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Selected Essays
 Selected Essays
Volume II

Studies in Theology

A N D R E W LO U T H

Edited by
L E W I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
 Editors Preface and Acknowledgments

Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone

Patristic studies for the past four decades, and a key theological
figure within Orthodoxy (especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for
three. Andrew is also a thinker known far beyond the world of those
devoted to the study of early and Byzantine Christianity, and far
beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His works have
been a major source for all those—across many Christian traditions—
interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the
resources of classical Christianity (especially as it is developed in the
Greek world between Plato and John Damascene). His monographs
cover a considerable range, from his early and much appreciated
two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and
Discerning the Mystery to his translations and commentaries, and on
to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and
Development in Byzantine Theology and Greek East and Latin West:
The Church ad 681–1071. Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge
are rendered all the clearer in his reconceptualizing and editing of
the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
(2022).
But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a
significant essayist; many of his most significant contributions to
scholarship and to theology are scattered throughout journals and
edited collections, some of which are rather difficult to access. These
contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at institutions and
to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range
and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of
the theological community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in
his long contribution as co-editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early
Christian Studies,” and “Oxford Early Christian Texts.” The present
two volumes attempt to reveal something of that range and
erudition by presenting seventy-four of his essays, in a selection
made by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is
that Andrew has not included any of the many pieces he has
produced for “handbooks” over many years.
Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented
something of a challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic
theology is also intrinsic to his work as a theologian—the division is
not one between history and theology. But neither is it one simply
between the theology of the Fathers over against work in modern
theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would
contradict Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which
engagement with the Fathers is the enduring heart of theological
work, however much it also must reflect on the streams of thought
that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus
intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on
exploring the thought and world of figures in the early Christian
world (and in a few cases exploring the links between that world and
the world of Byzantine Christianity) appear in the first volume. In the
second volume many of the essays consider broader theological
topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological writers
(especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-century
Orthodox diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early
Christian theology. The essays in this second volume are offered in
chronological order, allowing the reader to gain a sense of how
Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays were written at a
variety of points over the past half-century a number of them use
styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were
written. We have therefore left the wording of the essays as they
were published.
Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and
friends helped to prepare these essays for publication, especially the
arduous task of checking pre-published electronic versions against
the final published forms, and turning PDFs into text. We would like
to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis, Fr Demetrios
Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios
Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr
Christopher Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher.
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals,
and others who have granted permission for the essays collected in
these volumes to be reprinted.

Lewis Ayres and John Behr

October 2022
 Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers
2. The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a
History of Early Christian Dogma…
3. The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans
Urs von Balthasar
4. Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song
of Songs
5. The Image of Heloise in English Literature
6. Νά ϵὔχϵσαι νά ᾿ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on
Pilgrimage
7. The Theology of the Philokalia
8. Theology, Contemplation, and the University
9. Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God
10. The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov
11. The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel
Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov
12. Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox
Theology?
13. The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora
in the Twentieth Century
14. Pagans and Christians on Providence
15. What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?
16. The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology
17. Inspiration of the Scriptures
18. Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian
19. Space, Time, and the Liturgy
20. Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition
21. Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
22. The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World
23. Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium
24. Theology of the ‘In-Between’
25. Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and
Christian Identity in Late Antiquity
26. Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology
27. Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View
28. Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some
Reflections on the Development of Mariology
29. The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015
30. Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox
Reflections
31. What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?
32. The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim
33. Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am
Kreuz
34. Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology
35. Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the Russian
Émigrés
36. Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion
37. Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine
Theology

Details of Original Publication

Index
 Abbreviations

Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their
original publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal
or series titles), they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near
Eastern, Biblical and Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
 Introduction

I
Looking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am
struck by the fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each
volume there are only three essays published before 1990, by which
time I was in my late 40s—one well before, in 1978, ‘The
Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest in
the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder
why. Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two
books came in rapid succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian
Mystical Tradition (1981), and Discerning the Mystery (1983). That
first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather led to my being classified
(still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysticism’ (in some
ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006 with
its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the
‘mystical tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested
in ‘mysticism’ as in a form of religion independent of institutions or
dogmas (what has come to be called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism
as, in a tradition revived by William James at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’, rather my
interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer,
both personal and liturgical.
Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, as I see it now, an approach
to theology for which the practice of prayer, and what such practice
presupposed, was indispensable—indispensable, not in the sense
that theology demanded prayer, and therefore faith, so that the
answers had smuggled themselves in before being asked, but
indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the
transcendent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the
nature of things could be encompassed by human conceptuality,
ruling out the notion of a closed universe.
There has remained lodged in my memory—largely unconscious,
though surfacing from time to time—some lines of thought discussed
by Thomas Vargish in his book, Newman: The Contemplation of
Mind (1970). Discussing Newman’s ‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it
as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought”…elastic and delicate
enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the uniqueness
of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much
as delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes
progress by being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties”’ (p.
87, quoting William Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the
Fathers’ use of Scripture, as discussed in the earliest essay included
in these books—a freedom from both the prescriptive nature of
Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single
determinative meaning to be found in Scripture.
I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the
Eastern Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright,
perceptively pointed out to me after reading Discerning the
Mystery). Another—quite different—aspect of these early books is
contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to Denys’.
For there had never been any question for me but that that book
would begin with Plato—an interpretation of Plato much indebted to
A.-J. Festugière’s seminal work, Contemplation et vie contemplative
selon Platon (3rd edition, 1967). Plato has remained important to me
—probably returned to more often than to any Christian writer—
possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics (and G. H.
Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities,
not ideas humanly constructed).
It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were,
reception into the Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware,
soon followed. That was at the end of 1989, the year in which my
third book, Denys the Areopagite, was published—in response to a
request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding Christian
Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity,
because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s
On the Orthodox Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely
uninformed way, and it already seemed to me that two profound
influences on the Damascene were Dionysios the Areopagite and St
Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then full of
Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading
everything I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense
that, ultimately, I was going to write something on the Damascene
led me, a few years later, to agree to the request of Carol Harrison,
the editor of the Early Christian Fathers, to produce a volume for the
series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books were
conceived in sequence—but not as a trilogy, for they are very
different, the first on Dionysios—Denys, as I called him then—simply
an introduction, the second on Maximos an even shorter introduction
accompanied by translations of a brief selection of his works, mostly
drawn from his theological, as opposed to his spiritual, works (an
opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos), and the
third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most
likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during
the construction of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of
Islam.
So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not
anticipated, what still seem to me the three writers who, together by
inheriting and interpreting the Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the
lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and, indeed, its best, and most
enduring elements). Plato, and especially the developments of
Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and I
became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and
Christianity. The books speak for themselves, and many of the
articles in this collection fill out aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of
theology and philosophy, prayer and asceticism, and liturgy and
song.
 II
Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual
development, though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly
must now seem) of my formation as a theologian. I never studied
for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no Doktorvater. I did, however, while
studying for the Anglican priesthood in Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh
at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there under Professor Tom
(T. F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that degree was
the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the
most important sections of which were on the place of natural
theology in his Church Dogmatics and doctrine of analogy. The chief
influence on me during undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one,
preparing for Part III) was without doubt Donald MacKinnon, the
Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose guidance I took two
courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of the
Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the
style of philosophy of religion that I mostly encountered in
Cambridge (I don’t think MacKinnon made much sense of it either)
and rather made my own way by careful textual study of the texts—
Descartes to Kant—that we were expected to read; but it was from
MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his
students that I learnt to think (or rather—though that is perhaps the
same thing—discovered that I could think). Another don at
Cambridge, with whom I had a few supervisions in patristics, was
Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal even though largely
by way of disagreeing with him—a disagreement that continued
when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of
Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and
Fellow and Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though
probably due to my philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new
joint degree in Philosophy and Theology had just been introduced),
did not specify what area of theology I was to pursue, so I decided
to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never
regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick,
who moved from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ
Church in 1970, whom I held in awe, though I never got to know
him very well (though well enough in the eyes of others to be asked
to write his obituary for the Independent). I also came to know, in
the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a
student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently
departed Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in
Eastern Orthodox Studies during my time in Oxford (and before and
after): my debt to him is incalculable. There are many others to
whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of this volume.
Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or
entirely) knew through their books; in the later 1970s (as I
remember it), I often devoted the long vacation to reading some
massive work that I wanted to come to terms with. One year it was
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in
conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then)
feeble German. Another year it was A.-J. Festugière’s monumental
four-volume work, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of
which tells you more about its origins (in the notes he made in the
course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock, the Budé
edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its
contents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical
thought of late antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s
Exégèse Médiévale (4 vols, 1959–64), another work that starts from
a particular problem and casts light much more widely. Hans Urs von
Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced by Donald MacKinnon,
came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for which I
translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by
John Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of
Theologik.
My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they
seemed to fill out and deepen insights that I had originally
discovered in Western writers, such as those already mentioned. It
was mostly through reading their works, though I came to know
personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course, Fr
Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in
Oxford when I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony
of Essex. One Orthodox thinker whom I read early on was the
French convert, Olivier Clément, the disciple of Vladimir Lossky, who
has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov became increasingly
important to me (I encountered him first in the French translations
by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted
to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his
Russian, as well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal
about Florensky from Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed
biography, published in 2010, already by then a great friend. She is
an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and helped me to
see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the
broader cultural context of the Silver Age.
In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek
theology, not least Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly
wide reading in Greek literature—especially the amazing poets of the
twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis—through whom
I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and interpreted them
(but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological
writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also
encountered through my reading in Greek literature and had some
sense of his theological insights before ever engaging with Yannaras,
with whose writings I have tried to keep up over the years (in recent
years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent translations).
Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis, which
opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of
Orthodoxy (a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to
translate). Something of this engagement with Orthodoxy—mostly
the fruit of my becoming Orthodox, which seemed to me a fulfilment
of my intellectual and spiritual development, not a rejection of the
West (although such anti-Westernism has been a Leitmotiv of too
much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian
millennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing
Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers:
From the Philokalia to the Present (2015), which were the result of
four years spent as Visiting Professor at the Amsterdam Centre of
Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit, now the St
Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of
Radboud, Nijmegen.
Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat
passed over is my ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, from 1985 to 1995. During this period Goldsmiths went
through a major change from being an Institute with Recognized
Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From
being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually
became head—for five years—of a new department of Historical and
Cultural Studies, made up of the old departments of History, Art
History, and Religious Studies, in which I taught early medieval and
Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul Fouracre, a
fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from him,
a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—very different were the
ways of the theologian’s mind—which affected my own way of
thinking about history (and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of
that are to be found in my volume, Greek East and Latin West: The
Church ad 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The Church in History,
originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff.
Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am
not at all sure what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my
aim has been to elucidate their thought and their concerns. It looks
like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intellectual history, but one
thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—as so many essays in
intellectual history seem to imagine—float in some kind of noetic
ether; ideas are thought by people, who live at a particular time and
in a particular place. Their ideas are part of the way in which they
have sought to make sense of the world in which they lived, and
theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are the products of
human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel and
the Church in a world created by God and governed by his
providence, in however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation
(inspired by another who greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an
Orthodox nun who spent her final years near Whitby in Yorkshire)
that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology, Modern
Orthodox Thinkers.
I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my
friends and colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking
to bring this collection of essays of mine to publication. Although the
work of publication is theirs, what is to be found in these volumes is,
for better or worse, mine, and I would like to dedicate the volumes
to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac.

