IN POLITICS the church is only a theoretician. The religious communities as such should be concerned with political doctrine, and with clarifying and keeping wide open the legitimate options for choice. Their task is not the determination of policy. Their special orientation upon politics is, in a sense, an exceedingly limited one. They need to stand in awe before people nowadays called political “decision-makers,” or rather before the majesty of topmost political agency. Political decision and action is an image of the majesty of God, who also rules by particular decrees. God says, “Let there be … ”; and His word becomes deed and actuality. So also earthly magistrates have the high and lonely responsibility of declaring what shall actually be done. Allowing for the limitations that surround even the highest magistrate of a great nation, it is still the case that he creatively shapes events by decisions that must be particular decisions going beyond doctrine. He must actualize what is to be from among a number of legitimate choices. The majesty of political rulership is that it is always a triumph over doctrine through right doctrine, a victory over generalities through the proper generalities. It injects life-giving, or at least actuality-giving, deeds into words over words and beyond words.

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of “hellfire and brimstone.” The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the “left” nor on the “right,” and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.

ONE of the major issues over which the Russians and the Chinese have disagreed is the emphasis to be placed on violent or nonviolent tactics in the “national liberation movement” in underdeveloped countries. Recent developments in Viet Nam have focused new attention on this dimension of the Sino-Soviet conflict. American bombings of North Viet Nam have elicited widespread protests in the West based on the fear that this militant response to the South Viet Nam “Liberation Front” portended the involvement of the United States in a major war on the Asian continent that might escalate into a nuclear holocaust. Some commentators have also expressed the fear that the American military reaction might close the split in the Sino-Soviet alliance and drive the two Communist giants together. It is perhaps timely then that we turn our attention to the study of the major features of Soviet strategy regarding Asia and reexamine the earlier phases of Moscow's involvement in underdeveloped countries as they emerged after the Second World War. This reexamination might provide insight into the conditions prompting the Soviet militant strategy between 1948 and 1951 and the subsequent tempered withdrawal and retreat from the risk of a direct confrontation with the West; it might also shed light on Moscow's formula for calculating costs and consequences and illuminate the roots of present conflicting Russian and Chinese approaches to the national liberation movement in underdeveloped countries.

ALTHOUGH the dynamics of American politics demand perpetual and creative alterations in the constitutional system, the building of the original complex of arrangements on the foundation provided by the framers was probably the most precarious undertaking in America's history. It was the task of Congress to turn the blueprint for a government into an operating reality, and all at one time. Any structural weakness might have brought down the entire edifice or, at least, would have forced some rebuilding at a later time under new stresses and strains. The establishment of the Supreme Court was peculiarly significant since, paradoxically, the Constitution deemed it as coordinate and co-equal with the Presidency and the Congress, and yet the Court was a creature of Congress in the sense that its detailed form and substance depended upon a statutory enactment. Had the framers spelled out in Article III the precise structure of a federal judicial system, prescribed the detailed nature of the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction, and explicitly authorized judicial review, much of the conflict which continues to this day might have been avoided. Instead, the Constitution left these important questions open to legislative discretion and the stage was set for frequent legislative-judicial altercations which at times have almost reached an irreparable constitutional crisis.

THE Goldwater phenomenon is the great mystery of American politics. His nomination as presidential candidate by the Republican Party and his campaign for election have profoundly challenged accepted theories of American politics. Merely to enumerate some of the puzzling questions suggests how badly we need explanations.

THANKS to Richard Ellmann's definitive biography of James Joyce we know quite a lot about the genesis and writing of ‘The Dead,’ the concluding story in Dubliners. Joyce wrote no other short stories after it, but in a letter (January 6, 1907) to his brother Stanislaus, from Rome, in which he first referred to ‘The Dead,’ he mentioned it as one of five stories “all of which … I could write if circumstances were favorable.” The others, which seem not to have been attempted were ‘The Last Supper,’ ‘The Street,’ ‘Vengeance,’ and ‘At Bay.’ It must have been immediately thereafter that ‘The Dead’ took precedence in his thought, for in a letter written only five days later he remarked that the news of the controversy in Dublin over The Playboy of the Western World had “put me off the story I ‘was going to write’ — to wit, The Dead.” Shortly afterwards he decided to give up his job as a bank cashier in Rome and return to Trieste, which on March 5, 1907, he did. Apparently he worked at the story intermittently in the ensuing months.