In the famous treatise on The Laws of England by Blackstone, published in four large volumes in 1769, there are but two pages devoted to the natural law and the law of nations. It is interesting in these days, when English judges and professors are apt to deride the whole conception of natural law or any law beyond the customary and the legislative, to see how far already the abandonment of any eternal or moral juridical reference had proceeded even in Blackstone’s day. His acknowledgement, perfunctory and abbreviated as it is, constitutes almost the last reference to any juridical principle (beyond parliamentary democratic desire), to govern the making or interpretation of laws in England: the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament has become unchallengeable.

Yet, under the heading ‘Of the nature of Laws in general’ Blackstone still writes:

It is rather more than thirty years since Dr G. G. Coulton inaugurated the series of ‘Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’. In the interval between the two great wars a number of notable books appeared, including Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and Coulton’s own monumental Five Centuries of Religion, of which the recently-published posthumous volume appropriately terminated the series. It is now revived, under the general editorship of the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, ‘to present as a single collection some of the work submitted for higher degrees or fellowships by young Cambridge medievalists’. Thus it will provide in some sense a parallel to the Oxford Historical Series.

The first two volumes to appear in the new series are both studies of ecclesiastical estates, and so carry on the tradition established by the late R. A. L. Smith in his Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Mr Edward Miller’s subject is the abbey and bishopric of Ely; while Mr H. P. R. Finberg writes on Tavistock Abbey. In both cases, however, the ecclesiastical is strictly subordinate to the ‘social’ interest.

Mr Miller makes no excursions into the field of diocesan administration, but defines his aim as ‘to draw out of the records of the Church of Ely some deductions about the progress of the lordship exercised by the abbots and bishops of Ely, and about the influence they exercised upon those fragments of medieval society which they had some real power to shape’. Mr Finberg, as he tells us in his preface, is concerned with Tavistock less as a community of men dedicated to the religious life than as ‘an economic unit, a property-owning organisation, a producer and consumer’, seen against the background of that part of Devon in which the estates of the abbey lay.

Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.’ Freud’s famous utterance, tom from its context like that, had all the makings of a slogan. Whether we liked it, or found it thoroughly offensive, it was—like the one about the ‘opium of the people’—difficult, impossible to forget. Whether or not it wins our rational assent, it ‘rings a bell’ of some sort, there is (we feel) ‘something in it’. It will probably survive when the book in which it appeared is quite forgotten. It has already survived devastating criticism of its own premisses.

Freud’s critique of religion, perhaps reflected indirectly, perhaps thoroughly misunderstood and distorted, is part of our modem heritage. Believers or unbelievers, we can hardly have escaped its impact. Comparatively few can have studied, tested, examined it for themselves, but it can be all the more impressive for that. This was no case of a specialist trespassing outside his own field to express opinions on subjects about which he is no authority. When Freud said religion was a neurosis, he was presumably talking about what he knew. He was a pioneer discoverer of causes and cures of neurosis.

An obsession of humanity or not, religion was certainly something like an obsession with Freud himself. The subject seems to have fascinated him; in his books he can never leave it alone for very long. Perhaps it is ungracious to subject Freud’s writings to his own technique of psycho-analytic investigation, yet it is difficult to avoid doing so; and we begin to suspect that his anxious, sometimes tortuous, theorising about religion tells us more about Freud than religion. But that is hardly our business; we must consider what he says on its own merits, rather than his private motives for saying it. And it may be worth while to reset the slogan in its original context.

An essential aspect of Ortega’s philosophical outlook is his theory of perspectivism. According to this, every activity, every philosophy, for that matter, every individual point of view, constitutes a unique and irreplaceable perspective on reality. With this in mind, we may examine the following paragraph from one of his most fundamental works, En torno a Galileo (1933), in which he studies the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and from Christianity to rationalism:

I think that, carefully considered, there may be no objection to make to this view. The fundamental desire of man is life—life is the only thing which, in the logic of which man is capable, is without an ulterior justification: life justifies itself. All values, truth, goodness, beauty, justify themselves by the objective requirement of their external correlative and by the subjective demand of the human nature which creates them in the sense of acknowledging them. Truth acquires its raison d’être by the obligation it is under, in order to be itself, to conform to the reality it describes and because the man who utters it is unable (in the simplest meaning of the words) to live without truth.