‘I wouldn’t belong to this bunch of macaroni merchants for another second if it wasn’t the way of laying hold on Christ’. My own feelings about the Church are not exactly the same as those of Stanley Morison when he made this statement many years ago to Tom Burns, but something like this principle has enabled me to remain in the Church as the body of Christ, without feeling obliged to belong to the Catholic club, throughout my three score years and ten. Unlike Morison, I am not a convert, but Catholicism intervened effectively in my life only after childhood. And my first contacts were not with an Italian but with what appeared to be a very Irish and clerical institution.

For those inside and outside the Church in 1908 Catholicism in the West Riding town of Keighley was personified by the parish priest, Joseph Russell, a fine figure of a man who until his death in 1945 was always seen outside wearing a top hat (except on one occasion when he realised halfway up Highfield Lane that biretta and frock coat did not go together). After studies at Waterford and Maynooth, he soon made his mark in the Leeds diocese as preacher and administrator, a successful money-raiser who established four parishes from St Anne’s in Keighley and largely paid for their churches before they were cut off. He was very concerned tor the rights of the Church, reluctant to accept English curates, but on excellent terms with the Anglican rector and active on the local board of guardians.

My purpose in this article is (a) to consider the value and the coherence of the concept of divine necessity and (b) to offer some suggestions about the way in which divine necessity might reasonably be understood. I shall argue that there are reasons for denying the value and coherence of one notion of divine necessity but that another way of understanding it is not incoherent. Secondly, I shall defend the view that belief in divine necessity can plausibly be understood as an item of negative theology, as a way of refusing to tolerate certain positive affirmations.

Some philosophers have argued that belief in divine necessity amounts to belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. As many recent writers have pointed out, however, there is more than one kind of necessary proposition. The kind which comes immediately to mind is, perhaps, that of logically necessary propositions. These are analytic, i.e. they are coherent and their negations are incoherent. But not all necessarily true propositions are logically necessary. There are, for example, propositions which are not analytic but which seem necessarily true when we think of what is picked out by the referring expressions used in them. An example is ‘The number which is the number of the planets is necessarily greater than 6’. The number referred to here is 9, and 9 is necessarily greater than 6. But the number which is the number of the planets could have been 4.

It is not, then, helpful simply to say that belief in God’s necessity is belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. One influential view of divine necessity is, however, unaffected by this fact.

Acquiring the faith in 1946 was a process that lasted a year and a half and was predated by two circumstances that probably had an influence which outlasted the years of belief one was that I happened to have an uncle who – despite never going near a church even at Christmas – was a quite remarkably good man, and the other was that apart from the conventional influences of my Anglican school I was brought up in a fundamentally pagan and easygoing home.

No doubt because of this nominally religious background, when the faith did impinge on my adolescence it was all the more virulent – there had been no saving inoculation. Certainly it was quite unlike anything I had previously come across.

The doctrine of creation is theologically central. If God is not our Creator, we humans are not his creatures, much less made in his image: and still less can we fall short of the divine glory or be recreated in accordance with it. It is therefore vital for theists, and for those theologians who are committed to any of these doctrines, not to commit themselves to positions which entail or presuppose the denial of the creation doctrine.

So far, I should imagine, Brian Davies, O.P. who recently contributed to New Blackfriars a review of my recent book God and the Secular, would agree. The review was a generous one, which endorsed the need for natural theology, and indeed for maintaining the doctrine of creation. But Davies also contended that my own claim that God is an individual, and as such a member of a class, makes this doctrine collapse, and thus effectively undermines theology. My present purpose is to explain how, far from undermining theology, belief in God’s individuality and membership of a class is indispensable for upholders of the creation doctrine. At the same time I shall take the opportunity to expound the state of a discussion about these matters in philosophical books and journals which may have escaped attention.

Karl Rahner writes as follows (Foundations of Christian Faith, page 431): “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. The meaning of this sentence, according to Hugo Meynell (New Blackfriars, July/August 1980, page 348), is that Rahner is warning us against the temptation of thinking that eschatological statements tell us anything, or have any bearing upon, what is to happen to us when we die: “Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future after the end of the present life”. Dr Meynell thus reads the sentence as if it were stressed as follows: “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eye-witness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. What we are being warned against, then, is the notion that eschatological statements refer to the future. This is the only sentence which Dr Meynell quotes to support his suspicions that Karl Rahner does not hold orthodox Catholic beliefs about the afterlife.

Pope Paul VI elected in the summer of 1963, after the first session of the Vatican Council, presided over a Church that was to continue and extend the new policies of detente and co-operation with the Communist world that were begun under the previous pontificate. Diplomatic agreements were reached with many Communist countries, notably Hungary in 1964 and Yugoslavia a year later. Meetings between the two sides were frequent: when the Pope visited the United Nations in 1965 (and incidentally seemed to favour the admission of China to the Assembly) he had a long talk with Gromyko afterwards. Paul met the President of the Soviet Union, Podgomy, in 1967 and 1968, and both the Rumanian Prime Minister and Tito in 1968 and later in the early 70’s. In 1971 Casaroli became the first Vatican representative to visit Moscow since the Revolution, and the Vatican has had frequent contact with Polish government officials throughout the period. The Soviet authorities also allowed an increase in the contact between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church which had previously been very limited.

