bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The First Editor of ‘Blackfriars’
Authors: Reeves John‐Baptist
Published: July 2007

There is a form of truth known as calumny.’ This howler appeared in the first Editorial of Blackfriars. The Editor, Father Bernard Delany, followed up by Father Vincent McNabb in the first article, was expounding ‘Our Aim of Truth’. The slip was quite out of keeping with Father Bernard’s character and its like never recurred while he was Editor. If he had a fault it was excessive caution born of selfdistrust. It used to be said of him that when he came to be beatified the Breviary would have to admit ‘Nimis demisse reputabat de se’. To us, his contemporaries, this initial slip seemed a cruel misfortune, a quite unnecessary manoeuvre by his heavenly patrons to safeguard his modesty. We feared it might discourage him and intensify his habitual shyness of publicity. The way his lapse was brought home to him made that the more likely.

Six of us, at least, were given his leader to revise. It must have been over-confidence in his diffidence that blinded us, for we saw nothing wrong. Nor, as far as we knew, did anyone else, until James Britten opened his copy of the Review. Britten, then a peppery old gentleman and a militant convert of many years standing, was joint founder of the Catholic Truth Society, which at that date was in the early stages of a post-war ‘Forward Movement’. He was learned, and zealous for the exaltation of Holy Church and the overthrow of her enemies. He was also incapable of silence or of keeping out of print when anything called for contradiction or correction.
Religion and Secularism in the Arab World
Authors: Daniel Norman
Published: July 2007

The state of religion among Arab Muslims is much the same as among Western Christians. With both, religion survives in an active form among a minority; with both, the majority still cling to the name. Among both, men desire a high standard of living which most of them have always been denied; they have a new faith in scientific progress, which has brought about concrete results, and they accept the claim that it supersedes old beliefs. Both in Christendom and Islam there are conservatives who do not care at what cost they associate religion with inessential interests to which they are attached. Among Muslims there may be a greater pride in the name of their religion than among Christians; the national apostasy of the Arabs is as far advanced as ours if we reckon by mosque attendance, but less so if we remember their pride in being Muslim. The intellectual reaction of a minority against unbelief is less advanced among the Muslims. Our intellectuals have reached the reaction against reaction, scientific humanists against believers, and with this has come a further hardening of our differences. Among Arabs the modern intellectual approach to religion is both cruder and more fluid. These differences are not as important as the similarities. Modern preoccupations are everywhere secular. In this Arab world which is broadly similar, in detail different, to our own, can we trace the influence of religion upon the actual preoccupations of ordinary people?
The Destiny of French Catholicism
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

One may well wonder whether contemporary civilization does not create a type of man impervious to religious feeling.’ This sentence from the preface to M. Dansette’s book sets the general tone of the work, which is to show how this generalization applies in particular to France, and what the French Church is doing about it. Using the techniques of sociology applied to religious data, undertaken first by a professor of Canon Law, Gabriel Le Bras, M. Dansette paints a picture of a de-christianized France where there exists a Church in which old forms struggle against new ideals. Of course, Le Bras’ four categories of Frenchmen do no more than register external observances—it is only by and large that they reflect a religious mentality, and the categories themselves are very crude: ‘dissidents’ who do not belong to the Church, ‘seasonal conformers’ (those who go to church for baptism, first communion, marriage and death), ‘faithful’ who make their Easter duties and go to Sunday Mass, ‘pious’ who do more than that. Again, practice itself is often deceptive; though very faithfully observed in the eighteenth century, no one would describe that as a century of faith: ‘Un pratiquant peut être athée et un non pratiquant, croyant.’

The figures, even with the obvious reservations, are interesting. Three per cent of the French population is unbaptized; 3 per cent confessionally non-Catholic; of the 94 per cent baptized, 34.2 per cent make their Easter duties—but again this average figure is deceptive, since regional variations are so marked.
Reaction to the Bishops' Report
Authors: Walls Ronald
Published: July 2007

In April 1957 the Bishops’ Report burst upon Scotland with a minor explosion. It fanned the embers of national feeling in those who, having little interest in theology, saw in the proposals an attempt by the English to absorb one of the few remaining national institutions; it frightened many Godly Presbyterians who saw in it the thin end of a prelatic wedge and the beginnings of idolatry; but it did not arouse organized popular support for its own proposals. Probably several influential Scottish churchmen would welcome the acceptance of the proposals contained in this report, but they certainly cannot claim to lead a popular movement. And so the explosion which heralded the first publication of the Report turned out to be more of a firework display than the first rumblings of a serious battle, for there was only one fairly clearly defined party—the opposition.

