An act of forgiveness is essentially a response to an expression of remorse. It is a condition of its possibility that it is asked for. Otherwise it is absurd to ask a victim whether they forgive the wrong-doer, and it is confused to proclaim your forgiveness of someone who hasn't expressed remorse. In such a case all the victim can do is express their willingness to forgive.

Dr David Kelly

Harrowdown Hill

I shall probably be found, I said,
and I flashed a smile as I spoke, dead

in the woods, and he smiled back,
with that minute shake of the head,

momentary blink of eyes that lack
comprehension, and do not match

the smile, nor for the moment catch,
quite, the dissonance of mood and voice

where I, briefly revealed in speech, rejoice
to hear myself announce the fate

I’d only secretly dared contemplate:
such a blood sacrifice I thought were just

as I watched resentful men dissemble
before the cool courtesy of my call for trust;

I did not know how soon I would resemble
in the stress of my demeanour those betrayed

by the grave, insistent promises I made.
Public dishonour I could stand and face

were not this moral pride my real disgrace:
the woods, God’s glory, and myself, dismayed

into atonement with this blameless blade

CONT'D



But before we turn to Rahner, I should fill out the Cardinal's remarks, since it brings us back to that anxiety about losing the faith. I don't care what you do, my mother used to say when we were growing up, as long as you don't give up the faith. This was a bad strategic move, like the warning about the fruit of the one tree that you mustn't eat, the one door not to be opened ... except that giving up the faith is not something that one straightforwardly does. Losing the faith can sound like carelessness, and perhaps in some cases it is, though is its loss always a cause for blame? Perhaps one can be blamed for failures one was hardly aware of ... so, the precious gift that can be lost and if lost then lost on account of some failure of will or action or inner disposition that slips below the surface of one's attention. Perhaps even thinking too much? There were those who thought that a blameworthy activity that put one's faith in jeopardy. Anyway, "For Jesus the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils. You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trusts between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people". No, I don't agree with this either, gentle reader, but precisely where does the disagreement lie? And is there some truth that Murphy-O'Connor seeks to convey that one might acknowledge, and recognise that one had not taken into account? Disagreeing is not the same as dismissing it as nonsense, the latter a reactive movement that depends upon misinterpretation of what it is to be a believer.



In any event, commentators in the media were astonished that the Cardinal claimed this at the time of the Ryan Report on child abuse in Ireland. How can the 'inability to believe in God' be the greatest of evils? I suppose they might have gone on to say that surely these cynical priests and nuns and Christian Brothers did evil things and were believers. But actually it is not so clear that they were .... believers, I mean. I know that this will irritate my secularist friends--and I do, honestly, speak as one of them--but the Cardinal is not saying that the greatest evil is to be of the opinion that there is no God. To think so is to misunderstand the nature of belief. To believe in God is to have confidence in the saving power of his Word and thus to commit oneself faithfully to following his commandments --- something like that. I shall have to return to this.

But 'the rule of egoism and the loss of peace' are phrases that echo the thinking of the present Pope. The thought seems to be that the loss of faith amounts to the loss of a vision of the world, including the loss of moral vision. It is the expression of a fear, one we are entirely familiar with from that remark from Dostoevsky, 'If God is dead, then everything is permitted'.. It is the assumed loss of moral vision, and the sense that moral life loses its foundation, that sees the loss of faith as the greatest evil. This is a thought that we have to resist, but should take account of its being the expression of a fear on the part of those who believe and are afraid of the loss of that belief.

When I first read accounts of the mid-Victorian crisis of faith I wondered how late I was to undergo it myself more than a centry later.

I belong to the Catholic tribe and have in earlier years hoped to have the courage of solidarity. At the road block, the question was a tribal one, Catholic or Protestant? and 'atheist' is the wrong answer. I learnt this sense of solidarity from an Indian Muslim friend. He used to be an atheist, but even then, he said, he hoped that if he were cornered by a Hindu mob he would declare himself a Muslim and stand with his companions.

But belonging to this tribe ... is a difficult life sentence, without parole. I always come back to it. Sometimes it feels as though I am an agnostic/Buddhist/humanist trapped inside a Catholic's body and that reassignment is not available. I say trapped, because it affects the whole of my intellectual life and I cannot move on, though maybe the truth is not to be expressed in this linear way, but rather the circle widens (imperceptibly) and that is a better image. Once a Catholic, you see. A certain set of questions, round and arduously round is how it seems in the bad times, my intellectual life dominated by the attempt to understand and resolve them, a set of questions that defines my life, and maybe that is the point of the idea of a 'world', whose derivation seems to be the idea of the 'life of a man', that its construction or dismantling is the work of a human lifetime. In my case the work seems to be to express the experience of its dismantling, and then to sift through the remains.

