“The true speaking absolutely is prior to the good, as appears from two reasons. First because the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to good. . . Secondly . . . knowledge naturally precedes appetite.” (Summa, 1a, q. 16, art. 4, English trans.)

The object of the intellect (i.e. Truth) “is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will” (i.e. goodness). Therefore the intellect in itself and absolutely is higher and nobler than the will—yet “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is better than the will.” (Ibid., q. 82, part 3.)

These two texts from the Summa of the Blackfriar St. Thomas Aquinas must outline the attitude of Blackfriars towards Truth.

At the risk of failing to express what is in our mind, let us say that we fully accept the consequences of St. Thomas’s principle: “Truth is more simple and absolute than goodness, therefore the intellect is higher and nobler than the will.” In our aim of finding and telling the truth we will not primarily concern ourselves with what is good; or only with that highest good, the Truth. This is but to realize that transcendentals, such as truth, must be sought for their own sake or they will not be found in their fullness. Truth-seeking and truth-telling must not be blended and weakened with enquiries into the economic, political, ethical or theological value of the truth.

“To propose to man no more than what is human, Aristotle remarked, is to betray man, to will his unhappiness, for by the principal part of himself, the spirit, he is called to something greater than a merely human life. On this principle, if not on the manner of its application, Ramanuja and Epictetus, Nietzsche and St. John of the Cross are all agreed” (p. 10). Is the remark humanist or anti-humanist? Humanism, like so many other good things, is sometimes looked at askance by pious people because of the associations or the expressions it has wrongly or at least accidentally acquired. The Renaissance humanism, anthropocentric as M. Maritain here calls it, was or became an enemy of humanism as Aristotle, as the Christian, understand it, because it in fact reduced the potentialities and in consequence the possible fulfilment of man to the narrowly human. It was a partial humanism, a half-truth. Against this the Christian sets up the ideal of a humanism which is integral and theocentric, and integral because theocentric, the boundary of the perfection at which it aims being nothing less than the sharing in the life of God, including within this the human life of body and spirit in the world of men. “Let us say that humanism . . . tends essentially to make man more truly human, to manifest his original grandeur by making him a sharer in whatever may enrich the personality in Nature and in history. ...

It is the nemesis of a cliche-ridden prose that a term may become trite yet stay ambiguous. The phrase philosophy of history covers four distinct approaches to three subjects, and before its relation to a Thomist scheme of thought can be considered it will be necessary to analyze the contrasted senses of the adjective “historical” and to determine the meaning of “Thomist” and of “philosophy.” Thomism may be conveniently defined as the application of the principles of act and potency to the study of the necessary and of the contingent. Philosophy may be restricted to a consummated human study in an ultimate causality: “consummated,” for as a science it implies the achievement of a certitude, not a content with an opinion; “human” since it is achieved through reason, not through the supernatural; “ultimate causality” since it is a search for origin, not for occasion, for undeviating principle rather than for contingent event. Such concepts are relatively simple, the complexity of history has commonly been expressed through a consistent use of analogy.

The three primary divisions of modern historical writing, the Chronicle, the Myth, the Culture Study, seem contrasted rather by their perspective than by their object. Each is in intention a form of record of the past; the first in terms of the past, the second as an explanation of the present, the third often primarily as a premature reflection of the future.

Principal John Oman, invited to explain why he was not a Catholic, began with the following memorable and instructive words:

This, the reason which on analysis will be found to be the one that most powerfully withholds men, especially thinking and religious men, from becoming Catholics, is, curiously, the one of which least account is taken by the zealous apostle and apologist.

