The Bishop of Woolwich has, I need hardly say, a great number of true and important things to say about morality—notably his magnificent aphorism, ‘Prayer and ethics are simply the inside and the outside of the same thing.’ But the thing I want to discuss here is something he says about prohibitions. Briefly the New Morality is characterised by the doctrine that no moral prohibition is unconditionally valid. That is to say, according to the New Morality you can never describe a course of human action and say that this action would always be wrong in absolutely any circumstances. I think the New Morality is mistaken about this.

It is true that prohibitions do not have a very fundamental or important part to play in ethics. I do not think that a man can base his moral life on avoiding prohibited actions, any more than he can base his physical life simply on avoiding poisons. The law, in the sense of a code of prohibited behaviour, could never be the foundation of a human life. This is the clear teaching of St Paul and I accept it as unreservedly as does the Bishop. If a man tries to live simply by the law it will not help him to do right—it will only make clear to him where he has done wrong. The root and life of morality is not the law but love; what is not an expression of love is not good behaviour however much it may resemble good behaviour. Let us agree once and for all that, for example, chastity without charity is not even true chastity, it resembles the true virtue as a corpse resembles a living animal.

Although the teaching and example of Christ clearly call us away from violence and hatred and bloodshed, the world often pulls the other way. The tension which results can be agonising; and it is tempting to get rid of it straightaway by a kind of intellectual manoeuvre. We can for instance pretend that the world does not exist—or that we arc not responsible for it; or we can pretend that the gospels do not apply to it. If we succeed in reducing the tension, then is the time to beware; for the tension between the world and the gospels can only be removed by eliminating one of them; and both are necessary for a Christian-in-the-World.

St Augustine felt forced by historical circumstances to admit that a man could serve in the army and still please God; but it was not without a great sense of strain that he gave some kind of approval to ‘such great, repulsive and cruel evils’. From scraps of St Augustine, the Western Church evolved what has come to be known as the ‘just war tradition’, permitting war, and later making it obligatory, in certain defined circumstances. The idea of a ‘just war’ is an explosive one; it provokes extreme responses. The Roman Catholic who still bases his thinking on this tradition, or the more common type, who simply relies on the opinions of ‘experts’ and does not think at all, will regard the just war as part of the Creed and will afford it an unquestioning reverence; those who do not have such faith consider it as just another piece of appalling Roman casuistry.

To this second edition of his now famous Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow has added fifty pages of further thoughts provoked by the extraordinary amount of attention it received. One can say ‘extraordinary’ without irony, or with little. In itself the lecture was not very remarkable— neither deep, nor subtle, nor closely reasoned, nor witty. But it made its points with force and it was exceedingly topical. Moreover Sir Charles is an interesting and versatile man, and as a writer he has a beguiling knack of combining a certain high seriousness—solemnity even—with the common touch. One feels that he has tried hard not to be spoiled by success—not, in a sense, to be changed by it at all. He brings the whole of himself, his feelings as well as his gifts and experience, into all that he writes. He does so here. Allusions to Rutherford and G. H. Hardy, dropped with a tone at once admiring and affectionate, and to high table conversations, evoke the Cambridge background and the thrill of having been a young research student there at ‘one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics’. Allusions to the working class origins widen the perspective and humanise it; reference to important tasks well performed in the civil service add the impression—and a perfectly just one— of a man who knows much front the inside about power and the workings of power. Indeed the only ‘inside’ allusion one misses is to the novelist’s art; which is a pity since so much of the lecture, on its more polemical side, and so much of the comment now added to it, amount to an indictment of the ‘literary intellectual’ and, indirectly or by implication, of a good deal of the literature which he either produces or spends much time and energy discussing.

Robert Rauschenberg, whose show has just ended at the Whitechapel Gallery, is a traditional artist, binding into one vision all the major streams of experiment and achievement of twentieth-century art which interest him. The paintings, combine paintings, and objects on view are a digest of influences which in fact we all know; if we do not, then there is no excuse, because books on the art leading up to Rauschenberg are a commonplace in bookshops, let alone the pictures themselves which are on view at the Tate and other galleries. Rauschenberg’s is probably the best example of a kind of art in the mid twentieth century which starts off by making you think it is art autre, and then it becomes art engagè, only, on final analysis to turn into a kind of art pour I’art. At first glance nothing could be more art autre than the first combine paintings with their wilful inclusion of everything that is not art. The point of art autre as I see it, is to cut to the root any kind of making or appreciating that involves the aesthetic faculty; it is done expressly to destroy the academic and conventional idea of what constitutes Art and substitute a gratuitous gesture in its place, a gesture that is in the end only made valid by the vision of the maker, the true artist. It is a simultaneous alienation of the art-object from the spectator and from arty, or aesthetic, art; but this situation is never a complete success unless the art-object is thumpingly bad—then of course you do get a complete alienation. Rauschenberg’s art is very good however and so the feeling of alienation is quickly replaced by a feeling of magnetism.