bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Art and the Anthropologists
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.

From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).
Some Thoughts on Divorce
Authors: Fitzpatrick P J
Published: July 2007

Some twenty years ago, that wise and good man Gerald Vann wrote an article in Blackfriars about ‘The Muddled Marriage’. It was concerned with the plight of those spouses whose unions are canonically irregular, and apparently without remedy; it contended that they deserve a love and a sympathy they do not usually get; and it suggested they should be told that they were not in a state of grievous sin or cut off from the life of the Church. Such assertions could hardly go unchallenged, and a lumbering attack, Roman in origin, appeared shortly afterwards. Indeed, rumour attributes to the incident the subsequent residence of Father Vann in the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, whither he was sent, like some latter-day Ovid, to expiate his sins by the Black See.

Times have changed, and even Canon Law is not exempt. Ever more is being written on the matter of divorce and re-marriage. The bibliography at the end of this article (to which all references are made) shows that an up-to-date survey is available of how things stand in France, Germany and the United States; New Blackfriars, in June 1973, published several interesting articles to do with African attitudes in the matter; and the items by Harrington and O’Callaghan give useful accounts of scriptural and theological reflexion, with some further reading. Still more recent are the two works that provide the starting-point for this article. The first is an essay on the theology of indissolubility, the second an account, by a former presiding judge of the marriage-tribunal in the archdiocese of New York, of his own pilgrimage towards a change of heart in the matter. The two books contain between them most of the themes to be encountered elsewhere in what is being written : I wish to use them as an occasion for some remarks on the point myself.
Catholic Faith and Easter Stories: Reflections on Hubert Richards
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Is it possible for a Catholic to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ while at the same time classifying the resurrection narratives in the New Testament as examples of a special kind of fiction? Is faith in the resurrection compatible with treating the gospel accounts of an empty tomb and appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples as ‘stories’ ?

With the recent publication of The First Easter Hubert Richards has presented Catholics with problems about the literary status of the resurrection narratives which cannot be ducked by theologians and preachers because for one thing the ready availability of the book means that many Catholics who have not been able to keep abreast of current biblical exegesis have suddenly been shocked into reconsidering how they should regard the gospel stories. It is depressing, but not surprising, to hear that some enquirers are being headed off with the information that Hubert Richards has resigned from the priesthood. His faith in God and in the resurrection shines through so manifestly in his writing that we need not linger over this futile manoeuvre.
Contempt for the Past
Authors: Dummett Ann
Published: July 2007

‘L’immensite de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’, said Pascal, and we are all familiar with the ways in which European attitudes to the place of man in the universe have changed since astronomy rendered him small, lonely and vulnerable. But the idea of the expanding universe in infinite space, while it robbed man of a central place as lord of creation below the heavens, did not take away the idea of brotherhood between men. That deprivation has to do with another kind of frightening immensity: the unthinkable length of the human past.

It is less than two hundred years since educated Europeans believed that Adam was very close to them in time. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788, the work from which Keats took his knowledge of classical mythology, begins with a chronology following the guidance of Dr Blair and Archbishop Ussher: the creation of the world is given in 4004 B.C. and the birth of Moses in 1571. Thus the gap between Adam and Moses was of the same length as the gap between Moses and Basil the First at Constantinople in 862 A.D. Chronologies varied, but none placed the first man so far away in time that imagination could not encompass the distance. Moreover, this nearness was a matter not only of time but of human nature. Adam was no less human than they, no less intelligent, no less feeling: there was a real sense in which he was not only an ancestor but a brother. Made in the image of God, he was of noble appearance; fallen through sin, he was a fellow-sufferer of human misfortune; formed out of dust, he was lowly; speaking with God in Paradise he was touched with glory.
The Papacy and the Historian VIII: The Perennial Papacy?
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

In the preceding papers I have looked at the papacy historically, from the borderland of history and theology, but historically none the less—and socially. I have tried to relate developments in the papacy to certain features in the social structure of the day. I have passed a good deal by. I have said little about the Reformation, what I did say was by way of a criticism of Calvinist notions of Catholicity, a criticism made on theological grounds. I have said nothing about Luther because it seems to me that Luther’s phenomenal achievement of turning the Bible back from a rather quaint law book, which is what the canonists had made it, into the source of a personal encounter, which is what it was meant for, has been absorbed as much as it ever will be into the general Christian mainstream. Outside his capacity as a supreme master of the art of reading Scripture Luther seems to me to have been a disaster. His theology of Church order, if one can call it that, led from one Babylonish captivity to another: his social and political teaching were ruined by his need to creep to the German princes, his protectors. He was after all Philip of Hesse’s paid pander. But most important, the Reformation has only indirect lessons to teach for the student of papalism. If the Reformation was not simply a theological movement but a social movement too, an important stage in the development of a revolutionary capitalist society, then, if I am right, the papacy’s contribution to this movement of revolution had largely been made. In the event the papacy did little in the Reformation period except to serve as a symbol, a rallying cry.
Bonhoeffer: A Witness to Christ
Authors: Kelly Geoffrey B
Published: July 2007

On February 4 of this year, the Christian world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister-theologian hanged by the Gestapo in the waning days of World War II. Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine years old at his death; his influence on the Church in Germany seemingly at an end. And, yet, today a generation and a half later, Christians are still inspired and challenged to a more genuine faith by his letters from prison, and by his The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and other writings. In many ways Bonhoeffer has been more influential after his martyrdom than he ever was during his teaching and preaching career in the years prior to his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler.
Anthony Powell: The End of the Dance
Authors: McCabe Bernard
Published: July 2007

In 1951, after a twelve-year silence, Anthony Powell, who had produced several Waugh-like novels in the Thirties, published A Question of Upbringing, a gently witty and evocative meditation on the past in which Nicholas Jenkins, soon recognisable as a Powell self-portrait, reviews the course of his life from his late teens at Eton, through Oxford, and into the London social and literary scene of his early twenties and this century’s thirties. The novel, which was well received by the usual people—V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Waugh himself—turned out to be the first instalment of an immense roman fleuve, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, comprising twelve novels, the last of which, Hearing Secret Harmonies (William Heinemann, London, 1975), has now appeared. The first six, in two trilogies, cover the 1930s; there is a war trilogy; and a final trilogy in a rapidly developing time-span covers the post-war years up to the late Sixties. The series deserves attention, apart from any other reason, as probably the last major flourish in the long, honourable tradition of English social fiction.

The books are mostly about people meeting and trying to deal with one another—as friends, enemies, rivals, sexual partners, spouses. Jenkins develops and observes a network of relationships both tenuous and intense, friendships and loves that ripen and fade and fall. All this is presented in a huge casual anecdotal recit, a series of largely comic social encounters in which each character is present as himself or herself and also present as a social force, with the narrator’s voice providing the balancing clues about the situation.
The Search for the Self
Authors: Benson John
Published: July 2007

There is a familiar determinist argument that runs: those of my actions that are most my own are those that express my character. But I did not make my character, it was made for me by heredity and circumstances. Those whose characters have been so made that they do good acts are lucky; those whose characters make them do bad acts are unlucky. Perhaps some people can change certain of their qualities, so that they act better after the change. But to have the desire and ability to make the change is simply something else about the way they are made -they are lucky. Actions that express one’s character may be chosen, but if one can do nothing about one’s character one surely cannot be blamed for it, or for what, given that one is like that, one will inevitably choose to do.

There is a curious defence of freewill which accepts nearly everything in this determinist argument. It concedes that character determines action and that character is made by other factors than one’s own choices. But it claims that in the exceptional situation where one’s moral duty requires an action that is incompatible with what one’s character would suggest one becomes aware that the self is more than one’s character, and the common or garden me that is my character can be over-ruled by the transcendent I which sees where duty lies.

This is an extreme example of a recurrent theme in philosophy—the identification of the self-observing self with the good rational self. In this version it is surely unacceptable because it implies that the capacity to see where duty lies and the strength of will that enables one to go through with it have nothing to do with the character that is formed by experience, the empirical character.
Guerilla Warfare in Rhodesia
Authors: Weinrich Aquina
Published: July 2007

The moral aspect of the inevitable use of violence in the guerilla warfare in Rhodesia cannot be discussed without a clear perception of the institutionalised violence which marks the daily lives of Africans in that country. Given that all violence is to be deplored, there are, nevertheless, situations in which the passing phase of physical violence has to be regarded as less destructive to the human personality than that permanent violence which, disguised as lawful authority, systematically reduces 96% of the country’s population to an inferior kind of existence. To appreciate this the following historical and social facts are relevant.
Christ and China
Authors: O'Collins Gerald
Published: July 2007

It has been conventional to describe theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’. We might, however, care to shift from the private sphere of understanding to the public sphere of language and call theology ‘watching one’s language in the presence of God’. Either way Christian theology must show itself to be truly Christian. It should seek understanding in the light of Jesus Christ. It should watch its language in the presence of the God-man.

Using either version of theology, what might we say about the New China and the recent Chinese experience? What insights and reflections does faith in Christ suggest about the era and the nation on which Mao Tse-tung has put his stamp? Where can belief in the Crucified and risen Jesus take its stand vis-a-vis contemporary China?

When asked to confront Christ and Mao’s China I have no short or easy answer to give. Let me single out two themes (suffering and the emulation of heroes), and then conclude by listing some major points of comparison and contrast when we bring together the two figures themselves, Jesus and Mao.

First of all, suffering. Over twenty years ago Father Robert W. Greene’s Calvary in China appeared. In 1937 he had begun his missionary career in China. He was imprisoned after the Communist victory in 1949, put on trial in 1952, and then expelled from the country.
What makes America different?
Authors: Black Antony
Published: July 2007

If we ask what differentiates most Americans from non-Americans, if we want to define American culture qua outlook and values transmitted by family, school, associates, etc., which perpetually underlie these peoples’ approach to problems, moulds their intelligence and stirs their will-power, we must consider their past and their environment, as well as the living molecules of that culture itself. The very question may seem to be inappropriate, but not to a foreigner who has lived here for an appreciable time.

There were planned programmes of corporate English settlement in North America, not unlike the traditional pattern of human migration. But by far the greatest number of settlers came to America either as nuclear families and individuals, or, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, as distinctive sub-groups which had deliberately differentiated themselves from their earlier national ethos. Among these latter were the English Congregationalists or neo-Calvinists and the German Mennonites. Such groups set up townships or village colonies which for a time— and in a few cases up till now retained a corporate character. But they were different from all earlier migratory enterprises in that the dominant factor that formed them as groups and brought them to the the new lands was religion, and a very particular kind of Christianity. They came because they had been persecuted at home, and they looked for a place where they could establish their own versions of the city of God on earth in peace and freedom from their enemies. Thus the word or concept ‘freedom’ was written on the sails and in the hearts of many of the early European immigrants.
Theology in a Century of Death
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

In the fifth of a series of six Norton Lectures given at Harvard University in 1973 on the semantics of music called The Unanswered Question and recently broadcast on BBC 2, Leonard Bernstein said that ‘ours is a century of death, and Mahler is its prophet’. A history of the twentieth century must inevitably read as a catalogue of death and any authentic prophecy about the twentieth century must have the experience of death at its centre. Since 1914 the toll has mounted as cataclysm has been overtaken by self-inflicted cataclysm until the number of those killed during the last sixty years is no longer calculable. The optimism of the nineteenth century could be maintained until the First World War, but any attempt to perpetuate it after that has been a delusion. We can hardly be optimistic any longer about a civilization that is so self-destructive. The twentieth century experience as an experience of death has its true beginning not in 1900 but in 1914. The first fourteen years of this century were really a hangover from the bouyant bourgeois idealism of the last century. The authentic twentieth century experience was possible only after 1914. Since that first holocaust Europe and North America has moved from an initial optimism about its consequences (Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’) to disillusion, unemployment, depression and further destruction in 1939. Since 1945 we have had the initial optimism of the welfare state, followed by disillusion, unemployment, successive economic crises, followed by who knows what.

