There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes—the primordial images and patterns of behaviour of a supra-personal character which the depth-psychologists find in their clinical work, and which have been expressed in manifold ways by human beings throughout the ages and throughout the world. Whatever else may he said for or against Jung’s concept of the archetype, it has undoubtedly provided a meeting place for specialists in the most disparate fields of inquiry.

This is particularly manifest at the yearly ‘Eranos’ meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, whose proceedings are subsequently published in the Eranos Jahrbuecher. The sciences, as distinct from the humanities, were, however, rather poorly represented at the 1956 meeting, which was devoted to ‘Man and the Creative’. But it had some notable contributions from Professor Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Chung-Yuan Chang, Laurens van der Post, Hellmut Wilhelm and Sir Herbert Read. Meanwhile we have another volume of previous Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks translated into English. Its theme is ‘Man and Time’, and here the sciences are represented by the physicist Max Knoll and the biologist Adolf Portmann. The arrangement of the contributions is somewhat haphazard, and readers may be recommended to begin at the end with the late Professor G. van der Leeuw’s brilliant essay on ‘Primordial Time and Final Time’, with its careful analysis of basic concepts and its profound theological and philosophical insights.

The Pasternak affair of last autumn tended to throw into obscurity the awards of the other Nobel Prizes for 1958. Normally, it is ‘peace’ rather than ‘literature’ which attracts the notice of the press and the other organs of publicity. But this time the roles were reversed, and it was ‘literature’ which offered a rich store of acceptable copy by providing a significant chapter in the development of something that really interests us more than peace, namely the ‘cold war’. After all, one could hardly grudge the journalists their excitement that at long last the U.S.S.R. had dropped practically its first point in the ‘world propaganda’ competition with the West, even if maturer reflection could not but see this as only adding a deeper shade to the personal tragedy of Dr Zhivago’s creator.

That Boris Pasternak, then, should eclipse Père Pire in the press as a whole is understandable enough. What is surprising is that the award of such a widely prized honour to a priest should have raised so little attention in our Catholic press. After all, even bears—or so the apocryphal story runs—can hit the headlines simply by eating nuns on the way to Mass. Yet, at the time of writing, only the briefest notice has been taken of this award, only the baldest details of Père Pire’s life and work given.

To give an explanation of this silence would be easy enough. It would have to be in terms of ignorance; an ignorance, I hasten to add since my present intention is far from being a criticism of the Catholic press, which is shared by all of us, Père Pire’s own Dominican brethren in England not excluded.

The spectacular increase in recent years of serious crime, especially among young men, has created an inevitable reaction of disquiet, indeed of anger. The need, it is suggested (and not only by reactionary opinion), is for severe punishment, exemplary in its unpleasantness, which will dissuade the gangster and the man with the gun. And even lesser crimes of violence must be sharply punished: the restoration of the birch and the cat, it is argued, will achieve far more than the assumptions of a remedial penalty—whether it be probation or Borstal training.

Much of the propaganda for such measures is intelligible enough as a reflection of public indignation. But it is often irresponsibly expressed, as in a petition for the return to corporal punishment which was displayed in many Glasgow shops recently and immediately received hundreds of enthusiastic signatures. The case for such a grave step was not stated; no argument was offered but that of instinctive aggression. The Home Secretary has on several occasions resisted such proposals, and has pointed out that, even at the statistical level, there is no evidence that offences previously allowing for a sentence of corporal punishment have in fact increased since such punishment was abolished.

The Home Secretary, instead of giving way to the storm (which, it must be admitted, is by no means as spontaneous as some newspapers make it seem to be), has urged the need for much greater research into the causes of crime, and to that end the Cambridge Institute of Criminal Science is to have more substantial help for its work.

‘It seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but that the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace.’ These words from the closing passage of a most important recent book, Professor Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, draw attention to a great misconception in the usual interpretation of that movement, spread over a considerable stretch of time, which we call ‘The Renaissance’. It is most often thought that this movement represented simply a revival of classical learning, an enthusiasm for technique, for style in all aspects of life, and a deepening sense of wonder at the mystery of Man himself. All these were features of the situation naturally, but its core is lacking if we merely consider them. Professor Wind has given us the missing heart: the heart of Renaissance art, architecture, poetry, music and science. What he presents to us is, of course, a religious vision, for nothing else could have had these effects. An esoteric vision, which is why he says that he deals with the exceptional, and one that verges often on heresy. But something which has nevertheless deep roots in the Christian past.

What was this vision? What brought these mighty manifestations into being? Briefly, a belief that it is the spiritual and not the material which is the essence of man, and that the truth of Christ existed in the world before Christ. These might seem unexceptionable truths, but in them lurked grave dangers.

The last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing is an unfinished note, made during a retreat in Dublin, on the wedding feast at Cana: ‘There has been no stint, but there has been an unwise order in the serving’. It might stand, Father Devlin suggests, ‘for posterity’s estimate of him as well as the steward’s of the wine’. For that matter it might stand for the two volumes that now complete the gathering together of all the fragments of Hopkins’s writing. Rarely can a poet’s papers have been edited with such care, and at first one wonders at the industry that has been devoted to editing material which is often trivial and even tedious. Simply as an editorial achievement, the work of the late Humphry House (completed by Mr Graham Storey) and of Father Devlin will surely remain of classic importance. Here, exactly ordered and sympathetically annotated, is all the detailed record that remains of Hopkins’s curiosity about words or weather (‘Sept. 17. Dull. Sept. 18. Cold. Sept. 19. Dull, I think.’), of doubts and decisions (usually cryptically indicated), with often penetrating glimpses at the world that was his— Oxford, holiday journeys, Jesuit houses. Unfair, then, to say that much in both these books is unimportant. In themselves the diary entries and the retreat notes, the undergraduate essays and the sermons, are hardly likely to earn for Hopkins a new fame. There is little that distinguishes much of them from the papers of any scholarly priest of his period—and there were many—who had lived in Oxford during the years after Newman’s conversion and who shared the taste of the time for botany, country walks, music and ecclesiology.

This survey will consider introductory works, and then apologetic and finally theological and devotional studies.

Let us start with Professor Alfred Wikenhauser’s New Testament Introduction. The publishers are to be congratulated on this production which now becomes the best recent manual in English. The translation is made from the second, revised and enlarged German edition; and the bibliography is brought up to date by the author himself up to the spring of 1957. Thus it is good to see an adequate note on Papyrus Bodmer II and references to the principle articles thereon. Among other good points we could single out the admirable summary on form-criticism. There is a wealth of information concisely set out. Altogether a fine example of sound Catholic scholarship is now made available to a much wider public of theological students and educated layfolk.

For seemingly the same sort of public, but this time non-Catholic, and in a very different style is a new work on the Gospels by Professor Frederick Grant. Here we have the work of a well-known scholar and life-long lover of the Gospels: yet we cannot avoid the impression that this work is redolent of past rather than present and future trends of New Testament study. True, there are wise lessons. Nothing can replace method and hard personal work in the reading and close comparison of gospel with gospel. Yet we would hesitate to urge, as our author does (pp. 41-50) the marking of our texts (even in red and blue!), as if that was the only way to enter profoundly into synoptic and other problems.

If we wished to try and show how culture leads up to, and finds perhaps its finest expression in the ideal of the contemplative, or monastic, life, it would be essential at the outset to dispel from our minds the unfortunate overtones of affected superiority which have become associated with this word ‘culture’. Let us, then, bring the whole thing right down to earth, literally, and explain what we understand by ‘culture’. The English word comes from the Latin verb colo (I cultivate, tend, look after), which was originally used in connection with farming. Agriculture means ‘looking after fields’. But, of course, ‘the unconquerable mind of man’ is not limited to the consideration of material objects only: it strives ever upwards towards the immaterial and, ultimately, the divine. So it came about that the simple, essentially earthy, word of the farmer was used to express the care man had for the spiritual in himself, and his reverence for the gods.

Culture, then, is the quintessence of all those qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his material needs. They are not necessarily practical, but they belong to a truly human life: man could not do without them. Pope John XXIII recently emphasized this when he was stressing the importance of the humanism of classical studies. In his address to the International Conference of Students of Cicero on April 8, quoting the Pro Archia, he said that ‘such studies nourish youth and delight old age, ornament prosperity, provide refuge and solace in adversity, are a pastime at home, are no burden abroad, never abandon us, and even at night follow us, on our travels and into the country.

The works of Teilhard de Chardin, now being published posthumously, appear to be having a considerable impact on certain sections of the Catholic community on the Continent. The time is hardly ripe yet for the publication of a full critical appraisal of his writings, and the author of this book would not pretend that it is more than an introduction to Teilhard himself, with an exposition of certain features of his writings which appear particularly to call for critical comment. More important at this stage than commentaries, is that the works themselves should be read and talked about. Slowly, then, by constant usage, we shall extract more and more meaning out of those brilliant new words and phrases that Teilhard has introduced into the study of the history of the world: words such as enroulement, to describe the essential feature of the evolutionary process (compare the traditional déroulement); and hominisation, to indicate the unquestioned tendency in evolution, especially in the Vertebrates, for increasing elaboration of the central nervous system without which, so far as we can see, those characteristics which we recognize as essentially human would not be possible. Hominisation becomes, then, the end of the evolutionary process, for it is admitted by not a few biologists today that, of all the species now extant, it is Homo sapiens alone which is capable of making any further major evolutionary advance. This is attributed by Teilhard precisely to Man’s spiritual capacities by virtue of which, in continuation of the process of enroulement, he is offered the possibility (one species representing all the rest) of discovering at the heart of all creation the Omega, present there from the beginning as the Alpha.

Refuge for Huysmans, inspiration for Péguy, Chartres has a secret allure which escapes analysis in terms of art or religion. The psychology of architecture, once sufficiently articulate, betrays the same elusive charm which graces men in the major changes of life, the succession of bewilderment and mastery in adolescence, the éclat of a James Dean or the universal teddy-boy catching the imagination of a decade aware of its crossroads. I looked therefore at Chartres with a questing eye— would I be caught? should I resist? could I diagnose?

Chartres is not, at least in the factors which combine to achieve its rare effect, the work of one artist. Excluding the crypt, alterations, and some superimposed decorations, its creation spans three centuries, from the last signs of classical souvenirs in certain motifs of the west facade, to the realization, but not the fulness, of the gothic plan in its corona. The charm lies in a certain awareness of opposites bursting one from another with the improbability of butterfly from chrysalis, an inclination of the masculine in its romanesque to flirt with the feminine in its gothic, of the earthbound yet mystic in the one to consort with the poetic yet mathematical in the other, liaison without lust, personality hovering between sexes, like a poet’s perception and gentleness which does not disgrace his manhood.

Once the romanesque artist had conceived the corona—the ensemble of apse, ambulatory, and radiating chapels—the sensibility of the building raced there, as that of a man concentrates on one fine experience, or as features express a deep emotion.

Both St Teresa and Franz Kafka in The Interior Castle and The Castle explore the geography of the soul. The first is a sixteenth-century spiritual treatise cast in the form of an allegory, the second a modern piece of fiction presented as a novel. In each case, a failure to pursue these terms as definitions has led to a good deal of confused critical comment.

St Teresa begins: ‘While I was beseeching our Lord today that he would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down, in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. . . These words say exactly what the writer means them to; she is preparing the way to elaborate her image of the soul as a castle, just as St Augustine referred to Heaven as a city, or Bunyan to some of the landmarks on the way to the Celestial City as Doubting Castle and the Slough of Despond. Each example shows the language to be that of personal comparison—although, whereas the soul is a castle for St Teresa, for Bunyan Doubting Castle is the citadel of the Giant Despair.

This impressive book marks very clearly the revolution that is taking place in Christian thinking about Islam, and at the same time it illustrates an important new trend in scholarly treatment of the Qur’an. In the past, theological hatred of Islam has often been stronger among Oriental Christians than among Latins; the prejudice shared by both has been intensified by the frustrations of subordination in the political and social order. Now this important book comes from a Maronite author, that is, from the Church traditionally most anti-Muslim. It enjoys the blessing of that truly remarkable prelate, H. B. Mgr Meouchi, the Patriarch, who, however, is far from being at one with his church. The book is a little dour; it has all the severity of the thesis form. Even when it was turned into a book, the solid meat was served without sauce. This criticism, which militates against its readability, is the only criticism I can wish to make of a book which greatly promotes understanding of Islam, and clears new paths for scholarship.

It reverses the traditional attitude of Christians and of scholars, in a very simple revolution, which consists in treating the Qur’an as a religious book; in treating it consistently as consistently a religious book; in assuming that religious ideas inspired and informed it and guided the Prophet. From the earliest days of Christian criticism, Islam was supposed to have been contrived out of Christian, Jewish and pagan elements, by a false prophet; hypocritically, it was thought in the old days, and more or less sincerely, or innocently, in a more modern view.