The publication of this exchange of letters is in some ways unique, and of great religious and philosophical significance. The two men are of absolutely outstanding eminence and influence, and each in his way of outstanding experience. They are of the same generation, Claudel born in 1868, Gide in 1869. They were friends and have long since fallen apart. They stand for two absolutely opposite conceptions of man’s duty and destiny.

During his recent visit to Rome, Claudel told an Italian interviewer (Mario Guidotti) that neither he nor Gide had taken the initiative in publishing this correspondence. It came from Robert Mallet, a friend of Gide’s (who has supplied the letters with a minute and enlightening factual commentary). Claudel consented, in the hope of exercising a moral influence: ‘I should like the letters to do good today to young people whom Gide may have harmed: the good that I tried to do, unhappily in vain, to a great writer and friend’.

Both correspondents hold strongly to what they stand for. Both have allowed the letters to be supplemented by other documents: passages from Gide’s Journals, and one from a literary interview of 1947 in which Claudel utterly disavows the other’s position. That position is indicated in a typical passage picked out by the English, or rather American, translator of the Journals: ‘In the name of what God, of what ideal, do you forbid me to live according to my nature; And where would that nature lead me if I simply followed it? Until now I had followed the rule of Christ, or at least a certain puritanism that had been taught me as the rule of Christ.

The modern printed editions of the Dominican Chant which, as is well known, differ widely from those of the Roman rite, preserve accurately the text of the Correctorium of Fr Humbert de Romans, who undertook the work at the instigation of the General Chapter of the Order held at Buda in 1254. When at the beginning of the twentieth century the reform of Gregorian Chant was introduced attention was drawn also to the origins of the Dominican version of Plainchant. P. Wagner, the first musicologist to investigate the problem, discovered that remarkable similarities existed between the Dominican and Cistercian tradition of Plain-chant, as can be seen from his Neumenkunde (second edition, 1912, pp. 471 sqq.). But he considered that it was impossible to find out whether Humbert took the Cistercian Chant as a model or whether both versions were derived from a common source; namely the theory of chant used in Paris at that time. No progress has been made in solving this question since the publication of Peter Wagner’s book. Now, at last, Père Dominique Delalande has taken up the examination of the question on a wide scale. From the comparison of the melodies of the Dominican Gradual with those of the Cistercian he comes to the conclusion that the Dominican Gradual was derived from that of the Cistercians.

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.

Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.

But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.

Among the historians of Christian culture alive today, two stand out with particular distinction: M. Etienne Gilson and Mr Christopher Dawson. They are both prolific writers, and neither is always equal to his own standard; but their best work is of a very high quality indeed. These qualities differ, however, and it is interesting to compare diem. Both men are scholars through and through, and both possess to a very unusual degree the real historian’s gift of generalising from particular data. But their points of view differ, and their data. M. Gilson is a connoisseur of ideas; of other men’s ideas, in studying which he discovers his own. He knows much about many human minds, precisely in so far as these minds have become articulate in conceptual thought, and expresses this thought in words and writing. An expert in philosophies, he is scrupulously careful to respect his documentary data; but he wrings all he can out of it. For he makes it his business to discern and define what is individual and original in each thinker he studies; to study therefore each case in and for itself before passing on to another one. Then, having so treated a number of cases, he pauses to consider interconnections; and so draws up patterns of intellectual transmission and differentiation. All his work is a study of minds in their expressed ideas; with a view, first, to discovering originality and then to tracing derivations.

Mr Dawson’s very different work is harder to characterise. His range is of course wider, materially, but it is less abstract. He is called a philosopher of history, but he is hardly a historian of philosophy. Though his work teems with individual testimonies he never, or scarcely ever, pauses long to consider an individual.

I once gave a talk to sixth-form boys in a Catholic public school about delinquency, and at the end of it one of my audience remarked: ‘with all due respect, sir, I think you have been talking nonsense. I think that human beings are responsible and if they do wrong they should be punished, unless they are mentally defective’. That is a perfectly reasonable and refreshing statement concerning the freedom of the will and the essential simplicity of human action. At the other extreme we find the elaborate analyses of human motivation made by sociologists and psychologists, which appear to deny all freedom of choice and responsibility.

The subject of delinquency is indeed nowadays a touchstone for everybody’s opinion—expert or not, and the trouble is that they are all in the right—in varying degrees. Every general statement needs qualification and particular application, but so often we get nothing but the general statement dogmatically pronounced.

For example we are told that the main causes for the alleged increase in juvenile delinquency are to be traced to the lack of religion, with the consequent decline in the stability of family life and in respect for authority. But, for argument’s sake, a State could be imagined where there was no family life or religion, as we conceive it, but in which the social sanctions against theft were so stringent that delinquency of this type would be practically eliminated. We have no proof that in die Middle Ages or in Victorian England, there was less minor delinquency such as pilfering, than we get now. We have only exact figures for the past half century or so—a period which has seen two very major wars—themselves both a symptom of man’s fallen nature, and the causes of further depravity and lawlessness in Society.

When I agreed to speak this afternoon I thought it would be more useful if I spoke to you personally and informally, rather than if I attempted to give a set lecture on so vast a subject. Besides, I would like to begin by making my own standpoint clear, and I can do that more easily if you will let me be personal.

I have great sympathy and great respect for many of those who are working towards reunion. But I have never classed myself among them, partly this is because ‘reunion’ has never seemed to me an immediate and practical problem. Perhaps because, all my life, so many of my closest friends have belonged to different communions and religions from my own, I can realise what a gulf still remains of mutual misapprehension, and how unlikely it is that that will be done away with within a space of time measurable by the historian. And then I have always consciously avoided the use of the term ‘reunion’ since it has seemed to me ambiguous in modern English. Possibly I am here influenced by the fact that, when I was a young man, ‘reunion’ was commonly used in England in the sense of ‘reunion of the Church’, and that as a phrase is incompatible with either the Catholic or the Orthodox conception of the Church’s indivisibility. But the need of mutual charity will always be an immediate and practical problem. All through history in every religion and in.every Christian communion there have been members who have been infected by the spirit of religious intolerance. That spirit of intolerance has been always a father of lies leading to calumnies of individuals and to distorted travesties of the doctrines of others. It has had its roots deep down in the spirit of hatred and has flowered in season into acts of gross physical cruelty.

Commenting on the recent presence in Cairo of the Egyptian Minister to the Holy See, The Times has twice alluded to the probability of some joint action by the Vatican and Islam with regard to the formation of a common front against the dangers of Communism. That some form of general rapprochement is under consideration can indeed hardly be doubted, since only last November the possibility of this was mentioned by the Holy See itself in an announcement made by the Congregation de Propaganda Fidei. This announcement was not, however, any new or sudden departure, but can be best understood if it is regarded merely as a further step in a process that plainly appears as steadily developing during recent years.

Since the Catholic and Islamic Faiths jointly account for a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants, the growth of friendly understanding between the leaders of both is of profound importance, and the details of such growth are of much significance. Islam itself has been described as a sounding-box on which an event occurring in one place immediately affects the whole. This is particularly true of Cairo, capital of Egypt, since political happenings there have speedy repercussions among the various Muslim states of the Arab League, whilst also influencing Islamic opinion as a whole, because Muslim students from all over the free world are numbered among those attending at the great University of Al Azhar, one of the main centres of Mohammedan religious thought and teaching today as it has been for ages past.

But let the reader be sure to notice at the outset that it is of the southern half of the West Indies that I can speak with experience. There are so many islands in the whole chain, extending as it does for a thousand miles and more; and, whereas all resemble one another in some respects, in other ways they can be, and are, astonishingly different. Naturally, therefore, one should only dogmatise about those of which one has first-hand knowledge. The islands I know are Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados, and (omitting the French islands) the Windward group, which now includes Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica.

