A Catholic, whose interest in the movement for Christian unity urges him to make ecumenical contacts with other Christians amongst whom he lives, will find himself, at least in town and city areas, confronted by Presbyterians, by Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists, and with a certain dominance of prestige by Anglicans. For his encounter a Catholic ecumenist will want to know about some if not all of these differing religious bodies; what sort of people are they, what divides them from each other, on what are they agreed? He will probably need knowledge to supplement his vague ideas of their history and how they came into being. He will be interested in their antecedent presuppositions, but still more in what are their aspirations, hopes, doubts and fears today concerning the prospect of future unity; its possibility, the changes it would involve and its dangers.

The Star Books on Reunion a series of six inexpensive paperbacks on unity as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Roman Catholics see it, contains the substance of this information in accessible and readable form. It is a pity that a seventh volume, on the Eastern Orthodox, was not included in the series, for full understanding of unity problems, especially the theological ones, requires the witness of these ancient churches. The authors are well chosen, highly qualified, theologically and pastorally, to represent the position of their respective communions. All of them share common ground in their conviction of the paramount importance of the ecumenical approach between Christians.

‘It was the pattern of Michelangelo’s life’, writes Mr Michael Ayrton, introducing a translation of the great artist’s sonnets, ‘that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed . . . whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him’. A story, then, of disappointment by distraction: an artist of outstanding genius in several media, but profoundly drawn to one in particular, finds himself repeatedly diverted, by circumstances and his patrons, from the work he most wanted to do; the result being the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment on the one hand, and on the other the unfinished tombs for Julius II and the Medici. And while those paintings are superb, they are unmistakably, almost pathetically, the work of a man whose deepest impulse was to carve in stone. ‘Say a good word, John’, wrote Michelangelo in the bizarre sonnet-letter to a friend about the discomforts of painting the Sistine vault lying on his back, ‘for these dead paintings of mine... for this place is no good and I’m no painter’. And many years later, in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, he tries to define what he felt about the two arts. It is a hesitant, halting letter because the old man was genuinely puzzled. Varchi, writing ‘philosophically’, had declared painting and sculpture to be really ‘the same thing’, and though Michelangelo knew by experience that they weren’t, he was too humble to contradict. He had always assumed, he replied, that painting was good ‘the closer it approached relief and relief was bad the nearer it got to painting, so that I’ve always thought of sculpture as the guiding-light (la lantema) of painting and that the two differ as the sun and the moon’. Now however he has changed his mind, yielding to Varchi’s metaphysics, agreeing that these arts ‘are one and the same’.

Stanley Spencer has left it on record how in 1916, among the miseries and the friendlessness of a military hospital in Bristol, he was suddenly aware of someone who, ‘like a Christ visiting Hell’, came walking down a stone passage towards him: ‘a young intellectual named Chute’. In April 1940, a few months before his own death, Eric Gill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘of Father Desmond I shall say little because my love for him is too intimate, too much a matter of daily companionship and discussion and argument, too close a sharing of life and work and ideas and doubts and difficulties - the only man and therefore the only priest with whom I have been able to talk without shame and without reserve.’ Ezra Pound, no blind admirer of the clergy, was present at Father Desmond’s funeral. It falls to me to offer some coherent account of this remarkable man, perhaps the most widely gifted of all English priests of his own time, yet one who through accidents of circumstance remained comparatively unknown. It is easy to gather recollections of him; it is hard now to convey to a younger generation the things he stood for.

He was born at Bristol on September 11,1895, a collateral descendant of William Charles Macready, the Shakespearian actor whose surname was his own second name; his family had kept links with the stage, and still owned the Prince’s Theatre at Bristol. In 1906 he went to Down- side; brilliant from the first, a classical pupil of Nevile Watts and later Head of the School, he might well have become a scholar of Balliol or of King’s, and this would have pleased both his parents; but in 1912 he chose instead to enter the Slade.

Dr Robinson has written an important book about God, Christ, the nature of religion and morality. He does not claim to be a professional theologian; it is not, as he says, his academic field, but the book will nevertheless be of great interest to theologians as well as to the general reader, and it deserves a more discriminating reception than it has so far received in the press. Those of us in particular who are grateful to the Bishop for his work in his own field of New Testament scholarship will want to pay him the compliment of treating his book seriously and critically.

