Maurice Wiles, who is Regius Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford as well as Chairman of the Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England, is that rare species, a dogmatic theologian who is neither so deeply entrenched in doctrinal fundamentalism that he sees no need for the introduction of the critical-historical method nor so anxious about its initial effects on the orthodoxy of his own thinking that he prefers to remain almost silent. He obviously does not regard his tenure of weighty and perhaps rather exposed offices as barring him from pursuing a course of enquiry which he himself often refers to in such terms as ‘daunting’, ‘dangerous and disturbing’, and the like. One may well want to argue over the detail and the force of some of these critical-historical studies of various Christian doctrines at the most decisive stages of their formation. This the author would certainly welcome. Given that most of these papers have already appeared in learned journals (the earliest in 1957), it is surprising that their intention has not been better understood. Perhaps collecting them like this will help.

In a nutshell, what Wiles proposes is that the kind of critical study of the formation of the Scriptures which began over a century ago should at last be extended systematically to the case of Christian doctrine. The model of biblical criticism suggests the necessity of an equivalent kind of doctrinal criticism (a phrase which Wiles ascribes to the late G. F. Woods). Partly because of his own background in patristic scholarship, but mainly in recognition of the decisive role the Fathers played in the formative period of Christian doctrine, it is the faith of Nicaea and of Chalcedon that Wiles is led to examine and question. There, of course, is where the dangers lie, that he foresees as clearly as anybody, and perhaps far more clearly than many of his critics.

It is easy for a historian to write about the papacy indifferently but very difficult to write about it very well. It is even more difficult to write well about individual popes. If we console ourselves for the inadequacy of the current biographers of Pius xii or John xxiii with the thought that the passage of time will mend matters our optimism is misplaced. There is no outstanding biography of any pope. The first known original literary composition by an Englishman was a Life of Gregory the Great: in the thirteen hundred years since he wrote it he has been surpassed but not by very much. Gregory VII is a household name in every ecclesiastical history seminar but there is no modem scholarly biography in any language that I know of. The standard work, Martens’ Gregor VII, is a collection of foot-notes of incredible pedantry to which the author never provided a text. Even the basic facts of the life of Peter had to wait until 1952 before they were established on a scholarly basis. There is, however, a basic scholarly consensus about the papacy as an institution, a consensus expressed in a brilliant and compelling book, Professor Walter Ullmann’s Growth of Papal Government. There are, of course, dissenting voices, and distinguished ones, over this or that issue, but most of what is written and taught about Church history still does not stray far from the guide-lines laid down by Dr Ullmann.

There is a familiar determinist argument that runs: those of my actions that are most my own are those that express my character. But I did not make my character, it was made for me by heredity and circumstances. Those whose characters have been so made that they do good acts are lucky; those whose characters make them do bad acts are unlucky. Perhaps some people can change certain of their qualities, so that they act better after the change. But to have the desire and ability to make the change is simply something else about the way they are made -they are lucky. Actions that express one’s character may be chosen, but if one can do nothing about one’s character one surely cannot be blamed for it, or for what, given that one is like that, one will inevitably choose to do.

There is a curious defence of freewill which accepts nearly everything in this determinist argument. It concedes that character determines action and that character is made by other factors than one’s own choices. But it claims that in the exceptional situation where one’s moral duty requires an action that is incompatible with what one’s character would suggest one becomes aware that the self is more than one’s character, and the common or garden me that is my character can be over-ruled by the transcendent I which sees where duty lies.

This is an extreme example of a recurrent theme in philosophy—the identification of the self-observing self with the good rational self. In this version it is surely unacceptable because it implies that the capacity to see where duty lies and the strength of will that enables one to go through with it have nothing to do with the character that is formed by experience, the empirical character.

