Professor Zaehner is one of the few Catholics in England to-day who is seriously concerned with the relation of Christianity to other religions. Though his special subject is Zoroastrianism, he has an intimate knowledge of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and has worked out a definite theory of their relation to Christianity. This was made clear in an earlier work, At Sundry Times, where he tried to show how all these traditions ‘converge’ on Christ and find their fulfilment in him. In his most recent work he develops this idea further, particularly in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the convergence of the whole creation on Christ, and tries to show how in the evolution of human consciousness the different religious traditions are stages in the progress of mankind under the guidance of the Holy Spirit towards the consummation of both man and the universe in Christ.

What is perhaps most original in his vision of human history is that he regards Marxism as an important stage in the development of religion. Marxism, particularly in its most authentic exponents like Marx himself and Engels, is concerned with the ultimate nature of man and the universe and with their ultimate destiny, and in this sense it may be called a religion. In Professor Zaehner’s view the Indian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are concerned almost exclusively with the salvation of the individual soul through its escape from this world of time and space. Marxism on the contrary, rejecting both the concept of the individual soul and any world beyond seeks the collective salvation of mankind in this present world through the working out of the ‘inner laws’ of nature, by which the ‘essence of man’ (in Marx’s phrase) will be realised.