In his attempt to defend the Declaration of Human Rights against criticism from both the second and the third world, the Belgian philosopher Guy Haarscher admits in his book Philosophie des Droits de l’homme (Brussels, 1987) that this would be easier if modern men could still believe in God. Why? Because God is the embodiment of what is common to all people. He represents the universal truth of human values on which human rights are based.

Ever since Durkheim we have been strongly aware of the fact that there is a close relationship between society and faith in God. But Guy Haarscher states that God is dead. We cannot go back to a faith in God, he says, for it would entail accepting a hierarchically structured cosmos and thus a hierarchical society. Society before the French Revolution was such a society, one in which all individuals had their place, their definable rights and obligations. It was a society in which the value system was clear and persons enjoyed quite a lot of security, but in which they were not allowed to leave their places lest they endanger the society’s unity. In the third century Plotinus had argued for the inner goodness of such a social order, and his impact on Christian theology can hardly be overestimated; many Vatican declarations cannot be understood fully without some knowledge of Plotinus’ philosophy.

For modern human beings this hierarchical society is repressive. The French Revolution marked the death of of hierarchical society and the dawn of an age in which (in theory) all individuals were allowed to find the places in society which suited them most.

Jansenism and Lefebvrism arose in profoundly different worlds. Yet there are striking similarities between them in beliefs and practices—common tendencies, attitudes and assumptions.

Important similarities in the circumstances of their origins and development help to explain these. Not, of course, that the same weight can be given to all these similarities.

For example, both movements have been led by people with charismatic personalities. Central to the development of Jansenism was a series of individuals with powerful personalities such as Saint-Cyran, the Arnaulds, Nichole and Pascal. Their biographies are well recorded—all too well, for the Jansenists loved writing hagiographies of each other—and need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that ‘the personal factor’ was pre-eminent in the direction of the coterie.

Though vacillating and, by his own admission, inclined toward inordinate indignation, the personality and strong personal authority of Marcel Lefebvre, leader of the so-called ‘Tridentine movement’, has been central throughout the events linked with his name: his leadership at the Second Vatican Council of the conservative faction known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and his attack there against collegiality, against the declarations on religious liberty and against relations with non-Christians; his founding after the Council of the diocesan society ‘The Priestly Fraternity of S. Pius X’ in Fribourg; his setting-up of the seminary boasting preconciliar discipline, training and rites which was soon moved to Ecône; his illicit celebration of ‘Tridentine’ Masses and ordination of deacons, priests and finally bishops.

In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.

On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).

Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.

The hall-mark of a genuine spirituality must lie in the honest recognition of our rootedness in the world of matter. It is the theme of poets as various as John Donne and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps in Donne we find its chief expression in the Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sickness of 1624, but it is present as the background of many of his poems:

Dylan Thomas refers to Donne with approval and comments in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson in similar vein:

This rootedness is our greatest glory. It must drive us towards engagement with the stuff of creation, in contrast to a spirituality which offers us ways of putting up with things as they are.

This suggests a spirituality which must face up to the concrete particularity of our daily life. As Jon Sobrino has remarked recently:

‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.’

According to St Luke, the Lord dies fully conscious, quoting this line from the 31st psalm: ‘Into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ And, later on, in St Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, we hear St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying as he is dying: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And in the 1st epistle of Peter Christians suffering severe hardship are told to ‘entrust their souls to a faithful Creator’.

Trusting ourselves to God, letting go, putting ourselves in the hands of God. Down through the ages numerous holy men and women have urged us to do this, but it is not quite as easy as it sounds. There are all sorts of obstacles—our sins, hang-ups deep down inside us—that stop nearly all of us, right until the end, right until death, from letting go completely.