bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wolf Masks: The Early Poetry of Ted Hughes
Authors: Smith Stan
Published: July 2007

‘It was a violent time’. Thom Gunn’s description of the Elizabethan age (‘A Mirror for Poets’) could equally be applied to the 1950s. Again and again the poetry of this decade returned to the central theme of violence, yet, constantly, shrank back from engaging with it. Gunn’s own poetry, replete with latent aggression,, nevertheless strove to contain its smouldering energy in couplets and formal stanzas and histrionic poses (‘Even in bed I pose’) as impersonal and self-disciplining as those nazi uniforms and leather-jackets with which his poems abound. The motor-cyclists of ‘On the Move’ seemed to offer an adequate parallel to his own poetic stance:

In goggles, donned impersonality,

In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,

They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—

And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

Much of the writing of ‘The Movement’ tried to explore the barbarous hinterland which recent history had shown lay behind the genteel littoral of western civilisation, but most poems had an air of ‘donned impersonality’ which seemed to brand them as exercises rather than explorations. The doubt was too profound, the revelation of depravity too recent and too raw, to make total candour possible. For many poets, an ostensibly empirical interest in the quotidian became, in fact, a rationale for escapism.
Marxists and Christians: Answers for Brian Wicker
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

The question which Brian Wicker poses to Denys Turner—how is Marxism to accommodate the notion of ethical absolutes?—is clearly one of first importance to those who, like Denys Turner and myself, would regard themselves as both Christians and Marxists. I don’t think I can give any satisfactory answer to Wicker’s question, but I can perhaps at least prepare the context for such an answer by making some general remarks about the relations between Marxism and morality. In doing so, incidentally, I shall be elaborating on Turner’s own truly pioneering earlier article in this journal, ‘Morality is Marxism’ (New Blackfriars, February and March 1973).

The question of the relevance of moral values to Marxism is at the heart of one of the most theoretically crucial debates now being conducted within European Marxism : the conflict between those revolutionary theorists for whom Marxism is in essence a humanism—an historical praxis of love and liberation—and those for whom historical materialism is in the first place a science. The adherents of the former position espouse a Marxism deeply indebted to Hegel and the work of the young Marx; the latter believe that such a case is no more than an idealist ideology of historical materialism, and claim to be restoring Marxism, after this long twentieth-century heresy, on the truly scientific basis to be found in the mature Marx of Capital. The debate—one, roughly, between the followers of Georg Lukacs and the disciples of the most prominent European Marxist theorist of our own time, Louis Althusser—has created a good deal of dust and heat among revolutionary intellectuals.

For the Lukacsians, there is an essential continuity between the work of the earlv, humanist Marx and the later scientist of Capital; for the Althusserians, there is radical rupture and discontinuity between the two phases.
On Dissolving Indissolubility
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

Let us begin with dissolving inflated statements on the indissolubility of marriage which do nothing but distort the issue: statements such as marriage is indissoluble, or marriage between Christians is indissoluble, or marriage is indissoluble because it is a sacrament. In point of fact, the Church considers marriage to be generally dissoluble: she claims the power to dissolve marriages between unbaptised spouses and does avail herself of that power when she sees fit to do so. Since by far the majority of spouses that live on our planet are not baptised, the initial proposition must be reworded as follows: in the Church’s view, marriage is dissoluble, with the proviso that in some cases it is not.

What are those cases which are exceptions to the rule? Marriages between baptised spouses—or, to use the short-cut formula, marriages between Christians? The trouble is that the Church also claims the power to dissolve such marriages and actually goes on to break some, as when she grants a dissolution of the bond to validly married Christian spouses who have failed to ‘consummate’ their marriage.

What, then, about relating indissolubility to the reception of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Doesn’t everybody know that if you are baptised and validly married in the Church, your marriage is ipso facto a sacrament and indissoluble by divine law. . . ? Beware, however, of bringing God into the picture before the Church is out of it: for your marriage is a sacrament even though you may have chosen not to consummate it, yet the Church would have no qualms of conscience in regarding you a free man (or a free woman) if you wished, say, to join a religious order and actually made your solemn profession.
Christianity and Violence: An Alternative Tradition
Authors: Cullen Peter J
Published: July 2007

During this Twentieth Century, more human lives have been lost as a result of warfare and political strife than have been taken by famine or any natural disaster. Not only have two world wars inflicted unmeasured misery and suffering upon millions of people, but also atrocities have been committed in the pursuit of political freedom or the protection of human rights throughout the five continents. In Vietnam, war was a fact of life for thirty years; relations between the countries of the Middle East are strained to the limit by violence and acts of war; in Northern Ireland, the deaths and injuries of the last five years, with the many who have been unjustly imprisoned or ill-treated, have ensured that it will be some considerable time before the hostility which has characterised the troubles finally disappears.

