‘No one has ever seen God’; this is the text which was read to us from the first Epistle of St John, and which also occurs at the end of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel. ‘No one has ever seen God’: an appropriate text, perhaps, for the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost, in that pause which the liturgy has contrived for our meditation between the departure of the Son as risen Lord and the coming of the Spirit, an experience of absence through which we may more profoundly recover an experience of presence—absence, presence, of what, of whom? Of God, whom no one has ever seen.

Let us recall what must be a familiar experience to all of us at some time in our lives: the sleeping city, the lights shining in the empty streets, oneself, the solitary watcher withdrawn from the human community of sleep, to which one is all the more deeply drawn. This is the before and after of all the active business of the day, the multifarious contradiction of human project, plan and purpose, the coming and going: all rises from and returns to sleep, movement back to stillness, the rising and falling of a single biological rhythm of breathing, unconscious, at rest. Are these sleepers dreaming their personal dreams, or are they united in the single impersonal dream of the worl? Even those who do not sleep in this sleeping stillness, the sufferers awake in their white nights alone, the lovers involved in their private intimacy, aren’t they too enacting in this universal dream a typical human destiny of pain and sex, death and procreation, sounding a ground bass of human existence? The sleeping city: a human community realized in a unity before and after, below if not above, the community of active function and conscious purpose: this underlying community finding itself in a deeper unity of typical man. And who or what sustains this deeper unity—is the dream of the world really impersonal, or does the dream unfold in some deeper dreamer?

The subject of love is of universal interest, has engaged the attention of many since time immemorial and will continue to do so. It is of particular interest to Christians who make the claim that God is love. If this be true, as we believe it to be so in faith, then no other subject has comparable significance.

It is for this reason that I am beginning this paper with a brief personal credo which can be stated simply. If Christianity finds itself in a situation in which few are really concerned with its survival and may find it irrelevant to their lives, I believe that in the final analysis this is so because Christianity has failed in one of its fundamental missions, which is to be the catalyst of love in the world. After every possible case for its present demise—such as its internal disunity, its obsolete language and liturgy, its authoritarianism, its pessimism over sexuality, the disarray of its structures, the anachronism of much of its habits and its legalism—have each been exhaustively examined, I believe there is left one enduring and irreducible reason which is succinctly stated by St Paul:

Having once berated (by letter) the present editor of New Blackfriars for feeding his readers on the ersatz provender of bloated book-reviews, I find myself involved in the same offence. My excuse is that I have rarely read a book which has aroused in me such ambivalence of reaction as Dr Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols. My hope is that this extended reviewed will encourage other people to read this book, which it would be unjust to ignore totally, and pernicious to accept entirely. The book is of significance in both anthropology and theology; is it perhaps the turn of an intellectual tide, a theological anthropology moving in to the vacuum left by secular theology?

This, I believe, is the author’s intention: to carry out a counterrevolution in the social sciences, so that anthropology and sociology, whose origins were so deeply rooted in the wish of the French positivists and British agnostics to reveal and shatter the foundations of faith, will now become instruments for demasking the social causes of all religious attitudes including atheism, agnosticism and indifference, and for indicating the social patterns which favour faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This intention does credit to Mrs Douglas as a Christian, and the examination of ethnographic material which it has provoked reveals her brilliance as an anthropologist. Underlying it all, however, is, I consider, an appalling error, or paradigm of errors. But let us see what she has to say.

Although, if we are to grasp at all the fundamental reasons behind the falling number of confessions, we must not only trace the development of the sacrament but also try to look at the theological principles involved, this could easily divert us away from the urgent problems of the moment into a tedious and complex historical survey. To avoid this we shall restrict ourselves to quoting a suggestive conciliar text, drafted more than eleven centuries ago. In 813 the Emperor Charlemagne, as part of his programme of ecclesiastical reform, summoned a number of councils. One of these met at Chalon, and the following is one of its canons:

‘Some say that sins ought to be confessed only to God but others believe that they are to be confessed to priests: both of which are practised within the Church not without great fruit. And so let us confess our sins to God in so far as he is the Remitter of sins . . . and according to the institution of the apostle, let us confess our sins to one another, and let us pray for one another that we may be saved. And so confession which is made to God cleanses sins; but that which is made to the priest, teaches us how these same sins are cleansed. For God, who is both the author and dispenser of salvation and health, frequently offers this by the invisible ministry of his power, frequently by the work of physicians.’ (P. F. Palmer, Sacraments and Forgiveness, p. 157.)

The exact interpretation of this canon is difficult and need not delay us. It is clear, however, that a tension was felt to exist between the confession of sins to a priest and the direct repenting of them in the sight of God. It is clear that this tension is still with us and underlies the falling number of confessions.