A great deal has been heard of late of the problem of reconciling one aim of economic policy, that of stability, or full employment as it is usually expressed nowadays, with another aim, that of economic efficiency. But stability and efficiency do not exhaust the list of the rightful aims of economic policy. There is a third, since the economic system should be not only efficient and reasonably stable but should also be just. This third element, justice, has received relatively little attention in modern economic analysis, but this is in direct contrast with the discussions of economic matters found in the scholastic philosophers. In their treatises, the one thing about price which they emphasise is that it must be a just price. They devoted little space to any direct consideration of those aspects of human economic activities which bear upon the stability or efficiency of the system, but a great deal to those aspects which treat of justice as between man and man. Does this mean that the medieval writers were very poor economists? They have indeed been treated as such in the textbooks on the development of economic thought. But recent developments of economics are giving cause for some reassessment, here as elsewhere.

Riddles are out of fashion. They have sunk to an idle fourth form exercise. The classics, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ or ‘When is a door not a door?’ hardly kindle enthusiasm. Even the more promising ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ with its answer ‘The higher the fewer’ cannot take one far. The Mad Hatter and Mr Salteena had one or two up their sleeve, but they were both in their own way rather questionable company, and nowadays riddles do not figure in polite society. Still less does one meet them in poetry. Yet this is strange, for they once flourished in our literature, rhyming riddles whose remnants survive in nursery jingles—‘Long legs, crooked thighs, Little head and no eyes.’ Every mind with a bent towards poetry has in it something that engenders riddles, and the recognition of these and the attempt to solve them are among a writer’s most important tasks. The Sphinx in the mind propounds her dark saying and waits in her cave for the answer,

‘. . . that Theban Monster that propos’d Her riddle, and him, who solv’d it not, devour’d’, showing that inability to answer may have serious consequences.

It is convenient to collect Milton, and Thebes, here, for they are part of my riddle (which I set, not officiously for you, but for myself). It was set me two years ago, one gusty Sunday afternoon in September on a farm in the Hudson Valley. I had been invited to spend the day there, whiling away the brief uneasy week before the opening of an academic year.

It is necessary from time to time to withdraw oneself from the tangle of events and to contemplate the main trends of contemporary history. What are the most significant international happenings of recent months, and what conclusions may be drawn from them?

It is a tribute to the immense power and responsibility of the United States in the world today that Governments outside the Communist orbit almost all marked time as they awaited the outcome of the recent American presidential election. The semi-paralysis of diplomacy has continued during the interregnum between General Eisenhower’s election and his official replacement of President Truman in the White House. The reason is not far to seek. The whole scale of the rearmament effort, which has been getting under way in Western Europe during the last year, depends more than anything else upon the policy of the new President and the appropriations of the 83rd Congress. The prospects of orderly control of the Middle East and Moslem North Africa—which constitute the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—depend upon the extent to which the new American Government can subordinate the sentimental anti-imperialism which is part of the stock-intrade of American politics to the solidarity of the alliance and long-range strategic requirements. In the Far East, no solution (if solution there be) can be found for the deadlock in Korea except through the leadership of the United States, which has shouldered the main responsibility for the war against the Communists and has suffered nine-tenths of the United Nations’ casualties.

Why was it that Simone Weil, with her intense desire for the truth at all costs, with her love of God, of Christ crucified and of the Mass, was yet kept outside the Church and died without receiving baptism? The answer to this question is to be found partly in the letters which she wrote to Father Perrin, the Dominican, and which were published in an earlier book, Waiting on God, and more definitely in the Letter to a Priest, which she wrote from New York a year before her death. It is not merely a personal question, because Simone Weil, though more intense in the ardour of her desire for truth and more uncompromising in its pursuit than anyone, perhaps, in our time, was yet typical of a whole generation of those who are apparently estranged from the Church or from any form of organised Christianity. She expresses the position both of herself and of many others in the opening words of the letter: ‘When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of Mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine. . . .’ She then goes on to enumerate all the reasons which keep her from the Church, about which, she says, ‘I have been thinking . . . for years with all the intensity of love and attention of which I am capable’.

