This article, and the four which follow, will be about revelation, about the community God has established, and about the sacraments that constitute it: they are theological, concerned with God and his dealings with men. Most of what I say will probably be pretty familiar stuff to you, but some of it may be new; this is because I shall be drawing on the results of the great theological revival which has been going on for some years in the Church but which has not yet had its full effect in England. A word in passing about this revival, because we will be constantly coming back to it. It is one aspect of a quiet reformation, a surge of new life within the Church. The most obvious signs of this are the liturgical movement, the return to the scriptures and the Fathers and, above all, the new understanding of the place of the laity in the Church.

‘As the kingdom of God in its perfect form does not lie in mere knowledge, but rather in the life that the knowledge awakens, so it could not be prepared for by the mere knowledge that it was approaching, nor even by the knowledge, outwardly communicated, of what it was. It could be prepared for only by bringing in, and that in ever fuller tides, the life of which it consists…. What we meet in the Old Testament are two concrete subjects and their relation. The two are: Jehovah, God of Israel on the one hand, and Israel, the people of Jehovah, on the other; and the third point, which is given in the other two, is their relation to one another. And it is obvious that the denominating or creative factor is the relation to Jehovah.’

Thus a very great theologian, nowadays somewhat neglected, has defined the scope and significance of the old testament. It is the record of a people chosen from among the peoples to live in the light-giving and life-bringing presence of Yahweh, and to draw from that presence ‘in ever fuller tides’ supernatural light and life. And this process is to continue until at last the Light of the World comes ‘that they may have life and have it abundantly’ (Jn. 10,10).

In talk and writing about religion the expression ‘the spiritual life’ is well known. It is assumed not only to have meaning but to mean something very important. It will not, therefore, be out of place to examine these assumptions in a review that is called LIFE OF THE SPIRIT, a title which has affinity, if not identity, with the expression in question. ‘The spiritual life', ‘the life of the spirit', how shall we distinguish them? Perhaps any distinction there may be will emerge later.

The spiritual life is considered to be something that a religious man should seriously engage himself in, and an important part of it for him will be his ‘spiritual exercises', notably assistance at the sacrifice and reception of the sacraments, but also prayer, public and private, vocal and silent, and ‘spiritual reading'. To settle on the measure and manner of these, he will sometimes, even regularly, have recourse to a ‘spiritual director'.

It has been concluded, on the evidence of the verses that Suger wrote to celebrate his new basilica, that he looked upon it mainly as a monument to his own greatness. But although one admits that he was not without his streak of vanity, this particular manifestation of what at first glance appears to be mere complacency is worth examining more closely. His verses are not simply tombstone bombast; on the contrary, each one has a definite message to convey. It becomes clear that they were written for a purpose more interesting than that of Suger's selfaggrandizement. They were meant, in fact, to provide a commentary on the whole conception and undertaking of the new St Denis, his opus nobile, as he calls it.

It is, of course, not easy for us to imagine why Gothic architecture and traditional Christian iconography should require any explanation. It requires a real effort to imagine St Denis making the sort of impact on Suger's contemporaries that Ronchamp makes on ours.