The purpose of this article is to give some evidence of the kind of understanding we can win through reading African prose writers, and of the misconceptions we can clear up in so doing; and to make some suggestions as to what authors and what books we might begin by reading. A good deal of the prose writing done by Africans is biographical, either directly or derivatively. One of the best known examples is Camara Laye’s autobiography The African Child. In it he tells the story of his childhood and youth until the time he leaves Guinea, his home country, to go to France for higher studies. The extract below, which must be about a time when he was six or seven years old, shows the warmth and charm of the book. At that time he lived in Kouroussa, a large up-country town, and the incident described is a visit to his relatives at Tindican, a small village to the west of Kouroussa.

Any discussion of authority in the Church today must start from the fact that authority in the political sense has become a dirty word. To adapt a saying originally coined by Sir William Harcourt in 1889 and given wider currency by the future King Edward VII in 1895, we are all anarchists now. There was a time when authority was given the benefit of the doubt: unless there was glaring evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that those in authority knew what they were doing and thus commanded our obedience; and even if the matter was analysed further and it was admitted that authority could make mistakes, it was thought better that the wrong decision should be made and applied immediately than that any decision should be deferred until it might be too late. Today our assumptions tend to work the other way. We assume that those in authority will lurch from blunder to blunder, and we no longer see any great virtue in muddling through: it is apt to be a messy and expensive business.

This cannot be put down simply to a widespread cynicism alleged to exist as part of a supposed far-reaching malaise affecting the whole of our national life today. Indeed, there is some justification, if not for cynicism, at least for scepticism: our governments since the war seem to have been singularly unable to avoid leading us into one economic crisis after another, and when we are encouraged to swallow yet another dose of deflationary medicine we cannot help wondering if this cannot do more than alleviate the immediate symptoms of our economic ill-health.

Father Herbert McCabe was penalised, or disciplined, for having written that the Church is corrupt, and the censor who passed the statement for publication has been removed from office. I have very little doubt that it was the use of this word, ‘corrupt’, which brought down such indignation on their heads; and, indeed, I can readily understand how his statement, tom from its context, provoked feelings of anger and shock. Taken out of context, the statement appeared to bring against the Church the gravest possible charge, and to do so on a flimsy basis of four complaints about particular actions, only one of which (Cardinal Spellman’s militaristic speech) was obviously substantial. Of course, most people who have followed the affair know by now how misleading this appearance was. First, the general drift of the editorial was a rebuttal of Father Davis’s accusations against the Church, in explanation of his own withdrawal from it, so that the statement so widely quoted had the force of a concession to Father Davis of what Father McCabe found true in his charges, although he nevertheless found the general assessment incorrect. Secondly, the role of Father McCabe’s examples was not (as it appeared out of context) as proof of the corruption of the Church: rather, the proof was that we took such things as expected behaviour on the part of bishops and the like, instead of as shocking aberrations. It was, no doubt, foolish of Father McCabe to write a sentence so liable to be quoted out of context, and so misleading when thus quoted; but far less foolish than the behaviour of the authorities who dealt with the rcsulting situation by first silencing thc one man who could havc explained cxactly what he meant, and thus correctcd thc misinterpretation.

The world as suffering and as entering transformation is crucifixion. At the heart of the world is the continuation and working out of Golgotha. The revolution of peace is the world in the critical process of overcoming its self-resistance to unity through the upward convergence of love, a process animated by the union of God and man.

But the world is creation as well as crucifixion, natural growth as well as divine revolution. Man is born in the cathedral of earth and sky, reaches out to the infinite silence of the universe, and begins to form himself in a rhythm of creation and self-recognition. Man is growing and maturing through time, provoking and provoked by a progressive self-understanding. Today the world as creation is man’s cumulative discovery of himself in time, not at his deepest self-identity—for his deepest manhood is found through his suffering union with God, through crucifixion not creation, or through that unique creation which is crucifixion. But the world as evolving creation is man’s growing discovery of himself as distinct and fully responsible, as that one called from childhood to recognize and affirm the possibilities of a world come of age.

