In a recent publication a German Jesuit Father has set down some useful suggestions for the ascetic which are culled from the authoritative findings of modem experimental psychology. He shows, among other things, how psycho-analytical research can, and does, contribute much of importance in educating a stable, virtuous life; and one of the basic spiritual problems dealt with is a faulty disposition of will—a disposition with such urgent consequences as to compel immediate attention of both spiritual teacher and psychologist.

As many of the modern exponents of psychological knowledge and motive-analysis in general have called down upon themselves the condemnation of not a few moralists, Catholics have been inclined to ignore the subject as something not safely assimilable. This appears to be in response to certain authorities who opposed the Christian pursuit of virtue—maintaining it to be an oppression of man’s primitive urges, which of course is not quite the case; for it is a position of one instinct being subordinate to another, and ultimately to the Divine law. But probing as it does the inflammable part of man, experimental psychology should receive constant observation by Catholic teachers in view of the help and enlightenment it affords in self-formation.

We have so often heard the cry that Liberty is threatened. Statesmen preach to us of our precious heritage of Liberty which must be preserved from the attacks of foreign-born political absolutisms. In the name of Freedom we are called upon to rally to the defence of parliamentary institutions or Democracy. Why does this appeal fail to carry conviction? Is it not that many feel that the Liberty that they are called upon to save has not yet been won? They are told that they must not allow themselves to be enslaved as are the peoples living under Dictatorships. But is it not true that the peoples living under dictatorships sometimes renounced their parliamentary institutions because they believed that dictatorships would give them greater freedom?

The alliance between parliamentary institutions and freedom is a fiction of political Liberalism, which is already denied by half of Europe. Liberalism is, however, more than a political philosophy; it is a Weltanschauung or general attitude of mind. In England this attitude dominated the intellectual outlook of the nineteenth century, permeating theology, philosophy and economics, as well as politics. The Liberal attitude is essentially relativist, anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian. Denying the truth of absolutes it is fundamentally hostile to all systems of thought and institutions which seek to preserve them. In the name of freedom Liberalism has waged war on all absolutism, whether theological, economic or political. For religion it has tried to substitute freedom of thought; for a monopolistic economy, a free economic system; for political despotism, free representative government.

Research made in connection with the impending canonisation of Pauline Jaricot, the French girl who is perhaps best known as the foundress of the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, has brought to light an interesting chapter in the history of the practice of saying the rosary. A little more than a century ago the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Lyons silk-merchant was inspired to start an association which would promote prayer and almsgiving for the conversion of the heathen. The humble effort which begun among her father’s work-girls spread rapidly thanks to the zeal and organizing ability of this would-be missionary. Her system was simplicity itself: a short prayer each day and alms of a sou a week, the members to be grouped in dizaines, centaines and milles; and the widespread success did much to rehabilitate the fortunes of the French missionary societies who had been reduced to inactivity by the upheavals of the revolution and the Empire.

In these “talks” we have been trying to meet the difficulties of those thousands of people who say they have no use for creeds and dogmas. We have tried to show them that dogmas —doctrinal statements—are necessary because knowledge of God is necessary, and that such knowledge can be conveyed to us only by words. And not only so, but we hold it to be a matter of plain historic fact that it was by words that God has conveyed the knowledge of Himself, of His love and His salvation, to us. We have described, too, the response which that historic Self-Revelation demands of us: the response of Faith.

But a difficulty remains. Granting all that has been said: granted that the truth of God is available to us; granted that we can learn about God through nature, and still more through His Self-Revelation in Jesus Christ—a difficulty still remains. For what, it has been asked, has all this to do with the vast and complex dogmatic system of the Catholic Church of to-day as we find it in her dogmatic formularies and catechisms? What have they to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? What is it that we claim for these dogmas and formulas? We know that many of them have been drawn up only in comparatively recent times; every one of them subsequently to the time when Our Lord was on earth. What authority do we claim for them? Do we pretend that they were all expressly taught by Him during his earthly sojourn? Or do we claim that God makes new revelations to Popes and Councils and compilers of catechisms, in such wise that they can add to the content of the Catholic Faith which that Revelation demands?

It is commonly thought that gnostic systems are grounded upon a dualist conception of the origin of the Universe, but this is subject to question. Gnosticism was the source of many religious and philosophical movements in nowise marked by dualism, suffice it to recall Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and later the mediaeval adepts of secret teachings who, through many perversions, were seeking for the one Divine Absolute. Dualistic elements, more or less marked in different gnostic systems, co-existed with a monistic element often predominant.

