Analogies are a little like the toeholds one grasps on a steep slope; they enable one to take the next step in a dangerous geography. The next step is the point in question: is it possible ? The question, for a climber, cannot be an abstract one; he must create as he goes. And he draws breath, when the air is very thin indeed, from the example of those who went far, who died in the breach, or who made it further.

Danger is within and around. Whatever the quality of the air (it is not high, by all reports) this is of its substance. It is not merely that one is hunted in a perpetual open season; this is taken for granted, part of the game today. Much nearer the point is the possession of one’s own life, one’s own soul: not to belong to the hunters, not to inhabit their dreams, not to be hung as a trophy on their walls. Resistance is one way of putting it; the pressures one can olfer against a foul project, unworthy of man, undertaken in that decrepit chain of command which forges one man to another, a chain gang of slaves, blind in authority, blind in obedience.

Such thoughts arise on the occasion of the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. His faults, which were indeed large ones, died with him, extinguished in blood. The questions raised by his life and dramatized in his murder remain to haunt those who were his friends, who, two years later, have tears to shed for a young life, so brutally extinguished. In a sense which is both true and difficult of understanding, his death was irrelevant to his failure; one could still consider him as having won his prize, gone on to the highest political honour—and changed nothing.

I want to present a difficulty, and to commend a solution to that difficulty. The difficulty is one which frequently troubles Catholics and (to a lesser extent) other Christians; the solution to it is neither original nor new, but I think deserves wider publicity than it has had up to the present time.

The difficulty is as follows. Catholic Christians, and also many Christians of Protestant or Eastern communions, hold that the assent of believers is demanded to some doctrines, like those of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which have been solemnly defined by the Church in the past. Now the definitions are couched in terms derived from earlier philosophical world-views. So, if we assent to the doctrines, it seems that we are thereby committed to the world-views which provided the terms in which they were defined.

It seems that the believer is faced with the following dilemma: to reject the world-views as outmoded and therefore to reject the doctrines; or to accept the doctrines and with them the worldviews. No Catholic can really accept either alternative; to accept the second is to be stuck for ever in the conceptual scheme of the ancient world, while to accept the first is, logically, to cease to be a Catholic. ‘Conservatives’ in the Catholic Church tend to emphasize the importance of maintaining the doctrines, and divert attention from the apparent consequence that the outdated world-views must also be retained. ‘Progressives’ tend to emphasize the imam portance of dispensing with the world-views, and to gloss over the problem of in what sense, if any, one can consistently at once maintain the doctrine and abandon the world-view. To raise this question at all is to invite the stigma of conservatism at the hands of progressives, of progressivism at the hands of conservatives.

The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.

At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’

When I was saying goodbye to Michel Butor on the southbound platform of Durham station some months ago, I asked him if he did not feel that student activity on the violent left, in France and elsewhere, had already reached a peak, and that what students really expected from teachers was not discussion towards reform, but a reason for order. There was, he replied, nothing more repugnant to him than the teaching of order to the young (I was very much reminded of Camus’s embarrassed proclamation to a group of students when asked to address them on some serious topic, I would rather preach passion to you’) and the only valid thing to tell them was to explore and risk. I had been full of Camus and limits when I asked the question, having only a few months before lectured on L’Homme révolté to an audience of African students on Camus’s depiction of the pitfalls of millenarian revolution, its constant history of over-reaching and failure; and I had been roundly rebuked by nearly all the expatriate professors—European and American—on the staff of that African university: in their view, what might have been a careful indication of ‘brakes’ in Britain or Europe could be only a counsel of cowardly despair in modem Africa, where the first lesson needed was revolt.

Butor clearly felt this about France, too, but whatever one’s views about the events of May, 1968, and the legend it has left behind it, in the most conspicuous case of Nanterre it seems to me that the reasonable limits of revolt were crossed long ago.