The tool of social analysis

Power has become a central concept in the analysis of political and social institutions. Its newly-found utility in part stems from the growth of Marxist analysis, which so many academics in the social sciences who are not necessarily Marxists have accepted to various degrees.

Until recently, the more common concept was authority—an idea that was once popular particularly amongst political theorists. Authority as an analytical tool has ceased to have pride of place because of its abstract nature and ideological overtones. The tendency today is to speak of power structures, not authority structures. Authority exists but it can be overthrown by another authority. The question is not so much the nature of the authorities but the fact that one is able to vanquish the other. How is the triumph achieved? The answer is simply that one authority has more power than the other and thus overcomes it. The concept of authority is still referred to and continues to be valuable, but the model of power is more useful, since it is that of a conflict in which sheer strength wins the day. Power implies opposition and final triumph. That is what politics is about. Some would see the whole of history as a power struggle. As Lenin has written: ‘Great questions in the life of nations are settled only by force.’

The extensive use now made of the concept of power has brought with it the problems of definition, and within the social sciences the issue virtually constitutes a subject in itself.

When he reviewed my book Marxism and Christianity (Oxford 1983) in New Blackfriars last December, Professor Nicholas Lash said he would be grateful for comments on his own very different attempt to confront some of the same issues as I had dealt with. He was referring to his book A Matter of Hope, published in 1981 by Darton, Longman and Todd. Here I am complying with his request. After Lash on Turner, readers of New Blackfriars can now try Turner on Lash!

Lash “aims to take Marxism seriously” (p.5) from the standpoint of Christian theology. He certainly does take Marxism seriously, at least in the sense that he gives Marx’s ideas a fair crack of the whip. The substance of his work consists in detailed, patient, lucid and by and large at least plausible reconstructions of some central themes in Marx’s thought. These include epistemological and/or ontological themes concerning “appearance and reality”, “ideology”, “truth”, “science and theory”, themes in social and anthropological theory such as “revolution”, “utopianism” and “alienation”, and above all the controverted question of the nature of Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ which,rightly, in my view, Lash sees as being the foundation of all that is distinctively Marxian about the rest. The strength of Lash’s book is, first, that he sees this distinctiveness and pervasiveness of Marx’s materialism and,secondly, that the intellectual and scholarly weight of the book is dedicated to its exploration. Indeed, as an essay by a theologian in the exploration of this and other central Marxist themes, I do not think Professor Lash’s book is seriously rivalled by anything much in the English language.

It was in 1973, in his book God and the Universe of Faiths, that Professor John Hick argued for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions. His argument met quite a lot of criticism, and it is fairly widely thought that the debate is today a dead one. How true is this?

In his book he characterised as “Ptolemaic” the view which has been allegedly held for at least the last “fifteen centuries” which proclaims that “all men, of whatever race or culture, must become Christians if they are to be saved”. He cites the Decree of the Council of Florence (1438—1445) which upheld the traditional Catholic position, summed up in the axiom, extra eeclesiam nulla salus—there is no salvation outside the Church. He maintains that Vatican II and modem theologians such as Karl Rahner propound further epicycles of the same Ptolemaic view, as they still assume “without question that salvation is only in Christ and through incorporation into his mystical body, the Church”. He feels that there is little difference between Roman Catholics and Protestant positions on this issue.

The Ptolemaic system held that the earth was at the centre of the universe and explained the movement of the planets (which did not conform to the theory) through “epicycles”. The increasing number of epicycles rendered the Ptolemaic view less and less plausible until finally the Copernican view, in its simple explanation of the facts by the theory that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe, replaced it.

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.

Few sociologists of religion have been tempted to explore the visual dimension of religious change. The problems—both theoretical and methodological—are formidable.

In the first place, when scrutinizing religious art in any culture we have to be very careful about our assumptions concerning the iconicity of religious symbols and the so-called creative character of visual images. Richard Wollheim, for one, has argued persuasively that when we discuss iconicity in any cultural setting we have to take account of the relation of the sign to the sign-user as well as what is represented by the sign, i.e. the referent. It is, he says, “when signs become for us ... ‘fuller’ objects, that we may also come to feel that they have greater appropriateness to their referents”. The problem for sociologists of religion is just how to tease this kind of sense data from respondents.

Secondly: as Hugh Duncan has noted, “the problem is not that of asserting that there is a reciprocal relation between art and society, but rather of showing how this relationship exists” ‘Proof’ might be arrived at by establishing either valuative congruence, social structural influence or interpersonal influence within the artistic vocation itself. But here we also need to postulate a psychological mechanism through which the individual artist transmutes social, cultural and credal themes into tangible artistic statements, as well as a theory of perception and symbolic process to account for art’s effect on the disposition and behaviour of the audience.

