Has there ever been such a general sense of frustration as the world is suffering from today? I think not. In Pagan times this state of mind was certainly unknowm. People had bad luck, no doubt quite often, and keenly regretted it: but they never felt frustrated, for there was no basic, fundamental expectation which had got the bottom knocked out of it. Pagans knew that the gods were jealous and that a run of good luck and success was sure to break sooner or later. Or else, as the Hindu would put it, if he had a rough time, it was just his bad Karma; he was now merely paying in this life for the ill deeds he had committed in a previous’ one. Bad luck or bad Karma in neither case admitted of a sense of frustration.

In Christian times obviously there was no room for frustration either. What was this life but a vale of tears, a pilgrimage to one’s true home in another world? And if one did not expect anything better, how could one feel frustrated? Even when Christendom came to pieces and life became more and more secularized and paganized, the concept of frustration was absent. The eighteenth century witnessed the discovery of steam power and the ushering-in of the machine age: soon God was declared to be a hypothesis, which was no longer required, and man, instead of waiting for a better world beyond the grave, now began with his newly discovered powers to construct a better world right here.

The people of the country we call Rumania are in part descended from the ‘veterans of Trajan’, colonists drawn from several parts of the Roman empire, chiefly Italy and Illyricum, and planted in the province of Dacia in the early years of the second century A.D. They fused with the Thracian natives, and during the great migrations were overrun by Goths, Huns, Avars and other barbarians; the new people thus produced retained a language Latin in origin but modified by Slavonic and other influences—the name ‘Romania’ explains itself.

St Niketas of Remesiana (d.c. 414), to whom the composition of the Te Deum is attributed, is claimed as one of the apostles of the Dacians, and they certainly at first formed part of the Western church. But they were conquered by the Bulgars in the ninth century, passed to the Eastern church, and so were eventually involved in the Byzantine schism during the later middle ages. For a long time the Rumanians (or Vlachs) depended on hierarchs of the Bulgarian and other churches, and it was not till the fourteenth century that three separate metropolitans were given to the Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia by the patriarch of Constantinople; there were some Catholics of Làtin rite and earlier in the middle ages bishops were appointed to look after these Kuman converts and Magyar, German and Polish colonists. The Moldavian metropolitan, Damian, signed the act of union at the Council of Florence in 1439, but his church refused to support him.

When a man dies we reflect that he might have lived otherwise and attained to a Times obituary. W. W. Coupe, one of the more reverent of outcasts, would not have been more than mildly amused by a tribute to his spirit in the columns of The Times. But his death should not pass entirely unnoticed. In these days of ‘self-expression’ and gross over-publication we fail to realise just how many unpublished and unpublicised near-geniuses may live and die under the noses of the eminent and accepted arbiters of culture.

Coupe’s work was thinking. He was, in his way, a fine scholar and an interesting philosopher, yet when he died a short while ago only a handful of people knew of his work and were therefore able to recognise the extraordinary brilliance of his analysis. There are many reasons for this, the main one: Coupe. He had no talent for self-advertisement and made little effort at publication. Perhaps he would have enjoyed fame and notoriety, and gained a little happiness from academic distinction, for he was, I imagine, a reckless and ambitious fellow in his youth, and retained to the end an acute sense of humour. But he was by nature observer, analyst, commentator, even perhaps a bird of prey. He did not seek praise, he sought the response of understanding and exchanged ideas. He cared little for the mass, whether of scholars or of newspaper-readers, though he cared always, as every religious man must, for the innocent.

The natural sciences, especially physical science, have made very great strides in this century. I refer especially to Einstein’s theory of relativity and the quantum theory. There can be no doubt that these theories are valid; that is to say, either they are true, or they are abstractions bearing such a relation to truth that they systematise observations and lead to correct predictions. Among scientists theories are no longer regarded as true but have come to be recognised as abstractions, as a result of the teachings of Mach, but even more so as a result of the impact of relativity and quantum theory. The naïve realism of Newtonian physics is dead. But at the same time nobody has succeeded in building up a system of natural philosophy showing exactly how theoretical science is related to reality. The effect of this has been, on the one hand, to move scientists towards scepticism or even a kind of Kantian idealism, as in the case of the late Sir Arthur Eddington, doubting or denying the validity of the concepts of reality and truth. On the other hand it has prevented the Thomist arguments for the existence of God from resting upon the conclusions of natural science through the mediation of natural philosophy. Instead they rest upon the nature of common-sense.