In The Secular City Harvey Cox has effectively described the present point of the world as creation in terms of secularization, of ‘man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time’ (The Secular City, 1965, p. 2). The age of the secular city is a liberation of man from religious world-views whose orientation distracted him from the task of building the earth.

The monk pointed his pistol. ‘As far as I am concerned, the community no longer exists. The land is mine. I suggest you get out— and quick!’ The two hired thugs made it clear the threat was a real one. Reluctantly, the little group of Benedictine postulants, and their superior, packed up their few things and trudged off into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon. So ended the first period of one of the most interesting experiments in the monastic life in this century.

The superior was, it turned out, a man of rare courage. Born in Lille in 1912, and educated ih Louvain, Dom Grégoire Lemercier spent seven years at the abbey of Mont-César before accepting the invitation of a Mexican colleague to accompany him and another monk, a Belgian, to found a monastery in Mexico. The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, during which Lemercier served as a chaplain and was taken prisoner. When he was released he left for the United States, and joined his two companions at their abbey of Monte Cassino in the north of Mexico in 1944. The foundation was a double failure: the Belgian threw up his vocation and got married, and the Mexican apostatized and at the end of 1949 took over the monastery by armed force. Two years later, little daunted by this experience, Dom Grégoire founded another monastery, Santa Maria de la Resurrección, a few miles from Cuernavaca, following the strict Benedictine observance.

Some three years ago I was asked to write an introduction to a new journal of radical catholic opinion. I sent along, to what proved to be Slant, what seemed to me at the time a slightly rash note of welcome, and was much impressed, when the first number appeared, to find that I had been understood as cautious, suspicious, and even vaguely minatory. Such ambivalences will doubtless recur. The Slant position, if we are to believe Catholics and the Left, is now well established. It has already been honoured by an attack in the Spectator, and I suppose it is just another mark of its success that it must now face the rigour of its friends.

The Slant manifesto, which is what Catholics and the Left amounts to, is very uneven: not so much in quality as in level. Its first part, Christians against Capitalism, by Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton,is a vigorous piece of pamphleteering, of a properly manifest kind. I hope I do not wrong it when I say that it seems to me the best short statement that I have read of the general position of the New Left. Its Christian interpretation of community, which is inevitably its starting point, is unforced and organic, and it gains in specificity by being able to talk frankly (as in other traditions is not always possible) about loving relationships as the heart of community. At the same time it is powerful in negative criticism: the chapter on Liberalism is especially astringent and wholly convincing.

Anything written about China, other than for the daily press, risks being out of date long before it gets into print. By the time this is being read, the differences between Chairman Mao and the administrative set-up in Peking may have been finally resolved, or shelved; there may even have been an intervention — though it is difficult to conceive of the Americans being foolish enough to back it — from Chiang Kai Shek. In theory, he has been awaiting just such a time of internecine strife to send an expeditionary force across to the mainland. That is, of course, if the strife is really as violent as we have been led to believe. English visitors recently (January 1967) in Canton suggest that although a few months ago there was a serious likelihood of the army under Mao moving from Shanghai against an army raised from Peking by Liu Shao Chi, this clash has been averted, and rumours of violent deaths by the hundreds in cities like Nanking seem to lack foundation.

