I

It is now clear enough that the disturbance in the Catholic world caused by the publication of Humanae Vitae was a symptom of much deeper stirrings in the Church than a difference of opinion about contraceptive methods of family limitation. We have to recognize that a profound shift of Catholic consciousness had already begun to take place, and that the publication of Paul VI’s encyclical served to precipitate this new consciousness and to make its protest against the old articulate.

The visible structure of the older Catholic consciousness is easily described: within the period between Pius IX and Pius XII, Catholics recognized their distinctive identity, especially in England, in terms of an explicit awareness of the Pope, Mary, eucharistic devotions as well as Mass, Friday abstinence and the unlawfulness of ‘unnatural’ methods of birth control. It is instructive to recall that the Pope who confirmed his predecessor’s withdrawal of the discussion of contraception from Vatican II and who could not accept the recommendations of his theological commission is also the Pope who insisted on giving Mary the title of Mater Ecclesiae in his allocution of 21st November, 1964, at the close of the third period of Vatican II, although the title was after consideration excluded from the chapter on Mary in the constitution Lumen Gentium on the Church; thus Paul VI continued the tradition of Pius IX and Pius XII in associating Pope and Mary in a special relationship to the Church. Paul VI is also the Pope of the encyclical Mysterium Fidei on the Eucharist.

Every Catholic knows that the Church is faced with a crisis and the name of that crisis is authority. Similarly in our society, the majority is aware that there is a challenge to authority as witnessed repeatedly on television which brings to millions of homes scenes of strife involving students, demonstrations, marches and clashes between employers, trade unions and workers. The majority of men and women sit and watch, leaving the few to march, sit down on the streets, barricade themselves in and from time to time explode in violence. At this point fingers are raised, critical editorials are written and sermons are preached about law and order. Indeed the desire for law and order is so great that human beings have to reach a very high degree of desperation before they threaten seriously the conditions which stabilize any society. Ideally everyone in authority should have as a primary concern the anticipation of legitimate needs. But this is an ideal and the enormous amount of human strife is a witness that this highly desirable objective is rarely achieved. Because of the known temptations likely to afflict those in authority who exercise power on behalf of others, the principles of democracy have been evolved to safeguard both the ruler and the ruled.

When Ortega y Gasset was writing his Notes on the Novel in the nineteen-twenties he could still take it for granted that the fundamental purpose of the novel was the presentation of character:

Indeed, Ortega assumed that this interest was being intensified in the work of Proust, which offered opportunities for the ever greater and more leisurely contemplation of character, even if at the expense of dramatically interesting action. And in so far as Proust— like Joyce—represented the culmination of the realistic novel as well as its destruction, Ortega was not wholly wrong. Nevertheless, I presume that no intelligent modern reader could read his remarks without some slight incredulity. The notion that character can be considered as an absolute, without necessary reference to a given literary context, is a quintessential nineteenth-century concept; it underlies, for instance, Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, a celebrated work in which the influence of the nineteenth-century novel is everywhere apparent; it has been pilloried in such a statement of twentieth-century critical orthodoxy as L. C. Knights’ How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

In the course of his article ‘The Encyclical Abstraction’ last month, Fr Thomas Gilby, O.P., touched on the distinction between the notions of conscience and ‘prudence’. He suggested that we should conduct our discussions of the moral issues raised by Humanae Vitae with greater precision and usefulness if we resorted to the suppler and ampler notion of ‘prudence’ rather than to that of conscience. ‘Prudence’ is something of a misnomer, carrying with it unfortunate associations for us today. Yet in much of our present discussion we seem to want to make ‘conscience’ do a great deal of the work that was formerly done by the finely analysed and thereby quasi-technical notion of ‘prudence’. It seems sensible, therefore, to take another look at this classical conception, and we do so by publishing here a translation of an extract from the extended Appendix to the French edition of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, dealing with Prudence. This piece thus takes its place as one of a series of contributions to a deeper consideration of the encyclical. We intend to publish further reflections in coming months from Mr Michael Dummett, Fellow of All Souls, and from Frs Timothy McDermott and Cornelius Ernst, O.P.

The important place occupied by ‘prudence’, in doctrine as in moral life, in the teaching of Aquinas can be seen clearly enough in his treatise on ‘Prudence’ in the Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, 47-56. It is only too evident, however, that it has not subsequently kept pride of place in theology, for reasons which are not far to seek.

