The Catholic faith of Georges Bemanos was simple if not uncritical. He claimed to be thoroughly of the Church yet he was dissatisfied with many aspects of its temporal existence. He sometimes rejected classification as a Catholic writer, regarding himself as a writer who was also Catholic. His books were not designed for a restricted audience, but were a kind of wayside preaching of the mysterious way of providence, and the dangers to humanity when God was written out of the story of its life.

His works were not designed to promote the self-protective certainties of contemporary bourgeois Catholicism. His clerical heroes, in particular, were all John the Baptist figures, raised up in the rural desert to uncover the superficialities of a compromised urban clerical Catholicism: la confiture de Saint Sulpice, as he allegedly referred to it. A truly Catholic existence lived under the unrelenting sun of divine grace was a demanding profession. Bemanos’ religion was for heroes and saints. Their heroism was their commitment to truth, their fidelity to the gospel in the smallest and most ordinary things of life, and their unstinting, sacrificial, gift of themselves in the self-abandonment of love for God and those whom he had made. Bemanos’ Church was the communion of saints, a place of exchange where ashes become fire and deserts bloom.

The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.

This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.

A metaphor is implied when one speaks of a person of “culture”, a “cultivated” person. The word “culture” here derives from agriculture, the tilling and planting of the soil to yield a harvest of nourishing things.

Culture in this broad sense means simply, as Jacques Barzun defines it, “the interests and abilities acquired by taking thought.” Any thoughtful person is potentially a person of culture. Culture is not bookish or remote, not the province of the idle, the rich or the overeducated. On the contrary, it is essential to a meaningful life.

The Church clearly has a mission in the world of culture in the broad sense of ‘taking thought’ about things that matter. But such discussion often neglects the fact that most adult Mass-goers commonly relate to the Church through their parish. Since parish life is how most people experience the Church, one can legitimately ask what it is about parishes that touches culture. In what way do they carry on as communities, not only of the heart and spirit, but also of the mind?

How do laity work in the world, as Gaudium et Spes mandated them? How do parish priests “interpret the signs of the times” as the Directory on the Ministry and Life of Priests directs? Paul VI said throughout Evangelii Nuntiandi that we must pay attention to the culture in which we immerse ourselves and not react to it passively but creatively. How, at the broadest level?

Whatever the activity of the parish, whatever the spirituality of the laity and priests there, Scripture is a part of their experience.

For George Batailie (1897-1962) the world is ‘purely parodic'. Each thing we see is ‘the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form’ (Batailie 1985: 5). For Batailie, everything in the world is ultimately relatable to everything else, everything can be substituted for another thing, in a ceaseless process of metaphoric exchange. It is the circulation of language that makes this possible; and since it is possible in language it is possible in the world(s) that language constitutes. The coupling of words performs the copulation of bodies.

For Batailie, parody utterly eroticises the world, so that in the running of the ‘locomotive’s wheels and pistons’ he sees the world's ‘two primary motions’ of ‘rotation and sexual movement'. In the image of the steam engine's pounding pistons and turning wheels, he sees the coupling of animals and the movements of the planets, always moving from ‘their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation'. These ‘two motions'—the thrusting of sexual frenzy and the circling of the stars—are ‘reciprocally transformed, the one into the other', so that the turning of the earth ‘makes animals and men have coitus’ and—since ‘the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it'—the coupling of animals and men turns the earth (Batailie 1985:6).

In this article I want to trace the similar parodying of the erotic in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. While Batailie couples the sun and moon with the sea, with clouds and plants, with the coitus of animals and the ‘amorous frenzy’ of men and women (Batailie 1985: 5)

The perennial question whether translation is, in fact, possible is rooted in ancient religious and psychological doubts on whether there ought to be any passage from one tongue to another. So far as speech is divine and numinous, so far as it encloses revelation, active transmission whether into the vulgate or across the barrier of languages is dubious or frankly evil .... [thus] the belief that three days of utter darkness fell on the world when the Law was translatd into Greek (George Steiner, After Babel).