Before 1914 there were a few precursors who, we can now see, gave intimations of what was to come. These prophets had already experienced the disintegration of bourgeois culture; Schnitzler, Karl Krauss, Thomas Mann in his early novels, Mahler. Others had even set about reconstructing our perception of reality, the cubist painters between 1907 and 1914, and Schönberg.
Women and the Eucharistic Presidency
Authors: McNeil Brian
Published: July 2007

There has been much discussion recently about the ordination of women to the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Most writers on this subject agree that there are no theological reasons why women may not be admitted to the priesthood, and so the debate is conducted between prejudice on one side and sentimentality on the other. I do not see how it can be denied that there are many pastoral ministries, including preaching and counselling, where the effectiveness of women ministers would be very great; nevertheless, I believe that there are important theological considerations which tell against the ordination of women to one of the central ministries in the Church, the celebra-of the eucharist.

This has nothing to do with the intentions of Jesus: the fact that he included no women among the Twelve is fundamentally irrelevant to the question of whether women today should be admitted to the priesthood, and not because of changed social conditions (that argument is merely one version of the fallacy that man has ‘come of age’ in the twentieth century), but rather because of our changed understanding of how, the Church stands in relation to Jesus as her founder. Even if Jesus did intend to found a Church, we have no warrant to suppose that he drew up detailed blueprints for its structures: and as it appears much more probable that he had no such intention, but exercised a ministry wholly within the parameters of contemporary Judaism, the question of what he would have thought of women priests becomes purely speculative. Further, it is in any case clear that the relation of the threefold ministry as it developed in the second century to the ministry of the Twelve is extremely distant; since the Twelve could not be replaced in their most important function, that of eye witnesses of the ministry and the resurrection appearances of Jesus (cf Acts 1 :2 If), the sense in which bishops or popes may be said to be their successors according to a pipeline model of apostolic succession is far from obvious.
Dramas and Pilgrims
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Perhaps in some set of legends there is a story of some book that shrank or swelled according to the capacity of the person handling it to draw knowledge from it. If so, Victor Turner’s new book is of the same stock, since, approaching it at different time, I seem to find some different message in it. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors looks at first sight like a string of separate essays on matters ranging from the cosmology of the Dogon to the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. On a second glance, it becomes clear that, while several of the chapters did originally appear separately, this is no mere collection of warmed-up leftovers, but does present a set of related themes which run, albeit with varying stresses and counterpointing, throughout the book. But even to describe the themes will be deceptive, since it might seem that Victor Turner has not really moved beyond the positions taken in his earlier books, notably The Ritual Process. It may be granted that Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors largely makes explicit ideas which were implicit in the earlier books; but, even so, the book is certainly not deja vu.

I write ‘the book’, and physically, there is only one book; but one has an uneasy feeling that perhaps there are three books trying to get out of this one volume, the first a treatise on sociological method, the second an attempt to apply this method to particular historical episodes and social experiences, and the third a hymn to the power and value of ‘communitas’.
The Demise of Man
Authors: Masterson Patrick
Published: July 2007

The theme of this article was suggested by an enigmatic remark of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the final page of his book The Order of Things. “Man”, he writes, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” I wish to reflect upon this suggestive remark though in somewhat different and broader terms than those of its author.

Since the time of Hegel’s use of the phrase, and particularly since Nietzsche’s sensational application of it, it has been fashionable to speak of “the death of God”—the death of God at the hand of man. However, the elimination of God which it was hoped would enable the reality of man to become more effectively visible has been superseded by a more radical consideration whose consequences profoundly affect our theory and practice today. It is the consideration that a true idea of man far from emerging into assured and concrete realization is rather breaking up and disappearing into an impersonal anonymous ground. The evidence suggests that the achievement of our age is the death of man at his own hand, at least speculatively if not yet in effect.