In Christianity pure dualism, i.e., the essential and primordial opposition between two distinct principles, has existed only within Manicheism which owed its origin to Persian Mazdeism. Before Manes this Persian dualism had only an indirect influence upon the great syncretistic movement of the Hellenic world. Actually this term—dualism— is applicable only there where the principle of evil is considered to be in its origin independent of its opposite—the principle of good. In the gnostic systems the evil principle is the outcome of a slow evolution proceeding from a unique First Principle. These systems are essentially monistic, differing one from another precisely by the way they conceive this creative evolution resulting in an inferior world and its final reintegration into the Godhead. The ancient gnosis, with its multiple systems, was an effort to connect the actuality of the material world with the divine transcendency. Modern Russian thinkers are concerned with the same problems. Gnosticism originated outside Christianity, but borrowed its soteriological doctrine as a basis for speculations closer to pantheism than to dualism, and it is within this pantheist evolution that the idea of Sophia, link between the unknowable and the actual, originated.

Perhaps the most deceptive aspect of this new unrest among the European people is the superficial newness of it. Men are not prepared to recognize the age-old undefeated forces of good and evil, God and the devil, in the new complexity of twentieth century life. They will not realize that the new paganism is saying to-day what intellectual fools have said in all the ages, and that the new Christianity is stealing its very essence from the old, the true, the everlasting Church of Christ. And perhaps the most alarming aspect of it is the subtle encroachment of this sophisticated blindness upon the Catholic field of vision. Now, more than ever before, the need for Catholic Action and the opportunities for its promotion are evident on every hand. The bulwarks of the Faith need strengthening with the strength that comes only from unity of thought and purpose, staunch co-operation between the laity and clergy, and unstinted perseverance in the propagation of God’s revealed Word. Without that strength to stem the flood of anti-Christian feeling which is especially directed against the Catholic Church, there is small prospect of preventing the decline and fall of what was once the whole of Christendom.

Though it is eminently true that there is but one way for all men through the tangled wilderness of human life, namely the way that has been opened and trodden by Him Who declared: I am, the Way, nevertheless there is a sense in which it is true to say that the ways of God are as diversified as the individuality of those who seek Him. All are Members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but the hierarchy of place and function within that Body comprehends, and indeed demands, a variety of state and action that covers all the needs and capacities of human nature. It is not a difference of way, but rather a difference of emphasis. In its essentials the Christian life and the Christian ideals are the same for all men—union with God through union with the God-man; but in its variety of emphasis the Christ-life which men are called to lead is a jewel of a myriad facets.

It is in this sense of emphasis, therefore, that we may speak of Dominican spirituality as the Way of Truth, without wishing to appropriate that quality exclusively to the Order of St. Dominic. The word Veritas, the distinctive motto of the Order, undoubtedly sums up the ideal which St. Dominic realized in his own life and set before the members of his Order as the essential means of their sanctification and of their apostolate. Into how great a tree this mustard seed can grow is made strikingly clear in a notable work of the late Père Joret, O.P., which has recently appeared in its English translation.

Storms have a sacred mission from God: the twofold mission of sifting and of rooting. Firstly, they have the mission to sift: they separate the weak from the strong, and thus preserve the strong from the pernicious influence of the weak. After the storm has passed, only the strong remain. Secondly, storms have the mission to root: while shaking the powerful trunks these are forced to take deep root in the undermost layers of the fertile soil. After the storm, the strong continue, deep-rooted, unconquerable, in the depths of Life.

This double Mission is being fulfilled by the tempests which in our time have broken upon the World-Church in German as in other lands. They have wrought separation: weakly members who never fully lived of the trunk of the Church have broken off in the onslaught. The stronger members have remained, and in them we witness the glorious fact that, in the face of the most formidable attack, they tend only and desire to root deeper and deeper into the soil of the Church.

