The Bishop of Woolwich has, I need hardly say, a great number of true and important things to say about morality—notably his magnificent aphorism, ‘Prayer and ethics are simply the inside and the outside of the same thing.’ But the thing I want to discuss here is something he says about prohibitions. Briefly the New Morality is characterised by the doctrine that no moral prohibition is unconditionally valid. That is to say, according to the New Morality you can never describe a course of human action and say that this action would always be wrong in absolutely any circumstances. I think the New Morality is mistaken about this.

It is true that prohibitions do not have a very fundamental or important part to play in ethics. I do not think that a man can base his moral life on avoiding prohibited actions, any more than he can base his physical life simply on avoiding poisons. The law, in the sense of a code of prohibited behaviour, could never be the foundation of a human life. This is the clear teaching of St Paul and I accept it as unreservedly as does the Bishop. If a man tries to live simply by the law it will not help him to do right—it will only make clear to him where he has done wrong. The root and life of morality is not the law but love; what is not an expression of love is not good behaviour however much it may resemble good behaviour. Let us agree once and for all that, for example, chastity without charity is not even true chastity, it resembles the true virtue as a corpse resembles a living animal.

In a week’s brief and hurried visit to Cuba one can gather nothing more substantial than an impression of the current attitudes, problems and prospects of the Cuban Church. This is not, therefore, a full report, but only a note which attempts to portray the climate of opinion and experience among Cuban Catholics today.

To understand better the remarks that follow one should first sketch in the general Cuban background against which the Catholic mood develops. The most obtrusive fact about Cuban daily life today is that the economic situation is very difficult. Though no one actually goes hungry, for some food is always available, the diet is annoyingly unappetizing. Stores offer practically no choice; one simply eats what is available. For the poorest people, especially among the peasants, this is an improvement over the past, but for most Cubans this is a hardship to which they are unaccustomed. All things considered, however, it is rather well borne, an index of which is the lack of general patronage of black markets. Not only food but also clothing is in very short supply. All other ordinary goods are similarly scarce and often not to be found. The distribution system is erratic: today matches have suddenly disappeared from all tobacconists, but beer is available at any bar; tomorrow there is no beer, only cider; then one can get matches, but nothing to drink. Only luxury goods are plentiful. Art galleries exhibit a lavish variety of oils by Cuban artists, and along San Rafael Street one can find tempting bargains in Chinese jade. What the deeper economic situation might be and whether it inclines upwards or not is anyone’s guess—and contradictory estimates are as easily found among Cuban as among American and other experts.

In a notable speech at the Vatican Council on November 20 last, the Archbishop of Westminster undertook, in the name of the hierarchy of England and Wales, to promote a fuller and more frequent dialogue with all Christians in this country of whatever denomination. The occasion was the opening debate on the Constitution de Oecumenismo. The Archbishop said that the hierarchy, for whom he spoke, gives its ready approval to this document and receives it with joy. It gives us the guidance of the Church’s supreme authority, which we have been awaiting, and clearly shows us its mind. Without this our ecumenical work could not make progress.

Soon after the publication of this speech it was announced from Lambeth Palace that the Archbishop of Canterbury had set up a Commission on Roman Catholic Relations, to be composed of experts from strategic areas throughout the whole of the country. They will be responsible, from the Anglican side, for the arrangement of dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. It can hardly be doubted that there has been a causal connection between the Vatican speech and the Lambeth announcement, and we may hope therefore for the setting up, on our side, of a similar body to co-operate in organising this work.

It will not be out of place then to consider, on as wide a basis as possible and in a spirit of experiment, not only what are the most suitable topics, at the theological level, to embark on in dialogue, but, and this is more important, what are the presuppositions on either side with which eirenic discussion of these topics will inevitably be approached.

