Some twenty years ago, that wise and good man Gerald Vann wrote an article in Blackfriars about ‘The Muddled Marriage’. It was concerned with the plight of those spouses whose unions are canonically irregular, and apparently without remedy; it contended that they deserve a love and a sympathy they do not usually get; and it suggested they should be told that they were not in a state of grievous sin or cut off from the life of the Church. Such assertions could hardly go unchallenged, and a lumbering attack, Roman in origin, appeared shortly afterwards. Indeed, rumour attributes to the incident the subsequent residence of Father Vann in the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, whither he was sent, like some latter-day Ovid, to expiate his sins by the Black See.

Times have changed, and even Canon Law is not exempt. Ever more is being written on the matter of divorce and re-marriage. The bibliography at the end of this article (to which all references are made) shows that an up-to-date survey is available of how things stand in France, Germany and the United States; New Blackfriars, in June 1973, published several interesting articles to do with African attitudes in the matter; and the items by Harrington and O’Callaghan give useful accounts of scriptural and theological reflexion, with some further reading. Still more recent are the two works that provide the starting-point for this article. The first is an essay on the theology of indissolubility, the second an account, by a former presiding judge of the marriage-tribunal in the archdiocese of New York, of his own pilgrimage towards a change of heart in the matter. The two books contain between them most of the themes to be encountered elsewhere in what is being written : I wish to use them as an occasion for some remarks on the point myself.

An ideology was matured, if not created, in the reformed communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was mostly done under the banner of the Rule of St Benedict. What this means, is not that all the reformed communities were really Benedictine, nor that all those who called themselves Benedictine were what we should recognise as Benedictine monks. In Northern Italy in the sources emanating from the more conservative churchmen it is obvious that the term Benedictine conjured up ideas of rabble-rousing radical churchmen urging their lay supporters to prevent married and unreformed priests from celebrating mass, by force of necessary. The centre of this activity was the Burgundian abbey of Cluny: it is instructive to compare the conventional image of a venerable, ivy-grown, primitive Ampleforth purveyed in the works of some modern historians of Cluny (the works of Dr Noreen Hunt are excellent examples of the scholarly hagiography of our own day that is quite as false as anything put out by a medieval writer) with the picture given by a hostile contemporary, Bishop Adalbero of Lâon. Adalbero presents us with a power-seeking, ruthless, abbot of Cluny, socially subversive, tottering on the verge of heresy, the enemy of the natural ‘feudal’ order of the day. Adalbero’s abbot is St Odilo, the charming old dear of modern hagiography. Adalbero, himself a deeply political bishop in an age when all senior churchmen, and above all the abbot of Cluny, had to be politically alert, knew what he was talking about. Cluny was born of an attempt to manipulate the intricacies of the feudal world to the advantage of the kind of monasticism envisaged by Gregory the Great, Columbanus, and St Wilfrid. Cluny lay in the kingdom of the West Franks, in the duchy of Burgundy, the territory of the count of Mâcon and the see of the bishop of Mâcon. But the original endowment was the property of the neighbouring and more powerful duke of Aquitaine, who was also count of Mâcon.

Clive James, reviewing Seamus Heaney’s third collection, remarked: ‘Soon people are going to start comparing him with Yeats’. Which was characteristic of James, since he didn’t actually make the comparison but could claim first credit for it if necessary. C. B. Cox, reviewing the second collection, was less circumspect: ‘Major poets are as rare as the phoenix, and it is possible that since 1960 only one has emerged in these Islands. He is Seamus Heaney’. In the first Annual Yeats Lecture, in 1940, T. S. Eliot offered a variation on his own attempt to define the difference between a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet:

Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier; and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows us beauty and significance not before perceived.

This emphasis on the notion that ‘a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it’ (Eliot, ‘What is Minor Poetry?’) is peculiarly apposite to Yeats—at least in Yeats’s own view, since, despite Leavis’s contrary judgement, Yeats intended his Collected Poems to be read together and ordered the poems accordingly: each was to find its place within the pattern of the whole. If we compare Heaney with Yeats at all, this might be a starting-point since a similar patterning intention seems to be at work in at least three of his collections so far. It is an overall pattern in Heaney’s poetry that I want to present—which precludes any very close commentary on individual poems.

It hasn’t needed an economic crisis to make shareholders and taxpayers in Britain realise that the motor car industry is tottering on the brink of virtual financial collapse and ruin. Poor management, lack of efficiency, overmanning, a deficiency in new ideas and inability to respond to competition, are just some of the reasons for this failure. Excuses are even more abundant. The well worn oil crisis theme is dragged in at every available opportunity (even though it occurred several months ago and does not appear to have affected the sale of foreign vehicles). Allegations are made of overseas competitors ‘dumping’ their products on to the British market (this frequent ploy is used where responsibility is not taken for self-inflicted inflation with its accompanying non-competitive and higher prices). Industrial disputes are blamed, Communists are seen under every factory bench, even inflation itself is used as a scapegoat. But in offering these, and a host of other excuses, including all but the weather, what none of those connected with the motor car industry is prepared to admit is that they are collectively and directly responsible for the state of affairs in which they currently find themselves.

It was the first Vatican Council which suggested that a suitable method for a deeper appreciation and understanding of an article of faith was to employ analogy. In making such a suggestion, the Fathers made it quite clear that it was a mistaken view to claim that because a doctrine was a mystery there could be no further theological reasoning employed for a furtherance of understanding (as if to say ‘a mystery is a mystery is a mystery’). Following their example, I would like to suggest that a current appraisal of the Catholic Church in Britain can be aided by use of another British institution, that of the British motor car industry. The comparison of the two institutions will stress similarities, rather than differences, although of course the latter do exist.