- My next major step forward came in October 1958, just
before John XXIII's election to the Papacy, when in accordance
with Father Hall's plans for my future, which he had outlined to
me in the summer of 1954, I went to Rome to begin a further
seven-year course of studies in the Pontifical Salesian
University.
- There I studied metaphysics, which is one of the most
basic and more difficult areas of philosophical inquiry, guided by
Father Giulio Girardi, SDB, a priest who managed to combine within
himself, either despite or because of his poor physical health, a
strong mystical feeling, a deep sense of humanity, a lively and
subtle intellect, and an ascetic commitment to scientific method.
He encouraged me to open my mind to non-Catholic thoughts and
advised me to make a careful study of contemporary English
philosophy.
- Father Girardi saw the Christian life as a mystery of
absence and presence. Man's personal relationship with Jesus
Christ, and, in him, with the whole supernatural world rests, he
said, upon the certainty of his presence and the uncertainty that
derives from our lack of any natural ability to perceive this
living, active, cosmic Christ who we are, and in whom we live and
move and have our being. Saint Paul expressed this paradox of the
Christian experience, when he said: “Jesus lives in me to such an
extent that my life is no longer mine, my life, our life, is his;
and, on the other hand, we have a burning desire to be dissolved
so as to be consciously with Christ and in Christ. Already our
lives are identical; yet we live in the expectation of our
resurrection in him.”
- This communion of life in Christ is the paschal
mystery. I am a social being. I find my true identity in
relationship to G-d, in relationship to Jesus Christ, in
relationship to all the persons I meet to share their experience
of life, their faith in the value of being true to oneself, their
hopes and fears, anxieties and aspirations. Together we have an
identity which none of us would have were we not in this community
together. It is not that the whole adds to the sum of its parts.
Rather, the individual is, and always has been, a member of the
human group - even if his membership sometimes consists in
behaving in such a way that reality is thereby given to the
mistaken notion that he does not belong to the group at all.
Communication, dialogue, meeting people, encounter, getting
together, contact does not create the human community; it does
nake its existence demonstrable, and provides for its
growth.
- We are flower people, and each person must learn to
flower where he is planted. Each flower is different. Growth is
slow and patient. The flower needs an atmosphere of warmth to
encourage it to unfold, blossom and bear fruit. A small flower can
be prettier than a large one. What is important is for each to
grow to its own dimensions, and to blend in the garden with the
rest.
- If we can only permit ourselves to be human, and let
ourselves behave as humans, we shall find that the more we love
Christ, the more we bring Christ to others. When we share our
faith with others, their view of life is improved. When we share
our hope with others, their confidence grows. When we rejoice in
their company, Christ is more alive among us. The more we
communicate with each other in the everyday discourse of human
interchange and relationships, the more we shall come to
appreciate that everyone in the Church has a priestly and
prophetic rôle. We have not so much been picked individually
to be priests, as become priestly in baptism, which was our
explicit entrance into the living community, which is the mystical
body of Christ continually exercising his priesthood of praise and
thanksgiving.
- As I understood Father Girardi, thanks are due because
not only does our Christian faith have for its object a reality
that neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into
the heart of man to conceive, but at the same time faith is the
affirmation of the presence of this reality in our lives. It is
not only believing in the existence of the supernatural world
disclosed to us in the Christian revelation, but it is believing
in its presence. It is not just to believe in Jesus Christ, but to
believe that we are plunged right into, indeed, that we ourselves
are living, the life of Christ. It is not merely to recognize the
mystery of Christ, but it is in a certain way to acknowledge that
Jesus and ourselves together go to make up one big mystery. We are
the body of Christ.
- Christians believe that they are wrapped up in, and in
some way constituted by, this supernatural reality of the paschal
mystery. Yet they have no way of seeing this. They are
constitutionally incapable of seeing it. The reality which is,
more than any other, actually present and operative in their life
remains outside their grasp. This is not surprising. Man's reach
always extends beyond his grasp. Even a fool can ask questions
that a wise man cannot answer. In many ways we all remain a closed
book to ourselves. We are inaccessible to ourselves.
- Father Girardi suggested that with regard to the
reality of the paschal mystery I find my condition is that of the
man born blind. He knows with certainty, thanks to his Christian
faith, that certain realities are present in front of him,
realities which are most important for him; but which he finds
that he is incapable of seeing. He believes those realities are
there, but he doesn't see them. He believes that even if he
managed to love G-d with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and
strength, and his neighbour as himself, he would still be an
unprofitable servant; that from the point of view of his
supernatural vocation he would still have done nothing, and would
remain without merit, unless this natural love of G-d and men were
transformed by a quite distinct, though never separate,
supernatural love, called charity, with which are associated the
equally strictly supernatural faith, hope and created grace. The
supernatural reality, which nevertheless surrounds and penetrates
us, is something we can neither see, nor hear, nor understand
objectively - either now, or in heaven. The supernatural lies
beyond the range of all ordinary human experience and
understanding, even that which becomes available in specially
altered states of consciousness. And it isn't only that G-d, as
the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity are in and for themselves,
stands outside the range of our understanding, but so also, added
Father Girardi, do all things supernaturally considered - the
blessed in their state of glory, the risen humanity of Jesus
Christ, grace, our mystical links with one another as members of
the mystical body of Christ. And while this is mysterious, it is
not strange. The fish in the seas and rivers do not (unless they
live near the surface) see the water which is their natural
environment and principal support; they only see what is in and
around the water. Again, I do not see the sunlight which
illuminates the Earth; I see instead the persons and things on the
Earth that are made brilliant and warmed by this heavenly light.
As a Christian I am not, either now or in heaven, either in a
normal or in an altered state of consciousness, conscious of the
paschal mystery, because it is my consciousness in Christ in which
I am drawn to become conscious of persons and things at the very
deepest level. It is a mystery because it is a presence. In the
limits of the finite world, in the very intimacy of my own being,
through my Christian faith, I live and move and have my being in a
zone beyond the comprehension of any created intellect. I am
impelled to question myself even more keenly than I otherwise
would be, because of this distinct and mysteriously present
operative motive of supernatural faith; I live a life of quest; I
am this questioning.
- Faith alone tells me that my friend who is answering
is G-d become man for me, the risen and cosmic Christ, whose body
we are. Christ answers by a presence that moves me to question
ever more deeply and surely. Christ our friend, a person
intimately present at the very heart of our lives together, is a
mystery strictly so called. He asks us to live completely,
unceasingly for him, without seeing him save where we can find him
only in faith - in ourselves, in our neighbour, in the good things
of life, in sorrow and hope and love and trust and joy.
- From Father Girardi's writings and lectures I learned
to appreciate the superficiality and the at least unconscious
dishonesty that runs through most traditional Roman Catholic
sermons, newspapers, magazines, children's books, and text-books
of philosophy and theology. Roman Catholics have tended to use
intellectual skills and theories not to help human beings find
their own personal answers to their own personal questions, but to
drug them into a lazy and superficial acceptance of the party
line, to lure them, perhaps, into a dream world of sometimes
irrelevant speculation, or to insinuate the idea that philosophy,
psychology and theology are best left to the experts as their own
private preserve, and that for ordinary men and women a rather
dull routine way of living is the best to be hoped for.
- In other words, when John XXIII became Pope, the vast
majority of Roman Catholics seemed to me to be sunk in a condition
of religious indifference and to be living a very drab, dull,
milk-and-water sort of life. Heavy drinking, parish football
pools, dances and raffles, and spasmodic bouts of sexual athletics
were the main safety-valves in the system, and the popularity of
regular Sunday Mass attendance was, I thought, the result of its
sugaring with a coat of gaiety the rather plain and stale cake
provided in the rest of Roman Catholicism as a way of life, and of
its being a very valuable insurance policy against the risk of
hell-fire.
- This way of putting things is very sweeping and
contains a rather unfair generalization. The relevant point in
this context is that I was coming, rightly or wrongly, to see the
general situation in these terms at the very time in which I was
enjoying my first opportunity of attending regularly the
magnificent Papal ceremonies in Saint Peter's and in the other
Roman Basilicas, when I was visiting the catacombs, and making
direct contact with the historical treasures of the Vatican. I
have always enjoyed the colour and pageantry, the solemnity and
splendour of the Roman Catholic liturgy and ritual. I can feel the
mysterious thrill of a simple sign of the cross made devoutly and
in silence. To take part in the great ceremonies in Saint Peter's
was pure rapture. There the Pope, Christ's Vicar and deputy on
Earth, knelt down in silent prayer, was carried through the air in
sacred pomp and magnificence, held aloft the Sacrament of Christ's
Body and Blood, received the homage of princes, and declared some
of G-d's departed servants to be in truth Saints in his Church. As
a future priest myself, I felt that I shared in the Pope's own
grandeur, indeed, that I was participating in the majesty of G-d
himself. During a visit to Sotto il Monte I would speak with Pope
John's brothers; in Turin I would hear sermons from the Father
Confessor of one of the three visionaries of Fatima; in Rome I
conversed with the English Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, during her memorable visit to a Salesian house in Rome; I walked
in procession behind the body of Saint John Bosco as it was
carried in what I felt was our triumph to Saint Peter's; I later
celebrated Mass at the Papal altar in the catacombs and even said
Mass in Saint Peter's with the Pope preaching throughout; I took
part during my very first month in Rome in the funeral and almost
apotheosis of Pius XII; in short, I lived in the centre of
Catholic Rome. There I felt I was in touch with the very heart of
the universe; I was living in the presence of G-d in his clearest
and most intimate manifestation.
- During my first few months in the eternal City I used
a lot of my energies in developing my abilities to understand, to
speak and to write Italian with ease and even elegance, and in attuning my ear to six hours of lectures delivered each day, for
the most part in a none too classical Latin. I was a member of a
religious community living in the Sacred Heart Institute, on the
Via Marsala, near the principal railway station, and there were
about two hundred and fifty of us, comprising more than forty
different nationalities. Life in such an international setting was
quite an experience. It was hard, at first, to get used to Italian
food and drink, and to come to terms with hole-in-the-floor
toilets, washing in cold water in communal sinks without plugs,
and sleeping in crowded dormitories in which the majority had
placed an almost absolute veto on open windows. Gradually,
however, I fell in love with this new way of life.
- We sang hymns, carols and popular songs in a variety
of languages, staged international variety concerts for our own
recreation, and conversed for long hours together about our varied
experiences of life in our own countries. For the most part I was
a zealous university student eager to learn all I could about
philosophy. When I was in a holiday mood I ran through the streets
in an effort to get a front seat in Saint Peter's and jostled
vigorously in the crowds swirling around the smiling Pope. Beneath
the surface, however, my mind was becoming increasingly
preoccupied by the paradoxical combination of human splendour and
human misery, and I wanted to understand.
- It was Father Girardi who first helped me to get some
of my questions into focus. He awakened me from my dogmatic
slumbers, just as Father O'Brien had previously aroused me from my
psychological ones.
- Indeed, I have to admit when I look back that I used
my newly awakened passion for relentless philosophizing as a
cop-out with which to escape from my underlying need to solve some
of my own emotional problems. As my thinking grew in
sophistication and complexity, and the cultural gap between myself
and my parents widened, I moved further and further away from the
home emotional situation I had refused to face.
- My experiences in Rome proved an emotional and
intellectual catalyst. It is because of them, I suppose, that I am
now so quick to criticize the shortcomings I find in Roman
Catholic Church leaders, their useless attention to ritual or
legal details, and their failure to get to grips with the personal
as distinct from the theoretical aspects of contemporary problems,
with the consequence that their fellow believers are all too
frequently left in a situation of severe and unnecessary hardship.
In my heart of hearts I experience a need to know about and to
find out for myself all that is going on in the world. I am only
asking for trouble if I try to live my religion in a way that
makes of it an attempted escape from the emotional realities of
life, and if I try to use the Church's institutions as a shelter
against the violence present in the world and in myself. I am
sorry that Father Girardi's awaking me from my dogmatic slumbers
became almost an excuse for falling back to sleep once more in
matters of psychology and feeling. Perhaps I did not entirely miss
the boat, but I tended to rest on my oars, to pride myself on
having worked so many things through with Father O'Brien, and to
look upon the majority of my teachers and fellow students as being
psychologically unawared. I secretly regarded myself as king of
the castle.
- I had completed my Bachelor of Philosophy course in
1959, and in the summer of 1960 I took my second degree in
philosophy, that of Licentiate, which corresponds to something
between the English BA (Hons.) and MA degrees. This meant that I
had had to prepare a written thesis on some topic that would
enable me to show my grasp of scientific method. At Father
Girardi's suggestion I had made a special study of the method of
metaphysics as developed by Father Bernard Lonergan, SJ, then a
professor in Rome in the Gregorian University, in his
astonishingly courageous book Insight" (B. J. F. Lonergan, SJ,
Insight - A Study of Human
Understanding: London: Longman's
1957).
- Since that time I have read almost everything that
Lonergan has ever written, and most of the things that have been
written for and against him. If I can accept extremely
sophisticated and complex models of thought into my mind and
preserve a sense of simplicity, balance, meaning, perspective,
focus, movement, peace and hope, I owe it chiefly to Bernard
Lonergan.
-
- My studies in Rome taught me that any real culture I
may possess has to be something I have built up from within
myself. It is not a filing system of accumulated words and ideas,
but a character and a mentality that has matured by means of
successive, graduated and blended developments. Learning is not
just my passive acceptance of a traditional heritage of knowledge,
but my active and deeply personal response to the challenge made
to me by significant others. Even if I can trust those others'
love, can I afford to trust their judgment?
