It seems strange, at the time the Oedipus complex was being unravelled, that the case history of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 350-434) and his mother Monnica should not have been more generally used as basic illustrative material. Perhaps it was too firmly embedded, in the lay mind, in the bracket of salvation-history to be eligible for general use. Fortunately, however, the portrait of this provincial Roman-African mother has been preserved simply because it was safely insulated within the pages of a ‘devotional’ book—the Confessions of Augustine, a writing that itself has barely begun to disgorge its total psychological treasures. To excise and examine the history of Monnica will tell us a lot about Augustine, which in its turn could tell us a lot about Augustine-style Western Christianity—a grass-roots examination that is becoming a popular lay pastime.

The biography of Monnica presents a complex study. At times Augustine almost persuades us into believing that she is actually the theme of the Confessions:

But even when he presents her ‘straight’ he depicts a complicated love-hate relationship, however much he attempts to polish up the love aspect. Added to which is the immense difficulty presented by Augustine’s own dichotomous style of writing and thinking whereby he presents Monnica to us through a series of quite contradictory lenses.

Can the university—even a radically reformed university—really carry the burden of providing our society with ‘memory and mature purpose’, as Dr Leavis keeps hoping? Remembering some of his more recent essays while staying in fairly remote parts of Scotland this summer, I began once again to reflect on how much the schools fail to do and yet could so easily undertake (as a handful of rare teachers have always done)—if only we could unlearn the attitude to language that has prevailed from the beginning of public education a century or so ago. Gaelic steadily declines in the Hebrides, the vital remnant of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, and the Buchan dialect in the north-east of Scotland is losing its vigour. In both cases the schools are where the native speech dies. If this is a matter of conscious political decision at all, it is only because we submit to the priorities of the commercial system and allow our conception of language and life to be dictated to us by that. Seeing a language die out doesn’t bother the man who regards language as simply a means for exchanging ideas: for him another language can easily be substituted. But if language is, as Dr Leavis says, what creates ‘the human world of values and significances and spiritual graces’, then it is surely clear that ‘exchanging ideas’ is much less than an adequate description of the place of language in human life.

It must have been early in 1919, the time when Father Bede resumed his weekly walk with me, that he spoke of his desire for a monthly review; of the need for a new Catholic review in England; a periodical, fearless, outspoken, zealous for truth; not primarily theological; a review that would present, in intelligible fashion, Catholic teaching on social justice, comment on passing events, give adequate space to literature, strike the human note. A Dominican review—acceptable to the unlearned—and, perhaps this was harder, a review the learned would not disdain. The articles must not be heavy, nor yet be too abstruse for the plain man. Scientific technicalities were to be avoided, humour not discouraged. A Dominican review that would appeal to the laity and, no doubt, might be read by the clergy. In all its criticism of books and political activities, and in the inevitable controversies that would be provoked, the review, while not allowing truth to be obscured by feelings of charity must not let the plea of truth excuse want of charity. All cocksureness, arrogance, identification of personal opinions with eternal verities—in short, all pontificating by lay-writers on matters by no means de fide was to be deprecated, as far as possible excluded.

So, in many talks, Father Bede discussed the review he projected, the kind of review he wanted, that he believed there was room for; a review that would find its public. Of course he knew quite well that Catholics in England are not addicted to the habit of reading, preferring in their newspapers startling headlines rather than sober statement or reasoned argument. Aware of this disadvantage, equally aware that a large body of Anglicans read Catholic literature, Father Bede reached a definite decision—a monthly Dominican review should be established.

The ideal of communal living often fails to survive the ordeal of practical realities. A recent book by Clem Gorman combines a survey of the movement towards communitarian life-styles in Britain since about 1965 with a practical manual for would-be communards which is packed with useful information and some reflective insight. At no point does the author make any reference even to the existence of monasteries and convents. It is fascinating and touching to see how, in an experiment less than a decade old, the problems and structures arise which have been familiar in religious communities now for centuries. People always have to learn things for themselves, of course; and one need not lament the fact that the hard-won wisdom of monastic experience has not been available for modern communards to draw upon. For that matter, our communities have been undergoing fairly radical changes during the relevant period, and we have not always given much attention to the proven principles we have inherited, far less practised them impressively enough to instruct others. In fact the blunt advice which Clem Gorman offers can perhaps help to cut through the pious odour that hangs about religious life and sometimes prevents its practitioners from realizing elementary facts. The sheer naivety of the discoveries the communards are making casts fresh light on the hoary truisms of monastic life.