The absence of equilibrium implies the presence of tensions; there are tensions in the life of everyone, but nowhere more so than in the life of those who are trying to live up to an ideal. Experience has proved this to be true. But it is the more true of the Christian, continually responding to the urge of grace or failing to do so. Even the great Apostle of the Gentiles was forced to admit that ‘praiseworthy intentions are always ready to hand, but I cannot find my way to the performance of them. It is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing.’ Yet such tensions can be an asset, provided we are clear about our goals. We cannot hope to eliminate tensions—trying to suppress or ignore them can only lead to worse effects—because they are due to our human nature wounded by the sin of our first parents. But we can hope to arrive at a state of harmony, a balance of tensions which will sustain us and even carry us forward.

Again it is even more true of the social worker whose function is, by definition, ‘to assess the disturbance of equilibrium in a given handicapped person, in his family, his social relationships, so as to give appropriate help.’ In order to do his job properly, the social worker has to place himself in a situation that is lacking equilibrium, and through empathy to share—at least to some extent—the client’s problems. The social worker is not to be considered as a person safe and dry who throws a lifebelt to somebody struggling in the water. He has himself to jump in the water and to encourage the person in difficulties to make the necessary strokes to remain afloat, and perhaps eventually to make for the shore.

During many years of consideration, I have grown into a firm conviction that two of the greatest masters of the human psyche have been Plato and St Augustine. There is a close connection between them. Both considered philosophy to be a sort of therapeia, both were personally and theoretically concerned with the problem of integration, and both saw clearly that the personal and the social problem are at bottom one and the same. That is why we can take so much of our material from Augustine’s City of God.

Everybody knows that Plato declares in the Republic that the individual is the state writ small. Usually this is taken to be a proposition of political philosophy, and this is true enough if we have a right understanding of what Plato intended by politics. If we read the Gorgias we shall find a remarkable sentence in which Socrates says that the science which takes care of the health of the body is medicine, but that that which takes care of the health of the psyche is—politics! The argument with Polus, near the commencement of which this statement stands, concludes by saying that the man who is sick with guilt ought to go to the judge and legislator and beg them for the punishment which will cure him. If we consider how much profit we ourselves could expect for our guilt-ridden souls by approaching Parliament or the minister of justice as the agents for our release, we can imagine the incredulity of Socrates’ hearers. But his point is clear: politics should be regarded as psychotherapy. The right environment for integrated personal living is a community under just laws.

It is no secret that the Church finds herself in crisis, and the awareness of such a fact is ‘pessimism’ only in the eyes of those for whom all change is necessarily a tragedy. It would seem more realistic to follow the example of Pope John (and of Pope Paul after him) and to envisage courageously the challenges of an unknown future in which the Christian can find security not, perhaps, in the lasting strength of familiar human structures but certainly in the promises of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. After all, Christian hope itself would be meaningless if there were no risks to face and if the future were definitively mortgaged to an unchanging present. Christian hope is confident not in metaphysical immobility but in the dynamism of unfailing love. ‘Crisis’ means ‘judgment’, and the present is always being judged as it gives way to what was, yesterday, the future. Only when we try to drag yesterday bodily with us into the future does ‘crisis’ become ‘cataclysm’. An ‘optimism’ that insists on denying evident realities is hardly inspired by Christian truth, and true hope is that which finds motives for confidence precisely in the ‘crisis’ which seems to threaten that which is dearest to us: for it is here above all that the power of God will break through the meaningless impasse of prejudices and cruelties in which we always tend to become entrapped. It is in the crises of history most of all that the Church knows, from experience, that the truth shall make her free.

You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape . . . The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ, for us today? ... We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all; men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-years old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the ‘religious premise’ of man . . . But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.c. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion . . . what does that mean for Christianity . . . ? How can Christ become the Lord even of those without religion; If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity—and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods—then what is religionless Christianity?

