bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Angelus Silesius
Authors: Graef H. C.
Published: July 2007

The religious development of Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the religious life. Usually coupled with Meister Eckhart, he became a text-book example for the Protestant theory that the Catholic Church kills the inner life—Meister Eckhart she condemned (though, in fact, only a few of his more extreme statements), but Angelus Silesius she broke.

The time into which Johannes Scheffler was born was not unlike our own. The greater part of the continent was in a state’of material and spiritual upheaval; the Thirty Years’ War devastated Central Europe, Reformation and Counter-Reformation were fighting for the souls of men; peasants and soldiers sang that awful ballad, ‘There is a reaper called Death, Hath power from the great God’— not knowing whether they should eat and drink for to-morrow they would die, or follow the call to sackcloth and ashes of men like the great popular preacher Abraham a Santa Clara.

Outside the Catholic Church the religious life had broken up inttf two main streams : the orthodox Lutheranism (or Calvinism) of the established territorial churches on the one hand, and a number of sfnall groups and sects experimenting in a pseudo-mystic religion on the other. Two provinces of the Holy Roman Empire were especially affected by this revival : Silesia, where Scheffler was born, and Holland, where he spent part of his university years. It was, therefore, almost inevitable that the passionate young man should have made contact with these circles, ‘conventicles ‘as they were usually called, in the hope of finding in them the fulfilment of the yearnings of his deeply religious nature.
The Catholic Church and British Labour
Authors: Pakenham Frank
Published: July 2007

This is not a subject on which I would dare to dogmatise or attempt to say the last word at this stage. It would, however, be an affectation to pretend to more diffidence than I feel. Soon after I took my degree, I worked for two years in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Research Department; later I became a Labour City Councillor and prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford. Brought up a Protestant, I was received not very long ago into the Church. I should indeed be a poor creature if the topic under discussion aroused in me no individual reactions.

The Editor of the Catholic Herald has recently computed that out of three million or so Catholics in England, 90 per cent, vote Labour. Be the figure 90 per cent or 75 per cent., as more often suggested, the fact in any case is striking. It is seldom animadverted to by those who exploit the authoritarian tendencies of a small group of gifted Catholic laymen in the service of an argument that the average British Catholic is a British (not too British) version of General Franco.

It cannot be pretended, however, that the substantia! Catholic element in the Labour vote exercises a distinctive influence on Labour principles or policy remotely proportionate to their number or to their merits as citizens. They do not vote Labour because of their Catholicism, nor yet in spite of it. For the most part poor men and women living in large towns, many of them of Irish extraction, their natural bias is towards the party of the under-dog. Individual leaders such as the late John Wheatley have done splendid work.
The Fact of the Family
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

The title I have chosen ‘for this brief essay is both comfortable and soporific. Come what may—like the earth on which we stand— by very reason of our existence, the family will always be with us. But (here’s the rub) what do you mean by family? The greatest clanger to it is perhaps our complacent disregard of its history. The popular conception of the family as an unchanging political entity is a snare as well as a delusion, for it blinds us to the possibility of another and disastrous stage in its ‘evolution.’

Already, the family is regarded by many as a quaint relic (like marr’age or Sunday worship) of the Christian era. ‘The unit of ancient society,’ in the well-known words of Sir Henry Maine, ‘was the family, of modern society the individual ‘(Ancient Law, p. 121). The movement of progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation and privilege in its place. The individual, Maine continues, is steadily substituted for the family as the unit of which civil law takes account. Professor F. G. Peabody in his brilliant book (Jesus Christ and the Social Question) comments on the fact that this substitution has been for several generations the key of English jurisprudence, philosophy and economics; and to show that this is true also of the spiritual life and thought of Protestantism h,e quotes the judgement of Hecker’s biographer that Protestantism is mainly unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism whose Christ deals with men apart from each other, furnishing humanity with no cohesive element.
The Family—The Pivot
Authors: Haynes Renée
Published: July 2007

The family depends on two people, a man and a woman. It is probable, in our present pattern of culture, that they marry because they fall in love with one another, wish to spend their lives together, and consciously or unconsciously desire children. Before marriage, each is likely to be a self-supporting adult individual, earning and laying out money at his or her own discretion ; rooted in his or her own nationality ; a citizen able to subscribe to the funds of whatever political party he or she thinks likely to bring about the public good; a worker contributing in the vast majority of cases to the national health insurance scheme, with a call on the services of a doctor if he is ill; a person able to give to personal relationships the un-self-conscious love, co-operation, sympathy, respect and self-respect of a responsible and independent human being.

