There seems to be a special need in our time for new forms of the contemplative life, lived not behind grilles and high walls, cut off from the world as much externally as internally, hut lived in the midst of the world, open to its needs, but not contaminated by its vices. This form of life is nothing new; on the contrary, it is older than other forms, for it is the life lived by our Lord, our Lady and the Apostles as well as by the Christians of the first centuries. All through the history of the Church there have been men and women who, though remaining “in the world’’, have combined a life of intense contemplation with the life of the Apostle who goes out to seek what is lost—we need only think of Saints like. Catherine of Siena, Francis de Sales, Bl. Anna Maria Taigi or the Curé d’Ars.

But, it may be argued, they were saints, souls with a unique vocation specially chosen by God—is it possible for a person less abundantly gifted to live in our distracted paganized world a life that can he truly called contemplative? There are many souls today who, despite their admiration for the life of the Contemplative Orders, yet feel the need and the attraction for this other kind of life. The world seems to cry out for it in its very blindness and indifference, and where there is a need God will not withhold the means of satisfying it. With such a call to a life of contemplation without “leaving the world” in the physical sense, there seems to be no reason to ignore the opportunities. For the contemplative life in this noisy world is so difficult that there need be little fear of illusion.

One effect of the very strong French habit of self-assessment and self-apprajsal is that foreigners are often mildly surprised to see the literature of the French survive and continue to renew itself. We are apt to take our neighbours’ introspection for granted; we cannot get used to their vitality. They have summarised themselves so often that we expect this to go on almost automatically, and we expect little else. In fact there is much else, a constant renewal of creative effort; but it never or hardly ever gets detached from the the critical reason. And this constant exercise of reason, on the part of the creative writers just as much as of anyone else, tends to make the work of the literary historian easier; for he finds, already in being and ready to hand, defined points of view and definite groupings and loyalties. It must be rather easy to write manuals—bad, facile manuals— of French literature. The “clear idea’’ is everyone’s property and nobody’s earnings, once it has been made clear It becomes, in a word, cliché.

M. Gonzague de Reynold, fortunately, is no dealer in clichés. His recent work on the 17th century is not even a manual, but a lucid summary thrown into a series of short essays, each of which represents a real and powerful effort to understand. It is a good introduction because it is lucid and alive, even if it does, at times, remind one of the commonplace manual, much as a man’s face may remind you of a caricature of him. For M. de Reynold is so sure of himself. From the first page he raps out questions which he is perfectly prepared to answer and to answer immediately; and this speed and this assurance go on for 300 pages.

We may now turn to some particular problems in which we feel more at home. In the fourth chapter we are given a lucid account of the events that led up to the Edict of Milan, but it raises one regret that Professor H. Grégoire of Brussels has not yet published his work on Constantine the Great, which was announced a few years ago. But there is a study published by the same author about 1930 in a Belgian review not widely known (information can be found in the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique), where regarding Constantine’s policy he expresses views that alter in many ways the whole aspect of the problem and which Church historians would do well to study carefully.

The explanation of how the emperor came to the decision of convoking an Oecumenical Council makes plausible reading, but the author has evidently missed my study on the authority of the State in the Oecumenical Councils in the translation which apeared in 1934 in the ‘Christian East.’ There he would have found indications that would have facilitated his own researches and helped him to get a better understanding of the whole problem of Constantine, the Council of Nicea, the presidency of the Council and the squaring of historical facts with the theological conclusions on the papal primacy. Constantine simply borrowed the conciliar procedure from the proceedings of the senatorial sittings. Just as the Emperor presided in person or by deputy over the sessions of the Senate, led the debates and appointed their subjects, so he acted at the Councils, which were run like an ecclesiastical senate; but as the Emperor took ‘no part in the senatorial voting, so he abstained from voting with the bishops and he abode by their decisions.

During 1942 a treatise, written, printed and edited in a French prisoners of war camp in Germany was then circulated in France through the agency of repatriated compatriots. It was the first of a series to be known as Les Cahiers des Captifs composed by Frenchmen whose enforced captivity had led them to alter or modify their pre-war views regarding government. One of these volumes is entitled Les Fondements de la Communauté Française—an attempt to outline the composition, function and powers of a State based on what may be called ‘communitarian’ principles. The treatise is divided into two sections, the first part dealing with basic principles and the second part with their organic applications.

