Suppose we had the revolution! and that an upheaval comparable to that of 1789 were once more to sweep away much of the existing Catholic fabric. How, in the light of the theology of post Vatican II, would we reconstruct our forms of Christian association?

The most obvious prophecy is that such associations would not be primarily or purely clerical in form. But they might well lead to a distinction between the originating association, which would be lay, and the foundation (or Congregation) which might become clerical, growing out of and serving the permanent needs of the association. An association would no longer be confined to a neighbourhood: it might be formed by lay-people living at a distance from each other, but united by a common aim and determination to develop a homogeneity of spirit. To form such an association would take many years, so that its character could not be pre-determined by simple manifestoes or rules: it would need time ‘to work clear’.

When the usefulness of the association had been proved, and its character made manifest, then and then only would it be time to see how a foundation could be established which would function as the permanent nucleus or heart. Some members of the association might be called out to minister on this more permanent basis. If Catholic, the membership of the association might want its foundation or congregation to be priests, the better to associate the work with the bishop and, through him, the universal Church. On the assumption that ‘the higher your building is the broader must be its base’, a slow growth to personal maturity would be the qualification for such candidates.

In the William Golding canon, his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most famous, and his third Pincher Martin (1956), his most controversial. Both are concerned with castaways and their fight for survival.

When Lord of the Flies opens, nuclear war has broken out in Europe and a school from the English Home Counties has been evacuated by air to an unknown destination. On the way there, they are attacked, the crew killed, but the ‘passenger tube’ released so that it can crash-land on the jungle below. At the moment of impact, a fierce storm is raging and only a number of boys manage to scramble out of the ‘tube’ before the wind sweeps it out to sea. Those who do, scatter in the forest undergrowth. They are castaways —though it is some time before it dawns on them that they are marooned and consequently ‘island castaways’.

The island itself is never named. But the description of its coral reef, beaches and fruit trees that bear all the year round, suggests that it might be one of those lying south of Sumatra or Java. The ways in which the boys adapt to their new tropical background is the book’s main theme, and ‘interpretations’ of it depend largely upon a reader’s own particular preoccupations. Freudians, for instance, have already noticed how the boys’ behaviour fits the theory that if parental, state, or Church authority is taken away, children will evolve their own gods, totems, and taboos. Others have found the story a parable of man stripped of the sanctions of custom and civilization.

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.

Homily for the fifteenth Sunday of the year 1970 (12th July).

Readings: Amos 7, 12-15; Eph. 1, S14; Mark 6, 7-13.

There are many things which one can admire in Jesus, whether one is a Christian or not. But in some things Jesus is rather primitive and does not seem to know what he is doing.

I have no doubt Jesus would be turned down if he were to apply for the job of sales manager. At least, if he dared tell how he is accustomed to ‘sell’ his own message. His method seems entirely wrong.

Of course one can say: ‘Jesus is not selling soap or encyclopaedias; he is bringing a religious message.’ This may well be so, but does that make any difference? A message is a message. There are lots of people who sell religious and political messages. They want to make us their allies and they do it well.

To send one’s disciples away to preach without any material provisions seems rather irresponsible. Jesus’ order not to wear two tunics looks fussy. Much planning is not done, either. You just stay where you are received without even wondering whether there are not more strategic points from which to work. When people refuse to listen to you, you simply leave and do not really try to force on them the idea that they would be much happier if they listened to you.

Sending our preachers in rather poor conditions may be a gimmick, but not planning carefully where you stay and for how long, and refusing to put in too much effort, suggest that Jesus' preaching methods could be improved on. His message may be interesting but he does not know how to sell it.

I want to present a difficulty, and to commend a solution to that difficulty. The difficulty is one which frequently troubles Catholics and (to a lesser extent) other Christians; the solution to it is neither original nor new, but I think deserves wider publicity than it has had up to the present time.

The difficulty is as follows. Catholic Christians, and also many Christians of Protestant or Eastern communions, hold that the assent of believers is demanded to some doctrines, like those of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which have been solemnly defined by the Church in the past. Now the definitions are couched in terms derived from earlier philosophical world-views. So, if we assent to the doctrines, it seems that we are thereby committed to the world-views which provided the terms in which they were defined.

