bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dickens: An Essay in Christian Evaluation
Authors: James G. Ingli
Published: July 2007

It is just over half a century since G. K. Chesterton warned his readers not to insist too urgently on the splendours of Dickens’s last works lest it should be discovered that they were not true admirers of the novelist. Chesterton celebrated the Dickens of the stage-coach and the spirit of Merry Christmas and charity: that aspect of the novelist which Mr Walter Allen has termed the jolly Dickens, Dickens in fairy-land. It is not surprising that he had but faint praise for the later, darker novels. Most recent critics of the novelist, however, have tended to direct their attention chiefly to the later works and to occupy themselves with the task of elucidating and illuminating what is sometimes spoken of as his powerful and impressive rendering of evil and, by contrast, the weakness of his portrayal of goodness.

This contrast, and the problem it poses for the critical reader, is strikingly apparent at the very beginning of Dicken’s career. In the early novel Oliver Twist it is the vision of the underworld, the world of the workhouse and Fagin’s lair that most of us remember. The world of the Brownlows and the Maylies fails to grip the imagination. Probably the least thoughtful and least satisfactory way’ of elucidating this weakness is to suggest simply that what we arc confronted with here are characters who fail to impress because they are too good to be true. This explanation appears to be irrepressible; it is capable of appearing, usually in the form of a brief aside, even in the work of critics who have in fact much more carefully considered explanations to offer.
Miracles and the Gospels
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

Cardinal Ottavian, in an article that he wrote in the
Osservatore Romano in 1951, pointed out that
there has been a very great change in the way in which people regard the
possibility of miracles today as compared with fifty years ago. Then, under
the influence of Modernism and liberal criticism, the tendency was to reject
as absurd an element of ‘wonder working’, or miracle from religion, and to
regard any accounts of events purporting to be miraculous as suspect. Now,
he observed, the climate of opinion has changed. There is a tendency to be
interested in paranormal phenomena, and among certain people this interest
has degenerated into an uncritical and irrational appetite for the
marvellous in religion. It is very easy, when subjected to such influences,
to become interested in the marvellous for its own sake and to regard the
supernatural as only consisting in the wonderful and inexplicable. One
becomes more interested in stories of miracles worked by saints than in the
saints themselves, and the consequent dislocation of religious concentration
can lead to outbursts of superstition.
Proxmiate and Ultimate
Authors: Macqueen A. T.
Published: July 2007

There is still a tendency, which will probably persist as long as this
planet remains inhabited, to belittle the miracles at Lourdes. This is
exemplified by two fairly recent books. I want, in this article, to suggest
that the attempts to explain away, as it were, the supernatural element in
the recorded events, rests on the failure of those who try to do so to
distinguish between what Catholics call proximate and ultimate
causes.

Few modem writers who have taken the trouble to go into the medical
aspects of Lourdes would deny that remarkable recoveries do occur there, and
that, in the prevailing circumstances, the standards of medical detective
work undertaken to exclude mistaken diagnosis, hysteria and fraud, are high.
It is true that the great majority of officials and doctors who make up the
three bodies which handle the evidence (the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, the
Medical Commission, the Canonical Commission set up by the Bishop) are
Catholics; but it is unlikely that these men, concerned with their own and
their Church’s good name, would deliberately deceive both Catholics and
non-Catholics so successfully for so long. I shall not here concern myself
with the consideration of either the cruder explanations put forward to
account for the cures at Lourdes, or with the history of Bernadette with the
growth of the medical services which now supervise the investigation of
alleged miraculous cures. These aspects of the shrine’s activities have been
dealt with in many books, to which the reader is referred.
Italian Catholic Reviews: A Survey
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

I have not visited Italy since 1956, so that these impressions of current journalism there are at a slight remove: but I have kept up with various periodicals printed in Italy through 1957 and into 1958. These are mostly Catholic—though very different in other respects—, my recent reading of non-Catholic Italian journalism being almost limited to the two chief ‘neutral’ newspapers of the North, the Corriere della Sera (Milan) and La Stampa (Turin), and to glances at the ‘highbrow’ anticlerical review II Ponte (Florence) and the equally anticlerical but far more widely sold II Mondo (Rome).

