The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.

What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).

’ Without this theological provenance I should never have come upon the path of thinking. But provenance decides destination’ (Unterwegs zur Sprache, page 96).

Heidegger’s reputation in English philosophical circles has suffered badly from his association with Nazism. It would be easy to accumulate quotations to show how the connection suffices to discredit him philosophically. Yet we have no reason for expecting philosophers to be politically informed or enlightened or even sensible. They have in fact often proved very authoritarian and elitist in their views. Furthermore, Wittgenstein visited Russia in the 1930s and seriously considered emigrating there as late as 1939, when it was surely plain enough what Stalinism was like (cf. John Moran: “Wittgenstein and Russia’, New Left Review No. 73), but this fact has not affected any one’s estimate of his philosophical work. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s philosophy may not be so independent of his social, political and religious opinions and experience as his most devoted exponents have led us to believe. But in the context of his life Heidegger’s connection with Nazism is not unintelligible.

In this paper we should like to examine some rhetorical aspects of theological language. Before doing so, it is necessary to argue for the view that there is a special mode of discourse appropriate to theology, as opposed to the view that theological language is composed of statements which differ from others only in terms of their subject-matter. There is a distinguished history of opposition to the view we propose; in a very ancient debate it has repeatedly been maintained that theology should be concerned only with discovering and promulgating true statements about God and our knowledge of God, and that any concern with developing sorts and styles of language can only distract and distort. This position is connected with another, which has received support from natural-scientific quarters since the mid-19th century especially: it presents a contrast between academic and non-academic language, founded on the contention that academic discourse occurs in the course of researches where the truth of a statement matters, but virtually nothing else about it does. According to this position, as long as a statement is true it should not matter to the researcher whether anyone finds it important or believable, or whether it impinges on anyone’s interests or needs. (Hence the expressions, presumably used chiefly in non-academic circles, ‘an academic point’, or ‘of merely academic interest’.) The concept of rhetoric can be used to point to misguided features in this type of position, whether it is taken up in relation to theology or in relation to research in general. But theology, more obviously than most subjects, highlights the dubiousness of trying to erect a linguistic ideal without attending to the effects on language of its most communicative aspects.

July 18th 1986 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the event has been widely commemorated both in writing and in exhibitions, both alike often focussing on the heroism of the men of the International Brigade who made the cause of the Spanish Republic their own. Less attention has been paid to the fact summarized by Professor Adrian Hastings in his recent History of English Christianity 1920—1985 that ‘probably at no other moment in 20th-century history has the English Catholic community, as such, taken up so strongly a political position, and to such effect’ (p. 325). The largely uncritical endorsement of the rebels’ claim to be engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church in Spain against a threat vaguely and frighteningly characterized as a ‘Communist-anarchist dictatorship’ was powerfully and passionately sustained, and the nationalists’ atrocities, for instance at Badajoz on August 15th 1936 or (at the hands of their German supporters) at Guernica in April 1937, either brushed aside or denied.

Of course, the cause of this enthusiasm lay in the appalling actions that accompanied the revolutionary situation of July 1936. The lapse into chaos defined for the nationalists by the murder of the right-wing deputy Calvo Sotelo on July 13th inevitably increased the readiness to welcome the military pronunciamento long in preparation, by social groups feeling their future threatened by the quickening pace of social change. The moderate socialism of Prieto was rapidly being taken over by the radicalism of Largo Caballero, and the fundamental, seemingly intractable issue of agrarian reform tackled no longer by legislation but by spontaneous occupation of land long denied to the landless.

‘Communism is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be such—Marx, 1844.

Whether marxism poses for itself solutions to the riddles of history, or whether, more narrowly, it is a science of social formations and their transformation, or some combination of the two—these are central issues of contemporary marxist theory. They are focussed in the debate over the work of Althusser, and over the ‘neo-hegelianism’ of the earlier Lukacs, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School and others (for present purposes I shall collectively describe this latter position as Critical Theory). It is in this context that the old disputes over the relation between the earlier and the later work of Marx remain so important, for they have implications for the orientation, scope and purchase of the tradition as a whole.

Reflexion on these issues is prompted by two recent collections of marxist essays. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s Studies in Critical Philosophy (New Left Books, £3.25) provides for the English reader essential material for the assessment of the claims of critical theory, Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble’s From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed & Ward, £5.50) is an attempt to establish the unity of ‘the total Marx’, without falling back on the critical theory tradition. In both texts, however, there are surprisingly similar lacunae and areas of fuzziness, especially over the definition and analysis of human needs. This is a concept basic to the marxist tradition but one which has rarely been satisfactorily investigated, or its crucial and awkward significance grasped (Mascolo, Meszaros, and Kolakowski not withstanding). It is on this question, and the related ones of the objectivity and universality of marxist theory, that I shall concentrate.

John Noonan’s long history of contraceptive practice and prohibition demands and merits a second reading—a cautious one. For all the intelligence and careful research that has obviously gone into it, still it has its gaps and misreadings, some of them by no means peripheral to the author’s overall picture of an ‘evolving’, ‘developing’ ecclesiastical doctrine of love and marriage and the Church’s consequent attitudes toward contraception. One of the wider gaps is the failure to consider a man named Nicole Oresme; and one of the more serious misreadings is of St Thomas Aquinas.

Noonan proposes that Martin le Maistre—a late fifteenth-century layman of considerable standing and reputation in the University of Paris—was the first theologian to make the ‘modern’ breakthrough. Prior to him the Augustinian insistence, found also in St Thomas, on procreative purpose as the only justifying motive for conjugal intercourse held all but exclusive sway. Marriage was rarely or only secondarily thought of in terms of love, and where love happened to be encouraged it was not the kind that had to do with sex. Sex as a biological function productive of the child, well and good (for the most part); but as an expression of love, as an experience of joy and pleasure, no—on pain of at least venial sin. But with le Maistre we have ‘the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic approach to marriage’. His ethics offer reasons justifying conjugal intercourse other than procreation and even suggests (though hesitantly) venereal pleasure as a licit motive.

Few topics, to my mind, have been so obscured by inter-confessional debates as that of grace. Particularly, perhaps, among Catholics really everything written or said since the sixteenth century has been conditioned by reaction against, or attack upon, positions asserted to be those of the Reformers. Yet when we trundle out these statements and the arguments on which they rest, it comes as a surprise to be told that we have got the Reformers quite wrong; even their contemporaries, the theologians of the Council of Trent, seem to have been grappling with adversaries of their own making. When we go on to look, far too superficially in my case, at what seems to be the Reformed view about what we hold, the results are even more surprising.

Perhaps the Reformed take theologians more seriously than we do, but even given this, they seem, from our point of view, to be remarkably unlucky in the ones they read (but I except Professor Torrance from this).

It may well be—because Catholics have been guilty of practically every absurdity—that there are theologians who hold, or have held, that grace is a separate thing, something we can possess; or a reservoir on which we can draw. Some, not of very great repute, have certainly held that a right use of natural powers deserved or brought about a giving of grace. On a hasty reading it might appear that even the great medieval theologians regarded grace as the embellishment of an aristotelian universe. But when it is suggested that even Roman theologians regard grace as an impersonal something, a something detachable from the presence of the living God, I do not recognise anything more than the selection of one set of statements interpreted in the worst possible sense and used out of context.