Clem Gorman prefers to speak of ‘communes’, but he allows that the difference between communes and communities is not clear. He sees a spectrum, with a left and right wing: ‘On the far left are the very poorest communes, often squatting, frequently having to support a fair proportion of members who are not working, and probably more likely to involve group marriage and absence of personal property concepts.

The interesting and provocative article entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence’, which appeared in the issues of New Blackfriars for August and September under the name of G. Egner, lead one to anticipate with eagerness the forthcoming book on which it is based. In the mean time I am glad to be allowed to make some comments upon it, and if these are largely critical it is simply because there is not much point in endorsing passages (of which there are many) with which one is in entire or almost entire agreement.

Think that a consecrated host is still bread’, Egner writes on p. 354, ‘bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread.’ If what is meant is that all the natural properties of bread remain, I fully agree, and I would emphasize that I have just said ‘natural’ and not (using words in their modern sense) ‘physical’ or ‘material’. There has been, from time to time, a lamentable tendency in Christian thought to assume that sacramental realities are concerned simply with the spiritual aspects of man’s being (his ‘soul’) and that his material aspects (his ‘body’) need only natural nutriment. In the Catechism of the Anglican Prayer Book of 1662 there is a most unfortunate statement that, in receiving Holy Communion, the benefits are ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the Bread and Wine’, in other words that, while our souls need supernatural nutriment, natural nutriment is sufficient for our bodies.

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his greatgrandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.

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.

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’.

I turn to the newer theories of the eucharistic presence. They are not as accessible as the old: that much we can all admit. In fact, I begin what I have to say about them by giving two reasons for this inaccessibility. First of all they have been published for the most part in Flemish or Dutch, and in periodicals not easily traced in England. I got round this difficulty by having a large selection of material microfilmed in Holland: what I have to say, although I do not propose to take up much time in quotation, is in fact based upon original sources that I have read and translated for myself. The second cause of inaccessibility is more important. Just as the older theory was couched in the terminology of Aristotle (misleadingly so, if my contentions are correct), so the newer theories have their philosophical setting. The setting is the tradition known as phenomenology, and associated with the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938. To understand what the newer theology is getting at here, one needs to know something of this way of philosophizing.

I have one help in embarking on a brief description: the relationship between the newer theology and Husserl is not the same as the relationship between the traditional account and Aristotle. The newer opinions do not abuse phenomenology in the way that the concepts of actuality and potentiality are abused in the theory of transubstantiation. On the other hand, phenomenology is a very difficult brand of philosophy to put into a few words. Be that as it may, I think it is possible to pick out one or two things from it that have influenced recent theological speculation on the eucharistic presence. First, an insistence that meaning and significance are not to be understood in isolation, but in the whole context of the world of life which we have in common. (Some of you may find resemblances here to another philosophical tradition.)

Some time ago I met here in England a missionary priest with whom I had worked while in Tanzania. I knew him for an excellent missionary, a man who had adapted himself well to Africa and had put himself entirely at the service of his people. Yet, when I met him, he stated his firm intention of never returning to Tanzania.

Why had he so radically altered the course of his life? Was it for personal reasons—failing health—or a compelling desire to marry? No. He had come back because he could not see why he should stay in Tanzania any longer. For one thing, the ‘new theology’ had considerably weakened the motives for which he had gone to the missions in the first place: if pagans already know God, why bother to cross sea and land in order to announce God? If men can be saved without being baptized into the Church, why go on instructing catechumens and making converts? Besides, after twenty years of experience, he had reached the conclusion that conversion to the Church did not appreciably affect people’s lives—Christians seemed no better than pagans. Then, thirdly, there are enough Tanzanian priests to cater for the flock, and in the sectors of education and health, the country is sufficiently developed to look after its own people. Better leave now than wait to be expelled in five years’ time . . . our time is limited, anyway.

A religious Order, Père Lacordaire said, is an expression of the ideal of man as raised and inspired by God. Greater or lesser loyalty to this ideal is the measure of the success or failure of a religious Order. The motto Veritas, Truth, is the mark of the Dominican Order, the symbol of its ideal. To uphold, to spread and to defend the Truth was the high ideal of St. Dominic in establishing the Order of Friars Preachers. But if the quest for truth is a noble aspiration, it is none the less an arduous pursuit. To maintain the truth without counting the costs, to become its apostle by preaching it in season and out of season, to vindicate it without flinching when challenged, is an achievement which entails much labour and strenuous self-sacrifice. An apostle is not sent to preach his own fancies and theories, but to teach and defend the truth of God and His Church in whose name he speaks, so that if he, as the Church’s representative, indulges his own fancies and speculations, he forfeits his rights in the apostolate of truth, and is likely to become a traitor to the Word of God and His Christ, according to St. Paul’s strong words.

’ You must not thitik that you shall take leave from love. Behold, they who said they loved you could not love. And if your heart were as full of love as the bottomless sea, it would all be drunk in by the love of the Beautiful Lover.'—Henry Suso.

The fourteenth century may justly be called the classic period of German mysticism, for it gave birth to the great triad of Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and John Tauler, all of them Dominicans.

The conditions in which they lived were, indeed, almost ideal for the development of a Christian mysticism of the highest order. Their time was a time of widespread and intense suffering for Church and people alike. The Church, in the person of the Popes, was persecuted by the Emperors; epidemics were rife in town and country, and frequent interdicts deprived the faithful of the consolations of Religion often for years at a time. Thus, in the desolation of a life whose insecurity and transitoriness were only too apparent, souls sought and found stability in a personal relationship with God which the vicissitudes of earthly existence could not affect and death itself would but transform and fulfil. This close intercourse between God and the soul was cultivated, especially among the nuns and lay communities of women whose direction was entrusted almost exclusively to the Dominicans. This contact between the highly strung spirituality of the nuns and the theological austerity of the disciples of St. Dominic produced a wonderfully enriched mystic life. Securely rooted in Thomistic doctrine, the flower of Dominican mysticism drew from the Angelic Doctor all his learning, sanity, and balance, developing his own mystic elements in the less restrained atmosphere of feminine tenderness and devotion.

There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.

Thus, forcefully, the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. Certainly the fashionable currency of quasireligious mysticism, the resort to the private and aggressively anti-modern can, along with aestheticism and sexual liberation, remind one of the 1890s. Incense and beads abound; the lush, the exotic and the febrile. And Professor Zaehner reminds us that meditation takes time, and time takes unearned income, and is thus open to the same criticism as psycho-analysis. But it is not difficult to disengage from his testy remarks about washing machines and televisions, and his fine disdain for modern theology, matters which are of a substantial, complex and even hopeful contemporary relevance.

There’s nothing very poetic about the title ‘XVIIIe arrondissement’, but it contains districts with a claim to poetic nomenclature as strong as that of the Rue du Chat qui peche or The Land of Green Ginger. One of them is the area called la Goutte d’Or, though its surroundings are far from rich and far from poetic. It is, in fact, one of the many Arab ghettos of Paris, a violent, rowdy, and unsalubrious spot, where North African labourers try to construct some kind of domestic life for themselves in the teeth of the environment and the intolerance of their French neighbours. In one of the tenements of la Goutte d’Or, in the last week of October 1971, a young Arab boy was shot dead on the staircase outside his uncle’s flat by the concierge, Daniel Pigot. Pigot pleaded legitimate defence, his story being that the lad, Djellali ben Ali, had attacked Pigot’s mistress—his wife, according to another version—scratching her neck as he went down the stairs to buy the morning’s milk and bread for breakfast. Djellali’s uncle, Lahaouri Djahafi, tells a different story. A week before he had been threatened himself by Pigot, who brandished a rifle at him. Djahafi had brushed the incident aside with uneasy humour, but he knew that Pigot, a laundryman who worked in Boulogne-sur-Seine, lived in an explosive situation: his damp hovel contained not merely his wife/mistress but five children in one room, and he was envious of what appeared to him the increasing worldly success of his neighbour across the landing. Djahafi had been a hawker who had left Algiers for France in 1948 and had managed to set himself up in a little shop selling cloths and silks, ‘Aux tissus et soieries d’Orient’.

The quasi-episcopal jurisdiction held by abbesses over the ‘separated’ territories of exempt orders has been presented by some writers of today as an abuse. I am alluding to such authors as Giovanni Mongelli, who has written on the mitred abbesses of San Benedetto, Conversano, Italy, and José Maria Escriva, who has written on the abbesses of Las Huelgas de Burgos, Spain. Bath these abbeys, like very many others, received innumerable papal bulls in their favour confirming them in their independence of any bishop and accepting their civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Although many religious orders in Europe lost exemption at the time of the French Revolution, the Abbey of Las Huelgas de Burgos, after a brief lapse of some eight years, continued to be exempt up till 1874. The system was brought to a close by Pius IX in a bull entitled Quae diversa addressed to all religious orders in Spain, both men and women. The reason given was that the system was no longer suitable to the changed social conditions.

