Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.

Westerners who profess and call themselves Buddhists are, and will probably remain, few in numbers— however distinguished and worthy. Organised Buddhism in Christian or once-Christian countries is, and will probably remain, negligible. But a good Buddhist cares little for what he calls ‘names and forms’; and Buddhism is a force which a Christian even in the West can no longer ignore.

It is alleged (such rumours arc hard to check) that in several European countries images of the Buddha outsell crucifixes and madonnas by a considerable margin; it is certain that there are British manufacturers and merchants who will supply you with both or either with detached impartiality. It is astonishing to find in how many British homes—and those by no means only of the more ‘educated’ classes—a Buddha is installed. Of course, to their owners they are just ‘art’ or ornament, as inevitable almost as the Van Gogh Sunflower or the crazy pavement. And, lest there be any mistake about it, the Buddha will, as often as not, be found fulfilling some such utilitarian function as supporting an electric lamp or propping up a row of novels. But, if the owner is deceived, the good Buddhist is not—and the good psychologist will understand him. An image of the Buddha inculcates Buddhism (whether we call it that or no) more effectively and profoundly than many books about it. Even if we set aside the subtler symbolism of Buddhist iconography (and to those in the know, every single feature is charged with significance—the posture, the gesture of the hands, the curve of each finger, the very folds of the drapery), the appeal of a Buddha-image to a modem Westerner is understandable, however little he may consciously avert to it.

There was something indefinite about the effect of Avicenna on the West in the thirteenth century. Constant and pervasive as his influence was—from its beginnings in Spain in the twelfth century, through the confusion of its first contacts with the Cathedral Schools and the nascent University of Paris, down to Albert and Aquinas and Scotus—yet it nowhere crystallised into a definite set of doctrines accepted by a clearly marked group or school, as did, later in the century, the influence of Averroes. Some years ago Père De Vaux brought into circulation the term ‘Latin Avicennism’, parallel to the ‘Latin Averroism’ which Mandonnet had disclosed in his great work on Siger of Brabant. But Père De Vaux’s term, unlike Mandonnet’s, has not gained general acceptance; there is too much difference between the confused eclecticism at the turn of the century, studied by De Vaux, and the clear-cut, far more unified position of the Averroists of the 1270’s. More acceptable perhaps as a name for that earlier phase is Gilson’s ‘augustinisme avicennisant’, though this denoted originally only one aspect of it—the attempt to adapt an Avicennian theory of the ‘agent intellect’ to the Augustinian tradition of the human mind’s dependence upon illumination from God. And in any case one must not overstress the Augustinian element in the currents of thought that were running at the end of the twelfth century, and that largely derived from other sources—Boethius, for example, and Erigena.

Mr Evelyn Waugh once wrote, in a letter, I think, to a Catholic newspaper, that it is the business of the novelist to portray man ‘against a background of eternal values’. Few novelists and few critics have been sufficiently clear-headed to attempt such a succint definition. In making his point so neatly, Mr Waugh has disclosed the dilemma in which the modem poet and novelist find themselves, a dilemma which is fairly represented in this passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s own notes on novel-writing: