The title of this article has been borrowed from one in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1944 by the Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood, Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston. In his opening paragraph he records that ‘at a recent conference at Columbia on Science, Philosophy, and Religion two delegates voiced the pungent opinion that “the entire missionary movement should be stopped”. They raised a vigorous demurrer to the axiom that “the post-war world can be built successfully only on the basis of Christianity” and categorically denied that “we are fighting to save Christian civilization”. Granted that only two of the delegates exploded this bombshell, nevertheless there are persons not delegates to this august conference who would second the motion—both at home and, more understandably, among the nationalists in the non-Christian countries’.

The rest of his article is chiefly taken up with an examination of that nationalist attitude in Japan, India, and China, and while he seems to be in general accord with the familiar Catholic thesis that ‘the Church can then only be said to be founded in a region when it is self-governing, with its own churches, its own native clergy, its own resources: in a word, when it depends on nobody but itself’ (S. Cong. Propaganda, May 20th, 1923), it is not clear that he rejects what he styles a ‘steady liberalization of Christian eredalism’, or that he looks upon Christianity as anything more than an ornament to ‘revivified native faiths—a higher Buddhism, a cultured Hinduism, a reborn Mohammedanism, a philosophic Taoism, an assertive Shintoism’.

The subject matter of Social Anthropology, human societies, with special reference to primitive societies, has been a field of philosophic speculation from the earliest times. It has only very recently become a field of scientific inquiry; so recently that Sir Edward Tylor is sometimes spoken of as ‘the father of anthropology’. Tylor defined the scope of his inquiry in his classical work, Primitive Culture (1871) as culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, a definition which excludes what the rest of Europe calls anthropology and what in England is sometimes called physical anthropology: the study of racial characteristics, genetics, and so forth. But it covers what is generally called today in England social anthropology, or the sociology of primitive peoples. Tylor was himself the first occupant of a university post in the subject, from 1883 at Oxford.

Social anthropology is therefore still a very young discipline, hardly yet accepted as one of themselves by the august natural sciences. It has, however, taken the first step towards qualifying as a science by becoming inductive. The earlier social anthropologists were what are sometimes called ‘arm-chair’ anthropologists. When they wrote about primitive peoples they relied for the material from which they constructed their theories not on their own observations but on the reports of missionaries, administrative officers, and travellers. Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough is one of the best examples of this kind of work—polished, erudite, comprehensive, and occasionally profound. Such writings suffered, in the eyes of men of science, from a serious defect.

According to Father Rommerskirchen (Guide des Missions Catholiques 1937, p. 165) we owe the word ‘missiology’ to the French—the term ‘missiologie’ having been popularised by P&re Charles, S.J. German Catholics, under the inspiration of Professor Schmidlin, have preferred to use the word ‘Missionswissenschaft’ and it is perhaps unfortunate that English speaking Catholics did not follow their example and talk of the study or science of missions, rather than the clumsy and pretentious ‘missiology’.

Granted, however, that the term is in common use, the purpose of this essay is to attempt to explain its meaning. The explanation is really quite simple. Missiology is the scientific investigation and description of the history and conditions of the apostolic action of the Church in pagan countries. It is that part of Dogmatic Theology which provides us with a justification for what are termed Foreign Missions, and which discusses the ‘mode’ of missionary activity in relation to the data provided by the anthropologist, the historian of culture and other allied specialists. In so far as it is a self-conscious discipline Missiology is recent, but in principle, in its dogmatic foundations, it is part of the theological heritage of the Church. .

The Fathers and the great Scholastics dealt with its fundamental presuppositions as parts of the treatises on Providence and Faith. The discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, in that they revealed vast groups of persons ignorant of the Gospel, led to an extension of these treatises in relation to the problem of the salvation of the infidel. Lastly, in our own day the growth of the sciences of Anthropology and relevant discoveries in the fields of Comparative Religion and Psychology, have led to the accumulation of a vast mass of data which demands theological interpretation and application in practice. It is against this background that the pioneers, too numerous to mention, of Missiology have developed their discipline.

The idea of this article was suggested by an anthropological lecture on two aboriginal peoples of the Pacific.

Two peoples, the Andamanese Islanders and the Tikopia, have lived within boating distance of each other for countless generations. The one is semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing. The other is, or was, agricultural. In the first the communal element in the ownership of property is very marked. In the second the private or personal ownership was far more marked.

From this arises a thought. Is it possible that the question of the balance of individual with communal or social rights in the ownership and use of property is not a matter of industrialism, nor of atheism, but chiefly of mobility or immobility of social occupation?

One can follow the idea in many fields: for instance in the Catholic Middle Ages. As the peoples of Europe began to settle, but were yet uncertain and largely mobile and pastoral, they developed the system called feudalism. Feudalism was a kind of socialism, in the sense that the prince, the owner and the employer all three coincided in the person of the feudal lord. All lands were held in trust from him. He was the government. He was the employer in so far as there was an employer outside the subsistence economy of the people who held tenures on his land.

As the people became more and more settled, agricultural, less and and less mobile, in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, absolute individual tenure of land outside any further responsibility to an overlord became more and more common. The squirearchies appeared, and more and more independent farmers.

The following essay by Dr Coomaraswamy is offered to Black- friars readers for the very high degree of interest which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar standpoint to the familiar problem of the relation of science to religion.

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the imagination of East and West lends support to the concept of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself which is called modem philosophy, has tended to imagine reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.

For St Thomas also, being is an ‘act’ to which, ultimately, even substance among the categories is potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other position available to the West can fruitful contact be made with the tradition Dr Coomaraswamy represents.

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St Thomas’s metaphysics, it may be possible, now that Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern tradition further than the position outlined in the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of consciousness of which Dr Coomaraswamy speaks, has nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental conceptions of theological modernism.