Andrew Louth
Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0001
 1
The Hermeneutical Question
Approached through the Fathers

In the more traditional English theological courses, the student first

comes across consideration of Christian theology for its own sake in
the study of the Fathers of the early Church. Biblical Studies tend to
be approached from a literary, historical, and expository point of
view, rather than from a theological point of view.1 The idea of
theology, the idea of dogma, emerges for the English student out of
his study of the Fathers. This means that the way theology emerged
in the Fathers and the form it took tend to be treated as normative,
or at least as a point de départ. The doctrine of the Trinity and the
doctrine of the Incarnation are the two foci in such an approach to
theology. Even those English theologians who think of themselves as
liberal or radical, and who wish to reject such an approach to
theology, are seen, in their very reaction against it, to be taking up a
position in relation to the patristic tradition, thus revealing the marks
of their initial approach to theology. All this seems to me to be
different from German Protestant theology. In Lutheran theology,
say, it seems—at any rate from the outside—that whether or not the
doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are held or rejected, other
theological themes are central. The doctrine of justification by faith
becomes a principle of profound and far-reaching significance,
particularly when it takes the form of the dialectic between Law and
Gospel.
 In this contrast there are advantages on both sides. The
apprehension of the fundamental significance of the doctrine of
justification by faith can lend great clarity to Lutheran theology. Here
is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae; here is a criterion that
enables us to see whether we are being faithful to God’s word or
not. It is a criterion for distinguishing between both relevance and
irrelevance. That God justifies the wicked, that this justification is
apprehended by faith, not by anything we do but by our standing
before God and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner’—this
concentrates theology in such a way that irrelevance seems out of
place. Theology embraces everything indeed—but under God. And
so the irrelevance with which human ingenuity loves to distract itself
is seen for what it is. German theology is a serious business, and it
knows it.
The Anglican approach to theology is much less conscious.
Anglicans tend to approach theology through the concerns and
interests of the Fathers because that is the way they have been
introduced to it. And they may see in these concerns some great
principle being worked out. Such a principle, for instance, may be
discerned in the way the Fathers tried to think through the
implications of the Greek preoccupation with virtue (areté), and all
the ways of fostering it (paideia), in the light of the Gospel. Here the
Fathers are grappling with Hellenistic modes of thought so as to
exploit the support such a preoccupation gives to their view of
creation, while at the same time questioning it fundamentally when
it appears to threaten their understanding of the radical newness of
the grace of God. But this is not like grasping the central significance
of the doctrine of justification: it is a personal aperçu, the
idiosyncrasy of the individual scholar—and a peculiarly scholarly
idiosyncrasy at that, for the working out of the Gospel in Hellenistic
modes of thought is not obviously our problem. But Anglican
theology rarely takes that form; more often the unconscious
acceptance of the Fathers’ approach simply means that the doctrines
enshrined in the creeds are accepted as the programme of theology.
And this can mean an academic discussion of doctrines that have
little obvious relevance to anything except the particular
controversies—now long dead—in which they were originally
enunciated. However, it seems to me that the Anglican approach can
be something consciously approved, even if unconsciously accepted.
In this paper, I want to indicate how this might be so and then how
such a position might suggest an approach to the hermeneutical
question rather different from that of German theology.

I
I begin by making a virtue of the fact that, as I have said, this
English approach is not so much consciously adopted as
unconsciously received. It is not, I think, a mere quirk of the syllabus
that we have come to theology through the Fathers. It owes a great
deal to the inherent structure of Anglican theology.2 Although our
departments of theology look very secular in England, without the
confessional ties found in Germany, the tradition of theology they
have received has come from the ancient universities where
theology was once Anglican theology. And Anglican theology is not
Reformation theology, though it has been deeply influenced by the
Reformation (and perhaps even more by the Renaissance). It is not
confessional, but ecclesial or churchly. By that I mean there is no
equivalent in Anglicanism of the Augsburg Confession, or the
Heidelberg Catechism, or the Scots Confession. Anglican theology
starts from a faith lived, not from a particular—and local—definition
of that faith. The XXXIX Articles—the nearest thing Anglicans have to
such a confession—are subscribed to ‘not as articles of faith, but as
theological verities, for the preservation of unity among ourselves’
(to quote the seventeenth-century Archbishop Bramhall).3 And the
way in which they are subscribed to is worth noting. An Anglican
priest professes his agreement with the doctrine of the Church of
England as set forth ‘in the XXXIX Articles, the Book of Common
Prayer, and the Ordinal’. He is not just agreeing to a formula, but
affirming that he belongs to a particular community, which worships
God and celebrates its faith in Christ in a particular way, and that
through this community he belongs to the Catholic Church of Christ.
Anglicanism, therefore, tends to see the Reformation not so much as
an appeal to Scripture against the Church, as making clear a
continuity in the Church’s life that had been blurred in the later
Middle Ages. And so, to quote Bramhall again,

the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England
after the Reformation are as much the same Church as a garden, before it is
weeded and after it is weeded, is the same garden; or a vine, before it is
pruned and after it is pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches, is one
and the same vine.4

The Anglican, then, begins within the Church, within the

worshipping community, accepting the faith rather than consciously
confessing it. And Scripture is something given to him within the
Church, by the tradition, by the handing-on, that is the continuity of
the Church. This does not mean that Scripture is subordinated to the
Church. In the light of Scripture the Church can be reformed, the
garden weeded, the vine pruned and freed from the luxuriant
branches. And this is not an event but ideally a process, for the
Church always stands under the Word, always finds through
Scripture its way of obedience to her Lord. Under the Word she finds
herself to be ecclesia semper reformanda, in the words of Pope John
XXIII.
As I see it, the way in which the Scriptures show the Church her
way of obedience rests on no principle. The problem of
hermeneutics is not the search for some key of interpretation that
will enable us to extract from the word of Scripture the meaning of
the Gospel today. Rather it rests on the faith of the Church that in
the Scriptures God speaks to his Church, the faith—classical
Anglicanism often says the experience—that the Scriptures which the
Church offers us and to which she leads us kindle the light of the
Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. So Archbishop Laud said:
 I admit no ordinary rule left now in the church, of divine and infallible verity,
and so of faith, but the Scripture. And I believe the entire Scripture, first, by
the tradition of the Church; then, by all other credible motives…and last of
all, by the light which shines in Scripture itself, kindled in believers by the
Spirit of God. Then, I believe the entire Scripture infallibly, and by a divine
infallibility am sure of my object. Then am I so sure of my believing, which
is the act of my faith, conversant about this object: for no man believes, but
he must needs know in himself whether he believes or no, and wherein and
how far he doubts. Then I am infallibly assured of my Creed, the tradition of
the Church inducing, and the Scripture confirming it. And I believe both
Scripture and Creed, in the same uncorrupted sense which the primitive
Church believed them…5

If you like, the Scriptures are experienced as self-authenticating. But

this experience, though inevitably an experience of the individual, is
but the experience of the individual within the Church. Only in the
Church is the believer led to approach Scripture in such a way that
he hears the Word of God speaking to him from it.
Only in the Church—it is this which leads the Anglican to stress
the importance of the Fathers of the early Church. Scripture cannot
be considered in isolation—indeed it does not exist in isolation. The
Scriptures are the Scriptures of the Church: the Old Testament
inherited from Israel, the New Testament the apostolic writings.
Indeed, seen as witness they are Church documents, the prophetic
and apostolic witness to Christ—prophets and apostles being
members of the Church of which Christ is the head. There is no
fundamental divide between the Church in which and for which the
Scriptures were written and the Church of the Fathers—not if
theology is seen essentially as a reflection on God’s Word taking
place within the bosom of the Church. If the Reformation discerned
a continuity that had been obscured by the later Middle Ages, it was
a continuity manifest in a theology closer in spirit and teaching to
that of the Fathers. So unless we are to drive a wedge between
Scripture and the Church, the reflection of the Fathers on Scripture
must be given very great weight, to say the least.
But what do we mean by the ‘Fathers’? Most fundamentally, I do
not mean a particular group of theological writers—the Fathers of
the Undivided Church (whatever that is)—though clearly I have in
mind the Fathers of the first five centuries after Christ. But I do not
want to limit the term ‘Father’ either to those whom the later Church
accepted as ‘Fathers’ or to a particular period. Rather it seems to me
that the Fathers manifest a particular approach to theology
especially evident in the early centuries of the Church’s history. For
the Fathers see theology as the expounding of the mystery of Christ
to which the Scriptures witness. Another element—which passes
beyond the ‘theology of the Fathers’ (precisely as that phrase begins
to be used)—comes in when theological orthodoxy begins to mean
whether you agree with some earlier theologian. In the Fathers
there is a direct access to Scripture as the source and criterion of
theology. It is something else when Athanasius or Cyril or Augustine
become the test of orthodoxy. But this defines no period, even
though the period of the first five centuries is a peculiarly potent
witness to such theology. Rather the ‘theology of the Fathers’
characterizes a certain approach to theology; an approach in which
one can discern a certain directness in expounding Scripture, a
certain boldness—parrhesia—in their expounding of the mystery of
the faith. It is in that parrhesia that the fundamental dogmas of the
Christian faith—of the Trinity and the Incarnation—achieved their
first and enduring expression. And it is because it comes out of this
parrhesia that it is enduring. To speak of the Fathers is to speak of a
way of exploring the mystery of faith that is characterized by this
parrhesia, and so there is, in a sense, no ‘patristic period’. In the
Cistercian theology of the twelfth century, especially in St Bernard,
we recognize the voice of those who form part of the consensus
patrum.

II
There is something exemplary about the Fathers’ approach to
Scripture, and it is because classical Anglican theology followed this
example that it has what value it has. Can we say more about the
‘way of the Fathers’? There seem to be two basic premises that lie
behind the Fathers’ approach to Scripture. First, that Scripture must
be interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith; and second, that
Scripture admits of spiritual or allegorical interpretation. (True, the
Fathers often frown on allegory—and not only the Antiochene school
—but all admit a typological interpretation of Scripture that for my
purposes in this paper can be subsumed under allegory.)
First, Scripture interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith.
This rule of faith—at any rate in the pre-Nicene Church—is a free-
hand summary of the threefold faith in the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, professed in Baptism. It is the faith handed down within
the Church, it is the faith that admits to Baptism, and in that sense
defines the Church, the community of the baptized. Scripture is
handed down within the Church and so is interpreted in accordance
with the rule of faith that defines the Church. But the rule of faith is
no formula—it is not a form of words, but the truth the words
enshrine. Even after Nicaea, after the definition of the faith in a
formula, a creed, a symbol, we know—as we have learnt from the
researches of Dr Kelly6—that the Nicene faith did not mean to the
Fathers any formula, but the truth that formula enshrines. Indeed it
seems to me that Newman was close to the mind of the Fathers
when he declared in his Arians of the Fourth Century that

freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of

Christian communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church…
because when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth,
instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are
kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is
otherwise possible.7

At the heart of the faith of the Fathers is no principle, or creed, or

formula, but a mystery, a mystery that is lived, a mystery that claims
the whole man, a mystery that we apprehend not simply with our
minds but in ways that are unconscious and unfathomable, a
mystery that draws out our love. And that mystery is Christ. It is not
simply a question of believing the right things. It is not even a
question of simply hearing the Word of Christ; more deeply it is a
matter of being close to him, at the deepest level, in prayer. So we
find St Ignatius of Antioch saying: ‘He who truly possesses the word
of Jesus can also hear his stillness, that he may be perfect, that he
may act through what he says, and be known through his silence’.8
Before any articulation of our confession of Christ, there is an
inarticulate closeness to Christ, to that creative silence out of which
the Word comes,9 to that stillness (hesuchia) in which are wrought
the mysteries that cry out.10 This is the ultimate meaning of
interpreting Scripture in accordance with the rule of faith: not simply
subordinating Scripture to the articulated faith of the Church, but
listening to the Scriptures from a contemplative stillness that is being
with Christ. And this is something given and known in the life of the
Church, in the tradition that is the movement of the Spirit in the
Church. Interpreting Scripture within the Church does not at all
mean subordinating Scripture to the Church, but interpreting
Scripture within the life of the Church, finding in Scripture the voice
of God calling us to obedience, renewed discipleship, new life. It is
to see Scripture as the Word of God, because in listening to it God’s
Word may be heard, and God’s Word is the incarnate Son of God,
and it is his word, his voice, that we may hear speaking to us
through Scripture.
The other feature of patristic interpretation of Scripture is allegory
(understood in a broad sense). This is often immediately and simply
dismissed by modern scholars. The Fathers, it is maintained, used
allegory as a way of accommodating their belief in the plenary
inspiration of the Scriptures with their unwillingness—rather, inability
—to believe what the Scriptures plainly taught. It was particularly
used in relation to the Old Testament, and without such resort to
allegory the Fathers would hardly have resisted Marcionism. What is
wrong with allegory, it is said, is that it is entirely uncontrolled,
entirely arbitrary, and robs the text of Scripture of any real authority
even while appearing to concede to it the very fullest authority,
because with the use of allegory any text can be made to mean
anything. Its origins are highly suspect, too. It goes back to Stoic
attempts to justify the Homeric tales against the criticisms of the
Platonists and Epicureans, and in Heraclitus’ Homeric Questions we
have a clear—if unintended—insight into how arbitrary allegory can
be, when he defines allegory as ‘speaking one thing and signifying
something other than what is said’.11
There is much truth in all this, but it seems to me to miss the
central point behind the patristic resort to allegory. While it is true
that one often gets the impression when reading Origen, say, that
the text of Scripture which justifies his use of allegory is Galatians
4:24 (‘Now this is an allegory…’), this seems to me to be only a
formal, and polemical, justification. The real justification for the use
of allegory is found elsewhere in Paul: in II Corinthians 3 and I
Corinthians 13. The contrast between shadow and reality, letter and
spirit, death and life, the veiled and the manifest; the contrast
between seeing through a glass darkly and then ‘face to face’, in
which latter glorified state love alone remains—this is the context in
which the Fathers see the use of allegory. ‘Tout ce qui ne va point à
la charité est figure. L’unique objet de l’Écriture est la charité’.12
Pascal’s words are a good summary of the patristic understanding of
allegory. The sole truth, the sole reality, is Christ, and him we know
through love. All else is shadow, all else is allegory, all else has value
only so far as it points towards the Truth, Jesus Christ. We might put
this another way round and say that Christ ‘in whom are hid all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ is Truth, or Reality, so
overwhelming, so overpowering, that our feeble minds cannot grasp
it. We can only grasp the truth partially.
That is why there is such diversity in the prophetic and apostolic
witness to Christ. Our minds need to be drawn gradually to the
whole truth, that is Christ, which might otherwise overpower us or
be accepted by us in a way that radically distorted it. You will recall
how Ambrose recommended the neophyte Augustine to read Isaiah.
Not because Isaiah is a more direct witness to Christ than the
Gospels; certainly not because it is easier; but because at that
moment in Augustine’s development Isaiah could lead him more
surely to Christ. Why? Perhaps because the immensely intellectual
convert from Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism needed to be
baffled, needed to realize that now he knew only in part. And it is
the way of allegory to help us to grasp what is contained in Scripture
‘in part’. The use of allegory is a recognition of the fact that here is
not the whole truth, but a partial reflection of it through which we
might be enabled to discern the truth itself. Allegory is appropriate
precisely because it is not a definite method yielding clear and
predictable results. Allegory helps us to discern through Scripture a
truth not contained in Scripture, but simply witnessed to by it. In
Scripture we have the truth, broken up, fragmented, so that we can
grasp it, so that we can receive it as a gift, and then look through it
and beyond it to the Giver, to Christ who is the Truth. Such an
approach to Scripture is not ‘scientific’ and is not meant to be: it is
contemplative, it is a way of prayer.

III

And he who approaches the prophetic words with care

and attention will feel from his very reading a trace of
their divine inspiration and will be convinced by his own
feelings that the words which are believed by us to be
from God are not the compositions of men. Now the light
which was contained within the law of Moses, but was
hidden away under a veil, shone forth at the advent of
Jesus, when the veil was taken away and there came at
once to men’s knowledge those ‘good things’ of which the
letter of the law held a ‘shadow’.13

That is Origen, and if we follow through the way in which he

explains his approach to Scripture, we see that his engagement with
Scripture is discussed in terms drawn from the tradition of mystical
theology. It is not simply a question of expounding the message of
the Scriptures, much more it is a matter of being able to discern the
Word, or rather of being alert to the Word’s disclosing of himself
through this engagement with Scripture. So, commenting on the
verse from the Song of Songs, ‘Behold, here he cometh leaping upon
the mountains, skipping over the hills’, Origen says:

Now if at any time a soul who is constrained by love for the Word of God is
in the thick of an argument about some passage—and everyone knows from
his own experience how when one gets into a tight corner like this one gets
shut up in the straits of propositions and enquiries—if at such a time some
riddles or obscure sayings of the Law or the Prophets hand in the soul, and
if then she should chance to perceive him to be present, and from afar
should catch the sound of his voice, forthwith she is uplifted. And when he
has begun more and more to draw near to her senses and to illuminate the
things that are obscure, then she sees him ‘leaping upon the mountains and
the hills’; that is to say, he then suggests to her interpretations of a high
and lofty sort, so that this soul can rightly say: ‘Behold, he cometh leaping
upon the mountains, skipping over the hills’.14

Understood like this, allegory is not obviously absurd. It is in fact an

attempt to be faithful to the fragmentary, partial nature of the
Scriptural witness, and also to the sort of witness Scripture is. Here
lies its advantage over exclusive dependence on the historical-critical
method for theological interpretation of Scripture. For that method
seeks to discover what the writer of some text originally meant by
what he said, and also what grounds he had for saying it. But
theological interpretation of the text of Scripture goes beyond this. It
is an attempt to see Scripture as a witness, as pointing to the Word,
to Jesus Christ, in whose presence we live in the Church through the
Spirit. It may be important to understand what the original writers
said, and why they said it, but that is not the end of exegesis. Resort
to allegory sees this, because it seeks to take us beyond the text to
someone who could be captured by no text, to our Lord himself. The
historical-critical method—precisely because it is a method that
might be expected to yield results—runs the risk of duping us into
supposing that its results are what we are after when we attend to
the witness of Scripture. But the task of listening to Scripture is just
that—to listen to the Word speaking to us through Scripture. It is not
the task of piecing together the fragmentary witness of Scripture to
make some construction of our own. In the end we pass beyond our
own efforts, we let go our intellect and what we spin from it, and
simply listen. Allegory keeps this end before us.
Even if all that I have said about allegory is granted—that is a
way of interpreting the partial, fragmentary witness of the Scriptures
so that the Truth that is Christ may be discerned through it—a
difficulty remains. How do we know that what is discerned beyond
the letter of Scripture is really there? How can we escape the
apparent arbitrariness of allegory?
Here we need to be sure what sort of question we are asking, or
rather what sort of answer we would accept as an answer, and
whether we are not in fact begging the question anyway. For to
speak of the ‘arbitrariness’ of allegory is perhaps to itch for some
method that will exclude arbitrariness: the historical-critical method,
say, which yields (we hope) definite, non-arbitrary results. But the
Fathers do not see allegory as arbitrary, rather they see what we
might call an openness in allegory; an openness to God, an
openness to God’s manifestation of himself in Scripture so that we
are responding through it to the mystery to which it is a mystery to
which it is a witness. And in this openness are found the springs of
our apprehension of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
For the doctrine of the Incarnation is, from this point of view, to
do with the fact that the period of the Incarnation is the period
where there is made possible being with God through being with a
man. The ‘one thing necessary’ (Luke 10:42) that Mary of Bethany
found sitting at Jesus’ feet was a being with and listening to Jesus,
which was being with and listening to God. The heart of the Gospel
is not a message but a fact; and it is this to which the doctrine of
the Incarnation bears witness. And for this Scripture is and must be
interpreted within the tradition of the Church, a tradition that is most
basically nourished by countless Christian lives lived close to the
mystery that is Christ.
‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his
stillness…’ He who truly understands the Word of God declared and
articulated in Scripture is one who silently and inarticulately waits on
God in stillness. And this latter is more fundamental; just as the fact
of the Incarnation, the fact that God condescended to be with us
men, is more fundamental than any message we may derive from
this. Scripture is the prophetic and apostolic witness to the
Incarnation of God; it is the Church’s witness, handed down by the
Church and received within the Church. And this is no human
movement. To speak of the Church’s tradition is to speak of the
Spirit. To speak of any true witness to Christ is to speak of the Spirit:
no man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Spirit.
And here we stumble across the springs of our apprehension of
God as Trinity. The openness of allegory would be arbitrariness if we
were simply surrendering our reason to some human convention.
But the openness of allegory is the recognition of the fact—the
experience—that we are brought to the meaning of Scripture—the
mystery of Christ revealing the Father—by the Spirit, not by our own
ingenuity. For the Fathers do not suppose that their understanding of
Scripture is a purely human affair. The whole end of revelation would
be rendered nugatory if the Spirit who inspired the apostles and
prophets did not also move the hearts of believers to recognize and
obey the word of God speaking to them through their writings. In
the theology of the Fathers, their acceptance of a contemplative
approach to Scripture leads inevitably to the idea that the revelation
of the Father through the Son, to which the Scriptures bear witness,
is discerned also in God, in the Spirit. ‘All knowledge of the Father,
when the Son reveals him, is made known through the Holy Spirit’.15
So Origen. And Basil echoes him: ‘For the mind illuminated by the
Spirit beholds the Son, and in Him contemplates, as in an Image, the
Father’.16
To hear the Word of God in the Scriptures is to be in the Spirit, to
be up into the life of the Blessed Trinity, which is the love that binds
them together. And we pass beyond allegory, beyond figure. We
pass into the sole object of the Scriptures, love.*
Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0002

1 This is a generalization that admits of many exceptions, but it might be

epitomized in the contrast between two commentaries on the Fourth Gospel—the
English one by C. K. Barrett and the German one by Rudolf Bultmann. Each
admirable in its own way, but very different.
2 In passing I ought to apologize for the way I am using ‘English’ and
‘Anglican’ as if they were synonymous. They are not, of course, though the
influence of the Anglican approach extends in England beyond the borders of the
Anglican Church.
3 John Bramhall, Works, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker,
1842–45), ii. 261.
4 Bramhall, Works, i. 113.
5 William Laud, Works, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1847–
60), ii. 366f.
6 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (Longman, 1950), passim.
7 J. H. Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (Pickering, 1876), pp. 36f.
8 Ignatios of Antioch, Ad Eph. xv.
9 Ignatios, Ad Magn. viii. 2.
10 Ignatios, Ad Eph. xix. 1.
11 Quoted in R. M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (SPCK, 1957), p. 10.
12 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Louis Lafuma (Seuil, 1962), no. 270.
13 De Principiis IV. i. 6.
14 Comm. in Cant. III. 11 (tr. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26
(Longmans, 1957), 209, slightly edited).
15 De Princ. I. iii. 4 (tr. G. W. Butterworth, Origen on First Principles (SPCK,
1936), 32).
16 Ep. ccxxxvi.
* A paper read to the Oxford-Bonn Theological Seminar, 1977.
 2
The Greatest Fantasy
As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of
Early Christian Dogma…

Review Article of Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its

Rise, Growth and Dissolution, 3 vols
Marxism has been one of the most pervasive, and most
successful, movements in the last century and a half. As a political
movement it has conquered two great empires—a large part of the
surface of the globe—and does not appear to have exhausted its
energies. But it is more than a political movement; as a philosophy
or world view, it has had immense influence, not only in the realms
of thought where it originated, in philosophy, economics, and the
study of society, but in literature, literary criticism, and music, and
even theology. Its influence is met with at almost every turn in many
contexts—as a kind of set of mind, or group of premises, or a handy
collection of axioms. In this book, Leszek Kołakowski, one-time
professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Warsaw,
examines the whole phenomenon: its origins, the thought of Karl
Marx, its blossoming in the period of the Second International, and
its attaining the status of an orthodoxy as the ideology of the
Communist States that followed in the wake of the Russian
Revolution.
 In some ways this book reads like a history of dogma:
antecedents are determined, the thought of the founding fathers is
examined, and the fate of those ideas is traced through history.
Indeed, the analogy is even closer, for we seem to find in Marxism’s
second century something not unlike the phenomenon of gnosticism
in the second century of Christianity. Whatever its origins, from the
point of view of Christian orthodoxy, gnosticism took the form of a
bewildering array of attempts to (mis-)understand Christianity by
assimilating it to the climate of thought of the second century: it was
a collection of, for a time, fashionable and exciting, but for that
reason one-sided, interpretations of the Faith. In the second and
third volumes of Kołakowski’s work we find chapters with titles like:
‘German Orthodoxy: Karl Kautsky’, ‘Jean Jaurès: Marxism as a
Soteriology’, ‘Paul Lafargue: A Hedonist Marxism’, ‘Georges Sorel: A
Jansenist Marxism’, ‘Stanislaw Brzozowski: Marxism as Historical
Subjectivism’—all those from the period of the Second International,
and later: ‘György Lukács: Reason in the Service of Dogma’ and
‘Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a Futuristic Gnosis’. But in most histories of
Christian dogma gnosticism is a phenomenon that blossoms and
decays, while Christian Orthodoxy grows steadily and inherits the
earth, and histories of dogma are usually written from some dwelling
place within that inheritance. There might seem to be something
similar here, with Marxism-Leninism taking the place of the
orthodoxy which grows from strength to strength. But Main Currents
of Marxism is not written from within the fold, as the titles of the
successive volumes indicate: The Founders, The Golden Age, The
Breakdown. It is as if a history of Christian dogma had been written
by Julian the Apostate.
But the titles of the successive volumes are misleading too. They
suggest that Marxism grew, flowered, and then went awry and
collapsed; that the later developments of Marxism betrayed the
promise of its origins. That is a common apologia for Marxism by
those who wish to espouse the cause but are unable to stomach the
realities of Soviet Communism (though there have been, and still
are, many who do not find the horrors of Stalinism or Marxism that
unpalatable). But it is not a line pursued by Kołakowski. For him the
Leninist version of socialism ‘was a possible interpretation, though
certainly not the only possible one, of Marx’s doctrine’ (I.418); it can
fairly claim to be a legitimate successor of Marx. And Stalinism is a
legitimate—the only legitimate—development of Leninism. ‘There is
absolutely nothing in the worst excesses of the worst years of
Stalinism that cannot be justified on Leninist principles’ (II.517). For
Kołakowski it is quite wrong to try and represent the period of
Stalinism as the result of the wickedness and mania of a single
despot, Stalin, and it is likewise wrong to suggest that things have
changed much in principle as a result of the subsequent
denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ which developed under
Stalin: ‘on Stalin’s death the Soviet system changed from a personal
tyranny to that of an oligarchy’ (III.456). During the Great Purge of
the late thirties, ‘the whole country was in the grip of a monstrous fit
of madness, induced apparently—but the appearance was deceptive
—by the will of a single despot’ (III.82). The line from Marx to Lenin
is direct, though other lines could have developed; the line from
Lenin to Stalin is direct and inevitable. The worm was in the bud.
Marxism is not a great and hopeful movement that went wrong.
Rather ‘Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was
a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which
all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled’
(III.523). And the dream turned into a nightmare.
Kołakowski’s work is primarily a treatise—and a masterly one—in
the history of ideas. He writes as a historian, fairly and
dispassionately, and, though he does not conceal his own opinions,
they usually present themselves as a critical questioning of the ideas
under discussion. He begins in the beginning, as they say, with a
survey of the origins of dialectic, a survey that takes us back to the
thought of Plotinus, Christian Platonism, Eriugena, Eckhart, and
Nicholas of Cusa, and leads us into the immediate hinterland of the
Enlightenment with Böhme, Angelus Silesius, and Fénelon. The
survey then proceeds through the thought of the Enlightenment, by
way of Rousseau and Hume, to Kant and Fichte, and finally to Hegel
and his fully-fledged notion of dialectic. What Kołakowski shows us
in this survey is how a notion of dialectic is evolved in man’s attempt
to come to terms with his experience of transience and contingency.
In the Platonist and Neo-Platonist tradition—Christian and pagan—
man’s experience of transience is an experience of alienation from
himself, from his true being, and it is overcome by being
transcended—in union with the Eternal and Absolute, or, with Kant
and Fichte, in a process of infinite progress towards the Absolute.

A new philosophical possibility and a new eschatology comes into view with
the conception of humanity self-present as an Absolute in its own finitude,
and the rejection of all solutions that involve man realizing himself by the
actualization, or at the command, of an antecedent absolute Being. This
new philosophical prospect is that displayed in the work of Marx. (I.80)

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, as Kołakowski insists in the

very first sentence of his work, and it was in his apprehending of this
‘new philosophical prospect’ that Marx found his basic ideas.
Kołakowski traces Marx’s thought from its earliest phase, through
his criticism of Hegel and Feuerbach, his ‘discovery of the proletariat’
and his development of the key ideas of the alienation of labour and
the dehumanization of man, to his understanding of Communism as
a historical trend and the idea of class struggle leading to revolution
and the overthrow of the structures of dehumanization. After
discussing the development of Marx’s thought up to The German
Ideology, he gives an interesting survey of socialist ideas in the first
half of the nineteenth century, in comparison with Marxian socialism,
and then embarks on an analysis of the ideas of Kapital. On the
question of the ‘Young Marx’, i.e. whether there is any fundamental
difference between the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 (only
published in 1932) and the Marx of Das Kapital, Kołakowski argues
for continuity of development in Marx’s thought and finds
unconvincing the attempts to drive a wedge between the Young
Marx and the later Marx. This is not the place to go into the detail of
Kołakowski’s interpretation of Marx, except to say that his treatment
is magisterial in its balance and clarity. Often enough clarity cannot
be achieved, for Marx himself does not provide a clear exposition
even of important matters—such as his theory of value—
nevertheless Kołakowski’s exposition displays clarity in that concepts
that can be explained are lucidly explained and where matters
become murkier he at least points out the source of the difficulty
and confusion. In common with most modern interpreters of Marx’s
thought, he follows Lukács in laying stress on Marx’s ‘philosophy of
praxis’, about which, indeed, he is particularly illuminating.
Commenting on the famous phrase from Marx’s eleventh Thesis
against Feuerbach—‘The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’—
Kołakowski says:

To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging
it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself,
an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of
understanding it. This can only come about when the subject and object
coincide, when the difference between educator and educated disappears,
and when thought itself becomes a revolutionary act, the self-recognition of
human existence. (I.144)

