bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
God and Jane Austen
Authors: Watts Mary
Published: July 2007

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’ But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.

Mansfield Park is the novel in which religious concern is most apparent and not only in the crucial fact of Edmund’s ordination. Yet even here critics have avoided admitting that the chief effect of of the book is to assert the primacy of religion over ethics.
This Side of Paradise
Authors: Murray Isobel , Merrilees Jim
Published: July 2007

Many weird and outrageous accusations have been levelled at John Steinbeck, but no one has gone so far as to accuse him of being a Christian, nor do we intend to overstep this mark. But interesting light is cast on his fiction by consideration of his use of biblical themes and images. This has become a critical truism in the notorious ‘Christ-figure’ of Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), whether this portrayal is seen as perfection or parody. We think that a profitable and sane perspective on Steinbeck can be achieved by attention to these biblical themes, and propose to demonstrate this by a brief examination of Old Testament references only, in one early and one late novel, To a God Unknown (1933) and East of Eden (1952).

Briefly, we would claim that in To a God Unknown Steinbeck was presenting and exploring in his hero, Joseph Wayne, a powerful and strange personality who becomes a devotee of the land and of fertility, and eventually carries his devotion to his ‘God Unknown’ to crazy as well as to gigantic lengths, when he kills himself upon his ‘sacred’ rock as a sacrifice to bring rain. But it is clear from close reading of the book that Steinbeck employs a number of techniques,

which have been largely ignored, to distance Joseph Wayne from the author’s or the reader’s whole-hearted admiration. The reader is constantly kept alert and suspicious of the truth of Joseph’s visions by several means: these include the exaggeration and frenzy of his approach to the land; the close parallel to Joseph of the demented Willie who ends his nightmares of a desert landscape with suicide; the loyalty and worry of his Indian friend, Juanito, who is closer to the Catholic Church and to the ancient native religion than is Joseph; the rather feeble but carefully presented figure of the priest, Father Angelo; and, most of all, the never obtruded but constantly present incomplete parallel between Joseph Wayne and the biblical patriarch, which points most clearly where Wayne moves away both from rationality and from the kind of Providential guidance vouchsafed to the biblical Joseph.
Monica Wilson: Remembrance of Roots, Awareness of Persons
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, history surely is. ‘We do not’, said A. J. P. Taylor somewhere, ‘understand the present by the past, but the past by the present.’ For an historian this is courageous, for an anthropologist it would be trite. Even at undergraduate level, social anthropology teaches one to see how often the appeal to history is just the excuse for, or the indictment of, the present; what Chesterton, I think, called ‘the democracy of the dead’, the influence of an acknowledged tradition on decisions, may prove to be the most rigged of ballots. Perhaps this way of seeing things is partially a result of the pre-selection of anthropologists ; certainly a remarkably high proportion of us do seem to have undergone some sharp uprooting, whether of country, or faith, or family ties, between infancy and early maturity, and hence are especially sympathetic to rejections, or reshapings of the past, on the part of others. Clearly enough, there are continuities in our lives and our societies which, even though they need reshaping, also need to be honestly interpreted; and I think that what Professor Monica Wilson has given us in Religion and the Transformation of Society is such an honest interpretation of southern African society as a whole, and, more closely, of Nyakyusa society in particular, and also, impressively though unintentionally, of Monica Wilson’s own understanding of life. It seeks, to be sure, to interpret societies which, more than most, experience the torment of unrealized change; yet the impression of the author’s personality which remains after reading, as that of one whose very fulfilment has been through the conscious seeking of continuities and the willing acceptance of change, is stronger than that given by many garrulous autobiographies. Perhaps, therefore, it may be legitimate to sketch out her life and work a little more fully than this book does.
Notes after Foucault
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

‘ . . . the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier . . . changes the whole course of history by modifying the lines which anchor his being.

It is in precisely this way that Freudianism is seen to have founded an intangible but radical revolution. No need to collect witnesses to the fact: everything involving not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, art, advertising, propaganda, and through these even the economy, everything has been affected.

