That branch of the science of psychology, which perhaps is the most important branch, Medical Psychology, has without doubt become a permanent addition to Medicine.

One Catholic psychiatrist has called this contribution towards the Art and Practice of medicine ‘the other half of medicine,’ and the medical faculty would be inclined to endorse this opinion. Most of the teaching hospitals have now a special department in charge of a psychiatrist who acts as lecturer in psychological medicine as Well as being consultant to ‘out patients’ for functional nervous disorders.

Before the war the Institute of Medical Psychology, besides teaching and training an ever increasing number of doctors who wished to specialise in this subject, gave treatment to 14,986 new patients in the twenty-one years of its existence. The number of doctors who specialise in psychological medicine is now very large, and in this war all branches of the services have special psychiatric hospitals, where service patients are given treatment. This brief summary of the activities of psychological medicine should be sufficient guarantee that the medical profession has given an ‘imprimatur’ to what was perhaps considered at one time to be the happy hunting ground for cranks, faddists, and even charletans.

Theology’s role in modern society is slight, to say the least. People are not waiting with baited breath for new ideas from theologians—unless, of course, they are theologians themselves. Scientists and, for that matter, scholars in general, cannot easily be persuaded to read a theological essay. And surely it is also the case that, while theologians themselves may be rather more ready to read in the literature of the human and even the natural sciences, they will often find it hard to relate what they read to theology. It is little comfort to them to be told that other academics too know astonishingly little about what is happening outside their own field.

The specialisation that goes with expertise partly explains this state of affairs, but this fragmentation of knowledge is also a reflection of the fragmentation of human society. We are all supposed to be autonomous adult beings obliged to live together, in the same time and space. We behave like cars passing one another on the same motorway (and hopefully in the same direction), without much communication that reveals who we are, what we desire, hope for, love. When we enter the motorway we have to fight for our place. It is not self-evident that we have one. Society is not any more a warm blanket woven from many threads, where every thread the weaver may add has already its place before it is woven in. We are free. In principle we may choose our place, competing with those who happen to covet the same place as we do.

The forms for my Poll Tax registration are sitting in my kitchen as I procrastinate about how to deal with them. The whole process of registration and the tax to which it is a prelude seem so despicable that I would gladly decide at this point not to fill in the form and begin the process of non-compliance. When Ministers say that this tax is fairer than the present system I feel anger and also a sense of powerlessness. There seems to be little doubt about the injustice of a tax which charges the richest person in a locality the same as the poorest. Yet another part of me recognizes what a fruitless gesture non-compliance would be, seeing that the mechanism exists to sequester my resources: I will have to pay it whether I like it or not. Is there room for manoeuvre in responding to this injustice? How best can I work constructively to remedy this injustice when there seems to be little space for any alternative action?

In situations like this there are two important tasks for me as a Christian. Firstly, I am determined to join with those who feel similar revulsion to this piece of legislation, with its regressive attitude to taxation and alarming implications for civil liberties. Secondly, while I have to renounce my desire for ready-made answers to my problem, whether in Scripture or Tradition, I must attend to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today, but use the necessary discernment to enable my path of discipleship to be in continuity with our ancestors in the faith. What I want to attempt in this article is to put on paper some of the clearing of the Biblical ground that enables me to continue the journey of faith and take into account this new challenge to our contemporary witness.

The concluding part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984. In the first part of this study of the relationship between the religious use of political images and concepts and their use in political rhetoric (published in January) the author focussed on the political and religious language of early seventeenth-century England.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a kind of stability returned to England; conflicts and controversies there, of course, were in the political sphere, and even a ‘glorious revolution’, but compared with the preceding decades a certain peace and order is evident. There was a strong desire for peace among various sections of the population, and the economic and social foundations were being established upon which was to rise the political stability of the following century. By 1688, writes J. Carswell, ‘Englishmen were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics rather than fighting about them’. Ideas of arbitrary power were assailed and the notion of a law depending not simply on the dictate of a sovereign once more became predominant. This is particularly evident in the deist and rationalist writers of the period. God is not ‘an arbitrary being’, insisted Matthew Tindal, but the reasonable governor of a regulated universe. The order, stability and rationality of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ provided a model for social and political relationships. It would be little less than horrid and dreadful blasphemy, declared the influential archbishop John Tillotson, ‘to say that God out of his sovereign will and pleasure can do anything that contradicts the nature of God, or the essential perfections of his deity’.

Perhaps I’d better make two preliminary remarks. One is that, inevitably, I am speaking out of tradition which is quite clearly marked in a confessional sense, that is to say quite definitely in the Roman Catholic tradition, and so some of the problems which vex me may be peculiarly Roman Catholic problems. I mention that because certainly I shall not only be looking at thought that has been located in our Roman Catholic continuum, yet at the same time there is no doubt that for various reasons (in the way I have been philosophically brought up, and so on) this particular tradition will be exerting pressures, even of an unconscious kind, on me.

The second preliminary remark is of a rather different kind. I understand that I am supposed to open this discussion — that is to say to talk for twenty minutes or half an hour, but not more than that, so I think I can allow myself a certain amount of freedom. I would like to raise questions, rather than get answers.

So, two preliminary remarks. One to protect myself against seeming over-confessionally characterised, on the other hand I want to protect myself against being thought too questioning altogether.

The title has been quite definitely chosen as “Thinking about Jesus Christ”. I mean that title fairly strictly, because I wouldn’t like the title to be “Jesus Christ”. Obviously, thinking about Jesus Christ can’t ignore the object of the thinking! But I would like to stand back a bit from actually thinking about Jesus Christ, and think about thinking about Jesus Christ, because at the moment it seems to be a most difficult area.

TIME: the present.

SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.

Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.

Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.

Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!

Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?

Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.

Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.

Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.

A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter's Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and discuss reincarnation, abortion—to refute it—; invoke the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities, but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his Catholicism, has never paraded it.

Return to the Sources

A Winter's Tale is a masterpiece of subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is sometimes discernible in Rohmer’s previous film, A Summer’s Tale, where references to Kant were a little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six films made during this ten-year period, especially My Soul’s Friend (1987), were far superior to the average film production.

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.

In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?

This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.

The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.

We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.