The words ‘People and Freedom’ did not sound well to Catholic ears when a small group bearing that name was founded in London in 1936 under the inspiration of Don Luigi Sturzo. ‘Sounds to me like Bolshevism’, said an old lady to whom the Group’s news-sheet was offered outside Westminster Cathedral. And the old lady echoed the feelings of the majority of her co-religionists, who found the title slightly provocative and subversive, not knowing that it had once been the proud old Guelf motto of the City of Florence—the battle-cry of Pope and people.

It would be untrue to describe English Catholics as philo- fascists in the years immediately preceding the war of 1939. There were, of course, the devotees of General Franco and those who—in the words of Professor Brogan—considered Mussolini to be ‘a combination of Augustus, Constantine and Justinian’, but the majority felt that whilst Democracy worked well enough in England, it was not an article for export, especially to Catholic countries, where authoritarianism was the form of government not only best suited to the temperament of the people, but most in keeping with the ‘Catholic tradition’. Those who travelled on the Continent were told by their friends, especially in France, of the existence of a few extremists, best described as ‘Black Marxists’ or ‘Red Christians’, who were fortunately unrepresentative and insignificant. No one seemed aware of the existence of a vigorous Christian-Democratic movement with a tradition extending well over one hundred years—soon destined to play a leading part in saving Europe from Communism.

A March afternoon. At Ascalon, five miles from the Gaza Strip, in a hot, windless silence smelling of orange blossom, three of us had picked up fragments of Roman glass and pottery two thousand years old, had looked down from the broken ends of the ruined Crusader walls to the long white beach and the dark Mediterranean. We had forgotten the huge factory and the new settlement to the north. We had forgotten our plan to drive on to Beersheba, thirty miles to the south-east. For the moment we were isolated from the pressure of work against time which makes Israel an invigorating, exhausting, nervous country.

Now there was no time to visit Beersheba. We must drive fast to reach Jerusalem before dark. Our guide, tirelessly informative, drove eastwards. As we approached the Jordan frontier a prospect of wild, hilly, stony, deserted country opened out, the edges of the Negev. We were suddenly aware of tension and anxiety. We stopped to pick up a young soldier who wanted a lift to the next military post. The tension dropped momentarily: we had a revolver aboard. That mound on the left; That was the mound of Gath. Yes, there was heavy fighting here during the war. Which war; The War of Liberation, the most recent of the endless conflicts which have raged across the landscape of Palestine.

A few miles further on, at an army camp which used to be a Palestine Police Station, the soldier got out. Tension mounted and we drove faster into the bare, rocky mountains of Judaea.

In this final article we shall examine and contrast the verdict of two traditions upon one of the most far-reaching and divisive of all doctrinal developments, the cultus of our Lady and the Saints; the tradition of historic Christendom in East and West, and the tradition of the Churches of the Reformation. The development of Mariology, which is of course a part of Christology, from the virginal conception and the divine Motherhood, clearly grounded in the New Testament, to our Lady’s perpetual virginity, her Immaculate Conception and her corporal Assumption, together with the universal mediation of her merits and intercession, is viewed by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches upon precisely similar principles; the later developments being regarded as implicit in New Testament doctrine. It is true of course that since the definition of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by Pius IX, Orthodox theologians have unanimously denied what they formerly treated as an open question. Dr E. L. Mascall has remarked on the suspicion of the West that the real objection is not so much to the dogma itself as to the mode of its promulgation. He goes on to suggest the need for a deeper investigation by the Orthodox of the nature and transmission of original sin, with a view to clearing away misunderstandings concerning its bearing upon the doctrine as defined.

This universal tradition of the cultus of our Lady, a wholly developed doctrine, found in the Scriptures in seminal form only, was rejected at die Reformation in deference to the insights of the Reformers, who claimed not only to set right abuses, but, on the strength of those insights, and in opposition to the authority of the Church’s Tradition, to decide what were abuses, and what were not.

Happy is the minority that has no history. The Jews of Britain, Dr Neustatter shows in this book, are impossible to count with any accuracy. They carry no identity cards, fill no special column of the census, have no special status defined by law. Once, at the beginning of their community in the seventeenth century, they would have wished for such a status. Luckily for themselves, they were never given it. They have had to contend, says Dr Parkes, with conservatism rather than official hostility or formal anti-semitism. They have increased, flourished, and absorbed what has sometimes been a trickle and sometimes a flood of new immigrants. There were 350 Jews in Britain in 1690, 35,000 in 1850, 350,000 in the late ‘thirties, 450,000 in 1950. One European Jew in 27 was British in the ‘thirties, one in six, after the Hitlerite massacres, in 1951.

Naturally, there have been times of difficulty. The great flight from Russia from the 1880’s to the first World War, which filled up trades like tailoring and the classic Jewish quarters of the East End, threatened to associate Jewry in the public mind with sweating, overcrowding, and undesirable aliens. But the crisis was handled skilfully and passed, thanks partly to the good sense and qualities of the immigrants themselves and partly to the cohesion, good management, and readiness to pay of the Jewish community previously established. The Jewish immigration as a whole has brought great economic benefits to Britain. Perhaps I see these through too rosy spectacles, for who is a Montague Burton Professor to bite the Chair he sits on? But look at commerce alone, think of a few of the Jewish names which have become household words, and it is obvious what the gain has been. Montague Burton is one: Marks and Spencer another: Lyons a third. These are the giants.

There are many unresolved questions about the relations of the natural sciences to Aristotelean-Thomist philosophy, and the accurate placing of science on the map of intellectual activities is one of the most important objectives of our time. The prestige of science is still so high that the relative neglect of it by Thomists is unfortunate, and a positive approach is of great value. The American Dominicans have therefore done wisely as well as boldly in setting up a permanent institution where scientists and philosophers can meet and collaborate, with a permanent staff most of whom have been trained in one of the natural sciences as well as in the Thomist tradition. This institution is called the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science and is situated in a suburb of Chicago. Its leaders hope that, by bringing men engaged in specialized research into contact with a homogeneous intellectual tradition, they will be able to help scientists towards a synthesis that they feel to be necessary for the health of science itself as well as for modem culture generally. Clearly this venture could be of the greatest importance.

The present volume is a report of an ambitious five-week meeting held in 1952, at which a varied group of experts in philosophy, logic and the natural sciences considered the relations between modem science and the Aristotelean tradition. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology were allotted a week each, and the final week was devoted to an attempt at synthesis.

The first two or three centuries of the Christian era witnessed a luxuriant outcrop of sects which we nowadays group together under the label ‘gnostic’. But ‘gnosticism’, as the name of a religious movement, is a modem invention. True, some of these sects did like to style themselves ‘gnostic’; but the Greek word gnosis only means ‘knowledge’, and that is a thing to which not only heretical sects laid claim. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Christian Church’s history, it was part and parcel of God’s manifold gifts to his faithful, of which the Christian community believed itself to be the privileged recipient. St Paul himself writes to the Corinthians about the diversity of gifts and ministries in the believing community, under the One Lord: ‘But to each one’, he writes, ‘is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the profit of all: to one it is given to speak the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of gnosis, of knowledge, according to the same Spirit’, and so forth. And yet he, too, knew of ‘profane babblings and paradoxes of the falsely so-called gnosis’, and he warns his disciple Timothy against their seduction. This self-styled gnosis is, in his eyes, the parody of the God-given knowledge enjoyed by the faithful.

From St Paul onwards, gnosis has retained this two-faced character. On the one hand, for a Christian Father like Irenaeus, the ‘gnostic’ could become almost synonymous with the ‘heretic’; on the other, the no less orthodox Clement of Alexandria could write of the ‘true gnostic’ as the ideal of the Christian theologian, the model of the man to whom is vouchsafed a Spirit-given insight into the mystery which penetrates deeper than that of his fellows with a more easy-going faith.

