The phrase ‘ministry of the word’ is still an unfamiliar one even to Catholics who are fairly well instructed in the traditional theology of the eucharist. By comparison with talk about the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ the phrase seems odd, and even perhaps quasi-heretical. Historians of the liturgy can tell us a good deal, of course, about the way in which the ministry of the word, as an original and necessary part of the eucharistic celebration, fell into comparative decay, and indeed became almost entirely forgotten as an object of theological reflection for centuries. But here I want to point to an aspect of this subject somewhat different from that which is given to us by the liturgical historian. There is, I think, an important philosophical truth which needs to be dug up from the liturgical rubble in which we have all been poking around for the last few years, before we can give an adequate definition of the ‘ministry of the word’ as part of the whole eucharistic act, and therefore before we can begin to realise once more in practice what it means.

It can be taken as agreed, to begin with, that the eucharistic celebration has to do with the real presence of Christ. It is the permanent sacramental means by which Christ is made present to us and, indeed, in us. But, notoriously, the notion of the presence of Christ has been very variously interpreted.

One might put the point by saying that, in the past all the emphasis, in discussion of the real presence, has been upon the reality of the presence, whereas what we need to explore today in order to restore a balanced theology of the eucharist is the presence of the reality.

Apud barbaros. With this acid phrase Julien Green began his diary when a student at an American university some forty years ago. Feeling himself to be an embittered exile from Europe, a cultured man among philistines, his alienation was completed by the onset of sexual torments which, in a world of evasive hints and implications, gradually led him to realize he was much more radically different from his society than he had suspected. He was a homosexual. Riding on a country buggy to one of the splendid Southern homes owned by members of the American branch of his family, he turned towards the young driver and found his heart gripped as if in a vice: ‘Why do we suffer so when we look upon a human face? We can look and look, suffer and suffer more, but there is in that suffering a cruel happiness which ravages the heart. I did not know what to think, I almost wanted to die. No doubt that will seem exaggerated, but you must have gone through what I went through to understand what I mean.’ The ‘jeunesse merveilleuse’ of the American South of those days captivated him, and inevitably made him think of the Greek statuary the college authorities had disturbingly and unwittingly placed at frequent intervals along the corridors. All the more aware of this misery and unhappiness because he was, as his sister stormily told him, in a society where you had to do as everyone else did, he could not resist the revelation of himself that came through Greek poetry and Virgil.

To the European outsider the achievement of political independence in the last few years by most of the countries of Africa may appear as the ending of a story: the story of European colonisation and overseas rule, and the story of the nationalist struggle for freedom. As these are now over, it is presumed that conditions of stability must have been established, and that an era of uneventful development is about to ensue. When there is instead a revolution or other disturbance, one easily concludes that the country in question was not after all ready for independence. In the hands of a John Biggs Davison or a Patrick Wall every apparent deviation from western normality becomes one more item in a terrible catalogue of the sins of independent Africa: a ghastly warning which the white leadership of Rhodesia and the South are only too right to heed. This view does, of course, work on the curious supposition that a people not possessing economic and political stability should, ipso facto, be ruled by someone else. It seems to me that approaches of this kind to what is going on in Africa today present us with a dangerously false focus, implying as they do that the acquiring of independence should have marked the term rather than be the condition for the great process of building the new society. In fact it is that process which is going on now and I find it far more interesting than what happened before independence, but it is of its nature something which involves instability, tension and the immaturity which is inevitable when people are just beginning to face, collectively and individually, a wide range of new situations and problems.

Come to think of it, Nietzsche’s famous phrase: God is dead, has a peculiar ring to it. It is not an unqualified statement of atheism, a simple denial of the existence of God; it is rather the announcement that someone who was alive at some time has died. God existed, he exists no more. A straight atheism would have tried to prove that God is not, does not exist, cannot exist. Not so Nietzsche: for him God has died. The one who is acclaimed by a long tradition as the Immortal, has disappeared from the scene, his time is over. God is dead.

It would be too easy an answer if we decided that, in any case, Nietzsche is dead. We can perhaps qualify Nietzsche’s statement and say that in view of the faith of ever so many theists, God is not really dead yet. But, somehow, we have to agree that something is wrong with God. It would be accurate to say, resuming Nietzsche’s imagery, that if God is not really dead, he is at any rate sick. If he has not disappeared yet, it is at least clear that his appearance is not quite what it should be. And it seems timely to ask: what is the matter with God? Or, again more closely to Nietzsche’s language: what has become of God ?

I think we can dispense with arguing the actuality of the problem. Ever since the Bishop of Woolwich wrote his Honest to God, it has been clear that God has become a problem generally, also within the fold of the Christian churches. Bonhoeffer’s program of a life in a world come of age ‘as if God did not exist’ also finds a rather amazing following.

Professor Gregor Smith has done us all a service by writing an important, interesting and honest book. If I want to disagree with him, it is because he has made clearer to me than before what the issues are between secular Christianity and that kind of Christianity – which I shall call radical or revolutionary – which I think is the only alternative. We now know more precisely why there will soon have to be a frank showdown between two quite different kinds of leftwing Christianity. Pace Christopher Driver, we are not ‘all brother radicals under the skin’ (The Guardian, January 13th 1966) and my main debt to Professor Gregor Smith, and the point at which I part company with him most decisively, is that he shows me why his position is not nearly radical enough. Or perhaps it would be better to say he is radical only in a direction which is irrelevant to the real issues of our time, and offers a way of letting off steam through a kind of intellectual safety-valve which, like all safety-valves, works in fact to the preservation of the equilibrium of the present state of things. The trouble with his kind of ‘secular’ Christianity is that, like philosophers, ‘secular’ Christians have only ‘interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, eleventh thesis on Feuerbach). Despite his protests to the contrary, Professor Gregor Smith is, in this respect, a philosopher, and his secular Christianity is, as I hope to show, a philosophical scheme rather than a living faith.

Let me begin with a joke, a rather grim joke attributed to a popular Bavarian folk comedian named Weiss Ferdl. It seems that he would innocently inform his Munich audiences that the Nazi regime had just opened a new camp at nearby Dachau, and he would proceed to describe the elaborate security measures taken there – the armed guards, the dogs, the encircling rings of barbed and electrified wire. And then, when he felt the moment was right, he would deliver the punch-line: ‘But no matter what they do, they can’t keep me out if I really make up my mind to get in’.

It takes nothing away from the thousands who did ‘get in’ to Dachau or from the millions who ultimately peopled the other camps like Dachau to state the obvious fact that the great majority of individuals in Nazi Germany did not ‘make up their minds to get in’ but, quite the contrary, did what they were told to do so that they might be sure of staying out.

This obvious fact led many to embrace the doctrine of ‘collective guilt’ that was so popular as World War II drew to its close with the total collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’. This was the time when the question of the form of peace would take was already engaging the attention of the political and intellectual leaders of the Allied World. The prevailing tone was one of stern vindictiveness. The enthusiasts of the so-called Morgenthau Plan in America had their counterparts in the followers of Vansittart in England.

Those of us who are anxious to implement as fully and as quickly as possible the Constitutions and Decrees of the Second Vatican Council have enough and more than enough to inspire, encourage and occupy us. So much to be done, and each of us has only a life-time in which to do our utmost — so that the less obvious and less exciting things, which will apparently have little immediate result, are liable to pass unnoticed. For example, since 1936 there have been numerous pronouncements concerning vocations to the priestly and religious life. It is only in the past year or so, in England at any rate, that it has ceased to be bad form to refer to the appalling shortage of vocations, so that now there is no need to speak of it in veiled and polite terms, and we can face it for what it is, a rapidly accelerating process which will take all our prayer, determination and ingenuity to arrest. The first necessity of course is that we should want to do something about it, and not, as living members of the Church, exempt ourselves from the responsibility.

On April 26th, last year, speaking on Good Shepherd Sunday, which is the annual World Prayer Day for Vocations, Paul VI said:

It is not often in this country that the official or semi-official Catholic line on controversial questions receives the close attention devoted to it in Mr Walter Stein’s formidable article in the November Blackfriars. Its subject (the reader will recall) was nuclear weapons and the morality of their possession and use. There-may-well-exist-possible-lawful-targets; We-should-leave-it-to-our-governments-and-experts: H-bombs-are-just-the-counters-of-diplomacy; Possessing-them–is–only–an–occasion–of–sin–which–a–good–intention–could–render-remote; Do-not-we-need-an-up-to-date-ethics-of-bluffing ?

Any-how-was-Hiroshima-so-very-different-from-Dresden? All these recent instances of casuistry (when the need was for witness) inside and outside of the Council, on the part of prelates, theologians and editors, were patiently examined by Mr Stein; and he had no difficulty in showing their ‘appalling irrelevance’ in face of the ‘massively murderous commitments here and now’, the existence of which all the Catholic nuclear apologists admit though boggling at the idea that Christians should do anything practical about the situation beyond favouring disarmament by general consent. It is all very criminal and crazy (say our official Catholic representatives in effect) but there is nothing that a Christian can do about it beyond what any atheist or communist can do and is indeed doing already.