It seems that the believer is faced with the following dilemma: to reject the world-views as outmoded and therefore to reject the doctrines; or to accept the doctrines and with them the worldviews. No Catholic can really accept either alternative; to accept the second is to be stuck for ever in the conceptual scheme of the ancient world, while to accept the first is, logically, to cease to be a Catholic. ‘Conservatives’ in the Catholic Church tend to emphasize the importance of maintaining the doctrines, and divert attention from the apparent consequence that the outdated world-views must also be retained. ‘Progressives’ tend to emphasize the imam portance of dispensing with the world-views, and to gloss over the problem of in what sense, if any, one can consistently at once maintain the doctrine and abandon the world-view. To raise this question at all is to invite the stigma of conservatism at the hands of progressives, of progressivism at the hands of conservatives.

I begin with a number of propositions, which I shall try to develop in detail:

First, that allegory and symbolism are modes of analogy, that both present one thing or concept in terms of another thing or concept, even though the ways in which they do so have been contrasted and seen as vitally different.

Secondly, that the novel is, as a literary form, generally characterized by realism, and that realism as a literary technique would appear to be opposed to analogical modes.

Thirdly, that this opposition is only apparent because all literary discourse (and in a sense all language) is analogical, in so far as it is meaningful: and that this is confirmed by critical practice.

Fourthly, that the development of the novel therefore reveals a continuing compromise in which overtly analogical modes are allowed to permeate the apparently non-analogical mode of realism in the interests of meaning.

Fifthly, that in the modern period the value of realism as a technique begins to be called into question, and consequently the point of the compromise begins to be called into question, with significant repercussions on the form of the novel.

In putting forward these ideas, particularly the last one, I have been much influenced by The Nature of Narrative (1966), by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg. Surveying the whole range of Western narrative literature, they suggest that the primitive oral epic was a synthesis of two antithetical types of narrative, one which they call empirical, whose primary allegiance is to the real, and the other fictional, whose primary allegiance is to the ideal.

Although exports of underdeveloped countries (UDCs) are currently for the most part primary products, with manufactured exports accounting for only about 15 per cent of the total, the future growth of these exports is crucial to the success of efforts to achieve economic development in these countries. This proposition holds regardless of whether one accepts the widely held view that the outlook for primary product exports is extremely bleak. That view may turn out to be too pessimistic. The proposition that there is a secular tendency for the prices of primary products to decline relatively to those of manufactured products is not well supported by either the empirical evidence (unless that evidence is presented rather selectively) or by theoretical argument. The claim that prices have a long-run tendency to move against primary products and in favour of manufactured products is often the premise to an argument that the UDCs will have to move out of specialization in primary products towards the production and export of manufactured products. But the conclusion does not depend upon this premise. Production of primary products will not be a sufficient basis for economic development even if the trends in primary product prices turn out to be extraordinarily favourable. A few countries in specially favourable circumstances may be able to raise income per head to high levels by achieving high levels of productivity in the production of primary products and obtaining their requirements of manufactured products through international trade.

There is no easy way of resisting the impression that of the five continents the Asian has been the least responsive to Christian missionary endeavour. While in Africa the Christians today account for over 20 per cent of the total population, in Asia not even 4.5 per cent are Christians. Yet Asia has a population which is nearly three times that of Europe and Russia, and nearly twice that of Europe, Russia and the Americas. Over Asia’s vast and densely inhabited territory, seventy-three million Christians live (except perhaps in the Philippines) in a diaspora situation—scattered, small in relative number, seemingly of little civic consequence. The question then is whether these Christians who form the Church in Asia have any relevant function towards their far more numerous non-Christian fellow citizens, and whether, beyond the boundaries of Asia, they have anything to say and to contribute to the Church Universal and to the world.

Since it is such a little flock, it may seem futile and pretentious to speak of the role of the Church in Asia. Indeed, the claim is advanced—even though the title of this paper may be misleading—that this role spans not only Asia, but the whole world. The title might of course have been framed less ambiguously as the Role of the Asian Church. But this could have carried certain never-intended separatist overtones. For it is the one Church of God which exists in Asia as in all the other continents.