In this Holy Year, with its theme of reconciliation, Christians can use the Old Testament to discover the contribution they can make to a world which is desperately searching for peace. The Jewish understanding of peace is characterised by the prophet Isaiah, who looked forward to the Messianic Age as a time when the swords and spears of destruction would be converted into the ploughshares and pruning-hooks with which men could sustain life (Isaiah 2 :4). Such a positive vision of peace inspired the composer of Psalm 72 to pray for the establishment of the Messianic Kingdom, where ‘Justice will flourish, and peace, until the moon fails’. The poor and the weak will be freed from oppression and material well-being will characterise the times as corn ‘is abundant in the land’ and men flourish in the cities ‘like grass on the earth’.
Sermon at a Latin Mass
Authors: Fitzpatrick P J
Published: July 2007

Profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera: ‘he bringeth from his treasure new things and old’. (Matt. XIII 52).

We have come together tonight, not only from different Christian traditions, but from different areas of thought in our own Church. We have come together to celebrate Mass, the holy mysteries in which, as Our Lord commanded, we shew forth his death and rejoice in him, our risen Saviour. But we have come together, for all our differences, in another way too. We have assembled here to celebrate Mass in a tongue that links us with a remote past older than Christianity itself, and in a form that was for centuries a distinguishing mark of the ancient church of the West. Our ceremony tonight would have been recognised at once by Pascal, by Thomas More, by Cuthbert Tunstall; and, with almost equal ease, by Bede, by Cuthbert, by Gregory. Yet in order that you should join in and recognise the ceremony yourselves, you have needed to assemble from many parts to this place—almost as a new gens lucifuga in its catacomb. It is this paradox that has prompted the reflexions I offer you.

Liturgy—the leitourgia, the public work of worship—bears on itself the marks of time and of ages that are past. Examples are easily found. Just as the outstretched hands of the priest recall the frescos depicting the earliest Christians, so his hands folded in prayer are reminiscent of a later age, and of the medieval gesture of homage. In action and posture, in phrase and word, in the very artefacts of worship, the course of our history, as Christians and as men, has left its mark.
Jesus between Poetry and Philosophy
Authors: O'Collins Gerald
Published: July 2007

Early this year I heard a lecture by Hans Georg Gadamer (a retired professor of philosophy from Heidelberg University) on the history of relations between philosophers and poets. Gadamer mused on the ups and downs, the loves and hates, the convergences and divergences of that relationship. It runs all the way from Plato to the later Heidegger. Plato called the poets’ stories of the gods ‘theologies’. His ideal republic—he believed—would be better off if it severely controlled this kind of theology and even banished the poets. Plato refused to accept that his own master in philosophy, Socrates, had corrupted the youth of Athens, but he clearly believed that poets could be corrupting influences. Other philosophers have been much kinder to poets. In our own century Heidegger turned from his earlier work to draw from poetry the material for his later philosophical reflections.

All in all, it was a brilliant lecture by Gadamer. It set a number of questions buzzing in my head. Would a period that was high on poetic imagination prove likely to be low on philosophical thought? Do poetry and philosophy represent completely different ways of approaching reality, which neither match one another nor even have much to do with one another? And then came the question that gave rise to this lecture. Would reflection on some of the ways poets and philosophers work throw light on the mind behind the preaching of Jesus?

Let us explore that last question and see what comes up. First of all, the philosophers and their revolutions. Some philosophers like Wittgenstein have stood back from their culture, surveyed centuries of intellectual history, and quite consciously tried to take philosophy and human thought in new directions. In their own way such philosophers could appropriate the sentiment of Jesus, ‘Of old such and such was said to you. But I say to you’.
The Papacy and the Historian V: Popes and Monks
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

Gregory the Great is important because he was born to the purple of what was left of the classical world—he was related to both Symmachi and Anici, to Symmachus and Boethius—but used the position his status gave him to further the cause of the revolutionary and subversive elements of Christian society, the hippies of his day, the monks. The Rome of his day was the apex of a wedge-shaped territory extending from the Adriatic, near Ravenna, to the Mediterranean, at Ostia. This, like all Italy, was supposed to be part of the Byzantine Empire. To the north, what is now Tuscany and Lombardy were ruled by the Lombards who were bitter enemies of the Byzantines, who could afford to maintain an unremitting hostility to them, and of the papacy, which could not. The so-called exarchate of Ravenna, of which Rome and its environs, the so-called duchy of Rome, were a part, was the object of a policy of covetous nibbling by the Lombards. The exarchate was Byzantine in that it recognised the sovereignity of the eastern emperor, who appointed the exarch, but in practice it had to be self-supporting. Inevitably the bishop of Rome played a greater and greater part in all this and the duchy of Rome at least was often in practice ruled by the pope of the day insofar as it was ruled at all.

