When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.

This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.

At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.

Our practical reasoning goes well and attains its truth when we identify ways of adequately getting or realising really desirable objectives. And our objectives are really desirable (good) when they either are really desirable in themselves, or are steps on the way to getting or realising some such intrinsically desirable objective or objectives. If there is but one such intrinsically desirable objective, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know what it is. If, as seems much more plausible, there are a number of intrinsically desirable objectives, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know whether there is some further objective to be attained or realised by or in the pursuit of some or all of these intrinsically desirable objectives, i.e. whether there is some further point to pursuing them; and if so, what that further point or objective (‘last end’) actually is.

Some say that the true last end is some one of the intrinsically desirable human goods, say, the highest instantiation of the highest good attainable in this life, thus contemplation of God to the extent that God is knowable through His creatures. Others agree that it is some one human good, but place it beyond this life, and beyond merely human capacities, in the beatific vision and contemplation of God.

There are obviously two groups of structuralists. There are the original quiet ones, led by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, and the new noisy ones, propagating ‘neo-structuralism’ with its political message.

Already last year this process of degeneration was apparent in France. Le Monde for the 30th November had a special section of comment and opinion called: ‘Was structuralism killed by the movement of May?’ Its general conclusion seems to be that it was.

With the publication of Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, a series of essays from various hands, published late last year, it is apparent that the work of the original structuralists cannot be brought together into any meaningful synthesis. Their key concepts are meanwhile being misapplied.

It may seem incredible that such a promising idea as the original concept of structuralism can have been side-tracked so soon, long before any adequate understanding of what it was has penetrated into our discussions in this country.

Yet it is the case. Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? is only the last, and poorest, attempt to give a unity to something which defies unification. In the last two or three years we have seen appear Clefs pour le Structuralisme, by Jean-Marie Auzias (1967); Comprende le structuralisme, by J-B. Fages (1967); A Quoi sert la Notion de ‘Structure’ ? by Raymond Boudon (1968); Le Structuralisme (in the series Qtie sais-je?) by Jean Piaget (1968); and last and most formidable of all, Claude Lévi-Strauss ou la ‘Passion de I'Inceste'.

The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.

The Romans can, with some justification, claim the credit for having introduced the most important legal and religious concept of war into the history of human thought. Thereby they made a very notable contribution to the historical development of international law. To the Romans we owe the idea of the ‘just and pious’ war which has for centuries characterized and influenced the thinking of Western Christendom about the place and practice of war. The idea is still with us today. Like the conception of natural law, the story of the ‘just and pious’ war is that of successive contents flowing though an ancient concept.

In the Rome of the kings it was the function of a special college of priests, the fetiales, to carry out the somewhat elaborate religious and legal procedures, the Jus fetiale, determining the declarations of war and peace between the Roman people and their enemies. The jus fetiale formed part of the Roman jus sacrum, and thereby imported a moral and legal element, over and above that of religion, into the formal procedures of establishing peaceful and hostile relations between Rome and other political communities. The task of the fetiales was to determine whether the duties owed to Rome by her neighbours had been violated, i.e., whether or not Rome had been wronged. These wrongs were well established and defined in Roman religiolegal thinking and formed part of the substantive content of the jus fetiale. These wrongs constituted the causes of ‘just and pious’ wars, to the Roman mind.

Wittgenstein once said (to M.O’C Drury): ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life’. I do not think Wittgenstein meant to point to some personal hang up Musical experience is at once very important to those to whom it is important at all and very difficult to talk sense about. It is not quite impossible to do this, but impossible to do it consistently. One thinks of the remarks on music in Cocteau’s Rappel a I’Ordre or Stravinsky’s Conversations where remarks which illuminate sit cheek to jowel with remarks that merely obscure. Or, to take a more academic example, what is one to make of the fact that the same man, Donald Tovey, wrote the brilliant essay on Schubert and Loewes’ setting of Erlkönig that so illuminates the whole world of Lieder, and the utterly wrongheaded paper on Mozart’s fortieth symphony? It is then no disparagement of Hamish Swanston to say that his article, A Redeeming Occasion, in the March number of New Blackfriars, whilst full of interesting ideas, adds up to a general thesis about opera that must be rejected.

Dr Swanston likes opera. His taste is good, or at any rate I like most of the same things he does. He sees, what I am sure is just, that Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner are in quite a different category from other composers of opera. He would add Beethoven, on the strength of Fidelio, to this select company—here I strongly disagree but more of that in a moment. Going to one of this select group of operas is a redeeming occasion in the strict theological sense and Dr Swanston does not hesitate from a final conclusion that opera at this level ‘has itself become a way of theologising’. Here I am sure, he is quite wrong but to say why I find difficult because I do not think going to the opera, even to different performances of the same opera, is one kind of experience about which general conclusions can be made.

When a Western European landed his plane among African natives who gazed unbelievingly at this enormous bird, he proudly remarked, “In one day I have covered a distance which used to take me thirty”. Thereupon the wise black chieftain came forward and aSked, “Sir, what do you do with the other twenty-nine?”