There are some books whose line of approach sets up a train of thought in the reader’s mind. Quite apart from their intrinsic value, their very existence calls attention to some great problem, and only the more urgently when the problem is as obvious and the method of approach as honest as the day. In I Took Off My Tie Mr. Massingham has written a book of singular integrity and clarity of purpose; a book which has some of the clumsiness arising from profound honesty. Few writers succeed in attaining to such perfect unselfconsciousness as this author. The subject described is the life of a group of tenants in two or three houses in a side street in the East End. The book, as was almost inevitable from its subject, has suffered extensively at the hands of reviewers and has received a good deal of rather treacly praise. By some papers it has been regarded as a document or a sign and as other tiresome things. Mr. Massingham’s treatment of his subject is non-sentimental rather than unsentimental, and a writer of less integrity would have suppressed the character of little Annie Morgan knowing how the childhood of the poor throws the British Public off its balance. I Took Off My Tie is a record of actual experience and the author shared, in so far as he was permitted, the lives of the people he describes.

Catholic doctrine rests on two foundations: the revelation of God in nature, and the historic Revelation given to man which culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ.

We have already said something of how God is revealed to us in nature. We have seen that there is not a phenomenon in the world around us or within our own consciousness that does not tell us something of God, which can be so much as explained fully without some reference to a God, a creative, dynamic, supreme Intelligence and Will. The very existence of phenomena postulates the existence of such a One; their varied goodness and beauty tell us something of the goodness and beauty of God.

Yet, what nature has to tell us about God is not wholly satisfactory for many reasons. Although it is a fact that all phenomena in some measure reveal God, it is certainly not a fact that all men have found themselves capable of realizing that God is revealed to them in the world around them. The human mind is commonly too weak, too prejudiced, to be able to penetrate all that nature has to tell it; to see in phenomena the reflection of God’s attributes; to reason out patiently and accurately all that nature implies.

This book consists of two lectures, the first on The Normal View of Art, the second on Liberty and Discipline. We wish it were possible to have them delivered and redelivered in every public place (not specially Art Schools) in the English-speaking world; for the principles they enunciate are precisely those which our civilization most completely flouts and most needs to know. Such a wish is, however, not only “crying for the moon,” it would also be no more than “locking the stable after the horse has gone.” It is much too late now to hope for any widespread and deliberate reform of our world; what we must expect is such a complete breakdown of our palpably inhuman and therefore doomed institutions as will place us again in a state of primitive simplicity and barbarism and thus make possible a new growth, and eventually a new flowering, of the human and humane spirit. Meanwhile the existence of such lectures is all to the good. It is, under divine providence, possible that some memory of them will survive to fructify the new dark age which is obviously upon us. “My words shall not pass away,” and the words printed in this book are so clearly conformable to the Word which was in the beginning that we may hope for a like permanence.

To write a “review” of Dr. Coomaraswamy’s lecture is in fact an impudence; the only proper review would be a complete reprint. It has a clarity of vision which amounts to holiness.

“London was a bumper,” wrote old General Dyott in his diary for 1838, “foreigners in abundance.” Here are some of them. Dr. Mathew starts with Queen Adelaide, 677 tons, a Deptford built schooner-rigged paddle-wheeler with the new feathering floats, riding alongside the stone quay at Calais, and tells of her passengers, most of them crossing to attend Queen Victoria’s coronation. In previous works his treatment has been admired of the little Carthusian world before the Reformation, of the Celtic peoples about Queen Elizabeth, of the English Catholic minority in the seventeenth century. Now he evokes the decade after the Reform Bill: chokers and oysters and muffins and grog, fretwork iron verandahs, the London and Greenwich viaduct railway —“the enginemen are most judicious and the carriages are accompanied by guards in the livery of the company”— steamers so new-fangled that in rough weather it was feared the machinery might break loose.

The book is a delicate and allusive study of the different conventions and temperaments displayed when the vessel runs aground in a fog. Serene round the whist table sits privilege, the Austrian Ambassador, the Russian Envoy Extraordinary, the Minister of the brand-new Hellenic kingdom, and Lady Augusta born a Somerset. A shabby Carlist courtier is less assured, though he stands for a polity older than the Holy Alliance and Badminton House, more defined than the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe represented in the first-class saloon by M. Gratry. For a European order more ancient and secure, Mgr. Beccaria is writing in his cabin, “in an even light he could see his reports and their weaknesses and their passage through the Congregations in Rome, the venerable prelates and the gradual and sometimes retarded victory of balanced argument.”