The book suffers a good deal from the author’s lack of acquaintance with the history of theology. Thus he can open Chapter Two with the astonishing statement: ‘Traditional Christian theology has been based upon the proofs for the existence of God.’ This is, of course, flatly untrue. Traditional theology has always been based on faith in the Word of God. Whether and how God may be known apart from such revelation is itself a question within theology. To satisfy oneself that this is so one needs only to read the first three questions of such a classic of traditional theology as the Summa Theologica. In fact we might well complain that the area of theology connected with such proofs has been unduly neglected in recent years by conventional theologians—one good effect of the Bishop’s book may be to remind us that this is after all an important topic. He exemplifies some of the mistakes that may be made when it is neglected.

The front cover of the Penguin paperback Piers the Ploughman shows a woodcut of Langland lying beside a Malvern stream watching his vision of Piers. Piers is plowing the field of the world—there are the jackdaws flapping up out of the furrows and the sun shining hotly. Piers is giving Will a straight look, and Will is looking back: respectful, but a little dull and sheepish. They are both, naturally, barefoot. Then this other book, in covers exceedingly hard, and with no woodcut, opens to page thirty-five and, after a pointed quotation from St Augustine, commences a summary: ‘The Church needs, not only one to form her in the first place, but always, because she is deformed, a reformer. And this is Christ himself. This is why, throughout everything that we must not shirk saying, and in painful compassion and sorrowfully recognizing our co-responsibility, about the shadow-side of the Church, yet we can always firmly believe, in glad and unshakable faith, not in a sinful Church but in the holy Church.’ And further down the page (of The Council, Reform and Reunion) Hans Küng goes on: ‘ . . . insofar as God’s holy Church is a Church of men and sinful men, she, with everything that she is and has, is subject to that word of the Lord which reads “Do penance and be converted.” Insofar as the Church is deformed, she has to be reformed: ecclesia reformanda.’

In a previous article I argued that the present Western nuclear deterrents are immoral because they involve their operators, if not the Western governments, in the intention to destroy normal cities. And if this is true, we must stop co-operating with the present deterrent policies and try to change them.

The most obvious alternative to these policies is unilateral nuclear disarmament; and some people believe that we should accept unilateral disarmament in any case because the deterrent will sooner or later break down into nuclear war. But many would say that the disastrous immediate consequences of unilateral disarmament would outweigh the remote risk of war which attaches to the nuclear deterrent. If unilateral disarmament is the only alternative to our present immoral defence policy then we should adopt it, no matter how dangerous it may be. But if unilateral action is dangerous, we should not advocate it until we are quite sure that there is no alternative to our present policy which is morally permissible and less dangerous. Many people, including Catholics, view the nuclear deterrent not as an active preparation for mass murder but simply as a means of avoiding the situation which would arise without it. If Russia alone had nuclear power, she could blackmail us into surrender; we must have nuclear power too, not because we want to attack Russia or because we envisage a Russian attack - there is indeed virtually no danger of war - but simply to prevent the possibility of convincing Russian blackmail. One may point out to Catholics who regard the deterrent in this way that however unlikely war is and however much we are keeping the present deterrent just to avoid the consequences of not having it, it does still require its operators to be on the alert to destroy normal cities at a moment’s notice.

You cannot, says Karl Barth somewhere, talk about God simply by talking about man in a loud voice. But it may be asked whether, if you talk about man loudly enough, he does not eo ipso become a ‘god’ in some sense - in the sense in which St Paul says that the god of some men is their belly (Jung, rather unkindly, applies the same text to Freud), and in which the Psalmist said that the gods of the heathen were but idols. These uses illustrate the difference between what one might call the objective and subjective meanings of the word ‘God’. The Being ‘who alone exists of himself, and is infinite in all perfections’ (a well-known objective definition of the God in whom Christians believe) is an object of worship, of valuation above all else, for Christians (i.e. is their ‘God’ in the subjective sense). I call a humanist theology the intellectual formulation of a religious attitude which makes man its ‘god’ in the subjective sense. Someone might object that to call this a theology is an abuse of the term; yet such an abuse may be justified in as far it draws attention to interesting, and possibly disturbing, analogues to theology proper.

Men seem to have a disposition to talk about whatever they value most highly in a way comparable to Christian talk about God. As creatures prepared by creation to know and love God, we might be expected, when we do not believe in him or when we temporarily forget him, to apply the concepts we should have reserved for him to other objects. The Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz finds that he can train goslings of the Greylag Goose to treat him just as though he were their mother goose. H. G. Wells admitted to what he called a ‘Godshaped gap’ in human consciousness; in a similar way there was a gooseshaped gap in the soul of the goslings, which in default of the real goose could be filled by Konrad Lorenz. So much for the justification of the locution ‘humanist theology’. I shall continue with a brief account of the subject, merely sketching its beginnings in Hegel’s philosophy, and giving somewhat more space to its more thoroughgoing manifestations in the work of Auguste Comte and, more recently, Sir Julian Huxley.

The dangers which threaten the Catholic historian writing on controversial topics were all too plain in the works of Hilaire Belloc. Great as Belloc was as a writer, outstanding as he was in his capacity to recreate the past, he was nevertheless primarily a controversialist with a number of bees in his bonnet, and tragically, in many ways, he was a man in a hurry who had to turn out many books in order to support his children, who were, he said, crying out for pearls and caviar. All this helps to explain why Belloc, who was capable of being on occasions so brilliant an historian, wrote a remarkable amount of bad history. Moreover, partly because he had been denied the opportunity of pursuing his work without the perpetual nagging of financial worries, he turned on the university which had failed to give him the chance of exercizing his undoubted talents, and built up a picture of official academic historians, stupid, prejudiced, deceiving their readers by a spurious critical apparatus and footnotes which on investigation did not support the text. The stupidity, the ignorance and the deceitfulness of the dons became something of an obsession with him, and he thought official historians had entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now it must be admitted that when Belloc started writing, there was accepted by most educated Englishmen a picture of, say, the Middle Ages or the Reformation which is vastly different from what would be accepted now, and it is probable that Belloc’s writing did something to break down the old myths and prejudices, but it is still true that if Belloc was not acceptable to many non-Catholic historians it was because much of what he wrote was unbalanced and unsound.

If I dare to imagine that these letters may have some significance for both of us, it is because I believe that Christianity is concerned with human crises, since Christians are called to manifest the mercy and truth of God in history.

Christianity is the victory of Christ in the world, that is to say in history. It is the salvation of man in and through history, through temporal decisions made for love of Christ the Redeemer and Lord of History. The mystery of Christ is at work in all human events, and our comprehension of secular events works itself out and expresses itself in that sacred history, the history of salvation, which the Holy Spirit teaches us to read between the lines. We have to admit that this meaning is often provisional and sometimes beyond our grasp. Yet as Christians we are committed to the attempt to see some meaning in temporal events that flow from human choices. To be specific, we are bound to search ‘history’, that is to say the intelligible actions of men, for some indications of their significance, and some relevance to our present choice as Christians.

‘History’, then, is for us that complex of meanings which we read into the interplay of civilization. And we are also (this is more urgent still) at a turning point in the history of that European and American society which has been shaped and dominated by Christian concepts, even where it has at times been unfaithful to its basically Christian vocation. We live in a culture which seems to have reached the point of extreme hazard at which it may plunge to its own ruin, unless there is some renewal of life, some new direction, some providential reorganization of its forces for survival.

The attraction inherent in social work and the corresponding reluctance of Catholics to commit themselves wholeheartedly to it has always struck me as a curious paradox.

