I share Phil Beisly’s uneasiness about aspects of my ‘Faith and Revolution’ article. In particular, he seems to me right to fasten on a serious obscurity of relationship between, on the one hand, the ‘extreme’ testing of Christian commitment I delineated, and, on the other hand, the ‘normative’ values, life-forms and practices of the Christian faith as we familiarly know it. He also raises an acute point about how the notion of the Church as intensifying ordinary revolutionary practice is to be squared with Christianity’s permanently critical stance to the world. But if the image of the Church as super-revolutionary vanguard won’t quite do, neither will the image of the Church as Cambridge literary critical seminar. Beisly and I share a belief in Christianity’s ‘critical, negative, transcending role’: the problem on which my article focused was the specificity of that Christian critical transcendence, in an historical epoch where other creeds, and Marxism above all, advance similar and serious claims.

That still seems to me a reasonable question to raise: a real question, rather than one merely generated by a self-absorbed terminology. And the difficulty can’t be evaded by a simple replacement of a Marxian conceptual framework by another, equally ideological set of formulae: the hypostasized absolutes, at once generously ‘concrete’ and emptily self-definitive, of a Leavisian concern with ‘life’. That this self-enclosed Leavisian terminology is ideological seems to me self-evident. One doesn’t need to plough back far into the last decades of the nineteenth century to uncover at least some of the roots of that curious coupling of ordinary English anti-intellectual empiricism with an assertive, often contentless transcendentalism which, in part at least, characterizes the Leavisian ideology.