It must have been early in 1919, the time when Father Bede Jarrett resumed his weekly walk with me, that he spoke of his desire for a monthly review; of the need for a new Catholic review in England; a periodical, fearless, outspoken, zealous for truth; not primarily theological; a review that would present, in intelligible fashion, Catholic teaching on social justice, comment on passing events, give adequate space to literature, strike the human note. A Dominican review—acceptable to the unlearned—and, perhaps this was harder, a review the learned would not disdain. The articles must not be heavy, nor yet be too obstruse for the plain man. Scientific technicalities were to be avoided, humour not discouraged. A Dominican review that would appeal to the laity and, no doubt, might be read by the clergy. In all its criticism of books and political activities, and in the inevitable controversies that would be provoked, the review, while not allowing truth to be obscured by feelings of charity, must not let the plea of truth excuse want of charity. All cocksureness, arrogance, identification of personal opinions with eternal verities—in short, all pontificating by lay- writers on matters by no means de fide was to be deprecated, as far as possible excluded.

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.

Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?

There probably has never been a generation since the year 1329, when the Holy See in Avignon condemned fifteen propositions extracted from Eckhart’s writings as heretical, when the justice of the condemnation has not been questioned. The object of this paper is to take account of some recent publications which seem to support the decision of the Dominican General Chapter at Walberberg in 1980 to initiate proceedings for a reexamination of Eckhart’s case.

One is by Richard Woods OP, and it may be commended for its concise and factual account of the troubled times in which Eckhart lived and suffered. Sagely he observes that some of the Church’s grievous problems, which she may be thought to have visited upon the German friar, are still afflicting her, so that the Order of Preachers, in seeking to restore to him his good name, is not merely indulging in Dantesque brooding over the parish pump.

The second is by a Dutch Jesuit, Paul Verdeyen, who has with Romana Guarnieri’s permission reprinted, in 1986, as volume 69 of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis her text of the French Mirror of Simple Souls, parallel to his own critical edition of the manuscripts of the Mirror’s Latin translation. Though Verdeyen’s work is flawed (particularly by one strange misapprehension—that the translation was produced by the Inquisition in Paris before the author of the Mirror, Margaret Porette, was tried, condemned and put to death for heresy), nonetheless Verdeyen has made valuable contributions to our further knowledge of Margaret’s perplexing and engrossing case. Very soon I shall attempt to support my belief that it is relevant to that of Eckhart.

On the occasion of the publication, in March 1987, of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and foetal experimentation, there appeared a cartoon in a Roman newspaper, in which two bishops are standing next to a telescope. In the distant night sky, in addition to Saturn and the Moon, there are dozens of test-tubes. One bishop turns to the other, who is in front of the telescope, and asks: ‘This time what should we do? Should we look or not?’ Many see the Galileo affair as a prime example of the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, between reason and faith. Stephen Hawking, in his recent best-seller, A Brief History of Time, writes a two-page biographical appendix on Galileo which offers ample evidence for the persistence of the view that the accomplishments of Galileo must be understood in the face of the opposition of Aristotelian science and Catholic theology. Galileo, Hawking claims, ‘was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.’ Hawking, in commenting on his participation at a conference on cosmology sponsored by the Vatican at which he challenged traditional interpretations of Big Bang cosmology, evoked the image of himself as a potential Galileo:

‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:

The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.