136
Reviews
JESUS, by Eduard Schweizer. SCM, 1971. 200 pp. €3.
I n substance, this book was written when the
author was in Japan with plenty. of leisure and
little literature. As such it is primarily the
product of the reflection of this distinguished
Swiss scholar, rather than a minute documenta-
tion of new advances. The publisher’s blurb
expresses the hope that it will perform for the
next decade the service which Bornkamm’s
Jesus of Nazareth performed for the last, a hope
which may well be fulfilled.
The chapter on the sources sets the tone of
the work; it is clear and forceful, a combination
of detailed scholarship well mastered, and
breadth of approach, recognizing the part
which sympathy must play in any account of
an event: for a good report on a play it is not
enough to tell merely the details of staging, nor
simply to enthuse about it; there must be some
element of involvement, but not too much.
This is true of the gospels, which present the
Jesus of history, but only through the vision
of the Christ of faith who is their master. It
is the second chapter which, from its title
onwards, is truly arresting: Jesus, the man who
fits no formula. Jesus will accept no current
title because none fits him; instead he takes
and moulds the title Son of Man. No other
concept will cover the fullness of what he is
-they are half-truths which help to illustrate
but do not exhaust his richness, his unique
authority, his unparalleled relationship to the
Father. Schweizer holds that there is no
single genuine saying which shows that Jesus
accepted the titles of Messiah, Son of God or
Servant (all his views are stated with authority
and forcefulness, unmarred by acidity, which
are attractive whether one agrees or not);
these are all ways in which the community
struggled to express the personality which they
had experienced. The presentation of how the
kingdom features in Jesus’ ministry contains
many insights, how he, in fact, accomplishes
the prophecies (the early Christians notice
GOD AND MAN, by Anthony Bloom. DLT, 1971.125 pp. €1.50.
There is more fun for the textual and literary
than for the theological critic in this new
collection. My conjecture is that first of all the
archbishop was constrained to talk about things
he didn’t really want to talk about; then the
talks were badly recorded and unintelligently
this in their reflection on the phenomenon of
Jesus and write it into their accounts), how he
can accept the world by bringing the kingdom
to it. Again the author strikes to the core of
the Christian message in his assessment of Jesus’
attitude to the Law; his ambivalent attitude
towards it corresponds to his radical, uncom-
promising, all-or-nothing approach. Schweizer
succeeds in conveying more of theb attractive
yet insaisissable quality of Jesus than any author
I can remember.
After this most important chapter, Schweizer
goes on to develop how the vision of Jesus
developed among his followers, their attempts
to express this in the context first of Jewish
thought and then of Hellenistic. Among
important features of the book are the analysis
of the differences between Jewish and New
Testament apocalyptic (p. 59), and between
previous uses and the Christian use of the title
Son of Man (p. 67-none of the earlier or
contemporary literature had spoken of the
Son of Man as coming to earth, only to heaven;
this is a characteristic of Christian apocalyptic).
His plea (p. 85) that dogmatic formulations
can be properly understood only in their
original thought-context is amply illustrated
by the richness he brings to them. Only slightly
disappointing is the treatment of the transition
to the view of Christ as cosmic Lord, an
important step which it is difficult indeed to
track.
I t is a recommendation that the book ends,
and does not begin, with the gospels, the
theology of their writers, and with the non-
Pauline writings, for these stand at the end,
not at the beginning of a process. The treat-
ment of these is satisfactory and has a number
of good points pithily stated; but they are none
of them as striking as the pages on the Man who
fits no Formula.
HENRY WANSBROUGH
transcribed in manuscript (there are entire
passages without a vestige of sense, as well as
errors that upturn whole sentences-e.g.
‘different’ for ‘indifferent’ on p. 44) ; then
typed by someone who could not read the
manuscript (e.g. ‘clear’ for ‘dear’ on p. 57),
Reviews
and finally submitted to a printer who added
a few contributions of his own (e.g. ‘lasts’ for
‘last’ on p. 84).
The first chapter is the transcript of a tele-
vision discussion between Anthony Bloom and
Marghanita Laski, in which, essentially, they
are talking about totally different things
throughout. As so often, polite and slightly
forlorn (even jealous?) pious atheism meets
the wild and devastating world of the gospel
and does not even notice. And the archbishop,
in turn, has (as he admits) insufficient philo-
sophy to be able to respond with any particular
cogency or relevance.
This lack of philosophy, in fact, spoils a good
deal of the book. Three of the remaining four
chapters are talks originally delivered at
Birmingham University, on ‘Doubt’, ‘Man and
God‘ and ‘John the Baptist’. The last of these
is very good indeed, and the authentic voice
we expect to hear from Anthony Bloom comes
over. ‘The will of God is madness . . . you
cannot adhere to the will of God for good
reasons.’ The austere, exotic figure of the
Baptist, who is nothing but a ‘voice crying in
the wilderness’, who must decrease so that
Christ may increase, emerges with a strange
power and urgency.
But in the other chapters there is little that
rings true, except for odd flashes, where the
archbishop, as it were, plays truant and talks
from the heart and right off the subject. There
is some powerful teaching on intercession as a
stepping into the breach, into the total serenity
of God which is in and not apart from the
TRUTH, by Alan R. White. The Macmillan Press Ltd, London, 1971.150 pp. L1.95.
It seems that truth is mysterious, or quite
unproblematic. Academic discussion has
tended to focus on the field between these
extremes, and it is to this field that Professor
White introduces us. His book will occupy a
felt gap on academic shelves; it is workmanlike,
well-organized, and has an excellent biblio-
graphy (which would, however, have profited
from revision since the first publication of the
book in the United States in 1970). The book
is divided into two parts: the first discusses
‘characteristics of the notion of truth’, contri-
buting to discussions of truth-value gaps and of
necessary truth, inter alia. The second part
discusses six theories of truth. This part is the
more satisfactory, and the more useful, although
the account of Tarski (whose theory is said to
add ‘a discordant note to our search’) is
137
storms of the world. Involvement in one with-
out the other is not prayer, whether it be
involvement in God without the storms, or
the storms without the serenity of God. There
is an incisive remark about a faith that pretends
to be in heaven without its ever having been on
earth.
Then there is a long chapter on ‘Holiness
and Prayer’, reproducing a talk given at
Louvain, which repeats a lot that is already
familiar (on the prayer ofstability, for instance),
or that occurs elsewhere in this present book,
with only one or two new thoughts-though
these are important. ‘One of the reasons why
holiness is unsteady and why the holiness of
the Fathers and heroes of the Spirit in the early
days often seems so remote is that we have lost
the sense of combat.’ You have only to look at
the new breviary to see how true that is. And
I think Anthony Bloom has put his finger on
one of the crucial issues of our time. We
don’t believe, really, in the power of evil, and
we have lost our grip on the weapons of good
that are given to us. We have forgotten (extra-
ordinarily) that there is a war on, or a t least,
we have forgotten what kind of a war it is and
who the enemy is (Ephesians 6, 12). And in
this way we have lost the incentive to faith
and holiness.
All told, I don’t think there is enough in this
book to sustain its 125 pages. Admirers of
Anthony Bloom, amongst whom I am happy
to count myself, will find it, on the whole,
disappointing.
SIMON TUGWELL, O.P.
poor: semantic paradoxes are not, any more
than set-theoretic paradoxes, due to ‘abuse of
language’. However, wider horizons, such as
the significance of Tarski’s theory, seem to
escape Professor White. Even the problem of his
book nowhere receives clear formulation,
surely a serious deficiency in an introductory
work. It is, therefore, not surprising to read
that what we are really looking for is the
‘meaning’ of truth. But what does the author
mean by ‘meaning’? I t is quite on the cards
that truth does not have the kind of meaning
for which he seems to be looking. This possi-
bility is nowhere seriously discussed, and the
author seems too busy deploying his lists of
arguments to spare the time to help us under-
stand. Moreover, I must protest against his
use of trivial and ill-considered grammatical
New Blackfriars
remarks, such as the footnote on page 4 that
‘ “true” indicating “in line” seems to be used
only predicatively’.
Professor White proposes a refined corres-
pondence theory of truth. The three terms of his
theory are ‘what is said’, the relation of
‘corresponding to’ and ‘the facts’. Let us take
each in turn. ‘What is said’ is distinguished
from the saying of it, from what is used to say
it, and from what it is the content of. The
status of these distinctions is left unclear. How
does one individuate ‘what is said’? This, and
related epistemological difficulties, are not
discussed. What is said is ‘embodied in, though
not identical with’ what is used to say it.
