Marxist revolution, Bebel tells us, differs from all its predecessors in this, that it does not seek for new forms of religion, but denies religion altogether. ‘The first word of religion,’ wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘is a lie’. ‘The idea of God’, said Marx, ‘must be destroyed; it is the keystone of perverted civilisation’. ‘It is useless’, adds Bax, ‘blinking the fact that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of today than the Saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians’; and elsewhere: ‘In what sense socialism is not religion will now be clear. It utterly despises “the other world”, with all its stage properties—that is, the present objects of religion’.

The only claim, in short, that the Revolution of Karl Marx has ever made to religious recognition is that it ‘brings religion from Heaven to earth’. But its major prophets have never been so rash as to promise the translation of Heaven itself to earth. On the contrary the convert to Marx’s materialist dialectic has been heard to put it to the latter’s credit that it has no dope to offer the faithful, no pie whether in the shy or on earth. Herein lies the appeal of the revolution to asceticism. And we cannot deny that the revolution has had an abundance of witnesses, in men and women singularly devoid of self-gratification. The old inevitable gibe about communists foregathering at the sea-side like lords’ and having cars, as other men,

In her admirable biography, Gilbert, Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward dwelt at some length on a notable controversy in which her hero was engaged at the beginning of the present century. ‘He was still’, she says, ‘writing every Saturday in the Daily News. Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas. The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford, Editor of The Clarion, who had written a rationalist Credo, entitled God and My Neighbour. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open The Clarion to the freest possible discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called The Doubts of Democracy’.

The writer of the present article read these sections of Miss Ward’s book with special interest, for he remembers vividly the controversy to which they refer, and thinks it may be useful to describe it in some detail, as it has lessons for our own times. He has also another reason for recalling it.

At the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the present century (in fact, up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war), debates on religion held a high place in the attention of the reading part of our people.

On comparing the major and some of the smaller exhibitions held in London during the winter and spring, the striking factors were the vividly contrasting choice of subjects and the widely differing styles of expression: to name three examples, The Indian Art, Marc Chagall, and Vincent van Gogh. At the outset it seemed impossible to imagine that a common note could be found. Upon greater reflection, however, it appeared that perhaps their unity lay in the variance that previously seemed to ridicule any notion of coherence—briefly, that the completion of a work of art is, either consciously or unconsciously, an act of worship, and a record of the artist’s experience of God. Broadly speaking the common purpose exists in this context.

From a Christian standpoint a notable feature was the almost entire absence of ostensibly religious paintings—as distinct from those which could be religious in their implications—completed in the course of the last fifty years.

This was especially obvious in the exhibition recently held by the Institute of Contemporary Arts entitled ‘Forty Years of Modern Art’. The exhibits were drawn solely from British private collections, which may account for the inadequacy of some of them, for instance the Matisse ‘Head of a Girl’ which was the only example of his work. Also, on recalling the selection of Georges Rouault’s paintings, none of his religious works were included, although from the aesthetic point of view the water-colour ‘Odalisque’ was a superb choice, displaying the characteristic simplicity of his draughtsmanship and the resonance of his colours.

A woman must always remember that, she is a woman. She must dress like a woman, talk like a woman and walk like a woman. For the enrichment of her personal life, her personal happiness, she must observe the purely feminine attributes and feminine virtues. . . . We have neglected the special education which girls need to become good mothers and good wives and we must give it to them.—Olga Mishakova, Secretary General of the Russian Youth Organisation.

It may well be that economic necessity makes a supply of female helots an inevitable part of our industrial life.—John Newsom, County Education Officer for Hertfordshire.

