Hans Urs von Balthasar, the important Swiss theologian, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on August 12th.

Pope John Paul’s singling out of Hans Urs von Balthasar for the Paul VI award, for his contribution to Catholic theology, almost certainly marks his emergence as the preferred Catholic theologian of the pontificate. Interest in his thought is bound to increase, especially with the English translation of his master-work Herrlichkeit, now proceeding. Our aim here is to present what can only be an introductory picture of the man and his work, still—amazingly—so little known in the English-speaking world in spite of the fact that his eightieth birthday is at hand and he has been writing for fifty years. We are not attempting to summarize everything (that would be an impossibility) but considering the central theme of his writing, his Christology.

Balthasar was born in Lucerne in 1905. It is probably significant that he was born in that particular Swiss city, whose name is virtually synonymous with Catholicism in Swiss history. The centre of resistance to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in the nineteenth it led the Catholic cantons in what was virtually a civil war of religion, the War of the Sonderbund (which they lost). Even today it is very much a city of churches, of religious frescoes, of bells. Balthasar is a very self-consciously Catholic author. He was educated by both Benedictines and Jesuits, and then in 1923 began a university education divided between four Universities: Munich, Vienna, Berlin—where he heard Romano Guardini, for whom a Chair of Catholic Philosophy had been created in the heartland of Prussian Protestantism—and finally Zurich.

In a general picture of world bewilderment before problems which have grown beyond the grasp of responsible statesmen, the bewilderment of Britain concerning India is peculiarly tragic, peculiarly ludicrous. Picture an aged burglar who, many years ago, on entering a house by force and stealth, found it occupied solely by naughty children at continual blows, with no one to control or smack them; picture him reformed and, Smee-like, turned governess, guiding the young into more orderly ways; picture him finally debating his position with the elder children, fully grown, eager now to control their own prosperity, rebellious against his dominion; picture his anxieties; are they really old enough, are not these tantrums proof of youthful lack of balance, are there not other burglars abroad? What will happen when, as still occurs, the young ones start to pull each others’ hair?

Dr. Zacharias’ book is a fairly detailed account of the growing up—socially and politically—of modern India— with special attention paid to the agitation of Congress against British domination. As a Jew by birth and a Catholic by belief Dr. Zacharias claims impartiality, but he makes no secret of his whole-hearted preference for Congress and is certainly not impartial in his account of events such as the Partition of Bengal or the Amritsar Massacre.

Perhaps the most crucial single utterance of the Second Vatican Council, at least in terms of impact on our shared experience as Catholics, occurs at paragraph 14 of the Council’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first of the conciliar documents to be promulgated, and in many ways its most bloodily contested production. The paragraph in question runs like this:

“Full, conscious and active participation”, pastoral energy and liturgical pedagogy: these were momentous notions, laden with an agenda whose implications were sketched out in the rest of the document, and which were embodied in the reforms which followed. The summons to “active participation”, indeed, a phrase which occurs sixteen times in all, was singled out subsequently as the main refrain of the document.

Do you not say: There are yet four months and then the harvest cometh? Behold I say to you, lift up your eyes and see the countries, for they are white already to the harvest. (John 4:35).

We are living in the days of a great harvest. As I travelled here this afternoon, I looked out on the fields of standing corn, and my thoughts turned to our soldiers fighting today in the wheatfields of Normandy, the vineyards of Provence and the olive trees of Tuscany, where the corn, the grapes and the olives are ready to yield their harvest of wheat and wine and oil. A fructu frumenti, vini et olei sui multiplicati sunt, as the Psalmist sang so long ago, ‘of the fruit of their corn and wine and oil have they been given increase.“

These soldiers of ours in the armoured vehicles of modern battle, as they pass the peasant toiling at his harvest, are themselves reaping today the relentless harvest of war that has at last been made possible by the work of shipyard, foundry and factory, and months of hard training and exercise.

When, at the end of January, the Vatican Justice and Peace Commission advised debtor countries of the Third World that they were not always morally obliged to repay their international creditors, the announcement did not set off even a tiny ripple in the world’s money markets. But when Reagan blunders yet again or Thatcher slips back in the opinion polls the major stock markets react nervously. The Church is somehow excluded; it does not play any role in the making of economic decisions, though, today, these so deeply influence our personal lives. And Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes accepts at least one of the basic presuppositions of modern economics as a good one: progress ought to be made—albeit it ought to be made within the moral order and oriented to serve mankind. We can read subsections 64 and 65 as a criticism of the modern economic and social process, but at the same time they seem to approve fundamentally of what they criticise.

What the preachers, theologians and synods of 400 years ago had to say about economic practices seems to have had relevance. This is not to say that people did what they were told, but, even when they neglected Church warnings and prohibitions, at least they knew that they did so. Today economics is thought to be a science, a field reserved for experts only, an autonomous process clearly separated from the contents of the Christian tradition.