No doubt a movement with the youthful intensity of the Red Guards will not fade back into obscurity without some violence somewhere — you can’t summon up this massive support from a nation’s youth (their ages seem to range from 10 to 18) and then deprive it of an active outlet. But before we jump to hasty conclusions we should be very wary of press reports, particularly from correspondents who, though they may have been inside China for a week or so (it doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to get in) can’t converse with the Chinese without an interpreter,

The way of teaching any set of ideas must depend upon the context within which they will be understood. If this context is very different for teacher and taught, deep misunderstanding is almost bound to arise. Christian doctrine can hardly be got across to Africans who have not received any appreciable amount of western education – and that is even now the great majority – if the missionary has not first understood something of their own thought world. In some ways the missionary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was actually more likely to arrive at such an understanding than his successors of forty years later. The early missionaries could not open and busy themselves with loads of schools and hospitals. They were almost completely isolated from Europe and were forced to share closely in African society, once they abandoned the attempt to create independent Christian villages. Very probably there was quite a long period before any considerable number of converts was obtained. In this period they had the opportunity to acquire a fine knowledge of the local language, customs and thought forms, and many of them did so, both Catholic and Protestant. In areas and tribes where evangelisation began much later – during the last forty years – this has often not happened. Missionaries have rushed straight into the provision of social services and an extensive catechumenate without any adequate prior initiation into the local tribal mind.

It is the somewhat tentative conclusion of this article that there are three different, though related, notions of hell in Christian tradition. A first might be called Hell as Sheol (since this was what the Hebrews called it) or Hell as Hades (which was the Greek tran-lation). Another is Hell as Gehenna, the hellfire of the New Testament. And a third is something I shall call Hell as Tartarus for reasons which will later appear.

Sheol

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. These phrases account for over a third of all the Old Testament references to Sheol. Well over half of the remaining references explicitly couple Sheol with death as parallel concepts.

Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’. But at one period of his life, when he had lost both Joseph and Benjamin,

I love man. He is wild and lost and searching, searching. O God how he searches. He searches for the woman that will understand him. He searches for the more-than-woman that will understand the very thing in man that woman never understands, his passion for the absolute. He desires to be woman as well as man in his search: desires a maturity in his metaphysical passion whereby it will be able to shed that adolescence that seems to be built right into it. The most precious thing in man, the spark, seems fated to intellectualize the world, so that out of the live fire of his mind he peoples the world with immutable essences, so that he loses himself, his fire, transmuting it into dead cool planets of conceptual thought. And the concepts once formed have a terrifyingly long life. They continue to encircle him and constitute his mental universe long after big changes in human living have rendered them useless. He has to project himself all around, because he cannot believe in himself, cannot come to himself. I love him as he circles round and round the agony and promise of himself that he cannot enter; as a woman loves the man whom love has made talkative, parading before her his achievements because he cannot expose himself. And she waits for the moment of tears, of dissolution, of the truth of man. I love this conscious treasure that dare not own the treasure of consciousness.

To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.

No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.

Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.

Rhodesia today is an unhappy country. It is unhappy in its divisions, its rulers and the direction they have taken; unhappy in the international ostracism its white citizens have brought upon it and in the kind of friends they are making abroad; unhappy too in that its human and moral problem has been made a bone of political contention in Britain; unhappy especially because its Christian citizens by and large differ so little from the rest in their social attitudes and aims that Christianity seems irrelevant to the solution of the basic problem.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that Rhodesia should become the centre of a controversy that is assuming international proportions. Its problem is very much a problem of our time: a problem of acceptance of and adjustment to new social patterns and unities which conflict with habits of mind and living acquired in the past and the expectations they have engendered. To those who have enjoyed a dignified and stable existence with a comfortable standard of living, far-reaching social change, however inescapable in the long run, appears as a threat to their own and their children’s security and, if this security has been won by their own enterprise and effort, as an unjust undoing of their achievement. When the required change is one of the integration of two groups of people so different in cultural background, experience and present attainment as are the two major racial groups in Rhodesia – the Africans and the Europeans

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, submitted at the University of Copenhagen in 1841 for the degree of Magister Artium, has at last appeared in English translation.1 Not before time. It is the last of his major works to reach the English speaking public, and certainly the one without which all the rest of Kierkegaard’s work is in danger of being misunderstood. It is interesting to note that 1841 is the year when Marx took his doctorate at Jena. Marx has been accorded every kind of critical attention, but Kierkegaard, discovered late, is still emerging into his full importance. Last summer Gallimard of Paris issued Kierkegaard vivant. Comprising papers read at a recent U.N.E.S.C.O. conference by such figures as Sartre, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel etc, it forms an eloquent proof that the thought of Kierkegaard is being revalued by those very thinkers who ‘discovered’ him thirty years ago. Collins, in publishing The Concept of Irony, adds one further work of ‘the living Kierkegaard’ to their previous excellent output in the field.