The ruler of Rome had always had some responsibility for feeding the population: before Gregory became pope in 590 the Tiber overflowed its banks and inundated the city’s granaries. Plague had followed in the wake of the flood and carried off Pope Paschal I, Gregory’s predecessor. Rome was full of refugees from the Lombards, Gregory himself estimated there were 3,000 destitute nuns alone in Rome and appealed for help in feeding them.
Guilty Splendour
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley
Published: July 2007

The story which Wodehouse seems to have regarded as his funniest —with some reason—concerned a detective novelist, but ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ was primarily satire on ghost stories with subordinate satires on mysteries and slushy romance. The opening is almost appalling in its realistic reply to the normal ghost story beginning:

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ asked Mr Mulliner abruptly. I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.

‘Well’, I replied, I don’t like them, if that’s what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.’ (World of Mulliner, 117.)

As the story develops it raises the question of environment and change of predominant literary influence to which Wodehouse adverts in several Mulliner stories. Environmentalism was in many ways fashionable in Wodehouse’s youth and early maturity—the America of his day was still looking respectfully at the shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner when it read history—and while Wodehouse apparently concedes much to the environmentalist he was a little slower in picking up the unconscious influences of his surroundings than most writers. Apart from occasional lapses into American usages, verbal or social, the main impact of America on him is, as I have tried to imply earlier, a fairly subtle and largely undetected one. Orwell saw American effects on Wodehouse in terms which suggest a parallel between Wodehouse and the classic American immigrant: the home country is vivid in the memory, but frozen with virtually no allowance for change from the date of departure. But in fact Wodehouse made long sojourns in England before World War II.
The Papacy and the Historian—VII: The Feudal Papacy?
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

An ideology was matured, if not created, in the reformed communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was mostly done under the banner of the Rule of St Benedict. What this means, is not that all the reformed communities were really Benedictine, nor that all those who called themselves Benedictine were what we should recognise as Benedictine monks. In Northern Italy in the sources emanating from the more conservative churchmen it is obvious that the term Benedictine conjured up ideas of rabble-rousing radical churchmen urging their lay supporters to prevent married and unreformed priests from celebrating mass, by force of necessary. The centre of this activity was the Burgundian abbey of Cluny: it is instructive to compare the conventional image of a venerable, ivy-grown, primitive Ampleforth purveyed in the works of some modern historians of Cluny (the works of Dr Noreen Hunt are excellent examples of the scholarly hagiography of our own day that is quite as false as anything put out by a medieval writer) with the picture given by a hostile contemporary, Bishop Adalbero of Lâon. Adalbero presents us with a power-seeking, ruthless, abbot of Cluny, socially subversive, tottering on the verge of heresy, the enemy of the natural ‘feudal’ order of the day. Adalbero’s abbot is St Odilo, the charming old dear of modern hagiography. Adalbero, himself a deeply political bishop in an age when all senior churchmen, and above all the abbot of Cluny, had to be politically alert, knew what he was talking about. Cluny was born of an attempt to manipulate the intricacies of the feudal world to the advantage of the kind of monasticism envisaged by Gregory the Great, Columbanus, and St Wilfrid. Cluny lay in the kingdom of the West Franks, in the duchy of Burgundy, the territory of the count of Mâcon and the see of the bishop of Mâcon. But the original endowment was the property of the neighbouring and more powerful duke of Aquitaine, who was also count of Mâcon.
Memories of Dying: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

Clive James, reviewing Seamus Heaney’s third collection, remarked: ‘Soon people are going to start comparing him with Yeats’. Which was characteristic of James, since he didn’t actually make the comparison but could claim first credit for it if necessary. C. B. Cox, reviewing the second collection, was less circumspect: ‘Major poets are as rare as the phoenix, and it is possible that since 1960 only one has emerged in these Islands. He is Seamus Heaney’. In the first Annual Yeats Lecture, in 1940, T. S. Eliot offered a variation on his own attempt to define the difference between a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet:

Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier; and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows us beauty and significance not before perceived.

