One of the tasks of the Secretariat for Non-believers is to study the diverse forms of atheism. It has not been easy to do this in Britain for lack of studies which map out the field. Now with Varieties of Unbelief Dr. Susan Budd has filled the gap. A literate sociologist, she has put us all in her debt by examining the minute-books and records of the various secularist societies. Her work is another contribution to the ‘sociology of the past’ which is indispensable if we are to understand the present. It occupies, as she puts it, the wasteland ‘between the tilled and fertile plantations of the sociology of collective behaviour and the history of ideas’ (p. 1). Such is her almost superhuman objectivity that it is quite impossible to determine from the book where she stands: her story takes her down some fascinating by-ways of English eccentricity (thus Annie Besant managed to remain a secularist and a theoso-phist to the bafflement of everyone except herself), but she stays resolutely cool and tries to resist the temptations of irony. Though she is prepared gently to chide her secularists for their repeated attacks on citadels long abandoned by the religious, she clearly admires them for their independence of mind and rejection of compromise, and can speak of them as ‘heirs to a great tradition, to the continued vitality of a radical culture which exists outside established methods of thought’ (p.80). But her tone is so very different from the propagandists of secularism whose account of the ‘great tradition’ tends to enrol Erasmus (a Catholic) and Voltaire (a deist) and indeed anyone who has in any way contributed to human progress. To the secularist, the world is full of ‘anonymous secularists’ who would reveal themselves if only they knew better.

Those of R. S. Thomas’ poems which can be called—if somewhat loosely—religious, are frequently variations of a dichotomy one term of which appears to have the poet’s qualified approval. And our confidence in the integrity of Thomas’ response to the complexity of his experience is sustained because, as we constantly discover, the preferred term in one variation of the dichotomy becomes the less favoured term in another. Sometimes, indeed, the less favoured term may even be identified with the overtly religious position. Nor are we required to share Thomas’ faith; he is neither insistent nor didactic and consequently there is no problem of distinguishing between the poet and the believer. Indeed, R.S.Thomas is not only immune to the virus of apologetic religiosity but he sustains a dialogue in which faith and unfaith are held in unresolved tension. If his world clearly differs from the one we are familiar with in Larkin’s Church Going it does so, not because it is fundamentally different, but because it is approached from a less familiar direction.

Curiously pehaps, since both are Anglicans, R.S.Thomas’ poetry is quite unlike Betjeman’s, and this is not simply a matter of technique, but has to do with attitudes, and especially their very different ideas about the importance of social artefacts. However much Betjeman deplores Slough’s bogus Tudor bars he delights in the bricky beauty of small towns—the area formerly castigated by Hopkins as ‘Oxford’s base and brickish skirt’ and in this—as in a good deal else, R.S.Thomas is closer to Hopkins. The mere physical threat is seen as having important spiritual implications, although for Thomas the pain is less acute, less fraught, and less creatively tuned to transmit the fleeting energy of living movement.

Closely aligned with the theme of the passio Christi apud Sinenses is that of the emulation of heroes. Mao led his nation in an extraordinary struggle to reshape the values, attitudes and ideas of an entire people. James Reston, senior editor of the New York Times was astounded by the ‘staggering thing that modem China is trying to do. They’re not trying merely to revolutionize people, and establish a sense of social conscience, but they’re really trying to change the character of these people. The place is one vast school of moral philosophy.’ Many methods pour into this enormous programme of thought-reform: preaching, teaching, wide-ranging techniques of persuasion from the outside, and orgies of self-criticism in which people testify to their conversion away from selfishness and incorrect ideas towards an exalted service of the masses in the name of the party. In all this ideological struggle to practise good deeds, overcome selfishness and reach true equality in a new society, the emulation of heroes (and sometimes of heroines) has emerged as a major means used on a nation-wide scale.

I would like to explore this imitation of heroes. It would be silly to speak of it constituting an imitatio Christi apud Sinenses (imitation of Christ among the Chinese). Nevertheless, certain interesting Christological implications may emerge.

Priests working in parishes up .and down the length and breadth of Africa are faced with a severe, and ever increasing problem. They refer to it as the “school leavers’ problem”, meaning the thousands of disaffected and frustrated primary and secondary school graduates, who having completed their course of education, and armed with their hard-earned certificates find themselves unemployed and unemployable. They may have spent years in the city, have tried every avenue and have drifted either into delinquency and crime, or have gravitated back to the “bush”.

