Dialogue between Marxists and Christians is no longer surprising. It seems to me, however, that it frequently takes place on far too wide a plane. Marxism and Christianity are juxtaposed as two competitive all-embracing ‘philosophies of man’, and the discussion is conducted in ultimate, cosmological and metaphysical terms. I realize that this is all very well, and probably very necessary too; it does not, however, seem to me to exhaust all the interesting and important questions that Christians and Marxists, or Marxist Christians, should explore.

I write now for Christians who, in their understanding of society, social change and political controversy, recognize that Marx has made a fundamental and essential contribution to our diagnosis of social ills and our prescription for their cure. Along with these positions, they (probably necessarily) accept Marx’s criticism of the repression, physical and psychological, which have at times been perpetrated and justified in the name of Christianity.

I will assume, then, that if my reader has any quarrels with Marxism, it is not on the broad issues that I have just mentioned. We will then be able to look at another kind of question, which I think is equally interesting and important.

Dr Jack Goody has over a period of twenty years done extensive fieldwork in northern Ghana, mainly among the LoDagaa (more commonly known as the Dagarti) and the Gonja. In both areas, he has exercised very satisfactorily the normal skills of the anthropologist dutifully recording the size of farming groups, and the ways inheritances are divided. However, farms are cultivated, and inheritances shared by human beings, who use language and live in time; and Goody’s awareness of this has made him responsible for three books which related the history and literature (both written and oral) of northern Ghana to a wider world. In Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa Dr Goody argued that Ghanian history is significantly influenced not only by the means of production, but also by the means of destruction, the horse, associated with Islam and the savannas, and guns, associated with Christendom and the forests. In a contribution to Literacy in Traditional Societies Dr Goody showed in the West African context, but with obviously much wider relevance, that the break-through to literacy may lead not towards secularization, but rather to mythifying and mystifying to a much greater degree than before. In The Myth of the Bagre Goody has not only increased the available corpus of African oral literature by giving us the original texts and annotated translations of the two long Bagre poems, but has also indicated its place in the religion and world-view of the LoDagaa and its relevance to contemporary discussions of myth.

The LoDagaa are not, strictly speaking, a ‘tribe’ in the colonialist sense of an obviously distinctive group, sharply distinguished from their neighbouring tribes. As happens in a number of areas in Africa, this particular area of northern Ghana is marked by a lack of coincidence between cultural and linguistic boundaries, and by the gradual way cultural differences appear with gradually increasing distance. Even the term has been selected for use to cover a given area by Dr Goody, albeit with some justification in local usage.

‘Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ It is possible that this is more literally true than we realize.

This article is an attempt to discover what kind of thing is going on in people who get into ecstatic states of one kind or another, whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, and whether they tell us anything about the more ‘normal’ requirements for spiritual ‘conversion’ and growth.

‘Ecstatic states’ covers a multitude of—let’s say experiences. The phrase includes the L.S.D. ‘trip’, the ‘speaking in tongues’ of the charismatic movement, the deep trance of the shaman and the dark ‘unknowing’ of the mystic. Can one lump all those together? They don’t seem to be a well-assorted party, especially if we include (and maybe we should) sexual ‘ecstasy’, and the experiences induced by voodoo rituals, or in ‘covens’ of latter-day witches, and possibly even the ‘pink elephants’ of the alcoholic. Imagine a T.V. programme in which the interviewer collected individuals each of whom had experienced one of those kinds of ‘ecstasy’. It seems likely that the discussion would be inconclusive, to say the least, though the affair would probably have some lively moments.’

Even as organized religion becomes less fashionable in many corners, and perhaps especially in the university, a centuries-old scholastic debate about the existence of God has been resurrected to be pursued by the Academy with a new vigour. The so-called Ontological Argument, which St Thomas and Kant each in his turn demolished, is alive and well and alleged to have been more energetically debated in the last decade than ever before in its history, That this phoenix has risen from its ashes is not necessarily best accounted for by seeing it as an event in the war between belief and unbelief. For in large measure, today’s philosophers have occupied themselves with the new modal arguments of men like Malcolm and Hartshorne because of the fascinating logical problems which they entail. Moreover, in the course of the history of the argument, the sides have not been chosen by a strict division between those of the faith and those outside. St Anselm thought he had come upon a worthy insight when he first proposed the argument. But just as surely St Thomas thought the argument inadmissible—without by any means intending to deny God’s existence. There is a lesson here, albeit an embryonic one, for those who are carrying on another current debate—the one about whether theology can or should be done with detachment or commitments

To be academically respectable, some would say, theology must be pursued with scholarly objectivity and freedom from ecclesiastical constraints. Its integrity as a discipline hinges on dispassionate examination of the data and the freedom to draw conclusions wholly in accord with the evidence. One’s faith-commitment as such should not influence his theology.

‘An existential system cannot be formulated. Does this mean that no such system exists ? By no means; nor is this implied in our assertion. Existence itself is a system—for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit. System and finality correspond to one another, but existence is precisely the opposite of finality.’

S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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Philosophy of religion and theology

We are by now too well acquainted with much that goes on under the heading of ‘philosophy of religion’ which seems to provide sport for some professional philosophers but has little to do with religious belief. The tactics are well known. A typical statement of a theological kind is set up for examination and is then put through the logical hoops without, apparently, any further need for reference to the theological context. The strategy often presumes that there is basically only one type of theological statement and that this can be dealt with adequately without looking at the complex structure of thought which surrounds it in its theological setting. Faith may indeed be simple, but its systematic exploration and articulation inevitably demands a complex and sophisticated exposition without which it becomes not only unreasonable, but even unintelligible. The discussions of some of the philosophers of religion have as a result only too often a rather tired and well-worn air, and frequently theologians find little resemblance between what they themselves are doing and what philosophers presume that they are about.

Once again the expatriate pundits are out in force penning their solutions to the African Church’s problems. Having successfully surveyed the catechists and being shortly to publish the results of marriage enquiries, they are now turning their not inconsiderable, if at times inconsiderate, powers of persuasion to propagating alternative forms of ministry. Few would question the statistical evidence: the shortage of professional priests in Africa, both indigenous and expatriate, is becoming increasingly critical. Less evident, however, is the long-termed suitability and theological soundness of the proposed panacea, the ‘peasant priesthood’. ‘A priest in every village’ as there used to be until recently in parts of Spain and Italy, is the experts’ cry. Prima facie they have a case. Africa not only has been, is and will be for the foreseeable future, a pre-eminently rural society, but it is also government policy in many countries to create and centre development at the level of small-scale communities. For the moment these villages are merely mass-centres. There can be up to thirty or more of these outstations—the real parishes in sociological and theological terms—dependent upon one canonical parish. They are the occasional object of spasmodic, sacramental sorties, organized by an understaffed, overworked central mission. It seems to make sense then, pastorally speaking, that each community have a resident priest and consequently Sunday Mass. Most of these villages already have a catechist, more often than not a local man with much good will but little formal training. Their traditional role as teachers of religion, part-time sacristans and full-time watchdogs of faith and morals is changing.

Early in 1970 I was approached by the Anglican archbishop of Central Africa with a request that I conduct an investigation for the Anglican communion in Africa of marriage issues—to be precise, ‘a pastoral appreciation of the problems arising out of African marriage customs, both rural and urban, in relation to full membership of the Church’. It was hoped at first that the work could be sponsored by both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic hierarchies, but for various reasons the latter were unwilling to join in on the plan as it had been proposed, so in December 1970 I began work sponsored by the Anglican archbishops alone but with the general understanding that I would look at the problems of Catholics as well, in so far as I could. The Anglican communion is not present in most African countries, notably the French speaking lands (except for Rwanda and Burundi), and it was also decided to leave out West Africa, but the area to be considered remained vast—Kenya to South Africa— and it was obvious that my survey could not include original field research; the idea was to provide an overall view of the position in some nine countries based upon already available literature, brief visits on my part and a questionnaire, together with a theological and pastoral appreciation of the problems the factual survey indicated as most pressing. It is this that I have attempted to do in the six chapters and ten appendixes of my final report, Christian Marriage in Africa, published by SPCK in March of this year.

One recurring premise in much criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is the dissoluteness of his dramatis personae. I say ‘dissoluteness’, because there is usually assumed to be some correlation between the imputed psychological state and a moral dereliction. Thus, Bernard Bergonzi’s recent study, speaking of the ‘deluded’ or ‘corrupt’ narrator of Portrait of a Lady, argues that ‘his consciousness is at all times on the verge of dissolution’. His drawing-room conversation is said to be disrupted by the ‘grotesque musical sounds going on inside his head. . . . He makes an effort literally to compose himself but his impressions remain as fragmentary and disjunctive as the items in a daily paper.’ Yet the lines Bergonzi cites to substantiate this suggest the opposite. In face of a multitude of other lives assembled, but also abstracted, reduced, made safe for him by the newspaper, the narrator maintains a casual equanimity, only mildly stirred by the sense of a problematic otherness:

In his article on the future in the May issue of Blackfriars Professor Geach argues at some length against the thesis (which I will henceforth call fatalism) that the future is definite and determinate. I am just as firmly convinced as Professor Geach that fatalism is incorrect, but I am not at all sure that the reasons which he puts forward against this theory are sufficient to refute it. Geach’s main argument against fatalism appears to be contained in the following passages:

'P. T. Geach ‘The Future’ in New Blackfriars, vol. 54, number 636 (May, 1973), pp. 209, 211.

However, the simple fact to which Geach draws our attention is not as simple as it looks. ‘Not everything that was going to happen eventually did happen’ may be interpreted in a number of different ways. It could mean:

It is now some time since Christians tried to find a point of agreement on the Eucharist. The ‘Agreed Statement’ was the result of discussion between the Catholic Church and the Church of England. Catholics have always been rather cynical about the idea of the Church of England being able to speak as one body, but in this case it appears that there is some doubt as to whether the Catholic Church, in England—never mind the world, was speaking for the whole Catholic body. But that is not a point I wish to pursue. As I see it the terms of reference were too narrow, and the whole issue totally irrelevant in the context of the needs of the world of today. Both Catholics and non-Catholics could and should have used a broader front which would have led to some statement appealing to the needs of all men, Christian and non-Christian alike. For if the ‘Agreed Statement’ has a Barchester remoteness about it, the Eucharist has not. Today, more than ever, it can have a meaning and relevance; it can offer to man, if not a solution, then the symbol of a solution, to his problems and questionings. We may group these under three headings: (1) Human Dignity; (2) Love; (3) Hope.

Chapter 6 of St John’s Gospel begins by relating a miracle of the feeding of 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes. It was an action of the kind that would appeal most to the Jews of Christ’s day, and the account of it least to men of today.

Hazlitt has had a fair amount of modern critical attention, but not enough of it has been concerned with rescuing him from the drab category of ‘minor Regency prose’ and establishing him where he belongs, as one of the most extraordinarily intelligent writers of his period. Perhaps the difficulty has been in part one of genre. One dominant definition of the English essay form, as a belletristic set- piece concerned to charm, composed of the casual meanderings of a liberal, off-beat, impressionist mind, fits a little of Hazlitt’s work accurately enough; but there seem good reasons why critics who feel comfortably at home with Lamb, Stevenson and Belloc might feel less at ease with Hazlitt’s writings as a whole. His liberalism is allied with a trenchancy which has been attacked as intemperate and bellicose; and this is perhaps one reason why a book like Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, to my mind an inferior product containing hardly a single disturbing judgment, has assumed predominance over works with a sharper edge—Political Essays, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker.

Hazlitt’s trenchancy springs from his radicalism; and it is worth calling the abrasive force of that radicalism to mind, with its controlled combination of moral indictment and caustic irony. There are his comments on the Quarterly Review, for instance:

I have written this paper on the basis of the hunch that there is something very misleading about the relationship, as Marx sometimes describes it, between the scientific analysis of society and morality. I have the hunch, also, that many of Marx’s followers have been misled in the way one would expect them to be, given his false clues. I should say, however, that this suspicion of confusion concerns more what Marx and his followers call by the name ‘morality’ than what they offer as a method and a substance for the analysis of society. This misleading confusion is that Marx and subsequent Marxists more or less explicitly define their stance as scientists by way of contrast with the status the moralist or moral theorist is, on their view, supposed to have. I shall not discuss in any detail the various ways in which this false contrast has been made out. Rather I shall mention some guiding lines of thought which lead to it.

The hypothesis which I will offer as an alternative to this contrast is simply that it would best serve both clarity and the history of moral thought if we were to agree on the following proposition: Marxism, as the science of society is, if a true science, nothing but morality and morality nothing but Marxism. Hence, the judgments about how to act which may be based on the results of that science, if true, are moral judgments. If, however, the science has produced more than trivially false results it is nothing but vice to act, or want to act on the judgments about acting which are entailed by them. The question, therefore, whether Marxism is or is not identical with morality is, to my mind, an empirical question, to be settled one way or the other by reference to the very same facts which show it to offer either crucially true or else false statements about contemporary society.

Burundi is very small by African standards, almost the same size as Belgium, its former colonial master. Situated at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, Burundi’s neighbours are Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. Hills like vast sandcastles rise from a narrow plain along the lake to heights of over 2000m on the Nile-Congo watershed. Burundi’s population is estimated at 3.7 million. Because the density of population is so high, and because there are no minerals or other natural resources worth exploiting commercially, all except the educated elite are poor subsistence farmers and herdsmen. The sale of coffee—nearly all of which is bought by the United States, supposedly for political reasons—accounts for some 80 per cent of all foreign exchange earnings, though attempts are now being made to diversify agricultural production with tea, cotton and rice as secondary cash-crops.

Three ethnic groups make up the population: the pygmoid Twa, only per cent of the total and politically of no account, the agriculturist Hutu, a Bantu tribe who make up 85 per cent, and the cattle-herding Tutsi (14 per cent). Legend and some facts assert that the Tutsi are of Nilotic-Hamitic origins, that they came late to Burundi and reduced the Hutu to client status by leasing them cows in return for personal service and food. ‘Tutsi’ is somewhat of a simplification : there appear to have been two separate invasions, first the Abanyaruguru clans, literally ‘those from the north’, and then later the Hima clans who entered and now occupy mainly the southeast part of the country.

Spokesmen for the present government claim that it is the colonialist who is to blame for the very existence of tribal conflict in Burundi

On the 1st of November, 1950, Pope Pius XII announced in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, as an indispensable part of Christian belief, revealed by God, that ‘Mary, the immaculate and perpetually virgin Mother of God, after the completion of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven’. It is difficult to know what sort of sense to give to this kind of dogmatic formulation, but it would seem that sense has to be made of it because it has been accepted by the general consensus of the Church and defined by the highest authority as being an integral part of Christian doctrine for all Roman Catholics. We have to make theological sense of it in order to be faithful to the transmission of the Marian traditions throughout the ages of the Church. This is not to suggest that we should relax our criticism of these tranditions, but I take it that we cannot be faithful to Christian tradition and at the same time adopt the liberal attitude of dispensing as irrelevant with those dogmatic traditions which do not meet our taste. Marian dogma cannot be shrugged off by Roman Catholics as being a Catholic aberration of Christian tradition; after the Papal definitions of the immaculate conception of Mary in 1854 and of her bodily assumption in 1950 the dogmas have to be taken with the utmost seriousness, and if it is found to be difficult to reconcile an easy understanding of these dogmas with more fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine then we must adopt a more broad-ranging interpretation of these beliefs. What is required in this instance is an exercise in dogmatic hermeneutics.

The French theological landscape seems to have been lying comparatively fallow for the ten years since the great days of the Vatican Council, but the periodicals are now laden with the first fruits of a new generation. The notes that follow have been made in the course of reading essays by Michel de Certeau, and attempt to transpose his style and preoccupations into terms related to our own out of an idiom that is very different from most theological writing in English (though compare the valuable studies by Bernard Sharratt, hidden in the files of a sadly defunct review: ‘Locating theology’, Slant No 22 (1968), ‘Absent centre’, Slant Nos 24 and 25 (1969).

The Empty Tomb as Ideogram

On literary and text-historical grounds, as virtually all scholars now agree, the narrative of St Mark’s Gospel ends at verse 8 of the final chapter; the remaining verses printed in our bibles, though they appear in most of the extant MSS and are worth study in their own right, are clearly by some other writer and must therefore be set aside when we try to understand the message of St Mark. From the point at which the three women enter the sepulchre, then, the concluding verses read as follows

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:

Che sàrà, sàrà,

Whatever will be, will be,

The future’s not ours to see,

Che sàrà, sàrà.

The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.

We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.

Leonard Woolf, in Downhill all the Way, remarked of his wife that ‘the idea of a party always excited her’, and though it is true that on 11th November, 1918, ‘Virginia and I celebrated the end of a civilization’ by ‘eating, almost sacramentally, some small bars of chocolate cream’, for Virginia Woolf, as for the rest of us, eating was generally a celebration of the continuing value of life, where, as at the restaurant meal of The Waves, ‘here and now we are together’ drawn into ‘this communion’, and making ‘something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time’.

Talk of that kind about eating is an open invitation for those Christians who would engage in ‘Theology and Literature’, but a man should guard against any quick transition from Virginia Woolf’s talk of sacramental chocolate creams and congregations of past time to his peculiar Christian understanding of meal and communion. It should give us pause, for example, that the chocolate creams were eaten at the ‘end of a civilization’, and that in The Waves the meal is created around a hero who, described in Christ-like terms certainly, is finally ineffective.

This article takes as its point of departure Roderick Strange’s interesting article ‘Faith and Theology in the University’ but it is not really intended as another contribution to the somewhat closed debate on the place of Theology in the University. That is a fairly specialized question which theologians tend to worry about when their public relations have grown particularly remote, but has little reference to anyone outside their context, and may reasonably be left to them to resolve.

The problems implied in it, though, are not confined to the University context for several reasons; first, the privilege of having sufficient time to give thought to the health of one’s own religion is not the prerogative solely of dons and undergraduates; secondly, a lot of people read books which have been conceived and realized in the context of the University but are not themselves in a position to take account of what that genetic context has had to do with the making of the book; and, thirdly, the tensions between faith and reason do not confine themselves to professional theologians, but are part and parcel of every man’s consciousness.

Roderick Strange’s solution to the question, ‘Should the academic theologian permit his own faith to be involved in his professional activity?’ seems to me to be based on treacherous ground in the form of Dr Ian Ramsey’s rather unsatisfactory contribution to the problems of religious language. This latter debate has not yet made any real progress I think, and will continue to be unsatisfactory so long as it remains an eclectic science taking only piecemeal ideas, now from linguistics, now from literary criticism, with the result that it does justice to neither and leaves its own problems unresolved.

Tomorrow is a long time At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination Dylan was afraid that he too might be killed. Leaving aside his proverbial paranoia, what this fear showed is the extent to which Dylan considered himself ‘involved’ : he obviously thought that he was making a statement in his music radical enough for him to be made the target of a politically- directed bullet. Dylan was connected professionally with the Civil Rights Movement and was made into a young hero by that amorphous political and social group, but at certain points in his early career his own perspectives transcended the liberal optimism of the Civil Rights slogans.

Some of Dylan’s early songs were not in that one-dimensional rhetorical accusative one came to expect of the New York City folk crowd. Dylan became aware very quickly that there was only a simple answer to everything if you were simple enough to accept it. He did not wish to be made into a solo version of Peter, Paul and Mary, megaphoning easily-digestible platitudes to an auditorium full of hungry college students. In an early, unreleased song about Heze- kiah Jones he ‘accuses’ the white ‘rednecks’, the undifferentiated, anonymous, philistine mass who hide behind their respectable beliefs. But he was really more intelligent than that: he knew that the poor whites were as much victims of ‘society’s pliers’ as the exploited blacks (though often less spectacularly so).

His song, Only a Pawn in their Game, must surely rank as one of the most intelligent contemporary political comments upon the murder of Medgar Evans.