In the good old days of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, it was comforting to think that, whatever the divergences between the two camps, they were at least united by their profoundly humanistic dimension. It is a wry historical irony that the humanistic plank which once bridged the Christian-Marxist gap has now become the blunt instrument with which Marxism belabours Christianity about the head. For the most important developments in European Marxism centre on a decisive rejection of the ‘Marxist-humanist’ interpretation of historical materialism. ‘Marxism’, announces Louis Althusser in a polemical, programmatic chapter-heading, ‘is not a Humanism’; and Michel Foucault takes comfort in the thought that ‘man is but a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge, and will disappear when the latter has found a new form’. Man-centred Marxism—that heretical deviation from historical materialism which pivots all on the ‘collective subject’ and its ‘praxis’—is merely a displacement of the inherently bourgeois ideology of ‘humanism’. History as the expression of the generic subject Man, en route to reappropriating his alienated being: we cannot escape this Hegelian form of Marxism merely by substituting ‘men’ for Man. For the subjects of history are not ‘men’, not even ‘social classes’, but, as Althusser comments, social formations; Marxism is the science of the laws of these social formations, of these structures of which individual men are merely the bearers. It is ‘humanism’, with its corrosive insistence on rooting all in the ‘living concrete individuals’ of history, which forestalls us from thinking through society as structure—a structure which, like the unconscious, has its reasons of which ‘living individuals’ know nothing.

The ‘de-centring’ of the human subject: this is the scandalous, pervasive theme of European Marxism and structuralism. ‘Man’ or ‘men’, installed by bourgeois ideology at the heart of history and the universe, the source of all discourse and creation, is impudently dethroned.

As the Roman Empire waned the Church waxed. Inevitably it was a Church deeply affected by Romanitas. When the Empire became Christian, if that is the right way of putting it, under Constantine the political centre moved east to the new capital of the Bosphorous, the Washington or Brasilia of the new era. Byzantium became the royal city, Rome the urbs ecclesiae, the city of the Church. Inevitably the head of the city of the Church, in view of the hierarchical ideology coming into increasing favour, was taken more and more seriously as successor of Peter. The climax of this early papalism is the pontificate of Leo the Great and the reception accorded to his letter or tome at the council of Chalcedon: the tome and the council set the seal on orthodox Christology. However this undoubted display of successful authority must be seen in its context. Behind the council’s Christologi-cal decrees lay more than a century of conciliar activity and the production of what are still the orthodox credal formularies: to all this Rome contributed veiy little. The canon of Scripture had been debated and disputed: the authoritative work of deciding what was to be included and what was to be excluded was done without reference to Rome. It is Leo’s intervention which is unusual. His predecessors had not made much effort to settle doctrinal disputes: one feels by this time Christians felt this sort of thing was the job of gatherings of bishops. Leo is unlikely to have felt very differently but as the events of the last generation had shown, the problems of theology had become vital political issues and if Rome had not intervened it seems unlikely agreement of any kind would have been reached.

Early this year I heard a lecture by Hans Georg Gadamer (a retired professor of philosophy from Heidelberg University) on the history of relations between philosophers and poets. Gadamer mused on the ups and downs, the loves and hates, the convergences and divergences of that relationship. It runs all the way from Plato to the later Heidegger. Plato called the poets’ stories of the gods ‘theologies’. His ideal republic—he believed—would be better off if it severely controlled this kind of theology and even banished the poets. Plato refused to accept that his own master in philosophy, Socrates, had corrupted the youth of Athens, but he clearly believed that poets could be corrupting influences. Other philosophers have been much kinder to poets. In our own century Heidegger turned from his earlier work to draw from poetry the material for his later philosophical reflections.

All in all, it was a brilliant lecture by Gadamer. It set a number of questions buzzing in my head. Would a period that was high on poetic imagination prove likely to be low on philosophical thought? Do poetry and philosophy represent completely different ways of approaching reality, which neither match one another nor even have much to do with one another? And then came the question that gave rise to this lecture. Would reflection on some of the ways poets and philosophers work throw light on the mind behind the preaching of Jesus?

Let us explore that last question and see what comes up. First of all, the philosophers and their revolutions. Some philosophers like Wittgenstein have stood back from their culture, surveyed centuries of intellectual history, and quite consciously tried to take philosophy and human thought in new directions. In their own way such philosophers could appropriate the sentiment of Jesus, ‘Of old such and such was said to you. But I say to you’.

In point of technique, the great triumph of the Wodehouse novels was in the use of first-person narrative. It is curious how little he in fact used the first person. As Usborne has noted, the novels consist of Laughing Gas (1936) which, involving a switch of personalities, really needs something like this, Love Among the Chickens (where Wodehouse was very nervous about it) and the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. The stories told by the Oldest Member, Mr Mulliner and the Drones Club Crumpet have very little action by the narrator: from time to time the Oldest Member plays a small part in one of his own stories (although on the only occasion when Mr Mulliner does so, to any degree, in ‘George and Alfred’, the result is poor). The Ukridge short stories give a good deal of action to Corky. The Reggie Pepper episodes brought out the weakness and strength of the technique. Wodehouse brooded on the problem when writing his first Jeeves novel:

What he came to do was to capitalise on this, turning the novels into a series of shock discoveries, part thriller, part increase of psychological perceptions. Usborne very properly notes the great debt to Conan Doyle at this point (ibid., 152-3). The model is clearly The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle’s one unflawed Holmes novel. If Wodehouse learned from Moriarty that an absent Aunt Agatha could be far more effective than her presence, he also drew the lessons on how to keep the Holmes figure off-stage for much of the action, especially when the mysteries loomed darkest.