Some who find this story interesting may still have grave doubts about its truth. For life in an open society develops our awareness of the existence of alternatives to any established body of attitudes and beliefs. Our attitude to words becomes non-magical. Thinking is reflective. Motives are differentiated and segregated rather than mixed and confused. An experiential method is used. People like to believe the future can be better than the past, but are not wedded to their own ideas as strongly as before because, while these are still interrelated, they are no longer irrevocably linked to any particular individual realities, and so one can confess readily one's present ignorance. In an open society science rests on the appreciation of coincidences, chances and probabilities. Diagnosis is preferred to divination. There is a destructive attitude towards established theories and value-systems. Thus, as Rabbi Heschel has noted, the most significant form of education becomes the cultivation of total sensitivity and one's personal capacity for radical amazement - no so much inserting motivations as unleashing capabilities for affection, for freedom, for open-mindedness.
I hope I am open-minded; I know I am a Catholic. I believe Christian confession is a sacrifice of praise that should still be offered to G-d by his creatures in various ways according to the diversity of their moods and circumstances, a strange music in his honour. Confession is also a grace G-d bestows upon us. We acknowledge our ignorance and the fullness of his knowledge. We confess and recognize his position in the universe and our nothingness before him. We serve his interests with devotion. We trust the paths of his providence, however dark and devious they may seem. We love him without limit. We humble ourselves in his presence. We praise and glorify his majesty. We confess his rights before men by the way in which we organize our lives. We confess our sorrow before him for having trampled those rights under foot. In faith, in hope, in love, we confess G-d by the totality of our life, now as pilgrims with restless hearts, in the fatherland at peace and rest in Christ, in our Father's arms. In this biblical conception of confession, confession of sin is always subordinated to confession of praise, and sorror for sin has nothing at all to do with psychological guilt-feelings which are a self-centred sort of indulgence the Catholic can do without.
That is why the Confessions of Augustine are such a notorious disappointment to those interested in the details of his career of vice; the Saint was writing all the time about G-d, who is necessarily at the centre of Christian confession.
Unlike Marcus Aurelius,105 Augustine never took to himself the full credit for his own virtues; while he admitted his responsibility for his own personal sins, he never tried to reduce G-d's rôle in his life to that of some celestial computer arranging its external details, so that circumstances might favour one on whom fortune had deigned to smile.
Unlike Rousseau,106 he would have thought it futile to provide a bald, even if accurate account of his own individual behaviour. Christian confession always has to be permeated with the light of Christ.
As I have said, I had a Catholic mother and received a Catholic upbringing. However, I myself am responsible for my present-day commitments. The newly-born child breathes in a biological world of which, whether he knows it or not, oxygen is a constituent element, and this world is immediately opened to him by his five senses. With growth the horizons of the world are pushed back, and it comes explicitly to contain a larger area and more dimensions of the total universe of being. With his introduction to language the child hears stories, and his imagination is freed from the limitations of his immediate environment, reaching out to far-away places and times long ago, even becoming open to the notion of continuing for ever and ever. Later still, the boy or girl makes a decisive step forward into the world of technical language and abstract terms, and may be able to conceive, although not actually to picture in the mind's eye, worlds in which there are objects of seven dimensions, in which two and two would make eight, from which death is banished, worlds, in short, in which everything is possible. This is the root of imaginative literature, and of so many people's continuing fascination with witchcraft. However, man has invented philosophy to bring his own theorising under critical review, and to impose some sort of check on the exuberance of his creative imagination.
Whatever the charms of existentialism, this, of course, is the point of objectivity. Experientially, objectivity is the given as given; normatively, it is my preferring the openness of my detached and unrestricted desire to know to the closure that otherwise would be imposed by subjective desires and fears; absolutely, it is attained in my unconditional assent to evident fact; comprehensively, it emerges only within a patterned set of true judgments.
Such objectivity does not spring up overnight, because a man is not only an inquiring spirit. As a human inquirer, I am embodied, liable to mythic consciousness, in need of self-criticism, involved in developments that are at once social, historical, scientific and philosophical, open, too, I am suggesting, to a theology that can transform me totally in all these dimensions of my being and effect my entrance into a higher mystery, the operative presence in our human lives together of the graciously indwelling Trinity.
Development does not come easily. My present field of inquiry is always the region of the concrete universe I aim to master by available norms, structures and procedures. My present horizon is the maximum field of vision from my determinate standpoint. Whenever my relative horizon is radically threatened I experience at least subconscious anxiety, existential dread and strong resistance to change. Nevertheless, the need may arise for an entire shift of orientation, direction and concern, i.e., for a radical transformation of myself, my operations, my present world of meaning to overcome my alienation-through-ignorance-through-horizon-limitation from the reality of my true self, and through and because of that, from the reality of reality itself.
Human living can, indeed, be a continuing process of learning for ourselves and from each other. Education is our initiation into human community. The educational process is the strategy from rudimentary apprehension and modes of choice towards apprehension and commitment at the level of our present age in this contemporary context. The programme is that of fidelity to what Father Bernard Lonergan, SJ, (1904-1984) calls the Transcendental Imperative: Be attentive; be intelligent; be reasonable; be responsible; develop, and, if necessary, change.
Play, the activity in which we, perhaps seriously, engage when we are free from the demands of whatever has a serious relationship to our ordinary living, is particularly important in our education, both as children and during adult life,107 mainly because we learn that play is worthwhile in itself and doesn't need any extrinsic justification, but also because, like going to church, it enables our imagination to attach a special sacred significance to certain specific places and times, so making of them some sort of micro-model of what we would secretly like the whole universe to be.
The whole world is, I feel, a play-room. It has no meaning of its own, so far as I can tell, but we can love it passionately if we like. It is a complex whole of interlocking meanings establishing and interpreting one another incessantly, like the multiple images in a hall of mirrors.
The Sun is just the closest to us of the hundred billion stars comprised in the Milky Way, which is in turn simply one of perhaps ten billion similar galaxies scattered about in space. Electromagnetic radiations pulsating through the cosmos, some with a wavelength of seven million miles, indicate the fact of relationships between our Earth and other energy-sources, but what, if anything, we make of these at least partly depends on us.108
Thus, our art creates patterns that intelligently and intelligibly express our feelings. Even at its most sensuous, art communicates a meaning much more than it insinuates or awakens an emotion. Dancing, for instance, is ecstatic because by dancing we can leap our of privacy into community, and out of appearance into the sacred reality at its heart.109
If dancing is a ritual of religious power, music is a personal meditation. It yields insights into the dynamic process our interior development follows, now strong, now hesitant, sometimes smooth and flowing, at other times disturbed or hasty, here excited, and there calm and, perhaps, somewhat dreamy, with passing moments of a strange depth and poignancy.
Sculpture and architecture together can help us to understand the power and grace of human bodying, and the qualities and range of the spatial world in which we live, and move, and have our being. The pictorial arts express the many human interpretations and projects with which we are free to shape and fill this space.
Literature helps us create an illusion of life itself. Literature is the elaboration of our dreams on paper. This is no less true when it is a case of historical and political writings. In these cases, the content of the words may only mirror the outer features of personages and events, but the music of the prose is an imaginative projection of the writer's Weltanschauung, his feel for life.110
Yet the supreme work of art remains each person's life itself. A man's behaviour is the creative expression of his inner reality. Here, as elsewhere, bad art is irreligious. Indifference to art spells the downfall of society; when art prospers, the community is healthy.111
In the words of Beethoven: “Every art, all genuine feeling, is a moral progress. He who truly understands my music must go free of all the misery which others bear about with them. When I am alone, I am never alone. I prefer the spiritual realm and him who stands above all spiritual and celestial monarchs. The Almighty, the Eternal, the Unending! Music is the sole incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge, which comprehends mankind. It gives prophetic vision and heavenly wisdom.”
Bernard Lonergan shares the view that art is meaning, but distinguishes seven vehicles of meaning:112
Complementary to these seven vehicles of meaning are four patterns of experience, or sets of intelligible relations linking together sequences of sensations, memories, images, conations, emotions and bodily movements:
Lonergan has cultivated the intellectual pattern of experience, and to those dissatisfied both with the classicism that is dying and with the new romanticism that is, at first fulfilling and exhilarating but ultimately disappointing, his achievement offers the example of a critique as rigorous, as disciplined, and as theoretical as the present development of the various natural and human sciences and of philosophy and theology will allow.
His Method in Theology proposes the functional differentiation of eight dimensions of theological science: thorough research to secure critical editions of all relevant texts and documents; interpretation to express for the benefit of others their precise meaning as understood by the enlightened interpreter; history to bring to light what as a matter of fact actually happened in the particular original events being examined, and just what was the basic movement in significance and reality going forward through all the varied interpretations purporting to bring into perspective and communicate those events; joint serious study by people with different outlooks to appreciate the genetic-dialectic unfolding to date of at least all the major interpretations and histories of the original events; a basic horizon language providing for the theoretical and critical thematisation of the heuristic presuppositions, that are the foundations of human science; a doctrinal statement of minimum judgments and affirmations of fact; a clear, distinct and systematic expression in technical language of the nature of the realities one judges and affirms to exist; communications to assure relevant collaboration with specialists in communications theory, linguistics, comparative literature, political theory, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, theology, etc.
In his Parts of Animals Aristotle had conceived of the man who had received a general education as one who was able to evaluate or appreciate practically everything, but Lonergan acknowledges that a qualified judgment may sometimes call for the ongoing collaboration of a number of specialists, and this, too, is a fact we have to learn to live with. For the purpose of education is not an abstraction, not a set of prohibitions, not a non-existent ideal, not a system, but a concrete individual and collective history - the human good114 and, I believe, the fullness of Christ.
However austere the requirements of Lonergan's intellectualism, his confidence in the value of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility and openness may seem excessive.
“The symbolic mind has always distrusted attempts at theory. For symbolic consciousness offers the human spirit a richer, stranger world: theoretic proof yields to reiteration or variation on the same theme; the principle of the excluded middle to a superdetermina-tion which combines opposites; negation to positing and then overwhelming of what is posited; the single theme gives way to the simultaneous development of several themes. Further, the symbolic attitude is able to promise the human spirit a release for its affectivity and aggressivity, lacking to the theoretical attitude. The symbolic man really ‘knows’ what it feels like to live at this time, at this place, with this experience. He knows how to create a whole series of artistic forms powerful enough to lead others as well to experience the same depths, the same joys, beauties, horrors of concrete human existence. And he knows that the symbols a man chooses or creates reveal not his ‘theories’ on life but the more fundamental attitude or orientation which defines him.”115
This is why so many have been fascinated by the teachings of the Yaqui medicine man, sorcerer and shaman, Don Juan: “The world,” he claims, “is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. We talk to others and to ourselves mainly about what we see. We have been using our eyes to judge the world ever since the time when we were born. You must use your ears to take some of the burden from your eyes. Listen to the sounds of the world. The world is incomprehensible. It is sheer mystery.”116
“Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he's there. I would say that this is the time when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires nothing, and instead of playing with his fellow men like they were toys, he meets them in the midst of their folly. The only difference between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can't. A man who sees has no longer an active interest in his fellow men. Seeing has already detached him from absolutely everything he knew before.”117
“The symbolic man,” Tracy comments, “knows who Dante was. He can only be puzzled by the peculiar phenomenon of an Aquinas or a Newton. But his puzzlement need not prove insoluble. The theoretic, like the symbolic, is not first a series of products but an attitude. Aquinas demanded in effect that the human mind be allowed the full range of its unrestricted desire to know; that it be allowed, even in the region of religious faith, to detach itself from the image needed for its period of intellectual gestation and simply to understand - in strictly scientific terms - on its abstractive terms, with its rigorous norms, with its theoretic demands; that it be further allowed to detach itself from its own act of understanding by finding that act's scientific self-expression in a concept, a theorem, eventually in a whole set of related and cognate theorems, a system.”115
Jung confessed his inability to understand the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and it is interesting to think that the difference between the intellectual and symbolic mentalities may correlate with differences in the extent to which the cerebrum rules or is ruled by the cerebellum. It has been suggested that the latter, which is more highly developed in women, is the seat of the unconscious and of feminine intuition, while the cerebrum is concerned with consciously organised thought-processes.
This would shed considerable light on the present demand for a refashioning of woman's rôle in the Church and in society at large, and on the insistence of an exclusively male and celibate priesthood in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church, which her critics have seen as part of the hierarchy's subtly aggressive lust for power.118
It is true, for instance, that the rite for the blessing of holy water uses the word “power” no less than eight times, together with such similarly rousing terms as “command,” “judge,” “adjure,” “onslaught,” “drive out,” “ward off,” “subdue” and “banish.”
G-d's true power is the powerless power of love, but in the culture that this rite reflects he does seem to have been assigned the rôle of some sort of fire-god, quickening even water with his spirit, thereby almost separating it from all connection with earth to unite it with heavenly air. Such formulae, in other words, recall the cultural conflicts between patriarchal and matriarchal religious forms and values.
No attachment to the transcendent meaning and supernatural values enshrined in Catholicism can justify the perpetuation of such incongruous prayers, rite, laws and institutions within the Church.
As its cultural basis in Aegean, Mother-and-Son religious traditions strengthens the popular emotional appeal of Catholicism, so opposition to it is connected with its surviving involvement in Aramean and Indo-European warrior-god rituals.
I have mentioned that the priesthood is reserved to men, and the theology of the Trinity is also usually expressed in purely masuline terms. A second-century Egyptian heresy identified the sacramental eating of the flesh of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion with the Orphic ascetics' easting of the Hercules-Dionysus-Mithras bull in their initiation ceremony. This implied that in Christianity, as in Orphicism, the female, the matriarchal, the water and the earth were, if not bad, at least in need of purification, while the male, the patriarchal, the fiery and aetherial were good, and not to be contaminated by contact with woman.
As a woman procured the earthly ruin of Hercules and obliged him to flee to a more spiritual plane where he could encounter the Goddess in the security of a male environment,119 so in the blessing of holy water the God who judges the world by fire is invoked to banish the evil serpent from the water and the salt.
Woman's rights are not totally denied, but she is constrained to play a male-inspired power game; man is afraid to penetrate woman's real world. Woman can influence man by her beauty, but only when she disguises this as an instrument of power in a male-defined world - the selling-power of advertising and pornography, the prestige-power of beauty queens and fashion models, but less often the sensitive human subject of feelings and emotions of oneness with nature.
While the Catholic Church honours Mary, she fails to recognise sufficiently the femininity of G-d. In the Old Testament this was expressed in the symbolism of the Ark and the Mercy Seat, and in the distinction between G-d's holiness and G-d's glory, though these were, of course, ultimately identical.
By the glory of G-d, the Wisdom or Sophia of the later Hebrew canonical scriptures, the Glory of the Lord, the Shekinah of the Qabalists, was meant G-d's inner nature or self together with the external, visible expression of this in impressive observable events, things or persons, and the correlative acknowledgement and response made to G-d by men and a personified nature. In the Old Testament the creation of Israel was not just an action G-d performed; it was an impressive revelation and expression of G-d's glory. This glory of G-d was feminine in several respects.
Typically, for instance, G-d in her glory was both a mystery and a revelation. She imposed her presence on men. She was intolerant of any idolatrous worship directed elsewehre. She jealously demanded recognition of the mysterious infinity of her splendours. She brooked no rivals. She welcomed the sound of music and the singing of canticles in her honour. She loved applause. She was beautiful, attractive and fascinating.
If priests overstress the importance of dogma and canon law, they run the risk of making an idol in their own male image, instead of respecting the ultimate mystery, at once immanent and transcendent, as the omnipresent centre of reality.
In the Second Vatican Council the Church stated officially that it was ready to acknowledge and make reparation for its sinfulness and shortcomings in the past, saying that if the influence of events or of the times had led to deficiencies in conduct, in Church discipline, or even in the formulation of doctrine, these would be appropriately rectified at the proper moment.120
However, as well as understandably insisting on the preservation of the deposit of faith, the Church has so far limited her dialogue of renewal to attempts to improve her relations with other male-dominated bodies, such as the other Christian churches, international Marxism,121 and the Free Masons. Dialogue with witches has still to come.
Men blame women for being fickle, but continue to make impossible claims upon their attention. If the Copts combine the three Maries of the crucifixion into a single character, thereby identifying the Virgin Mary with the Triple Goddess of the New, Full and Old Moon, this reflects not so much a peculiar theology as Western culture's half-denial and half-Sado-Masochist-recognition of femininity. Male intelligence finds it hard to integrate the vision of the white goddess of birth and growth with that of the red goddess of love and strife and the black goddess of death and divination. Man fears the female spider, the queen bee, sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, hag, mermaid, blue-eyed, long fair-haired, red-lipped, pale-faced, slender, lovely, hook--nosed lady; she makes his hair stand on end, his eyes water, his throat constrict, his skin crawl and his spine shiver - she is sex, fright and lust, energy and eternal delight, and her embrace is death. Is this only the cerebrum's resistance to the attempted domination of the cerebellum?
Whenever persons come together they instinctively assume a mutual need to relate to each other, make themselves secure against dependence on aliens, and either overcome or avoid any existential threat to the survival of their relationship.122 Growth in understanding leads to the development of sometimes implicit rules and structures to transform fear of loss into hope of gain. The dynamic tension between this human evolution and its instinctual basis gives group process its characteristic polarity, dialectic and organicity. The present group culture expresses the conflict between individual desires and the prevailing group mentality;123 group life itself is the kaleidoscopic interplay of individual needs, group mentality and group culture.
I may wonder whether I am angry because the group is ignoring my problem, or because the others in the group are handling some unconscious problem of mine that I would much prefer not to have raised. I may appear happy and cheerful, and yet suspect myself of being the anxiety-ridden, depressed victim of circumstances I cannot consciously even bear to admit. Only the limitations of language present me with such seeming alternatives. If I truly understand my situation I realise it comprehends both Gestalts simultaneously. I can transcend this figure-ground contrast in a sort of non-focussed, total awareness of my whole existential situation.
This is not a question of losing my sense of order, but of preferring organic and creative chaos to any stultifying organisation of living process. Order remains, but it is unconscious and hidden.124 Formal education may actively prepare me for living, but it is my trusting surrender to the dark night of gestation and incubation that constitutes my personal commitment to reality. A sudden inspiration may at any time challenge me to project myself impressively upon my world and to transmute its horizons, and my subsequent fidelity in living-towards-death in the world I have thus responsibly transformed progressively verifies the authenticity of my claim to personal truth. Such, I submit, is the mystery of creative process.
While we remain indebted to Jung for his brilliant studies in depth of certain aspects of human psychology, it is unfortunate that he did not understand Aquinas. Aquinas handled very subtle questions. Some of his key-ideas derived from Aristotle who had expressed them in a Greek language insufficiently nuanced to preserve them from the distortions of lesser minds. Thomas's own key-words were Latin expressions previously used rather loosely by other philosophers and theologians in ways which were certainly technical, but which were, unfortunately, notably divergent from his own usage. In addition to this, the mind of Aquinas was growing all the time, with the result that his own use of words was never static, but had to develop in step with his evolving thought. The Thomist development was on many fronts at once, so that it is hard to isolate one particular question for detailed study, and we are met by the challenging task of mastering the whole.
The simplicity, profundity and brilliance of St. Thomas's technical exposition of his thought have long been obscured by his interpreters' lack of self-understanding, and by their failure to grasp the precise meaning of his language. While Plato had tried to know ideas, and Aristotle had concentrated on the natures of material things, with Augustine insisting on self-knowledge, Aquinas's principal aim was to know being.
The contemporary aberrations of man's practical and speculative intelligence neither invalidate nor admit integration with his real historical achievements. We should not allow those achievements to be lost sight of. When error exists in matters of principle it can be corrected, not indeed by deduction which presupposes true principles, but by collative thought and by the acquisition of sound intellectual habits which effect a right attitude towards principles, in other words, by some sort of personal conversion.
That is why there is no easy way of bringing the traditional wisdom back to its rightful place at the centre of all our living. The experts' past failures to understand have generated a relative fixity in misunderstanding, because although the explicit correction of prior misunderstanding is not needed for an individual to understand correctly his own personal situation, it is necessary if he is to be able to extrapolate accurately from that personal situation of himself in his private world to that of other persons differently situated in their own private worlds, all of which can be related to the contemporary developments in the total universe of being only by the achievement of a wisdom purified of misunderstanding.
Human beings develop in time. For each person there is a time before and a time after his conversion. Prior to his conversion a man is the spontaneous subject of his own actually intellectual nature; subsequent to his conversion he is the deliberately knowing and willing subject of his own intellectual nature both as already actuated and as open to a further and fuller self-realization.
Conversion takes place under the influence of other persons, who either help us to understand ourselves, merit our trust, or win our love. Normally, however, the development they promote within us is principally with respect to our own immediate situation. Priests, poets and philosophers are relatively few. Myths abound. Intellectual bewilderment is compounded with a sort of loving that is less honest and less total than truth would require. Hence, the ambivalence of the human situation, and the questionability, noted by the existentialists, of the contributions others can make to our own personal growth.
We have to learn to make our own judgments. We can reject racism, colonialism, war, paternalism, pharisaism, estrangement and fear. Each one is what hope he has and gives; he is what he can give freely; he is what he loves. As living-towards-my-dying I am a quite unique person; I have a secret I not only won't but can't tell - a secret that is utterly individual and private.
Community life is authentic when interpersonal communication respects this valuable secret which we all, in our identically different ways, share. Social maturity implies the ability to relate to others outside myself as thoroughly different both from me and from each other, as having each an ultimately individual identity that cannot be transcended and which, indeed, constitutes the most radical condition of possibility of all movements of transcendence. Only I can transcend my situation.
Some practitioners of Transactional Analysis seem to regard this “I,” the data-processing Adult component of my personality, as devoid of any life of its own, and essentially symbiotic with the instinctual vital rhythms of the Child or the introjected prohibitions and permissions of the socially dominant Parent.125 The philosophical implications of this view are that man is either just another species of animal, or a social construct devoid of any real identity, or a shaky amalgam of the two - a bundle of socially conditioned reflexes.
This may be why Arthur Janov directs his clients to give up all smoking and all alcoholic drinks; not to take any drugs; to give up compulsive eating, biting nails, keeping busy and on the run, oversleeping, etc.; not to make phone calls, see friends, watch TV or go to the cinema; and to be alone. He refuses to believe in the myth of some universal, basic, human anxiety, but regards the need for love as fundamental, and believes that it is only if and because this need is not met that the real self feels alone, feels constrained to play an unreal game of make-believe in order to win some love, feels hurt that such love is given only to the make-believe image and never to the real self, and, in consequence, feels angry, so angry, perhaps, that the intolerably great feelings of loneliness, hurt and anger have to be repressed, so that the social and unreal self thereafter experiences only superficial and unreal feelings, the feelings of the false self, that do nothing to alleviate the gnawing pain of the real person underneath. When clients enter therapy, it is found that with the progressive disintegration of the false self and the dissipation of anxiety, interpersonal love is peaceful and non-aggressive, and there is no need to use sex symbolically in a love-game. Real love, he claims, replaces pansexual eroticism.126 Is the client actually better as a person?
To this question I cannot replay with an unqualified “Yes.” As I have emphasized already questioning is a fundamentally human dynamic performance, and can never be reduced to or exhausted by its multiple particular expressions in the form of asking-a-question. What questions I ask is a function of my Child and my Parent, in other words, of my instinctual needs and my social situation, and primal therapy may re-condition me, so that such questions no longer provide any notable interior or external crisis in my life, because I am no longer neurotic. However, since the asking-of-questions only partially expresses the dynamism of questioning, my need to continue questioning remains. That I am a questioner is the core of my Adult, simply because it is what makes me human.
The traditional rational psychology is not abstract theory but the conscious explicitation of this concrete psychological reality. A blind man may listen to a lecture on colour, but has little chance of finding it other than obscure. A deaf person may read a book about music, but it will not be easy for him to make up his mind whether the author makes sense or is talking nonsense. Likewise it is only by growth in self-understanding that I can hope to find out what is meant by growth in self-understanding.127
The phenomenologists have given a lot of attention to the object of consciousness. They regard consciousness as an intentional experience of the subject, who tends towards, reaches out to, tries to get into contact with something distinct from himself as conscious subject, viz., an intentional object. Seeing means reaching out towards a world of colour, hearing reaching out towards a world of sounds, loving reaching out towards the person of the beloved.
Aristotle and Aquinas realized this alleged intentionality is a myth; we may conveniently imagine things this way, but in reality they are otherwise. Objects of consciousness are never the terms of conscious acts in the phenomenological sense, but are either the agent or instrumental causes of their occurrence, or their final causes, the goals to which they are naturally orientated. As light causes my eyes to see and my seeing is naturally orientated towards my world of colour, as sounds cause my ears to hear and my hearing is naturally orientated towards my world of sounds, so the intrinsic intelligibility of things and events in the material universe causes my mind to understand and my questioning mind is naturally orientated towards knowledge not only of my private world but of the whole universe of being.
Seeing, hearing and understanding are activities in the sense that I am more dynamically alive when engaged in them than when I give them a miss. However, despite the use of the active voice, they are more experiences that happen to me than effects I produce, and are, in this sense, passive, the result in me of light, sound and objective evidence.
While I may rest content if I see some colour and hear some sound, my thirst for knowledge seems unlimited, so that even a total mastery of the impressive intelligibility of the material cosmos would sharpen rather than satisfy my quest for an adequate understanding of the total universe of being.
In my experience I come to appreciate that knowledge is an identity, not a confrontation. My eyes are the instruments of my seeing which is trying not to possess but to become a world of colour, while my hearing seeks to become a world of sound, and my mind the universe. My mind to me a kingdom is!
While the enraptured child, the deluded mad-man, or the ecstatic seer may identify totally with his inner vision, normally I remain aware that an eye is an eye and a picture is a picture. However, when I look at a picture with my eyes, what the picture is physically and unconsciously, my seeing becomes consciously and intentionally, and since consciousness has more reality than its absence, my seeing is, in a sense, more truly the picture than the material picture itself.128 It is principally in this sense, I feel, that man is a microcosm; thanks to my growth in understanding I can become, not physically but intentionally, all things.
Growth in human understanding is growth in being and a central aspect of man's progressive making of himself. Just as food satisfies my hunger, or the care of her child is congenial to a woman's maternal instincts, so the achievement of the reasonable good suits the human appetite for truth, while an unreasonable state of affairs can suit only a misguided sort of self-indulgence, mascarading as self-love.
This may be why both Aristotle and Aquinas thought there were close connections between the achievement of wisdom and the life of virtue.129
For the theologian adult moral behaviour is the normal expression of a mind recollected in G-d, a will full of love for him, and a personal resolve to seek him with all one's energies. Moral behaviour means love, peace and joy. If I sin, I break the divine law, betray G-d's love, oppose the reign of Christ, destroy my own relationship with my risen saviour, and support the devil's work.
Without the transforming influence of the gift of G-d's love man is unable to lead a perfectly moral life. Nevertheless, he is born with his essential freedom unimpaired, and can gradually achieve effective, existential freedom by progressively liberating himself from the tyranny of material restrictions and from the manifold consequences of human failures in love, under the direct and indirect influence of G-d's transforming love.
Abnormal and pathological conditions may, indeed, lessen an individual's moral responsibility, but the more mature a person is, the more his practical behaviour is influenced by his developing personal knowledge, and, as Pius XII reminded Italian Catholic Jurists on 26 May 1957: “The mass of men and, indeed, the vast majority have not only the natural capacity, but even the possibility in the concrete of taking autonomous decisions and regulating their own behaviour… There are ample confirmations of this in legal practice, in social life, and in the revelation of the Old and New Testaments.”
Sometimes I may be uncertain what the positive moral law prescribes in a particular set of circumstances, uncertain whether this particular set of circumstances is in fact as it seems to be, uncertain of the practical way to act in order to do effectively what I know that the law prescribes, or just uncertain about my own individual degree of moral obligation to involve myself in this particular situation, having regard to all the other relevant features of my life and character.
Life is too short to produce any cogently argued justification proof against all objections and difficulties for even one practical moral decision taken in problematic circumstances, but my own conscience is satisfied if I can sincerely justify my own behaviour to myself, not necessarily in so many words. In order to meet this requirement in the more difficult cases Catholic moral theologians have evolved a variety of approaches.
Personally I agree with Augustine that where there is doubt there is freedom. An uncertain obligation is no obligation at all. Certainly it would be wrong of me to expose myself to the risk of doing anything wicked, but here what is in doubt is precisely whether or not a certain course of action is wicked, whether or not it is good. To place unnecessary restrictions on the range and scope of my personal freedom would be a tyrannical procedure and likely to incline me to turn a deaf ear eventually even to appropriately proposed moral vetoes. Obviously laxity is not implied, since I am always obliged to act with a good intention, viz., in a spirit of love.130
Any errors of judgment I make are morally reprehensible only if they are voluntary and concern something I ought to know, though an error about something I am not obliged to know becomes sinful if I pretend to be certain about it.131
In the annals of philosophy questions of right and wrong have an interesting history. Ockham, Descartes, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Nietsche concluded, in their very different ways, that explicit and positive laws provided the basic criterion by which to assess the morality of human behaviour.
Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and C. Bouglé have suggested that social factors are the really decisive ones.
Classical Marxists used to tell us to conform with the laws of historical process.
There were also attempts to decide moral issues by hooking them up with general cosmic process, as in Stoicism, Evolutionism and Vitalism.
Such detached, spectator-like approaches to ethical decisions, however, cut little ice with the modern mind and settle nothing, since there can be contrasting legal-systems, diverse societies, different readings of the lessons of history, and conflicting analogies from nature.
Contrast, for instance, the following arguments based on nature in favour of either a hierarchical or an egalitarian structuring of human relationships:
Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida132 favours hierarchy -
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order:
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered…
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows; each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong -
Between whose endless jar justice resides -
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.”
Instead, Jocasta in Euripides' Phœnissæ133 is an egalitarian -
“Why are you so keen on status-seeking, son? Don't be, it's quite wrong - the worst possible guide for life you could have. When that idea is current in a family or a state, it always ruins those who believe in it. Yet you're crazy about it! Much better to put your money on equality, my boy: that's what makes for solidarity among friends and townships and nations. Equality is what's naturally right for men, you see: when you get the overprivileged and the underprivileged lined up against each other there's always trouble. After all, the idea of equality is responsible for things like weights and measures and mathematics; the dark night and the bright sun take an equal share all the year round - neither's jealous because it has to give way to the other. If the sun and the night are prepared to do this for men's benefit, aren't you prepared to go fifty-fifty in your inheritance with your brother? And if you don't, what happens to the idea of justice?”
Certainly, legal, social, historical and natural factors of situations need to be taken into account in the maturing of one's personal decision as to how to respond to the challenges they present, but the main principles of right human action are to be found within that action itself.
Julian Huxley has for this reason called man “the only organism with a conscience.” Shaftesbury and Hutcheson found the secret of good living in the cultivation of the feeling of benevolence. Smith (1723-90) believed virtue consisted in disentangling imaginative reactions from self-centred considerations, gradually toning them down to the level of intensity of the detached observer, and increasing the volume of their transmission to chime in with the company's prevailing mood. Construed in this way, conscience, which Darwin agreed most importantly differentiated man from the lower animals, becomes the Freudian super-ego, the internal Parent that mirrors social requirements, but provides no indication at all about how we are to evaluate the moral state of past or present societies.
Comte commended emotional altruism. Stuart Mill and Sidgwick claimed that a voluntary action was right whenever and only when no other action possible to the agent under the circumstances would have caused more pleasure; in all other cases it was, for that reason, wrong. Earlier, Aristippus and Epicurus had regarded the securing of a maximum of pleasure as the criterion of morality. The utilitarianism of Bentham sought the greatest good of the greatest number. Aristotle favoured the promotion of happiness. Some Thomistic writers within the Catholic tradition have made ultimate happiness the deciding factor in moral issues. Buddhists134 and, among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer, have pointed to those actions as preferable which led to a minimum of unhappiness.
There are, of course, difficulties in deciding what is to count as pleasure, or good, or happiness. More fundamentally, however, I notice that I do not give moral approval to the man who does even the right thing, if he does it for a wrong motive. In other words, morality is not limited to the externals of human performance; it also regards the subject's intentions. We pass moral judgments not merely on human acts, but also on attitudes and dispositions.
Not everyone places the emphasis in the same place. Orthodox Marxists are sometimes too objective. Some Christians, psycho-analysts and existentialists lay excessive stress on subjective intentions. Thus, the vagueness of the Stoic account of world-order, the Cynicism of Antisthenes, the individualism of Max Stirner and the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Polin over-emphasise the moral significance of human freedom as creative of human values.
In 1966 Joseph Fletcher proposed his Situation Ethics135 according to which nothing possesses moral value except by reference to persons, because only love is intrinsically good; ethical norms are at best relative, unauthoritative and voidable, because only love is absolute; justice is identical with true love which is in itself calculating, prudent, shrewd, efficient, far-sighted and obligatory - not an optional extra; love is impartial, focuses in the area of greatest need, and is not commanded by sympathy, affection, benevolence or preference; only the end justifies the means, nothing else, so that it is good to kill one's own child to save many lives; the decisions of love are, therefore, situational, and no prefabricated rule-kit can meet the issue.
Christian writers on moral issues have traditionally noted four distinct factors in the evaluation of human behaviour, viz., the motive of the agent, the intrinsic nature of his act, its foreseen likely effects, and the modifying circumstances. The traditional Christian view is that other good circumstances can never outweigh a fundamental evil in the situation itself. Fletcher's theory, instead, is that no one with good intentions can ever go wrong, because our acts are what we put into them.
This is to fail to notice that our acts are even more importantly the responsible or irresponsible steps by which we advance towards or retreat from the personal achievement of a matured freedom to love in a fully human way. Thus, a boy who knows no better may make love to a different girl every night, just because this is a way of showing affection and togetherness approved by other members of his peer-group. It would be silly to call him wicked. It is obvious, however, that by this perhaps innocent misuse of his time he has corroded his own effective capacity to love.
The good man is not necessarily he who is best adapted or best adjusted to meet the requirements of his situation. When situations fall short of the ideal, the man of worth knows how to take his own stand against the false values of the society around him.
There can be no justice on Earth apart from men that are just, no peace apart from men that are peacable, no virtue apart from the practical judgments of men that are wise. The wisdom in question is not theoretical nor speculative but practical and empirical. In that sense it is a feeling.
In English speech we can use the verb “to feel” in a variety of ways. Gilbert Ryle, for instance, once wrote that the perceptual use of “feel” in the sense of finding-out or discerning e.g., the warmth of things by tactual or kinaesthetic detection was quite untechnical and referred to the use of an acquired skill. Thus, I feel how hot the water is, feel the rope round my neck, feel a pain, or feel that the spoon is sticky. I can perceive some things that you could not easily, if at all, perceive in any way, unless perhaps you had me on the operating table - when my throat is constricted, for instance, or my heart thumps. Then there is the connected exploratory use of “feel” in which I feel for the matches in my pocket or feel my horse's legs. The latter use stands to “peer,” “look” and “listen” as the perceptual use stands to “see” and “hear.” It is quite incorrect to say that all perceiving involves feeling something in one of these senses. Feeling may accompany but does not constitute taste, and it has nothing to do with sight, hearing and smell. Close to the perceptual use of “feel” is the mock-use in which, e.g., the condemned man in imagination feels the rope round his neck.
Ryle noted that from saying that “I feel something brushing my cheek” I can pass quite naturally through “I feel something tickling my cheek” to “I feel a tickle on my cheek.” One who feels a tickle has a felt impulse to scratch or rub himself. The tickle is not related to this impulse as effect to cause, neither are the tickle and the impulse identical. But the notion of feeling a tickle somehow involves the presence of an unsatisfied inclination. I say “I feel tickled” if I am highly amused in circumstances where I cannot laugh. I can feel a tickle now, or I can say I felt a tickle a short while ago. I may feel a tickle on my cheek, or I may feel tickles all over. Logically I can only feel my own feelings or sensations: tickles, seasickness, warmth, pin-pricks, pains, suffocations, thirst, nausea, aches, etc. And, of course, though a person can feel his own sensations, even he cannot see them. This led some disciples of Descartes to conclude that since sensations cannot be seen in the body, they must be somehow in the mind - which was a considerable logical howler. While a person may feel acutely or intensely ill, tired, unfit, sleepy, fidgety, worried, cross or slack, he is said to feel completely or perfectly wide-awake, well, contented, at home and confident, i.e., not at all strange or dubious. “Sure” comes from securus, sine cura, without anxiety, and to feel sure is not to feel any qualms. There is a natural transition from feeling satisfied with a meal, to feeling satisfied with the recipe followed in its preparation, or with a theory in general. Someone who feels sure is fully satisfied with his theory, it meets, that is to say, not his logical but his reasonable conditions for what a theory should be, just as a good dinner meets his requirements for a satisfying meal, without the goodness of the dinner being either seen or perceived by a “sense of taste.”
Ryle conceded that William James may have been right in identifying emotional feelings with sensations. There does seem to be a certain parallelism between feelings of apprehension and feelings of seasickness, glows of pride and glows of warmth, pricks of conscience and pin-pricks, flutters of excitement and flutters caused by over-smoking. But the behaviour of a thirsty infant or a dog with a tickle is easier to predict than that of an indignant, literate man, and while both rank as feelings, only the former are ordinarily called sensations. The man who tells us that he felt like writing to The Times means that the idea appears to him as seductive in retrospect. There is a gradual transition from animal feelings of thirst to highly sophisticated feelings, like those of the irate journalist. Quite different from feeling like writing to The Times or feeling sure about one's facts is feeling that something is the case. The person who feels that something is the case has a certain nisus, slope or momentum towards thinking that something is the case, but he does not yet think so, nor does this feeling mean that he hankers to say or to believe that something is the case - since belief is not an act, one cannot hanker to believe, though one may, of course, hanker after the comforts and the freedom from anxiety thought to be attached to such belief.136
I want to relate Ryle's remarks to certain observations of Aristotle137 to the effect that “actions are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them,” and also that “virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.”
In speaking of “ethical feeling,” then, I propose to use a threefold distinction: there is a dispositional capacity which, regarded optimistically, is a certain competence and, regarded less optimistically, may be a certain liability; next, there is the attempted exercise of this capacity; and there is also the successful or illusory outcome.
Ethical feeling in the dispositional sense is in the human body somewhat as eye-sight is in the eye, and just as eye-sight develops and improves with good practice in that variety of ways that gives us the marksman, the proof-reader, the photographer, the painter, so the ethical disposition evolves gradually as a man's personality develops, but in ways that are far more varied, nuanced, complex, sophisticated and hard to predict. Moreover, just as the man of vision is acutely or intensely frustrated and unsatisfied, if any situation arises to put him partly or wholly in the dark against his will, so the ethical man, when he is not asleep, experiences a similar momentum, slope or nisus towards moral behaviour. Regarded optimistically this state of dynamic tension that characterizes the ethical man's attitude within his typical situation is moral virtue; regarded less optimistically, it is moral scruples - a wild and undisciplined need to construe all situations in excessively moral terms, and a refusal to open oneself to the variety of experience.
To be possessed of moral scruples is not to be morally blind and without eye-sight, but it is to have a squint, a distorted and limited vision, a poor focus, a viewpoint that is over-rigid, horizons that are too narrowly confined. The horizons need to be pushed back all the time, because there are no limits. Eye-sight needs to be developed, and ethical feeling also needs strengthening, deepening, extending and diversifying in the school of sensitivity and experience.
The attempted exercise of one's ethical capacities is ethical feeling in a further sense that is related to ethical feeling in the dispositional sense somewhat as looking is related to eye-sight. Such ethical feeling constitutes our moral explorations of our own particular situation. The popular emphasis on the rights of the individual conscience points to a commonsense realization that in moral as well as in visual matters only I can explore exactly certain features of my particular situation, because only I can have my own moral viewpoint, my definite focus, my present horizons. This is, of course, not to deny that a moral philosopher may be in a position to give a better theoretical account than I can of my situation and behaviour, just as the physicist or the optician may tell me something I otherwise wouldn't know about my eye-sight - and yet I see.
Possibly just because looking is for seeing the person who really sees nothing to interest him may start seeing things, and the man whose exercise of his moral feelings fails to leave him completely and perfectly certain of the justice of his situation and at the same time of the specific injustices it may contain, may be given to moralising, to delusions of grandeur, to faint-heartedness, or to cries of “Wolf!” Writing to The Times may constitute moral behaviour, but it can often be a poor substitute for it.
Thanks to his visual and general physical competence the healthy man sees not just a tree but the whole woods and walks through them with confidence; he sees his full field of vision, all its constituent features, their interrelations and their significance in terms of his own free response to that global situation. Similarly, the moral man, the just man, the man of refined ethical feeling is never petty, but is sensitively alive and alert to his whole world of values, to the conditions of its order and its elements of chaos, and in that situation he not only stands firm, but advances serenely towards his chosen goal - without anxiety, without regrets, strong in the midst of flames. So did Daniel live in the lions' den.138
Clearly, this is not just an aesthetic or emotional view of ethics. When I say “honesty is good,” I am not merely saying “I like honesty and I recommend you to like it too.” Indeed, I may very well be saying, “Despite my habitual dishonesty and the difficulties involved in identifying and pursuing a honest course of behaviour, I have been convinced upon rational evidence that honesty is intrinsically worthwhile, and your agreement or disagreement with this view will not change the facts of the matter.”
That individual or community is good which lives according to the rule: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, develop and, if necessary, change - as this rule is interpreted by those who have considered it attentively, intelligently, reasonably and responsibly both in itself and in its manifold developments and implications.
Moral values differ from and should be unconditionally preferred to biological, sensible, economic, poetic, aesthetic, artistic and social values. Men's ways of acting and speaking and the questions they ask about what to make of themselves, show that they can be aware of this obligation to promote the good and to refrain from what is evil.
This sense of moral obligation is not the desire for comfort, a feeling of guilt, regard for the opinion of others, fear of social sanctions or of G-d's anger; it is not an emotion at all. It is the absolute demand for existence of a moral value, for the practical acknowledgement of a state of affairs which ought to be and must be. It is a categorical and a transcendental imperative. To be more moral is to be more human; to be less moral is to fall below the level of my own humanity, to abdicate my Adult and surrender to my Parent or my Child.
The morally good is self-justified. It is not only good because it subserves some purpose, expresses personal skill, favours physical health, brings pleasure or proves useful.
The good man develops his capacity for sound judgment, is not unduly influenced by the state of his instinctual feelings (of which he takes care to be fully aware), and respects the personal freedom of others. He is not manipulated by public opinion, but does whatever he can to bring out the best in himself, not just occasionally, but consistently, almost spontaneously, with ease and joy. Obviously, no one can become good overnight; it is a life-time's challenge.
I may elect to accept the universalisability principle that similar cases are to be treated similarly both in theory and in practice. I need the courage to cut free when necessary from the restrictions of traditional structures or my past personal habits, in order to assume my full responsibility for my present making of myself.
If I am reasonable, I am ready to discuss, I may have my set of moral do's and don'ts, but I use them as spectacles, not as blinkers. My moral life flourishes when my desires are intense, varied and balanced, and when there is good communication within my personality. Similarly, a healthy society is dynamic, multivalent, integrated and communicative. A community of values is the socially moral good.
Communication, however, can be difficult. The theoretical and practical knowledge of the expert is increasing more rapidly than ever before, but the world has not yet learned how to organise properly, interrelate effectively and exploit fully even our present knowledge of, say, philosophy, sociology, psychology and economics.139 We need to experience, tolerate and organize intelligently our emotional differences.
A main difficulty in seeking a consensus on moral issues is that we differ from one another in the quality of our experience, the level of our understanding and the maturity of our own personal judgment. Some have wished to get round this difficulty by appealing to some objective natural law governing moral behaviour. Catholic theologians, however, now tend to say that while in the purely hypothetical state of pure nature man would possess a satisfactory degree of personal insight into the requirements of this natural law, in man's actual historical condition we all need the help of a divine revelation if we are to avoid error in arriving at a moral evaluation of concrete human situations.140
This may be another way of saying that moral conversion in the sense of a radical and personal commitment to what is worthwhile, because it is worthwhile, as distinct from an instinctive pursuit of what is individually pleasurable, or an instinctive flight from situations one finds uncomfortable, is so lofty an ideal that no individual can achieve it unless G-d himself grant him this grace.
However, most people today probably reject the notion of natural law altogether. Many agree that prudence, beneficence and justice are important elements in morality, but these rarely suffice for an unequivocal resolution of a particular moral dilemma. Alternative courses of action may, in different ways, appear equally prudent, beneficent, useful, just and fair.
This highlights the appeal of the now prevalent view that each individual should be given the personal freedom to grow towards the truth in his own way, provided he respects the corresponding freedom of other persons. Coercion in all its forms, though certainly widespread, is extremely distasteful to the enlightened contemporary conscience.
It is widely admitted that the individual is better off when he is free from legal oppression, external constraint, psychological fixations, unconsciously dominant impulses, stupidity, ignorance, moodiness and irresponsibility. But freedom-from or freedom of self-determination is not the thousand-dollar question. The thorny issue is freedom-for or freedom of self-possession. What is the really authentic human good? Why is human living worthwhile? What should I be trying to achieve?
For instance, when Ghandi chose to travel along the path of non-violent political action, did his behaviour express a proper respect for the personal worth of other people's viewpoint? Is an obstinate struggle of wills ever justified?141 Is it better to have negative personal relationships than no communication at all? Is indifference worse than hatred? Is hatred perhaps a species of love?
Personally I favour the ethics of moral sincerity: the basis for human relationships should be a love that consists in one's enjoyment of the other, and not merely in one's enjoyment of oneself through the other. Bargains, claims and promises cannot substitute for this morally necessary basic love, but there is no obvious reason why particular moral rights and duties should not be made dependent in part upon legal contracts or other public undertakings duly given and received.
Catholics believe that since Christ is G-d by eating his flesh through communion in the Eucharist they share the life of the Trinity and anticipate the joy of paradise; since Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body and already in glory, communion with him draws Christians closer together in mutual love and transforms their body-life as individuals and members of the community of faith - none of this, however, has made the Church reluctant to formulate her Code of Canon Law as a means of safeguarding and promoting the healthy development of her spiritual life.
In saying that each should be free to grow towards the truth in his own way, I am aware that as well as moral conversion there exist intellectual and religious conversion. These three need not be separate, but they are distinct.142
It is possible to regard religious conversion rather superficially, and this may even be the proper approach to adopt when studying the history or sociology of religious belonging.143 However, even the surface history of religious institutions provides evidence of the need for each Church incessantly to purify itself of irrelevant concerns and to renew its fidelity to its original inspiration. Such, indeed, is the central programme of the present-day ecumenical movement.
Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church claim to be the true Church of Christ and teach that Christ wished his Church to be one. To each of them, therefore, the long-standing schism between East and West is a scandal.
This schism was neither inaugurated nor consummated by the placing of a bull of excommunication on the altar of the church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople on 16th July, 1054. The two Churches had been divided by Arianism (348-98), the deposing of Saint John Chrysostom (409-15), the question of the Henoticon (484-519), Monothelitism (640-81) and the heresy of the Iconoclasts (726-87), while they were united afterwards with the reunion effected by the Council of Florence enduring in Jerusalem until as recently as 1534.144
Moreover, the schism was never homogeneous. Diocletian had divided the Empire in 292, and Constantine's conception of a State Church confined episcopal authority to the mystical sphere of grace and the sacraments, with civil legislation for ecclesiastical matters, the Emperor ruling in Constantinople, lawful heir of Rome, as supreme arbiter over all externals, the one visible counterpart of the one invisible G-d. This Eastern Church, devoid of historical sense and considering itself the centre of unity, rejected the innovations of a Barbarian West.
If the Emperor had regarded the formation of the Papal States as a betrayal, his toleration of papal spiritual claims seemed a surrender of his own responsibility towards Christians in the West. Affronted further by Charlemagne's imperial coronation, and seizing the opportunity afforded by the Islamic conquests, the East therefore found a new focus in the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Language barriers arose. The cruelties of the crusades and the compulsory Latinization of conquered territory worsened the situation. Francis I and Louis XIV allied with the Turks against the interests of the Church. On the other hand, the Popes, triumphant in the West after their struggles for the investitures, failed to appreciate the value in the East of local peculiarities of organization and ritual. Their insistence on the tradition of instruments in the rite of priestly ordination, on the insertion of the word Filioque into the Creed, and on the use of unleavened bread in the celebration of Mass only served to increase the disgust and suspicion which made Eastern Christians, including the lower clergy, prefer the Turks to a so apparently proselytising Rome.
The Greek Fathers' neglect of Latin studies hindered proper theological communication. While the Church had created culture in the West, in the East it had to find a home in the midst of a millennary tradition - one result was that theology became a lay refinement. Their appreciation of the subtleties of prosopon, aitia, metanoia, etc., nurtured the Eastern feelings of self-sufficiency and superiority. Theology for them remained a static contemplation, and never became the dialectically developing system of definitions that evolved in the West, although in the present century the events of 1917 have lessened Orthodox opposition to the Western style of theologising.
Change does not come easily in the East. The Eastern Rites are not marginal matters of rubrics, but a popular heritage to be preserved at all costs, the warp and woof of life itself. Their attempted modification would present far more problems than did the recent official renewal of the Roman Catholic liturgy in the Western Church.
Orthodox Christians allow Rome not only a primacy of honour, but one of jurisdiction, too, in the passive sense, as a final court of appeal - but the papal claim to an active primacy of divine right extending directly and immediately to the details of local discipline is not appreciated.
Perhaps both Churches show insufficient recognition of the fact that immediate causality does not exclude the employment of intermediaries by the immediate cause, but only rules out the immediate cause's being itself used as an intermediary. At any rate, though union is desired in the East, local independence is rated more highly.
Historically this tension between Orthodox and Catholics stems from the fact that during the crusades the Orthodox, unlike the European witches and the German Jews, were not exterminated, so that there is something to be thankful for.
The tension itself reflects that between a self-centred and a G-d-centred humanism, a tension which should not really exist, since G-d is more intimately present to us than we are to ourselves, and Jesus Christ, who is G-d, is also man. Hence, it is by a more profound conversion from institutional rivalries and preoccupations to fidelity to the mystery revealed in Christ that the divisions between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches can be overcome.
The Roman Catholic Church is still in need of conversion.
Until the Council of Trent, which may be seen as the apotheosis by the official magisterium of the Catholic Church of the work of the mediæval theologians of the golden age of Scholasticism, Western religious development in its more official aspects was principally concerned with the evolution of explicit knowledge of revealed truth and of social institutions to safeguard and facilitate its communication. This was hardly surprising, since the Church conceived its main mission as being that of preaching the Gospel to all nations.
However, the more recent First Vatican Council of 1870 and the codification of Canon Law in the first decade of the present century represented, among other things, a crisis in self-confidence and an unrealistic attempt to disengage Catholic life from close self-involvement in the cultural turmoil of the modern era.
On the credit side, the dogmatic definitions of the Immaculate Conception and of the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary symbolised and expressed the more distinct emergence within Catholicism of a psychologically conscious need to lay aside the spirit of violence and masculine lust for power, to renounce the empty pomp and circumstance of human institutions, and to grow beyond a self-centred and intellectual commitment to disembodied truth to a more sensitive concern for Jesus Christ our incarnate Brother and Lord.
At a much earlier date Saint Francis of Assisi had given a prophetic anticipation of this mature Christian awareness. The freshness and peace of early Christian art in the Roman catacombs is evidence of a similar awareness in the primitive Church.
Unfortunately the dynamic impetuosity of Paul's apostolic zeal in his intellectual confrontation with gnosticism overshadowed the pastoral directness of the Gospel parables, and Rome assimilated Christianity to its own emphasis on law, order and fear of violence, while Constantinople contemplated the risen Christ in the static and aetherial splendours of a Platonic heaven.
Religious conversion, then, is something the Church needs, as well as being a possibility in each one's individual experience. Basically, religious conversion is G-d's gift to man, where G-d is not only the donor but also the gift; it is the joyful dynamism of love breaking into the circle of our self-centred living, and inclining us to love something or someone outside ourselves, not merely for the satisfaction we undoubtedly find in so doing, but equally for the sake of giving some expression to our recognition and acknowledgement of the intrinsic meaning and value of the other as other.
Defined in this way, as I believe correctly, religious conversion is obviously a fact in the lives of many persons without any explicit knowledge of the very existence of the transcendent G-d I worship. Intrinsic to the notion, though seldom explicit, is the fact that the convert as a questioning Adult is dominated neither by his Parent nor his Child, but is committed to the mystery present in the unknown Other his questioning, though not perhaps his questions, radically intends. His state of consciousness may not be ‘religious,’ but his consciousness as such, independently of whatever state it happens to be in, is religious in the sense that it at least implicitly intends G-d.145 Atheists may object to, and agnostics may be puzzled by this claim that transcendental or state-neutral consciousness (which can be distinguished by abstraction, though never separated from the various states of consciousness which are its changing and partial expressions) has G-d as its necessary, even if implicit Transcendent Object. I hope that why I make this claim will gradually become clearer.
Even if Westerners are still being unconsciously nourished all the time by the values, the life, and the spirit of Christianity, the world today is clearly constructed in such a way that G-d can be absent from man's conscious living without his actually suffering.146
Archbishop Bossuet said that there was a certain atheism in every heart. Today, moreover, as a result of an educational system no longer the prerogative of the clergy, a multiplication of fields of study, a great diffusion of culture, improved communications, and more rapid social transformations, we live in an age in which man is more ready to criticise and to challenge standards hitherto accepted. Individual persons, political institutions, schools of artistic style, humanist ethical movements, racial and national groups, women's and youth organisations, economic blocs - all are more conscious of their differentiations within a highly complex society and demand that their freedom and autonomy be recognised, refusing to be dictated to by religious leaders or state authority. The accelerated pace of change in modern life, the movement of populations to the towns, their lack of social roots and stability, overt and subconscious advertising, heavy work, group pressures, mechanical and psychological noise, the shock to routine thinking consequent upon emigration deprive man of the solitude and peace needed for constructive thinking, while technological advance makes man seem less in need of G-d's help for his daily bread, and so more ready to pick holes in traditional religion. Atheism, however, though favoured by modern conditions, like theism, has permanent roots in human nature itself. Man can know G-d naturally, but not easily, at least not in clearly explicit terms.
In its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World147 the Second Vatican Council notes: “The word atheism is applied to phenomena which are quite distinct from one another. For while G-d is expressly denied by some, others believe that man can assert absolutely nothing about him. Still others use such a method so to scrutinize the question of G-d as to make it seem devoid of meaning. Many, unduly transgressing the limits of the positive sciences, contend that everything can be explained by this kind of scientific reasoning alone, or, by contrast, they altogether disallow that there is any absolute truth. Some laud man so extravagantly that their faith in G-d lapses into a kind of anæmia, though they seem more inclined to affirm man than to deny G-d. Again some form for themselves such a fallacious idea of G-d that when they repudiate this figment they are by no means rejecting the G-d of the Gospel. Some never get to the point of raising questions about G-d, since they seem to experience no religious stirrings nor do they see why they should trouble themselves about religion. Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world, or from the absolute character with which certain human values are unduly invested, and which thereby already accords them the stature of G-d. Modern civilisation itself often complicates the approach to G-d, not for any essential reasons, but because it is excessively engrossed in earthly affairs.”
Even if there is, as I believe, some metaphysical sense in which atheism is so self-contradictory as to be impossible, this short phenomenological analysis of ten categories of contemporary atheism justifies the Church's feeling that this reality constitutes one of the most serious problems of our time, which no religious believer can any longer afford to ignore.
Even if some people experience no religious stirrings, no one entirely escapes the questions of transcendence, community and interiority. Some distinction between the sacred and profane worlds is intimated in the very dynamism of human consciousness, the tension I come to experience between the world of theory and that of common sense reflects the growing specialisation of my developed human consciousness, and a further differentiation of this grounds the distinction between my interior and the exterior world.
In trying to resolve these tensions between sacred and profane, theory and common sense, interiority and the call of the exterior world, I may strive to eliminate one side of the problem, work towards a synthesis, oscillate uneasily from side to side, effect a transposition of issues by a radical change of context, or mediate some sort of solution by using achievements at one level of development to express the emerging claims of the next.148
For modern consciousness all religious practices are suspect because they are functional, although Marx, Freud and Einstein have broken some idols. Yet religious practices may still have value, and I could not deny G-d's presence without feeling a certain resistance. At root it is my own existential experience as a contingent questioner that grounds my question about accomplishment and fulfilment in G-d, my question about the absence of his presence and the presence of his absence. This question seems to me important, because my need is mine, but can only be satisfied by the Other, and, of course, by him only if he exists.
Writing to me from Switzerland in December 1971 Doctor Evkathrin Schmidt made this comment: “Another point I want to mention is your faith in G-d as Absolute Being, the basic hope for us human beings. You say Marxism is wrong in telling us that religion is an illusion made by man with the function to console and to explain. Can't you accept such a view? How do you know they are wrong and not you? I appreciate your background and education as a priest, but what about your intellect - did you never doubt about this absolute existence of a superhuman power, about this absolute future?”
In the same month John Wren-Lewis raised a whole cluster of similar questions. In What Shall We Tell the Children?149 he claimed that belief and unbelief have meaning only in terms of immediate human experience. He admitted that religious belief gave a sense of meaning and purpose in life to those who were able to accept such belief, but felt that religious ideas focused in such a belief exemplified man's neurotic wish to escape from the responsibilities of life, suggesting it was high time we all agreed to accept our own responsibility to and for ourselves.
On the other hand, he said nothing about the faith of those who gave their personal assent to the truth of religious statements without necessarily claiming any natural understanding of their meaning, and so without any lessening of their own existential sensitivity to the anguish of the human condition. As a Christian I would say that faith transcends human uncertainty without diminishing it, just as concern with questioning transcends but does not eliminate interest in specific instances of asking-a-question; moreover, since Christ wished all persons to be saved, faith serves indirectly to sharpen my concern for the present plight of mankind.
Personal trust in the goodness of G-d as utterly Other, mediated by the Christian example of, for instance, parents whose interpersonal relations are based on unconditional trust in each other's goodness without any urge to subject it to the unnecessary stresses and strains of objective or experimental testing is, I feel, basic in Catholic education worthy of the name. In his book Wren-Lewis refers instead to some alleged sense of the divine presence,150 and sees the creativity of human imagination as the secret justification of G-d-talk.
His seeming unawareness of the human experience of non-experimental trust in other persons precisely as other leads him to restrict his attention to self-centred areas of psychological experience. Thus, he interprets Christ's saying that the Sabbath was made for man as a recommendation to value religious rituals as psychological disciplines, and thinks the warning of Jesus about not making rash judgments is justified by the consideration that energy spent in determining our present position is diverted from the more useful area of attention to our future development.
This is to pass over Christ's injunction to make clear judgments: “Let your words be, Yes, yes, and No, no,” and to fail to notice that the judgments we are warned against are not so much judgments about our own situation as about the behaviour of others in situations that do not concern us.
Wren-Lewis favours the open-minded or non-judgmental approach to living to such an extent that he thinks any factual revelation can only pervert the value of the religious experience from which it derives.
Regarding the contents of the Christian revelation he labours under a number of misapprehensions. He seems unaware that it may consist much more of the revelation of additional questions for us to explore than of deus ex machina answers to purely natural problems. He cites the former Bishop of Woolwich's view of Jesus as “the final truth about human nature,” while neglecting Christ's own declaration that there were many things his followers were not yet ready for.
He also thinks the traditional religious sense implies man has within him some occult entity called a soul, despite the Bible's clear emphasis on the unity of man and the Thomist detailed account of the real nature of man's spiritual principle of life.151
Wren-Lewis is a scientist by training, so it is not surprising that he should regard experimentation as important. He thinks the greatness of Galileo was that he implicitly abandoned the whole traditional approach to natural science as a source of clues to the hidden meaning of things, in favour of a fundamental concern with how human action might change them. Atoms, for instance, are not secret entities inside ordinary objects, but tools of man's creative imagination, intellectual constructs or operational models. The task of the artist, he suggests, is not to depict the reality of the invisible world within, but to body forth the latent possibilities of human creative genius.
I believe that human freedom is of greater and more central importance than the imagination of which it makes use, and that art can still be used to symbolize the realities of freedom as well as to body forth the products of its imaginative matrix. Moreover, I feel sure that the question of the meaning of freedom as such is still worth asking. One thing it does is to make trust possible, and trust is an experience, not an experiment. We may trust G-d, even if we cannot sense his presence.
My free choice to trust G-d is free only here and now, since I love only in the present, and the freedom of my choice is limited, because the present orientation of my will was determined by past choices, which have imparted to it a certain relative and psychological although not an absolute fixity. Explicit deliberation is not needed for my present act of choice to be free, but it is needed if I am to avoid a possible perpetuation of the effects of previous unwise choices. The difficulty, of course, is that I cannot possibly deliberate explicitly before every act, nor calmly decide today what I shall do in the heat of the moment tomorrow.
Freedom is something we can appreciate simply by making an authentically free choice, just as someone can appreciate psychological impotence by experiencing his inability to arrive at a really free decision.
Because, as a Christian, I believe I am not alone in the universe, and that G-d is the first cause of everything that exists and the first agent of every event, I can wonder how this fact relates to the undoubtedly certain fact of my own personal freedom and responsibility to and for myself.
Christian writers on the subject have examined this question with special reference to supernatural grace, without which no conversion is possible.152
The brilliant rhetoric of Saint Augustine was an adequate response to the challenge then facing the Church in the shape of the Pelagian heresy, but he failed to exhibit any detached love of systematic statement, and his utterances have in strict logic certain implications which he himself would no doubt have repudiated, but which more than a thousand years later the Jansenists propagated in his name.
Saint Anselm of Canterbury had the strength of mind needed to attempt a systematic reconciliation of divine and human freedom, and it must be admitted that he failed brilliantly, principally because his approach was insufficiently empirical, a factor that could hardly havde been remedied in the state of research studies in his day.
Fortunately, however, Peter Lombard later had sufficient patience to assemble all the basic data on the problem from the Scriptures, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and the works of his own contemporaries.
The next advance was Philip the Chancellor's invention of the theorem of the supernatural in about 1230. This created a new mentality among theologians. Since the fourteenth century Christian theology has often misrepresented this theorem of the supernatural as a division of the universe into two parts, a natural world presided over by the G-d of the philosophers, and a supernatural world graced by the indwelling Trinity. Pascal's thought was under the incubus of this blunder. Philip himself, however, in distinguishing between faith and reason, charity and the natural love of G-d, grace and nature, was simply learning to distinguish, not trying to separate, just as I earlier distinguished but did not separate questioning and asking-a-question. There is only one universe. The value of the theorem of the supernatural in proposing an analogy between the triads faith-charity-grace and reason-Eros-nature was that it introduced a set of coordinates that eliminated certain basic fallacies and their attendant host of anomalies, leaving Aquinas free to attend to the real issues.
Aristotle had thought the will was moved by the intellect, so that Aristotelian ethics failed to resolve satisfactorily the obvious fact that I can know what is better and yet choose what is worse.
Aquinas, however, vigorously repudiated all forms of determinism and in particular the Parisian Averroists' interpretation of Aristotle along lines that amounted to a denial of free will.
For Aquinas freedom depends on four interdependent factors. It requires the concrete availability of objectively possible alternatives, such as to trust G-d or not. It requires the subject's appreciation of the availability of alternative possibilities, and, therefore, the existence of understanding, which discussion may help to promote. It requires the absence of any blind and almost automatic acceptance of the first alternative considered, and so an understanding operating in accordance with the intrinsic requirements of intelligence rather than one unduly swayed by instinctive feelings or social pressures, and it is certainly not easy to concentrate one's attention on questioning instead of on the questions one may ask. Finally, freedom requires a will that does its own willing.
Saint Thomas knew that change of will always required a cause. It seemed to him that to will the end was already an adequate causal explanation of any willing of the means, but if from willing an end that is bad a person towards an end that was good, some further explanation was required.
Just as light is the cause of seeing and sound the cause of hearing, so the efficient cause of a person's willing an end is external to the will. Consciously and truly I see, hear and will, but these achievements of mine happen to me rather than being effects I produce; willing, like seeing, is a passive activity. The question is, how is the free act of the choice of an end by my will produced? What, for instance, commits me to G-d?
Aquinas says that the intellect gives my choice of an end the specific content that it has, i.e., determines it to this end rather than that. However, it is G-d himself directly who gives my will its effective thrust towards the end, who gives it its love. Like my consciously seeing eye, my consciously willing free will is one of the instruments G-d uses to operate his own free choices in creation. Hence, if G-d wills me to choose something of my own free will, I shall most certainly choose it and entirely of my own free will.
For example, I choose to write this page, and G-d chooses that I choose to write this page and that this page be written by me. To express things more schematically, A is the efficient cause of B, and B of C.
Some writers have thought that to call A the efficient cause of B means that there is a causally efficient influence proceeding, perhaps mysteriously, from A to (the subject of) B. When they consider the series A, B, C, they come up with three sorts of answers. Thus, Durandus perceived a causal influence proceeding from A to B, and another distinct causal influence proceeding from B to C. On his analysis G-d chooses that I choose to write this page, but he does not choose that this page be written. On the other hand, Molina perceived a causal influence proceeding from A to B, another such influence proceeding from B to C, and a third causal influence proceeding from A to C. On his analysis G-d does indeed both choose that I choose to write this page and choose that this page be written, but he does not, however, choose that this page be written precisely by me. To remedy this defect Bañez perceived instead a causal influence proceeding from A to B', a second causal influence proceeding from A to B", and a third causal influence proceeding from B" to C. Hence, between my choosing to write this page and its being actually written by me some further causal influence proceeding from G-d into my will seems to be required, and the reality of my choice turns out to be illusory - which is, incidentally, one of Wren-Lewis's greatest objections to the traditional theism.
It is not hard to imagine these three alternatives, and that, indeed, is their common defect. They are no more than a manner of speaking and a figment of the imagination. The causal influence does not exist and is not required.
To say that A is the efficient cause of B simply means that there is a real relation of dependence in B with respect to its ground and source in A. Thus, if Abraham is the father of Isaac and Isaac is the father of Jacob, the identical act in virtue of which Abraham is Isaac's father is his one and only claim to be acknowledged as the grandfather of Jacob. However, this dependence of Jacob on Abraham is no moe than coincidental. Isaac is able to father Jacob not because he is Abraham's son in particular, but simply because his is himself a man.
However, the chain of dependency is a closer one when I write this page with this typewriter. For the operation of my typewriter depends upon me, and the production of this page depends on the operation of my typewriter, and at the same time it depends even more so on me operating the typewriter, bringing the paper into relationship with the typewriter, and actively excluding the obstructive operation of alien causes.
Just as my typewriter happens to depend upon me for its operation, so all creatures, including free agents, necessarily depend upon G-d even for their free operations. However, this does not mean that I need any physical premotion from G-d so that I can be the efficient cause of my operation, because just as light and not eyesight is the efficient cause of my seeing, so my will is never the efficient cause of my willing. Again, it does not mean that my actually choosing is really different from my power of choice, so that my created free will needs G-d to produce something extra to provide for its causal actuation. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the objective difference between the capacity to operate and actual operation implies no change in the cause as such. Thus, for instance, if more people read this page I am the cause of whatever results from their reading it, but this does not mean I change whenever one more reader looks at what I have written.
To say that my free choice is causally dependent upon G-d means solely and quite simply that all finite causes are conditioned, that they cannot operate unless they exist, unless the patients on which they operate exist and are suitably related to them, and unless other causes refrain from interfering. G-d is the cause of each, because he is the cause of all, not vice versa.
Wren-Lewis suggests that “it may perhaps be necessary to think of ourselves and our inner lives much more in the way people in the past have thought of G-d than in the way most people have ever hitherto thought of ‘man’.” The demythologising of religion is, he suggests, not enough. The traditional view of G-d may be precisely what the Bible condemned as ‘idolatry.’ It is a mistake to treat persons as symbols or windows for discerning something beyond. Religious believers must, therefore, consider whether they wish to defend the traditional outlook, or to abandon it in favour of the modern outlook, while still remaining religious.
There may, indeed, be a sense in which the God of our fathers is unfit for modern man. For the primitive God is the mysterious power man needs to befriend and use to control his world and so find security in life and freedom from anxiety. As human science and technical ability grows, this God is maintained as the magical God of the gaps. Man does what he can, but there are still areas of precariousness, and man feels at home in his world only by supplying himself with a God who has the control of the situation in these areas that man hastn't got.
In this view God is irrelevant to most of life, but looms large in after-life, and crops up when disease is incurable or a situation hopeless - here belief in prayer brings comfort, even if not any evident relief. But as science and technology advance, the area to which God is relevant, at least for those able to enjoy the benefits of modern progress, becomes less and less.
Printing freed the plastic arts from their pedagogical function in the middle-ages. Photography has set the art of painting free. The sciences of phenomena have freed metaphysics from the trouble of explaining things of sensible nature. Yet, in the practical order, the government of earthly things, to the extent that it demands a heavier material work of intellect, is more and more separated from the life it leads beyond time; the more urgent and pressing the many questions, the harder it is to concern oneself with radical questioning.
The belief among underdeveloped peoples in the God of the gaps is now seen more and more clearly as superstition, and an excuse for not facing up in a manly way to one's own situation. Belief in God seems the badge of those who want to shift the responsibility of living on to other people's shoulders, and won't face up to the fact that man must solve his own problems, and bear the blame for his own blunders.
Fortunately for religion this God is, if not dead, extremely sick, and it is part of the theologian's Christian task to bring about a speedy end. This will make room for a belief in the G-d who lives. He doesn't take away man's responsibility for his life and destiny, but reminds him of it; he doesn't solve man's problems for him, but invites him to deeper questioning and humbler probing; he doesn't substitute for science and technology, but these are instances of man's finding the treasure G-d buried in nature for man to find: the G-d who is not the precisely carved, clearly defined, static idol of any institution, but the mysterious love that beckons man ever to go beyond himself, to grow, mature and develop out of any false security and stability into full responsibility for his own life, co-responsibility for what becomes of his fellow men and the universe, responsibility to G-d who has made him free. This talent of freedom is not to be buried in the field of any static value system, but to be traded at interest in the service of love.
Omega point is not everything,153 and in so far as Wren-Lewis's views represent an attack on any interpretation of the religious fact that leads to a neglect of the intrinsic value of our human here and now, they are legitimate and valuable guidelines in life. However, between regarding the cosmos or our own humanity as a painting to admire or a clay to mould, and thinking of it as a simple window or crystal through which to view eternity, there is a third possibility. The macrocosm and the microcosm are together rather like a shifting, kaleidoscopic,154 stained-glass window that both is beautiful in and for itself and witnesses to the existence of a Light that is not directly seen. I know no reason why my positive affirmation that the world of ordinary experience is not a mere scene, need preclude my regarding it as being also a scene.
So, when Wren-Lewis claims that educated opinion has lost the traditional religious assumptions, I continue to believe that with a better education both children and adults may be helped not to throw the traditional faith away. Of course, wisdom does not come all at once. Growth in Christ is a life-long process.155 Catholic reality cannot be reduced to the miserable proportions of a middle-aged, English business-man's after-lunch dream of contentment; it transcends even Beethoven's vision of symphonic peace; it shines with the clarity and majesty of divine judgment.
This is not to dream of Utopia. Technological Utopianism of whatever brand is incompatible with a proper recognition of the importance of the irrational. On the other hand, the Radical Utopianism of those Christians who commit themselves exclusively to preaching the Absolute Future is incompatible with a belief in the value of human hopes, human structures and human freedom.
Man should understand nature and exercise power over it. He should improve his present way of life, and also transform it when he so wishes. He should deal with immediate problems effectively, but he must not neglect to educate himself to face a radically different future. He needs to recognise that change is not only a danger; it is also his opportunity. As well as pursuing his goals with courage, he needs to question them with wisdom. He must become a citizen of the world, but without forgetting to keep the home fires burning. While he should not waste his material resources nor pollute his physical environment, neither should he squander the time he has in which to exercise his imaginative creativity, nor cloy his mind with attachments to material possessions. Involving himself fully in community experiences, including the enjoyment of playful competition, let him delight instead in the human situation as he actually finds it, while dedicating his energies to the reconciliation of those who are still estranged, to the removal of all forms of social injustice, and to the promotion of community freedom.
To be reasonable is to reject the unfeasible, to acknowledge whatever is probably practicable, and to arrive at effective decisions on the basis of an unbiased evaluation of the short-term and long-term costs and benefits, not to oneself alone, but equally to other individuals and groups.
Despite the importance of physics, chemistry, statistics and biological engineering, the technical, scientific, economic, sociological future156 of the futurologists, the extrapolated, calculable, possidictable future that becomes is not enough. It is no use our being gods, if we are gods without imagination.157 Only a liberated social imagination can open up the values for man of the anticipated, ethical future that is desirable, the wished-for, hoped-for future that comes, the future in which love extends to those who otherwise are unloved, neglected, derelict.
The situation is not and never has been perfect, but Wren-Lewis is incorrect in stating that people who copied Bibles were slaves. Neither is it true that religion holds a grip on people. The plain fact is that some people are holding on to religion. Personally I don't agree that religious ideas need to be exorcized, but believe those who idolize the experimental method stand to gain considerably from the complementary experience of unconditional interpersonal trust.
This, if anything, is the value for the world of the celibate witness of those who, like Francis of Assisi in his times and Roger of Taizé today, follow Christ's personal example158 and testify to the dynamism of their eschatological hope.
Like voluntary poverty and the acceptance of painful situations, Christian celibacy expresses faith in the completeness of the satisfaction and joy to be hoped for in the life that is resurrection, a joy so rich and full that not even death can frustrate it.159 Christian celibacy should symbolize160 a person's achievement, by G-d's gift, of self-transcendence, his radical commitment to the service of that community from which he is, in a sense, totally set apart. Celibacy at its best is radiant without outflowing love, buoyed up by the enthusiastic development of what is really worthwhile, and enlightened by a keen appreciation of the true state of affairs. Hence, the spirit of celibacy is that of authentic conversion161to intellectual trust, moral goodness and religious love.
The celibacy of the ordained Roman Catholic ministry, then, can still express the priests' love of G-d; it must no longer be a sterile token of their neurotic clinging to a Latin and Greek literature, a Scholastic philosophy and theology, a Roman canon law, and a closed circle of ecclesiastical chums insulated from the challenges and needs of contemporary men and women.
Wren-Lewis clearly appreciates that religious attitudes call for deep psychological understanding, but his own psychology does not reach deep enough, and he forgets that religious attitudes also call for strictly theological understanding. He tells his readers that questions of belief and doubt arise from the fact of imagination, because the images and impressions we form enable us to conceive of gods or demons, just as they are the basis of art and science.
Images, however, are not the causes but merely the conditions of our thinking and, more importantly, of our freedom, and as well as being the basis of self-centred speculations can be the leaping-off point for contemplation of the reality of the Wholly Other as the condition of possibility in his absolute freedom of our own experienced conditional freedom.
“In his spiritual existence man will always have to fall back on a sacred mystery as the very ground of his being, whether he admits this explicitly or not, whether he gives rein to this truth or whether he tries to suppress it. This mystery, which within its inexpressible and therefore undefined perimeter contains and sustains the small area of our knowing and doing in our daily experience, our perception of reality and our free activity, lies at the very root of our being, is self-evident, but, by the same token, most hidden and unheeded; it speaks through its silence and is present in that through its absence it shows us our limitations. We call this G-d.”
Thus, theology is a sort of negative anthropology; it is “the experience that man constantly disappears into the mystery which he can neither understand nor explain.” Man is “the being that loses himself in G-d.”162
To reach out in faith towards this divine mystery traditional theology makes use of symbolic images, and is not restricted to the employment of deductive logic or sensual intuition. I cannot admit Wren-Lewis's claim that we can form images of atomic particles or angels, that certain images correspond to reality, or that we can ever have a direct vision of reality; knowing does not consist in taking a look, but is a dynamic structure of experience, understanding and judgment.
The testimony of the senses and the deliveries of fantasy are always ambivalent, so that Wren-Lewis is unnecessarily determinist in outlook in regarding a stroke of fortune in the sense of a particular occurrence as a stroke of ill luck; it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.
I agree that any idea that does not serve its intended function should be jettisoned, but we are not free to jettison the underlying indeterminate notion of being from which our other ideas emerge, and it is on this that our natural knowledge of G-d turns.
He claims: “The sense that science has somehow undermined religion has certainly remained stronger and is more widespread today than it has ever been. For many people today it is something so much taken for granted that they cannot be bothered to argue about it, while those who try to argue about it mostly have a helpless feeling that it is something they cannot quite understand.”
Less reliance on the current psychological interpretations of religious phenomena and prayer for insight into their supernatural or pneumatic dimensions may help to remove any such feelings of helplessness. Trust in G-d allows one to believe that if everything can be a temptation, it is also a grace, since all things work together unto good for those who love G-d.
If religious ideas do exemplify a neurotic wish to escape from the responsibilities of life, this is the result of the way in which they are held, rather than of the fact that they are held; I can find nothing neurotic about religious ideas as such, and a neurosis is in any case more a question of emotional confusion than of a free decision for or against interpersonal trust.163
Sin does offend trust, but the specifically theological concept of sin is that of betrayal of a relationship with the absolutely trustworthy G-d of truth rather than of any breakdown in human relationships as such.
For lack of trust man has often imagined G-d as a cruel and exacting despot jealous of his privileged status and quick to punish even the beginnings of self-affirmation on the part of his creatures. In this context Christ's death on Calvary has been mistakenly seen as the awful spectacle of G-d's punishing his own Son for the sins of his other creatures.
Human imagination working the way it does, men will no doubt continue to think of the crucifixion in this way, but it is a blasphemous idea. G-d does not wish the death even of the sinner, but that he be converted and live. G-d has no desire to punish.
On Calvary Christ was not the victim of G-d but of his fellow men, and he freely chose to lay himself open to a cruel death at their hands in order to demonstrate by his example that love is stronger than hatred, stronger than violence, stronger than death.
Christian faith in the value and meaning of Christ's resurrection inclines believers to love life with a total love, to say “Yes” to life, to shake off superstitious fear, baseless anxiety and futile guilt. In the Church Christ reveals and communicates to all men the gift of G-d's love.164
When preachers use the expressions “should,” or “should not be thought,” and “since” in the sermons about natural calamities or the efficacy of prayer that Wren-Lewis dislikes, they are not usually considering practical doubts about faith, and are not trying to find motives for belief, since G-d himself is the sufficient and, indeed, the only motive for theological faith; they are merely considering speculative difficulties in order to facilitate a growth in theological understanding, which is, of course, a very different thing.
Wren-Lewis believes that metaphysical truths are irrelevant to religious issues, but the only reason he gives for his novel claim is that people who use metaphysical arguments do so for escapist motives. It seems to me, firstly, that arguments advanced for questionable motives may still be good arguments, secondly, that many people who have used metaphysical arguments most cogently have been distinguished for the very opposite of escapism in their personal attitude towards life, and finally, which was Pascal's point, that preoccupation with empirical questions can be a dissipating escape from the more radical experience of questioning as a human performance in depth.
Wren-Lewis would have done better simply to admit his own lack of familiarity with metaphysical or strictly theological arguments, instead of trying to put metaphysics down as irrelevant and rule it out of court.
It would, as he says, be putting non-Christians down to describe them as incognito or anonymous Christians, if this label purported to be a psychological description of certain feelings and attitudes they denied they had. Instead, it is simply one expression of the Christian's own existential hope and trust that G-d in his own utterly mysterious way has given his supernatural and, therefore, not psychologically discernible nor intellectually demonstrable life to every person called into this world.
Just as eye has not seen nor ear heard, so neither has it entered into the heart of man to conceive the wonders of G-d. Like Saint Paul, I believe that even in heaven, if I attain that state, I shall never know objectively what it is to be a Christian. Christians are, in that sense, eternally incognito to themselves; only G-d has full knowledge. It is true that of his fullness we have all received, but, as Marcel might say, this is a mystery in which we share, not an objective possession.
That Wren-Lewis finds the idea of hell absurd is hardly surprising, since otherwise it wouldn't be a bad place to go. His discovery that mental processes and types of behaviour involved in religious beliefs are parallel to those involved in psychosis and neurosis, and are delusions expressing a wish to flee from personal responsibility (without success), reduces to the obvious truism that any reductionist approach to life, any reliance on an objective scheme, any attempt to limit experience to the area of the experimental and definable, is parallel in structure to psychosis and neurosis.165
This comes pretty close to the idea that original sin is man's refusal to trust and his proud will to put G-d, and his fellow men, to the test. To test is to try to determine limits, and so, not unnaturally, most religious apologists have, as Wren-Lewis notes, seen the materialistic, scientific view as much more limited than the mystical and theological one.166
Just as Blake confused the scientific outlook with materialism, so Wren-Lewis has confused the institutional deformations of Christianity with its supernatural substance and charismatic reality.167 He has rejected or misunderstood a message of good news, because he has found its grammatical expression defective or its style alien to his own psychology;168 he has thrown away the baby with the baptismal water.
Yet not quite. He agrees that Christianity has been a leaven for good in the world, and can help us dismantle our neurotic beliefs in humanism, materialism or man-made religions.169 He also makes some useful points about not judging people and about the meaning of forgiveness, while his remarks about diffuse eroticism, celibacy, birth-control and the nudity of Adam and Eve170 as being not so much sexual as mutual emotional openness, deserve to be developed into a more trusting account of what we should tell the children and of how, more importantly, we should show them to live for each other and towards G-d, if, indeed, he exists.
For Roman Catholics this is a legitimate question. Among other Christians Karl Barth, having interpreted Saint Anselm's ontological argument as a meditation on G-d's revealed name rather than as any sort of rational proof, rejected philosophical theology as the wilful assertion of fallen man building an idol in his own conceptual image.171
However, a reading of the preliminary memorandum prepared in the First Vatican Council by the Deputatio de Fide makes it clear that one motive behind the definition that G-d can be certainly known by the light of natural reason through the medium of created things, was the widespread error that the existence of G-d cannot be proved by an apodictic argument, and consequently that by no process of human reasoning can the certainty of it be established.
Official Catholicism, at any rate is, therefore, open to a rational discussion of this problem. Professor A. G. N. Flew has published what purports to be a contribution to such discussion.172 Unfortunately, he feels that one cannot be in a suitable position to determine satisfactorily the question of the existence or non-existence of ‘God’ in either a positive or a negative sense, unless one has first taken pains to draw up a list of the defining characteristics of the supposed individual that one is raising a question about. For he holds it to be impossible to provide any acceptable answer to the question as to whether there exists a member of the class of beings characterized as divine, unless one has some prior notion of what it would mean for a thing to be divine. In logic, at any rate, existence cannot precede essence.
In conversation with Catholic philosophers, however, Flew has admitted to a certain feeling that essence is more, and is about a thing, and not about language, but he wonders what it can be other than the sum of defining characteristics. In my view, which many Christians share, G-d is first and foremost apprehended as Absolute Mystery, and infinitely transcends all possibility of man's ever defining him.
Flew misses the real issues between theism and atheism. He excludes the existence of some of his own specified imaginary claimants to the three-letter class-label “God” as used in his own language-game, e.g., by bringing to light irreconcilable contradictions between certain of his alleged God's conflicting attributes. But confronted with the challenge of G-d dwelling in light inaccessible, it is hard to see how Flew can really move beyond agnosticism.
And even agnosticism has its limits. Total agnosticism, like total scepticism is not a possible coherent human option. To lay claim to total ignorance would be a self-contradictory performance. On the other hand, it is quite impossible to construct a logical system which has logic for its whole foundation. Flew himself would be hard put to it, to justify his use of “logically” when he says that “many of the different characteristics of different butterflies and different sorts of butterfly are logically incompatible one with another.”173 Similarly, he would have difficulty in assigning the theoretical possibility of error precisely proportionate to its content involved in his assertion that “all assertion must involve a theoretical possibility of error precisely proportionate to its content.”174
Man's rational nature is contingent, but nothing is so contingent as to be absolutely removed from necessity.
There is no advantage that I can see in the atheist's paratheology of faith in material facts. A certain a priori dimension within rationality is indicated by the fact that there are different kinds of nonsense, such that the utterances:
are each nonsensical for a different reason.175
Nonsensical means nonsensical for a reason, and rationality is prior to nonsense.
It is not merely a logical truth that it is necessarily the case that if objects can enter into the world of fact, or if consciousness can be in a state of consciousness, or if questioning can find expression in asking-a-question, then it is necessarily a fact that this can, not just logically, but metaphysically, be the case.
I have already suggested that questioning is necessarily questioning-towards-an-answering. Rational human performance is intentional in structure, and all intentional behaviour is self-transcending.
I believe that the supreme intelligible is the divine substance which lies beyond the capacity of human intellect, not as sound lies outside the range of sight, but as excessive light blinds it and so seems an empty darkness. Man's spirit of inquiry never calls a halt, and can never be satisfied, until our questioning minds, united to G-d as body to soul, know his self-explanatory intrinsic intelligibility and through that intellectual experience, though then knowing aught else is a trifle, contemplate in ecstasy the whole universe as well.
I admit, of course, that while every human question includes an obscure and implicit questioning towards G-d, which the philosophical theologian can render explicit by making it thematic, it much more obviously includes the quite distinct and never separate element that formally constitutes it as asking-a-question. And while I can ask my recondite questions about questioning and about asking-a-question, I more commonly ask questions about my dreams, my primary reflexes of breathing, digesting and mating, about art, science, history, and about my interpersonal relations.
Moreover, if G-d is, he is not only the mysterious ontic ground of the possibility of my questioning; he is also the fulfilment of my dreams, the ecstatic delight of my sensuous yearnings, the fullness of understanding, knowledge and wisdom, the personal self-communication of eternal joy.
If I wish to know G-d, I need to know myself in depth. If I wish to know G-d explicitly and apodictically, I stand in need of intellectual conversion. This is extremely rare, and if neither Aristotle nor Kant appreciated its full implications,176 it is, perhaps, not too surprising that Flew seems not to have achieved the fully realistic position. Like Wren-Lewis many today choose to rely on scientific method and experimental living. Knowledge, however, is not mere experience, but a personal, intelligible and reasonable affirmation of an intelligible reality grounding that experience. The true intellectual knows that intelligibility is both the definition and the criterion of reality.
This is the critical point in philosophy. When I understand my experience I am not merely involving myself in it imaginatively and having an insight at the same time, so that I have quite separately an experience and an appreciation of a theory about it. No, my experience and my understanding of it are intrinsically related: my experience presents itself to my mind as something to be understood; and my personal insight grasps the intelligibility of my experience in that experience itself, which is concrete and particular, not universal nor abstract.
Suppose, for instance, my personal insight grasps that my release from the tension of the Oedipal situation is the necessary and sufficient condition for me to achieve sexual ecstasy177 in my present situation, and my creative imagination presents to my mind various features of this experience which my personal insight relates and unifies, so that I can say my love-making is like coming out of a dark tunnel into a world of sunshine.
For a materialist my sexual ecstasy is real, but its intelligible unification as a resolution of my Oedipal situation is regarded as subjective. For an idealist the ecstasy cannot be real and the intelligible unification is not objective. For the Platonist the sexual experience is not reality, but its intelligible unification is objective in another world. For the Aristotelian both the sexual ecstasy and its intelligible unification are objective in this world. Thomism adds a third category, existence, to Aristotelian material ecstasy and formal intelligibility. In other words, for Saint Thomas Aquinas, when I am in such an ecstatic state of consciousness, it is true that I experience the modality of my consciousness, viz., the feelings of sexual ecstasy, and it is true that I understand the nature of my state of consciousness, viz., as consisting in feelings of sexual ecstasy, but it is supremely and paramountly true that I judge I am in such a state of consciousness because I am the integrated subject of my feelings of sexual ecstasy as experienced, understood, affirmed and responsibly developed. No doubt I enjoy the ecstasy because it is sexual, and also because I understand my experience instead of feeling confused about it, but I enjoy it most of all because it is mine.178
It is this final existential element in the rational psychology of Aquinas that makes his account of our human condition more satisfactory than that of Aristotle, and it is the failure to appreciate this existential element in Aquinas that has threatened Catholic theology with extinction.
The Welsh language can help us to appreciate the connection between self-knowledge and knowledge of G-d. In Welsh there are two verbs “to know” - adnabod and gwybod. Adnabod approximates in meaning to the French verb connaître in some of its usages. It is employed to express knowledge of persons or things, and to claim knowledge in this sense is to say one either recognizes or is disposed to recognize a certain person or thing. Such persons or things would seem to be considered in this usage as correctly labelled and identified objective facts, outside the intimate experience of the knower, but with whose external features and characteristics he is sufficiently acquainted for practical purposes.
The other Welsh verb gwybod is more akin to the French savoir, though the French usage is misleadingly fluid, Pascal, for instance, sometimes using savoir in the sense of adnabod, and connaître in that of gwybod. Gwybod is employed to express either the knowledge that consists in personal experience, or that constituted by a personally acquired skill in some area of human performance, or else the individual's ability to impart reliable information on some particular subject. Gwybod in Welsh has, therefore, a vast range of applications, but seems always to be employed in such a way that the knowledge is felt to be a way of personal being rather than an objective possession. Such knowledge is that being-present-to-itself of Being, which being-present-to-itself is the being of any Exsistent.
G-d, I suggest, is never the object of adnabod, though theology can be. G-d, however, is the ultimate ground of possibility of gwybod, whether one adverts to this explicitly or not, simply because he is the first cause of everything that exists or occurs.
In gwybod I can know G-d, because gwybod is itself at least a latent knowledge of G-d, present and operative in all my knowing. This is my primordial, metaphysical insight in its obscure immediacy. Only if I choose to thematise it and make it explicit, can I hope to bring it into the open in accurately defined concepts and certain judgments. Such philosophical theologising does not reveal or prove anything new or previously unknown; it merely gives scientific expression to what I already implicitly acknowledged without having explicitly recognised what I was doing.
After all, many persons can ride a bicycle who do not know that they retain their balance by winding along a series of curves where for any given angle of unbalance the curvature of the winding is inversely proportional to the square of the speed at which the cycle is proceeding. Nevertheless, they will not deny that this rule is implicit in their performance.
Similarly, the just man and the seeker after truth is always implicitly worshipping G-d. “Wherever a man out of the innermost fidelity to his task and in the knowledge of the necessity of what he does for his fellow man, consumes himself quietly and unselfishly in his work; where, after being immeasurably disappointed by those who are near to one, a new stretch of life together is traversed - contrary to all hope; where, against all the laws of experience of this world, an important work is begun and performed that remains nameless and unrewarded; where a misunderstood and lonely conscience must go its painful way without recognition; there and in many, many thousands of similar situations in life is an experience of the eternity and of the grace of G-d.”179
Knowledge of G-d is a simple, conscious, psychological, personal and dynamic experience in gwybod. When explicit, it is a personal achievement consisting in the unfolding of a divine gift - in one sense an active, in another a passive experience, since, while man is its subject, G-d is its uniquely active cause.
Consciously, however, I am the active and creative centre of my own interior world, and need not choose to devote my attention to the explicit thematisation of the ontic core of gwybod. Even if I do not, like Wren-Lewis, regard this thematisation as irrelevant or, like Flew, substitute for it the logical analysis of its objectifications in writing, I may wish simply to enjoy gwybod and exclaim with Blake that energy is eternal delight.
Only when I come to acknowledge that created action is always passion, agere est pati quoddam, do I rightly refer gwybod from myself back to its mysterious source, the G-d I praise, not necessarily with much speaking, but certainly with a deepened, a heightened awareness.
As Lao-Tse observed, “that name which can be pronounced is not the eternal name.” “G-d is honoured by silence,” wrote Aquinas, “not because we cannot say or understand anything about him, but because we know that we are incapable of comprehending him. It is therefore said of us that when we come to the end of our knowledge, we acknowledge G-d as the Unknown, because mind has made most progress in understanding, when it recognises that G-d's essence lies beyond anything that the mind in its state of being-on-the-way can comprehend.”180 “This is the extreme of human knowledge of G-d: to know that we do not know G-d.”181
To surrender oneself to G-d means to catapult oneself in ecstasy out of the throttling restrictions of human law, philosophies and cultural forms. It means to swim in the sea of creative chaos, to risk death without fear.
The unique mystery who is G-d cannot be explained, and is the principle of all explanation, so that for human beings in this life faith is true wisdom. “I am the Lord your G-d who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage, out of the dream-valley of the shadow of death and into the universal realms of light. You shall not have strange gods before me.”
Though I find joy in the variety of human experience, I feel that pure multiplicity would be nothing; it would be utter chaos. My mind thirsts to understand the many as one, not unconsciously but consciously, not in the abstract categories of scientific theories but in their concrete, their ontic reality. In this way I appreciate sounds not as a cacophonous babel but in the unity of that silence from which they emerge; I delight in colours irradiating from the mystery of darkness, in movement about a centre that is still, in a world of language expressing an ineffable ænigma, in a round of pleasures bestowed on me by a love that surpasses all understanding. “Awake my soul and sing of him who died for thee, and hail him as thy matchless king for all eternity!”
In other words, it seems to me that one cannot regard the material universe as the playground for the projection or bodying forth of the intentions of rational beings in their striving for self-expression, without at the same time at least implicitly acknowledging that the world or field of activity open to man cannot assign any limit to the dynamism of his intention. The world, which may give an answer to satisfy the content of my particular questions, can provide no more than the launching-site in which my more radical performance of self-questioning and my self-transcending intention become increasingly aware of their fundamental orientation towards the wholly Other.
Flew asks: “Just what would have to happen, or not happen, or to have happened, nor not to have happened, to entitle us to say that - in your sense of the world - ‘There is no G-d?’ The most obvious possible falsification would have been if nothing whatever had existed at all. But if that is all that theism is denying, then we are all theists now.”182 As I have said, coherent atheism is not a possible position.
More recently, Flew tried to get round this by saying: “It is in principle impossible to explain everything.”183 However, it is merely a contingent fact that we cannot as yet explain everything, and this fact itself implies that everything is, at least in principle, explicable.
G-d is in any case not a gap-filler, but trust in him is the answer to man's existential insecurity, which it does not remove, and commitment to him is the answer to the question why man should plunge into this security through supernatural faith, hope and charity.
Gwybod is knowledge as self-presence; it is an identity, not a confrontation - in G-d we live, and move and have our being.
Such self-presence is not self-perception, which does not exist. Unamuno, Sartre and several others have tied themselves in knots trying to catch an intellectual glimpse of themselves catching an intellectual glimpse, only to find they were going round a maze ad infinitum and seeing nothing at all.
Neither does self-presence imply reflective introspection. Such introspection is very useful as a tool in the hands of the trained psychologist, and, in a less formal way, we all do our own introspecting from time to time. For instance, I find myself locked out of my flat, and fail to find the key in my pocket. In my mind's eye I retrace my movements, go back over my steps, in the hope of working out whether the key is in the staff-room at College, or on the seat of a bus, or inside my brief-case after all. Such introspection, clearly, is not primary but derived, since it supposes a prior experience upon which I reflect, and it is to that experience that I am directing attention.
However, if gwybod is self-presence, self-consciousness, self-awareness, direct experience, this is not the whole of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge also includes adnabod, since there are things I know about myself only because I have learned them from the words of others.
Similarly, there are things I believe about G-d only because I have learned them from the words of revelation mediated to me by the Church. Thus, as a Roman Catholic I do not yet know but do sincerely believe that the Father is G-d, the Son is G-d, the Holy Spirit is G-d, there is one G-d, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and there is only a Trinity not a quaternity.184
Although preachers seldom expound this dogma, it is the central mystery of the Catholic faith, and adherence to it is implicit in that most common of ritual gestures, the sign of the cross, which is made in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Church teaches that reason illuminated by faith, when it inquires diligently, piously, soberly, can with G-d's help reach some extremely fruitful understanding of this mystery, and desires that in every generation and in every walk of life people may seek an increase in this understanding, without departing from the authentic meaning of the dogma declared by the Church.185
I believe that G-d the Father neither made his own and only Son out of pre-existing material nor created him out of nothing, but begets him eternally out of his own substance consubstantial to himself. I believe that the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, proceeding from the Father, who has spoken through the prophets, is together with the Father and the Son to be both adored and conglorified. I believe that the divinity, the power, the substance of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is one, but that there are three divine persons or hypostases distinguished among themselves by their own proper characteristics, which are relational, and I, accordingly, believe that in divine things all things are one unless an opposition of relationship otherwise requires. I believe the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle and by a unique spiration. I also believe that this dogma of the Trinity, which is a mystery properly so called, can be neither understood in itself through any principles natural to man nor demonstrated from its effects. I believe this remains true even after the mystery itself has been revealed, but in such a way that reason illumined by supernatural faith can advance towards some analogical and imperfect understanding of this mystery with G-d's help.
In seeking this understanding, I notice that whenever I understand, from the very fact that I understand, there proceeds something within me, viz., either a concept defining what I have understood, or a theory expressing my appreciation of the interdependence of several concepts, or a judgment grounded in my recognition of the sufficiency of the evidence. I call this procession an intelligible emanation. It is the conscious origin of a personal act both in and in virtue of my actually determined intellectual consciousness. For, when I have an insight I find myself under the intellectually conscious necessity of expressing that insight in definitions, explanations or illustrations. When I understand the sufficiency of the evidence I find myself under the rationally conscious necessity of pronouncing my personal judgment. It is this intelligible emanation that marks off my prudent judgments from my rash ones.
I notice, too, that my personal love proceeds consciously and responsibly from my personal value judgments. When I have both understood and judged a certain course of action to be good for me, I find in my own experience that if I cede to the suasions of reason I experience my behaviour as rational, and that if I choose to go against reason I experience myself as behaving irrationally.
As well as understanding and judging many situations, I can understand and judge the intelligibility and rationality of my own understanding and judgment. As well as loving many persons and things, I love being in love. In other words, there is no need for what proceeds interiorly by an intelligible procession to be different, but the more perfectly a definition and a judgment express my understanding in my mind, and the more perfectly my love consciously adheres to the good affirmed in my mind, the more my judgment and love is one with the understanding from which it proceeds.
I know no way of showing that there are intelligible emanations in G-d. However, if there is an intelligible emanation in G-d, it will be infinite, since everything in G-d is infinite, and, since G-d is simple, it will be perfectly one with the understanding from which it proceeds. By one infinite intelligible emanation G-d will both really understand, really affirm and really love his own infinite perfection, and he will do so consciously, intelligently, rationally and responsibly.
I know no way of showing that there are processions in G-d. However, if there are divine processions on the pattern of an intelligible emanation, the processions will be real, intelligible, intelligent and conscious, and that which emanates will be consubstantial to that from which it emanates, since an intelligible emanation is the principle of sufficient reason operative in intellectual consciousness itself, and when that consciousness is an infinite substance, whatever is in that consciousness is substantial.
Although I have no way of showing that there are processions in G-d, there is no contradiction involved in saying that by one and the same act being is understood, truth is affirmed, and goodness is loved.186
If there are processions in G-d, there can only be two processions. Infinite understanding cannot emanate from anything prior to infinite understanding and allows of no distinction within it between infinite insight and infinite appreciation of the sufficiency of the evidence. From one infinite understanding there can proceed only one infinite Word and one infinite Love. Since, however, the Word cannot proceed from the Word, but Love does proceed from the Word, there are two processions, not one. The procession of the Word in and from understanding is the origin of a living derivative from a living originating principle linked to it according to a natural likeness, and is, therefore, a generation. For understanding is the natural ex-sistence of infinite understanding, and not merely intentional existence. The procession of Love from and as adhering to understanding and the Word is not, precisely as such, linked to its originating principle according to a natural likeness, but according to a dynamic impetus to cling to what is good, and is not, therefore, a generation. It may be termed a spiration.
If there are processions in G-d, they are infinitely conscious, so that Fatherhood is conscious, Sonship is conscious, active Spiration is conscious and passive Spiration is conscious. A procession is the origin of one from another. A relation is the order of one to another. If there are divine processions, then, they will be really identical with and notionally distinct from four real relations.
If there are these four real relations in G-d, they will be subsistent, not accidental. They will be identical with G-d, since G-d is infinitely simple, but they will be, nevertheless, really distinct because of their own mutual opposition. They will be notionally distinct from but really identical with the divine essence.
If there are four real relations in G-d, Fatherhood, Sonship, active and passive Spiration, all will be identical with G-d, Fatherhood and Sonship will be really and mutually opposed, active and passive Spiration will be really and mutually opposed, but active Spiration will be only notionally distinct from and really identical with Fatherhood-and-Sonship. Hence, in G-d there will be only a Trinity, not a quaternity.
The reason for saying this is that while absolutes are only really distinguished if some characteristic of the one is not a characteristic of the other, relatives are really distinguished by a mutual opposition based on complementary, mutually opposed notes. The reality of this opposition depends on the reality of the relations, whereas the relations themselves can both stem from one and the same absolute.
The three divine, real and subsistent relations are persons properly so called. A reference to them supplies the correct answer to the question: Which three are in G-d? They are distinct subsistents in an intellectual nature. They are distinct subjects of the divine consciousness, conscious of themselves both as subjects and as distinct. They are constituted and not merely interrelated by their own interpersonal relations. For, while human persons are distinguished substantially and numerically, and angelic persons substantially and specifically, the divine persons are distinguished only by their interpersonal relationships within the one divine consciousness with which they are identical.
The generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit are natural, conscious, intellectual, necessary, autonomous, eternal, and the foundation of that divine order in which the Son is from the Father only, the Spirit from the Father and Son.
Inasmuch as Fatherhood and active Spiration are constitutive of the divine persons they precede the notional acts of generation and spiration, but considered precisely as relations they are grounded in and follow upon these notional acts. This distinction, however, is only a notional one, and the question itself arises from our temporal experience in which there are befores and afters, while in G-d all is eternal.
Through one and the same real consciousness the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the three conscious subjects of themselves, of each other, and of their notional and essential acts. Whatever is meant by I and Thou is said in the Trinity by the Father through his Word, who does not speak but is spoken, while the Holy Spirit neither speaks nor is spoken but proceeds.
To call the Holy Trinity a mystery is not to suggest They are ultimately unintelligible or even puzzling or problematic; it is simply to acknowledge our conscious self-involvement in a challengingly luminous presence, the cloud of unknowing of the mystics. To understand is to grasp the many as one, but to experience unity is a personal achievement or an infused grace that transcends understanding: faith is true wisdom.
“Released from the world of sense and intellect, the soul enters into the mysterious darkness of a holy ignorance, and, renouncing every scientific datum, it loses itself in him who cannot be seen or grasped. It now belongs entirely to this sovereign object without belonging either to itself or to others. It is united to the unknown through its noblest part because it has renounced knowledge. Finally it draws from this absolute ignorance a knowledge that understanding could never win to.”187
It is in the paradox of the cloud which during the day is darkened, but shines brilliantly at night, that G-d reveals himself and lies hidden.
The psychological circumincession of the three divine persons in the unique mystery of the ever-living G-d is the supreme example of communication. In the Holy Trinity, three distinct psychological egos share one and the same consciousness, and they do so freely, rationally, intelligently. Their common life is a model of joy, perfection and order, utterly removed from even the slightest tain of confusion or obscurity, a life of infinitely justified complacency.
In human society, by contrast, communication is beset with problems. Technological innovations have brought about more rapid, universal and comprehensive communications, so that the same facts become known almost instantaneously to an increasingly wide variety of people coming from different conditions and backgrounds. This has accentuated the problem of reaching a consensus of opinion and arriving at some agreed interpretation of the facts. In other words, modern communication systems have brought out into the open the latent divisions and differences between nations and individuals.
People find themselves confronted with interpersonal problems they might prefer not to face at all, and certainly often feel ill-equipped to solve. Free, orderly communication is, however, the very substance of society. Authentic communication is nothing less than communion in process of development, the genesis and growth within and among us of our common vocation to live in openness, warmth and joy.
The problem of social dealienation is that of finding some institution capable of governing, serving, defending, teaching, entertaining, curing, and creating and sustaining symbols of integration great enough to overcome the disintegrative forces of fear and weakness. This calls not merely for fresh ideas, but for the well-adapted application of practical force. Not politics but art is the communication of society.
Observables, natural phenomena, historical events, people, the regularity and beauty of the stars can be accepted as G-d's pledge and self-expression of himself as a self-involving speaker and a self-revealing artist, and so provide a basis for the biblical and Christian philosophy of life, provided always we can learn to trust.
That is why I readily concede to Wren-Lewis that the question of how I know that G-d is, can never be reduced to a subtle question in metaphysics. The truth we need to appreciate is that human loving is an experience, not an experiment.
As long as human relationships develop on a purely experimental basis, G-d is bound to be experienced as if he or she or they were no more than a psychological projection, for the simple reason that all persons other than oneself will be being experienced as if they were no more than psychological projections.188
Personal growth, however, requires the self-responsible taking back of such projections, and the so-called atheism that may result from annihilating all images of an objective 'god' from one's own life in one's own world, is a pre-requisite of any adult appreciation of the mystery of G-d's presence in the universe.
Even the most genuinely unconditional human trust can only be unrestricted if it is grounded in the absolutely unconditional trust that G-d has revealed in Christ in entrusting to him the whole task of bringing his work of creation to fulfilment. For me, granted my Western and Roman Catholic upbringing, there is no mid-way position between total commitment to Catholicism and agnosticism. The divisions between the Orthodox and Roman communions present difficulties, but they have their historical explanations. The other Christian bodies have never seemed to me to have any serious claim to be regarded as the focus of the one, true Church of Christ. I see atheism as incoherent, and find nothing in humanism or the non-Christian religions to undermine the historical claims of the Gospels. Thus, the only question calling for my religious decision is: Have I or have I not unrestricted, unconditional trust in the man Jesus Christ?
In Chapter 14 of the second Book of his Treatise on the Love of G-d,189 Saint Francis of Sales brings together in an experiential synthesis G-d's loving activity in the soul, the obscurities of the human condition and man's personal commitment to trust:
“By his gift of faith G-d comes into our souls, talks to our minds. He speaks, not by words, but by inspirations. So attractively does he set the truths of faith before our minds, our wills are greatly gratified - to such an extent that the will urges the intellect to assent, to submit to the truth undoubtingly, in utter trustfulness.
There you have the wonder of it: G-d proposes these truths to our minds in darkness, in obscurity; we cannot clearly see them, we can only catch glimpses of them. The same sort of thing happens sometimes in the world around us when it is misty. We cannot see the Sun, only a faint lightening of the sky shows where it is. We catch sight of it without seeing it, you might say: we don't see the Sun well enough to say that we really do see it, yet we see enough to make it impossible for us to say that we cannot see it at all. We caught a glimpse of it, we say. Once this divine brightness of faith dawns upon the mind, it compels the obedience of the intellect without any force of reasoning or show of argument, simply by the charm of its presence.
I am dark of skin, says faith to human reasoning, to acquired scientific knowledge, for I dwell in the darkness of revelation, where there is no apparent evidence, where I seem to be dark, almost unrecognisable. Yet I have beauty, for all that, on account of my absolute certitude. If only worldly eyes could see me as I really am, they would find me fair in every part.
Faith fills a man with love for the beauty of its truth, with faith in the truth of its beauty, through the charm it uses on the will, the certitude it gives to the intellect.
Faith includes an embryonic love, as the human heart knows its first thrill for the things of G-d.”
I would miss the meaning entirely if I took the Saint to be talking about the dogmatic truth of doctrinal definitions, propositional knowledge or a formulated faith. His concern is with existential truth, substantial beauty, interpersonal trust, connatural knowledge by presence and participation in the living mystery of love.
We cannot deny that we are conscious of the presence of G-d, just as we cannot deny that we see the Sun on a misty day, and we know that the darkness belongs to our minds rather than to G-d's self-revelation, just as the mist that obscures our vision rises from the Earth, and does not tarnish the brilliance of the Sun itself.
It is mockery to put G-d to the test, just as it is a betrayal of love to experiment with trust
- Shalom & Welcome! - 105. MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Penguin Books, 1964.
106. J.-J. ROUSSEAU, Confessions, Penguin Books, 1967.
107. The alternative society is perhaps best seen as the official play-room. Cfr C. HAMER, Encounter Groups, London, Creativity House, 1977; W. W. BARTLEY, Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of Est, New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1978; R. S. PETERS, The Concept of Education, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; T. ROSZACK, The Making of a Counter-Culture, London, Faber, 1970; W. A. SHIBLES, Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History, Wisconsin, Language Press, 1971; C. TART, Altered States of Consciousness, New York, John Wiley, 1969; R. S. DE ROPP, The Master Game, New York, Delta Books, 1968; R. E. L. MASTERS & J. HOUSTON, Mind Games, London, Turnstone Books, 1972; H. BLATNER, Psychodrama, Rôle Playing and Action Methods, 3 Warren Close, Thetford, 1970; C. R. ROGERS, Encounter Groups, London, Pergamon Press, 1971; M. LAKIN, Interpersonal Encounter, New York, McGraw Hill, 1972; C. HILL & R. B. STONE, Conduct Your Own Awareness Sessions, London, Signet, 1970; W. C. SCHUTZ, Joy - Expanding Human Awareness, New York, Grove Press, 1967; A. HUXLEY, Island, Penguin Books, 1964; W. BRADEN, The Private Sea, LSD, and the search for God, New York, Bantam Books, 1968; A. H. MASLOW, Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1964; T. LEARY, R. METZNER, R. ALPERT, The Psychedelic Experience, London, Academy Editions, 1971; R. E. L. MASTERS & J. HOUSTON, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, London, Turnstone Books, 1973; R. GUSTAITIS, Turning On, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969; G. FENG & J. KIRK, Tai Chi - A way of Centering and I Ching, London, Collier-Macmillan, 1970; J. MUMFORD, Psychosomatic Yoga, London, Thorsons, 1962; T. BERNARD, Hatha Yoga, London, Rider & Co., 1968; G. DOWNING, The Massage Book, New York, Random House, 1972; J. L. ROSENBERG, Total Orgasm, London, Wildwood House, 1973; B. GUNTHER, Sense Relaxation Below Your Mind, London, Macdonald, 1969; A. LOWEN, Pleasure, New York, Lancer Books, 1970 and The Betrayal of the Body, New York, Collier Books, 1969; C. KENT, The Puzzled Body, London, Vision Press, 1969; P. LASLETT, The Physical Basis of Mind, Oxford, Blackwell, 1957; G. RYLE, The Concept of Mind, London, Hutchinson, 1949 and A Rational Animal, University of London, Athlone Press, 1962; S. PALOS, The Chinese Art of Healing, New York, Bantam Books, 1972; F. PERLS, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Lafayette, Real People Press, 1969; F. GOBLE, The Third Force, New York, Pocket Books, 1971; A. WEIL, The Natural Mind, Penguin Books, 1975; J. W. PAINTER, Deep Bodywork and Personal Development - Harmonizing Our Bodies, Emotions, and Thoughts, Mill Valley CA, Bodymind Books, 1986.
108. Cfr L. WATSON, Supernature, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1973; L. PAUWELS & J. BERGIER, The Dawn of Magic, London, Panther Books, 1964.
109. Cfr S. KEEN, To a Dancing God, Collins Fontana, 1971.
110. Cfr S. LANGER, Feeling and Form, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.
111. Cfr P. A. SOROKIN, Social and Cultural Dynamics, New York, Bedminster, 1962; H. D. DUNCAN, Communication and Social Order, Oxford University Press, 1962.
112. B. LONERGAN, Method in Theology, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972.
113. Cfr C. DARWIN, The Origin of Species, Penguin Books, 1969; D. MORRIS, The Naked Ape, London, Corgi Books, 1967; J. BLEIBTREU, The Parable of the Beast, London, Paladin, 1970; I. & S. HEGELER, An ABZ of Love, London, Neville Spearman, 1963.
114. Cfr P. VANIER, “Towards an Effective Philosophy of Education” in Continuum, vol. 2, no. 3, Autumn 1964. This whole issue of Continuum is a discussion of various aspects of B. Lonergan's ideas.
115. D. TRACY, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, New York, Herder & Herder, 1970, pp. 47-48.
116. C. CASTANEDA, A Separate Reality, London, Bodley Head, 1971, p.264. Cfr R. DE MILLE, Castaneda's Journey, Abacus, 1978; V. SANCHEZ, The Teachings of Don Carlos - Practical Applications of the Works of Carlos Castaneda, Santa Fe, Bear & Co., 1995; C. CASTANEDA, The Teachings of Don Juan, Penguin Books, 1970; Journey to Ixtlan, London, Bodley Head, 1973; Further Conversations with Don Juan, London, Bodley Head, 1971; Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1974 and 1978; The Eagle's Gift, Penguin Books, 1981; The Fire From Within and The Power of Silence - Further Lessons of Don Juan, Black Swan, 1985 and 1989; The Art of Dreaming, London, Aquarian/Thorsons, 1993.
117. A Separate Reality, p.186.
118. Cfr Pope JOHN-PAUL II's Letter to Bishops, dated 19 April 1995, reiterating the Magisterium's disapproval of any purported priestly ‘ordination’ of women because invalid (The Tablet, 4 June & 25 November 1995); T. GILBY, Principality and Polity, London, Longmans, 1958; H. HESSE, Narziss and Goldmund, Penguin Books, 1971; K. G. REY, Das Mutterbild des Priesters, Benziger, Einsiedeln, 1969; H. C. LEA, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, two volumes, London, Williams & Norgate, 1907; I. DE LA POTTERIE, “The biblical foundation of priestly celibacy” in For Love Alone, St. Pauls, 1993; B. GODDEN, Celibacy and the Catholic Priesthood - The Case for Change, Becket Press, Northampton, 1993; I. C. DE CASTILLEJO, Knowing Woman, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1973; G. FLAUBERT, Sentimental Education, Everyman's Library, 1941; V. BUISSERET, The Woman and the Future of the Church, Rome, Address to the Fathers of the Synod, 1971; V. E. HANNON, The Question of Women and the Priesthood, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1967; J. MORRIS, Against Nature and God - The History of Women with Clerical Ordination and the Jurisdiction of Bishops, London, 1973; J. PETERKIEWICZ, The Third Adam, Oxford University Press, 1975; M. ROSS, Pillar of Flame - Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity, SCM Press, 1987; E. SCHÜSSLER-FIORENZA, Discipleship of Equals - A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation, SCM Press, 1993; A. SHEPSUT , Journey of the Priestess - The Priestess Tradition of the Ancient World: A Journey of Spiritual Awakening and Empowerment, London, Aquarian/Thorsons, 1993; B. THIERING, Jesus the Man, New York, Doubleday, 1992; K. J. TORJESEN, When Women were Priests - Women's Leadership in the early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the rise of Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993; J. WIGNGAARDS, Did Christ Rule Out Women Priests?, Great Wakering, Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1977; J. BOBKO, Vision - The Life and Music of Hildegard von Bingen, Viking Penguin, 1995; A. CURTAYNE, Catherine of Siena, London, Sheed & Ward, 1929; Sister MADELEINE, Solitary Refinement, London, SCM Press, 1972; D. SHERWIN BAILEY, The Man-Woman Relation in Christian Thought, London, Longmans, 1959.
119. As well as The White Goddess (note 37 above) cfr D. STREATFIELD, A Study of Two Worlds - Persephone, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959.
120. Cfr “Decree on Ecumenism” in The Documents of Vatican II (note 5 above), p.250.
121. Cfr M. C. D'ARCY, Communism and Christianity, Penguin Books, 1956; P. CORBETT, Ideologies, London, Hutchinson, 1965; D. EVANS, Communist Faith and Christian Faith, London, SCM Press, 1965; R. GARAUDY, De l'anathème au dialogue, Paris, Plon, 1966; J. KLUGMANN & P. OESTREICHER, What Kind of Revolution?, London, Panther Books, 1968; G. GIRARDI, Marxism and Christianity, Dublin, Gill & Son, 1968 and Dialogue et Révolution, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1969; B. DELFGAUUW, The Young Marx, London, Sheed & Ward, 1967; G. O'COLLINS, “The Principle and Theology of Hope” in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 21 (1968) pp.129-44.
122. Cfr W. R. BION, Experience in Groups, London, Tavistock Publications, 1968.
123. This point may be behind a lot of what H. MARCUSE writes in Eros and Civilisation, New York, Beacon Press, 1965.
124. Cfr A. EHRENSWEIG, The Hidden Order of Art, London, Paladin, 1970; J. GLEICK, Chaos - Making a New Science, London, Heinemann, 1988; D. M. LEVIN, The Listening Self - Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics, London, Routledge, 1989; M. MUSASHI, The Book of Five Rings, Boston & London, Shambhala, 1994.
125. For Transactional Analysis cfr note 34 above.
126. For Janov's contributions cfr note 30 above.
127. Cfr H. SPIEGELBERG, The Phenomenological Movement, two volumes, The Hague, Martin Nijhoff, 1960.
128. Cfr J. MARITAIN, The Degrees of Knowledge, London, Blés, 1959.
129.Cfr Saint THOMAS AQUINAS, How to Study, London, Aquin Press, 1947. Similar thinking may underpin the recent development of counselling in education - cfr M. SIM, Tutors and their Students, London, Livingstone, 1966; E. VENABLES, Counselling, London, National Marriage Guidance Council, 1971.
130. Cfr G. E. M. ANSCOMBE, Intention, Ithaca - New York, Cornell University Press, 1963.
131. Regarding moral theology and philosophy generally cfr LONERGAN's Insight and ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, Penguin Books, 1963; R. ATKINSON, Sexual Morality, London, Hutchinson, 1965; J. DE FINANCE, Ethica Generalis, Rome, PUG, 1959; A. G. N. FLEW, Evolutionary Ethics, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1968; J. LECLERCQ, Grandes Lignes de la Philosophie Morale, Paris, Vrin, 1946; O. LOTTIN, Morale Fondamentale, Tournai, Desclée, 1954; J. MacMURRAY, Reason and Ethics, London, Faber, 1962; A. I. MELDEN, Essays in Moral Philosophy, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1958; J. B. NELSON & S. P. LONGFELLOW, editors, Sexuality and the Sacred - Sources for Theological Reflection, London, Mowbray, 1994; P. H. NOWELL SMITH, Ethics, Penguin Books, 1954; I. T. RAMSEY, Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, London, SCM Press, 1966; B. RUSSELL, Marriage and Morals, Allen & Unwin, 1961; R. SCRUTON, Sexual Desire - A Philosophical Investigation, Phoenix, 1994; J. M. TODD, The Springs of Morality, London, Burns & Oates, 1955; G. H. VON WRIGHT, The Varieties of Goodness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; M. WARNOCK, Ethics since 1900, Oxford University Press, 1960; J. WILSON, Equality, London, Hutchinson, 1966 and Logic and Sexual Morality, Penguin Books, 1956. Cfr also notes 4, 5 and 9 above..
