We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.

The question presents difficulties. It would not be asked if the answer was obvious. But the answer is not obvious because the name Jew seems to be used with diverse meanings both by Jews and others. Some give the name primarily a racial significance; a Jew is just one who is born of Jewish parents. Others give the name primarily a national significance; a Jew is one who belongs to a distinctive nation which has a culture of its own, a language of its own, national characteristics of its own, and, they would add, needs a national home or political state of its own. Others give the name Jew a religious content; a Jew is one who is an adherent of Judaism.

These diverse, and divergent, uses of the name Jew arise out of the Jews’ long history. The definition of a Jew must be related to the definition of the Jews as a group. What constitutes a Jew obviously depends on the basis and nature of the collective life of Jews. There are, in general, three categories of human groups— races, nations and religions. Into which of these do the Jews fit? Or, to put the question the other way about, which of these descriptions fits the Jews?

No one of them fits the Jews exactly. For one thing, Jews began their collective existence at a time when these categories were undifferentiated; they simply did not exist in the ancient world. They are comparatively modern divisions. There were separate human groups which included in their collective life all, or nearly all, that is now included under the terms race, nation and religion. That is still largely the case in the part of the Eastern world where the Jews originated; though the influences of the West are producing a growing distinction between religion and nation. The conception of nationality is, however, new.

The perusal of a copy of The Christian Pacifist which seems to have something of a Christian inspiration suggests the question ‘Is there a Christian Pacifism? ‘The issue for May, 1944, written before the Second Front was an actuality, contained this passage: ‘Through the deafening noise and blinding smoke let us try to see what is happening. What really are these brave events? Homes stricken desolate by grief! Children for ever rendered fatherless with all the thwarting and distorting consequences in character! The most precious creations of affection and long care smashed clumsily to formless fragments ! God’s noblest works defaced and fouled! The very life-blood of the family of nations poured out in mad and irremediable havoc? And a great heap of bitter hatred and lust for vengeance towering still higher than the material ruins ! Here is fear exalted over faith; evil worshipped in the place of good.’

Though this apostrophe may have a tinge of that ‘sentimental pacifism ‘which Pope Pius XI. warned us must not be confused with the ‘Peace of Christ,’ yet it has also some resemblance to papal exhortations themselves, especially those of our Holy Father Pope Pius XII. during the war. It even contains in brief his reasons for appealing for peace. But like all arguments that are not quite in tune with sound philosophy, it begs the question, and that in its concluding sentence.

It was the misty dawn of a Sunday morning, September 12th, in the year 1683. From the height of the Kahlenberg, where the last wooded escarpment of the Alps dominated a landscape of hillocks and ravines, a man was gazing towards Vienna, some three miles eastwards. As the light strengthened he could pick out the spires and steeples of the city, and the broken ravelins and splintered bastions which marked the line of the fortifications. He could also see, between him and the city, a vast town of tents, where the besieging Turkish army had encamped in a crescent outside the ramparts of Vienna. A wind arose, and dissipated the mist, and the watcher, sitting his bay horse, could hear the trumpeting of elephants, the beating of little war-drums, and strains of eastern music. The horseman, though only fifty-four years of age, had grown corpulent, and his face was already heavy. But the large dark eyes, with their direct gaze, were accustomed to command, and indeed, those about him at this hour, Princes of the great houses of Europe, deferred to him. For he was a King as well as a renowned Captain. When he had surveyed the ground over which the coming action was to be contested, he again looked towards the city, clear now in the early sunlight. And from the ramparts the sentries of the depleted and exhausted garrison, who had seen the rockets of the relieving force dufing the hours of darkness, strained their eyes for some glimpse of their deliverers. They saw that the defiles and gorges leading out pf the hills were blocked by Turkish troops, and it was not known whether John Sobieski himself was with the allied forces. But the horseman on the Kahlenberg was Sobieski, the hope of Europe in that hour of destiny.

I do not know if the conclusion that was reached at Teheran, now after three months still holds good : ‘We come here with hope and determination. We have been friends in fact, in spirit and in purpose.’ Nor do I know whether the British and American columnists who so solemnly proclaimed that the Moscow, Cairo and Teheran Conferences, had laid the foundations for the perpetual and peaceable direction by the Big Three or Four (leaving out of count all the other countries) of a future world order are to-day of the same mind. What has happened in these months is so significant and entails so many hypotheses as to the future of the world, that it challenges all the over-simple formulae which have nourished a superficial press.

