The theme of this article was suggested by an enigmatic remark of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the final page of his book The Order of Things. “Man”, he writes, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” I wish to reflect upon this suggestive remark though in somewhat different and broader terms than those of its author.

Since the time of Hegel’s use of the phrase, and particularly since Nietzsche’s sensational application of it, it has been fashionable to speak of “the death of God”—the death of God at the hand of man. However, the elimination of God which it was hoped would enable the reality of man to become more effectively visible has been superseded by a more radical consideration whose consequences profoundly affect our theory and practice today. It is the consideration that a true idea of man far from emerging into assured and concrete realization is rather breaking up and disappearing into an impersonal anonymous ground. The evidence suggests that the achievement of our age is the death of man at his own hand, at least speculatively if not yet in effect.

In this essay I propose to illustrate, and draw some conclusions from, the significance of this phenomenon by situating it in the context of its historical evolution. In what will inevitably involve rather broad generalisations and systematic simplification I will try to indicate how man today has come to be seen chiefly in socio-centric, impersonal and structural terms by contrast with two previous conceptions which can be globally described as the theo-centric and the anthropocentric conceptions of man.

I said in a previous New Blackfriars (October 1975) that Marxism has had on the whole little to say about morality, because one doesn’t engage in moral debate with men who can only grasp morality in moralistic — and so ideological — fashion. It’s in the provisional silence of those who refuse the term ‘morality’ that, perhaps, something of its true meaning may finally emerge. The condition for the emergence of that discourse is Marxism itself — the theory and practice of political revolution. Until that condition is fulfilled, our ‘moral’ discourse is bound to remain imprisoned within the ideological, that’s to say, that when we speak ‘morally’, we won’t, for much of the time, know what we are meaning. We’ll be in the condition of all those imprisoned within the ideological, who, in the very act of speaking, fail to recognise that they themselves are being ‘spoken’, being constituted, by certain discourses quite independent of themselves, quite concealed from their consciousness, discourses which they betray, despite themselves, in the slips, contradictions, inconsistencies which fissure and deform their speaking. It’s of the essence of the ideological that in speaking, in constituting myself as a subject, I must necessarily repress, remain in ignorance, of the very determinants of my discourse — determinants which are visible only to science, to that science of social formation which is historical materialism, or that science which is psychoanalysis. As ‘I’ speak ‘I’ the coherent historical subject Terry Eagleton, it — the unconscious — speaks through me, constantly disturbing and displacing my discourse.

Closely aligned with the theme of the passio Christi apud Sinenses is that of the emulation of heroes. Mao led his nation in an extraordinary struggle to reshape the values, attitudes and ideas of an entire people. James Reston, senior editor of the New York Times was astounded by the ‘staggering thing that modem China is trying to do. They’re not trying merely to revolutionize people, and establish a sense of social conscience, but they’re really trying to change the character of these people. The place is one vast school of moral philosophy.’ Many methods pour into this enormous programme of thought-reform: preaching, teaching, wide-ranging techniques of persuasion from the outside, and orgies of self-criticism in which people testify to their conversion away from selfishness and incorrect ideas towards an exalted service of the masses in the name of the party. In all this ideological struggle to practise good deeds, overcome selfishness and reach true equality in a new society, the emulation of heroes (and sometimes of heroines) has emerged as a major means used on a nation-wide scale.

I would like to explore this imitation of heroes. It would be silly to speak of it constituting an imitatio Christi apud Sinenses (imitation of Christ among the Chinese). Nevertheless, certain interesting Christological implications may emerge.

Is Brian McNeil serious (new Blackfriars Oct 1976) or is he casting his bread upon the waters in the hope of seeding a good argument? When someone suggests that theological insight or clarification can be made through an examionation of symbols and their legitimation, the sociologist in me immediately pricks up his ears. Mr McNeil’s argument on the place (or rather the lack of place) of women in the eucharistic liturgy provokes the ambiguous reaction of mild sympathy followed by profound disagreement.

I agree with him that the fact that there were no women included among the Apostles indicates little in the way of church structures and how the ministry should be organised. I agree with him that the symbolism of sacramental action should be ground grounded (or “earthed” as he puts it) in our own experience as human beings. I also agree, somewhat off the main subject, that the practice of concelebration adds little to, and indeed probably detracts from, the symbolic communication of the eucharist. It seems little more than a clerical pageant more designed to emphasise the separation of the ordained ministry from the ordinary faithful and to imply a minimisation of the priesthood of the people of God (one president of the eucharist is enough): the other ordained ministers should be identified with the assembled people. However, I profoundly disagree with his conclusions, be they never so tentative, and indeed with his overall argument.

Mr McNeil concludes that women, though possibly eligible for other forms of ministry, have no place presiding over the eucharistic liturgy. He arrives at this position through the application of two principles of legitimation for the sacramental symbols employed in the eucharist.