The bus conductor knew where the prison was, of course. ‘I suppose you’ll be a visitor’, he remarked, with the beginning of a smile. ‘I see them every day, lots of them— visitors, I mean. I reckon there’d be a good deal less nonsense in the papers if the reporters had my job. Crime doesn’t just mean blokes behind bars: it’s mothers and brothers and wives. We’re all of us in it one way or another, I reckon.’

The bus conductor was right. The frowning walls of a Wandsworth can be society’s final alibi: the publicly condemned, out of sight, out of mind unless there’s a riot or an execution, are hostages to many of our miseries and reflect much more than the crimes they have committed. This is not to deny their responsibility nor to condone the violence that, since the war and especially among young criminals, has become so grievous a social problem. And sentimentality is in this context the worst of counsellors. Yet the isolation of crime, of which the very structure of a prison is the symbol, can mask its further meaning. To arrest the wrongdoer, to demand his exclusion from society, satisfies the natural need of society to be protected from its aggressors. And punishment must remain a sanction to vindicate the claims of law. Yet for a Christian conscience the crimes of the member are the affair of the whole body. ‘All mankind is in Christ one man, and the unity of Christians is one Man’, St Augustine reminds us, and the shared life of the Body does not cease when the members rebel.

Catholics have been hearing, during recent months, of the prospect of something like a crisis in the Church of England, and even of the possibility of a schism. The trouble has arisen from the anxiety, mainly of Anglo-Catholics, caused by the growing desire amongst Anglicans in general for the acceptance in full communion, as soon as may be, of the newly constituted Church of South India. Most Anglicans, and even many Anglo-Catholics among them, would be ready to extend to this venture the completest possible recognition compatible with maintaining the unity of Anglicanism as a whole. The anxiety of Anglo-Catholics arises from doubts as to how far this may itself be compatible with the integrity of their own particular principles of Faith and Order, which they hold to be an essential element in the Anglican contribution to work for unity.

Any understanding of what all this means, in the context of ecumenical ideas, and that of course is its main interest for Catholics, depends first of all upon a knowledge of what the so-called South India scheme involves, and secondly, less easily attained, upon the understanding of what Anglo-Catholics mean by the maintenance of Catholic Faith and Order in the Church of England, and of the fears they entertain of its infringement by too hasty a recognition of the Church of South India, as it now is in its formative stage.

Antonio Rosmini, who died a hundred years ago, has a distinguished but rather singular place in Catholic history. Revered by many as a saint in all but name, founder of the Institute of Charity, a priest corde et animo, he was also, in the judgment of the relatively few who have studied his writings, a very great Christian intellect; while for students of Italian history he has an honourable if somewhat isolated place in the complex national revival known as the Risorgimento. Evidently a many-sided person and yet, just because of this, not one to be easily identified with any particular group or trend in Church or State. And this isolation, so to call it, is reflected in the fortunes of those voluminous philosophical writings which Rosmini himself considered his main life-work, along with the founding of the Institute. Among Catholics they are still shadowed, though less than formerly, by a suspicion of unorthodoxy; while anti-clericalism has hindered, until recently, their influence with lay academic circles especially in Italy. Moreover Rosmim’s literary style, though clear and dignified, entirely lacks the ease and grace and sting which so helped Croce, for example, to win the attention of his countrymen and hold it for nearly half a century. However there are now signs of a change; and in post-war Italy Rosmini’s influence is probably stronger, if still less widely diffused, than Croce’s.

Two more theologians have recently responded to Professor Jung’s invitation to collaborate with his work. Both of them are priests. One belongs to the Belgian Province of the Society of Jesus. The other is a German Jewish convert to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Their respective books contrast sharply. Father Hostie’s book, despite its restricted (and rather baffling) title, is the more comprehensive and ambitious. It attempts a complete exposition and critique of the whole of Jung’s work, at least to the extent that it impinges on religion and philosophy. Dr Zacharias’s book is more limited in scope, and treats of some particular questions which arise from Jung’s more recent work only; but what it loses in breadth it gains in depth. The contrast however lies mostly in their respective attitudes and manners of approach. Fr Hostie expressly restricts himself to a review of Jung’s published writings. Although he is convinced that ‘repeated personal contact with Professor Jung and his closest collaborators is absolutely necessary to grasp the exact meaning of the texts’, he deliberately confines his study to Jung’s ‘official publications’. This restriction is not without its value: it is, after all, from his writings, and without the benefit of personal contact and vocal interpretations, that Jung must be most widely known and judged. Moreover Fr Hostie has conducted his examination of these official writings, comparing and collating the various editions, with scrupulous care; and has incidentally added the most complete bibliography yet made of them—it includes several early opuscula which even the editors of the Collected Works seem to have missed.

The remarkably violent storm which raged around the two talks broadcast last January by Mrs Margaret Knight has now happily subsided and I do not want to start it again. Some of the attacks on Mrs Knight’s views looked like simple manifestations of bad temper, if not of actual hysteria, and very few showed much real understanding of her position. Although there is rather more rhetoric than logic in some of what she says, it seems to me that on the whole her talks present an understandable and moderate non-Christian view.

One who believes that religion is an illusion could do very much worse than follow Mrs Knight’s line of thought and action. She maintains, quite rightly, that it is inconsistent to ask your children to believe what you yourself think to be false. The Christian, of course, thinks it better that a non-Christian should sometimes be inconsistent in practice; just as a liberal humanist prefers a communist or fascist to act inconsistently with his principles, and rejoices to hear that children in Russian schools are brought up to respect ideals of scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty which a true communist might not accept. However one cannot expect a non-Christian to prefer to be inconsistent, one cannot blame Mrs Knight for wanting to be reasonable, and given that religion is an illusion it seems to me that her views are very reasonable. The question on which everything else turns is simply: Is religion an illusion or not?

Poetry and diplomacy are so rarely allied that there is the possibility of overlooking the fact that the great poet who has just died was also a distinguished diplomatist, ambassador at one time in Tokyo and at another in Washington, where he negotiated the Kellogg-Briand pact. This leading of a full life in the world of practical affairs and the simultaneous creation of an immense body of poetry, mystical in inspiration, denotes, not a dichotomy, but indeed a rare harmony. Claudel was not a poet who had strayed by chance or mischance into the diplomatic service; neither was he a professional diplomatist who wrote verse as a relaxation from official memoranda. He was at one and the same time a diplomatist by choice, rising through the various grades of consular service to ambassadorial status, and a poet from whose God-centred vision nothing human was alien. What influence his poetic genius may have had on his diplomatic activity one does not know, but it is clear that his poetry was enriched by the fulness of his human experience. It is rare nowadays for a poet to be a man taking full joy in all that is human, for whom the material world is a thing of beauty, yet who recognizes that the loveliness of God’s creation is but a foretaste of the absolute beauty which is in God. As he writes in his poem on St Teresa:

‘After the Steppe-cat—What?’ It is with the feeling of baffled uncertainty posed by Mr Thurber’s wistfully evocative question of long ago that the English filmgoer may look at the Italian cinema today, or at least so much of it as he is able to see for himself or learn about from the writing of those who have seen more, or other, films than he. For after Umberto D —what? This great film is not only the climax of the neo-realist school in Italy, it is also its full-stop, for after this there is really nothing more to be said in this line without repetition or recession. The Italian cineasts must either drive roads across new country or they must fall back on old ones which have for some time been abandoned.

This is not the first time that Italian films have had great importance; in the very early days of the cinema the Italians had an influence quite disproportionate either to their output or to their distribution. That taste for the grandiose and the magniloquent which had so far had to express itself in opera (should we prefer not to go back quite so far as the Imperial Games), seized upon the cinema as the perfect vehicle for the spectacle, seeing here no limit to the scale of decor or caste except the financial; and it produced in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis (1912) and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), two films which set the pattern for a picture which the Italians seem to have been making, on and off, for some forty years—each one bigger and more lush than its predecessor.

