One of the pastoral problems which loom very large in these days is that of the Catholics who, having entered upon a marriage which the Church cannot recognise as such, then find themselves tortured in mind by their consequent separation from the sacramental life of the Church, and long to return to it but see no way of doing so. What is to be done for them? How are they to be advised?

It is as useless as it is heartless to say simply that they have only themselves to blame: that they sinned in contracting a marriage which is no marriage at all, and that the Church will receive them back when, and only when, they renounce it. In practice this is harmful, since it may well drive them completely and finally away from the Church. In theory it is bad theology, because it simplifies what is in reality complex, and refuses to face all the facts of a human situation. Ethics is not an exact science, precisely because its business is with the complexities and untidiness of human action in the concrete; and indeed the ultimate ethical judgment, as to what A is to do here and now, is not a question of science merely but of art, the art of prudence. We might well recall here some wise words of M. Maritain: ‘Some people imagine that morality measures our actions, not in the light of the just human ends which they ought to be aiming at in the given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulae which life must copy like a book. ... In reality the principles of morals are not theorems or idols: they are the supreme rules governing a concrete activity the aim of which is something to be done in certain definite circumstances, and governing it through more proximate rules and above all through the rules, which are never set down in advance, of the virtue of prudence. . . . They do not seek to devour human life; they are there to build it up.

If the diffusion of his works and the range of his influence is to be taken as any guide, St Bernard was beyond question the most outstanding figure in the Europe of his day. Certainly among the schoolmen, no teacher ever had so many devoted disciples, no single preacher so fired the imagination of thousands, there was no one whose moral drive was so potent a fact in the lives of men of every degree. There were saints of the towns and saints of the country, saints of the court and the schoolroom: Bernard spoke to the world. Even to this day, when all allowance has been made for the misfortunes of time, of fire and casual destruction, a tangible witness to his power could be assembled in sackloads of manuscripts from the greater libraries, and those who have merely a nodding acquaintance with the available materials will know why Mabillon, that indefatigable scholar, doubted if any single individual were capable of coping with the task of collation. Available in print by 1475, although we still await anything like that critical edition which the great Maurist was content to leave for another generation, St Bernard’s works have never ceased to be re-edited and translated right up to 1953, the eighth centenary of his death. Among the many volumes and essays devoted to Bernard in the present year, the Rev. Bruno Scott James has given us an English translation of the letters and the familiar biography by Dr Watkin Williams has been reprinted.

From what a man is, springs all that he does. The being Hilaire Belloc, a person of very much larger than life size, a natural portent, vivid, roaring, and exciting as a thunderstorm, was present to me long before I knew anything about his work, even the Moral Alphabet and the Bad Child's Book of Beasts which were kept in the back drawing-room and later filled us with a fearful joy as intense as that inspired by their creator. He had always been there: a grown man who liked children, and who could be observed with delicious awe to behave very badly, according to the standards of Nanny. We did not then know he had created an entirely apocryphal legend that there hung in our quiet rationalist nursery a card bearing the words, illuminated like a text, ‘No Rot About God’; but we were acutely conscious that he did many other agreeably outrageous things. He shouted with laughter whenever he felt like it; he sometimes sang in the street as he walked along; he went into pubs; and once there was talk of his being tried in a court of justice for something he had put in a paper, talk which led me to visualise him as chained by the leg in a dark stone cell in the Tower of London, with a jailer looking in once a day to bring him a stale loaf and a jug (the large white enamelled sort used in bathrooms) of tap-water. This must have been at the time of the Marconi case libel action.

He had always been there; yet the natural self-centredness of childhood made him seem real only when he flashed through our humdrum ambience like a shooting star. To go to King’s Land where he lived under the downs was for the first time to perceive him as a giant with a house, a family, a way of living quite independent of our own, continuing when we were not there to see.

It is welcome news that the United States has agreed to consider the possibility of allowing East German refugees to enter America as immigrants, and that the Canadian Government has given an assurance that it will assist in giving East German farmers in particular new homes and places of work. For the problem of the twelve million refugees, swollen every month by thousands of fresh arrivals from the Russian Zone, is still one of the most important of all European questions. The plight of the D.P.s is perhaps even worse, for there are still between 150,000 and 200,000 of the old, weak, infirm and unemployables in D.P. camps in Germany.

The unprecedented migration that followed the Potsdam agreement—when in the winter of 1945-6 fifteen million people were moved out of Eastern Germany and neighbouring territories to make way for Poles and Russians—has provided an unprecedented responsibility for the Church in Germany. Only twelve million finally arrived in Western Germany—three million died or were directed eastward— but nearly half of them were Catholic, coming from the almost completely Catholic areas of Upper Silesia and the Sudeten territory, as well as from Tower Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania. Up to the last war the Catholic and Protestant majorities in Germany could be delimited almost exactly by the boundaries set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1,648 on the principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio.

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.

Those critics who felt uneasy about the nature of Mr Graham Greene’s achievement in The End of the Affair will not be reassured by his first excursion into drama. The Living Room raises in a particularly forceful way a problem that has always been attendant on his work—that of finding what Mr Eliot has termed a satisfactory objective correlative, or ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked’. The same point might be expressed by saying that Mr Greene’s work tends to lack artistic inevitability, so that the tale tends either to be arbitrarily controlled by the informing theological interest, or it is quite inadequate to convey the complexity of that interest. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the narrative pattern is obviously incapable of carrying the deeper meanings of the tale the distinction between good and evil and right and wrong, with which the novel is so much concerned, cannot be said to arise organically from the characters of Pinkie and Ida Arnold. The consequent effect on the reader is the reverse of the novelist’s presumed intention—the theological interest giving the impression of being a device enabling the author to heighten and sustain the emotional pitch of his ‘thriller’. Neither The Heart of the Matter nor The End of the Affair seem to be free from this criticism, in spite of their obviously greater range and maturity. Only in The Power and the Glory does the theological interest seem entirely organic, where the central character, a priest, combines in his own person the conflicting themes of fallen man and the operation of sanctifying grace.