This emphasis on the notion that ‘a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it’ (Eliot, ‘What is Minor Poetry?’) is peculiarly apposite to Yeats—at least in Yeats’s own view, since, despite Leavis’s contrary judgement, Yeats intended his Collected Poems to be read together and ordered the poems accordingly: each was to find its place within the pattern of the whole. If we compare Heaney with Yeats at all, this might be a starting-point since a similar patterning intention seems to be at work in at least three of his collections so far. It is an overall pattern in Heaney’s poetry that I want to present—which precludes any very close commentary on individual poems.
Auto‐Catholicism in Britain
Authors: Dann Graham M S
Published: July 2007

It hasn’t needed an economic crisis to make shareholders and taxpayers in Britain realise that the motor car industry is tottering on the brink of virtual financial collapse and ruin. Poor management, lack of efficiency, overmanning, a deficiency in new ideas and inability to respond to competition, are just some of the reasons for this failure. Excuses are even more abundant. The well worn oil crisis theme is dragged in at every available opportunity (even though it occurred several months ago and does not appear to have affected the sale of foreign vehicles). Allegations are made of overseas competitors ‘dumping’ their products on to the British market (this frequent ploy is used where responsibility is not taken for self-inflicted inflation with its accompanying non-competitive and higher prices). Industrial disputes are blamed, Communists are seen under every factory bench, even inflation itself is used as a scapegoat. But in offering these, and a host of other excuses, including all but the weather, what none of those connected with the motor car industry is prepared to admit is that they are collectively and directly responsible for the state of affairs in which they currently find themselves.

It was the first Vatican Council which suggested that a suitable method for a deeper appreciation and understanding of an article of faith was to employ analogy. In making such a suggestion, the Fathers made it quite clear that it was a mistaken view to claim that because a doctrine was a mystery there could be no further theological reasoning employed for a furtherance of understanding (as if to say ‘a mystery is a mystery is a mystery’). Following their example, I would like to suggest that a current appraisal of the Catholic Church in Britain can be aided by use of another British institution, that of the British motor car industry. The comparison of the two institutions will stress similarities, rather than differences, although of course the latter do exist.
Surviving Wiles: From Dogmatic Theology to Doctrinal Criticism
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Maurice Wiles, who is Regius Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford as well as Chairman of the Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England, is that rare species, a dogmatic theologian who is neither so deeply entrenched in doctrinal fundamentalism that he sees no need for the introduction of the critical-historical method nor so anxious about its initial effects on the orthodoxy of his own thinking that he prefers to remain almost silent. He obviously does not regard his tenure of weighty and perhaps rather exposed offices as barring him from pursuing a course of enquiry which he himself often refers to in such terms as ‘daunting’, ‘dangerous and disturbing’, and the like. One may well want to argue over the detail and the force of some of these critical-historical studies of various Christian doctrines at the most decisive stages of their formation. This the author would certainly welcome. Given that most of these papers have already appeared in learned journals (the earliest in 1957), it is surprising that their intention has not been better understood. Perhaps collecting them like this will help.

In a nutshell, what Wiles proposes is that the kind of critical study of the formation of the Scriptures which began over a century ago should at last be extended systematically to the case of Christian doctrine. The model of biblical criticism suggests the necessity of an equivalent kind of doctrinal criticism (a phrase which Wiles ascribes to the late G. F. Woods). Partly because of his own background in patristic scholarship, but mainly in recognition of the decisive role the Fathers played in the formative period of Christian doctrine, it is the faith of Nicaea and of Chalcedon that Wiles is led to examine and question. There, of course, is where the dangers lie, that he foresees as clearly as anybody, and perhaps far more clearly than many of his critics.
The Morality of Knowledge and the Disappearance of God
Authors: Barker Francis
Published: July 2007

It is with a certain circumspection that a Marxist enters the kind of debate represented by the articles of Denys Turner, Brian Wicker and Terry Eagleton on the problems of morality, Marxism and Christianity. This is not because he any longer fears that guilt by association which was once so characteristic a feature of (Stalinist) ultra-leftism by which anyone who even passed the time of day with a ‘petit-bourgeois idealist’ was automatically suspect and probably a class traitor, but rather because, in entering such a discussion, the Marxist simultaneously acknowledges that there is a discussion to be had—something real is at stake—and also his relative inadequacy to participate in it. This sounds like conceding defeat immediately but is intended to echo Terry Eagleton’s schematic but accurate map of the Marxist tradition—on the one hand a neo-Hegelian idealism stemming from the work of Lukács, fully equipped with a humanist ideology, and on the other the structural-scientific work of Althusser, programmatically anti-humanist—and thus to indicate right from the start that the English Marxist at least is bound to be caught wrongfooted. He is bound to look back and see that a Christian-Marxist dialogue was easier all round under the old socialist humanist regimé, but equally the Marxist is newly aware of the inadequacies of that theoretical past, the errors which led to irrationality in theory and defeat in practice and the correction of which are, for him, the primary theoretical concern. Marxism is now establishing for itself a new rigour the central thrust of which is towards the purging of eclecticism from itself and the preclusion of united fronts with other discourses at the level of theory.
A Modern Irenaean Theodicy — Professor Hick on Evil
Authors: Davies Brian A.
Published: July 2007

