Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.

When I settled down to prepare this lecture, I looked at the title I had offered to the Regent of Studies and began to have doubts: was it really appropriate, on so prestigious an occasion, to discuss what seemed, the more I looked at it, a rather naive or childish question?

Not that I have anything against childish questions. Small children are neither experts nor are they wise. They are not experts, because they lack the opportunity to amass specialist stocks of information and skill. And they have neither experienced enough nor suffered enough to be wise.

Nevertheless, small children do often ask fundamental questions as a matter of personal concern.

Theologians are usually elderly, or at least middle-aged. The theologian’s audience therefore have a right to expect of him a measure of scholarly expertise: they are entitled to assume that he knows a number of things that other people either do not know or have forgotten. Moreover, the theologian’s audience also have a right to expect of him a measure of that wisdom which is the fruit of experience and suffering. (The fact that, on both counts, the audience will often be disappointed does not render their expectations the less legitimate.)

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1950s Eric Gill was a minor cult figure among Catholics whom I knew. As an apologist, a social, political and aesthetic theoretician rather than anything else. Gill’s lettering in stone was something I had learnt to admire at Ampleforth where Dom Patrick Barry was at that time active in calligraphy and lettering in stone himself. I liked Father Patrick’s work a lot and he introduced me to Gill’s. There was a certain general keenness about Gill at Ampleforth then but I only got to his Letters and Autobiography as an undergraduate. In those days Gill and Maritain and St Thomas and Belloc and Chesterton were good company. In a dilettante, amateur way I enjoyed myself among them. As far as Gill was concerned I was particularly pleased with him and myself for discovering him in his First Nudes and 25 Nudes. I had liked Gill’s apologia in his Autobiography for sensuality in giving proper appreciation to God for His ways in His creation, and I liked his nudes. For all their occasional clumsiness and maladroitness of balance and proportion, I still do. I find it particularly a matter of regret that Gill’s deliberate erotic work is still under so much prurient lock and key at the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. When will the English grow up?

Gill’s more steamy and obsessive side, his sexy nudes and ex- ultance in sensual experience and joys, appealed more to me than to some of my Catholic friends, and than much of his polemic argumentativeness. Some of the more arty side of my family were enthusiasts for Gill’s way of life via personal acquaintanceship with David Jones and I found that rather tedious. Gill began to smack of affectation and moral-art snobbery at about the time I stopped being an undergraduate and went into National Service.

There is no question of my declining your kind invitation; rather, the talk I would give is not the talk you would want. I think that the Papal Visit is lamentable. I could do nothing but deplore it. And I ask you to hear my reasons.

It is not the sensationalism and vulgarity against which I complain — the souvenirs, the “logo”, the Popemobile, the hiring of a publicity-agent, the whole unlovely apparatus of a whistle-stop tour. After all, if the thing is going to take place at all, it will have to be financed from somewhere, and the cost seems crippling enough to call for every money-making scheme that ingenuity can devise or gullibility fall for. There is, I suppose, something vaguely comic about it all, but then there always is something vaguely comic in the travels of the very great. No, if there were no more to it all than a chance for crowds to see the Pope, my reaction would be very much what it is to cup-ties, or Butlin’s, or pilgrimages to Lourdes: carry on, God bless you, don’t expect me to join in, have a good time. Unfortunately, much more is involved, and if I had to state in a phrase what that something more is, I would say that the Visit is profoundly and damagingly misleading. Let me say why.

You will know that recent events and changes in our own Church - the concept of Oecumenism, the recovery of the Bible, the Second Vatican Council — are examples of how Christians of all denominations are trying to come to terms with their past and to understand it.

Quilmes is a large, predominantly working class suburb on the eastern side of Buenos Aires. With a population of some 800,000 it was constituted as a separate diocese five years ago and Bishop Jorge Novak was named its first bishop. To mark their five years as a diocese Quilmes held a synod last September whose aim was, as Sr Justa Tello told me at the synod office, “to help the people commit themselves”. The two-week synod last year was however just the beginning of a process of getting to know the socio-political and religious realities of the diocese; further sessions planned for 1982/83 hope to evolve pastoral responses to these realities. It is, as Sr Justa Tello explained, based on the ‘See-Judge-Act’ methodology and the September session of the synod had limited itself to the first of these.

