The novel has always told us about the world, not by offering verifiable case-histories, or presenting statistical analyses of behaviour, but by showing us the typical in the individual, the general in the specific. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina might be narrowly and unsympathetically described as an account of adultery among a small restricted segment of upper-class Russian society about a hundred years ago. As crude description this is not incorrect; yet it conveys nothing whatever of the actual quality of the book. Although remote from us in time and setting, Anna Karenina is still a great and moving account of the human condition, is still valid for us here and now. Anna is both a particular woman in a particular society and a representative figure whose tragedy one can immediately apprehend and respond to. By living through her situation one understands one’s own more fully. This extension of human sympathy gives a particular importance to literary experience; in some fine words of C. S. Lewis, ‘it heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality’. It also offends the tidy-minded by emphasizing the essential messiness and complexity of the human condition. It not only shows us, but lets us feel with all our senses, the dilemmas and tensions of a nature that is both fallen and created by God, which is in Pope’s words:

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole Judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

When I suggested that the Christian tradition is to be identified primarily with its central ‘works’—the Bible and the liturgy—and that it is something analogous to literary criticism which can most easily make available its meanings and values, I denied that Christianity can be identified with politics. That Christianity has implications which are political, in the fullest sense, needn’t be insisted on in these pages. The nature of any identity, however, is something which still needs to be queried, especially in the light of the simplification of human affairs which it invariably threatens to introduce. It isn’t merely a liberal equivocation which prompts this questioning; an active spirit of criticism demands it, if the values which are invoked aren’t, in the end, to be betrayed. Terry Eagleton’s ‘Faith and Revolution’ is a case in point, and since it is explicitly offered as a contribution to the debate about ‘the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism’ no better example need be looked for.

Eagleton is particularly concerned to examine the ‘point of divergence’ which appears once this convergence has been established, and he wants to locate the distinguishing characteristics of Christianity without opting either for ‘a merely theoretical divergence’ or for ‘some specifically “Christian” revolutionary practice’:

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.

In the Apostles’ Creed the Christian professes to believe ‘in Jesus Christ who was crucified, dead and buried, descended to hell, on the third day rose from the dead... ‘; the Catholics are told by the Fourth Lateran Council that Jesus Christ ‘descended into hell, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven’; the Anglicans are taught (Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 3) that ‘it is to be believed that Christ went down into hell’; and the Lutherans accept (art. 9 of the Formulae Concordiae) that ‘the entire Christ, God and man, after his burial descended to hell, overcame the devil, destroyed the power of hell, and deprived the devil of his prestige’.

For once there is a doctrinal unity among the Christian confessions. But what is the Descent to me, a Christian of the twentieth century?

Shall I drag you before the Inquisition, threatening eternal damnation if you refuse to submit to the collective teaching of the Christian Churches?

But why should anyone want to force us into believing that Christ did indeed descend into hell when neither hell nor descent seem to have a real place in our lives?

Besides, it will not prove difficult to get acquitted of such charges of unbelief. It is easy to relegate abstract and fanciful religious information to the colourful mythological flourishing which Christianity appears to have picked up on its journey through religious traditions from all over the world. Is there not also that grave warning from St Paul against man’s tendency to leave his proper abode, concerning himself proudly with the affairs of the divine, or bending too eagerly over the hideous and dark places at the unapproachable centre of existence?

The key to what follows is to be found in knowing how to sin. Or again, it is not, for that could suggest that some appropriate advice was going to be given to those with practical difficulties in sinning. Now this is a matter on which advice may well be as undesirable as it is, for most of us, otiose; and in any case no such advice will be given here. No Kama Sutra of barratry, no Teach Yourself Embezzlement will be found in what follows. What will be found is some explanation of what is involved in saying that someone has sinned, which is far from otiose. For though sinning may be as easy as lying, the word ‘sinning’ can conceal a plurality of senses. Once this has been done, ‘forgiving sins’ is more than halfway to being explained. By way of a corollary it will then be shown why ‘forgiven- ness’, much talked of by some sensitive people today in connexion with forgiveness, cannot serve for explaining ‘forgiving sins’.

A first step in the explanation proposed is to distinguish ‘sinning’ as simply designating some particular piece of sinning, some event or process in the world, from ‘sinning’ in its proper sense, as not only designating ... (as before), but in addition also connoting that what is so designated has been held to have been done, or has been done, out of disobedience to God, or whatever. (In medieval innocence I shall speak of ‘disobedience to God’: let theologians or catechists substitute the phrase of their choice.)

After reading David Blamires’ book, with digressions into similar essays and a re-reading of much of David Jones’s own work, I am as one who has just finished a long journey through familiar and cherished country with a companion who, though congenial, talkative and interesting, has some distressing peculiarities of speech and temper: so that, when we return to our starting point, I am pleased to be relieved for a while of his company, and yet anxious to meet him again and renew the conversation. A fastidious reader will not make his way through more than a few pages of David Blamires’ book, for he will find too much that is objectionable in the style: and yet it would be ungenerous to quote from the many examples of pompous jargon covering poverty of thought, of vagueness which assumes the air of profundity, of worn-out cliches which slip from the pen of the careless or hurried writer. Ungenerous for two reasons: in the first place, because such writing has become so common that I do in truth believe that were one now to write with the clarity and economy of a Newman there would be many readers who would be unwilling and even unable to make the effort that should correspond to Newman’s. In the second place, Blamires writes about things which are difficult to pin down and define, and all of us—all who have had to make a similar attempt, particularly in connexion with David Jones—know but too well how great is the temptation to grope for clarity by adding one vague approximation to another. It will not do, therefore, to be over-fastidious: there may be a core of gold beneath this slovenly exterior.