They went to school in the hope that school would free them from the grinding poverty of the rural areas, by obtaining employment hopefully in town, and even more hopefully, white-collared: an easier and more interesting life than their parents’ was their goal. Their parents looked on this as an investment, insurance against their old age or infirmity, and likely as not made tremendous sacrifices to send them, equip them, and keep them there.

It rarely .turns out that way and years of expense, sacrifice and effort dissipate themselves as the graduates slip back into, at best, semi-literacy. Their styles and standards of living, their outlook and ambitions are often indistinguishable from those of their “less-fortunate” brothers and sisters who did not go to school.

For decades, and often in the teeth of Colonial opposition, the Churches founded schools, and brought “education” to the furthermost comers of Africa. To do this the Church, as much as the parents themselves, made huge sacrifices of personnel and material, time and money.

The Venice Statement on Authority in the Church is a momentous document which it must take some years for us to digest. Starting from “the large measure of agreement in faith which exists between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Anglican Communion”, acknowledged in the Malta Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission (1968), the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has succeeded, in less than ten years, in reaching a significant consensus on the doctrine of the Eucharist (Windsor 1971) and of the Ministry (Canterbury 1973), and now on the question of the nature and exercise of Authority in the Church.

This final document closes a phase. It must surely force Roman Catholics in this country to search their hearts more deeply than ever about how true this series of Agreed Statements is to what they believe, and to ask themselves how far what they believe may be illuminated and purified, in the light of faith, by study of these documents. As a community, we are not accustomed to theological argument, and the documents are in any case much more difficult to read than they appear at first sight. They are immensely rich, opening up perspectives and introducing new concepts which it would stretch the mind of theological students to understand. It has been easy enough for us to delay the effort of settling doubts and resolving difficulties raised by the first two documents because we naturally waited to see if agreement would be reached on the question of the primacy of the Pope. If agreement could not be attained on that question, so we could excuse ourselves, then we did not need to struggle with the unaccustomed language of the previous agreements.

The revival at Covent Garden this season of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, though it was but indifferently well directed and sung, confirmed me in a supposition that this opera affords the Christian a useful pair of images for his meditation upon the ways in which God is said to justify man. The musical action of Ariadne presents whomsoever would employ them with lively images for the common faith of Christians and for the different doctrinal formulations of this faith by Roman and Lutheran theologians. It suggests, also, how far these formulations may be related to that faith. The theologian’s nice arguments are rendered immediately appreciable in Strauss’ music. Whether he, or Hofmannsthal his librettist, had ever been confronted with the excitements of the sixteenth century disputants, Strauss, in the composition of this delightful opera, was exploring for himself just that relation of seeing to knowing which is structurally so important for doctrines of justification, and he was doing so within a context which most naturally suggested that a man might come to share in the divine life.

‘Seeing’ is commonly taken as a strong metaphor for all kinds of ‘knowing’, not only that which depends on our opening our eyes. This much, at least, is evident. Nodding in comprehension, I say ‘I see’.

I had better begin my review of Mary Douglas’ Implicit Meanings by justifying my title, which might otherwise seem unjustly sneering. If we like to divide human activities into “work” and “play”, fashion parades are distressingly both and neither. People strain for the glory of leisure. Can fashion then be linked with art and sport as an exacting celebration of the human capacity for spontaneous creativity? It lacks surely their moral pretensions, appealing with crude honesty to envy, vanity, and the pursuit of the ephemeral. Yet in the concept of fashion and the event of the fashion parade are certain resemblances to the presuppositions of social anthropology, particularly as expressed in the work of Professor Douglas. They remind us sharply that culture is something made by people, and that choice can bring change, indeed that change should be seen as part of the nature of culture. Again, each set of fashions must, like a culture, have a certain internal consistency, partly explicit, partly implicit. Then, in fashion as in culture, the distinctions which we can make readily enough between the aesthetical, the ethical, and the utilitarian become difficult to apply in practice. Culture, like fashion, is first tailored to the human body and then in turn affects our perception of it.

This metaphor criticises, as well as elucidating, social anthropology. Inevitably, social anthropology tends to stress the autonomy and specificity of cultures, and thus tends to blur our perception of the underlying unity of human nature. Inevitably, too, social anthropology is attracted to the analysis of the more elaborate and formal patterns of human doing and thinking, kinship terminologies, the etiquette of gift exchange, ritual and mythology, neglecting the more formless and unspecific aspects of human behaviour.

On 1st February 1933, two days after his election as Reichskanzler, Hitler published a proclamation in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he promised to take Christianity, ‘the basis of our whole morality’, under his ‘Firm protection’. This meant that the state religion would have to conform with and support National Socialist ideology. For some who rebelled against this it meant exile and for others death.