In attempting to deal with the traditional problem of evil Christian theologians have had recourse to the presentation of theodicies. The two most influential kinds (though advocates of either can agree on some points) have been the Augustinian and the Irenaean and today the latter is the most popular largely as a result of its exposition by Professor John Hick. I have no distinctive theodicy to offer, nor am I sure either that one can be offered or that the Christian is bound to offer one. Perhaps, after all, what Alvin Plantinga calls a ‘defence’, coupled with an appeal to mystery is in order. I do, however, find the Irenaean theodicy in Hick’s form difficult to accept and am therefore disturbed to find it currently so influential. In what follows, and in the briefest possible manner, my aim is to indicate why others should feel the same.

The problem of evil is a problem for the theist. According to theism the following propositions are true:

1. God exists.

2. God is an all-powerful, all knowing and all-good agent.

The problem is how to square acceptance of these propositions with the acceptance of the facts of evil. By ‘evil’ here is meant (a) moral evil [viz. morally undesirable actions of human agents who frequently inflict suffering and harm on each other], and (b) natural evil [viz. pain producing events in the world of nature and undesirable though not necessarily pain producing natural events and states of affairs].
On Death and Human Existence
Authors: Cameron James M
Published: July 2007

The topic of death, now fashionable and much discussed, raises questions in almost every field of thought. Death has always been thought hateful, or almost always; hateful, and enigmatic. In the Christian and Jewish traditions death has always been terrible, something that reveals the distance between God and man and man’s dereliction; and it is therefore thought to be something that in some obscure sense ought not to happen. The primitive account of the passion in Mark and Matthew—characteristically and no doubt deliberately omitted by Luke—records the great cry of agony taken from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the same psalm we find: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast . . . and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; thou dost lay me in the dust of death.” Here is no attempt to prettify death or to make the process of dying acceptable. Death is intolerable.

Of course, there are other biblical ways of looking at death. In (and out of) the Bible we are given the picture of the just man full of years and honour who dies surrounded by his children and his children’s children. This is a fortunate death, and if to this we add the element contributed by Christianity, namely, the reception of the eucharist (viaticum, journey money, analogous to the placing of a coin in the dead man’s mouth to pay Charon’s ferry charges), and the anointing (formerly) of those parts of the body that have so often taken us away from God, and the sacramental remission of sin through confession and absolution, we understand how this can properly be called “a happy death.”
First‐class Fellow‐travelling: The Poetry of W.H. Auden
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

W.H. Auden died in Oxford a few years ago, leaving his reputation as untidy as his personal habits. There were those who believed him to be the greatest English-speaking poet of the century, after Yeats and Eliot; there were others who lambasted his work as slick, brittle, cerebral, excessively voulu. Hailed as a poetic revolutionary, Auden was also pilloried as an intellectual flirt, a brainy exhibitionist whose scintillating technical virtuosity conceals a merely adolescent smartness. If Eliot and Yeats are the revered masters of 20th century English poetry (neither of them, significantly, Englishmen), Auden has been seen as the upstart, too clever by half, thumbing his nose at received pieties, pathologically incapable of resisting the private joke or smart crack even if it ruins a poem. Placed beside the rhetorical resonances of a Yeats or the cryptic metaphysics of an Eliot, Auden can seem light-weight, flippant and garrulous; put beside the fertile resources of feeling of a Hardy, Edward Thomas or Lawrence, Auden seems clinical, anaesthetised, intellectually top-heavy, damagingly retarded in certain crucial areas of sensuousness and sensibility. Yet the judgement can be as easily inverted: compared with the hollow posturing and hairbrained mythologising of a Yeats, or the Olympian distaste of an Eliot, Auden emerges as our kind of man: materialist, democratic and subversively shrewd, with an uncanny eye for the telling contingent detail and a hardnosed sardonic realism which no soft-bellied Romanticism can seduce.
The Notion of Saintliness in Jean Genet
Authors: Parish Richard
Published: July 2007