In this passage, written from prison twenty years ago (30 April, 1944), Dietrich Bonhoeffcr raised an issue to which wide currency has now been given by the Bishop of Woolwich in the chapter of Honest to God entitled Worldly Holiness. Not that the question is confined to that chapter alone. Indeed I believe it to be the central issue of the Bishop’s whole book, more central in some way than the question of what image of God we are to have. For, if I am not mistaken, we have here the central anxiety which made Dr Robinson write his book.

Now that almost every African country north of Angola and Mozambique is independent, there may be a temptation in Western countries to shrug off entirely the cultural responsibility once held by Britain and France, and to limit Western action in Africa to Oxfam, economic assistance and technical co-operation. With the end of the colonial era, there is an understandable reluctance to create the impression in African countries that they are still in any sense under tutelage to the West, or even that they are undergraduates to be guided by Western dons. Yet there is a danger in leaning over too far backwards. The danger is that fastidiousness in trying to avoid giving the impression of interference may be understood by African minds as evidence that the West, in its unconfessed thoughts, still regards African countries as not mature enough to stand the ordinary rough-and-tumble of international exchange. Their reading of Western delicacy of manner may at bottom be right.

These two articles on the role of the West towards culture in Africa begin with the assumption that any culture has something of value to offer to another culture. Western culture is not valueless for Africa, nor is African culture without its lessons for the West. The relationship between cultures should rest on a basis of information and understanding, and their engagement in each other should be forthright enough to make motives clear, and humble enough to accept criticism. This article will try to sketch out some important features of the modern African cultural setting. A second will discuss some of the ways in which the West both is and should be culturally engaged in Africa.

This article presents a parallel to my previous article entitled ‘Dante’s Indirection’. Both are attempts to study a certain method of achieving effects in a reader, a method to which Kierkegaard gave the title ‘Indirect Communication’. Both articles are concerned basically with Kierkegaard’s technique, due to the angle from which I approach indirect methods in other writers. The expression ‘Indirect Communication’ is ambiguous, as was its use in Kierkegaard’s own hands, and sometimes in studying it, in and for itself, one’s attention is drawn to parallel and much clearer uses of the principle, when one finds it in poets or novelists of less involved theoretical pretensions. Such a man is Graham Greene, novelist, Catholic, individual. It is to him that I turn for further illustration of the principle which seems to defy (in Kierkegaard’s case at least) all attempts at analysis and capture. Critics for over a century, from all countries in the world, have tried to solve the enigma of Kierkegaard’s use of Indirect Communication. Perhaps his Indirection can only be approached indirectly. This essay on three novels of Graham Greene is such an attempt.

What did Kierkegaard mean by ‘Indirect Communication’? This he sets forth in a book called The Point of View for my Work as an Author, a book about which he had such terrible doubts that its publication in complete form was eventually only undertaken by his brother after his death. In it he draws the distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ works and the ‘religious’ works in his output with such clarity that we would expect no problem. But he himself obviously felt, and any reader of his works feels immediately, that the explanation he gave in that work simply did not answer to the actual feel of his production, even contradicted its spirit. The later theory does not explain the former practice.

Within the last seven years Britain has shed political responsibility for most of the areas she formerly governed, and France for all. With the waning and extinction of political power over Africa by former colonial countries, would it not be appropriate to disengage culturally as well?

The case is arguable. To survey the cultural confusion and desolation left in the wake of the withdrawing colonial powers is a deeply disturbing experience. It disturbs not merely the thoughtful Westerner, but, much more profoundly and lastingly, the sensitive African. Chinua Achebe shows the beginnings of disintegration in Things Fall Apart. Ferdinand Oyono in Le Vieux Nègre et la Médaille and Une Vie de Boy shows the growing cultural disorientation. Achebe, again, in No Longer at Ease and Cyprian Ekwensi in People of the City take the process a stage further into the cultural confusion and jumbled values of urban living in modern Africa. Surely the tale of harm is long enough; it is time to withdraw, with bowed heads. It is the West that is in need, of cultural and spiritual regeneration. Why send our disenchantment, our aridity overseas? Let us put our own house in order. If any African wishes to come and make his own gleanings amongst us, let him be welcome, but let him be warned that the pickings are thin.