The universities were among the earliest of state institutions to be purged after the confirmation of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and as early as April 1933 Bernhard Rust, the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs, had suspended the theologians Emil Fuchs, Professor at Kiel, Karl Ludwig Schmidt at Bonn and Paul Tillich at Frankfurt where he was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, together with teachers of other subjects in other universities.

Tillich had lived a curious life in Germany up to that time. Having been an Army Chaplain in the 1914-18 war and having endured the battle at Verdun, he became firmly identified with the political fate of Germany after the war. He became a Religious Socialist and had a very reserved and equivocal association with the institutional church. Yet he managed to combine his socialism with an enthusiastic participation in the parties of upper class society, and he combined his Lutheran Christianity with a still more enthusiastic participation in a wide variety of sexual adventures. Despite his detestation of the thuggery of Nazi university students he was loath to leave Germany even after the accession of Hitler and his desire to return from New York in 1934 and be given a university job led him to produce a most compromising letter to Rust in which he appealed for employment in Germany.

So very great is the range and complexity of the issues now raised by the New Black friars debate that it is impossible even to state, never mind argue, a position in relation to all of them. Nonetheless, since two main contributors, Barker and Wicker make some serious criticisms of my views, at least some of them on the strength of equally serious misunderstandings of what they are, some reply is, even if insufficient, also necessary. So I shall concentrate a lot on clarifiication.

First of all, then, I shall try to be clearer about what my basic contentions are, for they obviously cannot be clear from what wrote. Barker, for example, purports to agree with my thesis about Marxism and morality. This thesis was, in short, that they are historically, and therefore contingently, identical. But he then accuses me of lapsing from this thesis and offers a reason which can only show that he does not, after all, understand the nature of the identity I was maintaining there is between Marxism and morality. So I must first of all clear this up.

Having done that I propose, secondly, to challenge the conception of Marxist science and of its relationship to ideologies which underpins Barker’s main criticisms of the Marxism and Christianity “strong compatibility” thesis.

The clarification of this thesis is the third, and most obviously necessary task. Wicker, at least, has badly misconstrued it. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, for in the “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” paper I only mentioned, but did not formally spell out, what the “strong compatibility” thesis holds you to maintaining.

Statement of the Problem . . . Latin America In Latin America and specifically in Chile the most dynamic (socially concerned) clergy have experienced the phenomenon of secularisation in a way that is perhaps different from the clergy in Europe or the United States. In these countries the strongest impact has probably been made by the scientific and technical discoveries of recent years. On the other hand, in Latin America the impact is felt especially through the experience of the power of mass movements to produce cultural transformations which pastoral action has never been able to bring about. These mass movements have become a reality, thanks to leaders, generally non-Christian, who understood and could make use of socio-economic and sociopolitical laws which allowed radical changes in structures of exploitation. Seeing the effectiveness of these mass movements and technical expertise of their leaders, some of the clergy became increasingly conscious of the contrast with the more or less total failure of large scale ecclesiastical pastoral action such as Catholic Action, Y.C.W, Y.C.S, the Christian Family Movement... etc. I believe that this feeling of frustration built up within the clergy a sense of inferiority and ineffectiveness which today appears as their major problem. What social changes had the Church been able to achieve in Latin America, bearing in mind that 99% of the people are baptized, that is to say are people who might be expected to respond to the directives of the ecclesiastical leaders? It is this uncomfortable feeling that has pushed the progressive clergy to look for new forms of theological understanding that will promote really effective Christian thinking on the radical transformation of the structures of exploitation. This is where we find the psychological roots of action and indeed the theological roots too, for the breath of the Spirit can surely be felt there.

We cannot believe just what we please just when we please; however, there is no doubt that it is sometimes the desires, fears and convenience of persons and groups, rather than the relevant evidence, which determines what they believe about things. I want to say something on this topic, before directly discussing ideology.

Anthony Trollope’ novel The Warden is a story about an elderly and inconspicuous Anglican clergyman named Harding, who has for many years enjoyed a comfortable stipend as warden of a hospice for paupers. During the time when the hospice and the wardenship have existed, the sum allotted to the paupers has remained the same; but the overall income has considerably increased, and this has been entirely for the benefit of the warden. A young reformer named Bold has drawn attention to the anomaly, and intends to go to law about the matter. The archdeacon of the diocese, a domineering and self-opinionated man who is the very antithesis of the warden in character, regards Bold’s interference as an affront to the Church, and an attack on the very fabric of society. In fact legal advice is taken, and a skilful lawyer is hired by the ecclesiastical establishment, who makes it clear that Bold cannot win his case. But Mr. Harding is unable, now the injustice of his position has been pointed out, to retain the wardenship; there now seems to him to be a kind of intrinsic inequity about his station in life, which no assurances about his legal position can allay.