After marriage, however, everything changes; and most vividly of all, the economic position. If there are to be children, the personal relationship between two equal, different and delighted selves has to be run very awkwardly in double harness with an economic relationship of absolute power on the one side and utter dependence on the other. It should be said at once that this relationship has not always been a result of marriage. It has grown up since the Industrial Revblution, which had two evil consequences for married women. The first was the development of a habit of regarding work not as a means of getting things done—houses built, children clothed, food grown—but as a method of getting money ; so that its worth came to be assessed not in terms of achievement, but in terms of-ex-’ change.
Married Sanctity
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

The question is sometimes asked : Are there any married saints? Of course we all know there have been many married saints who died as martyrs; many who lived virginal lives in holy wedlock after the example of our Lady and St. Joseph; many who attained to heroic sanctity in widowhood; many who made a compact of continence after some years of marriage; and lastly there have been many married saints who mutually agreed to separate and serve God for the rest of their days in sanctuary or cloister. But all these categories are here excluded, and an attempt is made to show from hagiography that quite a numerous body of saints can be found who served God in the married state until their death, and lived lives of heroic sanctity, without surrendering the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.

Practically all the Old Testament saints fulfilled these conditions, and amongst those married to one wife we may instance Isaac, Joseph the Chaste and Moses, whilst of holy wives we cannot find a better example than the chaste Susanna. Verging on the New Law we have our Lady’s holy parents Joachim and Anna, and Zachafy and Elizabeth, parents of the Baptist.

Of the many married Christians who became disciples of the Apostles, St. Paul singles out St. Aquila and his wife, St. Priscilla, for special mention three times in his Epistles, whilst St. Luke speaks of them three times in the Acts of the Apostles. They were not martyrs, although they suffered much for the faith, having been exiled from Rome on that account. They died according to the Roman Martyrology in Asia Minor and their combined feast falls on July 8th.
Work, Wages and the Banks
Authors: Woollen C.J.
Published: July 2007

When in Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII taught that it was the ‘great and principal duty’ of every employer to give every one of his work-people a fair wage, he was, as he himself reminded the faithful, only enunciating a principle that had its foundation in natural justice. When he again, and Pope Pius XI after him, declared that a workman’s wages must be sufficient to enable him to maintain himself, his wife, and his children in reasonable comfort, and to put by for a rainy day, they were making a declaration not only of Christian, but also of natural, rights.

Nearly thirty years after Rerum Novarum the Anglican Lambeth Conference recognised that a living wage should be the first charge upon industry. That was in 1920, when many industries were finding it difficult to keep alive, and others were already expiring, when many workers, far from being paid a living wage, were soon to become wageless, while the prospect of permanent employment for many others was rapidly diminishing.

During the war of 1914-1918 there had been phenomenal prosperity. The living wage seemed to have become a recognised right, and rates of pay were constantly raised to meet rising prices. But the high wages were in great part the result of a large and easy flow of money. Whereas the deposits of twenty-two British banks in 1914 amounted to £875,000,000, in 1919 they had reached the sum of £2,117,000,000. This huge increase was caused very largely by the wholesale purchase of War Loan by the banks themselves, and by their lending money, which soon came back to them as deposits, for the purchase of War Bonds.
Economics and Reform
Authors: Hollowood A. Bernard
Published: July 2007

The Brains Trust once set the following question : Would the nation be better governed by men of science and great thinkers rather than by professional politicians? The problem is of paramount importance in these days when civilisation, as we know it, totters on the brink of destruction and when thinking men of every party and creed are endeavouring to find a sure basis for post-war reconstruction. According to Professor C. E. M. Joad, the man of science is certainly not fitted to guide the destinies of his country. In his specialised capacity he is as methodical and as efficient as the worker bee, but out of his laboratory he appears as stupid as the insect on the window pane. This view was severely criticised. Surely, it was said, the training of the man of science, his careful weighing of facts, his patient analysing, his impartiality, should fit him more pearly to approach the ideal legislator than his unscientific fellows. Are not the scientists the ‘disinterested men’ of J. B. Priestley— men dealing in hard facts without prejudice? Professor Joad’s reply pointed to the heart of the problem. He showed that the politician, too, was dealing in hard facts—the facts of human welfare—but, whereas the scientist was faced with the problem of yes or no, the politician’s job was a question of right or wrong. In other words, moral value was the primary consideration of the politician and morality was beyond the field of science. It is true, of course, that the scientists have contributed greatly to the potential welfare of man as they have also (for example by the invention of the internal combustion engine) contributed to his doom.
John Tauler
Authors: Graef H.C.
Published: July 2007

John Tauler, a contemporary of Suso, is perhaps the best known of the three great German Dominican mystics. For he is the most characteristic representative of his Order, being first and foremost a preacher and shepherd of souls. Like St. John the Baptist, he was a voice crying in the wilderness of the world : ‘Repent ye, abandon the creatures and turn to the Creator.’ This was his battle cry, and his life work was to show man how to fulfil its demand. Whereas Suso made his own life a mirror, as it were, of the mystic way, reflecting in it both its glories and its agonies, Tauler took man by the hand and led him step by step to the Sanctuary of Mystic Union.

He was eminently fitted for his work, for he had that deep insight into human nature which is indispensable in the preacher and teacher. ‘Man, he said, hangs between heaven and earth. With his highest faculties he is exalted above himself and above all things, and dwells in God, but with his lowest faculties he is subjected under all things into the very ground of humility.’ He calls the higher faculties the ‘inner man,’ whilst the lower faculties form the ‘outer man.’ The inner man is subject to God alone, but the outer man to all creatures in true humility. The task of the inner man is of a double nature: he directs the outer man by the light of his superior knowledge, whilst in himself he remains unruffled by the changes of earthly existence, ‘sunk and united’ in his communion with God.
The Human Person
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Man is a paradox; and his life is unceasing tension between contradictories. Of fallen man this is true in the sense explained by Plato’s horses and St. Paul’s ‘the flesh lusteth against the spirit’; but it is true also In a yet more primitive sense: of the human per. sonality itself in its inner structure. Man is a paradox because, being one thing, body-spirit, he is at the same time two things. He is a social animal, dependent physically, economically, culturally, spiritually, upon society; he is a ‘part of the universe,’ often at the mercy of natural forces, often determined not only in his behaviour but in his very way of thought by environment, upbringing, the history of the race, the history of the world; against the might of the stars he is a puny invisible speck—it is not only the dead who are

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal courseWith rocks, and stones, and trees.

Yet at the same time there is in the infinitesimal speck a sort of infinity ; for the spirit of man is in Aristotle’s phrase ‘in a manner all things,’ and for Christian theology it is capax Dei—made capable of union with the Infinite. This part of the universe is at the same time not part of the universe: the angels themselves cannot knbw a man’s secret thoughts. The whirling-speck of dust is at the same time ‘the most perfect thing in nature’; the servant of the social and cosmic machines is the master for whose benefit they are made, and the country he inhabits is, in Kant’s phrase, the ‘kingdom of ends.’

The human person is traditionally defined as an individual self-subsistent substance of rational nature.
Why Exhibit Works of Art
Authors: Coomaraswamy Ananda K.
Published: July 2007

What is an Art Museum for? As the word ‘Curator’ implies, the most essential function of such a Museum is to take care of works of art which are no longer in their original places or no longer used as was originally intended, and are therefore in danger of destruction. This care of works of art does not necessarily involve their exhibition.

If we ask, why should the protected works of art be exhibited to the public, the answer will be made, that this is to be done with an educational purpose. But before we ask, Education in or for what? a distinction must be made between the exhibition of the works of living artists and that of ancient or relatively ancient or exotic works of art. It is unnecessary for Museums to exhibit the works of living artists, which are not in imminent danger of destruction; or at least, if such works are exhibited, it should be clearly understood that the Museum is really advertising the artist and acting on behalf of the art dealer whose business it is to find a market for the artist; the only difference being that it makes no profit. On the other hand, that a living artist should wish to be ‘hung’ or ‘shown’ in a Museum can be only due to his need or his vanity. For things are made normally for certain purposes and certain places to which they are appropriate, and not simply ‘for exhibition’; and whatever is thus made by an artist for a consumer is controlled by certain requirements. Whereas, as Mr. Steinfels has recently remarked, ‘Art which is only intended to be hung on the walls of a Museum is one kind of art that need not consider its relationship to its ultimate surroundings.
Concerning The Protestant Church in Germany
Authors: Ehrenberg H. P.
Published: July 2007

I was in 1937 that one of the Gestapo-men who were then questioning me asked whether the Protestant Church was not in full collaboration with the Catholic Church. When I denied this, he insisted that one of our ministers had made that statement at a certain meeting. As I had attended that meeting myself, I pointed out that he had only spoken about the unprecedented friendliness that existed between the Churches, but not about collaboration. ‘And what is the reason for these extraordinary good relations?’ I could not help asking. ‘It is that both Churches to-day have to defend the same thing, v'z. the world beyond.’

I remember another, very different experience. In the winter of 1928-29 I was the only non-Catholic to address a Catholic conference at Boppard, on the Rhine, one of the other speakers being Dr. Briining, shortly to be Chancellor of the Reich.

For two reasons the struggle of the Church of Christ against Nazism has been different from any other. In the first place the Church no longer suffers passively as during the times of persecution even down to that of Bolshevism, but has passed from the defensive to the attack. Secondly, the enemy in so far as he makes his appearance within the Protestant Church itself—the ‘German Christians’—does not represent a new heresy but the old rationalistic ones, though joined to the political power. Thus the Church in Germany is fighting neither against sects nor against the State, but against a combination of both, which we call the ‘heretical State.’
The Liturgical Movement in Germany
Authors: Wesseling Dom Theodore
Published: July 2007

Towards the close of the nineteenth century Ernest Renan wrote: ‘I have studied Germany and believed I entered a temple. All I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful and moving. O my soul, it is a treasure indeed, it is the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality fills me with admiration, how sweet and how strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there.’

What he meant by ‘Christ’ was: ‘A pure cult, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, resting entirely on the heart's feelings, on the imitation of God, on the Immediate relation of our conscience with the Heavenly Father . . . Jesus founded religion in humanity as Socrates philosophy . . . Jesus founded absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing except the sentiment.’ That is one of the strong currents which Germany sent into the maelstrom of modern European civilisation. Kant, Hegel, Strauss, ‘Baur, Goethe were the sources.”

In 1936 Abbot Ildefons Herwegen spent four weeks in Italy. In an audience the late Pope said that he had himself been able to establish that liturgical life in Germany was on the increase, and that this was a strong support for Holy Church in these days of strife and suffering. And this is another current of which Maria-Laach is the source.

Europe is one. Its unity is not an opposition of races and nations overcome by commercial, diplomatic or cultural contacts.
The Catholic Social Movement in Germany
Authors: Crawford V. M.
Published: July 2007

The Industrial Revolution had progressed through the earlier decades of the nineteenth century before there arose any true appreciation either of the vastness of the economic changes that were in progress or the extent of the social evils that were in rapid growth. Agriculture continued to fall back before the viiles tentaculaires of Verhaeren’s vision and a huge new and debilitated population crowded into the sordid streets as fast as they sprang up. It is true that as early as 1839 the Comte de Montalembert, stirred in his Catholic conscience by rumours as to the conditions under which the factory workers lived, journeyed up to Lancashire to see for himself ‘these appalling towns ‘which filled him with a ‘triple horror,’ but this was the gesture of a singularly kind-hearted politician rather than an experiment in scientific investigation. The emergence on every side of vast fortunes was guarantee enough to the average citizen that great material progress was being made, while the political economists of the day unhesitatingly enunciated the principles on which such progress could be relied on for the future.

Unexpectedly enough, it was in Germany that a new appreciation on Christian lines was to present itself on a wide scale with social and religious results of the highest importance. It was in the Western parts of the Empire, and more especially in the Catholic Rhineland, that industrial development first showed itself on lines similar to those in England, and these were the districts that had been most severely affected by the principles of the French Revolution and by the disasters of the Napoleonic wars.
Origins of The Sastika‐Movement in Germany
Authors: Loewenstein John, Prince
Published: July 2007

The history of the Swastika-Movement goes back to the early nineteenth century. At that time, when the first archaeological excavations were made in Germany the Swastika was found on many objects from Germanic tombs of the first Christian centuries, and so it came to be regarded as a Germanic symbol. The first to popularise the sign was a man named Jahn, who in 1806 founded the German gymnastic clubs, which politically had a strongly nationalistic tendency. Jahn subsequently came to be known as ‘The father of the gymnastic movement.’ His motto was : ‘Frisch, Fromm, Froehlich, Frei’—‘Brisk, Pious, Joyous, Free’; and he arranged the four ‘F’s’ of this device to form a badge in the shape of a Swastika.

Then, the seventies of the last century saw the rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and the foundation of various Anti-Semitic parties, which in the years before the World War 1914-18 took an increasingly radical direction under the influence of the race theorists. The Swastika, which the Viennese author Guido List (1848-1919), in his bombastically written books, called ‘The holy symbol of the Aryans,’ became, some years before the World War 1914-18, thanks to his writings, the generally adopted badge of the Anti-Semites.

In order to understand later developments, it is necessary to study List’s writings, which prior to 1914 were widely current in ‘nationalist’ circles in Germany and Austria—although indeed they are completely forgotten to-day. Fundamentally, Guido List’s ideas are based on the vague and disputed writings of the Germanised Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and his predecessors, such as the French count Joseph de Gobineau and the latter’s compatriot, De Lapouge. To these must be added the publications of the East Prussian archaeologist, Gustav Kossinna, and certain misinterpreted teachings of the famous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Thomism and ‘Affective Knowledge’
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

It is probable that the most serious obstacle in the way of a rapprochement between Thomism and much ‘modern thought’ is the widespread misgiving that Thomism ignores or rejects ‘value-perception’ and ‘value-experience.’ This misgiving is impressive both to the layman and to the professional philosopher. To the layman, because it is supposed that the embracing of the principles of a system so frigidly rational and so rigidly scientific involves a repudiation of the ‘appreciative,’ ‘humanistic’ attitude to life, and with it the denial of the validity of one’s most cherished and intimate personal experience. To the philosopher, because, in the words of Professor Pringle-Pattison, ‘At the present time philosophy is carried on more explicitly in terms of value than at any previous time.’

That ‘experience,’ ‘value-perception,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘instinct,’ ‘real’ or ‘affective’ knowledge—call them what you will—have in great measure come to claim the place which of old was ascribed to logical reasoning is a commonplace which calls for no proof. Even among those whom the Romanticist revolt from reason has not led to an admitted abandonment of logical, hard-headed thinking, there has come about a divorce of ‘experience’ from ‘thought’ whose effects can be scarcely less disastrous. ‘Description’ and ‘appreciation’ come to be regarded, not merely as distinct and independent ways of approach to the same reality, but as terminating in diverse realities.
Neurosis and Industrial Civilisation
Authors: Hamilton Robert
Published: July 2007

Man is a creature rooted in earth and drawing his breath from heaven. Apart from the truism that nature itself and every created thing comes from God, there is a sense in which we may make a legitimate distinction between the origins of man’s bodily and spiritual parts, regarding the one as from nature, the other from God. This union and integration of the corporal and spiritual in one creature is man’s unique distinction; and in most cases the normal, uninhibited man is emotionally aware of his kinship with the earth and with God. Throughout history this feeling of kinship has expressed itself in the two activities most perfectly characteristic of humanity, namely agriculture and religion. All civilisations have tended to approximate to the rural-religious pattern in some form or other until the last few centuries in the West and very recently in the Far East. Since the rural-religious life is essentially normal to man and satisfies the supreme appetitions of his being, it follows that he can only achieve true happiness and integration when his relation to nature and God is harmoniously satisfied. It does not, of course, follow that rural-religious societies will be necessarily happy or integrated : original sin is not so easily overcome; but it does follow inexorably that if men apostatise from nature and God they will inevitably be unhappy and disintegrated.
The Beveridge Report
Authors: O'Sullivan Richard
Published: July 2007

The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is in its way a portent in English politics.

Though it is in form a report made by Sir William Beveridge to the Minister of Reconstruction, Sir William Jowitt, K.C., M.P., who held the rank and office of Paymaster General (and is now Minister without Portfolio), and though the Report admittedly raises matters of policy which are ‘so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole,’ the issue of the Report was heralded by a regular campaign of advance publicity and propaganda which appeared to be designed and calculated to impose the document on Parliament and the people; and its actual publication was accompanied by such a fanfare of trumpets, in the Press and on the Radio, as made one to understand, almost for the first time, the technique and power of publicity in the hands of a totalitarian régime and its habit of treating Parliament no longer as a deliberative assembly, but rather as a body accustomed obediently to register the decisions of the Party, or the Fuhrer. Thus, within twenty-four hours of its publication, summaries of the Report (as yet unconsidered by the Government or by Parliament) were broadcast in twenty-two languages as a forecast of the line of social legislation to be followed by Great Britain in the post-war reconstruction.
Gill's Last Essays
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: July 2007

Of these nine essays, two are now seen for the first time, and one, the longest, is new to the present writer. Secular and Sacred in Modern Industry takes up the last twenty pages. Two full-size reproductions and three or four ‘colophons’ from his hand make the little volume more intimate and precious to his old friends and the war-economy standard of production seems to enhance rather than impair the attractiveness. The little volume contains a lot of close reasoning, many aphorisms of price, and much true intense loyalty to the Papal Encyclicals on Labour and Social Reform. We speak feelingly;, having had to defend the faith of Eric Gill against those who never retain a single word of those earth-shaking documents even if they ever heeded one. On p. 13, 1. 7, occurs a sentence with one that too many.

Who wants an antidote to the Daily Bane and other touting boobytraps for Democracy and the Proletarianisation (his word) of all things? Who wants to hear that ‘the labourer’s point of view is necessarily radically different from any other’? Who swallows all the second-hand sops of Midas without any rumination? Who but everyone who does not read Eric Gill.
Cardinal Hinsley
Authors: Bell G. K. A.
Published: July 2007

The death of Cardinal Hinsley brings a sense of grievous loss to innumerable men and women outside his own flock. His championship of right, his outspokenness, his love of England, his pity for the suffering, all inspired by a deep religious faith, combined to make a remarkable impression on the public mind. A story he told me of his first meeting with Mr. Churchill throws a flood of light on the bonds which bound him to his fellow countrymen. It was just after the fall of France, when there was a widespread belief that anything might happen. ‘I am glad we’re alone,’ he said to the Prime Minister, ‘and have not to rely on France.’ ‘Why? ‘asked Mr. Churchill, much surprised. He replied, ‘Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.’ It was very fitting that when the Cardinal died, nearly three years later, Mr. Churchill should express his deep sympathy with English Roman Catholics ‘in the loss of a leader of character and courage, a great patriot, and a true lover of justice and freedom.’

There is another campaign in the leadership of which the Cardinal’s death will be most keenly felt. It is the campaign for a regeneration of Britain and Europe and a building up of a new social, economic and political system on just and moral foundations. Staunch Roman Catholic though he was, he saw that in a world so divided as our own the gathering of all forces looking in the same direction was indispensable for such a purpose. Accordingly, in August, 1940, profoundly stirred by the moral collapse which caused France’s down fall, he inaugurated the movement of ‘The Sword of the Spirit ‘to ‘deal with the issues raised by the present war.’
Meister Eckhart
Authors: Graef H. C.
Published: July 2007

Little is kown about the outer life of Meister Eckhart. Born somewhere in Thuringia about 1260, he probably entered the Dominican Convent at Erfurt as a youth. His great intellectual gifts were soon recognised, for he was sent to Paris to complete his education at the fount of medieval scholarship. On his return to Germany he was elected Provincial of his Order. As such he was entrusted with the supervision of all Dominican convents in Northern Germany, and, after some time, with the reform of the houses in the Bohemian Provinnce as well. About 1310 he was relieved of these administrative duties, and again sent to Paris as teacher of his Order. Three years later he returned to Germany, living first at Strasbourg and afterwards at Cologne, where he became one of the most influential preachers. As, at that time, one of the chief duties of the Dominicans was the spiritual direction of numerous communities of religious women, Meister Eckhart’s sermons were mostly addressed to them. In these communities an exuberant inner life had sprung up, and Eckhart, reared in the intellectual discipline of St. Thomas, brought his great learning to the task of leading the devout women away from visions and ecstatic experiences to the heights of mystic contemplation.

But in these heights human language becomes sadly inadequate. It was Meister Eckhart’s tragedy that he tried to express the inexpressible, and in doing so had to use paradoxical statements that savoured of false doctrine. So the last years of his life were overshadowed by a trial for heresy, which eventually led to the condemnation of twenty-six of his theses, though most of these were admitted to be susceptible of an orthodox interpretation.
The Uncompromising Lover
Authors: Talbot Hugh
Published: July 2007

The great, attraction exercised by the writings of the mystics on all who sincerely love God is a fact of everyday experience. Richard Rolle in our own country, Ruysbroeck in the Netherlands, Saint Catherine of Siena in Italy, Saint Teresa in Spain, these and a host of others have a numerous and sympathetic following. But there is one exception for which it is difficult to account : St. John of the Cross. Undoubtedly the greatest of them all, he is nevertheless generally regarded by average readers with something akin to fear and repulsion. When they pick up the Ascent of Mount Carmel for the first time and become aware of the sacrifices, the detachment and the denudation of spirit which he demands they are filled with consternation and dread. Such teaching seems to lead more to death than to life : and urged by the instinct of self preservation rather than by lack of generosity they recoil from putting it into practice.

This impression, derived solely from the Ascent, is, to a certain degree, comprehensible. The relentless logic with which St. John of the Cross drives his principles to their conclusions, the merciless insistence on the absolute validity of certain Gospel truths, the absence of all compromise and indulgence, these and other traits of a like nature strike a chill into the heart of uninitiated readers. They feel that the saint must have been devoid of all sensibility, out of touch with common humanity and limited in his outlook on the world. And they put down the book with the conviction that such counsel is not for them because it is utterly inhuman.
The Study of History in America
Authors: Sturzo Luigi
Published: July 2007

The New York Times in June 1942, published the ‘Charted Results of a Survey on College Study of U.S. History,’ with a commentary by Benjamine Fine under the heading : ‘U.S. History Study is not required in 82 per cent, of Colleges’ and again, a sub-heading : ‘72 per cent, do not list it as an entrance prerequisite.’

For a European like myself, brought up in the cult of history, Italian and foreign, ancient and modern, this seemed so strange as to surpass belief. I asked myself, if this was what happened to the history of the United States in United States colleges, what must be the unhappy fate of the history of other countries, and ancient and classical history.

The ‘Results’ have naturally amazed Americans too, leading to an animated discussion of the problem.

As easily happens, the general, educational problem was made to slide at once to that of war morale. The young man who does not know his country’s past cannot appreciate its institutions, cannot love its great figures, cannot be thrilled at the national name since the nation is unknown to him in its birth and development. It is easy to exaggerate on this theme, whether in order to show that history is necessary or to assert, as some have done, that it neither adds to nor detracts from patriotic feeling.
An Integral Christian Education
Authors: St. John Henry
Published: July 2007

The Christian religion teaches us that we have been made by God for Eternal Life; that is our supreme and final purpose. Here we have no abiding city; we are travellers on our way to our home, and our journey is designed by God to fit us for our home when we get there. That is why to the Christian this world is supremely important ; not as an end in itself; so considered it is worthless and to be despised; but as the means by which our personalities and characters are prepared by God for the eternal happiness of Heaven. This life then prepares us for Eternal Life and the purpose of education is to prepare us to live this life in such a way that we may be made fit for Eternal Life.

A Christian believes that each human person is specially made by God, specially endowed with certain qualities and capacities; set in particular circumstances, in a particular family, belonging to a particular nation with its own peculiar tradition and culture. That is the Christian doctrine of vocation; the belief that God calls each of us to a particular place and work in his scheme; and that our place and work is of supreme importance because it is the means by which we fit ourselves by the power of his grace for Eternal Life. What that place and work is to be should be decided largely by the circumstances in which God has placed us, and by the capacities with which he has endowed us; our family, the culture and tradition into which we are born, our education in home and in school; all these should play their part in the great decision : ‘What is God’s vocation for me?’
International Order and the Natural Law
Authors: Ward Barbara
Published: July 2007

As Christians we believe that all the relationships binding man to man and society to society are regulated by law which is not something which changes—not something-socially tolerable in one century and socially intolerable in the next—but an immutable law rooted unchangeably in the Will of God. This idea of the law of God is the whole basis of Christian society, national and international, and it ought to be the constant endeavour of Christian peoples to bring their own local order into harmony with the eternal and unchanging order of God. Internatioal law, however imperfect it may seem now, is just an attempt to make nations live according to the Will of God. That is why international law is so important to us and of such very deep concern to all Christians.

God did not design a Lawless world; man and the sins of man made the world lawless, and it is the task of Christians to bring back society, national and international, to the rule of law in conformity with the will of God. This is the principle on which all teaching of international order is based. The teaching of Christianity on the social order is, as you know, a harmonious blending of rights and duties up from the individual citizen, through the associations needed for a full Christian life—the family, the local community, associations for work, the nation itself—right up to that community of nations, that world society which, in the last ioo years, has come into physical being for the first time. I may say in passing that I saw how completely it had come into being last year when, on my way to the United States of America, I had supper in Ireland and the next day I had tea in Baltimore.
To the Undying Memory
Authors: Belloc H.
Published: July 2007

It was long a commonplace that the world knew nothing of its greatest men. Now that saying was already current a life-time ago. It is emphatically true to-day, and its value and meaning affect us at the present moment more than ever they did in the past, for this is a moment when men are only publicly known by their names, and when the real personality for which the name stands is hidden under a mass of popular print.

Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican, who has just passed to his reward, intensely illustrates all this. The greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgement, was something altogether separate from the world about him. Those who knew him marvelled increasingly at every aspect of that personality. But the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness. Everyone who met him, even superficially, discovered this. Those of us who had the honour and the rare advantage of knowing him intimately and well over many years find, upon looking back upon that vast experience, something unique, over and above the learning, over and above the application of that learning to Thomism, which is surely the very heart of the Dominican affair. To that testimony, which so many have the honour and privilege to present, I can add less than nothilng. We know holiness just as we know courage or the unimportant particular of physical beauty and proportion. When we come across that quality of holiness permeating and proceeding from the whole Dominican world, we can only be silent as before some very rare and majestic presentation, wholly foreign to our common experience.
The Soul and The Soil
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The man who lays down moral principles runs the risk of laying down platitudes. When a priest meddles with the affairs of this world he is regarded—rightly—as being professionally incapable of laying down anything except moral principles. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should be regarded as a purveyor of platitudes. He may indeed be regarded as professionally incapable of saying anything rational at all; but with this error I am not immediately concerned. On the other hand, to call priests platitudinous is not, as such, to convict them of talking rubbish; if it were so, their case would indeed be pretty hopeless.

Yet even granting the connection of moral principles and platitudes and the distinction of these from nonsense, it does not follow that :t is good to be thought platitudinous, still less that it is good to acquiesce in the imputation. Much of what I have to say in this article will sound platitudinous, but it is a pity that :t should. Platitudes, if true at all, are truths worn smooth like old coins—truths ready for falsification. That honesty is a virtue, is true and platitudinous, but that it simply consists in paying your bills and avoiding theft, as the platitude tends to suppose, is not true. A truth gone dull is a truth nearly lost. But to grasp a truth closely is to lose a platitude, is to be free from a platitude. This freedom, freedom not of or from but by thought, Father Vincent won for himself and expressed for others. The proof is that whereas many people said he talked nonsense, no one accused him of talking platitudes.

We, however, must run the risk. We are concerned with moral principles, and the principle of anything is its starting-point; and once things have started the starting point is taken for granted. It is very likely a platitude. If you become conscious of it you may say, shamefacedly, ‘Of course that's obvious, a platitude’; or, if you want to question it, you may call it a prejudice. In either case it is presumed to be presumed.
Scripture, Tradition, and the Church
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

We read in the Acts of the Apostles (xv, 23-29) :

‘The Apostles and ancients, brethren, to the brethren of the Gentiles that are at Antioch and in Syria and Cilicia—Greeting.

‘It hath seemed good to us assembled together ( to choose out men and to send them unto you. with our well-beloved Barnabas and Paul, men that have given their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

‘We have sent therefore Judas and Silas, who themselves also by word of mouth will tell you the same things.

‘For it hath seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, to lay no further burden upon you than these necessary things—that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols—and from blood—and from things strangled—and from fornication. From which things keeping yourselves you shall do well. Fare ye well.’
The Meaning of Tradition
Authors: Moreno Enrique
Published: July 2007

As the war now proceeds through stages that can, without undue optimism, be considered decisive, we become conscious of anxieties, tears, and even hopes, which, though always looming in the background of our thoughts, have been obscured by the very uncertainty of the war itself. We are all uneasy about the future of Europe. But we cannot postpone the declaration of our uneasiness until the last shot has been fired. Silence now would be imprudent for many reasons, and especially because it is certain that the end of hostilities will be the signal for an immediate outburst of bitter and passionate discussions between the partisans of the different political and economic systems that stand ready to compete for our support. Therefore, before we come to the parting of the ways, each of us owes it to himself to enter into his own mind and sort out his own ideas. Unless we do this, our ideas are always confused, and con-, fusion is always a sign of latent and unsuspected contradictions; until these are cleared away we are in no position to fight for or against anything.

In our opinion Europe is about to become the theatre of still another war, bloodless we hope, between two parties not yet aligned against one another : the one supporting a new order, and eager to profit by the ravages of the present war to build it; the other zealous to preserve in continuity the spiritual, political, or economic life ol the Old World. This is a general view, and does not ignore the intermediate shades of difference that may help to absorb something of the shock between extremes.
Common Life and Common Law
Authors: O’Sulivan Richard
Published: July 2007

On the last page of their classical history of the English Law, Pollock and Maitland wrote these words : ‘The men who were gathered at Westminster round Patteshull and Raleigh and Bracton (in the thirteenth century) were penning writs that would run in the name of kingless commonwealths on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. They were making right and wrong for us and for our children.

The rules of right and wrong that were framed by these prelates and judges of the Middle Age constitute the Common Law of England, a system of law that rules not only England (and Ireland), but also the Dominions of Canada and Australia and New Zealand and (in great measure) India and most of the colonies and possessions of the Crown. The Common Law rules also ‘those kingless commonwealths on the other shore ol the Atlantic Ocean,’ the states of the American Union, with the single exception of Louisiana.

The Common Law is thus one of the two great systems of Law and of legal tradition by which the world was governed before the war. The other system is the system and tradition of the Roman Law, which governed the great continental countries of Europe and their non-European dependencies. The Roman Law has a history of twenty-five centuries.. It was accordingly pagan in origin. It reflected what Lord Acton has called the vice of the classical state : it was Church and State in one. Divine honours were paid to the Emperor. And the law recognised or drew a sharp distinction between free man and slave; and between citizen and stranger.
Dr. Coomaraswamy on Art
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

An age which applauds the specialist and the genius will not acknowledge the master. Applause, we might say, costs nothing whereas the master is there to enforce a responsibility. And if modern man pays with a handclap all the debt he acknowledges to genius, from the master he must submit to learn a truth.

Dr. Coomaraswamy is a master in the philosophy of art, as his great pupil, Eric Gill, was a master in stone carving and letter cutting. As a master he embodies in his work the whole positive weight of traditional truth, and in acknowledging him we affirm the spiritual foundations of our civilization.

If this were a tribute merely to the man, to the person, Ananda Coomaraswamy, it would be no more than flattery; but Dr. Coomaraswamy’s position is clearly indicated in an incisive answer to critics printed among the present collection of essays : ‘If I assert . . ., etc., ... I am not necessarily wrong merely because this position was “earlier” maintained by Plato and in the Bhagavad Gita . . . The sooner mv critics realise .... that I am not out to express any views, opinion or philosophy of my “ own,” the sooner will they find out what I am talking about.’ For if the principles he argues and explains are common to Europe and the East, to Aquinas and (implicitly) to all save the essentially commercial eras of human civilisation : to Maori portraiture and the Neolithic cave drawings no less than to Chartres : it is precisely because Dr. Coomaraswamy has not invented them. Neither is the basis of such agreement sought in any type of common-denominator doctrine, humanist or modernist.