Professor White is over-fond of metaphor.
Let us turn to facts. Facts, we are told, have
causal effects: ‘It was the fact . . . that
the train was diverted which made me late
for my lecture’ (p. 83). I have seldom seen a
cruder appeal to ordinary language. We might
AUGUSTUS TO CONSTANTINE: THE THRUST OF THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT INTO THE
ROMAN WORLD, by Robert M. Grant. Collins, London, 1971. 415 pp. S3.15.
Professor Grant announces a major theme :
‘to set the Christian movement in its Graeco-
Roman context and try to assess how much the
direction of its development owed to its
environment or environments’; he seeks to
complement the classic studies of Nock
(Conversion), Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an
Age of Anxiety) and Chadwick (Early Christianity
and the Classical Tradition) with an. approach
less specialist and more comprehensive than
theirs, ranging over the history of the first
three centuries of Christianity not only where it
interacts directly with the Roman state, but
also with reference to the changes in its own
internal life and organization brought about
by its developing position in the world. The
book is inevitably a summary of a mass of
material, yet it remains a well-organized and
clear presentation of a complex process-
the product, as the author demonstrates in his
notes, of extensive and up-to-date acquaintance
with recent contributions to this prolific area of
study.
I t is a welcome feature of the book that
Professor Grant is concerned not to over-
emphasize the significance of the persecutions.
Such periodic confrontations with the Roman
authorities were no ,more than isolated out-
bursts against the background of the more
patient and lasting process of accommodation
with the empire which occupied the main
138
suppose then that facts are ‘in the world’,
but this is not clearly asserted. Facts arc
said to be ‘what the world is like’, but this i
merely to hypostatize an idiom. Nor is the
correspondence of what is said to the facts any
happier. Professor White is careful to point
out the inadequacies of ‘corresponding with’,
of ‘picturing’ and of ‘fitting’. He uses the term
‘corresponding to’ and offers in explanation:
‘an entry in a ledger may correspond to a sale
and one rank in the army to another in the
navy’. I suppose that we are to imagine a l i t
of facts and a parallel list of truths-both
expressed in the same words, as is admitted on
page 84! Such a theory lacks that ‘feeling for
reality’ which Russell thought so important.
It certainly does not explain anything.
Professor White has, I fear, added to an already
long tale of confusion.
DAVID PHILLIPS
body of Christianity from the second century
onwards. Grant is also rightly sceptical of the
‘persecution decrees’ which some recent
writers have pinned on to sundry emperors with
little appreciation of the genuinely popular
origin of most anti-Christian disturbances; in
this book the so-called ‘persecutions’of Septimius
Severus and Maximinus Thrax, to take two in-
stances,emerge in their proper perspective-the
former a series of local incidents, the latter not a
‘persecution’ at all. Moreover, Professor Grant
sees correctly that it was essentially the
religious issue which divided the Christians and
the Roman authorities: this is as clear from the
consistent concern for the maintenance of the
traditional worship expressed by Roman
officials like Pliny in Bithynia or Aemilianus in
Egypt, as from the uncompromising refusal
of Christians to worship at the altars of the
state. The concern for the pax deorum was
heightened in the critical situation facing the
empire in the middle of the third century, and
some assessment of this (it is a pity that
Professor Grant does not find space for it) is
essential to the understanding of the measures
of Decius and Valerian. It needs to be
emphasized that the edict of Decius was not a
‘persecution’ aimed directly against the
Christians-as Grant’s narrative tends to
present it-but, in Norman Baynes’ phrase, an
‘Act of Uniformity’.
 Reviews
The author is most at home in the intellectual
world of the Apologists, and in the Alexandria
of Clement and Origen. None will quarrel
with his presentation of these as the ‘pace-setters’
in the assimilation of Christianity into the
Graeco-Roman world; the reader is properly
reminded that the works of Justin and Melito
were Libelli submitted to the Roman emperor as
respectful pleas for justice and recognition-
with them Christianity took its place alongside
those interests in the Roman world waiting on
the attention of the emperor. But the emperor,
for his part, rarely took notice of the Christians,
and even if he did he would, like Marcus
Aurelius, view them in an unfavourable light.