‘L’immensite de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’, said Pascal, and we are all familiar with the ways in which European attitudes to the place of man in the universe have changed since astronomy rendered him small, lonely and vulnerable. But the idea of the expanding universe in infinite space, while it robbed man of a central place as lord of creation below the heavens, did not take away the idea of brotherhood between men. That deprivation has to do with another kind of frightening immensity: the unthinkable length of the human past.

It is less than two hundred years since educated Europeans believed that Adam was very close to them in time. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788, the work from which Keats took his knowledge of classical mythology, begins with a chronology following the guidance of Dr Blair and Archbishop Ussher: the creation of the world is given in 4004 B.C. and the birth of Moses in 1571. Thus the gap between Adam and Moses was of the same length as the gap between Moses and Basil the First at Constantinople in 862 A.D. Chronologies varied, but none placed the first man so far away in time that imagination could not encompass the distance. Moreover, this nearness was a matter not only of time but of human nature. Adam was no less human than they, no less intelligent, no less feeling: there was a real sense in which he was not only an ancestor but a brother. Made in the image of God, he was of noble appearance; fallen through sin, he was a fellow-sufferer of human misfortune; formed out of dust, he was lowly; speaking with God in Paradise he was touched with glory.

Gregory the Great is important because he was born to the purple of what was left of the classical world—he was related to both Symmachi and Anici, to Symmachus and Boethius—but used the position his status gave him to further the cause of the revolutionary and subversive elements of Christian society, the hippies of his day, the monks. The Rome of his day was the apex of a wedge-shaped territory extending from the Adriatic, near Ravenna, to the Mediterranean, at Ostia. This, like all Italy, was supposed to be part of the Byzantine Empire. To the north, what is now Tuscany and Lombardy were ruled by the Lombards who were bitter enemies of the Byzantines, who could afford to maintain an unremitting hostility to them, and of the papacy, which could not. The so-called exarchate of Ravenna, of which Rome and its environs, the so-called duchy of Rome, were a part, was the object of a policy of covetous nibbling by the Lombards. The exarchate was Byzantine in that it recognised the sovereignity of the eastern emperor, who appointed the exarch, but in practice it had to be self-supporting. Inevitably the bishop of Rome played a greater and greater part in all this and the duchy of Rome at least was often in practice ruled by the pope of the day insofar as it was ruled at all.

The ruler of Rome had always had some responsibility for feeding the population: before Gregory became pope in 590 the Tiber overflowed its banks and inundated the city’s granaries. Plague had followed in the wake of the flood and carried off Pope Paschal I, Gregory’s predecessor. Rome was full of refugees from the Lombards, Gregory himself estimated there were 3,000 destitute nuns alone in Rome and appealed for help in feeding them.

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.

I want to take as my next vantage point from which to survey the traditions of papalism the achievement of the policy Gregory the Great had started—though it had acquired some accretions he might not have cared for very much—the confiding of the rule of the Church to a specially marked-off status group of ordained persons. This is usually called the Gregorian Reformation, after its most famous protagonist Gregory VII. This is very misleading, especially as it leads scholars to see Gregory VII’s pontificate as the beginning of something when it is just as much a dead end. Gregory is supposed to have been an original and creative pontiff who saw the truth that the Church was subject to the Babylonish captivity of the lay princes of the day, notably the German Emperor (or potential Emperor to be strictly correct). He surveyed the great traditions of the Catholic religion, starting with St Paul, and by wielding his remarkable gifts of iron logic he laid the foundations of a recovery of Christian liberty. This meant in practice an hierarchical Church much more tightly governed than ever before but by clerics. At times Gregory’s letters suggest he thought of the Church as one huge parish with himself as parish priest, the bishops, etc., as curates and the lay princes as a sort of churchwarden or leader of Catholic action. It is not true to say that Gregory simply wanted the Church to be free of lay intervention or rule—it was in fact so in his day to as large a degree as it ever was in the Middle Ages and far more so than it was in the post-Reformation world, in either Catholic or Protestant kingdoms. What Gregory wanted was the subordination of lay rulers to his moral dictatorship, he wanted them to intervene but on his say-so. What the boundaries of the moral were, Gregory would define.