- My problem was not a new one, and an article published
by one of my fellow students at that time, Father Groppo, showed
me that history confronted us all with this question.
- In the Jewish culture of biblical times there had been
a focussing on justice, punishment and sin, on faith, knowledge
and love. There was a stress on the formation and strengthening of
moral life, practical wisdom, pithy sayings, severe
self-discipline, respect for G-d, traditions of worship,
temperance in food and speech. Added to this were paternalism,
meditation on lessons learned by rote, frequent use of the rod,
the rewarding of goodness in this life, and the educational
rôle of the scribe and his assistants. Man tried to live in
the image of G-d in accordance with appropriately administered
instructions and in fear of the punishment inevitably meted out to
those whose performance fell below par.
- When I turned to consider Greek culture, the focus
shifted to error and weakness, to prudence, justice, fortitude and
temperance. Eros rather than discipline had been the method of
education, which had been a poltical concern and not merely a
family matter. It aimed at virtue, humanitas, arete, kalokagathia,
and this was its own reward. Culture among the Greeks was humanist
with no emphasis on religion, and its guardians had been the
philosophers, wise men and sophists, under whose spell, despite
their apparent intellectualism, culture, like love, was caught
rather than taught.
- The Christian culture of mediæval Europe had
been different again. The stress lay on grace, prayer, sacraments,
preaching, liturgy, ecclesiastical art, canon law, cathedral and
monastery schools, theology, sacramentals, hagiography, Chuch
history, and Christian social movements, such as the Guilds. Saint
Augustine had wanted unity in essentials, charity everywhere, and
liberty wherever there was room for doubt.
- I read Father Groppo's remarks on Christian culture
with a passage from the fourth Chapter of Saint Paul's
Letter to the
Ephesians echoing in my
ears. It had been one of Father O'Brien's favourite
texts:
- “You must be always humble, always gentle; patient,
too, in bearing with one another's faults, as charity bids; eager
to preserve that unity the Spirit gives you, whose bond is peace.
You are one body, with a single Spirit; each of you, when he was
called, called in the same hope; with the same Lord, the same
faith, the same baptism; with the same G-d, the same Father, all
of us, who is above all beings, pervades all things, and lives in
all. But each of us has received his own special grace, dealt out
to him by Christ's gift. Some he has appointed to be apostles,
others to be prophets, others to be evangelists, or pastors, or
teachers. They are to order the lives of the faithful, minister to
their needs, build up the frame of Christ's body, until we all
realize our common unity through faith in the Son of G-d, and
fuller knowledge of him. So we shall reach manhood, that maturity
which is proportioned to the completed growth of Christ; we are no
longer to be children, no longer to be like storm-tossed sailors,
driven before the wind of each new doctrine that human subtlety,
human skill in fabricating lies, may propound. We are to follow
the truth, in a spirit of charity, and so grow up, in everything,
into a due proportion with Christ, who is our head. On him all the
body depends; it is organized and unified by each contact with the
source which supplies it; and thus, each limb receiving the active
power it needs, it achieves its natural growth, building itself up
through charity.”
- My heart thrilled at Paul's words, and yet I knew I
could not evade the fact that the Hebrew, Greek and Christian
views of life, all of which continue to influence us today,
contain basic differences. I realized that a comprehensive survey
of the history of civilizations would only increase my awareness
of the bewildering complexity and fascinating variety of human
cultural forms.
- Could I, then, ever escape the pressures brought to
bear upon me by the contemporary situation? Could my
philosophizing influence the development and reorientation of my
praxis, or could it merely mirror something that was happening in
any case?
- The coherent structure of contemporary knowledge is an
intellectual construction, the result of an imaginative act of
creation in which men have read into their experience some sort of
unity and meaning that they have hoped to find there. We rely on
our culture to provide the basic security we might otherwise lack.
But should we do so?
- Surely the present-day need is for some sort of
historical understanding of the actual concrete reality of our
culture, i.e., of the concrete development of human personalities,
their evolving patterns of interaction in their changing natural
and social environments, as these have occurred in their own
complex reality and with their own internal exigences. Maturity
includes having a genuine interest in all that concerns a man. The
purpose of education, therefore, should not be either an
abstraction, or a set of prohibitions, or a non-existent ideal, or
a system, but the advance of a Concrete History - the Human
Good.
- Bernard Lonergan brought home to me strongly that
human achievement issues from understanding and decision. The
educator's task, therefore, is to permit the learner to make the
transition, which is a very gradual one, from childish and
primitive ways of understanding and deciding to ways that are
adapted to the subject's full participation in the life made
possible by our contemporary situation.
- In Lonergan's view, the task of philosophy of
education is to permit the learner to understand and appreciate
the whole educational process in which he is being invited to
involve himself. This is a very complex task, and yet it is an
intrinsic part of and not a luxury addition to the educational
process.
- In the past a good education supposed the educators to
have some sort of implicit know-how that enabled them to draw the
various departments of knowledge into a living unity as if by
magic. There was no explicit philosophy of education, theories
were incomplete, static, abstract, and woolly. There was a great
deal of not always helpful insistence on the contrasts between
culture and erudition, mental gymnastics and instruction, a
well-filled head and a well-developed brain, and so forth. This
sort of approach is too slipshod to be tolerable today. As the
American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, the genuine educator
must possess knowledge in the sense of a reflective or
intellectual grasp of his situation growing out of though not
identical with his experience. The educator only has knowledge in
this sense when he has so completely modified his situation in the
educational world, which is the whole of the real world, that he
becomes the master of it, and, therefore, free within it to live
his experience to the full.
- The first element of importance in growing to
understand the educational process was, therefore, my world, i.e.,
the part of the universe that lay within my past, present and
future horizons as a child, a boy, an adolescent, a novice, a
teacher, a philosopher, a future priest. The world contained
within my present horizons might often conflict with or be
alienated from the world contained within someone else's horizons,
and this could be inconvenient. For every statement made by a
Catholic denoted an object in a Catholic world, and every
statement made by an atheistic Humanist denoted an object in that
Humanist's world. Statements, problems, and solutions were what
they were only as a function of the horizon in which they arose,
and could not be transferred unchanged into a different horizon.
My knowledge of my world, moreover, might be vastly different from
that of another Catholic who shared similar horizons. For some
persons apprehended the world at the intersubjective level, almost
instinctively; others in terms of common sense, others of
language, or art, or classical philosophy, or science. Lonergan
seemed to be suggesting that the contemporary need was to learn to
apprehend the world in terms of a scientific philosophy.* While
some who were ready to go along with this suggestion may have been
content in practice with knowing the world in the rough matrix of
their insufficiently differentiated patterns of experience, I
strove to assimilate the distinctly polished setting of Lonergan's
careful differentiation between the biological, aesthetic,
intellectual and dramatic patterns of human experience.
- * Note: If we do need, as Lonergan suggests, to learn
to apprehend the world in terms of a scientific philosophy, in
The Mind's Ear (Hounslow: Bibliagora 1979) J. D. Solomon explains why he perceives an even
greater need for us to learn to appreciate it musically. The
vocabulary of music seems to be the best we have available that is
genuinely intelligible; the balance between ontic and ontological
is, he feels, there better than in any other form of human
experience.
- The second element in growing to understand the
educational process consisted in being myself. In order to become
fully human I had to enter into interpersonal relations,
communicate, relate myself to my world, and the different
philosophies reflected the unsurprising fact that different people
made themselves in different ways.
- In the measure in which I was successful in
understanding myself and my world, I became free to live a full
life myself and qualified to contribute towards the education of
others. In a society in which there is a large measure of success
in this enterprise culture flourishes; to the extent that men fail
to meet this challenge the quality of life suffers, and, in the
extreme case, humanity is lost.
- Lonergan taught me that openness is needed. Openness
as a fact is man's distinterested, unrestricted and detached
desire to know, which, when functioning, is an immediate datum in
experience. Openness as a human achievement is the ordered,
methodical and self-critical use of one's intelligence in
accordance with the implicit exigences of the pure desire to know;
in consequence, it is also the corresponding objective formulation
in a theory of one's view of knowledge and the reality that
knowledge can attain. This achievement is sometimes more and
sometimes less, but it is never great enough to satisfy the
dynamic and inherent demands of this pure desire. Openness as
achievement is never commensurate with openness as primordial
fact. I may push back the horizons of my world, enrich my
experience, and alter my states of consciousness, and yet I never
fully comprehend the universe of being, which is what I desire to
know. As a Catholic, I, like Lonergan, believe there is also
openness as the gift of G-d, where G-d is not only the giver, but
also the gift. Openness as fact is the self as ground of all
higher aspirations. Openness as achievement is the self in its
self-appropriation and self-realization. Openness as gift is the
self entering into personal and therefore mysterious relationship
with G-d.
- In believing that openness as gift enables me to know
G-d face to face, to know him as he is known, I do not imply that
questioning, mystery or ignorance comes to an end - only by being
the whole, infinite G-d could one ever fully comprehend the
universe of Being; only then might there remain nothing to do or
discover. In any case, supernatural knowledge is knowledge by
participation, not objective knowledge; it is knowledge by contact
and presence, not knowledge that gives possession or control; it
is knowledge of the other as other, not a denial of separateness
or an intrusion of privacy.
- While the abiding inadequacy of human knowledge
results in part from human imperfection and weakness, and is the
knowledge of persons still in process of development, the
uncertainty and incomplete understanding that characterize our
human condition are essentially a permanent witness to the
infinite mystery of being.
- With Saint Paul I believe that eye cannot see, nor ear
hear; neither does it enter into the heart of man to conceive the
paschal mystery, in which we live, and move, and have our being.
Even in paradise, faith and hope as well as charity remain. In the
happiness and joy of surrender to the beatific vision the blessed
see clearly the eternal inscrutability of the living mystery of
divine love. There is, even in eternity, ignorance at the heart of
all our knowledge, and knowledge is eternally the heart of all our
ignorance. The supreme point of human knowledge of G-d is, as
Saint Thomas Aquinas realized, to know (not just to believe, but
to know) that we do not know him.
- Since I came in contact with Lonergan's work, openness
as fact, as at least partial achievement, and at least implicitly
as gift have been firmly established as the basic orientation of
all my philosophizing about nature, science, man, history, the
state, education, spirituality, religion, and so forth. Lonergan
explains how its basic terms are empirical, intellectual and
rational consciousness, and how its basic correlations are the
relations of empirical to intellectual consciousness and of
empirical and intellectual consciousness to rational
consciousness.
- The personal assimilation of Lonergan's achievement
did not result just from my grappling with and chewing over his
writings and what had been written about him. I found I needed to
ruminate afresh on all that I had learned from Boyer and Girardi,
from O'Brien and my boyhood teachers. I struggled with Aquinas and
his early commentators, with Newman's Grammar of Assent, Franz
Brentano's study of The True and the Evident, Michael Polanyi's
Personal Knowledge, and a vast array of psychological,
philosophical and theological studies by Freud, Erikson, Langer,
Hume, Darwin, Otto, Sartre, Marcel, Garaudy, Heidegger, Jaspers,
Teilhard de Chardin, Eliade, Sorokin, Stekel, Goldbrunner, Moran,
Coreth, Rahner, and many, many more.
- It is, therefore, hardly surprising that I remember
dreaming of myself as a head emerging from a pyramid of books. I
have fed myself on books, hidden behind books, defended myself
with books, crowned myself with books, attacked with books, grown
out of books, and almost buried myself under books.
- Lonergan's impact on me is best summed up as my
resulting clear commitment to what he calls the Transcendental
Imperative: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be
responsible, develop and, if necessary, change. I like to feel
that, since first reading Insight, I have changed
considerably.
-
- I left Rome in the summer of 1960, and from that
autumn until the summer of 1964 I was a student in the Theological
Faculty of the Pontifical Salesian University in Via Caboto in
Turin. There I was to make my final preparations for my ordination
to the Roman Catholic priesthood.
- The main reality of these four years was my growing
aesthetic and mystical appreciation of the mystery of the
priesthood within the context of my deepening appreciation of the
value of love. First of all, I investigated the question of
Christian love in the Bible, especially in the writings of Saint
John and Saint Paul. I studied the same theme in the writings of
the Fathers of the Church, giving special attention to the works
of Saint Augustine and to the wonderful friendship between Basil
and Eusebius. This was because I was becoming increasingly drawn
emotionally towards Carlos Alberto de Castro Ferreira, a
Portuguese fellow-student of mine since October 1958, whom I first
learned to appreciate as an individual after the move to Turin had
drawn more closely together the five of us who had taken the
Licentiate of Philosophy in Rome before commencing our theological
course with more than thirty others.
- I grew to like Carlos as a person because he seemed
artistic, boyish, delicate, refined, spontaneous and free. As well
as conversing with him, I loved to watch him walk and move about,
and delighted in the way he skipped and laughed in the seminary
playground. As our friendship developed, I found I was thinking of
him constantly, but none of this appeared on the surface. I
contented myself with joining him in his study of Augustine's
Confessions, and in
joining a Sodality group with him to explore the theme of
spiritual love.
- I read all I could about the intimate spiritual union
beween Saint Francis of Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal,
and about the love Saint Francis of Assisi had for Lady Poverty,
for Sister Death, and for the flowers, birds, animals, and,
indeed, the whole natural world. I focussed on this same theme of
Christian tenderness in looking through the nineteen massive
volumes of the official life of Saint John Bosco. I studied, too,
the writings about love and friendship of Father Voillaume, the
founder of the order of the Little Brothers of Charles de
Foucauld. All my studies in this way reflected my love for Carlos
and strengthened my resolve to dedicate my priestly ministry to
helping myself and others find a way of loving G-d and each other,
not in the coldness of routine rituals of observance, but in warm,
manly simplicity, in openness and joy. I also made up my mind at
that time to do whatever I could to promote the institutional
changes needed to make this a genuinely practicable
possibility.
