bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Dry Salvages—Topography as Symbol—I
Authors: Boyd John D.
Published: July 2007

Cape Ann in Massachusetts is one of the more plentifully documented areas of the country in tourist literature and in books of local colour and history. Details of historical and literary interest are carefully noted in brochures and guide maps. Kipling’s Captains Courageous and James B. Connolly’s Gloucestermen are rightly remembered. Summer visits of minor New England literary figures are duly recorded, and reference is ubiquitous to the Reef of Norman’s Woe off the Magnolia side of Gloucester Harbour, immortalizing Longfellow’s ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’. Yet one looks in vain for any notice of Cape Ann’s most distinguished literary event, T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, despite his explicit note preceding the poem: ‘(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)’ I found a recent visit to the museum of the Cape Ann Scientific, Literary and Historical Association in Gloucester no more rewarding. Apart from a few of his published books, the Sawyer Free Library in the same town has only a small collection of photos of Eliot and a drawing by his sister. Even the detailed and very readable Saga of Cape Ann of Melvin Copeland and Elliott Rogers (1960) passes the poem over in silence, though it does speak of the danger to navigation offered by the rocks from which Eliot named the third of his Four Quartets.
What is a Church?
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

The ecumenical movement is now old enough to merit a second volume to its history. It covers the twenty years from 1948 to 1968; or in the esoteric language of the movement, from Amsterdam to Uppsala. The book inevitably abounds in this kind of esoteric language; conferences, committees and consultations have been held at innumerable places, and the name of every such place thereupon becomes the name of an event as well. One is used to the habit in general history, in which it seems normal to talk about before and after Trent or Versailles; but the over-employment of it in specialized history creates an atmosphere of a close little world of people in the know. So, too, councils and associations and conferences have multiplied, each equipped with its proper set of initials. Under the heading ‘Abbreviations’ eighty-six of these code names and letters, with their meanings, are listed at the beginning of the work.

All this makes it a book that is hard—indeed, I would say impossible—to read. Had the fifteen contributors to the volume been literary historians of genius, it is doubtful whether they could have made it much more readable than it is; the material is too intractable. What they have provided is an indispensable reference book for the study and understanding of the contemporary ecumenical movement.
Coleridge: Friend or Partizan?‐II
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

The contention that Coleridge’s rejection of Rousseau’s ‘Reason’ as a political principle is based on a deep-seated prejudice can be clearly established if we analyse further the roots of his own political position. Just as his plea for more adequate communication of truth is ultimately a petition for administrative reform, the nature of ‘truth’ itself being analysed at this stage only in terms of the difference between what is self-evident and what must be demonstrated (55f), so his definition of politics is ultimately a reduction to ‘administration’, to how things ‘ought to be managed’ (214). That this conveniently forgets that politics is also about policies, i.e. about morality—a position that Coleridge will otherwise argue for—is clear from the use of the term ‘political’ in his criticism of Cartwright: that he ‘confounds the sufficiency of the conscience to make every person a moral and amenable Being, with the sufficiency of judgment and experience requisite to the exercise of political Right’ (207). This position has its epistemological roots in his distinction between the ‘truths’ of science and the ‘probability’ of facts of experience (158)— a distinction which holds politically, provided one genuinely acknowledges the equal validity of quite different ‘experience’. The practical outcome of Coleridge’s position is a politics which can meet an argument that the expenditure on one naval operation to destroy nine French ships could have provided instead £100 for 2,000 poor families or built a new town in every English county, by the response: ‘These men know that it is not practicable’ (244).
The Dry Salvages‐Topography as Symbol‐II
Authors: Boyd John D.
Published: July 2007

To stop, then, at the mere recital of topography would be like having ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. Yet the meaning of the symbols which rise out of the topography enjoy a peculiar character precisely because, as Miss Gardner has already been quoted as saying: ‘The landscape of The Dry Salvages is a landscape remembered.’ I suggest that this symbolism, especially of the sea and the rocks and of the plight of the fishermen, has a peculiarly realistic quality. I use the word ‘realistic’ largely in an epistemological context, with, however, psychological and anthropological overtones. This quality refers to structure, theme and tone. Further, transforming and intensifying this realism is a structure best seen as deriving from a Christian imagination—an ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’.

