Adam and Innocence: Two Books from the Catholic New Left

Extract

The chief moral impact of the Slant group, personally encountered, is that they believe in argument. They believe, with Aquinas, that truth is commensurate with the human intellect, and not, as some believe and most of us half believe, something fundamentally alien to it, approached only through organic imagery, mystery, silence and so on. In practice this means that Slant will argue relentlessly on long after the uncommitted liberal (that ubiquitous figure) has come to a halt, because he has arrived at the edge of his intuition, or is satisfied with some bit of poetic imagery that has floated up, or is merely tired and wants to go to sleep.

Two books from the Slant group illustrate the opposing sides of this enthusiastic belief in the mind. One of them is disastrous; for at its worst it can result in an over-confidence so appalling in its naiveté and so inhuman in its anger that the uncommitted liberal might be forgiven for ceasing to read further. Thus Neil Middleton solemnly points out Descartes’ ‘mistakes’, as if the whole Cartesian experience could be exposed as a false turning in the mind of Descartes. Thus he comments on a not-negligible passage from Catherine of Genoa: ‘although it is possible in this, as in every other case, (my italics) to show how wrong the author is. . . .’