The challenge which faced all Greek intellectuals alike, can be reconstructed in the form of a dilemma. Either some way of fixing a descriptive meaning for the language of moral evaluation had to be found, or, in the absence of any such method, moral and political virtue would have to be taught as a way of living well in a world where prescription was the basis of morality. In either case the fact remained that virtue would have to be taught.

Those who, like Plato and Aristotle, opted for the first alternative were faced with the problem generated by their adherence to the old assumption: namely that the descriptive meaning of moral evaluation was discoverable only in terms of some social order, some polis, to be a good member of which was to be a good man. But the very fact that it was now problematic what one’s polis was, meant that the search for moral knowledge had to be seen as the proper object of some specialized form of enquiry into the question, that is, of what those social roles and relationships are, to understand which is to understand how the good man acts. Thus it is that if political virtue can be taught it also needs to be taught. It can be taught because everyone knows what the universal virtues of the political life are, and that they are virtues—for, as Thucydides had emphasized, even bad men justify their vices in the language of those virtues.

There is a wide-spread feeling that the recent conference on ‘Salvation Today’ which took place in Bangkok from December 28th, 1972 to January 8th, 1973, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, may herald the beginning of a new period in the missionary endeavour of the Christian churches. A significant feature of the conference was that delegates from churches in the Third World outnumbered those from the West. They attacked the sending of missionaries and funds by powerful Western churches to the poor churches in the Third World, urging that the missionary enterprise should become ‘completely mutual and international’, and even proposed a moratorium on the sending of funds and personnel to Third World churches, to allow them to discover their own identity and resources for missionary expansion.

Only a few months after the Bangkok conference had discussed the meaning of ‘Salvation Today’, 720 delegates attended a ‘Congress on Mission and Evangelism’ in Durban, South Africa. As in Bangkok, the greater part of those who took part in the South African congress were ‘Non-Whites’. There was a further similarity of great significance: The aim of the congress was ‘. . . to discover together the relevance of the Gospel and the meaning of mission and evangelism in present-day Southern Africa ... to assess the resources and potential of all Christian churches and agencies for mission and evangelism . . . and to give stimulus, inspiration and encouragement to Christians as they face this task’.

It is trite to say that anniversaries stir the memory but it is true enough. As I write this down I am remembering a young Dominican who died a year ago this July. His death was not only a deeply felt personal loss, for it was something more in that it challenged us with the problem of his unfinished work and involved us directly and intimately in a conflict of which we had previously only been spectators. It was—and is—a whole situation we had not understood till he came to live our life with us.

It might at first seem odd to select this one man’s history out of so much that has happened to the Province in the last few years. Disasters and desolation, unparalleled since the period of the French Revolution, that laid us waste with a real death of God: this has been met with courage and constancy by the old and in a spirit of dutiful endurance by many of the elderly. The turmoil of renewal and the tensions created by change conflicting with ancient customs has led to a new experience of the role—not always pleasant—of discussion, a development that has associated itself with or sprung from the generous energy of the young determined to recreate the common life and rediscover a style of worship suited to the needs of today. After a spasm of rejection, almost anarchic in character, there has been in the studium a return to the tradition, even the text of St Thomas, purged of the trivialities of the manualists. All in embryo, all signs of hope and all associated with men loyal to their vocation as preachers. Why, then, pick on this one man when there obviously are so many others? Why this particular one, when we live with all our dead, having them in constant and loving memory-some well known to the public, others known only to their brethren?

The details that Dante gives us of his meetings with the earthly Beatrice are so sketchy and the circumstances so ephemeral—they encounter each other as children once, she begins to greet him in the street some nine years later and then shortly after passes him by—that one can reasonably say that Dante never fully meets Beatrice until Canto XXX of the Purgatorio. And it is neither the style of meeting nor the woman that Dante quite expected. He had gazed at a distance on the earthly Beatrice in the Streets of Florence and at Mass and at banquets—though she had rarely looked at him; he had gazed on the heavenly Beatrice, too, in his mind’s eye. But the actual encounter, the real meeting, with the heavenly Beatrice (and the heavenly is the revelation of the earthly, a manifestation of the truth) is a rude awakening. He has trembled through the reeking horrors of the Inferno, encouraged by Virgil’s indomitable trust that it is by descent into the deepest cavern that they will reach the redeeming light and come to Beatrice; he has toiled up the mountain of the Purgatorio, lightened by the hope of meeting Beatrice; he has cast himself into the wall of fire that divides the last purgatorial terrace from the Earthly Paradise, urged on by Virgil: ‘ “Look now, my son, between Beatrice and thee is this wall” . . . and my sweet Father, to comfort me, kept talking of Beatrice as he went, saying: “I seem to see her eyes already” ‘ (XXVII 35f and 52ff.).

