Most scientists today have ceased to bother about the famous nineteenth-century ‘conflict with religion’. It is over. They do not think that religion has been defeated; more seriously, they think it has become irrelevant to them. And unfortunately the scientists who do believe in Christianity, even those who are Catholic, contribute to this notion. Their religion is best kept at arm’s length, kept for Sundays. Those who write about the matter have found the perfect formula to ensure that no conflict should be possible; they insist that no point of contact can be found. Science and religion are about quite different realms, they say; science deals with the laws that govern the material universe, while religion is about spiritual truths, ultimately about a remote and immaterial God.

Such a picture is thoroughly false and misleading. But it is true that a lot of popular Catholic teaching does contribute to the existence of a general attitude of this kind in the community at large. It is still far too ‘spiritualist’ in outlook; children are still being taught, often enough, that their bodies are not really necessary, that the great moment to hope for is the escape of their souls from imprisonment in matter, from this wicked world of flesh (and, by implication, from all those nasty people) in order to wing away alone to God. No wonder there is a general impression that matter is not quite nice, and in consequence Catholics leaving school still receive nothing like the same encouragement to take up science as they do to take up arts. Or if they have been allowed to go to the science side at school, this is because of the great openings it offers: science is the gateway to influence and power, to be used naturally enough for the Church’s advancement. That scientific work can in itself be a spiritual activity is mentioned much less often.

There must always be a tension in Christianity between the demands of the world and the demands of the Kingdom of God. By her very nature the Church must be forever reminding herself that it is part of her vocation to be potentially subversive of any worldly order of things: and she must also be forever reminding the world of this fact too. But the definition of where this tension ought to fie, in the twentieth century, is not easy. We are still mainly influenced in our conception of it by late medieval and Jansenistic ideas. The spirituality of the Imitation of Christ lingers: ‘Fly the tumultuousness of the world as much as thou canst: for the talk of worldly affairs is a great hindrance, although they be discoursed of with sincere intention ... we are quickly defiled and enthralled with vanity’ (I. 10). The trouble is not that this kind of thinking is in itself bad, but that it is no longer taken seriously. The result is, I believe, catastrophic. Just as D. H. Lawrence was right to criticise the modem world - the product of the cold northern spirit of the Reformation and of the narrowing Catholicism of the counter-Reformation - for being obsessed with ‘sex in the head’, so we are right to criticise Catholicism for being preoccupied with a ‘spirituality in the head’ which is equally false. The essence of this parody of proper spirituality is to think of other-worldliness in terms of a future heaven of disembodied souls, instead of thinking of it as a new heaven which is to grow out of a new earth. Corresponding to this false spirituality is a false morality, according to which the main purpose of the sacramental and prayerful life of the Church is to give us help in living according to the moral law. We are to try to live fully in the body of Christ in order to be able to live according to the code.

In the recent collection of essays entitled ‘Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience’, Elizabeth Anscombe asks how it is that Cathohcs have been able to accommodate themselves with so little strain of conscience to modern war; and the answer, in her own telling phrase, is ‘double think about double effect’. We all know what she means; but perhaps it is not always easy to see just where double effect thinking becomes ‘double think’.

The principle of double effect is in itself by no means so mysterious and subtle a doctrine as it is sometimes thought. It is no more in fact than a rational and systematic explanation of what goes on in our minds when we wonder whether or not to perform a certain action which we see will have both good and bad effects. Thus a man who sells sporting shotguns in a district where there is a danger of violence many wonder whether to carry on with his trade. If he does, he will be carrying on his normal and legitimate occupation, and supporting his family; but at the same time, he will be adding to the danger of human injury. How is he to make his decision? Catholic tradition would suggest four principles (though found with many variations) to help him make his choice. An act with two effects, one good and the other bad, is lawful, according to this tradition, on four conditions. First, the action, viewed in itself, must be good or at least indifferent; secondly, the agent must not intend the evil effect, but only the good; thirdly, the good effect must be produced as immediately as - that is not by means of - the bad; and, fourthly, there must be a sufficiently weighty reason for permitting the evil effect. Now if we apply the principles to the case of the man selling shotguns, they begin to look like ordinary common sense.

Perhaps no other state can exhibit the variety in organization represented by English educational institutions at the secondary school stage. Within the boundaries of a single local authority may often be discovered public and private schools, direct grant grammar schools financed by the Ministry of Education, and their municipal counterparts governed by local councils, in whose care would also be found secondary modem and technical schools. The religious bodies, particularly the Church of England in the countryside and the Catholic Church in the industrial areas, have their own parallel foundations.

Nevertheless, irrespective of the constitution of the Governing Board or the section of the population served, the majority of them will probably echo in their studies and administration the prevailing educational philosophy. According to this theory there exists in the nation an intellectual elite with inborn mental superiority - although its protagonists differ as to its extent. Professor Cyril Burt estimates five per cent as specially gifted and requiring a separate academic course, while the present Minister of Education considers as many as thirty per cent of the senior pupils ought to be in attendance at grammar schools. All adherents are agreed, however, that one of the chief tasks of the administrator is to discern the elite by an examination at the age of eleven or thirteen years and, thenceforward, to provide them with the best available facilities for an advanced academic course. To such philosophers the examination also reveals those, the hapless majority, with mental ability of a lower order: these they assign to a school where a practical course forms the main staple of the curriculum. At such secondary modem schools there would be a minimum of abstract academic study and no attempt would be made to prepare the scholars for external examinations.

‘Ancient tragedy, ancient tragedy’, insists Cavafy somewhere, ‘is as holy and wide as the universal heart’. Of late this holiness has demonstrated its universality beyond the printed page, beyond the stone amphitheatre or the wooden stage, to make its impact all over again from the cinema screen; an impact, moreover, which is surprisingly unweakened by its transference to so unfamiliar a medium.

The process has not long been at work: Medea and her children, it is true, made a fleeting appearance in Never on Sunday when, Melina Mercouri explained, in spite of all appearances to the contrary they were really on their way to the beach. And when the bodies Uttering the stage rose to acknowledge the applause it was not easy for Dassin, as the American professor, to prove her wrong. The first serious example, however, of the new wave of adaptations from the great Greek dramatists (though not the first to reach this country) was probably the Electra of Michael Cacoyannis, which won a prize at Cannes in 1962; then came another Electra, that directed by Ted Zarpas, which was shown in Venice in 1962 and in the London Film Festival later last year; these two, together with Antigone, directed by George Tzavellas, seen earlier this spring in London, are straight-forward presentations of the original tragedy. Phaedra directed by Jules Dassin, is a modern transposition of the play, with details of the plot significandy manipulated to suit the twentieth-century setting and the geographical expansion of the action.

I have not, unfortunately, yet been able to see the Zarpas Electra, which stars the famous Greek classical actress, Anna Synodinou, as Electra and is, it is widely agreed, a revelation. This film avoids any personal angle - it is simply a magnifi- cendy photographed version of an actual performance of the play by the Greek National Theatre in the great stone amphitheatre of Epidauros; the same stage, incidentally, where Melina Mercouri saw Medea and which she so assiduously haunted that the sign ‘Closed owing to Greek Tragedy’ was hung on her door for the duration of the festival.

Having recently encountered the scorched and blackened ‘Assemblages’ of the American artist John Latham there, I nowadays approach the Bear Lane Gallery, in Oxford, with a certain caution. One can never be quite sure what is going to happen next. This month‘s exhibition, Modern Art and the Church, sounded like another challenge. On the earlier occasion, a few people were, I believe, rather indignant when they discovered what Mr Latham had been up to, with all that old gas-piping and burned secondhand books. But no one had to be carried out kicking and screaming as once they might have been. By now most of us have made our peace with Modern Art and the Modern Artist. But when one puts Modern Art and the Church together in the same room, one becomes aware how uneasy their alliance has always appeared. The problem is to see why this should be so. It is not that there is anything in the present exhibition which would upset one. One almost wishes there were. But problem there is, and it is made all the more difficult by the fact that nearly all the exhibits are meant to be seen in quite another context, as parts of a larger complex of architecture, or as things used and worn. It is not, however, just that stained glass is best judged when seen in the situation for which it was designed rather than when displayed under artificial light, even when this is done as effectively as it is in the depths of the Bear Lane. Most people are capable of makmg the required imaginative adjustment and allowing for the necessary restrictions imposed by a gallery. No. The sense of confusion has, I always feel where this matter is concerned, a deeper source and one more difficult to get at. It may perhaps be worthwhile attempting to say something about it, if this review is to be more than a mere elaboration of the catalogue, a list of ‘what I liked and what I didn't like’.