I am both happy and honoured to have been asked to give this lecture on mysticism in memory of Leo Robertson, of whom I have many very pleasant memories. It was a delight to be wafted off to the Saville Club after a lecture here, and to discuss mysticism and philosophy on one of its many sofas. I am very sorry that this particular pleasure will not recur. Leo Robertson belonged to an old-fashioned climate of thought in which an interest in mysticism was respectable, and a long stay in the East had confirmed him in these leanings. I myself have always been constitutionally mystical, feeling that certain kinds of rapture, concerned with work, beauty, love and a few other things, are the only things absolutely worth having. I dropped my mysticism for a long period, partly on account of certain disillusioning experiences in my ’twenties, and partly out of deference to the dry methods and doctrine that prevailed in British philosophy. Latterly, however, increasing age has restored many of my illusions and made me generally more tender-minded; also, seeing the completely nugatory accomplishments of purely unmystical analysis, I have found myself reverting increasingly to my original mysticism. It was very refreshing to talk to a philosopher like Leo Robertson who took mysticism with the complete seriousness I think it deserves—as one of the truly fundamental human attitudes—but who also thought of it as supplementing and completing, rather than as undermining and nullifying, what other less rarefied thinkers do. It was also refreshing to hear all his talk about an earlier Cambridge, where he knew Wittgenstein in the full brilliance of his personal beauty as well as of his intelligence, and also knew Moore in the golden period of his dialectic, before he became so very preoccupied with the minutiae of the English language. Leo Robertson was a complete and rounded philosopher rather than a hamstrung one, and knowing him has been a factor in strengthening my resolve to be a complete and rounded thinker too.

It is now some years since Professor D. Daiches Raphael published his interesting book, The Paradox of Tragedy, which represented one of the first serious attempts made by a British philosopher to assess the significance of tragic drama for ethical, and indeed metaphysical theory. Since then we have had a variety of books touching on related topics: for instance, Dr George Steiner's Death of Tragedy and Mr Raymond Williams’ most recent, elusive and interesting essay, Modern Tragedy. To entitle an essay Theology and Tragedy might be thought to invite needless trouble for oneself; to indulge to a dangerous degree the human intellectual obsession (so thoroughly castigated by Wittgenstein) of supposing that ‘the meaning of a word is an object’. After all, if one confines one's regard to the Greeks, one has to recognise that between the treatments of their common theme of Electra, Sophocles and Euripides are in fact doing very different things. There is no gainsaying the significance for Euripides of the postponement of the murder of Clytemnestra till after that of Aegisthus, still less of his introduction into the play of the morally upright peasant, who has had the banished Electra in his keeping, and whose simple integrity contrasts both with the corruption of the court and the obsessive preoccupation with a dreadful, supposed duty of brother and sister. The element of propaganda is unmistakable; while in Sophocles’ Electra it is altogether absent, although Dr Victor Ehrenberg in his very interesting monograph on Sophocles and Pericles has argued strongly for an element of subtle political commentary in the treatment of Oedipus in the Oedipus Tyrannus, and of Pocreon in the Antigone. These remarks may serve to show that the title does not express a blind indifference to the multiple complexity of those works which we class together as tragedies. They are inherently complex, and various in emphasis; at best we can discern a family resemblance between them, and, in an essay like this, the author runs the risk not only of selecting examples tailor-made to his thesis, but also of imposing an appearance of similarity of conception where it is at least equally important to stress differences.

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected by the scholar. From Plato and Fontenelle to Schelling and Bultmann, philosophers and theologians have proposed innumerable definitions of myth. But all of these have one thing in common: they are based on the analysis of Greek mythology. Now, for a historian of religions this choice is not a very happy one. It is true that only in Greece did myth inspire and guide epic poetry, tragedy and comedy, as well as the plastic arts; but it is no less true that it is especially in Greek culture that myth was submitted to a long and penetrating analysis, from which it emerged radically ‘de-mythicised’. If in every European language the word ‘myth’ denotes a ‘fiction’, it is because the Greeks proclaimed it to be such twenty-five centuries ago. What is even more serious for an historian of religion: we do not know a single Greek myth within its ritual context. Of course this is not the case with the paleo-Oriental and Asiatic religions; it is especially not the case with the so-called ‘primitive’ religions. As is well known, a living myth is always connected with a cult, inspiring and justifying a religious behaviour. None of this of course means that Greek myth should not figure in an investigation of the mythical phenomenon. But it would seem unwise to begin our kind of inquiry by the study of Greek documents, and even more so to restrict it to such documents. The mythology which informs Homer, Hesiod and the tragic poets represents already a selection and an interpretation of archaic materials, some of which had become almost unintelligible. In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing’, where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction, is considered to reveal the truth par excellence.

China's regard for nature, as expressed (for example) in Sung landscape painting, is clear and well recognised. What the Chinese believed to exceed the natural world, the realm of ‘the ten-thousand things’, is less clear. The present essay tries to explore this question systematically.

Self-righteousness and censoriousness are strong emotions. They exist in the claims of ‘orthodoxy’ as much as in the protests of ‘heterodoxy’. They lie behind claims of tolerance as often as behind displays of intolerance. These emotions should be disentangled in the motives of the men who make history, of those who write history, and of those who read history. The very designation ‘heterodox’ is both etymologically and conceptually structured in antithesis to ‘orthodox’. It is a word not only of doctrinal description, but also of inherent condemnation. The structure and the intention of words such as Shī‘a, comprising the whole sweep from bid‘a to ghulūww, direct the attention back to an opposite concept which originates, defines and prejudges these words. One corollary of this is that the movements and doctrines defined as ‘heterodox’ are fundamentally related to the ‘orthodox’ and cannot be understood in isolation. Another is that this relationship, by its very definition in terms of vindication and repudiation, is one of tension.