The English Dominican Province has given to the Church five cardinals, seventy-two archbishops and bishops, several papal legates and nuncios, and to the state some ministers of prominence such as Archbishop William Hotham, the favourite minister of Edward I, and Bishop John Gilbert of Hereford, twice Lord High Treasurer. In theology, philosophy, Sacred Scripture and other branches of ecclesiastical science English Dominican writers of repute number more than a hundred, and it is easy to show that during the first three centuries of their existence they were by far the most prominent theological body in England, whilst extant MSS. of sermons and state documents testify to their ability and popularity as preachers. In contemplating this long list of eminent men the question has sometimes been asked why there are no English Dominicans officially enrolled in the Calendar of Saints either as canonized or beatified. The difficulty, which applies equally to the Irish Province with its lengthy list of martyrs, is not really hard to answer. At the time of the Henrican schism the feasts of six Dominicans only were kept in the Order, now the number is three hundred and four, of whom two hundred and ninety-four have been raised to the altars since 1600. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English Dominicans, persecuted and generally working in secret, and frequently in prison, had little leisure for gathering the information necessary to obtain the beatification or canonization of the many members of the Province noted for their sanctity or heroism as martyrs. It has been left to us in more propitious times to undertake this task, and surely we can hope that such a work will be blessed with success.

Monsignor Bosco Chang felt cold and stiff and tired. He could not but compare this lumbering progress from the English coast, shaken and jolted in the clumsy coach along the rutty roads, with the ease and speed of travel in China, either by air or through the new compressor tubes, where you stepped into a private padded carriage, dialled your destination, and were shot there at 700 kilometres an hour. Why, one morning he had consulted the voice records at the great central phonary of Nanking, lunched with his friend from seminary days the Vicar-General of Honan-Fu, seen his publishers at Canton in the afternoon, and started his retreat that very evening at the great Manresa in the Snowy Mountains on the borders of Tibet. So little friction, he reflected, so little distraction; the mind could concentrate and the will fix its desire on the Simple Sheer, unworried by the multitude of little things. But here one was so close to time and space, to all the trivial quantitative modalities of being; to soft and hard and sore and wet, the fleas, the cold, the grit, the shaking; congested veins and broken finger nails, the smell of a drink that lingered in the breath of the natives, sour and yet touched with the sweetness of chrysanthemums decaying in the late autumnal gardens round Ko-Hoa. And their minds and speech, so definite and slow, with the edges of a chunk of Cartesian matter and the labourings of an ox before the plough; their nerves, too, like so much muscle and bone.

Faith is the subjective counterpart to objective Revelation: the human response to God’s Self-showing; man’s humble, worshipful assent to and acceptance of the words and the Word of God, itself a gift of God. To understand the nature and the necessity of Faith we must therefore recall and amplify what has already been said regarding Revelation.

Revelation means that God has spoken—has spoken to all men and so to me—through His appointed spokesmen, the prophets, and through His Son. He has told me things I could never have discovered for myself—things of the most vital and supreme importance to me for this life and hereafter. Revelation is essentially concerned with Mystery, with that which of its very nature is unknowable by man’s unaided efforts. It is not enough for me to know that God exists, that there is an Infinite, an Absolute, an Ultimate Explanation, a First Cause, a Supreme Intelligence, a perfect Beauty, a final Value, an Object of all yearning, striving and desire. These truths which thought and philosophy can tell me are, in themselves, of relatively little practical importance if God is to remain the unattainable Infinite, remote, impersonal.

The dominant note of English Dominican life from the accession of Elizabeth to the end of the Penal days was heroism. Often with a prison for a convent and a dungeon for a cell the friars suffered all cheerfully for the salvation of souls. They kept alive the Province not for the sake of the Province but for the maintaining of Catholic Faith in their native land. Reduced to the rank of a Congregation for want of a central house, they sent their recruits to foreign Provincials who in splendid charity trained them for the religious life and apostolate.

Heroism of the highest order is seen in the life of the martyr, the Venerable Robert Nutter, the English Dominican nearest to the supreme honours of the Church. He, and his brother John who was beatified in 1929, were Lancashire men and members of Brasenose College, Oxford, and both were admitted to the English College at Rheims, where Robert, though reputed the younger, was ordained priest on January 6th, 1582, nine months before his brother. Immediately following his ordination he set out for England and landed on the south coast, probably at Portsmouth, from whence he made his way into Hampshire where he worked until his first arrest, February 2nd, 1584.

“There is to-day an immense amount of nonsense talked about both Bolshevism and Fascism. It is not really necessary, in order to condemn Fascism, to become an apologist for the Russians; nor is it required that those who hate Bolshevism, as every intelligent Christian must, should cry out that Fascism is our only salvation therefrom . . . It is foolish to deny the enemy’s strength, or to blink at one’s own weakness.—Bernard Iddings Bell, A Catholic Looks at his World.”

With this text Mr. Attwater begins his enquiry into Why Communism Gets Away with It, why it is vital that Communism should not get away with it, and the only way to prevent it. As the text might suggest, his bird’s-eye-view of the general situation is balanced and common-sense. He shows that the purely economic proposals of Communism are “eminently calculated to appeal to men suffering under poverty, distress and injustice,” and further that this part of the Communist programme is not by itself morally objectionable. But he goes on to point out that Communism is not only an economic policy; it is also a quasi-philosophy, taught and held with the fervour of a religion. “And that philosophy is false; it is dialectical and materialist, whereas the truth is metaphysical and spiritualist.” It is not easy to convince the working-man of the terrible importance of this statement. Mr. Attwater endeavours, not without a real measure of success, to reduce the issue to concrete terms.

The recent attempt to settle the relations between the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Jugoslavia has been attended by tumult in the streets of Belgrade and in the minds of some religious publicists in this country who have seen in it an example of Roman Catholic aggression. Yet consider how subtle must be the diplomacy of the Vatican, when its schemes are initiated and promoted by the State, while the Catholic populations of Croatia and Slovenia look passively on, contenting themselves in their newspapers with chronicling the facts, almost without comment.

The following piece of documentation, representing the somewhat detached point of view of a Catholic Croat towards the whole business, may help to set things in proportion.

The first steps towards the Concordat were taken by the Government more than ten years ago, when a delegation, headed by M. Yanitch, was sent to Rome. The negotiations, however, hung fire owing to some bother over undiplomatic interference with the affairs of the Slavonic College of St. Jerome. Eventually, on July 25th, 1935, an agreement was initialled in Rome by Cardinal Pacelli, for Pope Pius XI, and Dr. Auer, the Minister for Jugoslavia.

Speaking as one less wise in such matters, I should say that Mr. Epstein's object in the grotesqueness of his sculptured figures is twofold: first, to bring out, by deliberate over-emphasis, points that others might overlook; and secondly, to balance the inadequacy of his medium, stone.

The first point explains the exaggeration of feature in his figures. And how justifiable this is I was able to note upon seeing in the flesh the original of one of the busts, exhibited in the Leicester Galleries, standing alongside the bust itself. To look at the original immediately after seeing the reproduction was to see how much one had missed in the former —and what a great sculptor Mr. Epstein is.

The second object explains what one might call the brutality of his technique, the hard mathematical lines, the artificial disproportions, and the rough, clay-model surfacing. A sculptor’s problem is this: he has to produce out of stone upon the observer the same dynamic effect as a living personality produces. Stone with the lines of a human face is something much less than the lines of a human form in flesh and blood vitalized by a human personality. The deficit has to be made up. There are many ways of making it up. Mr. Epstein’s way is to change the lines or usual appearance so that the thing presented is calculated, by its very strangeness, to jolt the mind and encourage the recognition of underlying realities, or suggested realities.

In a preface to a recent and up-to-date treatise on modem scientific psychology, based upon the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Viennese psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolf Allers, emphasizes the importance of such a foundation for modem psychology and maintains that no system of philosophy is better suited to this purpose than that of the Angelic Doctor. The peculiar position occupied by psychology, standing as it does between biology and philosophy proper, demands just such a basis. Man is a psycho-physical organism, composed of mind and body, spirit and matter, the ultimate nature and correlation of which cannot be discovered by experience alone. As other psychologists are beginning to realize, the detachment of empirical and experimental psychology from speculative psychology leads to uncertainty and confusion; and the failure to adopt a definite and common-sense philosophy has resulted in a number of divergent schools, each with some vague and uncertain philosophical background.

Jacques Riviere, one of Claudel’s converts, writes:

The French have the dramatic instinct better developed than the rest of us, to judge by their power of staging things. Lourdes from day to day is a good instance of the ease which only instinct can give in the setting out of thought or prayer in action. The French also work harder at the things of the mind, and their literature is central, that is, they can get all the thrills they want at home, and when they desire to add to their store, they assimilate the great things from abroad, and leave the trivial. Their Ecoles moyennes study Milton better than ours. They as a nation know much more about Dante than the English, whose national comprehension has been increased, for good or ill, by Dore’s illustrations.