Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King. It’s the last Sunday in the liturgical year: next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to relive liturgically the whole mystery of the meaning of life as we apprehend it, once again from the beginning, with the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem.

The liturgical year now ends with the feast of Christ the King, This is a feast introduced by Pope Pius XI in 1925. What he was doing then was simply to sanction and ratify a movement which started about 1870 in the town of Paray-le-Monial in France, a movement called La Société du Règne Social de Jésus-Christ, the founders of which seem mostly to have been aristocrats and merchants. The idea behind it seems to have been to suggest that the power of Christ, the sovereignty of God, was not just in our hearts, purely inward and spiritual, but that it made some visible difference to society. After all, 1870 was not a very happy time for the Church; the pope had finally lost control of the city of Rome and withdrawn into the Vatican. The new secular state had just offered him a pension and declared his basilicas and palaces extra-territorial and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the government. Pius IX refused to accept these terms and it was not until 1929 that Pius XI signed a treaty with Mussolini’s government which ran on these lines. In the climate of 1870 it must have seemed natural enough to compensate for the pope’s loss of temporal power by propagating the idea that Christ’s sovereignty is more than merely spiritual and interior— that it is also social and political.

If anyone thinks there have been quite enough translations of the Bible already, he will have to think again, and make room on his bookshelf; for the New English Bible (NEB) has arrived. It was heralded in The Times on 25th February with a fanfare, unusually shrill and orchestrated. And well it might be, for this is news indeed. It completes a project begun in 1946 and undertaken by representatives of all the major Christian bodies in Great Britain and Ireland, except the Roman Catholics. Why not they? A recent national newspaper colour supplement answers that it is because Roman Catholic scholars were engaged on the Jerusalem Bible (JB). What, all of them and all the time? Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration, but there is prudence in the telling. For seeing the august body that sat in judgment on one another’s work in committee stage, Roman Catholics could be nothing but admiring and grateful observers; which in fact, latterly, some of them officially were.

Review is necessary now only of the Old Testament as the New was published separately in 1961, to explode some of the critical booby traps. The Massoretic Hebrew text has been made the basis of the translation and the finest English scholars of a generation are the instrument. The result begins boldly; for the very first words summon up the apparatus of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica and a host of modern scholars to support the reading: ‘In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth. . . .’ And in the next verse, where JB had the first of its more notable misprints, there is ‘a mighty wind’ sweeping over the surface of the waters, instead of ‘the spirit of God hovering’. Thereafter a great deal more of Hebrew scholarship, especially by English scholars, is writ forever in the text.

The ecumenical movement is now old enough to merit a second volume to its history. It covers the twenty years from 1948 to 1968; or in the esoteric language of the movement, from Amsterdam to Uppsala. The book inevitably abounds in this kind of esoteric language; conferences, committees and consultations have been held at innumerable places, and the name of every such place thereupon becomes the name of an event as well. One is used to the habit in general history, in which it seems normal to talk about before and after Trent or Versailles; but the over-employment of it in specialized history creates an atmosphere of a close little world of people in the know. So, too, councils and associations and conferences have multiplied, each equipped with its proper set of initials. Under the heading ‘Abbreviations’ eighty-six of these code names and letters, with their meanings, are listed at the beginning of the work.

All this makes it a book that is hard—indeed, I would say impossible—to read. Had the fifteen contributors to the volume been literary historians of genius, it is doubtful whether they could have made it much more readable than it is; the material is too intractable. What they have provided is an indispensable reference book for the study and understanding of the contemporary ecumenical movement.

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.

The contention that Coleridge’s rejection of Rousseau’s ‘Reason’ as a political principle is based on a deep-seated prejudice can be clearly established if we analyse further the roots of his own political position. Just as his plea for more adequate communication of truth is ultimately a petition for administrative reform, the nature of ‘truth’ itself being analysed at this stage only in terms of the difference between what is self-evident and what must be demonstrated (55f), so his definition of politics is ultimately a reduction to ‘administration’, to how things ‘ought to be managed’ (214). That this conveniently forgets that politics is also about policies, i.e. about morality—a position that Coleridge will otherwise argue for—is clear from the use of the term ‘political’ in his criticism of Cartwright: that he ‘confounds the sufficiency of the conscience to make every person a moral and amenable Being, with the sufficiency of judgment and experience requisite to the exercise of political Right’ (207). This position has its epistemological roots in his distinction between the ‘truths’ of science and the ‘probability’ of facts of experience (158)— a distinction which holds politically, provided one genuinely acknowledges the equal validity of quite different ‘experience’. The practical outcome of Coleridge’s position is a politics which can meet an argument that the expenditure on one naval operation to destroy nine French ships could have provided instead £100 for 2,000 poor families or built a new town in every English county, by the response: ‘These men know that it is not practicable’ (244).

To stop, then, at the mere recital of topography would be like having ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. Yet the meaning of the symbols which rise out of the topography enjoy a peculiar character precisely because, as Miss Gardner has already been quoted as saying: ‘The landscape of The Dry Salvages is a landscape remembered.’ I suggest that this symbolism, especially of the sea and the rocks and of the plight of the fishermen, has a peculiarly realistic quality. I use the word ‘realistic’ largely in an epistemological context, with, however, psychological and anthropological overtones. This quality refers to structure, theme and tone. Further, transforming and intensifying this realism is a structure best seen as deriving from a Christian imagination—an ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’.

It is commonplace to say that Eliot’s poetry is deeply indebted to the French Symboliste tradition. It is also commonplace to say that this tradition, as its theory and practice developed from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Valéry, became more and more self-enclosed and private in tone and meaning.The strong idealist tendencies of its epistemology and its premises of the poet’s isolation from society are well known.