Fr Hastings has touched on many very serious problems in his report, now published as Christian Marriage in Africa, and in the previous article, with a compassion and sincerity that draw on wide reading and long reflection. Yet I feel myself out of sympathy with much that he has to say. This may be more to my discredit than to Fr Hastings’; at any rate, let me throw down a few words to suggest that at any rate such differences may be permissible.

First of all, on a relatively secondary point, Fr Hastings takes a view of polygamy which, while he is not the first to suggest it, is still very much a minority view among both Catholics and Anglicans. The direction of the New Testament is monogamous, not so much in an explicit command, as in defining marriage by the image of the union of Christ and His Church in the New Covenant. For the baptized Christian, therefore, polygamy is not an option. For the non-Christian, however, polygamous unions, when they are in accord with the traditions of his society, cannot simply be written off as ‘immoral’; to force the disruption of such unions as the price of baptism is much more immoral. Polygamists might therefore be admitted to baptism; and while Christians should regard monogamous marriage as the norm, there are cases where a Christian who has taken more than one wife may be admitted to the Eucharist. Fr Hastings claims that this is the only policy which will be consistent with the ‘central precepts of the Gospel’.

The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.

American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.

For the older generation of Catholics, ‘Welsh Disestablishment’ recalls Chesterton’s Ode with its climax, ‘Chuck it, Smith!’ and with its implication that the religious affairs of Wales are not of much interest to the rest of Europe. It often seems that they are of little concern even to those Europeans who have settled in Wales. I have been asked to re-present for New Blackfriars readers the nature and origins of our complex denominational situation. I would suggest that ‘disestablishment’, i.e. separation of Church and secular power (especially the power of the State) is a unifying theme and that this may have the interest of novelty for most of Europe.

The political background

In an earlier article ‘By Law Established’, I argued that from the beginning Wales has been a nation without a sovereign state, i.e. the highest political power in Wales has usually had its seat outside Wales, in England, in fact. While Welsh nationhood has been based chiefly on the Welsh language, it has generally been reinforced by a type of Christianity distinct from that of England. Since the English State has, of course, been hostile to Welsh nationhood, it follows that Church and State here have often been on opposite sides.

My friend, Father Marcel Boivin, W.F., sent me a copy of his article ‘A Positive Approach to Taboo’ and asked for my comments. I wrote a somewhat sharp reply, which he received with his usual good nature, standing his ground, however, on the essential point of there being an essential difference between the scientific mentality and the taboo mentality. For me, this theory is, if not a taboo, at least a myth which is perhaps open to critical analysis; however, I feel I ought to sketch out my own way of seeing human thought in action. As Fr Boivin knows, I am neither a psychologist nor a philosopher nor a theologian, but a priest capable of, at any rate, preaching to peasants, children and seminarists, traditionally the three most taboo-ridden categories of mankind; I am also a social anthropologist, a profession whose initiates aspire to explain taboos scientifically, a claim which, if taboos and science are really of such utterly different orders, should mark us as sacred monsters of the quality of the pangolin of the Lele.

To understand human thought one needs to reflect on language. Dolphins, honey-bees and apes all transmit information to each other ; human language abstracts and generalizes, and can refer to what is absent, or past, or purely imaginary. It can therefore transmit far more than is transmitted through animal communication systems, and, for this purpose, language is structured by grammar and syntax. One can speak a language correctly without being able to explain the rules of grammar, but whenever a language is analysed it is found to have a set of rules which have a reasonable amount of consistency with each other.

In September 1971 Graham Greene published his autobiography, A Sort of Life. The Times Literary Supplement took the opportunity to feature a leading article on his work in which it stated that the autobiography ‘reinforces Greene’s theories about the relations between art and life’, and at once added, ‘that is to say, between his art and his life’. The debate about the relationship between an author’s work and his life recurs constantly, but in Greene’s case the questions which are raised are particularly acute, his view of the matter being in marked contrast to that expressed by most of his critics.

The critics frequently affirm that his books are principally about himself. Marie-Béatrice Mesnet, for example, hints at this when she compares his travel book, The Lawless Roads, with his novel, The Power and the Glory, both of which are set in Mexico. ‘His only addition to reality in the novel’, she writes, ‘lies in the characterization of his human material, in his power to conjure up life and the interior history of a man. The entire background is as close to actual fact as possible.’ Still more explicitly, Victor de Pange has claimed: ‘L’oeuvre de Greene peut se lire comme une autobiographic à peine transposee’.

