Professor Zaehner’s new book is most timely, and—to anybody with any interest in the subject, from whatever point of view—quite absorbing. It is also a pioneer work, for although the study of ‘comparative mysticism’ is not totally new, the little that has hitherto been written about it has been mainly from an a priori standpoint with little regard for the actual records. Moreover, such writing has often been based on assumptions, or wishful thinkings, of very doubtful validity. At one extreme is the assumption that all ‘mystical experiences’ are essentially identical, whether they be of Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Wordsworthian Romantics, drug-takers or schizophrenics. At the other, that only Catholics (or Hindus, or Moslems, or the clinically sane, etc.) have authentic mystical experiences, and that all the rest are frauds, delusions, or at best purely natural phenomena from which any intervention of God’s grace must at all costs be excluded. The outstanding merit of Professor Zaehner’s book is its rigorous empiricism, its careful scrutiny and comparison of the plain facts, which can only be the testimonies of the mystics themselves, or those who have been called such. Even as a collection of texts, and apart from his own thoughtful comments, hypotheses and deductions, this is a most valuable book.

It is just over half a century since G. K. Chesterton warned his readers not to insist too urgently on the splendours of Dickens’s last works lest it should be discovered that they were not true admirers of the novelist. Chesterton celebrated the Dickens of the stage-coach and the spirit of Merry Christmas and charity: that aspect of the novelist which Mr Walter Allen has termed the jolly Dickens, Dickens in fairy-land. It is not surprising that he had but faint praise for the later, darker novels. Most recent critics of the novelist, however, have tended to direct their attention chiefly to the later works and to occupy themselves with the task of elucidating and illuminating what is sometimes spoken of as his powerful and impressive rendering of evil and, by contrast, the weakness of his portrayal of goodness.

This contrast, and the problem it poses for the critical reader, is strikingly apparent at the very beginning of Dicken’s career. In the early novel Oliver Twist it is the vision of the underworld, the world of the workhouse and Fagin’s lair that most of us remember. The world of the Brownlows and the Maylies fails to grip the imagination. Probably the least thoughtful and least satisfactory way’ of elucidating this weakness is to suggest simply that what we arc confronted with here are characters who fail to impress because they are too good to be true. This explanation appears to be irrepressible; it is capable of appearing, usually in the form of a brief aside, even in the work of critics who have in fact much more carefully considered explanations to offer.

I wonder whether the subject which is under discussion could best be tackled by the psychiatrist, the lawyer, the philosopher or the moral theologian, for it seems to me that it is only the old question of determinism versus free will over again, even if it is presented in somewhat modern dress. Therefore, to prevent the discussion developing on too abstract lines, may I assume that free will can never be proved philosophically, any more than can the existence of God, for instance; but that, unless it be admitted as a valid operative factor in the human situation, the whole debate would become woolly?

Our Common Law depends entirely on the axiomatic acceptance of the principle which accords a large measure of freedom of choice in matters of conduct to adult members of society not deemed to be insane or grossly mentally defective.

Is the whole applecart to be upset because certain psychologists of the unconscious come along and say that our behaviour is ineluctably determined by the emotionally significant experiences occurring in the first four years of life? In other words, is the modem psychiatrist, especially the psychiatrist with a psychoanalytical bias, undermining society by destroying man’s belief in his capacity for making moral choices? Or is he perhaps to be regarded as an angel of enlightenment bearing a new concept of justice by relieving man of an intolerable and crippling load of guilt which he has carried unnecessarily over the millenia of his organized existence? It seems to me that both points of view have something to be said for them; nor are they necessarily mutually contradictory.

Whatever be the exact relation between English and Scottish Protestantism it is certainly true that an understanding of the Scottish religious mind cannot be gained from knowledge, however thorough, of conditions in England. Moreover, the understanding of Scottish Protestantism is more important than is suggested by the size of the population of Scotland, because of the key position which the Scottish theological schools have in the English-speaking, non-Anglican, Protestant world. The faculty of Divinity at Edinburgh University is a most important place of post-graduate study in Europe for students from the U.S.A., and that faculty—and the others at Glasgow, Aberdeen and St Andrews—are very much in touch with Basel and other centres of Protestant scholarship on the Continent. Edinburgh in particular is quite a bottleneck in the traffic of Protestant ideas.