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 present renewal of the eucharistic liturgy can be seen as an attempt to remove some of the long-term effects of the imposition of extrinsic rites and ceremonies on the once-and-for-all given sign which is the means by which believers have access to the mystery of God in Christ. But what is that given sign? Bread and wine, certainly, but bread and wine precisely as bread and wine, in their full reality, bread demanding to be eaten to be bread and wine requiring to be drunk to become what it is. Not two substances which could be any other two substances, which could be say wood and iron, but bread and wine to be eaten and drunk. The sign is not therefore simply the two substances of bread and wine but all that these substances involve in the very understanding of them as bread and wine: people, and people to eat and drink them. The sign is the meal. The sign is the gathering of people eating and drinking the bread and wine, and the present liturgical reforms aim at making that sign as transparent as possible.

Questions can of course be raised as to just how little of such a sign there has to be in order for it still to constitute the authentic sign. What is meant by ‘people’? Does there have to be anybody there at all for the sign to be the sign? And if obviously there has to be (since a sign of this sort is a sign only for people), then how many people?

Reviewing some books about Utopia recently (Encounter, April, 1969), I ventured the suggestion that ‘Eros is traditionally an anti-utopian force, though he is catered for in the specialized utopias of pornography—what Stephen Marcus has called “Pornopia”.’ I used the word ‘traditionally’ because we have seen in modern times the emergence of a school of thought that may properly be termed ‘utopian’, in that it is concerned to construct ideal models of the good life, but which inverts the values we normally associate with Utopia, recommending not the enhanced exercise of rationality but the liberation of instinct, not the perfecting of the mind, but ‘the resurrection of the body’. The latter phrase is adopted by Norman O. Brown as a concluding slogan in Life Against Death (1959), a representative text of the new utopianism. It is not, of course, wholly new, and may be readily traced back to earlier sources—to Nietzsche, to Lawrence and, pre-eminently, to Freud, on whom Life Against Death is a commentary.

Brown begins with the paradox propounded by Freud, that civilization or ‘culture’ (which is prized by traditional utopists, and which they wish to perfect) is based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy. Freud himself was shifty about the proportionate loss and gain of this process, but Brown is quite certain and uncompromising: civilization is self-evidently neurotic, and the only solution is to end the tyranny of the reality-principle, to substitute ‘conscious play’ for alienated labour as the mainspring of society, and to restore to adult sexuality, narrowly fixated on genital and procreative functions, the ‘polymorphous perverse’ of infantile eroticism.

The foundation on which any adequate moral theology or philosophy must be built is an anthropology which does justice to the complexity of human life. The picture of the human agent enshrined in the manuals of moral theology on which the clergy of past generations were reared showed man as an intelligent being making rational decisions. Manualist man was a free agent bound in conscience by various hierarchically ordered systems of law. The ultimate ground of all morally significant law was the positive will of God. This picture has lost its credibility. The insights of contemporary philosophy have shown it to be an arid and distorted representation of the human condition, and moral theologians have already begun to enrich their understanding of man by incorporating into the picture they use elements drawn from existentialist, phenomenologist and even logical positivist analyses.

For moral theology as such, not only must an adequate picture of man be developed, there must also be a serious reconsideration of the traditional images of God. The God of the Divine Plan, Lawgiver, Judge, is no more credible in this century than is homo manualensis. Once again the work of demolition and reconstruction has already begun: philosophers and theologians (in this country one is tempted to add ‘respectively’) have already gone far in the work of dissecting and reconstructing or replacing the outmoded images of God. As yet, there is little sign of the more radical aspects of theological revaluation having a transforming influence on many moral theologians.

The subject of love is of universal interest, has engaged the attention of many since time immemorial and will continue to do so. It is of particular interest to Christians who make the claim that God is love. If this be true, as we believe it to be so in faith, then no other subject has comparable significance.

