The birth of an innumerable quantity of new generations I cannot reconcile us to the death of one single man.’ These words of Nicolas Berdyaev come towards the end of one of his latest works to be translated into English, The Russian Idea; and it has since transpired that they were written also near the end of his own life. They may serve as a fitting epitaph to the life and work of one who will not easily be replaced, and whose labour of interpreting the Russian world to the West was among the most pressing tasks of our generation in a field in which the labourers are still tragically few. His passing, therefore, is at once a blow and a challenge. We have lost one who undertook what few are willing, and fewer still are equipped, to do. But because the work must be done, it behoves us indeed not to be reconciled to his death, but rather to be emboldened by it.

It is difficult in the stormy moment of an historical crisis to reflect at all calmly on the deeper issues below the surface of the political and military hubbub. Thought about the Russian question is almost paralysed by the very fact that everybody is thinking about it. The temptation to reduce a complex conflict to the simple categories of friend and enemy, of ‘them’ and ‘us’, necessarily destroys that effort to find common ground or at least to understand the motives and purposes of the beloved enemy.

The period in the life of the Church during which one and the same tradition flourished throughout the Christian world, in East and West alike, is generally supposed to be the first five centuries, or, in other words, the period before and up to the medieval. The Middle Ages, and especially what may be called the Latin Middle Ages, are either discounted altogether or else mentioned only in order to eliminate them from the field of investigation; three charges in particular being levelled against them.

To begin with, the Middle Ages in the West are held to have been juridical and institutional, fenced about by an intricate system of legislation; they were the Golden Age of Canon Law and thus opposed to the spontaneous developments characterising the Eastern Church over the same period of time. The medieval West was also marked by moral and psychological trends of thought in contrast with the mysticism of Eastern Christianity, and religious life tended to be more practical than contemplative in spirit. The immediate present and its concerns bulked larger than the disinterested pursuit of eternal life, and the temporal preponderated over the eschatological in importance. There is, moreover, a noticeably psychological bent in the writings of the men most representative of the centuries in question; to quote examples from either extremity of the period, we find St Gregory the Great pre-eminently the moralist of Scriptural exegesis, and St Bernard’s conscious fervour far removed from the ancient spirituality of the Charisma.

Many in middle age are finding how far they have travelled from the opinions of their youth, in most of those sublunary matters subject to the rule of opinion. In youth our opinions commonly present themselves to us in the guise of convictions; it is part of the process of growing up (and indeed of growing old), that we learn how much greater the field of mere opinion is than we imagined it in our youth. The two books before us represent for the present writer, and for others of his generation, something of that gradual revolution in ideas which the sheer pressure of events has brought to birth in us.

First let us look at Gill, who recalls our youth, Distributism, Belloc, Chesterton, and all that happy romantic hangover from the 19th century into our own day, which beguiled us in the twenties. Few will take Gill as seriously as does the Editor of these letters, describing him as one of the ‘greatest minds of the day’, and even gracing his thought with the high name of ‘philosophy’. One admits readily the fascination of Gill, his passionate didactic style, his capacity for self-revelation, his sincerity at times almost fanatical, his vision crystal-clear but narrow in range. But these qualities which constitute the attraction of Gill for so many are bought at a high price—the price of a sort of affected ignorance on his part of those many things which did not interest him. Say if you will a sort of refusal to acknowledge the existence of the total field of reality—a vicious habit of simplifying the complex.