Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.

To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.

We are entering a new period in man’s history. Some men have always been poorer than others; people’s skin colours have always been different. But for the first time there is developing a fusion between those who are poor and those who are ‘different’. The one supporting the other – they have come to rest with odd exceptions side by side. A line has been drawn across the world. On one side are approximately one third who are white and well fed and affluent, whether they be American capitalists or Soviet factory workers. On the other side are the two thirds who are brown, black or yellow, and are either starving, or at least facing the prospect of always being poor and deprived; certainly standing little chance in the forseeable future of being affluent.

In the poor part of the world, the so called underdeveloped countries, there is a population growth of 2 to 4%. As well as high birth rates they have some of the lowest death rates in the world because of their over proportioned youthful population. A decrease in their birth rate from even a large birth control campaign would according to the distinguished Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, have no effect on the labour force for 15 years and only a very minor effect for three decades.

Again as Myrdal observes even if industrialization were pushed much more rapidly than has been possible in the underdeveloped nations so far, it will not create much employment.

Some few years ago I received a letter from Jacques Maritain, asking me if I could do anything to promote the performance in England of Arthur Lourié’s opera Le Maure de Pierre le Grand. This was based on a tale by Pushkin and extracts from it had been given by Stokovski with the Philadelphia orchestra. I did not know the work, and I had no influence in such matters. In the same letter Maritain declared that the time would come when Lourié would be recognized as the greatest composer of the century. That time has not come yet: Lourié’s work remains practically unknown, except to a few initiates. Until more performances of it have been given, and recordings from it made, it is obviously difficult for the rest of us to confirm Maritain’s opinion – whether we are musicians, or people like myself who are extremely fond of music. In the meantime curiosity is stirred by the publication of Lourié’s occasional writings under the title of Profanation et Sanctification du Temps.

Louri? and his wife are now living in Maritain’s house at Princeton and Maritain’s opinion is that of a close friend to whom this book is dedicated. It is supported, however, by independent and competent judges, like Henri Marrou, an eminent humaniste, and the musical critics Fred Goldbeck and Boris de Schloezer. Their testimony is printed as an appendix to this volume, which is admirably prefaced by Jean Mouton. The title is taken from a lecture given in 1963 at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette where the problem of Dieu et le monde moderne was under discussion. Lourié has no illusions about the monde moderne!

Leslie Dewart’s book, just published in England, is the most far-reaching philosophical reappraisal of Catholic belief that has appeared in this country in recent years. It is symptomatic of a shift of emphasis that has begun to appear in Catholic thinking generally — away from ‘progressive’ preoccupations with the modernisation of the church, the liturgy, the parish, the ‘community’ and towards a new way of thinking and feeling about God. The modernisation programme — at least in terms of books — is wearing thin. Its slogans no longer seem much more relevant than the ones they replaced. They do not offer a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What the hell does it all mean?’ As Sebastian Moore rightly says, in his new book God is a New Language (which is another symptom of the same shift in emphasis), ‘what is within the circle (i.e. of progressive theologians) a revolution appears to the wider world to be a purely domestic battle, offering no more than the journalistic interest of a palace revolution’. Whereas — the implication is — what is needed is a real revolution. Dewart’s work is largely subversive: helping to prepare for that revolution and suggesting the outlines of a strategy.

I have some reservations about Dewart’s thesis. In one sense I think he goes too far, and almost loses touch with the church as a community at all — and thus what is being hinted at is liable to become only an intellectual revolution, not one that overturns the world.

Professor Germain Grisez of Georgetown has written his criticism of contraception from the viewpoint of a natural-law theorist. He goes about his task in a tidily business-like way, first setting forth some of his own credentials:

Husband and wife, to use some earlier imagery of the book were not ‘goaded on to wrong paths by enthusiasm over the greener pastures projected in an illusory light by the latest phantasms of secular thought.’ Being thus armored in these durable orthodoxies, Professor Grisez adds a kindly admonition for many of his readers, ‘Those not accustomed to subtle argument, as well as those who do not respect reason, will be little moved by what I have to say. Against the heart reason has little power, and it is just as impotent against sentimentalism which has become confused with charity as it is against plain ill will.’

The subtlety of the argument is immediately evident in Professor Grisez’s derivation of the fundamental and absolutely basic principles of morality from our knowledge of man’s intrinsic inclinations.

Education is a subject which should engage our keenest interest, our most careful provision, our deepest thoughts. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of education in Britain at the present time is that it is not doing so.

Professor Castle writes about education in East Africa. As he is concerned with education in its widest sense – clearly formulated in ancient Greece as that which makes a man – his enquiry is not only into existing educational institutions but also into the whole nature of the societies in which African children are growing up in East Africa today.

He is uniquely well-qualified for his task. After spending most of his life in education in Britain – as teacher, headmaster, and Professor – he went in 1961 to Makerere in Uganda, as Visiting Professor of Education. From 1961-65 he was in East Africa travelling widely, visiting all types of schools and colleges. In 1963 he was chairman of the Uganda Education Commission, whose Report is likely to form the basis for educational planning in Uganda for the foreseeable future. Here is no fly-by-night ‘expert’, but a man whose knowledge about educational institutions in East Africa is probably unparalleled at the present time. To these highly professional qualifications one must add that extra quality of an author who has a deep personal sympathy and concern for his subject.

The result, in this book, is a picture of education as it is in East Africa today, clearly presented, acutely observed.

Such a wide and general subject is fraught with obvious complications.

This is not an exhaustive study of contemplation, and I omit severa important aspects of the subject; most drastically, I omit any discussion of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. I feel entitled to do so for two reasons: first, that Christ characterized himself as ‘the way’, and it is therefore permissible to make a preliminary enquiry, such as this present one, into what, in general, one is looking for in an approach to God. And secondly, we no longer know Christ himself in the flesh. To see Christ is to see the Father: but how do we see Christ? To some extent we may re-assimilate the problem of knowing Christ to that of knowing God (though since the Incarnation, one cannot leave it at that, obviously; otherwise the Incarnation would have no enduring revelatory significance, which it clearly has).

In English we are unfortunate in having only one word ‘know’ for both savoir and connaître; for the distinction is very important between knowing a fact, and knowing a person, and it is easy to create devastating problems for ourselves by tacitly assimilating contemplation of God to savoir rather than connaître.

The most obvious distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person is that the former is abstract and general, while the latter is particular. The object of the former type of knowledge, being an abstraction, only exists in my mind. In Buber’s terminology, there is an I-It relationship, an It always being only a part of my world.

The gradual abandonment of the purely theological basis for religious persecution in favour of a secular posture, based on social and political stability, inevitably led to the emergence of the basic modern premise of freedom of religious worship. The outcome of this long and painful interlude in the history of man becomes apparent when we look at certain recent developments in international law. The unfolding of the modern conception of human rights owes much to the philosophy of such men as Locke. The natural law rights of states produced their distinct natural law echo in the fundamental rights of man. Such ideas played a large part in American and French revolutionary thinking. The right to believe and worship as one likes is now based on natural law conceptions derived from a purely fictitious state of nature and reason. We are prone to say with Sir Henry Maine that natural law theories gave us international law. It is a legitimate extension to go on and say that 18th century natural law theories gave us the idea of fundamental human rights. Among these came, ultimately, freedom in the exercise of religion. It is this parentage that accounts for the provision in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution of 1776: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. A like idea translated into law appears in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 in providing for freedom from harassment on account of one’s religious opinions.

Fr Fergus Kerr (Slant g, June-July, 1966) presents as self-evident the proposition that ‘theology is primarily a way of talking about man', and supports this with the historicist description that ‘every major breakthrough in our understanding of God issues from an equivalent breakthrough in our understanding of man’. Our anthropology has undergone a revolution, so it is plain that our theology must, if it is to survive, undergo an equivalent revolution. It might at first appear that Professor William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School is the man to work the revolution. After the New Reformation and the New Morality, the New Essence of Christianity? He is certainly aware that ‘all our theology, even our essences of Christianity, must be done afresh in every generation’, and makes a brave attempt at this doing afresh. I want to say something here of how brave the attempt is and why I think that it ultimately fails to engineer the revolution. The kind of thing that Fr Kerr and Professor Hamilton presume about revelation and theology is perhaps easiest conveyed by suggesting that the case of the prophet Hosea has become our paradigm. Hosea’s understanding of his own condition, of his continuing love for the unfaithful Gomer, led him to understand the continuing love of Yahweh for the unfaithful Israel. Hosea’s longing for the return of his wife was not a longing for this or that aspect of her character but a longing for the woman herself, for Gomer. So Hosea thinks of Yahweh’s redemptive hope for Israel as a promise for the whole people. In this his theology differs radically from that of Amos and Isaiah whose experience led them to speak in terms of a remnant of the people having a share in the kingdom. Hosea has first of all made an effort to understand his own situation and has then been able to understand something of God. He has made his experience into a sign for the whole society of Israel. As Kerr says: ‘God reveals himself in a new light to people who have gained some new insight into what they are’.

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.

Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.