Such reflections may have a place when it comes to the translation of liturgical documents. They may even be required reading before the awesome task be undertaken. It would be indeed unfortunate if the next English version of the Roman Sacramentary in English were to spark off power cuts all over the English-speaking world!

Perhaps we need not worry. Recent articles in New Blackfriars by Eamon Duffy and Bruce Harbert have shown that the revised translation of the Roman Missal, now in draft form, shows some interesting improvements on the 1973 version: greater fidelity to the cadence, the nuances and, above all, the meaning of the original; a distancing from the Pelagian optimism which characterised the earlier translations and a return to the true Roman liturgical style: simplicity encrusted in a majestic flow and rhythm. In this article I would like to draw attention to the challenge this sort of translation faces: that of being faithful to the liturgical tradition.

Many of the ‘ordinary-speech’ translations of liturgical texts in the last twenty-five years have been faulted for falling short of the living tradition of the liturgy, reflecting rather the prevailing idiom and ethos.

The phrase ‘a spiritual space’ is used by Certeau at the end of his brief analysis of hagiographic material in ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’. The essay is one of three explorations in the production of certain topographies of the other found in The Writing of History. The spiritual space is another of Certeau’s non-places. Hagiography announces that a “non-place is here a discourse of places.” That is how he concludes the essay. What I wish to demonstrate in this essay is the way spiritual topoi govern Certeau’s understanding of the production of space both in its heterological and non-heterological forms. These spiritual spaces are profoundly theological in character and liturgical in economy. The direction of my argument, therefore, emphasizes, again, the importance of reading Certeau’s project theologically.

‘Spiritual spaces’ are not at the centre of Certeau’s work; they make that work possible. Other forms of space are focused upon and it is by mapping out these spaces that alternative places are opened up. I wish to examine three kinds of space explored, in fact, produced, in Certeau’s work. They correspond to three different epochs of time and three kinds of utopia [which, following the work of Louis Marin on Thomas More needs to be understood as both outopia (no-place) and Utopia (a good place)]. In outlining these three spaces, Certeau’s concerns with ethnography, speaking and texts at the dawn of modernity come more clearly into focus.

The Rational Utopia

The first space I will term, after Certeau, the ‘rational utopia’. It is the space produced by the closed system, what Certeau will describe as “a bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible production of an order.”

People have puzzled over the nature of the miracle reported in Acts 2 for centuries, and the passage is especially intriguing if you are a linguist. Did Peter really find himself speaking in languages he did not know?

Prophets and poets make difficult stable companions and they share the ability to unsettle or subvert the norms of their societies. Because of this they are often silenced or killed. They both, in different ways, offer to the individual or community a two way ‘glass’ in which the individual or community then has to face the truth about themselves. One side of this glass acts as a mirror from which is reflected the breaking of communities; the injustice, the impoverishment, the godlessness, from which our laws and systems normally shield us. The other side of the glass is the window, through which, creative and energising, the prophet/poet offers us a new and radical vision of an alternative future, a place of possibility and change. Change however is always unsettling and never easy, it is usually simpler to shut our eyes. In Cassandra, Christa Wolf turns the mirror/glass onto a society being broken down by war, and through the Scamander Caves, offers a window on an alternate way of being, visioned by women.

Walter Brueggemann discusses Israel’s turning away from being a prophetic people to being a people of worldly Kingship. He suggests that we are so enmeshed by our present reality that any other way of being is virtually unthinkable. Moreover, that this present history is one of “briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems.

All Christians have put themselves under obedience to God. They acknowledge God’s authority—his right to the obedience of every sentient being. They also acknowledge God’s power, since disobedience to God can only exist so long as God permits it.

God’s authority is promulgated to the human race in specific descriptions of certain rewards and punishments that are attached to specified kinds of behaviour. These laws are said to be made known by authoritative messengers, the prophets. God is held to be three persons in the one Godhead. The second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God, is said to have been incarnate, to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate, to have been raised from the dead and to have ascended to heaven. It is promised that he will come to earth again at the general resurrection of all the dead, and that those who merit eternal exclusion from the presence of God will be excluded and those who are judged worthy to enjoy God’s presence will live in bliss for ever. God the Holy Spirit has been sent, and will continue to be sent, to those who submit to the Father and the Son. Among other gifts, this Spirit has given and will give wisdom to discern what is true, good and beautiful.

Given recent receptivity to the importance of aesthetics and the role of art and the imagination, an examination of an artist who managed to arrive at creative expression not in spite of faith but because of that faith will be both useful and, one hopes, inspiring.’ Georges Bemanos was to the early part of this century what Olivier Messaien has become to the rebirth of Opera today and is the chosen subject of this study for similar reasons. Even a cursory reading of the best known novel of Bemanos, the Diary of a Country Priest, will initiate the reader who is otherwise ill-versed in the central preoccupations of French literature or unlettered in the complexities of Catholic spirituality, into an entirely different perspective on the function of the novel and the drama of human redemption. For in a world of peer-assessment, target-determination, performance-related pay, this story as others from the Bernanos collection can contribute to the unravelling of the activism and success-ethic that lies at the heart of our conception of what it means to achieve fulfilment and self-awareness. Fifty years after the death of Bemanos, it is not too late to set our sights on this most original of French authors for a repristination of the function of the novel and the way that the supernatural can make a contribution to that function. This is a poignant exercise given the complaint of one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, that much contemporary English fiction has lost its creative edge to the tired hymns of suburbia and that much North- Atlantic fiction has been slowed by the relentless march of the grey ideologies of the contemporary academy.

In the opening chapter of the book On Naming the Present, David Tracy engages with three “conversations” upon “difference and otherness” currently on stream in the West. Reflecting upon the “bourgeois subject” of modernity, the “communal subject” of anti-modernity and the “nonsubject” of post-modernity, Tracy concludes that the wealth of insight offered by these conversations still falls short of supplying the “Western centre” with the hermeneutical perspective necessary to a contemporary discernment of God’s presence among us. Holding such a perspective to be had subsequent to a multiplicity of conversations taking place, Tracy remarks upon the West’s need to “listen to other [i.e., non-western] conversations” which transcend the interpretative framework of our modern, anti-modern and postmodern narrative traditions. Only by opening ourselves to the discourse of those engaged “in the concrete struggle for justice against suffering and oppression and for total liberation” will we in the West be allowed “once again” to hear “the healing and transformative message of the Christian gospel.” (p. 18)

Responding to the findings of Tracy, and guided by his subject-centred focus, the following material endeavours to sketch the contours of a conversation currently under way among the Latin American community of liberation theologians. Focussing upon a theological understanding of the human subject as person, this particular conversation offers a valuable source of insight to those in the West who are concerned to ensure that the subjectivity which our own discourses narrate remains free from cultural solipsism and ever open to the novum by which the Divine is so often encountered in our own context.

Recent events in Egypt and Algeria, as well as the continuing difficulties of Christians in Iran and the Sudan, have returned the topic of Islamic militancy to Western newspapers. Concern for the situation of world Christianity requires of Catholics some grasp, however non-specialist, of where such militancy comes from and whither it is going. The 1994 Roman Synod of the Catholic churches of Africa was much exercised by the problem, though to judge from the reported speeches of the bishops, few had more to recommend than ‘dialogue'—that contemporary Vaticanesque panacea. To understand why the revolutionary Islam characteristic of a major segment of the Muslim world in the late twentieth century aims at nothing less than the comprehensive take-over of the civil societies where Islam is present, one sine qua non is an acquaintance, at least in broad outline, with the origins and development of the Islamic faith as a whole.

Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.

Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.

Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter published on May 22 1994, by coincidence the anniversary of the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake, stated in peremptory fashion that the admission of women to priestly ordination is not subject to debate among Roman Catholics, and the nonnegotiability of this statement has been insisted on more recently by Cardinal Ratzinger. In deference to this admonition I propose neither to debate the issue itself nor evaluate the theological and exegetical arguments on both sides, though it will not be possible to leave them completely out of account. What I would like to do instead is reflect on what is at stake for the church leadership, theologically and practically, in excluding women from the ministerial priesthood and doing so in such uncompromising terms as to even forbid the faithful to debate the subject. To pose the question in this way is not meant to insinuate that there can be no reasonable and arguable grounds for an exclusively male priesthood nor does it imply a dismissive attitude to arguments put forward in official documents in favour of the exclusion of women, much less assume that these arguments are advanced disingenuously. At the same time, I think it can be said that our reasons for holding certain positions are often unacknowledged and unarticulated even to ourselves, and are in any case more primordial than the arguments we elaborate in defence of these positions. In other words, our agenda is not always fully displayed in our arguments, which I imagine also holds for arguments put forward in official church documents.

It would appear that there are few things in human life that have the power to override all other concerns. There are few things, that is, that seem to command our unconditional attention. Amongst such things we might include ‘matters of life and death’. Perhaps the most admirable aspects of the human spirit are often found in the setting of life and death situations. Self-sacrifice, life-threatening risks on behalf of others’ lives, self-denying and courage etc. What is it that motivates people to behave in these ways? A common response comes to mind in their defence: ‘it was a matter of life and death’. We all understand the priority of that appeal. At the scene of an accident, an observer runs to an occupied telephone kiosk - ‘please let me use the phone, it’s a matter of life and death...’ A businessman arrives an hour late for a meeting, ‘Excuse me for being late, I was caught up in an accident, I had to stop - it was a matter of life and death...’ Despite the potential rudeness of interrupting another’s telephone call, or the tardiness of the businessman’s entry, we are willing to excuse such behaviour on the grounds that ‘it was a matter of life and death’. Like a verbal skeleton key, it is a plea that demands (and usually obtains) the unconditional unlocking of doors or removal of obstacles.

The purpose of this brief preamble concerning the effect life and death situations’ seem to have upon our attitudes and actions, or more particularly, our perceptions of appropriate attitudes and action, is to focus our attention upon an assumption that will be forming part of this paper - that religion itself is a ‘matter of life and death’.

This was not a journey I wanted to make. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Donald Nicholl, was dying of cancer in England. Travelling there to see him meant, I knew, saying goodbye. And this was something I did not want to do. I did not want to face up to the stark fact of his impending death. I did not want to consider how I would live with the immense hole that I knew his passing would create. Somehow, from a distance, I had been able to sustain the illusion that he would not die, that his disease would go into remission, that we would again walk the Pennines together, talking excitedly of our latest discoveries, of our hopes for the future. But now, handing my ticket to the stewardess and boarding the plane, I no longer harboured such illusions. Embarking on this journey brought home to me the harsh reality I had so far been evading: my friend was dying. In doing so, it also wakened me in a new way to Donald's journey, to his struggle, amidst much physical pain and loneliness, to make his way along the narrow, steep path toward death, toward God.

This was a path in many ways unimaginable to me. Certainly, I have faced up to the reality of death, struggled with it in my own way. But to be on the edge of death, to know that the end of life is near? No, I have not known that reality. But perhaps this was one of the reasons for my journey to see Donald in England: to be brought into the presence of this mystery in a way that I never would have discovered on my own. It is strange to consider this.

What is the meaning of life? Peter Singer’s new book offers us this answer (258-9)':

In Singer’s view the greatest cause of all is “to make the world a better place”, a cause which Singer also calls, apparently without irony (or indeed even humour), “taking the point of view of the universe” (274). “Making the world a better place”, as Singer understands it, in fact means only “the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is found” (275). What is the reflective justification for seeing this project as the only one involved in “making the world a better place”?