A word, to start with, on the post-war situation of Italian Catholicism. It seems an odd one, at first sight; powerful yet unstable. Politically, post-war Italy has been run by Catholics. The Resistance was, superficially at least, more Communist than Catholic, and until 1948 the situation seemed very dangerously fluid; but that year the Christian Democrats won their decisive victory at the polls, and they have stayed in power, though with reduced majorities, ever since; in the teeth of a fiercely sustained opposition from right, left and centre, not to speak of their own internal disagreements and such minor nuisances as the Montesi affair. Two chief factors—apart from the deep, if somewhat sluggish, attachment of most Italians to their Catholic heritage— have contributed to this real, if limited, Catholic predominance in Italian public life since the war: the high political intelligence and personal integrity of De Gasperi and the prestige of Pius XII.
Père de Foucauld and His Fraternities
Authors: Voillaume R.
Published: July 2007

When a saint reaches universality, his original background and personal characteristics sink into comparative unimportance. God’s possession of him has carried him beyond these things. Now, Charles de Foucauld, Brother Charles of Jesus, came from a very old family of the French nobility. His was a rich heritage of ancestral virtues and heroic chivalry. He himself was an officer and an explorer. He was thus quite thoroughly not only a man of his country, but a man of a particular period of his country’s history as well. In short, nothing would have seemed to have destined him in any particular way for a role as world-wide as the one we now know he was to have. Yet, once converted, he gave himself so utterly to our Lord, and his life turned into one so in keeping with the Gospel, that the witness he bore has in fact become universal. In other words, he became like a ‘little brother of Jesus’, as we say, and consequently, as he used to put it himself, a ‘universal little brother’.

After seven years generously devoted to life in a Trappist cloister, he felt himself irresistibly impelled towards a very literal imitation of Jesus working at Nazareth. He therefore set out on his quest in the self-chosen abasement of an all-but- penniless vagabond. From then on, he was to lead, first, the life of a domestic servant in Nazareth, devoting every hour he could spare from his chores to adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
Gide and the Epistle to the Romans
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Most of you will have seen, several years ago, André Labarthe’s film entitled La Vie commence demain, a film which speculated in quite a fascinating way on the future of the human race by seeing it through the eyes of certain great Frenchmen. A perhaps excessively ingenuous young man, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, puts questions to them, and their answers and what they are doing when he visits them reveal the way the world is supposed to be developing. The biological future is represented by some rather grisly experiments with a young calf in a rubber bath, carried out by Jean Rostand; the architectural future by Le Corbusier and his city of the sun; the future of the fine arts by Picasso sketching or making one of his plates complete with basso-rilievo knife, fork and sausages. One of these plates sent as a present via the ingenuous young man is the introduction to the next personage, who is demonstrating one of the possibilities of human speech in the future by handling a tape-recorder. To show the virtues of the instrument, its owner—this is, of course, André Gide—switches it on, and we hear his voice coming from it. And as it speaks, and develops a brief theme—what theme it is, matters very little—Gide’s face broadens with pleasure, with enormous satisfaction.
A Policy for Wages?
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

The publication of Mr B. C. Roberts’s book on wages policy has revived academic interest in this subject, though there has never been any real possibility of a wages policy on the lines of those adopted in some other European countries, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, being accepted here. In these countries, the main responsibility for fixing wage rates has been given to a central body in the hope that this procedure would help to stabilize both wages and prices, thereby bringing the inflationary spiral to an end. As a secondary aim, it was hoped that centralized wage fixing would bring about a more equitable and rational wages structure than would free collective bargaining. In this country, though we have been faced with the same kind of economic problem, the trade unions have preferred to retain their traditional independence and freedom in collective bargaining.

The argument that a centralized wages policy will check inflation rests upon two assumptions: first, that rising money wages are a cause of inflation, and secondly, that centralized wage fixing will in fact lead to a stabilizing of wage rates and labour costs. The Cohen Report showed that personal incomes in this country, in which wages and salaries are the biggest item, have risen more rapidly than output since the war. Between 1946 and 1956, production rose on average by three per cent a year and the wage and salary bill by eight per cent a year. This, however, is not proof that wage increases have been the principal cause of rising prices, or that the wage increases have been the result of irresponsible demands by trade unions.
Anglicanism and the Papacy
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Work for Christian unity must, of course, envisage the removal of what are called the non-theological factors, obstacles of divergence of ethos, outlook and idiom of thought, which separate Christians and Christian allegiances. These seem to bulk larger in the minds of many ecumenists than the primary and basic obstacles which are purely theological. Dr Mascall’s book wisely sets out to make theology the foundation of his approach to the problem of unity, and Christians of every allegiance, Catholics not least among them, have cause to be grateful for almost all of this ably written contribution to the solving of that problem. His work has been done with the learning and charity we should expect of him, and apart from one important section of it, the two chapters on the Papacy which we shall comment on later in this article, will prove of undiluted value in promoting the ecumenical dialogue.