It is commonplace to say that Eliot’s poetry is deeply indebted to the French Symboliste tradition. It is also commonplace to say that this tradition, as its theory and practice developed from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Valéry, became more and more self-enclosed and private in tone and meaning.The strong idealist tendencies of its epistemology and its premises of the poet’s isolation from society are well known.
Aelred of Rievaulx
Authors: Barrow G. W. S.
Published: July 2007

Aelred, or Ailred, Eilaf’s son, of Hexham, whom we know as Aelred of Rievaulx, was a wholly remarkable man for several quite distinct reasons. In the first place, he was English, or perhaps, to be more precise, Anglo-Scandinavian. The number of outstanding figures in the history of twelfth-century England who were English in this sense, ‘of fine old English stock’ as his disciple and biographer Walter Daniel put it, was so small as to be almost insignificant. The world which Aelred knew was one where lordship, both as ownership of land and as control of government and administration, was in the hands, almost exclusively, of Normans, Flemings, Bretons, Lorrainers, Frenchmen, of almost any save Englishmen, in fact, and a member of the governing order (such as Aelred was from 1143 till his death in 1167) who was also a thoroughly native Englishman was a prime rarity. Secondly, Aelred was a man of the north country, a Northumbrian born and bred in an age when it might be said that Northumbria had lost a culture and had failed to find a role. Thirdly, Aelred was a profoundly religious man in a characteristically English fashion—essentially unacademic, unintellectual, despite the great breadth of his reading and his undoubted facility for writing. Fourthly—but not lastly, by any means, for there were many sides to this complicated man—he seems perfectly to epitomize, in his career, his interests and his influence, the age through which he lived.

A deeply-felt inner pride is not incompatible with outward signs of lack of confidence, even of inferiority. Aelred moved among the great but in his relations with them he seems a little unsure of himself. He never quite took their measure or became one of them. In an almost naively idealistic way he expected too much of them.
A Neglected Principle of Christian Association
Authors: Coulson John
Published: July 2007

Suppose we had the revolution! and that an upheaval comparable to that of 1789 were once more to sweep away much of the existing Catholic fabric. How, in the light of the theology of post Vatican II, would we reconstruct our forms of Christian association?

The most obvious prophecy is that such associations would not be primarily or purely clerical in form. But they might well lead to a distinction between the originating association, which would be lay, and the foundation (or Congregation) which might become clerical, growing out of and serving the permanent needs of the association. An association would no longer be confined to a neighbourhood: it might be formed by lay-people living at a distance from each other, but united by a common aim and determination to develop a homogeneity of spirit. To form such an association would take many years, so that its character could not be pre-determined by simple manifestoes or rules: it would need time ‘to work clear’.

When the usefulness of the association had been proved, and its character made manifest, then and then only would it be time to see how a foundation could be established which would function as the permanent nucleus or heart. Some members of the association might be called out to minister on this more permanent basis. If Catholic, the membership of the association might want its foundation or congregation to be priests, the better to associate the work with the bishop and, through him, the universal Church. On the assumption that ‘the higher your building is the broader must be its base’, a slow growth to personal maturity would be the qualification for such candidates.
The Eucharist: Development or Deviation?—I
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

In the first of a series of lectures under the general heading, ‘Theology-Development or Deviation’, Fergus Kerr considered shifts in the way people are accustomed to think of the Church. He suggested that the central insights which have been recovered in recent years, though the beginnings of this recovery can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, are those of brotherhood and eschatology;- and he further suggested that this was not just a recovery of a long lost insight into the mystery of the Church but had been a real experience, though under a somewhat different guise and under very different names, in the English Catholicism of the inter-war years, in the ‘loud and draughty’ singing at benediction in a northern city parish for example. These two notions of brotherhood and eschatology are likely to recur constantly in discussing whether in any theological area there has been development or deviation, and certainly when the eucharist is in question.

