The point about being a Christian (other versions of this are no doubt possible!) is that one lives, loves, works, feels and thinks in the light of the disclosure/discovery of a sense of end (finis, telos), and hence of a possibility of happiness (beatitudo, eudaimonia), which in turn points to a whole style of being-with-others, a particular form of community (amicitia, koinonia). In principle this is both nuclear and global. As well as the smaller projects, such as the guerrilla bases, proleptic utopias, regenerating sanctuaries and the like which our local church-communities should be, there must be permanent transformation of the structures of interdependence, ongoing liberation of mankind as a whole, active sponsoring of the righteousness of God which happens as the righting of relationships within society. Salvation occurs as community: that is unmistakably the Christian emphasis. In other words, then, politics cannot be divorced from ethics. It is in the ethical, precisely, that the relation between the personal and the social-political is negotiated. And if that is a commonplace in the tradition represented by St Thomas Aquinas, as it is, however uncharacteristic it may be of many Catholics ‘in public life’, it is also a principle which is central in the literary- critical tradition developed and sustained by Scrutiny.

The plan of this paper, then, is first to outline how the Scrutiny tradition forms an essential part of the long revolution against the society which inhibits and falsifies all reference to an ultimate source of meaning and an ultimate ground of being,