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The Fifth Corbishley
Memorial Lecture - 7th May, 1981 It was Tom Corbishley who gave me a hint for this lecture. ‘I care about it’, he said, because I care about ecumenism’. ‘It’ of course meant Europe, the Community, but still more the indefinable idea. We had both at the end of a long meeting reached a point of mental weariness. The moment called for a simple re-affirmation of practical faith. That was how Tom made it. He cared about Europe because he cared about ecumenism. He did not explain the connection in his mind. I did not ask. Later I came to think that his thought must have run something like this. The breakdown of Western Europe in the sixteenth century had in part been a religious breakdown. Europe’s resulting disunity was clear. First the civil wars, then the festering religious wars of the next century were all proof enough. Structures of society went under. The mighty indeed fell. Peoples arose. To an English Catholic the trauma had to be a sixteenth century one. But to others the trauma went further back, and each had their point. In the German tradition Paul Tillich, the theologian, used to speak of the curses of the European tradition’, curses felt since the Treaty of Verdun. So intense were these curses that Tillich felt De Gaulle’s nationalism in 1963 to be nothing else than a re-expression of the year 843 Verdun). For then it was that Charlemagne’s empire was broken up, and with it that political coherence of Europe which has not yet been recovered. For his part Tillich had seen a benefit, ‘the richness of the development of the individual nations’ [cf. Paul Tillich Ultimate Concern, Dialogues with Students (London SCM 1965) p.85] Tom, I think, saw that too even if on a shorter scale, but to him that richness was not enough. I think that, behind the zigzag of modern religious convergence, he saw a further necessary - condition, that of transnational convergence. To hasten or promote the first, you would also have to hasten or promote the second. Looking across frontiers must be what the good Christian, ‘good man’, does. Erasmus, before the religious schisms of the West, would call the European Church the Respublica Christiana. ‘And for the Kingdom’, said Thomas More at his trial in Westminster Hall on 1st July 1535, ‘I have all other Christian realms’. But thereafter we had to wait, because of ‘the curses of Europe’, until the year 1945. Then came the reverberating phrase used at Strasbourg by that tested democrat, Carlo Sforza, We, the European People". [Carlo Sforza (1873-1952) has been a militant opponent of fascism, Italian Foreign Minister, Member of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe] At the end of this lecture I shall want to say in my own way that the Christian and the ‘good man’ have reason to care about Europe because they care about ecumenism. For the moment, let us go wider. Let us take another hint. The hint comes from the ‘good man’ as such. I take it from that good man and advocate of religious toleration at a time when the Churches had not yet thought of it, William Penn. He is rightly remembered as an early Father among the Society of Friends. It is, Mr Dean, one of the charisms of the Wyndham Place Trust that it rejoices in the active collaboration of members of that Society. It is very much in the spirit of that Society, as well as of the theme of this lecture, that we should make one of Penn’s famous dicta our own. His dictum was: ‘True Godliness don’t turn men out of the world but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavours to mend it’. He applied his dictum, and it suits our theme, in his Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of an European Parliament (1693). The peace he envisaged, he said, ‘is maintained by Justice, which is a fruit of government, as government is from society and society is from consent’. There is the ‘good man of the seventeenth century. His voice is a voice without the bite or anxiety or self-preoccupation of the religious polemicists at that time. It was a ‘good man’s’ concern for justice, society and consent. It is also a good classical voice. You will hear it in Cicero. ‘For it is in justice’, he said, ‘that the splendour of virtue is at its greatest, that virtue indeed from which the good man takes his name’. And Cicero was of course going back to the master of the West for whom, ‘the most shining of the virtues is Justice. Equal admiration is not to be given to the evening or to the morning star. I am thinking of that Justice which presides over the common good, the order and the equilibrium of the city’. Behind Aristotle can be heard the voice of another even more venerable master in Europe, that of Plato himself. I shall want to argue, as we proceed, that Europe 1981 or Europe 2000 must still abide by its earliest and morally most historic insights, namely that the ‘good man as a citizen must still remain preoccupied with that general justice from which he takes his name, and that very preoccupation of his must preside over the common good, the order and equilibrium of that European society, which in his time William Penn desired to be ‘from consent’. One more characteristic we shall take from Aristotle. It is this. The ‘good man’ needs an education in politics. It will teach him ‘not only how to dominate others, but it will teach him also the service of others’. So Justice coming from government and from society, while ultimately coming also from consent, is to be pursued by the ‘good man’ in politics, when he has learned not only how he may dominate but even more how he may serve. Now we cannot confront Aristotle with butter-mountains or wine-lakes, cod wars or mutton-protectionism. He after all disapproved of our fast disappearing retail corner-shop. But we can invite him to Join William Penn who is nearer to us. They can unite in reminding us of the general good, of consent, of such domination as we may achieve by being harnessed precisely in the context of Europe to the service of others. Since the European Community does derive from consent, we should let these two prophets of Europe persuade us that the ‘good man’s’ ideals must not perish. They must inspire our consent so that it may gravitate around justice. They must help us to ensure that the effort to dominate is in fact never bereft of service, and that domination takes place only by persuasion within the established area of consent. But the ‘good man’ must leave his abstractions and come down to earth. Where should he start? In 1981. if he is not to be written off as a mere Euro-idealist, he must start by trying to answer an urgent challenge to him. For economic Europe has now filled the stage. So much so that of April 24th this year we have seen in the UK the launching of the Anti-Common Market Project. ‘Entry into the EEC was an act of political adventurism that