The ideal of communal living often fails to survive the ordeal of practical realities. A recent book by Clem Gorman combines a survey of the movement towards communitarian life-styles in Britain since about 1965 with a practical manual for would-be communards which is packed with useful information and some reflective insight. At no point does the author make any reference even to the existence of monasteries and convents. It is fascinating and touching to see how, in an experiment less than a decade old, the problems and structures arise which have been familiar in religious communities now for centuries. People always have to learn things for themselves, of course; and one need not lament the fact that the hard-won wisdom of monastic experience has not been available for modern communards to draw upon. For that matter, our communities have been undergoing fairly radical changes during the relevant period, and we have not always given much attention to the proven principles we have inherited, far less practised them impressively enough to instruct others. In fact the blunt advice which Clem Gorman offers can perhaps help to cut through the pious odour that hangs about religious life and sometimes prevents its practitioners from realizing elementary facts. The sheer naivety of the discoveries the communards are making casts fresh light on the hoary truisms of monastic life.

Clem Gorman prefers to speak of ‘communes’, but he allows that the difference between communes and communities is not clear. He sees a spectrum, with a left and right wing: ‘On the far left are the very poorest communes, often squatting, frequently having to support a fair proportion of members who are not working, and probably more likely to involve group marriage and absence of personal property concepts.

I turn to the newer theories of the eucharistic presence. They are not as accessible as the old: that much we can all admit. In fact, I begin what I have to say about them by giving two reasons for this inaccessibility. First of all they have been published for the most part in Flemish or Dutch, and in periodicals not easily traced in England. I got round this difficulty by having a large selection of material microfilmed in Holland: what I have to say, although I do not propose to take up much time in quotation, is in fact based upon original sources that I have read and translated for myself. The second cause of inaccessibility is more important. Just as the older theory was couched in the terminology of Aristotle (misleadingly so, if my contentions are correct), so the newer theories have their philosophical setting. The setting is the tradition known as phenomenology, and associated with the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938. To understand what the newer theology is getting at here, one needs to know something of this way of philosophizing.

I have one help in embarking on a brief description: the relationship between the newer theology and Husserl is not the same as the relationship between the traditional account and Aristotle. The newer opinions do not abuse phenomenology in the way that the concepts of actuality and potentiality are abused in the theory of transubstantiation. On the other hand, phenomenology is a very difficult brand of philosophy to put into a few words. Be that as it may, I think it is possible to pick out one or two things from it that have influenced recent theological speculation on the eucharistic presence.

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.

‘(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: