In a private conversation with an occupant of Rutherford’s chair of Physics at Cambridge University, I was struck by his distance from that overall association of metaphysics and religion which we take as normative, even though, at this moment, it is understandably diversified. “I am prepared to consider the possibility of mind—though most of my colleagues are not.” That British scepticism here is not aggressive conceals from many the intellectual distance that has grown up between science and religion; it also ensures that, despite the heroism of individuals who rise above the ethos, debate is in fact rudimentary; the anti-religionists consider the battle won. English culture and paideia have lost an overarching conception of their unity. That is not the case elsewhere.

But when had this conception broken down? The background, but little known, work of Anneliese Meyer, from the Vatican Library, showed the anticipations of “modern” science in late medieval science. A.N.Whitehead saw the contribution which medieval scholasticism had made to a rational culture, including subsequent natural science. Both Descartes as the mechanist of man and animals and mathematician, and Newton as mathematician-mechanist of the Cosmos, kept their faith, as did Leibniz as mathematician-theodicean. “The Enlightenment”, about whose extent there is incomplete agreement, expressed itself in France in the unbelieving ideal of the Encyclopedic, in Germany in the religious rationalism of Christian Wolff. The position of Kant was not one of pure enlightenment. The last speculative endeavours to include natural science within an overall, complete philosophy including religion

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.

Modernism then represents faith in three things:

1. 1 Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;

2. 1 Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises

3. 1 Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.

Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.

James Cone begins his book about The Spirituals and Blues by defining this music as ‘the power of song in the struggle for black survival’. The quality of spirituals and blues is ‘an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength’. The use of human life at its roughest as a source of power is also the meaning of comedy. Comedy is not just a funny ha-ha plot, it is a milieu. It is a milieu over which love presides. Speaking about the earthiness of the blues, Cone observes, ‘People cannot love physically and spiritually ... until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.’ The painful, raw sounds of the blues and the spirituals venture further into the comic milieu than do Hollywood romantic ‘comedies.’

Richie Havens used to sing a spiritual called ‘Motherless Child’

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home.

Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home.

Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
And I spread my wings and I fly,

I spread my wings and I fly.