Muriel Spark’s concept of faith is an essential feature of her work.lt supplies perspective and balance. Without an appreciation of it, her novels may only be valued for their wit, their irony, their unpredictability. These are indeed attractive aspects of her writing. However, they do not function merely to tease, surprise and entertain. They exist to illustrate a life which is essentially fragmented.

In a world where nothing can be fully grasped, there are dangers; the most threatening is a misplaced confidence in a single selfish viewpoint. Such an error constitutes an essential sin in Christian terms: it is philautia, love of self. St Augustine described sin as a turning away from God towards the self. Sin in Christian terms is negative: it is the opposite of all that comes from God. And so we find certain characters in Spark’s work mistakenly asserting themselves as the source of power and their own viewpoint as a criterion of truth. On the other hand we find characters who have a profound need to acknowledge a truth beyond themselves and who strive to come to terms with the essential inadequacy of a human perspective. These characters have a determination to identify what is true and honest in their existence; they have a sense of irony and sometimes a great sense of joy. All these characters describe themselves as Catholics. Although they are not portrayed as dependent on church ritual or practice, the dimension of faith is of the utmost importance to them.

Caroline in The Comforters is most explicitly bound up in her faith. She is a convert and finds herself patronized by cradle Catholics such as Mrs Hogg. She is irritated by this for she has a sense of her faith which lies beyond the smug platitudes of this woman. Although Caroline goes into retreat, she does not encounter her faith by turning her back on her life. On the contrary, the challenges, the irritations and the mysteries which nurture her faith are in her experience.

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.

This is the second stage of an attempt to make a fresh assessment of the foundations of Christian morality, or of Catholic moral theology, in the light of the ideas of some of the thinkers who are concerned with the possibility of an alternative society. We who are committed to living and thinking eschatologically are bound to be interested in every serious endeavour to transcend the existing state of things. This paper will try to bring out the analogy between Marcuse and Heidegger.

1 —Repression and Liberation

Herbert Marcuse’s work stands well outside the ordinary Anglo- American framework of academic social and political philosophy. The reason for this is no doubt that he belongs to a tradition in which the impact of Hegel has been undergone and assimilated. What this amounts to, as we should see, is that he can take for grant ed, in his philosophizing, the intimations about the nature of man and of meaning which we associate with the Romantic movement. This has become part of our common consciousness too, but on the whole extra-philosophically. Indeed, the specifying difference between English and continental philosophies at the present time is not so much to do with technique and approach as with acceptance or rejection of the Romantic idea of man.

It is instructive to reflect on the divided response to Marcuse's work. He is the most widely discussed thinker among the opponents of our way of life in America today. On the Old Left (orthodox communist Marxists and such-like) he meets with unanimous hostility: he is condemned as a defeatist, a pessimist, who thinks not scientifically but poetically.

The death of T. S. Eliot in the first month of the seventh centenary of Dante's birth could be an occasion for examining a particular poetic influence; or, more generally, for reflecting on Dante's contemporary ‘image'. The subject, however, of the present note is an aspect of Dante's poetry in itself—though considered, as befits the occasion, with an eye to its general relevance to us today. That it has some such relevance is no doubt already implied in allowing this of Eliot's work – in particular of the Four Quartets; for no one, I suppose, would deny that these poems have a contemporary importance, and certainly they, like Ash Wednesday and Animula and even The Waste Land, are inconceivable without the influence and example of Dante. Yet one may doubt whether Eliot's own example has been much followed, in this respect, by more recent poets. Eliot did his best, certainly, and to re-read now the famous essay of 1927 is to be struck once more by its admirable concentration on Dante as artist and a master in his art. The essay was not addressed to scholars, nor even primarily, I think, to the common reader, but to the writer's fellow-poets. The emphasis was all on Dante ‘the master', ‘the greatest master of the simple style', from whom ‘more can be learned about how to write poetry’ than from any English poet. How many of our contemporaries, I wonder, look to Dante in this way? For the modern educated public the Comedy— that epitome of Western pre-Renaissance thought and feeling – remains an important historical document; it is hardly felt as a stimulus to fresh creative writing.

Until about the end of the nineteenth century, a man was expected to give his reasons for joining the Catholic Church. To-day a man is really expected to give his reasons for not joining it. This may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to stand for a subconscious truth in thousands of minds. As for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives, it is idle to enquire what were his philosophical or historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not joined it at all.

But a preliminary word or two may well be said about the other matter; which may be called the challenge of the Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware of that challenge in a curiously and almost creepy fashion. I am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of Catholics; but there has also been, if I may so express it, a happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense of conscious non-Catholics.

