When men stand out from great events they come of necessity under the glass of scrutiny, to be viewed from many angles. On some, a general judgment stands the test of time, on others it is later reversed or modified while others again elude a consensus of opinion and remain subjects of controversy. The great epoch of the reformation forced into the public view men who otherwise might have led lives of relative obscurity or be remembered today for quite different reasons. Because of the reformation, Thomas More and Martin Luther have, to the generality of succeeding generations, become identified with dramatic and irrevocable choice. Reginald Pole, on the other hand, is by no means so universally remembered. Historians have viewed him variously — as subtle and wily, as unworldly and indecisive, as upright and courageous. It can be fairly stated that his temperament bore an affinity with that of Erasmus, that he shared with Colet a clear-sighted desire for ecclesiastical reform and that at one time he came close to Luther’s thoughts on justification. In common with Erasmus, his considered theological opinions were regarded in some quarters with a suspicion which hardened into menace. Like More and Luther, Pole was presented with dilemmas and, not without agony, he came to decisions. His decisions were not followed by consequences of comparable drama. He did not divert the course of history and he died in his bed of a common fever. His writings are not often recalled, his career presents contradictions, his personality eludes.

I should like to record something of the result of an experience which I had from 1961-1964. I was working as a schoolmaster in Ghana for that time. The school was in routine and academic syllabus an imitation of European, mainly English, practice but we were fortunate in being far removed from the main centres of European expatriate concentration. To be precise we were 130 odd miles from Accra and 70 odd from Akosombo which were the nearest and most accessible European centres. In a town of 10,000 inhabitants throughout our stay at most 40 were expatriates, at the least 20. They included from two to four priests, the Presbyterian missionary and his wife, the two mission doctors and their team of from four to six nurses. This situation could mean virtual isolation in a tiny social world where contacts with Africans and adaptations of ways to theirs were kept to a minimum, or it could provoke a more or less natural interchange between African or expatriate which the circumstances made easy and spontaneous, rather than condescending, folkloristic or exotic. It would be untrue to say that it did not involve a conscious decision, but the decision was an easy one.

Old attitudes die very hard even in so out of the way a place. Many of the Europeans did choose to huddle together to lick over each other’s sense of isolation endlessly; contacts with Africans were kept to a minimum, formality of occasion was encouraged, any crossing over of racio-customary lines was seen as daring and by no means habit-forming.

The German occupation brought to French Jews a fresh realization of the profound anguish of the Jewish condition — and also to those Jews in North Africa who had been emancipated by the presence of France, and who had adopted French as their literary language. Albert Memmi is the most articulate of these writing today, and his new book, La Libération du Juif (Paris, Gallimard, 1966, 15 Fs, the second volume of his Portrait du Juif) proposes what is for him the only possible solution to that condition. M. Memmi himself is a very interesting phenomenon, a Tunisian Jew who has described the life of the North African ghetto in Statue de Sel and has since analysed the psychology of colonialism in Portrait du Colonisateur. The fact that he was a member of an oppressed minority within an oppressed majority under French colonial rule made his situation rather special. The French language liberated him from the ghetto, but separated him from the Arab majority who, at the same time, were trying to free themselves from the French. The young Memmi obviously sympathized with their aspirations, whilst realizing that once they were achieved his own people would be far worse off than they had been under the French. And this in fact is precisely what has happened: the life of the North African Jewish communities has been made intolerable by the new independent Arab governments, whether monarchical or democratic-socialist, and another exodus has begun from what were once flourishing communities.

The central Christian tradition has always carried the teaching that men are, before God, equal: that the differences due to social rank, class or race are only of accidental importance compared with the fundamental truth that each human being, as made in the image of God, may not, without sin, be deprived of his dignity or proper freedom. Though this is a statement about what is most real in man, a statement about his meaning as a being created by God, it none the less wears a very abstract character. Each generation of Christians must find for it its historical verification, and the pious mind, being prone to dwell in the world of aspiration and ideal, is only too often content, in the name of subjective peace, to refuse to come to grips with concrete circumstances. The result is that the cynic often seems to have justice on his side when he says that it is a nice bit of rationalisation that is never allowed to influence the structure of society, or our social motivation. Excessive stress on the ‘before God’ leads either to the view that what happens in history is irrelevant to salvation, which is a heresy, or to the attitude that after all it is a personal matter between the individual and God. This implies a very naive view of the influence of environment and society on the individual.

