One is always tempted to view the Communist order, as it exists in Russia today, as something essentially static. But Communism does not differ from other orders: it is subject to the same eroding process of time.

The Communists themselves firmly believe that the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the capitalist order are insoluble, and that, sooner or later, they are bound to bring about the downfall and disintegration of the bourgeois society. They admit the existence of certain conflicts in their own society, but claim that these conflicts are merely the natural outcome of the eternal struggle between old and new elements. A closer scrutiny of these conflicts reveals, I think, that their character is far more serious than the Communists would be prepared to admit. Indeed they constitute a grave danger to the continuation of the regime as we know it. Four of these conflicts—one in the sphere of foreign policy and three in that of domestic affairs—may be usefully considered.

The contradiction which exists in the field of foreign policy is a comparatively simple one. The Soviet Union tries to pursue two contradictory aims at one and the same time, that of expansion and that of isolation.

The expansion is an essential element of the Communist doctrine of the world revolution. This expansion requires a great number of Soviet citizens to be stationed abroad. Their stay abroad implies close acquaintance with the outside world} the penetration of certain ideas and attitudes alien to their original Communist attitudes. At the same time, ever since 1948 at least, perhaps even earlier, there has been the doctrine of isolationism, the doctrine that the bourgeois world, the non-Soviet world, is an evil thing against which the citizens of the Soviet Empire ought to be guarded.

It was only to be expected that in the great effort which has been made in recent times in France to go back to the sources of Christian tradition and to recover its principles, an attempt should have been made to reconsider the nature of the monastic life and its place in the life of the Church. Of these attempts the most remarkable is the work of the Oratorian Père Bouyer on Le Sens de la Vie Monastique. It may be a matter of surprise that this should be the work of one who is not himself a monk. But the reason for this becomes clear when it is seen that for Père Bouyer the monastic life is simply the life of Christian perfection. ‘To be a monk’, as he says, ‘is simply to be an integral Christian.’ Viewed in this light, the first chapters of his book form one of the most memorable studies of the ideal of Christian perfection in modern times. They are distinguished from the work of Père Garrigou-Lagrange on the same subject in that they are based not on the teaching of St Thomas and the Carmelite mystics, but on the doctrine of the Fathers, and especially the Greek Fathers. This gives his view a richness and depth which is lacking in the work of Garrigou-Lagrange, but it also brings with it certain dangers. This becomes evident in the second part, where he turns from the theory to the practice of the monastic life; for he bases himself here largely on the teaching of the Fathers of the Desert. Now this teaching has, of course, immense value, and the fundamental principles of prayer and asceticism and spiritual perfection were laid down at this period for all time. But there were also defects and excesses in their outlook which make them often dangerous guides, and one does not feel that Père Bouyer has altogether escaped the dangers. As Father Aelred Sillem pointed out in a review in The Life of the Spirit, the fact that the Fathers of the Desert went out into the desert ‘to fight with demons’ is not really of much relevance to the vocation of a monk today.

The posthumously published Un mauvais Rêve, recently translated into English, adds a third murderess to those with whom we have already become acquainted in the novels of Bernanos published in his lifetime. Certain basic features are common to them all. The words of Abbé Donissan to Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan would seem to apply to all three: ‘Vous êtes comme un jouet, vous êtes comme la petite balle d’un enfant, entre les mains de Satan’. They are all victims of demoniacal possession. They are therefore victims in a deeper sense than are the unfortunate persons whom they murder, more or less gratuitously. The murder they commit is but the exterior manifestation of the deep corruption within, a corruption which in each case has its origin in childhood, indeed farther back still, in the blood which they have inherited. ‘Vous n’êtes point devant Dieu coupable de ce meurtre’, says Abbé Donissan to Mouchette, and with the terrible insight that he has acquired in his grim encounter of the preceding night he reveals her vicious antecedents. The ‘communion of sinners’ of which the curé of Ambricourt wrote in his diary is strong and has deep and wide ramifications. When the sham priest of Mégère, Evangéline, is awaiting the train that will presumably decapitate her, the author adds his thoughts to hers and evokes the sin of her mother, in whose false position as a defrocked nun with an illegitimate child and in whose sacerdotal obsession her own aberration had its origin.

Early in May this year the proctors of Cambridge University took action against The Granta in view of complaints that a poem published in that magazine was blasphemous. The affair made a stir in Cambridge and even got into the London papers j and if I take it here chiefly as an occasion for some remarks on the blasphemies of certain long-dead poets, this is not because I consider the Granta poem negligible. It was not. The remarks that follow are merely one observer’s modest attempt to get the whole subject into focus.

One may start with St Thomas’s preliminary definition of blasphemy: ‘the term seems to denote the disparagement of some high degree of goodness, and especially of the divine goodness’. In the context certain things are presupposed 5 in particular that there is such a thing as goodness, that it has degrees, and that there is a maximum goodness called God. ‘Blasphemy’ is related chiefly to God, as it always has been since the New Testament writers stressed the religious reference of blasphemia (in general, scurrilous or abusive language), though this reference was not lacking in classical Greek, just as the wider or secular sense of the term still appears in the New Testament itself. Both Francis Bacon and St Thomas’s master St Albert speak of ‘blasphemy’ against learning or knowledge; others have spoken of blasphemy against nature, friendship, and so on. But these are extensions of a term already appropriated by Christianity to mean disparaging speech about God, or about things and persons closely associated with him.

During our stay in England last summer, we were constantly struck by the fact that when people—both priests and laymen—would ask, as they often did, what Order we belonged to, there would be no reaction if we said, ‘The Little Brothers of Jesus’; but if one of us were to add, ‘The Little Brothers of Father de Foucauld’, faces would immediately light up and we could see, much to our gratification, what a familiar figure this hermit of the Sahara was to our inquirers—the hermit who was murdered there in the desert in 1916, after a life completely given to God, and at the same time to the most destitute of mankind, in imitation of his Lord and Brother’s life at Nazareth. We were therefore led to conclude that, while, thanks to various writings—the most recent of which is, I believe. Desert Calling by Anne Fremantle—Father de Foucauld himself was far from unknown in England, it was not yet generally realised among English Catholics that he had given birth to a rapidly growing spiritual family, the ‘Little Brothers of Jesus’ and the ‘Little Sisters of Jesus’.

It is true that Father de Foucauld was a rather unusual kind of founder. As far back as 1905 he knew, as he wrote, that ‘Jesus wishes me to work for the establishment of this double family ... in supplication, in self-immolation; by dying to myself, sanctifying myself—by loving him, in short’; and he did so for twenty years, meanwhile drafting as many as four successive Rules for his ‘little brothers and sisters’ to come. He however waited in vain for his first disciple to appear, and died without having been able to achieve this most cherished of his human desires. ‘A grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die’, he would repeat, ‘but I am still alive!’ And, in fact, it was only seventeen years after his death that the ‘Little Brothers’ came into existence.

Those critics who felt uneasy about the nature of Mr Graham Greene’s achievement in The End of the Affair will not be reassured by his first excursion into drama. The Living Room raises in a particularly forceful way a problem that has always been attendant on his work—that of finding what Mr Eliot has termed a satisfactory objective correlative, or ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked’. The same point might be expressed by saying that Mr Greene’s work tends to lack artistic inevitability, so that the tale tends either to be arbitrarily controlled by the informing theological interest, or it is quite inadequate to convey the complexity of that interest. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the narrative pattern is obviously incapable of carrying the deeper meanings of the tale the distinction between good and evil and right and wrong, with which the novel is so much concerned, cannot be said to arise organically from the characters of Pinkie and Ida Arnold. The consequent effect on the reader is the reverse of the novelist’s presumed intention—the theological interest giving the impression of being a device enabling the author to heighten and sustain the emotional pitch of his ‘thriller’. Neither The Heart of the Matter nor The End of the Affair seem to be free from this criticism, in spite of their obviously greater range and maturity. Only in The Power and the Glory does the theological interest seem entirely organic, where the central character, a priest, combines in his own person the conflicting themes of fallen man and the operation of sanctifying grace.

