In a paper published in New Blackfriars a few months ago, Mr Eagleton applied a number of political insights to our understanding of relationships within the Church, in an attempt to prevent the formulation and implementation of theological ideas that would be at variance with a correct understanding of our society. He is convinced that ‘our changing ideas about the priesthood aren’t only theological but are part of a general pattern of change in our whole society which for over a century has been redefining relationships, values, functions, attitudes’. He is concerned lest we block this process of development by merely changing our tone of voice, or our terminology, leaving intact and unquestioned a pattern of ecclesial relationships that is inappropriate to our contemporary understanding of political reality. Much that he says in criticism of what he describes as the ‘liberal paternalism’ of English Catholicism is both penetrating and important. But it seems to me that his analysis is defective because he has failed adequately to ask the question: what is a priest? It is certainly true to say that ‘we have in fact to make a clear division between what theology tells us about the priesthood, and the whole historical accretion which this has gathered in society’, but, if insufficient attention is paid to the data of revelation, we shall extricate the idea of the priesthood from one particular historical entanglement only to drown it in another: that of the dominant perspectives of contemporary politics.

A fact to begin with (from the Birmingham Post of 31 May 1966) about the new British Polaris submarine, due to be launched in September: ‘Each submarine, with its 16 missiles, can unleash more destructive power, 2,800 miles from the target, than all the bombs dropped by all the air-forces of the last war. It is the most powerful weapon yet devised by man.’’ The crews know (adds the newspaper) that if ever they have to use this power ‘they will have failed in their task – the maintenance of world peace’. Voices of criticism and protest seem to fade away in weariness, as the shadow of world-suicide creeps nearer. Of the statesmen and prelates who favour peace by nuclear deterrence, a few do stir uneasily as one fresh country after another ‘proliferates’ nuclear weapons of its own, or gets them from America. As for mere ‘conventional’ armaments, our own Government announces with pride its arrangements for selling them to pretty well all comers and nobody lifts an eyebrow. It is difficult not to agree with Fr Thomas Merton’s sombre summing-up of our situation as a turning of man’s creativity away from God to make a temple to man’s own powers of destruction. ‘The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man’s powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself.’ (The New Man, p. 42.)

My prevision of the papacy’s more or less immediate future differs from that of R. H. Benson, the Roman Catholic H. G. Wells, in his two novels Lord of the World and Dawn of All, by being neither eschatological nor ultramontane. To save prognostications about an institution’s future from being mere fiction one should try to control them by some consideration of its past. So I will begin my essay in fortunetelling by a glance at an earlier post-conciliar papacy, and thus try to set up a contrast between the papacy after the two councils of the Vatican and the papacy after the two councils of Constance and Bâsle/Florence in the fifteenth century. It is generally recognised that this episode of Church history is of special relevance to us today. It is discussed by Hans Kung in Structures of the Church), by Paul de Vooght in Les Pouvoirs du Concile et L’Autorité du Pape au Concile de Constance), and by Olivier de la Brosse in Le Pape et le Concile ... àla Veille de la Reforme). Without of course wasting our time by reviving the old papalist-conciliarist controversies of that epoch, we can profitably enquire why in the event they were so sterile, and whether in fact they have ever been satisfactorily resolved, and if not, whether we are today on the threshold of such a resolution.

Karl Stern writes in The Flight from Woman of a male-female polarity which runs through life, and suggests that it is a kind of ultimate, ‘anchored in the absolute’. One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘two principles’, a male and female polarity at the heart of things. To Lawrence the work of the male is to actualise, to bring into being, the turbulent potentiality of the Flesh, a disturbing darkness which is prior to rationality, morality and value, and which is ambivalently savage and tender.

This conviction that there is an area of dionysiac darkness and force within men, to be tapped, to be entered, a further resource of power beyond the polite liberal enclosures of conscious awareness, may go back to the nineteenth century to Schopenhauer (who believed in and feared it) and Nietzsche (who affirmed it) but it is a twentieth-century creed, confirmed by Freud and by the shock with which men have recognised their own violent depths. What are we to do? The familiar answer is that we are to accept the dark, this female pre-rational source, as the really ultimate thing which defines us as what we really or intrinsically are. So – obviously – this is what we ought to be. The hunger for extreme situations, for shock, for the perverse, which one meets for example in Antonin Artaud or in Genet, is a sign of this almost metaphysical belief in a deeper passional ground to which we must break through by violence, abandoning the tight restrictive world of morality and conduct.

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Professor at the Collège de France as from 1952, radically influenced the course of phenomenology, turning it from Germany towards France. With Merleau-Ponty philosophy is sincere and searchingly intelligent, it begins to try as never before, it really exerts its strength towards a genuine human breakthrough at all levels of our experience. With Merleau-Ponty we find a respite from those traditions of mechanism and intellectualism which, starting from Descartes and Kant, have never ceased to plague the course of the philosophy of perception. With Merleau-Ponty, philosophy speaks simply, simply because things are so very difficult.

What interests Merleau-Ponty most perhaps is the classical philosophical problem of the Other, and our possible means of knowing him and communicating with him. In Merleau-Ponty we have a guide who is awake to every level of consciousness in the Other. He sees that communication with the Other is a matter of understanding that area where thoughts and actions are conceived, of moving, that is to say, behind the figure of the Other as he expresses himself in acts and words, in a search for meaning. We need to destroy in psychology and in philosophy the mindless collecting of facts and the refusal of synthesis together with all artificial dichotomising. We need to seek for the reality of the Other in a private or ‘inter-subjective’ space.