A child in trouble or in disgrace goes first to its mother for comfort and forgiveness. When in fear of its father's anger it hopes for its mother's help in turning anger aside. It is not surprising that after a long period of self-sufficient rationalism, in a time of widespread misery and persecution, men should begin to show a new appreciation of their own sinfulness and weakness and their dependence on God by turning first of all to our Lady, God's Mother and ours. Unlike ours, her heart has never faltered for one moment in its love of God and its love of mankind. All its desire has been for God and the showing of his glory among men. Her heart has never lacked courage or patience; it has been always what our hearts should be and are not. Thinking of it we see our own shortcoming; we see, too, a source of sympathy and help. Our Lady is the first, most perfect, fruit of Christ's redeeming work and cooperates with him in the rescue of sinners and the perfecting of his Church.

‘In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor. 12 : 13a). Repentance and faith give a man koinōnia—participation—with the Holy Spirit and by virtue of that partaking he has koinōnia too with all his fellow-Christians who are partakers with him of the same Spirit. He belongs to and within the communion of holy people, of the holy people who share holy things, the sacraments and mysteries of the Church. But the body into which we were all baptised by the one Spirit is itself the body of the Son, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made man. The Church, the body of the Messiah, the messianic community, is koinōnia with Jesus Christ as well as koinōnia with the Holy Spirit. True, it is through the koinōnia of the Spirit that the Church becomes the koinōnia of the Son, but nevertheless it does really become that. Paul writes to Corinth:

After a long period of neglect the English Mystics of the fourteenth century are coming again to the light. Patient workers have provided us with accurate texts and greatly helped to show how valuable are the writings of these mystics. One may perhaps apply to their re-birth the words that St. Ambrose used of the birth of St. John the Baptist: ‘Habet sanctorum editio laetitiam plurimorum, quia commune bonum est.’ This is especially the case with the most original writer of the whole school, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing and of the Epistles connected with it. It is true that Father Henry Collins, so long ago as 1870, edited the Cloud and the Epistle of Privy Counsel; but his text, though sufficient for devotional use, was not very exact, chiefly as regards the Epistle, and it was not till 1912 that the Cloud was issued for the first time in all its genuineness and originality. We must remain very grateful to Miss Evelyn Underhill for her work.

There is room, however, for other editions—as Miss Underhill herself would acknowledge—and Catholics will welcome the news that a new one, containing— I hope—the Cloud and all the Epistles, is now being prepared for the ‘Orchard Books’ by Dom Justin McCann. It will do a great service to contemplative souls, and I believe that there may still be many such among the countrymen of St. Bede, Rolle, Hilton, and Father Baker.

Will this new edition throw light on the question of the authorship of the Cloud and its attendant treatises? That is perhaps to hope too much, for the problem is one that has hitherto baffled every investigator.

The epoch known as the Renaissance is the most complex in all history. Various forces were at work moulding the national, economic, intellectual and moral life of the people. Religion was not the least important of these factors. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church was the sole means of civilization for the nations. From the time of Charles the Great, Church and State had worked hand in hand, with but little friction. Under the sway of Gregory VII and Innocent III, the temporal power of the papacy was secured. Philip the Fair and the exile in Avignon weakened papal rule. Pope after pope tried to protect and increase the so-called Donation of Constantine and the estates of Matilda of Tuscany which formed the bulk of the Patrimony of St. Peter.

During the fifteenth century there was a change among the people in their attitude toward the Church. The economic growth of cities, the increase of commerce resulting from inventions and discoveries, the strengthening of central governments and the rise of national kingships, lessened subserviency to papal authority. But above all, the intellectual Renaissance developed an independence of thought which in many cases led to a change of dogma.

It has long been recognized that there is a psychology not only of individuals, but also of groups. As with the hypothetical units of physics— electrons and atoms—so with the real units of the animal kingdom and of the human race, the group has a definite constitution and definite laws expressing its behaviour which are not the same as those which express the behaviour of the individuals of which the group is composed. Man is not merely an intelligent animal : he is also essentially a social animal, and, if the human race is to make progress, it is of supreme importance that the factors in social life which make for progress or for deterioration should be analysed out and critically discussed in their concrete historical setting.

This is the main aim of Professor McDougall’s latest work, The Group Mind., a book no less interesting than the other psychological works which Prof. McDougall has given us, and no less provocative of thought. It purports, in fact, to be the continuation of his Social Psychology, and assumes that the factors and principles of social life, as there laid down, are already familiar to the reader. These it now discusses from the point of view of the group. In the First Part the characteristics of different kinds of groups are set forth, notably those of the crude group or crowd and those of the most highly organized group—the army. Then there is a discussion of the group spirit, of the interrelation and interaction of groups, and of the peculiarities of certain types of group.

On September the 14th, this year, the six hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, at Ravenna, will be celebrated. It is a significant fact that the revival of the study of the great Italian poet, and of mediæval Italian literature generally, in the nineteenth century was contemporaneous with the “Second Spring” of Catholic life in England. For while it is true that many non-Catholic scholars have contributed to our knowledge of his life and work, it is also true that no one who has not an inner knowledge of the Catholic Church can fully understand the Commedia. To such there must always be, inevitably, something in it that is alien to his mind. For Dante was, first and foremost, a Catholic and regarded everything from a Catholic standpoint.

The argument in his famous political treatise, De Monarchia, and the real purpose of the Guelph and Ghibelline wars in Italy, can be properly understood only from that point of view.

Those protracted wars ended at last, in 1266, after fifty years of swaying fortunes, in the victory of Charles of Anjou over King Manfred at Benevento, and the final supremacy of the Guelphs. Dante was one year old when that decisive battle was fought. The echoes of the long struggle are heard throughout all his writings, for his family were patriotic Guelphs. It must be remembered that the war was not, fundamentally, a strife for mastery between Popes and Emperors.

