Ethico-Medical controversy, as exemplified in the recent furore created by the Holy Father’s pronouncement on the natural right to life of the unborn child, is no new thing. More often than not the controversy revolves around problems that are sentimental in essence (the word is not used in any pejorative sense), and which are based upon false antitheses. As the eminent physician and neurologist, Dr F. M. R. Walshe, has acutely observed, ‘all these antitheses arise from the unguarded use of abstraction, and from a false simplification of the welter of things and processes we encounter when we seek to build a philosophy of medicine. If we are to achieve a philosophy we must escape from the fragmentation of ideas that comes of thinking too exclusively in the static terms of classifications.’ Dr Walshe is not concerned in this oration to consider the particular false antithesis of ethics and medicine; he is dealing with medicine in terms of ‘art in science’; but his terms of reference are most significant. ‘The truth is surely that every successive layer of thought in the analysis of nature . . . stops at a halfway house when tracing its ideas back to their basic elements, and is content with ideas of a generality sufficient for its immediate purpose. Yet each remains a field of discourse in its own right; one of the many layers in the palimpsest of natural knowledge, each of which has its own distinguishable intellectual content. Medicine is no exception to this rule. For philosophy alone there is no halfway house, for its ideas aim at a supreme generality. ... Yet we must surely aim at the highest degree of understanding of the foundations of our thoughts and actions. ...’

It may seem odd to count the psychology of C. G. Jung as a challenge to religion. It is more usual to complain that, as Freud doffed the physician’s coat for the professor’s gown, so Jung, still more incongruously, has assumed the clergyman’s surplice—if not the robes of the magician, the prophet, the mystagogue. Yet I think that the friendliness of Jung presents a far more serious and radical challenge to religion as we know it than did ever the hostility of Freud.

For Freud, religion was an obsessional neurosis. For Jung it seems to be rather the absence of religion that is at the root of most present-day neurosis among adults. Already in 1932 he wrote: ‘During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. . . . Among all my patients in the second half of life (that is to say, over thirty-five) there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers.’

How did it come about, this diametrically opposite evaluation of religion—by two psychologists who once worked together in close harmony and considerable mutual admiration? Their early differences, on the surface at least, had nothing whatever to do with religion or philosophy. Jung was every bit as sceptical of both as was Freud. Theirs were wholly professional differences, concerned with the interpretation of actual psychological facts, and with what was, and was not, therapeutically successful.

The coming rift was already visible in Jung’s Wandltmgen und Symbole der Libido, written in 1911. Jung still accepted, even stressed, Freud’s ideas about the origin, and the illusoriness, of religion. But he recognised that traditional religious beliefs and practices (whatever else they may have been) had in fact functioned as a sort of mass-therapy, or at least as a preventive against the sort of neuroses that afflict modem man.

The readers of Léon Bloy can be divided, on the whole, into two opposing camps. Those who read his work primarily for its religious content see him as a pious Christian who vehemently protested against the evils of the modem world; and, even if his imperfections are recognised, few critics have attempted to explain or even reconcile the conflicting tendencies of his character. There are others, however, who frankly scoff at his Christian principles, finding it impossible to believe in the religious sincerity of a man who could live, during the greater part of his life, on the generosity of his friends, and could cover his enemies with violent scorn and abuse.

Few writers have penetrated very far into the motives and principles of this puzzling man: he is either dismissed as a literary joke, or accepted unquestioningly for the sincerity of his faith. The complexity of his character is, nevertheless, bewildering. The more we study his correspondence and diaries, the more uncertain we become of what he is setting out to achieve. Bloy seems to have lived his life on two distinct levels. He certainly saw himself as a modem St Francis, an apostle of poverty in a world of materialism, reduced to begging and borrowing from friends to provide his daily bread; yet contemporary records show that he spent a great deal of money on absinthe and amusements, and his poverty could undoubtedly have been mitigated by more careful management and foresight. How can Léon Bloy, fighter and hater of his fellow men, be reconciled with the Christian evangelist he claimed to be? How can the devout Catholic have been attracted by some of the most obscene tendencies in the literature of his day? The answer to all these problems can, I suggest, be found in a deeper penetration into the piety and the religious outlook of Bloy himself.

When Monsignor John O’Connor slept peacefully in the Lord in his eighty-second year on the day which also saw the death of his late Majesty King George the Sixth—Father John would have chuckled at the coincidence— Blackfriars and the Dominican Order lost an old and staunch friend.

His first contacts with the Order are not known to the present writer, but he once quoted something which had been told him in 1894 by an old novice of Father Tom Burke. Many well- known members of the English Province were his friends, among them Fathers Bede Jarrett, Hugh Pope and Vincent McNabb. Some of them may even have been a little disconcerted and embarrassed by the familiarity with which he spoke or addressed them by their Christian names. Until the outbreak of the last war he used to invite one of the Friars to his parish every second year to conduct a parochial retreat, thus bringing the Dominican habit to a part of the world where it was otherwise seldom seen. It was unforunate that the death or absence of his friends left the Order unrepresented among the hundred-and-fifty priests who attended his funeral.

Though a great admirer of the Order, he never became a tertiary. He was too much of a free-lance for that. And while he held St Thomas Aquinas in high esteem and considered himself his disciple, he could hardly be called a thomist in any strict sense of the word. Nor did he claim to be a theologian: ‘reasoning on revelation’ was how he described his ruminations and declarations on theological topics.