For those whose work is in Scotland this key position of the Scottish faculties of Divinity will be secondary. Their main interest will be in the conversion of the people of Scotland. If we think only of this we are still considering a very important matter. The evolution of Protestantism in Scotland has come to a stage where great opportunity may be given to the Church to make itself known. There are signs that in Scotland earnest Protestants are fast approaching a point from which the next step will have to be either Humanism or the Truth. They are about to bring forth either religious disillusionment or Catholicism. It is imperative that the midwife be on the spot and well equipped.

The last ten or eleven years since the end of the war with Japan have shown some fascinating problems for the Catholics and other Christians in the Far East. I cannot claim to be an authority on them, but I have watched them as best I can and would just like to tell here something of what I have seen and to hope that others may answer my doubts with far greater knowledge and experience.

To begin with, I went back to Japan ten years ago in 1947 and saw the air of expectation in the Catholic world, which I now feel seems to have been unjustified.

At that time, General MacArthur and the U.S.A. held complete control. The Japanese had been ordered to cease to believe in their religion (if you can call it a religion), Shinto. To this day, Catholics have been unable to decide whether Shinto was really a religion or a sort of political cult. If the latter, then Catholics could still practise it; if the former, then obviously not. At any rate, Shinto was now dead and every Catholic missionary wondered if Catholicism could not take its place; and the Protestants of course thought the same.

The opinion that it is impossible to make moral judgments about other people is sufficiently widespread amongst Christians to be worth attacking. It is of course a Christian doctrine that it is hardly ever my business to pass adverse moral judgments on people, but that is an entirely different matter. It is Christian teaching that I am very rarely justified in killing a man by shooting him with a gun, but we ought not to confuse this with the theory that it is impossible to kill a man by shooting him with a gun. In practice the latter theory will lead to a whole lot of death; similarly the theory that moral judgments are impossible leads to a whole lot of slander.

The theory is that while we can judge the behaviour of a man and say whether his external actions are good ones or bad ones, we cannot penetrate to his soul to see if he himself is good or bad. I can say that Peter did something that was ‘objectively’ or ‘materially’ wrong, but only God can say whether Peter was ‘subjectively’ or ‘formally’ committing a sin.

India is one of the few countries left in the world which still has the capacity to produce saints. One of the most authentic of these was Ramana Maharshi, who died only a year or two ago and whose life by an English disciple, Arthur Osborne, was published recently. He lived a life of austerity equal to that of the greatest of the Fathers of the Desert and reached a state of contemplation which in Christian terms could only be described as habitual union with God. He himself remained a Hindu of the strict advaita (non-dualist) school and maintained simply that his ‘self’ had ceased to exist and that he had realized his true ‘self’ in God. I have met many people, both Christian and non-Christian, who have known him, and all of them testify to the extraordinary holiness of his character, which was shown not least in his wonderful compassion and kindness. It can hardly be doubted that the transition from a life of complete silence and solitude in the isolation of a cave to the later life of the Ashram with its constant concern for every human need marks the influence, at least unconsciously, of Christianity on the Hindu mind, but Maharshi remained typically Hindu in his character.

The same must be said of Vinoba Bhave, who continues the tradition of Hindu sanctity in our own day and who has also found an English disciple to write his life. Mr Tennyson has written an extremely good book. He lived and worked, and what is more walked, with Vinoba, and though his actual contact with him was only for a short period, it was obviously the most momentous experience of his life and he has the bom writer’s flair for revealing the feeling and quality of his experience. The result is a book which not only gives a vivid record of the life and work of Vinoba, but is also able to show something of its historic importance for India and for the world.

In 1575 a Welsh priest in Rome wrote down a plan which he had cherished in his long years of exile, since the time when the death of Mary Tudor had extinguished his hopes of becoming Bishop of Bangor. He imagined the galleys of the Papal fleet coming to anchor at Menai, and disembarking an army led by Catholic exiles. The mountain passes from Harlech to Conway were to be blocked by Welsh Catholic sympathizers, and when sufficient English Catholics had made their way into this bridgehead, he proposed a breakout into the Midlands to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the English throne.

