bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ataraxy and Utopia
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

This is surely bound to fail, but the need to attempt to make some connections has become irrepressible. In this first article, then, I want to use Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the present state of British culture to introduce some quotations from The Dialectics of Liberation. What I am getting at here can emerge, if ever it does at all, only as we proceed. The point is that there is something wrong with British culture: what Anderson refers to as its ataraxy, its imperviousness to certain disturbing ideas; and there is a chance that the utopian dimension evoked once again by some recent thinking may prove quickening and liberatory. In a second article I want to bring out the ambivalent connections between the work of Herbert Marcuse and that of Martin Heidegger. Finally, in a third article, it should be possible to relate all this to the English literary-critical tradition and to the classical moment in Catholic theology.

Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, first published in 1959 and now widely available as a paperback, has recently been hailed as a ‘classic’, to which ‘all critics of English philosophy owe a great debt’. This salutation of another orthodoxy (that by the standards of a revolutionary and internationalist political consciousness English philosophy is trivial, after all) comes in an important essay by Perry Anderson in the fiftieth issue of New Left Review (July-August 1968). This is the most persuasive and thorough-going offer of new bearings for the critique of contemporary British culture that has so far been made.
Stalinensis: Yurodivy
Authors: Nicholl Donald
Published: July 2007

This is an essay that I have wanted to write for a long time. Perhaps not exactly this essay but one like it. In fact, I once did so, about twenty years ago. That essay was all about the rights of conscience: how our consciences are formed; and how to be Catholic means to be free. But the article was turned down by the editor of the journal in question because my remarks on conscience were ‘meat being offered to babes who can only take milk’. If the Catholic ‘babes’ had been given such meat twenty years ago perhaps they would not have suffered such pains from the diet which recent events have provided for them. Yet what saddened me most about the episode was the editor’s assumption that anything written by a Catholic must in some sense be ‘definitive’.

This notion that an article has to be definitive leads to articles being mass-produced, all of the same form and, above all, identical in tone, very solemn, rather omniscient, final in their judgments, givng an air of finality even to their non-judgments, donning the judge’s black cap even when pronouncing the accused not guilty. This means to say that writers are encouraged to pretend that one of their half-thoughts is a thesis, and two of their half-thoughts a whole book (a publisher once asked me to turn an article of twelve pages that I had published into a book of 140 pages, saying ‘You needn’t add anything of substance to it’; he produced a series of such books).
Thoughts of a Monknik
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

I am sometimes asked how I reconcile being a monk with my involvement in movements devoted to the Alternative Society. I think we should turn that question upside down. A monk is ipso facto involved in the enterprise of the Alternative Society, and the wonder is that so few seem to realize it.

After all, what do we mean by the alternative society? We mean, I take it, that we have glimpsed, far away, a vision of what it might be like for man to be free; a dream of human society in which love is all you need, in which death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more (that’s from the Apocalypse, actually). And not only that. We have decided to stake all on that vision, that dream. We have committed ourselves to living as if man were really like that, as if society could really live by love alone. We have let ourselves be subverted by utopia, and can never be the same again.

And that is the definition of the Church, and most especially of the religious orders. The Church is, according to the Second Vatican Council, the present sign and nucleus of the future kingdom, the new creation; and religious orders are in particular called to live their whole lives as a witness to this future, this Utopia.
Man's Body in Relation to The Rest of Creation
Authors: Sahi Jyoti
Published: July 2007

Modern man seems to have lost his faith in nature. This is part of a more complicated loss of faith in himself. For the artist, anyway, nature is largely only an extension of himself, and it is primarily the artist who finds nature has become a sort of enemy. In outlining a possible new theory of our relationship with nature, we are attempting to integrate in our own work that nature which we too, as modern men, find antipathetic to our consciousness. I would like to explain more exactly what I mean by nature. This is not the nature which is looked for in empirical experience, but rather that a priori intuition of creation which we experience because of our subjective sense of our ontological contingency. A scientist, viewing what he calls facts, apprehends the causality of things, but cannot from that deduce an eternal source from which all things emanate, a source essentially different from its own emanations. For the artist, on the other hand, everything has its still centre, a centre which is somehow the very voiding of all that he perceives, an inner principle, one might say, of naughting, which is yet the most cogent affirmation which he knows of all that he sensually experiences. So we see at the very crux of our concept of nature there is a paradox, a paradox which leads the artist to distrust his own empiricism, because for him nature can never be wholly revealed. The most essential part of nature lies hidden in that which is beyond concept, and only enters into the artist’s own concepts as a certain mystery, a certain secret, or ‘shakti’, which accepts his own works as a temple for its presence, through an ineffable condescension beyond the power of the artist to understand.
Aid to Developing Countries
Authors: Pearse Erik
Published: July 2007