Lee Capel has rendered us great service in letting us have at last his polished and erudite translation. It has taken a long time, at least six years in the correcting. The difficulties of this work are famous. Now the work is available to anyone who, while interested in the enigmatic thought of Kierkegaard, has not a ready command of a fluent and punning Danish.

The Concept of Irony deserves to be well-known, hailed, read and enjoyed. Rarely can such a witty, good-humoured, mature, intelligent and ferociously yea-saying work have appeared as an academic dissertation.

‘Has Rome been converted?’ is the question put by the title of Henri Fesquet’s book on Vatican II and its aftermath (Rome s’est-elle convertie? Paris, Grasset, 1966, 12.00 Frs.). Better placed than most to sound the reactions of the French bishops to events in Rome, Fesquet is Le Monde‘s correspondent on religious matters, and a very well-informed one he is. This makes the only slightly muted optimism of his book all the more surprising. He is convinced that the question must be answered in the affirmative, and he selects a number of themes to illustrate this — the new concept of the priest, the concern with the ecumenical spirit, with world poverty, with public opinion, and with the role of women in the Church.

‘Thanks to Vatican II,’ he writes in the preface, ‘Catholicism is giving the impression of taking the Gospel more seriously. The Council’s most essential task . . . was for the Church to look at herself in the light of the New Testament. What does the Gospel tell us, if not that all progress passes through death ? The Church will only renew herself by accepting immolation in the image of her Founder.’ Immolation of the old, to direct the development of the new. A renewed Christian eschatology, for example, which will present itself to twentieth century man as the accomplishment and metamorphosis of humanity. And a way has been shown of reducing the tragic opposition between Marxism and Christianity, which only developed in the first place because Christians had forgotten their most urgent duty.

The present generation of parents and other educators faces a particular problem: having been brought up for the most part with little or no sex instruction, having been protected to some extent by the pressures of social convention, they find themselves faced by a generation of young men and women who talk freely about sex, who say openly that they are not prepared to accept the traditional teaching of the Churches with regard to sexual behaviour and for whom the fear of an illegitimate pregnancy is no longer the deterrent to fornication that it may have been in the past. To make matters even more perplexing, the young men have long hair which used to be thought a symbol of homosexuality and the young women wear mini-skirts which is confusing for a generation of men accustomed to thinking of the exposed female thigh as a non-verbal communication of a specific kind. What are they to do ? Judging by the number of books currently flooding the market, at least part of the answer seems to be ‘read a book about sex’ for, with no statistical evidence, I’d be prepared to guess that it is this generation rather than the one at risk that is doing most of the reading—perhaps the others are too busy with the field work.

The first of these three paperbacks, Sense and Nonsense about Sex, purports to be written for teenagers, and more specifically appears to be directed to Protestant teenagers in youth clubs, but I find it hard to imagine any young man or woman actually reading it.

There is a parlour-game in which a whispered message is passed down a line from player to player and comes out unrecognisably distorted at the end. Sometimes the result is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, sometimes it is merely flat. Invariably it is ridiculous. Now this is not merely a game for parlours. It is a game which the succeeding generations of mankind have been playing with one another throughout history; and there we call it tradition (which is after all only a Latin word for handing on). Men of one generation after another have handed on their thoughts, their customs, their institutions to succeeding generations who have often made extraordinary and unrecognisable use of them. Sometimes the results are whimsical, more often they are tiresomely childish.

