Do you, when speaking informally in your own words, talk of particular other people as ‘holy’, or say you desire ‘holiness’? Christians today vary widely on this—from omission of the word ‘holiness’, through assorted hesitations, to unselfconsciously terming certain others holy and voicing a wish to be holy themselves. People may often have deep down a lot more inklings regarding holiness than commonly become explicit. But faced here with an invitation to consider how ‘our perceptions’ of holiness relate to ‘our perceptions’ of sin, it is wise to note that initial reactions on the former front as well as the latter can prove less than clear-cut. In my own case, I tend to be fairly reticent in singling out specific individuals as markedly holy, while quick—amidst theologizing—to state that all are called to holiness, and that some growth towards it is widespread.

The central ideas in this article are the possibility for humans of close relationship with God and alignment with God’s purposes; the primacy in this of God’s gracious outreach; yet the place also of human personal responsibility. These ideas lie at the heart of my account of holiness; and they help assessment of statements about holiness as ‘virtue’, or as ‘wholeness’. Notions of sin are correspondingly clarified. And light is thrown—so I think—on some issues evident during reflection on engagement within history, including in political arenas.

From biblical times onwards, ‘holiness’ has been applied to certain collective referents: specially ‘People’ and ‘Church’. ‘Sin’ terminology too has had collective referents, whether defined religiously or by other social concepts. The immediate focus of this paper is on individuals, and ascriptions of holiness or sin to them. But such focus spans not just any particular individual’s private concerns, but also the individual’s stances vis-à-vis broad social affairs and structures.

Esoteric and often frustratingly organised, his utopian philosophy has been dismissed, by Christians and Marxists alike, as a confused and idiosyncratic amalgam of heresies. Yet within his writings, which span half a century (born in 1885, he died at nine-two), there can be shown to be a remarkable unity of thought. Furthermore, themes and perspectives can be discerned which arguably continue even today to be of relevance to both Christianity and Marxism and to the dialogue between them, and which make Bloch a philosopher of more than just historical interest.

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.

Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.

When, in the mid-1930s, T.S. Eliot was asked whom he considered the most influential English writer, he replied: ‘Christopher Dawson’. Such a statement may cause surprise, if not disbelief. For Christopher Dawson, whose centenary is celebrated this month, is today a largely forgotten figure and his once influential books seem everywhere to be gathering dust. The reasons for this will be better understood by considering Dawson’s work in the wider context of his intellectual development. Only then will it be possible to reassess the strength of his scholarship and to highlight the relevance that his vision might still hold today.

Dawson is frequently associated with that group of writers and intellectuals who continued the tradition of Chesterton and Belloc to mark the English Catholic ‘revival’ of the 1930s. To some extent this tendency is understandable, since much of Dawson’s work was in fact aimed at making Catholicism intellectually accessible to a largely Protestant or secularized audience. But his association with Chesterton and Belloc can also be highly misleading, for, unlike the latter’s militant and prolific writings, there was nothing apologetic or polemic about Dawson’s work. Indeed, its fairness and serenity came as a breath of fresh air to the Catholic scholarship of the twenties and thirties, even inviting the respect and praise of non-Catholic contemporaries like Dean Inge, Sir James Marriott and H.A.L. Fisher.

The spectacle of Mr Casey waving the pope’s nose over the Christmas dinner table towards the irate Mrs Riordan seems a good place from which to approach the issues of Church and State, not least for its exposition of the prejudices, half-truths and common assumptions that will crown round and must be thought through: the Church is really the hierarchy; the bishops’ word is final in a Catholic country; religion should be kept out of politics. But it indicates also the way Church-State relations in Ireland are the product of a complex history, just as they are in most countries. Without proper attention to that history, it is impossible to analyse the present situation adequately. The description and analysis on offer here are bound to be sketchy and incomplete, yet it is possible and timely to pick out some of the key features of the historically moulded present and then reflect on the potential opportunities and challenges in the immediate future.

