In his 1977 book The Eucharist and Human Liberation, Tissa Balasuriya reminds us that “the Eucharist has an extraordinary potential for being an agent of personal and global transformation. Every week about two hundred million persons meet all over the world in Christian communities”. Yet, while the worldwide eucharistic congregations every Sunday probably make up the largest global assembly for any shared purpose, the influence of the Eucharist on the creation of a more just, more loving and (in fine) more Christian world is almost minimal. The paradox, in Balasuriya’s words, “is that while the example of Jesus should make the eucharistic community a champion of social justice and a contestant of social evil, this happens very seldom” (op. cit. pp 85-6). Gustavo Gutiérrez has tried to emphasize this matter by directing a hard hit at the quality of the Eucharist as celebrated in some gatherings:

But Gutiérrez oversimplifies here. The search to help resolve the paradox has to take into account not only attitudes of indifference but also the theological schizophrenia — the great divorce between faith and life, or religion and everything else — which underlies and has helped to form them. This has led, on the one hand, to the ‘idealist’ and ‘spiritualist’ attitudes which (as Gutiérrez maintains) avoid the sharp realities; and, on the other hand, to the huge loss of credibility sustained by the Church in the present century and hence by the Eucharist which lies, or should lie, at the heart of the Church’s work.

It is now some thirty years since the Summa Theologica began to circulate in an English translation. Little or no notice was taken of it even by those whom it was calculated to serve in their service of scientific truth. But the lack of welcome which befell it had no dismays for those responsible for an enterprise which seemed on the verge of folly. They were not moved when they were told that no good and little profit could come of an attempt to put the clock of modern progress back seven centuries to the age of Aquinas. Such friendly dissuasion as they were offered they met by silence and a more dogged resolve to forgive even their enemies by offering them not a cup of water but a wine-cup of the best!

Experience and instinct had taught them that after the bewilderment of modern materialistic expansion had settled, the human mind would begin to ask questions, that is, to seek ultimate causes. Some sort of unity would be demanded by the finer minds who could not brook a mere welter of multiplicity. Men would seek to discuss with their fellow men the What and Whence and Why. They would desire both a Synthesis and the power to discuss that synthesis with minds of like desire. All this meant that they would demand such a Synthesis if it existed and accept some standarised vocabulary in order that discussion might become a possibility.

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.

My aim is to make some observations on the recent Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (summarised in The Tablet of 30 June, pp. 838—841) in an attempt to clarify certain issues and assist the debate which has been initiated, of which this journal has revealed ample evidence. These are observations bom of the awareness that the language of this document finds interesting echoes within my own tradition and consciousness as a Reformed theologian.

The very notion of a vocation of theology is an interesting reflection of the sense that theology is a church-related activity. As terminology employed to specify a certain view of ecclesiastical polity it is in fact reminiscent of Calvin’s Institutes and so—naturally—this view of theology and the theologian has been one of the main features of 20th Century Protestant theology, with its rediscovery of Classical Reform. Part of that lovely sense of theology as a church-related and indeed church-based activity has been the realisation that theology is of necessity an ecumenical task. When this is ignored its practice is less than its profession and its efficacy is at once frustrated. Hence my title; for it is neither as an onlooker judging somebody else’s concerns nor as an outsider with no interest or involvement in the issue that I would make these comments. Rather, this is the deliberate attempt to bring what assistance one part of the Church can offer to another—and this on the basis of the unity of our common faith and the singleness of theological purpose.

Englishmen curious about the New Morality, and fatigued by the well-known but amateurishly incompetent exposition it has suffered from certain domestic divines, are benefited by the publication here of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (SCM: 1966; 25s). The author is professor of social ethics at the Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been active in ethical debate since the days when the Old Morality was the Newest thing around.

Dr Fletcher, if I understand him correctly, repudiates the Old Morality because it is legalistic. It takes the form of a code, a list of commandments which assign an invariable moral value to certain acts. The circumstances attending these acts may, it is granted, slightly modify their morality. But the ultimate and over-riding source of good and evil is the very nature of the acts. Against such a view Fletcher urges that no action is good or evil in itself. It cannot be judged in isolation from its meaningful and meaning-giving context of circumstances. The morality of any action is correlative to the love it expresses. Admittedly there are many deeds which are usually sinful (e.g., abortion, lying, arson, extramarital intercourse). This is not because they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they most often embody selfishness, exploitation of one’s neighbour, and irresponsibility. In certain extraordinary circumstances these actions might so bespeak commitment and caring and sincerity that, viewed in their contextual totality, they would be adjudged good and virtuous. Since morality is not intrinsic to acts, we can never resort to inflexible ethical laws or norms.