No doubt it is this trend in the criticism of Greene’s work that explains the reaction of the critics to his autobiography, for while they admire the quality of his writing, they confess to a sense of disappointment. They had hoped to learn his secret. Peter Lewis complained outright in the Daily Mail that ‘Many of Graham Greene’s admirers will be disappointed by A Sort of Life, the autobiography which might have thrown light on his secret’.

I am indeed grateful to Professor Mascall and to Fr McCabe for their perceptive and kindly critiques of my article on the eucharistic presence. To answer them adequately would take more room than even the Editor’s generosity would tolerate, so I shall content myself with two things. I shall try to show what I think are the strengths and limitations of their views (in my opinion, although perhaps they will not agree with me, we are closer than might appear). And, in doing this, I shall refer to or cite passages from what I trust is my forthcoming book, In the Breaking of the Bread. In this way I shall at least show that the points they raise have not been neglected by me, whatever may be thought of the answers I offer. References to the articles in New Blackfriars will be by ‘E1, ‘E2’, ‘M’ and ‘H’, with page-numbers. References to the book will be by ‘BB’, followed by chapter and section.

Let me start by stressing that we are all agreed that no human language or philosophical system is capable of expressing the the eucharistic presence adequately. I make the point with some generality and at some length in BB iii, 1. The remarks about ‘amnesia’ and ‘confrontation’ in my article (E2, pp. 406-407) are based on later sections of that chapter, and are consequences of the general thesis that in theology ‘not only is our linguistic medium inadequate; it is inadequate to the task of drawing bounds to its inadequacy’ (BB iii, 1). The Aristotelian (or any other) vocabulary of change needs maltreatment of one sort or another for its eucharistic employment (see M, pp. 542-543; H, pp. 548-551). Where we differ is in our verdict on the particular ‘maltreatment’ that is in question.

A theology of liberation purports to answer the question of the relation between Christian faith and the struggle for human liberation. From within the Bolshevik party, Bukharin and Proebrazhensky thought the two antithetical: ‘A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party ceases thereby to be a communist’. But Gutierrez is a Peruvian who writes as a Latin American. Things in that strife-torn continent are less ossified, as in the third part of his book he makes clear. The struggle for liberation is not the possession of one revolutionary group or set of groups who can dictate the terms on which others may participate, and while the bulk of the church (for Gutierrez, the Catholic church) is still reactionary, many Christians are coming to see that their commitment to Christ places them within and not against or just outside the liberation process. Indeed, Gutierrez would claim, the scope and seriousness of the process of liberation is such that no one in Latin America, and no one in the world, is outside it (p. 143). Ostensible neutrality is a fraud, real neutrality a fiction. Gutierrez does not address himself to the world, though the world may have something to learn from him. He writes in a Latin American perspective, and for his own, for the oppressed and for the exploited.

The Rights of Women throughout most of Africa are guaranteed, legally. Yet the full participation of women in the life of many African countries is still more a matter of policy than practice. Very few women share in the actual power of state. Former traditional securities are today less assured. Rather than more high-level appointments, the masses of women need more to be awakened to their potential as the changers of women’s position. For this, ‘Women’s Lib’ may have something to offer.

* * *

‘Women’s Liberation’ is the current development in the United States, although the movement has since spread to Europe. However, a militant reformist movement of African women predates this upsurge of feminist rebellion by nearly two decades. It was born out of national struggles for independence. The women of Algeria fought and worked for their nation’s independence and after the struggle a dynamic women’s organization was founded. Sékou Touré described as ‘decisive’ the contribution of Guinea’s women to the liberation of the country and the growth of the Democratic Party of Guinea. The Mau Mau of Kenya’s forests learned that their women had equally understood the high stakes at risk in the war against European settlers.

These activist roles in bringing about independence in many countries facilitated the development of an undoubtedly latent ‘freedom consciousness’. However, this stirring was only for a duration centred on the struggle against the colonial authorities. In some instances, women’s national movements were given impetus because of the gap between what women expected and had been promised, and what they actually received.

I would like to regard this review of Professor James R. Flynn’s book, Humanism and Ideology, as a kind of appendix to Denys Turner’s recent articles on ‘Morality is Marxism’. This is because of Flynn’s thesis that we need to return to classical conceptions of morality if we are to be able to justify the social and political activities of those today who are agitating for social justice. Though it is far from being a Marxist book, Flynn’s work is certainly in line with Turner’s view of what Marxists ought to say about morality.

The first thing to say, quite simply, is that not only is Flynn’s a good kind of book, but a good example of its kind. By a good kind of book—and I’m speaking of philosophical books primarily—I mean one which combines a passionate sense of its relevance to the urgent problems of life with scholarly fairness, precision of thought and a due recognition of the difficulties that stand in the way of proving its thesis. Flynn’s book has these qualities. But it also has clarity, economy, and a sense of occasion. And it reads like the best kind of philosophical discussion—i.e. like a serious conversation with an opponent in the civilized atmosphere of a good pub.

The task to be undertaken is to show that a sound philosophical case can be made for adopting the ethic of a ‘humane’ humanism rather than any other. Professor Flynn sees the most obvious alternative to such humanism today in some variety of the Nietzschean ethic—that is to say, an ethic which values outstanding personal achievement, the thrill of power and competitive success. He wants to prove that, over against the Nietzschean ethic, a humane humanism can be shown to be best for all mankind and is thus worthy of regard not only by those who already espouse it but also by those who don’t.

Can you say a prayer prayerfully with words in it you don’t understand? Yes, because for centuries Greek Christians have done precisely that. Wilfully, day in day out, they have asked God to give them epiousion bread in the Our Father. Every attempt to understand this word is more or less guess-work, so that after nineteen centuries of saying the Lord’s Prayer, we are still at square one. Square one being the statement of Origen, early in the third century, that we don’t know what epiousion really means, because it was never used by Greek writers, nor does it exist in common speech, and seems to have been made up by the evangelists.

This is a very extraordinary state of affairs. Jesus expressly repudiated meaningless and repetitive phrases, and supplied his disciples instead with this simple and straightforward prayer that everyone can understand. And then somehow or other it first appears in Greek with one quite unintelligible word. And it is an important word. For we are asked to pray for bread; but what sort of bread?— plain brown bread, spiritual bread, eucharistic bread, or food in general, eschatological food and drink, or what? The only qualifying word is this epiousion and we don’t know exactly what it means.

Most studies of the British electorate agree that Catholics tend to support Labour. Indeed, Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver argue that Roman Catholics are the group least likely to vote Conservative. However, with a few notable exceptions Catholics have not made a great contribution to Labour politics. This failure can be explained by a variety of factors, primarily the insistence by Church leaders in the past that, as a minority, Catholics ought to organize defensively to protect their own interests, particularly the schools. Hence the formation of the Catholic Federations as a response to the educational policies of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Governments. Some Catholics in this period were also mesmerized by the chimera of a Catholic party similar to the German Centre Party, and it is highly significant that the Salford Diocesan Federation received overtures from the right-wing British Labour Party in 1911, which had been formed ‘to promote by constitutional methods the welfare of the working class, and to secure real Labour representation’. Ecclesiastics were suspicious of state socialism and ideological politics in general and hostile to the secularists and anarchists on the fringe of the Left. Bishop Vaughan declared in 1883 that the doctrines of socialism were the outcome of Satan’s teaching, and that ‘terrorism, incendiarism, violence, and murder are lawful weapons whenever it is judged that this will advance the cause of socialism’. Finally, most of the Catholic working class were Irish, or of Irish extraction, abjectly poor, and unlikely to possess the necessary property or residential franchise qualification, so consequently Catholics were under-registered until after the implementation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

Stiff opposition from the Socialist and Communist parties in Japan has forced the Japanese Government to cancel the visit to the United States of a marine biologist, author of Some Hydriods of the Amakusa Islands and ten other works. Censorship ? Persecution of intellectuals ? No, nothing so sinister. The distinguished scientist in question also happens to have another role, and is known, outside the pages of biology periodicals, as the Emperor of Japan. This gives the postponement this week of his visit to America planned for the autumn an importance of a different kind. The Socialists and Communists claim that the Liberal-Democratic party is misusing the person of the Emperor by making him a factor in relationships with the US. It is, they say, giving him a political role, and this is in direct contradiction with the Japanese Constitution of 1947. Indeed, that constitution does state quite clearly in Article 1 that the Emperor ‘shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. It doesn’t matter now that this new constitution was largely American- inspired, in ideas and language; what matters is that a totally new concept of the Emperor’s function was forcibly introduced into Japanese life by it. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 had stated categorically that the Emperor was sacred and inviolable, the heir of a ‘line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal’.