The division between East and West on which most of us have been brought up, is gradually losing its significance and relevance in the face of a very much sharper division of mankind—between rich and poor countries. Among the rich are all the ‘white’ countries and Japan. They make up one quarter of the world population and share between them 90 per cent of the world’s income. This leaves 10 per cent for the other three-quarters. On average, an American earns in one week a little under what an Indian earns in one year. An Englishman earns the same amount in about two and a half weeks. This imbalance is far greater today than it has ever been before. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the ratio of wealth between the richer and the poorer countries was of the order of five to one. Now it is twenty-five to one.

One could argue that in a world of plenty, in which all were able to satisfy their basic needs and aspirations, such a gross disparity was intolerable. But the point is that the majority of those living in the poor countries are not in a position to satisfy the most fundamental of their needs and aspirations in terms of food, shelter, clothing and employment; whereas we, in the rich countries, having quite lost sight of the distinction between what is fundamentally necessary and what is superfluous, are increasingly brain-washed into thinking that the most unnecessary novelties are vital to our well-being.
Wrestling with the Word‐I
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

For the next three weeks, as Lent builds up more intensively towards Easter, the gospel readings at Sunday Mass abandon the ordinary course of readings for the year (Luke this year) and go over to John. And that for a very good reason, which is internal to the gospel according to John. What Lent is all about, as we have been seeing this last couple of weeks, is a longish preparation for Easter—a preparation that once was the final spurt of adults preparing to be baptized during Easter night, and then also of already baptized Christians who had fallen away in some pretty serious regard and were now getting ready to come back to the heart of the Christian community on Maundy Thursday, and then finally a sort of extended retreat for the whole Christian people. Because everybody realized that they all needed to come back closer to the heart of things—every Christian had fallen away to some degree, every Christian was in some way an internal emigré—they realized that they all had to come back closer to the heart of things, and that meant recovering something of their first flush of enthusiasm and their first entry into the Church, their baptism. And baptism from the beginning was an Easter affair, an Easter affair even before there was an Easter kept as an annual feast; already in the New Testament letters, baptism was seen as a sharing in Christ’s death and in his being raised again.
I.R.F.E.D.—Struggle for Development
Authors: Cosmao Vincent
Published: July 2007

I.R.F.E.D.—Institut international de recherche et de formation en vue du diveloppement harmonist, the International Institute for Research and Training towards Integrating Development—was founded in 1958 by Fr L. J. Lebret; in spite of the originality of its research and activities, the Institute is still virtually unknown to the British public.

I.R.F.E.D. defines development as the constructive use of all natural and human resources in order to promote the collective and interdependent progress of mankind. This means that I.R.F.E.D. seeks to tackle development in every sphere and at every level; it is concerned as much with making peoples aware of their situation as with the structural reorganization of international trade and finance; with socio-cultural change and strategies for industrialization; with the appropriate spiritual, moral or political conditions for participation as well as with the rational, economic or technical constraints on planning. This global approach demands a simultaneous and concentrated emphasis on a series of different activities —fundamental and applied research, analysis in depth, programming, training, publication, the stimulation of public opinion, etc....

Development is the key word in the work of the Institute; but how is it visualized ? Since the discovery of underdevelopment has made people aware of the word, the concept, the myth of development, its significance has evolved concurrently with the different stages in the analysis of underdevelopment and the elaboration of strategies or policies to combat this. I.R.F.E.D. has followed this evolution, taking part in its different stages, and progressively acquiring a deeper understanding and a clearer insight into a pattern of development which is dependent on man’s gradual assumption of control over his world-wide destiny.
Black Power—Black Racialism?
Authors: Baldock Peter
Published: July 2007

The recent report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ was greeted by the press with mild bewilderment and a sigh of relief. Britain apparently is not, after all the fuss, on the edge of racial violence. Three-quarters of the population are demonstrated to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘tolerant-inclined’, and it is precisely in those areas where coloured immigrants actually live that there is most tolerance.

In this respect Colour and Citizenship, like the laborious P.E.P. report on discrimination, is useful. But more than volumes of sheer fact are needed if we are to come to grips with the race problem. We would be mistaken to point out too enthusiastically that the majority of people in this country have been shewn to be tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ is a pretty word and one that is heavily overvalued by the prevailing ideology. In effect it means ‘indifference’. It makes little difference to the established economic system whether people have purple or green wallpaper, whether they worship in Anglican churches or synagogues, whether they sleep with members of the same sex or not. These are matters of indifference to capital organization and only a paranoid will be really intolerant of the options that people make. In other circumstances those choices could become significant. Only a minority of the population (10 per cent) are prejudiced in the strictly defined sense of Colour and Citizenship and for many of those it is apparently a symbolic issue (like the members of the Conservative Party in Surbiton—where there are some hundred black people out of a population of over 60,000—who wish to replace their liberally minded M.P. with a supporter of Enoch Powell).
Enforcing the Encyclical
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.
The Concilium World Congress: Impressions and Reflections
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

There had been a derailment ahead of us at Dover, so I was late arriving in Brussels. More delay getting a taxi, because I couldn’t quite bring myself to use my elbows like everybody else; the hotel room booked for me, I calculated, would cost about £5 10s. a night, so unless I stopped eating or found another hotel I should have to return home well before the Congress ended. At last the Congress hall itself: the Palais de Congrés, past the illuminated fountains of the Mont des Arts and a small knot of cameramen, timidly into the Salle Albert 1 er—and it really hit one then: the long, high swooping hall, with what must have been a thousand people in it, the brilliant glare of the television lights reflected from the huge black and white poster at the back of the stage, bearing the words in English—

Schillebeeckx was speaking in French from the rostrum; his voice resonated effortlessly from the splendid amplification system, though soon one became aware of a counterpoint of high-pitched chirp and chatter from the badly adjusted earphones of theologians unaccustomed to the use of simultaneous-translation equipment; this was to form an accompaniment throughout the Congress. Photographers crawled and flashed unceasingly over the stage; from time to time the television cameras swivelled and turned their black snouts on the audience. I would return to England the next day, I decided; no, no, not this, not this.
Salvation as Oop Gesprek
Authors: Shutte Augustine
Published: July 2007

The logic of the word ‘salvation’ involves the idea of a person or situation from which the subject of salvation is saved. There are a variety of models used in the Bible for describing such a situation or person; I choose to use that of slavery. Apart from other considerations, this model is useful in that it connects the idea of situation to that of person: slavery is always slavery to. Salvation is thus the setting-free of someone from slavery to someone else. In the Bible the paradigm case of salvation is the setting-free of the Israelites from their slavery to Pharaoh. Ultimately, however, in the Gospel, salvation becomes the setting-free of man from his slavery to the devil.

So much by way of defining how I intend to use the word ‘salvation’. I wish now to question our contemporary experience as to how far it contains anything which this model of salvation can help us to interpret. Do we experience a need which could be called the need for salvation? And if so, how does it show itself? What are the characteristic forms of the need for salvation today? Where, in our multi-storeyed modern society, does it show itself most clearly? To indicate at the outset the way in which I intend to deal with this question, let me say that it is in the sphere of language, or more generally that of communications, that I discern the clearest evidence of this need.

Consider the following. They are passages quoted in an article by W. A. de Klerk (a well-known Afrikaner novelist and playwright) in the recently published ‘Beweging Uitwaarts’ (‘The Movement Outward’), a collection of critical essays by de Klerk, Johan Degenaar and Martin Versfeld, that is at present causing quite a stir in Afrikaner cultural circles.
The Eucharist: Development or Deviation‐II
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

The present renewal of the eucharistic liturgy can be seen as an attempt to remove some of the long-term effects of the imposition of extrinsic rites and ceremonies on the once-and-for-all given sign which is the means by which believers have access to the mystery of God in Christ. But what is that given sign? Bread and wine, certainly, but bread and wine precisely as bread and wine, in their full reality, bread demanding to be eaten to be bread and wine requiring to be drunk to become what it is. Not two substances which could be any other two substances, which could be say wood and iron, but bread and wine to be eaten and drunk. The sign is not therefore simply the two substances of bread and wine but all that these substances involve in the very understanding of them as bread and wine: people, and people to eat and drink them. The sign is the meal. The sign is the gathering of people eating and drinking the bread and wine, and the present liturgical reforms aim at making that sign as transparent as possible.

