What is this thing called love?’ The question has been debated times without number: by the great poets, philosophers, mystics; by alert little logicians and portentous statisticians; by playwrights, novelists, songsters; and of course by lovers of various kinds, from those who indulge in a fever of passionate introspection to the simpler souls who sometimes briefly wonder in a bemused and befogged sort of way what has hit them. The plain man may well find himself confused by the variety of often conflicting answers given to the question, the variety of names given to the experience or to different aspects of it. In an interesting analysis of Moral Values in the Ancient World Professor John Ferguson discusses such concepts as the Greek eros, philia, philanthropia, homonoia, the Latin amicitia, pietas, humanitas, and the Hebrew chesed and ‘ahabah—the former of these last two being the steadfast, covenanted loving-kindness of God and pietas of man, the latter the deeper, unconditioned love that has in it something alike of eros and of philanthropia. But the two worlds of thought, the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman, were fundamentally different and could impinge but little on one another until Christianity brought to the world its new inspiration, its new concept of love, and what was in effect a new word to describe it: agape.

Again there has been a great deal of discussion about the difference, and the relationship, between eros and agape; and again the discussion has led to confusion because of the varying interpretations or emphases put on the words by various writers.

A word or two first to explain the title of this paper. My subject is ‘The autonomy of the university’. Actually, of course, the essential question is about the autonomy of the individual university teacher and research worker, not so much of the university as an institution, and I propose to treat the matter from that angle. Also, ‘autonomy’ is not the best word to express the question we are discussing. I would prefer to put it thus: ‘What is the responsibility of the university to the rest of the community, and how is this responsibility to be enforced?’

I shall try to answer this question, not from special principles applicable to the university alone, but from the general rules that govern the rights and duties of all workers. I know that many people dislike the idea that the university teacher or researcher is just one more kind of worker. In this country (Austria) we have recently heard the eloquent protest of Josef Pieper on this point. But opinions will not change facts. Work is work, whether it is done by the driver of a bus, the typist at her desk, or the professor in a university chair, and the rules governing the rights and duties of workers are the same for all. Everyone who works has the right to use his special skill and ability to the full—to enjoy, if you like, full employment—for two ends. The first is the development of his own personality, for achievement in work is necessary to the growth of a mature personality. The second is service to the community.

The level of unemployment rose steadily during 1958. I On January 13 th, 1.8 per cent of the insured population X. were out of work, but by December 8th this figure had risen to 2.4 per cent, and there was a further rise to 2.8 per cent by January 12th, 1959. Although these figures may be explained in part by recession abroad and a fall in British exports, the chief explanation is undoubtedly the effect on the economy of the raising of Bank Rate and the associated monetary measures taken to protect the pound in 1957. Important fundamental questions are raised by this rise in unemployment. It is clear that unless a government is determined to maintain the very low unemployment figures that we have become accustomed to in the post-war period, the level of unemployment is likely to rise as a result of changes in external circumstances or of measures intended to promote price stability at home.

Most people would agree that full employment and price stability are both desirable objectives. On the other hand, opinions differ as to whether or not the two objectives are compatible. Some Catholics may be inclined to believe that there is really no problem: if price stability can only be achieved at the expense of full employment, then the human waste and suffering caused by unemployment is too great to be contemplated with equanimity. They may feel that they have the authority of the Church behind them in taking this view.

The mystery of life has intrigued man’s mind from the beginning, as his earliest ideas and beliefs show. Some men, indeed, have been so fascinated as to make it the focal point of all human experience and to see in it the basic type of reality on which everything else is modelled or to which, at least, it is ordered. There is, of course, one field in which such notions as ‘life’, ‘soul’ and ‘organism’ have a particularly powerful attraction, namely that of political philosophy. The ideal city- state of Plato is based on the conception of society as a great organism, a living universe animated by a single soul. Nor is it by accident that in his political philosophy Hegel was so greatly influenced by Plato’s thought, even if in taking it over he modified it profoundly. And Hegel, in turn, is in this matter the principal source of Marx’s thought.

If in fact we are to grasp Marx’s thought in its original contours before these became ironed out under the successive manipulations of his chief disciples Engels, Lenin and Stalin, we must try to see it in the context of the Hegelian school which was its starting point. The main lines of Marxism were laid down in the philosophic climate of Germany—more exactly Prussia—of the years 1830-1845. Hegel himself had died in 1831, but his thought dominated succeeding thinkers who could do no more than repeat the Master’s philosophy while at the same time struggling vainly against it.