The most surprising thing about Mr Foot’s book is that it is there. When one considers the scale of the official war histories, one volume for the momentous events of El Alamein and Tunisia, one volume for Normandy, one volume for Singapore, one for Mandalay, military operations involving the deployment of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of men over wide areas of the globe, with final strategic issues in the balance, it comes as rather a shock to find that the compass of one volume is also required for a branch of operations directly involving a force of British and French agents numbered merely in hundreds. The reason is quite simply that these operations have become the focus of at least as much interest and concern as any other single aspect of the war in Europe. There can have been few supposedly clandestine operations bathed in a brighter glow of publicity. The organisers and agents of Special Operations Executive have written about its activities in many countries, and it was high time someone dredged through the archives and at any rate attempted a balanced and neutral account of what happened after Winston Churchill set Hugh Dalton at the head of the organisation with the dramatic order: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’

Mr Foot has worked under severe limitations. SOE controlled a good many activities in France, not all of which are fully covered by this book. He deliberately excludes the running of escape routes, and of the two sections which ran saboteurs into France, RF Section and F (French) Section, the latter is his real concern.

‘Our bishops have warned us: “There is a grave danger that the circumstances of the present war may, in time, diminish our moral sensitivity to its evils”. We fear that this very danger has become actualized. We face a severe crisis of conscience within our Catholic community that arises from the incongruity between the moral principles enunciated by the Church and the uncritical support of this war by so many Catholics’: from the Catholic Committee on Vietnam—Open letter to the clergy and laity of the United States.

Since the beginning of 1965, the Committee of Clergy and Laymen concerned about Vietnam, comprising distinguished figures such as Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, John C. Bennett, President of the Union Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr, together with Protestant bishops and many prominent rabbis, has maintained constant moderate pressure on the administration to bring about a non-military solution to the Vietnam conflict. Although it was reported in Herder Correspondence for September/October 1966 that Cardinal Cushing was on the committee, this report proved to be a misunderstanding caused by a priest from the Boston Diocese who did support the concern. None of the Catholic Hierarchy has supported the committee, though two of the bishops have found themselves able to give private help and encouragement. There has been a number of reports of attempts at dissuading clergy from associating themselves with public protests organized by the group.

‘The Church in Mission’ is a collection of papers by various authors, mostly translated from the French, which have been published in recent years. There are eleven; and nine would have been enough. After an excellent introduction from Information Catholique we are given two papers on missionary theology which make weary reading. Presumably it is a prudent convention, before launching into any subject, to survey what has already been done, but in the field of theology this can be tedious, and the reader begins to wonder whether the Church is well served by writings which wrap up a few simple ideas in many yards of abstractions. In these sixty two pages we learn that whereas at one time the primary aim of the missions was said to be to plant the Church in pagan lands, which took precedence over the aim to save souls, -more recent thought has reached the conclusion that the first cannot be done without the second. There is an interior as well as an exterior Church, a res of which the visible Church is the sacrament. That the theologian is not redundant when dealing with living issues can be appreciated in the articles by P. A. Liégé, who writes realistically and economically on ‘The Theology of the Church and the Mission Pastoral’ ‘Religious Liberty’ and ‘Before the Catechuminate’. His third paper contains this important paragraph:

In the April issue of New Blackfriars, Terry Eagleton wrote a fair and interesting review-article on my book On Trying to be Human. This article is a comment on certain questions that arise out of the review. They are quesdons about politics and philosophy and theology, but what it is really about is the irreducible gap in human awareness of life, the edges of which my book was clumsily exploring, and the reality of which gap the reviewer denies. I hope to throw some light on what it is that makes for growth in a society or in an individual.

On Trying to be Human is a mixed book with some extremely turgid passages. Reading it over now, I find much of it unnecessarily complex and lengthy. On the other hand several people, whose scholarship and intelligence is unquestioned, have found it illuminating, and said so. The book was written in an attempt to use Christian ideas as a tool for interpreting the common experience of human life, without calling on support from faith or the idea of revelation. (This was what made some reviewers — Christian and non-Christian — wonder if I were really a Christian at all. As a matter of fact I scarcely was, when I wrote it.) Its starting point was that of many of those who are vaguely called ‘humanist’, and whose prevailing mood is a pessimism which is the only realism they feel is justified by the facts. It was a response to a view of life which can accept nothing but verifiable fact and refuses even to see connections between facts, except for purely practical purposes.

It is, by now, a truism to state that one of the major problems in the traditional forms of religious life is that they tend to attract and conserve immature personalities. So does marriage, of course. In both cases the state of life entered upon is not viewed objectively in all its stark reality, but as offering an immediate assuagement of the craving to be loved. It is an effort, not to give love, but – without necessarily earning it – to get love and, through it, an assurance of personal value which, for one reason or another, was denied in the earliest formative years.

Whatever names psychologists give to the various compensations and defence mechanisms which the ego develops in reaction to primary experiences, the trouble is always born of fear out of devaluation. Whatever ideal self-image the individual sets up, and for which he seeks recognition and affirmation, the burning question in every relationship is always, at bottom, ‘Do you love me, accept me, value me . . . ?’ When the proffered ‘me’ is not the actual person but a ‘persona’, a construct based on who knows what borrowed notions, the quest is bound to be a disappointment for all concerned.

A mature person is one who is free from the compulsion to play a part, who is content to be himself to the best of his ability and who is, therefore, free to pour himself out in love of others, and of another in particular. Maturity is developed by accepting and exercising responsibility.

We are constantly being told there is a ‘crisis of authority’. Catholics in particular are always talking about authority and worrying about it, in fact they seem to have a sort of obsession about it—for or against. But they aren’t the only ones who worry, it affects all aspects of public and private life. It affects, naturally, the idea of what kind of leadership—if any—Christians can give at a time like this, in a society like ours. Does the ‘crisis’ mean that the possibility of leadership has gone, at least for the time being? Is there any sense in Christians trying to shore up the crumbling walls of authority?

In order to answer questions of this kind we need to ask two others, which we seldom do ask because we take the answers for granted. These questions are first, What is authority? and secondly, What kind of society do we live in?

It’s important to see exactly what we mean by authority, otherwise we are likely to waste a lot of time talking at cross-purposes.

Authority is primarily to do with community, in fact it is an essential ingredient of community. We tend to think of authority as synonymous with power, or government. Authority may involve the exercise of governing power, but that is not its nature.

Terry Eagleton’s article, The Limits of Liberalism, in the April number of New Blackfriars is as important as it is absorbing. In it he acknowledges that Mrs Rosemary’s Haughton’s book, On Trying to be Human, represents ‘the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition—the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships’ (p. 353), and he seeks to bring it into contact with another ‘important contemporary Christian tradition’, the radical one, which has been articulating itself in a series of articles in New Blackfriars but which was risking becoming closed in on itself. More significantly still it promises to bring the debate between these two traditions, the liberal and the radical, to issue beyond the rhetoric of mere labelling, so enabling and compelling us to choose between them. The importance of the article to all those engaged in the debate and concerned with the exigencies of contemporary Christian commitment is therefore clear.

Terry Eagleton’s contention is that Mrs Haughton’s affirmation and exploration of ‘the meaning of being human for a Christian’ is gravely deficient in that it systematically excludes ‘wider (and arguably deeper) connections of this immediate focus’ (p. 353). He devotes the bulk of his article to criticizing Mrs Haughton for attributing a distorted primacy to the spirit, the inward, the personal, with a consequential devaluation of the flesh, the external, the social and the political, and this on account of a misconception of the relationship between the two.

If Ford Madox Ford is more widely read and discussed today than he was a few years ago, then most of the credit must go to the Americans. In the late thirties, Ford’s reputation was at an absolute nadir in England, only twenty years after he had been at the centre of the metropolitan literary scene. The English Review, which Ford edited between 1908 and 1910, was one of the most distinguished publications ever to appear in the English-speaking world: the contributors to the first issue included Hardy, James, Conrad, Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Tolstoy, and Wells, while later numbers included the first published work of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford may, indeed, have been half-remembered as a great editor, but his own creative achievement as a novelist was resolutely disregarded. Thus, Mr Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, contains a useful chronological list of key works of modern literature published between 1900 and 1932.If we look up the entry for the year 1915, we see titles by Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, and Somerset Maugham, but no word of Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Again, Mr Connolly gives a very comprehensive list of books for the years 1924 to 1928, but says nothing of Some Do Not and the other sections of Ford’s long novel about Christopher Tietjens, now known collectively as Parade's End. And Parade's End is certainly regarded in America as one of the major achievements of modern English fiction.

I was teaching in a secondary school in ex-British Africa for fifteen months. The following article is written from notes I made while in Africa. The situation may have changed in the two years which have elapsed since I left. I would imagine that if anything, relations between white and black nuns will have deteriorated still further with the growing African sensitivity to racial undertones in white endeavour among black people.

When I arrived at the Mission, on the first evening, one of the teachers said as he showed me around, ‘There is the convent for the white sisters and that other building is for the black sisters’. My immediate reaction was to be shocked that there should be two separate establishments, one white, one black. But there were several reasons for this separation. The African sisters formed a diocesan community under the local bishop. The Missionary sisters were directed from Europe, and theoretically were working for their own replacement by converting the Africans. Also there was the argument that the African sisters would never develop responsibility and independence if they joined an established European community. And it would be detrimental to the growth of the African church to have Africans in missionary orders, ready to move on to new fields, instead of staying after the Missionaries had left to consolidate the Church among their own people. I was also told that Africans were bashful and inhibited in front of Europeans. So the ‘separate development’ made good theoretical sense.