In this article I make no attempt to transcribe the detailed working out of the plans proposed, but only to give the main reflections of this prisoner of war who believes firmly in the resurgence of his country provided she can achieve that national solidarity and cohesion she came so near losing.

To-day France is ripe for a new venture, and yet what she needs is to restate the old ideal which at bottom has always been treasured by the French people in all epochs of their history, at first instinctively, and then consciously—the ‘Communitarian ideal.’ In the 19th century France made the mistake of trying to restore a merely traditional past followed by the other mistake of transposing on to her soil institutions which were alien to her history, her national temperament and her genius.

There could hardly be a more controversial topic than that upon which I have so rashly consented to embark in this article. The him is an artistic medium, and the discussion of art raises problems upon which all men, creators, critics and public, hold strong and conflicting views. Propaganda, too, is an inflammable subject. Not all those who are officially concerned in it would agree upon the ethics—or even upon the definition—of their calling. It is proper to state at the outset that the following reflections are wholly my own, and in no way represent any views that may be held, officially or otherwise, by my colleagues at the British Council.

Indeed, the British Council, whose immediate purpose is defined by a Royal Charter as being “the promotion of a wider knowledge of the United Kingdom and the English language abroad”, tends to avoid the use of the word “propaganda”—and that for the very practical reason that the term is now used in an almost wholly discreditable sense. To-day, the bemused or cynical citizen of a crazy world recognizes propaganda only in one sense; the deliberate propagation of falsehood for political ends. “That,” he says, as he turns his news-sheet over or his wireless off, “is just propaganda”. And he means, quite simply: “Someone is lying, and they hope to take me in. “ We must recognize, at the outset of our enquiry, that “propaganda” raises the issue of truth, and that “the film as propaganda” will involve us in a conception of the film as a truth-telling medium, or the reverse.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity should be regarded as complementary, and certainly not as opposed, to the Church Unity Octave. The Octave has among Anglicans come to be associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with the holding of certain doctrinal positions and therefore many who desire unity, and devoutly pray for it, have felt bound to hold aloof from the prayer thus organised. One might regret their decision, but mere regret would be no remedy for the situation and a remedy was necessary if the prayer was indeed to become universal. It was also desirable that from a movement which was purely eirenic in intention, all possible points of controversy should be removed.

A remedy was fortunately at hand. The work of the Abbé Paul Couturier of Lyons was already well-known in this country and the Abbé himself had paid visits here in 1937 and 1938. Père Couturier was the driving power of the ‘Semaine de l'Universelle Prière des Chrétiens pour’ l’Unité chrétienne ‘ wherein the movement of prayer for unity was released from any controversial doctrinal requirement and centred wholly in the prayer for unity of our Lord. He had appealed, with extraordinary success, to Christians of all denominations to join in this prayer and all found themselves able to do so without controversy or violation of conscience. The basis of this prayer, and its expression, is best stated in the Abbé’s own words:

‘When and how will unity be brought about? What are the obstacles to be overcome? This is Thy business, my faith can only bid me pray with Thee, in Thee, that Thy unity may be accomplished, that unity which Thou hast never ceased to desire, which Thou pursuest, and art preparing, which Thou wouldest long since have realised, if all men with me had been as a crystal between that part of creation which wishes to rise to Thee through the Christian and that part of Thee which wishes to descend to the world by the same agency of the Christian.

Some weeks ago in two articles in The Tablet, entitled: “Education and Technique”, J. B. Sandeman, O.S.B., described the rejection by the 1944 Education Act of the idea of liberal education and asked what the Wisdom of Christ’s Church has to say and do at this time. He epitomised the historical facts thus: “In 1870 we abolished God, or at least reduced him to the rank of an idea . . . And now we are engaged in the abolition of man, for he too, in his turn, is to be sacrificed to something lower than himself, to the exigencies of technique”.

The State rejects liberal education because it only understands it as a pagan thing, as the practice of traditions, which, rising from the noble but pagan ideal, “mens sana in corpore sano”, have become corrupt and moribund, lacking the principle of life; it rejects a “classical education” because it knows no reason for its existence. When the Holy Spirit ceased to pour the water of life through Christ’s Church into our schools, when in fact, “God was abolished, or at least, reduced to the rank of an idea”, the virtue went out of our schools, the virtue went out of liberal education. When the study of the classics became an end in itself, instead of being part of the means and methods of training minds to logical and later to theological thought, in fact when man was abolished or at least “in his turn sacrificed to something lower than himself, to the exigencies of technique”, the idea of a classical education came into disrepute. But the Church lives still in Europe.

It is probable that since the beginning of civilisation there has never been a high culture without some kind of systematic study of matter. The Egyptians and Babylonians were metallurgists, architects, physicians, astronomers and mathematicians. The Greeks inherited some part of their tradition and transformed it from technique to philosophy. A scientific world-view emerged; theoretical systems of the sciences and natural histories, good and bad, expressed this view and the facts which it attempted to explain; and the corpus of Greek scientific writings remained as the chief inspiration and fountain of science until the seventeenth century, nor is its influence extinct to-day. Between 150 b.c. and 450 a.d. Greek science gradually died, but the record of it, preserved in Greek manuscripts, remained known to those who spoke that tongue. Thus in the sixth and seventh centuries there was considerable philosophical and scientific activity in Byzantium, Syria and Persia, and this later inspired the culture of Islam; but since very little had been translated into Latin, the knowledge of science in the Western world sunk to a low ebb.

These notes are intended to be nothing more than a brief summary of Père Mandonnet’s excellent and exhaustive treatise on the origins of the Rule of Saint Augustine, extending over a hundred pages and forming part of the monumental work entitled Saint Dominique, L’Idée, L’Homme et L’Oeuvre, published in 1938 (two years after his death) by his disciples and assistants Père Humbert Vicaire and Père Reginald Ladner, in two volumes. This work, with the exception of five valuable études critiques, has recently been translated into English by Sister Mary Benedicta Larkin, O.P., of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, U.S.A. As unfortunately these essays which occupy eighty-two pages of the original book have not been listed by the translator, but only referred to numerically, their titles are here given for the guidance of those who cannot have access to the French edition :—(1) The Chronology of Saint Dominic’s Life between 1205 and 12107, by Vicaire; (2) Cardinal James de Vitry’s account of the Preacher-Canons of Bologna, by Mandonnet; (3) Paul of Hungary’s Summa de Poenitentia, by Mandonnet; (4) The Constitutions of the Order between 1220 and 1227, by Vicaire; (5) The Beginnings of the Order of Penance, by Mandonnet. Admittedly these studies are technical and do not all touch directly on Saint Dominic and his work, but Vicaire’s first study, not a very lengthy one, could have been included in the translation with much profit.

The Rule of Saint Augustine, as universally known to-day, is prefixed to the Book of the Dominican Constitutions, and is incorporated in the Institutions of many other religious Orders.

I do not mean that Truth shifts. I mean that as men stretch out their hands to grasp her, she seems to them to withdraw herself : even as the fairy glow on the distant hills recedes as we draw near. Men are bashful of the truth and are eluded because of the coyness of their grasp-Moreover the truth is expected to shift; and that position which is static is suspected of some falsity, since at some time or other truth must have shifted thence on her travels. Thus von Martin complains in his book, Sociology of the Renaissance.

‘The centre of gravity of mediaeval society was the land, was the soil. . . Mediaeval society was founded upon a static order of Estates, sanctioned by the Church. Everyone was assigned to his place by nature, i.e. by God himself, and any attempt to break away from it was a revolt against the divine order. Everyone was confined within strictly defined limits, which were imposed and enforced by the ruling Estates, the clergy. . . The King himself was bound to rule according to definite laws: he had to carry out his reciprocal obligations towards his vassals ; he had to treat the Church according to the principles of justitia.’

There is a certain notion of the Middle Ages which even the most ‘Protestant’ historian of our day has dismissed with contempt. It is based upon a purely imaginative estimate; it relies upon that selective principle which inevitably distinguishes the polemist from the historian. Above all, by its nervous distrust of the objective it must be classified as a subjectivism of the first order.

Natural science is concerned with understanding the working of material nature. The subject of this paper is the positive contribution which natural science, given its true place among the other activities of man, might make to the world. At the outset, it is essential to distinguish between science and the applications of science. When a certain knowledge of nature has been won, it is often possible to apply it to the control and manipulation of nature—to devise new techniques for handling matter. Modern industry is becoming more and more dominated by technology based in this way on applied science. The emphasis on the use of science in modern life is such that most of those who write on the ‘place of science in society’ are thinking primarily of the place of technics in society, and treat science only in relation to technics. But the question of the place of technics in society raises problems wholly different from that of the place of science in society, and a lack of clear distinctions here can lead to a wholly false conceptions of the functions of science. That technics (which presupposes science) will be of major importance to this nation, it is impossible to deny; that science has significance only as a basis for material prosperity is not, however, a legitimate conclusion. Science is concerned with understanding nature, not with manipulating it for economic purposes. The great human problems centreing round the rapid growth of industrial technology must here be left aside, as being only indirectly, connected with the functions of science in modern culture.

Responsibility implies in the responsible person a nature to be served : our own human nature and that of our fellow men in all its kinship with other creatures and all its dependence on God. The service of nature in this sense involves service in and with our bodies : and it involves the service of bodily nature in others—not only in other persons but in all the bodily creation. For bodily nature, although indeed it is fashioned in accordance with the divine intellect, is answerable to God in man and not elsewhere. And this service of bodily nature is not any kind of task imposed from without, but is implied in the norm of our humanity and thus in the law of our understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in.

Thus the norm of our bodily life implies no bondage to material nature although it implies service in and of the body. Such service is responsible precisely to the extent that it is in obedience to our understanding, free to the extent the understanding we obey is our own. A distinction is noted here between the precise bearing of freedom and of responsibility, although in the integrity of human nature they inseparably imply each other.

‘Outside’ the integrity of human nature is the domain of sin, considered—precisely from the point of view we have adopted—as contra naturam. Thus, in the shattered and scattered consciousness which belongs to sin, freedom—obedience to the law of our own understanding so far as it is ours—may be held as a political or quasi-ethical ideal, even though the understanding be false and its law, absolutely speaking, no law.

Arthur Koestler is unique among modern novelists for two reasons. Firstly he has written novels which have achieved wide popularity without in any way sacrificing their claim to be serious literature. Secondly, his political philosophy is sufficiently mature to enable him to analyse left-wing politics from a left-wing standpoint and yet to arrive at conclusions far more balanced and critical than we are entitled to expect from any British political commentator starting from the same assumptions.

The popularity of his two novels, Darkness at Noon and Arrival and Departure, has been achieved by his use of all the reader-appeals of the modern best-seller. His subject matter is extremely palatable to those types of middle-class intelligentsia who frequent the circulating libraries. Koestler’s chief appeal, of course, is his topicality. The setting of his novels is in modern Russia and Germany. But one has only to compare his grasp of political realities with the tedious platitudes and gross over-simplifications of such a political novelist as Philip Gibbs to appreciate Koestler’s mature and informed political criticism through characters and vividly localised details.

The present writer had already sent to the printer his reflections on Psychotherapy and Ethics) before the opportunity came to him of reading Dr. J. C. Flugel’s recent book on the same subject. Dr. Flugel’s approach is, naturally enough, very different from our own. He writes as a psychologist pure and simple, and with a minimum (at least in intention) of extra-psychological presuppositions. He is moreover a convinced and orthodox—though also a “progressive” and by no means uncritical—Freudian; but he is unusually open to interests and considerations outside his own professional province and writes with an ease and urbanity uncommon to his kind. Last but not least, he is gifted with a quality which, as has often been remarked, seems to be singularly rare (but, one might have thought, singularly necessary) among psychologists—a keen sense of humour.

The great value and importance of Dr. Flugel’s book lies in the fact that it presents us with a remarkably candid, thorough and comprehensive treatment, from a psychoanalyst’s own viewpoint, of the subject which has recently engaged our own attention. In certain important matters his conclusions strikingly anticipate and confirm our own. In particular we would draw attention to the frankness with which he dismisses the contention that psychotherapy, as a “pure science”, can confine its attention to the means of human conduct and disregard consideration of the ends and values which are the province of ethics (pp. 12 ff., 30 ff.) Indeed it is precisely because he believes that the analytical exploration of psychological means modifies our apprehension of these ends and values that he has written and published the book at all; in the belief, that is to say, that from psychoanalysis (notwithstanding its many candidly recognised insufficiencies) many lessons may be learned “concerning the general nature of human morality and the general lines of moral progress” (p. 240, cf. Preface).

