If I understand the French expression of the title correctly, the word ‘clercs’ does not primarily refer to the clergy but to those that in olden days were the philosophers, the writers, the scribblers and the gabblers, and no doubt some clergy came under this heading. Now there are few problems so bluntly omnipresent and so impractically approached by the intellectuals as violence.

I have three books in front of me, one dealing with brotherhood, one with peace, and a symposium on violence. All three are connected since peace can only come from brotherhood and will never come at all as long as our world is dominated by violence. We are all Brothers, by Fr Louis Evely (Burns & Oates, 1967, 15s.), puzzles me. Apparently his books sell on the continent by the 100,000 and are translated into ten languages. Yet, the treatment of the theme of brotherhood is wholly that of a talk given at a retreat in the old style of a nice, comforting, pleasant relationship between a somewhat domestic God and a simple-minded Christian leading himself up the garden path in the private garden of his private soul. One respects the intention but it is difficult to take such spiritual glibness seriously. The next book is Building Peace, by Fr Dominique Pire, O.P. (a Corgi Book, 6s.), which is somewhat clumsily put together by Dr Dricot, but it is honest and faces some facts. I shall return to this later. The third book is called La Violence (Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1967, 12 Frs). It is a collection of papers read at the Semaine des Intellectuels Catholiques in February last year.

One may disagree with this. But it gives the mind that jolt which is absolutely needed before we can think truthfully about ourselves and our world. Only genius, with its preternatural command of words, can give this jolt, can really make us see.

The study of man has made unprecedented advances in the recent centuries. And all would agree that the major advance has consisted in a new emphasis on the concrete. We are no longer content to define man—as rational animal, say: we seek to know how he ticks, what goes on in him. The emphasis is on experience.

But the very placing of this emphasis makes us forget a very simple fact: that all experience is somebody's experience. In order to keep open to the puzzling nature of this fact, ask: what can be meant by attributing ‘experience’ to ‘somebody’? What sort of ownership is referred to?

In the traditional interpretation mankind is a unity because it is, so to speak, a genealogical tree of which each man’s personal life is a branch. I suggest rather that the unity of mankind must be thought of as a unity in history, a unity in a play with one plot in which each man has a rôle. Just as Aquinas conceived of a biological intention of nature presupposed to all personal intentions, and of the propagation of mankind as presupposed to all personal lives (and therefore in a position to taint them); so we must conceive of an intention of history, which I call its plot, underlying every man’s personal life in so far as that life is a rôle in the total play. Just as a man, on Aquinas’ picture, is to some extent determined by an intention of nature even before he begins to take personal charge of his life, so too man’s life must receive sense from the part it plays in the whole play, even before one judges of the success or non-success of the way he personally played that part.

I would suggest, indeed, that this notion of a plot in history more truly expresses the nature of man than any genealogical or biological concept. For if, in some unimaginable future, intelligent animals were discovered on some other planet who belonged to some quite different branch of the biological tree, nevertheless, because they were intelligent animals, it would in principle be possible for us to communicate with them, for us to affect each other’s culture, and for us to grow into having one history with them.

I should like now to sum up the discussion so far, trying to show that what I have been saying does not depend only on what to many will seem a queer and barbarous jargon. To put it in other words: the triumphalist, because he lacks the insight social studies give, does not realize that not only do other minds exist but other kinds of authority, other patterns of government and social living which he does not know. Every one of them has a right to participate in the Church. No one has the right to say that what exists now is the only pattern and must be accepted as a condition of entry. What is the triumphalist pattern? Their pope is a Lord Chief Justice dispensing authoritative justice in a court of law. A man who must be guarded by strict rules of laesae majestatis lest the law be brought into disrepute. The sort of man who reproached Peter Damian when he criticized the late pope, St Leo IX, for recruiting a gang of ruffians to fight the Normans for him under all the trappings of a Holy War. He received the unanswerable reply, We don’t call David a saint for his relations with Bathsheba. But it takes more than commonsense to silence a triumphalist. In the case of a secular judge, one can see that rules of laesae majestatis are essential.

Here is another of those radical-theology desacralizing books from the continent, this time translated from the French (Structures of Christian Priesthood by Jean Paul-Audet, Sheed & Ward, London 1967, pp. 200, 14s.). The author is a French-Canadian Dominican, a distinguished biblical scholar still at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. The general theme is broadly similar to that of Fr Robert Adolfs’ The Grave of God, but less challengingly expressed: namely, that the pastoral ‘structures’ (blessed word!) of the Church unfortunately took a wrong turning in Constantine’s time or even earlier and now need de-institutionalizing back to something more like the apostolic age. Interwoven is an argument against obligatory celibacy for the priesthood, which it will be easier to leave to the end of this article for separate consideration.

The first two-thirds of the book take the form of historical evidence about Christian ecclesial organization in the first century or so. The evidence is marshalled from the New Testament and the early Fathers. What it shows (according to the author) is that our Lord’s own ministry’ was that of a travelling prophet, heralding a message (a kerygma) to the general public and imparting instruction (a didache) to his close followers. The twelve apostles were chosen and trained to imitate this mobile ministry of the word. Thus was set the pattern for the early Church, which at first was quite flexible; small local communities of a few dozen people meeting in somebody’s private house. Thus the ‘base-community’ (local Christians) was identical with the ‘liturgical assembly,’ and our author reckons that there were no ‘sacral persons’, nothing like the Jewish priesthood, at first.

‘Eat up your dinner’, my mother used to say. ‘Think of the starving millions in China.’

That was before 1949. When 1949 came round, no one bothered to tell me what had happened. The ploy simply changed to ‘Think of the starving millions in India’.

Even at that age I knew there was something funny about this argument. Whether I ate my dinner or not, the starving millions weren’t going to get a whiff of it.

It is interesting, especially after nearly two years in China, to look back and laugh at my mother’s trick. More interesting, though, to realize that the new generation in the West has still not grown out of thinking in my mother’s terms.

‘What is to be done about Vietnam?’ people say, in intervals between working at their meaningless jobs, or keeping up with the Joneses. ‘And what about India?’ And now that the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China, such people might add ‘And poor China. . .’.

There is no end to the ‘problems’ that confront Western suburban man. He revels in solving (in his head) the population explosion, the bomb, famine and flood, war. It seems to be little more than a game, an entertainment to take his mind off himself, off the apparently insoluble problems of his own society.