It is for this reason that I am beginning this paper with a brief personal credo which can be stated simply. If Christianity finds itself in a situation in which few are really concerned with its survival and may find it irrelevant to their lives, I believe that in the final analysis this is so because Christianity has failed in one of its fundamental missions, which is to be the catalyst of love in the world. After every possible case for its present demise—such as its internal disunity, its obsolete language and liturgy, its authoritarianism, its pessimism over sexuality, the disarray of its structures, the anachronism of much of its habits and its legalism—have each been exhaustively examined, I believe there is left one enduring and irreducible reason which is succinctly stated by St Paul:

In the first of a series of lectures under the general heading, ‘Theology-Development or Deviation’, Fergus Kerr considered shifts in the way people are accustomed to think of the Church. He suggested that the central insights which have been recovered in recent years, though the beginnings of this recovery can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, are those of brotherhood and eschatology;- and he further suggested that this was not just a recovery of a long lost insight into the mystery of the Church but had been a real experience, though under a somewhat different guise and under very different names, in the English Catholicism of the inter-war years, in the ‘loud and draughty’ singing at benediction in a northern city parish for example. These two notions of brotherhood and eschatology are likely to recur constantly in discussing whether in any theological area there has been development or deviation, and certainly when the eucharist is in question.

It is probably in the area of the eucharist more than in any other that Catholics tend to suspect that there has been not so much development as deviation. That, no doubt, is because there has been a not insignificant change in eucharistic worship over these last ten years, a change altogether unlooked for by most Catholics, unlooked for, unexpected, and therefore viewed with some suspicion.

I.R.F.E.D.—Institut international de recherche et de formation en vue du diveloppement harmonist, the International Institute for Research and Training towards Integrating Development—was founded in 1958 by Fr L. J. Lebret; in spite of the originality of its research and activities, the Institute is still virtually unknown to the British public.

I.R.F.E.D. defines development as the constructive use of all natural and human resources in order to promote the collective and interdependent progress of mankind. This means that I.R.F.E.D. seeks to tackle development in every sphere and at every level; it is concerned as much with making peoples aware of their situation as with the structural reorganization of international trade and finance; with socio-cultural change and strategies for industrialization; with the appropriate spiritual, moral or political conditions for participation as well as with the rational, economic or technical constraints on planning. This global approach demands a simultaneous and concentrated emphasis on a series of different activities —fundamental and applied research, analysis in depth, programming, training, publication, the stimulation of public opinion, etc....

Development is the key word in the work of the Institute; but how is it visualized ? Since the discovery of underdevelopment has made people aware of the word, the concept, the myth of development, its significance has evolved concurrently with the different stages in the analysis of underdevelopment and the elaboration of strategies or policies to combat this. I.R.F.E.D. has followed this evolution, taking part in its different stages, and progressively acquiring a deeper understanding and a clearer insight into a pattern of development which is dependent on man’s gradual assumption of control over his world-wide destiny.

There had been a derailment ahead of us at Dover, so I was late arriving in Brussels. More delay getting a taxi, because I couldn’t quite bring myself to use my elbows like everybody else; the hotel room booked for me, I calculated, would cost about £5 10s. a night, so unless I stopped eating or found another hotel I should have to return home well before the Congress ended. At last the Congress hall itself: the Palais de Congrés, past the illuminated fountains of the Mont des Arts and a small knot of cameramen, timidly into the Salle Albert 1 er—and it really hit one then: the long, high swooping hall, with what must have been a thousand people in it, the brilliant glare of the television lights reflected from the huge black and white poster at the back of the stage, bearing the words in English—

Schillebeeckx was speaking in French from the rostrum; his voice resonated effortlessly from the splendid amplification system, though soon one became aware of a counterpoint of high-pitched chirp and chatter from the badly adjusted earphones of theologians unaccustomed to the use of simultaneous-translation equipment; this was to form an accompaniment throughout the Congress. Photographers crawled and flashed unceasingly over the stage; from time to time the television cameras swivelled and turned their black snouts on the audience. I would return to England the next day, I decided; no, no, not this, not this.

I am old-fashioned enough (of course I really mean orthodox enough) to hold that every word of the Bible is true, to use a rather loose figure of speech. But I am also rational enough, I hope, and just modern enough to concede that a pretty good case can be made against the Bible being totally true, and it can be made in the name of history, and with the accusation of mythology.

