steinbeck’s use of Old Testament material in East of Eden (1952) is very different from that in To A God Unknown (1933). As outlined in a previous article, Steinbeck was there qualifying the status of his protagonist, Joseph Wayne, by a number of literary means. But the most powerful qualifier of Joseph Wayne as prophet and saviour of his people is the manner in which Steinbeck contrives to keep the closely parallel story of the Joseph of Genesis ever-present throughout To A God Unknown. In East of Eden Steinbeck again, and indeed more obviously, makes use of Old Testament sources. But the Old Testament Cain and Abel do not loom reproachfully behind mere human characters in the book: when considered at all, they are considered explicitly and rationally in discussion, and in another sense the whole novel is clearly devoted to re-enactments of the episode and discussions of its significance.

Steinbeck sums up the centrality of the story in Journal of a Novel (1970), written during the composition of the first draft of East of Eden:

its framework roots from that powerful, profound and perplexing story in Genesis of Cain and Abel... this story with its implications has made a deeper mark in people than any other save possibly the story of the Tree of Life and original sin (90). It is using the biblical story as a measure of ourselves (105). However, Steinbeck’s adaptation of Genesis 4, 1-16 carefully excludes consideration of God, to whom, in Genesis, Cain and Abel offer their gifts. The blatant Cain-Abel correspondences in the novel are Charles and Adam Trask, and the twin boys Caleb and Aron Trask, ostensibly Adam’s sons, but, it transpires, probably like all of us sons of Cain, that is, of Charles.

One morning, I rose from my bed and walked out to explore the world. There was much that was familiar to me and after a short time I felt the need to break new ground. I set off towards unknown regions, while my gaze left the familiar things and settled on the distant horizon. Far and fast as I walked, I could not reach that horizon, for, as I advanced, it receded, yet my journey seemed far from fruitless; it was full of discovery.

I began to question the existence of the horizon, though, and I met one who had travelled much more than I, and I held him in conversation for a while. He laughed, and said that the horizon is always there, always receding as man advances. ‘Then why advance?’ I inquired, seeking a reason for my own behaviour. ‘Because there must be an end’, he said. ‘It is of the very nature of the cosmos that there must be an end to time and to space.’ This perplexed me because I could not imagine an end to time and space, but he drew on the ground and waved his hands in the air until his words settled on my understanding. Although I was annoyed to think that I was captive to time and space, I could not help but think that an infinity of time and space would be a bit of a bore.

‘But what is there beyond time and space?’ I called, as he parted from me. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not-time and not-space in which all-that-is is cradled.’

I began to think and reflect, and realized that I was existing. So, I began to explore my thoughts, knowing that I was exploring my own existence, and the belief came upon me that perhaps I had now found a world without limit, an existence without end.

Thomas Merton wrote in the letter in which he accepted the invitation to speak at the Congress in Bangkok where he was to die: ‘... the great problem for monasticism today is not survival but prophecy’. There are good reasons for thinking he was right. In the last few years most religious orders and congregations have been busily working on new rules and constitutions which are usually heavily loaded with quotable quotes from conciliar and postconciliar documents, carefully worded resumes of current theological writing, and skilfully framed paragraphs of compromise intended to satisfy the demands of as many pressure groups as possible. In practice these new documents are often ignored, apart from a little tightening up here and loosening up there and the inevitable litter of commissions that will in due course produce more painfully contrived documents that will also be as much ignored as implemented! This may appear to be a cynical assessment of what is going on in religious life today. In fairness it must be pointed out that the Church ordered the search for new rules and constitutions, they are provisional and experimental, and the discussions that took place at every level prior to their formulation have initiated a long overdue rethinking of religious life. Nevertheless, there continue to be more departures and fewer arrivals to religious life. There is no shortage of new laws but an obvious dearth of true prophets. From his new book Thomas Merton emerges as one of the major prophets in contemporary religious life. It would be a pity if he goes unheard because of the din created by the staggering volume of second-rate writing on religious life.

The Reverend Joseph Berington (1743-1827) has never had a particularly good press even from sympathetic Catholic historians. This is almost certainly due to the fact that he was a leading supporter of the cisalpine, if not gallican, Catholic Committee and was one of those Catholics who belived that an Oath of Supremacy, properly understood, was not incompatible with Catholic principles. As a result of his attitude and activities, he was at one stage censured by the bishops and deprived of his faculties. Berington himself felt that English Catholics had suspected him since he taught philosophy at Douay where he was regarded as being too modern and bold in his philosophical opinions, and that this explained the later questioning of his orthodoxy. Joseph Gillow simply claims that Berington’s ‘love of novelty and of the affected liberality of the day created great prejudice against his writings, which, however, was considerably removed before his death’.

