In a television interview on the religious position of the Church of England recently given, the new Archbishop of York, Dr Coggan, said that he was an Evangelical, but with a high doctrine of the Church. This is as if his predecessor, Dr Ramsey, now Primate of all England at Canterbury, had said in a similar interview, as he might well have done, that he was an Anglo-Catholic but with a marked infusion of Evangelicalism.

The very real fact that two such statements, actual or hypothetical, represent is of profound ecumenical significance. The Church of England, and indeed world-wide Anglicanism as a whole, is a microcosm of the Ecumenical movement, for it contains in an organism which is highly cohesive in outlook and spirit most of the widely differing elements which exist within the World Council of Churches. It follows that the process of evolution going on within Anglicanism is likely to be reproduced, and is in fact now being reproduced, within the wider context of the main allegiances of World Protestantism.

One aspect of this process, and a fundamental one, is the increasing unity of outlook which marks the approach of many sections of divided Christendom to the Scriptures. In this we Catholics have both a share and a deep interest. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Liberalism in the non-Catholic world took a lead in the scientific criticism of the Scriptural documents.

Outside St Paul and the Acts the term charis—whence our ‘grace’—is rather rare in the New Testament, but the idea, as Dr Ryder Smith has said, ‘is everywhere.’ Common alike in secular Greek and the Septuagint, charis was a wonderfully apt term for Christian uses. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew chen, meaning favour or goodwill freely bestowed and presupposing the idea of love and of a love active and generous. Again charis, as derived from chairein, ‘to be glad,’ carried a sense of joy—-joy on both sides for the gift bestowed, both in the giver and in the receiver, or more precisely in the relation arising between the two as a result of the gift. Thus it could denote a state of being in communion or fellowship, and in the New Testament (especially in St Paul, but cf. John i, 14-16) it became the chief term signifying the specifically Christian situation of being loved by God, in Christ, and of returning this love, in Christ—or simply of being ‘in Christ.’ Certainly the Church was fortunate in having to hand a word so flexible and beautiful.

Around charis gathered the other Christian words, faith, love, peace, etc., as well as, in St Paul particularly, the contrast-term ‘law’ and the term for grace’s antagonist, ‘sin’. In time these words came to be defined more precisely, and as each one became more precise all the rest were affected too. The Church could not understand ‘love’ or ‘faith’ except in the context of grace, and in particular, and more quickly, she found she could not understand grace except in relation to sin and vice versa.

Love is a word we use for widely different activities: sexual desire, friendship, turning to God; we even ‘love’ books or games. The differences can be marked by adjectives (love is ‘carnal’ or ‘spiritual’), but the recurrence of the same noun implies, one supposes, that something remains the same, or similar, in every case. But it is not easy to define this common factor or similarity, and we are more likely to be irritated by the ambiguity of ‘love’ than to try to see how it arises—to take, I mean, this ambiguity as a clue for exploring our own nature. On reflection, however, we might agree that the imprecision of the term comes from its meaning, if anything, too much, not too little; from its referring to something at the centre of existence and involved, inextricably, with all that we do. We might, of course, try to limit the meaning of the word to one particular context, to sexual relations; but although ‘love’ in modern English does chiefly refer to sex, such a limitation would he somewhat artificial. The idea behind the wider, inclusive use of thi term arises quite naturally, and it is an integral part of our culture, as a glance at any Latin dictionary will show. Already in classical Latin amor had a wide, trans-sexual sense; which Christian theology and meditation was quick to appropriate in its turn, and then enormously to extend—enough to recall a single great phrase from St Augustine, pondus meum, amor meus: ‘my weight is my love; thereby I am borne, whithersoever I am borne’.

Morality is not immediately concerned with what happens but with what people do. The characteristic moral judgment is not ‘It would be better to have this happen than that’ but ‘It would be good to do this, better to do this other, and definitely bad to do that’.

It is important to restate this platitude because nearly all muddle in questions of morality comes from forgetting it. Take for example, the business of the population explosion and contraceptives: you can have an interesting discussion about whether the world would be a better place with a large population or a small one, whether a large population means too many mouths to feed or more hands to work, and so on. Such a discussion can be very interesting but is attended by a curious difficulty—apart from dogma and prejudice it is exceedingly difficult to rest the discussion on any firm basis at all. You get difficult exchanges like ‘If you do such and such, the human race will not survive’. ‘Why should the human race survive?’ ‘Well I just want it to’. Mr Evelyn Waugh’s famous and characteristic remark that he saw no objection to the destruction of the human race, especially if, as seems likely, it should happen accidentally, was taken as some kind of joke. But it is perfectly serious. Mr Evelyn Waugh sees no objection, if you are surprised it is up to you to think of an objection. One of the most interesting things about a discussion of this kind is that it brings you up against these curious puzzles.

I propose to discuss in general terms some recent neurological and neurophysiological views upon perception—which seem threatened with obscurity by the introduction of epistemological factors into what purport to be physiological accounts of this complex process. One or two writers have chosen, unfortunately, I submit, to resuscitate Locke’s famous doctrine of primary and secondary qualities in perception, which doctrine we owe in the first instance to Galileo.

