Thus did Eric Gill sign his letters to Bede Jarrett, the English Dominican Provincial between the wars. I hope to show that he was saying something true about himself.

But it is presumptuous of me to write about him, and especially here in New Blackfriars, which is a development of the Black- friars in which he first published so many of his essays. Blackfriars has also given us many personal witnesses to Eric Gill’s character and shape of mind — David Jones, John O’Connor, Walter Shew- ring, Desmond Chute and a number of others. So there is an element of the absurd in my appearing here. I have tried to get rid of the absurdity in so far as I am able by assembling some of the available evidence about Mr Gill, and especially of course from his Autobiography.

Since the publication last November of Dr Yorke’s book, the name of Gill has frequently appeared in all sorts of places. There have been several exhibitions of his work. There has been a sale at Sothebys. He has become someone talked about in the art world. I wonder what E. G. would have thought about that. When I read some of the reviews of Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit I wondered whether the Gill they portrayed was in fact recognisably the same as the Gill described by those who knew him, or indeed as Dr Yorke recognised him.

The Times reviewer wrote that ‘it is certainly true that the literature relating to Gill has up to now been mainly superior hagiography. And Gill’s confreres have most noticeably played down the eroticism’ (3 December 1981).

The importance of Gill’s political writings lies in their linking of two major traditions of response to industrial capitalism, that of libertarian socialism and that of Catholicism. In the line of Morris and Kropotkin he is a significant figure; in the history of modem English Catholicism, a major one.

Industrialism in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe can be seen as consisting of two basic phases. In the first industrial revolution there was a breaking of the traditional vertical links between social strata and a tendency for them to polarise into selfconsciously opposed classes. In the second wave of the industrial revolution the horizontal links of family, workplace and voluntary association which had survived are weakened or broken. A basic strand of socialist thought was preoccupied with the first development. It tended to welcome the polarization of social classes and to stress the conquest of state power and state control of industry as the agent of the liberation of individuals. In their very different ways, anarchists and catholics were as responsive to the second as to the first development of industrialism. Attention to the disruption of horizontal relations of work and domestic life produces an hostility towards, at least a scepticism about, the role of the state, of centralization, and of the mass-organization of work. Issues of control and quality of life predominate, whether the focus is on the family, the individual, or group of workers.

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1950s Eric Gill was a minor cult figure among Catholics whom I knew. As an apologist, a social, political and aesthetic theoretician rather than anything else. Gill’s lettering in stone was something I had learnt to admire at Ampleforth where Dom Patrick Barry was at that time active in calligraphy and lettering in stone himself. I liked Father Patrick’s work a lot and he introduced me to Gill’s. There was a certain general keenness about Gill at Ampleforth then but I only got to his Letters and Autobiography as an undergraduate. In those days Gill and Maritain and St Thomas and Belloc and Chesterton were good company. In a dilettante, amateur way I enjoyed myself among them. As far as Gill was concerned I was particularly pleased with him and myself for discovering him in his First Nudes and 25 Nudes. I had liked Gill’s apologia in his Autobiography for sensuality in giving proper appreciation to God for His ways in His creation, and I liked his nudes. For all their occasional clumsiness and maladroitness of balance and proportion, I still do. I find it particularly a matter of regret that Gill’s deliberate erotic work is still under so much prurient lock and key at the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. When will the English grow up?

Gill’s more steamy and obsessive side, his sexy nudes and ex- ultance in sensual experience and joys, appealed more to me than to some of my Catholic friends, and than much of his polemic argumentativeness. Some of the more arty side of my family were enthusiasts for Gill’s way of life via personal acquaintanceship with David Jones and I found that rather tedious. Gill began to smack of affectation and moral-art snobbery at about the time I stopped being an undergraduate and went into National Service.

In an article published in this journal in December 1980 I sought to draw out some of the moral and theological implications of a punitive attitude on the part of the Church towards a kind of minority which it could not comprehend and by which it felt challenged. Since that time it has been borne in upon me, both through experience and through discursive reasoning that the implications are far deeper and more terrible than I had thought. For that reason I beg the indulgence of readers for a further exploration. I am aware that such a fusion of introspection and exospection is spiritually dangerous, since the subjective and objective can only coinhere in one who is pure in heart. Nonetheless, I feel that the effort is worth the risk.

I should perhaps explain at the outset that my own theology is rapidly developing in a radical ‘materialist’ direction; that is to say, my understanding of both the Gospel kerygma and Tradition is confirming my intuition that the material, and in particular our being-in-body, has normative spiritual value. I am not at all shocked by Bishop John Robinson’s suggestion in the famous lady Chatterly trial that sexual intercourse has precise sacramental signification. Those who cannot go along with this perspective will not be able fully to appreciate the following argument and may even be offended by it. Reader, be warned!

I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.

The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.

Original sin, nowadays is usually not welcomed by most Christians of Western culture. Religious traditions on original sin are felt to be uncomfortably strange in our society where people, by common consent, see themselves so unconnected to others that the actions of one person are supposed to leave other people untouched. Such cultural agreement is at the roots of a society that believes every person is free and able to achieve whatever he/she wants. Since original sin doctrines clearly deny such “unconnectedness”, no wonder they are often rejected and reduced to a teaching as simplistic as “a spot on a child’s soul!” This articles suggests that original sin traditions can speak to our contemporary culture, challenge some of its deepest presuppositions, and lead to new levels of awareness of what it means to be Christian in today’s world.

To understand the meaning of doctrines which are expressed in what anthropologists call mythical tales or myths, it is relevant to recognize the different representations of the world which flow from different mythical tales, and the effects of those different representations. I submit that a doctrine as “religious” as Original Sin says a lot about how we envision the civil organization of society. Furthermore, the present disregard for this doctrine is related to social and political respresentations. I will thus compare the basic assumptions of the original sin myth with another set of assumptions, those underlying the individualistic world view which is sometimes summarized in-another myth: the civil religion of free enterprise.

Various interpretations of original sin have attempted to articulate individual and collective dimensions of the sinful condition. These interpretations at the same time propose diverse understandings of the relationship between history and our present actions. Classical Catholicism seems to identify original sin with the tendency of each individual toward selfishness and personal aggrandizement.