The historical study of the papacy begins with Peter and the study of Peter can only be undertaken in a scriptural context. I use the word ‘scriptural’ advisedly. Only if one gives the New Testament a special status as part of ‘Scripture’ does it make sense to sift its texts relating to Peter in the way traditionally done. Now one cannot accord the New Testament documents the status of Scripture on scholarly criteria alone. Scholarship has a very important part to play but it is necessarily subsidiary and incomplete.

It is conceivable, though after the last few generations of international scrutiny improbable, that evidence might come to light, or some great scholar notice something previously missed, that would make it intellectually impossible to accord the texts we have scriptural status. It is conceivable that a scholar might demonstrate that the thought of the New Testament and the language that went with the thought were impossible for the first century AD, as Lorenzo Valla did with the Constitutum Constantini. But after a century of scholarship trying to demonstrate just this, we are left with texts, all almost certainly originally written in the first century and therefore much nearer the autographs than any Latin or Greek classical texts, that so far as scholarship can tell are ‘authentic’. But this has only negative value. It means it is not intellectually disreputable to take them as texts of the time and place they purport to come from. It means that arguments of the kind one still meets that there is no evidence that Jesus ever lived can only be accepted if the same criteria be applied generally and it be freely admitted that there is no evidence that Julius Ceasar ever lived, or that Cicero wrote a line in his life—if he ever had one— or that there ever was a people called the Germans.

As I wrote in my review of the book (New Blackfriars, July 1975), all but one or two of the thirteen symposiasts in Looking at Lonergan’s Method initiate what seem like quite damaging lines of criticism, and in the space of an article Bill Mathews could no more refute them all (New Blackfriars, January 1976) than I could fairly present them all —and, like me, he has incorporated theological reflections of his own, which makes the debate so multilateral that it threatens to exasperate readers without access to the symposium or perhaps even to Lonergan’s own books. It seems to me, then, that extended argument about the soundness or otherwise of this phalanx of objections to Lonergan, and about the wisdom of my general endorsement of these objections, with all the grit of detailed claim and contradiction and the paraphernalia of criss-crossing page references and citations, would weary all but a tiny minority of our readers. These I am content to leave to judge for themselves between my reception of the symposium’s objections to Lonergan and the totally different assessment proposed by Bill Mathews (and by Hugo Meynell, forthcoming in The Month). For the rest, as regards readers without access to Lonergan’s books, I must of course emphasise—and after Bill Mathews’s article they will surely realise—that it would be unfair for them to take either the symposium itself or my review of it as the last word on Lonergan, enabling them in good conscience to defer for good the labour of reading Lonergan’s Method and allied works.

What I want to attempt now—because it forced itself on me as I read what Bill Mathews had to say—is to bring out the difference in expectations and presuppositions which (I suspect) leads him and me to read Lonergan so differently. Since it is a difference in perspective that (I believe) divides theologians today, and not only theologians, the issue has the wider implications with which the majority of our readers may be assumed to have some acquaintance and concern. It is the question of the preconditions of any future theology.

Psmith, Journalist is history; and it is crusade. But it also has its place as the best novel Wodehouse had written to date. Psmith was the god from the machine; but he was also the god who made the machine. Instead of leaving a good idea to rot in the background of the failure which The Prince and Betty in the American edition is (and there is even less to be said for it in the English one), Wodehouse had hacked his material into shape, introduced his god to bring it to life, and maintained a splendid pace alternating excitement and humour. He had simultaneously been working on another social document, appropriately named Something Fresh, analysing the almost Byzantine absurdities of English country-house drones and the snobbery of their servants which helped to maintain them. It it important to stress that this, the first view of Blandings Castle, is in fact an extremely hostile one. We must view Wodehouse as the disciple of Conan Doyle in social attitudes to some degree; and just as Holmes is frequently employed to show up the effete aristocrats and immoral millionaires, Wodehouse time and again returns to the theme of resolute and hardworking young men and women as a foil to aristocratic drones. In both cases, it is the bourgeois attack on the privilege and non-productivity of the aristocracy. In this sense Wodehouse, both in relation to Britain and to America, was in 1915 very much a figure of that eminently bourgeois phenomenon which the Americans have termed Progressivism. Wodehouse was seldom quite so pointedly hard-hitting as he was in Something Fresh. But the argument continues to be made, pleasantly, yet firmly.

This passage takes us into the prison cell where Albert Camus’ Outsider awaits his execution, watching the changing colours of the sky in the daytime, and looking out for the stars at night. The chaplain had come before but he had refused to see him. He did not believe in God, and now, with the little life that was left to him, the question whether God existed or not had no importance. So he released everything inside him, and shattered the priest’s hopes of doing anything for his ‘soul’.

During his life, Meursault had decided to do certain things and against doing other things, and all this time, he had been waiting for this moment, and the guillotine which was now very near. The priest with his talk about God and the after-life and divine justice, was merely an irksome interruption.

‘I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an after-life’, the priest in Camus’ story persists. Of course he had, but it was no more significant ‘han wishing he could swim faster or that he had a better-shaped mouth. The memory of Marie, and those fleeting hours on the beach when they swam out into the deep water, clambered onto the raft and lay down together under the scorching sun: these were the only things worth having now. As for a life after the grave—well, all he wanted was a life in which he could remember this one on earth. The priest continued on the subject of God.