All education is due for overhauling; and that of women, being least concerned with the vital needs of its victims, is justly answerable for the most uneasiness. Papal pronouncements having frequently dealt with the kindred points of heaven and home as the magnetic poles of civilisation, there is no need to reiterate the teaching of the Church on the subject. But because the integrity of the English home is to all intents and purposes a forlorn hope, and the English heaven strikes one as being unlikely of attainment without it, the reviewer proposes to survey two books, one American, one English, and neither of them Catholic, which exhibit a novel awareness of our danger and offer some practicable suggestions for averting it. In the brief space at her disposal, she has almost entirely ignored the unhelpful aspects of the books in question.

The ‘numbering’ of people used to be resented in ancient times as presumptuous, unlucky and only meant as a means of further fiscal extortion. The taking of a census for purely scientific, demographic purposes is something quite modern and goes back to the ‘counting of heads’, required by democracy, practised for the first time in 1790 by the United States; Great Britain following suit with a first census in 1801. Subsequently most other countries have likewise introduced the system of a decennial census; but there are important exceptions still, the most serious one being that of China, which is quite innocent of any reliable nation-wide statistics of any sort.

To say anything about China’s population one is therefore left to shrewd guesses, scientific approximations or a lively imagination. The Imperial Government ordered a census to be taken in 1895 and 1910, which yielded a total of 377 and 316 million inhabitants respectively. The Republic, if only on account of the endemic warfare which has bedevilled its existence from the very start, has had to content itself with ‘Post Office Estimates’, which in 1920 suggested 428 and in 1930 445 millions as China’s total population. Finally in 1932 the Government came out with a fiat declaring 475 millions to be the right figure; against which W. F. Wilcox of the American Statistical Association in its Journal for 1980 maintained that 342 millions was the most he could concede.

C. P. Fitzgerald by a painstaking computation of cities actually occupied at different periods of Chinese history arrived at a grand total of 130 millions as China’s population under the T’ang Dynasty in 618 A.D. (China Journal of 1932).

The period in the life of the Church during which one and the same tradition flourished throughout the Christian world, in East and West alike, is generally supposed to be the first five centuries, or, in other words, the period before and up to the medieval. The Middle Ages, and especially what may be called the Latin Middle Ages, are either discounted altogether or else mentioned only in order to eliminate them from the field of investigation; three charges in particular being levelled against them.

To begin with, the Middle Ages in the West are held to have been juridical and institutional, fenced about by an intricate system of legislation; they were the Golden Age of Canon Law and thus opposed to the spontaneous developments characterising the Eastern Church over the same period of time. The medieval West was also marked by moral and psychological trends of thought in contrast with the mysticism of Eastern Christianity, and religious life tended to be more practical than contemplative in spirit. The immediate present and its concerns bulked larger than the disinterested pursuit of eternal life, and the temporal preponderated over the eschatological in importance. There is, moreover, a noticeably psychological bent in the writings of the men most representative of the centuries in question; to quote examples from either extremity of the period, we find St Gregory the Great pre-eminently the moralist of Scriptural exegesis, and St Bernard’s conscious fervour far removed from the ancient spirituality of the Charisma.

I suppose there is no greater and more devoted authority on the classic Thomist tradition than Father Garrigou-Lagrange. For well over forty years he has been writing in defence of that tradition. His first works were written at a time of crisis, when the very bases of faith were attacked by the Modernists. He was an apostle of Thomist realism against the immanentist, evolutionist and phenomenalist philosophies before modernism was condemned by Pius X. Writing now in his old age, long after that struggle of his youth, Father Garrigou feels that there are once again danger-signals of a falling away from St Thomas, and he is as convinced as he ever was that such a falling away will bring disaster to many. ‘Whither goes the new theology?’ he writes at the end of his book. ‘It is returning to modernism.’

In view of the urgency, as he sees it, he considers it timely to give us a constructive and concise statement of the whole system of philosophy and theology of St Thomas. In all controversial questions he takes, as he always has done, the more traditional view, almost always under the guidance of the classical commentator, Cajetan.

An English Catholic, aside from the main stream of Catholic thought, must wonder that there could be any foundation in present-day Catholic thinking for Father Garrigou-Lagrange’s fears. It is more in France than in England that much of the older theological tradition has been questioned in recent years.