By the term ‘perception,’ I refer to sensory perception in all its modes, not limiting myself to visual perception, since some confusion has arisen in the past by such restriction.

Before I proceed, I should define my operative term, ‘perception.’ Except in the case of infants, lights and colours and sounds do not enter consciousness without some significance and without some measure of interpretation. For example, auditory reception pure and simple is rare. Sounds come into the focus of attention as spatialized, and identified as to their source and significance. This perception has physiological and psychological elements and affective accompaniments, and is in effect a product of experience, as Rheinhold has recently reminded us. The same holds true for other sensory modalities. Simple sense reception is what Whitehead calls ‘sense awareness.’ When this is enriched by these accompaniments, when in fact it involves thought and feeling, it is better spoken of as ‘sense perception.’ Simple sense awareness or reception is the fleeting endowment of the infant, rarely to be repeated in later life, save in circumstances unprecedented for the individual.

Example alone is the end of all public punishments and rewards. Laws never inflict disgrace in resentment, nor confer honour from gratitude. ‘For it is very hard, my lord’, said a convicted felon at the bar to the late excellent judge Burnet, ‘to hang a poor man for stealing a horse’. ‘You are not to be hanged, sir, answered my ever-honoured and beloved friend, for stealing a horse, but you are to be hanged that horses may not be stolen.

Henry Fielding too, was honoured in his time as a just and humane magistrate, but few of us today would feel able to endorse the judge’s action as he does. Even the severity of the sentence scarcely repels us so much as the callousness with which the judge scores a debating point at the expense of the condemned man. And is his point even valid? Put like this, the theory of pure deterrence appears crudely utilitarian, and difficult to justify morally, because it treats a human being as only an instrument of deterrence. Can we truly say that the man is not being hanged for stealing a horse? Would he have been hanged if he had not stolen the horse? Surely not. And in that case, can we say that penal justice is concerned only with the future effects of punishment, and that we need not consider what punishment the criminal has deserved?

In talking about punishment, there is a danger of a false antithesis arising through over-simplification. Retribution, deterrence and reformation are sometimes presented as if they were mutually exclusive— as if the adoption of one theory automatically excluded the other two.

This eminently quotable and much quoted passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover allows us to indicate the purpose and scope of the reflections which follow. It is certainly an exploration of consciousness (and conscience) that we propose to make, but neither as novelist nor as saint, concerned to illuminate and purify the secret springs of life, so far as these are accessible to the intelligence of feeling and sympathy; it is rather from the viewpoint of the Christian theologian that an attempt will be made here to explore consciousness and conscience, to analyse its ingredients, to take stock: an exercise of intelligence sensitive enough, it is hoped, to avoid the crudities of brute imperatives, but none the less conceptual and discursively rational, while at the same time resorting to those privileged sources of insight available to the Catholic in divine revelation.

I want to begin with a picture I do not accept, and I will try to explain why I do not accept it and what I want to put in its place. It goes like this—‘Sex is first of all a matter of fulfilment... it is an appetite which must be satisfied one way or another; sexual desire is something implanted in us by nature and nature’s purpose is the maintenance of the race. But nature with her usual lavish hand has given us far more sexual desire than is really necessary, just as she makes far more cod’s eggs than are really necessary to keep up the population of cod. Because our sexual desires are stronger and more frequent than is really necessary we are led into various kinds of competition and violence, disorder and war. In order to regulate this stimulation man has invented the institution of marriage. Marriage is rather like the institution of private property to which indeed it is closely related. Men have an appetite for possessions greater than is really necessary and to regulate this appetite we grow hedges round bits of land and say to a man “Go in there and own away to your heart’s content but don’t come over the hedge into my bit of land”. Private property means that a man may perhaps have less than he would like, but what he has is secure’. Marriage according to this picture is a fence around the sexual appetite just as the hedge is a fence around the appetite for possessions. Marriage is a limit set on sexual activity for the sake of other people.

I cannot remember ever having seen an article in blackfriars on sin—not sin and Mauriac or Graham Greene, or sin and homosexuality or sin and Jung: just sin. This may very well be due to my own pre-occupations; it is easy enough simply not to notice an article which doesn’t seem to offer anything to one’s immediate structure of interests. But even then, it may be, this inadvertence would not I feel be untypical. If the Catholic intelligentsia today is very conscious of having moved, and having to move still further, from a Catholicism almost wholly turned in on itself, psychologically and sociologically, almost wholly ‘interior’, it is hardly surprising that the Catholic themes which excite and hold attention are ‘exterior’ ones: liturgy, the lay apostolate, ‘the Bible’ (the Bible as proclaiming a message, kerygmatic, and not as ‘devotional’). Again, it isn’t easy to write about sin or to think about it, to make it an object of serious contemplation, to hold it before the mind’s eye. One’s own crude and violent experience of sin interferes with the peaceful contemplation;

