The Second Vatican Council draws to a close amid the rather general realization that the Catholic Church has reached the end of a historic age. Indeed it is sometimes, provocatively, said that we find ourselves now in the ‘post-Christian era’. Naturally this term has such undertones of pessimism and ambiguity that it cannot be taken too seriously. From the point of view of theology, there can be no post-Christian era. Since the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us, and since ‘behold He is with us all days even to the end of the world’, all ages are His and He is the King of Ages, immortal and invisible. Yet on another level, that of social and cultural history, it may perhaps be possible to find certain fruitful suggestions in this insolent expression.

For over a thousand years the Catholic Church in Western Europe has first helped to build, then to sustain a Christian culture, a ‘Christendom’, which has after all been not without its glory. It is the culture and society not of the last days of the Roman Empire, though inspired by Augustine and the other Latin Fathers, but of Garolingian and then Medieval and Renaissance Europe: the Christendom of Chartres and Canterbury, Paris and Rome, Cambridge and Salamanca, of St Anselm and St Thomas, of St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, of St Francis and St Dominic, Duns Scotus, St Theresa, St John of the Cross, St Ignatius . . . What need is there to go on?

Here, almost literally at randon, is a paragraph of print from the front page of a Catholic newspaper:

‘(Sunday) is a day primarily for Mass, then for relaxation and for good works. The precept of servile work was first enunciated to give an opportunity for relaxation so that people might be able to worship God and to be with their families.’

There is nothing very startling about this statement for a Catholic, but it’s worth considering the effect of it on someone outside the Church. What kind of sensibility does it show at work? There is a marked tendency to categorization, to begin with: Sunday is divided neatly from week-days and then subdivided between Mass, relaxation and good works. The language has a stiff remoteness: ‘good works’, ‘precept’, ‘enunciated’ have a period flavour, and so does ‘servile work’, which the Catholic eye takes in and slides over automatically. But the stiffness is a matter of feeling as well as language, as the final message makes clear: Sunday was enunciated by precept as a day of rest so that people could worship God and be with their families. What kind of concern is it which arranges worship and rest by precept, under pain of serious sin ? What validity is there in the implicit assumption that worshipping God is done better relaxed than driving a bus? Is worshipping God a special activity, in its own category, apart from working or even from being with one’s family ?

The Foreword to the original edition of Hans Küng’s Strukturen der Kirche is dated May 1962; the new Foreword to the English translation is dated March 1965. Apart from a Preface by Cardinal Cushing and some paragraphs from Pope Paul’s striking speech at the opening of the second session of Vatican II, no changes seem to have been made for this English edition. One might have expected that a book written on the structures of the Church before the Council had met at all would date painfully after three sessions of the Council and the enormous upheaval in the life of the Church which has accompanied them; and this might seem especially likely for an author whose writings are always ‘conversational’ (or should one say ‘dialogical’), contributions to a continuing debate, or even sometimes publicist, more concerned to change other people’s ideas than to explore ideas in depth. Indeed Küng’s own writings, including this book, have played a considerable part in the upheaval, and no future history of Vatican II will be able to ignore the impact of The Council and Reunion, especially on the English-speaking world.

It must then clearly be said that Structures of the Church retains real value and interest even today. This is not to say that a good deal of the rather longwinded book (358 pages in English) has not now outlived its immediate interest, the first part in particular. The general thesis of the book, for instance, that the ecumenical council by human convocation is the representation of the Church as ecumenical council by divine convocation, should by now be familiar to Küng’s more popular presentation of the thesis in The Living Church;

With the stage set for a Catholic-Orthodox dialogue one is inclined to welcome any book which might have a bearing on this matter, since the lack of material available in Western languages is a serious difficulty in preparing for such a dialogue. Fr Schmemann, Dean of the Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, has a long record of ecumenical activity and any book by him is bound to raise hopes among the friends of the Orthodox in the west. It is therefore all the more disappointing that The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy makes such an equivocal contribution to this dialogue.

In fairness to the author it must be said that the book, which originally appeared in Russian, was intended for the non-specialist Russian Orthodox of the diaspora. But, as has been shown by the Second Vatican Council, the internal affairs of any Christian communion have ecumenical relevance, and thus what the Orthodox say to each other in these days is also of concern to those outside their communion.

The book is a history of the Orthodox Church, starting with the Book of Acts and ending with the Russian Church before the Communist Revolution. This, too, is disappointing, since the last fifty years have raised issues which vitally affect Orthodoxy today, particularly the question of jurisdiction, which will continue to complicate inter-Orthodox relations for many years to come. As an exposition of Orthodoxy Fr Schmemann’s book is unconvincing. His point of view, expressed in the concluding paragraph, that ‘the true Orthodox way of thought has always been historical’ is a very personal one and suggests Western influence which also shows itself in other ways throughout the book.

We have already considered William’s eleventh meditation as a sort of examination of conscience, designed to enlighten him about his major problem, namely his vocation. One cannot help feeling that he went on thinking about it for too long, since the passage in question recalls something he had written probably ten years earlier, in his ‘Nature and Dignity of Love’. Between the ages of about thirty-five and forty-five, he seems to have been thoroughly bugged by the noonday devil, and there were still five years to go before he was finally to make up his mind and transfer to the Cistercians at Signy. The big problem was one of responsibility, for he felt a failure as a superior, and even more than that, he felt it was stupid that he of all people should be in charge of a monastery, when all he wanted was peace and quiet. The fault, naturally, was with those who had put him there.

In the Nature and Dignity of Love, he had written . . . ‘In this school (the monastery, his schola charitatis), those who are tired by their journey lose nothing by taking a rest: neither did the two hundred of David’s men who were so spent that they could not cross the brook at Besor (I Samuel, 30, 9). If anyone will sit and “tarry with the stuff”, as these did ... if anyone sits by the baggage and faithfully guards it, he will hardly be worse off than his companions who go on ahead and win the victory, for he shall have an even share of the spoil’.