Based on a talk given during a Catholic People’s Week

“‘All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful’ (v. 12). The Corinthians have a sexual ethic which starts from the question, ‘What is allowed? What may I do?’. And doubtless they could quote Paul back to himself to show that since they were free from the law, they could do anything; ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5:1). It follows, then, that there can be no restrictions upon what is permitted to the Christian. We are allowed to perform any sexual acts that we wish.

Paul’s reaction is not to revise his view that we are not under the Law but to suggest that asking what is permissible is not the right starting point. A proper sexual ethics is not, in the first place, about what is lawful, but about what is ‘helpful’. In this passage Paul subverts the Corinthians’ basic presuppositions in thinking about sexual ethics. Two thousand years later most Catholics need to submit to the same gentle subversion. The Church’s teaching on sexuality is normally seen in terms of what is allowed or forbidden; sexual ethics are classified as ‘permissive’ or ‘restrictive’, and the Church authorities are usually happy to oblige by stating the limits of acceptable behaviour. We all need to submit to the Pauline therapy, and this works, like any decent therapy, by means of a dialogue between the patient and the therapist.

In a humorous, fanciful collection of stories by R.M. Rilke, Stories of God, God forgets about parts of the creation and then gradually comes to learn of them, sharing in their suffering and joy. The notion that God can forget about the created order or fail to know some of its basic features in not unique to Rilke. Some Christian philosophers believe that an essential feature of creaturely freedom is that God does not know what free acts will be performed. They claim that God either cannot know, or elects not to know, important events which will occur. More extreme is the deistic conception of God in which the creator is less than fully apprised of human history, past, present and future. Early gnostic myths envisioned God as being unaware of the created world, the world being the result of some demiurgic intermediary emanating from God. Aristotle held that God does not apprehend all the particular features of the world. In contrast to this sampling of deism, gnosticism, and Aristotle, the classical Christian conception of God is that God does not avert his gaze from the creation; the knowing presence of God is inescapable. Notwithstanding some disagreement whether the scope of divine knowledge includes future free acts, Christians have claimed God’s knowledge of the world is supreme and unsurpassable. God does not forget about the world, nor does the world blindly emanate from him. The creation and conservation of the world is deliberate and consciously willed.

There is a paradox—one, no doubt, among many—about contemporary Euro-American culture. On the one hand it has developed a capacity for systematic, and critical, ‘self-consciousness’, unequalled by any other, or by its own ancestral cultures. This is exemplified by the development in the last hundred years, practically from zero, of the human sciences, in particular of psychology and sociology. In Academe, at any rate, the intellectual leaders of our culture live in a world of ‘meta’s’—‘metahistory’, ‘meta-science’, ‘meta-psychology’, and meta-sociology too, I shouldn’t wonder. A capacity and techniques for reflexive thinking have been carried much further than ever before. In the Christian dimension of our culture the ecumenical movement and above all the Second Vatican Council illustrate the same trend; the Church ‘self-consciously’ reflecting on what it means to be Church—and whether and how far it is succeeding in being Church. Ecclesiology (the Church reflecting on itself), is now a most important branch of theology. A hundred years ago, when the word ‘ecclesiology’ itself had a different meaning, the Church’s reflecting on itself was rarely more than one weapon in an arsenal of polemical apologetics.

On the other hand Euro-Americans, in their cultural leaders and in the mass, still retain by and large the serene uncriticised assurance that their—or should I say ‘our’?—culture is normative, and that it is the only authentic realisation of human potentialities. It is, to be sure, not the only way of being human or organising human society, but it is certainly the best, and the only one that has a future.

Prayer is a form of bleeding, a wound which we may not staunch. Its source is in the incompleteness of the human person and its continuance depends upon that incompleteness, that wounding being maintained. To be a prayerful and spiritual person requires an affirmation and an acceptance of one’s incompleteness. It requires a realisation that the important thing about human beings is their incompleteness. Human beings are characterised by the unstaunched wounds within their nature. They reveal these wounds by being those who continually and consistently look towards the future, always seeking a new heaven and a new earth, always hoping, always moving forwards. Doing this is what makes us human. To settle into a final completeness of understanding is to accept an ideology. To believe that you have found a complete explanation, a way of seeing things that explains and welds into a complete pattern all of the inconsistencies of life, this is to lock oneself into a diminishment of the human person. To believe that you have finally uncovered and understood the means of human fulfillment is to embrace the roots of fascism. We are all radically incomplete, wounded at the centre. The Christian gospel is that which asks us to accept that incompleteness and to accept it as being, in itself, good news. Prayer then becomes the outpouring of the self which radically maintains and affirms our incompleteness, springing, as it does, out of our longing and desire. Prayer keeps us incomplete and to remain incomplete is the fulfilment of mankind.

In his article of this title, which we published last January, Gilbert Márkus OP wrote about the political and social influences of some of the evangelical groups now in Central America, and he mentioned World Vision, which has its headquarters in California. The Director of World Vision of Britain writes:

The incidents to which your author refers, predominantly in the present tense, occurred approximately five years ago and this in itself is extremely misleading. World Vision, while we have 75 development projects in Honduras, caring for some 10,000 children and their families, together with some other general development work, has no involvement whatever in relief projects or refugee involvement in areas where fighting is going on. This has been the case for approximately four years so, again, your article is misleading.