St Paul said that Christ was ‘delivered up for our sins and raised again for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25); and the whole point and purpose of Fr Durrwell’s book is to bring out as clearly as possible, in the full context of New Testament teaching, the meaning of the second half of that sentence: to show how we are saved by the Resurrection. It was a bold thing to attempt on such a scale. The Resurrection of our Lord is the central fact of the New Testament, both as historical narrative and as a doctrinal message, and to explore its mysterious meaning is a task calling for the finest theological intelligence as well as a consummate skill in the interpretation of some extremely difficult texts. Let us say at the outset that Fr Durrwell shows himself not unequal to the task. One may differ from him in detail or remain unconvinced by this or that particular analysis, but there is no denying that his work as a whole is a masterpiece; a deeply pondered, beautifully constructed doctrinal synthesis, full of the light and sweetness of a noble intelligence entirely dedicated to the noblest of subject matters. It is a strikingly original book and its main thesis certainly calls for further sifting and elucidation. A work of purely biblical theology, it remains, as Fr Charles Davis says in his interesting Introduction, ‘within the world of biblical ideas and expressions.’ But it cannot and will not be left there; it is far too powerful a work not to have a profound effect on speculative theology in the Church for many years to come.

Three times in the last seventy years, a major encyclical has been devoted primarily to economic and social questions. Each has made its contribution to the social doctrine of the Church, setting forth the moral principles which should govern economic and social relationships, drawing attention to the chief social evils of the day, and suggesting the general lines of reform. The latest of these encyclicals, Mater et Magistra, makes important contributions to the social teaching of the Church in four areas. First, there is a clear and authoritative re-statement of the principle of subsidiary function at a time when the provision of social services has been and is being greatly extended in many countries, and when the proper role of the state in this field is a subject of considerable controversy. Secondly, in its discussion of wages, profits and the status of the worker, the new encyclical clarifies the Church’s teaching, and also shows that despite the reforms that have already come about, in some measure in response to the earlier encyclicals, much still remains to be done. Thirdly, it calls attention to the depressed state of agriculture relatively to industry, and sees in this an evil to be remedied. Finally, far greater attention is paid in this latest encyclical to international economic questions than in Rerum Novarum or even Quadragesimo Anno.

One Catholic M.P. appears to have found in the new encyclical support for the Welfare State as it exists in Britain to-day, whilst a correspondent writing to one of the Catholic papers has suggested that countries wishing to put the social encyclicals into practice would do well to copy our National Health Service.

As a philosopher St Thomas had very little to say that was his own, and I suspect he would have looked askance at anyone who might have suggested that he was an original philosopher. If you try the experiment of dipping into one of his commentaries on Aristotle, I think you will get a vivid illustration of what I have in mind. Take any of his commentaries—on the Metaphysics or the Ethics, the de Anima or the logical works—open it at random, and what you will find is something like this: first you will have reproduced the Latin version which he used; this will normally be the word-by-word translation prepared by William of Moerbeke. This is practically incomprehensible, unless you go through the labour of turning it back into Greek first. Then the commentary. The standard pattern of this is to begin by relating the passage to be considered in each particular lecture to what has gone before: ‘having dealt with so-and-so, the Philosopher now discusses . . .’. The problem under discussion is stated, the reason why it is necessary to discuss this problem and discuss it at this stage; then you have the steps in the argument distinguished and their logical structure displayed, the various reasons given by Aristotle for holding a view tabulated, and so on. Within each of the closely mapped out divisions the text of Aristotle is paraphrased, usually in a slightly extended form. Criticism or disagreement is almost totally absent; the nearest we get to that is in the occasional hints in the interpretations adopted by St Thomas, the shifts of emphasis, the unobtrusive play of overtones.

At the meeting of the World Council of Churches at Evanston in 1954 it was reported in the newspapers that a movement, within its organization, was pressing for a motion against the Roman Catholic Church condemnatory of its alleged persecuting activities against Protestants in such countries as Spain and Colombia. The motion was successfully shelved by the skilled and tactful chairmanship of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Fisher. It is very generally admitted, and often publicly stated, by leaders of the Ecumenical movement, that any thought or action on its part which definitely excluded the Roman Catholic Church because of the difficulties involved, would damage its Ecumenical character and tend to render it pan-Protestant and anti-Roman. Nevertheless, even within the movement, there are Protestant pressure-groups which are anti-Catholic, especially because of the charges of persecuting intolerance made against the Church, and these would like to see it ousted from consideration in the work of the World Council for Christian Unity.

But even where alleged persecuting intolerance is not seen as a reason for the complete exclusion of Roman Catholicism from the ultimate concept of Christian unity, this charge undoubtedly causes concern even amongst those non-Catholic leaders who are otherwise well disposed towards the Church; there is always the lurking suspicion that if and when Rome gets the power it will of its very nature turn persecutor. This suspicion is strengthened by a prevalent belief that the only orthodox doctrine of religious freedom permissible to Catholics is that based upon the distinction between thesis and hypothesis.