This is the first of a series of articles intended to be an introduction to contemporary political theology. It is not meant to be a survey of movements or literature. There is already a large and increasing number of articles and books which set out to do this. But a certain amount of surveying will have to be done, since it is of the essence of political theology that it is tied to history. It is not a purely theoretical discipline which can be elaborated without regard to events. It has been generated precisely as a Christian response to events. It is a response to the historical misappropriation of theology. It is a historical re appropriation of the Bible, of the Christian tradition and of the practice of worship out of the hands of those who serve certain dominant class interests with the aid of these things. It is a critique of Christianity in its form of class ideology and at the same time a critique of those societies which use Christianity in this way. This critique is done in the name of a more authentic Christianity, faithful — it is hoped — to the true purposes of revelation. It is not therefore a mere branch of theology, to be studied alongside of a ‘theology of marriage’ or even a ‘moral theology’. It is not a ‘theology of politics’, still less a ‘theology and politics’: In the hands of the Liberation theologians at least, it claims to be a complete rethinking of theology: an entirely new turning point in the historical articulation of the Christian faith. Such a large claim will need examination. At any rate it is clear to me that theology can no longer proceed without a close examination of the role that it has played in the past and even now plays in the political determinants of human life. Christian theological innocence is now lost in this respect: as should have been acknowledged since Marx’s critique of religion. We cannot escape facing the use to which theology has been put in case the very purposes of revelation have been frustrated by this use. No politically neutral theology is now possible. Political experience has forced itself upon theology.

In this article I shall attempt to place Ernest Hemingway in an intellectual tradition that continues to exert enormous influence on our civilization. The paradox of placing Hemingway, of all people, in an intellectual tradition will be dealt with in passing. What I wish to do straightaway is to say what I mean by an intellectual tradition; I shall then sketch the particular tradition I have in mind; the body of the article will be devoted to substantiating the thesis that Hemingway belongs to this tradition. By way of conclusion I shall say why I believe this kind of thesis, the establishment of which requires a combination of philosophical and literary analysis, is important.

It is not all that easy to say what is meant by an intellectual tradition in the present context. It does not refer to a single, unified philosophical system but rather to a set or series of philosophical systems that hang together naturally because of certain assumptions or methodological principles common to all of them. It is a fairly loose mesh of ideas the various strands of which represent distinct lines of development but nevertheless interconnect and sustain each other in certain important respects. The three main strands of the tradition to which I shall assign Hemingway are empiricism, behaviourism and naturalism. It will be necessary to say briefly what each is or stands for and why they can be considered as amounting jointly to a distinctive pattern of ideas.

Traditional British empiricism received its classical statement from David Hume and it is to Hume that I shall refer in outlining this philosophical option. The importance empiricism places on the senses and on sensations — what Hume calls ‘impressions’ — is vital. The contents of the mind are divided into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’, and ideas are said to derive from impressions.

Karl Rahner, as we saw last time (New Blackfriars May 1980), believes that, however much of Barth’s work may endure, it has not settled the questions raised by Liberal Protestantism To that extent, then, Rahner sides with those who think that no amount of massive reaffirmation of classical Christian doctrine can ever dispense us from facing Bultmann’s programme of demythologization.

Schleiermacher, who died in 1834, was the first theologian to face up to the problems of making sense of Christian faith in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. No doubt, by the close of the century, the movement he initiated had degenerated into mere accommodation of Christianity to the spirit of the age. Barth’s outcry, particularly in the 1921 version of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, was a necessary protest against critical methods in biblical exegesis which amounted to rationalism, and against an emphasis on religious experience in systematic theology which promoted subjectivism. The counterpart in the Catholic Church to Barth’s protest was the encyclical letter Pascendi issued by St Pius X in 1907 condemning Catholic Modernism on much the same grounds as Barth rejected Liberal Protestantism. Even allowing for the difference in literary genre, and ecclesiastical function, Barth’s commentary is obviously an incomparably richer human and Christian document, and of altogether greater intellectual distinction. The papal letter, as far as the doctrinal part goes, was apparently composed by Joseph Lemius (1860-1923), an extremely influential Roman theologian otherwise known best as an effective protector of Mercier’s reputation and of the kind of neo-Thomism he was promoting at Louvain, which others in the Vatican suspected (rightly, as it turned out) of being disturbingly open to ‘modem’ philosophy.

When I went on 23 September to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Commission called to discuss plans for next Peace Sunday, I had no idea that I was going to be presented with a Bene merenti medal. Bishop Mahon, who was presiding over the meeting, suddenly started talking about people who spend thier lives in obscurity beavering away for a cause, and I thought he was going to tell us about some little-known curé in Lyons or Marseilles, when suddenly I heard my own name mentioned as someone who had been beavering away for peace ever since 1936 when PAX was founded. I was too astonished and abashed to make a speech at the time, so I am going to make it now, among my friends at Spode, where it will be several times longer.

I would like to begin by saying that I feel I was given the medal under false pretences, because for years I didn’t beaver away for peace at all and had nothing to do with PAX. I was in it at the beginning in 1936 and vividly remember Eric Gill arriving in his smock and biretta-type headgear at one of the early meetings in London; there was much discussion as to whether PAX should try to stop the impending war or try to help those who wanted conscientiously to object to fighting in it — the latter alternative was the one chosen by the more realistically minded. But then, owing to living abroad and the subsequent dispersions of the war, I lost touch with PAX. It wasn’t until the fifties — at the time when an improvement on the atom bomb was discovered by the scientists, namely the hydrogen bomb — that I wrote a letter to The Catholic Herald asking what on earth had become of that Catholic Peace Society of the thirties called PAX ... whereupon I was inundated with literature from Charles Thompson and John O’Connor, the organisation’s then Bulletin editor and secretary. So I immediately rejoined PAX, met those two gallant men, and not long after was asked to be a speaker at a PAX conference here at Spode — that would have been in 1959.

I do not think that ‘arraignment’, the term used by Fr Fergus Ken, quite hits off my comments on Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith. I said as clearly as I knew how that I thought the book was in most respects of very high quality indeed. It is true that I devoted most of my comments, partly for reasons of space, partly because panegyric is uninstructive and tiresome, to what I felt were its limitations.

I agree that it is often necessary to qualify the meaning of one’s statements carefully, if misunderstanding is to be avoided. But there is a difference between the kind of qualification which makes one’s meaning more precise than it would otherwise be, and the kind which seems rather to destroy it. Thus I can say, I love that lady, but I don’t intend to marry her’, and my qualification serves to clarify my feelings and motives. But if I say, I love that lady, but I don’t mind in the least if I never see her again, or if she falls under a bus tomorrow’, then I may cause a certain amount of confusion, and may reasonably be asked what I do imply in saying that I love her. A propos of Christian expectations of a future life, Rahner says that we must resist the temptation to think of them as ‘anticipatory, eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding’ (p 431). Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future, after the end of the present life. If Rahner’s point had been merely that the expectation was not arbitrary, or that the afterlife to be expected was not unconnected with the moral dispositions and the relation to God which a person was building up in the present life, it would surely have been expressed in some other way.

Certainly I have a use for qualifications, believing as I do that to contrast Christian faith with myth in the way that Rahner does (p 291) is an important strategic error in apologetics, unless one mitigates the contrast with a great many qualifications.