It is the nemesis of a cliche-ridden prose that a term may become trite yet stay ambiguous. The phrase philosophy of history covers four distinct approaches to three subjects, and before its relation to a Thomist scheme of thought can be considered it will be necessary to analyze the contrasted senses of the adjective “historical” and to determine the meaning of “Thomist” and of “philosophy.” Thomism may be conveniently defined as the application of the principles of act and potency to the study of the necessary and of the contingent. Philosophy may be restricted to a consummated human study in an ultimate causality: “consummated,” for as a science it implies the achievement of a certitude, not a content with an opinion; “human” since it is achieved through reason, not through the supernatural; “ultimate causality” since it is a search for origin, not for occasion, for undeviating principle rather than for contingent event. Such concepts are relatively simple, the complexity of history has commonly been expressed through a consistent use of analogy.

The three primary divisions of modern historical writing, the Chronicle, the Myth, the Culture Study, seem contrasted rather by their perspective than by their object. Each is in intention a form of record of the past; the first in terms of the past, the second as an explanation of the present, the third often primarily as a premature reflection of the future.

The term “social reconstruction” has almost of late years become a pass word assuring admission into the House of Commons. Perhaps by design it is nebulous in meaning and the more capable of adjustment to varied contexts. In common usage an idea is enshrined expressive of consorted endeavour to marshal forces within society with a view to economic needs. With this ill-defined campaign, peace conferences and international treaties may well harmonize. Assurance is given, by an elegant gesture, of every type of worldly gain and to the best advantage. The fulcrum of world leverage is money made productive by wealth. So now peace itself is converted into a commodity on the world market for sale at the costly price of armaments. But here, too, moral values are involved and though disguised as national “interests” cannot be weighed in material scales. The bodies and souls of men are incapable of adjustment to a gold standard. The moral worth indeed of human enterprises is accorded to them by ethical sanctions in regard to which they are deserving of praise or blame.

Civil society has as its worthy aims felicity and prosperity in common, yet to make these aims exclusive is to unsettle the balance of power and to leave standing a tottering ruin. A polarizing of society by the decentralisation of its moral units must inevitably lead to social unbalance. Over-much indulgence to the freedom of disorderly and shattered instincts cannot result in anything harmonious within the social group. Under pain of social anarchy self-realization must be allied in partnership with self-restraint. Social reformers have not been unaware of the unhappy path which events have taken, and have adopted various methods to avert the threatened destruction.

Dorothy Osborne, writing to her lover, Sir William Temple, in 1653 gives this description of her daily life at her home in Bedfordshire:

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep or cows, and sit in the shade singing ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but trust me these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings to their heels.

The picture of the shepherdesses singing at their task on an English summer’s evening catches the same pastoral beauty that one finds in Gray’s Elegy: to some it may seem romantic and a touch sentimental. The writer, however, was not of that temper: she shows in her letters a plain common-sense and humour, which gives this description a sense of exactness: nor is her picture exceptional. Sir Thomas Overbury had written this of milkmaids and shepherdesses a few years earlier:

She dares to go alone and unfold her sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say the truth she is never alone; she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones.

To investigate the ancestry and relationships of the theological system expounded in the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen, and to trace the history of the controversy about that system which arose in France in the seventeenth century, is a difficult task. It implies a knowledge not only of St. Augustine’s writings but of Pelagianism and Semipelagianism, and to some extent of Predestinarianism. It supposes, further, a knowledge of St. Thomas’ theology and of the writings of the Thomist commentators; and it includes an examination of the system of Baius, as well as of that of the Molinist school.

An analysis of the doctrine contained in the Augustinus, with its historical implications, has recently been attempted by Mr. Nigel Abercrombie. His work is divided into two parts, the one theological and the other historical. The latter section, beginning with the career of Saint-Cyran and ending with the destruction of the Couvent Port-Royal, affords interesting reading and is not without merit, but it is vitiated by onesidedness. The author loses no opportunity of depreciating the Dominicans.

The Eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas are a cycle—indeed the only cycle—of liturgical song. They form such a unity and fulness of Eucharistic truth and worship that a greater than Elgar or Bach would be needed to express them as an oratorio.

But there is one spiritual quality throughout them which the greatest master of music would confess to be beyond the power of his craft. Every line of these Eucharistic hymns, though unmistakably wrought by genius, is yet dyed by a subtle rosential humility which has escaped notice only by the semblance of a miracle. Yet if none but the prayer of the humble pierces the clouds, this twice-hidden humility of the Eucharistic hymns has given them a place apart in the great throng and song of liturgical prayer.

Let us draw attention to this quality (i) in the Hymns of the Divine Office and (2) in the Sequence of the Mass.