Dr Morys of Clynnog, the author of this scheme, made Wales his landing place for three reasons: her potentialities for resistance, her separate language and history, and her fidelity to the Catholic faith. All these points are made, from the opposite side, by Morys Clynnog’s supplanter in the Bishopric of Bangor, the Protestant Nicholas Robinson. ‘I have found’, he wrote in 1567, ‘since I came to this country images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and indecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the country full of beads and knots.’ Fr Robert Persons, s.j., likewise turned his attention to Wales at the start of his famous missionary journey with Blessed Edmund Campion in 1580 as a region where priests would be welcome and would do great work for the Catholic cause.

Our enquiry leads us to consider the way in which the Catholic Church adapted her mission to the Welsh nation in the unprecedented circumstances of the Elizabethan persecution. First we must study the part played by the seminary priests from Douai in North Wales. At the very beginnings of the Douai seminary we find associated with Cardinal Allen a Welsh priest from Anglesey, Dr Owen Lewis, like Morys Clynnog, an Oxford graduate and an exile.

To continue this brief survey of some recent exponents of those final causes which, if they are dead, certainly wont He down, here is a quotation from Professor Agar’s Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (2nd edition, 1951). After discussion of the significance of organs of perception and their function he says : ‘The anticipatory aspect of perception compels us to recognize the reality of final causation in all perceiving organisms. Anticipation implies the power of directing action in accordance with that anticipation; otherwise it would have no function. The function of the capacity of anticipating future occurrences is to influence present action in relation to that anticipation. Causation in this sense is teleological or final causation. It is directed towards bringing about a situation which is not yet existent.’ Once again the argument seems to depend on a prior assumption that living organisms are in some way essentially different from non-living, and such an assumption is unwelcome to those of us who have a natural sympathy with monist rather than with dualist interpretations of the things of nature.

Dr L. E. R. Picken, the Cambridge zoologist, writing in 1955 of the significance of final causes in the development of biological structures, says: ‘Claude Bernard expressed the opinion that science is not concerned with first causes (origins); he might well have added that scientists are also scared to death of final causes (ends). But it is clear that the biologist at least cannot be indifferent to final causes—to ends—any more than was Aristotle himself, whose entire analysis of types of causation is coloured by his biological studies.’

Whatever be the exact relation between English and Scottish Protestantism it is certainly true that an understanding of the Scottish religious mind cannot be gained from knowledge, however thorough, of conditions in England. Moreover, the understanding of Scottish Protestantism is more important than is suggested by the size of the population of Scotland, because of the key position which the Scottish theological schools have in the English-speaking, non-Anglican, Protestant world. The faculty of Divinity at Edinburgh University is a most important place of post-graduate study in Europe for students from the U.S.A., and that faculty—and the others at Glasgow, Aberdeen and St Andrews—are very much in touch with Basel and other centres of Protestant scholarship on the Continent. Edinburgh in particular is quite a bottleneck in the traffic of Protestant ideas.

For those whose work is in Scotland this key position of the Scottish faculties of Divinity will be secondary. Their main interest will be in the conversion of the people of Scotland. If we think only of this we are still considering a very important matter. The evolution of Protestantism in Scotland has come to a stage where great opportunity may be given to the Church to make itself known. There are signs that in Scotland earnest Protestants are fast approaching a point from which the next step will have to be either Humanism or the Truth. They are about to bring forth either religious disillusionment or Catholicism. It is imperative that the midwife be on the spot and well equipped.

Since I am myself a Jew and the nature of my work constantly involves me in the activities of the Jewish people, I had supposed that the preparation of this paper would occasion me very little trouble. But the more have considered the matter the more I have been forced to the—perhaps salutary—conclusion that really I know very little indeed about my own people.

In the first place we have to ask ourselves the apparently simple but perhaps insoluble question: what is a Jew? It has been truly remarked that a Jew is very easy to recognize and very hard to define.