It is only with great diffidence that the following considerations on a difficult subject are put forward in the hope of being of possible assistance to others. By unbelief is meant the initial reluctance to accept the doctrines of Christianity as well as the disinclination to retain them that often comes upon those who devote themselves to an intellectual life. This unbelief occurs especially during the formative period, usually, but not necessarily, the years spent by young people at a university, or the time immediately following. The purpose of this essay is to try to isolate the various elements in modern life that tend to disturb settled faith in Christianity, and very briefly to indicate some way of trying to counteract them. Many of the causes are common to all periods of history, some are proper to our own age or have unusual strength now. This account does not pretend to be more than a limited and partial sketch.

Behind every problem of modern instability there lies, first, a fundamental insecurity in social life, affecting all of us in many and sometimes unsuspected ways. This insecurity is manifested in the multiplicity and diversity of moral and political, personal and emotional standards all round ; these react in their turn to make more acute the basic insecurity in the soul—it may sometimes amount to a positive fear of life.

The perfection of the Christian life consists essentially in Charity; principally in the love of God, secondarily in the love of our neighbour. (Sum: Theol: II-II, 184, 3). The source and exemplar of all Charity is the Uncreated Love which is the very life of the Blessed Trinity, while its plenitude is possessed by the Soul of Christ, of Whose fulness we have all received. Each Religious Order strives in its measure to reproduce some aspect of this “Charity of Christ which surpasseth all knowledge” (Eph. 3, 19), the contemplative life pertaining directly and immediately to the love of God, while the active life is more immediately concerned with the love of our neighbour. (II-II, 182, 2). Yet St Dominic, by founding an Order whose purpose was contemplation ordained to the Apostolate—contemplan, et contemplata aliis tradere, has perhaps come as near as is humanly possible to combining the two lives and the double aspect of Charity, in a single vocation. St Catherine, herself an outstanding example of the realisation of the Dominican ideal, had this brought home to her, when in a vision she saw St Dominic emanating from the heart of the Eternal Father, and resembling even in features the Word Who proceeded from his mouth. The Eternal Father explained to her: “My only Begotten Son devoted all his life to the salvation of souls . . . Dominic, my adopted son . . . taking on himself the office of the Word, directed all his efforts to the salvation of souls . . . That was the chief object that led him to plant and to train his Order. Therefore I tell you that in all his acts he may be compared to my Begotten Son.”

As stated in the Preface, the present work comprises within the compass of eight lectures the Bampton Lectures for 1941, a survey of the relation of the Papacy and the Christian ‘Church, paying particular attention to their character within the first six centuries. The spirit in which it is written is accurately set forth by the author when he writes : ‘It may be that by a fuller recognition of its (the papacy’s) status in the history of our Faith there will grow a more generous acknowledgement of its appropriate place in the glorious reunited Christendom of the future.’ It is the eirenic spirit of theology, which in historical matters means a benevolent neutrality.

And we do need books of this kind. In the Catholic Church, most of our ecclesiastical history has been dealt with as a department of Apologetics and few are the Catholic historians detached enough to allow for the human element in the communion of saints. It seems so difficult for one who loves the Church as a son to reveal her past as a historian; or for one who reverenced her as divine to analyse such of her actions as are obviously human. Outsiders, of course, labour under the same difficulty the other way about and often fail to see the divine wood for the human trees. In medio Hat virtus.

Anglican historians of the Roman Catholic Church are fewer even than their Catholic opposite numbers, but few as they are, they substantially assist us in the arduous task of stating facts without bias either for or against the Church, of showing the possibility of criticising with love and reverence, of discerning the divine without overlooking the human.

I was arrested by the Gestapo on May 16th, 1941, and taken to the prison of la Santé. Two months later I was transferred to the Fortress of Romainville, then being used as a concentration camp for prisoners usually released only by death or deportation to Germany.

For cell companions I had three young men from Nantes: Caldecott, a chemist, Hévin, a railway draughtsman, and Labrousse, a student of Legal History. Caldecott, a charming fellow with fair hair, bright eyes, a slightly ironic smile and determined manner, was of English extraction.

Romainville was like a convict prison. No priest ever set foot there. Religious services were forbidden. Convicts’ dress was worn. The first time I met Julien Cain, the Director of the Biblioth&que Nationale, I failed to recignize him in this costume of yellow canvas. Soon I was wearing it myself.

One day I asked him: “Are we hostages here? We shouldn’t be since we haven’t been accused.” He thought that actually we Were not hostages.

Shortly afterwards my question assumed sinister significance. A corporal told me that I must prepare to leave. Was it as a hostage for Nont-Valérien where the executions took place? No, Julien Cain was certain that I was returning to la Santé.