It is presumably comparatively simple to overthrow a régime and start a new one if you have sufficient resources, either of good-will, of money or of arms, or a judicious mixture of the three. Whether this is likely to be a practical method of ushering in the millennium, as opposed to more limited goals like making things a bit better for some people, is a debatable problem. The evidence is not coercive, and in any case I have no intention of debating it. My point, to put it crudely, is that in England and America, at least, this method of changing society doesn’t seem likely to be possible for some time to come, and that to assume it is the only way must lead either to the abandonment of effort, or the watering down of aims, or to a lot of self-delusion about what the possibilities actually are. This last is quite prevalent, because if you deeply believe that drastic change is essential, and that life is scarcely bearable except in the hope that it will come, there is a strong motive for persuading oneself that it will come soon. This is bolstered up by much discussion among groups of like-minded people, especially young ones.

The trouble about this is that when someone with this kind of belief moves out of the inner circle of the faithful, and comes up against the ignorance, indifference or sheer perverseness of other people, he is appalled and disgusted, and often very much surprised. This is especially likely when the people concerned are very young.

It is a truism—and one repeated so often that it is starting to become tedious—that the issue of Humanae Vitae has precipitated a crisis of authority and obedience in the Church. Indeed the Roman authorities have been talking in these terms for several years now.

What, of course, is tedious about the phrase is the indiscriminate way in which it is employed. It may be helpful just to look at what the term ‘crisis’ basically means. It means, of course, simply ‘judgment’, ‘testing’, ‘questioning’. So, if we talk about a crisis of authority and obedience, we mean that authority and obedience are under question. But many jump immediately to the conclusion that this means that an attempt is being made to overthrow all authority and obedience in the Church. This seems to me a peculiarly obtuse misreading of the situation. There is undoubtedly a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction within the Church at the current theory and practice of ecclesiastical authority, but this is something quite different from wishing to throw overboard all authority in the Church, lock, stock and barrel. I do not see why this dissatisfaction in the Church should not be as much a ‘sign of the times’ for the Church as was the dissatisfaction with, say, the Church’s attitude to other Churches, or with the sclerosed ecclesiology that dominated in post-Tridentine times till our own days. These dissatisfactions had a fruitful result: the spirit and theology behind Vatican II. Why should we weep and be fearful regarding the dissatisfaction about authority?

A brief report of a congress on the pastoral relationships of priests, held at Louvain, and published in France in 1968, shows encouraging signs of a serious wish on the part of a team of both reputable clergy and of qualified psychiatrists to assess the psychological implications of the priestly role in the contemporary world. That its conclusions should be tentative is only to be expected, for there is so much new ground to cover, and an English translation is probably not to be looked for. It is, in any case, doubtful if, as it stands, it is an eminently exportable product outside a French-speaking milieu. But in raising, as it does, some of the more profound sexual implications for the figure of the priest and being bold enough to make articulate the latent ramifications of his relationship to money, it blazes a trail along which others are bound eventually to follow. The truth of the most universal of its observations can scarcely be disputed, namely that to the conscious reaction to the very notion of the priest there is ‘not sometimes, but invariably’ a normally, unconscious affect which is exactly its contrary. ‘On the image which arouses a conscious aggressiveness, another image imposes itself in the unconscious which arouses a feeling for its antithesis. Indeed this phenomenon is translated into noteworthy sociological terms in our contemporary society. Consciously anti-clerical, it nevertheless throws up a mass of books, films, etc., dealing with the person of the priest. A fact which shows well enough that it is not indifferent to him.’

This is surely bound to fail, but the need to attempt to make some connections has become irrepressible. In this first article, then, I want to use Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the present state of British culture to introduce some quotations from The Dialectics of Liberation. What I am getting at here can emerge, if ever it does at all, only as we proceed. The point is that there is something wrong with British culture: what Anderson refers to as its ataraxy, its imperviousness to certain disturbing ideas; and there is a chance that the utopian dimension evoked once again by some recent thinking may prove quickening and liberatory. In a second article I want to bring out the ambivalent connections between the work of Herbert Marcuse and that of Martin Heidegger. Finally, in a third article, it should be possible to relate all this to the English literary-critical tradition and to the classical moment in Catholic theology.

Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, first published in 1959 and now widely available as a paperback, has recently been hailed as a ‘classic’, to which ‘all critics of English philosophy owe a great debt’. This salutation of another orthodoxy (that by the standards of a revolutionary and internationalist political consciousness English philosophy is trivial, after all) comes in an important essay by Perry Anderson in the fiftieth issue of New Left Review (July-August 1968). This is the most persuasive and thorough-going offer of new bearings for the critique of contemporary British culture that has so far been made.