- The first commandment in the Gospel of Jesus Christ
that every priest is ordained to preach to the world is love. Even
in the Old Law and the Prophets fear is subordinated to love. Fear
is only a step towards love, which I increasingly came to regard
as the basis of all genuine religion. Man is drawn instinctively
to serve G-d and to love him, whether he call him by that name or
not, whether he recognize the nature of this natural tendency of
his or not. Unless I actually love G-d I cannot really know
him.
- Living faith and love is the whole principle of the
Christian economy of salvation. The whole law reduces to love. We
have no debts, save the obligations of mutual love. He who loves
his neighbour has fulfilled all the requirements of the law. There
is even no need to make separate mention of the need to love G-d.
The two are inseparable. Love of my neighbour wells up from my
love of G-d. This love is readiness for self-dedication,
sacrifice, imitation, which, through the merits of Christ and
under the influence of his Spirit, orientates my entire life
towards the final meeting and encounter with Jesus Christ in the
glory of the Father.
- Love, which involves trust, is the principle of the
Christian life, the cement which binds the whole construction
together, making the problem of purely intellectual proofs for
Christianity largely an academic exercise, while it renders the
urge to subject its validity to experimental testing almost a
blasphemous temptation. For it is mockery to put G-d to the test,
and it is a betrayal of love to experiment with trust. The
Christian always lives in a situation of openness, not in
isolation, but as part of a greater whole. He believes he is bound
by close solidarity to other persons and that with these he shares
both his responsibilities and his blessings.
- As men in general have collaborated to bring into
existence a diversity of social institutions which have, in their
turn, helped to shape the destiny of mankind throughout history,
so Christians have given objective and institutional expression to
their sense of responsibility towards each other in
Christ.
- In both the natural and supernatural dimensions of our
existence, the rules, laws and institutions we have developed are
not meant to be a rope round our neck, but something that helps us
keep our feet out of the mire. Rules are only the framework of
life, not life itself. They are necessary because, where there is
no frame, there is also likely to be no work, and also no play. We
need some sort of frame. We can step out of it occasionally for a
little while, but it may not be safe to remain outside of it
altogether for very long. The problem is to find a frame that is
itself dynamic and sufficiently adjustable.
- Laws, in other words, are worthy of their name only
when they free us from the tyranny of confusion and disorder
without involving us in a more oppressive tyranny still - that of
static rigidity and stagnation. Laws and institutions which will
not work are worse than useless. Dispositions of authority
purporting to foster the common good may increase instead mutual
intolerance and suspicion, social and cultural sluggishness,
individual selfishness and infantilism. Rules which are
misunderstood and wrongly applied develop the very qualities they
were designed to avoid. Laws which fail in their main purpose are
bad laws, and do more harm than the evil itself would have done
which they were intended to correct. Legislation which is purely
negative is meaningless; rules must develop some things, or at
least keep the subject away from harmful influences and give him
the freedom to grow. Human beings should not restrain themselves
for the sake of it, but in order to develop their maximum
potential.
- For Carlos and myself, living Christianity meant
moving in an atmosphere of confidence under the guidance and with
the support of the Spirit of G-d who would give us the strength to
overcome all obstacles and difficulties. If love was our motive
nothing would be impossible. Our life would be no longer listless,
static and inert, but active and dynamic. I saw grace as precisely
this mysterious, interior operation of Christ, the cause of my
love for, and complacency in, the supreme and unchanging good
which is G-d.
- And as the goodness of G-d was unchanging, so his love
for me in Christ was eternal, not only in the sense that it would
never end, but also that it had had no beginning. G-d's love was
eternal, not only as a matter of fact, but in the very nature of
things in this actual order of providence. Incorruptibility was,
therefore, an essential characteristic of my new life in Christ
and of my love for him. This life and this love were immortal
because they pertained to a sphere which transcended space and
time, which soared beyond the tangled unconscious undergrowth with
which, during my years in Bollington, Father O'Brien had seemed to
me to be so much concerned.
- Nothing could separate me from Christ's unending love.
In it the whole of my perfection and fulfilment might be found. In
this life, of course, I would never quite manage to reach the
perfection and fullness of charity. Like every life that develops
and grows in perfection, my Christian transformation, aided by
divine grace, would have to be a continuous, progressive
operation, an ever-active spiritual renewal, consisting in my
steady assimilation of the thoughts and feelings of Christ and in
their translation into practice. I took it for granted that I
would be entirely successful.
- I came to feel that the best way for me to grow in the
love of G-d was to cultivate my friendship with Carlos Alberto. He
was extremely intelligent and we were both very much committed to
the religious way of life. But where I approached my religious
duties in the spirit of a mathematician or an engineer trying to
build up an extra special electronic organ on which G-d could play
his own music, Carlos was the sensitive artist embodying that
music of heaven in his gestures, his eyes, his style of dress, his
handwriting, his smile, and the richness of his voice.
- I had rarely played cricket or football or, indeed,
any other games. I played no musical instrument, and had seldom
been asked to sing in the choir. Because Carlos played the
clarinet, sang in the seminary choir, played some games, and
seemed so artistic, I tried to imitate him in these respects. I
procured a clarinet and for a year or so tried to play it,
teaching myself to read music and mastering the keys, but never
learning properly how to control the reed. The sounds I produced
were none too pleasant, and I eventually resigned myself to
leaving the clarinet on one side. I also asked the choir-master,
Mæstro Dusan Stefani, to take me on, and there I was more
successful. I sang as a first tenor with Carlos, looked after the
hymn-board when he wasn't there, and felt pleased when I was
selected to sing in a group of eight on the feast of Saint John
the Baptist, Patron Saint of Turin, in the course of a special
televised Mass, celebrated by His Eminence Cardinal Fossati. I
also took up Italian bowls, table-tennis, table football, and even
soccer, because Carlos was involved a little in all of these. In
addition, I tried my hand at drawing, and learned a little about
that art of taking a line for a walk, though I never became
anywhere near so skilful as Carlos, who also produced one or two
quite creditable oil-paintings in his spare time.
- Carlos Alberto's physical health was never good. He
tired easily and was so sensitive to dust that he had to have
special injections several times a week during his four years in
Turin to enable him to keep going. Two tons of steel dust fell
from the skies into the streets of Turin each day in the early
1960s, so it was not the best place to live for someone with
Carlos Alberto's complaint. I noticed, however, that the very way
in which he always smiled and never complained about his troubles
won him the affection of the superiors and the various lecturers.
Because he tired easily, he asked, and was allowed, to have his
examinations spaced out so that he seldom had to face two on the
same day. The examinations were conducted orally, and he had the
knack of being asked the questions that suited him best.
- Carlos studied hard, and so did I, but to a greater
extent than some of the other students we appreciated that in an
oral examination good personal relationships are crucially
important and that no amount of knowledge of the subject is of
much use without them. My strategy was to rest before an
examination, to communicate the feeling that the question I was
being asked by the two examiners was important and interesting,
and to convey the impression that I very much wanted to know all
about it. To the extent that I succeeded in my diplomatic efforts,
the examiners were then inclined to overlook any gaps or
inaccuracies in my factual knowledge, and to put these down to
temporary tiredness occasioned by overwork. And, as I have said, I
did study hard, so that more often than not I had my facts right,
and the local doctor once had to prescribe a series of special
injections for me to help me recuperate from a state of total
nervous exhaustion. Carlos's approach to examinations was only
slightly different from mine. His secret was that he really
believed the questions he was asked were important and
interesting, that he really did want to know about them, and that
he really felt warmly towards the examiners. While I admired his
emotional freshness, I could never bring myself to believe that
the majority of our lecturers were anything better than retail
purveyors of rather poor quality goods. Girardi, Lonergan and, in
his different way, O'Brien had helped me set my own intellectual
standards very high. I refused to believe that a padded-out
catechism was an acceptable substitute for a scientific
theology.
- Just as, in a sense, the philosopher is a person who
has found it very hard to think, so the theologian should
understand the difficulties of belief. Having learned over the
years to reject the uncritical reverence for authority that I had
once thought my mother expected of me, I wanted to spend my time
in Turin at least partly wrestling with the hardships involved in
the acquisition of personal knowledge and in an authentic life of
faith. As a result of a critique of the dubious character of many
of my motives for regarding my own skills as sufficient for the
determining of key-questions in philosophy and for regarding the
skills of other philosophers as seriously deficient, I had become
both more tolerant and more difficult to please than I had
previously felt myself to be. Similarly, the emotional sifting of
my uses of thinking as a faint-hearted substitute for practical
commitment in my existing situation had reminded me that I had
only one life to live, and that time would not wait until I was
ready to move on. If I wished to live at all, I had to live in the
present.
- Human fulfilment can never be found in pure passivity;
it does not consist in hoarding, in exploitation, or in the
marketing of other people's products. Man is born to produce, and
I need to express myself.
- The set of values I adopt about my relationships with
my environment leads me to experience certain needs and wants. In
the light of these I formulate certain goals, assess possible
course of action, make decisions, move into action, modify my
relationship with my environment, change that environment, and
thereby bring about a change in myself, which leads me to modify
my sense of values. This is the dialectic of praxis in a
nutshell.
- Sometimes my sense of values is vague, inarticulate,
hard to define. My freedom is enlarged as I tune in to my
unconscious aspirations. Because I prefer goal-orientated action
to haphazard behaviour, I wish to plan my future. My decision to
adopt planning calls for a decision about how to plan.
Subsequently I decide to keep all my decisions under constant
review. I make a decision about my long-term and short-term
objectives. This obliges me to study the available possibilities.
I move on to evaluate the respective merits of the alternatives
offered. Then I make a practical decision about what to do. In the
light of my subsequent action the whole process moves through a
further cycle in my development.
- Like any other human mind, mine can only penetrate the
meaning of reality in one dimension at a time. It cannot focus all
points at once. It makes use of abstract language and treats
things as objects, moves from one level of inquiry to another,
deals with a variety of horizons, contexts, viewpoints and worlds
of discourse. The fragmentation of this analysis needs to be
complemented by the harmony of a living synthesis. My various
psychic activities - understanding, sensation, desire, choice,
affection, love, hatred, emotions, moods, unconscious impulses and
drives - together with my biological process and my involvement in
human communication, economic cycles, social life, and the rhythm
of nature, demand integration.
- As a philosopher and a future priest, studying to
equip myself for my mission in life, I conceived that it would be
an essential part of this to arouse the sleepers, to be a catalyst
of social improvement, especially in the Salesian world. I
expected that, once I had left Turin, my influence would help to
disrupt the status quo, and hoped it would be welcomed by the
whole community if it was exercised in a well-adapted way. I knew
that the relative stability of the then prevailing Salesian system
was no indication of its moral excellence, and might stem from
patterns of interaction in which group members were assuming
morally unacceptable albeit congenial identities and
rôles.
- Lonergan had taught me that thinking went on in heads
rather than in books, and in whole persons rather than in
disembodied heads. It consisted principally in the living
dialectic of dialogue that philosophers promoted in the human
community.
- I had no desire, therefore, to rest my life on any
ideology, even one that I felt I had understood intellectually,
and to which I had given some measure of at least provisional
assent. I was not a computer-triggered automaton, but a living
symbol, influenced by images, myths, stories. My feelings were of
central importance to me. Like Newman, I believed that what could
be proved, must be false. I was more persuaded by the convincing
tone of voice with which Carlos spoke of the love of Jesus Christ
than by any of the professors' logically developed
arguments.
- I was dismayed by their generally uncritical stance,
by their soulless rehearsal of other people's thoughts and their
glib recipes for solving all problems in the approved Roman
Catholic fashion. Quite a lot of my fellow students, too, took a
dim view of the lectures, and with sometimes five and even seven
lectures a day, half of which were delivered in Latin, it would
have needed something much different to command total attention.
Not surprisingly, then, some students did their own thing in the
lecture-hall, reading books, writing letters, feeding pet mice,
listening in to music from the radio on a personal headset, or
playing over foreign language tapes, and so forth. I seldom did
this sort of thing. As a very seriously religious person, I would
only do what my superiors officially permitted me to do for so
long as I remained a student in training.
- I still felt that by being as fully Catholic as
possible, by preparing myself to be a priest and living as a
member of a large religious congregation, I was somehow providing
company and support for my mother. Since fidelity to her Catholic
practices had partly separated her from my father, I felt she must
find religion a burden, and I wished to help her carry the load.
It was my sense of fidelity to a sometimes irksome duty, and not
always a feeling of heartfelt devotion, that kept me faithful to
my prayers, and to my official programme of study.
- The Rector of the theological seminary, Don Eugenio
Valentini, was a priest of considerable experience, but whatever
his private feelings about things, his official line was that I
was in Turin not so much to learn theology as to practise
religious obedience by learning theology. So, when I told him I
found I learned nothing from the lectures, he said I should still
listen to them, regardless of how my companions behaved, and not
do other things. In this way I would learn more about religious
obedience.
- In the lecture hall, then, even though I found it very
hard at times, I gave my ears to the professor's words, boring and
stupid though they might sometimes seem. In the meanwhile,
however, my eyes used to wander over to Carlos Alberto's
place.