It is probably in the area of the eucharist more than in any other that Catholics tend to suspect that there has been not so much development as deviation. That, no doubt, is because there has been a not insignificant change in eucharistic worship over these last ten years, a change altogether unlooked for by most Catholics, unlooked for, unexpected, and therefore viewed with some suspicion.
‘Generously as Bread’: A Study of the Poetry of R. S. Thomas
Authors: Allchin A. M.
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this article is to examine the poems of R. S. Thomas and to attempt some exegesis of them from a theological point of view. So far as I know, this has not been attempted before. Naturally enough, the poems of this writer have already received considerable attention from a literary viewpoint, and critics and reviewers have established certain of their more obvious characteristics : their spare diction, their rich imagery, their hardness to the touch, the quality of perfection in some of the lyrics, their frequent mood of anger or near despair. The fact that the writer is a priest with a small country parish in Wales is, of course, always registered. It accounts for his concern with the countryside, with the difficult relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the land, for his concern with the past, present and future of the people of Wales. Doubtless there is much more to be done here. In this article however we shall not be doing it. Our purpose is rather to enquire into some of the underlying structures of Christian thinking which the poems reveal, and what their significance may be for the Christian believer who is trying to think through the meaning of his faith. Whatever ,else may be uncertain about R. S. Thomas, it is clear that he does not reveal his deepest thoughts and feelings easily. We shall have to look beneath the surface for the heart of what he is saying.
I'm Nobody—Who Are You?
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

‘We piped to you, and you did not dance.’ And when people do dance, we tend to look down disapprovingly from our upper window, like the worthy lady Michal. She remained barren, and so do we.

It has perhaps become commonplace to say that ours is an age which has forgotten how to play (eutrapelia a forgotten virtue, and all that). There are even therapists to teach us how to play! But somehow, the Church seems to go on, doing all things in moderation and busily turning the Lord’s wine back hto water.

Now the books under consideration—admittedly a rather heady mixture—are all about wine, or attempts at wine.

Richard Neville in Play Power (the book was previously to be called Flower Power) offers us his, in many ways attractive, version of ‘the underground scene’. He admits to being himself only halfliberated, so perhaps he won’t mind another half-liberated person venturing to offer some comments from a slightly different angle. Richard Neville’s background is political, and his interest in play power is as a form of political movement (when I first met him, he confiied rather shamefacedly to still writing letters to the New Stateman). Earnest protest movements suddenly caught fire (turned into wine), and became parties, games; people began to preach revolution, not because it was important, but because it was fun. People began to have confidence just to ‘do their thing’ (which is highly revolutionary in its implications). The whole thing became ‘turned on’.
Ceylon and the Search for an Asianized Church
Authors: Caspersz Paul
Published: July 2007

If the present writer could have been suspected of megalomania for his earlier article on The Role of the Church in Asia (New Blackfriars, January 1970), he should at least not be guilty of inconsistency. And so, in this sequel, on the one hand, the minimum view is advanced that the little island of Ceylon is an interesting case-study of the contemporary Church in Asia and, on the other, the maximum view that Ceylon’s place is crucial in the role-context of the Church in Asia and the World.

The basic figures of Ceylon’s demographic and geographic littleness are quickly enumerated. In the early 1960s, in a total Asian population of nearly 1,800 million, Ceylon had a population of nearly 11 million. In Asia’s total Christian population of 73 million, the Catholics numbered a little more than three-quarters of a million, while the other Christians numbered a little more than 100,000. Geographically, Ceylon is a small island, 25,332 square miles in area, situated at the southern tip of the Indian sub-continent and separated from it by a narrow strip of shallow water.

Yet, Ceylon has an importance far greater than its size would warrant. Her people have a higher degree of literacy than in most other countries of Asia. The standard of living, though very low in comparison with Western attainments, is high for Asia. Her educational, political and religious institutions and her tri-lingual press are highly developed. Her systems of easy island communication and her position as a sea and air port of call between Europe and the East have made her important for world trade and have turned her capital city, Colombo, into a large and crowded cosmopolitan and commercial centre.
Military Repression in Brazil
Authors: de Alencar Lima Tito
Published: July 2007

‘. . . I persisted in denying, and they continued to give me electric shocks, kicks, blows with a rod and punches in the ribs.

Once Captain Albernaz had me open my mouth to “receive the sacrament of the eucharist”. They put in an electric wire. My mouth became completely swollen, preventing normal speech. They shouted accusations against the Church, saying that priests are homosexuals because they do not marry. At 2 p.m. they finished the session. They brought me to the cell where I lay stretched out on the floor.

At 6 p.m. they brought me something to eat but I could not swallow a thing since my mouth was one big wound. A few minutes afterwards, I was led to the interrogation room for an“explanation”. There I found the same team of Captain Albernaz. They asked me the same questions and repeated the same accusations. To explain my resistance to the torture, they concluded that I must be a guerilla and I was hiding my participation in attacks on banks.

