Early in May this year the proctors of Cambridge University took action against The Granta in view of complaints that a poem published in that magazine was blasphemous. The affair made a stir in Cambridge and even got into the London papers j and if I take it here chiefly as an occasion for some remarks on the blasphemies of certain long-dead poets, this is not because I consider the Granta poem negligible. It was not. The remarks that follow are merely one observer’s modest attempt to get the whole subject into focus.

One may start with St Thomas’s preliminary definition of blasphemy: ‘the term seems to denote the disparagement of some high degree of goodness, and especially of the divine goodness’. In the context certain things are presupposed 5 in particular that there is such a thing as goodness, that it has degrees, and that there is a maximum goodness called God. ‘Blasphemy’ is related chiefly to God, as it always has been since the New Testament writers stressed the religious reference of blasphemia (in general, scurrilous or abusive language), though this reference was not lacking in classical Greek, just as the wider or secular sense of the term still appears in the New Testament itself. Both Francis Bacon and St Thomas’s master St Albert speak of ‘blasphemy’ against learning or knowledge; others have spoken of blasphemy against nature, friendship, and so on. But these are extensions of a term already appropriated by Christianity to mean disparaging speech about God, or about things and persons closely associated with him.