If the art of painting exists for its own sake, if painting is nothing more than a sensuous arrangement, or (as the modernists would put it) an “organization” of line, colour, rhythm and mass, and if there is no underlying ethical or religious principle that finds its way from the artist's mind to the painted work, then of necessity the speculations and conclusions contained in the following essay are valueless. As a basis of agreement it may be acknowledged that art has no conscious concern with morals, and that the painter who has the deliberate intention of expressing an ethical or moral concept by means of his art is handicapped from the start. We may agree also that the satisfying quality (which we call beauty) of a painting depends upon quite other elements than those that belong to moral worth, and that the ethical outlook of the artist cannot and does not affect the aesthetic perfection of his work. All this we may concede. But it would be unreasonable to infer from this that his ethical outlook does not nevertheless find expression in his work, whether he will it so or not. A pious person may produce an execrable or negligible work of art, but at least the piety will be apparent in it. A hedonist, of a robust and vigorous habit of mind, may produce a series of works of great aesthetic perfection, but in the sum total of his works his hedonism can hardly fail to appear. All art is self-revelation.

The question of property is now again receiving the attention it needs. Catholics have for too long assumed that there is no difficulty about it. They have taken for granted that Communists and Socialists wished all the means of production, distribution and exchange to be public property and that Capitalists supported private property. They have taken for granted that it is a principle of Christian teaching that private property is a natural human right and that, therefore, Capitalists were on the whole in favour of Christianity, or at least that Capitalism was not anti-Christian. The development of Capitalism in the direction of large combines, cartels and monopolies has been so gradual that it has passed unnoticed that this development has involved the destruction of private property among the masses of the people. The growth of Communism and Socialism has therefore seemed to be mere wickedness.

But the events of recent years have opened our eyes. At last we are able to see that the development of Capitalism with its accompanying development of machine industry has in fact undermined and to a large extent destroyed the reality of private ownership and individual appropriation, and that, in consequence, the development of Communism and Fascism is inevitable, that in fact these movements are the logical conclusion and consummation of Capitalism.

Take as a simple example such a thing as the Great Western Railway. Before the coming of the railways there were the Stage Coach and the Carrier. Any man with a horse and cart could run a passenger service or could carry goods from town to town.

Let us follow the sun in its perpetual rising, as it passes over the earth's scarred surface, crossing illimitable oceans, continents, deserts, and towering mountain ranges, and the eternal snows—silent, glistening, old.

It lights up, with its dawn, the dawn of the world—the superposed strata of archaic cultures, one upon another in an unfolding phantasy, of prolific confusion, yet a crumbling order, proclaiming an ordered growth in the buried millennia of the world’s childhood. It tells us things we had never grasped as a whole, till we came to this preparatory contemplative vision (preparatory to all real thought), or, perhaps, which we never knew at all. Giant human forms, of enigmatic origin in the abyss of time, emergent, yet now in retreat, from crumbling stone, among the old decay of Easter Island. The stone lamps, the lavers of holy water, and 200,000 shrines, each with its frail conscious beings, who reason and pray within, in the red dawn of Shinto Japan. The convents of Tibet, and Burma, and Siam, where thousands upon thousands of devoted religious pray, and work, and sacrifice—the daily priestly offering of incense, fruit, and flowers, to the lord Buddha’s golden image, and his relics, in their precious shrine. The earth’s-dawn mysteries of Ur, and Agade, and Babylon: crumbled, earth-sprawled temples, where vultures call and jackals prowl, and all is distant, and dim, and past, the crumbling symbols of a mighty religious conception—the ziggurats, or ‘‘step- temples,” of Babylon and Ur, each a consciously planned microcosm, in form and detail, organically symbolizing all creation: the steps or degrees of created being.

To Catholics of the older generation the names of La Tour du Pin, Leon Harmel, l’Abbe Naudet, l’Abbe Pottier, Henri Lorin, and with them those of Mgr. Ketteler and the two Cardinals Mermillod and Manning, evoke memories, memories of the movement known as Christian Democracy.

It is strange that those two words, which forty years ago aroused such hopes on the one hand, and at the same time such rage and resentment among good Conservative Catholics, mean very little to the youth of to-day. Is this really so? And if it is, will people ever speak of Christian Democracy again?

Professor Giuseppe Toniolo was not only one of its chief supporters, but its theorist. The epithet Christian as applied to democracy (which was then as much feared as communism is to-day) appeared in Italy for the first time in Father Curci’s voluminous work Christian Socialism, published in 1885. But it was the Belgian Verhaegen who, in 1893, brought the expression into current usage as an ideal to be fought for: “Christian Democracy” had henceforth an established footing.

And the Word was made flesh. No Catholic worthy of the name can stand outside the realities of faith and of grace, and seek to live his life as one alien, aloof and “secularized”; at best he can only detach himself by taking up hypothetical attitudes of mind. The Incarnation means that a new world, transcending the limits of time and touch, is flung open to him; and he is necessarily of it and in it, inextricably caught up, so that the only “escape” is no escape but death of the soul. “All things betray thee who betrayest Me.” He must live and move and have his being in an atmosphere saturated by grace. He must experience at once the exhilaration and crucifixion of having mind and will set heavenwards, for our citizenship is in heaven, and of still living amidst the world’s realities, very much a man among men, with no right to be estranged from human interests. Further, there must be growth in the life of grace; and this necessary growth entails deeper appreciation, more vivid realization of what the Incarnation means, of what grace means, of the supreme reality of the Mystical Body—all this and more must play upon his whole being in all its complexity, and not least upon his mind; for his mind looks out upon a world leavened by grace, wholly centred in, and only fully knowable in terms of, the Incarnation. A glance over the course of history shows a tangled skein, hard to unravel; yet the Catholic can be conscious of the extension of the Incarnation in time, of the mysterious life of the Church, and can say “Vicisti Galilaee,” for the Incarnation means Redemption and therefore hope.

To say of psychology that it is the science of the soul, whilst this is in accordance with the literal meaning of the word, is not to take us very far. We need to know at the outset something of what the soul is in itself and how its investigation may best be undertaken. In truth an account of the definition of psychology is to a large extent an epitome of its history. The conflict of opinion already alluded to in our previous articles is by no means a contemporary development, as some of our readers may have been led to suppose, though it has undoubtedly assumed, in some respects, a new form. It is our purpose here, therefore, to trace to their sources in a summary manner these conflicting ideas as to the nature and scope of psychology.

The main issues turn in the first place upon the origin and meaning of the word “soul” and the relation of that which is so called to the body, as well as upon the standpoint from which the study of soul has proceeded. It will be remarked, secondly, however, that a new standpoint was adopted round about the seventeenth century when the earlier accepted notion of soul came to be replaced by that of mind and consciousness, which thus became the primary concern of the psychologist. In a very general way, the earlier standpoint may be described as “objective,” the later as “subjective.” A third phase came to pass when psychology began to be defined as the science of immediate or individual experience; the word “psyche” or soul being used for the totality of individual human experience.

It is an important book which can throw light, as this book by M. Fumet certainly does, on the life and writings of Léon Bloy. For since his death Bloy, as man and as thinker or seer, has come to exert great influence in the world of Catholic thought, greater perhaps than that of any other writer of modern times. Already towards the close of his life, it is true, his apostolate had begun to tell (notable among his converts being Jacques and Raïssa Maritain), but it was only posthumously that fame of him blazed out and he came to be widely recognized as a great exemplar and pro-claimer of the spirit of Catholicism in its opposition to all that is mediocre or bourgeois. Yet there is a scandal which still somewhat limits the range and force of his influence. To come into contact with Bloy is not only to be thrilled by a new perception of the splendour and vitality of the Faith, but also to be confounded by the violence and exaggeration of his ideas and the extravagant vehemence and seeming insufferable arrogance of his character. Where we cannot accept all, we are inclined to reject entirely. M. Fumet comes to save us from ingratitude and superstition. This present article is no more than a series of hints at the contents of his book, at the image of Bloy emerging from its pages.

If Bloy’s mind can only be understood through knowledge of his life, practically all the clues lie in the first half of it, running to the period of the tragic experiences dramatized in Le Désespéré.

“IF I had not fallen for G.K. in 1900 I should have been caught by the Webbs in 1910.” I quote this sentence from a letter recently received because it may remind many of a fate they also escaped. The Fabian, as we now know, did not offer an alternative to Capitalism, he offered fetters of security and sufficiency; a better ordered world of which, even before the war, there seemed a need. The slums were awful and the rich corrupt, we did not question the qualities of the Fabian remedy. The young were to be nourished in clinics and educated in schools, the unfit exterminated, the old fed and clothed like the lilies of the field, the dead collected by a municipal Carter Paterson. The people were to control the means of production and distribution, text books on economics were to replace the Bible and everything was to be efficient. Fabian tracts, black with statistics and documented to the nth degree, were found upon the bookstalls, experts became as eloquent as the blue books from which they preached. Sanitation was exalted into a religion and hygiene accepted among the gods. The whole was spiced, for those reaching the more active areas of propaganda, by a certain laxity in morals, an evidence of escape from Victorianism. This looseness was to be discouraged among the poor, who were to be kept sober if not righteous; though not godly they were to be maintained at least in health.

The lugubrious procession of economists, welfare workers, mother Grundies and busy bodies was held up by a circus.

For many centuries past Religious Life, in the official or technical sense, has implied the cloister and the religious habit; and the obvious advantages of these external helps need no showing. Yet it has always been the way of Holy Mother Church, is indeed one of her essential qualities, to accommodate herself in her modes of life to the needs of her children in every age. In recent years many of the faithful have discovered in themselves a desire and a need to seek the perfection of religious life and yet, for one valid reason or another, cannot enter a religious Order or Congregation. For these, too, there is a special corner in the understanding heart of the Church; so that now there exists a number of organizations whereby these souls may pursue the special vocation which has been given to them. Amongst them is one that is under the aegis of the Dominican Order, and it is about this we propose to write a brief account.

The object of Catholic Action is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. It is identified with the mission of the Church to teach all nations “to observe whatsoever I have commanded you.” The Bishops, by their strict apostolic succession, acquire the right and the duty to lead in the Church’s mission. With themselves they associate priests, who are ordained for specially sacred functions in the Church, and lay apostles who, by Catholic Action, share in the Divine Mission. The methods adopted by Bishops and priests in pursuance of this mission—prayer, exhortation and the Sacraments—are universal in their application and effective under all conditions. The methods of the lay apostle must depend largely on conditions of time and place, on the atmosphere in which he works, on the temperament of those with whom he comes into contact and even on his own human qualities. In a word, the method of Catholic Action depends on the milieu. It may therefore be of value to the apostles of Catholic Action in this country to attempt an analysis of the milieu in which we find ourselves and which we seek to supernaturalize.

Of late years there have been signs of a considerable change in the study of comparative religion, in so far as it affects the origins of the Faith and its relations with the Pagan religions contemporary with its earliest period. Not so long ago it was almost assumed as a commonplace fact among scholars that the application of the Comparative Method to the religions of the Roman Empire had disposed of Catholic Christianity's claim to uniqueness; and on the Catholic side the study of Comparative Religion was generally regarded with suspicion and distrust. Plenty of examples of the first attitude could still be found, especially in the works of the older contemporary scholars; but on the whole students of Comparative Religion who concern themselves primarily with the Mediterranean world are becoming more and more disposed, to admit the uniqueness of Christianity. Works like W. R. Halliday’s Pagan Background of Early Christianity, Guthrie’s Orpheus and Greek Religion (though the authors’ very occasional expressions of their personal views on Christianity sometimes seem rather naive compared with the rest of their work), and Nock’s admirable Conversion are all examples of this tendency in the work of non-Catholic scholars. And on the Catholic side a really scholarly interest in Comparative Religion is growing up, as is exemplified in the new series of C.T.S. pamphlets on the subject and in many other works. This interest is only part of the general modern tendency among Catholics to pay more attention to that element in non-Catholic religion which is positively good and therefore Catholic, and not to contemplate so exclusively as sometimes in the past the negative element which makes it pagan or heretical.

During the month of July, two conferences on international problems took place in London. Both were held in semi-privacy, but their importance was such that the organizers of the conferences have seen fit to publish the details of the speeches which were given on these occasions. They present an interesting study in comparison.

At Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs arranged a series of debates from May 29th to July 7th on the Future of the League, and succeeded in obtaining for this purpose the co-operation of some of the best known and most competent students of international affairs in England. The debates have now been published in book form and are invaluable for the large number of English students who cannot claim to the same competence as the personalities whose views are here expressed, but who seek to gain by their learning.

From the 3rd to the 6th of July, the Catholic Council for International Relations held a rather different kind of reunion. The general subject for conference was “The Part of Catholics in the Maintenance of the European Order,” and those who took part were Catholic writers and lecturers from many countries, with an international reputation for their ability in these problems. Their conclusions have already been published in the Catholic press, and a fuller account of the papers will be given in the next issue of the C.C.I.R. organ, A Catholic Survey. The present writer is indebted to the secretary of the C.C.I.R. for the use of notes on the papers before they appeared in print.

Most of us take a certain pride in the great collections of works of art preserved in our museums, and in the systematic efforts that are made in schools and universities to teach the appreciation of art and to bring about improvements in taste; we congratulate ourselves upon the presence amongst us of individual collectors and “lovers of art.” I am not going to maintain that these cultural activities are, humanly speaking, altogether insignificant, but I am going to suggest that they represent very little more than palliative measures applied to symptoms of what is really a fundamental spiritual deficiency in ourselves, too deep-seated to be dealt with by such indirect methods. I am going to suggest that the love of art, and the collection of works of art, when regarded as ends in themselves, imply the view that art is essentially an emotional luxury, that art can be divided off from and known apart from every-day social, industrial, and political activity, and should be seen only in museums and private collections, or heard only in great concert-halls; just as we have come to think of religion as a luxury product, distinct from social, industrial, and political functions, and to be considered only in church and on Sundays.

Principal John Oman, invited to explain why he was not a Catholic, began with the following memorable and instructive words:

This, the reason which on analysis will be found to be the one that most powerfully withholds men, especially thinking and religious men, from becoming Catholics, is, curiously, the one of which least account is taken by the zealous apostle and apologist.