There can have been few novels published in the twentieth century which have more firmly rejected the traditional Christian bourgeois morality than the one I propose to study in this article. It is the novel of a counter-culture par excellence, and has come to be seen as the definitive literary statement of a radical alternative. Its main character, a homosexual prostitute with a criminal record, moves in and epitomises the specific milieu of his culture, carrying with him all the detail of its particularity. He is arguably the last literary figure, if judged solely on his superficial reputation, to whom most people would turn for enlightenment on the notion of saintliness, and yet it is precisely this notion that is at the centre of much of his significance, and to which this article is devoted. Genet does not simply describe his creation periodically as a ‘saint’, without further qualification, but rather carries this epithet through in the context of a developed understanding of what he considers it to mean. Our possible initial reaction of feeling that ‘saint’ is probably used as a more eye-catching term for ‘hero’ or ‘star’—a sort of linguistic shock-tactic—is thus, on closer examination, transformed into a conviction that the word ‘saint’ is used simply because it is the only word that is right; it is the only word that means what the author is trying to say, and as such deserves, and indeed demands analysis.

The topic of death, now fashionable and much discussed, raises questions in almost every field of thought. Death has always been thought hateful, or almost always; hateful, and enigmatic. In the Christian and Jewish traditions death has always been terrible, something that reveals the distance between God and man and man’s dereliction; and it is therefore thought to be something that in some obscure sense ought not to happen. The primitive account of the passion in Mark and Matthew—characteristically and no doubt deliberately omitted by Luke—records the great cry of agony taken from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the same psalm we find: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast . . . and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; thou dost lay me in the dust of death.” Here is no attempt to prettify death or to make the process of dying acceptable. Death is intolerable.

Of course, there are other biblical ways of looking at death. In (and out of) the Bible we are given the picture of the just man full of years and honour who dies surrounded by his children and his children’s children. This is a fortunate death, and if to this we add the element contributed by Christianity, namely, the reception of the eucharist (viaticum, journey money, analogous to the placing of a coin in the dead man’s mouth to pay Charon’s ferry charges), and the anointing (formerly) of those parts of the body that have so often taken us away from God, and the sacramental remission of sin through confession and absolution, we understand how this can properly be called “a happy death.”

The moral aspect of the inevitable use of violence in the guerilla warfare in Rhodesia cannot be discussed without a clear perception of the institutionalised violence which marks the daily lives of Africans in that country. Given that all violence is to be deplored, there are, nevertheless, situations in which the passing phase of physical violence has to be regarded as less destructive to the human personality than that permanent violence which, disguised as lawful authority, systematically reduces 96% of the country’s population to an inferior kind of existence. To appreciate this the following historical and social facts are relevant.

As the Roman Empire waned the Church waxed. Inevitably it was a Church deeply affected by Romanitas. When the Empire became Christian, if that is the right way of putting it, under Constantine the political centre moved east to the new capital of the Bosphorous, the Washington or Brasilia of the new era. Byzantium became the royal city, Rome the urbs ecclesiae, the city of the Church. Inevitably the head of the city of the Church, in view of the hierarchical ideology coming into increasing favour, was taken more and more seriously as successor of Peter. The climax of this early papalism is the pontificate of Leo the Great and the reception accorded to his letter or tome at the council of Chalcedon: the tome and the council set the seal on orthodox Christology. However this undoubted display of successful authority must be seen in its context. Behind the council’s Christologi-cal decrees lay more than a century of conciliar activity and the production of what are still the orthodox credal formularies: to all this Rome contributed veiy little. The canon of Scripture had been debated and disputed: the authoritative work of deciding what was to be included and what was to be excluded was done without reference to Rome. It is Leo’s intervention which is unusual. His predecessors had not made much effort to settle doctrinal disputes: one feels by this time Christians felt this sort of thing was the job of gatherings of bishops. Leo is unlikely to have felt very differently but as the events of the last generation had shown, the problems of theology had become vital political issues and if Rome had not intervened it seems unlikely agreement of any kind would have been reached.