The distinctive mark of Dr Mascall’s approach is a typically Anglican one; it is characteristic, as he points out, of the central theme of the Report Catholicity, namely the necessity of getting back behind the Reformation and the middle ages if the wholeness of the Catholic tradition is to be recovered. Much of what he says on this subject, in his chapters on Clearing the Ground, Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter, The Rediscovery of Liturgy, and The Church and the Ministry, will gain the cordial assent, exceptis excipiendis, of the majority of Catholic theologians, whether their particular interest is ecumenical or not.
Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

‘While I, brought up to scoff rather than blessAnd to say No, unless the facts requireA neutral verdict, for this once say Yes.’(Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel.)

When the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia in 1401, they erected a triumphal monument with the skulls of the hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad who had not defended themselves.’ This quotation from Spengler begins Jacques Soustelle’s defence of French right-wing policy in Algeria (Le drame algérien et la décadence française. Réponse à Raymond Aron. Plon, 1957). The pamphlet might well have served the French left as a warning of how far Soustelle and his fellows were likely to go in defending their point of view. There is no such thing, proclaimed Soustelle—with some show of justification—as historical necessity, any more than there is such a thing as the inevitability of progress. There is no reason at all why we should believe in the ultimate triumph of Arab nationalism, of Pan-Arabism. A similar surrender to a feeling of inevitability in 732 would have stayed the hand of Charles Martel against the Moors, and in 1940 would have prevented de Gaulle from rallying the forces of Free France. There is no need to abdicate any position.

The historical references are a feature of Soustelle’s thinking which illustrate the fact that the revolt of May 13 was not entirely a question of Professors versus Colonels. Certainly in the case of Maurice Audin there is much more than a suspicion that the French army was willing to go to extreme lengths to silence intellectual opposition; but the civilian who espoused the army’s cause is himself an ex-academic of considerable ability who was, in addition, one of the first to join de Gaulle in 1940.
Two Cathedrals
Authors: Luff S. G. A.
Published: July 2007

Refuge for Huysmans, inspiration for Péguy, Chartres has a secret allure which escapes analysis in terms of art or religion. The psychology of architecture, once sufficiently articulate, betrays the same elusive charm which graces men in the major changes of life, the succession of bewilderment and mastery in adolescence, the éclat of a James Dean or the universal teddy-boy catching the imagination of a decade aware of its crossroads. I looked therefore at Chartres with a questing eye— would I be caught? should I resist? could I diagnose?

Chartres is not, at least in the factors which combine to achieve its rare effect, the work of one artist. Excluding the crypt, alterations, and some superimposed decorations, its creation spans three centuries, from the last signs of classical souvenirs in certain motifs of the west facade, to the realization, but not the fulness, of the gothic plan in its corona. The charm lies in a certain awareness of opposites bursting one from another with the improbability of butterfly from chrysalis, an inclination of the masculine in its romanesque to flirt with the feminine in its gothic, of the earthbound yet mystic in the one to consort with the poetic yet mathematical in the other, liaison without lust, personality hovering between sexes, like a poet’s perception and gentleness which does not disgrace his manhood.

Once the romanesque artist had conceived the corona—the ensemble of apse, ambulatory, and radiating chapels—the sensibility of the building raced there, as that of a man concentrates on one fine experience, or as features express a deep emotion.
Fine, Dull, Beautiful
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing is an unfinished note, made during a retreat in Dublin, on the wedding feast at Cana: ‘There has been no stint, but there has been an unwise order in the serving’. It might stand, Father Devlin suggests, ‘for posterity’s estimate of him as well as the steward’s of the wine’. For that matter it might stand for the two volumes that now complete the gathering together of all the fragments of Hopkins’s writing. Rarely can a poet’s papers have been edited with such care, and at first one wonders at the industry that has been devoted to editing material which is often trivial and even tedious. Simply as an editorial achievement, the work of the late Humphry House (completed by Mr Graham Storey) and of Father Devlin will surely remain of classic importance. Here, exactly ordered and sympathetically annotated, is all the detailed record that remains of Hopkins’s curiosity about words or weather (‘Sept. 17. Dull. Sept. 18. Cold. Sept. 19. Dull, I think.’), of doubts and decisions (usually cryptically indicated), with often penetrating glimpses at the world that was his— Oxford, holiday journeys, Jesuit houses. Unfair, then, to say that much in both these books is unimportant. In themselves the diary entries and the retreat notes, the undergraduate essays and the sermons, are hardly likely to earn for Hopkins a new fame. There is little that distinguishes much of them from the papers of any scholarly priest of his period—and there were many—who had lived in Oxford during the years after Newman’s conversion and who shared the taste of the time for botany, country walks, music and ecclesiology.
The Social Mission of the Church in South Africa
Authors: Hurley Denis E.
Published: July 2007

Some day no doubt an attempt will be made to probe the roots of the
colour bar in the psychology of certain European nations. The colour bar did
not originate in South Africa. It came with Dutch and British colonists. But
it found a vigorous stimulant to its growth in the formidable challenge of
that very thing, the black skin, in the dread of which it consists. It has
been suggested that the list of capital sins needs amplification, for it
contains no reference to one of humanity’s worst failings, the tendency to
restrict the scope of the connatural love of the species to a particular
community constituted by language, lineage, race, religion, politics,
economic interest or colour. In our days, colour is one of the most fiercely
sundering of these restrictive elements.