Can the traveller abroad penetrate the ethos of a country? If there is such a thing, the traveller, properly so-called, may do so. But is the modern tourist properly to be called a traveller? Both elements in our preliminary question are so doubtful that it is difficult to see whether what we want to say is worth the attempt. But at least, when abroad, we are conscious of difference, whether it is superficial or deep we are less able to gauge. The danger is of supposing it, on the one hand, to be all a matter of climate and food-supply, and, on the other, of carrying it so deep as to forget our common humanity. As to the tourist, we can admit him as a traveller on this simple point of difference: if he seeks difference as a titillation, for the sake of a change, to forget for a fortnight the monotony of his office and the anxieties of his personal life, he is, what he is perfectly entitled to be, a man on his holiday; but if he is prepared to study his subject beforehand, to bring philosophic principles to bear on the differences, he observes in the new environment, to reflect on them afterwards, to beware of false generalisations and biassed conclusions, he is a serious traveller, if only for a fortnight, even though merely a tourist.

He Communist Party in Britain has at this moment only some 35,000 members. This makes it sound small by comparison with such Communist Parties as those of, say, France or Italy, which are millions strong. But if such a comparison is to be of any real significance we need to observe the different roles and the different circumstances within which they function.

In France and Italy there are no mass Socialist movements. The result is that the biggest mass working-class party there is the Communist Party. Under such circumstances the party consists of a hard core of well-indoctrinated, highly disciplined members, who know what they want, where they are going and exactly how they are going to get there, and a great mass of less well instructed members who follow the party ‘line’ most of the time but cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as well-instructed Marxists. The role of the hard core within such a party is to try to leaven the entire lump, to raise its ‘Marxist-theoretical understanding’ (to use the Communists’ own jargon) and to keep it constantly active on behalf of Communist policies.

In Britain, the workers’ mass movement is Labour-led and the Communist Party is small. Its role in such circumstances is precisely that of the hard core in the continental-type Communist Party, i.e. to make the great working-class mass as Marxist as possible and to activise it on behalf of Communism. Had the Labour Party been prepared to admit the Communist Party as an affiliated body (as it once hoped would be the case, and for which it runs campaigns from time to time), the job would have been made much easier for it. But early in its life it was disaffiliated and so, whilst seeing itself as the Marxist hard core of the wider Labour movement, it must do its leavening from outside, so far as the political wing of the movement is concerned, although it can work from within in the case of most of the trades unions and the co-operative movement.

It has lately been complained that Catholic publicity in England lies in the hands of middle-aged adolescents; our continental brethren, on the other hand, seem to grow in youthful generosity as they come to maturity. At least that is true of the authors contributing to the Christe Heute series edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar and admirably produced by Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln. Perhaps the most salutary of the new volumes for English readers—who so readily equate the Faith with medievalism—is Das Experiment Europas by the Viennese historian Friedrich Heer. Heer courses over European history like a spring gale, blowing aside Catholic, Protestant and Liberal prejudices in order to reveal the diversity of gifts and beliefs in the rich European tradition; he says, for instance: ‘without the Enlightenment our scientific sobriety, freedom of conscience and civic rights would be inconceivable’. That is but one instance of the refreshing judgments which one encounters on every page. A similar élan characterises Balthasar’s Schleifung der Bastionen, the crumbling bastions are, of course, those of the medieval city, and Balthasar sees their fall as providential, the impetus towards the catholic mission. His reflections on ‘tradition’ are particularly interesting and valuable, as showing that it means almost the opposite in the Christian tradition from what conservative social theorists mean by it. And it is in the light of this principle that he ventures to assert: ‘The future of the Church depends on whether lay people are to be found who are prepared to live directly from the Gospel teachings and transform the world in the light of them’. One layman who seems to be prepared to do this is Francois Mauriac, whose Der Stein des Anstosses also appears in this series. Although this collection of discursive observations has little shape, it leaves us feeling that we know Mauriac personally—and, more important, says many things which are always being mentioned in conversation amongst Catholics but are scarcely ever breathed in public. It is for the health of the Catholic community that these opinions should be expressed, since our very salvation depends on our not meriting the taunt of André Gide: ‘Catholics do not love the truth’. (Two other recent volumes in the Christe Heute series are Hugo Rahner’s Der spielende Mensch—a revised version of his Eranos lecture—and a collection of de Lubac’s essays on the spiritual sense of Scripture.)