But the snug haven of withdrawal is no longer open today. Suzerainty has gone but interdependence between states has taken its place. No country can withdraw into political isolation. Britain is still politically involved in Africa, and Africa in Britain, and the involvement will increase. Cultural withdrawal makes even less sense than the spurious neutrality of political disengagement. Cultural interrelationships will grow closer, and will provide the setting and much of the matter of political interdependence.

One important issue that confronts the third Session of the Vatican Council is the question of religious freedom. With the recent publication of a number of the speeches made at the second Session we are able to follow something of the lines along which the discussion is likely to proceed, and to understand something of the issues at stake, issues of great significance to the ecumenical movement. The matter arises in fact from the Schema on ecumenism with which the Council was concerned at the end of the second Session. That Schema comprised five chapters—on the principles of Catholic ecumenism, on the practical applications of ecumenism, on the separated Christians, on the Jews, and on religious liberty. Bishop Schmedt of Bruges introducing the fifth chapter expressed his hope that ‘it will be possible to complete the discussion and the approbation of this very brief, but very important decree before the end of this second session’. ‘The whole world’ he said ‘is waiting for this decree. The voice of the Church on religious liberty is being waited for in universities, in national and international organisations, in Christian and non-Christian communities, in the newspapers and in public opinion— and it is being waited for with urgent expectation’. His hope was not in fact fulfilled, and though this was to many disappointing it is surely better that in so difficult and controverted a matter the final decisions should be seen to have emerged from slow and mature reflection rather than by what might have appeared a snap-decision reached under the pressure of a guillotine procedure.

The importance of the decree to the ecumenical movement was well put by Pete Le Guillou, O.P., in a conference given at Rome at the time of the discussions.

The first discovery one makes about America—and this affects the subject of crime just as much as any other—is the great variety that exists from state to state, and how strong is the resistance to any encroachment of federal government on state rights, which certainly include disposing of the vast majority of criminal offences committed. The importance of local loyalties is real and enduring. They have their roots in American history: have indeed made America what it is. And this is most certainly true, not only of the state laws themselves (the differences in the matter of divorce from state to state is an obvious example) but of the enforcement of the law and the treatment of offenders. Indeed Mr James Bennett, Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, can say ‘the penal statutes of this country are a mishmash of conflict and variation’.

That is why any statistical account of crime in America must be inadequate. The annual report issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, which gives a detailed analysis of crimes committed in the various states, has been described as the cheapest work of fiction in existence. This is a serious libel on a most valuable work, but of course it would certainly help in making a true picture if there were uniformity —or at least consistency—in the penal offences themselves as well as in the punishment they attract, quite apart from widely varying police standards which obviously affect the issue.

On the strength of two volumes of short stories the American Catholic writer J. F. Powers seemed conspicuously free of characteristic qualities of our three Catholic novelists. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Whatever the literary merit of the novels of these three writers their work contains in different kinds of degrees the same basic quality of nightmare; their atmospheres are heavy with the macabre, the ugly, the violent, the symbolic, their plots are full of decadence and despair, and their involvement with Catholicism has a great deal of the Gothic about it. Now Mr Powers has written a novel it is possible to judge him tackling the same problems in the novel form, and Morte D’Urban reveals the same quiet detailed observation of spiritual life in America, a life that simmers and then explodes with nightmare. As the titles of his short story volumes show, A Prince of Darkness and The Presence of Grace, Powers is as much concerned as, say Graham Greene, with the heroic life of the Christian, and equally concerned with what makes a hero. Morte D’ Urban with its immediate appeal to Malory seemed a puzzling but impressive novel in which the hero becomes heroic in spite of himself, and, one is tempted to say, in spite of the reader. The epigraph to the novel is a quotation from J. M. Barrie:

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. . . .