The original ‘slightest alteration’ underlying Freud’s intangible but radical revolution can be conveniently dated to 1898, when Freud, travelling to Herzegovina, turned to ask a travelling companion whether he had ever seen the famous frescoes of the ‘Four Last Things’ in Orvieto Cathedral, painted by-----: the painter’s name would not come; ‘Botticelli’ and ‘Boltraffio’ came to mind instead. Freud’s account of why he had failed to recall the right name, ‘Signorelli’, contains the core of his later theories. ‘Signorelli’ had been replaced through a series of transformations: ‘Signor-’ into ‘Herr’, recalling both Herzegovina-and-Bosnia and an anecdote about attitudes to death and sex in which the sentence ‘Sir (Herr), what is there to be said?’ had been the punch-line. This anecdote had linked to an earlier incident when Freud, while staying at Trafoi in the Tyrol, had heard of a patient’s suicide because of an incurable sexual disorder. Thus, the ‘forgotten’ ‘Signorelli’ produced ‘Herzegovina-and-Bosnia’, ‘Bo-snia’ conflated with ‘-elli’ to produce ‘Bo-ttic-elli’, ‘Herzegovina’, via ‘Herr’, indirectly produced ‘Trafoi’, which conflated with ‘Bo-snia’ to produce ‘Bo-l-traffio’.
The Trinity and Human Love
Authors: Mackrell G. F.
Published: July 2007

‘Batter my heart, three-Personed God’, wrote the poet John Donne. However, it has been the mind, not the heart, which has been battered by this most unfathomable of all mysteries. Centuries of long and painful battering of Unitarian hammer on tritheistic anvil eventually forged a statement which expressed the mystery: three persons in one nature. And ever since the Council of Florence there has echoed down the centuries a thunderous ‘So what?’. For the riddle of the Trinity is not merely that of the Three-in-one, but the revelation of it. Not ‘how?’, but ‘why?’. What is its relevance?

Karl Rahner, in his Theological Investigations, is exaggerating only slightly when he notes:

‘One might almost dare to affirm that if the doctrine of the Trinity were to be erased as false, most religious literature could be preserved almost unchanged throughout the process. And it cannot be objected that the Incarnation is such a theologically and religiously central element in Christian life that on that account the Trinity is always and everywhere irremovably present. For when the Incarnation of God is spoken of, theological and religious intention is today concentrated on the fact that “God” has become man, that “a” person of the Trinity has assumed flesh—but not on the fact that this person is precisely that of the Word, Logos.’

In the attempt to make the Trinity relevant one is beset by problems which appear insoluble. The most obvious of these is the danger of falling into the error of ‘tritheism’.
Looking for Transcendence
Authors: Sharkey Michael
Published: July 2007

One morning, I rose from my bed and walked out to explore the world. There was much that was familiar to me and after a short time I felt the need to break new ground. I set off towards unknown regions, while my gaze left the familiar things and settled on the distant horizon. Far and fast as I walked, I could not reach that horizon, for, as I advanced, it receded, yet my journey seemed far from fruitless; it was full of discovery.

I began to question the existence of the horizon, though, and I met one who had travelled much more than I, and I held him in conversation for a while. He laughed, and said that the horizon is always there, always receding as man advances. ‘Then why advance?’ I inquired, seeking a reason for my own behaviour. ‘Because there must be an end’, he said. ‘It is of the very nature of the cosmos that there must be an end to time and to space.’ This perplexed me because I could not imagine an end to time and space, but he drew on the ground and waved his hands in the air until his words settled on my understanding. Although I was annoyed to think that I was captive to time and space, I could not help but think that an infinity of time and space would be a bit of a bore.

‘But what is there beyond time and space?’ I called, as he parted from me. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not-time and not-space in which all-that-is is cradled.’

I began to think and reflect, and realized that I was existing. So, I began to explore my thoughts, knowing that I was exploring my own existence, and the belief came upon me that perhaps I had now found a world without limit, an existence without end.
Sex and Modern Fiction
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