The questioning began again, in order to make me confess my share in the attacks: electric shocks, kicks in the genital organs and in the stomach were repeated. I was beaten with small planks of wood, cigarette butts were snuffed out on my body. For five hours I was subjected to this dog treatment. Finally they had me walk the “Polish corridor” (a torture consisting in having the prisoner pass between a double file of soldiers who are beating him all the while until he falls unconscious). I was assured that this was just a sample of what would happen to the Dominicans.
Power against the People
Authors: de Certeau Michel
Published: July 2007

The impossible is becoming a reality in Brazil, the unthinkable has become a fact. Methodical violence, unjustifiable repression, systematic use of denunciation and torture are emerging in a country where they were least likely to do so. Nothing is so opposed to Brazilian culture. Yesterday, speech was still circulating freely in the streets as the light and blood of communication. Today, blood is flowing in police cellars where so many men and women have fallen without knowing why: torture and corpses impose fear and silence everywhere, and dumb and terrifying rumours. Tongues fall silent, censorship and suspicion are rife.

Yesterday, the intelligence, subtlety and the manifold resources of human relationships were enough to solve or cope with all problems. Today, relationships are shattered by the suppression of all discussion; violence breaks age-old links, the brutality of a military order tends to multiply withdrawals, retirements and breaks, except between those who profit from the rCgime. The liberal tradition which inaugurated the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824 is thrown out as so much refuse.

This brutality takes the Brazilians by surprise, in the way in which horror suddenly strikes out of a morning sky which seemed to be dawning like any other. ‘Que cosa!’ Brutality strikes them before they have time to realize that it was possible. And the military may be maiming for a very long time a sort of national Brazilian genius in the way in which they are maiming so many victims of torture.
Notes from the Underground
Authors: Berrigan Daniel
Published: July 2007

Analogies are a little like the toeholds one grasps on a steep slope; they enable one to take the next step in a dangerous geography. The next step is the point in question: is it possible ? The question, for a climber, cannot be an abstract one; he must create as he goes. And he draws breath, when the air is very thin indeed, from the example of those who went far, who died in the breach, or who made it further.

Danger is within and around. Whatever the quality of the air (it is not high, by all reports) this is of its substance. It is not merely that one is hunted in a perpetual open season; this is taken for granted, part of the game today. Much nearer the point is the possession of one’s own life, one’s own soul: not to belong to the hunters, not to inhabit their dreams, not to be hung as a trophy on their walls. Resistance is one way of putting it; the pressures one can olfer against a foul project, unworthy of man, undertaken in that decrepit chain of command which forges one man to another, a chain gang of slaves, blind in authority, blind in obedience.

Such thoughts arise on the occasion of the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. His faults, which were indeed large ones, died with him, extinguished in blood. The questions raised by his life and dramatized in his murder remain to haunt those who were his friends, who, two years later, have tears to shed for a young life, so brutally extinguished. In a sense which is both true and difficult of understanding, his death was irrelevant to his failure; one could still consider him as having won his prize, gone on to the highest political honour—and changed nothing.
On Dogmas and World–Views
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

I want to present a difficulty, and to commend a solution to that difficulty. The difficulty is one which frequently troubles Catholics and (to a lesser extent) other Christians; the solution to it is neither original nor new, but I think deserves wider publicity than it has had up to the present time.

The difficulty is as follows. Catholic Christians, and also many Christians of Protestant or Eastern communions, hold that the assent of believers is demanded to some doctrines, like those of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which have been solemnly defined by the Church in the past. Now the definitions are couched in terms derived from earlier philosophical world-views. So, if we assent to the doctrines, it seems that we are thereby committed to the world-views which provided the terms in which they were defined.

It seems that the believer is faced with the following dilemma: to reject the world-views as outmoded and therefore to reject the doctrines; or to accept the doctrines and with them the worldviews. No Catholic can really accept either alternative; to accept the second is to be stuck for ever in the conceptual scheme of the ancient world, while to accept the first is, logically, to cease to be a Catholic. ‘Conservatives’ in the Catholic Church tend to emphasize the importance of maintaining the doctrines, and divert attention from the apparent consequence that the outdated world-views must also be retained. ‘Progressives’ tend to emphasize the imam portance of dispensing with the world-views, and to gloss over the problem of in what sense, if any, one can consistently at once maintain the doctrine and abandon the world-view. To raise this question at all is to invite the stigma of conservatism at the hands of progressives, of progressivism at the hands of conservatives.
My Own Death
Authors: Hobson Robert F.
Published: July 2007

Deal on, Deal on, my merry men all

Deal on your cakes and your wine;

For whatever is dealt at her funeral today

Shall be dealt tomorrow at mine.

(Verse at an Irish Wake in 1810)

One day I shall be dead.

The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.

At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’
On Non‐Infallible Pronouncements
Authors: Rahner Karl
Published: July 2007

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

‘17. On this point there is a difficult problem which needs careful appraisal, since it concerns the faith or the relationship to the Magisterium of many Catholics today even more than in the past. We refer to the fact that in the exercise of its task the ecclesiastical magisterium can fall into error, and indeed has been known to do so. The Church has always been aware of this possibility, has catered for it in her theology, and has developed rules of procedure for such a situation. This possibility of error does not arise with those decisions whose promulgation demands the absolute assent of faith, namely those promulgated by the solemn definition of a Pope or General Council or through the ordinary magisterium.

It is historically incorrect to maintain that subsequently the Church has been found to be in error on such dogmas, though a given dogma is inevitably liable to be understood differently (while preserving its original sense) as it acquires greater precision in the face of past and contemporary misunderstandings.
Post‐Pill Paradise Lost: John Updike's Couples
Authors: Lodge David
Published: July 2007

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

Brown begins with the paradox propounded by Freud, that civilization or ‘culture’ (which is prized by traditional utopists, and which they wish to perfect) is based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy. Freud himself was shifty about the proportionate loss and gain of this process, but Brown is quite certain and uncompromising: civilization is self-evidently neurotic, and the only solution is to end the tyranny of the reality-principle, to substitute ‘conscious play’ for alienated labour as the mainspring of society, and to restore to adult sexuality, narrowly fixated on genital and procreative functions, the ‘polymorphous perverse’ of infantile eroticism.
The Church and Moral Decision
Authors: Harris Peter
Published: July 2007

Not all the discussion between progressive and conservative wings in the Church is about doctrine and liturgy. As the Humanae Vitae affair revealed there are growing areas of disagreement on questions of morality. Though the ones I want to write about are found in acute form in Roman Catholic circles where there is a sharper clash between individual and authority, they are also frequent wherever any strong doctrine of revelation, particularly of a fundamentalist kind, prevails. This essay aims simply to elucidate some of the questions which do not always get properly examined in the heat of debate and to analyse some of the presuppositions behind popularly held and taught views which lay some claim to being representative of ‘traditional Christian morality’. Not infrequently the views of serious moral thinkers are dubbed ‘situation ethics’ or ‘purely subjective morality’ and by being so labelled are accounted suitably disposed of along with the rest of the contents of the bin marked ‘new theology’. There is a risk that more than garbage is disposed of in this way. I want in this essay to do a bit of ‘cool looking’ at some of the presuppositions of the supporters of ‘traditional Christian morality’ (self-styled) and also to look at a problem that crops up frequently in these discussions: what can be reckoned as specifically ‘Christian’ in a moral view which does not understand moral imperatives to have been delivered timeless and eternal in some earlier period of history?
Atheism and The Avant‐Garde
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

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

Now, if Alter is right, Robbe-Grillet’s deliberate and calculated refusal to include anything to do with religious activity shows that his aesthetic is not ideologically neutral, but critical. It keeps its distance from the world of ‘bare facts’, takes up a stance towards them.
Wrestling with the Word—4
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

‘No one has ever seen God’; this is the text which was read to us from the first Epistle of St John, and which also occurs at the end of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel. ‘No one has ever seen God’: an appropriate text, perhaps, for the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost, in that pause which the liturgy has contrived for our meditation between the departure of the Son as risen Lord and the coming of the Spirit, an experience of absence through which we may more profoundly recover an experience of presence—absence, presence, of what, of whom? Of God, whom no one has ever seen.