Summing up what must be one of the definitive accounts of Marx’s

thought, Kołakowski discerns three motifs: the Romantic motif, the
Faustian or Promethean motif, and a motif supplied by the
rationalist, determinist Enlightenment. It is, in fact, from the
Romantics that Marx derived the main lines of his criticism of
capitalist society, only for the Romantics this was conservative
nostalgia, whereas Marx looked forward to a revolution that would
transcend the features of capitalist society. There was to be no
retreat from technology, rather armed with technology mankind was
to perfect its control over natural forces and in that way revive his
lost harmony with nature. Here emerges his Promethean motif: man
is on the brink of being able to understand and thus control the
immanent forces that govern his destiny. This features in Marx as a
kind of social reductionism: everything is reduced to social conditions
and Marx finds it difficult to admit that man is limited in other ways.
As Kołakowski remarks, ‘Marx’s ignoring of the body and physical
death, sex and aggression, geography and human fertility—all of
which he turns into purely social realities—is one of the most
characteristic yet most neglected features of his Utopia’ (I.414). In
this stress on social conditions determining man there emerges the
last motif, that derived from the rationalist, determinist
Enlightenment: for Marx believes that here he has discovered the
determinative laws of human society—what he presents us with is
not prophecy, but science (though this must be qualified for Marx
himself who regards these ‘social laws’ as applying only to the
development of society up to the proletarian revolution: ‘the
revolutionary movement of the proletariat is not the exemplification
of a law in this sense, for although it is caused by history it is also
the awareness of history’ (I.415). Here the Promethean motif
emerges as Marx’s philosophy of praxis).
The other ‘founder’ of Marxism is Engels, also discussed in the
first volume. Kołakowski brings out the peculiar nature of Engels’
thought in contrast to Marx, as well as the way in which it is a
development of his thought. With Engels, Marx’s ‘philosophy of
praxis’ is dissolved by a much more thoroughgoing ‘scientism’ than
we find in Marx. Marxism is assimilated to the fashionable currents
of Darwinism and evolution of the latter half of the nineteenth
century: far from human history moving to a point where man
understands the laws of history and achieves union with his
environment, human history is simply an exemplification of the laws
of nature and it is these laws that point to the coming classless
society. With Engels, then, we have a new version of Marxism,
‘differing as much from its original as did post-Darwinian European
culture from the age that preceded it’ (I.181).
It is the ‘new’ Marxism of Engels that has a continuous history,
and the second volume, The Golden Age, discusses its
manifestations in the period of the Second International (1899‒
1914). It is the breadth and magisterial quality of this volume that
lends it its value, for this was perhaps the most decisive period for
Marxism’s influence in the wider realms of culture (though this
influence was often delayed), and this volume enables us to see the
phenomenon as a whole. It was Engels’ Marxism that set the stage,
and his cruder ‘scientism’ that constituted much of the appeal of
Marxism. The sail of Marxism was filled with the prevailing winds of
thought: evolutionism, the tendency to find in an evolutionary
scientism some sort of basis for a mathesis universalis. Marxism was
‘scientific’; those who lacked conviction were reactionary
obscurantists. Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Poland:
these are the centres of the Golden Age of Marxism—and, of course,
Russia. (It is interesting that Kołakowski has nothing to say about
any English manifestations of Marxism in this period. ‘Why?’ is a
question worthy of reflection. The fact that the British representative
at the inaugural congress of the Second International was William
Morris is perhaps in some way symbolic.)
But half the second volume is devoted, quite properly, to the
growth of Russian Communism and in particular to the figure of
Lenin. And with Lenin we begin in a sense to move outside the
history of ideas, or at least find ourselves in a situation where, in
accordance with the views of some of the cruder manifestations of
Marxism, the history of ideas becomes simply an epiphenomenon of
the history of society. Lenin’s own thought is inconsistent and
incoherent, and is not inspired by any concern for the truth. ‘He was
not in search of answers to any philosophical questions, for all the
important ones had been solved by Marx and Engels…Lenin was not
seeking. He believed firmly that the revolutionary movement must
have clear-cut, uniform Weltanschauung, and that pluralism in this
respect was a grave political danger’ (II.458). What he provided was
a coarsening of Marx and Engels, a subjugation of all thought to
‘dialectical materialism’, which becomes a magic key to unlock all
problems. Kołakowski indicates the intellectual banality of it all, and
also shows how such anti-intellectualism led to qualification in the
name of ‘dialectical materialism’ of the proper autonomy of scientific
research. There is a direct line from Lenin to the Lysenko affair in
Stalin’s time. But further: this subjugation of thought to the crude
categories of ‘diamat’ (as it is engagingly called) is a manifestation
of Lenin’s concern for power, power for the party, though with
Lenin’s understanding of party orthodoxy that could hardly mean
anything else than power for himself. So, of Lenin’s writings
Kołakowski can say, ‘the obscurities of his text are not due so much
to inherent philosophical difficulties as to Lenin’s indolent and
superficial approach and his contempt for all problems that could not
be put to direct use in the struggle for power’.
The third volume, The Breakdown, moves on to deal with Stalin
and Communism after Stalin. As we have seen, Kołakowski sees
Stalin as a worthy successor to Lenin and deprecates the use of the
term ‘Stalinism’, as if it were a diseased form of an otherwise healthy
Communism. Kołakowski explains the Great Purge by saying that it
was intended to demonstrate and effect the genuinely totalitarian
nature of Communist society. It was an attack on the party lest the
party become a focus for devotion independent of the citizen’s total
possession by the State, lest it become a source of values, of an
ideology, in terms of which the State itself could be criticized. ‘The
citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even
to the state ideology’ (III.85). For Kołakowski this is a result of the
natural logic of the system, not an aberration. He admits that, under
the tsars, Russia had been equally totalitarian in principle (though
not so effectively in practice), but finds little consolation in this, as
the whole system can be perfectly well justified in Marxist terms: ‘if
freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more
freedom; as the “objective” conditions of unity have been achieved,
namely the confiscation of bourgeois property, all manifestations of
discontent are relics of the bourgeois past and should be treated
accordingly’ (I.428 f.). The effect of ‘Stalinism’ was to produce the
‘new Soviet man’: ‘an ideological schizophrenic, a liar who believed
what he was saying, a man capable of incessant, voluntary acts of
intellectual self-mutilation’ (III.97).
The third volume also discusses representatives of European
thought who stood in the shadow of Stalinist Russia: Trotsky,
Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse,
and Bloch. Apart from Gramsci (who was imprisoned in 1927 and
was therefore outside Stalin’s influence), Korsch (who was expelled
from the party in 1926), and Goldmann (who never belonged to the
party anyway), Kołakowski has severe things to say about them all.
Lukács is ‘perhaps the most striking example in the twentieth
century of what may be called the betrayal of reason by those
whose profession is to use and defend it’; Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics is ‘a model of professional bombast concealing poverty of
thought’; ‘there is probably no other philosopher in our day who
deserves as completely as Marcuse to be called the ideologist of
obscurantism’; and although he finds some kind things to say about
him, ‘Bloch must be termed a preacher of intellectual irresponsibility’.
Nonetheless, his discussion of all these writers is painstaking and
sheds valuable rays of light where otherwise there is but the murky
darkness of obscurity.
In the final chapter Kołakowski sketches what he sees as the
collapse of Marxism as an ideology in the countries of the
Communist bloc.

Marxism is practically extinct as a doctrine, though it performs a useful

service in justifying Soviet imperialism and the whole internal policy of
oppression, exploitation and privilege. As in Eastern Europe the rulers have
to resort to other ideological values than Communism if they wish to find
common ground with their subjects. As far as the Russian people itself is
concerned the values in question are those of chauvinism and imperial glory,
while all the peoples of the Soviet Union are susceptible to xenophobia,
especially anti-Chinese nationalism and anti-Semitism. This is all that
remains of Marxism in the first state in the world to be constituted on
allegedly Marxist principles. This nationalist and to some extent racist
outlook is the true, unavowed ideology of the Soviet state, not only
protected but inculcated by means of allusions and unprinted texts; and,
unlike Marxism, it awakens a real echo in popular feeling. (III.473)

This is clearly a work of the very greatest importance and interest.

The translation of the Polish original by P. S. Falla is fluent, though
the proof-reading has not been perfect. It is perhaps unfortunate
that the title suggests no more than a text book in the history of
political ideas, for this book is more than that, precisely because it
fulfils that function so well.
 ‘The greatest fantasy of our century’—but, just for that reason,
Kołakowski’s exposing its inadequacies as a political theory will not
do away with the fantasy. Men do not indulge in fantasies on rational
grounds, and so showing these grounds to be false or inadequate
will not stop them. To some extent, as Kołakowski shows, Marxism
has been so attractive because it indulged men’s irrational hopes
that in reason can be found the key to human destiny. Marxism has
posed as a science: and Kołakowski shows how at the height of its
influence Marxism made that claim in a particularly blatant way. But
here Kołakowski is himself ambiguous. In his criticism of Marcuse he
remarks at one point that ‘the destructive effects of technology can
only be combated by the further development of technology itself’
(III.420), which sounds like saying that more of the disease will
work a cure. But what if we are wrong in thinking that man is such a
being who could finally be master of his destiny, who could, with the
help of technology, finally turn his environment into just that—that
is, so control nature that it becomes simply man’s environment?

…but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable
…destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching
and waiting.
(T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, I.1‒2, 8‒10)

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0003
 3
The Place of The Heart of the World
in the Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar

The Heart of the World was published in 1945 and was Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s first sustained piece of theological writing. By then he
had behind him his studies in philosophy and literature which
culminated in his vast thesis, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele,
and his studies at Lyons in the Jesuit scholasticate under Père Henri
de Lubac, in which he had read deeply the Greek Fathers, especially
Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Part of the
fruit of those studies had already been published, the rest was
shortly to appear, and must already have been nearing completion
when Balthasar broke away from such historical studies (though
Balthasar had never allowed himself to be a purely historical
investigator) to write The Heart of the World. Five years earlier
Balthasar had moved to Basel as a student chaplain, and it was in
Basel that Balthasar very soon came to know Adrienne von Speyr—a
meeting that issued in Adrienne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism
in the November of 1940. The Heart of the World was, then, written
out of the initial impact of his friendship with that remarkable
woman, whose influence on his own thought Balthasar readily
admits. Balthasar has said that, as he prepared Adrienne for
reception into the Roman Catholic Church, everything he said found
in her a response that seemed to come from the receptiveness of
Another random document with
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himself. And that leaves out of account this mysterious claimant, with
his doubtful pack of associates, and also the suspicious way the
Fleetwoods are behaving. If we ever get to the bottom of the affair,
it'll turn out to be a Fordingbridge concern entirely, either directly or
indirectly. That's plain to a village idiot.”
“What do you propose to do in this last business?” Wendover
demanded.
“Get hold of a pair of old Fordingbridge's shoes, first of all. We
might need them; and we might not have time to come back for
them. I'll manage it through the boots, now. I could have got them
from Miss Fordingbridge, I expect, but she might have been a bit
alarmed if I'd asked her for them.”
With the shoes in an attaché-case, Sir Clinton set out for the
Blowhole, accompanied by Wendover.
“Not much guidance, so far,” he commented, “so we may as well
start at the only place she could mention.”
When they reached the Blowhole, out on the headland which
formed one horn of the bay, it was only too evident that very little
trace was to be expected there. The turf showed no marks of any
description. Sir Clinton seemed rather resentful of the expectant
manner of Wendover.
“Well, what do you expect me to do?” he demanded brusquely.
“I'm not an Australian tracker, you know. And there don't seem to be
any cigar-butts or cigarette-ash or any of these classical clues lying
around, even if I could use them if I'd found them. There's just one
chance—that he's gone down on to the sands.”
As he spoke, he stepped to the cliff-edge and gazed down on the
beach.
“If those tracks on the sand happen to be his,” he said, “then
we've got at least one bit of luck to start with.”
Wendover, coming to the chief constable's side, saw the
footprints of two men stretching clean-cut along the beach until they
grew small in the distance.
“We'll go down there and see what we can make of it,” Sir Clinton
suggested. “I've telephoned to Armadale to come out from Lynden
Sands and meet us. It's handy that these tracks stretch out in that
direction and not into the other bay.”
 They descended a steep flight of steps cut on the face of the cliff
for the convenience of hotel visitors; and when they reached the
sands below, they found the footprints starting out from the bottom of
the stair. Sir Clinton opened his attaché-case and pulled out Paul
Fordingbridge's shoes, which he had procured at the hotel.
“The boots told me that Fordingbridge had two pairs of shoes,
both of the same pattern and both fairly new; so it should be easy
enough to pick out his tracks, if they're here,” he said, taking one
shoe and pressing it into the sand to make an impression of the sole.
“That looks all right, squire. The nail pattern's the same in the shoe
and the right-hand set of footmarks.”
“And the mark you've just made is a shade larger than the
footprint,” Wendover commented, to show that he had profited by Sir
Clinton's lesson of the previous day. “That fits all right. By the way,
Clinton, it's clear enough that these two fellows met up at the top of
the stairs and came down together. If they'd met here, there would
have been a second set of tracks for Man No. 2, which he'd have
made in coming towards the foot of the stairway.”
Sir Clinton nodded his agreement with this inference, put the
shoes back in his attaché-case, and set out to follow the tracks
across the sands. In a short time they passed Neptune's Seat, where
Sir Clinton paused for a few moments to inspect the work of his
diggers.
“That seems an interminable job you've set them,” Wendover
commented as they walked on again.
“The tides interfere with the work. The men can only work
between tides, and each incoming tide brings up a lot of sand and
spreads it over the places they've dug out already.”
“What are you looking for, Clinton, damn it? It seems an awful
waste of energy.”
“I'm looking for the traces of an infernal scoundrel, squire, unless
I'm much mistaken; but whether I'll find them or not is another
question altogether. It's a pure grab in the dark. And, as I suspect I'm
up against a pretty smart fellow, I'm not going to give any information
away, even to you, for fear he infers something that might help him.
He's probably guessed already what I'm after—one can't conceal
things on the open beach—but I want to keep him guessing, if
possible. Come along.”
The tracks ran, clearly marked, across the sands of the bay in the
direction of the old wreck which formed a conspicuous landmark on
the shore. The chief constable and his companion followed the trail
for a time without finding anything which called for comment.
“They don't appear to have been hurrying,” Sir Clinton said,
examining the tracks at one point. “They seem just to have
sauntered along, and once or twice they've halted for a moment. I
expect they were talking something over.”
“The second man must have been a pretty big fellow to judge by
the size of the footmarks,” Wendover ventured cautiously. “Apart
from that, there's nothing much to see.”
“No?” Sir Clinton retorted. “Only that his impressions are very
shallow—much shallower than Fordingbridge's ones. And his stride's
not longer than friend Paul's, either. Also, the impression of the
sole's quite smooth—looks like crêpe-rubber soles or something of
that sort. If so, there's nothing to be got out of them. That kind of
shoe's sold by the thousand.”
Wendover made no reply, for at this moment he caught sight of
the inspector plodding along the road above the beach. Sir Clinton
whistled shrilly, and Armadale, catching sight of them, left the road
and descended to the sands. In a few minutes he reached them, and
Sir Clinton gave him a summary of the facts which had come to light
since he had telephoned.
“There's just one thing that's turned up since I saw you last, sir,”
the inspector reported in his turn. “I've had Flatt's cottage watched,
as you ordered; and there's a third man there now. He keeps himself
under cover most of the time; but I gave Sapcote a pair of good field-
glasses, and he recognised the fellow as soon as he saw him—knew
him quite well. His name's Simon Aird. He used to be valet at
Foxhills, but he got fired for some cause or other, and hasn't been
near Lynden Sands since. Then I asked the fishermen if they'd
recognised the man who opened the door to them when they went to
borrow the boat, and they recalled that it was Aird. They hadn't
thought anything about it, of course, until I questioned them.”
 “Now, that's something worth having,” Sir Clinton said
appreciatively. “But let's get on with the job in hand. That tide's
coming in fast; and, if we don't hurry, it'll be all over these tracks. We
never seem to get any time to do our work thoroughly in this place,
with all that water slopping up and down twice a day.”
They hurried along the beach, following the trail. It seemed to
present nothing of particular interest until, as they drew near the old
wreck, Sir Clinton's eye ranged ahead and picked up something
fresh.
“See that new set of tracks—a third man—coming out from
behind the old wreck's hull and joining the other two?” he asked,
pointing as he spoke. “Keep well to the landward side as we come
up to them, so as not to muddle them up with our own footprints. I
think our best line would be to climb up on top of the wreck and
make a general survey from above.”
They followed his advice; and soon all three had climbed to the
deck of the hulk, from which vantage-point they could look down
almost straight upon the meeting-point of the three trails.
“H'm!” said Sir Clinton reflectively. “Let's take No. 3 first of all. He
evidently came down from the road and took up a position where the
hull of the wreck concealed him from the other two. The moon must
have risen three or four hours before, so there would be light enough
on the beach. You'd better make a rough sketch of these tracks,
inspector, while we're up here. We shan't have much time before that
tide washes everything out.”
The inspector set to work at once to make a diagram of the
various tracks on the sand below, while Sir Clinton continued his
inspection.
“No. 3 evidently hung about behind the wreck for a long while,”
the chief constable pointed out. “You can see how the sand's
trampled at random as he shuffled around trying to keep himself
warm during his waiting. Now we'll suppose that Fordingbridge and
No. 2 are coming up. Look at their tracks, squire. They came up
almost under the lee of the wreck; and then they turned right round,
as if they intended to retrace their steps. It looks as though they'd
come to the end of their walk and meant to turn back. But they seem
to have stood there for a while; for the prints are indistinct—which is
just what happens if you stand long enough on wet sand. The water
oozes, owing to the long displacement of the sand particles, and
when you lift your foot it leaves simply a mass of mushy stuff where
you stood, with no clean impression.”

He glanced again over the tracks before continuing.