- Because he was Portuguese and I English, and we had
met in Rome and Turin with Italian as our common language, and yet
as a foreign tongue to both of us, I suppose non-verbal and
pre-verbal elements in our encounter had sprung to the fore right
from the start, so that we were more sensitively aware of the
depths of meaning revealed in touch, glance and gesture. In the
lecture-hall I rested my gaze on his shoulders, his hair, his
neck. I wore the tonsure, because he did. I let my hair grow when
he did, and had it cut when he had his hair cut. I tried to copy
his handwriting. I underlined phrases in my text-books, because I
saw him doing so. I exchanged notes with him, learned Portuguese,
read the Portuguese Government's News Bulletin each week,
suuported the Portuguese claims in Goa, Angola and Mozambique, and
even asked Father Hall, who was still my Provincial Superior in
London, to allow me to transfer to the Portuguese Province. Father
Hall did not feel this would have been a good idea, but regarded
my developing relationship with Carlos as a valuable and important
experience.
- It is part of the Salesian tradition that each member
of a religious community has a private talk (known as the
rendiconto or manifestation) with the Rector or superior of that
particular house each month and, without being morally obliged to
so so, he is very much encouraged to discuss the otherwise secret
aspects of his life. Even though I didn't find it always easy, I
was quite open with Father Valentini about my relationship with
Carlos, and he was not at first opposed to it, because he saw it
as stimulating my personal growth. Later he came to feel I was
over-involved in it, and would have required me to break away from
Carlos, had not other circumstances made him feel I was too weak
to face such a change in my emotional life at that precise point
in time.
- As my love for Carlos grew, my realization that both
as religiouses and as future priests we had committed ourselves to
sexual abstinence and to the cultivation of purity, drove me wild
with frustration. That was why I read all that I could about love
in the Bible and in theological books and magazines. I collected
photographs of Portugal. I contrived to meet him in the corridors
several times a day, washing and cleaning my teeth at the same
time as he did, trying to get the seat next to his in the cinema,
and so forth. It was obvious to him that I was sick with love, and
he didn't like being followed round by me, as if I were a dog
trailing its master. He wanted me to be responsible for me, and he
wanted his own freedom.
-
- Meanwhile in Bolton my mother had still not adjusted
to my leaving home. In 1954 my sister Edna, too, had decided to
leave home in order to embark on her own career. My mother had
been opposed to this, because of the effect she thought it would
have on my father. Levi, however, had insisted my sister should be
free to do whatever she wished, and she did in fact, as previously
mentioned, leave home to become in due course a fully professed
religious Sister of the Congregation of the Most Holy Cross &
Passion, a highly respected school-teacher, an eminent historian
and a published author (Edna Hamer, Elizabeth
Prout: 1820-1864 - A Religious Life for Industrial
England, Downside Abbey 1994).
- At that time, my father still had his work and also
his hobby. He was a very good bowler, and won many prizes in
bowling competitions in the local parks. When the time came for
him to retire from work at the age of sixty-five, and when a leg
injury occasioned by a fall from a ladder† prevented his playing
bowls, time began to hang on his hands, and it became impossible
for him to escape from his feelings of regret regarding my
sister's absence from home, and his lack of a fully mutual
relationship with my mother.
- † Note: Only in 1990 did I learn that Levi's fall from
a ladder also displaced a metal plate which had been inserted in
his skull in 1917 in an effort to repair some of the damage
inflicted on him at Passchendæle, and only in November 2003 was I at last informed that he had also had a glass eye replacing one irreparably damaged natural one from that same time onwards. My earlier understanding
of my father's personality and behaviour took shape and developed
in complete ignorance of both these significant factors.
- When I visited him during my summer visit to England
in 1962 his physical health was still good, and the doctors found
nothing wrong with him. In fact, however, he had gone completely
off his food, always feeling that he had already eaten much more
than he could swallow, that what he had already tried to chew was
choking him to the top of his gullet, and that he needed a
purifying purge. He spent long hours sitting on the lavatory,
meditation and trying to evacuate the evil that he felt was within
him. He believed he was contaminating the house by his poisonous
presence, and said that after his death it would need to be
completely demolished, and even the very bricks destroyed for the
health of the rest of the town.
- My father insisted that he wasn't mad, and in fact his
behaviour shows, to my mind, a pretty clear appreciation of his
emotional state. He realized his situation was intolerable, and
tried to escape from it by spending long hours in bed, which was
like a return to the comfort of his mother's womb or of some
purely physical relationship with his wife. He continued to spend
a great deal of his time in the toilet, trying to clear the poison
out of his system. Nevertheless, at my suggestion he visited
Father O'Brien in Ingersley and ate without any hesitation a pot
of honey my Rector gave him, because he recognized Father O'Brien
as a person who was making no attempt to manipulate him into
pretending he was anything other than his real self. However, he
laid no store by the advice of the psychiatrist in the Bolton
Royal Infirmary, because he knew that psychiatry had no power to
cure the sickness of his soul.
- In August 1962 Levi became a Roman Catholic and made a
general Confession of the sins of his past life to the local
parish priest. He had come to feel that if G-d took him into his
own keeping, nothing in the whole wide world could do him any more
harm - not even, I suppose, the state of his relationship with my
mother. My father distrusted the world; he disliked the dishonesty
he found in it, and he felt himself too weak to win a clean fight
against it, too honest to compromise his integrity in a free for
all. He took what seemed to him the only way out.
- On 9 October 1962 he drowned himself in a mill-pool
just off the bottom of Wigan Road.1 Whenever he had been asked to specify his religion, he had replied that he had no
religion, but that he would die a Catholic. His becoming a
Catholic seemed his last act of surrender to my mother's
leadership. Levi's suicide was his farewell gesture of protest and
independence.
- I came back from Italy for a few days to attend the
funeral. Levi was buried with a Requiem Mass from Saint Edmund's
Church, and I felt a tremendous sense of peace about his passing.
Perhaps I envied him. I knew he had done what he believed to be
the right thing all round. Some time before that he had spent a
few days in hospital, where he had been made to eat, but he felt
quite rightly that his was not a physical problem, and that the
hospital could do nothing good for him, though its depressing
atmosphere threatened to sap his strength. Very wisely, he had run
away from it, going, not surprisingly, to visit my sister in her
then convent-home in Manchester. In her company he laughed, talked
and ate as merrily as any schoolboy. But he realized he was no
longer a schoolboy, and that she had her own life to lead. He
never wished to make Edna responsible for his own inability to
live without her, and, as she perceived his and my mother's
situation, I undoubtedly had much to answer for!
- In the summer my father had eaten some bread I blessed
for him, and had got out of his bed to take me on a brisk two-mile
walk to visit the grave in Heaton Cemetery of Father Thomas
McGrath, the priest who had baptized me as a baby, and whose last
Mass before he died was the only Mass my father ever attended.
This walk was an action with a meaning, an expression of Levi's
acceptance of Father McGrath's spiritual influence in my mother's,
my sister's and my own life, an expression, too, of his awareness
of the supreme reality of death as the final touchstone of truth.
He believed Catholicism could pass that test. That was why he had
asked to be received into the Church. But he did not believe it
was easy to remain true to G-d amidst the difficulties of this
life. He felt tired and, like Father McGrath, he wanted to go home
to G-d.
- My mother was completely stunned by my father's death,
9 October 1962 is a day she will never forget. She lost all her
hair. Her fingernails and toenails fell out. Her fingers and legs
swelled up. She seemed to lose all interest in life, and found it
increasingly hard to walk or get about. She cried a lot, but not,
I think, enough to release her from the accumulated burden of her
grief and her sense of guilt. From that day until her own death on
11th March 1973 (by which date, incidentally, she had both read
the original text of this book and discussed its contents with me)
my mother needed all her strength to keep herself alive, very
gradually to grow her hair and nails again, and to regain the use
of her hands. She prayed and prayed for her husband, and felt my
sister and I could never pray too much for him. She was convinced
he needed prayers, and that praying for him was something good for
her to do. I believe these prayers also helped him at an earlier
stage, G-d having known they would be recited later, and because
they helped him during his life and in his dying, I trust that he
no longer needs them now. However, I feel that by praying for
Levi, Edna was at that time perhaps also running away from a full
meeting with her own unconscious awareness that she had not been
the wife she might have been.
- My only immediate regret about my father's death was
that it prevented my being in Turin to witness on Italian
television the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council by
John XXIII on October 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
returned as soon as I could, threw myself energetically into my
study of the idea of priesthood in the writings of Denis the
Areopagite, followed the Council closely in all its aspects, and
made the developments in my family an extra talking-point with
which to cement my intimacy with Carlos.
- For, when my father died, Don Valentini did not
consider that I had no real grief to face, nor that I had
immediately appreciated the mysterious appropriateness of his
passing. He supposed me to be under considerable stress, and so
allowed my continuing special relationship with Carlos
Alberto.
- Carlos himself was familiar with my home
circumstances. Unlike myself he had one brother and several
sisters; his father had died when he was very young. Being
emotionally more mature than me, he understood and sympathized
with my situation, prayed for my father and the rest of the
family, but had no morbid feelings about what had happened.
Although, of course, he rejected any suggestion of physical
intimacy - as, indeed, did a half of myself - he never cut me
socially, and this only served to redouble my ardour and my
pain.
- I began to find I could only sleep two hours a night,
and suspect this was partly because, since he was physically sick,
I wanted to be sick, too. At all events, it was hard to lie awake
in one dormitory, with nothing to do - Father Valentini having
even forbidden me to say more than one rosary in bed - aware that
only thirty yards away, in another dormitory, the most beautiful
person in the world was sleeping peacefully. I wanted to share
that peace.
- So, one night, a few months later, I tiptoed quietly
along to the other dormitory, parted the curtains round his place
in it, and, stooping gently over his bed, kissed him softly on the
cheek. I was, perhaps, imitating something my mother had done for
me when I was a child, and something I would have been satisfied
if Carlos had done for me then. Certainly I had no thought of
making any sexual assault on him. For me Carlos was spiritual
beauty in the flesh, and I worshipped him, and, in him, I
worshipped G-d. I am grateful to G-d still for having allowed me
to live through that experience.
-
- My spiritual symbiosis and attempted spiritual fusion
with Carlos expressed my insistent feeling that it is impossible
to live a fully Christian life in terms of individualistic piety,
solitary meditation, retirement from social life; just as I cannot
accord a primacy in my scale of values to institutionalized and
stereotyped patterns and formulæ of orthodoxy.
- As many grains of wheat go towards the making of the
one host to be consecrated in the Mass as Christ's body, as from
the juice of many grapes the wine for the one Sacrifice is
obtained, as the paschal candle burns and fuses into one the wax
produced by the activity of man bees, so we, though many, are
called to a unity in holiness in Christ. Holiness is union with
G-d and with the whole human race. As the Second Vatican Council
expressed it: “G-d did not care to make men holy and to save them
as individuals, irrespective of their mutual relationships, but
decided to draw them together into a people acknowledging him in
truth, and serving him in holiness.”
- “No more Jew or Gentile, no more slave and freeman, no
more male and female; you are all one person.” I found it hard to
say what this meant, let alone go further and talk about the
mystery of being “in Jesus Christ.” It seemed clear to me,
however, that Saint Paul was chiefly concerned with bringing
people together, not with pulling them to pieces. The more we grew
together, the happier we should be, and the more we should be in
love with joy.
- I admired Saint Francis, the poor man of Assisi, who,
inspired by his Christian faith and thrusting aside every instinct
of brutal violence, had passed his life in a spirit of unlimited
dedication, with a sense of loving responsibility towards every
creature, man or beast or bird. He called the animals his brothers
and sisters, and knew how to gain their confidence. He belonged,
as I felt Carlos belonged, to that cosmic brotherhood that we may
like to think would have existed more generally but for man's fall
from grace, and that, perhaps, we can look forward to when time
shall be no more. For the veils were removed from the eyes of
Francis, and he was able to see all things in G-d, and G-d in
all.
- His contemporary, Thomas of Celano, tells us that
while Francis was alive the fields were rich and fertile, the
birds sang, and the sky was serene. But when he was taken from
among us, there came famine, pestilence, sedition, war and death.
In these poignant words of the author of the Dies Irae there was
for me a tremendously moving symbolic image, in which I sensed
something of the mystery and grandeur both of my love for Carlos
and of the Church into which my baptism initiated me.
- There were other and even more authoritative images.
The Ecumenical Council referred to the Church as the People of
G-d, a Building, a Spiritual House, a Temple, a Holy Kingdom, the
Light of the World, a Missionary or Ambassador to the World, the
Salt of the Earth, a Holy Priesthood, the Sign of Christ, a
Sheepfold, a Vineyard, a Plot of Land to be tilled, the
Incarnation of the Mystical Body, the Bride of Christ, and our
Mother.
- I appreciated that these images had an æsthetic
function. In Christianity, and, more specifically, in my
relationship with Carlos, G-d was revealed to me as truth, as
goodness, and also as beauty. Even the healthy institutions of the
Church function more as stained-glass windows to be looked
through, rather than as statues or ikons to be looked at. As truth
G-d draws man to himself in faith, as goodness he wins him with
love, as beauty he gives him hope. For, while the human mind is
capable of possessing the truth, and of clinging to what is good,
beauty is only glimpsed or faintly descried.
- Beauty cannot be defined. It is the splendour of
truth. It is unity, order and harmony. Absolute beauty is the
perfect harmony* of the attributes of G-d, and we are so far away
from appreciating this harmony, that we don't even know how to
reconcile G-d's freedom with his eternal necessity, G-d's justice
with his mercy. These mysterious agreements defy our understanding
at the very point in which they attract us. Perfect beauty2 is always somehow at a distance, something hoped for. It is beauty glimpsed in hope which is the very heart of worship.
