Finding myself at Le Saulchoir, the French Dominican study-house near Paris, towards the end of September 1962, was a daunting and exciting experience. My first meal, in the meticulous asceticism of that lofty gymnasium-like refectory, consisted of half an artichoke, a lump of cheese, and as much thin beer as one wanted. A month later, as complaining letters home would confirm, I felt hungry, cold, lonely, alien, and profoundly depressed by the oppressive weight of lectures. The liturgy, with its drilled schola, ran with praetorian precision. When my week came to preside at the conventual mass I was told that my performance was ‘détraqué’ and ‘relâché’—and these were not complimentary epithets. At the end of the academic year I was told that my dissertation was too ‘literary’—that I needed to be more ‘scientific’. With the two laid-back Brazilians and the three irrepressible Dutchmen, I constituted the handful, in this pagoda of exact ceremonial and dedicated cerebration, who knew that other Dominican ways were possible.

On the other hand, with sermons and lectures by Chenu, Congar, and so many others of that character, in the inaugural year of the Council, how could I not delight at being in a great theological power-station at such a time? The lectures were often dreary—but I remain grateful to have had that experience of good old-fashioned Thomist scholasticism. I shall not forget my excitement at Claude Geffré’s exposition of Thomas Aquinas on the Passion of Christ, or the recreation of his treatise on the Virtue of Charity by Jacques Pohier ...