The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.

However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.

The view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn projected in the press, both popular and literary, in the bourgeois countries is of some kind of embattled Western liberal, who, amid the severities of ‘totalitarianism’, continues resolutely to articulate the values that underpin the Free World. We do not see him treated as a Russian socialist who after decades of official dogma is conducting a genuine struggle to come to terms, artistically, with recent Soviet history, to deal with real problems of common life and its valuation in a transitional society. Nor is he even shown to be the author of a certain kind of typically Russian social novel discernibly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—but always as the Scourge of Communism.

Naturally, it is easy for the champions of the Western bourgeoisie to appropriate Solzhenitsyn to their own ideological purposes (along with many other ‘dissident intellectuals’): do not, after all, the demands most often raised by the ‘cultural opposition’ such as those for freedom of speech and of publication—the civil rights most cherished by the intelligentsia—have the very appearance of ‘liberal’ demands? This mystification is easy to dispel. Noticeably, the Western press only reports the activities of the intellectuals: widespread factory occupations, food riots, work stoppages, street demonstrations, and the storming of the party headquarters in Novocherkask by local factory workers (all of which took place when Kruschev announced rises in meat and dairy prices in 1962, the year of Solzhenitsyn’s first publication) are not reported in the West with such alacrity. And in any case, as Harding remarks, freedom of speech is by no means a liberal call in the Russian context: by raising demands which the state bureaucracy dare not satisfy, the intellectuals must eventually consider the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and a means of achieving this, and thus their dissent falls within the dynamic of permanent revolution.

Knowledge that the author of a book between one’s hands died before its publication inevitably affects one’s judgement of it. At first reading, the late Dr Jean Buxton’s Religion and Healing in Mandari seemed to me to lack complete integration as a book, to be rather a collection of extremely interesting and thoughtful chapters loosely strung together. Further reading, however, has suggested to me that this impression is a superficial reaction to a remarkable quality in the book, its capacity to give attention to several different themes in succession, or rather, to give each theme its own value in the overall pattern of Mandari thinking and doing, without either isolating it from the whole, or giving the totality an imposed, schematic unity in the service of some favourite formula. Dr Buxton refused to see Mandari reality as a collection of bits and pieces or as a shapeless mass or as a geometrical pattern.

The Mandari are a people of the southern Sudan, numbering, when in the nineteen-fifties Dr Buxton did her fieldwork among them, some 15,000. They are linguistically and culturally different from the Dinka and Nuer, even though in the present century they have undergone considerable influence from the latter. Dr Buxton had already described their social institutions in her earlier Chiefs and Strangers; her theme here is in fact wider than the title suggests, since, in so far as a central theme gradually emerges from the rich and fascinating material here presented, it is how the Mandari order and arrange in a rational way what they see and experience. Nothing is in the mind which is not first in the senses, said the old scholastics; or, as an excited disciple of Chomsky exclaimed: ‘The human mind exists’. Dr Buxton would have accepted both these statements; but it is her merit that she has shown how they apply to an obscure, poor and non-literate people in the circumstances of the culture they have formed and the environment which dominates them.

The subject of the ordination of women to the representative priesthood of the Church is often discussed in terms of objections and meeting objections. The quick exchange and the tension involved in differing considerations can often be helpful and constructive; but I have chosen simply to consider the idea of women priests in itself, in a positive way. One may very well agree with the Anglican bishop, Trevor Huddlestone, that the theological arguments against the ordination of women ‘simply don’t hold water’; and one may also take the view of the novice master of an anglican monastery, that the argument of the twelve apostles all having been men is New Testament a similar view, and yet prefer simply to think about a priesthood of men and women in and for itself.

One other point of introduction is this, that any open discussion on the matter, and any public consideration of it, should, to be safe, have the support and purification of private self-examination. For the issues involved touch us at levels deeper than our reason; and if discussion becomes highly charged emotionally, as it sometimes does, then it is fairly certain that the people concerned have not privately come to terms with their feelings; we need to discover by ourselves what we feel about the subject, not only what we think, and not only what we think we ought to feel. In this way we can both discover our motives and work out our reasons. Doubtless the two should converge, but they do so to some extent in a divided, not yet perfectly integrated, human nature. A person can have a case for or against the ordination of women which in itself is flawlessly reasoned but which covers a subconscious motive or feeling of very dubious quality.

Those whose reservations kept them away from the ‘Dance’ Mass at the French Church, Leicester Place, last summer will be relieved to know that the congregation neither indulged in ‘one more time’ of Lord of the Dance, nor flung off garments to give way to unbridled holy rolling. A few jackets and ties were removed (it was a warm evening) but the only sensational happenings were the sincerely vigorous protestations of a few ladies of strong Tridentine loyalties. What, then, was done? And was it worth doing? Above all, was it proper to be done in the context ?

‘The theatre is the place for this, not the House of God’ intoned one of the ladies in a recurring and joyless antiphon, received for the most part by the packed congregation in compassionate silence and heroically overlooked by the readers thus interrupted. Well, is it? Were we insulting God by a mock marriage of actress and bishop? ‘But what about David ?’ a young Anglican said to me as we queued to get in. Ah, yes, David . . . but he was one of your ancient royals. And very Old Testament and Jewish. But so—inconveniently?—is the foundation of belief in, and credibility of, the Person who said ‘Before Abraham was, I am’.

By this time the moths of misconception have no doubt gathered in large numbers. It will be useful to begin, therefore, with an account of what actually took place. Before the Mass, the celebrant, Father Kevin Donovan, S.J., explained clearly and with infectious enthusiasm what was intended. The Liturgy of the Word would include a number of readings from the Gospels and the psalms which would then be interpreted in dance and movement.

It was in the future days—I know time tells strange tales—that the idea first came to me. We had discovered long before how to transmit objects by dematerialising them in one place, translating them into the basic energy of their matter, and directing this energy to another place for rematerialisation. You will appreciate that this in itself had given rise to some pretty wild theories about the Resurrection of Christ. However, in working out how to apply this principle across galactic distances, we accidently discovered a way of tracking the light of past events. As you know, you see a thing when light is reflected from it to your eye. That light never dies but hurtles away, out through space, at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Somehow, one of our team was able to draw up the formula for finding and reconvening the light of past events, and for showing us these events on the face of our computer.

To put it crudely, this involved a leap ahead of the light, by a short-cut method, encountering the light and bringing its information back, by short-cut, almost instantaneously to our computer which translated it into vision on its face. A few seconds was all the computer needed to intercept and interpret events of thousands of light-years’ distance.

Even though we could do this with light only, and not with sound, an extraordinary amount of excitement was generated, and many people used the machine to witness once more the happy events of their childhood, etc. On the whole, though, this shattered too many illusions, and it hurt and embarrassed some very nice people indeed. More caution was used.