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 ...