Reply to Comment By C. Peterson

When I Presented my paper at the English International Congress I found that I had offended some of the audience by not having preached about original sin. Their misunderstanding of what I said is well represented in the foregoing ‘Comment’, which raises issues of general psychological importance.

Since the issues have been presented with a theological cast, let me sketch a theological position to which—when understood psychologically—I can subscribe: ‘faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’ (1 Cor. 13: 13)—for which I would substitute the plainer and broader word ‘love’. If faith, hope and love are to foster realistic knowing (rather than illusion) they must be tempered by an alert awareness that evil is real, that our lot is imperfection, and that we must take fair responsibility for what we imperfectly do. The doctrine of original sin is one way of construing this state of affairs. It is not the only way, and there are profound reasons for preferring others.

St Paul begins his list with ‘faith’, which I will here translate as ‘trust’. The world's evils, commencing with the infant's pangs of hunger, could not be endured without it and the courage generated by it. My paper is not about evil but about trust.

Trust is, on the one hand, an achievement. It persists and consolidates despite threats and frustrations. Before it is an achievement trust is, on the other hand, ‘given’, as potentiality, as active predisposition, as a vital and indispensable part of the ‘fit’ between person and world. Festivals affirm and generate trust.

Some festivals affirm trust as an achievement, doing this by acknowledging the reality of what Joseph Conrad called the ‘destructive element’ and celebrating deliverance from it. Festivals need not do this; many do not.

Many festivals rather affirm trust as ‘given’, affirm the condition of well-being largely in disregard of forces that might pervert or diminish it. They are basic in the way that experiences of justi