Let us recall what must be a familiar experience to all of us at some time in our lives: the sleeping city, the lights shining in the empty streets, oneself, the solitary watcher withdrawn from the human community of sleep, to which one is all the more deeply drawn. This is the before and after of all the active business of the day, the multifarious contradiction of human project, plan and purpose, the coming and going: all rises from and returns to sleep, movement back to stillness, the rising and falling of a single biological rhythm of breathing, unconscious, at rest. Are these sleepers dreaming their personal dreams, or are they united in the single impersonal dream of the worl? Even those who do not sleep in this sleeping stillness, the sufferers awake in their white nights alone, the lovers involved in their private intimacy, aren’t they too enacting in this universal dream a typical human destiny of pain and sex, death and procreation, sounding a ground bass of human existence? The sleeping city: a human community realized in a unity before and after, below if not above, the community of active function and conscious purpose: this underlying community finding itself in a deeper unity of typical man. And who or what sustains this deeper unity—is the dream of the world really impersonal, or does the dream unfold in some deeper dreamer?
The Earthbound Pangolin
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Having once berated (by letter) the present editor of New Blackfriars for feeding his readers on the ersatz provender of bloated book-reviews, I find myself involved in the same offence. My excuse is that I have rarely read a book which has aroused in me such ambivalence of reaction as Dr Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols. My hope is that this extended reviewed will encourage other people to read this book, which it would be unjust to ignore totally, and pernicious to accept entirely. The book is of significance in both anthropology and theology; is it perhaps the turn of an intellectual tide, a theological anthropology moving in to the vacuum left by secular theology?

This, I believe, is the author’s intention: to carry out a counterrevolution in the social sciences, so that anthropology and sociology, whose origins were so deeply rooted in the wish of the French positivists and British agnostics to reveal and shatter the foundations of faith, will now become instruments for demasking the social causes of all religious attitudes including atheism, agnosticism and indifference, and for indicating the social patterns which favour faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This intention does credit to Mrs Douglas as a Christian, and the examination of ethnographic material which it has provoked reveals her brilliance as an anthropologist. Underlying it all, however, is, I consider, an appalling error, or paradigm of errors. But let us see what she has to say.
The Falling Number of Confessions—Development or Deviation?—II
Authors: Linley Piers
Published: July 2007

Although, if we are to grasp at all the fundamental reasons behind the falling number of confessions, we must not only trace the development of the sacrament but also try to look at the theological principles involved, this could easily divert us away from the urgent problems of the moment into a tedious and complex historical survey. To avoid this we shall restrict ourselves to quoting a suggestive conciliar text, drafted more than eleven centuries ago. In 813 the Emperor Charlemagne, as part of his programme of ecclesiastical reform, summoned a number of councils. One of these met at Chalon, and the following is one of its canons:

‘Some say that sins ought to be confessed only to God but others believe that they are to be confessed to priests: both of which are practised within the Church not without great fruit. And so let us confess our sins to God in so far as he is the Remitter of sins . . . and according to the institution of the apostle, let us confess our sins to one another, and let us pray for one another that we may be saved. And so confession which is made to God cleanses sins; but that which is made to the priest, teaches us how these same sins are cleansed. For God, who is both the author and dispenser of salvation and health, frequently offers this by the invisible ministry of his power, frequently by the work of physicians.’ (P. F. Palmer, Sacraments and Forgiveness, p. 157.)

The exact interpretation of this canon is difficult and need not delay us. It is clear, however, that a tension was felt to exist between the confession of sins to a priest and the direct repenting of them in the sight of God. It is clear that this tension is still with us and underlies the falling number of confessions.
The Castaways‐The Mariner
Authors: Braybooke Neville
Published: July 2007

In the William Golding canon, his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most famous, and his third Pincher Martin (1956), his most controversial. Both are concerned with castaways and their fight for survival.

When Lord of the Flies opens, nuclear war has broken out in Europe and a school from the English Home Counties has been evacuated by air to an unknown destination. On the way there, they are attacked, the crew killed, but the ‘passenger tube’ released so that it can crash-land on the jungle below. At the moment of impact, a fierce storm is raging and only a number of boys manage to scramble out of the ‘tube’ before the wind sweeps it out to sea. Those who do, scatter in the forest undergrowth. They are castaways —though it is some time before it dawns on them that they are marooned and consequently ‘island castaways’.

The island itself is never named. But the description of its coral reef, beaches and fruit trees that bear all the year round, suggests that it might be one of those lying south of Sumatra or Java. The ways in which the boys adapt to their new tropical background is the book’s main theme, and ‘interpretations’ of it depend largely upon a reader’s own particular preoccupations. Freudians, for instance, have already noticed how the boys’ behaviour fits the theory that if parental, state, or Church authority is taken away, children will evolve their own gods, totems, and taboos. Others have found the story a parable of man stripped of the sanctions of custom and civilization.
The Falling Number of Confessions—Development or Deviation?—I
Authors: Linley Piers
Published: July 2007

As a result of the changes inaugurated by Vatican II our eucharistic experience is now very different from what it was a few years ago. But what about our experience of the sacrament of Confession? Here the shift during these same few years has rather been simply from experience to non-experience. Though statistics are hard to come by and motivation difficult to establish, it seems certain that the number of confessions has fallen.