Fr Orlando Yorio, who himself ‘disappeared’ for five months in 1976 just after the military coup in March of that year, is secretary of the synod. He pointed out to me that in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Latin America “evangelisation took place through synods”. Among the ample documentation prepared by various commissions for the synod is one which gives an historical background in the early councils of the church, various diocesan synods held in Europe at different times and especially the 51 diocesan synods held in many different regions of Latin America from 1539-1638. To my great surprise Fr Yorio pointed out to me that canon law insists that each diocese hold a synod every ten years. This major event in the life of the Quilmes diocese then was, in the words of Fr Yorio, “to put us in touch with a renovating tradition of the Latin American Church”.

An image of the emperor is set up to be venerated in his absence, (Summa Theologiae 3a, 73, 5 responsio)

Dr Coulson proffers a thesis which relates belief to imagination by referring both to assent. If he is to make a real assent to the objects of faith, the theologian must “use his imagination”, which means undertaking the intolerable wrestle with meaning, since what he seeks to renew “lies hid in language”, (p 168). Dr Coulson’s thesis is evidently to be substantiated by reference to the languages of T S Eliot and J H Newman. Dr Coulson argues that ‘Eliot’s method as a poet, and its theological implications’, (p 169), are anticipated by Newman in the Grammar of Assent. ‘Eliot’s poetry exemplifies what Newman’s theology explains’ (pp 5 and 169). Newman is presented to us as a guide in the uses of imagination for our present situation.

Dr Coulson has a gift for civilised conversation. Here he deals familiarly with the great matters, with religion and art, if not with sexuality; he deploys the hint, the echo, the overlap, catching at connections that do not have to be fully expressed; he is not all that anxious to avoid repetitions, and more than content to return some several times to a favourite quotation. He would have us share his enthusiasm for some favourite author, not for Newman and Eliot only, but for Coleridge and several Coleridgeans. He is himself at least like Coleridge in his method which is, as he says of that of the great man, ‘the very reverse of the system-building required for a magnum opus’, (p 13). And Dr Coulson’s beginning is the common one of conversation.

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?

There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.

This article is inspired by an interest in basic Christian communities in Latin America, and also by a critical interest in some attempts to translate the Latin American experience to this country. The texts on which my criticism is based are John Vincent’s essay ‘Doing Theology’ in Agenda for Prophets (ed D Haslam and R Ambler, 1980), and, to a lesser extent, Basic Communities by David Clark (1977). I want to make it clear that I am concerned with David Clark’s view of the significance of the basic communities and not with the communities themselves. I shall be going on to argue that both writers implicitly deny the importance of a scientific study of society and the importance of intellectual work in social theory, politics and economics. They appear to be antiintellectual, preferring an instinctive, common-sense response with an emphasis on action. This means that they have no way of developing an awareness of their own ideological conditioning and so seem to accept many liberal middle-class values in an uncritical way. A comparison of the Latin American and British situations reveals that if the church in the west is ever going to stand with the poor and the weak, then western Christians must develop a critical attitude towards those class ideologies which they take for granted as common-sense. This is only possible through a social and political education, in theory and practice.

Somehow, the subject of new ministries always calls up to my mind the picture of those hundreds of young people who, in the course of an ecumenical session held in Manchester in 1970, had filled a vast auditorium to hear Canon John V Taylor give an address on possible new forms of ministry. Expectations were running high. On the Protestant side, there was the widespread feeling that the pastorate was welded to the establishment rather than in live contact with people. On the Catholic side, there was the vexing combination of decreasing numbers of vocations to the priesthood and growing numbers of resignations from it. The Canon’s address was challenging and one could feel that the crowd was of one mind with him: indeed there was a vital need to re-assess the Church’s ministerial structures and to re-distribute ecclesial functions. The trouble began when he went on to propose his list of reformed ministries. These turned out to be a selection from the wide choice offered by the New Testament, and they rallied no one; to some they appeared to be no match for the priesthood, to others they seemed to be too ancient to again deserve a place under the sun. The question-period soon degenerated into a high-pitched barrage of objections and confusion was the net result of the day.

Ten years have passed. In the Catholic Church at least, the question of priesthood and ministry has been studied from all angles and there is a growing consensus on the need to disentangle the two. Some concrete steps have been taken in that direction, as witnessed by a recent issue of Pro Mundi Vita Dossiers (June 1980).

A few days after the publication of the Church of England report, The Church and the Bomb, a Foreign Office spokesman replied to the suggestion that the Church has a duty to give a moral lead to the nation by saying that “giving a moral lead may be good for the conscience but it is not a valid proposition in the real world”. A somewhat more elaborate version of the morality versus reality outlook occurred in Bernard Williams’s talk on Channel 4 on 15 November (now published in New Society, 18 November). He said that something he called the Simple Moral Argument about deterrence works in the abstract but is useless for coming to any conclusions about how to live with nuclear weapons now we have them. It is the business of practical and political rationality to argue about what to do next. (Unfortunately, he went on to say, practical rationality soon breaks down amid the complexities of deterrence theory and we are left with scepticism as our only intellectual resource.)

It is a fact that the apparent divorce between morality and practical reason is brought into sharp focus by the issue of nuclear deterrence. To simplify the picture somewhat: against nuclear deterrence are to be found nearly all those who give priority in international relations as in personal relations to certain inviolable moral principles; in favour of nuclear deterrence — in some form at least — are to be found nearly all those who believe that moral principles must be subordinated to “reason” or “reality”, especially in matters of security. Underlying the difference over nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly some fundamentally opposed value- choices at work, but also some fundamental confusions about the meaning of morality and practical reason.

It is a foolish thing to make promises about what you intend to do in a year’s time, but at the chapter meeting last year I promised the Provincial that I would give a talk on celibacy this year, hoping to provoke some discussion on a topic that is too rarely discussed. I have had plenty of time to regret it. But I have kept to my original proposal because the reasons I had for making it have not gone away.

The first reason was a sense of irritation at the way some of the brethren speak about the problems of celibacy entirely by way of anecdotes: how Father A was nearly seduced in the parlour, how troublesome women plagued the life of Father B, about Father C and his “cousin”, about the real reason for Brother D leaving the Order. When I thought about it, I realised that there are two things about this kind of talk that I find unsatisfactory:

1. its privatisation of the vows: that celibacy is mostly a matter of an individual keeping his vow of chastity, like a precious object to be kept intact under threats, especially threats from certain women; and that the available collective wisdom on the matter consists in anecdotal knowledge of how to do this.

2. the failure to take seriously the lives of the women whose attentions cause so much difficulty when it gets out of hand and — it must be added — so much satisfaction when it is under proper ministerial control. It is a failure to look very deeply into what happens and ask why it happens in such predictable ways and what this tells us about the injured relationships between men and women,which we celibates have to live out as much as anyone else. Men and women in the life of the Church get caught up in processes of interaction which few people understand and which cause humiliation and frustration on all sides.

The argument adduced for the existence of God arrives by a chain of reasoning at the affirmation of a being that is self-explanatory, an uncaused cause, at what is sometimes also called a ‘necessary being’. The notion of a necessary being is one that Hume, in arguments not so far outlined, finds incoherent, and he has been followed in this by a good many other philosophers. The argument for a necessary being is presented by Demea:

When the dust from the present troubles settles, the debt to those who have consistently and courageously campaigned against injustice and violence will be clear. One of those campaigners is Fr Des Wilson, who has now written a book that covers the struggle for justice and peace (note that it is justice and peace, not peace and then justice) in N Ireland. It would be unfair to Des Wilson to attempt to review his book out of its context, so it is necessary to sketch out the background first.

In the eyes of “The Man From The Daily Mail,” to quote the song of that title,

“Ireland is a very funny place, sir,

It’s a strange and a troubled land”.

And there’s no disputing that superficial observation, though it’s one of the few comments from that particular source regarding the present situation in N Ireland that I could agree with. For the characteristics of the present era of troubles in the North have been horror (the violence of a bloody Monday, a bloody Tuesday, a bloody Wednesday, a bloody Thursday, a bloody Friday, a bloody Saturday, and bloody Sunday) terror (sectarian warfare, intimidation, internment, rubber and plastic bullets) anger and frustration (sit-ins, demos, barricades, riots) and the constapt unemployment (Billy-now Lord-Blease of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, said there was a “crisis in unemployment” in 1971 when the figure was 7% — it’s now 20% and climbing).

Lonergan sometimes calls his epistemology the fully critical position on account of its total rejection of the naive realist notion that reality is an-already-out-there-now and that objectivity consists in sensory extroversion to this already-out-there-now. The residue of the naive realist notion is found in the empiricist assumption of a world of bodies ‘out there’ and in the Kantian assumption of things in themselves, or noumena, with the debilitating consequence for both that the real becomes unknowable since knowledge is confined either to sense data or sensible phenomena, i.e. appearances. By its rejection of naive realism the fully critical position denies the intelligibility of any mere matter of fact that is simply given in experience. It affirms that the real is what is understood on the basis of experience and affirmed in rationally grounded judgments. Besides the real there is nothing. But the real is, in its very constitution, intelligible. Therefore, besides the intelligible there is nothing. The universe is intelligible.

In a scientific age many would be willing to grant this much, since science itself seems to assume and support the notion of the universe’s intelligibility, without seeing any reason for proceeding from this to an affirmation of God’s existence. But the fully critical position demands an answer in terms of itself to the question of the universe’s intelligibility. Science is unable to supply such an answer since science is methodologically restricted to investigating the intelligibility of the data of sense by erecting explanatory hypotheses that stand or fall by appeal to the data of sense. Science has its own autonomous realm — the explanation of sensible data. The question of God does not arise from the questioning of sensible data but from questioning our questioning, that is, when we take a global look at the process of coming to know and ask what are the implications of the mind’s demand for explanation at the level of understanding and of the mind’s demand for the unconditioned in its movement towards judgment.

Since the term ‘Ideology’ and ‘Ideological’ are used in a variety of ways, I shall start by saying something about how I intend to use these terms in this paper and indicate what I understand to be the nature of my remarks about them.

For the purposes of this paper I shall take Marxism, Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism to be examples of political ideologies. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; I could, for example, have included Fascism or National Socialism. It is merely intended to provide me with enough material to make the main points of this paper without becoming too involved in matters of exegesis. It should also be noted that in calling Marxism, Liberalism and the rest ideologies I am not using the term in a pejorative manner. That is, I wish to distinguish at the outset between my thesis and that of those who would argue that in calling a belief, doctrine or argument ideological, we are also condemning it as unreasonable or irrational. My aim is simply to discuss how we can best characterise ideological arguments, by comparing and contrasting them with other kinds of arguments. That said, it ought to be clear that my remarks will be philosophical rather than historical in nature. Though I shall be referring to disputes between ideologists that took place in the past, my interest in them will not be that of the historian. I shall be concerned with their conceptual structure rather than their chronological development.

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.

What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).