The Apologists and the Alexandrian school
were important, as Professor Grant well shows,
not for any conversion of the Roman authorities
to a sympathetic view of Christianity, but rather
for their conversion of Christianity itself to an
attitude of convergence with the state and an
acceptance of the Graeco-Roman heritage.
This conversion also made possible the
transformation which, by the reign of
Diocletian, had brought Christians into the
imperial court (even to the fringes of the
emperor’s family), and into the army and the
offices of state, and which saw the Church in
Nicomedia stand facing the imperial palace.
Professor Grant regrettably devotes little space
to this social aspect of the Christian ‘thrust’
into the Roman world-regrettably, because
this proved a potent factor in the ultimate
triumph of the faith in the next generation or
two, as was demonstrated by the late Professor
A. H. M. Jones in Momigliano’s The Co@ict
THE WORKS OF ST CYRIL OF JERUSALEM: Volume 2: The The Fathers of the Church: Volume
64. Translated by Leo P. McAuley, S. J., and Anthony A. Stephenson. Catholic Universify of America
Press, Washingfon, D.C., 1970.273 pp. $8.65.
This second volume rounds off the first com-
plete version, I think, of the surviving works
attributed to St Cyril to appear in English
(and the first entirely fresh translation of his
catechetical lectures in their entirety since that
made in 1839 for the Tractarian Library of the
Fathers by the future Dean Church). Of the
two collaborators, Fr McAuley appears only
to complete his version of the (pre-baptismal)
Lent lectures. The remainder is introduced,
translated and commented on by Fr Stephenson
(now a lecturer in the department of theology
at Exeter), and it is his treatment of the Easter
week series of lectures on the sacraments of
initiation that constitutes the main interest of
this volume.
139
between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth
Century. Much of the evidence which Grant
himself adduces might have been turned
to advantage here. It is not without its signi-
ficance that a contemporary bishop could
invoke the prayers of Christian soldiers to
explain an event so memorable in the life of the
empire that it was recorded on the column of
Marcus Aurelius at Rome; a similar point
emerges from the incident in the reign of
Caracalla when the actions of one (and only
one, it seems) ‘conscientious objector’ aroused
the anger of many fellow-Christians in the
ranks, who criticized his provocative behaviour.
On another social question, Professor Grant
notes Celsus’ criticism of the Christians’
disruption of family life-why not a reference
specifically on this point to the telling evidence
of the Acta of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, or to the
Passio Perpetuae ?
Professor Grant’s brief, however, is a large
one, and we must beware of demanding too
much. I n the short chapter which is all that
can be allowed for the complexities of Con-
stantine’s reign the author manages to combine
a succinct narrative with an assessment of the
emperor which captures the essential ambiguity
of his position, at once pontgex maximus and
‘bishop of all mankind’. Such are the charac-
teristics of the whole book: the evidence of
much learning is presented in a manner which
is concise and unburdensome, while the theme
of the progress of Christianity into the Roman
world emerges always clear and secure.
E. D. HUNT
These lectures stand rather apart from the
rest, and for the past thirty years or so it has
been known that there is at least a serious
critical case against Cyrilline authorship; but
Stephenson is, so far as I know, the first to set
this out at length in English, a task which he
discharges modestly, objectively, and, to my
mind, convincingly. If it is accepted, and the
lectures accordingly belong to the end instead
of the middle of the fourth century, the usual
version of the liturgical history of that century
needs to be modified in certain respects;
Jerusalem can no longer be regarded as the
solitary pioneer of developments in eucharistic
doctrine and of the dramatic build-up and
emphasis on mystery which went along with it,
New Blackfriars
but simply as one centre among several in the
Christian East in which these made themselves
felt.
Stephenson exhibits a rather uneven aware-
ness of these issues. Thus he correctly, in my
view, suggests that the reason that the exposi-
tion of the eucharistic anaphora passes im-
mediately from the Sanctus to the epiclesis is that
the author is commenting only on what was
audible to the people, and the practice of
reciting the substance of the great prayer sotto
uoce has already crept in; but he does not seem
to see that this and the relatively late date it
presupposes makes unnecessary, and indeed far-
fetched, the hypothesis of Dix that the anaphora
in use at Jerusalem was a derivative of that
found in the Syriac Liturgy of SS. Addai and
Mari. Again, he rightly sees in these lectures
not a little that is relevant to the dispute over
whether it is the water of baptism or the chrism
of confirmation that bestows the gift of the
Holy Spirit; but he confuses this issue by (i)
comparing the Jerusalem practice not with its
contemporary neighbours but with that of the
West two centuries earlier, and (ii) assuming
that all Churches had both rites. A glance at
the contemporary catecheses of Chrysostom
JOSEPH ARCH (1826-1919), The Farm Workers’ Leader, by Pamela Horn. Roundwood Press. W.75.
No man has exerted so great an influence on
rural trade unionism as Joseph Arch, the first
president of the National Agricultural
Labourers’ Union. He achieved this position
because he responded to a call for action on
behalf of weaker brethren who respected the
strong and independent hedge-cutter who was
also a Primitive Methodist local preacher.
Information about Arch’s career and ideas can
be found in Joseph Arch, The Story of His L$e
Told by Himself, edited by the Countess of
Warwick. That work, with its passionate and
even revivalist tone, is very different from Dr
Pamela Horn’s factual study.
This author accepts Arch as a key-figure
because he was so involved in decisive social
action. Before the formation of the national
union in 1872, landowners and farmers could
think collectively‘ of ‘Hodge’ and ‘Johnny
Raw’, but Arch forced them to see farm
labourers as human beings with rights and
duties. The men Arch represented were simple
folk blindly seeking ways to combat poverty,
hunger and illiteracy; the local preacher who
stepped into the limelight at the age of forty-
six was pledged to fight for the labourers of
110
(published fifteen years ago by Wenger), to
which he hardly alludes, would have disclosed
that Antioch, even at this date, had no con.
firmation at all, and this suggests that ‘Cyril’ia
commenting on a recent innovation in hia
Church, the logic of which has not yet been
fully worked out. There is, on the other hand,
a valuable note on ‘Cyril’s’ doctrine of the
eucharistic presence, which he shows to be by
no means so close an approximatjon to tran-
substantiation as, e.g. Edmund Bishop thought
and, indeed, somewhat further from it than
some of his Syrian near-contemporaries.
Stephenson is critical of ‘Cyril’ as a stylist
as well as a theologian; perhaps it is partly his
determination to leave ‘some of its infelicities
unimproved’ that has led him to desert, asa
translator, the tradition established by Church.
The result is readable, not to say racy, and
wholly avoids, as too many patristic translations
do not, any suggestion of the ‘crib‘; but to
gloss the ‘flying’ of the seraphim in Isaiah’s
vision (the prototype of the Sanctw in the
liturgy) as ‘really “treading air”, as they are
apparently stationary’ seems over-scrupulous.
H. BENEDICT GREEN, C.R.
England as well as those of his own Warwick
shire.
Dr Horn does not consider in any detail the
career of Joseph Arch as a politician or his
commitment to local preaching. She shows
that he was elected to Parliament in 1885 and
that he retired from such national activity in
1899 because he was said to be aged and feeble.
Even so, he lived happily in his garden and
cottage at Barford for another twenty years.
In this labourer’s life there was a shadow, a
sadness. Possibly it derived from the fact that
the countryman found London life hurtful and
troublesome; or from the bitter memories of
his early days, or it could have been due to the
total collapse of his union in 1896. Dr Horn
does not answer such questions. Her ‘value-
free’ account is, in some respects, a little bland
and even patronizing as, for instance, when she
writes of Arch’s relationship with the Prince of
Wales. She makes much of the fact that Sidney
and Beatrice Webb referred to the ‘glorified
farm labourer’ who was overcome with the
honour of acquaintance with the Prince of
Wales. All this demonstrates is that Beatrice
Webb’s socialism was barely skin-deep.
