You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape . . . The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ, for us today? ... We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all; men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-years old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the ‘religious premise’ of man . . . But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.c. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion . . . what does that mean for Christianity . . . ? How can Christ become the Lord even of those without religion; If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity—and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods—then what is religionless Christianity?

In this passage, written from prison twenty years ago (30 April, 1944), Dietrich Bonhoeffcr raised an issue to which wide currency has now been given by the Bishop of Woolwich in the chapter of Honest to God entitled Worldly Holiness. Not that the question is confined to that chapter alone. Indeed I believe it to be the central issue of the Bishop’s whole book, more central in some way than the question of what image of God we are to have. For, if I am not mistaken, we have here the central anxiety which made Dr Robinson write his book.

This article presents a parallel to my previous article entitled ‘Dante’s Indirection’. Both are attempts to study a certain method of achieving effects in a reader, a method to which Kierkegaard gave the title ‘Indirect Communication’. Both articles are concerned basically with Kierkegaard’s technique, due to the angle from which I approach indirect methods in other writers. The expression ‘Indirect Communication’ is ambiguous, as was its use in Kierkegaard’s own hands, and sometimes in studying it, in and for itself, one’s attention is drawn to parallel and much clearer uses of the principle, when one finds it in poets or novelists of less involved theoretical pretensions. Such a man is Graham Greene, novelist, Catholic, individual. It is to him that I turn for further illustration of the principle which seems to defy (in Kierkegaard’s case at least) all attempts at analysis and capture. Critics for over a century, from all countries in the world, have tried to solve the enigma of Kierkegaard’s use of Indirect Communication. Perhaps his Indirection can only be approached indirectly. This essay on three novels of Graham Greene is such an attempt.

What did Kierkegaard mean by ‘Indirect Communication’? This he sets forth in a book called The Point of View for my Work as an Author, a book about which he had such terrible doubts that its publication in complete form was eventually only undertaken by his brother after his death. In it he draws the distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ works and the ‘religious’ works in his output with such clarity that we would expect no problem. But he himself obviously felt, and any reader of his works feels immediately, that the explanation he gave in that work simply did not answer to the actual feel of his production, even contradicted its spirit. The later theory does not explain the former practice.

Jean-Paul Sartre as a critic has been harshly judged in Western Europe, indeed he is one of the more notable victims of cold war mental attitudes. This is well illustrated by the quarrel with Albert Camus brought into the open by Jeanson’s harsh review of ‘L’Homme Revoke’ in ‘Les Temps Modernes’, a quarrel in which a very large number of western readers have taken Camus’ side. Camus is seen as the upholder of human dignity and values, over against Sartre, the system builder, infatuated with the marxist myth of history. This attitude very much undervalues Sartre’s contribution—he points out clearly the essential weakness in Camus’ position. Moreover the whole debate is an excellent illustration of the difficulty involved in building any coherent, materialist system of ethics.

This difficulty is rooted in their common ground; both start from the atheism of Nietzsche and its consequence the absolute freedom of man. Yet both belong to the long line of French moralists and are passionately concerned with what a man ought to do, granted this double premiss. However they begin to differ even in the ways they accept this atheism. Sartre is very matter of fact, for him the death of God is so self-evident that there is no point in talking about it. Towards the end of ‘Le Sursis’ Mathieu receives a letter from Daniel in which the latter very interestingly explains his half-conversion to Catholicism. Mathieu reads part of the letter, loses patience with its to him utter irrelevance, and throws it into the waste paper basket. This contrasts sharply with Camus’ interest in the way the individual accepts atheism.

Now that four years have passed since Le Corbusier’s Dominican church and priory at La Tourette burst on an astonished world with the impact of what was described as ‘the greatest ruin of the twentieth century’, it is possible to have later thoughts and to consider the building not as a major tourist attraction but as a place of prayer and study. It is possible, in fact, to ask whether Le Corbusier’s frequent claims for La Tourette as un lieu de silence, un lieu de repos, are justified. It is good to be there in the empty weeks of early spring, before the tourist hordes descend, and if the endless rains of a wet March have left the concrete mass a leaden grey and the waterspouts are for ever dripping—and the many leaks reveal themselves in new places—then at least one is spared the coloured illusions of the picture postcards.

One’s earlier impressions are on the whole confirmed. The building is a triumphant statement, in terms that match the needs of our time, of what an architect of genius can do to give spatial reality to the sacred. The jeu de volumes—that untranslatable phrase that expresses Le Corbusier’s primary concern with the use of space—is even more effective now that even a brief period of time has given the patina of use to what has too often been a sort of cerebration. These buildings, after all, church and refectory and lecture room and cells, arc to be used, not to be written about or even to be admired. And the marvellous counterpoint of solid mass and floating horizontal surface, of the honest concrete and the progressions of the glass, takes on an altogether different meaning when a bell rings and the cloister fills with friars on their way to church or refectory.