It cannot be said that English Catholicism has entered with mind and heart into the stream of doctrinal development which is so noticeable a feature of the Marian movement in the Church today. Any attempt to dismiss this movement and the doctrinal development within it as a Continental exaggeration runs the risk of so emphasizing the Englishness of our Catholicism as to compromise its Catholicism. The needs of apologetics in England are sometimes urged in favour of a minimalistic approach to Marian doctrine. There is one decisive answer to this suggestion : the only truth which we as Catholics must proclaim is the whole truth. Our duty as Catholics is not to minimize Marian doctrine but to present it as an integral part of the totality of saving truth which it is the Church’s office to preach to the world.

It is in view of this unsatisfactory situation in England that, so it seems clear to me, the central problem to be examined is the point of departure of the development of Marian doctrine. What I feel is most needed is not a more or less academic study of explicit Mariological structures, the technical elaborations of doctrine, but a disclosure of the motive force and impetus of the development, so that by renewing our living contact in faith and love with our Lady we may be able actively to contribute to the development, this active engagement being the essential precondition of any more objective theological assessment of the sense of that development.

One may well wonder whether contemporary civilization does not create a type of man impervious to religious feeling.’ This sentence from the preface to M. Dansette’s book sets the general tone of the work, which is to show how this generalization applies in particular to France, and what the French Church is doing about it. Using the techniques of sociology applied to religious data, undertaken first by a professor of Canon Law, Gabriel Le Bras, M. Dansette paints a picture of a de-christianized France where there exists a Church in which old forms struggle against new ideals. Of course, Le Bras’ four categories of Frenchmen do no more than register external observances—it is only by and large that they reflect a religious mentality, and the categories themselves are very crude: ‘dissidents’ who do not belong to the Church, ‘seasonal conformers’ (those who go to church for baptism, first communion, marriage and death), ‘faithful’ who make their Easter duties and go to Sunday Mass, ‘pious’ who do more than that. Again, practice itself is often deceptive; though very faithfully observed in the eighteenth century, no one would describe that as a century of faith: ‘Un pratiquant peut être athée et un non pratiquant, croyant.’

The figures, even with the obvious reservations, are interesting. Three per cent of the French population is unbaptized; 3 per cent confessionally non-Catholic; of the 94 per cent baptized, 34.2 per cent make their Easter duties—but again this average figure is deceptive, since regional variations are so marked.

There is a form of truth known as calumny.’ This howler appeared in the first Editorial of Blackfriars. The Editor, Father Bernard Delany, followed up by Father Vincent McNabb in the first article, was expounding ‘Our Aim of Truth’. The slip was quite out of keeping with Father Bernard’s character and its like never recurred while he was Editor. If he had a fault it was excessive caution born of selfdistrust. It used to be said of him that when he came to be beatified the Breviary would have to admit ‘Nimis demisse reputabat de se’. To us, his contemporaries, this initial slip seemed a cruel misfortune, a quite unnecessary manoeuvre by his heavenly patrons to safeguard his modesty. We feared it might discourage him and intensify his habitual shyness of publicity. The way his lapse was brought home to him made that the more likely.

Six of us, at least, were given his leader to revise. It must have been over-confidence in his diffidence that blinded us, for we saw nothing wrong. Nor, as far as we knew, did anyone else, until James Britten opened his copy of the Review. Britten, then a peppery old gentleman and a militant convert of many years standing, was joint founder of the Catholic Truth Society, which at that date was in the early stages of a post-war ‘Forward Movement’. He was learned, and zealous for the exaltation of Holy Church and the overthrow of her enemies. He was also incapable of silence or of keeping out of print when anything called for contradiction or correction.

If a man could take his shadow and accept it not merely as a sign of himself written by the sun but as an essential part of himself, he might begin to understand something of the mystery of prayer and poetry, suffering and surrender, religion and imagery. This is what Georges Bernanos, the recently dead French novelist, has tried to do. He is not a poet, except at those moments when his novels reach the limits of prose and cry for a barer and simpler statement; nor is he a mystic in the sense that he is trying to depict his own religious experiences directly. But that he has something of the mystic in him is evident both from the subjects he selects and the way in which he treats them. In his novel Joy, he is concerned with the terrifying experiences of a young visionary. Here, the visionary is seen as something very like a victim, a bearer-away of the sufferings which other men refuse. She confronts evil, even accepts it, yet she does not let it overwhelm her. In one of the later chapters of this novel, Bernanos describes Chantal’s surrender to God:

Recent statements by leading American statesmen, including the President himself, in support of a ‘Peace through Law’ campaign, coupled with the proposal presented at the N.A.T.O. congress in London that the N.A.T.O. countries should establish a Court of Justice to solve their mutual differences, lead one to suppose that the cause of judicial settlement of international disputes is once again coming into favour. This cause is one which has been successively in and out of favour ever since the first and second Peace Conferences were held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. It is proposed in this article to set out, in a manner as free from technicalities as possible, the present situation in regard to the judicial settlement of international disputes; to consider, from a practical point of view, the advantages and disadvantages of this means of settling disputes as compared with other means; and finally to consider the matter in its moral aspect.

In article 2(3) of the Charter of the United Nations one of the principles of the Organization is stated as follows: ‘All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered’. On being construed carefully, however, it appears that this principle does not impose a positive obligation to settle all international disputes so much as a duty not to settle them in a certain way. The reason for this is the feeling that international law cannot compel its subjects never to be in dispute with one another; its primary concern is rather to prevent them from taking the law into their own hands and disturbing the peace.

Those embarking upon a serious and constructive reading of the Old Testament usually have two basic questions to ask: first, ‘Where should I begin?’, and second, ‘How should I read?’ Though it may not seem obvious, actually I believe that the first of these questions is the more important. The second to some extent solves itself as one progresses. So it is a possible answer to the first question that I want to suggest here. ‘Where should I begin?’ Emphatically not, I suggest, at the beginning. The composition of the Old Testament is utterly unlike that of a modern book. It is a complex of traditions which has grown up round a central nucleus, and which has only subsequently been crystallized in book form. The most ancient and the most creative of these traditions constitutes the central nucleus and the later traditions have been either added on to it at the beginning and end, or else inserted into it. Thus von Rad speaks of the Einbau of the Sinai tradition, the Ausbau of the patriarchal narratives, and the Vorbau of the Primordial history (Gen. i-xi) into or on to what he regards as the central nucleus, namely the events of the exodus and the entry into the promised land. The first task then is to grasp this central nucleus, and to examine how and in what sense it influences or is presupposed by the later traditions. For these reasons, it seems to me, one should begin reading the Old Testament in the middle.

The letter printed, below is a reminder of how sketchy is our knowledge of the English Dominicans during the half-century prior to the foundation of Bornhem in 1658 and the start of the registers of clothing and profession. Englishmen who joined the order joined abroad, and their particulars were recorded in the registers of foreign convents, registers that for the most part are no longer extant. In 1615 these scattered members were formed into an English Congregation, but without a house of its own and without even the most rudimentary archives. Thus any chance reference to a Dominican at this dark period is a find of some importance, and this letter is a fair example of what we may still hope to unearth in some archive in almost any part of western Europe.

All that is known of the writer of this letter is what he tells us himself. He is writing to the master-general, Nicholas Ridolfi. The dispensation he asks for was beyond the powers of the master-general, and a copy of his letter was therefore sent to Propaganda. It is this copy only that has survived. It is here translated from the Latin.

The Bible starts with a deed and a wonder: ‘In the beginning God created . . .’. The reader is at once, without preliminaries, told of a power so great that it handles the sum of things, ‘heaven and earth’, and produces what it handles. Prior to whatever else is going to happen, things, we learn, only- are because of ‘God’. The statement is familiar—too familiar; but what it says is wonderful, in the sense that it means that the accepted order of things, the world around us, need not be. All wonder, all surprise, implies a norm, an accepted order of ‘ordinary’ reality from which the surprising fact or act seems to deviate as an exception. But here it is the whole ordinarily accepted norm itself, not man’s world only but all nature too, that is suddenly presented as an ‘exception’: it need not have been. The accepted norm is swept aside and another, infinitely more real, appears—God. As for the universe, we know now what it is made of—nothing!

I shall not attempt here to prove this doctrine as a thesis, restating familiar arguments, but only to draw out its meaning a little and then touch on one or two difficulties we may find in holding it firmly.

The doctrine tempts the imagination (witness my first paragraph), but it baffles it too, of course. Our images are always of limited things or activities, and if we try to represent ‘creative’ activity we have to make shift with such human doings as seem most original—the production of a symphony or poem, of a scientific or philosophical theory: all human things, presupposing at least the man who produces them and some sort of working material.