Reviews
More serious perhaps-because it calls into
question not only the author’s concern for
accuracy but also her historical judgment-is
the matter of Arch’s alleged intemperance. It
is suggested that his habit of regular drinking
(if it was a habit) might have been encouraged
by his practice of staying in village pubs. This
is surely a doubthl supposition. Many honour-
able and sober persons did this regularly. Many
agricultural organizers followed the same
custom in later times. Pamela Horn quotes a
note from British Trade Unions Since 1889
(Vol. l), by Clegg, Fox and Thompson, which
says: ‘Joseph Arch, a loyal Liberal satellite,
sat in the House from 1892 to 1900, drinking
his bottle of whisky a day but hardly opening
his mouth for any other purpose.’ This is more
like malicious gossip than factual reporting
and no serious historian would regard it as
being credible. But the biographer goes on to
argue that his daily drinking did not prevent
him from condemning the then Conservative
Government of 1896 as ‘a “parson, publican
and brewer Government” opposed to the
Sunday closing of public houses’. It would have
THE SPIRITUALITY OF FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL, by Joseph Whelan, S. J., Collins, London, 1971.
320 pp. E3.75.
Years ago I read Letters to a Niece, Selected
Letters, and the Baron’s Life, and dipped into
The Mystical Elements and Essays and Addresses.
von Hugel’s great lumbering sentences, full of
recurring parentheses and, as it seemed, almost
obscured by his heavy learning, put me off any
serious attempt to read him properly. Fr
Whelan has shown what a loss this has been.
Professor D. Knowles calls the book ‘the
revelation of von Hugel’s mind and soul’ that
has given him so much to admire and such food
for reflection. Professor Mascall says that it is a
work of the highest scholarship. Bishop
Christopher Butler thanks von Hugel for helping
him ‘to remain a convinced and open-minded
Christian’, and ‘for preparing the way’ for his
move into the Roman Catholic Church. He
speaks of ‘the fresh air and limitless horizons’
of von Hugel’s world. Here are reliable
witnesses.
But what about a run-of-the-mill reader,
theologically not particularly educated ? Surely
we are offered not just an enlightenment, but
almost a new insight, a coming into God’s
presence, because von Hugel practised prayer,
and trying to read the book and reflecting on
it will be praying.
141
been most strange and out of character if
Arch had not condemned that government :
it would have meant turning his back on all
the things he had believed in throughout his
life.
What the writer is saying, by innuendo rather
than by direct statement, is that Arch was a
drunkard and a hypocrite. She does not prove
either of these covert assertions. I n his later
years Joseph Arch appears to have deserted the
Primitive Methodist sect, and he must have
had reason for doing so because his preaching
meant a great deal at one period of his life.
Arch’s experience of the world outside Barford
and Warwickshire must have enlarged his
mental horizons and affected his attitudes to
men and institutions. This biography contains
many new facts about the life of Arch as a trade
union official but it does not really approach
the personality or the beliefs of Joseph Arch.
Probably it would have been a better work in
all ways if the author had taken it beyond the
thesis stage.
E. W. MARTIN
‘Live all you can’, he wrote to his niece; ‘as
complete and full a life as you can find-do
as much as you can for others. Read, work,
enjoy-love and help as many souls-do all
this. Yes-but remember: Be alone, be remote,
be away from the world, be desolate. Then
you will be near God.’ (May I be excused if I
say that Mrs Greene, his niece, found all this,
it seems, in the person of our Bede Jarrett:
‘Never so many opposite things have lived
together in amity as in this rarely proportioned
person’. Pax, August 1934, p. 105.)
‘People put God so far away’, he wrote,
long before Tillich, ‘in a sort of mist some-
where. I pull their coat-tails. God is near. He
is no use unless he is near. God’s otherness and
difference, and his nearness. You must get that.
God‘s nearness is straight out of the heart of
Jesus . .. God’s given-ness. ... We are
creatures and we must be creaturely.’
God is near, in our lives. We must gain life
from ‘a double current’, of the here-and-now
and the eternal, of history and eternity, of
secularism and religion. Never is it ‘either-or’;
always ‘both-and’. ‘A broad secularity is the
situation, the stuff of, and the opportunity for,
a profoundly religious Christianity.’
New Blackfriars
From ‘the eternal in the temporal’, the flower
and strength of which is Christ, comes the
creaturely capacity for lasting love, having its
cause in ‘God, the already fully extant and
operative eternal beauty, truth, love and
goodness, infinite Personality and Spirit .. .;
.
and Jesus, who actually lived in the flesh . .,
the lowly servant’. This demands an unin-
terrupted service of others, ‘a persistent faith-
fulness’. The joy of ‘God-near’ should arouse
‘tip-toe expectation’.