No event has so stirred up the dormant forces of anti-clericalism, anti-semitism and nationalism in post-war France as has the recent Affaire Finaly. The fate of two Jewish children, Robert and Gerard Finaly, who were baptised and taken to Spain by their Catholic protectors when the court had ordered that they should be given up to their Jewish relatives, have become a national scandal comparable to the Dreyfus affair. The Church and individual Catholics have been the targets of bitter attacks in the French press and radio, and the old cleavage between Catholic and anti-Catholic Frenchmen, barely healed in the last war and in the changed political atmosphere since 1945, seems to have opened up again.

The facts of the case are briefly these: The Jewish doctor, Fritz Finaly, and his wife, who had found refuge in France after the Nazi occupation of Austria, were arrested in Grenoble by the Gestapo on February 14, 1944. They were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where they were killed in the gas chamber. Shortly before their deportation they had entrusted their two children, then aged two and three years, to the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul. The mother superior of that convent was unable to keep them and approached the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion who handed the children to Mlle Brun, the head of the municipal orphanage, who was already hiding ten other Jewish children.

Until recent years Dafydd ap Gwilym was the only Welsh poet with a high reputation outside Wales. This was not so strange. He fitted into the conventional picture of medieval poetry. He shared themes and modes with Guido Cavalcanti and with Thibaut de Champagne. He stretched a hand to Rutebeuf and another to the early Chaucer. Sir Idris Bell tackled English translations; Stern treated him as a Welsh minnesänger; a Dutch scholar, Theodor Chotzen, killed later in a Nazi prison, had in 1927 published his Recherches sur la poésie de Dafydd ap Gwilym, a large volume which remains still a most valuable survey of much of the poetry of Northern Europe in the fourteenth century. Now Professor Parry, of the University College of Bangor, gives us the long-awaited edition which is based on a study of all the manuscript sources. One must not speak of a final edition, for the simple reason that oral tradition admits of very little finality} but here are the text and critical apparatus that will be the starting point of study for the rest of this century. What I propose to attempt now is to give English readers a glimpse of Dafydd ap Gwilym from the point of view of the Welsh literary tradition.

This is no longer too difficult. The first volume of The Growth of “Literature by H. M. and N. K. Chadwick—a great and noble work despite necessary lacunae and some errors—has revealed to English students the tradition of heroic panegyric that is the main stream of Welsh poetry from the sixth century onwards. The Welsh poets themselves used to call it the tradition of Taliesin, from the sixth-century poet of that name.

Even those who are most insistent that architecture is an art will admit that there is a limit to what aesthetics can do to gild distressing human arrangements. The truth of this has been brought home to English people in a painful way by the dilemma of ‘housing’. For perhaps no modern building problem has had so much architectural skill lavished on it. But if its fruits are on the whole more seemly than they were forty years ago, this is on the surface only and cannot hide the fact that the conception— whether it is realised, in an estate or a neighbourhood or a new town—is humanly unsatisfactory. If we enquire why and how this is so, all objections lead back to the intractable defect that there is altogether too much of it. ‘Intractable’ because those who still want houses will explain that so far as they are concerned there is altogether too little.

It is not only monotony to the eye which is complained of—though this is at least an indication that there is something wrong—but the great distances which everyone must walk to get anywhere and the social defects which these distances produce and which are generally described as ‘thinning of the social fabric’. Distances so ‘take it out of’ people that they do less, participate less, see less of one another. And it is perhaps this toll on social life which we are chiefly aware of when we remark the lifelessness of our new localities. They are an aggregation of units which do not add up to a commune.

It is surely clear that no urbanity in the architectural arrangements can make up for defects of this kind; but that the fault must lie, if not with basic requirements, at least with the present mode in which they are supplied.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and when it was evident that the French strikes would make transport indefinitely doubtful, we decided to renounce the tidy shape of our original plans and let chance offers on the road take us where they might. Perhaps even in the limited time at our disposal—three days only—we should see something of St Bernard’s country and the places where he had been. So we set out, the two of us, hopefully.

The first offer, taking us beyond Auxerre, came after no more than five minutes walking and we were soon moving through the forest of Fontainebleau in the morning sunshine. The rain which had broken the oppressive heat of the previous two days had left the leaves clean and shining, and beyond the wood the blue sky opened that was above us all the way; a route through Moret with its narrow gates and an old house in a world of moving waters, past Sens, and gradually into downland till you are on a ridge of hills. The trees along the road change from poplar to unclipped chestnut and then to generous plane and, now in the Côte d’Or, the Yonne lies below on the right, a broad and pleasant river in a singularly favoured land. To have read in one’s history books of the power of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy is to have learned the hard way. Here one has only to look to understand. A country of such resources, so royally self-sufficient and assured, could scarcely be less than a kingdom. The light has a quality all its own, the very air moving among the leaves in the orchards seems blended according to secret ingredients. And white and honey-coloured in this light, bathed in this air, on the crown of a steep hill stands the abbey of Vézelay.

The generalities of geography, or a shape on the map, do little to prepare you for a new land. After the timeless, torpid days of sea and sun, the gradual bulk of a strange continent seems a heroic gesture against the empty world of water. And the introduction to South America is a warning that you must forget what you expected to see. For the islands of Fernando de Noronha, two hundred miles still from the Brazilian coast, a penal settlement for political prisoners, stand hostile and apart, with their toppling peaks and deserted bays. This is what land can be like; first a geology, and then the fantastic thing within that man can make of it.

Brazil is the fourth largest country in the world. More than two thousand miles from north to south, as many from east to west, and with a coastline of four thousand five hundred, it sprawls, huge and unmanageable in mind. Absurd to begin to write of it in terms of ports of call: the half-day visit and the scheduled sights. Yet there is something to be seen, and much to imagine. Here, more than in any other Latin American land, the layers of history are immediately revealed. First the immense fact of it, prodigal and strange: vast enough and rich enough to absorb the succeeding waves of Portuguese conquerors, African slaves, immigrants from Germany, Italy, Japan. Today a population of fifty-three million can suggest a false record of the facts, for three-quarters of the people are crowded within a hundred miles of the coast, mainly in the south-east. Here are the colossal cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, skyscrapered and growing every hour.

It is welcome news that the United States has agreed to consider the possibility of allowing East German refugees to enter America as immigrants, and that the Canadian Government has given an assurance that it will assist in giving East German farmers in particular new homes and places of work. For the problem of the twelve million refugees, swollen every month by thousands of fresh arrivals from the Russian Zone, is still one of the most important of all European questions. The plight of the D.P.s is perhaps even worse, for there are still between 150,000 and 200,000 of the old, weak, infirm and unemployables in D.P. camps in Germany.

The unprecedented migration that followed the Potsdam agreement—when in the winter of 1945-6 fifteen million people were moved out of Eastern Germany and neighbouring territories to make way for Poles and Russians—has provided an unprecedented responsibility for the Church in Germany. Only twelve million finally arrived in Western Germany—three million died or were directed eastward— but nearly half of them were Catholic, coming from the almost completely Catholic areas of Upper Silesia and the Sudeten territory, as well as from Tower Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania. Up to the last war the Catholic and Protestant majorities in Germany could be delimited almost exactly by the boundaries set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1,648 on the principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio.

The scope of this paper is the relationship between Marxism and science, and I shall deal principally with biology, both because it is the science that has been most affected by the impact of Communism, and because it is the one with which I am best acquainted.