The novel has always told us about the world, not by offering verifiable case-histories, or presenting statistical analyses of behaviour, but by showing us the typical in the individual, the general in the specific. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina might be narrowly and unsympathetically described as an account of adultery among a small restricted segment of upper-class Russian society about a hundred years ago. As crude description this is not incorrect; yet it conveys nothing whatever of the actual quality of the book. Although remote from us in time and setting, Anna Karenina is still a great and moving account of the human condition, is still valid for us here and now. Anna is both a particular woman in a particular society and a representative figure whose tragedy one can immediately apprehend and respond to. By living through her situation one understands one’s own more fully. This extension of human sympathy gives a particular importance to literary experience; in some fine words of C. S. Lewis, ‘it heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality’. It also offends the tidy-minded by emphasizing the essential messiness and complexity of the human condition. It not only shows us, but lets us feel with all our senses, the dilemmas and tensions of a nature that is both fallen and created by God, which is in Pope’s words:

Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole Judge of truth, in endless error hurled;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
The Function of Criticism and Politics
Authors: Beisly Phil
Published: July 2007

When I suggested that the Christian tradition is to be identified primarily with its central ‘works’—the Bible and the liturgy—and that it is something analogous to literary criticism which can most easily make available its meanings and values, I denied that Christianity can be identified with politics. That Christianity has implications which are political, in the fullest sense, needn’t be insisted on in these pages. The nature of any identity, however, is something which still needs to be queried, especially in the light of the simplification of human affairs which it invariably threatens to introduce. It isn’t merely a liberal equivocation which prompts this questioning; an active spirit of criticism demands it, if the values which are invoked aren’t, in the end, to be betrayed. Terry Eagleton’s ‘Faith and Revolution’ is a case in point, and since it is explicitly offered as a contribution to the debate about ‘the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism’ no better example need be looked for.

Eagleton is particularly concerned to examine the ‘point of divergence’ which appears once this convergence has been established, and he wants to locate the distinguishing characteristics of Christianity without opting either for ‘a merely theoretical divergence’ or for ‘some specifically “Christian” revolutionary practice’:

‘How are we to steer between, on the one hand, an intellectualist reductionism which leaves faith hanging in the air above Christian historical practice, and, on the other hand, an insistence that faith must show up in a distinctive form of praxis which runs into the traditional Christian mistake of redundantly duplicating social institutions?’
Criticism and Politics: A Rejoinder
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

I share Phil Beisly’s uneasiness about aspects of my ‘Faith and Revolution’ article. In particular, he seems to me right to fasten on a serious obscurity of relationship between, on the one hand, the ‘extreme’ testing of Christian commitment I delineated, and, on the other hand, the ‘normative’ values, life-forms and practices of the Christian faith as we familiarly know it. He also raises an acute point about how the notion of the Church as intensifying ordinary revolutionary practice is to be squared with Christianity’s permanently critical stance to the world. But if the image of the Church as super-revolutionary vanguard won’t quite do, neither will the image of the Church as Cambridge literary critical seminar. Beisly and I share a belief in Christianity’s ‘critical, negative, transcending role’: the problem on which my article focused was the specificity of that Christian critical transcendence, in an historical epoch where other creeds, and Marxism above all, advance similar and serious claims.

That still seems to me a reasonable question to raise: a real question, rather than one merely generated by a self-absorbed terminology. And the difficulty can’t be evaded by a simple replacement of a Marxian conceptual framework by another, equally ideological set of formulae: the hypostasized absolutes, at once generously ‘concrete’ and emptily self-definitive, of a Leavisian concern with ‘life’. That this self-enclosed Leavisian terminology is ideological seems to me self-evident. One doesn’t need to plough back far into the last decades of the nineteenth century to uncover at least some of the roots of that curious coupling of ordinary English anti-intellectual empiricism with an assertive, often contentless transcendentalism which, in part at least, characterizes the Leavisian ideology.
David Jones, Artist and Writer:
Authors: Hague René
Published: July 2007

After reading David Blamires’ book, with digressions into similar essays and a re-reading of much of David Jones’s own work, I am as one who has just finished a long journey through familiar and cherished country with a companion who, though congenial, talkative and interesting, has some distressing peculiarities of speech and temper: so that, when we return to our starting point, I am pleased to be relieved for a while of his company, and yet anxious to meet him again and renew the conversation. A fastidious reader will not make his way through more than a few pages of David Blamires’ book, for he will find too much that is objectionable in the style: and yet it would be ungenerous to quote from the many examples of pompous jargon covering poverty of thought, of vagueness which assumes the air of profundity, of worn-out cliches which slip from the pen of the careless or hurried writer. Ungenerous for two reasons: in the first place, because such writing has become so common that I do in truth believe that were one now to write with the clarity and economy of a Newman there would be many readers who would be unwilling and even unable to make the effort that should correspond to Newman’s. In the second place, Blamires writes about things which are difficult to pin down and define, and all of us—all who have had to make a similar attempt, particularly in connexion with David Jones—know but too well how great is the temptation to grope for clarity by adding one vague approximation to another. It will not do, therefore, to be over-fastidious: there may be a core of gold beneath this slovenly exterior.
Fiction and Poetry in the Bible
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