Undying hope drives man on to cling closer to the beauty of G-d,
who cannot be seen face to face here on Earth.
- Man helps himself with all that seems to rise to
heaven: flowers, fire, incense. He makes the stones leap upwards,
and carries the pinnacles of his cathedrals to unheard-of heights.
He gives to his prayer the wings of poetry and song which take it
higher than the cathedrals and the towers. Even so he does not
reach the uppermost point. Infinite space still separates him from
his goal. The Christian spirit still yearns to soar on
high.
- The Christian flight towards G-d is, however, not like
the rise of the space-rocket, achieved by progressively
jettisoning the various stages as they have fulfilled their
purpose. Christian detachment from the Earth is not a rejection of
the world. Charity does not trample on human affections. Wisdom is
not contempt for simplicity.
- Christ in his Ascension and Mary in her Assumption
took up into heaven the bodies they needed for their life on
Earth, and I, having found G-d and his Church embodied in Carlos,
loved him in his body, as well as loving in and through Carlos the
Holy Spirit of Love. I believe that Christ bears in heaven the
marks of his five most precious wounds, and feel that the
Christian should not reject and forget at the earliest opportunity
the sufferings he undergoes during his pilgrimage towards G-d. He
should have towards them an attitude of grateful and attentive
affection. Through them he collaborates with G-d's purpose, which
is to restore all things in Christ.
- Christians live in hope. Hope is the source of beauty
and of everything good in the world. It is not only the substance
of fine literature; it is the indispensable prop of our lives.
Hope does not only cause us to produce works of art; it enables us
to live. If hope is needed to guide the hand of the artist in the
moment of his despondency, it is no less necessary for the young
father of a family, or for the farmer ploughing the furrow. We all
need to trust in the words and the promises of Christ who tells us
that as we sow, so shall we likewise reap.
- I approved of and imitated Carlos in his cleanliness,
neatness, tidiness, simplicity and order, not just because of the
obvious advantages for the continued smooth running of the
machinery of my life, but because by cultivating these virtues we
could symbolize Christ in our persons, and so glorify G-d in his
creation. Beauty was a gift of G-d. It was best appreciated in the
detachment of contemplation, and I understood that if my love for
Carlos was to be holy and pure, it would have to be detached. I
believed, however, that a detached love was best, because it was
beautiful and non-threatening. Beauty opens up the within of
things.
- There are, of course, degrees of beauty. Not all sorts
of beauty are equally noble and ennobling. Appreciation of the
beauty of Carlos Alberto's body carried with it the risk of my
seeking selfishly to possess it. Delight in creation might make me
forget to than the Creator. I had to delight in creation in such a
way as to open myself increasingly to the goodness of my Creator.
My life was to seek G-d and all things in him. If I had G-d, I
should want for nothing.
- The tension between my desire for immediate possession
and my drive towards total contemplation had to stimulate me to
make of this world a symbol of the world unseen, an anticipation
of paradise, a witness to Christian hope. It mediated G-d to me as
divine beauty and ultimate mystery. It conveyed delicate
intimations of a world unseen. And Carlos's music and painting
reminded me that art could help me towards a deeper appreciation
of the Gospel.
- Green fields spoke to me of expectancy and hope. The
ceaseless movements of the waters were echoes of eternity. A blue
sky was full of mystery and strength. Snow-clad hills beckoned me
to purity. I had the rose of charity, the lily of purity, the
violet of humility, the gentian of mortification, the evergreen of
perseverance. The skies proclaimed G-d's glory, and the vault of
heaven revealed his craftsmanship.
- For those like Carlos, able to withdraw behind the
scenes of the visible and experience the presence of the
all-powerful and the all-gracious, the invisible has always been
more real than the visible. It is the material world around us
which seems at times to be an illusion. G-d and other persons and
the hidden meaning of all things in the paschal mystery are what
counts. The paschal mystery is everything. It is in this sense
that the Church is all-important, and that we attain our own
personal holiness by spreading Christianity, according to those
words of Saint Paul: “Woe to me if I preach not the
Gospel.”
- When I told Carlos the next day how I had kissed him
in his sleep, he said I ought to tell Don Valentini all about it.
I did so. He considered my gesture was a natural one, and there
was nothing morally objectionable about it. However, he did think
it was not the kind of behaviour to be looked for from a future
priest. Therefore, pending a further decision about my future, he
told me not to present myself for ordination whedn my companions
came forward to receive the sub-diaconate, an order which is
usually received about twelve months before actual ordination to
the priesthood.
- In the meantime, Don Valentini discussed my case
privately with another experienced priest, who, I am told,
expressed the opinion that I ought never to be ordained. However,
after reviewing the whole situation, Don Valentini decided not to
stand in my way. He explained nothing whatsoever to me of the
workings of his mind, beyond saying that he had known me over a
four-year period and was making a judgment on the basis of his own
general observations, and not only in the light of the account I
was in a position to give of myself. My guess is that he was
influenced very favourably by my honesty and openness with
him.
- However, it had been a close shave, and I did want to
become a priest. I knew my philosophizing and theologizing were
not only very much along the progressive lines of the Second
Vatican Council, but also very much in conflict with the positions
at least implied by many of the Turin lecturers in the classes I
attended. I also knew I had a degree of psychological awareness
that some of them very sadly lacked. In addition to this, I was
utterly convinced that I had to experience for myself, understand
for myself, and make my own judgments. I was answerable to G-d for
the honesty of my judgments. Equally I was bound to use the mind
he had given me. Not even Carlos could carry my personal
responsibility for myself. Only I could do that.
- After what had happened, I knew I could not kiss
Carlos again, but my feelings towards him remained the same, and I
would type for his benefit an extra copy of any research notes I
made. I had also to work out for myself whether my affection for
Carlos was of such a kind as to be compatible with my position as
a religious and a future priest. Don Valentini suggested that the
time had come for me to make a clean break away from Carlos, and
said that, whatever my speculative doubts about how best to
behave, the problem was easily solved in practice by obedience to
his personal directive.
- However, from my study of an article written by Don
Valentini himself, I learned that Saint Francis of Sales had found
it useful to distinguish between a command and a recommendation.
He believed that G-d did not want everyone to put into practice
all recommendations, but only those well adapted to persons,
times, circumstances, and the varying requirements of Love, which,
being the Queen of the virtues, of the commandments, of the
counsels, the Queen of all Christian laws and actions taken
together, allocates to each thing its proper place, order, time
and value. He said that it was not always a prudent thing to
follow the counsels of perfection, since these are expressions of
Love, which must regulate them and determine to what extent they
be put into practice.
- Christianity commits those who accept it to a life of
love for all men in Christ, but not all the counself of perfection
found in the Gospels can be or ought to be put into practice by
each individual. It suffices that we put into practice with
devotion those that we judge to be suited to our condition.
Ordinarily we are not obliged to put the counsels into practice in
the most excellent way of all. As a rule, acts of heroic virtue
are not obligatory, but only recommended. If occasionally we are
obliged to practise heroic virtue, this is because certain various
and extaordinary combinations of circumstances make this necessary
if we are to keep in the grace of G-d.
- Francis of Sales would have the Christian rely on
G-d's guidance in all this. He has to keep in touch with his own
unconscious. For his spiritual life grows through pleasure in and
consent to the divine inspirations, by which are meant all the
invitations, movements, rebukes, and internal remorse, all the
lights and insights that G-d works within us preparing our heart
with his blessing because of the loving care he has for us, in
order to waken us up, spur us on, draw and attract us to the
practices of virtue, to heavenly love, to good resolutions, to
whatever is conducive to our eternal welfare.
- In the light of this, I concluded that I was not
obliged to renounce my affection for Carlos, even though he
himself did not wish me to regard him in any special way, since I
was not bound to heroic self-denial. I concluded further that,
Love being the Queen of the virtues, my special affection for
Carlos and, in and through him, for the Christian and Salesian
style of living, was even the very foundation of my holiness. By
myself I was nothing; thanks to this gift of Love I could hope
all.
- I needed to love Carlos in a particular way, because I
had never before loved anyone in a particular way, though I had
loved the philosophy of Lonergan, the questioning of Girardi, the
insistence on total honesty of O'Brien. I knew that knowledge of
G-d could only be authentic if it was something more than a
commitment to an abstract theory; it had to pervade the whole of
my ordinary body-life.
- On the one hand I believed that G-d loved all mankind
with an universal and distinterested love, a love that extended
even to those who had never heard his name. On the other hand I
believed that G-d's love remained an act of his free choice. It
was an invitation addressed to the secret depths of each person's
innermost being. It was a delicate, intimate, special summons. It
was never the same for two people - not even when they were moved
by the same word or the same gesture, not even for me and Carlos -
because it was the personal G-d attracting each one to himself in
a personal way.
- I believed that all persons without distinction of
race, sex, age or creed were loved by G-d with a special love. My
own most treasured possession was my vocation to the Christian
faith coming to me from G-d through my mother and father, my
parish priest and primary-school teachers, my first Salesian
headmaster and various other members of the world-wide Salesian
family including Fathers Giacomo Simonetti, Terence O'Brien and
Giulio Girardi, as well as through the writings of Father Bernard
Lonergan, SJ, and now through Carlos Alberto.
- My response to that vocation was, at each stage of its
development, my own, but the invitation itself was sovereignly
free, like all of G-d's gifts. The Christian religion draws its
origin from G-d's free initiative, from a manifestation of his
love, to which every person of good will can respond.
- As I saw it, the economy of salvation was not founded
on the basis of straightforward and rigorous justice; it was based
on benevolence. At the start of everything there stood G-d's love.
It was quite obviously gratuitious, alive, personal. G-d's love
had its principle within itself. It was not a response, but a
stimulus: the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, so
that never for a moment, through the course of history, did the
whole people of G-d or the individual Christian cease to depend on
this love, which remained always faithful to its own eternally
unpredictable nature.
- The divine invitation I experienced as embodied in
Carlos's kindness depended not on human will nor on the intensity
of human effort, but on G-d's mercy. This was particularly clear,
since while I experienced Carlos as loving me in a very special
way, he claimed, and I believed him, that his feelings towards me
were only those of brotherly affection in Christ, and not at all
extraordinary. I, therefore, felt it was G-d's grace that was
principally operating on my affections in and through Carlos.
After all, G-d's call always contained an element of gratuitous
benevolence independent of all human causality.
- In due course, then, I asked for the priesthood.
Everything is a grace, just as everything is also a temptation,
and I found it hard to decide whether in seeking the priesthood I
was giving myself truly to Jesus Christ, or just trying to become
an extension or duplicate copy of Carlos, my theologian friend and
likely to become my fellow priest. Perhaps the two were not
incompatible. I did not experience my relationship with him as
threatening, but rather as powerfully fostering the development of
my personal and religious life. My attachment to him enabled me to
learn a great deal about the real meaning of Christian love. Being
a man, I did not see him as a rival to my mother's claims on my
affection, and felt that my unmarried state as a priest vowed to
celibacy would, indeed, link me even more closely to my mother,
since it would be celibacy in the service of that Mother Church my
mother regarded as of such crucial importance for her own, her
children's and her husband's salvation. In my childhood, her
reluctance to let me play with non-Catholic children in the
neighbourhood had increased my feelings of loneliness and my sense
of the wide gap between religious and secular reality. My father's
death had finally brought home to me that no habitual routine, no
fixed outlook, no seeking of security in the familiarity of my own
home, of the traditional institutions of Catholicism, or of the
underlying assumptions of the Western way of life, could avail by
itself to preserve me from disaster. I knew that I had to assume
full responsibility for myself, and did not find it hard to make
unconventional decisions. At the same time I was trying to evade
the responsibility of living a life of my own. I seemed to give no
value to myself apart from Carlos. I felt that unless I was, in
the context of my own body, temperament and experience, and thus
even in ways he would seem to disapprove of, somehow the
enfleshment and the mirror-image of him, I would be
nothing.
- I made a retreat in preparation for my ordination
under the guidance of Don Valentini and along with the thirty-two
other candidates for ordination that year at Muzzano in the
Italian Alps. There I lay nude in my room one night with my face
to the ground, and recited the psalm of David, the Miserere,
feeling I was not my own master, that I very much needed G-d's
help if I was to make the gift of myself to others. My posture of
close contact with Mother Earth possibly expressed my total
surrender to my own mother. My ordination would recompense her
life of severe self-denial, her long hours of kneeling in prayer,
kneeling to scrub the church floor, kneeling to knead loaves of
bread to earn money for her family, kneeling to clean the front
door step and preserve her sense of personal dignity and of her
own human value, kneeling to clear away the weeds from her own
mother's and from my father's grave. As I lay on the floor at
Muzzano, I feared lest my self-giving might bring death rather
than life to others, that it might prove a contaminating
influence, as my father had felt his presence to be, unless I was
sustained by G-d's grace and blessing. My apparently English
'gift' might prove to be German 'poison'
(Gift!). As Christ had
ascended into heaven, I wanted to launch myself like a spiritual
space-rocket (a Sputnik my sister used to call me), into the arms
of G-d, but I felt that my sexual thrust was not, perhaps, potent
enough to reach that far. I knelt for a while on my haunches, with
my hands locked in lonely, almost masturbatory prayer, but with my
eyes of faith raised in weak and real hope. Was I really open to
receive G-d's grace, the gift of the Spirit of his Love? Taking a
needle and a pair of scissors I scratched the name “Carlos”
horizonally just below my navel. The incision drew only a little
blood, and I had soon completed my ritual. I concluded by writing
out my ordination promises and signing them with blood drawn from
my fingertip, a token of my surrendered masculinity.
