That the question should protrude out of English Catholicism and start prodding about in German Catholicism seems like irreverence, biting the hand that fed, or just plain scandalmongery. The revival of theological interest amongst English Catholics owes, after all, much to the activity of German-speaking theologians like Rahner and Kung. Here, we have said, is a Catholicism that takes theology seriously. The German bishops brought this activity in their train to the Council in the form of theological advisers. They were very well advised theologically. The Council was for German Catholicism something like a Trade Fair; its stands were stocked with the latest models of German theology, and the bishops quite overreached themselves in attempting to express it.

Meanwhile back in Germany there was considerable surprise in many quarters that the German episcopate should be, as Simplicissimus put it in a front page cartoon, marching like a mitred army on Rome behind its two cardinals. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel rummaged through its considerable files and produced a number on Cardinal Frings setting out dialectically his record as a conservative churchman in Cologne, and his activity as leader of the progressives at the Council. How were the two conflicting images to be reconciled? Certainly the German Church can never be the same again. Things have been said by its leaders in Rome which will have to be said in Germany.

Let me begin with a joke, a rather grim joke attributed to a popular Bavarian folk comedian named Weiss Ferdl. It seems that he would innocently inform his Munich audiences that the Nazi regime had just opened a new camp at nearby Dachau, and he would proceed to describe the elaborate security measures taken there – the armed guards, the dogs, the encircling rings of barbed and electrified wire. And then, when he felt the moment was right, he would deliver the punch-line: ‘But no matter what they do, they can’t keep me out if I really make up my mind to get in’.

It takes nothing away from the thousands who did ‘get in’ to Dachau or from the millions who ultimately peopled the other camps like Dachau to state the obvious fact that the great majority of individuals in Nazi Germany did not ‘make up their minds to get in’ but, quite the contrary, did what they were told to do so that they might be sure of staying out.

This obvious fact led many to embrace the doctrine of ‘collective guilt’ that was so popular as World War II drew to its close with the total collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’. This was the time when the question of the form of peace would take was already engaging the attention of the political and intellectual leaders of the Allied World. The prevailing tone was one of stern vindictiveness. The enthusiasts of the so-called Morgenthau Plan in America had their counterparts in the followers of Vansittart in England.

We are familiar enough now with the distinction between doctrine and theology, between the doctrinal content of the Christian faith as a form of life (an ‘experience’) and the variety of theological formulations in which this form of life is recognized and registered in the continuing self-awareness of the Christian community. The distinction is not absolute: there are cases in which, for instance, it is extremely difficult to imagine how a particular doctrine could be presented in any but the terms of some particular theology; but in principle at least it is always possible to express the truth of the faith in theological systems which, while of course never actually conflicting, nevertheless diverge considerably from one another in standpoint and procedure. This pluralism of approach has not developed so richly as it might have done because Christian thinking has always been conducted in predominantly European categories and modes of understanding. It may even be that the rapid unification of world culture which we are witnessing today decreases the likelihood that any theology will ever emerge that displays a serious indebtedness to distinctively African or Asiatic approaches to experience. Even if the faith is to survive in these continents at all, it may be bound to do so now in basically European, or post-European, ways of experience and reflexion; but it is clear enough that, at least in principle, there could be some encounter with God in Christ which would take a form sufficiently expressive of originally African or Asiatic approaches to reality to produce a ‘spirituality’ and a ‘theology’ radically different from anything hitherto (though words like ‘spirituality’, ‘experience’, and ‘reflexion’ are themselves so profoundly interwoven with European approaches to reality that one wonders how appropriate they may be here at all). God, even God in Christ (perhaps God in Christ above all, because thus God incarnate), requires to be encountered, that is loved and worshipped, by man – and man is always man in some particular culture, in some particular tradition, in some particular epoch.

Saint Benedict’s Rule, which was the most basic piece of government in the lives of thousands of medieval Christians, visualises the good life as a return to paradise, a return made possible through the merits of the Redeemer, and essentially an imitation of His life. The lost image of God was found again when the novice heard the voice of his master, calling clearly for the first time: ‘If today you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts’. The Redeemer has put everything at the novice’s disposal in the church and, more specifically, in the monastery. The monastery is a quintessence of the church in its life of community, its consecration to the one thing necessary, and its gradual preparation for the fulness of the beatific vision.

The ideal groundwork for Saint Benedict’s theology of conversion was already in existence, already a tradition, in Augustine’s teaching of a divine image deformed at the fall, and in constant process of reformation until the final union with God whose image the soul is. There is a catena from Saint Paul . . . ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed, so that the image may be reformed by Him who formed it.’ ‘When the vision of God is perfect, the soul’s similitude to God will be perfect also. Now we see in a glass darkly... We are transformed from glory to glory in the same image. This is happening from day to day in those who strive after God.’