Stalin is in the foreground. He has an active, volitive policy which starts from Moscow and arrives at Moscow. Without stressing historical comparisons too much, he can be considered as a Russian Napoleon, who is as much a Muscovite (a Muscovite of Georgia) as the Corsican was a Parisian. Such types bring to capital cities a certain provincial originality, which cuts them off from tradition, thus facilitating the developments of their inventive spirit. Just as Napoleon transformed the semi-anarchic democracy of the French Revolution, (already at its third phase), into a Directory and then into an Empire, while maintaining the symbols of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, so Stalin has transformed the Leninist Soviet regime into a politico-military dictatorship, while preserving the name and certain structures of Communism.

Stalin has dropped the Red International for a more concrete and profitable nationalism ; he has passed from persecution of the Orthodox Church to benevolent toleration ; he has restored a particularist trend to economic life, little by little bringing back private interest.

Total war has clearly shown the interdependence of all European countries. It has taught us that a European country cannot save itself by geography, valour, or neutrality. If a few isolated European countries have been able during the war to maintain their existence by declaring themselves neutral it is solely due to the fact that Nazism and Fascism have lost the war before they had succeeded in accomplishing their final aims.

Great Britain, with her Empire and possessions scattered throughout the world, is closely bound up with the interests and aims of the non-European continents. But this does not alter the fact that this country and the Empire can no longer dissociate themselves from the fate of Europe and that an isolation policy—such as was advocated before the war by certain responsible political circles—has now become an inner impossibility. If any extra proof is needed it can be seen in the invasion of the Continent by the allied nations and in the use of the newly-invented technical weapons. These have proved how vital it is for Great Britain to prevent any potentially hostile power from using the ports of the Lower countries and France for an attack on her. Beyond that, we must reckon with the perfection of these weapons in future. Nobody can predict whether one day it will not be possible to send flying bombs from Central or even East Europe.

Before the end of the twelfth century when the Universities came into existence, the intellectual life of Europe was centred in the monasteries. It was not an intellectual life of great vigour, breadth or profundity, for the Benedictine lectio was concerned more with devotion than with scholarship. Yet it served to keep at bay the barbarism and ignorance that threatened to engulf the Church, and contrived to make in its multiplication of manuscripts a small but precious contribution to Christian civilisation. It was insufficient, however, for the educational needs of the pastoral clergy, and for that reason the Church found herself obliged to erect Cathedral schools as training grounds for her own ministers. The immediate effect of this policy was to lessen the prestige of the monasteries as intellectual centres : and this, added to the changing economic conditions and the increasing prosperity of the towns, resulted in the final emergence of the Cathedral schools as the focal points of culture. From these schools, founded by Bishops and designed mainly as seminaries for their clergy, the universities took their rise.

Of all these Paris was by far the most celebrated. Whereas at Orleans, Bologna, Salerno and Toledo, studies were almost exclusively confined to arts, or law, or medicine or physics, at Paris no specialisation was attempted. Roman law and Canon law, Aristotle and Peter Lombard, the new Euclid and the new Ptolemy, the Greek and Arabic physicians, all these had their masters and their students. And as strict supervision over studies and scholars was very difficult, all this feverish intellectual activity, all this jostling of humanists, jurists and theologians, coud only lead to extravagance and disorder. John de Hauteville has described in his Architrenius the resulting chaos, violence and squalor of student life in Paris.

When General Simuts delivered his much-discussed Thoughts on the New World, he gave utterance to some home-truths which badly needed enunciating. As he warned his audience, his remarks were intended to be stimulating, lacking in ‘diplomatic ‘qualification, not to be an expression of carefully-balanced policy. Especially have his remarks about France provoked reaction. ‘A nation,’ he said, ‘that has been overtaken by a catastrophe such as she has suffered, reaching to the foundations of her nationhood, will not easily resume her nationhood again. We may talk about her as a Great Power, but talking will not help her much.’

There have been protests against these blunt, almost brutal, words, by those who love and long for the culture of France. But these protests are not to the point; the culture of a nation survives and is of influence long after that nation has ceased to be a political reality, and French culture will be no exception. But to be a political reality a nation must have a State-will which can be made effective both for national life and for external preservation, and such a State-will demands at least a measure of national unity. The prospects of French unity—and this General Smuts must have had in mind—fill her friends with dismay, if not despair. News from Algiers does not suggest the development of a wide national coalition of French statesmen and the prospect is more easily foreseen in the words of a charming French actress, depicted in Picture Post of Nov. 27th, 1943, as saying : ‘After the war there will be a lot of people to be shot in France. Then we will start again.’