The journey from Warsaw to Wloclawek was depressing: eighty-five miles of uneven road through flat featureless country, through villages poor and dirty beyond description, ankle-deep in mud and manure, the people dressed in layers of assorted garments, standing at the doors of their decrepit shanties, staring intently at our smart British car which belonged to my hosts. They had no other vehicle to stare at except long, narrow, wooden carts drawn by horses.

The journey back was more than depressing; it was frightening. For three-quarters of the way we were in thick fog, and the idea of spending the night in the car on the side of the road in that strange land was less alarming than the prospect of seeking shelter in one of the primitive villages. So we went steadily on, hardly faster than the wooden carts that sometimes trundled through the darkness. I was chilled, tired, hungry and very angry. The journey had been a waste of time and a mockery.

The day before, I was delighted to hear that my request to meet one of the bishops had been granted. The prelate I had named was Mgr Klepacz, Bishop of Lodz. Although the next day was to be my last in Poland and all my careful arrangements had to be altered, I was pleased with the thought of meeting the Chairman of the Conference of Bishops and the close friend of Cardinal Wyszynski. Then, when all these adjustments had been made, I was told that I was being escorted not to Lodz but to Wloclawek, not to see Bishop Klepacz but Bishop Pawlowski, the one bishop in Poland who agrees to, or is allowed to, receive foreigners, the one bishop of them all who is suspected of finding favour with the government.

Poverty and unemployment, slums and dirt were the conditions best known to those who worked amongst the under-privileged in 1925. In London and all the big cities families lived in houses that were dismal and insanitary, houses where a bathroom was an undreamed of luxury, where, as likely as not, hot water was to be obtained only from a kettle on an open fire. Walls were damp and crumbling and many women waged perpetual warfare against the ‘steam tugs’, as the Londoners called the bugs which tainted the air with their sickly smell. Families who had a four-roomed house to themselves were fortunate, for many were housed in large tenement buildings where lavatory accommodation was shared between several families and every drop of water used by the top floor tenants must be carried from upstairs a tap in the yard. In such buildings it was not unusual for babies to be bitten by rats or mice and for girls who were working in the exclusive shops of the town to be forced to keep their clothes in large paper bags that could not be invaded by the bugs at night. A bed to oneself was unheard of privacy in these overcrowded homes; there were few facilities for personal cleanliness and the family washing was done at the public washhouse. Cooking facilities were little better, and as there was no space for the storage of provisions food had to be bought in small quantities from day to day. Many spoke scornfully of the thriftlessness of the poor who had no knowledge of the conditions which forced them to live in such a hand-to-mouth fashion.

In any period men’s thoughts about the past tend to harden and simplify into conventional praise or disparagement. This in turn, as fashion and then prejudice, affects the present and the future; until a new generation finds it an intolerable cliche. It is then criticized and perhaps discarded. Modem scholars cannot stomach the old cliches about the Renaissance. To go further back, Voltaire’s generation sneered at Dante, whom it did not read, and thought Gothic a style for barbarians; and both these views, with their implications, had become conventional, not to say stale, by the mid-eighteenth century. When, with the new century, the tide turned, the motive was largely religious; a revival of Christian piety, a new interest in theology. But the new outlook could be equally one-sided. Pugin thought Gothic the only Christian style in building and Ruskin thundered against the neo-classical style of the Renaissance—‘pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age . . . an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants’. And from this attitude, become in turn a convention as stale as neo-classicism, we inherit (do we not?) much highly unpractical ugliness. Nor is the association of prayer with pointed arches quite dead yet.

The present century’s slow movement away from Gothic in ecclesiastical architecture has not however implied any loss of interest in the Middle Ages on the part of scholars or indeed of the educated public in general. Far from it. Never have the philosophy, art and literature of the Middle Ages been so thoroughly studied or keenly appreciated as in recent years.

The triumph of Christ for St Paul was most clearly shown in the resurrection. Being dead, he was buried and the third day rose again. The risen Christ was seen and St Paul lists the occasions (i Cor. 15). The resurrection is the supreme point of the triumph of God’s grace in the world, for it demonstrates that the flesh is redeemed. This does not merely mean that the corporeal, the quantitative element in man, is redeemed. It means a conquest of all that is alien from God in man’s hfe.

It is, of course, true that body, the whole sphere of sensation and imagination, becomes through Christ an instrument of salvation. Each sacrament is an occasion of the redemption of the whole man, and in each sacrament the physical and sensory is the sign of God’s action. Body is, therefore, not something inimical to the action of grace; far from being a poison or the instrument of corruption, it is of its nature made for God. The flesh as alien to God means something more complex. It is the whole man closed to God, feeding on his own resources. Man as independent of God and hence the victim of his illusions. Man the idol maker, cut off from the Creator, yet still creative. The symbol of his creation is no longer marriage: union with the ground of existence, hfe in the garden of controlled fertility: the symbol is adultery, the burning of the child, the jumping and slashing before the altars of Baal—creation and fertility run riot, become malignant because of sin.

This is overthrown by Christ: body is no longer evil flesh, but the carrier of resurrection. Because the Son condescends, subjects his body to the powers of evil, he redeems flesh. In the flesh the victory is won by the Word made flesh.