In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature. Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious. He suggested that ‘the profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction’ and he proposed ‘Francis as a patron saint for ecologists’. The article sparked off a good deal of interest. Richard Means, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, took up the point and expressing fundamental agreement with White on the religious aspect of the crisis, put forward pantheism as the basis of a solution. While there is a superficial attraction in pantheism as a foundation of the unity of reality, ultimately it destroys the diversity of creatures through a fusion in the All and it makes change, finitude and even evil, intrinsic to God Himself. Francis A. Schaeffer, Director of L’Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland, submitted the proposals of White and Means to a detailed analysis. In conclusion he rejected both : ‘So pantheism is not going to solve our international ecological problem. St Francis’s concept, as presented by Lynn White, is not going to solve it—the concept that everything is equal and everything is spiritually autonomous. Romanticism is no solution because ‘firstly, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and secondly, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man’.

Father Bede Jarrett and America would probably appear to most of those who knew him as a natural juxtaposition. Yet it ought perhaps to be rather surprising, for he was so completely and even so typically English. The truth is, of course, that though he was English he was not insular, and he escaped the narrowness of insularity because he was also so typically Dominican. (We call him typical not in the sense that he was like many others cast in the same mould, but in the sense that he was himself a model from which a true mould might well be fashioned.) He was thus tvpically Dominican not merely in his apostolic spirit, but also in his discernment and appreciation of truth and true values. It is this, more than anything else, that explains his interest, and perhaps his success, in the United States. He, who loved youth for its fineness, its enthusiasms, its unaffected (even if sometimes quixotic or unformed) idealism, and all its possibilities of greatness as yet unspoiled nor disillusioned, saw and appreciated these qualities of youth in the American nation. He was big enough, too, not to expect perfection but to overlook the failings which were the outcome of unbounded energy and activity, and not of malice. And if he found there a more eager response than in England, it was because we have perchance grown old and sluggish. He did not cease to love what was old and set, but he saw greater hope for the future in what was young and still plastic. He found this in America; but he found, too, the signs of a fruitful maturity, evidences of a true scholarship, of new-born literature and art, and above all a vigorous and sincere Catholic life. It is still the purblind fashion of many of us to think of Americans in terms of gangsters, racketeers, and go-getters, or of superficiality, hustle, and graft. Perhaps we are not helped in this matter by the American movies or tourists that do not always show us the true American. In any case, it is high time we should remove the beam out of our own eye and stand prepared, as Father Bede was, to find in the United States a new Saul amongst the prophets, a source of rejuvenation for the hardening arteries of Western life and culture, a ‘New Deal’ for civilization at large.

Last December a conference of the War Resister’s International was held at Gandhigram in South India, which I was invited to attend. I was only able to go on the last day, but I felt that the meeting was significant both for its timing and for its setting and for the conclusions to which it came. I was glad to find that there were two or three other Catholics present, including a priest sent by his bishop from Belgium. Catholics are not generally supposed to be favourable towards pacifism, but it is obvious that the threat of nuclear war calls for a radical change in our attitude to war, and it seems inevitable that there will be an increasing number who will feel obliged to take up a pacifist position in regard at least to nuclear war. The timing of this meeting was significant because the W.R.I. is an international organization without any religious basis, yet clearly it was felt that the birth of Christ was something which is relevant to the issue which faces all men to-day, and I must say that I was impressed by the spiritual attitude which was shown by the majority of the delegates. The setting also was significant because clearly it was felt that the country of Mahatma Gandhi was the country in the world which could best be expected to offer some guidance on the supreme problem which faces our generation.

Commenting on the recent presence in Cairo of the Egyptian Minister to the Holy See, The Times has twice alluded to the probability of some joint action by the Vatican and Islam with regard to the formation of a common front against the dangers of Communism. That some form of general rapprochement is under consideration can indeed hardly be doubted, since only last November the possibility of this was mentioned by the Holy See itself in an announcement made by the Congregation de Propaganda Fidei. This announcement was not, however, any new or sudden departure, but can be best understood if it is regarded merely as a further step in a process that plainly appears as steadily developing during recent years.

Since the Catholic and Islamic Faiths jointly account for a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants, the growth of friendly understanding between the leaders of both is of profound importance, and the details of such growth are of much significance. Islam itself has been described as a sounding-box on which an event occurring in one place immediately affects the whole. This is particularly true of Cairo, capital of Egypt, since political happenings there have speedy repercussions among the various Muslim states of the Arab League, whilst also influencing Islamic opinion as a whole, because Muslim students from all over the free world are numbered among those attending at the great University of Al Azhar, one of the main centres of Mohammedan religious thought and teaching today as it has been for ages past.

The delay in publishing the Dead Sea scrolls, long a quiet academic scandal, was recently thrust into the forefront of the news by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception?. Its authors, M.Baigent and R. Leigh, two qualified experts in discerning arcane conspiracies, manifestly Find the world a threatening place. They give reality to their nightmare of Vatican world domination by claiming that the moment the scrolls were discovered a prescient Vatican, foreseeing the damage that first-century documents (then still unread!) must inevitably cause the faith, inserted its inquisitorial minions, the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, at the beginning of a process which to date they have consistently subverted. An hilarious thesis to those who know the facts, but disturbing to those forced to rely on titillating innuendo.

A major archaeological discovery is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Time and time again chance, not planning, is the decisive factor. Had Heinrich Schliemann dug another sector of Troy, he would never have found the spectacular gold objects he identified as Priam’s treasure. If Kathleen Kenyon had placed her main trench 15 metres further north she would never have brought to light the 8000 BC tower which is the earliest evidence of urban organisation.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.