There can have been few novels published in the twentieth century which have more firmly rejected the traditional Christian bourgeois morality than the one I propose to study in this article. It is the novel of a counter-culture par excellence, and has come to be seen as the definitive literary statement of a radical alternative. Its main character, a homosexual prostitute with a criminal record, moves in and epitomises the specific milieu of his culture, carrying with him all the detail of its particularity. He is arguably the last literary figure, if judged solely on his superficial reputation, to whom most people would turn for enlightenment on the notion of saintliness, and yet it is precisely this notion that is at the centre of much of his significance, and to which this article is devoted. Genet does not simply describe his creation periodically as a ‘saint’, without further qualification, but rather carries this epithet through in the context of a developed understanding of what he considers it to mean. Our possible initial reaction of feeling that ‘saint’ is probably used as a more eye-catching term for ‘hero’ or ‘star’—a sort of linguistic shock-tactic—is thus, on closer examination, transformed into a conviction that the word ‘saint’ is used simply because it is the only word that is right; it is the only word that means what the author is trying to say, and as such deserves, and indeed demands analysis.
Metaphor and Metaphysics
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

Brian Wicker has written a very curious book. A rough summary of its contents will indicate the obvious sense in which it’s curious: the second part consists of six critical studies, of Lawrence, Joyce, Waugh, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Mailer; the first, theoretical, part includes an analysis of metaphor and analogy in relation to Saussure and Chomsky, a comparison of homopathic and contiguous magic with myths and fairly-tales, an excursus on causality in science linked with comments on angels and ecology, and a chapter that brings together discussions of religious language, Whitehead and Teilhard, and the differing narrative structures of Old and New Testament stories. It’s a brave author and publisher who can expect a readership for such a work. But it’s the kind of argument that links these components that I find really curious, since I remain very unclear just what Wicker is arguing for. There are two major difficulties: the overall argument seems to be trying to establish a kind of natural theology, a queer kind of proof that God exists, though Wicker’s formulations of his case never quite commit him to this; and secondly some of his basic arguments seem to me so dubious that, given my respect for Wicker’s previous work, I can only conclude that one of us is deeply muddled but remain uncertain which.
Christ and China II
Authors: O'Collins Gerald
Published: July 2007

Closely aligned with the theme of the passio Christi apud Sinenses is that of the emulation of heroes. Mao led his nation in an extraordinary struggle to reshape the values, attitudes and ideas of an entire people. James Reston, senior editor of the New York Times was astounded by the ‘staggering thing that modem China is trying to do. They’re not trying merely to revolutionize people, and establish a sense of social conscience, but they’re really trying to change the character of these people. The place is one vast school of moral philosophy.’ Many methods pour into this enormous programme of thought-reform: preaching, teaching, wide-ranging techniques of persuasion from the outside, and orgies of self-criticism in which people testify to their conversion away from selfishness and incorrect ideas towards an exalted service of the masses in the name of the party. In all this ideological struggle to practise good deeds, overcome selfishness and reach true equality in a new society, the emulation of heroes (and sometimes of heroines) has emerged as a major means used on a nation-wide scale.

I would like to explore this imitation of heroes. It would be silly to speak of it constituting an imitatio Christi apud Sinenses (imitation of Christ among the Chinese). Nevertheless, certain interesting Christological implications may emerge.
Women, Theology and the Eucharist
Authors: Williams Chris
Published: July 2007

Is Brian McNeil serious (new Blackfriars Oct 1976) or is he casting his bread upon the waters in the hope of seeding a good argument? When someone suggests that theological insight or clarification can be made through an examionation of symbols and their legitimation, the sociologist in me immediately pricks up his ears. Mr McNeil’s argument on the place (or rather the lack of place) of women in the eucharistic liturgy provokes the ambiguous reaction of mild sympathy followed by profound disagreement.

I agree with him that the fact that there were no women included among the Apostles indicates little in the way of church structures and how the ministry should be organised. I agree with him that the symbolism of sacramental action should be ground grounded (or “earthed” as he puts it) in our own experience as human beings. I also agree, somewhat off the main subject, that the practice of concelebration adds little to, and indeed probably detracts from, the symbolic communication of the eucharist. It seems little more than a clerical pageant more designed to emphasise the separation of the ordained ministry from the ordinary faithful and to imply a minimisation of the priesthood of the people of God (one president of the eucharist is enough): the other ordained ministers should be identified with the assembled people. However, I profoundly disagree with his conclusions, be they never so tentative, and indeed with his overall argument.