In a previous article in this Journal (December, 1968) I presented a description of some elements in the contemporary revival of the Penance Service. This description made it plain that there is not one novel element in such services and that their procedures derive from the traditional practice of the Church. I based this description on my experience of the contemporary celebration of the sacrament in a variety of community contexts, and certainly these services are going on all over the place. This is evidenced in several recent books. Penance: Virtue and Sacrament, edited by John Fitzsimons (Bums and Oates, Compass Books, 90 pp., 18s., 1969), gives the papers and some idea of the excitements of the 1968 Spode Conference of Practical Liturgy. These papers and the essays collected in Making Sense of Confession edited by Otto Betz (Chapman, 25s., 1968), show us what is entailed in the appreciation of penance as a sign of the renewing love of Christ in the eucharistic congregation. These two books are decisively adult in tone, expressive of an awareness that, as Cardinal Rampolla once remarked, ‘of necessity the Church should be democratic, not demagogic, but simply the plebs sancta', and alive to the urgent demands of penance if we are to come into that holiness. Fr F. J. Heggen’s Children and Confession (Sheed and Ward, Stag Books, 118 pp., 9s., 1969) is a more particularized effort which is concerned with one area in which most successful celebrations have been developing in many parts of the world.

Since the Vatican Declaration Nostra Aetate, concerning the relations between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, was promulgated on 28th October, 1965, a slow, but sound and effective change has been taking place in the Church. Obviously, the painful misunderstandings of centuries cannot be removed in a single year, but there is no doubt that the Church, during the Vatican Council, sincerely sought a new and better understanding of itself. Praying, discussing, listening, struggling, it discovered many new insights into its very being. One of the points most discussed was the relation between the Church and the Jewish people. Israel is either a stumbling block for the Church or else points out a deep mystery of divine revelation, in which both the Church and Judaism participate. It is not necessary to digress here on the history of relations between the Church and Judaism for the past twenty centuries, because there have been many dark patches. Nor do I need to speak about the difficult and painful struggle of the Vatican Council to reach a positive statement. The final result was neither very good, nor very bad: it was a compromise addressed to Catholics; a pastoral document in a positive spirit, and as such a revolutionary declaration compared with statements of former Councils.

Montevideo still has old buses of 1890 vintage, ‘made in England’ and lovingly maintained. When Europe expanded in the nineteenth century, Latin America quickly caught the imagination of businessmen, whilst Christians were looking towards the new mission fields of Africa, Asia, Oceania. Did they really need to worry about this ‘Christian continent’ which had been baptized when it was colonized in the sixteenth century? But suddenly the spell broke: Latin America was in peril. Communism threatened, there were too few priests, sects menaced the integrity of the churches: all this impinged brusquely about twelve years ago. With the result that Latin America came to the forefront of pre-occupation. New organizations appeared: C.E.L.A.M. (Bishops’ Council for Latin America, 1955) and the pontifical commission for Latin America at Rome in 1960. (We might note in passing that it was also in 1960 that the Alliance for Progress was launched, designed to show that ‘free men, working within the framework of democratic institutions, are better able to satisfy human aspirations than regimes like that of Cuba’: so spoke the Charter of Punto del Este, a year after Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in the January of 1959.) A new channel was opened, with its source in Europe (one need think only of such West German organizations as Adveniat, Misereor, Caritas) and the U.S.A.: money and men, priests, lay people and religious. The Council insisted on the necessary sharing between rich and poor churches, each bishop being responsible for the whole of the Church in virtue of the principle of collegiality.

The point about being a Christian (other versions of this are no doubt possible!) is that one lives, loves, works, feels and thinks in the light of the disclosure/discovery of a sense of end (finis, telos), and hence of a possibility of happiness (beatitudo, eudaimonia), which in turn points to a whole style of being-with-others, a particular form of community (amicitia, koinonia). In principle this is both nuclear and global. As well as the smaller projects, such as the guerrilla bases, proleptic utopias, regenerating sanctuaries and the like which our local church-communities should be, there must be permanent transformation of the structures of interdependence, ongoing liberation of mankind as a whole, active sponsoring of the righteousness of God which happens as the righting of relationships within society. Salvation occurs as community: that is unmistakably the Christian emphasis. In other words, then, politics cannot be divorced from ethics. It is in the ethical, precisely, that the relation between the personal and the social-political is negotiated. And if that is a commonplace in the tradition represented by St Thomas Aquinas, as it is, however uncharacteristic it may be of many Catholics ‘in public life’, it is also a principle which is central in the literary- critical tradition developed and sustained by Scrutiny.

