Few confusions are more common, or more perplexing, today than the confusion between two quite different uses of the word ‘natural’; yet both uses are valid enough if rightly understood; and the distinction between them is a very simple one.

On the one hand, we are always saying, or hearing it said, that this or that action, though not commendable, is ‘natural enough’ or ‘only natural’. It is only natural for people to lose their tempers or their heads sometimes, only natural if occasionally they oversleep or overeat, only natural if sometimes they let this or that passion get the better of them. What does the phrase mean? It means, in effect, ‘only to be expected’. And why is it to be expected? Because that, to use another common phrase, is ‘only human nature’ as we know it. But what is the human nature that we know in everyday experience? It is, in the language of Catholic theology, fallen human nature.

Fallen human nature means human nature, not as it was created by God, not as it was intended to be by God, but as it exists now, warped and twisted by evil. It is not wholly evil, far from it; but the evil tendencies are there, as we all know from our own experience; in our better moments we realize that we ought to be conquering them, integrating the energies which find an outlet in evil actions into the organic unity of the good life; but again and again we fail, or we forget altogether even to try, and then nature-as-we-know-it has its way.

Religion as a perspective intensifies life and enhances it from within more efficaciously than any other (objectively speaking; subjectively and in practice there may be any number of gradations possible in this). But is it to the exclusion of every other perspective? Does the religious perspective, once adopted or taken up, or, to allow for a more passive process, slid into, impose the renunciation of every other? This is the much discussed question of Christian humanism, the eschatological question that claims to dominate every other, the question of the precise significance of asceticism in the Christian life. Christian tradition in all this has been complicated by the fact that at different epochs there has appeared an extremism which has made it difficult to focus the question with a calm judgment. There seems to be a contradiction between the Gospel and History. Christ speaks of the Cross and of abnegation, even of total abnegation, but he leaves no room for doubt that he proposes to all men the specifically new relationship with the Father which he came to implant in humanity, nor that he reserves for the stronger souls a more intense religious cultivation: this means that ordinary human life is to be taken up into that new relationship and that the intenser cultivation of religion is neither the norm nor intended to supplant ordinary human living. The evangelical teaching gathered up and handed on by St Paul, in the same way, leaves no room for any out-and-out rejection of the ‘world’.

As you approach Buenos Aires, sailing slowly through the dredged channel of the vast brown River Plate, you are aware of a skyline that is exceedingly strange. It is not just the fact of the towering skyscrapers. This is America, and north and south alike seem committed to this monolithic invasion of the sky. What is extraordinary is that you can see through so many of these blocks of stone: the blue that fills the window-spaces is innocent air. It is bomb-damage in reverse, or even, you may think, in anticipation. Later you will be reassured. Here, it appears, building goes on as long as the money lasts, and work can be suspended for years at a time. (In a suburb one saw a completed ferro-concrete steeple, improbably balanced on the bare skeleton of a church yet to be built.)

Building is a South American disease, or, more accurately, it is the symptom of a disease. In Argentina, as in Brazil, the fantastic growth of the cities has gravely disturbed the national equilibrium. Buenos Aires, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, has a population of four million, and including the province of the same name, accounts for half the total for the whole republic. Even though Argentina were far more developed industrially than she is (and the facts of nature have determined the primary role of the country as one of the greatest food-producing areas of the world), so disproportionate a head for such a body induces a sort of vertigo whose effects are immediately seen.

This is an important book. For beginning with this ejaculation from the litany of ‘blurb’ writers I have a reason; it is to underline at the outset the fact that whatever disagreements one may have with Mr O’Donnell, his book marks the first serious and detailed attempt to consider the issues raised by the remarkable group of contemporary novels which have been written by Catholics. One avoids, carefully, labelling the group, although it is clear they possess a certain unity. Maria Cross (the title is named after a Mauriac character) in offering the first account of this aspect of contemporary fiction raises the fundamental questions: what is the relationship between ‘belief’ and fiction; in what way does ‘belief’ modify and colour the sensibility of an individual writer; is it possible for the Catholic novelist to take over Maritain’s dictum, namely to have compassionate understanding of the sinner without collusion with the sin? The general impression that Mr O’Donnell’s book leaves is that he sides with Newman rather than Maritain, for whom literature was ‘the Life and Remains of Natural Man, innocent or guilty’. I say ‘general impression’ advisedly because Mr O’Donnell works for the major part of his book in terms of particular novels and novelists, and consequently such generalized dicta never become explicit. There is no affinity in approach between Maria Cross and Art and Scholasticism.