One of the charms of the Colony of Grenada is that, full of coloured people as it happens to be, there is no colour-bar. I use the word charm, because it is the reverse of charming when in company with a cultured coloured man to be obliged to halt and reflect We may not enter here. It must be admitted, I suppose, that in this matter, at least among the English islands, Grenada is at the moment unique. Not for very long, however, can it remain unique, because in the West Indies the colour-bar does appear to be breaking down: very slowly in some places, but surely. And this is not a question of what one would like, or of what one hopes for, but of the inevitable development of these islands, which are still colonies but which, as all the world knows, are aspiring to federation and even finally dominion status. As an aside, I may remark that highly exclusive hotels have found it impossible to keep their doors closed against delegates from the Governments of other islands who happened to be coloured men.

Parents are often heard to lament the lack of books capable of explaining the Bible to their children. There is a very obvious lack in this matter among Catholic books, but the deficiency is not restricted to Catholics. There are, of course, a certain number of picture books illustrating the life of Christ or episodes in the Bible, but they are generally prepared on the false assumption that the only sense of Scripture a child can grasp is the literal sense. Herein lies a serious fallacy, for the child’s mind is instinctively symbolic and metaphorical; the poet exists in the young mind long-before the philosopher is born in him, long before he can analyse the meaning of his signs and make-believe. But when an artist tries to give only the literal sense to the child he begins by painting Jews and Arab sheiks as they are said to have been at the time of Christ. He then goes on to apply certain aspects of the universal appeal of Christ to every individual with an almost complete univocity in which our Lord appears not only as a baby but also as a sailor boy and fighter pilot. And since Christ in this respect has to appear as the lowest common denominator among all these types of humanity he has to be robbed pictorially of any definite character. The ‘baby-Jesus’ style of art turns the Word Incarnate into a simpering doll, meant to represent the neighbours’ little Sally aged eighteen months without excluding cousin Tom who is two years older. The holy Child must be no more than an outline of round cheeks and chubby limbs in order to fit into it any child character one chooses.

On 4th February of this year a remarkable joint pastoral letter was published in Quebec, signed by all the bishops of the Province of Quebec, with the title The Workers’ Problem in the light ofthe Social Teaching of the Church. Second only to the United States, Canada has prospered from the application of liberal capitalism to an expanding economy. The encylical is the more remarkable in that in some respects it is an indictment of liberal capitalism. As such it was interpreted and has provoked a number of reactions from big business. It has been understood as support for the stand taken by Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal and Bishop Desranleau of Sherbrooke in the ‘asbestos strike’ of last year. Moreover it foreshadows a period of increasing strife between the Church in the Province of Quebec and the forces of capitalism which are allied with a corrupt though soidisant Christian government.

At the outset the bishops state quite bluntly that, though their country has been endowed by Providence with greater wealth than most parts of the world, there are many areas and professions where the pay is insufficient. In fact, the national wealth is far from equitably distributed and the economic system does not provide ‘for all the members of society in a stable way the material conditions that they need for their spiritual and cultural development’. This latter was declared by Pope Pius XII in 1948 to be me purpose of an economic system. Further than that, the fundamental problem of the worker in Canada has not been solved: economic and social security for himself and for his family.

The modern liturgical movement has taken many years to find its dogmatic and really deep spiritual basis. It has received its confirmation in this regard from the two great Papal Encyclicals, Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei; while the whole movement has depended upon, as well as influenced, the abandonment of the post-reformation, literal explanation of the Sacrifice of the Mass and on the return to the priestly and sacramental understanding of it. This conversion of the theologians, the effects of which are now reaching the ordinary Catholic, is due in the first place to Père de la Taille, S.J., whose heavily documented Mysterium Fidei exploded like some doctrinal atom bomb just after the 1914-18 war. It is a happy coincidence that the second volume of the English translation of this revolutionising work should have just appeared,! for it deals with the Church’s sacrifice as offered by the priest at Mass and united with the unique act of Calvary. Although Père de la Taille did not fully escape from the unreal terminology of the post-reformation disputes he sets forth in this volume the principles which in fact underlie the point of view of the outstanding modem writers on the Eucharist such as Abbot Vonier or Dom Casel. His clear distinction between immolation and oblation has been regarded as his special contribution to the development of Eucharistic doctrine; yet the approach here is still the over-literal one which considers only the present sacrifice here on the altar and fails to appreciate the full significance of a sacramental sacrifice. It was easy to dispose of those almost crude theories of the ‘mystic sword’ which would slay Christ once again did he not remain impassible, but it was not such a straightforward task to escape being involved in the mechanics of the Mass as though it had to fulfil some man-made definition of a sacrifice.

