This article is based on Trotsky’s article Their Morals and Ours (New International, February 1938) which I will refer to as TMO. Taken together with his second article The Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism (New International, 9 June 1939) which reiterates many of the same arguments TMO is important because it represents a clear and consistent account of the moral philosophy of Revolutionary Marxism. In passing I should point out that even talking about the moral philosophy of Marxism is a little contradictory since for Marxism political philosophy and moral philosophy are the same thing. In classical times no distinction was made between the political and the moral obligations of man. In the Greek city state a good member of the polis was quite simply a good man. Only with the rise of capitalism did it become necessary to posit the Kantian moral imperative as something external to the social and political life of man. In his essay on Kant Herbert Marcuse argues that Capitalist ideology was faced with two conflicting needs. On the one hand it was necessary to foster individualism as an essential component of the growth of capitalist economy but on the other hand it was necessary to subordinate the individual to the needs of the bourgeois state. If the individual were subordinated by crude repression this would expose the mythological character of capitalist freedom of the individual. By positing the moral a priori, a call to duty above class, Kant provided bourgeois ideology with the solution to this problem. Like Marx but unlike Marcuse TMO is polemical rather than speculative in tone, written in a specific historical situation to meet specific charges against Marxism.

Recent discussions of religion have, as we have seen, made much use of the idea of “ineffable experiences”. It is suggested that there is, beyond reach of conceptual language and the discursive intellect, a primary experience which grounds religion. It is also suggested, at least sometimes, that this experience is common to all religions, in spite of their considerable doctrinal and philosophical differences.

In my last article I expressed some doubts about this suggestion. And it is, in fact, very difficult even to see what it is actually meant to be suggesting. Quite apart from the extreme vagueness of the word “experience”, it is not at all clear what sense can be given to “ineffable” simply on the basis of experience. Presumably experiential ineffabilists, if I may so designate them, would not wish to deny that there might be all kinds of experience which make us talk in terms of ineffability or inexpressibility. “It was inexpressibly beautiful”. “It was unspeakably horrible”. “It was more terrifying than you can conceive of’. And so on. But if it is possible to pick out in some way (as, for instance, Otto tries to do) just what kind of inexpressible experience is intended, then it is not clear in what sense it is said to be inexpressible, unless, indeed, nothing more is meant than that the experience is “too wonderful for words”.

Vatican Council II and the post-colonial period in Africa dovetailed chronologically very neatly and the resultant euphoria witnessed the growth of funding agencies (hereafter F.A.) established by various national hierarchies dedicated to playing a role in alleviating poverty and ignorance in the less developed countries. The F.A.’s range from the small but effective Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund and the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development of the hierarchies of England and Wales, to the large and wealthy “Misereor” of the German Bishops and the even wealthier Catholic Relief Services of the United States. Apart from these there are other funds of a more private, voluntary and ecumenical nature. It is mainly through missionaries that the first group channel their funds, but the latter group also to a large extent, make use of missionaries. As a result, the traditional image of the poor missionary bringing the Gospel and ministering to’ the world’s poorest is rapidly being challenged. In this article we would like to examine the effects that this is having on missionary activity, and some of the implications.

The operating procedure of the F.A.s is relatively simple, through advertising and appeals they collect funds from those Christians in the more developed countries interested in helping alleviate misery and encourage development in the Third World. This is mainly done through advertising and making appeals through the parish, school or other Christian groups in the hope that they will also be able to solicit not just a one-off donation, but a continuous commitment from interested parties. It should be stressed that the aim is not limited simply to collecting money but also to educate the Christian public of their responsibility to help the Third World more than just financially, and that their donations do not absolve them from cutting down on waste and attacking rampant consumerism in their own lives. Advertising is also used to assure the donors that their contributions are being correctly and wisely used.

While my cook is preparing chicken soup, to be followed by the actual chicken and some yam cakes, I ought to fill in the interval of anticipation by explaining my situation and my problem. I might perhaps equally well fill it in by drinking some sherry, but it might be better to keep that luxury for the guests who may come at the week-end.

My situation is this; I am a Catholic priest, with some training in anthropology, in charge of a mission in a rural area of the Rivers State of Nigeria. For the article I want to write, my library is extremely limited. I beg my readers not therefore to grumble at inadequate, nay minimal, footnoting, and the absence of exact quotations.

My problem is this; how correct is the claim that contemporary Christianity differs from all other manifestations of religion in being unconcerned with nature? It may be seen, in an approach which goes back, I think to German Idealism, as a historical religion, the moment of the Incarnation marking the beginning of the end for the nature religions; or it may be seen as a religion essentially concerned with relations between persons, having, with the progress of science, sloughed off the cosmological ideas on such absorbing questions as the exact date of the Creation, the topography of Hell, and the necessary function of mosquitoes in the designs of a benevolent Providence, which were found so fascinating in earlier centuries.

