There is a moment in Twelfth Night when Feste, the Fool, calls upon Malvolio, who has been shut up in a dark cell as a dangerous madman. Feste, to render himself the more credible as a prison visitor, puts on a parson’s gown and a parson’s voice and, announcing that he is Sif Topas the curate who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic, counsels him with words of learned but wholly irrelevant comfort. Malvolio, in frustration at this pastoral nonsense, most violently asserts that he is in no way mad, so the pretence clergyman agrees to test the prisoner’s wits by posing some deep question. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?’ From that encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world we expect in a renascence man, Malvolio answers that the philosopher held ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Ruthless as if he were conducting a seminar, the Fool then asks him: ‘What think’st thou of his opinion?’ Malvolio rather carefully replies: T think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion’. But at this the clergyman seems quite convinced that Malvolio is indeed mad, declaring as he hurries away, ‘thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits’.

This absurd interlude seems to many, I suspect, a paradigm of theological talk. A madman and a fool disputing about the soul, and as if this were not itself at sufficient remove from reality, disputing about whether the human soul might animate a bird. I should like to suggest to you, however, that while this dialogue may very well present an unkind parody of the manners both of the student of religion and of the believer, its satire does not, even glancingly, touch the theologian’s enterprise.

Ernst Troeltsch is not one of the more accessible of twentieth century theologians as can be seen from a bibliography of his works translated into English which appears at the end of Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, translated and edited by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, Duckworth, London, 1977, £12.50. Whether the translation of the four papers presented in this volume will make him more popular is rather doubtful as he here shows himself at his most heavy and turgid mainly because he writes in abstractions about methodologies. When Troeltsch does discuss issues and authors he is usually concerned with Protestant theology in the Nineteenth Century and it sometimes seems very dated (as in ‘Half a Century of Theology: a Review’ [1908]). This book, however, aims to introduce Troeltsch to a wider public particularly in Germany where he has never had much impact and this volume, curiously, is a translation of the original German including introductory articles by the English editors. These three articles by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye are tremendously helpful in giving an overall view of Troeltsch and his place in modern theology.

Troeltsch is important, it would seem, mainly as a philosopher of religion rather than as a systematic theologian. He is at his best when discussing theological methodology, but when he tried to do straight theology, as in the article ‘The Significance of the Historical Jesus for Faith’ (1911), the effect could be disastrous. In this article Troeltsch assumes at the outset that traditional orthodox dogmatics had crumbled by the beginning of this century and that no one who was at all sensitive to modern intellectual sensibilities could accept the doctrine of the incarnation and that Christ had done anything concrete to redeem or save mankind. Salvation, whatever that might mean for Troeltsch, comes directly to the individual from God and, he says, is a matter of personal experience.

York Minster has always provoked mixed feelings. When I first saw it as a schoolboy, and wandered around it with my father, looking at as much of the stained glass as we could see (not all of it having been put back after the Second World War) and making rough jokes about some of the classical oddities inserted by Sir Albert Richardson or his eighteenth century predecessors, I came away with a lasting impression of gloom. It now seems a false impression, though there are many people in York who regret the recent changes that have effaced that brooding presence. But what is also certain is that the Minster has undergone a spectacular piece of renewal and that the exploration of it is a new and exciting experience.

It is not just the structural transformation, devised and supervised by Bernard Feilden and his professional colleagues, fundamental and important in the development of the science of restoration as it is; it is not just the cleaning and restoration of the whole Minster so that it shines like new (even the crumbling west facade, probably the main victim of an enthusiastic facelift); it is not just the new role of the Minster in attracting a vast increase in the number of tourists to the city, so that the Minster now welcomes, as tourists and worshippers, more people in a year than ever before; it is also very much the fact that the nature of the investigation and restoration—and the presence in the chapter of some outstanding scholars as well as the founding of the new university of York whose outstanding department is history—has sparked off a massive investigation of both the Minster itself as a historical document and the mass of documentation available in York, in archives now carefully preserved.

If religion means anything at all it has to be relevant to our situation. It has to be a source of hope for desperate people. I specify desperate people because those who are contented and happy rarely search for solutions until disaster forces them.

In my sixties, I try to come to some conclusions. There is not much time left and the need for solutions is more urgent. I have made a long search by attending Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal, Quaker and other Christian churches and by reading their writers. All have made some impact but left me unsatisfied. It may be my fault that I am not satisfied, but, since my search has been genuine, I have taken some drastic measures. I have sold my house and home and come to London, with only my clothes, to work as Warden in a hostel for thirty-six homeless women. These are raw material. They come from every kind of society and collectively they have suffered everything. Very often I admire individuals; altogether, they are generally hell to live with. They do not read and their vocabulary is limited. Some are on drink, on drugs; on smoking, on bingo, on jumble-sales or on sleep. I reflect again that religion in England has been mainly the product of the middle classes expecting a high degree of articulation and academic study. Words come to mind—‘eucharist’, ‘litany’, ‘transubstantiation’, ‘atonement’. Even worse, ‘logical positivism’, ‘language-games’, ‘semantics’, ‘linguistics’. Can these help my guinea pigs? Not much.

So many of our theologians and philosophers seem to live in ivory towers. Do they starve, live on social security, feel they are socially worthless, sink into apathy, drown their pain in gin or whisky? To these troubles add physical illness and emotional instability. I repeat, religion must be relevant to the situation and provide a source of hope for desperate people.