Yet according to a ‘Memoir’ published in the Catholic Miscellany, Berington made ‘the first open and bold attack ... on the immense mass of Protestant prejudice that had been accumulating against Catholics for more than two centuries’, while the Reflections addressed to the Rev. John Hawkins was described as his ‘principal work on religious controversy’. The story of this particular publication began in America during 1784 when Charles Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published his Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester. This personal apologia for leaving the Church was addressed to the English Catholics whom he had served as chaplain.

Thirteen years ago Professor G. E. M. Anscombe gave reasons for thinking that it is not at present profitable for us to do moral philosophy. The steady flow of books since then shows how little notice was taken. The three I shall be considering in this article present an opportunity to consider the case she made and its continuing relevance.

Miss Anscombe’s essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, is included in The Definition of Morality, together with twelve others which are meant to hang from the same peg: the question, ‘What is the meaning of “morality” ?’ The most interesting of them get up and walk away with the peg, opening up issues beyond the matters of usage which the editors tidily catalogue in their introduction. This is certainly true of Miss Anscombe’s. Her quarrel with modern moral philosophers is not that they are wrong in the way they use or define ‘moral’ and ‘morality’, but that in the way they use them these terms mean nothing at all. She argues that the concept of obligation, with its related moral sense of‘ought’, which has been given pride of place by moral philosophers since the eighteenth century, is intelligible only within a law-conception of morality. To speak of a moral ‘law’, of being ‘bound’, ‘obliged’ and so on, makes no sense unless one believes that there is someone who issues the law. The decay of divine law as a basis for morality has left these terms bereft of content, but not, unfortunately, of their ‘mesmeric force’. The smell remains for some time even when the gas-works has been dismantled. When ‘ought’ lacks the content provided by some actual law, telling a man that he ought not to commit adultery gives him no reason at all for not doing so.

The key to what follows is to be found in knowing how to sin. Or again, it is not, for that could suggest that some appropriate advice was going to be given to those with practical difficulties in sinning. Now this is a matter on which advice may well be as undesirable as it is, for most of us, otiose; and in any case no such advice will be given here. No Kama Sutra of barratry, no Teach Yourself Embezzlement will be found in what follows. What will be found is some explanation of what is involved in saying that someone has sinned, which is far from otiose. For though sinning may be as easy as lying, the word ‘sinning’ can conceal a plurality of senses. Once this has been done, ‘forgiving sins’ is more than halfway to being explained. By way of a corollary it will then be shown why ‘forgiven- ness’, much talked of by some sensitive people today in connexion with forgiveness, cannot serve for explaining ‘forgiving sins’.

A first step in the explanation proposed is to distinguish ‘sinning’ as simply designating some particular piece of sinning, some event or process in the world, from ‘sinning’ in its proper sense, as not only designating ... (as before), but in addition also connoting that what is so designated has been held to have been done, or has been done, out of disobedience to God, or whatever. (In medieval innocence I shall speak of ‘disobedience to God’: let theologians or catechists substitute the phrase of their choice.)

Introducing the hermeneutical problem

It is a pity that theological communication so often gets bogged down because a key concept is never satisfactorily and clearly explained. The key idea then degenerates to a kind of magical word, periodically invoked, temporarily perhaps exciting, but ultimately mystifying. A few years ago the word ‘existential’ underwent this process of degeneration. Although the word had a clear meaning in Heidegger’s early philosophy, and indeed, as ‘existential analysis’, signified an enduringly valuable method, the basic insight represented by it failed to shape and illuminate the popular theological discussion. (A fine example of the kind of communication that should have taken place on a much wider scale regarding this word is still Cornelius Ernst’s 1961 Introduction to Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations.) Instead, the word ‘existential’ became used indiscriminately for anything remotely ‘relevant’ or ‘concrete’. This inflation ended by making the word worthless and unusable—where everything had to be ‘existential’, nothing could be any more. And the mystifying communicators and the befogged hearers concluded about the same time that the word had become meaningless. This need not have been the case: as so often before, a chance had been missed.

Perhaps something similar is happening now with the word ‘hermeneutical’. Wheareas ‘existential’ was used indiscriminately, ‘hermeneutical’ is often used in an almost gnostic fashion, as if allusion is being made to some arcane discipline allowing a privileged few access to philosophical and theological mysteries. And before the general meaning of the word has been assimilated within theological discussion and satisfactorily communicated, particular ‘hermeneutics’ have begun to proliferate, producing a situation at once labyrinthine and mystifying.

When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument ?

Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’ ?

Again, how shall we formulate our uneasiness at the following suggestion ?

A recent book by a Nobel prize-winner in biology, Jacques Monod, is proving a best-seller in France and Germany and is causing much discussion in Britain. Written as it is by an expert in the field of molecular biology with a flair for philosophical thought, it poses a serious challenge to Christian belief in the uniqueness of man and his need of redemption. Monod’s undisguised aim is to demolish what he calls the ‘anthropomorphic illusion’. Galileo in removing the earth from the centre of the cosmos failed to achieve it, advances in biology at the molecular level, he claims, give every promise of succeeding—in fact have succeeded. ‘We would like’, he says, ‘to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophers, and even part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.’ Armed with the latest advances in molecular biology he sets out with overweening confidence and in places superb skill to lay bare the evolutionary process from the level of simple molecules to the greatest mystery of all, human consciousness. Not content with that achievement he then offers a panacea for the modern spiritual malaise—a formidable undertaking.

Monod stands in the tradition of materialistic philosophers dating back to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus and the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius. He has more facts at his command but less poetry. Strangely he ignores this tradition and makes a simple opposition between the objectivity of science and ‘vitalistic’ and ‘animistic’ philosophies. ‘Vitalistic’ theories place the teleonomic principle (that which preserves and reproduces the structural form) in the heart of living matter, i.e. these theories imply a radical distinction between living beings and inanimate matter.

In the great effort of ‘ressourcement’ in which the Church is currently engaged, while the Dominicans have set themselves to produce a massive new edition of St Thomas, the Cistercians have undertaken a multi-volume series of new English translations of the Cistercian Fathers.

This venture is warmly to be welcomed. The Cistercian corpus is intrinsically valuable, and is, historically speaking, one of the major monuments of western monasticism; it is also peculiarly significant as revealing the immediate context for the great theological synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas.

To take this last point first. It is often forgotten just how thoroughly monastic the early Dominicans were. The De modo studendi generally ascribed to St Thomas himself is thoroughly monastic. It is curious how Victor White, for all his insight, missed the reference to the Song of Songs in the bit about the wine-cellar—a monastic commonplace. St Bernard, for instance, says that anyone who proposes to teach others must himself have been ‘introduced into the wine-cellar’, that is to say, must have had personal experience of the intoxicating force of heavenly sweetness. A book written by an anonymous Dominican novice master, and enthusiastically approved by the General Chapter of 1283, leans heavily on Bernard and William of St Thierry. A little later, St Vincent Ferrer’s On the Spiritual Life teaches the same, monastic, spirituality.

It is this monastic context that shows the kind of experience of life underlying St Thomas’ whole moral theology.

After reading David Blamires’ book, with digressions into similar essays and a re-reading of much of David Jones’s own work, I am as one who has just finished a long journey through familiar and cherished country with a companion who, though congenial, talkative and interesting, has some distressing peculiarities of speech and temper: so that, when we return to our starting point, I am pleased to be relieved for a while of his company, and yet anxious to meet him again and renew the conversation. A fastidious reader will not make his way through more than a few pages of David Blamires’ book, for he will find too much that is objectionable in the style: and yet it would be ungenerous to quote from the many examples of pompous jargon covering poverty of thought, of vagueness which assumes the air of profundity, of worn-out cliches which slip from the pen of the careless or hurried writer. Ungenerous for two reasons: in the first place, because such writing has become so common that I do in truth believe that were one now to write with the clarity and economy of a Newman there would be many readers who would be unwilling and even unable to make the effort that should correspond to Newman’s. In the second place, Blamires writes about things which are difficult to pin down and define, and all of us—all who have had to make a similar attempt, particularly in connexion with David Jones—know but too well how great is the temptation to grope for clarity by adding one vague approximation to another. It will not do, therefore, to be over-fastidious: there may be a core of gold beneath this slovenly exterior.

The name of John Donne is not immediately associated with the idea of moderation and the golden mean, but that of one of his earliest and most ardent admirers, and his first biographer, most certainly is. In the description of his equable self as Piscator in The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton offers to posterity a moral ideal which reconciles the turbulent egoism of the age of the English Renaissance with the quietist values of the more mature religious sects.

The nub of Walton’s argument lies in the discussion between Venator and Piscator on the First Day of The Compleat Angler. ‘And for that I shall tell you, that in ancient times a debate hath arisen, and it remains yet unresolved, whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in contemplation or in action?’ The battle lines are already drawn up between non-utilitarian and utilitarian points of view. On the one hand, ‘the nearer we mortals come to God by way of imitation the more happy we are. And they say, that God enjoys himself only, by a contemplation of his own infiniteness, eternity, power, and goodness, and the like.’ ‘And on the contrary, there want not men of equal authority and credit, that prefer action to be the more excellent; as namely, experiments in physick, and the application of it, both for the ease and prolongation of man’s life; by which each man is enabled to act and do good to others, either to serve his country, or do good to particular persons; and they say also, that action is doctrinal, and teaches both art and virtue, and is a maintainer of human society.’