Each of these words has a different bearing on the truth of the Bible. History is a very respectable word, and if I say that the Bible contains history, that it gives an account of salvation history, or that Christianity is a historical religion, the reader will doubless accept the statement as true, if trite. But mythology is still rather a disreputable word, and if I say that the Bible not only contains myth but presents us with a salvation myth, and that Christianity is a mythological religion, some of my readers may be tempted to wish me burned at the stake. Yet I am prepared to say so, with qualification, and still to maintain that the Bible is totally true. In fact, I think the mythology charge against it is easier to meet than the charge of containing bad, or false, history.

In any case, it is clear that a defence of its truth will involve us in a consideration of the meaning of these two words ‘history’ and ‘mythology’, not to mention the word ‘truth’, as well as requiring us to examine the facts in the shape of biblical texts. The neatest way to proceed would doubtless be, first to say what I mean by these words, and then to look at the biblical evidence in the ligfit of my clear definitions.

‘Unfortunately, in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money (that is, his argument) because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and most unseemly appearance, are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partizans.’ (I, 227).

Coleridge’s comment on ‘those, who under the name of Reviewers, volunteer this office’, of the door-keepers of literature, seems to have passed unnoticed by many of his own reviewers. Of the reviews of The Friend I have seen, few have departed from the model drearily and anonymously exemplified in The Times Literary Supplement: a meticulous account, drawn almost entirely from Barbara Rooke’s scholarly introduction, of the immediate circumstances in which The Friend was first published and later revised; a few (very well-deserved) compliments on the superb editing, and a final paragraph asserting the profundity and continuing worth of Coleridge’s thought—and the job is done. Such a response is doubly inappropriate in this case: because on Coleridge’s own grounds the value of scholarship lies in the re-disclosure of the relevant in the dated, and because this particular work is concerned precisely with an attempt to outline underlying, ‘fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’ (title-page). To assert its continuing worth is to acknowledge both points; but—as Coleridge would agree—mere assertion is inadequate.

The recent report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ was greeted by the press with mild bewilderment and a sigh of relief. Britain apparently is not, after all the fuss, on the edge of racial violence. Three-quarters of the population are demonstrated to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘tolerant-inclined’, and it is precisely in those areas where coloured immigrants actually live that there is most tolerance.

In this respect Colour and Citizenship, like the laborious P.E.P. report on discrimination, is useful. But more than volumes of sheer fact are needed if we are to come to grips with the race problem. We would be mistaken to point out too enthusiastically that the majority of people in this country have been shewn to be tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ is a pretty word and one that is heavily overvalued by the prevailing ideology. In effect it means ‘indifference’. It makes little difference to the established economic system whether people have purple or green wallpaper, whether they worship in Anglican churches or synagogues, whether they sleep with members of the same sex or not. These are matters of indifference to capital organization and only a paranoid will be really intolerant of the options that people make. In other circumstances those choices could become significant. Only a minority of the population (10 per cent) are prejudiced in the strictly defined sense of Colour and Citizenship and for many of those it is apparently a symbolic issue (like the members of the Conservative Party in Surbiton—where there are some hundred black people out of a population of over 60,000—who wish to replace their liberally minded M.P. with a supporter of Enoch Powell).

Modern man seems to have lost his faith in nature. This is part of a more complicated loss of faith in himself. For the artist, anyway, nature is largely only an extension of himself, and it is primarily the artist who finds nature has become a sort of enemy. In outlining a possible new theory of our relationship with nature, we are attempting to integrate in our own work that nature which we too, as modern men, find antipathetic to our consciousness. I would like to explain more exactly what I mean by nature. This is not the nature which is looked for in empirical experience, but rather that a priori intuition of creation which we experience because of our subjective sense of our ontological contingency. A scientist, viewing what he calls facts, apprehends the causality of things, but cannot from that deduce an eternal source from which all things emanate, a source essentially different from its own emanations. For the artist, on the other hand, everything has its still centre, a centre which is somehow the very voiding of all that he perceives, an inner principle, one might say, of naughting, which is yet the most cogent affirmation which he knows of all that he sensually experiences. So we see at the very crux of our concept of nature there is a paradox, a paradox which leads the artist to distrust his own empiricism, because for him nature can never be wholly revealed. The most essential part of nature lies hidden in that which is beyond concept, and only enters into the artist’s own concepts as a certain mystery, a certain secret, or ‘shakti’, which accepts his own works as a temple for its presence, through an ineffable condescension beyond the power of the artist to understand.