Questions can of course be raised as to just how little of such a sign there has to be in order for it still to constitute the authentic sign. What is meant by ‘people’? Does there have to be anybody there at all for the sign to be the sign? And if obviously there has to be (since a sign of this sort is a sign only for people), then how many people?
Theology and Developing Countries
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

I took advantage of updating sessions in Zambia last summer to put the following question to Zambian and missionary priests that I met: ‘Has your training really prepared you for your ministry?’

The question was deliberately ambiguous; training could be interpreted as spiritual, pastoral or theological. The question was put to eighty-eight priests, and it is revealing that nearly all of them singled out the theological side of their training for criticism. This criticism was certainly not ambiguous : forty regarded their theological formation as mostly irrelevant to their ministry, compared with eleven who considered it useful preparation; the other thirtyseven refrained from making any clear-cut statement, but suggested drastic modifications.

The quasi-unanimous reproach was that their theology had been one-sidedly academic and intellectual, aimed at furnishing their minds with answers to out-dated European questions, rather than at making them messengers of a living Gospel that would be Good News to the people they were sent to.

This sentiment of frustration is a symptom of a much wider problem. A young missionary or African priest, on the completion of a six- or seven-year course of study from which he rightly expected some sort of competence, complains that he has nothing effective to tell his community in his homily, no compelling News to announce to the school children in the period of Religion, no direction to offer to a people puzzled by a rapid social change, no contribution to make to the development of the country.
Son of Calepin: The French Scene
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

When I was saying goodbye to Michel Butor on the southbound platform of Durham station some months ago, I asked him if he did not feel that student activity on the violent left, in France and elsewhere, had already reached a peak, and that what students really expected from teachers was not discussion towards reform, but a reason for order. There was, he replied, nothing more repugnant to him than the teaching of order to the young (I was very much reminded of Camus’s embarrassed proclamation to a group of students when asked to address them on some serious topic, I would rather preach passion to you’) and the only valid thing to tell them was to explore and risk. I had been full of Camus and limits when I asked the question, having only a few months before lectured on L’Homme révolté to an audience of African students on Camus’s depiction of the pitfalls of millenarian revolution, its constant history of over-reaching and failure; and I had been roundly rebuked by nearly all the expatriate professors—European and American—on the staff of that African university: in their view, what might have been a careful indication of ‘brakes’ in Britain or Europe could be only a counsel of cowardly despair in modem Africa, where the first lesson needed was revolt.

Butor clearly felt this about France, too, but whatever one’s views about the events of May, 1968, and the legend it has left behind it, in the most conspicuous case of Nanterre it seems to me that the reasonable limits of revolt were crossed long ago.
Human and Divine Love
Authors: Dominian Jack
Published: July 2007

The subject of love is of universal interest, has engaged the attention of many since time immemorial and will continue to do so. It is of particular interest to Christians who make the claim that God is love. If this be true, as we believe it to be so in faith, then no other subject has comparable significance.

It is for this reason that I am beginning this paper with a brief personal credo which can be stated simply. If Christianity finds itself in a situation in which few are really concerned with its survival and may find it irrelevant to their lives, I believe that in the final analysis this is so because Christianity has failed in one of its fundamental missions, which is to be the catalyst of love in the world. After every possible case for its present demise—such as its internal disunity, its obsolete language and liturgy, its authoritarianism, its pessimism over sexuality, the disarray of its structures, the anachronism of much of its habits and its legalism—have each been exhaustively examined, I believe there is left one enduring and irreducible reason which is succinctly stated by St Paul:

If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but without love, then I am nothing at all. If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it but am without love, it will do me no good whatever.