- When I showed Carlos my resolutions and told him what
I had done, he was silent and anxious, but said nothing to Don
Valentini. Perhaps he was pleased and honoured in a way, conscious
of his secret power. From that day forward, however, without
seeming to treat me any differently than the rest of his
companions in public, he avoided me as much as he could. He said
that this was for my own good. We agreed we would still pray for
each other, and contained to exchange greetings at Christmas
time.
- Meanwhile my mother had gladly paid the cost of the
air tickets for Carlos's mother and one of his sisters to fly from
Portugal to Turin and back for his ordination. On 9 February 1964
in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin, the principal
church of the world-wide Salesian Congregation to whose mission I
had dedicated my life, I, along with Carlos and together with
thirty-one other Salesian deacons from sixteen countries including
a fellow Boltonian and past-pupil of Thornleigh Salesian College,
Bernard Grogan (turin.jpg), was ordained a
Roman Catholic priest in the presence of my mother, my sister, my
aunt Annie Rowan and my cousin Josephine Knowles, of Sister
Xaverius, CP, the nun who had been my headmistess throughout the
six years I had attended St. Ethelbert's primary school, and also
of a parishioner from that parish in which I had for so many years
served Mass when I was still living in Bolton.
- On the following day, assisted by our Maltese
Professor of Dogmatic and Ascetical & Mystical Theology,
Father Nazareno Camilleri, SDB, I offered Holy Mass at the
principal altar of that vast Church, rich in marbles and baroque
ornament and, wearing shimmering white and blue vestments symbolic
of my priestly dignity, I gave Holy Communion to my mother as she
knelt at my feet, her mouth open in adoration of her G-d.
- DOCTOR OF
PHILOSOPHY
- Although Father Thomas Hall once told my mother that I
was a born philosopher, I do not find it surprising that I had
never even noticed the existence of the subject until I was
formally introduced to it in Ingersley in September 1955.
- Most English schools still provide no introduction to
philosophy, so that the majority of school-leavers cannot
recognize, and certainly cannot cope with, even the simplest
philosophical problems.
- Young people, of course, feel in their bones that
personal knowing is the fruit of questioning, hesitating,
searching blind alleys, posing problems with anxiety, in
insecurity, and with frustration never far away. They realize that
important questions can never be settled by a slick appear to the
evidence of observation and experiment. Yet at school they are
expected to work hard to make themselves familiar with the
currently accepted answers to the fashionable questions of the
day, and the brighter ones soon learn to play a variety of life
games with self-confidence, skill and all the tokens of success.
This may prove to be the foundation for a very successful career
and a with-it social life. It is not a basis for personal
living.
- I pitied those of my companions in the theological
seminary in Turin who treated it as a big school, one of them, an
Italian, even bursting into tears whenever he did not get full
marks for having learned off his theological two-times table
exactly as it was laid down in his orthodox textbook of dogmas.
His uncle had been a Cardinal, and his chief ambition seemed to be
that of becoming a perfect Roman theological yes-man.
- The situation in adult education in England is not
very much different. Some courses purporting to be introductions
to philosophy are not introductions to philosophy at all, but
collections of information about philosophical work accompanied by
ruminative discussions of its possible relevance for our
contemporary situation.
- Genuinely to grapple with philosophy implies going
beyond this sort of relatively superficial, inconsistent and
rather naïve thinking to a stringently self-critical and
logically consistent examination of philosophical issues.
- Father Hall had been impressed by a short paper I
wrote about one of his spiritual conferences in Burwash prior to
my taking my religious vows. In my first year in Ingersley Father
O'Brien had directed me to study privately for the London
University external BA honours degree in French, and I therefore
took the relevant subsidiary examination in Latin, enrolled for a
Wolsey Hall correspondence course in French, and practised French
composition guided by Father Martin McPake, SDB, an outstanding
French scholar who later became novice-master for a time, and
eventually the Rector Major's delegate for the whole of the
English-speaking Salesian world. However, in the summer of 1954,
as Father O'Brien was making me his private secretary, the
Provincial, Father Hall, took the somewhat unusual step of
requring me to discontinue my studies in French, save as a
marginal hobby, and to concentrate my attention on philosophy. He
told me that in due course he would want me to take the Doctor's
degree in philosophy, and recommended me to broaden my culture in
the meantime, by a private study of physics, chemistry and
biology, together with Greek, of which I had no previous
knowledge. I presume it was this plan of the Provincial's that had
determined my being entrusted with the teaching of history of
philosophy in Ingersley and Beckford, and it had matured with my
beginning degree studies in Rome in 1958.
- After I had completed my course there, and was due to
begin my theological studies in Turin, Father Hall advised me to
study theology with a constant eye to its relevance for my own
specialization in philosophy, and also to prepare what material I
could in the meantime for my doctoral thesis. Having been most
impressed by what I had seen of Lonergan's thought, I would have
liked to make it the subject of my final dissertation. However,
Don Vincenzo Miano, the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, and my
own tutor Don Giulio Girardi wanted me to prepare a thesis on the
work of some English non-Catholic philosopher, and suggested I
study the method of philosophy in the writings of Gilbert Ryle,
editor of Mind, and Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics in the
University of Oxford, whom Don Girardi had been impressed by when
he had met him in London. I was very keen to study Lonergan in
depth, and continued to keep myself up-to-date with whatever he
wrote and with all that was written about him. I told Don Miano
and Don Girardi that even though we were living in a period of
dialogue and ecumenism, I should still prefer to have the
opportunity of making a deep study of an outstanding Catholic
thinker. They claimed, however, that Lonergan's philosophical
production was insufficient for a doctoral thesis to be written
about it, unless, indeed, such a thesis were to undertake a
thorough critique of that author's position - in which case, they
considered it would prove unrealistically difficult to undertake
at that stage in my career. Reluctantly, therefore, after
consulting Father Hall and Father Valentini, I agreed to prepare a
thesis on Gilbert Ryle, knowing in my own mind that my study of
him would be guided considerably by principles assimilated from
Lonergan and the authentically catholic tradition he so
marvellously represented.
- It may seem surprising that I should have attached so
much importance to the selection of the subject of my academic
dissertation in philosophy, which may not seem a vitally
interesting issue. Certainly there is no scientifically confirmed
correlation beween philosophizing and good living. Most men are
not philosophers, and remain content with an implicit philosophy
of life.
- Yet I believe that sensitive and thoughtful engagement
with the deepest cares of men is a good in itself. Those who
refuse to teach philosophy to others because they prefer people to
be free to think for themselves may thereby encourage their
uncritical and unconscious acceptance of the implicit assumptions
of our present way of life.
- We may love simplicity if we like. But this will not
solve any of our problems for us. We have to make up our minds at
the outset to accept the fact of complicated relations. We need to
be humble and put sympathies and antipathies in the background, if
we wish to learn to know about reality.
- In theory, and also in a mystical and supernatural
universe whose meaning and value is guaranteed by G-d's loving
providence, my ordination to the Catholic priesthood on 9 February
1964 was the climax and final integration of my life, but in the
human world of thought and feeling I still had to achieve the
unity that my ordination symbolized - I still had to make myself.
It was a formidable task. The German phenomenologist Nicolai
Hartmann made this clear to me:
- “The work of a person who wants to tackle the
metaphysical problems in the critical manner demands the waiver of
all hasty satisfaction by way of
Weltanschauung, of
grabbing for results; it demands the radical renunciation of any
kind of premature construction of systems, the ruthless rejection
of metaphysical needs. Metaphysical research demands the long
breath of being able to wait, the patient aporetic advance along
the whole horizon of metaphysical problems, the inner detachment
from types of world picture which tempt the longing eye. It is a
philosophical ethos of toughness and of intellectual
self-discipline. Whoever cannot muster it relapses hopelessly into
what is historically outdated and lost. He has not learned from
the great failures of man's intellectual history. This is not the
way to get beyond them. And no seeming destruction of tradition
can help him. What is philosophically hardest is the most simple:
the plain, sober exploration without pathos and sensationalism,
the purity of the love of truth, obedience to its law. The seeker
must not sell out for the sake of the more easily obtainable. He
must not be discouraged if he, a mere link in a long historical
chain, is denied the view of the fruits.”(Nicolai Hartmann,
Deutsche systematische Philosophie nach ihren
Gestaltem, vol. I, Berlin, 1933; pp.
57-58).
- Because we are instinctively opposed to intellectual
novelties in any radical sense, we are apt to reduce anything that
claims to be new to a mere bagatelle of no importance, to sum it
up in a pocket-size slogan, and then forget it.
- Yet sometimes honesty demands an account that is
obscure and complicated. Accuracy requires us to qualify and to
restrict, to spin out our trains of thought, and to refuse to keep
all our ideas within the confines of one department of knowledge.
We cannot simplify things at the expense of truth. Sometimes our
subject really is many-sided and intricate. We cannot always
understand everything at once.
- My decision to engage myself in the activity of
philosophizing meant that I could not allow philosophy to remain a
merely theoretical study satisfying my curiosity about how things
were; I needed to see how philosophizing could make a difference
to my way of life, to find out how it fitted into the total
pattern of my human existence.
-
- In 1964 the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was
still in session, and I was witnessing deep and rapid changes in
all sectors of economic, social, political, psychological, moral
and religious life.These were the result of the tremendous
progress of the natural sciences, the technological revolution,
and a variety of other sociological and philosophical
factors.
- This acceleration of history was cutting deeply into
our ways of living, thinking, behaving and judging. It was leading
towards a total transformation of our idea of human nature, of
society, the world, God and his activity among men. Mankind was
moving on from a static way of thinking about the world to one
that was dynamic and evolutionary, though this was not happening
everywhere with the same speed nor even with the same intensity. A
few still felt quite at home in their traditional way of thinking,
some found life within the new movements among thinking people,
and others gave signs of indecision and lack of security.
- In this way there were arising tensions, restlessness,
imbalance, and, consequently, the crises with which we have all
become acquainted.
- The word personalization reminded me that contemporary
man was increasingly aware of his own personal worth. Culture and
civilization had as their focal point the affirmation of man. Man
expected others to respect his own individuality. He refused to be
reduced to a cipher or lost in a crowd. He took national and group
interests into account, but did not let them prevail over his need
to preserve a sense of his value as a person.
- There was, thanks to this new awakening to the
importance of personal values, a growing appreciation of the value
of freedom and a demand for more of it. Man wanted to know he was
responsible for his own life, his own choices, and for the world
he built around him. There was a strong move to make sex
meaningful, and to encourage woman to realize her own
potentialities.
- In the political arena democracy was becoming
increasingly widespread, and provided an outlet for the
satisfaction of these needs of human beings to feel free and
responsible.
- In industry the participation in and sharing of
responsibilities at all levels was tending to dissolve the
barriers between those who gave commands and those who obeyed. The
working classes were increasingly alive to their own
rights.
- People felt the need for specialization, long-term and
detailed planning, decentralization in the interests of greater
efficiency.
- Insistence on each own's personal worth also carried
the risk of pretentions to self-sufficiency, and of an exaggerated
individualism devoid of all sense of social
responsibility.
- However, personalization was necessarily accompanied
by a strong sense of community, because it was only in relation to
others and to the world that man could achieve fulfilment. By
socialization was meant this progressive multiplication of
patterns of interaction and interdependence in our living together
in a variety of forms of social behaviour and activity.
- Man was increasingly concerned to be a citizen of the
world, contributing to it by his work and his own growth in
understanding. It was this that gave him a sense of solidarity,
corresponsibility, mutual trust and support.
- Yet, despite these advantages for the reinforcement
and development of the human personality, socialization had its
own attendant dangers.
- Nationalism, closed economies, collective egoism,
conflicts between classes and groups continued to persist. The
state in some countries almost laid claim to omnipotence in the
field of education. Families were being thrown into crisis by
economic, social and moral traumas. Much work remained to be done
if mankind was to overcome the deep divisions within itself and to
dispel the clouds of war.
- Poverty and hunger in the third world remained an
explosive and crucial problem for 75% of mankind.
- The world offered the spectacle of economic progress
and increasing well-being in the midst of vast zones of poverty
and need. Developed countries continued to become richer, while
the developing countries became poorer, often with strong economic
groups arising and driving the mass of the population into utter
misery. Even in the large industrial centres, where the greatest
development and the most abundant riches were concentrated,
suburban areas were overcrowded with poor, exploited people living
in squalid conditions.
- Particularly in view of my Salesian vocation, the most
recent revolution, the emergence of youth power, seemed to merit
special attention. Young people's impatience with mediocrity was
growing into extreme anguish. It drove them to rebel and, at the
cost of conflict and tension, to try and open up new roads for men
and women of the future to enjoy.
- The interchange of ideas, a breaking free from home
ties, foreign travel and more frequent contacts among young people
differently placed all contributed to the coming into being of
international youth in movement.
- I identified myself with this huge, seething mass of
the adolescent population with all its demands, the crowds of
young people uncared for in the nations' capitals and on the
outskirts of large cities, the ever-increasing number of young
people finding it difficult to give themselves to a steady trade
or profession, their new and keener sense of liberty, autonomy and
distrust of authority, their challenging of the values of the
older generation.
- I saw young people as suffering a profound crisis in
their sense of values. Their need to show and receive affection
was frustrated. Their ideals were shattered. They showed evidence
of immaturity in some areas, an almost exclusive concern with the
immediately practical, indifference to existing forms of organized
religion, and growing alienation from the classical notion of
G-d.
- Young people were also more open to social values, and
showed a strong sense of their solidarity with the poor. Better
than their elders they knew how to overcome the barriers of
nationalism and racism. Social and foreign-aid enterprises were
blossoming out among them. They offered tremendous possibilities
for good, which needed to be brought into play and helped to
develop.
- I saw this as one reason for Christians to acknowledge
the value of the process of secularization. This aimed to gain
recognition for the legitimate autonomy of earthly realities
relatively to the religious fact in a world increasingly ready to
have faith in its own knowledge and its own technical skills. In
this way man, who took so much from the world, acknowledged his
indebtedness to it and treated it with respect. Far from despising
the supernatural values of an authentically validated religion or
the corresponding human response of supernatural faith, this
recognition of the autonomy and value of the world guaranteed a
proper appreciation of the transcendent and original character of
the religious fact.
- It was only when secularization degenerated into
secularism that materialism in the reductionist sense stalked
abroad, an ill-conceived and horizontal view of sex, hedonism,
life, philosophy and religion raged rampant, and G-d was shut out
from the life of man.
- I saw the process of secularization itself an an
undeniable and irreversible sociological fact, which could not
fail to affect the life of religious institutions, if not in their
inner reality - as the following of Christ, being in love with
G-d, living in the Spirit of the Gospel - at least in the
historical-social forms in which, of necessity, they were embodied
in any given epoch. Day by day I was becoming increasingly aware
that things I had previously considered absolute and permanent
had, in reality, only relative validity.
- It would have been dishonest of me to reduce my
decision to seek priestly ordination to the question of whether or
not I was attracted towards the priestly life as officially
described in 1964. The Roman Catholic Church itself was so
obviously agitated by grave problems. As well as the biblical,
liturgical, theological and ecumenical movements of aggiornamento
and renewal, there were the anguished questions of atheism and
religious indifference, particularly among the young. The Church's
teaching-office was being called into question, doctrines were
denied, the missionary spirit was dwindling, vocations were
becoming few, and many were leaving the priesthood and religious
life.
- Modern man claimed for himself the right to give his
assent to a religious creed consciously and freely. Conscience was
increasingly recognized as being, by right, the subjective
criterion of the moral decision to act. In this way a certain
sense of individualism was encouraged, which went very much
against the revealed and the community aspects of Christianity,
but which, nevertheless, tended to favour the emergence of
outstandingly religious personalities.
- In the midst of the countless questions raised by the
speed of social change, and by man's radical uncertainty and
insecurity which his conquests both on Earth and in space had not
availed to dispel, in the midst of all man's efforts, blunders and
inconsistencies in his eagerness to set himself free from what was
“sacred,” it was, I felt, encouraging to see that he was still in
fact going in search of the G-d of the Bible. Man was beginning to
catch a glimpse of G-d as the transcendent undercurrent of his own
living fulfilment; he was learning to recognize G-d immanent in
everything that exists and occurs. In the man Jesus he could
discover the primary epiphany of G-d. Like Jesus he was opening
himself to the world and to his fellow men, and with them helping
to inaugurate the Reign of G-d. It was already possible for me to
see the first fruits of this Reign in the Church, which was a
loving communion centred on Christ, in which the embodied love of
G-d was pushing Christians into the service of man and his
world.
- With Teilhard de Chardin I felt that Catholics needed
to grow out of a way of expressing their faith which turned them
away from the world in a desire to win purity for themselves.
Instead, they had to give themselves to the world to fill the
world with joy.
- Authentic Christianity meant facing the challenge of
life. It was all too easy to dream my life away in the
cloud-cuckoo land of a private devotion. I had to share in making
things happen. I had to do something with my life. I had to be
somebody. I had to live in a way that was personally fulfilling.
Adoration was not rejection of the world. Carlos did not reject
the world. It was my commitment to a creative life that fulfilled
the world through effort and research, through sorrow and joy,
through my continually developing understanding and my
ever-increasing love.
- My first task as a priest was to conclude my four-year
theology course and take the degree of Licentiate in Theology,
which I did on 20 June 1964, one year after taking my Bachelor of
Divinity degree. My research paper was a short study of the
priesthood according to the De Ecclesiastica
Hierarchia of Denys the Areopagite.*
- * Note: In the general theology course I had, as was
usual, studied Christian revelation and its source, the Church of
Christ, G-d in his Unity and Trinity, creation and the
supernatural, the Incarnation of Christ and the Divine Motherhood
of the Virgin Mary, grace, the theological virtues, the seven
sacraments, death, judgment, hell, heaven, the moral law,
conscience, virtue, sin, the obligations of particular states of
life, social justice, the Old and New Testaments, Christian
archeology, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, Church
history, Canon Law, the Eastern Church, Liturgy, ascetical and
mystical theology, elementary Hebrew, New Testament Greek,
catechetics and sacred eloquence. There were compulsory
examinations in all these subjects, some of them in Latin, the
others in Italian. The course had been a very demanding one, and I
was glad to have it over with .
-
- During my summer holiday in England I celebrated Mass
and attended dinners in my honour in Burwash, Bollington, Beckford
and Bolton, where I gave the Papal blessing to the congregation in
the Parish Church of my boyhood, Saint Ethelbert's, Deane, and
attended a reception arranged for me in the school-hall. However,
my mind was already focussed on the preparation of my doctoral
thesis, and I spent a lot of my time in England in procuring
relevant books and photostats of useful articles.
- October 1964 saw me once more in Rome, at the Salesian
house in 42 Via Marsala, getting down to work on my thesis. By
this time there was a new Salesian Provincial in England, Father
George Williams, SDB, PhD, and he was eager that I should, if at
all possible, complete my dissertation in one year, so as to be
available for the philosophy staff in Beckford.
- In my previous two years in Rome I had been burdened
with lectures and examinations - in logic, theory of knowledge,
metaphysics, philosophy of nature, psychology, the philosophy of.
G-d, ethics, history of philosophy, biology, physics and
chemistry, selected texts of Aristotle and Aquinas, the principles
of social economy, teaching method, German, French, and
experimental psychology. I had also followed special courses in
characterology and on the proof of the divine existence, as well
as making my own study of Lonergan.
- From October 1964 to June 1965 I was not entirely free
of lectures, but I had much more time to myself. I had to attend
on average two lectures a week, and to take examinations in the
history of atheism, the philosophy of law, the history of Spanish
philosophy, and symbolic logic. For the rest, I was free to carry
out my own research, and to prepare my thesis under the guidance
of my tutor Don Girardi. He helped me by consistently refusing
even to look at anything I had written until I could satisfy him
that the order of my development was intrinsically logical and
faithful to the requirements of my subject. As a result, I had to
re-work my thesis six times before I could persuade him to read
it. Once he had approved it, however, I felt its success was
assured.
- While others passed by situations without stopping to
think, Don Girardi's ideal philosopher had the curiosity to pause,
look, and meditate. He tried to satisfy his intellectual appetite
once his sense of wonder had been aroused. For Giulio Girardi,
philosophy included the intellectual attempt to penetrate the
mystery of reality, to bring to light the unity hidden behind the
variety of appearances.
- Giulio Girardi thought of the philosophical quest as
essentially connected with the anguish and uncertainty of human
freedom. Many possibilities are open to man. His present choices
have an effect on his future happiness or his future frustration.
He must choose now. He chooses in the awareness that the outcome
of this activity of choosing will be conditioned to a very large
extent by the structure of the universe in which his human living
is embedded, a universe whose structure was, in its turn, partly
determined to be what it is by previous individual and collective
human choices. Impelled by such considerations, Girardi occupied
himself increasingly with the whole problematic issue of
contemporary atheism. What is man? What is his place in the
universe of being? How should I act? What is the meaning of sorrow
and death? Is it reasonable to believe in G-d?
- Only in philosophy, if anywhere, could an answer be
found to such questions. Theology did not stand on its own
foundations. Common sense was unscientific and often ambiguous.
Science did not arrive at absolute truth, but merely pursued truth
within the context of a prior acceptance of some particular
conceptual framework and method of inquiry.
- At school, and in my early studies of philosophy and
theology, I had become familiar with some of the main features of
the conceptual frameworks and methods of inquiry currently
accepted and used. It was the philosopher's task, however, to
question the value of these methods and structures.
- Any man who is really alive asks questions. He
questions because his situation never comes up to the level of his
ideal. He feels the need to discover a meaning for those aspects
of his behaviour which seem to be his free creation. He fulfils
this need by trying to relate his activity to its proper place in
the total context of his personality structure. For human
development is more than the random bundling together of different
sorts of behaviour, and requires their harmonious and hierarchical
integration being actively pursued by their consciously
responsible agent. The person feels that he should be one, not a
being at odds with himself.
- Philosophy includes a fundamental inquiry into being.
It is concerned with the problem of the ultimate meaning of
reality. It seeks to know the nature, origin and value of reality.
It demands a final answer, an answer that begs no questions,
shelves no issues. The philosopher must take nothing for granted
and is allowed no presuppositions. He does not assume deduction,
induction, intuition or introspection to be veridical. He has to
be critical of historical positions, established schools,
particular uses of words, a definite logic, the desire for system.
His point of departure is the complete question in its total
context:
-
"Beware the seeker of disciples
the missionary
the pusher
all proselytizing men
all who claim that they have found
the path to heaven.
For the sound of their words
is the silence of their doubt.
The allegory of your conversion
sustains them through their uncertainty.
Persuading you, they struggle
to persuade themselves.
They need you
as they say you need them:
there is a symmetry they do not mention
in their sermon
or in the meeting
near the secret door.
As you suspect each one of them
be wary also of these words,
for I, dissuading you,
obtain new evidence
that there is no shortcut,
no path at all,
no destination.”*
* B. Stevens, "Don't Push the
River" (Lafayette, Calif.: Real People Press
1970).
-
- As Husserl, the father of phenomenology, realized, “a
true philosopher cannot be other than free: the essential nature
of philosophy is the most radical autonomy. Only one need absorbs
me,” he wrote, “I must win clarity, else I cannot live; I cannot
bear life unless I can believe that I shall achieve it. I attempt
to guide, not to instruct, but merely to show and to describe what
I see. All I claim is the right to speak according to my best
lights - primarily to myself and correspondingly to others - as
one who has lived through a philosophical existence in all its
seriousness.”
- When Merleau-Ponty, the Belgian existentialist, was
asked, “Do you leave people in a situation which you yourself call
vertiginous?” he replied: “To my mind this is the philosophical
attitude. Philosophy is amazement, the consciousness of
strangeness. It means to suppress ‘philosophical’ explanation by
systems. Philosophy is no hospital. If people feel dizzy and want
to take drugs against dizziness, I do not stop them, but I say:
These are drugs.”
- No amount of boasting about the practical triumphs of
the natural and human sciences can conceal the fact that they have
brought us up against theoretical puzzles and human problems which
defy any purely conventional solution. Many people are still
unwilling to acknowledge the importance of problems of value and
meaning. Yet man's responsibility for himself and his culture can
be satisfied only by a science and a philosophy giving the fullest
possible account of all our claims and beliefs, preferring, if
need be, the uncertainty of the beginner to the false security of
a questionable dogmatism.
- As I read the philosophical writings of Gilbert Ryle I
learned to respect him as having a genuinely philosophical
outlook. In 1937, long before the Second Vatican Council
popularized the word dialogue among Catholics, Ryle had
recommended his fellow philosophers to fight against their biases
and preferences, to avoid too close an identification with group
interests or beliefs, and to steer clear of any premature or
doctrinaire commitment. He did not deny the value of combativeness
and team spirit, nor of having a variety of different languages
and conceptual frameworks available in society so that questions
could be tackled in more than one way. He thought we needed our
prophets and poets just as much as our engineers and grammarians.
We had to learn to prize other forms of excellence than our own.
It was, after all, hardly likely that any one person or group
would prove to be completely right about everything, or that
anyone should be completely wrong about anything. Hostility,
suspicion, or a strained silence was not going to improve the
quality of our experience nor of anyone else's.
- Some welcome debate and even controversy because they
approve of mental gymnastics, wish to make money, feel they can
earn a name for themselves, believe their own public humiliation
does them good, or find the whole thing something of a lark.
However, the intrinsic justification of such discussion is the
promition of better understanding. Irritation and impatience of
contradiction, vehemence of assertion, and the determination to
silence others suggest the presence of some unacknowledged
uncertainty. The criterion of our sincerity and sense of
responsibility is the extent of our readiness to respond to
comment and criticism, to distinguish the important issues from
questions of marginal interest, to listen and learn as well as
speaking and attempting to teach. Dialogue is not a disguised
teach-in, a linguistic compromise, nor the opting out of the
logical consequences of our own position. It should be a free and
cordial exchange between persons who trust each other's basic
sincerity and acknowledge their own limitations.
- Concern for dialogue was also characteristic of Don
Girardi, who had a considerable share in drawing up the Vatican
Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, promulgated in 1965, and
who later, in 1968, along with Don Miano, the Dean of the Salesian
Faculty of Philosophy, was the inspiration behind the Vatican
Secretariat for Non-Believers' Document on
Dialogue with Non-Believers.
- As the Council entered upon its final phase, and I
scoured the libraries of Rome for out-of-the-way articles by or
about Gilbert Ryle, all the major superiors of the Salesian
Congregation together with delegates from all the provinces
throughout the world assembled at the hardly completed new
University buildings on the Via Salaria, just outside Rome, to
hold a Special General Chapter and consider matters of general
interest to the order. Such assemblies are normally held once
every six years, and their deliberations can be of very great
importance since, subject to their subsequent confirmation by the
Holy See, they can introduce considerable changes into the
Salesian way of life, in both its spiritual and material
aspects.
