There are many points of view from which one might enjoy pondering the intelligible and the absurd. I am going to tackle absurdity in three ways: as (a) the residue left in reality after intelligibility has been exhausted; (b) the complement of intelligibility; and (c) as a mode of intelligibility (which is one of the absurdest words in the language, when you come to look at it).

Although no doubt it raises all sorts of problems to talk like this, it does seem that one can meaningfully say that there is a certain intelligibility built into reality. This would appear to be involved in any doctrine of creation, whether Platonist or otherwise.

To start with ‘otherwise’: in English we more naturally talk of people understanding one another, than of understanding nonpersonal objects, trees for instance; as against Platonist thought, where the object of intellection is generally non-personal.

Understanding each other means, let us say, being on each other’s wavelength, speaking the same language, and so on. It has something to do with the old definition of friendship as idem sentire and so on. I see what you mean’ does not merely indicate that I, with my inner eye, perceive your meaning; it also suggests that with my outer eye I see things from your point of view, with your perspective: we share for a while a common vision.

Whatever future judgments may be on our contemporary Western culture and education, we cannot be accused of denying a major, even a predominating role, to the life of the artistic imagination (though when one turns from stated aim to present practice, in primary schools and elsewhere, the position may be less satisfactory). In the last forty years philistinism has quietly died after a few rearguard actions and many whimpers; the ultimate success of the opponents of censorship in the cases over Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn was due in the first place to this triumphant antiphilistinism and only secondly to a climate of increasing moral permissiveness: the argument that carried the day with people of all shades of ethical opinion was that the artist could get away with it.

The high claims made for poetry and the imagination by the Romantics and their successors have led us into a position where poets and novelists have been studied in a manner formerly thought suitable for moral teachers. Arnold’s plea for a poetry of the emotions which would provide a substitute for religion was a landmark along the way. Arnold declared that ‘the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry’: the increase in the authority granted to the insights of the artist has often advanced in a ratio with the declining authority of dogmatic belief.

In the present crisis over Humanae Vitae, Catholic opinion may be roughly divided into three groups: those who believe that the Pope’s pronouncement ought to be treated as definitive; those who already agreed with or have come to accept the Pope’s decision, but deplore the process of disciplinary enforcement of it on the clergy now under way in some countries, including this one; and those who think that the decision was wrong and must be reversed. Presumably, however, there are few Catholics who would deny that the fact that the Pope chose to take this stance, and to promulgate his decision in so weighty a manner, ought to be weighed carefully by anyone concerned to have a true opinion on the matter. It is therefore of great importance to come to understand what may have led the Pope to his decision; and this can best be done by enquiring into the cogency of the three documents submitted to him by the Papal Commission.

The first of these documents, generally known as the ‘majority report’, presents arguments of a general moral and theological nature in favour of the view that the use of contraceptives is not in all cases morally impermissible. The second, the ‘minority report’, offers arguments to show that it would be impossible for the Church to reverse her traditional position and adopt that of the majority report. The third document, without advancing any position of its own on the substantive question, attempts to controvert the arguments of the minority report and show that it would be in principle possible for the Church to change the official line on contraception.

In his ‘Reflections on the February Editorial’ (New Blackfriars, April, 1967) Father Cornelius Ernst suggested that in the context of ecclesiological analysis the notion of institution should not be restricted to ‘its narrower, governmental sense’ of legitimated offices and procedures which, however initiated, are formally constituted, but might be more usefully employed in the wider sense of the term ‘familiar to sociologists and social anthropologists’. If I have understood him correctly, his argument is that to confine the term to formally ‘instituted’ institutions, while denying it to ways of thought and action which although equally established as usages have not been established formally, is to lend countenance to dubious oppositions between the formal and explicit on the one hand, and the informal and implicit on the other. As an example of such an opposition he cites that between ‘institutional Church’ and ‘persons’. He suggests that if such distinctions as this are taken as expressing fundamental dichotomies, they may entail ‘damaging oversimplification’.

In the context of this interesting theme, a brief and inevitably cursory note by a social anthropologist on some of the ways in which the notions of institution and institutionalization have been used in his field may be of some small value.

In the 1930s there was a considerable interest in the possibility that chemical and biological weapons might be used in the war which many people realized was impending. When such weapons were not, in fact, used in the war, public interest in their potentialities died down and the use of thermonuclear weapons diverted the attention of those who would otherwise have been concerned with chemical and biological warfare by focussing it on the urgent need to prevent any further use of these catastrophic new armaments. From time to time there have been outbursts of indignation when reports of the use of gas or microbial agents have been made public but there has been little study outside military circles of the potentialities or implications of their use. During the past year or so, however, there has been a recrudescence of public interest in the subject. There have been many reasons for this but, undoubtedly, the international conference on chemical and biological warfare held in London last February under the auspices of the J. D. Bernal Peace Library had a stimulating effect. The contributors to this conference were able to speak authoritatively on various topics connected with chemical and biological warfare as they were mostly senior scientists, some with world-wide reputations, working in related fields, or else younger people who, for one reason or another, had made a special study of some aspect of the subject. Furthermore, the conference received considerable publicity on radio and television and in the newspapers and gave rise to questions in the House of Commons which, in turn, received publicity and helped to keep public interest alive.