John Noonan’s long history of contraceptive practice and prohibition demands and merits a second reading—a cautious one. For all the intelligence and careful research that has obviously gone into it, still it has its gaps and misreadings, some of them by no means peripheral to the author’s overall picture of an ‘evolving’, ‘developing’ ecclesiastical doctrine of love and marriage and the Church’s consequent attitudes toward contraception. One of the wider gaps is the failure to consider a man named Nicole Oresme; and one of the more serious misreadings is of St Thomas Aquinas.

Noonan proposes that Martin le Maistre—a late fifteenth-century layman of considerable standing and reputation in the University of Paris—was the first theologian to make the ‘modern’ breakthrough. Prior to him the Augustinian insistence, found also in St Thomas, on procreative purpose as the only justifying motive for conjugal intercourse held all but exclusive sway. Marriage was rarely or only secondarily thought of in terms of love, and where love happened to be encouraged it was not the kind that had to do with sex. Sex as a biological function productive of the child, well and good (for the most part); but as an expression of love, as an experience of joy and pleasure, no—on pain of at least venial sin. But with le Maistre we have ‘the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic approach to marriage’. His ethics offer reasons justifying conjugal intercourse other than procreation and even suggests (though hesitantly) venereal pleasure as a licit motive.

The chief moral impact of the Slant group, personally encountered, is that they believe in argument. They believe, with Aquinas, that truth is commensurate with the human intellect, and not, as some believe and most of us half believe, something fundamentally alien to it, approached only through organic imagery, mystery, silence and so on. In practice this means that Slant will argue relentlessly on long after the uncommitted liberal (that ubiquitous figure) has come to a halt, because he has arrived at the edge of his intuition, or is satisfied with some bit of poetic imagery that has floated up, or is merely tired and wants to go to sleep.

Two books from the Slant group illustrate the opposing sides of this enthusiastic belief in the mind. One of them is disastrous; for at its worst it can result in an over-confidence so appalling in its naiveté and so inhuman in its anger that the uncommitted liberal might be forgiven for ceasing to read further. Thus Neil Middleton solemnly points out Descartes’ ‘mistakes’, as if the whole Cartesian experience could be exposed as a false turning in the mind of Descartes. Thus he comments on a not-negligible passage from Catherine of Genoa: ‘although it is possible in this, as in every other case, (my italics) to show how wrong the author is. . . .’

‘In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person or the like; and I must put all my fervour in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone; like a stick in the hands of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him.’

St Ignatius’s ideals about the nature of authority were derived from sixteenth-century Spanish culture and although perhaps not quite so drastically expressed today, his view of the Superior/Subordinate relationship still constitutes a central element in the thought pattern of many participants in the modern debate in the Church. This dialogue should be of interest to social psychologists, because it illustrates one of the recurring themes of that discipline, the forms of authority and people’s perception of them.

Before the war, Kurt Lewin and his associates Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White tried to compare the effects of three kinds of adult leadership on the behaviour of a group of American boys. The setting for the experiment was a number of small ‘clubs’, ostensibly set up to carry out a variety of craft and recreational activities, and the adult leaders of the clubs were described as Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez-faire.

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.

The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.

As John Noonan reads him, Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in everything except his sexology, in which he reverts to the rigours of the traditional Augustinianism. For the Angelic Doctor as for Augustine the marriage act is not a product of love and is not to be motivated by a desire for pleasure; it is justified only in its purpose of multiplying mankind. Noonan concedes (briefly, and reluctantly: ‘A case can be made . . he says) that late medieval theologians, Thomas included, were ‘somewhat in advance of their society in their declarations on the ideal of married love’, but, he adds and emphasizes, they failed ‘to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse’. (Contraception, Mentor ed., pp. 299-311.) The purpose of this article is to summarize St Thomas’s doctrine on marriage; to show that he did indeed teach that love and marriage go together, and did also teach that love—human, passionate, pleasurable love—not only entered into the purposes of the marriage act but was also the root and source of the act’s ultimate beneficial value for the spouses.

St Thomas’s reflections on love and marriage are found scattered here and there through his vast opera, but his teaching appears in full and concentrated form in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, dists. xxvi-xlii. This early teaching of St Thomas was, in the middle of the fourteenth century, incorporated into a Supplement to the Summa Theologiae by an unknown Dominican friar in an attempt to complete the Saint’s master work. Accordingly, it is these two loci that have served as the present paper’s principal sources.

In the 1930s there was a considerable interest in the possibility that chemical and biological weapons might be used in the war which many people realized was impending. When such weapons were not, in fact, used in the war, public interest in their potentialities died down and the use of thermonuclear weapons diverted the attention of those who would otherwise have been concerned with chemical and biological warfare by focussing it on the urgent need to prevent any further use of these catastrophic new armaments. From time to time there have been outbursts of indignation when reports of the use of gas or microbial agents have been made public but there has been little study outside military circles of the potentialities or implications of their use. During the past year or so, however, there has been a recrudescence of public interest in the subject. There have been many reasons for this but, undoubtedly, the international conference on chemical and biological warfare held in London last February under the auspices of the J. D. Bernal Peace Library had a stimulating effect. The contributors to this conference were able to speak authoritatively on various topics connected with chemical and biological warfare as they were mostly senior scientists, some with world-wide reputations, working in related fields, or else younger people who, for one reason or another, had made a special study of some aspect of the subject. Furthermore, the conference received considerable publicity on radio and television and in the newspapers and gave rise to questions in the House of Commons which, in turn, received publicity and helped to keep public interest alive.

It is well known what confusions and misunderstandings have arisen in the history of Christianity by translations from one language into another. They can be worse when attempts are made to translate religious literature from a European language into languages of peoples with cultures very different from ours, such as the peoples of Africa. I have recently come across an illustration of this in a C.M.S. hymn book in Zande (Buku Aimina, The Religious Tract Society, London, n.d.). I shall present a few specimens of translations into this Central African language of familiar verses as examples. Before doing so I should say that Zande is a tonal language and that the translations are made to conform to English metre and to be sung to the English tunes. This in itself is enough to render the hymns more or less meaningless. I am not trying to make fun of the missionaries, for whom I had great respect, but I must say that I am astonished at their attempts not only to translate hymns to be sung to a foreign system of notation but also to translate them, where possible, literally. Thus:

This would have sounded quite remarkable to an ordinary Zande (one who was not an instructed Christian convert).