Recently attention was focussed on the Church in Latin America by the Puebla conference of bishops, but we must not forget that last year, 1978, was not only the year of the World Cup but also that of Jim Jones and the mass suicides. Those events in Guyana were as photogenic as any papal visit or assembly of bishops and perhaps even more difficult for a secular world to comprehend. Such mass religious hysteria is unusual in any continent but the fundamentalist religious beliefs that seem to have accompanied it have been increasing recently and the activities of groups like the Mormons have become a feature of life in the shanty towns. For some, these happenings are an anglo-saxon excrescence on the fair face of South America. True enough, flight from the world usually takes a different form in Latin countries. The situation does not lead men to indulge in fantasies about a new Jerusalem or Jonesville here on earth. The most they can hope for is to take time off and spend it in the company of fellow sufferers who may teach them how to transmute their present cares and troubles into something of mystical value. There is a down-to-earth realism in the suffering Christ and the Mater Dolorosa in a world where incarceration, flaying, and swords of sorrow are no idle metaphors. But we must not forget that these religious forms have their secular counterpart. In the dark days of the late nineteen twenties after the fall of Hipolito Yrigoyen the unevangelised masses of Buenos Aires found a liturgical release from their cares in the tango.

Master, Fellows, Scholars and Friends of St Edmund’s House:

It is customary on this annual occasion to delve into the scantily recorded life of St Edmund of Abingdon—in order to discover anachronistic references to the work of Newman or Newton upon which the speaker may hang his threadbare argument. In my own case the exploration did not, at first sight, augur well at all: I was indeed christened Edmund, but after the East Anglian Edmund, the patron saint of failed governors rather than of successful scholars; and perhaps even more ominously, one of Edmund of Abingdon’s great quarrels was with my ancestor Maurice Fitzgerald, Justiciar of Ireland. However, as is so often so in such cases, my good wife came to my aid, for St Edmund’s great academic contribution to Oxford, or so Roger Bacon assures us—was the introduction of the New Logic based on the Toledo Translation: in other words, the rendering into Latin of the Arabic versions of the Greek masters made in Cordoba by scholars such as Averroes, while in Europe only the dim Hibernian candle flickered fitfully in the night.

However, although I shall return to St Edmund’s tenuous connexion with Islam at the end of this Address—for having hung one’s garment on a somewhat insecure peg one must presumably take it off before it brings the whole wall down with it—I think it would be more useful to pursue the main practical concern of St Edmund’s life: the relationship between Church, State and University. Specifically, I would like to draw some parallels between the role of Church and University in society in order to derive some implications for the future role of this College.

The decade that preceded Vatican I saw what was by far the most intensive and exciting theological debate there has ever been in modern English Catholic history. Compared with the pious torpor of the decade that preceded Vatican II, certainly, the zest and odium of theological exchange prepared the clergy and educated laity in England more thoroughly for the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility than was the case anywhere else in the Catholic world. It is true, of course, that nobody elsewhere expected papal infallibility to be so high on the agenda at the Council. The English debate, through Manning’s extraordinary influence at the Council, may even be described (with little exaggeration) as the key factor in ensuring that papal infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.

The Dublin Review, from 1863 onwards, was the principal organ of the “New Ultramontanism”. In that year the editorship passed to William George Ward, the most brilliant of all the ex-Anglicans from Oxford who dedicated their energies to “Romanizing” the English Catholic community. A fellow of Balliol College by 1834, when he was twenty-two, Ward of course took minor orders but it was in mathematics and logic that his brilliance lay. As the DNB entry delicately puts it, “his union of a severely logical intellect with a craving for more concrete assurance in matters spiritual than reason can afford” led him inexorably to seek communion with Rome. Censured by Convocation on a famous occasion in the Sheldonian Theatre, because of his “Romanism”, Ward at once resigned his fellowship, married, and became a Catholic six months later. Six years later, in 1851, much to the horror of most of the Catholic clergy, Ward had been installed, against strong opposition both within and without the college, as lecturer in moral philosophy in the Westminster archdiocesan seminary.

I had better start by declaring an interest: Cosmas Desmond (hereinafter CD) is a friend from South African days, and it is in his flat that I write this review, of his book. Readers will be able to allow for any possible loss of objectivity; in another way the location is a positive advantage since CD’s flat is a centre of South African contacts and involvement. This is directly relevant to the work done in the book, since it is self-confessedly a committed work and a socialist work, not a piece of arm-chair theorizing but a thoughtful statement arising directly out of work in a traditional communalist (President Nyerere’s useful word, see p. 131) society, ruined as it is by White political and economic exploitation, work that is for a future African socialist state. It is refreshing to read a marxist argument in which “theoria” and “praxis” do not bespatter the pages till towards the very end, and this refreshment is directly related to the rootedness of the book: I remember a weary paper on “Theoria and Praxis” delivered by an Afrikaner philosophy teacher at Wits University, but the South African philosophical association is not the locus out of which any revolution, even a peaceful one, will come.

The thesis of the book is that the only Christian option in South Africa now is a socialist one. This is carefully argued both theologically-politically and politically-theologically (Part I and Part II); only theology has the right and duty to confess the emptiness of theology when faced with positive political option, only politics can argue positively for a particular political option — for one thing it has to be a realistic possibility, and theology can hardly calculate that.

The modernists, those innovators of epic ellipses, almost did their successors out of a job. Their formal developments seemed terminal, one-way progressions to be achieved, then discontinued. In the United States the new techniques were taken on with exhilaration, but in Britain existing positions were defended more strongly. Apart from simple imitators, who usually missed the point in any case, those who have actually taken modernism as a genuine beginning have been few and far between.

This is understandable. Ezra Pound developed metrical technique and allusion in a dazzling fashion, but overall formal organization and control did not keep pace. Eliot himself shifted from the early concentrations and cinematic cuts to a discursive style of philosophical meditation, and then to the social niceties and equivocations of the verse plays. Modernism appeared as an interlude, bracketed away from the mainstream. So it comes about that Philip Larkin’s poetry enacts a continuous,insistent closure against modernism, and is in that act seen to be fully aware of the experimentation it refuses. Similarly, Jon Silkin sees a wrong direction, and goes back to the work of Isaac Rosenberg to start again. Basil Bunting’s Briggflats is a rare reconciliation of England to modernism. Meanwhile Christopher Middleton, eager to set out from the most exciting starting-points on offer, ends up in the U.S.A. his reputation in Britain absurdly small.

Traditional Christian theology draws on a remarkable number of terms to express its conviction that God is beyond reach of human concepts and language. More than forty different words have been noticed in the works of Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, referring to the incomprehensibility of God in one way or another. Some of them derive from scripture, others from Philo, others from Greek philosophers; some of them find their way into the liturgical texts of eastern Christendom. They leave us in no doubt that it is radically impossible for the mind of man, or of any other creature, to fathom God. “The being of God is incomprehensible to the whole creation”, as Chrysostom concludes.

Not surprisingly, the theological tradition of divine incomprehensibility overlaps to a considerable extent with the kind of philosophical speculation we have been considering in the previous articles. But the theologians have their own slant on the matter, and it is with this that we shall be concerned in this article.

In the first place, the theologians are convinced that it is an essential part of Christian doctrine to assert that God is unfathomable; it is part of revealed truth.

This comes out in the orthodox response to the claim made by the Anomocans in the fourth century. Apparently they were saying, “I know God just as he knows himself’ Eunomius is quoted as saying, “God knows nothing more of his own essence than we do”. This provoked St John Chrysostom to preach a series of sermons in Antioch on the incomprehensibility of God's nature, as being an article of Christian faith. Though he does sometimes use simple arguments of a more philosophical kind, he concentrates chiefly on scriptural and doctrinal evidence.

The Trojans heeded too late the warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts and admitted into their city a wooden horse full of Greek commandos. One had to be even more circumspect about Greek gods bearing gifts and the legendary Midas should have known better when he asked them for the gift of the “Golden Touch”. Yet when he touched his leaden goblet and saw the dull grey change to bright yellow he thought that his cup was overflowing. As indeed it was, until the wine touched his lips. Then the purple liquid congealed into solid gold. He stretched out a fatherly hand to pat his daughter’s head and withdrew it a fraction of a second too late; she froze there — a golden statue. For some people money is everything; for Midas everything was money.

The Synoptics recount the story of another gentleman with similar values:

“We feel that, even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our existential problems (Lebensprobleme) have not been touched at all”. suppose many people would agree that we feel that there must be more to life than just getting sensible answers to sensible questions, there must be more to life than “sweet reasonableness”. “He who does not dance, does not know what is going on”. In a short story by the Russian writer, Olga Larionova, a rebellious young lady who has fallen in love against instructions laughs at the “poverty-stricken wisdom” of her thoroughly rationalist commander from Logitania. In the words of e. e. cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom