Even as organized religion becomes less fashionable in many corners, and perhaps especially in the university, a centuries-old scholastic debate about the existence of God has been resurrected to be pursued by the Academy with a new vigour. The so-called Ontological Argument, which St Thomas and Kant each in his turn demolished, is alive and well and alleged to have been more energetically debated in the last decade than ever before in its history, That this phoenix has risen from its ashes is not necessarily best accounted for by seeing it as an event in the war between belief and unbelief. For in large measure, today’s philosophers have occupied themselves with the new modal arguments of men like Malcolm and Hartshorne because of the fascinating logical problems which they entail. Moreover, in the course of the history of the argument, the sides have not been chosen by a strict division between those of the faith and those outside. St Anselm thought he had come upon a worthy insight when he first proposed the argument. But just as surely St Thomas thought the argument inadmissible—without by any means intending to deny God’s existence. There is a lesson here, albeit an embryonic one, for those who are carrying on another current debate—the one about whether theology can or should be done with detachment or commitments

To be academically respectable, some would say, theology must be pursued with scholarly objectivity and freedom from ecclesiastical constraints. Its integrity as a discipline hinges on dispassionate examination of the data and the freedom to draw conclusions wholly in accord with the evidence. One’s faith-commitment as such should not influence his theology.

One recurring premise in much criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is the dissoluteness of his dramatis personae. I say ‘dissoluteness’, because there is usually assumed to be some correlation between the imputed psychological state and a moral dereliction. Thus, Bernard Bergonzi’s recent study, speaking of the ‘deluded’ or ‘corrupt’ narrator of Portrait of a Lady, argues that ‘his consciousness is at all times on the verge of dissolution’. His drawing-room conversation is said to be disrupted by the ‘grotesque musical sounds going on inside his head. . . . He makes an effort literally to compose himself but his impressions remain as fragmentary and disjunctive as the items in a daily paper.’ Yet the lines Bergonzi cites to substantiate this suggest the opposite. In face of a multitude of other lives assembled, but also abstracted, reduced, made safe for him by the newspaper, the narrator maintains a casual equanimity, only mildly stirred by the sense of a problematic otherness:

My friend, Father Marcel Boivin, W.F., sent me a copy of his article ‘A Positive Approach to Taboo’ and asked for my comments. I wrote a somewhat sharp reply, which he received with his usual good nature, standing his ground, however, on the essential point of there being an essential difference between the scientific mentality and the taboo mentality. For me, this theory is, if not a taboo, at least a myth which is perhaps open to critical analysis; however, I feel I ought to sketch out my own way of seeing human thought in action. As Fr Boivin knows, I am neither a psychologist nor a philosopher nor a theologian, but a priest capable of, at any rate, preaching to peasants, children and seminarists, traditionally the three most taboo-ridden categories of mankind; I am also a social anthropologist, a profession whose initiates aspire to explain taboos scientifically, a claim which, if taboos and science are really of such utterly different orders, should mark us as sacred monsters of the quality of the pangolin of the Lele.

To understand human thought one needs to reflect on language. Dolphins, honey-bees and apes all transmit information to each other ; human language abstracts and generalizes, and can refer to what is absent, or past, or purely imaginary. It can therefore transmit far more than is transmitted through animal communication systems, and, for this purpose, language is structured by grammar and syntax. One can speak a language correctly without being able to explain the rules of grammar, but whenever a language is analysed it is found to have a set of rules which have a reasonable amount of consistency with each other.

I am indeed grateful to Professor Mascall and to Fr McCabe for their perceptive and kindly critiques of my article on the eucharistic presence. To answer them adequately would take more room than even the Editor’s generosity would tolerate, so I shall content myself with two things. I shall try to show what I think are the strengths and limitations of their views (in my opinion, although perhaps they will not agree with me, we are closer than might appear). And, in doing this, I shall refer to or cite passages from what I trust is my forthcoming book, In the Breaking of the Bread. In this way I shall at least show that the points they raise have not been neglected by me, whatever may be thought of the answers I offer. References to the articles in New Blackfriars will be by ‘E1, ‘E2’, ‘M’ and ‘H’, with page-numbers. References to the book will be by ‘BB’, followed by chapter and section.

Let me start by stressing that we are all agreed that no human language or philosophical system is capable of expressing the the eucharistic presence adequately. I make the point with some generality and at some length in BB iii, 1. The remarks about ‘amnesia’ and ‘confrontation’ in my article (E2, pp. 406-407) are based on later sections of that chapter, and are consequences of the general thesis that in theology ‘not only is our linguistic medium inadequate; it is inadequate to the task of drawing bounds to its inadequacy’ (BB iii, 1). The Aristotelian (or any other) vocabulary of change needs maltreatment of one sort or another for its eucharistic employment (see M, pp. 542-543; H, pp. 548-551). Where we differ is in our verdict on the particular ‘maltreatment’ that is in question.

My reactions to all priests and monks are based partly on my own early memories of my convent school and on my father’s healthy anti-clericalism. ‘Feudal barons . . . that’s what they are, nothing but feudal barons’, he used to roar about the Irish bishops of the thirties and I think he still would have said it had the rooms been bugged and the threat of the salt mines hanging over him. Still, he realized that you couldn’t, at that time (and possibly even now in Ireland), beat City Hall or rather the Archbishop’s House and so he sent me to the care of the nuns. I have written about my hatred of their mixture of hypocrisy, snobbery and sanctimonious smugness elsewhere. All I can say on the credit side of my attempted brainwashing is that its harshness was like Commando training in that nothing, I feel, will ever be quite as bad again. My school days left me with the shaky idea that the Almighty was a Furious Old Man for most of the time and that there just might be a hell, so I went to Mass on Sundays to pacify him and I gabbled daily prayers as if presenting a shopping list.

Years in England practising as a psychiatrist diluted whatever bits of bogus religion I had left. This worried me at first, so conditioned was I to the crackles of hellfire if you didn’t go to Mass. I was a reluctant unbeliever and so I tried to do something about it. I mentioned my doubts to a priest in Confession and he said ‘Its your age’ (I was 31 at the time!). I felt just as indignant as most women patients do when their doctor rakes this up when he doesn’t know really what’s the matter with them. Feeling that there ought to be a sort of spiritual clinic where people like myself could bring their symptoms of accidie and religious ennui I even went back to my old enemies, the nuns, because a friend told me that a day retreat might help me. It didn’t. I was put into a small room and given a boring little book written by an old Jesuit whose fertile output gracing the Irish church book-stands must make him the Harold Robbins of the holy book world.