The title of this paper indicates an exploration; the indefinite article implies that it is (perhaps necessarily) expressed in personal terms. Putting and responding to questions like this one is very much a custom of our time; a time of questioning, when we are disinclined to accept the forms of tradition and the pronouncements of authority. We assume that it is normal and necessary, for Christians, to ask themselves what they mean when they use the traditional language of Christian doctrine: to ask themselves how these are related, on the one hand, to the experience to which they are intended to give intellectual shape and, on the other, to the intellectual processes which we use when we try to understand more manageable kinds of experience. Do we accept such language and in what sense? Do we want to reinterpret it? I suspect that most of us have asked ourselves the question that Bonhoeffer, in his prison-cell, came to see as the central one: ‘What do we really believe, in the sense that we hang on to it with our lives?’ Notice that he uses the word ‘We’; he thought of faith as something shared, something corporate. But he had to do his own thinking. And if you feel that need you can’t.in good faith, suppress it.

It is in this sense that my paper will be an individual and personal one. I haven’t any distinctive experience to offer you; and what I have to say will, I think, be of general rather than of personal interest. Still, since it does come from an individual I ought to say something about the background of temperament, experience, orientation and interest which lie behind it, and which may help you to place what I have to say, and therefore to assess it for yourselves.

In an article published in this journal in December 1980 I sought to draw out some of the moral and theological implications of a punitive attitude on the part of the Church towards a kind of minority which it could not comprehend and by which it felt challenged. Since that time it has been borne in upon me, both through experience and through discursive reasoning that the implications are far deeper and more terrible than I had thought. For that reason I beg the indulgence of readers for a further exploration. I am aware that such a fusion of introspection and exospection is spiritually dangerous, since the subjective and objective can only coinhere in one who is pure in heart. Nonetheless, I feel that the effort is worth the risk.

I should perhaps explain at the outset that my own theology is rapidly developing in a radical ‘materialist’ direction; that is to say, my understanding of both the Gospel kerygma and Tradition is confirming my intuition that the material, and in particular our being-in-body, has normative spiritual value. I am not at all shocked by Bishop John Robinson’s suggestion in the famous lady Chatterly trial that sexual intercourse has precise sacramental signification. Those who cannot go along with this perspective will not be able fully to appreciate the following argument and may even be offended by it. Reader, be warned!

The admirable work edited by Fr Alberic Stacpoole OSB, Mary’s Place in Christian Dialogue (St Paul Publications, 1982), makes no mention of Fatima. Even Archbishop Eugenio Cardinale’s paper on ‘The Mariology of Pope Pius XIF does not allude to it, which is strange because in Portugal he is known as ‘the pope of Fatima’. Clearly, Fatima has no place on the agenda of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose papers are collected in this volume. The reason for the omission is evident: Fatima represents the kind of mariology that most alarms and scandalises our Christian brothers and sisters. With its banal ‘messages’, its improbable miracles and its resolute anti-communism, it makes the faith ‘risible’, and St Thomas says we should not do that.

What is the significance of singing the psalms? It is the one form of prayer shared by every major Christian denomination. Whatever the disagreements about the Eucharist, charismatic prayer, the rosary or whatever, the singing of psalms has gone unchallenged as the typical form of Christian prayer. And yet it is not immediately obvious in what sense the psalms are either Christian or, for that matter, prayer. How can it be an act of Christian prayer to long to dash out your neighbour’s children’s brains on a rock, to celebrate a law by which we are no longer bound, and to proclaim God’s mysterious intention to use Moab as his washbowl? The question is not what this or that psalm, might have meant originally in the Temple. It is not even of what Christian theological sense we might discover or construct for any or all of the psalms. That is an important question but its answer will not make sense of our practice of singing the psalms, in which there is no time to carry out complex theological hermeneutics and during which our minds are often enough dull, vacant or distracted. The question is not of the meaning of the psalms but of the meaning of singing them, though, as we shall see, the relationship between the two is complex.

The first thing to note is that we are not just singing the psalms, we are singing the psalter, and it is the canon of the psalter that gives us a preliminary definition of the significance of psalm singing. It is true that we do not sing all the psalms in the psalter, and even the psalms that we sing are sometimes bowdlerised of the nastier verses. But even if we only ever sung just a few of the psalms it would still be true that the canonical form of the psalter makes a claim about what sort of an activity psalm singing is.