Hence the story of Urban, citified man, seemed to me to finish with his salvation for reasons excluded from the explicit narration of the novel, only gradually realized in terms of qualities praised in that explicit narration; in short a very ironic, compassionate, literate novel on the spiritual life which I thought I had understood.

Although the teaching and example of Christ clearly call us away from violence and hatred and bloodshed, the world often pulls the other way. The tension which results can be agonising; and it is tempting to get rid of it straightaway by a kind of intellectual manoeuvre. We can for instance pretend that the world does not exist—or that we arc not responsible for it; or we can pretend that the gospels do not apply to it. If we succeed in reducing the tension, then is the time to beware; for the tension between the world and the gospels can only be removed by eliminating one of them; and both are necessary for a Christian-in-the-World.

St Augustine felt forced by historical circumstances to admit that a man could serve in the army and still please God; but it was not without a great sense of strain that he gave some kind of approval to ‘such great, repulsive and cruel evils’. From scraps of St Augustine, the Western Church evolved what has come to be known as the ‘just war tradition’, permitting war, and later making it obligatory, in certain defined circumstances. The idea of a ‘just war’ is an explosive one; it provokes extreme responses. The Roman Catholic who still bases his thinking on this tradition, or the more common type, who simply relies on the opinions of ‘experts’ and does not think at all, will regard the just war as part of the Creed and will afford it an unquestioning reverence; those who do not have such faith consider it as just another piece of appalling Roman casuistry.

In Spring 1963 the British Council of Churches appointed a Working Group ‘to study, as a matter of urgency, the question of Britain’s continued possession of an independent nuclear deterrent’. The group (which included a Catholic observer, Father Corbishley, s.j.) reported back to the Council that ‘there is no case for independent nuclear action—that is, without prior consultation with our allies—in any part of the world’, and the Council of Churches endorsed the report in a resolution of October 16th, 1963. The Resolution, together with the Working Group’s Report, forms a document of considerable importance.

Although it must be said that, like previous similar documents, such as The Valley of Decision (1961), The British Nuclear Deterrent fails to maintain its grip at the most decisive levels, it is a serious expression of concern, and its well-informed respect for the strategic and political realities of our situation is particularly striking after the endless hypothetical abstractions that still disable so much Catholic thinking in this field. One can only heave a sigh of gratitude when one reads that ‘the Churches are bound to bear witness’ where one’s nation ‘is prepared to annihilate vast populations in another country’ and that ‘our concern is to find God’s will in this given situation—the will of a God of whom it may not be said that He does certain things in general but nothing in particular’.

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dead. It was buried in January of this year, just ten years old. For its epitaph some would write ‘A Great Experiment That Failed’; others, nearer the truth, ‘The Unwanted Partnership.’

Economically the Federation was a great success. Each of the constituent territories—Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland— benefited much in its own way. Southern Rhodesia enjoyed a remarkable boom, years of extraordinary expansion in industry, commerce and immigrant population, the most striking memorial of which is the present skyline of Salisbury with its soaring buildings. In Northern Rhodesia too there was rapid development and the Copper Belt lived through years of fantastic prosperity. Even Nyasaland, the poor relation, experienced substantial if less spectacular gain. Now all that is over.

Expansion has given way to contraction. This is especially marked in Southern Rhodesia, which is now suffering from an economic recession, unemployment, shortage of overseas investment and a large exodus of valuable white settlers. Worse still, there is great political uncertainty and civil unrest breaking out intermittendy into violence, which occasions more and more Draconian laws.