If that is the situation at least for us in Britain and U.S.A., the question arises urgently: why the boggling? Why have Catholics become so helplessly habituated to what our critic calls a falsely-prudent ‘legalist lifemanship’, a ‘diet of casuistic pusillanimities’? One tempting explanation might be a kind of irresponsibility; a serious layman might imagine he saw in the clergy (high or low) an inability to face realities, an almost charming immaturity as of schoolboys who do not grow up, for whom loyalties mean more than truth or justice.

A fact to begin with (from the Birmingham Post of 31 May 1966) about the new British Polaris submarine, due to be launched in September: ‘Each submarine, with its 16 missiles, can unleash more destructive power, 2,800 miles from the target, than all the bombs dropped by all the air-forces of the last war. It is the most powerful weapon yet devised by man.’’ The crews know (adds the newspaper) that if ever they have to use this power ‘they will have failed in their task – the maintenance of world peace’. Voices of criticism and protest seem to fade away in weariness, as the shadow of world-suicide creeps nearer. Of the statesmen and prelates who favour peace by nuclear deterrence, a few do stir uneasily as one fresh country after another ‘proliferates’ nuclear weapons of its own, or gets them from America. As for mere ‘conventional’ armaments, our own Government announces with pride its arrangements for selling them to pretty well all comers and nobody lifts an eyebrow. It is difficult not to agree with Fr Thomas Merton’s sombre summing-up of our situation as a turning of man’s creativity away from God to make a temple to man’s own powers of destruction. ‘The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man’s powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself.’ (The New Man, p. 42.)

This reply, under oath, by Air Commodore Magill to Pat Pottle at the British Official Secrets Trial of February 1962, distils the essence of nuclear deterrence. In the light of common sense, and especially with reference to just-war principles, it also defines its essential immorality.

As a prosecution witness, the Air Commodore was being cross-examined by one of the accused who had invaded a nuclear base in protest and who was later sentenced to imprisonment for this offence. The Air Commodore’s reply is of course in no sense surprising; everybody knows that the backbone of nuclear strategy remains the threatened icineration of enemy cities. (Even is so-called tactical nuclear combat and in so-called strategic counterforce strategies it is precisely the ultimate threat against enemy cities which seeks to enforce the proposed restraints.) What is notable about Air Commodore Magill’s colloquy with his objector is simply that it spells out, with a clarity we cannot evade, the moral cost of nuclear defence.

This cost lies not merely in the risking of future enormities; it involves gravely immoral intentions here and now. These declared intentions to execute city-hostages ‘if the circumstances demanded it’ are no less immediately and categorically genocidal for relating to a future hypothetical condition. No doubt there is a difference between murder accomplished and murder in one’s heart, but it is not a difference between murderousness and non-murderousness.

‘ ... and one of them, a lawyer, put a question to try him: Master, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments and the first. And the second, its like, is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments, all the law and the prophets depend.’ (Matt. 22, 35-41)

With these words Jesus pointed out the Way for man to come to God and the essence of that Way is a continuing love affair between each man and God, each man with himself for the love of God, and each with his neighbour whom he is commanded to love as he loves himself. Christianity is not only an intensely personal religion, binding each human person man and woman, directly to God in the love of friendship which we call charity, it is also an intensely social religion, because it commands that we love all of our neighbours as we love ourselves. As Christ clearly states, all of the commandments of the Law may be reduced to these two, because all of the commandments pertain to the ordering of self-love and love of neighbour to the love of God.

The love of God is both the means to the end and the end itself of human life, insofar as we must continually be in love with God in this life, and ultimately be personally united with Him in life eternal.

It is disturbing to realize how little the educated reading public knows about Africa, in spite of the fact that this continent has rarely been out of the news for the past decade. Reporters in the daily press, as well as columnists in the weeklies, may perhaps be excused for paying attention principally to rapid change or abnormality, since they take this to be their function. Perhaps too the reading public, however educated it may be, has been conditioned to expect the spectacular and the violent; the main features of living, largely constant, shifting only gradually in character and emphasis, do not make news.