(1 Corinthians 13, 1-4.)
Realism, Allegory and Symbolism
Authors: Lodge David
Published: July 2007

I begin with a number of propositions, which I shall try to develop in detail:

First, that allegory and symbolism are modes of analogy, that both present one thing or concept in terms of another thing or concept, even though the ways in which they do so have been contrasted and seen as vitally different.

Secondly, that the novel is, as a literary form, generally characterized by realism, and that realism as a literary technique would appear to be opposed to analogical modes.

Thirdly, that this opposition is only apparent because all literary discourse (and in a sense all language) is analogical, in so far as it is meaningful: and that this is confirmed by critical practice.

Fourthly, that the development of the novel therefore reveals a continuing compromise in which overtly analogical modes are allowed to permeate the apparently non-analogical mode of realism in the interests of meaning.

Fifthly, that in the modern period the value of realism as a technique begins to be called into question, and consequently the point of the compromise begins to be called into question, with significant repercussions on the form of the novel.

In putting forward these ideas, particularly the last one, I have been much influenced by The Nature of Narrative (1966), by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg. Surveying the whole range of Western narrative literature, they suggest that the primitive oral epic was a synthesis of two antithetical types of narrative, one which they call empirical, whose primary allegiance is to the real, and the other fictional, whose primary allegiance is to the ideal.
Marriage and Mysterion
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

‘Europeans say’, I remarked to Cosmas Daudu, ‘that a man with several wives cannot bring up his children properly.’ ‘That is not so’, he retorted, ‘my father had eight wives. In the evening, he would gather us round the fire, and begin to ask us what we would do, if things happened in this way or that. If we just tried to agree with him, he would not be pleased with us. He wanted us to think everything out carefully.’ I did not offer any more of the empirical and ill-informed wisdom of Europe. Some time later, I heard Gosmas himself defending monogamy, ‘For in the beginning God made one man and one woman in the garden there.’

Now, on reflection I think Cosmas had the better of the two arguments, and the main object of this article is to claim that many of the difficulties with which Catholic moral theology finds itself occupied just now can be solved only (by ‘solved’ I don’t mean neatly weighed and measured, but rather made meaningful in a wider context) by adopting Cosmas Daudu’s approach, which seems to me not a precedent-seeking fundamentalism, but rather an awareness of the essentially symbolic nature of Christian ethics, and their orientation to the unity of mankind in the love of God. Or, to put it a little differently, Oscar Wilde’s witticism about the Bible beginning beautifully with a man and woman in a garden but ending with the Book of Revelations is really quite sound exegesis, since the end of the Book of Revelations does take up the theme of marriage, presented by Genesis as at the root of the bliss and woe of Everyman and Everywoman, and show it as the transcendent sign of reintegrated mankind at the wind-up of history.
Anglican Orders: Re‐assessing the Debate
Authors: Coventry John
Published: July 2007

After doing much to discredit in Absolutely Null and Utterly Void the historical build-up to Apostolicae Curae, Fr Hughes has now tackled the theological questions involved in Anglican Orders. In doing so he pursues his attack on Dr Francis Clark’s two books. This does not make entirely happy theological reading. One is left with the impression that both authors were first quite convinced a priori of the truth of their thesis, and then set out to prove it.

The basic argument of Clark’s Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation was surely not, as Hughes writes (p. 41), ‘that it was not abuses or errors that caused the Reformers to reject eucharistic sacrifice, but their own new conception of grace, justification . . .’; rather was the basic argument that the Reformers did not merely reject current late medieval superstitions about the Mass, but the Catholic doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice itself. In so far as Clark has maintained that a perfectly clear and orthodox doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice was currently taught (and as clearly rejected by the Reformers), and that the prevailing superstitions have been greatly exaggerated, Hughes makes many inroads on his position: Biel’s theology was extremely unsound, even if orthodox by the skin of its teeth; how threadbare Catholic thought was on the point came out in post Reformation apologetic, when it was clear from their twisting and turning that Catholic theologians, though insistent that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, were quite unable to give either a coherent or an acceptable account of why or how it is (and remained so till yesterday or even today); what theological thought there was, lay buried under a mass of devotional and allegorical comment on rubrics; the elevation was wrongly thought of as the moment of offering, Cajetan’s lone voice, that the whole of the Mass was a sacrifice in a sacramental sort of way, going unheeded; above all, theological thought does not exist in isolation, and in this period was embedded in a shocking system of buying the effects of Calvary piecemeal for personal use.
Whatever Became of Artukovitch?
Authors: Butler Hubert
Published: July 2007