But the tribal thing: when we were kids we always knew who the Catholics were, in parliament, in the unions, on the stage, in the literary world, in broadcasting. But that was about us and who we could, should, identify with, take pride in. 'You know he's a Catholic?': rather different in intonation from that perplexing knowledge some people of a certain class tend to have: 'of course, he's Jewish, you know'. For me, nowadays, it takes the form of noticing the news when it turns to matters Catholic, a papal gaffe, a new Archbishop, another embarrassed episcopal interview, the tense, brittle, unyielding and defensive, slightly puzzled voice, about gays or contraception or child abuse, or abortion or embryo research. I am distant enough to note the intellectual disaster zone, close enough to feel their pain and want to shake them, longing for one of them to break out, break free and say what they really think, except, I realise, in many cases this is what they really think. But what is it, really to think something? These guys are loyal sons of the Church, reasonably decent men (of course notice the gender), dedicated to, even infused by the ideal of Love, seeking in their lives to be 'another Christ': but spare me that love when the ideal is mediated by life-destroying theory and ideology, precise and petty regulation, so that, confusing loyalty to Christ with loyalty to the official Church, they help to maim and cripple souls, without noticing, and all in a spirit of love, and to that extent they are victims also, of self-harm, though, again, they do not notice, where to notice is to go deeper into self-knowledge than the maintenance of their world can contain. They are loyal sons of the Church and the Church has a position on many things and one needs to know what it is in order to stand up for it, and the education of priests is a training in its articulation. But, note to self, it is dangerous to charge others with lack of self-knowledge, it tempts the gods ... except that once the world came tumbling down, and after many years I have heard again the ancestral voices in those of my contemporaries, who talk unselfconsciously about Almighty God and what he wills. inhabiting what, in my case, came tumbling down. But the faith and the loss of faith, is a high anxiety area: 'the fool hath said in his heart ...' expresses such anxiety.

In which connection, the other day the Cardinal, at the enthronement of his successor, said things which caused vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a delicious glee of affront. The problem is that the delicious glee, the affront, the outrage, also express a state of the soul, one that passes unnoticed because subjectivity is not so much not thought to matter, as never referred to. One looks out, as it were, and not in, so all unknowing of what determines what one can see. Anyway, the Cardinal. I suppose my complaint about the hierarchy is that its members are compelled to appear orthodox even if their private thoughts are not, like politicians or cabinet ministers, they must defend the line, the position, the policy, even if they are against it, this on pain of expulsion. There are not many rogue bishops, so I assume that for most of them there is no such dissonance between private thought and public utterance, but that their minds are shaped by the official teaching. But to come to particulars, the Cardinal said that in the absence of faith we were left with 'an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human', that people were 'not totally human if they leave out the transcendent'. This is what caused the vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a tabloid glee: 'he says we are less than human!' as though 'less than human' implied 'sub-human'. The trouble is that these people are incurious and do not help the cause of secular humanism, they lack charity, do not seek to see what the man is trying to say, which I take to be that in the absence of faith we are not fully human, that a dimension of what makes us human beings is absent. I offer these brief clarifications not because I agree with him but because they are thoughts that belong to generations of clergy trained in theology and philosophy.

We have, therefore, to turn to one of the eminent catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner ...

Ramadan goes on to say that without an intra-religious dialogue between Muslims 'it is impossible - and it may indeed be counter-productive - to engage in a 'dialogue of civilisations'. One has to do both, however: 'one should enter dialogue as one looks at oneself in a mirror ... and draw on the ... information that dialogue with the other reveals about oneself ... one should indeed, when starting a critical, constructive dialogue with other civilisations, ask oneself about one's own meaning and objectives.' (p 305). Ramadan is writing of course as a Muslim concerned about the current condition of Islam, but when he says 'one' here he surely refers to anyone who is concerned to start a dialogue, though he finds too many of his fellow Muslims wanting in this respect:

"Referring to ethical outcomes should give rise to a collective, critical and constructive approach of the very notion of "dialogue" and its meaning. Instead of such fundamental reflection, idealistic reflections appear here and there about common values and respectiing diversity'. One knows what he means, but what is the exact nature of its limitations? 'The debate over "civilisations" and "cultures" must not act as a screen and be a pretext behind which the other real problems of contemporary times are hidden ... Depicting the "dialogue of civilisations" as the positive ideology of our time to avoid discussing the strategies of political, economic, cultural and military domination is a smokescreen and, when all is said and done, nothing but hypocrisy ... a twofold displacement is being performed in the North: a kind of ideology of fear is created, fixing attention on differences and on potential disruptions and clashes between religions and cultures, then debates focus on issues concerning civilisations and values, far from any general political or economic considerations. This clever strategy encloses the agents of dialogue in an isolated Universe where issues that suddenly seem the most important are discussed without dealing with previously existing real problems that nevertheless remain essential" (p 306)

Ramadan claims that this kind of displacement occurs nationally as well as internationally, thus, 'in many European countries, problems are being 'culturalised', 'religionalised', or 'Islamisised' while they are in actuality primarily social and political in nature." (p 306)

