Love is a word we use for widely different activities: sexual desire, friendship, turning to God; we even ‘love’ books or games. The differences can be marked by adjectives (love is ‘carnal’ or ‘spiritual’), but the recurrence of the same noun implies, one supposes, that something remains the same, or similar, in every case. But it is not easy to define this common factor or similarity, and we are more likely to be irritated by the ambiguity of ‘love’ than to try to see how it arises—to take, I mean, this ambiguity as a clue for exploring our own nature. On reflection, however, we might agree that the imprecision of the term comes from its meaning, if anything, too much, not too little; from its referring to something at the centre of existence and involved, inextricably, with all that we do. We might, of course, try to limit the meaning of the word to one particular context, to sexual relations; but although ‘love’ in modern English does chiefly refer to sex, such a limitation would he somewhat artificial. The idea behind the wider, inclusive use of thi term arises quite naturally, and it is an integral part of our culture, as a glance at any Latin dictionary will show. Already in classical Latin amor had a wide, trans-sexual sense; which Christian theology and meditation was quick to appropriate in its turn, and then enormously to extend—enough to recall a single great phrase from St Augustine, pondus meum, amor meus: ‘my weight is my love; thereby I am borne, whithersoever I am borne’.

I cannot remember ever having seen an article in blackfriars on sin—not sin and Mauriac or Graham Greene, or sin and homosexuality or sin and Jung: just sin. This may very well be due to my own pre-occupations; it is easy enough simply not to notice an article which doesn’t seem to offer anything to one’s immediate structure of interests. But even then, it may be, this inadvertence would not I feel be untypical. If the Catholic intelligentsia today is very conscious of having moved, and having to move still further, from a Catholicism almost wholly turned in on itself, psychologically and sociologically, almost wholly ‘interior’, it is hardly surprising that the Catholic themes which excite and hold attention are ‘exterior’ ones: liturgy, the lay apostolate, ‘the Bible’ (the Bible as proclaiming a message, kerygmatic, and not as ‘devotional’). Again, it isn’t easy to write about sin or to think about it, to make it an object of serious contemplation, to hold it before the mind’s eye. One’s own crude and violent experience of sin interferes with the peaceful contemplation;

Eight hundred electric lights brilliantly outlined the facade and cupola of the new market that looks out on the Mediterranean quayside. On the top of the building, angled eastwards, was a large illuminated X P (Chi Rho) symbol, surmounting the words, Pan-Orthodox Meeting of Rhodes 24.9 - 1.10.1961.

Rhodes gave a warm official welcome to the congress. Ecclesiastics and civic dignitaries spoke. There were dinners, concerts, trips. Perhaps the visiting naval vessels of the United States and Britain did introduce what someone described as ‘unfortunate over-tones’ to the atmosphere in which religious matters are best discussed. But, on the whole, everything was calm, apart from puzzled speculation among journalists and observers; the extra hundred or so attracted by the congress were easily absorbed among the sun-worshipping late season holidaymakers; taxis did a roaring trade; excitement seemed to be well contained within the closed church where the delegates met generally in private.

Religious inscrutability is intensified when ecclesiastics are bearded. Of the nine or ten Catholic priests on the island that week, four wore beards, but only Father Dumont, with the added advantage of his white Dominican habit, looked in place. The impression was forced on one that here was a man fully aware of the issues involved at Rhodes, who understood what the dignified prelates and their theologians were about: so far, an Orthodox might say, as a Latin can understand us.