The world being what it is, a ‘peace movement’ is bound to be a haven for odd-balls, eccentrics, the awkward squad: people who go against the direction of the current and resist the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, a movement composed solely of such people will always lack effective organisation, and its protests will peter out into mere idiosyncrasy. I think that these two facts go far to explain why the English Dominicans have been somewhere near the centre of the Catholic peace movement in Britain ever since it began (if one can talk of a beginning) with the founding of PAX in the mid-thirties of this century. For the English Dominicans — at least as far as my experience goes — are themselves an awkward squad: a regiment of misfits and individualists. I don’t know much about the Dominican Order elsewhere in the world: I suspect that outside Britain they may be very different. Neither do I know much about their history in this country. So I speak ‘existentially’, as the jargon goes, from my own personal observation only.

My first experience goes back to the Oxford of the early nineteen-fifties: and to feel the difference then between, say, the atmosphere of Jesuit Campion Hall and the atmosphere of Dominican Blackfriars was to experience an almost tangible shock. As I remember it now, Campion Hall was like something out of Henry James: a rich tapestry of dark browns and reds, complex and subtle in its visual as well as its intellectual organisation. Its inhabitants wore their black suits and soutanes as a uniform: one had to dig quite deep to discover the person within. Dominican Blackfriars, by contrast, was light and airy; a set of variations upon the theme of whiteness and transparency.

At least in the western tradition nothing so affects our attitude to God as our recognition of evil and suffering. An important factor in the modern bourgeois indifference to God has been a cultivated exclusion of evil from our consciousness. It is not long since English moral philosophers searching for an example of moral evil could only come up with promise breaking; the liberal imagination shied away from real sin, just as commercial advertising shies away from suffering. It is a commonplace that prisons and hospitals are not only institutions for dealing with crime and sickness but also for hiding them.

Raymond Williams strives to unite fidelity to tragic realities with an absolute secular revolutionary faith. On the social plane this leads him, as we have seen, to a highly problematic, indefinitely recessive, conception of ‘total redemption’ – and to attendant moral risks. And, so long as ‘so absolute a conception’ of some actual social future is envisaged, it is proper to ask how much is included in this conceptual absoluteness. There is a story about a conference of French writers, soon after the last war, in which a Marxist, discussing the mastery of human suffering under socialism, was asked what he thought of the problem of, for instance, a child run over in a traffic accident. His reply was that, in a truly socialist society, there would be no traffic accidents. It is not necessary to approach these problems with a similar ingenuousness in order to recognize the pertinence of such simple questions. Social injustices aside – and can we really envisage an era when all injustice and alienation will belong to the past? – accidents will never be wholly avoidable (at any rate, there will always be floods and earthquakes). It surely cannot be mere pedantry, or paralysis, that continues to find such problems to the point.

There would of course be no such problem if the theoretic future were not called upon to redress past and present actualities so absolutely. But in that case the whole imaginative universe of the ‘total redemption of humanity’ by revolution – and the whole moral calculus going with it – would wither away.

Of course others have faced this problem, and found their answer. It would be wanton, spiritual arrogance for the author in his academic seclusion to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, as he lays aside one or other of the various handbooks of Christian reconstruction with which the market is flooded in these days, a horrid doubt crosses his mind which passes into a nightmarish sense of unreality. We draught our charters, we hold our luncheons, we address our public meetings. We go to the world outside the conference-hall door with a smile, with a handbook, nearly always with a sense of assurance Again, we search the Scriptures not that we may have life, but that we may find a slogan for a Christian mass-movement, in which the demands ot the platform will blunt the sharpness of our truly Christian perception. Our attitude seems sometimes a curiously sorry compact of assurance and desperation. We are assured because we think we have a solution for the frightful torments of the present; we are afraid because we see the dreadful possibility that men will not listen to us, may in fact opt finally for other gods.

Is this altogether unfair? The picture is not intentionally spiteful. But there are moments when it seems hard to escape the conviction that some contemporary forms of Christian social activity are little less than highly subtle forms of escapism. They are ‘idealist’ in the sense assigned to that term by Marxist writers, for they rest on unconscious desire to escape the pressing demand to wrestle with social actualities in the here and now by passing into a world that analysis points out to be one of ideas only.

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.

A child in trouble or in disgrace goes first to its mother for comfort and forgiveness. When in fear of its father's anger it hopes for its mother's help in turning anger aside. It is not surprising that after a long period of self-sufficient rationalism, in a time of widespread misery and persecution, men should begin to show a new appreciation of their own sinfulness and weakness and their dependence on God by turning first of all to our Lady, God's Mother and ours. Unlike ours, her heart has never faltered for one moment in its love of God and its love of mankind. All its desire has been for God and the showing of his glory among men. Her heart has never lacked courage or patience; it has been always what our hearts should be and are not. Thinking of it we see our own shortcoming; we see, too, a source of sympathy and help. Our Lady is the first, most perfect, fruit of Christ's redeeming work and cooperates with him in the rescue of sinners and the perfecting of his Church.