In late 1969 and early 1970 the Brazilian press carried a story which it called the “Dominican Affair”. It told of how an important urban guerilla had been shot dead by the police owing to his betrayal by two student-brothers of the Dominican Order. The story had the widest implications for Church-State relations at a national and international level, and it got world coverage. Recently more information has come to light, which makes possible an hypothesis (but not yet a definitive statement) of what really happened. It is fascinating, whether or not one is a Brazilian or a Dominican. It reveals very dramatically the complexity of the ways in which the apparatus of government and the media may distort—and continue to distort—even the most localized of events. And it shows how, in spite of these distortions, a seemingly modest man, Frei Tito de Alencar, whose sufferings and ideals have been written about several times in New Blackfriars, can emerge eventually with the stature of a martyr.

A talk given to the Dominican Sisters at Rosary Priory, Bushey, England, on 12 March 1983.

Let’s begin with the case against obedience, I mean the case against obedience in general. There is a very widely held view that obedience is a necessary evil. I think more of the sisters and brethren subscribe to this view than would admit to it, even to themselves. The view is not confined to people at the receiving end, those who have to do the obeying; it is shared by quite a lot of people who do the commanding. I don’t want to make this a matter of obedience’. To put someone under obedience is thought of as a sort of last resort. We ought to be able to get along without obedience but, the world being what it is, and interests conflicting as they do, we just have to use it from time to time, like war or surgical operations.

The root of this opinion is a certain view of what it is to be a human being. The view that we are each unique individual subjects with our own personalities and desires and talents and that the good life consists in each one of us developing her/his individual personality as far as possible. As far as possible; because the full and complete development of the personality of Sister Ermyntrude may turn out to be incompatible with the full and complete development of the personality of Sister Gladiola: they therefore have to find some kind of compromise, a little give and take on each side.

An expanded version of a paper given at a seminar on “contextual theology” held in November 1983 at the Pastoral Institute at Multan, in the Punjab, Pakistan.

At the various meetings of Third-World theologians it is stated again and again that theologizing is not an academic exercise of a highly trained group of professional experts. Rather, the fundamental subject of theology is the Christian community. This is true of whatever theology exists, because it is the character of a Christian community, its life and witness, which determine the kind of theology it will produce. A truly Third-World theology, therefore, can only grow from within a community that is aware of its being part of the struggles of the Third World and has made an option for the poor and their liberation against the structures of evil and oppression.

Against this background, it is the purpose of this article to describe the history of the Punjabi Christian community and the theology which has been developed in this community, with its strengths and weaknesses, up to the present day. In this description certain directions for the future may perhaps emerge.

If it is to be of real value, Catholic discussion in Britain on the right to strike must take into account the main strands of reflection so far on the subject. My object here is simply to draw attention to these, not to describe them in detail, much less to make here a theoretical contribution to the discussion myself.

It may be of interest to begin with three contrasting examples of clerical reflection born out of social realities. Cardinal Manning’s social thinking had an important influence on trade unionists even in his own lifetime. He seems to have developed personal friendships with some union leaders, described rather ambiguously as ‘some of their most famous agitators’ by the anonymous writer of the 1934 Preface to a collection of Manning’s works on social questions. Manning was deeply and personally involved in the celebrated London dock strike of 1889. Writing a couple of years after that strike, the Cardinal took it as ‘evident’ that between a capitalist and a working man there can be no true freedom of contract. The capitalist is invulnerable in his wealth. Concerning the nature of strikes he reflected, ‘A strike is like war. If for a just cause, a strike is right and inevitable, it is a healthful restraint imposed upon the despotism of capital’. John Lopes was Catholic chaplain at Cambridge from 1922 to 1928. During the General Strike of 1926 he was dismayed to hear of undergraduates volunteering as strike breakers and he warned, ‘If there is ever a class war in this country the universities of Oxford and Cambridge began it in 1926’. The Cardinal, preaching at Westminster, condemned the strike; dons were divided.

In our first article (published in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars) we discussed the tensions between the Christian Church as a model of a new kind of family and the traditional family in Greco-Roman society, and trends toward the resolution of this tension both by separating out the vision of the new community into an eschatological ascetic religious order, on the one hand, and the repatriarchalisation of the Church and the resacralization of the patriarchal family, on the other hand. It would be useful at this point to summarize the major features of the patriarchal family as that existed in Jewish and Greco-Roman society.

Patriarchy refers to a legal, social and ecomomic system of society that validates and enforces the domination of male heads of families over the dependent persons in the household. In classical patriarchal systems, such as are found in Hebrew law, this included wives, dependent children and slaves. In this sense, various groups of males are also dependent persons in patriarchal systems. However, women are subjugated persons in patriarchal societies in a different sense than either male children or male slaves. The former could grow up and become themselves householders; the latter might become emancipated and become householders. Women, first as daughters, then as wives, and sometimes even as widows dependent on the eldest son, were defined generically as persons dependent on the patriarch or male head of the household in which they lived.