This paper assumes that there is a Bible and not just biblia, that there is a more or less recognizable corpus of revelation. It assumes the soundness of the Christian instinct which eventually said that ‘all these books and no others, all these books with all their parts’ constitute a book. Precisely which books and which parts of which books are to be included is not so important. None of the deutero-canonical (‘apocryphal’) books represents a genre of literature that is not represented in the universally accepted Bible. The whole Christian tradition has a book with an agreed beginning and an agreed end, a book that plays itself out between the Pentateuch and the Apocalypse. Exactly where the canon is fixed between those bounds is not a matter of great moment, exactly what weight Christians give to the decisions of the Synod of Jamnia.

But assuming that there is a book and not simply a collection of books, all the various literary items which go to make it up have to be read within the context of the whole book whose terms are the Pentateuch and the Apocalypse. That is, they all have their context in the overall Christian myth, of the movement from creation to re-creation (Genesis to Apocalypse) or within the myth that stretches from Exodus to Apocalypse, the myth of redemption, which is situated by and also situates the creation-recreation myth. All the individual books with all their parts are misread if they are not read as held in tension by this myth. Of course they have a right to be studied as though they had not been finally included in the Book, and that is so for each part of each book even down to each saying ascribed to Jesus by a gospel-writer.
That one must speak lightly… A Study of Stevie Smith
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

It is likely enough that if some Catholic controversialist of the early seventeenth century had been discussing the merits of various contemporary poets, he would have extolled Crashaw and Southwell, deplored Donne, and vacillated in his opinion of Alabaster according to whether the gentleman was imprisoned in England for the Faith or had returned to the Anglican Church and a wife after differences with the Inquisition. Blame or approval would have been a matter of ‘party’ loyalty; not of poetry. The position was honourable enough in time of adversity but one we should attempt to outgrow. Such a simplistic attitude to religious belief is almost certainly an important factor in accounting for the intellectual and emotional poverty of religious art. One has heard the remark that dismisses Sutherland because he has lapsed, as if integrity as an artist depended on Easter Communion. It is tempting to inquire how many of the great figures of the Renaissance were certifiably in a state of grace.

Thus it comes about that in March 1971 we lost one of the very few religious poets of our time and it is doubtful whether anyone noticed. She herself would not have been surprised:

I cannot imagine anything nicerThan to be struck by lightning and killed suddenlycrossing a field As if somebody cared.
‘Fish‐hooks in Amos’: Izaak Walton and the ‘Real Truth’
Authors: Bond M. A.
Published: July 2007

The name of John Donne is not immediately associated with the idea of moderation and the golden mean, but that of one of his earliest and most ardent admirers, and his first biographer, most certainly is. In the description of his equable self as Piscator in The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton offers to posterity a moral ideal which reconciles the turbulent egoism of the age of the English Renaissance with the quietist values of the more mature religious sects.

The nub of Walton’s argument lies in the discussion between Venator and Piscator on the First Day of The Compleat Angler. ‘And for that I shall tell you, that in ancient times a debate hath arisen, and it remains yet unresolved, whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in contemplation or in action?’ The battle lines are already drawn up between non-utilitarian and utilitarian points of view. On the one hand, ‘the nearer we mortals come to God by way of imitation the more happy we are. And they say, that God enjoys himself only, by a contemplation of his own infiniteness, eternity, power, and goodness, and the like.’ ‘And on the contrary, there want not men of equal authority and credit, that prefer action to be the more excellent; as namely, experiments in physick, and the application of it, both for the ease and prolongation of man’s life; by which each man is enabled to act and do good to others, either to serve his country, or do good to particular persons; and they say also, that action is doctrinal, and teaches both art and virtue, and is a maintainer of human society.’
Morality is Marxism
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