132. W. SHAKESPEARE, Troilus and Cressida, I, iii, 85-118.
133. EURIPIDES, Phœnissae, 531-48.
134. Cfr R. P. ANURUDDHA, An Introduction into Lamaism - The Mystical Buddhism of Tibet, vol. XXXI in the Sarvadanand Universal Series in memory of Swami Sarvadanand Ji, Hoshiarpur, Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute, 1959; R. H. BLYTH, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, New York, Dutton & Co., 1960; K. BROWN & J. O'BRIEN, The Essential Teachings of Buddhism, London, Rider, 1989; D. M. BURNS, Nirvana, Nihilism and Satori, Kandy, Buddhist Publication Society, 1968; J. EVOLA, The Doctrine of Awakening, London, Luzac & Co., 1951; A. GRAHAM, Zen Catholicism - A Suggestion, London, Catholic Book Club, 1964; Bhikku KHANTIPALO, The Wheel of Birth and Death, Kandy, Buddhist Publication Society, 1970; T. L. LISSI, Buddhist Handbook, Colombo, Frewin & Co., 1950; NYANATILOKA, Buddhist Dictionary, Colombo, Frewin & Co., 1950; Professor S. OGATA, Zen for the West, London, Rider & Co., 1959; P. RENDEL, Understanding the Chakras, Wellingborough, Aquarian Press, 1990; P. REPS, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Penguin Books, 1971; R. A. F. THURMAN, Inside Tibetan Buddhism, San Francisco, Collins, 1995; A. WATTS, The Way of Zen; Penguin Books, 1962; N. WILSON ROSS, Buddhism - A Way of Life and Thought, London, Collins, 1981. Because of my upbringing, I write in a Western context, but here I would also draws attention to M. BOSS, A Psychiatrist Discovers India, London, Oswald Wolff, 1965 and J. MOFFITT, Journey to Gorankhpur, London, Sheldon Press, 1973 - this latter work relates Hinduism and Catholicism.
135. J. FLETCHER, Situation Ethics, London, SCM Press, 1966.
136. Cfr G. RYLE, The Concept of Mind, London, Hutchinson, 1949; “Feelings” in Philosophical Quarterly, I, 1951, pp. 193-205; Dilemmas Cambridge University Press, 1954; “Sensation” in H. D. LEWIS, Contemporary British Philosophy - III, London, Allen & Unwin, 1956.
137. Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 2, cc. 3 & 6.
138. Zen Buddhist practice stresses this attitude, cfr note 134 above. It can also be found in the ethical humanist, cfr A. J. AYER, The Humanist Outlook, London, Pemberton, 1968. For a stimulating novel about the inner crisis that may be involved, cfr J. BARTH, Giles Goat-Boy, London, Secker & Warburg, 1967.
139. For some indications of recent trends cfr W. L. RIVERS, The Mass Media, New York, Harper International, 1966, regarding modes of communication, and regarding content: J. PASSMORE, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Penguin Books, 1968; A. J. AYER, Revolution in Philosophy, London, Macmillan, 1956; M. J. CHARLESWORTH, Philosophy and Linguistic Analysis, Louvain, Nauwelaerts, 1959; E. GELLNER, Words and Things, London, Gollancz, 1959; D. F. PEARS, The Nature of Metaphysics, London, Macmillan, 1962; M. F. SCIACCA, Les Grands Courants de la Pensée Mondiale Contemporaine, six volumes, Milano, Marzorati, 1958-64. This latter work considers, in addition to philosophy, sociology, psychollogy and economics, developments in law, politics, aesthetics, matehmatics, logic and education. Most of the references in other notes above are also relevant.
140. In Roman Catholic circles the contraception issue became a focus for the debate on this issue. Cfr Pope PAUL VI, The Regulation of Birth - Humanae Vitae, London, CTS, 1968.
141. Cfr E. WYNNE-TYSON, The Philosophy of Compassion, London, Centaur Press, 1970.
142. Conversion is a main theme in Lonergan's Method in Theology and my treatment is derivative.
143. Cfr A. TOYNBEE, A Study of History, Oxford University Press, 1972; B. R. SCHARFF, The Sociological Study of Religion, London, Hutchinson, 1970; E. BARKER, New Religious Movements, London, HMSO, 1994; J.-O. HERON & J. VALLON, World Religions Past and Present, London, Moonlight Publishing, 1991; J. O'BRIEN & M. PALMER, The State of Religion Atlas, London, Simon & Schuster, 1993; M. RUTHVEN, The Divine Supermarket - Travels in Search of the Soul of America, London, Chatto & Windus, 1989. Also, no less relevantly if less obviously: PETER BROWN, Authority and the Sacred - Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 1995; SYLVIA FRANCKE & THOMAS CAWTHORNE, The Tree of Life and the Holy Grail, London, Temple Lodge, 1996; MICHAEL J. EASTCOTT, The Seven Rays of Energy, Tunbridge Wells, Sundial House, 1980; The Message of Divine Mercy - A Short History, Dublin, Divine Mercy Publications.
144. For details cfr A. FLICHE & V. MARTIN, Histoire de l'Église; H. JEDIN, K. REPGEN & J. DOLAN, editors, History of the Church, 10 volumes, London, 1965-81, or the relevant articles in Sacramentum Mundi (note 5 above). Also: M. RINVOLUCRI, Anatomy of a Church - Greek Orthodoxy Today, London, Burns & Oates, 1966; V. LOSSKY, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1957 - a masterpiece.
145. Regarding atheism cfr T. J. J. ALTIZER & W. HAMILTON, Radical Theology and the Death of God, New York, Bantam Books, 1968; P. L. BERGER, A Rumour of Angels, Penguin Books, 1970; M. J. CHARLESWORTH, St. Anselm's Proslogion, Oxford University Press, 1965; H. DE LUBAC, The Discovery of God, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1960; L. DEWART, The Future of Belief, London, Burns & Oates, 1967; J. DURANDEAUX, Living Questions to Dead Gods, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1968; A. FLEW & A. MacINTYRE, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London, SCM Press, 1955; R. GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, God, His Existence and Nature, two volumes, St. Louis, Herder, 1934; T. GORNALL, A Philosophy of God, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1962; D. HUME, Dialogues concerning Human Understanding, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1955; J. HUXLEY, Religion without Revelation, London, Parrish, 1957; D. JENKINS, Guide to the Debate about God, London, Lutterworth, 1968; B. LONERGAN, Philosophy of God and Theology, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973; M. NOVAK, Belief and Unbelief, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966; A. J. D. PORTEOUS, R. D. MacLENNAN & G. E. DAVIES, The Credibility of Divine Existence, London, Macmillan, 1967; K. RAHNER, Im Heute Glauben, Einsiedeln, Benziger, 1966; J. ROBINSON, Honest to God, London, SCM Press, 1963; P. M. VAN BUREN, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, London, SCM Press, 1965; C. WILLIAMS, Faith in a Secular Age, Collins Fontana Books, 1966.
146. Contrast R. OTTO, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, 1958; cfr the religionless Christianity of D. BONHOEFFER, Letters and Papers from Prison, Collins Fontana, 1959.
147. The Documents of Vatican II, p. 216: cfr note 5 above.
148. Lonergan mentions this in Method in Theology, but treats the theme more fully in Insight. For examples cfr A. WHELAN, An Analysis of Tension and Change within the Catholic Church in England with particular reference to its manifestations and effects upon the members of a semi-monastic community, London, Bedford College unpublished dissertation for B.Sc. (Hons.) Sociology degree, Department of Sociology, 1972; B. WICKER, Culture and Theology, London, Sheed & Ward, 1966.
149. J. WREN-LEWIS, What Shall We Tell the Children?, London, Constable, 1971; for his psychological position cfr his contribution to C. RYCROFT, Psychoanalysis Observed, Penguin Books, 1968. Despite fundamental areas of disagreement Wren-Lewis admires Lonergan's work, and was, indeed, Longman's reader for Insight prior to its publication for the first time in 1957, cfr his review of the book in Modern Churchman, I (1957) pp. 139-43.
150. See the notion of religious experience in MASLOW, note 107 above, for some idea of what Wren-Lewis may have in mind. For a Catholic approach cfr O. CASEL, The Mystery of Christian Worship, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962.
151. For references and the main point cfr Insight.
152. Here I am following Lonergan's Grace and Freedom, note 14 above. Incidentally, Pelagius himself never seems actually to have subscribed to the ‘Pelagian’ heresy mentioned here; his own position seems rather to have been that also commended by St. Augustine, viz.,a firm and whole-hearted personal commitment to what is perhaps best termed the Primordially Traditional Catholic Faith.
153. Cfr. N. M. WILDIERS, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Fontana, 1968; P. TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, New York, Harper & Row, 1959 & 1960, The Future of Man and Hymn of the Universe, Collins Fontana, 1969 & 1970.
154. Note to p.86, § 1: Cfr H. M. LUKE, Kaleidoscope - “The Way of Woman” and other Essays, New York, Parabola Books, 1992; S. NICHOLS, Jung and Tarot - An Archetypal Journey, New York, Samuel Weiser, 1980.
155. Note to p.86, § 2: Cfr ANON, Die Grossen Arcana Des Tarot, Basel, Herder, 1983 and Méditations sur les 22 Arcanes Majeurs du Tarot, Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1984; H. U. VON BALTHASAR, Mysterium Paschale and Credo: Meditations on the Apostles' Creed, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1991.
156. For the language of sociology cfr E. CHINOY, Sociological Perspectives, New York, Random House, 1954; for the possidictable future see note 15 above - the later references.
157. For a parable of the ethical future cfr J. BUNYAN, The Pilgrim's Progress, Penguin Books, 1965; for its contemporary proclamation to the rising generation cfr R. SCHUTZ, This Day Belongs to God, London, Faith Press, 1961 and Dare to Live, SPCK, 1973. Brother Roger Schutz is the prior and founder of an ecumenical community at Taizé in Burgundy where young people camp out in thousands each Easter to celebrate the festival of the risen Christ.
158. Note to p.87, § 4: Barbara Thiering, however, maintains that Jesus himself married twice - cfr Jesus the Man (note 118 above). These pages references correspond to locations in the 1978 hardback edition of Voice I+N The Darkness (copies of which are available at cost from Creativity House, while stocks last).
159. Note to p. 87, final §, 1st sentence: Cfr. note 155 above. Also: H. U. VON BALTHASAR, The Glory of the Lord - A Theological Aesthetics, vol. I: Seeing the Form, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1982.
160. Note to p.87, final §, “symbolise”: The meaning and value of symbols is beautifully and prayerfully illustrated in Meditations on the Tarot - a Journey into Christian Hermeticism, New York, Amity House - Element Books, 1985 (this is an English translation of the only posthumously published above-mentioned Die Grossen Arcana des Tarot to which Hans Urs Von Balthasar contributed a Foreword), cfr J. ARGÜELLES, The Mayan Factor - Path Beyond Technology and Surfers of the Zuvuya, Santa Fe, Bear & Co., 1987 and 1989; T. O'BRIEN, Living in Personal Relationship with God Father, Son and Holy Spirit - The Understanding of it and a Way of Achieving it, 2nd edition, London, Guild Publications, 1993.
161. Note to p.88, line 2, “conversion”: Cfr E. ROUTLEY, The Gift of Conversion, London, Lutterworth Press, 1957; F. E. CROWE, Lonergan, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1992; E. DOYLE, St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood, London, Allen & Unwin, 1980; C. HAMER, “Aquinas today - tradition and innovation", 14-15 August 1995, an unpublished paper identifying a fourth species of ‘conversion’, viz.: “enstatic conversion”. The paper is included as an appendix in this electronic English-language edition of Voice I+N The Darkness, but is not yet included in the Italian translation.
162. K. RAHNER, Concilium, vol. 3, no. 3 (1967) pp. 38ss.
163. Cfr note 30 above, and V. WHITE, God and the Unconscious, Collins Fontana, 1960.
164. Note to accompany p. 90, §§ 2 & 3 of the 1st edition of Voice In The Darkness, which complements and, albeit to a very large extent retrospectively, presupposes all that is so wisely taught by both authors now mentioned, viz., my own immediate predecessor in office as Preliminary LibrArian IN The Neith Network, the anonymous and only posthumously published author of the already mentioned Meditations on the Tarot and JOAN D'ARCY COOPER (1927-82), Ascended Mistress of the Rainbow Program and author of: Culbone - A Spiritual History, Georgan Studio, 1977, The Ancient Teaching of Yoga & the Spiritual Evolution of Man, London, Research Publishing Co., 1979, The Door Within, Wincanton Litho, 1979, Corner Stones of the Spiritual World, Taunton, Hammetts, 1981 and Guided Meditation and the Teaching of Jesus, Element Books,1982, all of which may be obtained from Culbone Community Trust, Porlock Weir, Somerset, although only the last named can also be ordered from any good bookseller. I have prepared detailed Indices both to Meditations on the Tarot and, separately, to all of Joan Cooper's available writings.
165. Cfr note 30, 37 and 163 above.
166. For mysticism cfr E. GILSON, The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard, London, Sheed & Ward, 1955; W. JOHNSON, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, New York, Desclée, 1967; St. JOHN OF THE CROSS, Complete Works, three volumes, Westminster-Maryland, Newman Press, 1946; for the pseudo-mystical cfr A. WIESINGER, Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology, London, Burns & Oates, 1937. For a recent religious apologia cfr B. C. BUTLER, A Time to Speak, Southend-on-Sea, Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1972.
167. For a general view of Christianity cfr H. DE LUBAC, Catholicism, London, Burns & Oates, 1950. For a theoretical account of Church management in relation to Church life cfr P. F. RUDGE, Ministry and Management, London, Tavistock Publications, 1968.
168. It may be helpful to consult H. PALMER, The Logic of Gospel Criticism, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1968.
169. For a useful illustration of how the modern version of a given religion may differ profoundly from the pristine model consider the gulf between the Druids of history and those of contemporary British folk-lore - cfr S. PIGGOTT, The Druids, London, Thames & Hudson, 1968.
170. Cfr note 63 above.
171. There are affinities here with the thought of Pascal and Unamuno.
172. A. FLEW, God and Philosophy, London, Hutchinson, 1966.
173. God and Philosophy, p. 121.
174. Ibid., p. 133.
175. Cfr A. L. AUSTIN, Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford University Press, 1962.
176. In the Metaphysics and the Critique of Pure Reason. For apodictic arguments in favour of the existence of God one may consult, for instance, GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, note 145 above. For my comments on Flew's book in this connection cfr my “God and Professor Flew” in Downside Review, vol. 86, no. 283 (1968) pp. 121-31.
177. Note to p.94, final §: “sexual ecstasy” - cfr, e.g.: M. E. NASLEDNIKOV (= MARGO ANAND), Le Chemin de l'Extase, Paris, Albin Michel, 1987 and The Art of Sexual Ecstasy - The Path of Sacred Sexuality for Western Lovers, London, Aquarian Press, 1990.
178. Note to centre of p.95, where “mine” is italicised: However, cfr R. ELBAZ, The Changing Nature of the Self - A Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse, London & Sydney, Croom Helm, 1988.
179. K. LEHMAN, in Concilium, vol. 3, no. 3, 1967.
180. Commentarium on Boethius De Trinitate, 2, 1, ad 6; 1, 2, ad 1.
181. Quaest. disp. de Potentia Dei, 7, 5, ad 14.
182. God and Philosophy, pp. 171-2.
183. A. G. N. FLEW, Introduction to Western Philosophy, London, Thames & Hudson, 1971, p. 197.
184. Here I am following Lonergan's trinitarian studies, see note 39 above.
185. For Lonergan's development of this point cfr Method in Theology, note 112 above.
186. Note the link with religious, intellectual, moral and enstatic conversion (note 161 above).
187. PSEUDO-DENYS, Mystical Theology, ch. 1, 3.
188. For a battery of methods of psychological maturation cfr R. ASSAGIOLI, Psychosynthesis, New York, Hobbs Dorman, 1965; SUE COX, Female Psychology - The Emerging Self, Henley-on-Thames, 1976; B. LEWIS & F. PUCELIK, Magic of NLP Demystified - A Pragmatic Guide to Communication & Change, Portland, Oregon, Metamorphous Press, 1993. Meditations on the Tarot and the writings of JOAN D'ARCY COOPER (note 164 above) are also extremely helpful - cfr notes 20, 30, 34, 109, 116, 124, 154. Werner Erhard… (note 109 above) offers several valuable insights into psycho-cybernetics and also illumines the general ecology of contemporary consciousness, as Western will encounters Eastern spirituality and relaxation transforms into an intensely active process for both individuals and groups.
189. Cfr Saint FRANCIS DE SALES, Introduction to the Devout Life, London, Burns & Oates, 1962; A Treatise Of The Love Of God, Douai, 1630; Selected Letters, London, Faber & Faber, 1960. Compare I. TRETHOWAN, Certainty, Philosophical and Theological, London, Dacre Press, 1948. For a related method of education cfr P. BRAIDO, Il Sistema Preventivo di Don Bosco, Torino, SEI, 1956.
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