Here we have the twofold possibility of man’s fundamental decision: on the one hand technological rationality, and on the other the question of the meaning of human action.

The question also of the relationship between human hopes and expectations by self-liberation, and the God-given salvation: the question of God as connected with the context of mankind’s striving for liberation. The question of God-talk is intrinsically connected with the question of human integrity and wholeness in such a way that this question of identity cannot be solved in purely theoretical terms: it includes the question of a particular life-style — contemplative and political as well. Talk about God stands under the quest of our way of life; it is governed by the question of our real concerns in life.

Most primitive peoples are without anything which we should call a theology, and civilised people often know as little about their systematic theology as though they were without it. Such people live their religions, without regarding them also as subjects for investigation. If they do investigate, it is with the intention of showing the truth of their religion, or of being reassured in its truth, or of understanding more of that truth. Religious controversy has always been about other matters than the value of religion, and between people who practise some form of religion this is still so. It does not occur to them that religion has a ‘value’ or alternatively no ‘value’ for society; what can be evaluated are particular religious beliefs and practices. The study of religious beliefs and practices, however, has tended to fascinate those who do not practise any religion, and would claim to have none. Mr Dawson has quite naturally found it impossible to ignore such a public, and the literature on which it has been formed and fed.

No man would attempt to write upon the legal system or economic transactions of another society, still less of Society, without first taking stock of his knowledge of such matters in his own country, and without in some way systematising what he supposed to be law and economics at home. Religion, unfortunately, has been served like art, which everyone supposes himself to be versed in, without either the labour of study or the familiarity of practice.

Our inquiry is about two aspects of Eckhart’s theology of the Trinity. One aspect (treated in Part I, which appeared in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars pp. 169—181) is his use of the notion of bullitio (‘boiling’) in the Latin treatises to explain personal procession and plurality within God. The other is the distinction in Eckhart’s German sermons between the Trinity and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond the Trinity.

The conclusions drawn from the first part of this study were as follows:

Bullitio is a metaphor depicting the generation of the Son from the Father. It also depicts the procession of the Holy Spirit, but this aspect is less developed in the texts we have considered. The metaphor represents an attempt to explain and to understand not only the nature of this generation but also the reason for it. I have argued that Eckhart, unlike Aquinas, allies himself with the tradition of a priori proofs of the Trinity. Bullitio is a metaphor for the self-diffusiveness of the good, and is related to Bonaventure’s notion of fountain-like fulness (plenitudo fontalis). Bonaventure finds in the latter attribute, which he regards as a property of the Father, the reason for plurality in God. There are no grounds to suppose that the idea of bullitio involves a distinction between God as Trinity and as the hidden Godhead.

Ebullitio, the first moment, as it were, of the creative emanation from God, is rooted in bullitio, and these two ideas are linked by that of formal emanation. The generation of the Son is a formal emanation; it is also the formal cause of creatures, insofar as this cause is considered in abstraction from their efficient and final causes.

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.

The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.

One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.

I should like to record something of the result of an experience which I had from 1961-1964. I was working as a schoolmaster in Ghana for that time. The school was in routine and academic syllabus an imitation of European, mainly English, practice but we were fortunate in being far removed from the main centres of European expatriate concentration. To be precise we were 130 odd miles from Accra and 70 odd from Akosombo which were the nearest and most accessible European centres. In a town of 10,000 inhabitants throughout our stay at most 40 were expatriates, at the least 20. They included from two to four priests, the Presbyterian missionary and his wife, the two mission doctors and their team of from four to six nurses. This situation could mean virtual isolation in a tiny social world where contacts with Africans and adaptations of ways to theirs were kept to a minimum, or it could provoke a more or less natural interchange between African or expatriate which the circumstances made easy and spontaneous, rather than condescending, folkloristic or exotic. It would be untrue to say that it did not involve a conscious decision, but the decision was an easy one.

Old attitudes die very hard even in so out of the way a place. Many of the Europeans did choose to huddle together to lick over each other’s sense of isolation endlessly; contacts with Africans were kept to a minimum, formality of occasion was encouraged, any crossing over of racio-customary lines was seen as daring and by no means habit-forming.

This document was composed by the Dominican friars who have been imprisoned in Sao Paolo since 1969. It is the outcome of their joint reflections and those of other Christian prisoners with them. It falls into three parts: a meditation on the role of the Church in the world (extensively summarized here), an account of conditions in Brazil, and a consequent justification of the revolutionary position they have adopted.

The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, continuing in time the presence, mission and work of Christ in the world. Jesus Christ came to make salvation a reality, and his whole life, including his death and resurrection, was a witness of love. The mission of the Church is to continue this living witness of love, and the Church is essentially missionary, sent to the world to witness to Jesus Christ among men.

The Church cannot exist on the fringe of the world; it is in the world and has to be constantly present to the world, since it is there that its mission lies, as light to the world, salt of the earth, the leaven in the dough. This is why the Council produced a Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.