has gone disastrously wrong’, said the launching statement. The manifesto’s figures were out of date, but plausible enough nevertheless. A protagonist, Mr John Silkin, was persuasive about it. ‘The effect of the Common Agricultural Policy is to increase food prices in Britain, which still imports so much of its food and has to pay a large tax upon that’. Now the ‘good man’ does not have to approve the Common Agricultural Policy as it stands. Europe and the CAP are different but related problems. Negotiations will go on, and go on within a framework of consent. So will negotiations over an energy policy and a fishing policy. That is how the process in which we strive to unite service with Justice flowing from consent must continue. But such processes are difficult and time-consuming. From being merely the business of Europe they become the challenge of Europe. But what sort of a challenge? In reality a challenge to see things on a wider scale, on a bigger map. Also a challenge not to forget -have we forgotten that in 1977 the last of the customs duties between the Nine were abolished? Or that the latest proposals put up by the European Parliament really did manage to keep Community Budget expenses to roughly the same figure as in the 1979 budget? There does exist some balance between the frustrations and the achievements. The ‘good man’ should not too soon be distracted by our Labour Party’s withdrawal resolutions, or by the mood that the shrill tone of the Prime Minister’s my money’ campaign engendered. Because he is already in fact living differently, the ‘good man’ should surely begin to think differently. Though the vast range of differences is never clearly put before him, he can, if he will, begin to see them for himself. "Different living" said Stephen Spender, ‘is not living in different places, but creating in the mind a map’. The map in the mind must above all be a bigger one. Indeed the ‘Euro-good man’ must begin to live with an atlas in his head. Let us open that atlas with him, and glance at one or two of its maps., They are not, of course merely geographical maps, but are a projection of geography on to a moral and a human scale. Europe’s Geography Europe, we are aware, is not an island. Oddly, it is not really a continent either. View it from Moscow. What does it look like from there? A promontory, surely, jagged enough, but a promontory thrown out from a world-sized land-mass that runs East-West. Now place a transparent communications map above it, a global one. How do the lines converge on our promontory? This time the axis lies rather North-South with strong supporting lines running West. From the East we could be pushed or drawn across or over the land mass or the promontory. From the other three points of the compass we, the Europeans, are almost incessantly bombarded with arrivals: and as incessantly we take off in the same directions. More than any other global area we seem to be in contact. What we do, or fail to do, affects the rest along those axes. The ‘good man’ is forced to give Mr Silkin a point when he says: ‘every mountain of food in Europe undercuts the living of a whole people across the sea’. [The Guardian, 24th April 1981]Yet the map also teaches us to see things in balance. Europe’s position is still a bargaining position, even a position in which initiatives can still be undertaken. But it is also a vulnerable one. Some things can be maintained only at too great a moral cost. How for instance can the European continue to make his Wohlstand, his quality of life and standard of living, the all-important yardstick of his future? The pressure may affect even the European Russian neighbour. He has a falling birth-rate, but the trend in his Asian republics is the opposite. More mouths are being opened which must be fed. On our European doorstep we shall also be under pressure. It is frugal and proud, not mad and bad, Albania which has the highest European birth-rate. That will be our concern. Russians and Western Europeans will have to bow before the fact that their relatively higher standards of living will very surely have to sink. By the same token our everlasting preoccupation with our Gross National Product will become a piece of very questionable morality. It hardly lies within the sphere of the ‘good man’s’ justice and service, and in the long run it cannot work. The ‘good man’s’ Judgement will make him scrutinise the fate of the immigrants who have come to share in the fate of Europe. It will strike him that old colonising Europe had and still has its debts to pay. Of course, world recession and mounting European unemployment hardly make it the right time to talk about debts upon a planetary scale. But the ‘good man’ cannot be a fugitive from them. For one thing he has to recognise what Europe recognises through its initiatives. The EEC has co-operation agreements with South East Asia. Here is Europe going out of its way to deal with developing countries which are ‘non-associated developing countries’. In those areas she need not be ashamed that she has joined a political will to an aid programme. The stage has been wisely set. Others in Asia and Latin America are watching, and they set much store by the results. There is hope for a better balance in the Community’s relations with the Third World. Under the Rome Conventions the EEC has agreed to important priorities with African, Caribbean and Pacific States. These priorities include the promotion of trade between ACP States and the Community, industrialisation if those states where needful, the development of agriculture, regional co-operation and special aid. Lame II above all smoothes the way to more effective co-operation. The implementation of the Brandt Report, North-South, A Programme for Survival, still preoccupies the mind’s eye of the ‘good man’ who will look to see what sort of implementation takes place. These planet-wide initiatives will be set in the ‘good man’s’ balance book. Not only will he want to know what has been or can be achieved according to his first large map, but he will want to set it against the effect of unthinking slogans and their effect. The political kudos of ‘standing up to Europe’ now and again canvassed at Westminster, must have no more than an insignificant place on this map. This mildly absurd bluster is already counterbalanced by the continued and constant consultations which now take place between the Foreign Ministries of EEC member states. Already on a day to day basis these states no longer deal with each other through the roundabout way of their embassies. The advertised ‘standing up to’ has already given way to an unadvertised practice of political co-operation. It is in the continuing way of civilised organisation, when all allowance has still been made for wastefulness, that European man still plays his best cards. The question is whether we play them well enough. The