- In 1965 there were 22,383 Salesians spread throughout
the world and 18,214 Salesian Sisters. Vocations might already be
dwindling in other religious orders and among the secular clergy,
but the Salesian story was still one of steady growth, indeed, of
phenomenal expansion. During the Nineteenth General Chapter Don
Renato Ziggiotti demonstrated that fidelity to tradition need not
imply stagnation, and became the first Salesian Superior General
to lay down his office during his life-time. Dialogue was in the
air, and the new Rector Major, Luigi Ricceri, who assumed office
on 27 April 1965, immediately showed himself to be an
indefatigable committee man with an outstanding genius for
resolving tensions fruitfully. I spoke to him in Rome on the day
of his election, and recall vividly both the satisfaction with
which his appointment was greeted, and the admiration aroused by
Don Ziggiotti's decision to refuse re-election.
- Pope Paul VI received all the members of the General
Chapter in a special Audience and delivered an allocution praising
the vitality and up-to-dateness of the Salesian spirit, and
pinpointing the salient problem areas with which the order was
confronted. Don Ricceri pledged the whole Congregation to total
renewal in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and I felt
enthusiastically grateful for my own Salesian vocation.
- If the Christian faith, said Don Ricceri, was to
become the basis and the animating principle of all our living,
our theology would have to take flesh in living experience, and a
theological outlook would have to run through everything, so that
we accustomed ourselves to ponder continually upon the realities
we were living through, in order to be able to read and interpret
the signs of our times in the light of Christ.
- He emphasized that, because we were involved in a
world in continual evolution, our feelings and attitudes could not
afford to become fixed or rigid, but needed to be inspired by the
principles of flexibility and unremitting renewal. Instead of
lamenting over the passing away of some features of life that time
had made both familiar and dear to us, we needed to cultivate an
openness towards all forms of good. We could not escape the
influence of rapid social changes, and so we needed continual
adjustment ourselves. Unless we learned to adjust, we ran the risk
of finding ourselves in a world that was strange and beyond our
ken.
- Christianity obliges us to have genuine love for our
neighbour, whom we believe to be one being with us in Christ. The
characteristic of the Christian religion should be the tenderness
which brings together the followers of Christ, a tenderness which
is open to all men, because all are sons and daughters of the same
Father in heaven and redeemed by the same Brother and Saviour
Jesus Christ. John XXIII had reminded us that charity in the
Christian sense was not limited to a cold, negative, peaceful
coexistence; it was a positive, universal, brotherly living
together in Christ.
- At the same time, said Don Ricceri, each retained his
own sense of identity. A person was not clay moulded into shape at
will by the potter, the toy of external pressures and
circumstances, but a being with the freedom to operate on his own,
endowed with his own particular potentialities and skills. Each
one had a personal history by which he had been formed in his
emotions, his culture, his religious attitude. He had a more or
less well-defined life project to make a reality. He had his own
unfathomable personal mystery. This had to be respected. Whatever
drew a person away from the harmonious flowering of his
personality drew him away from the response he should be making to
G-d, prevented his fulfilling his vocation in this life.
- I felt happy about my spiritual link with Carlos and
our shared Salesian vocation. As I was working on my thesis on
Ryle in the Sacred Heart Institute on Via Marsala, he was living
in another Salesian house in the grounds of the catacombs of Saint
Callistus on the outskirts of Rome, and attending the Pontifical
Biblical Institute with a view to taking the Licentiate in Sacred
Scripture. We saw each other occasionally, but there was no growth
in our relationship; instead, we prayed that we would each be a
good Salesian priest.
- My priestly ideal at that time is, I believe, best
summed up in the words of a modern French writer:
- “If we live with criticism we learn to condemn. If we
live with hostility we learn to fight. If we live with fear we
learn to be apprehensive. If we live with pity we learn to feel
sorry for ourselves. If we live with ridicule we learn to be shy.
If we live with jealousy we learn to feel guilty. And so I have
destroyed in germ a community of love. If we live with
encouragement we learn to be confident. If we live with tolerance
we learn to be patient. If we live with praise we learn to
appreciate. If we live with acceptance we learn to love. If we
live with approval we learn to be real. If we live with
recognition we learn that it is good to have a goal. If we live
with sharing we learn about generosity. If we live with honesty
and fairness we learn truth and justice. If we live with
friendliness we learn that this world is good to live in. If we
live with serenity our companions will know peace of mind. If we
live in a true Christian community we shall learn what heaven can
be. If I think this is worth living for G-d dwells in me and I in
him.”
- These words may sound too good to be true, and yet I
feel that several priests I have known embody the reality behind
the words, and do so not in any superficial, sugary, goody-goody
sort of way, but in some deeply consistent sense that still allows
the surface of their lives to have all those variations and
blendings of light and shade that I associate with genuineness and
spontaneity.
- As for myself, I was too self-conscious about my
efforts to grow towards perfection. I read and re-read
"The Concept of
Mind" ( Gilbert Ryle,
"The Concept of Mind",
London: Hutchinson, 1949) and came to feel with Ryle that the
story of man as being a union of body and soul was a myth, albeit
an important myth.
- Man was one. There was no thinking that was not also
bodying. Man hadn't so much got a body; he was a body. Better
still, man lived in a process of active bodying, and because his
bodying, in its many diiferent forms (such as seeing, smelling,
playing football, dancing, resting) was his, it had to be aware,
intelligent, reasonable, responsible, developing and open to
change.
- For joy includes expanding human awareness. My life in
Italy taught me that physical confrontation, bodily feelings and
wordless meetings could all help to improve the quality of
community living in terms of giving and taking affection. The more
I was willing to learn, the more I discovered that people were
good company. The only way to learn how to live was by living, and
the real love-in was generous social service. I made myself by
this process of acting on my environment and interacting with
others, bringing into being new possibilities, confronting myself
with ever-renewed challenges to my developing sense of freedom and
responsibility.
- It seemed to me that the meaning of life was that it
allowed me to ask about it, and if I had been asked whether or not
things made sense, my instinctive reply would have been that it
was up to us to make sense of them, and to make sense ourselves.
It was not, I felt, pride nor sensuality that I needed to fear
most, but idleness and laziness. I remembered Don Bosco's promise
- bread, work and heaven. Perseverance in doing good and the
steady effort required for such perseverance seemed to me
mortification enough.
- I do not mean I had no problems. I was deeply aware of
my continuing failure to bring about a satisfactory blending into
one of my intellectual, legalistic and meticulous approach to
life, religion. and priesthood, and of my passionate hunger for
beauty, freedom and spontaneity. I was still trying to reconcile
fidelity to my father's devotion to duty with my instinctive
appreciation of my mother's thirst for joy.
- On the one hand, I deprived myself of recreation,
checked and double-checked my library sources of information about
Ryle, obeyed the rulings of my religious superiors with
exactitude, made every possible economy in the use of money,
attended to the minutest details of my religious duties, treating
myself somewhat as a kind of super-computer responsive to each and
every demand made upon me from the outside, but lacking any
independent mind of my own. On the other hand, I enjoyed extra
wine or a double helping of pudding, liked to see actors on the
screen and other people in actual life doing and enjoying the
things I didn't allow myself to do or enjoy, and often felt that I
would have liked to be completely free, with no one at all making
any rules for me. I wanted to taste life to the full, but feared I
might lose heaven in the process. I studied hard hoping to find
for myself and others a practical way of having the best of both
worlds.
- I still feel this is the right thing to aim for, and
it is certainly very much the spirit of Roman Catholicism as it is
lived in Rome, and of the Salesian Congregation to which I have
been so happy to belong.
-
- In the summer of 1965 Father George Williams took the
opportunity of his presence in Rome for the Nineteenth General
Chapter to inform me that he now wanted to appoint me not only
principal lecturer in philosophy but also director of studies in
the Salesian Institute of Further Education at Beckford in
Worcestershire. Though I had expected the philosophical
appointment, this was a greater responsibility than I had
anticipated being mine in my first appointment as a priest, and I
put forward all my best efforts.
- I took up office in September 1965, after spending two
weeks' holiday in the parish of Scarlino near the Mediterranean
coast north of Grosseto, and six weeks at Landeck in the Austrian
Tyrol, where I studied German. I interpreted my rôle as
lecturer, tutor and administrator as that of a key-figure in the
life both of the Seminary and of the Salesian Congregation in
England.
- My appointment was part of the first wave of change in
Salesian seminary life occasioned by the Second Vatican Council
and the Nineteenth General Chapter. The Provincial, whose father
had been a sea-captain, wanted to have one person navigate the
choppy waters of curricular upheaval stirred up by the Council's
directives on the renewal of the whole approach to the training of
priests. He had known me for some time, liked my work, and hoped I
would prove to be the right person for what he knew would be an
arduous task.
- I was young and enthusiastic and immediately
introduced a number of changes. To the general satisfaction of the
students I replaced their six-volume Latin text-book of scholastic
philosophy by a single volume written in English, Lonergan's
Insight, which I already
knew very well, and which covers the same field, though a
superficial reader might find this hard to appreciate.
- Despite its great merits, or possibly because of them,
Insight is not easy reading, and the fact of its being written in
English made it impossible for the students to pretend that their
failure to understand it was the result of insufficient
familiarity with the Latin language. Some of them suggested I was
setting too high a standard. My own position was, and still is,
that while they may have been correct, this standard was no higher
than that set officialy by the Second Vatican Council's relevant
decree, as it had been previously set in earlier Papal
documents.
- The Provincial never wished to question the truth of
this statement in any way, so far as I know. However, it was my
own private opinion that neither he nor any of the other members
of the staff in Beckford during my first year there gave any
evidence of possessing any real philosophical understanding. I
believed that even those members of the staff who also lectured in
philosophy were not genuinely competent to do so. They had a more
lor less extensive knowledge of one or more of the technical
languages in which philosophical questions are sometimes explored,
but I found little evidence that they either understood the issues
themselves or cared to commit themselves seriously to their
further investigation. One senior priest, Father Aloysius Coppo,
SDB, for example, preferred to study The
Times' weather reports. Since the staff was
appointed by the Provincial, not by myself, there seemed little I
could do about it.
- The Rector of the House, Father Laurence Castelvecchi,
SDB, did have a philosophical outlook, but did not lecture in the
subject during my period of office in Beckford, and used his
considerable energies in other ways.
- I had taken up my own appointment in Beckford before I
had completed the final draft of my thesis for my doctorate in
philosophy, because the Provincial had wanted me in Beckford as
soon as possible. Don Girardi would have preferred me to stay in
Rome for a further year, but having completed my obligatory
minimum period of attendance in the University, I chose to do my
best to meet Father Williams's wishes.
- Accordingly, I spent many long hours during my first
year back in Beckford completing my thesis. At the same time, as a
matter of course, I gave well over twenty lectures each week, was
my own secretary, cleaned my own room, fulfilled my administrative
function as director of studies, and attended to my priestly and
ministerial duties in the house and neighbourhood. At no time that
I can remember did either the Provincial or the Rector of the
house encourage me in my research efforts, although they
appreciated my contribution to the work of the community.
- On the other hand, and especially as my father was
dead, my mother continued to devote her remaining strength to
following as best she could my sister's career and principally my
own. As she had previously given me her milk, made my clothes,
sent me to a good school, and had vestments made for my
ordination, so now she paid for me to have the books and
photostats I needed for my teaching, my Lonergan studies, and my
research for my doctorate.
- Despite the many other calls on my time and energies,
I did finish my dissertation, and in the Easter week of 1966 I
flew to Rome and defended my thesis successfully in the
Aula Magna or Great Hall
of the new Higher Institute of Latin Studies in the brand new
buildings on the Via Salaria of the Pontifical Salesian
University, which I had visited before their completion together
with my mother two years previously, when we had spent a few days'
holiday in Rome together. My mother was delighted at my new
success, which I celebrated on Easter Sunday by eating an
ice-cream cornet in Saint Peter's Square, as the Pope gave his
blessing to the City and the World.
- My effective proclamation as Doctor of Philosophy did
not become thoroughly official until 2 September 1968
(oxford02.jpg), when the Secretary
General of the Salesian University acknowledged the due receipt of
fifty printed copies of an extract from my thesis, published in
Ireland with the Imprimatur
of John Charles, Archbishop of Dublin (cf
dialogue.htm ). However, my final examination took place on 14 April 1966, a few days before my
thirty-second birthday, and from thence forward I was a Doctor of
Philosophy and, as such, fit to begin to study.
- ADDITIONAL
NOTES:
- 1. Students of the phenomenon of bilocation may
experience some difficulty in tracking down a local police
constable's written report of his sighting of somebody matching
Levi's description more than a mile away, on Bradshawgate in
Bolton town-centre, at about the same time as this alleged suicide
- my father's nagual or astral self may have been the Good
Samaritan, actively saving some other passer-by from having his
skull very severely damaged by the impact of a broken bracket,
which suddenly fell down from one of the main lamp-standards
there.
- 2. J. D. Solomon argues that, since beauty is
infinite, 'perfect harmony' is not a sensible concept. He suggests
that joy lies in the search for beauty, and in the intensification
of our experience of it; the resolution of harsh discords often
provides us with the most intense experiences of this kind.
'Bodying' is among G-d's methods of intensifying our experience of
beautiful structures.
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