Iran is a large and important country which is too little known in Britain, and which is even the subject of grave misunderstandings—such as the idea that it is an ‘Arab’ country and that therefore its religion is the same as that of its Arab neighbours. I went there simply as a visitor, bent on listening and learning through personal contacts. My reading of Iranian history had informed me that Iran has produced many important religious movements, though none of them has survived as a major world religion, unless you count the Baha’i. The birthplace of several powerful religious personalities — Zoroaster and Mani for example—it has tended to influence rather than dominate. In some strange way it has always subtly altered, sometimes even confused the great religions of mankind. Lacking the intellectual rigour of the Greek tradition, and without the intensity of the Semitic outlook, the Iranians have evaded the clutches of these two powerful alien influences. They are a humane and moderate people, much attracted to the good things of life, with a liking for speculation, often expressed in vast and woolly ideas. In this they betray their affinity to the people of the Indian subcontinent.

Contradictions in a Controversy

Las Casas has always been surrounded by controversy. Not only clid he play a highly important role in what is known as the ‘Indian Controversy’, but he himself has been the object of violent and protracted dispute. He has been regarded as the glory, and at the same time as the disgrace of Spain; as a fanatic, and a man of enlightenment. He has been used as an example for all kinds of people, for Christians as well as atheists, for Protestants and Catholics, for those on the left as well as those on the right; for people who love Spain, and those who hate the country.

This article does not seek to cast new light on that problem, which is sufficiently vast and complicated to inspire a book and much more. The present task is more modest; it is to look again at one or two important points in the interpretation of Las Casas, and to arrive at a picture which fits better with the man, his thoughts, and his deeply-held desires. I am sure that it is impossible to understand him if his life and work are separated from his basic motives; and this separation has been one of the main sources of the controversy surrounding him. It is also at the bottom of the paradoxical criticism and praise for him that spring out of the turning-point in history known as ‘The Indian Controversy’.

Samuel Purchas (1575-7 to 1626) provides us with a very illuminating example of this contradiction, and his attitude to the Spanish conquest is a case in point. His Relations of the World was first published in 1613, that is 61 years after the first edition of Las Casas’ best-known and most polemical work, the Brevisima Historia de las Destruccion de Las Indias. Now the gap between what Las Casas wrote and the motives of Purchas can be seen clearly expressed in the latter’s writing, for his aims were quite different from those of Las Casas.

It has almost become platitudinous to state that the controversial literature at the time of Catholic Emancipation illustrates the fact that the expression of radical political opinion had been muted as a result of the events of the French Revolution. On the whole, it is argued, the controversy tended to be theological or apologetic rather than political and the usual arguments in favour of Catholic emancipation were those of expediency rather than principle. The Roman Catholics themselves, it is argued, would not wish to associate their claims with more radical political demands, while their social and political isolation during the previous century would be reflected in their reluctance to seize the opportunities which became possible after emancipation. As the future Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman himself wrote, the ‘shackles were removed, but not the numbness and cramp which they had produced’.

However, the point of this article is simply to show that the most cursory reading of Catholics periodicals at the time would demonstrate that none of these historical claims are necessarily supported by the evidence. In fact, it would be more surprising if the political awareness of the Cisalpines at the end of the eighteenth century had so quickly disappeared; after all, the political tradition of English radicalism did not completely disappear after 1789. Furthermore, Bernard Ward made the interesting point that there were eight English Catholic M.P.s in the Parliament of 1831—a number which was only exceeded in the twentieth century. Of course, not all English Catholics wished to be associated with political radicals and most of them were not prepared to ‘seize their political opportunities’ after the grant of emancipation, but there were significant exceptions.

The contemporary world is characterized by rapid and intense activity. Yet, sometimes as an understandable reaction to the feverishness of haste, at other times for the very success of activity, there are worldwide manifestations of a drive towards greater interiority.

Asia today is an interesting example of the activity-interiority tension. Even apart from the too facile generalizations of comparative sociology, Asia remains the place where of set purpose interiority is passionately sought, even at the expense of activity. Yet Asia today is one of the most exciting fields of the action-conquest of reality. Asian action is therefore distinguished by its inherent reference to concomitant reflective interiority.

It is against this background that the Church has to work out its corporate renewal and reform. And in summary form the theme of the present article is that a continuing interaction of liturgy and a system of interiority-seeking, such as the Ignatian Exercises, provides the ideal framework for the renewal of the Church in Asia, as indeed anywhere else.

The liturgy is the most potent means of spiritual renewal for both individual Christians and for communities. This is so all over the world, but is particularly true in Asia, where the external sign and symbol have always had an important pageant value in themselves, even apart from the reality they indicate.

But in order to lead to effective and drastic renewal and reform the liturgy must proceed from the deepest inner realization and acceptance of all that it implies. It is here that the Ignatian Exercises can play a powerful role in the action-reflection dialectic by leading to a greater interior preparedness for meaningful liturgy. And fortunately the Exercises seem to be gaining ground on Asian soil.