Report of the Cadmos Group insists, pessimistically, I think. that we never really play our trump cards: the Greek sense of measure, the Roman sense of Law and the Anglo-Saxon sense of Common Law, the Germanic sense of community, the Celtic sense of imagination and adventure. [The State of the Union, Report of the Cadmos Group to the European People, ed, Denis De Rougemont, trans. V Ionescu (Oxford. Pergamon, 1979) p.8] Still the reminder is a good one, and the ‘good man’ should read his large planetary map with an inner as well as an outer eye. But read it he must, for it is not the mere balancing of features on the map that matters to him. It is rather the conclusion he draws for our common responsibility, for our common human existence upon our ever-shrinking small earth. Europe’s Culture I want to suppose that the next page of the ‘good man’s’ atlas will be the most familiar one to us all. It shows how the European has been living with all his mental and aesthetic inner furniture. It contains our vast and deep culture. From one angle it contains also our religious make-up. Belloc’s celebrated dictum, ‘Europe is the Faith, the Faith is Europe’ puts it most attractively. and most dangerously. Truly enough it is the standpoint from which we were colonisers and missionaries. Our successes owe it as much as our failures. Thus it formed the reason for the Jesuit expulsion from China in the seventeenth century: too much cultural transposition. It was the reason for the irrational demand in the Belgian Congo in the days before independence that the Africans learned either Flemish or French, according as their teachers had come from one or the other region of Belgium. Emotionally the force of this argument says ‘home is best’, so long as it is my home, of course. Politically, economically and socially it says ‘nothing succeeds like success’, my success of course - so ‘Just be like me’. But the ‘good man’ will take the closest look at this map. He will see that it must somehow record not merely spatial contours and configurations however varied. He will see that it is a time map as well as a space map, the subtlest combination. And the time factor is one we neglect or fail to correct at our peril. The neglect is easy to slip into. The Roman Catholic Bishops of Europe have too easily lapsed into this way of thinking. In their Statement on the Christians’ Responsibility in Europe they lean handsomely on the cultural argument. They notice a reassuring configuration of values. They neglect the time factor. Our inheritance is a good thing. History teaches us lessons. So we should preserve our inheritance, and they are thus led to conclude:
How I would like to say that here is Euro-Catholicism 1981 at its best. But I simply cannot. That the Christian image of man in his cultural European matrix will always provide: that with it we may ground all human dignity: that here we have what ought to be the inspiration of our whole culture - these assertions are a misreading of the present and a baseless form of futurology. In one respect this argument is welcome. It begins to shove the pendulum away from Belloc’s ‘Europe is the faith...’ But the shove is feeble and of no help to the future. Why was Vatican II not consulted which was right? But it has gone unheeded. Section 55 of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World said something very much to the point, and something which took account of the time-factor on the cultural map: In every group or nation, there is an ever-increasing number of men and women who are conscious that they themselves are the artisans and authors of the culture of their own community. Such a development is of paramount importance for the spiritual and moral maturity of the human race. We are the witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility towards his brothers and towards history. You will notice that here is the cultural argument again, but this time something of the future Europe can be read off in the present Europe. The argument does not look back, but is open-ended towards the future. Its emphasis is upon human creativity (‘artisans and authors of the culture of their own community’). It points to the need for adulthood in the moral order of ‘moral maturity’). It reaches out across the frontiers of mental furnitures and aesthetic appreciations to ‘responsibility towards his brothers and towards history’. A charter for European youth, one might think. An invitation to the moral human constants beyond cultural pluralism. The Bishops of Europe, however, give youth their assurance that everything will be all right if youth does what Dad tells it to do:
The ‘good man’ may be forgiven for wondering how it is that time goes by so slowly for bishops. There is alter all no indefinite set of generations of young people simply waiting to be counselled by the mitred sexagenarians of Europe. We have precisely those whom we now have. and they form a very complex mix. Certainly one characteristic is eagerness. But to pat the young people’s cross-cultural eagerness on the head, and then to remark, that it remains for ideas to be put into practice is no sort of declaration. It is ostrichism. A glance out of their own sand-pit - would the bishops see nothing? Could there not have been a word for the European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam, for the European Association of Music Festivals (38 in 18 countries), for the Association of Institutes of European Studies (34 universities In 10 countries), for the Community of Guilds and Book Clubs, for the Campaign of Civic Education? Yes, but must not these things be shown to be of great value to the Church? For that reason, too, perhaps, we hear no praise for the on-going Discussion Forum at Alpbach (Austria) or for the European University of Florence (Fiesole). In effect it is not entirely the Europe of the intellectuals or the Europe of youth which is so nerveless. What Vatican II had in mind sixteen years ago is not after all so outlandish: ‘the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility towards his brothers and towards history’. My purpose is not to snap my fingers at bishops. It is to insist upon this: if the cultural argument for Europe is used, it must be used with great care. First, the ever-variable time-factor must not be left out. Secondly, the argument must not in covert form bring back Belloc and try to turn it into a prop for the Church. The cultural argument has a natural and human strength. It is not however the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thirdly the strength that it has must be allowed to run towards the creative acceptance of the coming even richer cultural pluriformity of Europe. Here is where the cross-cultural appeal still tugs at youth. Here indeed, youth can still find its glimpse of the spirit and of a genuinely human moral dignity. Keeping this particular map up to date requires sensitivity. Our London religious bookshops have been slow to produce a picture or booklet of the martyred Archbishop Romero of El Salvador. It may be true that youth does not stay and browse overmuch in our religious bookshops. But in one London bookshop, where youth does seem at home enough to stay and browse, I saw what I was looking for. There the dead Romero looks up at you from among a generous supply of dust-jackets enfolding a Moscow or an East Berlin imprint. That tells us some thing. The San Salvador emergency is important to youth. Youth must latch on somewhere. Nor should we distract it. All the same there must be a framework. With another glance at the cultural map the ‘good man’s’ eye may alight on the subject of education .Will he conclude to a new era for youth? Will he find the reassurance of cultural means taken to the coming cultural ends ? He may indeed muse upon the problem. He may ask himself which of the European Ministries of Education is showing anything significant for the future of Europe. Does the future really figure in the university ‘think tanks’ as much as the traditional inheritance of methods and learning? In 1968 neither France nor Germany could offer much reassurance. In 1981 the picture within the UK is not much more coherent or positive and a glance backwards is surely a story of opportunities missed. There was, a decade ago, respectful acknowledgement that the French Orandes &oles especially in their production of the polytechnicien, were capable of becoming the nurseries of our creative Eurocrats. Yet this smooth and elitist system has kept itself to itself. We hear of no ‘brain-drain’ towards it from our own best-adapted institutions in the UK. In the twenty-first century the European will have to face the now well prophesied communications revolution. As processes, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge will pass beyond our recognition. Our children now manipulating their pocket calculators as a most normal operation are at the beginning of a revolution. Books and libraries, which for us still lie at the centre of our learning system, will eventually be found at the periphery. Telecommunications alone will change ‘the whole culture we undertake to build’. The valued past can then only become dwarfed. The telecommunications experts assume an adaptive capacity in the young till now quite untried. Yet the great institutions of liberal and technical education in Europe assume systems, structures, techniques and values Just as they appear, shaped by the past. In a sense they cannot do otherwise. Even the ‘good man’, like the bishops, tends to look back at the expense of the future that is in the making. But for his children and his children’s children’s sake he will have to ask himself which of the great liberal institutions of Europe’s educational system will fatally become marginalised. Here in Britain it is almost impossible to pose, let alone to answer, the question. On the university scene we have had a period of over-expansion to be followed by probable over-retrenchment, with what coherence it is very hard to make out. Problems are taken piecemeal. One such problem is that of the overseas student, a real enough problem but treated as though no European dimension existed. ‘The country composition’, writes Peter Williams, ‘of the overseas student body was such that more places were taken by private students from Iran or Malaysia than by all our European Community partners combined’. [See Peter Williams The Overseas Student Question (London Heinemann 1981) and extracts in The Guardian 4th May 1981] That was not even enlightened self-interest, since the economic giants of the twenty-first century will be in all probability China, Brazil, Mexico and India. In fact only a few students are admitted from these countries. As the Brandt report instructs us, it is better for the development of planetary well-being that, even in the sphere of education, instead of working towards aid, dependence and inequality, the relationship should be a new style one based rather upon co-operation, interdependence and equality. If that is so, will not the ‘good man’ say that Europe has not yet even begun in men’s minds. Indeed that most humanist of pursuits, philosophy, has, in the European go-it-alone style of Oxbridge since the forties, ensured that any real British-Continental philosophical interdependence, any creative thinking on the nature of man himself - such interdependent thinking has simply not been on offer. That is the case in philosophical activity and in related fields where few of our historians or sociologists share, or can share, a philosophy of what they are doing with their continental counterparts. The same would be true of theology, were it not that strong denominational loyalty sometimes makes the cross-channel journey necessary. So England at any rate stays different from continental Europe. Different questions are asked, or not asked at all. Yet here is one question that the history of Europe will prompt the ‘good man’ to ask. What of the year 1848? Has it nothing to do with us? It was a year in which European man struggled, a struggle of man’s idea of himself, with no other reality than a different idea of man about himself. That division cut deeper than even the French Revolution. Louis Philippe abdicates. The French Republic is proclaimed. The Swiss Federal Constitution is established. Bohemia and Hungary live through national uprisings, while the Frankfurt Parliament tries its hand at uniting a geographical Germany. It was the year a sovereign Pope went into exile. It was the year that Marx and Engels gave the world The Communist Manifesto. Through its political turmoil it became the year of the alternative offer, that of liberating man from his own alienation. The offer became a quasi-religious alternative and in the meaning of history has come to colour the rest. It stands out in highest relief on the time-space map of the cultural argument for Europe. Marxism as a doctrine has been refuted more than any other. But for European man the Marxist version of himself survives and systematically presents him to himself without his ancient religion. It is a system at home with the language of the industrial conditions of work, of the wage struggle, and above all with the language of economic relations, class and property. Its place on the map of the cultural argument for and about Europe is certain. Its quasi-religious claim is also certain. As Marx put it in The Holy Family: ‘the possessing class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-estrangement’. The former for Marx solves the matter comfortably by sitting in Church and as a diversion repenting of that unrepentable, old original sin. The latter feels annihilated, impotent. All it sees, and it cannot be diverted from seeing it, is the