Now this is not a shift inaugurated by Vatican II. The Council reaffirmed the value of this sacrament and reiterated the principle laid down in Canon Law that priests should ‘show themselves entirely and always ready to perform the office of the sacrament of penance as often as the faithful reasonably request it’ (Presbyterorum Ordinis, c. Ill, Abbott translation, p. 561). It seems clear that this does not mean merely the provision of regular times on Saturdays and on the eves of feasts but also urges that priests should respond unhesitatingly to a spontaneous request to hear a confession. Beyond this the Council did not go except to recommend a revision of the rites and formulas of the sacrament—a revision that has not yet been carried out. The falling number of confessions has been brought about, therefore, by the decisions of individuals. This growing feeling within the Church that the sacrament need not be received so frequently must be recognized and respected. It must also critically examined. Is it a development, orthodox and legitimate, of the Church’s experience of divine mercy? Or, on the contrary, is it an aggressive, individualistic deviation from the sound tradition of the Church? Rather than rush to any such sweeping judgments we must first ask what it is that this sacrament celebrates and what is the previous experience of the Church in this matter.
Northern Ireland—Dismantling the protestant State
Authors: Boyle Kevin
Published: July 2007

The past two years in Northern Ireland have been a time of intense political activity among its one-and-a-half million people. The frequency and intensity of street violence has ensured international publicity and attention. Yet the causes underlying the disturbances remain much misunderstood at home and abroad.

It is a trite but necessary beginning to emphasize that the Irish problem is not one of religion. It is true that religious denomination neatly divides the political positions. Unionists are Protestant, non-Unionists Catholics. But however compelling it is to see the intermittent guerrilla warfare in Belfast or Derry in terms of Catholics and Protestants it must be resisted. These confrontations may have little formal political character, but in a real sense they represent a clash of different political forces; the resistance of a complex postcolonial social structure to new economic and social influences from within and without.

Put another way, the Civil Rights campaign and the British Government’s involvement in that campaign and its aftermath represent attempts to dismantle, what had, under strain, become a semi-fascist state, and to replace it with something approaching social democracy. Just why the ‘Irish Question’ should once again irrupt into British politics, and at this particular time, is problematical. But an important factor which enabled a Labour administration to begin on the unfinished business of Ireland is the impact of economic change on the relationships between the parties involved, the Republic of Ireland, Ulster, and Britain. Economic change alone cannot account for all developments, but an analysis of recent events in Ireland which leaves them out altogether could only help to mystify further the reputedly already amazed Britisher.
The Christian as Counsellor
Authors: Hollings Michael
Published: July 2007

It was not until a fairly recent visit to the United States that I came across and wondered at the emphasis put on counselling by the clergy over there. It struck me at first hearing that this must be something for which specially selected clergy were specially trained, put through courses, taught techniques—something for which I had never been qualified. A closer appraisal made it clear that though some may indeed have been on courses, most were more likely to be doing not much more than what I have always summed up as ‘being available’—available for what? Well, almost anything—meal, bed, tea, sympathy, cash, a ready ear, a shoulder to be wept on, a sponge to absorb, a tap to turn on, a man to pray with, a person who can be silent, a pillar of strength, a place of peace, a warm area of concern, a vehicle of love, a man of God, a secular human being who will be interested.

What I am trying to say is that a counsellor is one who is available to God and to his or her fellow men and women to put at the service of both all that he or she is—and has to give. How much there is depends initially on God, secondarily on heredity, background, education, etc., and thirdly and continually upon the individual’s openness to the Spirit, as the Spirit moves in the world and in him.

The Spirit scatters his gifts: none of us possess all. God is God—too great for us—how wonderful that we can and should go on growing in wisdom and grace before God and man, till we meet each other and Him—face to face—and know what we are now ‘seeing in a glass darkly’.
Crisis in the Foreign Aid Industry
Authors: Power Jonathan
Published: July 2007

Last year the largest aid budget in the world was steered through the American Congress—yet it was the smallest budget since America began giving aid twenty-three years ago. But perhaps this is no cause for alarm. Consider the following vignettes.

