The changes you see are not always the ones that really matter. True, the new buildings invade what is left of the urban sky and demand to be noticed. The jets are sleeker and the freeways are faster and the television programmes are more insistently mindless than ever. But even after only eighteen months away – separated, too, by President Kennedy's assassination and all that has happened since – you are aware after a while of a hidden stream of change, a shift of accent and attitude that is hard to define but is none the less decisive.

You could call it a mood of self-appraisal, a critical undertone that is a new note in the carefully orchestrated harmony of America's need to conform. Of course the harmony was always a celestial hope rather than a terrestrial reality. The very structure of the United States has meant a constant tension between ‘the truths we hold’ and the local understanding of their application. The Supreme Court gives its judgments, the federal agencies move in to implement them, but Alabama is not greatly affected – yet. Nevertheless the change is there; sometimes publicly plain in such events as the sit-in protests on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, more commonly reflected in less sensational ways.

In the evolving life of the Catholic Church in America the external changes are indeed evident enough. Improvised altars facing the people have sprung up everywhere: unlikely trestle-tables that carry on a silent war with the shrines of St Jude and the fitted carpets.

'Tradition’ is one of the most problematic words in the vocabulary of theology. At one end of the theological spectrum it serves as the name for a norm whereby to judge any practice or belief, a standard endowed with authority related – in a way which it is not my concern to define more closely here – to that of the scriptural revelation. At the other end of the spectrum it can approximate to customs, practices, beliefs which are carried by the Church through her history as the debris of the past, a dead weight which may have lost meaning and relevance but is built into the Church's sociological structure. Thus a pope of the eleventh century, Gregory VII, who always liked to stress that his own reforming ideals were only to bring the Church back to the precepts of the holy fathers and the ancient canons, could nevertheless reply to his opponents, who invoked time-hallowed customs to justify their opposition, by remarking in words themselves borrowed from a long tradition – that Christ had said he was the truth, not that he was tradition. In general our talk of ‘tradition’ moves on a level a little lower than the angels of authoritative norm and above the beasts of outworn custom. It is this peculiarity that gives such evocative power to the language, to take a recent example, of Mrs Rosemary Haughton. in one of the more thoughtful contributions to the symposium Objections to Roman Catholicism.

This article is concerned with the practice of philosophy in religious institutions such as seminaries or the study-houses of religious orders. But it is clear that the possibility of such a limitation – the practice of philosophy in some particular setting – is itself problematic. Philosophizing would seem to claim that it is independent or can become independent of the setting of its practice in all relevant respects. Speaking as a theologian (as I intend to do throughout this article) and claiming therefore complete freedom to appeal to revelation in Scripture and the Church, I must maintain that there is one setting, one Sitz im Leben, of which philosophizing can never become independent: the concrete economy of sin and salvation which embraces humanity and the whole of creation with it. But to admit this is not yet to commit oneself to the view that the theological Sitz im Leben of philosophizing is philosophically relevant, i.e. that philosophical discourse is dependent for its shape and content on the theological existence of philosophers. If it is possible for any intellectual activity to release itself from the constraints of the concrete conditions of its exercise – we can think in spite of a feverish cold though not when we are delirious – then there would seem to be no obvious reason why philosophizing, the intellectual activity par excellence, should not precisely define itself as just that discourse which actively releases itself from the particularity of all and any concrete conditions of its exercise, including theological ones, by simple (though perhaps costing) pretermission or by reflexive objectivization.

The argument that the study of Latin and Greek is justified because it disciplines or trains the mind is a weak one. Taken to its extreme it involves the fallacy that training for an activity is separable from that activity itself; that you can train a mind to discover the truth, without the person whose mind it is having to decide whether any part of his experience is in fact true or false. You cannot do this. If you are to learn the truth, or some part of the truth, then you must learn the truth. There is no preliminary activity you can engage in which makes you able to know, without actually knowing anything. The only way to train the mind is to use the mind: and to use the mind you must direct it to something outside the mind : something that is worth while in itself.

How worthwhile then in themselves are Greek and Latin? Simply as languages they have no special magic. If you want to learn a language more firmly inflected than English, you might quite happily learn German. If you want to enter a new world of language, then learn Russian. This does not mean that we should decry the purely linguistic study of Latin and Greek – writing proses, and verse too, if you want. But it should be seen for what it is: a technique, a mental craft.

How possible is it to design a first-rate new church in the middle of the twentieth century ? Our grandchildren, perhaps, will be able to answerthis question better than we can, because what is being built now will, if it survives at all. be much easier to evaluate after it has been lived with and used for a couple of generations. Meanwhile one can at least draw up a balance sheet of our contemporary advantages and disabilities. On the positive side, the apparatus of rationality, simplicity and appeal to first principles which the modern architectural movement wrought for itself should, anyway notionally. give its present-day followers a good start – or at the very least it should preserve them from the worser kinds of pretentiousness and vacuity. A generation reared on le Corbusier's dictum that ‘the plan is the generator’ ought to be able to devise liturgical spaces that are light, plain and sensible if they are nothing more. Further, the independence from ‘historic styles’ which the modern movement asserted should make our architectural idiom more readily responsive to changes in liturgical practice and indeed to all the new kinds of religious sensibility and orientation which, long latent, seem at last to have found expression in Pope John and the Council. If, as seems tremulously possible, the Church does in fact decide to enter the twentieth century, understand it and lead it, there is available at least the makings of an architectural vocabulary to suit the purpose.

Then don’t let him engage a decorative artist of the second, third or any subsequent rank to apply fiddling little bits of art to a structure which will probably at least have the humble merit of plainness. Again and again as one turns these pages one is struck by the pity of it ‣ messy ceramic plaques, vacuous mural reliefs, busy semi-abstract stained glass windows of overblown cosmological significance, facile streamlined statues of sacred personages appliqué to fine blank walls with about as much relevance as if one were to stick a Valentine card on a Mondriaan abstract … if only they’d refrained! So unless you can afford the prices payable to the Chagalls, Rouaults or Légers of this world, let the architecture do the talking: it has a far better chance of avoiding the arbitrary, the personal, and therefore the distracting.

A Sermon on Psalm 42 by St Augustine</i>

This is a short psalm; so it will do nicely for satisfying eager minds without being irksome to fasting stomachs. May it provide food for our soul, which is said to be sad, according to the man who is speaking in this psalm ; sad, I think, because of some fast of his – or rather of some hunger, since fasting is something you do on purpose, while being hungry just happens to you.