There was something very distasteful about the way Ghana’s preparations for independence were watched by the daily press; it was clear that reporters expected a disaster when Africans took over the government of a state after so much shorter a period of tutelage than had been given to India and Pakistan. ‘Barely a lifetime of British rule.’ people found themselves thinking, ‘it’s bound to lead to civil strife, and the collapse of order. Then I suppose we’ll have to go in again to clear up the mess’. But the Ashanti people didn’t revolt; Ghana has remained internally at peace, though the methods she has used have caused dismay in Britain. This dismay need in many cases not have arisen. If some newspapers had tried more conscientiously to give an account of the social and cultural forces that made two-party democracy an unsuitable, in fact an unstable, form of government in Africa at the present time, readers would have been less alarmed or less despondent about the collapse of parliamentary opposition in one country after another.

The Quest for Love published a year ago, is the best of the dozen books – of poetry, of criticism, of short stories, of works on teaching and of anthologies for teachers – that Mr David Holbrook has put out in the last five years. Something of his programme, and of a distinctive overtone that accompanies it, can be seen if we go back to his dispute with a Times Literary Supplement critic in 1962. Writing in reply to a fairly stinging review of Llareggub Revisited, his book on Dylan Thomas, Mr Holbrook affirmed (and that seems the right word for it): ‘It is true that I feel strongly that literature is of little value unless it brings us deeper perceptions and insights into our own nature, and the nature of our living conditions, in time and mortality. For this reason I seek to write with gravity .. .’

What he intended, he suggested, was ‘a quest for gravity, in the art of writing, and in personal living’. Yet there is a kind of quest for gravity, and a kind of quest for love, which makes us pause. To care so much is a great thing, to declare oneself openly is an honest act which we see too seldom, but aren’t the references to time and mortality uncomfortably over-large, embarrassingly imprecise? A quality of Puritanism, as Hooker knew, is to think too little of the multiple lesser needs and laws that govern our lives, to concede a kind of hypertrophy to the greatest and (at worst) to dismiss with rancour those who cultivate the less.

It was time, evidently, that someone should make a thorough study of marriage as an institution in the twentieth century, and do so from a Christian point of view. It was time to look at the way people actually think and live their marriages and consider those of others. It was time to be unsatisfied with the Christian or Catholic label as sufficient indication of what the labelled ones think and feel. It was time to do all this in a way that would make clear to priests (priests both at work and in the process of education) the real nature of the problems they have to cope with in their parishes, and help them to do so with compassion but also with understanding. It is important that this should be done because the state of the institution of marriage in a particular community, and the attitudes and situations that attend it, dictate the structure and growth of that society, form its behaviour in other departments of life, and decide its future for good or ill.

Father Haring is nothing if not thorough. His 488 pages examine every conceivable aspect of marriage and family life from the sociological, theological and practical points of view, and every point he makes is supported by statistics of public-opinion polls (mostly from Germany, Holland and Belgium). And since my final, depressing conclusion at the end of all this hard work is that the book is a monumental disaster I had better begin by saying all the nice things I can find to say, and there are plenty.

The problem of politics is essentially the problem of reconciling personal relationships to public or impersonal human relationships. For we all feel a tension between the two. We begin life almost wholly within a context of personal relationships – with parents or parental substitutes who present themselves to us as individuals. It is only gradually that we discover a wider world or relationships with people who are not members of the family – that is to say, people not familiar to us. Slowly, as childhood proceeds our original personal relationships are surrounded by a rarefied and less know-able but ever-expanding ‘atmosphere’ of unfamiliar humanity. This ‘atmosphere’ of impersonal humanity can only be partially explored, and has for the most part to be taken for granted. Of course, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between those whom we know in a real, personal way and the surrounding mass of humanity which we can know only in a notional, impersonal way, but just as the familiar air of Birmingham or Bermuda gradually thins out as we go upwards, until we come to a point where we quite obviously need some artificial means for continuing to breathe there at all, so we gradually come to a point, in the exploration of our human surroundings, where we need to set up some artificial, institutional framework if we are to carry on living in that rarefied atmosphere. That is to say we need to set up a political order and to develop a political consciousness.

The fourth and finalSession of the Vatican Council hascometoanend. The mind of the Council, and therefore of the Church as a whole, is now expressed in the sixteen official documents personally promulgated by the Pope in its name, four in the third Session and the remainder in the fourth. Most of these documents include, in a greater or lesser degree, outstanding new or revived insights into the nature of the Church and its place in the world. Many of them reflect the differing outlooks, in their various phases, of the bishops of the world and of the People of God they represent. Yet, on the whole, we may be deeply grateful for what the Council has given to the Church and to Christianity, as we stand at the beginning of what must be the momentous post-conciliar era. For in a very real sense the documents are seminal, seed planted in the soil of the life of the People of God. A long period of careful cultivation, within the sensus fidelium, now awaits them, before the fruits they may produce can be fully estimated and judged.

