The controversy roused by the Pope’s address last autumn to Italian obstetricians was at its height when on a Sunday evening I sat listening to the second of Lord Radcliffe’s Reith Lectures. His scholarly exposition of the natural law seemed to silence the din of ill-informed and sentimental criticism which had assailed the Holy Father’s calm and authoritative statement of moral judgments which were the ordinary teaching of the Church. It was not that Lord Radcliffe stood forth as a champion of natural law; the pleasure one felt was due merely to this reminder of a concept which had been the corner-stone of ethics for a millennium. For the attack on the Pope’s teaching in this particular allocution, like the modem propaganda in favour of birth control and euthanasia, of divorce and artificial insemination, was made in ignorance or in contempt of that fundamental law of nature which in fact governs most of these grave problems. That law goes almost unrecognised outside the Catholic Church. It seems opportune, therefore, to introduce this series of articles in Blackfriars with an account of the natural law and its relationship with law in general.

The word ‘law’ is used in a variety of senses today. It may mean the decree of a legislator, usually the human ruler, regulating the external conduct of the human subject; or it may mean a scientific law, like the law of gravitation, which is regarded as merely the expression of the behaviour of inanimate objects as discerned by a process of induction from observation and experiment.

But the medieval mind took a wider sweep, and subsumed under the name ‘law’ all these various meanings. First of all it considered the eternal law which was the plan of the all-wise Creator for the harmonious progress of the whole universe of his creation.

In my last talk I drew attention to some of the striking similarities between—on the one hand—the traditional Christian rites of Holy Week, and several incidents in the Gospel narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, and—on the other hand—the so-called pattern of the Dying and Rising God which emerged largely as the result of Frazer’s researches in The Golden Bough. Fifty years or so ago, it seems to have been widely supposed that these discoveries of similarity between Christian and pagan mysteries, collected by scholars like Robertson Smith and Frazer, popularised in tendentious paper-backs by writers like Grant Allen, somehow made nonsense of Christianity. And it must be admitted that they did make nonsense of a great many nineteenth-century ideas about Christianity; at least they made it impossible to regard it just as some sort of transcendental ethic, dropped ready-made from the sky, without roots in the earth, in history, without relevance to the basic and perennial needs of human society and the human psyche, or to the forms and forces that shape them. But I remember when, as a boy, I read one of those books published by the Rationalist Press, it had just the opposite effect on me to that intended. The Christian Scriptures and the Catholic rites to which I was accustomed, without losing their wonted sense, gained a quality and a sense of which my pastors and catechisms had told me nothing: a sense of solidarity with creation, with the processes of nature, with the cycles of the seasons. Dramatisations of the processes of vegetation they might be, but had not Christ himself drawn the analogy between the Christian self-sacrifice and the grain of wheat which must die if it is to bear fruit?

I had just switched on the light in my reputedly haunted room when the door of the cupboard swung slowly and purposefully open and a heavy thud behind it proclaimed that the skeleton therein had decided to take action.

It was a suitcase, precariously balanced on a mound of junk, that had, by its pressure, forced the door open at last, and the hollow sound of its falling was a proof that the policy of keeping a room tidy by throwing everything into a cupboard and slamming the door shut is no policy at all. It is a short cut, and a short cut is often an evasion of responsibility. Tidiness is not order.

Among the results of the fall of man, this attempt to take a short cut back to Paradise is perhaps the most disastrous in its consequences. Mankind was scarcely on the hither side of the flaming sword when it was first essayed, and Cain murdered Abel in order to obtain an illusion of order by destroying the evidence of a righteousness superior to his own. Abel’s sacrifice was visibly accepted, Cain’s rejected. The Lord God showed Cain that the cause lay in his own bad will. ‘If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? But if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door?’ Cain found the rebuke to his pride intolerable. He murdered his brother to remove the offending evidence of his own inferiority. Whatever his previous sin had been, he committed a far graver one to erase its consequences. It is the classic picture of fallen humanity failing to acknowledge its own perversity and sinning more deeply still in order to create an illusion of being in a state of justice. Slam the skeleton into the cupboard and close the door firmly.

There is an interesting little paragraph in St Thomas Aquinas’ works which refers to play. He has been describing how every action is performed towards some end, with some aim in view. Then he breaks off, and says that there are some actions which do not seem to be for any end, such as contemplating, playing—stroking one’s beard! Leaving aside the beard-stroking (which St Thomas accounts for as would a modem analyst), he sees close similarities between contemplation and play. That is to say, contemplation does not have any end outside itself, because it is its own end; likewise with play, for although we sometimes play so as to study better afterwards, we also play for the sheer delight which is in the game itself. Therefore there is obviously a close similarity between the playful and the contemplative attitudes: they have no end outside themselves.

St Thomas begins an exposition of Boethius by quoting from the book of Ecclesiasticus (XXXII, 15) where man is told on rising to run first to his home, and there recollect himself and play. St Thomas uses the quotation to explain that he is undertaking this exposition because to contemplate wisdom (the recollection) is itself a delightful game which requires no exterior aim for its justification. Furthermore, he points out, the Scriptures themselves compare the divine wisdom to the delight of play, for in Proverbs VIII, 30, we hear how ‘I was with him forming all things; and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times’. In view of which one is not surprised to discover St Thomas saying that a man may commit sin by not playing sufficiendy.

In the great pastoral effort of contemporary Catholicism, a return to sources seems to provide one of its most powerful inspirations and also to give some of the finest results. Catholics are re-discovering an interest in the Bible, the Fathers, the Liturgy, an interest which completes and perfects what the return to the texts and teaching of St Thomas has contributed to Christian thought during the last fifty years. But since in this case a purely scientific perspective is not sufficient, what is required being not only to admire but to assimilate, the problem of the approach to, and interpretation of, these sources cannot fail to arise. And, primarily, the problem of how to read the Bible, how to discover anew a constant source of spirituality and of triumphant Christian energy in the Old Testament which modem exegesis seems at first sight to have drained of its spiritual value. A more extensive reading of the Fathers, by revealing innumerable possibilities and resources, has made the problem of the Bible more acute. We know that the Fathers, like the men of the Middle Ages moreover, were familiar with the sacred text through and through; many of them knew it by heart; it formed the subject of their prayers, the theme of their sermons; their language, even when there is no explicit quotation, is of the very warp and woof of the expressions of Holy Scripture. For them the Scriptures truly and unceasingly provide a meeting place with God, a discourse and a lesson given by God to man repeated over and over again in a thousand different forms, but (the point is an important one) directly and totally translatable, in terms of Christianity and the mystery of the New Covenant.