Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, wandering among the souls of those damned for incontinence, meets the lovers, Paolo and Francesca. He is told that they fell from chastity after reading a book, the story of Lancelot. ‘Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. . . .’

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

‘The book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther.’ And as the commentators tell us, for ‘Galeotto’ we may read ‘pandar’. Here we have what is, I think, a locus classicus for the problem under discussion: the meeting-place of behaviour and literature and morals; and an occasion for apprehension for both the moralist and the writer, though for very different reasons.

Most of you will have seen, several years ago, André Labarthe’s film entitled La Vie commence demain, a film which speculated in quite a fascinating way on the future of the human race by seeing it through the eyes of certain great Frenchmen. A perhaps excessively ingenuous young man, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, puts questions to them, and their answers and what they are doing when he visits them reveal the way the world is supposed to be developing. The biological future is represented by some rather grisly experiments with a young calf in a rubber bath, carried out by Jean Rostand; the architectural future by Le Corbusier and his city of the sun; the future of the fine arts by Picasso sketching or making one of his plates complete with basso-rilievo knife, fork and sausages. One of these plates sent as a present via the ingenuous young man is the introduction to the next personage, who is demonstrating one of the possibilities of human speech in the future by handling a tape-recorder. To show the virtues of the instrument, its owner—this is, of course, André Gide—switches it on, and we hear his voice coming from it. And as it speaks, and develops a brief theme—what theme it is, matters very little—Gide’s face broadens with pleasure, with enormous satisfaction.

A recent book about the Islamic law of war and peace suggests comparisons with Christian law which have interesting implications. In this comparative field the plough has so far scratched only the surface. Among the more obvious questions provoked is this: does Christian law derive in this matter from Islamic law, or is the character of holy war always in all religions necessarily similar? Certainly such a book as this reminds us that the similarities between the Christian Crusade and the Islamic holy war—jihād—are more apparent than the differences. It also reminds us that certain general principles must be relevant to the question in any religion. One particular conclusion to which it seems to lead us is that any just war is a holy war. A war is either wrong, or a Crusade; the cause that is proportionate to the evils of war must be a great one indeed and one that claims our whole devotion. I am not, of course, concerned with the question whether there can be a just war at the present day; I only point out some alternatives.

War—struggle, aggression—is a condition of life, whether spiritual or material. Some people have been so unreasonable as to jibe at the combative character of pacifists. It is obvious enough that it is not war, but certain kinds of physical war, that all Christians abhor and some renounce. The holy war against evil angels, the struggle to live righteously, are as really warfare as the war of bombs.