In an age of conferences the hope of an agreed conclusion most often overshadows the discussion, and the reassurance of public opinion can be a more powerful motive than the painful search for the truth. In July, the third of a series of Conferences being held this year at Spode House, Hawkesyard, on ‘Religion and the Arts’ was devoted to the Christian writer, and if its theme seemed vague it was at least happily free from the larger generalizations. The intention was not to produce a manifesto or to try to resolve the difficulties of a Catholic writer confronted with a world which at so many points rejects the religious and moral premisses that must be his. It was, rather, an opportunity for considering some of the factors in a debate that has suffered from lack of definition, and this was done in a setting of common faith and common life (if only for a few days), for want of which the writer or critic who is a Catholic can feel a special isolation.

Forty people came to the Conference and they represented no one but themselves. For the most part they were either contributors to this journal or critical readers of it; professionally they included university dons, working journalists, students, booksellers, creative writers of (as they would admit) varying degrees of achievement, and priests whose work requires them to be specially concerned with the written word. ‘Religion as the Writer’s Theme’ was the general subject of the lectures and discussions.

Thou waterest the hills from thy high dwelling: the earth shall be filled with the fruit of thy works’: St Thomas took this verse from Psalm 103 as the text of his inaugural lecture as Master in Theology at Paris, for, he says, it is ordained from eternity by the king and lord of the heavens that the gifts of his providence should come to his lowest creatures through the mediation of those that are higher, and so teachers and doctors are as mountains watered from on high by divine wisdom that they may pass on that wisdom to those they teach.

What is true of the theologian is true in a different way of every creative writer: he too is a mediator, he communicates a vision. But in what sense is he a creator? My concern here is to suggest questions rather than the answers to them: and here at once two different types of problem suggest themselves. The writer creates with words, but he also creates words. I am not thinking of the invention of neologisms: words are like living things, they grow, change, decay, die; and the fact that great Christian words can thus decay and die presents us with one of our most pressing problems. Some words become sterilized by over-familiarity, become labels empty of real meaning: do we stop to think what we really mean when we speak of grace or redemption? Some of the great Christian words have lost their virility, like ‘meekness’ and ‘mildness’.

In the whole vast field, of the social sciences, there can hardly be a more neglected subject than the sociology of Catholicism, that is to say, the study of the structure and of the life-processes of the Catholic Church, with the means and methods usually applied by sociologists to other societies or associations. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The Catholic Church is an organization to which it seems well-nigh impossible to assume an objective and unprejudiced attitude. To the classical Protestant she is the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, the devil’s most dangerous death-trap; to the atheist, whether liberal or communist, she is the main bar to progress, a hateful anachronism; to the Catholic she is a dear mother, and indeed the very Body of Christ. In so far as sociology is a scientific pursuit, a pursuit of the truth without favour or disfavour, the Church of Rome must be one of the most difficult objects to handle. Nevertheless, it is and remains surprising that she has never been properly studied by sociologists. After all, even the Protestant and the atheist cannot close their eyes to the fact that she is in all probability both the oldest and the most numerous social body in our western civilization, and even the Catholic cannot gainsay the fact that if she is the Gate of Heaven, she is necessarily at the same time a human society, showing human, even secular, aspects besides her religious and transcendent traits—aspects which are no less worthy of attention than the others.

One of the most striking manifestations of the underlying unity of all knowledge is the way in which a discovery in one branch of science often finds fruitful application in another. A recent example of this is the development by Professor Libby in America of a new method of dating archaeological samples using the techniques of nuclear physics. The basic fact underlying the method is that all archaeological specimens containing carbon also contain a small amount of radioactive carbon, or radiocarbon, which becomes progressively less in quantity as time goes on. The fraction of radiocarbon present can be measured, and hence the age of the sample deduced. To explain this in more detail, it is necessary to explain what is known as the carbon cycle and then to discuss some of the radioactive transformations which take place in the earth’s atmosphere.

The chemical element carbon, which plays an essential part in all vital processes, continually takes part in a cyclic series of interchanges between the earth and its atmosphere. Plants obtain the carbon they need to grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and, with the aid of sunlight, build up complex chemical compounds containing carbon by the process known as photosynthesis. Some carbon is also absorbed by roots from the soil, where it is present as a weak solution of carbonic acid. When a plant dies it is often burned, and the complex compounds are broken up and the carbon returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.