I have written this paper on the basis of the hunch that there is something very misleading about the relationship, as Marx sometimes describes it, between the scientific analysis of society and morality. I have the hunch, also, that many of Marx’s followers have been misled in the way one would expect them to be, given his false clues. I should say, however, that this suspicion of confusion concerns more what Marx and his followers call by the name ‘morality’ than what they offer as a method and a substance for the analysis of society. This misleading confusion is that Marx and subsequent Marxists more or less explicitly define their stance as scientists by way of contrast with the status the moralist or moral theorist is, on their view, supposed to have. I shall not discuss in any detail the various ways in which this false contrast has been made out. Rather I shall mention some guiding lines of thought which lead to it.

The hypothesis which I will offer as an alternative to this contrast is simply that it would best serve both clarity and the history of moral thought if we were to agree on the following proposition: Marxism, as the science of society is, if a true science, nothing but morality and morality nothing but Marxism. Hence, the judgments about how to act which may be based on the results of that science, if true, are moral judgments. If, however, the science has produced more than trivially false results it is nothing but vice to act, or want to act on the judgments about acting which are entailed by them. The question, therefore, whether Marxism is or is not identical with morality is, to my mind, an empirical question, to be settled one way or the other by reference to the very same facts which show it to offer either crucially true or else false statements about contemporary society.
Faith and Imagination in the University
Authors: Dale Peter
Published: July 2007

This article takes as its point of departure Roderick Strange’s interesting article ‘Faith and Theology in the University’ but it is not really intended as another contribution to the somewhat closed debate on the place of Theology in the University. That is a fairly specialized question which theologians tend to worry about when their public relations have grown particularly remote, but has little reference to anyone outside their context, and may reasonably be left to them to resolve.

The problems implied in it, though, are not confined to the University context for several reasons; first, the privilege of having sufficient time to give thought to the health of one’s own religion is not the prerogative solely of dons and undergraduates; secondly, a lot of people read books which have been conceived and realized in the context of the University but are not themselves in a position to take account of what that genetic context has had to do with the making of the book; and, thirdly, the tensions between faith and reason do not confine themselves to professional theologians, but are part and parcel of every man’s consciousness.

Roderick Strange’s solution to the question, ‘Should the academic theologian permit his own faith to be involved in his professional activity?’ seems to me to be based on treacherous ground in the form of Dr Ian Ramsey’s rather unsatisfactory contribution to the problems of religious language. This latter debate has not yet made any real progress I think, and will continue to be unsatisfactory so long as it remains an eclectic science taking only piecemeal ideas, now from linguistics, now from literary criticism, with the result that it does justice to neither and leaves its own problems unresolved.
Liturgical Prayer and the lgnatian Exercises
Authors: Casperz Paul
Published: July 2007

The contemporary world is characterized by rapid and intense activity. Yet, sometimes as an understandable reaction to the feverishness of haste, at other times for the very success of activity, there are worldwide manifestations of a drive towards greater interiority.

Asia today is an interesting example of the activity-interiority tension. Even apart from the too facile generalizations of comparative sociology, Asia remains the place where of set purpose interiority is passionately sought, even at the expense of activity. Yet Asia today is one of the most exciting fields of the action-conquest of reality. Asian action is therefore distinguished by its inherent reference to concomitant reflective interiority.

It is against this background that the Church has to work out its corporate renewal and reform. And in summary form the theme of the present article is that a continuing interaction of liturgy and a system of interiority-seeking, such as the Ignatian Exercises, provides the ideal framework for the renewal of the Church in Asia, as indeed anywhere else.

The liturgy is the most potent means of spiritual renewal for both individual Christians and for communities. This is so all over the world, but is particularly true in Asia, where the external sign and symbol have always had an important pageant value in themselves, even apart from the reality they indicate.

But in order to lead to effective and drastic renewal and reform the liturgy must proceed from the deepest inner realization and acceptance of all that it implies. It is here that the Ignatian Exercises can play a powerful role in the action-reflection dialectic by leading to a greater interior preparedness for meaningful liturgy. And fortunately the Exercises seem to be gaining ground on Asian soil.
On Teaching Religion in School
Authors: Shackle Emma
Published: July 2007

Cardinal Heenan’s pastoral letter on the importance of retaining Catholic schools even at an increased financial burden to the Catholic community has provoked these reflections on religious education.