I have been reading an 84-page pamphlet called ‘Artukovitch, the Himmler of Yugoslavia’, by three New Yorkers, called Gaffney, Starchevitch and McHugh. Artukovitch was Minister of the Interior, 1941 to 1945, under the dictator Pavelitch in the independent state of Croatia. Very few people have heard of him, yet if his story were told with remorseless candour, we would have a picture not only of Croatia twenty years ago, but of all Christendom in our century. Everything that the New Yorkers relate should be already known to us, except for one startling paragraph. It is an extract from a memoir by Artukovitch himself. After describing how he escaped to Austria and Switzerland in 1945, he goes on:

‘I stayed in Switzerland until July 1947. Then with the knowledge of the Swiss Ministry of Justice I obtained personal documents for myself and my family, which enabled us to travel to Ireland. Using the name of Anitch, we stayed there until 15th July, 1948. When our Swiss documents expired, the Irish issued new papers and under Irish papers we obtained a visa for entry into the U.S.A.’

So evidently we in Ireland, had sheltered this notable man for a whole year. He was not, like Eichmann, a humble executive, but himself a maker of history, dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox. He himself in the spring of 1941 introduced and signed the laws, which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. He established the twenty concentration camps, in which they were exterminated. Why do we know so little about his sojourn among us ?
Lead Us Not into Temptation
Authors: Baker Aelred
Published: July 2007

Liturgy is a great thing for sending people to sleep. It does not matter how archaic a word or phrase in the liturgy is, or obscure or even downright nonsense, it can still be said, provided it is said or sung often enough. Witness the remarkable lines of some popular hymns. This is even true of such an exalted thing as the Lord’s Prayer, which has been said somewhere in the liturgy from the earliest times.

Englishmen still say ‘hallowed’ long after the word has gone out of current use, largely because Englishmen have always said ‘hallowed’ since at least the days of King Alfred. This is not an English eccentricity. The Greeks have always recited the Lord’s Prayer with the word epiousios, which is known to have been unintelligible to second-century Christians. Nobody then and nobody since has ever heard of this word in any other context, and nobody is really sure what it means. And yet for century after century the Greeks have gone on saying it.

If this is so of single words, it is more so with whole phrases. The meaning of the line ‘lead us not into temptation’ is no less obscure than epiousios. The words themselves do not present any difficulty, but taken together they seems to imply something that is quite unthinkable. Are we really meaning that God would lead us into temptation, if we didn’t pray to him not to ? This certainly troubled the early Latin Fathers when they were engaged on providing a satisfactory translation for the Western Church. They frequently softened the shock by inserting something like: ‘do not suffer us to be led into temptation’ (ne patiaris nos . . .). But the novelty wore off, and as this cushioning interpolation was not in the Greek, St Jerome stuck on ne nos inducas . . . , and the Western Church was quietly lulled off to sleep by the liturgical anodyne of centuries of repetition.
Development of Doctrine: Smokescreen or Explanation?
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

‘The problem of orders must be looked at . . . facing squarely the question whether the new situation calls for a new policy in the Catholic Church. This policy would include a careful determination of the arguments behind the Bull Apostolicae Curae and a candid judgment whether the development of doctrine has superseded the theological assumptions of 1896.’ That statement was followed, a week later, by a letter in The Tablet from Fr Edward Quinn: ‘May one express the hope, in good time, that this really will be a candid judgment ... if a new investigation shows that the assumptions have been superseded, let it also be clearly admitted that the decision was mistaken. Even if the Bull was not infallible, Pope Leo XIII declared in the most forceful terms that Anglican Orders were null and void, and followed this up by a letter stating that the decision was irrevocable. Development of doctrine cannot mean that one statement was true in 1896 and its opposite true in 1980 or whenever we come to revise our former conclusions.’ The following week, Bishop Clark, Roman Catholic Co-Chairman of the International Commission, wrote: ‘Fr Quinn touches the nerve of this discussion when he seeks to clarify the relationship of Apostolicae Curae to a development of doctrine. What, however, has guided the thinking of the commission is the principle that any development in doctrine must be consistent with its past.’