“I'd read it this way. While they were standing there, with their
backs to the wreck, No. 3 started into activity. He came out from the
cover of the hull and walked up to where they were standing. He
must have gone quietly, for they don't seem to have turned to meet
him. You see that, squire? Do you see anything else?”
Wendover was staring at the tracks with a puzzled look on his
face. The inspector, who had just reached this point in his diagram,
gave a smothered exclamation of surprise as he examined the sand
below him. Wendover was the first to find his voice.
“Where's the rest of Fordingbridge's track?” he demanded. “It
simply stops short there. He didn't turn; he didn't walk away; and—
damn it, he can't have flown away. Where did he go to?”
Sir Clinton ignored the interruption.
“Let's take the tracks as we find them. After No. 3 came up
behind the others, it's clear enough that No. 2 and No. 3 went off
side by side, down towards the sea. Even from here you can see
that they were in company, for sometimes the tracks cross, and No.
2 has his prints on top of No. 3, whereas farther on you see No. 3
putting his feet on top of No. 2's impression. Have you finished with
that jotting of yours, inspector? Then we'll go and follow these tracks
down the beach to the tide edge.”
He dropped neatly down from the wreck as he spoke, and waited
for the others to rejoin him.
“Both No. 2 and No. 3 must have been wearing crêpe-rubber
shoes or something of that sort,” the inspector remarked, stooping
over the tracks. “And they've both got fairly big feet, it seems.”
“No. 3 seems to have been walking on his toes,” Wendover
pointed out. “He seems to have dug deeper with them than with his
heels. And his feet are fairly parallel instead of having the toes
pointing outwards. That's how the Red Indians walk,” he added
informatively.
Sir Clinton seemed more interested in the general direction of the
tracks. Keeping to one side of them, he moved along the trail,
scanning the prints as he went. Armadale, moving rather more
rapidly on the other side of the route, came abruptly to a halt as he
reached the edge of the waves. The rest of the trail had been
obliterated by the rising tide.
“H'm! Blank end!” he said disgustedly.
Sir Clinton looked up.
“Just as well for you, inspector, perhaps. If you'd hurried along at
that rate at low tide you'd have run straight into the patch of
quicksand, if I'm not mistaken. It's just down yonder.”
“What do you make of it, sir?”
“One might make a lot of it, if one started to consider the
possibilities. They may have walked off along the beach on the part
that's now swamped by the tide. Or they may have got into a boat
and gone home that way. All one really knows is that they got off the
premises without leaving tracks. We might, of course, hunt along the
water-line and try to spot where they came up on to high-and-dry
ground; but I think they're fairly ingenious, and most likely they took
the trouble to walk on shingle above the tide-mark if they came
ashore. It's not worth wasting time on, since we've little enough
already. Let's get back to the meeting-point.”
He led the way up the beach again.
 “Reminds one a bit of Sam Lloyd's ‘Get off the Earth’ puzzle,
doesn't it?” he suggested, when they came back to the point where
the three tracks met. “You can count your three men all right, and
then—flick!—there are only two. How do you account for it, squire?”
Wendover scrutinised the tracks minutely.
“There's been no struggle, anyhow,” he affirmed. “The final tracks
of Fordingbridge are quite clear enough to show that. So he must
have gone voluntarily, wherever he went to.”
“And you explain his going—how?”
Wendover reflected for a moment or two before answering.
“Let's take every possibility into account,” he said, as his eyes
ranged over the sand. “First of all, he didn't sink into the sand in any
normal way, for the surface isn't disturbed. Secondly, he didn't walk
away, or he'd have left tracks. That leaves only the possibility that he
went off through the air.”
“I like this pseudo-mathematical kind of reasoning, squire. It
sounds so convincing,” Sir Clinton commented. “Go ahead. You
never fail to combine interest with charm in your expositions.”
Wendover seemed untouched by the warmth of this tribute.
“If he went off through the air, he must have managed it either by
himself or with the help of the other two; that's self-evident. Now it's
too far for him to have jumped backwards on to the wreck and
climbed up it; we can rule that out. And it's hardly likely that he was
enough of a D. D. Home to manage a feat of levitation and sail up
into the air off his own bat. So that excludes the notion that he
vanished completely, without any extraneous assistance, doesn't it?”
“ ‘He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of
persuasion on his tongue’—Ruskin,” quoted Sir Clinton, with the air
of reading from a collection of moral maxims. “You've made the thing
crystal-clear to me, squire, with the exception of just one or two
trifling points. And these are: First, why did that very solid and
unimaginative Mr. Paul Fordingbridge take to romping with his—
presumably—grown-up pals? Second, why didn't he return home
after these little games? Third, where is he now? Or, if I may put it
compendiously, what's it all about? At first sight it seems almost
abnormal, you know, but I suppose we shall get accustomed to it.”
 Armadale had been examining the tracks on the sand without
paying Wendover even the courtesy of listening to him. He now
broke in.
“If you'll look at No. 3's tracks, sir, you'll find that they're quite light
up to the point where he came directly behind Fordingbridge; and
then they get deeply marked on the stretch leading down to the sea.”
“That's quite correct, inspector,” Sir Clinton agreed. “And if you
look again you'll find that when they're light, the toes turn out to a fair
extent; but on the heavier part of the track No. 3 walked—as Mr.
Wendover pointed out—like a Red Indian. Does that interest you?”
The inspector shook his head.
“I don't quite get it, sir.”
“Ever been in France, inspector?”
“Just for a trip, sir.”
“Ah, then you may not have chanced to come across Père
François, then. If you met him, he might have helped you a bit in
explaining these levitation affairs.”
Wendover pricked up his ears.
“Who's your French friend, Clinton?”
“Père François? Oh, he was one of the pioneers of aviation, in a
way; taught men to fly, and all that. ‘Get off the Earth’ was his motto.”
“There's not much of the strong, silent man about you, Clinton,”
said Wendover glumly. “I never heard anyone to beat you for talking
a lot and saying nothing while you're doing it.”
“Père François not mentioned in the classics? Well, well. One
can't drag in everything, of course. But don't let's dwell on it. What
about the business in hand? We must have a theory to work on, you
know. How do you account for Mr. Paul Fordingbridge's quaint
behaviour, squire? That's really of some importance.”
Wendover pondered for a time before taking up his friend's
implied challenge.
“Suppose that No. 3 had a chloroformed pad in his hand when he
came up behind Fordingbridge,” he suggested at last, “and that he
clapped it over Fordingbridge's mouth from behind; and then, once
he was unconscious, they both carried him down to a boat.”
“You can chloroform a sleeping man without any struggle,” the
inspector commented acidly, “but you can't chloroform a normal man
without his making some sort of struggle. There's no trace of a
struggle here.”
Wendover had to admit the flaw.
“Well, then,” he amended, “I suppose one must assume that he
voluntarily allowed himself to be lifted down to the boat.”
Armadale hardly troubled to conceal his sneer.
“And what earthly good would that be?” he demanded. “Here are
his tracks stretching back for the best part of a mile over the sands.
Lifting him for twenty yards or so at the end of that doesn't seem
much use. Besides, as I read the tracks, that's an impossibility. No.
2's tracks are mixed up with No. 3's in the second part of the trail,
and sometimes one was ahead and sometimes the other of them.
Two men don't waltz round like that when they're carrying anyone,
usually. It's impossible, for their footmarks show they were both
walking straight ahead all the time; and if they were carrying a man
between them they'd have had to reverse somehow if the front man
changed round to the rear. That's no good, Mr. Wendover.”
“What do you propose then, inspector?” Wendover inquired,
without troubling to repress a nettled tone in his voice.
“I propose to take casts of their footprints and hunt up shoes to
match, if I can.”
“I shouldn't trouble, inspector,” Sir Clinton interposed. “Look at
the marks. They seem to me to be about the biggest size of shoe
you could buy. The impressions are light; which seems to suggest a
medium weight distributed over an abnormally large foot-area. In
other words, these shoes were not fits at all; they were probably
extra-sized ones padded to suit or else, possibly, put on above
normal shoes. Compare the lengths of the steps, too. If these men
had heights anything in proportion to the size of their shoes, they
would be six-footers on any reasonable probability, whereas their
pace is no longer than mine. There's no certainty, of course; but I'm
prepared to bet that you'll get nothing by shoe-hunting. And by this
time these shoes have been destroyed, or thrown away in some
place where you'll never find them. These fellows are smarter lads
than you seem to think.”
Rather mollified by the inspector's failure, Wendover tried to draw
the chief constable.
 “What do you make of it yourself, Clinton?”
Somewhat to the surprise of both his hearers, Sir Clinton
extended the range of the subject under discussion.
“Motive is what interests me at present,” he confessed. “We've
had the Peter Hay case, the Staveley affair, the shooting of Cargill,
and this vanishing trick of Fordingbridge's. There must have been
some incentive at the back of each of them. Eliminate Cargill's affair
for the present, and the other three are all concerned with one or
other of the Foxhills people. The odds against that happening by
accident are a bit too heavy for probability, aren't they?”
“Obviously,” Wendover admitted.
“Then it's reasonable to look to the Foxhills affairs for motives,
isn't it?” Sir Clinton continued. “What's the big thing in the Foxhills
group about which they might come to loggerheads? It stares you in
the face—that old man's will. You've seen already that it's led to
friction. Paul Fordingbridge won't recognise the claim of this nephew
of his—we'll call him the claimant for short. He sat tight with his
power of attorney and refused to abdicate. That suggests a few
bright thoughts to me; and probably you feel the same about it.”
He glanced at his watch, and with a gesture invited them to walk
over the sands.
“By the way, though,” he suggested, just as they were moving off,
“you might note on your diagram, inspector, the difference between
the light and heavy tracks of No. 3's feet. Make the trail of the deep
footprints a bit darker.” [see diagram on page 208]
The inspector did as he was requested.
“If you start with that assumption,” Wendover pointed out, as they
began to move across the sands, “then it ought to lead you to the
idea of two camps in the Fordingbridge lot.”
“Who's in your camps?” Sir Clinton asked.
“The claimant, Staveley, and Miss Fordingbridge would be in the
one, since Staveley was living at the cottage and Miss Fordingbridge
identifies the claimant. The other camp would be Paul Fordingbridge,
with Mr. and Mrs. Fleetwood.”
Sir Clinton nodded thoughtfully, and put a further question.
“On that basis, squire, can you find a motive for each of these
affairs?”
 “I think one might find some,” Wendover contended confidently.
“In the first place, Peter Hay had known the claimant very well
indeed in the old days. Therefore his evidence would be invaluable
to either one side or the other; and whichever side he did not favour
might think it worth while to silence him. It was someone well known
to Peter Hay who murdered him, if I'm not mistaken. In any case, it
was someone in our own class. That was implicit in the facts.”
“It's not beyond possibility, squire. Continue the analysis.”
“Supposing Paul Fordingbridge were out of the way, who would
oppose the claimant?” Wendover pursued.
“The Fleetwoods,” said the inspector. “They're next in the
succession. And Staveley was a witness of some value to the
claimant, too, so he was put out of the way. Everything points to the
same thing, you see, sir.”
Wendover, bearing in mind the coming fall of the inspector's
case, took this side-thrust amiably.
“Let's go on,” he suggested. “There's the Cargill affair.”
“I've got my own ideas about that,” the inspector interjected.
“Though I haven't had time to work them up yet.”
“Cargill's about the same build as the claimant,” Wendover
continued, without noticing the interruption. “It seems to me quite on
the cards that the attack on him was a case of mistaken identity. Or
else—of course! He was a good witness for the claimant! He'd met
him in the war, you remember. Perhaps that was why he was
attacked.”
“I think more of your first notion, sir,” the inspector interrupted,
with more than a tinge of approval in his tone. “As I said before,
everything points the same way. You find Mrs. Fleetwood mixed up
in the whole affair from start to finish.”
Sir Clinton ignored this view of the case, and turned to Wendover.
“Doesn't it seem rather out of proportion when you assume that
Paul Fordingbridge would go the length of murder merely in order to
keep the claimant out of the money and out of Foxhills?” he inquired
gently. “It really seems carrying things a bit too far when you take
that as a premise.”
“Well, what better can you suggest?” Wendover demanded.
 “If I were set to make a guess, I think I'd hazard something of this
sort,” the chief constable returned. “Suppose that friend Paul has
been up to some hanky-panky under his power of attorney—
malversation of some kind. He wouldn't dare to sell Foxhills; but he
might safely dispose of securities. There was no audit, remember;
the competent fellow managed it all himself. And so long as no
claimant turned up he was all right; for none of the rest of them
seemed to need money badly, and no one protested against the
estate being left hanging in the wind. But, as soon as this claimant
hove in sight, friend Paul looked like being ‘for it’ if the claimant could
establish his case. Everything would come out then. That would be a
good enough motive, wouldn't it?”
“There's more in it than that, sir,” the inspector broke in. “If he'd
got himself into Queer Street, it might be handy if he could disappear
when things looked like getting too hot for him. Perhaps the whole of
this”—he turned and waved his hand towards the mysterious
footprints—“is simply a blind to cover his get-away. Perhaps it's just
something left for us to scratch our heads over while he gets under
cover, sir.”
Sir Clinton seemed slightly amused by the picture the inspector
had drawn.
“I never held with head-scratching, inspector. It's a breach of
good manners, and not even friend Paul shall tempt me to make a
habit of it. I don't think he's very far away; but I doubt if you'll get your
hands on him in a hurry. My impression is that he's gone to ground in
a very safe hole.”
The inspector seemed to be reminded of something.
“By the way, sir, that new fellow who's turned up at Flatt's cottage
must have come down by car, probably during the night. They've got
the car in the boat-house beside the cottage; I saw its bonnet
sticking out as I passed this morning.”
“Very sensible of Mr. Aird, inspector, since he seems to shun
being recognised by his old friends round about here. If he'd come
by train, someone would have spotted him at the station.”
Without paying further attention to the matter, Sir Clinton changed
the subject.
 “When we get back to the hotel, inspector, I think we'll interview
the Fleetwood family. They've had quite long enough to polish their
speeches by this time. But I'll give you one hint—and I mean it,
inspector. Don't be too sure about that case of yours. And don't let
your zeal run away with you when you come to question the