There are 220 pages of text, fifty pages of
notes, and an index. So there is much more
that could be said. ‘The most fundamental
need, duty, honour and happiness of man is
adoration.’ He explains a necessary part of it-
‘Be very faithful in your service of the poor’,
both in prayer and in practical secular matters.
And ourselves? ‘For the rich development and
full purification of our own personality, and
our consequent increasingly worthy conception
of his, we shall want work and recollection, the
visible and the invisible, science and morals,
nature and grace, a true self-dying and a true
self-finding.’No wonder Maisie Ward, puzzling
over his goodness and his part in the Modernist
affair, remarked, ‘There are quite simply two
von Hugels’, one of faith, the other of history.
He was called the Pope of Modernism; yet he
was never condemned. I n Insurrection versus
Resurrection, p. 512, Miss Ward wrote, ‘Surely
since Tertullian he stands alone in being at
once almost a heretic, yet almost a doctor in
THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH UNDERGROUND, 1917-1970, by William C. Fletcher. O W .
s.75.
This valuable book fills a gap in our know-
ledge. It has long been known that there were
underground church movements in the Soviet
Union, but information about their character
and the extent of their influence was impossible
to verify in detail. Some of it was Soviet anti-
religious propaganda and some of it came from
tmigrt sources that have sometimes now been
proved to be extremely accurate but could not
be checked at the time. However, in the last
decade or so a mass of information about
religion in the Soviet Union has become avail-
able. It would be a whole-time job to read and
digest all the religious protest literature which
reaches the West every year. To sift this
evidence is a vast task but it is now possible
to get a much clearer picture of many aspects
of religious life, as it has evolved since 1917.
Dr Fletcher has assembled the evidence from
I42
the eyes of some of the Church‘s leaders’.
Evelyn Underhill thought him the most
wonderful personality she had ever known. She
recalled how he aroused awe and passion in
his hearers ‘when he uttered the name of his
God’. And Abbot Cuthbert Butler remembered
long walks on Hampstead Heath: ‘We alwayJ
returned home by the little Catholic church in
Holly Place-it was his daily practice-and
went in for a long visit to the Blessed Sacra-
ment; and there I would watch him sitting,
the great deep eyes on the Tabernacle, the
whole being wrapped in an absorption of
prayer, devotion, contemplation. Those who
have not seen him so know only half the
man.’ I n spite of his enormous learning,
perhaps because, partly, of it, he emerges as
one of ‘the simple faithful’; it was very
important for him not to lose touch ‘with the
devotion of the people’. So, long quiet reflective
prayer, but short morning and night prayers;
frequent confession and Mass, and a daily
decade of the Rosary-‘after over thirty years
of this mixed rLgim, I am profoundly convinced
on the penetrating sagacity of this advice’.
I shall want to keep this book and try to get
to the bottom of it. For von Hugel, being a
Christian meant having ‘an unshakeable,
because creaturely, strength, a deep joy, and
a steady homely heroism, a gentle flowing
love and service of your fellow-creatures in,
with and for God, the Infinite, our Home’.
BEDE BAILEY, O.P.
all sources for those underground church
movements which stem from the Orthodox
tradition. He is a reliable guide, and his book
is readable.
‘The phenomenon of underground religious
organisations constitutes the primary factor
which, so far at least, has inhibited the State
from simply eliminating the churches from
Soviet society.’ If you close churches, people
do not cease to believe in God. Religion
simply goes underground. For this reason,
during the relative toleration of the Church
in the mid-’fifties I personally made the
mistake of believing that there would be no
renewal of religious persecution. It was clear
that renewed persecution would drive religious
people to find secret ways of expressing their
faith and that these would be harder for the
secret police to control than the overt activity
Reviews
of legal churches. The authorities cannot be
pleased with the results of persecution, since
religion shows no sign of dying out and, indeed,
is now quite strong where it used to be weakest,
namely among the intelligentsia. But nowhere
does the fact that a policy is unlikely to work
ensure that it will not be tried.
Underground religion takes various forms,
some of them extreme. There are, or have been,
those who never speak; it may be doubted,
however, whether this can properly be called
an underground movement; such a strange
custom could hardly escape notice; moreover,
some of the ‘silent’ have families and it is
hard to believe that anyone could try to bring
up children without speaking to them; the
evidence about this movement comes mainly
from Soviet attacks on them, and it seems clear
that the information we have is incomplete.
