A word or two first to explain the title of this paper. My subject is ‘The autonomy of the university’. Actually, of course, the essential question is about the autonomy of the individual university teacher and research worker, not so much of the university as an institution, and I propose to treat the matter from that angle. Also, ‘autonomy’ is not the best word to express the question we are discussing. I would prefer to put it thus: ‘What is the responsibility of the university to the rest of the community, and how is this responsibility to be enforced?’

I shall try to answer this question, not from special principles applicable to the university alone, but from the general rules that govern the rights and duties of all workers. I know that many people dislike the idea that the university teacher or researcher is just one more kind of worker. In this country (Austria) we have recently heard the eloquent protest of Josef Pieper on this point. But opinions will not change facts. Work is work, whether it is done by the driver of a bus, the typist at her desk, or the professor in a university chair, and the rules governing the rights and duties of workers are the same for all. Everyone who works has the right to use his special skill and ability to the full—to enjoy, if you like, full employment—for two ends. The first is the development of his own personality, for achievement in work is necessary to the growth of a mature personality. The second is service to the community.

The Bible starts with a deed and a wonder: ‘In the beginning God created . . .’. The reader is at once, without preliminaries, told of a power so great that it handles the sum of things, ‘heaven and earth’, and produces what it handles. Prior to whatever else is going to happen, things, we learn, only- are because of ‘God’. The statement is familiar—too familiar; but what it says is wonderful, in the sense that it means that the accepted order of things, the world around us, need not be. All wonder, all surprise, implies a norm, an accepted order of ‘ordinary’ reality from which the surprising fact or act seems to deviate as an exception. But here it is the whole ordinarily accepted norm itself, not man’s world only but all nature too, that is suddenly presented as an ‘exception’: it need not have been. The accepted norm is swept aside and another, infinitely more real, appears—God. As for the universe, we know now what it is made of—nothing!

I shall not attempt here to prove this doctrine as a thesis, restating familiar arguments, but only to draw out its meaning a little and then touch on one or two difficulties we may find in holding it firmly.

The doctrine tempts the imagination (witness my first paragraph), but it baffles it too, of course. Our images are always of limited things or activities, and if we try to represent ‘creative’ activity we have to make shift with such human doings as seem most original—the production of a symphony or poem, of a scientific or philosophical theory: all human things, presupposing at least the man who produces them and some sort of working material.

The publication of the Wolfenden Report has re-opened an old debate. How far should human legislation enter the field of morals and condemn behaviour reprobated by the Christian tradition? The difference between crime and sin is pretty generally recognized at the extremes; thus a man will admit to a technical breach of the rules and regulations without concluding thereby that it is matter for the Sacrament of Penance. The difficulty is to know where to draw the line between what should be legislated against and what should be left well alone, even though it may be objectionable to many on grounds of ethics, religion, or culture. Let us attempt to mark the frontier, or rather to narrow the marches between the temporal” and spiritual powers in the culpability country.

Among Catholics the guarded approval which greeted the Report was presently followed by dissent. Perhaps their attitude will harden when the proposals come before Parliament, but for the moment it remains unsettled. The ambiguity reflects an oscillation between two opposite charges in the widespread suspicions entertained about our social mentality. Grumbles at one moment about clerical fussiness and intrusion into private affairs are followed at the next by mutters about condoning human frailties which do not interfere with ecclesiastical privileges. We are told of priests with blackthorns scouring the hedgerows for courting couples of a summer evening, of petulant sacristans shooing lightly-clad tourists away from the churches, of orders from the pulpit telling us how to vote: behind all this lurks an archetypal Mrs Grundy—crowned with a biretta.

The Pasternak affair of last autumn tended to throw into obscurity the awards of the other Nobel Prizes for 1958. Normally, it is ‘peace’ rather than ‘literature’ which attracts the notice of the press and the other organs of publicity. But this time the roles were reversed, and it was ‘literature’ which offered a rich store of acceptable copy by providing a significant chapter in the development of something that really interests us more than peace, namely the ‘cold war’. After all, one could hardly grudge the journalists their excitement that at long last the U.S.S.R. had dropped practically its first point in the ‘world propaganda’ competition with the West, even if maturer reflection could not but see this as only adding a deeper shade to the personal tragedy of Dr Zhivago’s creator.

That Boris Pasternak, then, should eclipse Père Pire in the press as a whole is understandable enough. What is surprising is that the award of such a widely prized honour to a priest should have raised so little attention in our Catholic press. After all, even bears—or so the apocryphal story runs—can hit the headlines simply by eating nuns on the way to Mass. Yet, at the time of writing, only the briefest notice has been taken of this award, only the baldest details of Père Pire’s life and work given.

To give an explanation of this silence would be easy enough. It would have to be in terms of ignorance; an ignorance, I hasten to add since my present intention is far from being a criticism of the Catholic press, which is shared by all of us, Père Pire’s own Dominican brethren in England not excluded.

This impressive book marks very clearly the revolution that is taking place in Christian thinking about Islam, and at the same time it illustrates an important new trend in scholarly treatment of the Qur’an. In the past, theological hatred of Islam has often been stronger among Oriental Christians than among Latins; the prejudice shared by both has been intensified by the frustrations of subordination in the political and social order. Now this important book comes from a Maronite author, that is, from the Church traditionally most anti-Muslim. It enjoys the blessing of that truly remarkable prelate, H. B. Mgr Meouchi, the Patriarch, who, however, is far from being at one with his church. The book is a little dour; it has all the severity of the thesis form. Even when it was turned into a book, the solid meat was served without sauce. This criticism, which militates against its readability, is the only criticism I can wish to make of a book which greatly promotes understanding of Islam, and clears new paths for scholarship.

It reverses the traditional attitude of Christians and of scholars, in a very simple revolution, which consists in treating the Qur’an as a religious book; in treating it consistently as consistently a religious book; in assuming that religious ideas inspired and informed it and guided the Prophet. From the earliest days of Christian criticism, Islam was supposed to have been contrived out of Christian, Jewish and pagan elements, by a false prophet; hypocritically, it was thought in the old days, and more or less sincerely, or innocently, in a more modern view.