Preached at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on Sunday, 9 February, three days after Kenelm Foster’s death, to a congregation that knew him well. The readings for that Sunday were: Isaiah 6:1—8 (the call of Isaiah); l Corinthians 15:1—11 (Paul’s testimony of Christ’s death for our sins’ and resurrection); and Luke 5:1-11 (the call of the first disciples).

Kenelm would have been delighted at finding this Pauline reading, if he had been preaching today. He loved St Paul. He was his clear-favourite New Testament writer. Paul, who often spoke in the First person. Paul, who was like a boxer, and not in vain. Paul, who was always arguing, full of polemic and self-polemic. Paul, who could chart in his experience, even on his own body, the workings of grace, of grappling with the Saviour. Paul, who wrestled with meaning. We can even imagine Paul to be like his thought—tough, full of wiry strength. Kenelm had been a boxer at Downside and always kept some of the instincts and reactions of a boxer. Kenelm, who always asked awkward questions, even as a Dominican student; so he was banished to a parish as a kind of punishment, he who was so obviously clever. (But questions were not encouraged by all in the Study House in those days.) Kenelm on his death-bed, listening to a fellow-friar reading to him Hopkins’s poems—but not just listening, arguing about the meaning; getting impatient. Tenacious, dogged in style. You will never understand Kenelm properly unless you read some of his writings.

The year before Kenelm left Cambridge to enter the Dominican Order, A.E. Housman, in a famous, one might say notorious, lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, on 9 May 1933, deplored the choice made of him as Leslie Stephen lecturer and then said: ‘Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that Heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say; but Heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common’. This lecture by a poet and classical philologist in fact turned out to be an outstandingly original piece of literary criticism and one of the most characteristic utterances of the thirties. In spite of Housman’s gloom it was a time of literary critics of stature, writers who were at home in the borderland between poetry, philosophy and religion, discovering and rediscovering great poets in a rush of intellectual and political excitement. Though Kenelm’s writing work matured later because of his years of religious and theological training, he belonged essentially to the thirties, his seed-bed where, as Bede Bailey said, he remained firmly rooted. This era between two wars had an ‘escape-me-never’ hold on Kenelm and on his contemporaries, particularly those who returned to academic life after the war and all that the war had meant for European life and sensibility.

Kenelm was appointed a Lecturer in Italian in the University of Cambridge from 1 October, 1948. Professor Vincent showed flair and imagination when he made this far from obvious choice for the post which had become vacant following the retirement of Miss K.T. Butler. He had been one of the two examiners of Kenelm’s thesis on St Thomas and Dante, and was impressed by its quality. Kenelm had, I believe, some family connection with Italy and had spent some time there in the past, but he had had no formal training in Italian literature, apart from the deep knowledge of Dante he must have acquired while preparing his dissertation.

We were never formally introduced. After three years as Lector, I became an Assistant Lecturer on the same date on which Kenelm was appointed to a Lectureship, and a few days later, in the morning of 18 October, we bumped into each other in the Departmental Library, a gloomy and not much frequented room now occupied by University offices on the top floor at the back of the Old Schools, facing Clare College. I vividly remember that the first thing he said after a few words of introduction was a defensive and characteristically modest ‘I don’t know any Italian’. We must have felt a liking for each other from the beginning. Five days later he came to the house my wife and I rented in the Hills Road area for what was meant to be a brief afternoon visit and to meet my wife, and stayed till late in the evening.

I was asked to contribute something about St Thomas Aquinas to this collection in honour of Kenelm—an activity rather like offering a short paper on Karl Marx in a festschrift for Lenin. Much of whatever understanding I have of Aquinas I owe to the insights and scholarly precision of Kenelm’s writings and I shall not in this paper attempt to play in his league. This will be an elementary introduction to an important part of Aquinas’s thinking which was neglected for some centuries and is only in our own receiving the attention it deserves. I am concerned with the virtue he calls prudentia. I have nothing original to contribute here (except perhaps some mistakes); what I will say will be new only to those to whom Aquinas is new, but there are perhaps, enough of these to justify yet another simple introduction.

As is almost always the case with Aquinas’s technical vocabulary, the nearest English word to the Latin one would be a mistranslation: prudentia does not mean what we call prudence. Prudence suggests to us a certain caution and canniness, whereas prudentia is much nearer to wisdom, practical wisdom.

Fortunately, however, we have a nearly perfect English equivalent in Jane Austen’s phrase ‘good sense’. I take Jane Austen to be centrally concerned not with presenting the ethos of the new respectable middle class but rather with the failure of the new bourgeoisie to live satisfactory lives because of the inability of the older ‘aristocratic’ tradition to transmit to them a certain outlook and way of behaving and education that came down to the author via the remains of a Christian morality.

To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.

The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.

In the autumn of 1958 the columns of Blackfriars, normally reserved, as we know for polite murmurings of theological disagreement, resounded with literary controversy. In the September issue, in an article on ‘Morals and the Novel’, Bernard Bergonzi published some interesting, if inconclusive, reflections on the relation between a Catholic view of certain (principally sexual) moral matters and the presentation of those matters in works of literature, particularly novels. Unwisely, perhaps, he supplied the want of a conclusion with a quotation from Newman’s Idea of a University: ‘from the nature of the case if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ Unwisely, certainly, Bergonzi decided to begin his reflections with the case of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, Canto 5), whom he was persuaded ‘Dante would surely have liked to forgive... were they not already damned’. These opening and closing tropes attracted the characteristically circumspect but uncomfortably firm analytical attention of Kenelm Foster in a letter to the Editor. Bergonzi was convicted of failing to distinguish between Dante-as-poet and Dante-as-protagonist-of-the-poem, and Newman was shown either not to have said what he meant, or to have begged the question. The question, Kenelm then believed, was this: ‘can the subject-matter of literature—which, concedo, is sinful man—ever be treated, in-formed, in a way that may appropriately be called Christian?’