Indeed, my only major disagreement with Dr
Fletcher’s interpretation of the evidence is that
he accepts too easily Soviet accusations that
various sects cut themselves off from the life of
society. No doubt some do, but it is one of the
aims of Soviet propaganda to pin violent and
anti-social views upon those who may only be
protesting against a particular manifestation
of the State’s power in the affairs of the
Church.
The Communist Party’s hostility to religion
was clear from the start, but it took some time
to organize Stalinist power. So the believers
THE CONCEPT OF MIRACLE, by Richard Swinburne. Macmillan, London, 1970. 76 pp. 65p.
This book is one of the new Studies in the
Philosophy of Religion edited by W. D.
Hudson. It is brief, clear, and sensible. I t
concerns itself principally with two problems
set by Hume. Can there be such a thing as a
miracle, defined as a violation of a law of
nature by a god? If so, can we ever have good
reason to believe that one has ever occurred?
Swinburne shows convincingly, against the
arguments of some modern Humeans, that
there is nothing self-contradictory in the notion
of a miracle as a non-repeatable, counter-
example to a law of nature. He deals effectively
with the objection that any alleged violation
of a law of nature would at best be evidence
that the law had been mis-stated. Though he
has a number of interesting observations to
143
had time to work out secret ways of expressing
their belief, before the full rigour of the
rtgime was manifested. In the 1930s we hear of
‘a secret village led by a Bishop M., which had
links with other underground groups all over
the U.S.S.R.’ And Dr Fletcher has not
assembled all the evidence that could be found
for this sort of thing.
I t is clear, however, that the distinction
between the legal Church and the underground
Church is not absolute. When so many actions
are forbidden, it is impossible to live without
breaking the law. We know from Svetlana
Allileyeva that priests of the legal Church
conduct secret baptisms, and Dr Fletcher gives
much evidence of a similar kind. Moreover,
when believers of the legal Church and of the
underground find themselves together in prison
or in concentration camps, all distinctions
vanish. Personally I suspect that the differences
are even more blurred than Dr Fletcher
shows them to be.
How widespread is the underground Church ?
Dr Fletcher is inclined to think that at present
the various movements ‘consist of a scattered
few adherents here and there throughout the
Soviet Union’. But no one knows; and how do
you count? Are the congregation of a church
an illegal group, if they meet secretly simply
because their repeated requests to have their
old parish church opened remain unanswered?
JOHN LAWRENCE
make about the weighing up of historical
evidence, he is less persuasive in his attempt to
deal with Hume’s objection that a miracle-
story should only be accepted if its falsehood
would itself be something miraculous. I n
conclusion, Swinburne rightly points out
that the question of the creditability of a
particular miracle-story cannot be altogether
separated off from the evidence from sources
other than miracle-stories for or against the
existence of gods. I t is a pity, however, that he
was not able to develop this point at greater
length since there is a disappointing vagueness
about his final conclusion, that the acceptance
or rejection of a miracle must depend on one’s
Weltanschauung.
A. J. P. KENNY
Comment 144

him, but he remains a human enemy. He cannot be written off,

he cannot be thought of or treated as subhuman. The Christian’s
struggle for justice need not, in our opinion, always be non-violent
(though it is unlikely to succeed unless it is very largely non-violent),
the agents of injustice may sometimes have to be deterred by the
fear of death, but they must never be degraded or dehumanized,
they must never, for example, be tortured or barbarously treated.
This, for the Christian, is no mere tactical decision; it is an absolute
limit set to his conduct by the fact that he is dealing with those whom
God loves.
The injunction to love our enemies only reveals itself as mystery
when we actually have enemies-therwise we are likely to mistake
it for a sentimental recommendation to be friendly to everyone. The
Christian can recognize a group or a class as men who must be fought
and defeated, but at the same time he does not lose sight of their
mysterious ultimate value. The Christian makes the astonishing
cIaim that he has been taken up into the unintelligible love by which
God can love them. It is this that makes forgiveness possible, and
without forgiveness, however effectively your enemy has been
crushed, there is no peace. For the Christian, the roots of forgiveness,
the roots of the reconciliation that will follow the victory are already
present in his struggle.
H. McC.