Up to a few years ago it used to be said that it was still far too early to make more than a cautious interim evaluation of the importance of the Qumrân scrolls. Today one feels almost that the opposite is true, that in a certain sense it is too late. It has been done so often already. So many popular presentations of the subject have appeared, many of them highly competent, some few sensationalist in approach and grossly misleading, but all of them attempting to answer the same basic questions: What exactly has been discovered and how? What sort of people were the members of that strange Jewish sect who owned, and in many cases who must actually have written the scrolls? What is the bearing of these documents on the origins and on the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity? These are, I think, the questions everyone would like answered. My excuse for going over the same ground again must be primarily that the answers suggested have often been so bewilderingly different.

First, then, what has been discovered is the relics of a sect whose history in its total span (c. 125 B.C. to 68 A.D.) overlapped the lifetime of Christ, and the emergence of the Christian Church from Judaism. These relics are of two kinds: documentary, and archaeological, and the one exactly complements the other. Coins and pottery from the community building which has been found are identical in type and date with coins and pottery found in the caves which contained the documentary remains.

Moderator: The subject of this disputation is a fundamental one and touches the centre of every moral dilemma—for the individual as well as for the community at large. Conscience and law. Are they enemies, and is the most we can hope to achieve an armed neutrality, so that the conflict between them can at least be kept within bounds? Or are they brothers, twins—and Siamese twins at that, so that one must necessarily imply the other? Of course we must first want to see what the words mean, for here, as always, we are at the mercy of the labels we use to avoid the painful work of thinking. Conscience—too easily it can be the name for the spontaneous response of anarchy or anguish: law—as easily it can be the title for no nonsense, the totalitarian’s eternal alibi.

To decide what is their relationship, then, must demand a careful scrutiny of what their function is: a function that is proper to the human person, with a mind to know and a will to implement his knowledge. That is why the form of this disputation may be specially useful, demanding as it does a patient definition of terms, and a guarded inspection of their use in argument.

Of the method of concession-and-denial I think I need say nothing now: most people are now familiar with this kind of argument. But perhaps I should point out one difference of procedure which we have introduced in order to extend the dialectic as usefully as we may. The disputation will proceed in two directions.

It is now little over five years since the worker priest crisis in France provided the world press with a first-class story. For the vast majority in England (whatever may have been the case in France) the disciplinary action of the Holy See and the storm it aroused were, indeed, the first intimation that for several years a number of priests had abandoned the security of presbytery and religious house to work at the dock or in factories and share in every respect the living conditions of the working class. But even for those Catholics in England who were already aware of the movement and sympathetic with its aims, the Roman condemnation came as a bolt from the blue. They found themselves, in fact, singularly ill-equipped to find any answer to the inevitable accusation that the Church had shown itself to be incurably distrustful of any new methods of evangelization and indissolubly wedded to a ‘bourgeois’ outlook and way of life. Their embarrassment was only sharpened by the outcry which broke out in Catholic circles in France. Was there, in fact, danger of a split in the French Church or of the rise of a new and more bitter Gallicanism? Here at any rate was M. Mauriac talking darkly of a new concordat (not that many of us in England at least made much of what that might mean).

Looking back at all the furore from these five years’ distance, what perhaps is most surprising is the silence that has succeeded the storm.

At a superficial glance there seems to be little in common either between Rilke and the Christian mystics or between Rilke and so-called ‘religious’ poets. The majority of the latter, if they have not been orthodox Christians, have usually employed many of the Christian symbols even though they have sometimes wrenched them into odd and surprising shapes. Such writers have often expressed their personal visions in terms of Christian symbolism and at the same time have formulated or re-interpreted those symbols for their own ends.

Rilke, however, does not fit into this category; indeed, he does not fit into any category at all. He stands quite alone. There are many reasons for this isolation but one overriding one. It is this: Rilke’s poetry was for him a way of life. It was visionary, philosophical, emotional, sensuous and abstract, all at the same time. His poetry was his life, not simply in the sense that he was a supremely dedicated artist, but also because it was the only medium in which reality, for him, existed. Words did not formulate a previously articulated philosophy or vision of life; on the contrary, the vision, the ideas, only had existence in the medium of words. Desperate and painful as Rilke’s poetic struggles often were, he never for a moment doubted the power of poetry. In his view, nothing was inexpressible. If reality was not to be found in words and images, then reality was at fault, not language.