In this essay I propose to illustrate, and draw some conclusions from, the significance of this phenomenon by situating it in the context of its historical evolution. In what will inevitably involve rather broad generalisations and systematic simplification I will try to indicate how man today has come to be seen chiefly in socio-centric, impersonal and structural terms by contrast with two previous conceptions which can be globally described as the theo-centric and the anthropocentric conceptions of man.
Marxist Science and Christian Theology
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Francis Barker’s refreshing contribution to the New Blackfriars debate on Marxism leads me to pursue my own thoughts a little further. Barker and Eagleton have both accused me of idealism: it is part of my purpose to show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, if Marxism can claim to be scientific, so too (I maintain) can Christian theology. Indeed, Marxism will only become completely scientific, i.e. have shed all residual elements of deforming ideology when, ceasing to need to incorporate within itself a systematic misrepresentation of Christianity, it can be said to have become identical with it. But that is a matter for the distant future.

To begin with, it is agreed I think that we are discussing questions of theory: the relative claims to scientific status of certain forms of discourse. Neither side is likely to deny that at the level of actual praxis, there is an enormous amount of ideological distortion around. But what we are talking about is what Althusser calls ‘theoretical practice’. And it is my contention that what I shall call ‘scientific theology’ is scientific in the sense that, like Marxist science, it claims to be able to provide a ‘symptomatic reading’ of ideologies. Such a theology will consist of concepts and rules whereby not only the Christian ideology (that is, the Christian religion as a lived praxis) but also the ideological elements in Marxism, can be critically distinguished and dealt with.
Life as Fashion Parade: The Anthropology of Mary Douglas
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

I had better begin my review of Mary Douglas’ Implicit Meanings by justifying my title, which might otherwise seem unjustly sneering. If we like to divide human activities into “work” and “play”, fashion parades are distressingly both and neither. People strain for the glory of leisure. Can fashion then be linked with art and sport as an exacting celebration of the human capacity for spontaneous creativity? It lacks surely their moral pretensions, appealing with crude honesty to envy, vanity, and the pursuit of the ephemeral. Yet in the concept of fashion and the event of the fashion parade are certain resemblances to the presuppositions of social anthropology, particularly as expressed in the work of Professor Douglas. They remind us sharply that culture is something made by people, and that choice can bring change, indeed that change should be seen as part of the nature of culture. Again, each set of fashions must, like a culture, have a certain internal consistency, partly explicit, partly implicit. Then, in fashion as in culture, the distinctions which we can make readily enough between the aesthetical, the ethical, and the utilitarian become difficult to apply in practice. Culture, like fashion, is first tailored to the human body and then in turn affects our perception of it.

This metaphor criticises, as well as elucidating, social anthropology. Inevitably, social anthropology tends to stress the autonomy and specificity of cultures, and thus tends to blur our perception of the underlying unity of human nature. Inevitably, too, social anthropology is attracted to the analysis of the more elaborate and formal patterns of human doing and thinking, kinship terminologies, the etiquette of gift exchange, ritual and mythology, neglecting the more formless and unspecific aspects of human behaviour.
The Obscurity of Evasion
Authors: Bhabha Homi K.
Published: July 2007

It is difficult to differ in one’s immediate reactions from the critical consensus on Peter Levi’s Collected Poems. The general impression is of a competent body of verse produced largely independently of the various ‘movements’ contemporary with it, descended in its early phase from Spender, derived in its later style from Eliot, and marked by an obscurity arising, as Colin Falk recognised, from the absence of “an authenticating life…whose depths and anxieties get smoothed over…without being built up into the poetic structure”. Obscurity of this kind is not part of the difficulty characteristic of much significant ‘modem’ poetry: a problem of complex and contradictory things said and shown, often overburdening the signifier, in an already allusive and elliptical discourse. Levi’s obscurity is, rather, part of a process of exclusion and elision, a smoothing over which deprives his work of a memorable presence.

To ascribe this as most reviewers have done to the limitations of Levi’s imagination is an inadequate explanation. What is needed is some discrimination, however cursory, amongst obscurities: a distinction between that obscurity which is symptomatic of innovation and gives major works their multivalent character; and the indeterminancy of works where a lack of depth and conception make their resonances finally unmeaningful and insignificant.