I start with a quotation from the “Point of View” of the Church of Ireland Gazette for August 19th.

In this article I shall take the Gazette’s language and speak of the English “document” and the Irish “report” to avoid confusion. The Document appears to agree with Dr. Palley former Professor of Public Law in Queen’s University, Belfast. She contrasts the “majority of Protestants” who are “descendants of as the settlers” with “the majority of Irishmen, for the most part Roman Catholics”. Possibly Professor Beckett, who has recently retired from a history chair in the same university may be rather more reliable. I quote from the Appendix he supplied to the Irish Report of 1975.

I believe that the underlying philosophy of our culture has become nihilistic. If we pursue the implications of nihilism to their ultimate conclusions, where do we arrive? Very few have dared to do this: Max Stirner, who published a book on this theme in 1845, was one who dared. If we turn back to him we can see that he is the unacknowledged prophet of today’s fashionable culture.

The ultimate problems posed by nihilism are examined in a book on this German philosopher, by Dr. R. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, (Hull University Press, 1971). Stirner grew out of the neo-Hegelian movement, and published his one important work in 1945: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum— ‘The Unique One and His Property’.

Stirner belonged to movements which Marx rejected as ‘intellectual nihilists’. Following the nihilist logic to its ultimate implications, he denied God and Christian values, the State’s authority, and all traditional morality.

But he went still further, and denied all ethical obligations. In the face of nothingness he embraced nothingness, and he sought no commitment or ultimate responsibility, to man or the universe. ‘What is the commonweal to me?’ All that he was left with was— self. The self and the world were ultimately Nothing—but the Unique One ‘makes Nothing his cause’.

When a stage work of exceptional length and complexity not only survives for 100 years, but grows in popularity despite virtually insoluble problems of presentation, it is appropriate to mark the centenary by asking why this should be. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, is spread over four evenings and the uncut music requires between 14 and 16 hours for performance. To say that the appeal of the work reflects a general hankering after the larger than life merely touches the surface of the matter and it is necessary to grasp the extraordinary richness of The Ring. Apart from its musical grandeur it has a notable intellectual content, a wide emotional range, a potent symbolism and a capacity to involve the spectator in ways which he may hardly realise during or after the performance.

The literature concerning Wagner in general and The Ring in particular is very extensive and different commentators have sought and found different kinds of evidence for pronouncing the cycle a work of genius and a landmark in Western cultural achievement. English speaking commentators have been prominent beginning with Bernard Shaw who published his handbook to The Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite, in 1898. This is now felt to be a curious mixture of good sense and nonsense, the latter arising from Shaw’s own attitudes and limitations. He was a social crusader and a dramatist who felt that stage works must have a serious underlying purpose even when dressed up as comedies, and the message of the piece should be perfectly clear. It is hardly surprising that he saw the first three parts of The Ring as an intricate but perfectly comprehensible allegory concerning the evils of capitalism, the exploitation of the poor and the mechanism of revolutionary change. His detailed analysis, though ingenious, now seems over-tidy and glib.

To echo Denys Turner, the debate in New Blackfriars has by now ranged over so many different issues and mobilised so many separate arguments that it is impossible to answer every objection that has been raised against my position, nor shall I be able to take all the incidental points not raised directly in relation to my own views but which nonetheless warrant answers from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Equally it would be tedious (for anyone can read the debate for themselves) if I were to spend much time simply restating my earlier remarks and taking issue with every instance of their misinterpretation by my opponents.

Therefore, I shall rehearse my argument only in very general form, and then attend to the issue which is central to the debate— the differential characteristics of science and ideology.

My initial strategy was not to offer a substantive contribution to this debate but to carry out a reading of it, as it exists in certain texts, in order to expose the silences, incoherences and contradictions enforced on a writing that engages in what is, for the whole thrust of my argument, a project which has already failed even before its inception. Because, as I contend, Christianity is an ideology (as well, of course, as an ensemble of rituals, practices and institutions) and Marxism a science, and because they suffer a high level of mutual unintelligibility deriving from their very different epistemological statuses (the one, potentially at least, an object of the other), Marxism has no ‘contribution’ to make to this ‘debate’ except to define its character as an irresolvable ideological encounter.