Fleetwoods. You're on very slippery ice; and, if you get their backs
up too much, we may fail to get a piece of evidence out of them
which is essential.”
The inspector considered this in silence for a few moments. Quite
obviously he did not like being handled in this fashion.
“Well, sir,” he conceded at last, “if you think I'm likely to bungle
something because I don't know what it is, why not give me a hint?”
“Mr. Wendover could do that, I think, if you cared to ask him,
inspector.”
Armadale turned round to Wendover with ill-concealed sulkiness.
“Have you something up your sleeve, sir?”
Wendover took no notice of the ungracious tone. He saw his way
to achieve his end without the difficulties he had feared.
“You've got no case at all, inspector,” he said roundly. “Sir Clinton
told you long ago that there was a flaw in it. The whole thing's a
wash-out. Now I don't want to have you walking straight into a mess,
you understand; and you'll do that if you aren't careful. Suppose we
let Sir Clinton do the talking at this interview? He'll get what he
wants. You and I can ask any questions we choose after he's done.
And after it's all over I'll show you the flaw in your case. Agree to
that?”
“I really think Mr. Wendover's suggestion is sound, inspector,” Sir
Clinton interposed, as Armadale hesitated over accepting the
situation. “It's a fact that you can't prove your case on the evidence
available.”
“Oh, very well, then,” Armadale agreed, rather resentfully. “If you
want it handled so, sir, I've no objection. But it seems to me that
case will take a lot of breaking.”
“It's quite on the cards that this interview will stiffen you in your
opinions, inspector; but you're wrong for all that,” Sir Clinton
pronounced, in a voice that carried conviction to even the inspector's
mind.
 Chapter XIII.
Cressida's Narrative
Reassured by the knowledge that Sir Clinton had taken the
examination of Cressida out of the inspector's hands, Wendover was
eager to know if anything fresh would be elicited from the
Fleetwoods which might help him to carry his theories to a further
stage. Feeling sure that he could clear Cressida from the murder
charge, he had difficulty in restraining his impatience during the half-
hour which elapsed before they were shown into the Fleetwood
suite.
His first glance at Cressida showed him that the strain of the last
day or two had told heavily upon her. Her darkened eyes and the
weariness of her whole attitude spoke for themselves of the long
hours of tension and anxiety; and on her face he could read clearly
the apprehension which she was vainly striving to conceal. What
puzzled him most was an impression of conscious guilt which he
sensed in some mysterious way without being able to analyse it
clearly.
Stanley Fleetwood, lying on a couch with his leg in splints,
seemed to present almost as difficult a problem. On his face also the
strain had left its traces; and his whole expression inevitably
suggested the bearing of an accomplice who, seeing that all is lost,
still determines to brazen things out in the hope that some turn of the
wheel may yet bring him into a safer position.
The third occupant of the room was the lawyer, a pleasant, keen-
faced man, who was seated at a table with some papers before him.
His face betrayed nothing whatever as to his views on the case.
“Mr. Wendover has no locus standi here, of course,” Sir Clinton
explained when the lawyer had been introduced to them, “but I think
it might be advantageous to have a witness at this interview who is
not officially concerned in the case. Have you any objection, Mr.
Calder?”
The lawyer mutely consulted Cressida and her husband, and
then gave his consent without ado. Stanley Fleetwood nodded his
assent.
“I've consulted Mr. Calder,” he said, when this matter had been
settled, “and we've come to the conclusion that frankness is the best
policy. We've nothing to conceal. Now, what is it that you want to
know?”
Wendover's glance, travelling from one to the other, reached
Cressida's face; and he could see plainly that she was in dread of
the coming ordeal. It seemed as though she had made up her mind
for the worst, and could see no hope of coming safely through the
inquisition.
“Perhaps Mrs. Fleetwood could tell us what she knows about this
affair?” Sir Clinton suggested. “Then, after we've had her account,
Mr. Fleetwood could amplify her story wherever he came into the
matter directly.”
Cressida nerved herself for the task, but she seemed to find
difficulty in controlling her voice. At last she pulled herself together
with an obvious effort and began.
“If I'm to make the thing clear to you,” she said, looking
distrustfully from one to another in the group, “I'll need to go back a
bit, so that you can understand the state of affairs properly. You
know, of course, that I married Nicholas Staveley in 1917, when he
was convalescing after a wound he got. It's common property that
my marriage was a complete failure. It couldn't have been worse. In
less than a month he'd shattered almost every ideal I had; and I
loathed him more than I'd thought it possible for one person to loathe
another. And he terrified me, too.
“He went back to the Front again; and the next we heard was that
he'd been reported killed in action. It sounds dreadful to say it, I
know, but I can't pretend I was anything but glad when I heard the
news. He was a horrible creature, horrible in every way. Life with
him, even for that short time, had been a waking nightmare; and it
was an infinite relief to find myself free of him. Then, in 1926, I
married Mr. Fleetwood.”
 She paused and glanced at the lawyer, as though to draw some
encouragement from him. Evidently the sequence of her narrative
had been concerted between them beforehand. Wendover's glance
passed from her to Stanley Fleetwood; and he could see from the
expression on Fleetwood's face how much he must have hated the
dead man on Cressida's account.
“Last week,” Cressida continued, in a slightly more controlled
tone, “I got a letter signed ‘Nicholas Staveley.’ It was a dreadful
shock to see that handwriting again. It seems that the report of his
death had been a mistake; but he had let it pass for purposes of his
own. It had suited him to disappear then. Now it suited him to
reappear—so far as I was concerned. You can guess what that
meant to me. It invalidated my second marriage; and it threw me into
the hands of that brute. Or, at least, if it didn't actually put me into his
hands, it gave him a weapon against me which he could use for his
own ends. He was a selfish beast, and vindictive, too; and I saw that
he meant to stir up all the trouble he could. His letter hinted quite
plainly that blackmail was his object in reappearing at this moment.
He knew I'd married again, and he saw his chance.”
The lawyer produced a paper and handed it across to Sir Clinton.
“This is the letter,” he explained.
Sir Clinton glanced through it and then put it down on the table.
“That's a pretty production,” he commented. “I can understand
your feelings, Mrs. Fleetwood. Please go on.”
Cressida glanced across at the couch.
“Naturally I consulted Mr. Fleetwood,” she continued. “We
decided that the best thing to do was to arrange a meeting with the
man and try to get him to let us put matters on some bearable kind of
footing.”
“What we wanted,” Stanley Fleetwood interrupted, “was to
persuade him to allow a divorce to go through quietly. Then we could
have regularised matters with as little fuss as possible. From what I'd
heard of him, he didn't seem the sort who would refuse a bribe, if it
was big enough——”
He caught the lawyer's warning eye and halted abruptly.
“I understand,” Sir Clinton interposed smoothly. “You wished to
come to some agreement with him. We needn't discuss the terms.
Will you go on, please, Mrs. Fleetwood?”
“I wrote him a letter,” Cressida pursued, with rather more courage
in her tone as she saw that Sir Clinton was obviously not directly
hostile, like the inspector. “Mr. Fleetwood took it across to Flatt's
cottage that afternoon—Friday afternoon—and dropped it into the
letter-box. You'll understand in a moment that I didn't wish Mr.
Fleetwood to meet this man face to face.”
The inspector looked up from the note-book in which he was
making a shorthand report of the interview.
“You might identify the letter we found on the body,” he
suggested.
Sir Clinton produced the letter, and Cressida examined it.
“Yes, that's it. I arranged to meet him at Neptune's Seat late in
the evening, when no one was likely to be on the beach. I didn't want
to have him coming about the hotel, naturally.”
She halted for a moment or two, as though she felt she was
coming to the difficult point in her tale.
“Perhaps you won't understand what I've got to say next. If I
could let you know what sort of man he was, you'd understand
better. There are some things one can't tell. But I want you to know
that I was really in physical fear of him. I'm not easily frightened; but
during the month or so that I lived with him he stamped fear into me
—real physical fear, downright terror of personal violence, I mean.
He drank; and when he had been drinking he seemed to grow
almost inhuman. He terrified me so much that I left him, even before
he went back to the Front.”
Her face showed even more clearly than her words what it had
meant to her. She halted for a space, unintentionally letting her effect
sink home on her audience.
“When it came to meeting him,” she went on, “Mr. Fleetwood
insisted on going with me.”
“Naturally,” Stanley Fleetwood broke in. “I wanted to go alone to
meet the fellow; but she wouldn't let me go either alone or along with
her.”
Cressida nodded.
“If they had met, nothing could have prevented a quarrel; and that
man would stick at nothing. I was afraid of what he might do.
Anything was better than letting them meet. But I was horribly afraid
of meeting him alone, without any protection. I'd had enough
experience of him already. So I borrowed a pistol from Mr. Fleetwood
and took it with me to Neptune's Seat. I thought it would serve to
frighten that man if he showed any signs of going over the score.”
“What sort of pistol was it?” Armadale interjected, looking across
at Stanley Fleetwood.
“A Colt .38. I have the number of it somewhere.”
“I'll get you to identify it later on,” Armadale said; and with a
gesture he invited Cressida to continue.
“Mr. Fleetwood gave in about going with me to meet the man,”
Cressida went on, “but he insisted on taking me down to the shore in
our car. I let him do that. I was glad to know that he'd be at hand. But
I made him promise not to interfere in any way. He was to stay with
the car while I went down alone to Neptune's Seat.”
“I think the inspector would like to know exactly what you did
before you left the hotel,” Sir Clinton intervened.
“Mr. Fleetwood went round to the garage to get out the car.
Meanwhile I went down to the ladies' dressing-room, where I keep
my golfing things. I changed my slippers for my golfing-shoes—I was
in an evening frock—and I slipped on my golfing-blazer. Then I went
out through the side-entrance and joined Mr. Fleetwood in the car.
He drove me down to the point on the road nearest Neptune's Seat. I
left him there, got out of the car, and went across the sands to the
rock.
“The man was there, waiting for me; and at the first glance I could
see he'd been drinking. He wasn't drunk, you understand, but he
wasn't normal. When I saw that, I was terrified. I can't explain these
things, but he—— Oh, I used to shiver at times even at the very
thought of what he'd been like in that state; and when I met him
down there, face to face, I was really in terror of him. I pulled the
pistol out of my pocket and held it in my hand, without letting him see
it.
“Then I spoke to him and tried to persuade him to come to some
arrangement with me. It was no use—none whatever. You've no idea
of the kind of man he was. He wanted money to keep his mouth
shut. He wouldn't hear of any divorce, because that would loosen his
hold on me if it went through, he said, and he meant to keep me in
his grip. And then he said—oh, I'm not going to repeat what he said
about Mr. Fleetwood and myself—horrible things, meant to hurt me
and degrade me in my own eyes. And the worse he got in that way,
the angrier he grew. You know what a drunken man's like? I know it
only too well.”
She made an involuntary gesture which betrayed even more than
her words.
“At last he went beyond all bounds. I was trembling all over, partly
from fear and partly from pure rage at the things he said. It was quite
clear that I could do nothing with him in that state; so I turned to go.
Then he muttered something—I'm not going to repeat it; you can
imagine it for yourselves—and he pounced forward and gripped me
when I wasn't expecting it.
“I lost my head completely. I didn't know what I was doing. I was
almost beside myself with terror of him. Somehow the pistol went off
in my hand, and down he fell at my feet and lay there without a
movement. It was too dark to see anything clearly, and I was
absolutely taken aback by what had happened. I said to myself: ‘I've
shot him!’ And at that my nerves got the upper hand completely, and
I turned and ran up the beach to the car. I told Mr. Fleetwood at once
what had happened. I wanted him to go down and look at the man,
but he wouldn't hear of it. He drove me back to the hotel, and we left
the car in one of the side-alleys. I went in through the dressing-room,
took off my blazer, and changed my golfing-shoes for my slippers. I
was so much upset that I forgot to take the pistol out of the blazer
pocket. And when I came out into the hotel corridor, I heard that Mr.
Fleetwood had tripped on the stairs and hurt himself badly. That put
the pistol out of my mind at the moment; and when, next day, I
remembered about it, and went to get it, someone else had taken it
away. That terrified me, for I knew someone was on my track.”
She paused for a moment, and then added:
“That's really all I have to tell. It was the purest accident. I didn't
mean to kill him. When I took the pistol with me to the shore, I only
meant to frighten him with it. But he'd been drinking, and I wasn't
ready for him when he attacked me. I was terrified, and my finger
must have twitched the trigger without my knowing what I was doing.
I'd never have shot him in cold blood, or even intentionally in a fit of
anger. It was the merest accident.”
She stopped there, evidently having said everything that she
could bring herself to tell.
“One moment, Clinton,” Wendover interposed as the chief
constable turned to question Stanley Fleetwood in his turn. “There's
just one point I'd like to have cleared up. Would you mind telling me,
Mrs. Fleetwood, whether you can recall how Staveley was dressed
when he met you?”
Cressida, looking up quickly, seemed to read the sympathy in
Wendover's face, for she answered readily enough.
“It wasn't a very good light, you understand? He wore some sort
of lounge suit, but I couldn't tell the colour of it. And when I got down
to Neptune's Seat he was carrying a light coat of some kind over his
arm; but as I came up he tossed that down on the rock beside him.”
“He didn't put it on again, did he?” Wendover demanded.
“Not so far as I can remember,” Cressida replied, after some
effort to recall the point.
“You were caught in the rain before you got back to the hotel,
weren't you?” Wendover pursued.
“Yes. It came down hard just after the car started.”
Wendover's satisfaction at these answers was too plain to
escape Cressida's attention. She looked at him with a faint gleam of
hope in her expression, as though expecting him to come to her
help; but her face fell when he turned to the chief constable and
indicated that he had nothing further to say. Sir Clinton took his cue.
“Now, Mr. Fleetwood,” he inquired, “you didn't stay by the car as
you had arranged, did you?”
Stanley Fleetwood looked suspiciously at his interlocutor.
“As it happened, I didn't,” he admitted, rather with an ill grace. “It
was bad enough to let my wife meet that scoundrel at all. You
couldn't expect me to stand off at a distance, could you? I'd
promised her not to interfere; but that didn't hinder me from getting
as near them as I could, just in case of accidents. I went down to the
shore, keeping behind a groyne that runs down towards Neptune's
Seat.”