What will be the outcome? Will there be a real renewal, the emergence of a far more distinctive Christian character and attitude, manifesting more clearly the radical nature of the Church’s impact on contemporary life, in our own nation and in the world beyond it? Or will the work of the Council remain largely on paper, in its Decrees and Constitutions? That depends on the Holy Spirit, who will not fail, and on a resultant response to spiritual leadership among clergy and laity, which could. At present, at diocesan and parochial level, among priests and people, little of what the Council’s measures might involve is thought out, or the necessary steps to implement them realised.

We are familiar enough now with the distinction between doctrine and theology, between the doctrinal content of the Christian faith as a form of life (an ‘experience’) and the variety of theological formulations in which this form of life is recognized and registered in the continuing self-awareness of the Christian community. The distinction is not absolute: there are cases in which, for instance, it is extremely difficult to imagine how a particular doctrine could be presented in any but the terms of some particular theology; but in principle at least it is always possible to express the truth of the faith in theological systems which, while of course never actually conflicting, nevertheless diverge considerably from one another in standpoint and procedure. This pluralism of approach has not developed so richly as it might have done because Christian thinking has always been conducted in predominantly European categories and modes of understanding. It may even be that the rapid unification of world culture which we are witnessing today decreases the likelihood that any theology will ever emerge that displays a serious indebtedness to distinctively African or Asiatic approaches to experience. Even if the faith is to survive in these continents at all, it may be bound to do so now in basically European, or post-European, ways of experience and reflexion; but it is clear enough that, at least in principle, there could be some encounter with God in Christ which would take a form sufficiently expressive of originally African or Asiatic approaches to reality to produce a ‘spirituality’ and a ‘theology’ radically different from anything hitherto (though words like ‘spirituality’, ‘experience’, and ‘reflexion’ are themselves so profoundly interwoven with European approaches to reality that one wonders how appropriate they may be here at all). God, even God in Christ (perhaps God in Christ above all, because thus God incarnate), requires to be encountered, that is loved and worshipped, by man – and man is always man in some particular culture, in some particular tradition, in some particular epoch.

‘Tell me you definition of politics and I will tell you your politics.’ The real breakdown in communication between radical and conservative is about the nature of politics itself, and I find this breakdown acute in reading Bernard Bergonzi’s article.

A radical politics summons and activates fundamental belief about the nature of human relationship and tries to sustain this commitment through the detail of actual debate; if it is truly radical, its detailed involvement is controlled by this commitment to an alternative version of man in society. A conservative politics is not convinced that politics is basically about belief; it is itself suspicious of political activity, as inevitably corrupt and crude, intellectually suspect, and rationalises this suspicion by making politics a ‘science’ or an ‘art’, a matter of efficiency or running the machine, a dirty but necessary business, or a career like any other. Because it is not gripped by the conviction that politics activates belief, it is liable to be quickly disorientated when it meets other, opposing beliefs; it is driven back on its own bases, hesitant and self-doubting. A conservative politics shows, for reasons that can be argued and understood, the paradox of a deep failure of belief in itself, as anything more than a technique.

Mr Bergonzi seems to me to illustrate most of these points. For him, politics leaves out a good deal of human activity, as his second paragraph makes clear. This, instantly, is the conservative definition: politics as the actual processes of local and national government.

In February 1963, the Cambridge faculty of divinity sponsored four lectures on Objections to Christian Belief. In the last of them, Canon Bezzant pointed out that we need a natural theology. He said that ‘the only possible basis for a reasonably grounded natural theology is what we call scientific. The difficulty is that there is no such actuality as “science”; there are many and increasing sciences’. True, but there is such an actuality as a scientific discipline, a scientific attitude and habit of mind, a scientific conscience. To be detached, self-effacing, humble, industrious, co-operative, patient, observant, accurate, truthful, temperate is to be scientific. But why should you be any of these things? Why not be passionate, aggressive, arrogant, lazy, lonely, hasty, purblind, vague, false and lustful? Because the conventions of society chance to forbid these self-indulgences ? They don’t. Perhaps it is that without these high qualities and the discipline that lives upon them you cannot penetrate the mystery of the world we inhabit or discern a meaning in the life we have to live. Why is the world open to Aristotle, Newton, Planck, Einstein and their kind and closed to Tamerlane and Jenghiz Khan? Only through the discipline of science, a moral and even mystical discipline, can the existing universe be induced to yield up its secrets. Moreover the power thus liberated creates a human situation (e.g. the unity of the human race) in which the inferior human virtues such as courage and thrift are all inadequate and we cannot live without faith, hope and charity.