It is too obvious a fact to elaborate that to a Catholic conscious of his calling as a member of the Mystical Body and as a representative of Christ, the opportunities which social work provides for carrying out his obligations to his fellow men and for exercising charity to the fullest possible degree are exceptionally great. No discussion of social work with individuals is possible without reference to the casework relationship as its very foundation and I should like to clarify what I see as the reason for attaching such tremendous importance to the quality of this relationship, which the social worker succeeds in establishing with the client. It would seem to me that the high place allocated to this aspect of social work practice stems from our conviction that in and through this relationship we can offer to a fellow human being the most valuable gift which we possess; that part of ourselves which is most in keeping with our supernatural calling. It is only the intimacy of a relationship which provides an adequate means for a meaningful communication of our committal to the membership of mankind, to the fact that we are all members of one another, and to the implication of this truth. It is through this committal that we ourselves live more fully and enable others to do so. Herein is the golden opportunity which social work offers to Catholics. The recognition and acceptance of the unique importance which human relationships play in life must lead to the conclusion that there is no other occupation (parenthood excepted) which enables the same extent of valid concentration on this area.

There must always be a tension in Christianity between the demands of the world and the demands of the Kingdom of God. By her very nature the Church must be forever reminding herself that it is part of her vocation to be potentially subversive of any worldly order of things: and she must also be forever reminding the world of this fact too. But the definition of where this tension ought to fie, in the twentieth century, is not easy. We are still mainly influenced in our conception of it by late medieval and Jansenistic ideas. The spirituality of the Imitation of Christ lingers: ‘Fly the tumultuousness of the world as much as thou canst: for the talk of worldly affairs is a great hindrance, although they be discoursed of with sincere intention ... we are quickly defiled and enthralled with vanity’ (I. 10). The trouble is not that this kind of thinking is in itself bad, but that it is no longer taken seriously. The result is, I believe, catastrophic. Just as D. H. Lawrence was right to criticise the modem world - the product of the cold northern spirit of the Reformation and of the narrowing Catholicism of the counter-Reformation - for being obsessed with ‘sex in the head’, so we are right to criticise Catholicism for being preoccupied with a ‘spirituality in the head’ which is equally false. The essence of this parody of proper spirituality is to think of other-worldliness in terms of a future heaven of disembodied souls, instead of thinking of it as a new heaven which is to grow out of a new earth. Corresponding to this false spirituality is a false morality, according to which the main purpose of the sacramental and prayerful life of the Church is to give us help in living according to the moral law. We are to try to live fully in the body of Christ in order to be able to live according to the code.

It is difficult to persuade people to reflect seriously about moral questions concerning war. Most people who turn to the subject of war are primarily interested not in the choice between moral and immoral acts but in the search for ‘a practicable defence policy.’ Such people— especially if they are Christians—may occasionally recognise that the possession of nuclear weapons is what moral theologians call a proximate occasion of sin but they often feel that they are faced by a dilemma.

I believe that the extent of the duty to avoid the occasions of unlawful warfare is very commonly underestimated. Nevertheless one is bound to recognise that many Christians consider—in view of the magnitude of the Soviet threat to our natural and Christian liberties— that the case against nuclear deterrents of all types remains non-proven.

This dilemma disappears once it is shewn that, in a position in which we are bound to be tempted, there is a whole family of acts and omissions which are gravely sinful not after the manner of an occasion— namely, on condition that there is an alternative which is not equally an occasion of sin—but in an absolute manner. This has already been substantially demonstrated. In England, the most convenient presentations of the arguments are: E. I. Watkin’s article ‘Unjustifiable War’ in Morals and Missiles, edited by Charles S. Thompson; Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, edited by Walter Stein, and Father Anthony Kenny’s article ‘Counterforce and Counter-Value’ in the Clergy Review for December 1962.

Albert Camus declared in the preface to his last work that Dostoievski was the teacher of his youth, that The Possessed was one of the four or five books most influential in his life. Dostoievski, so influential upon us in his own works and through great men like Camus, liked to maintain that he had a faith that had been tried by fire, that had gone down into the abysses, and had risen up again. He surely had an ardent love for Jesus Christ: perhaps no one has ever written of Christ with words of more intense beauty. Yet Dostoievsky's faith is no clear call to unity; it is as scattered and dispersed as are men’s consciences today. Nonbelievers claim him equally with believers. Orthodox and Protestant spirits hail him as their own, and point to his rather virulent anti- Romanism. Guardini observes that Dostoievski hardly knew Rome, and finds that Dostoievsky's themes expose the profound depths of the Roman faith. William Hamilton writes of Dostoievski’s hesitant faith as an image of our own—the faith of Ivan Karamazov who cannot accept at once both God and his creation. What are we to think? Is Dostoievsky’s faith Christian or is it not? How far can we identify ourselves with it? The question has repercussions upon our relationship to the existentialist and rationalist currents in our modern world.

Part of the problem in understanding Dostoievski is due to the difference of his times from our own, and part of it is due to the qualities of his religious vision. Dostoievski—and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard— wrote in and for a complacent nineteenth century. Their protest against scientism and hypocrisy was urgent, passionate—and unavailing. They knew what underrode the surface of that smug age, they knew what could erupt: screaming voices, marching boots, crunching tanks, and bombs, and wire fences.

A few months after the beginning of the second World War, Father Max Metzger, founder of the Una Sancta Brotherhood, wrote a letter from his prison cell pleading with Pius XII for the convocation of a council of peace and of reunion. This letter—the full English text appears for the first time in the new American quarterly, Continuum, Summer, 1963—has a bearing not only on the prehistory of Vatican II, but even more significantly on a recent dramatic production, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy), by a young German publisher’s assistant, Rolf Hochhuth. In the play as in the letter, the Pope was requested to speak forthrightly in the name of justice; in the play the request is openly ignored, while the fate of Max Metzger’s letter remains unknown. In both instances the question that seems to rise spontaneously concerns the failure of the Pope to fulfil his role as servant of the servants of God.

The play has been recognized in the European and American press as perhaps the most controversial drama of the post-war era. An English translation is about to appear; it will be produced in Stockholm by Ingmar Bergman; Georges de Beauregard is filming it in France; and it will open next season in London and New York. While there is no doubt that some of this immediate fame is due to the dramatic merits of the piece, an even larger part is probably the result of the ‘scandal’ on which it is based, on the alleged failure of Pius XII to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. It may be observed in passing that, aside from the religious issue, much German acclaim for the work probably derives from the national need for a catharsis of the Nazi past, and, on the West-Berlin theatrical scene, from the desire to achieve a local work comparable to Brecht’s social dramas.

Professor Zaehner is one of the few Catholics in England to-day who is seriously concerned with the relation of Christianity to other religions. Though his special subject is Zoroastrianism, he has an intimate knowledge of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and has worked out a definite theory of their relation to Christianity. This was made clear in an earlier work, At Sundry Times, where he tried to show how all these traditions ‘converge’ on Christ and find their fulfilment in him. In his most recent work he develops this idea further, particularly in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the convergence of the whole creation on Christ, and tries to show how in the evolution of human consciousness the different religious traditions are stages in the progress of mankind under the guidance of the Holy Spirit towards the consummation of both man and the universe in Christ.

What is perhaps most original in his vision of human history is that he regards Marxism as an important stage in the development of religion. Marxism, particularly in its most authentic exponents like Marx himself and Engels, is concerned with the ultimate nature of man and the universe and with their ultimate destiny, and in this sense it may be called a religion. In Professor Zaehner’s view the Indian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are concerned almost exclusively with the salvation of the individual soul through its escape from this world of time and space. Marxism on the contrary, rejecting both the concept of the individual soul and any world beyond seeks the collective salvation of mankind in this present world through the working out of the ‘inner laws’ of nature, by which the ‘essence of man’ (in Marx’s phrase) will be realised.

In all the wealth presented to us in Dante’s Divine Comedy nothing is so rich as the intention of the whole, and the methods of presentation and communication which Dante uses to body forth this intention. I want to draw out two themes, the first concerned with the medieval device of the Dreamer himself, the second with what might be called an existential concern for meaning, which realizes itself in Dante’s use of categories.

I want to talk in terms of Soren Kierkegaard, an analogy which at first may seem strange, but, seen in relation to his ‘indirect’ works and his Christian concern, like Dante’s, ‘by indirections to fmd directions out’, the analogy will I think throw light on those strange moments (such as the famous faint in Inferno, 5) when we see Dante himself - the figure of the Dreamer - in all his medieval clarity.

The tension between form and meaning can be pulled so tight, that the excitement of our engagement in the poem forces a reaction upon us before we have a moment to decide consciously what, by our ordinary moral standards and preconceptions, our attitude should be. Before we have, as it were, been tipped the wink by Dante as to what our reaction to Francesca’s story should be, we see him prostrate on the ground in a faint of sheer human pity. If we are honest we will admit that we have been taken unawares.

Now that the negotiations on Britain’s application for membership of the European Economic Community have broken down, many people are asking what will happen next. Few are suggesting that the Common Market itself is in danger of disintegration because of the arrogant manner in which General de Gaulle chose to break off the negotiations, with complete disregard for the wishes of France’s fellow members. There can be no doubt that France never wanted Britain to join, for the reasons given by General de Gaulle - if really representing the motives for the French action - should have led France to have rejected the idea of British membership at the very outset. The negotiations were, in fact, a farce, and one can only accept the explanation given by Mr Macmillan in his broadcast to the British people: France brought the negotiations to an abrupt end when they appeared in danger of succeeding, not when they looked like breaking down. What France had hoped for, throughout the eighteen months of negotiations, apparendy, was that agreement would prove impossible, and that Britain would be kept out of the Common Market without France having to incur the odium of exercising her veto.

France’s partners in the Common Market are, no doubt, displeased with the use of the veto, and above all the manner of its exercise. The Common Market will remain, however. The Five may feel that for some time to come, they must assert themselves in the internal discussions of the Common Market. They will show stronger opposition where, as on a number of issues, they do not see eye to eye with France. Far from benefiting the rest of the world, however, this may have serious consequences for countries outside the Common Market.

Perhaps the greatest paradox in modem art, popular or esoteric, is the gap between the sort of music and verse which expresses itself in breathless, banal statements (often, incidentally, employing a diluted version of the poetic diction of the Romantic poets of the last century), and the quiet, withdrawn, secret and mysterious world of Abstract Expressionism and atonal music. It is as if two kinds of art were constantly at cold war with one another, and as if neither knew what war they were fighting in or who were their enemies. There is no communication, either friendly or aggressive, and the reader, the listener, the looker at pictures seems to be in a state of siege which he or she has not chosen and is powerless to explain.

Since communications between these two different kinds of art seem to have broken down so painfully, we are left with the spectacle of a world where man seeks stimulus through art, yet is not prepared to admit that art is, in some sense, amenable to reason, and where most people believe that if you are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, you will be happy, accepted and fulfilled. The Beat poets appear to have taken this dubious credo to its logical conclusion when they seek peace in the oblivion provided by drugs and in a kind of pseudo-mysticism which has little to do either with discipline or God.

Are we then to conclude that this is a decadent, a dead age, a century which is suffering from accidie rather than from violence or masochism? I do not myself think so. In Action Painting, Beat Poetry, and so on, I see an attempt to be realistic and honest, and to achieve something which has nothing to do with nihilism or despair.

The Secondary Modern School takes about 70 to 75 % of the children of England and Wales for their education from the age of eleven upwards. It is a type of school which is virtually the product of the 1944 Education Act: for what went before had a leaving age of fourteen instead of fifteen, and had a more limited objective: the addition of a year to the school life has brought with it both difficulties and opportunities.

Ubiquitous as the Secondary Modern school seems to be, a great many children do not have the choice of Secondary Modern or Grammar School. 141,000 children are educated in comprehensive schools; the number is growing: Anglesey is completely ‘comprehensive’: Coventry, London, Derbyshire, Birmingham are moving in that direction with varying degrees of conviction: Leicestershire has evolved a scheme different from any other, avoiding selection at eleven without embarking upon a scheme of comprehensive schools. The areas which have tried out some degree of ‘comprehension’ are not all controlled by the same political party. Southampton has avoided secondary modern schools altogether by giving every secondary school in the town some speciality of its own, leading up to some particular type of advanced course.

The Secondary Modern School is not the same thing in every area. Some areas have a very large grammar school entry; the secondary modern schools get on with a remnant, of which it could truly be said that there are not many gifted or talented among them; their more spectacular achievements are dependent upon the inefficiency of the selection process at eleven.