Colour dominates the South African social scene. It would be a mistake,
however, to simplify the picture and put all the blame for the country’s
ills on White oppressors. There can be no denying their guilt, but we need
not add to it by making them responsible for all the tensions that have
resulted from the meeting of Western sophistication and African
backwardness. White colonizers have probably made all the mistakes in the
book; but even without colonial conquest there would have been conflict
a-plenty arising from the impact of Western dynamism on the social
stagnation of Africa.
The Balance of Justice
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: July 2007

Theories of punishment arc sometimes divided into retributive theories, deterrent theories, and remedial theories. The remedial theories frequently take the form of denying that there is any such thing as a just punishment: the task of society is to cure its criminals, not to punish them. In this paper I shall take it for granted that there are some punishments which are just: hence I shall not be concerned with remedial theories in the sense indicated. Retributive and deterrent theories have as common ground the assertion that punishment may be justly inflicted; they differ in their explanation of what constitutes the justice of a just punishment.

The retributive theory of punishment is very difficult to state accurately. Indeed, I shall be concerned to argue that it is impossible to state it coherently: but this must be the result, and not the premiss, of our investigation. I shall begin, therefore, by stating the theory as baldly as possible, and then go on to consider the defects of the theory so stated with a view to discovering whether they can be refined away.

To avert misunderstanding, I should remark that there can be no objection to saying that a person who is justly punished for a crime has met with just retribution. The question at issue is whether the notion of ‘just punishment’ is to be explained by means of the notion of ‘retribution’ or vice versa. According to the retributive theory of punishment which I wish to criticize, ‘retribution’ is not a synonym for ‘punishment’ (or a genus of which reward and punishment are species), but rather a quite independent concept which serves as an explanation of the justice of a just punishment.
Paul Tillich and St Thomas
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The theological writings of Professor Tillich deserve the attention of students of St Thomas, both for their positive

content, which is of the highest interest, and because on fundamental matters they explicitly and sharply join issue with Thomism. They invite the presumption of a certain common ground, certain affinities, and at the same time throw out a challenge which we cannot ignore.

To read these works, especially the great Systematic Theology (1951), is to encounter a powerful and original personality, a mind organized to an uncommon degree around a single centre. Tillich’s peculiar gift is for synthesis; a constructive thinker with a very wide range of interests, he is always striving to correlate and organize these on the basis of a singularly vivid intuition of being in general, the primary datum of the mind, which for him—as for St Thomas—represents the mind’s first opening onto reality as a whole, as both containing and transcending human nature. It is this consciously ontological character of Tillich’s thinking that seems to distinguish him among contemporary Protestant theologians; as J. H. Randall observes, he ‘stands in the classic tradition of Western philosophy’, in the tradition, derived from the Greeks, of speculative concern with being itself and wisdom. Let us stress this ‘concern’. ‘Ultimate concern’ is Tillich’s definition of religion, and by ‘ultimate’ he means ‘that which determines our being or non- being’. Man for him is the being who ‘asks the question of being’, and since God is ‘the answer implied in the question of being’, theology is essentially a searching into the same question.
The Social Problems of the ‘Sixties
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

There would be fairly general agreement among those who can remember earlier days that Catholic interest in ‘the social question’ has declined. It is not difficult to find the reason for this present lack of interest, for ‘the social question’ no longer exists in the form it did a generation or two generations ago. The development of industrialization in this country, as in many others, brought with it the growth of a wage-earning proletariat; and for many the wage which was their sole source of income was insufficient to provide them with the requirements of a decent life. Even at the outbreak of war in 1939, our social order was marred by the effects of low wages and unemployment, the twin evils produced by the low level of economic activity. Thus in 1936, Rowntree’s survey of York showed that something like one-third of the working-class population of that city was living in poverty, and that the major cause of such poverty was unemployment and low wages.

Today the position is very different. In a more recent survey, it was shown that now only three per cent of the working class population of York is living below the poverty line, and that virtually none of this remaining poverty is the result of either unemployment or low wages. If we look at the level of unemployment, the comparison with the years even just before the war is startling. The Government White Paper on Employment Policy published in 1944 was still thinking in terms of an average level of unemployment of eight per cent, and this was the figure used for actuarial calculations in connection with the National Insurance Scheme.
The Innocent Audacity
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

If one did not know their context, it would be easy to mistake many of the mystical poems of St John of the Cross for the most passionate declarations of profane love. Influenced in content and imagery by the Song of Songs, and in form and rhythm both by sixteenth-century Spanish court poetry and by traditional folk verse, the poems assimilate several traditions, several attitudes. In one of St John’s songs between the soul and the Bridegroom, the Bride cries,

‘My Love’s the mountain range,

The valleys each with solitary grove,

The islands far and strange,

The streams with sounds that change,

The whistling of the lovesick winds that rove.

Deep-cellared in the cavern

Of my love’s heart, I drank of him alive:

Now, stumbling from the tavern,

No thoughts of mine survive,

And I have lost the flock I used to drive.’

If the reader did not know St John’s own commentaries on his Spiritual Canticle, it would not be difficult to assign such verse as this to the plane of physical love. The poem shocks because it is soTHE INNOCENT AUDACITY intimate. This is as true of the original Spanish as of the English translation; the problems involved in conveying, without loss, the extraordinary intensity of the original poems into another quite different language are well stated by the American poet John Frederick Nims, who has himself recently produced a very vivid rendering of St John’s poems: ‘My venture’, he says, ‘the windmill I am tilting at,
German and Austrian Opinion
Authors: Steiner W. A.
Published: July 2007

The Second Council of the Vatican continues to exercise religious opinion in Germany and Austria. The Herder-Korrespondenz, vol. 15, No. 2, Nov. 1960, pp. 80-83 gives a survey under the title Vorschau auf das ökumenische Konzil. People expect great things of it, but there is a note of anxiety lest it be too timid and miss some of its opportunities.

The dominant event of 1960 in Germany was the Eucharistic World Congress in Munich. A very full report is contained in the Herder-Korrespondenz, vol. 15, No. 1, Oct. 1960, pp. 7-34. Details are given of its programme, meaning, the sermons preached, its liturgical shape, and details of the help given by the Evangelical Christians in particular with accommodation. It was noted that the Archbishop of Paderbom stayed with the Evangelical bishop of Bavaria, and that several Spanish priests stayed with pastors’ families. No. 2, Nov. 60, reports on pp. 91-94 Evangelical reactions to the Congress. These were in many cases appreciative, but doubts were expressed about the spiritual value of mass events, requiring enormous organization.

During the Congress, a Una Sancta Feier was held in Munich, i.e. a meeting between Catholic and Evangelical theologians. The leading address was given by Otto Karrer, the well-known advocate of Christian unity. He explained certain doctrines concerning the Eucharist to which Protestants object particularly strongly and showed that Luther and Calvin were perhaps closer to the Catholic position than is generally realized.

Of articles concerning the Orthodox Church, we may mention a note in the Herder-Korrespondenz, vol. 15, No. 3, Dec. 1960 on pp. 115-117 on the possible reasons for postponement by one year of the proposed pan-orthodox conference in Rhodes.
The African Scene
Authors: Foster Paul
Published: July 2007

In speaking of the present state of Africa it will be necessary to limit oneself severely by designating the areas about which information is fairly reliable. In the case of the present writer, these areas are the Sudan, the Belgian Congo, the Rhodesias, East and South Africa.

All these are, at the time of writing, territories which present a bewildering picture. One exception within the general framework is Tanganyika, where the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), under the leadership of Mr Julius Nyerere, has achieved at least the appearance of stability and gives some promise of steady development. In Tanganyika there is something, or perhaps one should say someone, to work for, as Mr Nyerere is ‘the necessary man.’ His prestige, integrity and ability combine to give him a unique position in to-day’s Africa, and he provides a rallying-point for the one hundred and forty African tribes of his country and a head of government whom Europeans and Asians can support with a fairly clear conscience. The indications are, on the other hand, that he alone stands between Tanganyika and chaos. There is no one to replace him should any untoward event remove him from the scene.

The Sudan is also overtly peaceful, but this is far more illusory, since the Muslim Military Government is pursuing a policy of ruthless suppression. Many of the former M.Ps. are in prison, including at least one priest, and these prisoners are the representatives of the Southern Sudan, a territory entirely different in race,
Lines of Grace
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Outside St Paul and the Acts the term charis—whence our ‘grace’—is rather rare in the New Testament, but the idea, as Dr Ryder Smith has said, ‘is everywhere.’ Common alike in secular Greek and the Septuagint, charis was a wonderfully apt term for Christian uses. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew chen, meaning favour or goodwill freely bestowed and presupposing the idea of love and of a love active and generous. Again charis, as derived from chairein, ‘to be glad,’ carried a sense of joy—-joy on both sides for the gift bestowed, both in the giver and in the receiver, or more precisely in the relation arising between the two as a result of the gift. Thus it could denote a state of being in communion or fellowship, and in the New Testament (especially in St Paul, but cf. John i, 14-16) it became the chief term signifying the specifically Christian situation of being loved by God, in Christ, and of returning this love, in Christ—or simply of being ‘in Christ.’ Certainly the Church was fortunate in having to hand a word so flexible and beautiful.

Around charis gathered the other Christian words, faith, love, peace, etc., as well as, in St Paul particularly, the contrast-term ‘law’ and the term for grace’s antagonist, ‘sin’. In time these words came to be defined more precisely, and as each one became more precise all the rest were affected too. The Church could not understand ‘love’ or ‘faith’ except in the context of grace, and in particular, and more quickly, she found she could not understand grace except in relation to sin and vice versa.
The use of key‐words in the novels of Graham Greene—: Love, Hate and ‘The End of the Affair’
Authors: Lodge David
Published: July 2007

‘Every creative writer worth our consideration.......is a victim: a man given over to an obsession’, wrote Graham Greene in an essay on Walter de la Mare. Critics have not been slow in applying this statement to Mr Greene himself. He has been considered almost exclusively in terms of a few recurring obsessions: the vision of evil; the concept, borrowed from Peguy, of the sinner at the heart of Christianity; the theme of pursuit, and so on.

This critical approach has contributed much that is valuable to the study of his work. Unfortunately it has, by obscuring its variousness, inadvertently supplied ammunition to those critics who like to dismiss him as a mere manipulator of rigid and repetitive formulae. We can, for instance label both The Confidential Agent and The Power and The Glory as ‘Pursuit’ novels. But this does not take us very far. Apart from the fact that The Confidential Agent is an ‘Entertainment’, and The Power and The Glory a ‘Novel,’ the two books are of course entirely different. To determine the identity of each we must probe deeper than the obsessive symbol of pursuit, to the obsessive word. The key-word in The Confidential Agent is ‘trust’, presented mainly in its negative aspect as ‘mistrust’ or ‘distrust’. These three words occur at least sixteen times in The Confidential Agent. The irony of its title is therefore clear: the hero is a confidential agent who has confidence in nobody, and in whom nobody has confidence.
A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra concerning Giants
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

At a moment when all the discordant voices of modern society attempt to exorcize the vertigo of man with scientific clichés or prophetic curses I come to share with you reflections that are neither tragic nor, I hope, fatuous. They are simply the thoughts of one civilized man to another, dictated by a spirit of sobriety and concern, and with no pretensions to exorcize anything. The vertigo of the twentieth century needs no permission of yours or mine to continue. The tornado has not consulted any of us, and will not do so. This does not mean that we are helpless. It only means that our salvation lies in understanding our exact position, not in flattering ourselves that we have brought the whirlwind into being by ourselves, or that we can calm it with a wave of the hand.

It is certainly true that the storm of history has arisen out of our own hearts. It has sprung unbidden out of the emptiness of technological man. It is the genii he has summoned out of the depths of his own confusion, this complacent sorcerer’s apprentice who spends billions on weapons of destruction and space rockets when he cannot provide decent meals, shelter and clothing for two thirds of the human race. Is it improper to doubt the intelligence and sincerity of modern man? I know it is not accepted as a sign of progressive thinking to question the enlightenment of the twentieth century barbarian.
North American
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

That most expensive of all museum requisitions—Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’—is in its way an authentic symbol of American culture, and that not merely because of the cash it cost. The picture, with its grave evocation of one generation contemplating another, of one genius paying homage to a predecessor, sums up the seriousness of American interest in the arts—a seriousness, however, which is constantly in need of reassurance. It is not enough to respond to the beauty of a painting or of a symphony: they have their public place, their established share by this in the American image, and they should be made to appear so.

Nowhere in the world are there such temples set up to the glory of the arts, and new and exciting projects, such as the Lincoln Centre in New York, will give fresh and overwhelming evidence of how much Americans care for their heritage, which is no longer simply the possession of old masters or the establishment of superb orchestras and opera. Art is to be used, and the lending services attached to every gallery as well as the huge popular response to concerts, not only in Philadelphia and New York, but in Cleveland, Minneapolis and many places besides, are proof of a genuine and generous interest.
An Analysis of Newspeak
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The recent publication of his Collected Essays has renewed interest in Orwell’s position as a writer, and especially in his attitude to the artist’s commitments in the world. The writer’s problem, in a time of conflict, according to Orwell, was that ‘one half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature’. For Raymond Williams (e.g. in The Observer, May 21 1961) this separation, while understandable, is not necessary: ‘it is part of the dissociation between the individual and society which is our deepest crisis’. Elsewhere he points out that any defence of liberty by an exile, as Orwell chose to be, standing apart from society, is bound to be ambiguous because ‘while the rights in question may be called individual, the condition of their guarantee is inevitably social... to belong to a community is to be part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define its disciplines’. While I agree with this view, I want to argue in this article that the source of Orwell’s dilemma, and indeed of the dissociation in general, has an important but hitherto undiscussed, philosophical aspect—to put it crudely, Cartesian dualism—which manifests itself in Orwell’s treatment of two related problems: the problem of language and the problem of orthodoxy.
Family Planning in India
Authors: Floris George
Published: July 2007

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, has given free hand to the Indian ruling classes in their campaign against the Indian babies. Under the unofficial, yet distinctly recognizable, leadership of Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, wife of India’s prominent banker and diplomat, the male and female representatives of wealth and high society gather around the banner of ‘The Family Planning Association’. With official blessings they hold meetings and distribute their propaganda with the avowed purpose of pressing for more drastic measures against over-population.

Progress has been made during the last ten years; from moderate beginnings with the advocacy of the ‘safe period’, the Association and the Health Ministry went on to endorse artificial contraceptives and sterilization, so that today there is a growing demand for legalized abortion. No Tibetan crisis or Chinese threat is capable of turning these people’s minds from their single goal—the decimation of future Indian generations.

Justification is provided by the humanitarian and patriotic motives that inspire their relentless struggles against the natural expansion of the race. Arguments are invoked about world peace, which is to be promoted by their efforts; others claim that population limitation is vindicated on religious grounds because it prevents millions of souls ‘cascading into perdition’.

For many it has already become a way of life, and an end in itself that no longer requires any theoretical or practical justification. As one of the ladies at a recent meeting of the Family Planning Association summed it up: ‘We are on the lookout for children everywhere. Where there are children there must be parents.
Saint Augustine and the Just War
Authors: Windass Stanley
Published: July 2007

It is normal today to defend the right of one state to make war against another by comparing a war against aggression with a private individual’s exercise of his right of self-defence. If I have a right to live, it seems that I must have a right to protect my life against violent and unjust attack; it is probable that in order effectively to protect myself I may have to use violence, even such as to cause the death of the aggressor in a case of extreme necessity. If an individual can do this, then clearly an organized group can do the same, and this implies the use of an army by a state. Such an army would be used as an individual uses his fists or his sword or his gun in a lawless land; it would be used to protect the life of the country in an internationally lawless world.

Such is the commonsense approach to the justification of war today; and such, if we make allowances for the lack of theological refinement, is the current Catholic view of the just war. It depends for its cogency on an extension of the rights of the individual to the rights of the state.

It may cause some surprise, therefore, to those who regard Saint Augustine as the main source of the just war tradition to find that not only is such a line of reasoning absent from his writings, but that it is in fact directly contrary to his teaching.

In his treatise on Freewill, he states clearly that an individual has no moral right to kill an assailant in defence of life, liberty or honour. A law permitting such killing may well be objectively reasonable, since it permits the lesser of two evils; it is a lesser evil for a robber to be killed than for a good man to be killed.
Kokoschka
Authors: Reyntiens Patrick
Published: July 2007

Kokoschka is one of the few great modem painters that the art-publishing trade has not preconditioned our minds to. The usual jading influence of a torrent of monographs so bamboozles the mind that, by the time one gets to the pictures, an assessment is the last thing the mind is capable of or inclined to do. The reason for his escape from this kind of attention is, I suspect, because Kokoschka has nothing in common with the art movement that nearly monopolizes our attention, the school of Paris; he is outside the tradition of Paris, owing nothing to the discoveries of the early years of this century there. His unique personality is so secure in its own conviction that far from being in need of lateral help from a ‘school’ he defies any categorization at all. He cuts across any attempt to label him. The question of style which is so central to any evaluation of modem art is brushed aside with protean energy, and it is this unexpected impatience that is the most disturbing and individual quality of the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

However extreme and exuberant the artists of the school of Paris were, they possessed that precise instinct for balance and interval in drawing and painting, that instinct for measure that enables even their more unconsidered pictures to retain an authority because of it. Kokoschka’s balance in drawing and painting is imprecise; not only the more obvious lack of it in the paintings but the subtle lack of it in the drawings, gnaws away at our confidence, however attracted we are by the verve and vitality which almost persuade us that the qualities we miss are not central to the problem of all art. In Kokoschka’s painting the intuition seems to have been given full scope and a decisive divorce from any idea of intellectual clarity. One might think here is the ultimate ideal of what the romantic artist aspires to be—always protean, verging on the inchoate, with more than a dash of madness.
Desmond Chute, 1895–1962
Authors: Shewring Walter
Published: July 2007

Stanley Spencer has left it on record how in 1916, among the miseries and the friendlessness of a military hospital in Bristol, he was suddenly aware of someone who, ‘like a Christ visiting Hell’, came walking down a stone passage towards him: ‘a young intellectual named Chute’. In April 1940, a few months before his own death, Eric Gill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘of Father Desmond I shall say little because my love for him is too intimate, too much a matter of daily companionship and discussion and argument, too close a sharing of life and work and ideas and doubts and difficulties - the only man and therefore the only priest with whom I have been able to talk without shame and without reserve.’ Ezra Pound, no blind admirer of the clergy, was present at Father Desmond’s funeral. It falls to me to offer some coherent account of this remarkable man, perhaps the most widely gifted of all English priests of his own time, yet one who through accidents of circumstance remained comparatively unknown. It is easy to gather recollections of him; it is hard now to convey to a younger generation the things he stood for.

He was born at Bristol on September 11,1895, a collateral descendant of William Charles Macready, the Shakespearian actor whose surname was his own second name; his family had kept links with the stage, and still owned the Prince’s Theatre at Bristol. In 1906 he went to Down- side; brilliant from the first, a classical pupil of Nevile Watts and later Head of the School, he might well have become a scholar of Balliol or of King’s, and this would have pleased both his parents; but in 1912 he chose instead to enter the Slade.
The Evil of Men and the Evil of Nations
Authors: Windass Stanley
Published: July 2007

It is a fairly commonplace observation that the morals of groups fall far short of the morals of individuals—far short, even, of the ‘average’ morality of the individuals who compose the groups. The selfishness of nations is proverbial; it was a saying of George Washington’s that no nation is to be trusted beyond its own interests, and this saying has gained wide currency as an expression of political wisdom. The arrogance of powerful nations is as familiar to students of history as their selfishness. The late Professor Dicey, writing before the fear of world cataclysm had begun to darken men’s minds, advanced the theory that wherever British interests were at stake, these were to be advanced even at the cost of war—a theory that could be accepted as a reasonable political attitude, whereas if it were to be translated into personal terms, it would arouse the horror of any civilized person; for who in any circles would dare to assert that he was in favour of always advancing his own interests, however many murders he committed on the way?

Why should there be such a gulf between the moral behaviour of individuals towards each other, and the moral behaviour of groups towards each other? For make no mistake about it, this is not a question that concerns only the nation-group. Wherever recognizable social groups face each other, with or without political organization, we may expect scant justice, and less charity, in their mutual relations. There is no need, alas, to go into the world of profit-making industry to verify this fact; we have only to consider the attitudes of different religious groups towards each other—even the attitudes of different religious orders within the same Christian Church; the fact that these groups are composed of men and women individually dedicated to service of the same God seems to do litde to mitigate the conflicts arising from the selfishness and arrogance which everywhere accompany the behaviour of humanity ‘in the gang’.
The Existentialism of Dostoievski
Authors: Novak Michael
Published: July 2007

Albert Camus declared in the preface to his last work that Dostoievski was the teacher of his youth, that The Possessed was one of the four or five books most influential in his life. Dostoievski, so influential upon us in his own works and through great men like Camus, liked to maintain that he had a faith that had been tried by fire, that had gone down into the abysses, and had risen up again. He surely had an ardent love for Jesus Christ: perhaps no one has ever written of Christ with words of more intense beauty. Yet Dostoievsky's faith is no clear call to unity; it is as scattered and dispersed as are men’s consciences today. Nonbelievers claim him equally with believers. Orthodox and Protestant spirits hail him as their own, and point to his rather virulent anti- Romanism. Guardini observes that Dostoievski hardly knew Rome, and finds that Dostoievsky's themes expose the profound depths of the Roman faith. William Hamilton writes of Dostoievski’s hesitant faith as an image of our own—the faith of Ivan Karamazov who cannot accept at once both God and his creation. What are we to think? Is Dostoievsky’s faith Christian or is it not? How far can we identify ourselves with it? The question has repercussions upon our relationship to the existentialist and rationalist currents in our modern world.

Part of the problem in understanding Dostoievski is due to the difference of his times from our own, and part of it is due to the qualities of his religious vision. Dostoievski—and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard— wrote in and for a complacent nineteenth century. Their protest against scientism and hypocrisy was urgent, passionate—and unavailing. They knew what underrode the surface of that smug age, they knew what could erupt: screaming voices, marching boots, crunching tanks, and bombs, and wire fences.