The plan of this paper, then, is first to outline how the Scrutiny tradition forms an essential part of the long revolution against the society which inhibits and falsifies all reference to an ultimate source of meaning and an ultimate ground of being,

No, not a rather rhetorical reflection on the events surrounding the publication of Humanae Vitae, simply the reaction of the Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford in 1897 to an earlier papal encyclical, Apostolicae Curae.

On 24th August the Pope solemnly opened the general assembly of all the Bishops of Latin America in the Cathedral of Bogota, Columbia. This was the second general episcopal conference to be held on the soil of South America, and the first meeting of a local Church on a continental scale since Vatican II. This assembly had been carefully prepared for over a year by bishops, theologians and experts from the whole of South America, in accordance with an express mandate from the Episcopal Commission of Latin America, created in the wake of the fast general assembly of the Bishops of Latin America held in 1955. The text which we publish below (thanks to the kind permission of the editor of ‘Informations Catholiques Internationales’) is the first half of the first part of the entire document, which consists of three parts in all: this description of the situation in the continent, a theological reflexion, and pastoral directions.

The general theme of the Medellin assembly was ‘the Church in the present transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council’. The conclusions of the assembly have since been published, but this comprehensive diagnosis of the facts remains striking from many points of view: the catching of a historic moment of awakening on the part of a whole continent, the detail and social awareness, the sense that ‘the difficult progress towards development and integration [in Latin America] could become an important catalyst in the process of unification to which the whole human race is converging today’, and the vivid realization that ‘the upheaval we are experiencing demands new attitudes of us so that we can carry through an urgent, global and profound reform of structures’ (from the Introduction to the Statement)—all these are remarkable in an ecclesiastical document.

‘The description could appear to be pessimistic, since we do not dwell on the positive factors, which do of course exist. But it is, nevertheless, a reflexion of the reality of Latin America, which is tragic, and which demands a swift and effective response.’

This is the second stage of an attempt to make a fresh assessment of the foundations of Christian morality, or of Catholic moral theology, in the light of the ideas of some of the thinkers who are concerned with the possibility of an alternative society. We who are committed to living and thinking eschatologically are bound to be interested in every serious endeavour to transcend the existing state of things. This paper will try to bring out the analogy between Marcuse and Heidegger.

1 —Repression and Liberation

Herbert Marcuse’s work stands well outside the ordinary Anglo- American framework of academic social and political philosophy. The reason for this is no doubt that he belongs to a tradition in which the impact of Hegel has been undergone and assimilated. What this amounts to, as we should see, is that he can take for grant ed, in his philosophizing, the intimations about the nature of man and of meaning which we associate with the Romantic movement. This has become part of our common consciousness too, but on the whole extra-philosophically. Indeed, the specifying difference between English and continental philosophies at the present time is not so much to do with technique and approach as with acceptance or rejection of the Romantic idea of man.

It is instructive to reflect on the divided response to Marcuse's work. He is the most widely discussed thinker among the opponents of our way of life in America today. On the Old Left (orthodox communist Marxists and such-like) he meets with unanimous hostility: he is condemned as a defeatist, a pessimist, who thinks not scientifically but poetically.

In the present crisis over Humanae Vitae, Catholic opinion may be roughly divided into three groups: those who believe that the Pope’s pronouncement ought to be treated as definitive; those who already agreed with or have come to accept the Pope’s decision, but deplore the process of disciplinary enforcement of it on the clergy now under way in some countries, including this one; and those who think that the decision was wrong and must be reversed. Presumably, however, there are few Catholics who would deny that the fact that the Pope chose to take this stance, and to promulgate his decision in so weighty a manner, ought to be weighed carefully by anyone concerned to have a true opinion on the matter. It is therefore of great importance to come to understand what may have led the Pope to his decision; and this can best be done by enquiring into the cogency of the three documents submitted to him by the Papal Commission.

The first of these documents, generally known as the ‘majority report’, presents arguments of a general moral and theological nature in favour of the view that the use of contraceptives is not in all cases morally impermissible. The second, the ‘minority report’, offers arguments to show that it would be impossible for the Church to reverse her traditional position and adopt that of the majority report. The third document, without advancing any position of its own on the substantive question, attempts to controvert the arguments of the minority report and show that it would be in principle possible for the Church to change the official line on contraception.

