What really happened on the first Easter had a wide range of ramifications. The resurrection of Jesus can be related to the Church’s mission, to past history, to one’s present faith, future expectations, personal justification and salvation. It is related to newness of life, the victory over death, the end of the law, and the defeat of sin. The difficulty in talking about the resurrection, then, for a Christian theologian is to give an adequate account of the extent of its meaning. Far too often in popular Catholic belief and theology (perhaps especially in Catholic theology) the resurrection has been thought of as a resuscitation of the flesh of Jesus Christ and as no more than an event which happened at a specific time and place in the past. Now, I am not going to argue that this was wrong in every respect, but it must be said that the great virtue of Hubert Richards’ book The First Easter: What Really Happened? is that he has brought the dimension of faith and newness of life to something which had often been thought of as a brutum factum of past history. Richards’ shift away from a traditional Catholic historicist understanding of the resurrection of Jesus is reflected by Fergus Kerr when he says, ‘The resurrection of Jesus thus cannot be reduced to, or even specially concentrated upon, his restoration to bodily life.’ It does, however, seem to me that the approach of Hubert Richards—and of Fergus Kerr, in so far as they agree—does leave us with problems.

“Yeats said to me that if they knew what we thought, they’d do away with us. They want their poets dead.” Ezra Pound took no pains to conceal what he thought and, sure enough, found himself at the age of sixty in the death-cells at Pisa—open-air cages, exposed to the elements, with only a pup-tent for shelter—facing the possibility of execution for treason as a result of his war-time broadcasts on Italian radio in support of Mussolini, Hitler and fascism. Heymann’s study’attempts to chart the precise evolution which led him there, and thence to thirteen years in St Elizabeth’s Mental Asylum, medically diagnosed at his trial as a man “afflicted with a paranoid state of psychotic proportions,” and judged “of unsound mind” by a jury which took three minutes to reach its verdict.

Perhaps this is the significant phrase. Yeat’s remark was romantic braggadocio: for “do away” we should substitute “put away”. Pound’s treatment, after the initial atrocities of the Pisan cage, which induced an arguably long-imminent nervous breakdown, was “lenient” enough, in conventional terms—as if the authorities had almost conspired to avoid the embarrassment of a political trial for a man with such an international reputation and such influential friends. And to see Pound’s beliefs as a logical development from his starting-point was too risky an option in the war-ravaged Europe of 1945, where already former fascists were being rehabilitated to prop up the administration of the occupied zones, and fend off the risk of communist takeovers.

The Venice Statement on Authority in the Church is a momentous document which it must take some years for us to digest. Starting from “the large measure of agreement in faith which exists between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Anglican Communion”, acknowledged in the Malta Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission (1968), the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has succeeded, in less than ten years, in reaching a significant consensus on the doctrine of the Eucharist (Windsor 1971) and of the Ministry (Canterbury 1973), and now on the question of the nature and exercise of Authority in the Church.

This final document closes a phase. It must surely force Roman Catholics in this country to search their hearts more deeply than ever about how true this series of Agreed Statements is to what they believe, and to ask themselves how far what they believe may be illuminated and purified, in the light of faith, by study of these documents. As a community, we are not accustomed to theological argument, and the documents are in any case much more difficult to read than they appear at first sight. They are immensely rich, opening up perspectives and introducing new concepts which it would stretch the mind of theological students to understand. It has been easy enough for us to delay the effort of settling doubts and resolving difficulties raised by the first two documents because we naturally waited to see if agreement would be reached on the question of the primacy of the Pope. If agreement could not be attained on that question, so we could excuse ourselves, then we did not need to struggle with the unaccustomed language of the previous agreements.

So very great is the range and complexity of the issues now raised by the New Black friars debate that it is impossible even to state, never mind argue, a position in relation to all of them. Nonetheless, since two main contributors, Barker and Wicker make some serious criticisms of my views, at least some of them on the strength of equally serious misunderstandings of what they are, some reply is, even if insufficient, also necessary. So I shall concentrate a lot on clarifiication.

First of all, then, I shall try to be clearer about what my basic contentions are, for they obviously cannot be clear from what wrote. Barker, for example, purports to agree with my thesis about Marxism and morality. This thesis was, in short, that they are historically, and therefore contingently, identical. But he then accuses me of lapsing from this thesis and offers a reason which can only show that he does not, after all, understand the nature of the identity I was maintaining there is between Marxism and morality. So I must first of all clear this up.

Having done that I propose, secondly, to challenge the conception of Marxist science and of its relationship to ideologies which underpins Barker’s main criticisms of the Marxism and Christianity “strong compatibility” thesis.

The clarification of this thesis is the third, and most obviously necessary task. Wicker, at least, has badly misconstrued it. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, for in the “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” paper I only mentioned, but did not formally spell out, what the “strong compatibility” thesis holds you to maintaining.