The pleasures of literature may be classified as arising either from form or from content or else—and it is a classification which cuts across the first scheme—from the intellectual or architectonic element on the one hand, or the sensuous or harmonious on the other. By the pleasures of form one means the qualities of structure in novel or play, the satisfaction of speech sound in poetry produced by all the devices of the art— examples, widely different, are Spenser or Fray Luis de Leon, Swinburne or Jose Asuncion Silva, and T. S. Eliot or Luis Cernuda. By the pleasures of content one means either the incident-interest, the captivation of the attention that makes it impossible to ignore the command: ‘Now read on’, or the philosophical content, by which is meant the extent—if any—to which an author’s content and form contain any understanding of experience, any interpretation: here the pleasure that is exclusively literary is derived from the skill with which the interpretative element is presented or conveyed. The pleasure of rightness of interpretation is, of course, of a non-literary order. But the architectonic pleasure may arise from the form and the content taken together: it is the pleasure that is given by a wide sweep of subject matched by form on a grand scale. The Divina Commedia, the Faery Queen, Shakespeare’s tragedies—all procure us an aesthetic pleasure drawn from a power within the artist’s mind which sees and conveys an apprehension of life on a grand scale, and is not dependent on either subject-matter or form taken by themselves.

Every creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called, in the wide eighteenth-century use of the term, a poet, is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. . . . The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the symbols a writer uses.’ These words written by Graham Greene in a review of Walter De la Mare’s short stories are illuminating in a study of Mr Greene’s own work, and in this brief paper I want to use them as a central point of reference, in attempting to show what is meant by calling Mr Greene’s work ‘poetic’. In a sense, my purpose is pre-critical since its emphasis falls on description rather than appraisal. Obviously, these are simply terms of convenience, and can never be exclusive of each other, but they serve to indicate an emphasis. Where Mr Greene’s work has been concerned, critical arrows have so easily felt the gravitational pull of moral and theological forces that the intended target has remained strangely untouched. This paper, flighted with a literary observation, tries to maintain direction by continually keeping in sight the idea that Graham Greene is a novelist and therefore the target primarily of the literary critic.

Of all the developments that have taken place in Wales since the end of the war, perhaps those most vital to the life of the nation are the efforts now being made to preserve and extend the use of the Welsh language. Until recent years it was taken for granted that the language was such an integral part of the average Welshman’s being as never to be in serious danger, and this in spite of the early defection of whole counties like Radnor and Monmouth and of parts of several others. Now, however, with the immigration which started with the war we find people of English and other nationalities settled not only in the towns and villages but even in farms and homesteads in the remotest parts of the country. In my own village, for example, fifty per cent of the children attending the village school are of English parentage and many of the farms in the valley have been bought by English people. In former days such immigrants were rapidly absorbed into the native population and soon became Welsh both in speech and outlook. Occasionally that still happens, but the trickle of immigration has become a flood and the process of absorption is in danger of being put into reverse. Added to this, there is the influence of television, the wireless, English newspapers and magazines and, by no means least, the increase of rapid transport to cities and resorts, most of which have long been anglicized.

During the first three months of 1955 imports exceeded exports by an average of £77 millions. In March the Trade gap was £92 millions. There was a slight improvement in April and May; but in June exports were £128 millions less than imports and in July they were still £107 millions short. And exports in June were £90 millions less than they were in June 1954.

Gold and dollar reserves at the end of July were £48 millions lower than they had been at the end of June. At the end of August they were a further £31 millions lower still. The country’s balance of payments situation was clearly deteriorating in the summer sunshine of 1955. And although Mr Butler said that there was no crisis in a speech at the end of July, a month later Sir Anthony Eden warned the country that the balance of payments situation was getting worse and that rising prices were tending to lead to loss of export markets. He declared that the Government were determined to enforce all necessary measures to ensure the health and stability of the economy.

The balance of payments difficulties with which the country was faced in 1949 were to some extent due to the recession in America in the summer of that year and to excessive dollar spending by Australia. The crisis of 1951 was mainly due to the 16 per cent increase in import prices in that year. But today there is no recession in America: there is a boom.