‘Similitude of manners’, wrote Sir Thomas More in his Life of John Picus, ‘is a cause of love and friendship: a likeness of conditions is (as Appollonius saith) an affinity’. In the first of these articles looking at the uncertain place of literature within our modem culture, and within a Christian cultivation of the virtues, I tried to show how Chaucer’s art restores friendships which have been rent by our denial of common human weakness, a likeness of conditions in frailty and sin. I suggested that Chaucer invites his readers to overcome a desire to pass sentence on their neighbours in two ways: firstly he allows us to hear our sentences on the lips of his characters, and to see the violence such dismissive voices call into being; secondly he asks us to give voice to others’ sins and, in giving voice to them, hear ourselves and our own weakness. Chaucer thus creates a language of communal forgiveness as he trains our ear, and in the laughter he raises that language effects what it signifies. In that sense we can agree with David Jones that art is sacramental, and add that literature imparts an ethics of speech.

Here I shall be pursuing this view of art as contributing to an ethics of speech, something sadly neglected by most of today’s Catholic moral theologians. Apparently mesmerized by the bits and pieces of human anatomy below the belt, they remain uninspired by our vocal chords. The past tells a different story.

‘The crisis of the present,’ says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘is the long deferred resumption of the crisis of modernism.’

If by the resumption of modernism Ratzinger means the method Catholic modernists used in addressing the religious crisis of their time we may fervently hope modernism does resume. For the method of the modernists is useful to us as we face an unprecedented environmental crisis.

Let us make no mistake. We are not engaged in academic theological gamesmanship. We are facing, although career churchmen are hesitant to admit it, a crisis which Jürgen Moltmann well describes as ‘a crisis so comprehensive and irreversible that it cannot unjustly be described as apocalyptic. It is not a temporary crisis. As far as we can judge, it is the beginning of a life and death struggle for creation on this earth.’

In 1918, when Tyrrell had been dead for nine years and Loisy had faded from the Church, Von Hügel expressed in a letter to Miss Maude Petrie, Tyrrell’s literary executor, his awareness that the method of modernism was permanently useful and even necessary, ‘to interpret it (the faith) according to what appears the best and the most abiding elements in the philosophy and the scholarship and science of the later and latest times.’

A cogent case could be made that Pope John XXIII was himself to some extent influenced by the method of the modernists. Even some of his expressions were akin to theirs. He spoke of ‘opening the windows’ of the Church to the modern world.

From the discussion in the pages of New Blackfriars that has followed on my article of October 1987, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, I have learned much. Half of my article was devoted to the prospects of reunion with the Orthodox; and from the fact that none of the commentators has so much as mentioned that half, I conclude that anxiety for such reunion is not acute among the British Catholic intellegentsia. I think this attitude to it is mistaken: it is among our most urgent needs. Since the schism, the Catholic Church has been, intellectually and spiritually, a crippled body, paralysed, as it were, down the whole of one side: we need once more to become one with Eastern Christians for the sake of our own health, at least as much as for their advantage.