Can the university—even a radically reformed university—really carry the burden of providing our society with ‘memory and mature purpose’, as Dr Leavis keeps hoping? Remembering some of his more recent essays while staying in fairly remote parts of Scotland this summer, I began once again to reflect on how much the schools fail to do and yet could so easily undertake (as a handful of rare teachers have always done)—if only we could unlearn the attitude to language that has prevailed from the beginning of public education a century or so ago. Gaelic steadily declines in the Hebrides, the vital remnant of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, and the Buchan dialect in the north-east of Scotland is losing its vigour. In both cases the schools are where the native speech dies. If this is a matter of conscious political decision at all, it is only because we submit to the priorities of the commercial system and allow our conception of language and life to be dictated to us by that. Seeing a language die out doesn’t bother the man who regards language as simply a means for exchanging ideas: for him another language can easily be substituted. But if language is, as Dr Leavis says, what creates ‘the human world of values and significances and spiritual graces’, then it is surely clear that ‘exchanging ideas’ is much less than an adequate description of the place of language in human life. Hard Times, which came out in 1854, surely is the moral fable for our time Dr Leavis has so long insisted it is: bland and dulcified as it now is, Mr Gradgrind’s Utilitarianism still shuts out what Sleary’s Horseriding represents. ‘Louisa, never wonder’, Mr Gradgrind said to his daughter. But wonder is the most essential response to reality and a language surely begins as a people’s way of wording their sense of the place in which they dwell. Any given language is the tradition— the living and developing tradition—springing from the original sense a people had of its place on the earth. All significance must derive from the significance a place must have had for a people, whether it meant security and home or seemed eery and alien, or whatever.

Some time ago I met here in England a missionary priest with whom I had worked while in Tanzania. I knew him for an excellent missionary, a man who had adapted himself well to Africa and had put himself entirely at the service of his people. Yet, when I met him, he stated his firm intention of never returning to Tanzania.

Why had he so radically altered the course of his life? Was it for personal reasons—failing health—or a compelling desire to marry ? No. He had come back because he could not see why he should stay in Tanzania any longer. For one thing, the ‘new theology’ had considerably weakened the motives for which he had gone to the missions in the first place: if pagans already know God, why bother to cross sea and land in order to announce God ? If men can be saved without being baptized into the Church, why go on instructing catechumens and making converts? Besides, after twenty years of experience, he had reached the conclusion that conversion to the Church did not appreciably affect people’s lives—Christians seemed no better than pagans. Then, thirdly, there are enough Tanzanian priests to cater for the flock, and in the sectors of education and health, the country is sufficiently developed to look after its own people. Better leave now than wait to be expelled in five years’ time . . . our time is limited, anyway.

Obviously, the majority of missionaries working in Africa or elsewhere are remaining at their posts, and of those who come home, not all come for the reasons given by the missionary I have quoted. I have, nevertheless, chosen to begin with this example because it so well illustrates the kind of questions missionaries are asking, questions as to whether or not they still have a role to play in the Church, and if they have, how they should be playing it.

‘In the past workmen have thought that if they could secure higher wages and better conditions they would be content. Employers have thought that if they granted these things the workers ought to be contented. Wages and conditions have improved, but the discontent and unrest have not disappeared. Many good people have come to the conclusion that working people are so unreasonable that it is useless to try to satisfy them. The fact is that the unrest is deeper than pounds, shillings and pence, necessary as they are. The root of the matter is the straining of the spirit of man to be free.’— William Straker (Northumberland miner), in evidence before the Sankey Commission, 1919.

Workers’ Control is about the struggle for a genuine system of industrial democracy. It is based on the premise, and contradiction, that while we live in a political democracy, however weak and limited that democracy may be, we certainly do not have any real economic democracy. And, furthermore, that without a swift development of democracy in industry we are not very likely to maintain much of our existing political democracy, which has already been seriously undermined by the rapid growth of huge economic empires accountable to no-one. On the other hand if we can create genuine democratic institutions in the industrial sphere we shall have a substantial base from which to attack the weaknesses of the present political framework and to make it much more responsive to human needs and aspirations.

When Hans Kiing attacked infallibility as it has been understood in Roman theology until recently, he was accused by no less a theologian than Karl Rahner of being in effect a liberal Protestant. But the majority of friendly critics were more inclined to ask what all the fuss was about. Nobody took this theory of infallibility seriously any longer. There were undoubtedly situations where Church and Pope had to take a stand and, if the promises of the Church’s endurance were to mean anything, this must mean infallibility in teaching: the Holy Spirit would guarantee the Church’s freedom from error on such occasions. But they were rare enough and a ‘sensitive exegesis’ could always take care of out-dated definitions.

Charles Davis, a little earlier, had chosen to leave the Church because he could not accept the current explanation of papal claims, the present ‘structures’ which prevent even the most sympathetic bishops from treating their subjects with charity or even justice. But Gregory Baum and others were at hand to show that this brilliant young theologian was still too much entangled in nineteenth-century apologetics.

The latest critic of Church structures, more particularly of the papacy, is Fritz Leist. Angry as he is and in deadly earnest as the above were in deadly earnest, he is not a young man. He will be sixty in 1973.

A recent book by a Nobel prize-winner in biology, Jacques Monod, is proving a best-seller in France and Germany and is causing much discussion in Britain. Written as it is by an expert in the field of molecular biology with a flair for philosophical thought, it poses a serious challenge to Christian belief in the uniqueness of man and his need of redemption. Monod’s undisguised aim is to demolish what he calls the ‘anthropomorphic illusion’. Galileo in removing the earth from the centre of the cosmos failed to achieve it, advances in biology at the molecular level, he claims, give every promise of succeeding—in fact have succeeded. ‘We would like’, he says, ‘to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophers, and even part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.’ Armed with the latest advances in molecular biology he sets out with overweening confidence and in places superb skill to lay bare the evolutionary process from the level of simple molecules to the greatest mystery of all, human consciousness. Not content with that achievement he then offers a panacea for the modern spiritual malaise—a formidable undertaking.

Monod stands in the tradition of materialistic philosophers dating back to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus and the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius. He has more facts at his command but less poetry. Strangely he ignores this tradition and makes a simple opposition between the objectivity of science and ‘vitalistic’ and ‘animistic’ philosophies. ‘Vitalistic’ theories place the teleonomic principle (that which preserves and reproduces the structural form) in the heart of living matter, i.e. these theories imply a radical distinction between living beings and inanimate matter.