reality of an inhuman existence. Defenders of a simplistic view of the European cultural argument will see this section of the map as a negation. For in the alleged necessity of historical dialectical materialism they will be told that their bourgeois philosophy, their bourgeois art, their bourgeois Churches are the secretion of the expropriating class. In the future dialectical struggle of Europe, they will again be told that as the expropriators they cannot survive. At the same time the Marxist cannot put a date on the demise of the other-worldly bourgeois religion. Some form of co-existence to him becomes realistic. Nevertheless the ‘good man’ will read off his cultural map the Euro-Marxist claim that Marxism, as a view of man, is the historical successor to Christianity. For the Euro-Marxist will claim that, whatever the Party or Parties may in their time have done elsewhere, his own revisionist version can lay claim to a real philanthropy. As he looks away from this map the ‘good man will heed two lessons. The first is a moral one. The Marxist counter-culture argument makes a serious critique. Thus old Europe of the Middle Ages for example looked upon itself as an island of morality in an otherwise depraved world. The tables have been turned. The Euro-Communist, new Puritan perhaps, knows that it is in Moscow, Hanoi, Teheran and Riyadh that the western capitals, including some in Europe, are judged as centres of depravity and decadence, of a dolce vita where above all in the domain of sex everything is tolerated. The second lesson is surely one of interpretation. There is no quick and easy reading of this map. Things can apparently happen and equally not happen. 1848 has not happened in the United Kingdom. A year of the profoundest European issues has not happened on these off-shore islands. The Chartists hardly count now. There is no uniform time-scale for Europe. It lags and then races, now here now there. In France Just before the Communist Manifesto Augustin Thierry could say that there his contemporaries are one hundred years away from the French Revolution (1848/1789) - time had raced. Yet forty-three years after the Communist Manifesto the Pope with the same conditions in mind tried his hand at a systematic alternative, Rerum Nouaruni, (1891/1848) -now time had lagged. In the years following upon Vatican II I have often enough heard Cardinal Suenens declare that the Catholic world was having to live through a century of its own time-clock every ten years - again time was racing. Yet today you can still read Gulliver’s Travels and still find in them the most pertinent and acute criticism of the society bequeathed to us by our own industrial revolution (1981/1723) - time lags indeed. For the ‘good man’ we Europeans are not all contemporaries. He does not have to wonder that there are some in Europe waiting with bated breath (most probably in Italy) to see how far Poland has suddenly raced ahead. The same Europeans cannot be prevented. when they see us with Gulliver’s Travels in our hands, from spotting that 1848 has not happened in Britain, and from asking themselves if that year has not still unfinished business to do in Europe. So the page of the cultural map will be turned with a sense of great enigmas to be lived with. The cultural skins of Europeans are as varied as their histories and their languages. Of the latter, as Burckhardt said, we cannot know too many. Of the former we shall never know enough. Nevertheless in such a situation it is not surprising that the European Cultural Foundation announced its Plan Europe 2000 with the words: ‘Europe has no idea where it is going but it’s going there fast. Moreover, our continent, to use Valery’s phrase, seems to be entering the future backwards’. [Quoted in Europe 2000 ed. Peter Hall (London Duckworth l980) 3rd Ed. P.1.] The cultural argument will bear only very modest presentation. What if Europe dies? The map the ‘good man’ may next turn to will perhaps be the one that faces him with the question, What if Europe dies?’ That question he can hardly escape. The popular mood had been putting It under his nose. In 1977, nineteen years only after the treaties establishing the EEC and Euratom, the monthly European polls were giving out such depressing No percentages as these: Luxembourg 34%, Ireland 35%. UK and the Netherlands 37%, West Germany 42%, Italy 48%, France 49%, Belgium 51%. If aWwhich survey published last February (1981) is worth some credence. then 56% of a national sample of the UK must be accepted as agreeing with the statement that the UK should never have entered the EEC in the first place. The gloom was deepened by Giscard d’Estaing in April when in the course of his presidential campaign in Alsace he let it be known that he considered the UK entry to have been an error. Questions need an intelligible background. And Which did provide one as well as show that it is needed. lf your approval of something is to be worth while, then you must know about it, otherwise like the exam candidate you may be answering a question you have made up in your head, and not the one you have been asked.. Now some ignorance may be bliss. Here is a question which does not much matter. ‘Is it true or false that under EEC rules surplus potatoes are bought by a special agency and dyed green?’ Some devilish dealings at Brussels, of course, we tend to think. But no. That is Just what the Potato Marketing Board has been doing for years, a board which of course under EEC rules has no right to exist. Ignorance of the next question, however, is not bliss. Question: ‘How much of the price rise, if any, do you think is the direct result of EEC membership?’ A leading question is it not? So we must be fair-minded. We would say about half, would we not? We might suspect more. or be surprised by less, A fair-minded 47% of the poll thought that way too. But now we must ask the experts. One half do they say, or less than a half?. Ladies and Gentlemen, the experts put the figure at somewhere between 8% and 12%. It is a truism to say that democratic elections also require a background of understanding. This day I voted in local elections. but I was a bad voter, Even to discover the names of the four candidates I had to go to the polling station. I think, Mr Dean, I can correctly name my Euro-MP. Can you, Ladies and Gentlemen, correctly name yours? Yet to approve of him and what he stands for... there is no need to continue. That knowledge must be ours, must it not, if the agreed European ideal as in any historic and liberal sense to be a democratic one. But today’s popular mood is not based on knowledge. And the ‘good man’ must find it tragic for our civilization, if the death of Europe occurs simply because the popular vote does not know at all what Europe is about. lf Europe is found dead because it has not been tried, a second chance would seem most unlikely. I do not myself believe that the majority of 260 million EEC customers are all dissatisfied customers. But that is unadvised comfort. So is the Rousseauesque fantasy of 260 million noble Euro-savages all desiring political and social unity. No better indeed than the conceit that our UK football fans are still desiring that the best team may win when the police are hosing them down in some appropriate part of an Italian stadium. And yet, and yet - ‘we are not fabricating a machine’, said Churchill at Strasbourg in 1949, ‘we are cultivating a living plant’. How do you watch such a plant? Here we can only say how we might go about it. The organisms of a Europe exist. They can be interrogated. To take the oldest, the Congress of Europe first met in May 1948. A year later the Council of Europe was given a Consultative Assembly, an assembly of members appointed by member states. It was a forum, and it was a distinguished one. But here comes the fatal gap. Most of us do not know about it. It has not had the slightest direct popular impact. It precedes the Parliament of Strasbourg and is not to be confused with it. But a function it does have, and a highly necessary one. It maintains relations between the Community and other democratic states of Western Europe. Two irreplaceable organisms stem from the first one. The Commission for Human Rights and the Conference of Local and Regional Powers. lf he interrogates here. the ‘good man’ can record some quite definite human achievements. Thus by 1978 over 8000 cases had sought redress either from the Commission or from the Court of Human Rights. ‘Nowhere in the world’, said Chancellor Schmidt. ‘does there exist such an effective supervision of the internal practices of States in the matter of human rights’. Such examples show that something quite appreciable Is happening. as it where, from above. From such examples a balance sheet could be drawn up. We ha"e had to make negative remarks on the all important topic of Europe’s education and by implication upon Europe’s education for European citizenship. But we can also list some agreed political factors which amount to a real human and European plus. First, war between the nations of the new Europe is now quite simply unthinkable. What the Utopians used to write about in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is now an acquired state and order of things. Secondly - the ‘good man will approve of this - a democratic consensus is a necessary prerequisite for membership of the Community such as it now is. Once Greece could not Join. Now Greece has done so. Spain has kept us on tenterhooks. Portugal is struggling. We should add that economic integration has had the effect of reducing the significance of frontiers, many of which were simply residues of the arbitrariness of history. From this the ‘good man’ might come to a positive conclusion. Europe. however finally united, cannot indeed be in possession of the answer to all problems of cohabitation on the same promontory of that world-size land mass. But the point the ‘good man’ takes is this. It was not any of the full-blown national sovereignties as such which originated the achievements attained. It was that indefinable organism of Europe itself in the making. There are too some scenarios the ‘good man’ can see on the way to being realised. A close look at the ecological and regional movements is instructive. It shows that these respond to basic human needs and desires. It shows that they belong on the European level. The Basque area, South Tyrol, Brittany. fissionable Belgium, and, it may increasingly be believed, Northern Ireland have a future, if it is to be a future, with a European dimension. Who even pretends to see that they have one without it? I cannot delay you with explanations, though they are forthcoming, that regional politics, regional energy and regional ecology are all intimately interrelated. The Eurocrats know this very well, so do the movements themselves such as that of the ecologists. A general hope can be seen in this fact. The first regionalist claims in mainland Europe followed closely upon the setting up of the organisation for European union. They did not precede the establishments, they followed after. The reason is clear. The Steel Community, Euratom, the EEC had to be in possession first. Once they were, once an Authority had appeared which could be seen to adopt regional hopes and could take them out of the blocking force of sovereign states, then at last those regional hopes, facts and claims could be taken seriously. Then too the motivations of ethnic groups could be channelled. The consequence is that frontier groupings, which are to be found in some fifteen separate regions, have now achieved some democratic right of way. Regions described as ‘spaces of civil participation’ are already being created. That is how the very effective Regio Basiliensis has come into being. It is a region of Rhine dwellers with common interests who speak similar German dialects. Thus French Alsace, the German Badener area and that of Basle in Switzerland have united for clear gains: elimination of river pollution, improved public transport, a common airport, easier conditions for frontier workers and the successful resistance to no less than six nuclear power plants. [See Chapter IV The Regions’ in The Cadmos Report pp. 59ff] All that is vital but shouted from the hustings, regional novelty lies in the travel from university to it is not being and cannot be The effective force behind the very frequent seminars which university among the forty Institutes for European Studies. Here is an emerging Europe of the paper world which does get translated into action. This third map of course will refer the ‘good man to yet another map which needs a lecture in itself. This time it would relate to defence and disarmament. Defence and Disarmament Rational defence was part of the goodness of Aristotle’s good man. Our ‘good man’, however, will place himself before such evidence as he can glean and then seek rationality. That is what he will not find. Defence planners give away no sort of secret when they say that they can see six sorts of scenario from the initial nuclear strike, whether tactical or strategic. Such rational principles as the ‘good man’ may have will then be swept away. For no strategic studies suggest that the so-called ‘principle of discrimination’ (that non-combatants are not involved) and the so-called ‘principle of proportion’ (that there must be a proportion between strike and counter-strike) are still relevant. Any of the six plausible scenarios must involve such escalation as will destroy the two so-called principles. That dissuasion can be indirect is by no means clearly established, nor therefore is the role of the Euromissile a dearly acceptable one. Any measure of confrontational potential includes, if we are realistic, some estimate of continuing build-up with few expectations of long term rationality. The ‘good man’ is for the time being both politically and religiously on his own. He need not be and, foreseeable, will not be. The European Community’s role in seeking detente through the pursuit of arms limitation can be stepped up, and it should become the lever for nuclear disarmament between the Superpowers. In the UK the coming on to the scene of The Alternative Defence Commission can only command respect.