“Two loves,” St. Augustine says in De Civitate Dei, “have made two cities, love of self unto contempt of God the Earthly City, love of God unto contempt of self the Heavenly City,” the City of God. These “cities”—civitates—are, of course, not states, but societies; St. Augustine himself tells us that the term civitas is an equivalent of the term society. They are societies, however, of a special kind. The Ciyitds Dei is a “mystical” society of all the elect, past, present and future. The Civitas Terrena, the Earthly City, is identical neither with the earthly state nor with any particular earthly state such as the Roman Empire, nor with any merely human society, it too is a “mystical” society, that of the impious, the damned.

An historical experiment, begun almost a hundred years ago, is, in various phases and crises of development, emerging from die war. It must be based on its own specific theory, or, to put it more correctly, on its own specific philosophy.

To avoid ambiguity, let us agree to align the historical outlines of Christian Democracy with the two tendencies which developed among European Catholics in die post-Napoleonic period: first, the political tendency in favor of a constitutional system based on political liberty; second, the social tendency toward the moral, economic and political rehabilitation of the working classes.

My intention here is to make a few reflections on the relations between the Papacy and the Byzantine Empire and Church, mostly from the cultural point of view. I wish to point out how the Popes continued for several centuries—from 1054 to 1453—to keep their attention fixed on the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, even after dissent had developed in the Byzantine clergy: how the Popes helped by their policy to bring about a new convergence of Greek culture with the Latin one, a convergence which gave birth to the Renaissance.

The cultural break between Eastern and Western Europe had its distant origin in the resolution taken by Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of his reign to divide the responsibilities of power. For about a thousand years before 284 A.D., the trend had been to join together die various peoples around the Mediterranean Sea and to amalgamate their individual cvivilizations. Hundreds of years before the rise of Rome, the Greek colonies developed in southern Italy, in Sicily and as far north on the Tyrrhenian Sea as Cumae. The first signs of Greek influence in central Italy were in art: protocorinthian vases appeared as early as the seventh century B.C.; then terracotta works from Greek models in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Greek divinities were received in Rome at the beginning of the sixth century. In die middle of the fifth century, the Law of the Twelve Tables was framed after three commissioners had been sent to Greece to examine the best of Greek legislation.

The first year of the Atomic Age has drawn to a close. What were its achievements? What are the lessons we have to learn?

The Bikini tests were undoubtedly the single outstanding atomic event of the past year. These tests underscored the potency of the new weapon, although they fell far short of the catastrophic results freely predicted by some members of the League of Frightened Men. At the same time, they showed that, at least for navies, the problem of atomic defense is not entirely beyond solution, even though direct hits, as is the case with most other bombs, are lethal. Atomic hits are mortal over far wider area than conventional heavy bombs, but they are still weapons which can be used only against one, two, three or perhaps half a dozen ships in comparatively close formation, rather than against entire fleets. Th effectiveness of atomic attack, therefore, depends upon the number of bombs employed—a fact which also holds true for attacks against industrial or urban targets and which has found too little attention in the current discussion.

Any discussion of American occupation policies in Germany must necessarily vary somewhat from a discussion of similar policies in Japan, Korea, Italy. In Japan and Korea one may concentrate on the objectives of the period after hostilities. Many of these objectives have long-range significance. It might seem that one could safely ignore the combat phase in considering the general occupation which the United States is maintaining in Germany. Some, indeed, would go so far as to omit also the program during the months immediately following the capitulation of Germany, maintaining that only longrange items are of importance for World Peace. There is, of course, something to be said for such an approach if one feels that simplification is desirable, and that one can limit the field to be observed as one likes. But in Germany the combat phase, the phase immediately after hostilities, and the long-range phase are so intimately tied together in the military government organization designed by the United States that, in my opinion, it is not feasible to begin with the current phase which is highlighted in the press and which perhaps has the greatest interest for students of political science.

“What shall be done with Germany upon her defeat?” For many months prior to the surrender of the Wehrmacht this vital question evoked a host of conflicting proposals, official and unofficial, in both Military Government planning staffs and in higher policy-formation circles. Despite many differences, these proposals uniformly demanded immediate disarmament, demilitarization, and—denazification.

Early plans called for the occupation of Germany with the objective of insuring that she never again would threaten her neighbors and the rest of the world. The demilitarization and disarmament of the German armed forces was undertaken rapidly and resolutely by our occupation forces and those of our Allies as a preliminary step in securing this objective. But the more difficult task of denazification—that is, the permanent elimination of the institutions, leadership, and psychology in German life which produced and supported the Nazi regime—is still far from completed.