The result of the first round in the discussions may have been a little misleading. The General Assembly in 1957 accepted the Report for study. This meant that the majority of ministers and elders in the Assembly refused to reject the Report out of hand, but decided that it should be studied by as many ministers, elders, and members of the Church of Scotland as possible; and it also showed that very many Church of Scotland ministers admit the urgency of finding a solution to the scandal of a divided Christendom. The Report was, therefore, widely distributed for unofficial study and discussion; and after the Assembly of 1958 was sent down to the local courts, the presbyteries, for official debate.
Some Recent Studies in Archetypology
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes—the primordial images and patterns of behaviour of a supra-personal character which the depth-psychologists find in their clinical work, and which have been expressed in manifold ways by human beings throughout the ages and throughout the world. Whatever else may he said for or against Jung’s concept of the archetype, it has undoubtedly provided a meeting place for specialists in the most disparate fields of inquiry.

This is particularly manifest at the yearly ‘Eranos’ meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, whose proceedings are subsequently published in the Eranos Jahrbuecher. The sciences, as distinct from the humanities, were, however, rather poorly represented at the 1956 meeting, which was devoted to ‘Man and the Creative’. But it had some notable contributions from Professor Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Chung-Yuan Chang, Laurens van der Post, Hellmut Wilhelm and Sir Herbert Read. Meanwhile we have another volume of previous Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks translated into English. Its theme is ‘Man and Time’, and here the sciences are represented by the physicist Max Knoll and the biologist Adolf Portmann. The arrangement of the contributions is somewhat haphazard, and readers may be recommended to begin at the end with the late Professor G. van der Leeuw’s brilliant essay on ‘Primordial Time and Final Time’, with its careful analysis of basic concepts and its profound theological and philosophical insights.
The New Herder
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

The publication now in progress of the second edition of this standard work of reference, thoroughly revised and refashioned, is an event not only for German-speaking Catholicism but for the entire Catholic world. In its new form the Lexikon can fairly be described as the flowering of a long process of growth within the Church beginning perhaps under Pius IX, in which she began fully to accept the challenge of the modern world. If there have been hesitations in this growth, and sometimes even the apparent rejection of the possibility of growth at all, as in the Modernist crisis, these have been precisely crises of growth, brought about by the unbalanced and uncritical pursuit of novelty on the one side, and an often unfounded suspicion of it on the other. We have not seen the last of these crises; how could we, if, as we must firmly believe, the Church will continue to grow under divine Providence and fed by the Spirit of Christ, until the Coming of the Truth of Christ at the end of time?

Meanwhile we can be grateful for this remarkable manifestation of Catholic maturity. It need hardly be said that the Lexikon maintains the highest standards of German scholarship, wissenschaftlich in the best sense. As far as publications go, Mgr Höfer of Rome is best known for his studies in nineteenth-century German Catholicism and as an editor of Scheeben; Fr Karl Rahner, S.J., is Professor at Innsbruck, editor of the current Denzinger, and undoubtedly the most influential theologian writing in German today.
Stability or Full Employment?
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

The level of unemployment rose steadily during 1958. I On January 13 th, 1.8 per cent of the insured population X. were out of work, but by December 8th this figure had risen to 2.4 per cent, and there was a further rise to 2.8 per cent by January 12th, 1959. Although these figures may be explained in part by recession abroad and a fall in British exports, the chief explanation is undoubtedly the effect on the economy of the raising of Bank Rate and the associated monetary measures taken to protect the pound in 1957. Important fundamental questions are raised by this rise in unemployment. It is clear that unless a government is determined to maintain the very low unemployment figures that we have become accustomed to in the post-war period, the level of unemployment is likely to rise as a result of changes in external circumstances or of measures intended to promote price stability at home.

Most people would agree that full employment and price stability are both desirable objectives. On the other hand, opinions differ as to whether or not the two objectives are compatible. Some Catholics may be inclined to believe that there is really no problem: if price stability can only be achieved at the expense of full employment, then the human waste and suffering caused by unemployment is too great to be contemplated with equanimity. They may feel that they have the authority of the Church behind them in taking this view.
The Evolution of a Mission
Authors: Torbet Ronald
Published: July 2007