A medievalist rarely has the experience of reading for review a book which impresses him at once as being definitive in its field. Père M.-H. Vicaire’s life of St Dominic gives this impression in the first chapter, and continues to give it till the last page is reached, many days later. No historical work as such is immortal; Thucydides and Gibbon live chiefly as great literature; new material will always be appearing and no two ages will seek for exactly the same answer from their sources. But when these reservations have been made, it may be confidently said that this life, like Vacandard’s Life of St Bernard and that of St Philip Neri by Ponnelle and Bordet, will remain standard for fifty years or more, and will influence all that is written about St Dominic far into the future. It will not put an end to writings on the saint; it will probably lead to their multiplication, for St Dominic is a figure that every generation and every nation will seek to understand and to interpret for themselves, but it will be from these volumes that the ore is extracted, to be moulded into this shape or that.

It is frequently remarked, both by historians and devout Catholics, that little is known of the life and personality of St Dominic. Certainly the lessons in the breviary on his feast day are more than usually successful in confirming such a view. One reason for this is undoubtedly the lack of an adequate contemporary biography. Dominic lived when the monastic centuries, with their tradition of literary education and classical models, had ended.

The other day the members of a Youth Club asked if something could be done to prevent people who came to address them from talking about sex. They said, with considerable feeling, that nearly every speaker seemed to think that youth was interested in very little else; which is, of course, not true. It is not teenagers who are so much concerned with sex as their elders, who continue to produce and read a stream of books and articles. Reaction against secrecy has led to an over-anxious campaign to assert the importance of sex, which in turn is in danger of producing the reaction that sex does not matter much anyway. A good many people have become bored by sexual experience itself, and the last thing they want is to be further bored by reading about it.

A balance has to be struck somehow, and the four books listed below illustrate awareness of this in very different quarters. On the whole they illustrate the growing recognition that the fundamental question to be tackled has to do with the nature of human beings; what is being human ? For the Christian this is a theological question, answered in terms of our creation by God in his own image and likeness. Our life, even on the simplest level and at any time or place, must be somehow like God’s own life if it is to be truly human.

We are told something of what God’s life is in the doctrine of the Trinity.

1. The man himself.

An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.

Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.

According to the Second Council of Constantinople (2 June 553) there is ‘one divinity in three hypostases or persons’. Today it is commoner to say that there are three persons in one God. No doubt these formulations come to the same thing, but what is that?

The English word ‘person’ translates the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, expressions for the masks actors wore on the ancient stage. Since the same actor might appear in different masks, playing different roles, in the same play, the word suggests that the Persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit, are three roles the one God plays, three appearances or aspects he presents. The word ‘hypostasis’ is a philosophical term for something that exists on its own like a living organism; so to call the Father, Son and Spirit ‘hypostases’ is to suggest that they form a kind of three-membered society. Both these suggestions are unorthodox. The first is Sabellianism, the second tritheism, and these are the Charybdis and Scylla between which the speculative theologian is supposed to steer. But is such a course possible? The use of both terms by Constantinople II rather poses the problem than solves it.

It is not usual, in this country at least, for Catholic moral philosophers and theologians to question the metaphysical status of the principles which they employ in their arguments. God and man are taken for granted, and morality is presented as a systematic description of the order which ideally obtains between them and of man’s defection from that order. The importance of such a procedure is hardly to be denied: a programme, a map of life, coherently and consistently recommended, answers immediately to our present perplexities. And yet these perplexities cannot all be satisfactorily resolved in a programmatic way. For our perplexities are not merely first-level perplexities, which may be defined in terms of a restricted number of possible courses of action in a world whose intelligible articulation is something securely achieved, and which may thus be resolved in terms of the recommendation of just one of these courses of action. Our perplexities are also (when they are acknowledged) second-level perplexities, concerned with the articulation itself, throwing into question the very nature of the order obtaining between man and God. Our morality cannot be wholly derived from a metaphysics established without explicit reference to morality. We can no longer merely insert our action into a programme; to attempt to do so, to refuse to admit the existence of second-level perplexity, is to evade a responsibility, the serious acceptance of which could and normally should creatively achieve a fresh, a more interior insight into our relationship to God by deliberately taking the strain of the question in order to offer an answer.

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.