The content of any notion of Catholicity must ultimately be referable to, and not incompatible with at the very least, Scripture. But the idea that it can be read out of Scripture as though such notions could be settled in scholarly footnotes to the text is quite mistaken. It is experiences of the development of the Church; discriminations about what went right and what went wrong, that illuminate what we read in Scripture. Now that experience and that development are continuous, so that Scriptural notions of Catholicity need to be scrutinised and refined, if not every generation, at least from time to time, but experience, both of the private and personal, and of the institutional is no more to be got easily than the truth of Scripture by a mere reading of the words on the page. The tendency is to be conservative, to interpret our experience as we have been taught to interpret it, and to accept the institutions of Christianity as we have known them. It is only occasionally, when things break down, when the fallacies we were brought up on, both in our personal experience and the nature of the institutions we have belonged to, are too manifest to be denied, that we are in a position to revalue the nature of Christian experience and particularly that experience of Catholicity that underlies our acceptance of some institutions and rejection of others. It seems to me that the age of the Fathers was very much not this kind of age.

Patristic authors have been scrutinised almost as meticulously as the text of Scripture itself for justifications or condemnations of the papal version of the Petrine succession. Many such scholars have found their papalism confirmed—or their anti-papalism or even their indifference—because what you get out of the Fathers on this topic is very much what you took in in the first place. Of course, the Fathers as the interpreters of Scripture in the first instance, as the setters of the style of such interpretations, have and deserve special authority.

On February 4 of this year, the Christian world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister-theologian hanged by the Gestapo in the waning days of World War II. Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine years old at his death; his influence on the Church in Germany seemingly at an end. And, yet, today a generation and a half later, Christians are still inspired and challenged to a more genuine faith by his letters from prison, and by his The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and other writings. In many ways Bonhoeffer has been more influential after his martyrdom than he ever was during his teaching and preaching career in the years prior to his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler.

Reading Fergus Kerr’s article “Lonergan’s Wake’ (New Blackfriars, July 1975) as well as the book which inspired it leaves one with a whole new insight into the plight of Jairus. Containing as it does many misleading comments about Lonergan’s thought (for instance on p. 308 Kerr identifies the very common and ordinary occurrence of having an insight with the quite distinct and extremely rare event of self-appropriation) as well as totally destructive criticism it requires a reply. The criticisms given in Looking at Lonergan’s Method are held to be irreparably damaging, mark a watershed, and make Lonergan’s work seem ramshackle. Method, Kerr concludes, is a gross error. However, Kerr’s own uncritical acceptance of the accuracy of the interpretations of Lonergan by the contributors, of the soundness and significance of their arguments and comments, as well as the severity of his own conclusions are not themselves beyond criticism.

It is claimed (p. 307) that firstly Lonergan has never engaged in even the most elementary analysis of the central concepts of his method, understanding and knowing; secondly, that he systematically misunderstands these concepts and makes all the mistakes that Wittgenstein warned us to avoid in his Philosophical Investigations. The first of these claims is preposterous. Lonergan has both written and lectured on Aristotelian, Medieval, Rationalist, Empiricist, and Idealist theories of concepts of knowledge and has worked out a highly sophisticated dialectical technique for choosing between conflicting theories. Granted that his starting point is not the analysis of concepts of understanding but of the more basic human performance of understanding itself. To simply study concepts of understanding without relating them to the experience of understanding, theological or otherwise, is to build castles in the air.

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.