It is now little over five years since the worker priest crisis in France provided the world press with a first-class story. For the vast majority in England (whatever may have been the case in France) the disciplinary action of the Holy See and the storm it aroused were, indeed, the first intimation that for several years a number of priests had abandoned the security of presbytery and religious house to work at the dock or in factories and share in every respect the living conditions of the working class. But even for those Catholics in England who were already aware of the movement and sympathetic with its aims, the Roman condemnation came as a bolt from the blue. They found themselves, in fact, singularly ill-equipped to find any answer to the inevitable accusation that the Church had shown itself to be incurably distrustful of any new methods of evangelization and indissolubly wedded to a ‘bourgeois’ outlook and way of life. Their embarrassment was only sharpened by the outcry which broke out in Catholic circles in France. Was there, in fact, danger of a split in the French Church or of the rise of a new and more bitter Gallicanism? Here at any rate was M. Mauriac talking darkly of a new concordat (not that many of us in England at least made much of what that might mean).

Looking back at all the furore from these five years’ distance, what perhaps is most surprising is the silence that has succeeded the storm.
The Vision of Joy: A Study of Georges Bernanos
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

If a man could take his shadow and accept it not merely as a sign of himself written by the sun but as an essential part of himself, he might begin to understand something of the mystery of prayer and poetry, suffering and surrender, religion and imagery. This is what Georges Bernanos, the recently dead French novelist, has tried to do. He is not a poet, except at those moments when his novels reach the limits of prose and cry for a barer and simpler statement; nor is he a mystic in the sense that he is trying to depict his own religious experiences directly. But that he has something of the mystic in him is evident both from the subjects he selects and the way in which he treats them. In his novel Joy, he is concerned with the terrifying experiences of a young visionary. Here, the visionary is seen as something very like a victim, a bearer-away of the sufferings which other men refuse. She confronts evil, even accepts it, yet she does not let it overwhelm her. In one of the later chapters of this novel, Bernanos describes Chantal’s surrender to God:

‘For at present, the idea, the certainty of her impotence had become the dazzling centre of her joy, the core of the flaming star. It was by that very impotence that she felt herself united to the still invisible Master, it was that humiliated portion of her soul that had plunged into the abyss of suavity.
The Unity of the Old Testament
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

Those embarking upon a serious and constructive reading of the Old Testament usually have two basic questions to ask: first, ‘Where should I begin?’, and second, ‘How should I read?’ Though it may not seem obvious, actually I believe that the first of these questions is the more important. The second to some extent solves itself as one progresses. So it is a possible answer to the first question that I want to suggest here. ‘Where should I begin?’ Emphatically not, I suggest, at the beginning. The composition of the Old Testament is utterly unlike that of a modern book. It is a complex of traditions which has grown up round a central nucleus, and which has only subsequently been crystallized in book form. The most ancient and the most creative of these traditions constitutes the central nucleus and the later traditions have been either added on to it at the beginning and end, or else inserted into it. Thus von Rad speaks of the Einbau of the Sinai tradition, the Ausbau of the patriarchal narratives, and the Vorbau of the Primordial history (Gen. i-xi) into or on to what he regards as the central nucleus, namely the events of the exodus and the entry into the promised land. The first task then is to grasp this central nucleus, and to examine how and in what sense it influences or is presupposed by the later traditions. For these reasons, it seems to me, one should begin reading the Old Testament in the middle.
Two Philosophers of History
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

It seems that all roads of thought, all mind-routes, lead into history; because, of any subject of study, even the most abstract, one is bound to ask, sooner or later, what has this to do with human life? And human life is necessarily historical. Every concept we use includes some reference to time, and as soon as we relate it to human life the reference at once becomes more or less explicit. In God himself our faith finds such a reference: he is not temporal, but his ways with man are; and in Christ he has seized hold of time in such a way as to compel us to acknowledge a divine mystery in it and to strive to penetrate this mystery so far as we can. This is a new compulsion, a peculiarly Christian one; it does not spring from the need to make sense of human life as such, but from the need, if one may so put it, to make sense of Christ. We certainly cannot separate human history, down to the present moment and on into the future, from Christ. But if this seems to commit us, as believers, to a ‘theology of history’, can we say that we are also committed, merely as reasoning animals, to a ‘philosophy of history’? Is such a discipline in fact conceivable? As philosophy it must be conceivable, if at all, and approachable, if at all, from the side of reason, not of faith.
Culture and the Contemplative Life
Authors: Schlegel Desmond
Published: July 2007

If we wished to try and show how culture leads up to, and finds perhaps its finest expression in the ideal of the contemplative, or monastic, life, it would be essential at the outset to dispel from our minds the unfortunate overtones of affected superiority which have become associated with this word ‘culture’. Let us, then, bring the whole thing right down to earth, literally, and explain what we understand by ‘culture’. The English word comes from the Latin verb colo (I cultivate, tend, look after), which was originally used in connection with farming. Agriculture means ‘looking after fields’. But, of course, ‘the unconquerable mind of man’ is not limited to the consideration of material objects only: it strives ever upwards towards the immaterial and, ultimately, the divine. So it came about that the simple, essentially earthy, word of the farmer was used to express the care man had for the spiritual in himself, and his reverence for the gods.

Culture, then, is the quintessence of all those qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his material needs. They are not necessarily practical, but they belong to a truly human life: man could not do without them. Pope John XXIII recently emphasized this when he was stressing the importance of the humanism of classical studies. In his address to the International Conference of Students of Cicero on April 8, quoting the Pro Archia, he said that ‘such studies nourish youth and delight old age, ornament prosperity, provide refuge and solace in adversity, are a pastime at home, are no burden abroad, never abandon us, and even at night follow us, on our travels and into the country.
Missionaries and Colonials in the Sixteenth Century
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

Probably no issue is more important for the Christian Church than that created by cultural contact. The problems raised are tragic and difficult; the prejudices created have led to misery, injustice and fraud, dishonesty and cruelty on a gigantic scale. Wellmeaning and gentle individuals have been, and are, transformed by social and cultural pressures into overlords and oppressors. Bad history, bad anthropology, bad biology have been, and are, invoked to mask the real issues involved. Very few people can bear to consider themselves exploiters, or are so far devoid of good sense as seriously to consider themselves a better kind of person than other people. Yet given a commercial issue, some point of security or prestige, and at once our real feelings hide themselves under noble-sounding verbiage. It used to be the white man’s burden, then it was the development of colonial areas, so successful have we been in hiding from ourselves that it is with surprise that we discover that colonialism is a bad word, and the honour of white men very comic.

It may be that our materialistic folly or criminal blindness have closed the East and Africa to the effective preaching of the Gospel for generations; before the rising tide of rejection and protest we may be able to do nothing save accept the judgment of God; but that at least we must do, and so doing clarify our minds and reform our activity.

In helping us to do this Professor Hawke’s book is a tract for the times.
David Jones on Art and Religion
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

To start on a personal note, let me say that while I see that the visual art of Mr David Jones is a joy for ever, I cannot read the Anathemata. Mindful however of the magical beauty of those pictures, I am ready to spring to attention as soon as Mr Jones starts discoursing in prose; and so, for the purpose of commenting on this collection of his occasional papers and essays, the trouble I have with his other, ‘creative’ writings does not perhaps matter. It is partly no doubt a question of the sort of poetry one is predisposed to admire; and in my own case a mainly ‘Mediterranean’ training, and in particular the example of Dante, make a certain degree of visible order and outline in large-scale poetry a necessity for me. But our present business is with this rich miscellany of reflective prose, and here I find no difficulty at all in taking Mr Jones as a sort of Virgil-guide, a dolce maestro—in this case a Christian one—through a world he knows so well, the obscure but enchanting regions explored in this book.

I must, however, qualify the above with respect to the Welsh and Early British (if that is the right expression) matter contained here (Sections I and III), for on all this I am too ignorant to be even a good pupil. The strings of Welsh names mean nothing to me.
The Geography of the Soul
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Both St Teresa and Franz Kafka in The Interior Castle and The Castle explore the geography of the soul. The first is a sixteenth-century spiritual treatise cast in the form of an allegory, the second a modern piece of fiction presented as a novel. In each case, a failure to pursue these terms as definitions has led to a good deal of confused critical comment.

St Teresa begins: ‘While I was beseeching our Lord today that he would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down, in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. . . These words say exactly what the writer means them to; she is preparing the way to elaborate her image of the soul as a castle, just as St Augustine referred to Heaven as a city, or Bunyan to some of the landmarks on the way to the Celestial City as Doubting Castle and the Slough of Despond. Each example shows the language to be that of personal comparison—although, whereas the soul is a castle for St Teresa, for Bunyan Doubting Castle is the citadel of the Giant Despair.
Some Reflections on the Church and the Arts
Authors: Purdy W.
Published: July 2007

A lecturer at a study week-end on the arts recently caused a mild sensation among his hearers by attributing what he regarded as the negligible contemporary impact of English Catholics on the arts to the fact that the parish clergy (he made it clear that he didn’t altogether hold it against them) were largely drawn from the lower middle classes.

This equation—lower-middle class clergy, ‘people’s’ parishes, sentimentality, vulgarity, lack of taste—has come to be largely accepted, whether defiantly or with a resigned shrug. Like many similar commonplaces, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny unshaken. Sentimentality, vulgarity and lack of taste were unfortunately part of the climate in which the Church revived and expanded rapidly after emancipation, and all classes and creeds were affected. In casual conversation of the seminary common-room type, one still hears Anglicanism equated with good taste: yet half our English medieval churches are scarred by the fury of the antiquarian wreckers of the last century. These came in two styles: the strippers, who reduced churches to barns, and the titivators who made them look like repository showrooms. On the whole, considering our limited financial and other resources, Catholics come better out of the architectural history of the past 150 years than most other corporations. Admittedly this is not saying much, but at least we were spared all that dreadful watered-down pre-Raphaelite stuff one finds in children’s corners of Anglican cathedrals.
The Starting‐Point of Marian Doctrine
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It cannot be said that English Catholicism has entered with mind and heart into the stream of doctrinal development which is so noticeable a feature of the Marian movement in the Church today. Any attempt to dismiss this movement and the doctrinal development within it as a Continental exaggeration runs the risk of so emphasizing the Englishness of our Catholicism as to compromise its Catholicism. The needs of apologetics in England are sometimes urged in favour of a minimalistic approach to Marian doctrine. There is one decisive answer to this suggestion : the only truth which we as Catholics must proclaim is the whole truth. Our duty as Catholics is not to minimize Marian doctrine but to present it as an integral part of the totality of saving truth which it is the Church’s office to preach to the world.

It is in view of this unsatisfactory situation in England that, so it seems clear to me, the central problem to be examined is the point of departure of the development of Marian doctrine. What I feel is most needed is not a more or less academic study of explicit Mariological structures, the technical elaborations of doctrine, but a disclosure of the motive force and impetus of the development, so that by renewing our living contact in faith and love with our Lady we may be able actively to contribute to the development, this active engagement being the essential precondition of any more objective theological assessment of the sense of that development.
The Secular Angels: A Study of Rilke
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

At a superficial glance there seems to be little in common either between Rilke and the Christian mystics or between Rilke and so-called ‘religious’ poets. The majority of the latter, if they have not been orthodox Christians, have usually employed many of the Christian symbols even though they have sometimes wrenched them into odd and surprising shapes. Such writers have often expressed their personal visions in terms of Christian symbolism and at the same time have formulated or re-interpreted those symbols for their own ends.

Rilke, however, does not fit into this category; indeed, he does not fit into any category at all. He stands quite alone. There are many reasons for this isolation but one overriding one. It is this: Rilke’s poetry was for him a way of life. It was visionary, philosophical, emotional, sensuous and abstract, all at the same time. His poetry was his life, not simply in the sense that he was a supremely dedicated artist, but also because it was the only medium in which reality, for him, existed. Words did not formulate a previously articulated philosophy or vision of life; on the contrary, the vision, the ideas, only had existence in the medium of words. Desperate and painful as Rilke’s poetic struggles often were, he never for a moment doubted the power of poetry. In his view, nothing was inexpressible. If reality was not to be found in words and images, then reality was at fault, not language.
The Liturgical Parish
Authors: Luff S.G.A.
Published: July 2007

The gables of Saint-Séverin stand sentinel beside the Rue St Jacques as that historic artery of ancient France gains the Seine and the Ile de la Cité. Pilgrims passed by as they left for Campostella; the broad boulevard and the twisting streets of the old quartier are still the home of cosmopolitan youth flocking to the schools of Paris. Here in fact is a special welcome for them, for besides its native parish Saint-Séverin is charged especially with a mission to the university world of displaced youth struggling to keep body and soul together in a world of perpetual motion. A church with a history adapts itself more easily to broad and generous demands. And from the days of Séverin, a sixth-century south bank solitary, this church has a long history. Fulk preached the Fourth Crusade there; Dante prayed there in the thirteen hundreds; and if subsequently its fame declined somewhat, at least Huysmans at the end of the nineteenth century found the church ravishing and its Masses exquisite.

In 1947 something of a renaissance befell when Cardinal Suhard appointed the Abbé Connan to the parish of Saint-Séverin with a special mandate to revive and transform it into a church and community capable of ‘welcoming’ the students of the Latin Quarter. About the same time the Cardinal entrusted L’Hay-les-Roses to a Benedictine to establish a community capable of welcoming converts from the Mission de Paris. In each case the parish was to be given a chance to prove itself as a competent missionary instrument in the modern world.
Dominican Letters
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

The letter printed, below is a reminder of how sketchy is our knowledge of the English Dominicans during the half-century prior to the foundation of Bornhem in 1658 and the start of the registers of clothing and profession. Englishmen who joined the order joined abroad, and their particulars were recorded in the registers of foreign convents, registers that for the most part are no longer extant. In 1615 these scattered members were formed into an English Congregation, but without a house of its own and without even the most rudimentary archives. Thus any chance reference to a Dominican at this dark period is a find of some importance, and this letter is a fair example of what we may still hope to unearth in some archive in almost any part of western Europe.

All that is known of the writer of this letter is what he tells us himself. He is writing to the master-general, Nicholas Ridolfi. The dispensation he asks for was beyond the powers of the master-general, and a copy of his letter was therefore sent to Propaganda. It is this copy only that has survived. It is here translated from the Latin.
The Crimination of Sin
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Two traditions, of the ‘necessary evil’ and of the ‘noble city’, contend in the Christian attitude towards the State.

Augustinist and Aristotelean alike profess the duty of obedience to the secular power, yet while to the former this is virtue there encountering its occasion to the latter this is virtue there findiug its proper object. Both agree that all power descends from God; the difference arises from how we conceive a causal order of subordinate agents and purposes. Here, as we shall see presently, a scholastic distinction, between instruments and means on one hand and principal, if secondary causes and intermediate ends on the other, is relevant to the contemporary debate about treating sins as crimes. For if the State is no more than a useful convenience then its rule, though providentially ordained to prevent anarchy, is devoid of moral value within itself. If, on the other hand, the State is endowed with a moral authority of its own then virtue and vice as such can be its concern.

You would not expect men of the Augustinist tradition to bow before the powers that be, nor men of the Aristotelean to warn off the government for not minding its own business. History however does not always follow a thin logic of ideas; those who have believed that true religion is other-worldly and not committed to politics have been left most defenceless before the encroachments of temporal power, while a strong thread runs from St Thomas to the sturdy radicalism, and perhaps some of the pressure-groups, of later centuries.
Teilhard De Chardin
Authors: Towers Bernard
Published: July 2007

Le Phénomène Humain has been a best-seller in France since its posthumous publication in 1955. The initial impact of the recent translation, published as The Phenomenon of Man, has been considerable. Never before, one imagines, in English publishing history, has a book by a Roman Catholic priest received such remarkable tributes in all types of journals and newspapers. ‘Book of the year’ for a number of well-known critics, ‘possibly the book of the century’ for one Sunday Times contributor.

During the period when Teilhard’s works were available only in French, one had heard doubt expressed as to whether he would ever appeal to more than a few in this country. After the events of recent months there is now every indication that the teilhardian movement will become as international in character as was Teilhard himself. It looks as if the influence of this remarkable man will come to be felt more and more in many different branches of human endeavour during the next few decades. For myself, I would go so far as to say that Teilhard’s vision—he writes like a visionary but a visionary whose feet are always planted very firmly on or in terra firma— marks the most significant achievement in synthetic thinking since that of Aquinas. We cannot afford to neglect him, because, quite simply, he seems in so many matters, and those the most important, to be so essentially right. His genius has sown many seeds which, in so far as they fall on receptive and fertile ground, would seem destined to grow and flower according to the pattern of those same laws of development which lie at the heart of his system of thought.
The Greeks in the Council of Florence
Authors: Gill Joseph
Published: July 2007

The history of the ecclesiastical breach between East and West, and of
the attempt to heal it, is very long and obscure. There was the Photian
schism of the middle of the ninth century, but that was over within a few
years. Two centuries later the Patriarch Cerularius was excommunicated by an
over-zealous papal legate and retaliated in kind; but that quarrel was not
final. The Fourth Crusade captured Christian Constantinople and never went
any further, but set up a Latin kingdom there which lasted less than sixty
years and did as much to antagonize the Greeks as anything else. Yet, a
little more than ten years after he regained his throne, the restored Greek
Emperor—but not the Greek Church—had accepted the Latin faith and union in
the Second Council of Lyons (1274). His purpose, however, was political, to
win the Pope’s help to prevent any attempt to re-establish the Latin kingdom
of Constantinople.

From then on over the next century, whenever Constantinople was more in
danger than usual by reason of the rapid advance of the Turks, the Byzantine
emperors approached the pope of the time, as head of western Christendom.
They asked for military aid, and they offered the possibility of union of
the Churches through the medium of a general council. The offer was, of
course, a sort of bribe, but not entirely so. Both East and West sincerely
deplored the schism that divided them and would have wholeheartedly welcomed
a genuine union.
Morals and Politics
Authors: Pakenham Lord
Published: July 2007

There is generally understood to be some special link between morals and
the career of the politician. Every professional man, the business
executive, the professor, the actor, the doctor and the barrister (to
confine ourselves to laymen) encounters plenty of moral problems in the
course of his career and in the case of the last two categories—lawyers and
doctors—a number of well-known issues are recognized under the headings of
forensic and medical ethics. But there is generally thought to be more to it
than this in the case of politicians. They not only encounter personal
problems in politics, but they assume a duty, consciously or unconsciously,
of applying political principles which are often presented as an extension
of the principles of ethics.

The three distinguished men whose lives are wholly or partly portrayed
in three recent books were outstanding national figures in the 1930’s and it
is tempting to compare them in their respective attitudes to the tremendous
challenges of that period. There is bound to be something artificial in
doing so, for whereas the first volume of Mr Bevin’s Life and the full life
of Lord Lothian come to an end in 1940, Full
Circle is the second volume of Sir Anthony Eden’s Memoirs
(published first) and covers only the period from 1951 to 1957. And yet it
is perhaps possible to abstract from all else, including Mr Bevin’s truly
heroic creation of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and study one
question only which faced Lord Lothian in the thirties, Mr Bevin, in fact,
in the thirties and forties, and Sir Anthony Eden in the thirties, forties
and fifties. It is a question which faces us still—the question of the moral
reply in terms of political action to what one judges to be organized
evil.
The Council of Trent
Authors: Evennett H. O.
Published: July 2007

The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.
Catholicism and Political Mythology
Authors: Cameron J. M.
Published: July 2007

In our day the Church is present, as it were, only on the margin of politics. Even in those countries, such as Ireland and Spain, where the Church is in one sense an obvious power in politics, the action of the Church is still marginal; for the substance of politics, however it may be constituted and whatever analysis of it we may offer, is what it is by reason of those secular forces which determine the character of politics in other states where the Church institutionally is of little or no account; and the fundamental decisions of the political authorities are always in the last resort swayed by secular considerations of precisely the same kind as those operative in non-Catholic societies. There is, outside the Soviet Union, the popular democracies, and China, a common social pattern, diversified in appearance and in its degree of maturity and in the political superstructure it bears, but still a common pattern: that of the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.
A Theological Chronicle
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It is probably true to say that there is no form of intellectual life more unfamiliar to the educated English Catholic than theology. If he were asked to name some topics which he supposed were discussed by theologians he would probably refer to the proofs of the existence of God, transubstantiation, the sacraments-the first of these in the context of ‘Thomism’, the second of apologetics, in school and pulpit, the third in the context of ‘liturgy’. The reference to the pulpit is a considered one; for if lay Catholics are open to the charge of naivety, the responsibility is by no means wholly theirs; can the clergy, and even the professional theologians among them (with some embarrassment I include myself, if only as a theological columnist, in this sub-category) , really claim to be practising theology with energy, fertility, learning and insight?
Tradition and Traditionalism
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Jacob’s ladder leads from earth to heaven: but the angels in his vision ascended and descended. It was a two-way traffic that he saw. The patriarch’s vision and its sequel were crucial for the destiny of the Jews. But they are, too, a primary statement of what the sacred means. The episode provides a cardinal text for the rites of consecration in the Roman liturgy, for Jacob, when he awoke from sleep, poured oil on the stone on which his head had rested and called the place Bethel, the house of God. A vow is made, and the symbol of it is the anointed stone, ‘set up for a title’ in the place where God has been.

The sacred, in this primeval sense, always speaks of God to man. Something has been set aside and offered to God: something sealed and ratified, usually by rites of consecration. It declares now a reality other than its own, for the thing—metal, stuff or stone—has been taken out of the context of profane use to point to a mystery itself inaccessible to man.

St Thomas, in his long and perceptive discussion of the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law, points out that ‘the divine worship regards two things: namely, God who is worshipped; and men, who worship him. Accordingly God, who is worshipped, is confined to no bodily place; wherefore there was no need, on his part, for a tabernacle or temple to be set up.
Islam and the West
Authors: Avery P. W.
Published: July 2007

The attitude of Christendom towards Islam is part of a story much older than either of the two religions concerned; though Christianity being one of them gives the story certain important differences. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental, and also invigorating, factors of early civilizations was their habit of holding themselves superior to any other culture: of seeing themselves as the unique bearers of all that was best. This sense of superiority might be deemed essential to the process of advancing civilization at all: the process of wresting an area of order, and of grace, out of the mists of errant wildness. It was based on an obvious truth: one’s own patch was cultivated; so far as could be seen, the rest was not. Moreover, the rest was inimical. The patch of enlightenment and perfection needed protection. For this it had its exclusive deities. In course of time, associated with the obvious superiority of the area of life they guarded, these deities became The Deity in the mind’s of their protégés. When there was awareness of other patches of civilization, rivalling the one which had been thought unique, each considered its god the only True God, for now the gods were at war. Contests and comparisons between civilizations were contests between religions and, as the degree of polemic fervour in favour of the one civilization against the barbarisms without, of the one religion that is true against the others that are false, is indicative of the vitality of the polemicists’s cause, in later ages the sterner Christian attitude to its rival may be taken to show a degree of advancement in Christianity absent from Islam.
Africa's Contribution to Western Ideas
Authors: Duggan A. J.
Published: July 2007

During the last fifty years the majority of Western ideas have been conditioned, or rather dominated, by science. By the end of the last century scientists in Europe and America had become more or less intoxicated by the success with which mathematical reasoning had been applied to experimental observation, and this had bred a feeling of certainty that the ultimate knowledge of nature was at hand. The French mathematician Laplace, for example, believed that if the position and motion of every atom in the universe were known at a given instant, the whole future of the cosmos could be predicted. The work of Darwin was regarded as having established that every living thing was the logical consequence of a single chemical synthesis which had produced the first living cell. It thus seemed that the history of matter was predetermined and that the technological mastery of the clever and diligent Western nations over less inspired countries was ensured. This conception of an amoral, all-pervading science was gradually passed on through schools, colleges, lectures and newspapers to the public at large. Its impact upon intellectuals resulted in materialism and dialectical argument, while it produced among less-educated people a mixture of bewilderment and expectancy.

The attitude of the professional scientist of today is a much humbler one. As our knowledge of the very small and very large increased, almost all the cherished laws of classical physics have had to be modified as they cannot be applied to the atom or the cosmos.
Mind and Brain
Authors: Walshe Francis
Published: July 2007

Some years ago, in a Hughlings Jackson lecture, I ventured to give some personal views upon the nature of the relationship of mind to brain. I said nothing original, yet something rather different from what we are accustomed to hear in those popular symposia on the brain-mind relationship, or upon brain mechanisms and consciousness, of which we have had a number of examples in recent years. The views I expressed had the sanction of philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, and, in a measure, of such physiological geniuses as Hughlings Jackson and Sherrington, but there is little interest in them at the present time in a scientific world still intensely preoccupied with the concepts of cybernetics and biophysics: preoccupied in the sense that some scientists find they cannot easily entertain any concepts which transcend these fragmentary ideas.

How we approach this problem depends largely upon our concept of nature and of natural science. Therefore, I define natural science as being ‘the study of nature as perceived: a study wherein nature is disclosed as a complex of entities whose mutual relations can be thought of and discussed without reference to sense awareness or thought about it’. This is to say that we can be perfectly good natural scientists without bothering our heads about the nature of perceiving, or the theory of knowledge—epistemology, as it is called. This is a complex definition, which I have taken from a great mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Its full import will appear later, but in the meantime I wish to point out that nature, that is, the world as perceived, does not comprehend all that the human mind can entertain.
Christianity and the World Religions
Authors: Zaehner R. C.
Published: July 2007

Ease of communications brings all men together: but the contiguity of bodies does not necessarily entail the crossfertilization of minds, and the mere fact that we can now move round the world at incredible speed does not mean that we are any better equipped to appreciate the ideas and cultures of other lands. Indeed it can be argued that the enormous development of the tourist traffic in Europe has done more to emphasize national peculiarities than to promote international good will: mere physical contact between nations does not necessarily lead to better understanding.

That there is need for better understanding, however, few would deny; and it is only since the last war that Europeans have come to realize it. For it is quite certain that the last war put an end to European supremacy for ever; and Europeans, so long the master race, will now have to learn the hard way how to get on on equal terms with peoples they had previously dominated. Moreover, their recent attainment of freedom has given the Asiatics a new self-confidence and a new faith in their ancient civilizations.

Christianity benefited greatly from the imperialist expansion of nominally Christian powers, and Christian missions have made most progress where European political power has been strongest. With the retreat of Europe from imperialism all that has changed, and the newly liberated peoples of Asia see Christianity not so much as a rival religion to be judged according to its own merits as the religion of their late masters who so often seemed to behave in a singularly un-Christian way.