The bible or major talking point in religious education today is the Schools’ Council Working Paper 36 put out by the Project on Religious Education in Secondary Schools based on the University of Lancaster. Many teachers, including Catholic teachers, have been working on this project. The fundamental premiss of much of the thinking of this group, and of such pioneer groups such as the SHAP working party on world religions, is that an adequate understanding of religion can only be achieved in the context of learning not only about the child’s own religion (if he has one) but also about other major world faiths. The rationale for this stance varies from one apologist to another: we live in ‘one’ world; we are part of a multireligious society—these are commonplaces. A more valid reason is, perhaps, that we have now reached a stage of self-consciousness in the West such that, even those souls who are naturally religious, let alone the majority who are not, are no longer content with understanding religion only from the inside: they seek also to understand it from the outside, from the stance of the anthropologist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and the philosopher. Another important movement in a related field is that which seeks to understand how schools can best perform the task of the moral education of children.

These new approaches to religious and moral education have made their impact on Catholic education as much as anywhere else. Cardinal Heenan assumes, somewhat naively, that the purpose of Catholic colleges is to produce teachers capable of teaching the Catholic religion to Catholic children in the context of a Catholic school. There are different ways of understanding this proposition as can be seen by recent disputes in the field of catechetics.
William Hazlitt: An Empiricist Radical
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

Hazlitt has had a fair amount of modern critical attention, but not enough of it has been concerned with rescuing him from the drab category of ‘minor Regency prose’ and establishing him where he belongs, as one of the most extraordinarily intelligent writers of his period. Perhaps the difficulty has been in part one of genre. One dominant definition of the English essay form, as a belletristic set- piece concerned to charm, composed of the casual meanderings of a liberal, off-beat, impressionist mind, fits a little of Hazlitt’s work accurately enough; but there seem good reasons why critics who feel comfortably at home with Lamb, Stevenson and Belloc might feel less at ease with Hazlitt’s writings as a whole. His liberalism is allied with a trenchancy which has been attacked as intemperate and bellicose; and this is perhaps one reason why a book like Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, to my mind an inferior product containing hardly a single disturbing judgment, has assumed predominance over works with a sharper edge—Political Essays, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker.

Hazlitt’s trenchancy springs from his radicalism; and it is worth calling the abrasive force of that radicalism to mind, with its controlled combination of moral indictment and caustic irony. There are his comments on the Quarterly Review, for instance:

The intention is to poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame—to pervert literature, from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity, into an engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the English constitution and the independence of the English character.
Morality is Marxism—II
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

The challenge which faced all Greek intellectuals alike, can be reconstructed in the form of a dilemma. Either some way of fixing a descriptive meaning for the language of moral evaluation had to be found, or, in the absence of any such method, moral and political virtue would have to be taught as a way of living well in a world where prescription was the basis of morality. In either case the fact remained that virtue would have to be taught.

Those who, like Plato and Aristotle, opted for the first alternative were faced with the problem generated by their adherence to the old assumption: namely that the descriptive meaning of moral evaluation was discoverable only in terms of some social order, some polis, to be a good member of which was to be a good man. But the very fact that it was now problematic what one’s polis was, meant that the search for moral knowledge had to be seen as the proper object of some specialized form of enquiry into the question, that is, of what those social roles and relationships are, to understand which is to understand how the good man acts. Thus it is that if political virtue can be taught it also needs to be taught. It can be taught because everyone knows what the universal virtues of the political life are, and that they are virtues—for, as Thucydides had emphasized, even bad men justify their vices in the language of those virtues.
Bedding the Locale
Authors: Silkin Jon
Published: July 2007

Social Darwinian optimism assesses a poet in terms of his ‘advance’ or ‘development’—thus the conventional blurb’s claim that Seamus Heaney’s ‘power is, if anything, stronger than before’. The immodesty of Faber’s claim might obscure one’s sense that something more subtle, and less inevitably even, is taking place in Heaney’s third book. The book shows, for instance, the elements in his work as he assimilates himself into a variety of forms and tones of voice, some of which are modish, others achieved deftly but with creditable hesitation. In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem indicated Heaney’s capacity to formulate that revulsion which seems to be a fairly basic constituent of man’s relation to nature; (of the ‘gross- bellied frogs’).
Psychoanalysis and Religion
Authors: Julien Philippe
Published: July 2007