Historians of philosophy have been notoriously unsuccessful in the past, either through hanging their own thoughts on other men’s pegs or through simply giving a list of the pegs; of the former error the supreme example may for long be Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, whilst the second failing is one which Laird found difficult to avoid within the limited space of his Home University volume on Recent Philosophy. It is all the more pleasing, then, to find that Fr Bochenski has written a history of European philosophy during the present century which presents the main lines of modern philosophers neatly and lucidly, yet makes it quite clear that the question of truth is one which the philosopher, whatever his capacity, may not neglect, and he himself unobtrusively indicates the direction in which solutions of the difficulties are to be sought. He proves himself such a stimulating guide to the thought of our own day that we can whole-heartedly express the hope of seeing the work translated into English in the near future.

The characteristic notes of the book are neatness and precision. In his short preface Fr Bochenski points out with great modesty the shortcomings which are scarcely to be avoided in giving an account of other men’s thought, though his modesty does not prevent him from insisting that it is only a mark of respect towards another philosopher to offer criticisms of his work. To have expressed an essential truth so briefly is typical of the book.

On April 4th, 1946, Paul Claudel was elected a member of the French Academy by 24 votes out of 25, the 25th being an abstention. The recognition was tardy, for he was in his 78th year; and in reversing the resounding rejection of 1935 the Academy was only ratifying the place he occupies as one of the foremost modern poets, and the greatest modern Catholic poet.

It is opportune to analyse his poetic theory.

Not indeed that the hostility shown to Claudel in 1935 was mainly for literary reasons. These existed, certainly: a deliberate departure from accepted rule and custom, an apparently lawless technique and a degree of obscurity that seemed to flout the reader, a most personal choice of subjects and use of words as well as disconcerting syntax, transitions, sudden changes of tone, mingling of the loftiest with the most colloquial language. His poetic system, wrote a critic of the time, ‘goes counter to all the advances laboriously realised since Ronsard and even Villon’. But there was also the strongest opposition on political and personal grounds: it is painful for example to read the virulent article in which Léon Daudet (Action Française, 3 Avril 1935), exults over Claudel’s defeat, having first recorded his own early admiration for the poet.

Claudel though an official was no politician. His consular and diplomatic career was a step-by-step achievement of steady work. He contrasts himself in this respect with Mallarmé the professor-poet, who hated his teaching and never crossed the Pont de l’Eveque ‘without feeling inclined to throw himself over the parapet’.

The newspapers, some months ago, announced and commented on the proposal to revise the canon law of the Church of England, and a handsome volume was produced by the Commission appointed in 1939 by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. It was published by the S.P.C.K. in 1947, and contains, together with a number of very scholarly introductory articles, the draft of a proposed scheme of ‘The constitutions and canons ecclesiastical of the Church of England, 194—, with annotations’.

This publication is of the greatest interest, not only to members of the Church of England, but to all students of canon law, who cannot but welcome the perfecting of ecclesiastical discipline, wherever it may be, and the reading of these proposed canons will most certainly evoke in every canonist’s breast sentiments of sincere admiration, of puzzled wonder, or of charitable disapproval, as the case may be. Therefore, it should cause no offence if, in a review like Blackfriars, we take the liberty of putting on paper some observations which it has occurred to us to make when running through this interesting document. This we do in no spirit of carping criticism, but with the sincere desire of contributing something objective, and possibly constructive, to this important undertaking.

The ‘Conversion of England’ presents itself to us both as a problem and a mystery, but for one reason or another we become so preoccupied with the problem that we overlook the mystery. Yet our very handling of the problem is bound to be influenced by our awareness of the mystery. It must be confessed also that the problem has hitherto received only intermittent attention, and that nothing like a strategy of conversion has yet been evolved. It is my contention that our tendency to date has been to view the question as a matter of immediate practical concern demanding immediate action; and there seems moreover to be a belief abroad that this is a problem which will yield like any other to persistence and the correct technique—backed always by the grace of God. Certainly we should be active if only intermittently, but have we any reason for believing that our usual methods of tackling this immense problem are likely to lead to improved results? I would submit that the inevitable sense of frustration which follows on our efforts is due to an insufficient consideration of the truth that the problem is not only a problem, but also a profound mystery. In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.