This collection of essays discusses the issues that are important for Catholics and others who find in neo-Marxism, at least in some of its varieties, something that speaks to their condition. The situation is slightly complicated in that some of the writers, notably Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams, are also affected by a densely and peculiarly English background, that of the tradition constructed (if a tradition can be said to be constructed) by Raymond Williams and his circle out of their reading, in both senses of the word, of Cobbett, Arnold, George Eliot, Tawney, Lawrence, Leavis. I am not sure that I have ever wholly understood the theses advanced by these writers. In part this is because I find their style opaque. Certain terms seem to be terms of art, but one is left to pick up the sense as one goes along. ‘Totalization’ is one that is coming in; ‘structure’, of course, both as a substantive and a verb, but this is perhaps the influence of American sociological writing; losing and making connexions between ‘cultural meanings’ seem to be important but elusive processes; we have ‘praxis’, and so on.

One would wish to press for examples. One of the great lessons of Wittgenstein’s later writings is the need to measure formulations against examples. At any rate, we are given by Mr Williams himself and by Mr Eagleton one of the theses over the interpretation of which I remain confused. Summarily it is that if we want to have or to bring about or to realize more fully a common culture in England—and it is always taken for granted that there is a moral imperative to work for this end—then we must strive for revolution or socialism or both as the only way of bringing this end about.

Theology and the Social Sciences need to have a close relationship for they are both concerned to say things about the nature of man and the values which govern his decisions. But what kind of exchange is possible—will it be a happy marriage, a shot-gun wedding or a straight take-over bid ? The purpose of this article is to suggest that both sides can be enriched by attending to what the other is saying. Since it is the work of one whose first training is in the theological field, it rather stresses the gains which are achieved by bringing human warmth of the behavioural sciences to the sometimes arid tracts of traditional dogmatics! It is vitally important that the connections should be made because it is the task of theologians always to seek to communicate the truths they hold within the context of the contemporary perceptions of truth. Not that they will always accept these uncritically. Sometimes upon examination the theologian will want to say, ‘This way of describing things so conflicts with all that I hold true that I cannot accept it.’ At other times he will be bound to say, ‘My reason tells me that your findings are valid, therefore they must modify my theological assertions’, or perhaps, I now see that what this theological assertion meant is different from the way in which I previously understood it.’ Such a process of re-thinking and testing-out is bound to produce a considerable amount of anxiety w'hile the period of ferment lasts.

It seems to me only fair to begin this paper by inquiring whether the topic indicated by the title actually exists in any serious sense, or whether it has simply been conjured up by a trick of language within the general and familiar process of academic over-production and waste-making. The fact that a considerable literature more or less concerned with the topic does undoubtedly exist provides no guarantee of the existence of a genuine problem; for some at least of this literature tends to heighten one’s suspicions rather than to assuage them.

The title is, at any rate, ‘World Religions and Christian Theology’, not ‘World Religions and Christianity’. By ‘world religions’ I understand those religions which have not been confined to a particular ethnic or political unit but are found in more or less diversified forms remote from their place of origin. It is clear enough that Christianity is one of these world religions, in so far as we allow ourselves to use the word ‘religion’ with an appropriate looseness; we need do no more than declare ‘religion’ a family-word, where the different items all to be called religions need not share a single definition but form an irregular network. Now this paper does not attempt to consider the place of Christianity among world religions. This is not only because my own equipment for such a task would be wholly inadequate, but also because I suspect that no one’s equipment would be.

Both sociologists and philosophers are becoming more and more aware that a man’s personality is formed by the interplay between himself and his society. If he is transplanted into a different society or different culture at a sufficiently formative period of his life, then that culture will determine the directions which he takes in many fields of thought and activity; if, on the other hand, such a transplantation takes place when he is too rigidly (or firmly) fixed in the ways of a different society, he may be unable to communicate with or relate to the members of his new society, and remain a frustrated member of his old group, from which he is now separated. Examples of both these situations are easy to find among European immigrants to the United States. In more primitive societies where there are less universal conventions and systems of protection, the involvement of the individual within his group, and his dependence on it, are even more obvious. Today the Coca-Cola and Kleenex culture is worldwide; the traveller’s cheque and the passport will provide a fair measure of financial and legal protection the world over. Group loyalties and so group particularism, strong as they may be, need to be less extreme than in primitive times. The psychologists will tell us that a sense of belonging is a crucial factor for psychological stability, but in Hebrew times real belonging to a group was a condition of survival. This was one element which generated the way of thinking which was first characterized by H. Wheeler Robinson as that of the ‘corporate personality’.