What will happen to him if he is psychoanalysed? Will he lose his moral and religious convictions? Will he remain faithful to his previous commitments ? Will he still be Paul, Peter or John as we knew him before? These are the questions asked by friends and relatives of the person undergoing an analysis. Whether it is the doctor, the friend, the husband or wife, the parents, the spiritual director or religious superior, everyone has the feeling that from now on the person being analysed will escape them in some way and that he will enter the domain of a secret and mysterious power of which they have not the key … and that with a bit of luck he could become a balanced individual!

This desire to know ‘what it’s all about’ is all the more ardent because psychoanalysis does not fall into the usual categories of medicine. With medicine, the moralist and the believer consider that they can keep within their own domain: the doctor is concerned with curing the body and eliminating suffering; the Christian is concerned with judging moral conduct and speaking on the meaning of suffering. But with psychoanalysis, these yardsticks are of no use, so the argument goes, because the whole personality of the individual is radically questioned.

This uncertainty is inevitable. Indeed, psychoanalysis will be dead on the day that it is put to the service of some institution whether it be educational, economic, political or religious. It is concerned with something else: a truth which goes beyond the analyst and the analysed.
The ‘Peasant Priesthood’
Authors: Singleton M.
Published: July 2007

Once again the expatriate pundits are out in force penning their solutions to the African Church’s problems. Having successfully surveyed the catechists and being shortly to publish the results of marriage enquiries, they are now turning their not inconsiderable, if at times inconsiderate, powers of persuasion to propagating alternative forms of ministry. Few would question the statistical evidence: the shortage of professional priests in Africa, both indigenous and expatriate, is becoming increasingly critical. Less evident, however, is the long-termed suitability and theological soundness of the proposed panacea, the ‘peasant priesthood’. ‘A priest in every village’ as there used to be until recently in parts of Spain and Italy, is the experts’ cry. Prima facie they have a case. Africa not only has been, is and will be for the foreseeable future, a pre-eminently rural society, but it is also government policy in many countries to create and centre development at the level of small-scale communities. For the moment these villages are merely mass-centres. There can be up to thirty or more of these outstations—the real parishes in sociological and theological terms—dependent upon one canonical parish. They are the occasional object of spasmodic, sacramental sorties, organized by an understaffed, overworked central mission. It seems to make sense then, pastorally speaking, that each community have a resident priest and consequently Sunday Mass. Most of these villages already have a catechist, more often than not a local man with much good will but little formal training. Their traditional role as teachers of religion, part-time sacristans and full-time watchdogs of faith and morals is changing.
The Future
Authors: Geach P. T.
Published: July 2007

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:

Che sàrà, sàrà,

Whatever will be, will be,

The future’s not ours to see,

Che sàrà, sàrà.

The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.

We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.
The Cardboard Theatre: T. S. Eliot's Idea of History
Authors: Smith Stan
Published: July 2007

The discussion of Eliot’s cultural lineage has frequently assumed a simple opposition between the rival claims of English domicile and New England descent. Eliot’s writings have themselves encouraged this tendency. Overtly, they require us to observe the landscapes of London and rural England, or the family snapshots of haut-bourgeois Boston. The St Louis of Eliot’s childhood, which furnished the name of his memorable persona (Prufrock-Littau, Hugh Kenner informs us, was the name of a local furniture store), and the image of the river as ‘a strong brown god’ which opens Dry Salvages, rarely occurs as the scenario of the poems. Indeed, the stage-direction prefixed to this poem demonstrates Eliot’s usual attitude towards his mid-western patrimony, distracting our attention from the unsavoury effects of the Missouri mise-en-scene (‘the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops’) to the properties of a more condign birthright.