[ See Christian Mellon SJ, ‘Alternative Defence Policies’ The Month (May 1981) pp.166-169] The ‘good man’ will urge on talk, but he will also listen. For it is in the context of defence that the most serious modification of the European scene may have to be envisaged. It is for this reason that I have throughout refrained from attempting any definition of a Europe through its boundaries, as well as any definitions of the final form which unity should take. A more flexible Europe is thinkable. It is called the Europe with a ‘variable geometry’. Why indeed should Europe not have to change its shape and Its role as a wider world context demands it. In economy alone for example there are always new options. The idea is still young and not to be ruled out. To start with it may be that its proper place is at the regional level. It already has an organ in the Consultative Assembly which has its links with non-member democratic states. Such links could be extended and vitalized. And the notion of a variable geometry Europe can and should have its spiritual effects with their own proper applications. It is with that speculative thought that I begin my last section. The Religious Map Let us suppose that the last map the ‘good man’ will glance at on looking through his atlas will be the religious one. So let it begin with a theological statement: Dominus regnavit in old Euro-speak: The Lord is King. The Lord is King over all the earth. The Psalms are full of the idea. Full with the idea of a God who is universal Lord, Judge, Shepherd. The assertion that the Lord is King stands out and over against the idea of the nation-state’s self-identification with a total divine destiny. Israel was convinced that her cause was God’s cause. She was by no means always right. It was God who was faithful not Israel. Our European liberal states of the nineteenth century took on a sovereignty, political, diplomatic and military which became a caricature of what the Bible was trying to say. They forgot that, in the prophetic tradition, and in later Jewish universalism, the Lard was Ruler not only of Israel but of all the nations of the earth. If it is only now that we condemn genocide and total war, then little credit is that to our deepest insight. The first two chapters of the book of that startling and visionary cattle-minder Amos do the same. All nations must come before the bar of Yahweh’s Justice. Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon and Moab, none of them the Lord’s, were nevertheless condemned. Crimes against humanity, genocide, total war were Just their crimes. Co-existence and co-partnership in God’s gifts were really the divine design. That was hard for Israel to swallow. But universalism won through, and it was that which Jesus handed on to his disciples. Paul too got the point. It is at bottom he who provides my theological Justification for preoccupying you with the ‘good man’. Even in Christian and post-Christian Europe Justice in the end had to take a long road. From positive law, as Professor Gordon Dunstan puts it, to the moral sense of what is right and wrong, and hence the concept of ‘justice’ as standing sovereign over all mere law was a long road. [In Christians and the Common Market, Report to the British Council of Churches (London SCM 1967) Appendix B ‘National Sovereignty: a Theological Perspective. Professor Dunstan’s contribution has been especially prepared for the Wyndham Place Trust’s Commission on the Limitation of National Sovereignty] At Nuremberg in 1945 British Lawyers were hard to find. Legal Justice. yes, but that justice which stands sovereign over law, and in the end is divine, no. But the Europe of Augustine’s tradition of the City of God has in one supreme instance acted otherwise. Justice between men is not limited by the boundaries of the sovereign-state. The ‘good man’ anticipates this. The theologian goes further. ‘Ihe notion of absolute national sovereignty must be designated an aberration’. [Ibid. p.126] This is not said to harm national systems as such. It is said to protect the natural, social Justice between men and men of whom God alone is their ultimate Lord. In other words there exists a Christian view of justice, a divine attribute, a divine constant outside the shifting dispositions of the human phenomenon. The inheritance of that perception is one of the most precious gifts of the European heritage. Consider the EEC in 1969. The Colonels in Greece were in command. Prisons were gorged with dissidents put there under police harassment. There was torture. No Greek could go to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The Greek Government had refused to sign. No individual could have recourse to that court. But the Convention astonishingly allows for the interposition of a third party. Nevertheless, it was said, one sovereign state would never appeal against another. It was true that in 1955 the Greeks had complained against the UK in Cyprus, and then Austria had had grievances against Italy in the South Tyrol. But this was different. To their great honour Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands did make an appeal against the Colonels. The Commission found against the Greek Government. The report went to the Ministerial Committee of the Council of Europe. Should there be sanctions? Principle fought against expediency. Principle was safeguarded. Greece announced her withdrawal. It was the Protestant tradition of North West Europe which had with a prophetic gesture witnessed to a higher Justice. The Commissioners for Human Rights, it must be remembered, sit neither as national representatives nor as mandated officials. They form an independent Judicature, a noble European achievement that acknowledges the path from a national legal Justice to the more fully human Justice of an ideal. Europe is thus already looking forward. In that process it will become more than a vehicle for only Christian religious values. Why is that? No other continental land mass has ever been such a meeting place for religions as Europe. Our piece of world space has been unique in this way. Despite the Christian religious disasters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite indeed today’s North of Ireland, there has grown up a form of European tolerance for the other and for his other God, Just because his is another humanity. It is true that the toleration of the United States has helped us to recognise ourselves and our own humanism. Thanks to American and to other influences we continue to try and make our Europe a religiously sensitive Europe, as well as a Europe still capable of religious growth. When Paul found that altar to the unknown god in Athens his mental grasp of Europe’s religious potential was brilliantly intuitive. He wished his gospel to complete the pre-existent unknown. In that very idea he prepared for a Europe of variable religious geometry. We must be prepared for it too. It seems, sometimes, that the post-Christian sects treat us in our turn as Paul did that altar in Athens. We must remember the variable factor of our plural time-scales. Neighbourliness and religious contemporaneousness begin less and less to coincide. That applies to the situation with and between the churches. It applies between religions. In religion our time-scales are no more uniform than they were, as we saw, in culture or in politics. It is surely because they live in different time-scales that Judaism and Christianity have met, have been estranged, and are now meeting again. They were hardly synchronous throughout. Did the proud ages of faith really go before or go after Judaism at the time of the medieval repressions? Can one think of the European barbarians who were responsible for the genocide of six million as religiously in the same time-scale of their victims? With great difficulty Vatican II made a rediscovery of Judaism possible for all Roman Catholics. It was the World Conference at New Delhi in 1961 which re-proclaimed God as equal Lord of all his children, and thus unequivocally branded genocide as a Crime against religion. For the future of Europe Judaism still has a critical role to play, critical because always in part prophetic. For other world religions Judaism still stands out as a critical warning. In Europe Christianity and Islam have met and are meeting, It is religious short-sightedness to look upon an Islamic presence in Europe as a post-war phenomenon. Islam does not look upon her proximity to Christianity as a new thing. Why? Because European Christianity first went to Islam. It forgot, as we do, the tolerant place given to Jesus by the Prophet. It forgot the Prophet’s friendly connexions with the Christians on the peninsula. Our sins of forgetting are many. Above all we forget the crusades. By them we did not do ourselves much good. Worse, we did harm to Islam. We caused irreparable cracks in its world. We went with such an integral and narrow faith that we warred upon fellow-Christians into the bargain. ‘Faith without wisdom’, says Runciman - and the ‘good man’ can say it too -, ‘is a dangerous thing’. When I pass the serene floating dome of the Regent’s Park Mosque I feel the stab of the last sentence of Runciman’s so very fine History: ‘the Holy War was itself nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost’. Then the Egyptian Sultan comes to mind. Malik el-Kamil, the friendly and kind helper of St Francis of Assisi. So do Raymond Lull and Nicholas of Cusa striving towards a true dialogue with Islam, and then later reproved by the polemical Luther for not doing better. At least we gave Islam the honour of an early printed edition of the Koran out of the Arabic in 1543 (Basle). And we are happy to leave it to Goethe to see the essence of all religion incorporated in the religion of Allah. To me most unforgettably it was Mozart and his librettist who showed how the Muslim Turk could display compassionate forgiveness to a pair of Christian scamps. The splintered Christian past has seen the insertion of a double religious graft into the one tree of monotheism so as to form an ongoing sphere of belief in our one God. The already plural Christian time-scale has been eased into now two different time-scales. And a third religious time-scale is on the way. Southall, Birmingham, Bradford, Kidderminster, here are places where we must read off our religions in yet another time-scale with the advent of Hinduism and Buddhism. Heinrich Heine appealed to us to be sympathetic when we approach the Easterner’s religion:
These men who live with an inner vision are part of the Europe to come. Teilhard de Chardin,who studied the classical Vedanta in detail, favoured convergence. From Casserley’s book The Retreat of Christianity from the Modern World, Teilhard found a perfect expression of what he was trying to say. The thought of a ‘Christianity that surpasses itself, was what he wanted to say. For ‘in the non-Roman branches of Christianity a spirit of religious invention is finally manifesting itself which is the sole possible agent of a true ecumenism: not the sterile and conservative ecumenism of a ‘common ground’, but the creative ecumenism of a ‘convergence... on to a common ideal’. [Cf. Ursula King Towards a New Mysticism. Teilhard de Chardin and Easters Religions (London Collins 1980) pp.97-98 and Chapter 11 "Eastern and Western Religions in a Converging World’ pp.105ff]. Since those words were written in 1950 a creative spirit has entered Roman Catholicism. In the multiple religious time-scales of the coming Europe there is going to be space for the meshes of a variable religious geometry. Religious Europe is going to be more than ever in the melting pot. That alone calls for Christians who care about ecumenism to see that they should care about Europe. Tom Corbishley’s insight was profound. But he was thinking, I am sure, of a richer ecumenism within and between the European Churches of history. Yet that. when it comes about, will leave further unfinished religious business. It is not too soon for the good man’ to look beyond. And I find this ‘good man’ in the text of Vatican II. Is he not among the ‘artisans and authors of the culture of the new community’? Will he not in that new community care for ‘the spiritual and moral maturity of the human race’ itself? More precisely he will care for the birth of ‘that new humanism... in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility towards his brothers and towards history’. This Europe, and I have given it no geographical boundaries, may become a Europe of a variable geometry as we have said. lf so it will also call for a greater convergence than the unreconstructed marketeers yet dream of. If, with a variable geometry stretching from politics to culture and the art - yes, Mr Dean, via the Eurovision Song Contest and It’s a Knockout, if you like - then for the first time in our western history we shall have the right to talk about spiritual and moral maturity, the right to think of ourselves as artisans and authors. Perhaps too in the process we shall acquire the right so to redefine ourselves that our responsibility towards our brothers will be a loving responsibility towards human history and towards the genuinely human condition. Top |
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