H E is religious to whom something is holy’. The most basic experience of man is the impact upon his own .person of power from without. Towards the ultimate source (or sources) of this power he cannot be indifferent. He may react in one of two ways: he may regard it as something to be controlled and used, or as something to be served and propitiated. The first of these reactions is condemned by religion as such. It is the attitude defined as hybris, arrogance. Man attempts to place himself above the ‘Source of Power’ instead of acknowledging himself its lowly servant.

‘You said in your heart,
I will climb the heavens,
I will raise up my throne
Above the stars of God.’ (Isaias xiv, 13.)

The essence of religion consists in the second kind of reaction. Man feels himself confronted with an Other Being, one which wholly transcends himself and his own small circumstances, yet one from which constant impacts upon himself and his world are being experienced. The idea of holiness is in fact derived from these two elemental intuitions of Otherness and of Power. The holy is that which controls and transcends the profane, ‘a Being of Power, strange and of a different order, dangerous and lifegiving, terrifying and repelling and at the same time attractive, far away and near at hand, full of mystery’. The impact upon his awareness of such a ‘Being of Power’ summons man to acknowledge its sublimity on the one hand and his own lowly dependence on the other. Worship is man’s ‘Complete Responser to this summons, the response of religion to holiness.

To continue this brief survey of some recent exponents of those final causes which, if they are dead, certainly wont He down, here is a quotation from Professor Agar’s Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (2nd edition, 1951). After discussion of the significance of organs of perception and their function he says : ‘The anticipatory aspect of perception compels us to recognize the reality of final causation in all perceiving organisms. Anticipation implies the power of directing action in accordance with that anticipation; otherwise it would have no function. The function of the capacity of anticipating future occurrences is to influence present action in relation to that anticipation. Causation in this sense is teleological or final causation. It is directed towards bringing about a situation which is not yet existent.’ Once again the argument seems to depend on a prior assumption that living organisms are in some way essentially different from non-living, and such an assumption is unwelcome to those of us who have a natural sympathy with monist rather than with dualist interpretations of the things of nature.

Dr L. E. R. Picken, the Cambridge zoologist, writing in 1955 of the significance of final causes in the development of biological structures, says: ‘Claude Bernard expressed the opinion that science is not concerned with first causes (origins); he might well have added that scientists are also scared to death of final causes (ends). But it is clear that the biologist at least cannot be indifferent to final causes—to ends—any more than was Aristotle himself, whose entire analysis of types of causation is coloured by his biological studies.’

The first exhibition of William Blake’s paintings was held in 1809, just 148 years ago, in the house where he was born, 28 Broad Street, Golden Square. (The building can still be visited in Soho and contains a shop-sign business.) His brother James Blake, who had taken over their father’s hosiers’ trade, lent the first floor of the house for the exhibition which had several famous visitors. Among these was the poet Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and the Boswell of the age, Henry Crabb Robinson. It is interesting to remember this first humble showing at a time when the great galleries of the nation are vying with one another to present William Blake bi-centenary exhibitions. To celebrate the birth of this amazing poet and painter on November 28, 1757, the Tate Gallery has arranged an especially lavish display of its Blake Treasures. The Print Room of the British Museum has shown not only its Blake collection but examples of the work of Blake’s contemporaries and followers. The Fitzwilham Museum at Cambridge, which possesses beautiful examples of Blake’s illuminated books as well as many paintings, has also been holding an exhibition. Up in Manchester the Whitworth Art Gallery has shown its Blakes together with those belonging to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the Victoria and Albert has arranged a special exhibition where newly acquired paintings as well as drawings and engravings which have long been housed there were shown.

It is eight years since Miss Sayers brought out her ‘Penguin’ version of the Inferno, to the surprise of some readers of her other thrillers. Yet it need not have surprised anyone that she was interested in Dante and perfectly capable of writing competent footnotes to the Comedy. The long Introduction to her Hell was, however, a remarkable manifesto in praise of Dante and in justification of her own rendering of his verse—at once a declaration of love and a statement of method. But the most remarkable thing was the translation itself, a real tour deforce—five thousand lines rhyming in an intricate pattern, the terza rima, which I should have thought an extraordinarily difficult one to handle in English, though Miss Sayers herself speaks of the task with noticeable sans gêne. It had been attempted before, notably by Binyon for the whole Comedy and by Professor Bickcrsteth for the Paradiso; both commendable efforts, especially the latter. Then came Miss Sayers’s attempt; and then, a little later, the quiet voice of Mr Eliot was heard, off-stage, to observe that it would be better not to try to reproduce in English, with its less copious and ‘in a way more emphatic’ rhyming words, the ‘light effect’ of the more easily rhyming Italian. Mr Eliot did not refer, in the lecture from which I quote, tc Miss Sayers; he was talking, with characteristic modesty, about his own Dantean pastiche in Little Gidding; but his judgment is relevant, of course, to any rhyming English version of Dante. Meanwhile Miss Sayers, undeterred and unwearied, forged ahead with hers. Hes Purgatory appeared in 1955; and though for the moment, I believe, she has turned aside to deal with the trifling matter of the Chanson and Roland, no power on earth, we may be sure, will prevent her from crowning her labours, in due course, with a Paradise.

The casting out of beams is inevitably a more ponderous process than the discerning of motes. It has about it the heavy-handed inelegance of fly-swatting, in contrast to the darting agile dancing of dragon-flies in the sunlight. God forbid that anyone should wantonly swat a dragon-fly, or that I should attempt to toss a caber at the dexterous mote-discernment of Fr McCabe. I would, in any case, almost certainly miss. But dragon-fly antics, while they delight our gaze, are liable to leave us a trifle dizzy; and the virtuosity of Fri McCabe’s logic, sound and brilliant though it is, may easily reduce the holders of the opinion he attacks to a sad confusion. Now the confusion of the enemy is a legitimate object only of military, not of didactic, attack. Accordingly, in the hope of disentangling some of this possible confusion, I intend to poke about among a few of the fine threads of Fr McCabe’s weaving with my clumsy beam.

He establishes the wholly blameless position that it is possible to judge people’s morals by their actions, that we can say not only ‘That was a wicked thing to do’, but also ‘It was wicked of you to do that’, and even, though less often and with less assurance, ‘You are a wicked person for doing such things’. He does so in terms of two gospel texts, ‘Judge not, etc.’, and the one about discerning the mote in thy brother’s eye. Let us set out in full the passage from the Sermon on the Mount in which these texts occur. I give them in an unauthorized translation in order to avoid the incantation-like quality the well-worn words have acquired, which so insidiously blurs their meaning. ‘Do not judge, in order not to be judged yourselves; for by the judgment you judge by shall you be judged, and the measure you measure out shall be measured out to you. But why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, while you do not notice the pole in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother “Let me get the speck out of your eye”, and just look at the pole in your own eye! Hypocrite, first get the pole out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly to get the speck out of your brother’s eye’ (Matt. 7, i ff.).