Levi’s obscurity, I want to suggest, arises from a conceptual naivete. His desire to smooth over conflict results in a suppression of contradictions that is made possible by his belief in an immanent, essential spiritual unity. This influences a mode which, in avoiding argument, is often either sententiously preachy or passive; either distanced from the problem in its generality—“O Great God what is human life like?”—or immersed indistinguishably in the problem itself—“I think England is prison of a kind/and in that prison I am blank wall”.
He was Raised and has Appeared: Evidence and Faith
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

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.
The Venice Statement: Disestablishing a Church and Reforming the Papacy?
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

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.
Marxism, Christianity and Morality Replies to Francis Barker and Brian Wicker
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

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.
The Last Laugh of a Humane Faith: Dr. Alexander Geddes 1737‐1801
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: July 2007

“This unaccountable, heterodox, bad priest” was the accepted verdict of Catholic scholarship on Alexander Geddes almost seventy years ago. Amid the modernist crisis that view was understandable particularly in the British Catholic Church which had struggled for respectability and acceptance during the previous half century. Geddes seemed a disturbing unmannerly radical. But today in a Church more concerned with social justice and freedom, with ecumenism and scholarly integrity, we can come to a more charitable balanced conclusion. For Geddes was undoubtedly a talented scholarly priest of liberal imagination and provocative manner. Persistent ill health especially some severe form of rheumatism, gave his wit a bitterness which he effectively employed against any species of privilege, political or religious intolerance. In his desire for conciliatory dialogue between Churches, authentic local liturgies, and a more responsible and responsive ecclesiastical authority, he was a thoroughly modem churchman.

The life of Geddes may be briefly recounted. Born into a poor Catholic family in Banffshire in 1737, educated at Scalan and in Paris, he was ordained in 1764. Following a brief chequered career in Scotland, during which he acquired an LL.D from the University of Aberdeen, he lived in London from 1780 to his death in 1801. Free from pastoral demands he was able to devote himself to the intellectual life. His cosmopolitan life and training made him very much a child of the Enlightenment. His extended visits to France, 1758-64, 1766-69 and 1783, together with his continuous reliance on aristocratic patronage ensured that result. Well acquainted with Presbyterianism and educated within the Gallican tradition in the Paris of the philosophes, Geddes was associated with several leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. By nature gregarious, he freely associated with all denominations; Presbyterians, Anglicans, Unitarians and Quakers.
The Myth of God Incarnate
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

There is a view that Jesus was not quite as human as we are—that he was the Son of God disguised as a man, not a real man. The authors of The Myth of God Incarnate some of whom I suspect of having been brought up on this docetist heresy, are in revulsion against it. They reject it, however, not because the Church long ago threw it out as an option incompatible with her life, a heresy, but because it is found to be incompatible with the European way of life in the second half of the twentieth century. It seems odd for Christians to reject a doctrine on these grounds, since it is the very heart of the gospel to challenge conventional and accepted attitudes in any age; still, they do reject docetism, and that can’t be bad.

When Christians do this it is customary for them to do so in the name of the incarnation, the doctrine that the one person, Jesus, was both fully human and fully divine. What is peculiar to these authors is that they think the rejection of docetism involves also the rejection of its contrary, the incarnation. At least I think they are rejecting it. Professor Maurice Wiles at first talks definitely about a “Christianity without incarnation”, but then goes on to speak of it as a ‘myth’, and it is not at all clear whether a myth is always meant to be an untruth. Sometimes the authors merely seem to mean by ‘mythical’ the same as ‘subject to the limitations of religious language.’
How Historical is Genesis 1‐11?
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

The question arises, because Christian tradition has always assumed that these chapters are as historical as any of the historical books of the bible. For most of its course tradition has assumed this in a rather naive, quasi-fundamentalist way. The naivety of fundamentalism or literalism, is no longer intellectually possible in the light of modem historical, archaeological, palaeontological and literary criticism. But does this formidable array of criticism compel us to abandon the traditional assumption altogether?

I think not. Theologically we are still committed, not merely by the decisions of the Roman Biblical Commission, of which the latest (that I know of) and most genial is the letter to Cardinal Suhard of Paris, 16th Jan. 1948, but by the whole weight of theological tradition and the most up-to-date biblical hermeneutics (e.g. that of von Rad), to maintaining that these chapters are historical in some way or another: but it will be in a very peculiar way which the modern professional historian will not easily recognise as historical.

Rahner makes a distinction between historical in form and historical in content. It is a useful distinction to start from. To illustrate: a narrative which is historical in content but not in form would be Nathan’s parable to David, 2 Sam. 12. Its content in fact describes what David had done, but in form it was a kind of parable. It was history disguised as fiction. A narrative that is historical in form but not in content would be something like a historical novel—fiction disguised as history.
Schooling or Education?: Africa
Authors: Visocchi Tony
Published: July 2007

Priests working in parishes up .and down the length and breadth of Africa are faced with a severe, and ever increasing problem. They refer to it as the “school leavers’ problem”, meaning the thousands of disaffected and frustrated primary and secondary school graduates, who having completed their course of education, and armed with their hard-earned certificates find themselves unemployed and unemployable. They may have spent years in the city, have tried every avenue and have drifted either into delinquency and crime, or have gravitated back to the “bush”.

They went to school in the hope that school would free them from the grinding poverty of the rural areas, by obtaining employment hopefully in town, and even more hopefully, white-collared: an easier and more interesting life than their parents’ was their goal. Their parents looked on this as an investment, insurance against their old age or infirmity, and likely as not made tremendous sacrifices to send them, equip them, and keep them there.

It rarely .turns out that way and years of expense, sacrifice and effort dissipate themselves as the graduates slip back into, at best, semi-literacy. Their styles and standards of living, their outlook and ambitions are often indistinguishable from those of their “less-fortunate” brothers and sisters who did not go to school.

For decades, and often in the teeth of Colonial opposition, the Churches founded schools, and brought “education” to the furthermost comers of Africa. To do this the Church, as much as the parents themselves, made huge sacrifices of personnel and material, time and money.
Uranisme et Unisexualité: A Late Victorian View of Homosexuality
Authors: Healy P.W.J.
Published: July 2007

Between November 1927 and January 1929 there appeared in the pages of the then Blackfriars a series of articles under the name of Alexander Michaelson. They were mostly biographical vignettes in which the author recalled famous friends and acquaintances of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties: Browning, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Wilde, Beardsley. Alexander Michaelson was the pseudonym of Mark Andre Raffalovich, a wealthy man of letters and benefactor of the Church and, in particular, of the Dominican Order. Five years after the appearance of the last Blackfriars essay he died at the age of seventy-four. His family were Russian emigre Jews who had settled in Paris the year before his birth in 1864. There he had been brought up in the world of the salon; Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson, Ernest Renan, Sarah Bernhardt were among the visitors to the Raffalovich’s house.

In 1882 he was despatched to England, with his former governess as housekeeper, to complete his education. Instead of going up to university, the young man sought introductions to the literary and artistic men of the day. He would write articles on authors he admired, publish them in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, and send copies to their unsuspecting subjects. Thus he met R. L. Stevenson, Swinburne and Meredith. Others he met more conventionally; but almost always his friendships were marked by precociousness on his part.

His acquaintance with Wilde turned sour. Wilde reviewed a book of Raffalovich’s verse; it was not so much a bad review as a mocking one, and in the published correspondence which ensued Raffalovich was made to look more of a fool. And, of course, there was Wilde’s stinging wit which so aptly showed up pretension. The story went about of how Wilde and some friends, having been invited to lunch, arrived at Raffalovich’s front door and asked the butler for a table for six.
Questioning Critics: Hardy and Williams
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

Literary criticism seems to be in an odd cul-de-sac at present. Two recent works by widely-esteemed critics can serve as pointers to a persistent paradox. In reviewing together the latest offerings of Barbara Hardy and Raymond Williams I don’t intend to do ‘justice’ to each volume individually, but to suggest, by their juxtaposition, a curious state of affairs: the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of ‘literature’—its importance within an educational apparatus and as the focus of a political project, and yet a concomitant sense that neither critic, or approach, has much to say about why anyone might actually continue reading poems and novels anyway. As a link, or diversion, I also glance at an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work still largely unappreciated—his criticism of Brecht’s poems.

