Those who take their stand on their own, or others’, religious experience sometimes claim that unsympathetic critics can be dismissed simply with the plea that their lack of experience disqualifies them from offering any kind of useful critique. Ninian Smart, in his essay Understanding Religious Experience, shows that such a claim need not be regarded as compelling. It is possible for us to have a certain theoretical Understanding of situations of which we have no experience, no “existential understanding”, and this theoretical understanding, even if it is not adequate for all purposes (it will not make a man a mystic, for instance), may still be quite adequate for some kind of philosophical comment to be made. If the mystic then seeks refuge in the further claim that his experiences are so transcendent as to be utterly inexpressible and incomprehensible to the rational mind, even so we are still entitled to ask whether they are truly totally inexpressible and incomprehensible. If they were, then it is unclear that the mystic himself is in any better position than his critics, and, like Cratylus, he ought to confine himself to waggling his finger and give up the attempt to communicate anything to anybody, himself included. But if mystical experiences or their objects are not totally beyond reach of reason and language, then there is at least some common ground between the mystic and his critics, and at least some basis therefore for non-mystical comment on mystical experiences.

at the REQUIEM MASS at Blackfriars, OXFORD, on 26th January 1978

That is a paragraph, without any editing, which Cornelius set down in a notebook in July or August 1972 (to judge from internal evidence). The exercise book is labelled “Meaning in theology”: the first draft, probably of the book that we so much wanted him to write. He covered some twenty pages, in his slightly backhand italic script. His notes become increasingly cryptic and private. The text breaks off with the aphorism: “No human affirmation without negation”.

Conservatism and Catholicism have been synonymous in Britain during the past two hundred years. How that identification came about is debatable. Catholics for tactical reasons may have wished to conciliate opponents of Catholic Emancipation by emphasising their essential social and political conservatism. That image allowed the Church to capitalise on the public sympathy for the French emigre clergy who were pouring into Britain during the French Revolution: Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, (1790) was unwittingly the finest modern Catholic apologist. That expedient became, in the wake of the Oxford Movement a permanent feature of a Church still dependent to a degree on wealthy patrons and increasingly conscious of its social status; its hallmark dreamy spires rather than social democracy. If the Church had joined the Tory Party— or the Tory Party at prayer seemed about to return to Rome—then that was grist to the Liberal mill. If anti-Catholicism was the anti-semitism of the intellectuals, then militant liberalism could mobilise those nonconformist sentiments, temperance, disestablishment and evangelical schooling into a crusade against the whore of Babylon. It was in their political interest to portray Roman Catholicism as the bastion of conservatism. With the excesses of European Catholicism during this period the Church was indelibly identified with the most conservative forces in society. But that is to ignore another tradition, that of radical Catholicism whose most outstanding figure is Dr. William Maxwell.