In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.

It is gradually becoming possible to assess the figures concerning the expulsion of Germans from the eastern parts of Europe, from Eastern Germany, Sudetenland, Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia and adjacent countries. Each new figure implies a larger, more extensive, more irreparable sum of human misery; and means, moreover, an accumulation of new problems in almost every field of human relations, the full size of which is quite obviously not yet realised anywhere.

The latest figures are as follows. Those expelled number altogether about 11 millions, of whom approximately half, 5 1/2 millions, are Catholic. In the American Zone there are now 3 1/4 millions, in the British Zone 3 1/3 millions, in the Russian Zone 4 1/2 millions, and about 100,000 in the French Zone. It is assumed that about 3 million people died in consequence of the expulsion; these are not included in the above-mentioned total of 11 million. Out of a total of 4,500 Catholic priests who worked among these people only 2,500 are still alive. Only 15 per cent of those expelled had the opportunity of taking enough of their belongings with them in order to have a minimum of clothing, furniture and outfit of any type.

Fully to understand Claudel’s theory of poetic-expression we must follow his analysis of movement. Being, self-existent, is motionless; created things, both matter and spirit, are in movement. This motion imprinted on them by the Creator-Spirit gives them their sense : we have seen how much Claudel means by that word. He uses the metaphor of flight (/wife) to express their movement out from the Creator; but their origin is also their end (fin, goal and limit) and they are moving back thither. ‘Now every movement results in the creation or maintenance of a state of equilibrium’ (p. 75), but only through a constant tension because everything other than complete and self-sufficing Being is in a condition of ‘interplay and contradiction’ (p. 147). Man, like other creatures, is perpetually in movement for ‘there is movement wherever there is variation in existence’.14 It may be a movement of inner vibration tending to produce the form; or a movement of efference or outward process.

That the whole of creation, even inanimate, is in a state of alternating movement is also a hypothesis of modern science. But while its materialist exponents ‘observe the working of a machine’, the Christian thinker ‘enjoys the use of an instrument’ (Art Poetique, p. 28). For these changes, contacts, responses, man has, in common with the animals, senses: sensation is the first phenomenon of our activity, but we are not, like the animals, passive under it. Our senses are our tools: ‘as we learn the use of a tool by apprenticeship so we educate our senses’ (id. p. 91).

Speaking last year at the centenary celebrations of St David’s church, Swansea (which was also about the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Swansea mission), the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster remarked on the fact that ‘so little has been written of the history of Catholicism in Wales’. Having undertaken some years ago to write a popular account of the Church in Wales, the present writer knows from very practical experience how little that little is; and he hopes that the few pages that follow—to say nothing of all the other pages in this issue of Blackfriars—may perhaps encourage others, better qualified than himself, to put their hands to the work of filling this deficiency in the religious and ecclesiastical history of these islands, a deficiency which may be partly due to the fact that for a century and more the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Wales have not themselves been Welsh.

One of the first books published by authority of the British Military Government in Germany was Nietzsche and Christianity by Karl Jaspers. This was the first of a number of post-war publications through which Professor Jaspers became practically the spokesman of academic Germany. He had been one of the few outstanding university professors who, though not directly discriminated for racial, religious or political reasons, had never for a moment associated themselves with National Socialism. Apart from church dignitaries and scientific technicians, he was the first German intellectual to be invited after the war for lectures abroad. When the first German university was re-opened by the Allied Military Authorities at Heidelberg, he was not only restored to his professorship but appointed Rector. Fifteen years after the publication of his chief work, Jaspers has become perhaps the most influential figure in the intellectual life of Central and Western Europe. In Switzerland, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, England and France, his Existentialism is discussed even by those who used to take but little interest in philosophical pursuits.