Barbara Hardy entitles her book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry. Almost every word here invites comment, but the most provocative is “advantage”. The ‘advantage of lyric in itself is its concentrated and patterned expression of feeling. This advantage is negatively definable: the lyric does not provide an explanation, judgment or narrative; what it does provide is feeling, alone and without histories or characters.’ (p.1). The absence of history and explanation is frequently noted, and approved; an interesting example is the quoting (p.5) of Quiller-Couch’s cut-down version of Emily Bronte’s long poem Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle: in Q’s version ‘virtually all we are left with is the intense lyrical evocation of Hope’ and this turns a narrative of tyranny and physical imprisonment into a lyric of ‘spirit tormented by flesh’ (p.6). Specific response becomes transmuted into metaphysical universality.
The Key to Marx's Value Theory
Authors: Young Bruce
Published: July 2007

The first volume of Les “Senders Escarpes” de Karl Marx, by Paul-Dominique Dognin, Editions du Cerf (vol I 47F; vol II 35F) contains the German text of the original (first edition) version of Chapter I of Capital and of its appendix, as well as French translations of them, together with the fourth edition version (in French translation only). Dognin’s own critical commentary on these texts makes up the second volume of his book.

The first edition version of Chapter I differs considerably from the fourth, and from the standard French and English translations. The differences relate especially to the presentation of the distinction between “value” and “exchange-value”. Dognin argues that these changes are symptomatic of fundamental difficulties in Marx’s theory of value, difficulties which he analyses at length in his commentary. Although there is little that is original in Dognin’s criticisms—they will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Bohm-Bawerk’s critique —I think he is right to highlight the importance of the value/exchange-value distinction. In my view, however, Marx’s distinction is symptomatic, not of contradictions within his theory of value, but of contradictions between that theory and that of classical economics: by means of this distinction, Marx makes a definite break with classical economics and inaugurates a new science of his own. Seen in this light, the value/ exchange-value distinction is the key to Marx’s value theory as a whole, and hence is much more important than the use-value/exchange-value distinction to which so much attention is usually given. It is, indeed, Dognin’s failure to grasp the nature of the value/exchange-value distinction which vitiates his critique of Marx, a critique which is, however, quite standard in the neoclassical tradition. Let us, then, look at the distinction itself in some detail.
Faith and Experience II: Charisms and Ecclesiology
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

Heribert Mühlen’s “Introduction to the Basic Christian Experience” (wrongly entitled in English A Charismatic Theology), though not intended as a work of speculative theology, is nonetheless a theological work of considerable interest—probably the first so far to come from within Catholic Pentecostalism.

As we should infer from the very title of his book, one of Mühlen’s fundamental beliefs is that there is such a thing as “the basic Christian experience”. It is the “experience” of a real presence of Christ in his life, consequent upon a personal decision for Christ, that makes a man a Christian (p. 43). For Mühlen this can never be simply a private conversion experience, however: there is no experience of Christ which does not involve an experience of the church. The essential Christian experience is Jesus’s own experience of the Spirit, continued historically in the church. According to Mühlen, Jesus gave the church, not just the Holy Spirit, but his own experience of the Spirit. Reference is also made to Jesus’s experience of his Father, though it is not quite clear whether Mühlen believes the church to be the continuation of this experience too. He does maintain that the kernel of Jesus’s kerygma is his “Abba-experience”. He also says that “God gives us his experience of himself”. He regards it as an important sign that God is renewing his church that “the experience of the primitive church has today been bestowed in an historically new and surprising way to many Christians in all Churches” (p. 94).