The social thought of the Middle Ages, which undertook to comprehend and scientifically to formulate the nature and foundation of all human society, proceeded from the principle of a single and uniform but articulate whole. The idea of an organic conception of all human society in its entirety was as familiar to the mediaeval mind as the notion of an atomistic or mechanistic constrution of human associations was alien to that mind. Aside from issuing into a distinct and definite theory of “public law,” the mediaeval efforts to understand mankind in its entirety and to treat every form of human society as an organic unity were the starting points of a novel philosophy of law and state which brought about a new and glorious development of legal, social, and political ideas. This development was fully in line with the professed aim of the mediaeval spirit, namely the spiritual and moral education of die western world. It had for its core the doctrine of the Church, and for its goal the elaboration of an integrated outlook on all of human life. In die fields of legal, social, and political speculation this development was greatly enhanced by the collaboration of theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Here, as elsewhere, die mediaeval mind displayed and, on the whole, preserved that high degree of unity of thought and purpose which had its roots not only in that commonly shared conception of a single harmonious universe governed by one infinitely wise God, but also in the conviction that all first premises of right thought or right action were divinely revealed truths rather than discoveries made by human reason alone.

The American mind has been traditionally more ready to accept the validity of political parties which tend to reflect the complexity of political and economic problems and are not based on any simple ideology. For a nation's mind is not a simple one, nor are its interests capable of simple definition. In a free society, a political party with any claim to national scope and to a lasting identification with the task of solving the particular problems of the country in which it operates, will probably be found to be a composite movement, a meeting ground where different groups bring their different attitudes, a clearing house from which compromises emerge. This is the kind of party to which the United States has grown accustomed. It satisfies an instinctive desire to avoid those clashes on a straight ideological basis which would divide the country and endanger the maintenance of the common foundation and the survival of methods of political action accepted by all.

Something the human mind can hardly grasp took place among the German people during the twelve years of the Third Reich. In that corner of Bavarian-Austrian earth that lies between the rivers Inn and Danube, Hitler's home, the legend of the twelve terrible nights (Rauhnaechte) between Christmas and Epiphany is still alive. The legend tells us that wild hordes ride on horses through the air during these nights, bringing storms, unrest and destruction. The people say that it is dangerous to be outdoors alone, lest one be picked up and carried away into the air and made to join the wild riders above.

Nicholas Berdyaev, the noted religious philosopher and sociologist, wrote a book more than a decade ago entitled, in the French, The New Middle Ages. In this work he naturally did not imply that history is repeating itself. Nor did he imply diat, by reason of a cyclical recurrence of identical periods in history, following our age of enlightenment, there would dawn a new age of predominantly religious authority concurrently with which State authority would almost disappear—a new age wherein philosophy and science would exercise a far greater general influence upon life than they do today. History, indeed, does not repeat itself. If it did, its story would be a poor carmen universitatis, a poor drama of world progress, unworthy of the Lord of history and of human freedom.

As weak as France may be among the Great Powers the world is still interested in our reactions, our desires, our resentments, our hopes, sometimes even in our plans in the way one politely questions old ladies who have recently held positions of the first importance. Regarding what Jules Romains used to call before the war the “French-German couple”—a couple which hardly knows more than the sadistic and masochistic forms of love—the simple geographical situation of the two countries justifies, better than any vain politeness, the more or less anxious curiosity of our foreign friends. Among the immediate neighbors of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia are too closely bound today to Russia to consider their policy independently of the general problem which the immediate or future plans of the new Russia present. Denmark, Holland, and Belgium can timidly demand modest “frontier rectifications”; for none of these involves territories of importance to the economic or political equilibrium of Germany. Besides, it seems, rightly or wrongly, that these little nations have definitely chosen the road of the “Western bloc” while France tries with an unequal success to navigate alone among the broad currents which clash in the world ocean.

Since the end of military operations Danubian Europe has been undergoing a social and political upheaval in which, paradoxically, both Communism and a resurgent nationalism seem to be powerful elements. The most significant contributing factor in this atmosphere of political unrest is the all-too-direct domination of the Soviet Union whose policies are guided by conflicting motivations and divergent objectives, results of the flexible strategic and economic considerations of the Kremlin.

Hungary today is in the twilight zone of liberated states; her domestic politics are a mirror-like reflection of the fundamental tensions among the world powers. The post-war era has undoubtedly seen hopes for a real moral and economic transformation of the country spurred on by a series of significant, if temporary, liberal reform moves. Fair national elections resulting in a decisive Communist defeat and in an acceptable coalition government based on the Smallholders, a national party neither ultra-conservative nor revoluntionary, a thorough land reform, a reasonably free press, a stabilized currency, and a moderately successful process of industrial nationalization were promising landmarks at the beginning of the road toward reconstruction.

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

To write about Central Europe and do justice to all the problems that face us there, and to the nations that provoked them, is well nigh impossible. That part of Europe, in its national and political makeup, resembles a crazy quilt which does not, at first glance, present any common thread to unravel the general design of its historical and political evolution. The nations occupying the vast regions from the North Sea to the Adriatic and the Black Seas are so numerous and, on the surface, so heterogeneous, that it appears impossible to find any common ground on which all could meet and forget their national, religious, and political differences. Who will work the miracle of discovering a common interest among the Germans, the Slavs, the Magyars, and the Rumanians? Strictly speaking, Central Europe only includes the Germans from the Rhine to die Oder, the Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovenes, and the Croats. But any study of dieir history reveals that their story is inseparable from the history of Eastern and Soudieastern Europe. For a true understanding of Central Europe Poland and the Balkans must also be considered.

Russian foreign policy is characterized by matchless simplicity of conception and persistence of effort. By comparison the foreign policies of the Great Powers of modern times appear vacillating and ambiguous. There is in the history of Russian foreign policy no counterpart for that Hamlet-like indecision which gripped German expansionism confronted by the fateful choice between a western and eastern “orientation,” of the pull and counter-pull of British Empire commitments and continental interests, and of the contradictions between French colonial aspirations and French European policies.

Russian foreign policy is dominated by the strategic factor; its objectives, under the direction of the Czars and Soviet leaders, have remained the same: attainment of strategic frontiers and, wherever racial affinities re-enforce strategic geography, ethnographic frontiers. The principal theatre of operations is now, as it has been for nearly three centuries, eastern and southeastern Europe, and Russian policy in the Middle and Far East has been largely derivative. Only when Russia was blocked in Europe, on the Baltic and Moldavian Plains, only then did she turn to Asia. Russia exercised pressure on the Asiatic rimlands, especially on Britain's positions in southwestern Asia, in order to obtain concessions in Europe. Russian expansionism, although it harvested rich territorial gains in central and eastern Asia, did not let itself be deflected from its primary goals, to wit, Russia's strategic frontiers in the West. Indeed, it was the Russian advance upon Europe, the diplomatic set-backs of the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin and the military defeats in the Crimean War and World War I, which diverted Russia towards such secondary objectives as the Persian Gulf and the Yellow Sea.

The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—the American and the French had each in turn and in its own way a profound influence not only on the history of the United States and of France, but directly or indirectly on the history of the whole world.

These two powerful currents had a common source in the French ideological movement before the Revolution. The development of American revolutionary thought was of course more closely linked to the English ideology, but there was much contact and cross influence between the English and the French philosophers. Further, the French political and philosophical literature was directly accessible to Americans without intermediary English works. We have only to mention Montesquieu and his principle of the separation of powers which serves as the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Also, the American Revolution influenced in turn political developments in France. One finds the roots of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen not only in France but in America as well.

The series of purges that began last summer in the USSR have again aroused speculation concerning the stability of the Soviet regime. Do the purges indicate that serious popular discontent exists? Do they reflect, as some have observed, a state of fright among the Communist elite? In this essay an effort will be made to ascertain the connection between the recent purges in the fields of political, economic and intellectual life and certain continuing strains and stresses in the structure of Soviet society. Our general thesis is that recent developments merely reveal the continuation of certain long-standing but not serious weaknesses in the Soviet system. The purges are only part of the general effort of the Party to strengthen its control and to deal with these strains.

Throughout history, the control of public funds has been considered a cornerstone of political power. If it is true that all societies, from die dawn of civilizations to the present, have been divided into two classes, one that rules and the other that is ruled, it may be expected that the methods of raising and spending government money have been determined by one social group, generally a minority, to the complete or almost complete exclusion of the rest of the population. Such control would be intended to kill two birds with one stone, serving the direct purpose of administering the state and the indirect purpose of strengthening the privileged position of the governing group and thus prolonging their predominance. Yet studies in fiscal sociology are still in tlieir infancy. Because of their casual and hapo hazard character, they are not as yet a match for political sociology. Only during recent decades has a broader and more systematic approach been attempted.

The Junkers, as popularly conceived today, are considered to have been die evil genius of the German people, prompting their authoritarianism, their statism and their militarism. The popular conception is faulty when it uses die term “Junker” to include all German or even all Prussian nobles and fails to recognize diat Junkers come only from the historic eastern provinces of Prussia. It comes nearer to die trudi in its political judgment. For there is no doubt that die Junkers, who were able to defend dieir reactionary principles of absolute monarchy through their traditional and substantial political influence at Court, in die army, in the civil administration and dirough party politics, were a prime politcal cause of Prussia's failure to reform its government along liberal and popular lines before 1918.

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.