Mr McNeil concludes that women, though possibly eligible for other forms of ministry, have no place presiding over the eucharistic liturgy. He arrives at this position through the application of two principles of legitimation for the sacramental symbols employed in the eucharist.
Biblical Exegesis and the Resurrection
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

The Second Vatican Council taught that, in interpreting Holy Scripture, we must search out the meanings intended by the sacred writers, and that, in doing so, we must have regard for literary forms. I write as a layman in such matters, and will probably make mistakes on important points of detail: but I venture to write on the subject because I doubt that my general assessment is wrong. This is that, in the style of Biblical criticism now apparently prevalent within the Catholic Church, the appeal to literary forms has become little more than a formal device, serving to conceal, possibly from themselves, what the exegetes really mean; and what they mean is usually something inconsistent with any belief, however qualified, in the inspiration of Scripture, and often with more fundamental articles of Christian faith.

The general principle that we must take account of the literary form adopted is clear and evident. What is intended to be read as allegory must be read as allegory; what is written as fiction or as historical romance must be read as fiction or as historical romance. In reading historical accounts, we must try to assess what liberties the author was allowing himself, and not give a misplaced weight to details for which he was not meaning to vouch: we must distinguish reporting from reconstruction, must be aware of the use of devices such as compression and dramatisation. But, in applying this principle, we must, as much as in all other matters, submit to the evidence, not bend it to our will. Acceptance of the principle of literary forms is an acknowledgment of the more general principle that inspiration is not dictation. The inspired writers did not act as transcribing machines: it was not merely the hand that held the pen that was inspired, but the creative human mind itself.
Exegesis and Easter
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The problems which biblical criticism creates for Catholics cannot be disposed of so summarily as Michael Dummet thinks. He dismisses “ most modern Catholic Biblical exegesis” on the grounds that it is “dishonest”, in the sense that exegetes arbitrarily postulate ancient literary forms among which they proceed to classify parts of the New Testament they cannot take literally, without their having to admit that such parts are thus either fiction or fraud. The dishonesty lies in claiming texts as divinely inspired while refusing to take them at face value. It seems to me, however, for a start, that Mr. Dummett goes wrong on two important matters of fact.

First, as to pseudonymous writing, it is just not true that exegetes have invented the existence of such literature in order to place a document such as the Second Epistle of St. Peter within a well-known ancient literary convention, i.e. the convention of writing letters as if they were being written by some famous man already deceased. Not only was there an abundance of such pseudonymous writing in the ancient world at large but evidence for it exists in Judaism as well as in early Christianity. In spite of much research and speculation (see Kummel, page 362 for bibliography), many questions remain unanswered, particularly about the motives of such writing. The principle of pseudonymous writing was not generally questioned, though cases of forgery and fraud were certainly denounced. It should not be lightly assumed that New Testament writings are pseudonymous, but there are no grounds for asserting that pseudonymous writing was necessarily dishonest, less still for asserting that as a literary convention it never existed or was soon forgotten (think of the apocryphal Christian literature of the second century and later).
The Magic of Statistics: Sociology, Psychology and Women in the Church
Authors: Pickering W.S.F.
Published: July 2007

During the recently celebrated women’s liberation year, the cry—and indeed a just cry—was for equal rights with men in those social and economic areas where male dominance reigns. For the same work, the same wages, no matter the sex; in marriage, equality of status and the same rights, for both husband and wife; in general social benefits, no difference between men and women. The Church for countless centuries, despite the relative franchise it gave to women in its very early days based on a universalistic ethic, has been an impregnable bastion of male power. No wonder the call for female liberation has penetrated into the traditional churches, especially the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The result so far is not very encouraging. Admittedly women are allowed to do more than in former years and are often strongly represented in local Church councils, but to become a priest, and therefore eventually a bishop remains a strictly tabooed function for women. In the Free churches, the interdict has been removed in modem times but few women have in fact been ordained and even fewer have reached positions of prominence as Church leaders.