In spite of the very general title of this paper, my aim is extremely restricted. I do not propose to discuss past or present theories of doctrinal development, nor the relationship between notions of ‘development’ and related notions such as ‘progress’, ‘growth’ or ‘evolution’. Although I shall be obliged to touch on it at one point, I do not propose to discuss in detail the problem of the normative status to be accorded to the New Testament witness and to subsequent moments in the doctrinal history of the Church.
Eliot on Culture
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

During the nineteen-thirties T. S. Eliot steadily extended his interests as a literary critic to larger social and cultural questions; the process can be traced in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and his editorials in The Criterion. This interest culminated in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. It is one of his strangest books, where profound insights are interwoven with the most superficial observations, and where seemingly firm statements are then qualified out of existence within a paragraph or so. The book’s excessively tentative title is characteristic; Eliot says many interesting things about culture but he never succeeds in defining it. In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs and styles of living, as opposed to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free; any discernible form of social organization above the merely biological level will have its accompanying cultural modes, however odd they may seem to the observer. And as anthropologists have shown, seemingly primitive peoples can often produce very complicated cultural forms. So that when Eliot laments the decline of culture in the twentieth century and contemplates a possible future ‘of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture’ he cannot be using the word in the anthropological sense, since if organized human life persists at all it is bound to have its accompanying cultural forms. Clearly, Eliot is here using the word in a more particular, value-bearing sense, which is closer to the Arnoldian usage.
Religion and Social Work: Diocesan Rescue Societies as a Case Example
Authors: Timms Noel
Published: July 2007

The subject of this article invites (and has received) discussion at a high level of abstraction, but the basic question can be posed quite simply: are religious social work organizations (such as the Diocesan Rescue Societies) religious organizations that undertake social work or social work organizations that are religious? To some this will appear an unhelpful contrast, but I hope to show that analysis in these terms yields fruitful results. Clearly, the question is based on certain assumptions, the most important of which lies in the discontinuity between religion and social work. Such an assumption runs counter to some commonly held ideas concerning the relationship between these two. These ideas are, I believe, mistaken, but I cannot at this juncture do more than make a brief outline of some of the main themes in what I would consider an adequate history of the relationship between social work and religion.

Such a history would have to deal with at least three important themes. Firstly, the practice of religious protectionism and denominational exclusiveness, which is difficult to reconcile with the universalism implicit in social work, will require consideration. Historically there have been strong traditions, not only that particular religious groups ought to care for their own, but that their members would suffer penalties if they received help from ‘non-believers’. Thus, in 1677 the York meeting of the Society of Friends refused help to a member who had applied to the Lord Mayor, whilst in ancient Jewry a Jew living publicly on non-Jewish charities was considered to be like a pork eater and was disqualified from testifying in court.
Against ‘Enlightenment’
Authors: Holbrook David
Published: July 2007

Not long ago I found myself on a platform, organized by the Young Publishers’ Group, together with Sir Robert Maxwell, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, and Sir Basil Blackwell, speaking on the problem of censorship. It was a horrifying experience, because the nature and outcome of the meeting were predetermined. It was predetermined by the intolerant dogmatism of ‘enlightenment’. Those who spoke against censorship resorted to facile declarations combined with facetiousness, as if any objections to complete permissiveness could only be ridiculous. On the other side individuals tried to be serious: but they were so selected and set side by side that they were made to appear to discredit one another. In any case, the amount of time available to each was so limited that no one could begin to say anything relevant or meaningful. I could myself have talked for an hour on the subject, in the endeavour to point out some dangers, and some fallacies, by which time I would have but nibbled the edge of the problem of hate in culture. But it was evident that the gathering did not want anything of the kind. It did not really want the issue debated. It wanted merely a ratification, by a kind of circus, of its own ‘enlightened’ prejudices.