To begin, we must go back to the writings of Marx and more particularly of Engels, who was, much preoccupied with scientific questions. It is convenient to distinguish three groups of ideas in these writings, which may be described as materialistic, dialectical and ethical. In common with those whom Marxists call vulgar materialists, people like Büchner and Moleschott, Marx and Engels affirmed that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter—the Marxists say a reflection of matter; they are therefore realists asserting that matter exists independently of human cognition; they believe in strict causal determinacy operating according to physical law; and they deny that God exists. The dialectics comes from Hegel but most of the fundamental notions occur in the Greeks. The most important dialectical principles are firstly, the unity of opposites, which asserts the fundamental interrelatedness of all the objects composing the physical universe, secondly, the idea that change and development follow from the conflict of dialectical opposites, and thirdly, the notion that qualitative change supervenes upon the accumulation of quantitative, changes. The relation of the preceding notions to the ethical tenets of Marxism has always been obscure. For the present purpose two only of the latter need be considered, the notion that knowledge should be utilised for social well-being, and the notion, seldom explicitly stated but constantly implied, of equality in rights between all sorts of human beings. These two notions have obvious religious affiliations, which however need not be discussed here.

In a communiqué issued after their annual meeting last autumn, the archbishops and bishops of Canada have drawn the attention of Christians to the problem of immigration. In publishing this document, their thought was first of all for Canada where the policy of racial restriction in immigration recently put into force is much criticised by Catholics, but, in its general and doctrinal character, their communiqué is applicable in a much wider field:

‘Immigration is a social fact with many aspects.

The Church does not pronounce upon technical questions concerning immigration, but she reminds all that immigration is subject to laws of morality on which legislators should base their decrees:

1. 1. The separation of families is a deplorable and disastrous condition of affairs; it is the duty of public and private organisations to make an immediate and constant effort to reunite families, when one member has already obtained permission to enter a particular country—and this especially if it is the head of the family who has done so;

2. 2. Since God has put the earth at the disposal of mankind, those countries which have unoccupied land have the duty of favouring the immigration of the inhabitants of over-populated countries;

3. 3. The policy which directs immigration services must be truly democratic and any procedure which would arbitrarily exclude citizens of a nation with a surplus population from entering the country, or refugees from a country undergoing political or religious persecution, would be contrary to the principle of true peace.’

This firm stand is echoed by a declaration of Mgr Antoniutti, Apostolic Delegate in Canada. This important statement, from which we quote, stresses the fact that the problem of migrations is perhaps the most important social problem of our time:

‘It is not the problem of the poor of which I am going to speak to you, that problem which haunted the warm-hearted St Vincent de Paul, to quote one name alone.

When Wilfrid and Alice Meynell visited Francis Thompson at Pantasaph, Alice wrote of her fellow-poet who was lodging in a cottage at the monastery gates, ‘There is no disturbing renown to be got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills’. She envied the Franciscan peace to which her friend came homeward at nightfall. Viola Meynell’s gracious and discerning account of Wilfrid Meynell and Francis Thompson shows a strong personality and a weak one fulfilling each other in the Christian charity that makes give and take possible, and united in serving three things recognised by their age as worth individual sacrifice—religion, domestic love and poetry. Journalist and poet, happy if hard-pressed father of seven children and waif of the London streets, their unique and self-effacing collaboration did more for the conversion of the England of their day than any publicist is likely to achieve for ours. As in some sort one of their converts, I should like to glance at this aspect of Viola Meynell’s book and endorse it from my own experience.

Of the impact of Western science and technology on the East little needs to be said. But there is a reverse process which is less manifest, more subtle, but which may perhaps prove hardly less effective in shaping the future of mankind. ‘Let us look towards the East’, the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung has bidden us. ‘Let us look towards the East. . . . European cannons have burst open the gates of Asia; European science and technique, European worldly-mindedness and cupidity. . . . We have conquered the East politically. . . . But do you know what happened when Rome overthrew the Near East politically? The Spirit of the East entered Rome . . . and out of the most unlikely corners of Asia Minor came a new, spiritual Rome. Would it be unthinkable that the same thing might happen today? ... I know that our [Western] unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism. ... The spirit of the East penetrates through all our pores, and reaches the most vulnerable places of Europe.’