The new Pope’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam issued in November 1964 tentatively suggested that Paul was thinking on more reserved but similar lines to his predecessor. One section was completely devoted to dialogue with the modem world. “Speaking generally of the dialogue which the Church of today must take up with a great renewal of fervour, we would say that it must be readily conducted with all men of good will ...” (p. 93 CTS translation). Paul goes on to point out that although dialogue is difficult with communism “we have today no preconceived intentions of cutting ourselves off from the adherents of these systems and regimes” (p. 102). He even suggests that Communism could be a form of secularized Christianity and he holds out the hope that one day Communists may be led “back to the Christian sources” (p. 104), which lie behind many of their actions. Finally Paul, like John wanted a dialogue in order that the Vatican could fulfil its mission for peace in the world: “a disinterested, objective and sincere dialogue is a circumstance in favour of a free and honourable peace”(p. 106).

When I went on 23 September to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Commission called to discuss plans for next Peace Sunday, I had no idea that I was going to be presented with a Bene merenti medal. Bishop Mahon, who was presiding over the meeting, suddenly started talking about people who spend thier lives in obscurity beavering away for a cause, and I thought he was going to tell us about some little-known curé in Lyons or Marseilles, when suddenly I heard my own name mentioned as someone who had been beavering away for peace ever since 1936 when PAX was founded. I was too astonished and abashed to make a speech at the time, so I am going to make it now, among my friends at Spode, where it will be several times longer.

I would like to begin by saying that I feel I was given the medal under false pretences, because for years I didn’t beaver away for peace at all and had nothing to do with PAX. I was in it at the beginning in 1936 and vividly remember Eric Gill arriving in his smock and biretta-type headgear at one of the early meetings in London; there was much discussion as to whether PAX should try to stop the impending war or try to help those who wanted conscientiously to object to fighting in it — the latter alternative was the one chosen by the more realistically minded. But then, owing to living abroad and the subsequent dispersions of the war, I lost touch with PAX. It wasn’t until the fifties — at the time when an improvement on the atom bomb was discovered by the scientists, namely the hydrogen bomb — that I wrote a letter to The Catholic Herald asking what on earth had become of that Catholic Peace Society of the thirties called PAX ... whereupon I was inundated with literature from Charles Thompson and John O’Connor, the organisation’s then Bulletin editor and secretary. So I immediately rejoined PAX, met those two gallant men, and not long after was asked to be a speaker at a PAX conference here at Spode — that would have been in 1959.

in the attempt to give order to a diffuse and contradictory experience each individual is an artist, as he or she proposes an ideal solution for a particular difficulty and directs every effort towards achieving the closest practicable approximation to such a solution. Looked at in this way, it might be said that the action of the human mind is inevitably directly towards a synthesis of content and form. Society itself – the arrangements men make in order to live together in mutual security and provide for their well-being in organised interchange – could be considered to be a work of functional art, designed to solve problems and overcome difficulties encountered in living.

The greatest difficulty, the most intractable problem which faces mankind is the problem of death. To say that we are deeply pre-occupied with the fact of our own mortality is not to say, of course, that death occupies the forefront of our conscious awareness all the time. On the contrary, our awareness of the certainty of our eventual death and the accompanying knowledge of the vulnerability of our bodies, a vulnerability which may at any time prove fatal, forms a kind of unacknowledged background to all our thinking, a mental and emotional sitz-im-leben which has lost all precise definition because of its sheer familiarity as an idea. In fact, we might turn inside out the arguments of the common language philosophers, who hold that death cannot be thought about because it has never been experienced as a fact of life, by saying, with Heidegger that we cannot contemplate our own mortality because we are unable to distinguish the thought of death from all our other judgments and attitudes, which can only exist as humanly meaningful propositions in the context of finitude and limitation. Life exists in the context of death, human meaning in the presence of its own extinction.

I had better begin with some disclaimers. I am not confident of my ability to write adequately about the justification of being a Catholic now - this seems to have become far too complicated a problem: this issue, the sheer complexity of the problem, emerges again below, and I will have more to say about it there. Furthermore, I am certainly unable to say anything original about this or that disputed point in a theological or philosophical way. I hope then to proceed by working very carefully within my limits, at least as I conceive these to be, and to simply give here no ‘justification’ but an account: an account of some aspects of what ‘it feels like’ for one man to be a Catholic now. Naturally, this will engage me in questions that look like issues of justification, but in so far as they are these I hope to steer clear of anything that could be called ambitious and theological (in any really exacting sense), and stick with what I can cope with - perhaps best described as a more subjective (or perhaps better: privately held rather than publicly held) account of how I (rather than we) find Catholicism to be meaningful and true.