Often, thus, what seems to be a real debate is really nothing of the kind. Some time ago The Guardian ran a series on the permissive society. I wrote an article and sent it as a contribution. It was rejected—and I came to find that the series was not even planned and produced by the feature editorial staff. It was organized by the advertising staff, in combination with a television project. Here we glimpse the vested interests behind ‘permissiveness’. If one does get an article published it is often so badly cut as to be unrecognizable —an experience I have had with both New Society and The Times.
Faith and Revolution
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.
Interchurch Marriages
Authors: Reardon Martin
Published: July 2007

Episcopal Conference of England and Wales based upon the Apostolic Letter Issued Motu Proprio on 31st March, 1970, by His Holiness Pope Paul VI determining Norms for Mixed Marriages

Until the publication last year of the Motu Proprio and the Directory by the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales mixed marriages looked very different to different people. It depended where you stood. In fact there can be few states of life which appeared so different according to viewpoint.

If you were an average Roman Catholic priest or bishop brought up in the One True Church with a firm Catholic tradition, they were a major problem. More than half your marriages were mixed and the majority of the non-Catholic partners were merely nominal Christians. One of your primary concerns must have been that the Catholic partner continued to practise his or her faith and the children were brought up as Catholics. The Catholic Church in this country has been the only major Church which has increased in numbers in recent years, and, apart from the Irish immigration, the children of mixed marriages have probably accounted for the largest part of this increase.

If you were an average Anglican priest or bishop brought up in a firm Anglican tradition, mixed marriages with Roman Catholics were a minor, but very sharp, problem. You came across few of them where the Roman Catholic practised his religion, but the ones you did meet showed that ‘One True Church of Christ’ at its most intransigent, intolerant of the conscience of the Anglican partner. You were tempted to be as intolerant in return, leaving the couple as bewildered and unhappy pawns of a different colour trying to make love in the middle of an ecclesiastical game of chess.
What is the Point of Being a Roman Catholic?
Authors: Wicker Brian , Gregor Ian
Published: July 2007

‘A clean, well-lighted place’—the phrase occurs readily enough to anyone visiting Holland today and it has its own modulation when thought of in connection with contemporary Dutch Catholicism. Here, if anywhere, we can see translated into coherent and consistent practice much of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and it is hardly necessary to say that the notion of a Church as a whole seriously attempting to embody that spirit and not just paying lip- service to it cannot be other than impressive. A visit to Holland provides an opportunity to see some of the ‘progressive’ theological thinking in the Church ‘in action’, as it were—thinking which made us conscious certainly of ‘the well-lighted place’, but also, and more unexpectedly, of the shadows which fell across it.

Two propositions central to modern theological thinking are the importance of establishing a view of faith as a personal commitment and recognition of the pluriform cultures in which we live. And so it is not surprising to find these assumptions shaping contemporary Dutch Catholicism.

With regard to the first, in almost every conversation we had, words like ‘authenticity’, ‘maturity’, and ‘personal commitment’ occurred with unfailing regularity. Celibacy, to take the most obvious and topical issue, was felt to be significant only if it was a freely-chosen, maturely-pondered vocation. The individual had to accept it as the only mode of life in which his personal and social fulfilment could be envisaged. Celibacy as an obligatory pre-requisite for the priesthood or, at the least, intimately bound up with its meaning and function, was seen as a legalistic intrusion into the private conscience of the person concerned.
Satan and the Failure of Nerve
Authors: Yates Roy
Published: July 2007

It is an interesting exercise to trace the development in the character of Satan that takes place in the Old Testament. In the earlier strands himself, while in the later strands, when the problem of evil had become more acute in the experience of the nation and of the writers concerned, the evil and suffering inflicted upon them is attributed to supernatural beings other than Yahweh. By the time of Jesus this ‘failure of nerve’ had resulted in a complex demonology and satanology as men were borne down by this ‘cosmic totalitarianism’. In the Old Testament itself there are comparatively few allusions, let alone direct references, to hostile evil powers; a fact that is made more surprising when considered against the background provided by the demon-riddled world of Mesopotamia. Nevertheless we see this development beginning and growing. In this respect the figure of Satan is of great interest because in the role ascribed to him we have the clearest example of a development which begins with his work as ‘adversary’ and member of the heavenly council and builds up through clearly discernible stages to a supernatural enemy of God and man who organizes a kingdom of evil in opposition to God.

The conception of Satan as an individual and superhuman power occupies but a small space in the literature of the Old Testament. From the relevant references we gather that he in no sense fulfilled the role of the evil and subversive power ascribed to him in later Jewish literature.