Perhaps that sounds extravagant. But I am not so sure. It was just about the time when the French revolutionaries were enthroning the goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame that some Upanishads were first translated into a European language. It was a rather dubious translation into French by way of the Persian, and, for some time after that, European renderings of the great spiritual classics of the East were rare enough. But we know how the discovery of Buddhist thought influenced Schopenhauer; and however much he may have misinterpreted it, European thinkers have never since been unaware of the challenge to their own ways of thinking of an immense power of age-old wisdom in the Far East.

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.

The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.

One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.

Many mathematicians know their details but are ignorant of the philosophical characterisation of their science.’ It was A. N. Whitehead who wrote this. He himself made an admirable effort to supply the defect. Assuming that no recognised philosopher knew enough of the details of mathematical science to give a reliable account of it, he read, besides Plato and Aristotle, a selection of seventeenth-century writers—particularly Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant—who either knew enough about mathematics to be helpful, or little enough to show in what new way philosophy must be handled to meet the mathematicians’ need. He then wrote Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, which he delivered as the Gifford Lectures for 1927-28 and published in book form in 1929. It is less exclusively addressed to mathematicians than the earlier work he had begun with Bertrand Russell and then abandoned; but its whole drive aims at setting the sciences that use mathematics in their full philosophical and spiritual context. By the time it was finished the revolution worked in physics by the theories of quanta and relativity was firmly established. The work took into account, with full approval, the new cosmological outlook the change implied.

In The Anathemata (Faber and Faber; 25s.) Mr David Jones has rewarded admirers of his earlier period—that of opaque paintings, taut images, rare incised or rounded box-woods—by presenting them at length with another major work of sacred art.

Anathemata: ‘things patient of being “set-up to the gods”’: for matter, thoughts stirring as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’; for background, ‘the entire world of sign and sacrament’; for magnet and focus, the Body of the Lord.

Incarnation is here ‘no hint half guessed, [no] gift half understood’. In lieu of Mr Eliot’s ‘hardly barely prayable prayer’ we have an epic conterminous with recorded and unrecorded time, one vast eucharistic symphony, whose tempo is the velocity of thought; its music ‘unmeasured, irregular in stress and interval, of interior rhythm, modal’, moves stately as in breves, its tone akin rather to woodwind than to strings: ‘reeds then! and minstrelsy’. Great play is made with the more sombre vowels—‘the stone/ the fonted water/ the fronded wood’. Sharps are not to seek—‘if fifth the fire/ the cadence ice’, nor clash of consonants—‘skirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod’.

Our age may have many defects but it also has its virtues. One of them is a resolute search for authenticity, for the real and the genuine. This has shown itself in various ways, among which we can number the ‘return to original sources’, urged so long ago by Leo XIII. The revival of biblical scholarship in the last sixty years and the increasing and widespread practice among the laity of reading the Bible are among the most reassuring signs of the Church’s vitality at the present day. But a growing familiarity with the word of God is accompanied by a realisation of the difficulties that lie in wait for the ordinary reader. Higher Criticism is no longer the menace it was, but most of us carry about, as the familiar furniture of our minds, vague reminiscences of what the critics have said, so that when we read the Pentateuch we are aware that it has been carved up into four, if not more, sources and that R (or even R 1, 2, 3), is said to be the author rather than Moses. When we read the lovely oracles of the second part of Isaiah we remember that obscure Germans have taught that they were written by a committee and that they are prophecies post eventum. Compared with these matters, the standing still of the sun for Joshua, or whether Jonah was or was not eaten by a whale or by another as yet zoologically unverified sea-monster, are comparatively easy questions.