In these countries, it is difficult to obtain genuine information on Jaspers’s philosophy. Only one small book of his has been translated into English.

In 1931 the publishers of Sammlung Goeschen asked Jaspers to write the 1,000th volume of this series of popular text-books on all branches of learning. He gave his book the title The spiritual Situation of our Time, which the Australian translators (E. and C. Paul) rendered by Man in the Modern Age. This book is long out of print.

Any attempt to dissipate the confusion that reigns in Catholic circles on the subject of private property must be welcomed. Fr Drostan’s paper is to be welcomed also as a very notable clarification of the question and as an attractive preface to the major work which he may be persuaded to produce.

Not the least disturbing feature of the situation is that it appears so simple to many. Remaining wholly on the plane of reason, we can show Communism to be false, first because it is atheistic—and the quinque viae can quickly be pressed into service to show the folly of atheism—and secondly because it rejects private property—which natural law alone upholds as a fundamental right. But the Communist is not convinced, and to quite faithful Christians it does not seem as if there were much respect for God or the basic human rights in the stronghold of liberty and capitalism. And when American bankers turn to the crucifix before accommodating their clients—at the usual rates—militant atheism, if not more sincere, seems to have a better understanding of the meaning of religion.

Fr Drostan rejects this unholy simplicity and exposes the limitations of a largely hypothetical natural law. At the very opening of his paper he places the problem in its proper setting—where it is all too rarely placed: ‘private property is essentially and basically a theological question’.

There are few places in England where it is so easy to lose events as it is in Oxford; and there are few times in Oxford when it is so easy for events to be washed over by the term as in summer, when the river and the parks claim all who have not already been absorbed into political meetings or into polite afternoon tea with the man one knew in Colombo and whom one expected—even, possibly, hoped—never to see again. Yet there is one event, in particular, which it would be well to rescue from the spate of term’s activities, for in it were embodied many of the virtues which our own age has neglected, the virtues of stabilitas, of patience and of the unhurried building for a time beyond the span of our own individual lives. We refer to three farewell lectures delivered by the Regius Professor of Modern History, Powicke, in which he dealt with the movements in the Oxford history school over the fifty years of his association with it.

There was much in the lectures of direct and immediate interest to the Catholic student—even to those who did not sit on the south side of Balliol hall, and were thus unable to let their gaze wander occasionally to where the late afternoon sun lit up the portrait of Manning, giving a radiance to the ascetic countenance of the Cardinal, whose benediction, it is not entirely fanciful to suppose, was granted both to the lecturer and to his audience.

Many in middle age are finding how far they have travelled from the opinions of their youth, in most of those sublunary matters subject to the rule of opinion. In youth our opinions commonly present themselves to us in the guise of convictions; it is part of the process of growing up (and indeed of growing old), that we learn how much greater the field of mere opinion is than we imagined it in our youth. The two books before us represent for the present writer, and for others of his generation, something of that gradual revolution in ideas which the sheer pressure of events has brought to birth in us.

First let us look at Gill, who recalls our youth, Distributism, Belloc, Chesterton, and all that happy romantic hangover from the 19th century into our own day, which beguiled us in the twenties. Few will take Gill as seriously as does the Editor of these letters, describing him as one of the ‘greatest minds of the day’, and even gracing his thought with the high name of ‘philosophy’. One admits readily the fascination of Gill, his passionate didactic style, his capacity for self-revelation, his sincerity at times almost fanatical, his vision crystal-clear but narrow in range. But these qualities which constitute the attraction of Gill for so many are bought at a high price—the price of a sort of affected ignorance on his part of those many things which did not interest him. Say if you will a sort of refusal to acknowledge the existence of the total field of reality—a vicious habit of simplifying the complex.