In the preceding papers I have looked at the papacy historically, from the borderland of history and theology, but historically none the less—and socially. I have tried to relate developments in the papacy to certain features in the social structure of the day. I have passed a good deal by. I have said little about the Reformation, what I did say was by way of a criticism of Calvinist notions of Catholicity, a criticism made on theological grounds. I have said nothing about Luther because it seems to me that Luther’s phenomenal achievement of turning the Bible back from a rather quaint law book, which is what the canonists had made it, into the source of a personal encounter, which is what it was meant for, has been absorbed as much as it ever will be into the general Christian mainstream. Outside his capacity as a supreme master of the art of reading Scripture Luther seems to me to have been a disaster. His theology of Church order, if one can call it that, led from one Babylonish captivity to another: his social and political teaching were ruined by his need to creep to the German princes, his protectors. He was after all Philip of Hesse’s paid pander. But most important, the Reformation has only indirect lessons to teach for the student of papalism. If the Reformation was not simply a theological movement but a social movement too, an important stage in the development of a revolutionary capitalist society, then, if I am right, the papacy’s contribution to this movement of revolution had largely been made. In the event the papacy did little in the Reformation period except to serve as a symbol, a rallying cry.

Early this year I heard a lecture by Hans Georg Gadamer (a retired professor of philosophy from Heidelberg University) on the history of relations between philosophers and poets. Gadamer mused on the ups and downs, the loves and hates, the convergences and divergences of that relationship. It runs all the way from Plato to the later Heidegger. Plato called the poets’ stories of the gods ‘theologies’. His ideal republic—he believed—would be better off if it severely controlled this kind of theology and even banished the poets. Plato refused to accept that his own master in philosophy, Socrates, had corrupted the youth of Athens, but he clearly believed that poets could be corrupting influences. Other philosophers have been much kinder to poets. In our own century Heidegger turned from his earlier work to draw from poetry the material for his later philosophical reflections.

All in all, it was a brilliant lecture by Gadamer. It set a number of questions buzzing in my head. Would a period that was high on poetic imagination prove likely to be low on philosophical thought? Do poetry and philosophy represent completely different ways of approaching reality, which neither match one another nor even have much to do with one another? And then came the question that gave rise to this lecture. Would reflection on some of the ways poets and philosophers work throw light on the mind behind the preaching of Jesus?

Let us explore that last question and see what comes up. First of all, the philosophers and their revolutions. Some philosophers like Wittgenstein have stood back from their culture, surveyed centuries of intellectual history, and quite consciously tried to take philosophy and human thought in new directions. In their own way such philosophers could appropriate the sentiment of Jesus, ‘Of old such and such was said to you. But I say to you’.

Once Wodehouse transported Mike to Sedleigh from Wrykin and Mike hated it on sight, the god appeared. And from the very first the god began to send up not only Sedleigh but public schools and the public school story:

Catholics with some biblical knowledge will clearly be familiar with the expression ‘speaking in tongues’. Those who have encountered what is known as ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’ or the ‘Charismatic renewal’ will be even more familiar with it. For within this, though not always considered essential, it certainly is regarded by many as a topic of considerable importance. Up to the present, however, there has been little of a philosophical nature said on the subject and the purpose of what follows is to go some way towards remedying the deficiency. My comments will be necessarily curtailed for the sake of space, but, hopefully, something of interest will emerge.

Advocates of speaking in tongues undoubtedly have a biblical basis for introducing the topic. According to Acts, on the Day of Pentecost the apostles were ‘filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues’ (Acts 2.3, R.S.V. Cf. Acts 19.6-7; 10.66). In 1 Corinthians 14, although he has some harsh things to say on the subject, St Paul declares: ‘I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all’, and he makes it clear that speaking in tongues is a gift from God. The New Testament witness is not, however, a great deal of help in deciding what exactly speaking in tongues amounts to. It is not even clear whether the biblical authors regard the phenomenon as speaking in unknown but genuine languages. St Paul’s contribution is meagre enough and could hardly be called a fully worked-out analysis. He alludes to speaking in tongues only to make the negative point that this should not detract from Christian edification. Only when stating what he considers to be edifying does he begin to expand.