On the 22nd September, 1967, the German bishops published a pastoral letter concerning the Church’s doctrinal authority and mission to teach. In view of a certain incident that has occurred since, a few remarks need to be made about one passage in the document. The passage runs as follows:

Reviewing some books about Utopia recently (Encounter, April, 1969), I ventured the suggestion that ‘Eros is traditionally an anti-utopian force, though he is catered for in the specialized utopias of pornography—what Stephen Marcus has called “Pornopia”. I used the word ‘traditionally’ because we have seen in modern times the emergence of a school of thought that may properly be termed ‘utopian’, in that it is concerned to construct ideal models of the good life, but which inverts the values we normally associate with Utopia, recommending not the enhanced exercise of rationality but the liberation of instinct, not the perfecting of the mind, but ‘the resurrection of the body’. The latter phrase is adopted by Norman O. Brown as a concluding slogan in Life Against Death (1959), a representative text of the new utopianism. It is not, of course, wholly new, and may be readily traced back to earlier sources—to Nietzsche, to Lawrence and, pre-eminently, to Freud, on whom Life Against Death is a commentary.

Brown begins with the paradox propounded by Freud, that civilization or ‘culture’ (which is prized by traditional utopists, and which they wish to perfect) is based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy. Freud himself was shifty about the proportionate loss and gain of this process, but Brown is quite certain and uncompromising: civilization is self-evidently neurotic, and the only solution is to end the tyranny of the reality-principle, to substitute ‘conscious play’ for alienated labour as the mainspring of society, and to restore to adult sexuality, narrowly fixated on genital and procreative functions, the ‘polymorphous perverse’ of infantile eroticism.

Not all the discussion between progressive and conservative wings in the Church is about doctrine and liturgy. As the Humanae Vitae affair revealed there are growing areas of disagreement on questions of morality. Though the ones I want to write about are found in acute form in Roman Catholic circles where there is a sharper clash between individual and authority, they are also frequent wherever any strong doctrine of revelation, particularly of a fundamentalist kind, prevails. This essay aims simply to elucidate some of the questions which do not always get properly examined in the heat of debate and to analyse some of the presuppositions behind popularly held and taught views which lay some claim to being representative of ‘traditional Christian morality’. Not infrequently the views of serious moral thinkers are dubbed ‘situation ethics’ or ‘purely subjective morality’ and by being so labelled are accounted suitably disposed of along with the rest of the contents of the bin marked ‘new theology’. There is a risk that more than garbage is disposed of in this way. I want in this essay to do a bit of ‘cool looking’ at some of the presuppositions of the supporters of ‘traditional Christian morality’ (self-styled) and also to look at a problem that crops up frequently in these discussions: what can be reckoned as specifically ‘Christian’ in a moral view which does not understand moral imperatives to have been delivered timeless and eternal in some earlier period of history?

On the face of it, the ‘neo-modernist’ aesthetic is radically atheistic. (I borrow the term from Frank Kermode’s essay Modernisms, in Innovations, edited by Bernard Bergonzi.) For example Jean Alter has pointed out that in Robbe-Grillet’s world everything is meticulously present except that which is associated with God. Wallas, in Les Gommes, on the lookout for ways of finding his correct route without giving himself away, asks for the post office but not the cathedral: for the town has none. The island in Le Voyeur has a cinema, a café, a garage and a hotel, but no church. In L'Immortelle the religious manifestations are treated simply as tourist attractions, having no religious meaning. Now, the absence of all reference to religion, despite the meticulous rendering elsewhere of visible detail, is itself highly unrealistic. It points to the real message of Robbe-Grillet’s apparently neutral and value-free fiction; namely the discontinuity between human beings and the material environment. There can be no ‘complicity’ between man and the world for ‘les choses sont les choses, et l’homme n’est que l'homme’. (Pour un Nouveau Roman.) In so far as religion, and the objects associated with it, exist for the sake of establishing some rapport between the world and the people God has put in it, religion for Robbe-Grillet is simply a false trail, a cul-de-sac. The whole apparatus of symbolism, sacraments and prayer is therefore ignored, as something of no account in a fiction that concerns itself with life as it really is.

Now, if Alter is right, Robbe-Grillet’s deliberate and calculated refusal to include anything to do with religious activity shows that his aesthetic is not ideologically neutral, but critical. It keeps its distance from the world of ‘bare facts’, takes up a stance towards them.