A lecture given on the 23rd March 1987 at Sion College in the City of London as one of a series related to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Report ‘Faith in the City’.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God!
His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great king.
Within her citadels God
has shown himself a sure defence.
Walk about Zion, go round about her, number her towers.
Consider well her ramparts,
go through her citadels;
that you may tell the next generation
that this is God.
(Psalm 48)

It might not seem too misguided to look upon the whole vast biblical narrative, and much subsequent Christian writing as well, as one stupendous epic, a Tale of Two Cities: Jerusalem the holy city of God, upon the one hand, ‘Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her impure passion’ (Revelation 14:8), upon the other. Long after the historical Babylon had ceased to matter in the least to Jew or Christian, and long after the historical Jerusalem had ceased to matter all that much to Christians at least, the symbolism of the two cities lives on, and new Babylons continue to be denounced, new Zions, new Jerusalems continue to be built in Europe, America, Africa and elsewhere.

Cardinal Ratzinger has brought out an essay collection whose third and most substantial part is devoted to what can be called the theological foundation of political ethics. These essays are worth examining, not only for their own conceptual merits, but also for the light they throw on the criticism of liberation theology which has come from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his leadership, as indeed on the interventions in favour of human rights made by Rome during the time of John Paul II.

What emerges from the analytic summary which is offered in this article is, I believe, a twofold conclusion. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is headed by a powerful and original theological mind. That mind is, however, alien to the philosophical and theological tradition which has provided the customary idiom for the magisterial interventions of the popes in both dogmatic and ethical issues for the last hundred years. Almost no trace of Christian Scholasticism in its Thomist-Aristotelian form can be found in these writings. Rather do they draw for their inspiration on a variety of sources rarely tapped by figures in the Cardinal’s position: Christian Platonism in its various historic manifestations; the Catholic Tubingen school of the early nineteenth century, which worked out an account of the relation between revelation and reason in the light of Kant’s critique of human understanding; and, not least, the voices of European literature.

In the Johannine letters we learn that ‘Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3b). In a second Johannine idiom, we ‘abide in’ the Father and he ‘abides’ (or ‘indwells’, ‘remains’ or ‘makes his home’) in us. As we have seen, it was in the Spirit that we were baptised into the koinōnia of the Son: yet the origin and goal of the process is neither Son nor Spirit but the Father himself. We have fellowship with the Father because ‘God’s seed abides in whomever is begotten of God’. That is, we have fellowship with the Father precisely as Father, to the degree that we are made one New Man with the Son, conformed to the Son’s image, being members of the Son’s body. We stand where the Son stands, and have that same filial relationship with the Father which the Son himself enjoys. We form one body with the Son, living by the same Spirit or vital principle as he, and living before the same Father, the ultimate mystery of existence. This mystery, the Ground of being and the granite of it, we learn to perceive as personal and to address as ‘Father’. The disciples of Jesus once asked him to teach them to pray as he does; in response they receive the Pater Noster. The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of those who stand where Jesus stands.

In his article ‘American Pastoral’ (Thought 27/102,1952, pp. 365—380), John P. Sisk explains how a particular literary form reflects a basic human aspiration and its liabilities. Sisk’s examination of the relationship between literature and life in American pastoral is relevant to the human problematic reflected in both the tragic and melodramatic interpretations of human experience. An overview of Sisk’s study of American pastoral allows insights to emerge about the interrelationship of these three versions of human experience.

Pastoral poetry idealized shepherds and shepherdesses in idealized rustic surroundings. The pastoral form is artificial and unnatural. However, if we turn from the subject matter conventionally associated with pastoral to the attitude that is at work in this subject matter, we discover that the essential thing in pastoral, according to Sisk, is a certain critical vision of simplicity. It is basically critical because it is an argument. Its argument is that a certain simple state of affairs is more desirable than a certain complex state of affairs. To state its case effectively, it must use the tools of argument, among them abstraction and hyperbole. Abstracting from life only what will not hurt its cause, it too often exaggerates unscrupulously in the interest of the cause. Ironically, then, in the very act of opposing truth to falsehood what truth the pastoralizer possesses is distorted into falsehood.