We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.

We have set down these extracts in the time-order in which they were written and not in the time-order of the recorded facts. Thus St. Luke's record comes last. Yet it narrates facts earlier than those recorded in the three earlier Epistles of St. Paul.

The principle here involved is of fundamental importance in deciding the value of facts omitted by an earlier writer but recorded by a later.

The first extract is from the first letter St. Paul wrote to the much-tried converts in Corinth. This unique letter—almost the most characteristic of his letters—remains the bridge between the Epistle to the Galatians in all later epistles. When we reflect that it gives St. Peter a place of primacy four times, that it has the very form of consecrating the Blessed Sacrament, and that it discusses almost in philosophical terms the doctrine of bodily resurrection—we may wonder why St. Paul sends the salutation of a man Aquila and (presumably) his wife Priscilla.

According to statistics lately published and confirmed through investigations made among prisoners-of-war, ninety-three per cent, of the German people are still members of Christian denominations. Whilst it is hardly necessary to discuss the political aspects of this fact, I should like to make a few points regarding practical religious life in Germany which might contribute to an appreciation of that figure.

In justification of my venture, I may say that I am an off-spring of a family which for several generations past has played a prominant part in German Protestant church life and scholarship. I myself, through the study of Protestant theology, have become a Catholic. Educated in a purely Protestant part of Germany, I lived and worked for the last seven years previous to my emigration in one of the Catholic centres of the country. Living as I do at present in, I daresay, fairly close contact with Catholic life in these countries, I feel that perhaps the most important point in appreciating the religious situation in Germany is an understanding of the relations between Protestants and Catholics in that country. I must confine myself to some points which incoherent in themselves are all still up-to-date.

Roughly speaking and from a merely statistical view-point, Germany can be subdivided into a Protestant North and a Catholic South and West. However, whole provinces of Southern Germany, such as Wiirttemberg and the Palatinat, are predominantly and most actively Protestant, whilst Miinsterland, Ermland and Silesia have been, especially during the last twenty years, leading centres of Catholic life in Germany.

Shortly before the fall of France, there appeared in La Vie Intellectuelle a striking article by a French historian, G. de Reynold. The writer was then living in the centre of Europe and was thus very favourably placed to study current events. Many of his reflections are as relevant to-day as they were in 1940, and might prove of interest to a larger public. It is with this object in view that I would like to refer to them here.

De Reynold begins his article by putting forward the opinion that Europe, geographically speaking, can scarcely be considered a continent; her space is too restricted, her peoples too mixed and individual to produce a homogeneous civilisation. She is more in the nature of an Asiatic peninsula. Had it not been for Christianity she would by this time have been absorbed by Asia; yet we find her still the ombril of the world, fitted by Providence for a high and unique destiny. With Europe’s natural order and arrangement— easy access to the sea and splendid internal lines of communication— it is only when Christianity weakens within her borders that a general disintegration occurs—and M. de Reynold is of opinion that should there ever be total apostasy it would be a sure presage of death, a death heralded by a long agony. The weakening in Christian beliefs has always been the forerunner of some Asiatic assault, or at any rate of the imminent danger of such a thrust. This danger is enhanced by the fact that the Asiatic conception of Empire, ever since the days of Diocletian, has exercised a distorting and sinister influence on the European conception of the Imperium Romanum. Asia is a continent of ‘worlds,’ its pattern is the Empire, whereas Europe is composed of nations and its pattern is the ‘kingdom.’