• Washington. December 18th, 1969 (U.P.I.). ‘Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield said that the foreign aid programme had lost its original purpose and he would oppose it. “Foreign Aid is no longer an aid programme. It’s a programme for the benefit of American business”, Senator Mansfield said at a news conference. He added, it was no longer being used for the humanitarian precepts (sic) for which it was established.’

• Washington. June 7th, 1970 (A.P.). ‘U.S. Foreign Aid Chief John Hannah acknowledged today that the U.S. aid programme is being used as a cover for C.I.A. operations in Laos.’
Corruption Begins at Home?
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

Anyone sensitive to symbolism must normally shudder at the words of eucharistic consecration. Not because of the current English translation. Something that cuts deeper: the priest takes the chalice and says: ‘And when supper was ended, he took the cup, saying: This is my blood. . . .’ Most chalices are still lined with gold, a mark of respect, the most precious metal alone allowed to touch the consecrated wine. Yet that gold, enshrined at the heart of our celebration of love and peace, is also, still, at the base of the international monetary system; more specifically, it underpins the economy of South Africa, the world’s largest gold-producing country: the blood that is relevant here is also the blood of apartheid. The hasty response, that a gold-lined cup is a mere container, can only be dubious in the light of a sacramental theology that recognizes the sign-value of form. More honest to admit the contradiction, acknowledge indeed the wider interlocking of the eucharistic community itself with that systematic exploitation revealed in a minor, everyday detail.

The other words of consecration, ‘This is my body’, have resonance for another sacrament: matrimony. Bellarmine traced a further echo: ‘The sacrament of marriage ... is similar to the Eucharist, which likewise is a sacrament not only in the moment of its accomplishment, but also as long as it remains.’ But the eucharistic bread, one might argue, can decay and corrupt; it may not ‘remain’; an opening, by analogy, towards divorce appears: individual relationships may cease adequately to measure up to the form of marriage; the core corrupts, the sign decays.
Rational Man on the Dark Margin
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

The lady in Muriel Spark’s latest novel, eagerly looking out for her murderer, was surely an anthropologist manquée. For one element in the anthropologist’s complex fate is the dialectical compulsion to achieve the synthesis of contraries. The anthropologist’s charter— the cohesiveness and interpretability of all the works of social man— is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment surely; yet this volume suggests that it is in the very area where the hidden and the hateful come nearest to receiving the guilty approval of social man that anthropologists can do their finest work, marked by that passionate rationality and clear-eyed empathy which do at times reward painstaking research and patient reading. It is true that the best essays are by historians, or by anthropologists using history to gain a wider range; but the historians, Professor Norman Cohn, Mr Peter Brown, Dr Alan Macfarlane, and Mr Keith Thomas, have adopted the anthropological approach, which examines the interplay of ideology and institution, rather than work in the historian’s tradition of the placing of men in their milieu.

This collection, then, dedicated to exploring the dark margin of society’s self-consciousness, is intended as a commemoration of Professor Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the A'zande. Now this is one of the classics of anthropology in more than one sense. The ease of style depends on the extreme clarity of the underlying thought, and this in turn is the fruit of the prolonged, patient absorbing of an enormous mass of material.
Calepin Rides Again: The French Scene
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Between the promoters of the present discontents and the revolutionaries of the heroic early nineteenth century there seems to be one great difference: the refusal of detailed prescription for the society of the future. Our world is to be violently overthrown, but when we enquire what is to replace it, the answers are usually expressed in terms of a vaguely existentialist adventure, an undefined project thrust into the future, where love and risk will combine to create the millennium.

Older Utopias were vastly more specific. In fact it was almost a diagnostic feature that they had to be: either to carry the reader’s narrative interest, as in More’s Utopia or Wells’s The World of William Clissold (a book my provincial 1930s childhood fed on avidly), or to permit the social scientist to roam untrammelled in the realms of gold because his real appetite was a true romantic one for the poetry rather than the mechanisms of a new society. One who attempted to combine both poetry and mechanism was Charles Fourier, a prolific writer who has recently been expensively reprinted, more, I should imagine, for his impact on surrealism than for any residual value he may possess as a social analyst. Fourier was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out and died in 1837, after dabbling in a number of vaguely financial callings, and publishing endless works on the evils of industrialism and how they should be remedied.