Yet Eliot’s mid-western origins are not merely a matter of ‘background’; they are a central part of the meaning of his poetry. The complexity of his personality has its sources and resources in the complex negotiation of a complex and contradictory inheritance. But the personal equilibrium salvaged from this inheritance—the spiritual cement for this ‘familiar compound ghost’—owes much to that temporary settlement effected by Eliot’s family in the boom conditions of nineteenth-century St Louis. If the Mid-West is absent as the overt content of Eliot’s poetry, it presides throughout as a determining context of experience, embodied in the very forms of that experience, in the stances and attitudes assumed by the poet.
God, America and the Remnant
Authors: Lllo John
Published: July 2007

The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.

American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.
The Conception of Christ: Unanswered Questions
Authors: Mascall E. L.
Published: July 2007

The title of Volume 52 of the new English version of the Summa Tkeologiae, ‘The Childhood of Christ’, could be misleading if it suggested a biographical work. As Fr Potter remarks it is ‘essentially a theological treatment of some Gospel events’, and these are predominantly pre-natal, though they include Christ’s manifestation to the shepherds and the magi and his circumcision. St Thomas is concerned, in most of this treatise, to bring together two realms of thought of very different importance and authority, namely orthodox Chalcedonian Christology and the accepted genetics and embryology of his time. The latter have, of course, been completely superseded by later biological research, and the reader is therefore repeatedly confronted with the question of the manner and degree in which St Thomas’s arguments need revision and reassessment, though this has little bearing on the strictly theological, or at any rate on the strictly dogmatic, aspects of the matter. Fr Potter devotes a little space to these considerations in his appendix on ‘Jesus in his mother’s womb’; one might have wished for more, even at the expense of inflating the volume and its price. It is, in fact, remarkable how little attention seems to have been paid by theologians to the embryological and obstetric aspects of the Incarnation in recent years; medieval theologians did not feel that reverence necessitated this kind of reticence. The only modern work that I know on the subject is The Mother of God: Her Physical Maternity, a reappraisal (River Forest, 111., 1964) by Fr Cletus Wessels, O.P., though A.
Black Theology
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

It was my original intention to write this article about black theology in South Africa, where I first encountered the movement. But two things have led me to form the opinion that black theology is of crucial importance to Christianity all over the world, and not just in South Africa, or in the United States, where the idea was born. One has been my reading of two books by the black American theologian James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, and A Black Theology of Liberation ; and the other has been my introduction, very recent and superficial though it is, to the race question, and kindred political questions, in Great Britain. So I will, after all, devote this article to the subject of black theology as such, and chiefly in the form of a review of Cone’s two books. But I will lead into this subject by way of black theology in South Africa.

In writing this article I incur the risk of bringing down on my head the hostility and scorn of black theologians, or quite simply of blacks. As a white man I have no business to poke my long Caucasian nose in. Cone is quite scathing in BTL (p. 194) on two white liberals who presumed to write on the black power movement; and on the same page he writes: ‘To whites who want to know what they can do (a favourite question of oppressors) black theology says, “Keep your damned mouth closed, and let us black people get our thing together.” ‘ Still, just as in the dominant white ethos of today, or at least of a generation ago, it was possible for a black man to be a good nigger, and sometimes even earn the supreme accolade of being told that he was a true white man, in spite of his skin (You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din), so in the black ethos of the dominated which we are going to be looking at, it is possible for a white man to be a good honky.
A Report on Marriage
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

Early in 1970 I was approached by the Anglican archbishop of Central Africa with a request that I conduct an investigation for the Anglican communion in Africa of marriage issues—to be precise, ‘a pastoral appreciation of the problems arising out of African marriage customs, both rural and urban, in relation to full membership of the Church’. It was hoped at first that the work could be sponsored by both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic hierarchies, but for various reasons the latter were unwilling to join in on the plan as it had been proposed, so in December 1970 I began work sponsored by the Anglican archbishops alone but with the general understanding that I would look at the problems of Catholics as well, in so far as I could. The Anglican communion is not present in most African countries, notably the French speaking lands (except for Rwanda and Burundi), and it was also decided to leave out West Africa, but the area to be considered remained vast—Kenya to South Africa— and it was obvious that my survey could not include original field research; the idea was to provide an overall view of the position in some nine countries based upon already available literature, brief visits on my part and a questionnaire, together with a theological and pastoral appreciation of the problems the factual survey indicated as most pressing. It is this that I have attempted to do in the six chapters and ten appendixes of my final report, Christian Marriage in Africa, published by SPCK in March of this year.