Most people would agree that there are differences between Christian hope and Marxist hope. But where do these differences lie, and how are they to be specified? According to one widely accepted account, Marxists entertain high hopes for the future of the world, convinced that nothing can stand in the way of their realization. Christians, on the other hand, entertain no such hopes. They are prepared to tolerate, or endure, the state of the world as it is, hoping only for a future ‘beyond’ all futures, an eternity that will redress the tragedy of time.

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?

There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.

The admirable work edited by Fr Alberic Stacpoole OSB, Mary’s Place in Christian Dialogue (St Paul Publications, 1982), makes no mention of Fatima. Even Archbishop Eugenio Cardinale’s paper on ‘The Mariology of Pope Pius XIF does not allude to it, which is strange because in Portugal he is known as ‘the pope of Fatima’. Clearly, Fatima has no place on the agenda of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose papers are collected in this volume. The reason for the omission is evident: Fatima represents the kind of mariology that most alarms and scandalises our Christian brothers and sisters. With its banal ‘messages’, its improbable miracles and its resolute anti-communism, it makes the faith ‘risible’, and St Thomas says we should not do that.

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.