What are the differentia of distinctively Christian mysticism ? This is a question which poses itself with especial urgency at the present time, for two reasons. There is first the strong polemic against mysticism in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Emil Brunner—'anglo-saxon’ and continental’ theology agreeing, for the moment, on this point— and second the fascination for some literary figures of an orientalised gnostic type of mysticism (Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, etc.). Niebuhr and Brunner make no attempt to distinguish between the various types of mysticism; for them its only authentic form would seem to be the nonhistorical, non-incarnational ‘vedantic’ mysticism which attracts Huxley. Mysticism, for Brunner, means Eckhart; the mystic, he Writes, is always to be linked with ‘his revered Meister Eckhart and his Indian and Chinese prototypes'.

“Christian Platonism”, if we propose to take the expression seriously, is nothing less than a contradiction in terms'… ‘the discrepancies between Platonism and Christianity, when we get down to first principles, are so radical that only by complete misunderstanding or wilful blindness is it possible to profess allegiance to both.’ These unambiguous declarations on page 55 of the late W. H. V. Reade's Christian Challenge to Philosophy (S.P.C.K., 1951, pp. v-xiii, 1-194; 13s. 6d.) presents us with the central thesis of a brilliantly written book, one which breathes the wisdom of a fine intellect inspired by a lifetime's meditation upon the great tradition of European thought. The book will prove of most interest, no doubt, to the philosophers. Many of them will find points for disagreement as they follow the author along the European tradition from Plato to the positivists. Many, indeed, will rightly challenge his own exclusion of Platonists from Christianity; for there are of course good Christians who do understand Plato and yet prefer his ideas as a means of stating the faith.

Paganism, that is ethnic religions, can only be understood historically. They are the precipitate of a tribe's, a people's, group-experiences during its process of formation. They are passed on from generation to generation by way of tradition and are expressed either as customs, as mythology or as cult—the distinction between these three kinds of thoughts, words and deeds always remaining pretty vague. Moreover, all these group-expressions are in a constant flux; new experiences are added, modifying and perhaps logically contradicting, the previous forms of expression, possibly superseding them altogether.

Nothing, therefore, could be more misleading than wanting to explain a pagan ideology, an ethnic religion, in the same manner as that of a religion based on a depositum fidei, from which everything can be logically deduced. An ethnic religion never starts as a system, though in the end, at a certain point of intellectual development, systematisers arise that try to arrest the growth of amorphous agglomerations of group-experiences in the rigid moulds of a static ideology.

The attention Islamic Mysticism has so far received in this country presents to the Catholic a study of no little interest. Unlike some of the Indian ascetic practices, it has largely been the object of a purely professional, rather than of a popular and slightly bizarre enthusiasm; but, within the field of scholarship, that enthusiasm has been whole-hearted and uninhibited to a degree not witnessed in our time outside the natural sciences. From the middle of last century onwards, a whole range of scholars—Palmer, Browne, Nicholson, Arberry and Margaret Smith, to name only some of the outstanding among them—have found, and unmistakably gloried in finding, a satisfaction in their studies wider and deeper than the purely academic. It is perhaps not surprising that most of these scholars ‘discovered’ Islamic Mysticism either (in the case of the earlier ones) when living in an atmosphere of confidently well-bred agnosticism, or (during the present century) when their religious appetite no longer found anything like satisfaction in their own accepted faith.

The re-publication of Miss Waterhouse's symposium of prose and poetry, a ‘little bundle of thoughts’ as she herself calls it, takes for granted the relationship between literature and life. When this book was first published in 1902 it was still fairly widely agreed that literature and any form of art did touch human life and should be expected to touch human life at many points. Although Walter Pater and many like him had lived and written, the ‘Art for Art's Sake’ creed had not borne its full fruit. Now almost fifty years later this same book sees the light again in a world that thinks very differently. Today it is commonly taken for granted that poetry exists primarily in its own right and may only be judged on its own terms. It was indeed very necessary after the excess of ‘moral’ literary criticism to re-establish the natural rights of poetry.