The religiously inclined have always rejected materialism. The thesis of this study is that there may have been good reasons for them to do so until comparatively recent times but that the same reasons no longer exist. Our knowledge of matter has not only increased, it has also been altered so completely that there is no more justification for disapproving of materialism on religious grounds.

The purpose of this article is to develop a Christian doctrine of the Incarnation in the light of a process philosophy of the type expounded by A. N. Whitehead and E. S. Brightman. Rather than offer at this time a detailed defence either of the idea of incarnation or of process philosophy, I wish to show that the two can be coherently related in such a way that each receives a greater degree of completion and clarity. Of course risks are unavoidable in any attempt to make Athens and Jerusalem respond to one another. But the risks and losses would be even greater if the way of isolation and of mutually ignoring one another were accepted.

In the present philosophical climate of opinion many are inclined to respond to this question in the spirit of the cynical comment concerning Christian Science, that it is neither Christian nor scientific. So it might be affirmed of Christian philosophy. It is neither Christian nor philosophical. It is customary these days to find both theologians and positivistic philosophers agreeing on this point. Theologians of a certain persuasion wish to keep theology free from any taint of the bacillus metaphysicus. Philosophers of a certain school are equally anxious to keep philosophy free of any entanglement with theological questions which involve problems incapable of linguistic clarification and precise meaning. Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence that this kind of intellectual apartheid is becoming less and less possible in practice and less attractive in principle. Even those who wish to separate rigidly theology and philosophy seem in practice to find it impossible to let each other alone. Each exercises a kind of morbid fascination for the other, and even if real dialogue is refused, the sniping still goes on, in reluctant acknowledgement of the existence of the other. The time would appear to be ripe, therefore, for a fresh and bold re-opening of the question which forms the title of this paper.

I am very grateful to Professor R. W. Sleeper for his critical comments on my article, as also for the kind way in which he has expressed them. I should now like to make a few comments on his comments.

(1) May I first say that I have no objection to being metaphysical? I do not like the word ‘metaphysics’ very much, and wish that we could find a less provocative one. But still, I do think that the difference between the reducible and the irreducible belief-in is a difference which there really is (‘metaphysically really’, if you like). Moreover, I fully admit that when we believe in God we are making a factual claim. It is, of course, a factual claim of rather a special kind. If it is a fact that there is a supreme Being, ‘The Lord of All’, this is not just one fact among others. It is not quite like the fact that there is a stormy north-westerly wind this morning. One could not just give a list of facts and add at the end, ‘There is also another fact which I had forgotten to mention: there is a God’. All the same, this factual claim, like others, does need to be justified; and how is it to be justified? I am afraid that the brief hint which I offered elsewhere on this subject is indeed ‘not good enough’ as it stands (Sleeper p. 79). To be even half good enough, it needs much more elaboration, and I agree that there is much force in Mr Gunderson's criticisms.

In two recent essays,1 H. H. Price has offered an interesting approach to the ‘reducibility theory’ which yields several important distinctions that should be drawn between various meanings of ‘belief-in’ and ‘belief-that’ These distinctions go far towards illuminating the uniqueness or—depending upon your point of view—oddness of religious faith.2 It may be useful to examine Price's ‘reducibility theory’ and the basic distinctions he has drawn in order to point the way toward a related analysis of usage which he neither undertakes nor considers explicitly—that of the distinctly different function (i.e. meaning and use) of a similar if not equally commonplace expression: ‘in-faith’. This latter analysis is called for, it seems to me, for several reasons. In the first place, Price himself vaguely suggestsmdaash;but does not discuss— the possibility that talking about being ‘in the faith attitude’ is not necessarily the same as talking about believing or having faith-in ‘Someone’. Secondly, it may be argued that the use of the expression ‘in-faith’ conveys, in certain instances, much more of the uniqueness of the theist's position than do the expressions ‘belief-in’or ‘faith-in’. Thirdly, the claim—sometimes made—that the faith ‘situation’ (‘experience’, ‘encounter’, ‘meeting’, ‘confrontation’, or whatever it may be) transcends the grasp of reason is perhaps more readily pointed to by using the expression ‘in-faith’.

Philosophers of religion divide neatly into two camps on the problem of evil: those who think it fatal to the concept of a loving God and those who do not. The latter have established a wide array of defensive positions down through the centuries, but none that has proved impregnable to sceptical attack. In his new book Mr Hick wisely abandons these older fortifications and falls back on highly mobile reserves. Not for him the ‘Fall of Man’ thesis, with its unexplained choice to give up finite perfection; nor the Plotinian principle of plenitude, evil being an inevitable petering out of God's goodness; nor the ‘aesthetic’ gambit where the horrors of life constitute mere ‘shadows’ designed to highlight the beauty of creation; nor the ‘cosmic Toryism’, as someone called it, of Leibniz's ‘best of all possible worlds’; nor even, one might say gratefully, the gaseous obscurantism of Karl Barth's ‘das Nichtige’. All of these defences, and others besides, Mr Hick lumps together under what he calls ‘the majority report’ in Christian theodicy: the Augustinian tradition or type. In place of these venerable ramparts Hick elects the more fluid defence afforded, he thinks, by Irenaeus, Eastern Christianity and, in modern times, by Schleiermacher and a few contemporary thinkers.

First, a paradox, a problem in the problem of evil. I shall call it ‘the paradox of evil’.

On the one hand it is of course widely held that the evils in the world present an insuperable difficulty for Judeo-Christian theism. Russell, to take a conspicuous example, challenges any orthodox believer to visit the bedside of a child terminally ill with cancer and yet to retain his faith without hypocrisy (cf. ‘Why I am not a Christian’). No paradox here; just the familiar problem of evil.