We in the Christian church have on our hands a great number of conceptions that started their life as adult, but, because they have been let slip from generation to generation by mere tradition without understanding, are now thoroughly and tiresomely childish. This article is an attempt to rescue one such conception from the childishness in which it is wrapped: namely, our conception of the Devil and his angels. It is an attempt to unroll tradition, so to speak, and catch our present conception in the making; to watch generation pass on its message to generation, and ask what message we would have received if each generation had made sure it understood what the previous generation was saying. Perhaps such an article can serve to start the original message on its way again.

‘The proposition that is closest to the very centre of our common faith is that he who loses his life shall save it. It applies not only to the material dispositions of our egoism, but to the spiritual universe we construct to secure ourselves against uncertainty.’ I am an inveterate optimist, and one of my current optimisms is the thought that, just because it is now being forced to embrace the truth of that proposition, English Catholicism may be on the verge of an exhilarating breakthrough. We English catholics are apt to envy more favoured countries than our own, where bishops, priests and people were better prepared for that burgeoning of new life in the Church to which the Vatican Council stands as mid-wife. In many places ecclesiastical structures were already more flexible, liturgical and ecumenical sensitivity was already awakened, pastoral practice was less heavily complacent. And yet—is there not a danger (I am ridiculously overgeneralizing in order to try to focus the point I want to make) that, because of these things, the aggiornamento in such countries might entail little more than an envigorating rearrangement of the ecclesiastical furniture? In our own country, where structures were so rigid, where clergy and devout laity tended to live (with the ‘catholic half’ of their minds) in unruffled isolation from so many of the real issues that rack humanity and the Church of Christ, where theology hardly existed until recently, where ‘pastorale’ is significantly untranslatable, where liturgical immobility made Pius XII’s application of the brakes in 1958 look like dangerous novelty—in this country we are certain to be spared a superficial renewal.

Mr Roe’s book comes as something of a surprise; not because of its contents or its presentation, but simply because it has not been done before. Of all the comparative literature theses of the ‘Jones in France’/‘Dupont in England’ variety, it is natural to expect that someone would have examined the role of Lamennais in this country. From any point of view, he is one of the greatest names in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. He lived in England for awhile (a crucial while: it led to his much controverted decision to take orders), and had many English connections and admirers. No matter: Mr Roe has done the job very well indeed, though, as he is careful to warn us himself, he has been more concerned with the effect of Lamennais upon England, as exemplar, than with the influence of English ideas upon Lamennais.

By the development of current religious and political ideas in his own person, Lamennais offered to English observers the essence of certain key notions in religion and politics which were otherwise diffused throughout the pages of books and periodicals and the actions of very different groups of men. He was one of the most articulate exponents of the renascent Bourbon legitimism with de Bonald and Chateaubriand in the days of the Drapeau blanc and the Conservateur.

The comments by Martin Green in the October Mew Btackfriars editorial, Raymond Williams’s article (November) and the appearance of Terry Eagleton’s book1 mark, perhaps, a new stage in the debate about the ‘catholic left’. Beyond the mud-slinging and the taking to the ramparts (useful though such antics have been recently in helping to publicise the importance of the catholic left as a distinctive movement); and also beyond the appeal to history (Donald Nicholl in the Clergy Review, August 1966) and to received notions of church structure (Michael Dummett in Mew Blackfriars, December 1965) we now come to a fundamental problem. The definition of this problem is difficult, and can be approached from a number of points of view. But I think the basic question the catholic left has to answer is this: is the commitment to a political order, the concern with the restructuring of the human community, part of a homogeneous continuum which will simply inaugurate the kingdom of God as its final term, or is it rather a means by which the essentially gratuitous character of the kingdom can be most clearly revealed by having the obscuring clutter of merely human obstacles removed ?

Perhaps I may begin a review of Mr Eagleton’s book by registering one note of disagreement with Martin Green. This is that I feel he is trying to evade a problem, when he speaks of the need to ‘attune’ ourselves to war and peace simultaneously.

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.

To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.