There are, of course, definitions, but none that seem to me very satisfactory. According to Jewish religious law, a Jew (other than a proselyte) is the child of a Jewish mother—the faith of the father is not an essential factor. The test is, of course, logically indefensible, since we are bound to ask what made the mother Jewish, and to reply that she in turn was the daughter of a Jewish mother who derived her Jewishness from her mother, and so on for ever. We are thus landed in one of those infinite regressions that bedevil all logical argument. The same objection—together with a host of other objections—applied to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, according to which a Jew was a person, whatever his or her faith, who had one or more Jewish grandparents. That grandparent presumably was Jewish by reason of having the same stain on his or her escutcheon, and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

With important foreign statesmen arriving frequently on courtesy visits to India from East and West and with India’s voice respectfully heard at the international councils, the observer is left with the impression that Mr Nehru’s spectacular foreign policy is paying a high dividend and that Delhi is rapidly becoming one of the most important political centres of the world. Only on close scrutiny of the economic and social conditions does he get the impression of a scene reminiscent of Chancellor Briining’s Germany in the early thirties: a regime desperately trying to camouflage by real and imaginary diplomatic successes the fact that, domestically, it is sitting on a volcano.

In the cities the westernized ruling class—the British-trained civil servants and the American-inspired managing agency executives—seem to run the show at full swing. Although the shortage of technicians is still acute, there is a considerable tendency among the new generation to go in for scientific training. I was told by a university professor in Calcutta that the brightest students take up science these days.

Dr Deshpande, the Secretary-General of Hindu Mahasabha, the self-styled guardian of national traditions, assured me that the idea of a man working his way up—so essential to any industrial society—is by no means incompatible with the true principles of Hinduism; the rigidity of the caste system was the result of later corruption, but his Movement means to go back to the ancient sources.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no obstacle in the way of a new India, rising on the wings of modem technical production and re-invigorated Hindu tradition, utilizing vast, still untapped, raw material and manpower resources.

Art is the servant of beauty and beauty is God, ‘Beauty’s self and Beauty’s giver’, and it is only when beauty is seen by the artist and by those who study his work as in no way reflecting God that art becomes an end in itself. We know, of course, the fame of the Church as patron of the Arts; yet her direct influence upon the kind of painting done began to slip late in the fifteenth century.

‘In the minds of many’, writes Berensen, ‘painting, although a very familiar art, was too much connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in under the patronage of St Jerome, while romantic biblical episodes, like the “Finding of Moses”, or the “Judgment of Solomon”, gave an excuse for genre, and the portrait crept in under the mantle of a patron saint.’

Time and again the question is discussed whether the age of the Family Doctor, as our forebears knew him, has passed. Many seem to think it has. Many blame the National Health Service, under which, they hold, this relationship of the patient to the doctor—as to the friend, philosopher and medical adviser to the family—is no longer possible. Others seem to think that the progress of science has brought a progress in medical treatment which does away with this approach to doctoring, which they consider outmoded. ‘Make available to each and all the latest discoveries, under the most scientific control and in the most hygienic surroundings’ is their slogan. The sponsors of this approach cry out for health centres, for group practices with rotas based on them, and for all the trimmings of a miniature hospital to be provided in all such little units. ‘The Doctors say’, no longer ‘My Doctor says’, is what one can hear more and more when patients discuss their ailments with others. Depersonalization of medical practice is a direct result of this tendency, praised by some and deplored by others.

To my mind there is much good in both ideas. We need both the personal and the scientific approach in the Family Doctor. Happily I feel certain that they do not exclude each other, that a synthesis of all that is best in each is possible and is even now on its way.

The swing of the pendulum has become proverbial. It is something of this that we are witnessing at this present time. The period in which medicine was regarded as a more or less pure science, when patients wished to consult directly specialists in the various fields and either ignored the general practitioner or made use of him simply as a sort of traffic policeman to direct them to the various out-patients departments, is swiftly passing as more and more people realize that there is always a border country between the fields of the different specialists which would become a no-man’s land but for the general practitioner.

This book is intended to be read both by the specialist and by the more enterprising general reader. From the point of view of the specialist it reviews and makes new use of familiar material and also exploits the field of social anthropology in an experimental way. At the same time it is written clearly and readably and, together with the same author’s Muhammad at Mecca, constitutes a very full guide both to the life of Muhammad and to his social, political and religious background, for any reader who is already interested in, or is at least not put off by, themes and settings outside the European tradition.