Writing of Eric Gill some years ago Graham Greene remarked that ‘Catholicism in England instead of producing revolutionaries, produces only eccentrics, and that Gill was a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics . . . That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anticlerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful.’ And we have seen quite a lot of those silly weary smiles yet again in the reception of Mr Speaight’s biography of Gill. Rarely can such a beautifully produced and expensive book have received such accolades for the biographer’s skill and such a confident dismissal of the subject. One sees the book being read with a nostalgic regret for the sunny days of such delightful chesterbelloc buffoonery with all the home-grunnit food, tunics and sandals, and placed on the shelf with a sad shrug, ‘Poor Gill’.

I do not want to be misunderstood, Gill was certainly eccentric in many respects, his views on monarchy and the indecency of husband and wife kneeling together in church, for example, and Mr Speaight has valuably stressed Gill’s Victorian formation which plays an important part in all this. He has also filled in many of the gaps in the Autobiography, particularly the incidents leading up to the removal from Ditchling, his documentation is wide and admirably integrated. Gill’s biography is perhaps an unenviable and delicate task, but I think the reception of the book and the confirmation of Gill’s place among the wayward cranks of English Catholicism owes something to the biographer’s interpretation of his subject, or rather the interpretation he fails to make.

‘It is evident’, wrote Thomas Carlyle a century ago, ‘that an old order of things is breaking up into fragments; and men watch it, as they watch all wrecks, fearfully’. Nothing could be more apt than this when applied to London today. For we see a city in dissolution, a city that has got out of hand.

The problem is so vast. The idea that the problem is solely one of traffic does not bear a minute’s examination; traffic congestion is a convenient scapegoat, an excuse for not doing anything, a reason for doing the barest minimum (the odd traffic roundabout here, the odd fly-over there). These muted attempts to solve traffic congestion savour of a sop to the conscience, just as the cornflake packets posing as architecture are acts of tardy defiance against a chaos that was predicted by Ruskin and Carlyle with ineffable accuracy.

Had there been no war, had the population remained static, then London might have tottered on for a century more or so, with its prisons disguised as Gothic castles and its abatoirs as Venetian palaces, and its churches built for little more than £4,000 (including fittings and furnishings). However, such was not to be. As Matthew Arnold wrote in another context, ‘For what wears out the life of mortal men? ‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;’

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

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

It has not been easy to decide on a suitable title for this address. The phrase ‘significant life’ has been chosen in preference to ‘role’, ‘function’, or even—wilder flights, these—‘inner life’ or ‘soul’. The point has been to indicate a perspective (rather than to frame a policy) for our common life of study at Blackfriars, and to propose it for inspection and reflection (not for instant discussion). I am conscious that many of my hearers this evening have had to listen to me before, sometimes for many years, and it is hardly likely that they will hear anything new from me today; and yet there would seem to be some value in publicly rehearsing, with some ceremoniousness, views which are intended to elicit positive attitudes of assent or dissent, to contribute to a common if differentiated consciousness. With this in mind, I have upon careful consideration determined to speak with as much honesty as I am capable of; the time has really passed, if it ever existed, for triumphalism of any form, conservative or progressive. What is offered is a ‘Here I stand’, like Luther’s; but it is not necessarily, not yet, anyway, an I can do no other’, provided someone shows me how. Those of my hearers who are not Dominicans have at least done us the honour of sharing our erratic pilgrimage, and I must suppose that they too will not be without concern for an attempt to sketch out its horizons, if hardly to plot its future course.

Towards the end of the sixth century, the invading pagans were pushing their way northwards along the eastern coast of Britain. At this period too, Aneirin the poet was singing his verses in the court of Mynyddawg Mwynfawr at Edinburgh. He was to sing the lament at the death of the brave three hundred who lost their lives in the desperate attempt to retake Catterick, and so halt the pagan advance. Farther to the west, about his time too, Taliesin was celebrating the victories of Urien Rheged and of his son Owain. He also sang their elegies. These two are the earliest Welsh poets of whom we can say with reasonable certainty that we have some of their authentic work. Both of them can use the word bedydd (baptism) to mean the world. To them, the only world they knew was the baptised world. All outside that was darkness and barbarism.

In 1823, at meetings at Aberystwyth and Bala, the Welsh Calvin-istic Methodists met and agreed on the forty four articles of their Cyffes Ffydd, their confession of Faith. It was published in book form in the following year, and literate Wales could read and learn by rote the restrained and powerful language, the finest prose of the nineteenth century written to give glory to God and to instruct His people.