He goes on to talk about the monolithic construction of one's own civilsation and that of the other, and that the West needs to overcome its own selective memory and recall its hidden islamic sources. Ditto the Muslim world, nurtured by Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian thought: 'it is impossible to start earnest ddialogue about present diversity if one persists in denying the plural reality and diversity of one's own past'. (p 307)

Crucially, 'ideas and values should not only be discussed, but measured through their concrete implementation in reality ... ... we must undertake a true critical and self-critical analysis to measure the gap between our values and our practices. Dialogue between civilisations is meaningful only if it compels its agents and involved parties to ponder the inconsistency between ideals and respective concrete policies. Intellectual probity calls for such self-awareness in the mirror of the other's questioning. One can then realise that the problems encountered have less to do with values, which have often been historically or philosophically shared, than with disagreements about their ideological use or with the inconsistency observed every day in political, social, or economic practices. Both universes refer to dignity, justice, equality, and freedom and in both Universes-to various dehrees-one can observe undignified or wrongful treatment of human beings (from immigration policies to torture), conspicuous injustice ... persistent inequalities ... breaches of freedom' (308)

Some of these realities are presumably to be understood in terms of the 'shadow', thus our self-image is framed in terms of the positive values, our practice is furtive and concealed from ourselves and there is an aura of resistance in the demeanour of the political leaders who announce the one and practice the other. Tony Blair and Jack Straw manifested this kind of demeanour in their public utterances about the Iraq war and it came out most strongly when they resolutely refused to acknowledge what everyone else knew clearly, that the war was a recruting sergeant for violent extremism, which was put down to corrupt forms of Islam, whereas in fact it was expressed in those forms and not caused by them. We quite properly want to counter violent extremism but find it impossible to acknowledge that our own actions and policies have something to do with its growth. Now, it is one thing to acknowledge a link and another to condemn those policies. That is an independent question. In principle, if we think our policies are just then we ought to pursue them and accept that we shall to suffer violent reaction from some quarters. But violence is often allied to a sense of injustice, and if the policies are unjust ...

Ramadan talks rightly about the conditions for the possibility of dialogue, humility, respect, self-criticism and so on, and similarly with inter-faith dialogue ...

I have been reading what seems to me an important book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation by Tariq Ramadan. He talks about how 'Popular demonstrations, so excessive in the Muslim world, against the Danish cartoons or Pope Benedict XVI's speech in Germany, reveal far more about societies where critical debate is lacking, where civil society is muzzled (and sometimes cunningly instrumentalized to vent its anger on the outside world, the West), where hypocritical formalism is institutionalized, than they do about the specific object of the anger. The same is true of mobilizations against the war in Iraq or of opposition to the Israeli government's repressive policy towards the Palestinians. From the top leaders to the grass roots of Muslim societies and communities, one can observe emotional mobilizations determined by the timing and the intensity of media coverage. There is no in-depth debate between trends of thought, no critical dialogue, no long-term strategy ... and always the same lack of vision and co-ordination' ( p 305).

School is out

Well, it has felt like school is out after a heavy few days inserting other people's proof corrections into a master copy and producing an Index. All is in hand then for Philosophers and God, which should appear some time in the Spring: there are some interesting papers in it, though I say so myself. Anyway, I managed to get out of the house and do a circuit of the north end of the island, the sky blue, the wind not too hard, but one breathed it in like delicious sips of iced water. I was thinking about death again, though not for gloomy reasons. I wonder whether representations of it as an utterly bleak deprivation of sense is precisely a result of attempts to imagine one's own non-existence. There is heaven and there is Hell, of course, neither of which are 'non-existence'. For those who hope for the life to come the problem is that they cannot imagine the positive, only the absence of what belongs to this physical, mortal life. As for 'non-existence' or 'extinction', when the bubble bursts there is no bubble, when the flame is extinguished there is no flame.. Neither of these images are of the sensory deprivation that some people imagine as the negative aspect of a presumed or hoped for survival..

One cannot stress enough the significance of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith. I find it very difficult to think in terms of 'the meaning of life' or the idea that 'life has a meaning'. Both these expressions are predicated, historically, on the idea of a life to come, a life that will make sense of this one, restore the balance of justice and affliction and so forth. In the absence of these concepts ... the trouble is that people will then ask, well what is the meaning of life? Whereas, it seems to me that at best we are dealing in metaphor when we apply this term to 'life'. A person loves their life or hates it, they are anguished at the prospect of losing things they hold dear, they will be relieved of what causes them affliction, they want to live or they don't want to live, they live for this or they live for that, they are bored or in despair, they are absorbed and engaged, and so forth, these are the primary categories. In the absence of what we love, the presence of what we recoil from we might start talking of 'meaning' or 'loss of meaning', but these expressions are derivative and to understand them we have toi refer to what is primary.

I have just taken delivery of something completely different, Hutton's Arse.