Men of my unit went into two of those places the Nazis had efficiently called ‘concentration camps’, but for which there are other names: Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Ohrdruf, near Gotha. What struck the mind, and remained, was the unbelievable. The greater the horror, the more it was necessary to select details to make the whole have some reality. At Buchenwald, amid the fantastic complex of gas chambers and furnaces, the great sheds filled with human debris piled to the roofs, what seemed to affect the men most of all were some strange decorative plaques. A day or so afterwards, when an article in the service newspaper Stars and Stripes identified the objects as mounted pieces of tattooed human skin, the reaction was not quite melodramatic revulsion, but a more sudden, self-conscious formation of what had actually been seen. The journalistic account put things into place; the sentences, with their plain words and terse phrases, made the entire experience into something that had happened. One man rushed over to say that the things described in the article were the things he had held in his hands. Now, he knew that his experience had been real, and he knew what it was he had experienced.

At Ohrdruf, some indignant civilians from the neighbourhood were being put to work digging graves and burying the bodies left untidily about when the camp was hastily abandoned by the guards. There were corpses with blackening gouges in the sides and back. One or two walking cadavers, their filthy rags flapping, explained that some of the starving inmates of the camp were able to eat the livers and other organs of those who died. Then, much as guides denoting sights of interest to passing tourists, they pointed out the ingenious arrangement whereby the furnaces of the crematoria heated the buildings of the commandant’s headquarters.

To this second edition of his now famous Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow has added fifty pages of further thoughts provoked by the extraordinary amount of attention it received. One can say ‘extraordinary’ without irony, or with little. In itself the lecture was not very remarkable— neither deep, nor subtle, nor closely reasoned, nor witty. But it made its points with force and it was exceedingly topical. Moreover Sir Charles is an interesting and versatile man, and as a writer he has a beguiling knack of combining a certain high seriousness—solemnity even—with the common touch. One feels that he has tried hard not to be spoiled by success—not, in a sense, to be changed by it at all. He brings the whole of himself, his feelings as well as his gifts and experience, into all that he writes. He does so here. Allusions to Rutherford and G. H. Hardy, dropped with a tone at once admiring and affectionate, and to high table conversations, evoke the Cambridge background and the thrill of having been a young research student there at ‘one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics’. Allusions to the working class origins widen the perspective and humanise it; reference to important tasks well performed in the civil service add the impression—and a perfectly just one— of a man who knows much front the inside about power and the workings of power. Indeed the only ‘inside’ allusion one misses is to the novelist’s art; which is a pity since so much of the lecture, on its more polemical side, and so much of the comment now added to it, amount to an indictment of the ‘literary intellectual’ and, indirectly or by implication, of a good deal of the literature which he either produces or spends much time and energy discussing.

In our issue of February 1964 we published an article by Leslie Dewart, the underlying implication of which (also worked out explicitly in his book ‘Christianity and Revolution: the lesson of Cuba’) was that the Cuban Church had made a too simple identification of the Christian cause with anti-Communism and of anti-Communism with pro-Americanism. In the course of the article (p. 56) Mr Dewart referred to the voluntary exodus of more than four hundred priests after the failure of the Pig’s Bay expedition. In this connection we have received the following document from Mgr Eduardo Boza Masvidal. Mgr Boza was appointed auxiliary bishop and vicar-general of Havana in February 1960 and was forced into exile by the Cuban Government in September 1961, as a result of the worsening in relations between the Cuban Church and the Government following the Pig’s Bay invasion. His expulsion and that of the 132 priests who were expelled at the same time is clearly to be distinguished from the earlier withdrawals of mainly non-Cuban priests, and his enforced exile and that of other Cuban priests is plainly an act of grave injustice on the part of the Cuban Government in which he deserves our deepest sympathy. The document sent us by Mgr Boza is a copy of his reply to the Cuban Ambassador to the Holy See. The Ambassador had protested against the inclusion of Cuba in an Exhibition of the Persecuted Church. The Bishop’s reply is given under three main headings.

1. The Ambassador points out that diplomatic relations still exist between Cuba and the Vatican.

This in no way signifies there is no persecution of the Church in Cuba. As is well known, the Holy See has no other object in view, in maintaining such relations, than the good of souls; it is not concerned to withdraw from any country so long as it is not obliged to do so, notwithstanding all the injustices to which the Church may be subjected.