It is a long cry from the sixth to the nineteenth century. The earliest Welsh literature was written in Southern Scotland, before Wales as an entity had come into existence.

Gabriel Moran has written an important and disturbing book. It is disturbing because it challenges practically every axiom of modem Catechetics. Just when it seemed we were getting somewhere we are made to wonder if we have to start all over again.

For about sixty years now the Catechetical movement has been working away to bring new life into the teaching of religion, to make religion relevant to the lives of the pupils; and in this it has achieved considerable success.

One of the first things that Catechetical experts turned their attention to was the danger of verbalism and jargon. Thus, the ‘penny Catechism’ with its archaic, involved and abstract vocabulary was soon under fire. Although not long ago Catechetics was regarded by many as the off-beat hobby of a few cranks, recently (and especially since Vatican II) it has become respectable and even fashionable. Catechetical books pour on to the markets, and phrases such as kerygma, Salvation History and the Four Ways are to be heard in staff-room and presbytery. And it is just this that worries Brother Moran! He is conscious that Catechetics has reached a crisis. There is a danger of complacency and fossilization. We may wake up and find that instead of a renewed theology we have merely a new jargon.

In an age when people ask whether God is better visualised as ‘up there’ or ‘in here’, it could be relevant to recall the medieval and Augustinian approach, which claimed that the best way to think of God was necessarily as that on which the intellectual structure of man is modelled – mens, notitia, amor or even memoria, intellectus, voluntas. In other words, the Trinity. For if a Christian holds in the first place that man is made in the image and likeness of his creator, then one can speculate about the original on the basis of the copy. ‘For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.’

The traditional formula still had validity in the period of William of Saint Thierry because man was even then conceived as being sympathetically in accord with the universe around him, and with God. A divine quaternity related him to the four elements, the four humours, and so on, and divine trinity, in the same way, related him to the nature and the persons of God. It was apparently not difficult for twelfth century people to see themselves as part of the landscape, in an almost Chinese sense, nor was it difficult for them to see themselves as involved in the matter of God, ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin’.

We have already considered William’s treatment of the vindication, as he calls it, of the three faculties of man by the three persons of the Trinity, memory, reason and will, each being taken as his own by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively.

A few years ago, it would have sounded unthinkably liberal to say that a priest should not let a week go by without spending an evening socially with laymen. To many maybe it still does. But the point is obvious enough; there is no better way for a priest to cut through platitudes and pat answers and learn to address himself directly to realities than through candid and honest conversation with lay friends, on a level of social parity and about matters of common human interest, and not merely those of a professional, ecclesiastical nature. Such exchanges would benefit particularly the young priest and help him overcome the brash and insensitive enthusiasm which is so often the product of much education and little experience. This would appear to be what Vatican II’s Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests means in its statement that ‘the Word of God ought not to be explained in a general and abstract way, but rather by applying the lasting truth of the Gospel to the particular circumstances of life.’ In its first chapter this decree states that, although priests are taken from among men and ordained for men, they are nevertheless to ‘live on earth with other men as brothers,’ and in a manner which is marked by such human virtues as affability and sincerity. ‘They are not to be separated from the people of God or from any other person.’ The reason for this is quite clear: ‘They cannot be of service to men if they remain strangers to the life and conditions of men.’

In view of the Church’s divine mission it is not surprising that some of her moral teachings are not self-evident to secular man. However she has usually offered supporting reasons for her position and no disloyalty is involved in questioning whether these are really valid. In the case of direct sterilisation Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, presents the classical argument for prohibition (frequently to be repeated by Pius XII) and specifically states that his conclusion is one that ‘the light of human reason makes most clear’. In this article I want to suggest that there are many good men, even within the Christian tradition, to whose reason the prohibition of sterilisation is far from clear and, furthermore, that even the classical arguments may need to be reviewed in the light of new developments. I am not going to discuss the various medical, psychological and economic factors involved, since their bearing on the central moral problem is indirect.

The argument that secular man might put forward to support direct sterilisation could take the following form: There are many instances in which a married couple would have reasons of conscience to refrain from further conceptions; such possible reasons are in fact suggested by Pius XI in his encyclical. They could be of such gravity that the only way in which the risk could be responsibly avoided would be by permanent abstention from sexual intercourse or by sterilisation. The first solution, it would be readily admitted, carries certain dangers such as the straining or even breakdown of the marital home with consequent damage both to the existing family and to society at large.