Le pécheur est au cœur même de la chrétienté... .‘The sinner J J stands at the very heart of Christendom. No one is more competent than he to say what it all means—no one unless it be the saint.’ These words of Péguy might form a text for a great many contemporary Catholic novels: you think not only of Greene, but of Waugh too, of Mauriac. And as you follow the unfolding drama of the lives created by them you sometimes find that in the end the sinner comes to look suspiciously like a saint. Are the novelists justified? Can the sinner be a saint?

We shall perhaps find an answer if, to begin with, we examine Peguy’s words more closely. Why is the sinner the central figure? Why is he more competent than others to say what Christianity is about? Because Christianity is the religion of redemption, of rescue, of mercy, of the tenderness of God: because Christianity means the coming of light from darkness, of life from death: the dry bones live again. And it is the sorrowing sinner who knows this process, knows it in his heart, far more than the ninety-nine who need not penance: it is the sinner who knows the need of a Saviour by more than hearsay: it is the sinner who knows the grace of God not as an empty term in a textbook or a sermon but as a reality longed for, fled from, gained and lost again, known as a blinded man knows light and colour.

Clearly we are using the word sinner, when we speak thus, in a special sense. Mary, who was a sinner in the city, Peter, who denied, out of cowardice, the Christ he loved, all the millions of human beings who fail from weakness to keep the law of God: yes, you can call them sinners, but they are sinners in a very different sense from those who deliberately turn their love into hate, who coldly deride God and his law, who blandly ignore the reality they have once known.

‘Laetati sumus pro diebus, quibus nos humiliasti, annis quibus vidimas mala.’ (Ps. 89.)

There are as many roads to Rome as there are travellers. Each one’s experience is different, so that the record of each journey has a unique value. I was a girl of eighteen when the Church first attracted me, and a woman of fifty-four when I was finally received. What follows is the story of a long, bitter and unavailing struggle against the endless patience of God.

I was the only child of an Oxford don who died young, and was brought up in the traditional beauty of an ancient university town. My mother was a devout High Anglican, but very tolerant: religion was never forced on me, and as a child I took little or no interest in it. At seventeen I read a little Plato at school, and thus discovered a new world of spiritual values. In this way, helped by my mother’s influence, and probably impelled also by some hidden process of inward conversion, I was drawn towards the religion which had hitherto been to me mere words and conventional churchgoing. I began to go to church of my own will, and to read the gospels, The Imitation of Christ, a book of selections from the German mystics, Dante, and St Augustine’s Confessions. There also developed a profound interest in the contemplative life, which persisted, sometimes consciously, but more often in secret, through all the years of my infidelity, working like a recurrent fever in the system. At this time I seriously thought of becoming a Catholic, and was encouraged by my mother, who, like so many Anglicans, had a great admiration for Rome, combined with an intensely patriotic attachment to her national church. I had also a secret desire, which I kept to myself, of eventually joining one of the Contemplative Orders.

First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather than accept any tutelage from theology to that attractive over-simplification which he calls ‘theologism’ in which all human thought is made theological. The unity of such experience is to be found in the constant swing of the pendulum along the same path.

It would be possible to show some similar swing in the realm of mysticism from the moralism which leaves no room for passivity with God to the excessive passivity of quietism. We might begin with St Peter and St Paul or St Ambrose and St Augustine, where the seeds of such divergence might be unearthed. But such is not the plan of this paper; for the experience to be considered is not simply European, nor yet even exclusively Christian. And the unity which we hope to disclose is not the uniform motion of the pendulum, but the union of synthesis in the central point of reality.

There can be little doubt that there are men not Christian nor European whose experiences in the realms of religion, to say the least, bear a close resemblance to the experiences described by the greatest of Christian mystics. Writers—and many of them are not writers only for they have set out to taste the experience as well—such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, or even in another direction Ananda Coomaraswamy, have made this abundantly clear in the last twenty years.