Historically a predominantly Catholic country, Ireland has known only one established church, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Since its disestablishment in 1869 no attempt has been made to substitute any other in law or constitution. This is one simple but important fact of Irish history which immediately sets it off from its nearest neighbours in England and Scotland. Its implications are manifold, something not always appreciated by the churches in Ireland themselves, who have sometimes behaved as if they did enjoy some kind of established status as churches of majority populations, Catholic in the South and Protestant in the North.

In words that tried, but failed, to temper growing contempt with resignation, John Henry Newman in Tract XC wrote this of the Thirty Nine Articles: ‘let the Church sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies...’. In Newman’s ears the language of the Via Media had come to seem deceitful. It took pride in plain speech, yet its words were so framed to include heresy with orthodoxy, false with true. The assured tones of the Articles and Prayer Book, cadences in which generations of Englishmen had come to find comfort and devotion, now seemed in 1841 to belong to a Church that would not listen to the sterner, clear, voices of Church Fathers. Such tones seemed instead to lull their hearers into complaisance. The lips of the Church could be said with irony to stammer, for assurance was only the proud veneer that smoothed over, as it smooth-talked, doctrinal confusion and hesitation. Newman’s words were those of Isaiah, who prophesied that the ‘stammering lips’ of foreign conquerors would command the sinful Israelites, as a result of their desertion of the Law’s clear precepts. Such words hit home: those who complained that the allusion to Isaiah fell wide of the mark could not do so except by excluding broad interpretations of Scripture and Creed of this kind, Newman’s very targets. But if not thus, how are we to proclaim our faith?

On 8 February BBC 1 broadcast a programme on the work of Dr. Robert J. White, the American neurologist based in Cleveland, who is world-renowned for his experiments, which he calls ‘body transplants’, in which the body of one monkey is transplanted onto the head of another, through a joining of the carotid arteries and jugular veins, and a clamping together of the two spinal columns. In his most successful experiment, the creature remained alive for seven days, though it was paralysed from the neck down. A photograph showed it lying down, its face contorted in a grimace.

Hundreds of such experiments, involving primates of all sorts, dogs, cats, and various other animals, have been carried out in many countries, notably the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Dr. White has been showered with awards by his peers, both for his research and for his work with brain-damaged human accident victims. At the same time he is vilified by animal rights campaigners.

He says he can ‘understand’ why some people feel outraged at his experiments and his proposals for further research; people also felt outraged at the thought of kidney and heart transplants—but they are now commonplace. True, he admits, the brain is different, as it seems bound up with the very existence of a person in the way that their heart or kidneys do not, but as long as helping human life is the goal, there is no reason why the brain should not also be treated as transplantable, either with its original head, or into another brainless head (though the latter operation has never succeeded and is technically much more difficult).

When I set out to prepare this paper I was mildly disconcerted to discover that what I had in mind had already been done, and done brilliantly, by an American nun, Sister Kathleen Hughes R.S.C.J. You will find it in Reconciliation, a collection of lectures given by American theologians at Notre Dame in 1986, and I must express my warm appreciation of its excellence and my debt to its contents for stimulating much that I now wish to say.

Sister Hughes’s argument was that any theological discussion of reconciliation should start from human experience, which she illustrates very broadly from both fiction and real life. It may be worth adding that the point applies not just to this one sacrament but to all. Every sacrament meets something lodged deeply in human instincts and widely expressed in human behaviour. It was not the sacrament that invented marriage. It was not the Eucharist that invented ritual meals celebrating the intimate bond between creator and creature, the gifts of creation, and human ties of affection. And so with the other key human experiences—entrance into life, entrance into adulthood, serious illness and death. The sacraments are not stuck into ordinary life like candles on a cake. They are the God-given, church-moulded, Christian ways of speaking to deep-seated human needs and instincts as familiar as the lines on our hand.