It is eight years since Miss Sayers brought out her ‘Penguin’ version of the Inferno, to the surprise of some readers of her other thrillers. Yet it need not have surprised anyone that she was interested in Dante and perfectly capable of writing competent footnotes to the Comedy. The long Introduction to her Hell was, however, a remarkable manifesto in praise of Dante and in justification of her own rendering of his verse—at once a declaration of love and a statement of method. But the most remarkable thing was the translation itself, a real tour deforce—five thousand lines rhyming in an intricate pattern, the terza rima, which I should have thought an extraordinarily difficult one to handle in English, though Miss Sayers herself speaks of the task with noticeable sans gêne. It had been attempted before, notably by Binyon for the whole Comedy and by Professor Bickcrsteth for the Paradiso; both commendable efforts, especially the latter. Then came Miss Sayers’s attempt; and then, a little later, the quiet voice of Mr Eliot was heard, off-stage, to observe that it would be better not to try to reproduce in English, with its less copious and ‘in a way more emphatic’ rhyming words, the ‘light effect’ of the more easily rhyming Italian. Mr Eliot did not refer, in the lecture from which I quote, tc Miss Sayers; he was talking, with characteristic modesty, about his own Dantean pastiche in Little Gidding; but his judgment is relevant, of course, to any rhyming English version of Dante. Meanwhile Miss Sayers, undeterred and unwearied, forged ahead with hers. Hes Purgatory appeared in 1955; and though for the moment, I believe, she has turned aside to deal with the trifling matter of the Chanson and Roland, no power on earth, we may be sure, will prevent her from crowning her labours, in due course, with a Paradise.

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 row over exorbitant salaries for the bosses of private monopolies has resurrected an ancient belief: namely that we can distinguish just from unjust prices. ‘Just prices’ — as distinct from prices set by market forces and the profit motive — once formed part of the ‘moral economy’. A just price for some article had to be proportionate to the amount of work that went into making it and to the contribution it made to the common good.

The great enemies of justice in fixing prices were (and are) ‘damnable avarice, sensuality and pride’ (as the fourteenth century writer Henry of Langenstein rightly remarked). His views resonate loudly today in the columns of the newspapers and on the tops of Clapham omnibuses. But they can hardly be squared with the economics of Adam Smith or his modem disciples. For the tradition which Smith initiated put things asunder which the earlier tradition regarded as having been joined together by natural law and ultimately by God: in particular, ethics and politics (and therefore economics).

A commentary by an eighteenth-century Spanish scholastic on Adam Smith’s political economy may seem an unlikely place in which to find a sharp and telling critique of ‘the state we’re in’ (to use Will Hutton’s punning phrase). Yet (as Scott Meikle’s recent article in the February 1995 New Blackfriars shows) Fray Antonio de la Santisma Trinidad, who was appointed in 1791 by the Spanish Inquisition to examine The Wealth of Nations, was able to reveal something fundamentally amoral with the ideology which afflicts contemporary Britain.

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never”. We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.

(a) The brief account of events in Spain since 1931, given on earlier pages, shows the vivid contrast between the weakness of the Republican-Socialist Government of 1931-1933 and the strength of the Republican Government of 1936.

(b) It would be incredible blindness for anyone in the working class or on the side of democracy and liberty, not to see what made this change possible.

(c) It was the developing strength of the working class as a whole; and this, in turn, was made possible by the developing strength of the Communist Party, and the triumph of its policy of unity and resolute class-struggle.

(d) As in other countries, the leadership of the Socialist Party was hostile to the Communist Party, hostile to a policy of class-struggle, filled with illusions of a peaceful, democratic constitutionalism.

(e) This led to the policy of holding back and even repressing the militant struggle of the rank and file in 1933.

(Spain, by Emile Bums, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, page 11.)

The italics are those of the pamphlet. I am writing this not as a politician, nor in the interest of politics, but solely in the interests of the poor and of peace.

1. I need not point out that this honest self-witness of the Communist Party dispenses us from the almost impossible task of finding out the truth about the alleged terrorism on one side or the other. For the moment the only available evidence is of one side about the other; in other words, it is admittedly the weakest of all evidence.

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.