Such a reason is plausible; but to consider the jurisdiction held by abbesses as an abuse is pure prejudice. Abbesses, like queens or empresses, had a right to rule when their position was officially accepted. Such a system was in keeping with early Christian custom, throughout the feudal period and up to the fall of the nobility at the time of the French Revolution.

Marx spent most of the years 1843 and 1844 in Paris, having been expelled from Germany. During this period he produced three essays, two on the Jewish question and one on Hegelian philosophy in Germany, as well as the more famous Paris Manuscripts. My aim in this essay is to present a puzzle which arises about the argument which Marx proposes in these writings as to the relation of religion and politics, and to suggest a possible partial explanation and some possible implications of the occurrence of this puzzle.

We may start by making clear Marx’s intention in the writings in question, particularly the three essays. He is concerned to warn the Jews against those who say: ‘Give up your religion, which marks you off from all of us; you cannot merit the privileges of modern political life unless you agree to shed your religious distinctiveness, at least where your politics is concerned.’ Marx tells the Jew to inquire carefully into the real conditions of life in modern society. If he does so he will see that shedding his distinct religion will in no way help him to overcome the defects of his real, concrete existence: he will still live a narrow, isolated life, in enmity rather than co-operation with his fellows. This sphere in which we live our concrete, day-to-day existence, Marx calls Civil Society, and he contrasts it with the State, or political sphere; together, the two spheres go to make up what I shall call ‘modern society’. This name refers not precisely to any actual historical society but to an ‘ideal type’ to which post-Revolution France and the post-Independence United States of America would be close empirical approximations.

‘In the past workmen have thought that if they could secure higher wages and better conditions they would be content. Employers have thought that if they granted these things the workers ought to be contented. Wages and conditions have improved, but the discontent and unrest have not disappeared. Many good people have come to the conclusion that working people are so unreasonable that it is useless to try to satisfy them. The fact is that the unrest is deeper than pounds, shillings and pence, necessary as they are. The root of the matter is the straining of the spirit of man to be free.’— William Straker (Northumberland miner), in evidence before the Sankey Commission, 1919.

Workers’ Control is about the struggle for a genuine system of industrial democracy. It is based on the premise, and contradiction, that while we live in a political democracy, however weak and limited that democracy may be, we certainly do not have any real economic democracy. And, furthermore, that without a swift development of democracy in industry we are not very likely to maintain much of our existing political democracy, which has already been seriously undermined by the rapid growth of huge economic empires accountable to no-one. On the other hand if we can create genuine democratic institutions in the industrial sphere we shall have a substantial base from which to attack the weaknesses of the present political framework and to make it much more responsive to human needs and aspirations.

When I was a youth in England, a favourite anti-Protestant argument ran: ‘We were here first.’ ‘We’ meant St Augustine of Canterbury. When I came to Wales, this would not do, for as Bede tells us, there were Christians here before St Augustine, and, when he met them, they rejected his authority. To the argument that these Christians were obviously not Roman Catholics, we used to reply: ‘Yes, they were, but cut off by barbarian Saxon invaders of England, they were unaware of Roman liturgical changes and were so attached to old Roman ways that they quarrelled with Augustine.’

I began to study the validity of this reply and hence, twenty years later, this article. My amateur thesis is based on the work of the late Rev. A. W. Wade-Evans, complemented by that of three Blackfriars contributors: Mr Donald Nicholl, Professor Finberg and, especially, Mr Eric John.

That barbarian Saxon invaders cut off Wales from the Continent rests entirely on the story of the Loss of Britain, which forms part of a work ascribed to the Welshman Gildas. Bede made important changes in this story and also wove into it independent traditions of a Saxon advent in Kent. He interpreted the whole in the light of his knowledge that the Saxons were of Germanic stock.

This essay is an attempt at a modest diatribe against some of the themes often associated with the ‘new moral theology’. It is my contention that in our enthusiasm for the seeming freedom promised in the new love ethic we have forgotten that the self must be transformed if we are to see the world as it is, and that the transformation into loving persons is not accomplished overnight by declaring our good intentions but by submitting patiently to the suffering that makes us real. We have impoverished our ethics by assuming that our lives can easily embody and reflect the good. In our moral behaviour, we have tacitly accepted existence in a world where God does not exist; in such a world, evil often appears beautiful and even kind. Such a situation is all the more pernicious because we claim to base our self-imposed blindness on love, kindness, justice, and even Jesus Christ. The main purpose of this essay is to try to locate some of the problems that have led us to confuse illusion with reality, for only when we understand the nature of our self-deception can we begin to appreciate how wonderful and yet how painful it is to live in a world where the good is not easily done.