Liberation theologies provide a framework for serious reflection about systemic issues. But some liberation theologians, while urging social change, foster a guilt-inducing process which actually prevents both personal and social change. The tendency to moralize individual life is thus simply transposed into moralizing and collective issues. Absolute search for justice can even sometimes become offensive. The content of normative ethics is changed but the same guilt-inducing attitudes remain.

This article is concerned with the construction of a “liberation ethics” which goes beyond the mere transposition of idealistic moral philosophy to a new set of issues. It deals with the meaning of ethical principles and of sin, while constructing an ethics based on historical accounts of liberation. Interestingly, this approach is consonant with the “different voice” of women in ethics, as it has been analysed by scholars like Carol Gilligan.

The Shortcomings of Idealistic Ethics

People would like to have reasons for believing that God exists. With its appearance in attractive paperback format Hans Küng’s Does God Exist? certainly looks like the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject. For one thing, at seventeen ounces, clearly printed on decent paper, and sturdily enough bound to survive several readings, it is a fine example of modern book-production. The translation by Edward Quinn, is, needless to say, almost faultless. Some of the reviews which the hardback version received were very destructive—Alasdair MacIntyre’s page-long diatribe in The London Review of Books (5—18 February, 1981) comes to mind: “Whenever in future I try to imagine what Purgatory will be like, the thought of having to read Dr. Küng’s book will recur”. Judgements in some of the theological periodicals were rather more respectful. To give only two examples: in Theology (September 1981), after some gently expressed but actually quite devastating criticisms, Brian Hebblethwaite concludes as follows: “So it can hardly be said that this is a great book. But as an attempt to set the scene for a serious engagement with atheism, it serves a very useful purpose”. In The Month (March 1981), while describing Hans Küng as “a sort of Dale Carnegie of modern theology, building confidence, edifying in the best sense of the word”, Paul Lakeland’s judgment of the book runs thus: “He has two ostensible purposes, to present the history of thinking about the problem of God since the time of Descartes, and to define a new concept of God.

When Etienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978 at the age of 94, medieval studies suffered the loss of one of its most celebrated historians of philosophy. This year witnesses the centenary of his birth. It is perhaps appropriate briefly to recall the memory of this truly great scholar of our age. He was a cultured man in the best traditions of western scholarship, a fact to which his literary output amply attests

Born on 13th June 1884 in Paris, and after a notable rise through the French educational labyrinth, Gilson emerged as a scholar and teacher of considerable dimensions in terms of the breadth and depth of his learning. Though a dedicated family man, he was never afraid to meet the countless calls to lecture, write and also to attend and contribute to the numerous conferences to which he was invited. Such was his stature to become that on more than one occasion, he was called to represent his country on the international stage in various capacities.

His travels in the service of his scientia amabilis were fruitful not only in the sense that they gave him the opportunity to share and enrich his scholarship through the contact he made with so many others on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because it was on one such journey to Canada in 1927 that the idea of establishing a programme of Medieval Studies in St. Michael’s College, Toronto, was seriously discussed. Two years later the new Institute of Medieval Studies was born, receiving Pontifical approbation in 1939.

In June we published the paper which Fergus Kerr had given at the Upholland Theological Consultation in April, ‘‘The Need for Philosophy in Theology Today” (p. 248—260). In it Father Kerr set out to establish his case by assembling examples of the neo-Cartesian presuppositions which he believes still pervade a lot of Western thinking, and Catholic theology especially, but are largely undiscerned. The paper has evoked many and varied reactions, ranging from enthusiastic praise to severe criticism. One of its critics, Father Illtyd Trethowan, discusses it here, and Father Kerr replies.

The issue of New Blackfriars for June 1984 contains the text of Father Fergus Kerr’s address to ‘the gathering which founded the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain’ in April 1984. A rough summary of his theme might go as follows. Catholic theology is profoundly imbued with ‘a certain Cartesianism’ from which we need to escape (pp. 248—9). Catholic Scholastic philosophy of 25 years ago, based on Aristotle, presents issues which are the subjects of current philosophical debate (although not of current interest to Catholic theologians) and resistance to Cartesianism would have the added advantage of contact with this philosophical debate (pp. 249—52). Catholic theology since Descartes was a struggle to resist Cartesianism, and Aristotelian Thomism was a weapon in the fight; but the battle was lost because the enemy had infiltrated too deeply (pp. 252—3). Examples of Cartesian influence in Catholic theology today are to be found in ‘mentalism in prayer’, ‘interiorist volitionism in moral theology’, a certain approach to human survival after death, Kiing’s presuppositions and Chirico’s epistemology (pp. 253—7).