But if women’s cards are poor in bidding for equality in function and leadership, they have a very good hand in their general support of the church. Their attendance and devotion are out of all proportion to the position they occupy in the hierarchical structure. At Mass on Sundays, on weekdays, coming out of a Baptist or Anglican Church, who predominates? Always the answer is females. This phenomenon which appears so widespread invites curiosity and enquiry. The parish priest wonders about it and seeks schemes to restore the balance, for example by providing, as was the custom, men’s clubs and boys’ clubs, and getting men to do masculine things in and around the parish.
A Hundred Years of Wagner's Ring
Authors: Blackadder David
Published: July 2007

When a stage work of exceptional length and complexity not only survives for 100 years, but grows in popularity despite virtually insoluble problems of presentation, it is appropriate to mark the centenary by asking why this should be. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, is spread over four evenings and the uncut music requires between 14 and 16 hours for performance. To say that the appeal of the work reflects a general hankering after the larger than life merely touches the surface of the matter and it is necessary to grasp the extraordinary richness of The Ring. Apart from its musical grandeur it has a notable intellectual content, a wide emotional range, a potent symbolism and a capacity to involve the spectator in ways which he may hardly realise during or after the performance.

The literature concerning Wagner in general and The Ring in particular is very extensive and different commentators have sought and found different kinds of evidence for pronouncing the cycle a work of genius and a landmark in Western cultural achievement. English speaking commentators have been prominent beginning with Bernard Shaw who published his handbook to The Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite, in 1898. This is now felt to be a curious mixture of good sense and nonsense, the latter arising from Shaw’s own attitudes and limitations. He was a social crusader and a dramatist who felt that stage works must have a serious underlying purpose even when dressed up as comedies, and the message of the piece should be perfectly clear. It is hardly surprising that he saw the first three parts of The Ring as an intricate but perfectly comprehensible allegory concerning the evils of capitalism, the exploitation of the poor and the mechanism of revolutionary change. His detailed analysis, though ingenious, now seems over-tidy and glib.
A Lesson Half‐Learned
Authors: Smith Stan
Published: July 2007

“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.
Many Gifts: One Form of Service
Authors: Sutherland K. , Allen P
Published: July 2007

The many recent discussions in the churches on the “ministry of women” have only served to reveal the sterility of the topic when considered as an end in itself, apart from the wider context in which it belongs, a context which itself needs to be re-examined: the responsibility of every member of God’s church to minister.

The arguments on women and the priesthood face a particular danger in the Roman church, where there is an unhealthy focus on priesthood, to the exclusion of every other aspect of Christian ministry. This has produced a church in which rigid conformity to the three estates—the priesthood, the “religious life”, the lay state—has blinded its members to Christ’s exhortation to every soul to seek out freedom and wholeness. The result has been a misuse of the concept of vocation. Any member of the church who gives exceptional evidence of a spiritual dimension to his life, or exhibits an interest in the workings of the institutional church is expected and channelled to go on to something higher, and this means to take a step up the hierarchical ladder which has been devised. In this way his universal Christian vocation is subsumed into a specialist vocation which the church regards as superior. Such a system fails to profit by and encourage the growth of those of its members who are permanently committed to the lay state. Most especially is this anachronistic in the modem world where education and the tools of civilisation are no longer the special charge of the church but within the grasp and gift of everybody. Such a development in the Christian world should be joyfully accepted as heralding the replacement of institutionalised and elitist knowledge by equality of opportunity and, therefore, of contribution.
The Romantic Critic
Authors: Savage D.S.
Published: July 2007

Since the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the late Sir Herbert Read, author of Reason and Romanticism, was an influential figure in literary England, Romanticism as an avowed literary attitude has suffered an eclipse, even if vulgarized forms of Romanticism are more prevalent in society at large than ever before. Less prominent than Read was the equally Romantic critic and moralist, J. Middleton Murry. Among Murry’s younger associates was F. A.Lea, the author of several studies of Romantic writers including Shelley, Carlyle and Nietzsche. Now Mr Lea has come forward with a book of literary studies which again raises the Romantic banner. Voices in the Wilderness, studies of six “prophetic” writers of the modem age, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Arthur Koestler, is the second volume of a dual work the first volume of which, The Ethics of Reason, is a philosophical examination of attempts from Socrates onwards to define “the good man”. Voices in the Wilderness, however, is complete in itself, and constitutes a very revealing exposition of the Romantic viewpoint.

Like most people whose thoughts and feelings are not limited to their own immediate circumstances, Mr Lea is appalled by the joyless collectivism towards which human societies seem inevitably to be progressing. He diagnoses the root of our trouble to lie in the Utilitarian philosophy born, he believes, out of eighteenth-century materialism with its seductive creed of “happiness here”, confused pragmatically and illogically with an abstract Christian altruism based on contradictory expectations of “happiness hereafter”. One of the consequences of this pervasive Utilitarianism is a widespread present inability to achieve originality, i.e. to penetrate beyond general concepts fixed by language into the truth of particular perceptions: to see things as they miraculously are.