In Muhammad at Mecca Dr Watt presented the prophetic call as a response to the individualism of the tribal system in decay. In his new book he shows himself particularly aware of two aspects of the Prophet’s reforms: of the individualistic trend of the legislation, and of the institution of the religious community. It is the sense of this community which has always been so characteristic of Islam, and this aspect appears especially clearly in the chapters on the ‘Unifying of the Arabs’ and on the ‘Character of the Islamic State’. Dr Watt expressly sees the whole of Muhammad’s work as a ‘building on religious foundations’, equally when it is political, social or economic. The early unifying of the tribes under Muhammad prefigures and leads onwards to the later unity of the Islamic world under the Caliphs. The section on the character of the ummah is one of very great interest. The community (ummah) to which a prophet is sent, and which may reject him, develops as the Qur’anic revelation continues into the ummah which is itself the religious community.

Even if we assume the obvious, namely that the insurrection in Hungary was immediately motivated by previous developments in Poland, our assumption still begs the question. How could the Hungarian people muster such a valiant spirit of defiance in the face of Russian tanks, artillery fire and aerial bombing overnight, after the long years which must have appeared to die impartial observer as inglorious submission? After all, there was an active resistance in Poland in 1945-46 and even General Mihailovitch managed to continue for a while his resistance against Tito in the Yugoslavian mountains. Czechoslovakia, although by peaceful means, maintained her partly Western orientation until the beginning of 1948.

During all these years between 1945 and 1948 the Magyars appeared docilely to accept their submergence behind the iron curtain, the open Communist flouting of the anti-Communist popular vote at the General Elections in 1945 and 1947, Rákosi’s ‘salami tactics’ to reduce the Smallholder Party’s parliamentary majority, the liquidation of the Ferenc Nagy Government, the imprisonment of the Protestant Bishop Ordass and Cardinal Mindszenty.

However profound the impact of the Polish developments on Hungary may have been, particularly in view of the centuries-old Hungaro-Polish sentimental attachment, could the news from Warsaw have changed the national character of the Magyars in a matter of a few hours? Of course not! If we seek to explain the contrast between the Hungarian attitude before and after October 23, 1956, we must go back a few years in history to show that Hungary’s loss of independence came about with a slow graduality which precluded any spontaneous resistance in the past.

Adam, says the Bible, was made to the image of God, and the Church adds that so are all men; and that this image-hood is chiefly in man’s soul. What then is ‘soul’? In our philosophy the term, or its equivalents, denotes life; anything alive has a soul. But ordinarily, of course, it means the life- principle in man; and human life is very different from that of other terrestrial beings. Whether or not any animals reason, it seems absurd to compare the cleverest dogs or monkeys with the enormous range of human achievement. On this planet at least we stand out pretty clearly. Now this, Catholics say, is due to a radical difference in the human life-principle—that it differs from the rest of the world we know not only as dogs differ from roses or horses from dogs, but as something that is not strictly part of the physical world differs from the entire physical world. The human soul is partly outside the physical and even the animal world. To use a question-begging term, it transcends all bodies animate and inanimate. What does this mean?

The ‘transcendence’ of man, his ‘spirituality’ as distinct from mere vitality, is commonly approached negatively. It is said that precisely as a human agent I have certain activities which are not activities of my body or of any part of my body, in which something other than any organ of the body is operating. The body may concur with or condition such activity, it is not precisely the agent acting. The reference is to intellectual activities. Reflecting, then, on these, I think I can make two affirmation about them which, on analysis, yield some understanding of that boasted ‘transcendence’: that I am aware of things (a) as real, and (b) as significant.

On entering St Peter’s the eye of the visitor is almost immediately caught and held by the great canopy sheltering the papal altar which, according to an ancient tradition, stands over the burial place of St Peter. The arresting feature of the canopy is the shape of the columns which stand like gigantic old-fashioned sticks of barley sugar in the heart of Christendom. This canopy, executed in bronze and standing on the immense piers necessary to carry its great weight, was made in the sixteenth century by Bernini on the instructions of Pope Urban VIII, and it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable features of a remarkable church.

The recent excavations under St Peter’s have thrown much light on the tradition that the papal altar marks the place where St Peter was buried, and they have illumined much that has hitherto been obscure. The archaeological evidence resulting from the excavations does not, it is true, provide conclusive proof of the authenticity of the tradition, but it is entirely consistent with it. It is certain, however, that from very early times it was the firm belief of the Church that the apostle was buried on the traditional site. This site was in a pagan cemetery adjoining the road which ran near the Circus of Gaius and Nero; it is this cemetery which has now been partly excavated.