The difference between Catholics that comes out very plainly in recent writing on the Resurrection (New Blackfriars, October and November 1977, pp 453-461 and 506-515) prompts questions and reflections about the nature and extent of the diversity of belief that exists within the Catholic communion. This is particularly urgent and apposite at the present time, in England, as Catholics seem to be moving, slowly but inexorably, towards some degree of communion with the Anglican Church—long mocked as the home of incompatible beliefs. As Cardinal Hume said, in his address at Church House, Westminster, on 1st February 1978:

That avowal of ignorance—which is also clearly a word of hope— must seem to many Catholics even now very like an admission of defeat. Surely, they will say, the one thing that Roman Catholics can be clear about is what diversity of doctrinal emphasis and difference of practice are permissible. How is it possible that, on any but trivial and peripheral matters, there can be a serious question about this? Do we not already know, have we not always known, what doctrinal differences we cannot permit—far less desire—within the communion of the catholica? How can a cardinal archbishop ask such a question?

After a quick breakfast, the long wooden table is cleared and wiped clean, ready to receive the corpse of the victim, a poor ignorant innocent. Little light enters the musty kitchen where all the meals are taken together. Through the side door near the orange tree, heavy with fruit (like a Christmas tree with the bulbs switched off) dark, agitated shadows can be seen. The early morning sun is just beginning to draw out a thin sweat. A band of young campesinos, brandishing various tools of destruction, like conspirators planning their attack on a hated dictator. Suddenly with a cheer they break up and head off in search of the appointed offering. There is a pagan gleam in their eyes, a wild joy as the pig with its front trotters tied together, is dragged by its hind legs through the grass to the execution spot. The string is then removed as a jeering circle is formed around the creature, a large meat knife catching the morning light, an axe, someone with a small revolver. Meanwhile the wood collected earlier has been piled up to make a fire, the flames of which are now licking upwards, crackling; and a huge bowl containing oil is placed over the fire in preparation for the chicharron to be fried. The pig watches these pro ceedings with unease and while the boys are lost in their own excitement it spies a gap and makes a bolt for freedom, heading downhill and through a hole in the fence. The fence, however, is no guarantee of political immunity; the boys chase after it, one grabbing its tail and a fierce struggle ensues (amid panic stricken squeals) to get the pig back through the hole in the fence. The revolver is placed by its head, fired and echoes in a shout of glee from the boys which dies almost as rapidly as the pig’s legs give way: it is all over.

It is a matter of commonplace that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most controversial novel—perhaps even, in some ways a failure. Fanny Price who occupies the central position in mediating what is widely thought to be Jane Austen’s point of view, is, in fact, almost completely antipathetic to the attitude to life revealed by Jane’s correspondence with her sister, Cassandra; while Mary Crawford—having won our approval by her good natured intelligence and vivacity—is cast aside, not merely as a threat to Fanny’s romance—what Angus Wilson has called ‘the dusty union’, but as a comprehensive danger to the very foundations of the Mansfield estate, and by extension, to the stability of the whole fabric of society at a critical period of revolutionary ferment. It is also largely agreed that Jane Austen’s supposed intention of writing a novel on the theme of ordination—with all that this implies of a conservative political philosophy—led her to abandon the ironic mode and even compelled her to impose an arbitrary didactic conclusion upon the plot so that virtue might be almost as glibly and sentimentally rewarded as in Pamela.

Ironically, much of the misunderstanding and confusion seems to have arisen because it has been believed that Jane Austen wrote her novel under the influence of Evangelical Christianity with all that this implies of regeneration and enthusiasm and disapproval of the smartly decadent values of fashionable London society. This critical response sees Mansfield Park as Jane Austen’s response to the issues of her time—a response in which the religious affirmations of the debate in the chapel at Sotherton and Edmund’s impending commitment to the duties of Thornton Lacey are balanced by secular responsibilities to the management of the estate. In this thematic reading Jane Austen assumes the mantle of Edmund Burke; and clearly, the coherence of such a reading has much to recommend it.

In trying to understand the world, or, at least that part of it with which we are involved, we can look for a prophet, or even turn prophets ourselves, or we can tell stories about the world. The excellence of the prophet is that he parts the wheat from the chaff; the excellence of the story-teller is that he makes chaff look like wheat, perhaps even transmutes it into wheat. The poet, if he is lucky, is something of both prophet and story-teller: the theologian, if he is, as many theologians appear to be, unlucky, will falter when he should speak in prophetic judgement, and fail too in the task of imaginative transmutation. In apocalyptic, the two modes of understanding are fused, as we see in Daniel or Revelations, much to the bafflement of most of us. But for the purposes of this review, it seems possible to see prophecy and story-telling as complementary and inter-acting opposites. Perhaps I should say that I am myself more in sympathy with the story-teller than the prophet; but I shall try to be fair as I mpve between the polar interests of my fellow-Adrians, the prophet-watching of Adrian Hastings and the story-hearing of Adrian Roscoe, taking a look in between at that prophetic institution in which so many stories end, namely marriage.

The first volume of Les “Senders Escarpes” de Karl Marx, by Paul-Dominique Dognin, Editions du Cerf (vol I 47F; vol II 35F) contains the German text of the original (first edition) version of Chapter I of Capital and of its appendix, as well as French translations of them, together with the fourth edition version (in French translation only). Dognin’s own critical commentary on these texts makes up the second volume of his book.

The first edition version of Chapter I differs considerably from the fourth, and from the standard French and English translations. The differences relate especially to the presentation of the distinction between “value” and “exchange-value”. Dognin argues that these changes are symptomatic of fundamental difficulties in Marx’s theory of value, difficulties which he analyses at length in his commentary. Although there is little that is original in Dognin’s criticisms—they will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Bohm-Bawerk’s critique —I think he is right to highlight the importance of the value/exchange-value distinction. In my view, however, Marx’s distinction is symptomatic, not of contradictions within his theory of value, but of contradictions between that theory and that of classical economics: by means of this distinction, Marx makes a definite break with classical economics and inaugurates a new science of his own. Seen in this light, the value/ exchange-value distinction is the key to Marx’s value theory as a whole, and hence is much more important than the use-value/exchange-value distinction to which so much attention is usually given. It is, indeed, Dognin’s failure to grasp the nature of the value/exchange-value distinction which vitiates his critique of Marx, a critique which is, however, quite standard in the neoclassical tradition. Let us, then, look at the distinction itself in some detail.