bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ortega and Christian Humanism
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

Religion as a perspective intensifies life and enhances it from within more efficaciously than any other (objectively speaking; subjectively and in practice there may be any number of gradations possible in this). But is it to the exclusion of every other perspective? Does the religious perspective, once adopted or taken up, or, to allow for a more passive process, slid into, impose the renunciation of every other? This is the much discussed question of Christian humanism, the eschatological question that claims to dominate every other, the question of the precise significance of asceticism in the Christian life. Christian tradition in all this has been complicated by the fact that at different epochs there has appeared an extremism which has made it difficult to focus the question with a calm judgment. There seems to be a contradiction between the Gospel and History. Christ speaks of the Cross and of abnegation, even of total abnegation, but he leaves no room for doubt that he proposes to all men the specifically new relationship with the Father which he came to implant in humanity, nor that he reserves for the stronger souls a more intense religious cultivation: this means that ordinary human life is to be taken up into that new relationship and that the intenser cultivation of religion is neither the norm nor intended to supplant ordinary human living. The evangelical teaching gathered up and handed on by St Paul, in the same way, leaves no room for any out-and-out rejection of the ‘world’.
Latin American
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

As you approach Buenos Aires, sailing slowly through the dredged channel of the vast brown River Plate, you are aware of a skyline that is exceedingly strange. It is not just the fact of the towering skyscrapers. This is America, and north and south alike seem committed to this monolithic invasion of the sky. What is extraordinary is that you can see through so many of these blocks of stone: the blue that fills the window-spaces is innocent air. It is bomb-damage in reverse, or even, you may think, in anticipation. Later you will be reassured. Here, it appears, building goes on as long as the money lasts, and work can be suspended for years at a time. (In a suburb one saw a completed ferro-concrete steeple, improbably balanced on the bare skeleton of a church yet to be built.)

Building is a South American disease, or, more accurately, it is the symptom of a disease. In Argentina, as in Brazil, the fantastic growth of the cities has gravely disturbed the national equilibrium. Buenos Aires, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, has a population of four million, and including the province of the same name, accounts for half the total for the whole republic. Even though Argentina were far more developed industrially than she is (and the facts of nature have determined the primary role of the country as one of the greatest food-producing areas of the world), so disproportionate a head for such a body induces a sort of vertigo whose effects are immediately seen.
New Bearings in the ‘Catholic’ Novel
Authors: Gregor Ian
Published: July 2007

This is an important book. For beginning with this ejaculation from the litany of ‘blurb’ writers I have a reason; it is to underline at the outset the fact that whatever disagreements one may have with Mr O’Donnell, his book marks the first serious and detailed attempt to consider the issues raised by the remarkable group of contemporary novels which have been written by Catholics. One avoids, carefully, labelling the group, although it is clear they possess a certain unity. Maria Cross (the title is named after a Mauriac character) in offering the first account of this aspect of contemporary fiction raises the fundamental questions: what is the relationship between ‘belief’ and fiction; in what way does ‘belief’ modify and colour the sensibility of an individual writer; is it possible for the Catholic novelist to take over Maritain’s dictum, namely to have compassionate understanding of the sinner without collusion with the sin? The general impression that Mr O’Donnell’s book leaves is that he sides with Newman rather than Maritain, for whom literature was ‘the Life and Remains of Natural Man, innocent or guilty’. I say ‘general impression’ advisedly because Mr O’Donnell works for the major part of his book in terms of particular novels and novelists, and consequently such generalized dicta never become explicit. There is no affinity in approach between Maria Cross and Art and Scholasticism.
Television and Opinion
Authors: Gorham Maurice
Published: July 2007

Television is the best medium yet discovered for selling goods. That is the opinion of practical men in the United States, the home of commercial television, and it can be backed up by an array of facts and figures showing how the enormous sums of money spent on television advertising justify themselves in the eyes of those whose business it is to sell mass-produced goods.

The same factors that enable television to sell goods enables it also to sell ideas, provided that, like the goods, they are suitable for a mass public. Television is probably not the best medium for spreading original ideas, any more than it is the best medium for selling first editions or vintage port or thoroughbred sires or any other commodity that can be bought only by the few. But for the sort of vague general ideas that make up most people’s everyday thinking, for the habits of thought and standards of value that influence the ordinary man’s life, television has advantages over and above the other forms of mass-communication—print, cinema, radio—and it has access to people who are rarely touched by the still older influence of platform, stage, and pulpit.

Not so long ago, most people in civilized countries viewed the world through the medium of the popular newspaper and the cheap book. Later, this medium was largely displaced by the radio and the films. Now television is showing its power to replace them all as the universal oracle, the social law-giver, the norm-setter, the mirror in which you can see life as it ought to be and as you come to think it is.
Religion and Television
Authors: Andrew Agnellus
Published: July 2007

During the past year, the B.B.C. has broadcast about fifty religious television programmes. Of these, twelve were major ‘outside broadcasts’ from churches, and the rest were from the studio. Catholics contributed six programmes: Pontifical High Mass from Leeds Cathedral; the Easter Vigil from Clifton Cathedral; Evening Service with Benediction from St James’, Spanish Place; the Westminster Passion Play Behold the Man and Talks from the studio by Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mr Frank Sheed. Before last year we had contributed Solemn Mass from St Denis, Paris, and some half-a-dozen other programmes, including an Evening Service from St Chad’s, Birmingham, Stations of the Cross, the Christmas Crib and an illustrated Talk. All these broadcasts have been largely experimental. Comments and the reaction of viewers have been most carefully observed, and we are by no means yet clear in our minds as to the best way in which Television can serve the Catholic Apostolate.

B.B.C. policy in religious television is identical with that in sound broadcasting which has been publicly stated more than once. Perhaps the clearest statement was made by the then Director General, Sir William Haley, in a speech to the British Council of Churches in November 1948. Dealing with the question whether the B.B.C. was neutral where Christian values were concerned, he said: ‘Of course it is not. There are many demands of impartiality laid upon the Corporation, but this is not one of them. We are citizens of a Christian country, and the B.B.C.— an institution set up by the State—bases its policy upon a positive attitude towards the Christian values.
Films and Television
Authors: Burke J. A. V.
Published: July 2007

The publicists for television like to regard the medium as a threat to films, and though the film-makers—or, rather, the distributors—pretend that it is, the connection between the two forms of visual presentation is so close that it is impossible to separate them as completely as either of their advocates would, apparently, like.

For a long time to come television programmes are going to have to depend on some kind of film presentation. There are a large number of newly-formed companies whose sole purpose is to make films for television consumption. Those so far viewed by the critics do not inspire confidence that any significant advance in the art of cinema need be expected. They are patently made as time-fillers and reflect the current lack of policy and sense of ill-at-ease to be seen among the producers of television programmes in this country.

It should have dawned by now upon the minds of both sellers and buyers of television programmes, that whatever the actual merits or demerits of films or telecasts at the present moment, ultimately they will have to differ considerably from each other and also, ultimately, they will have to be good of their kind if the customers are to be expected to continue their patronage of either kind of diversion.

It is interesting to note that, despite the frantic efforts of the film-world to try out various forms of wide-screen and panoramic and three-dimensional films during the past year in order to provide a counter-attraction to television, the films so far shown nave not been highly rated by the critics.
Television and the Catholic World
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Unda is not the latest of the initial-words that reflect the multitude of international organizations that have come into being to serve the hopes and fears of the post-war world. It is simply the Latin word for ‘wave’ and is the convenient name for the co-ordinating body for Catholic radio and television throughout the world, with its headquarters at Fribourg in Switzerland. Last February, the television section of unda organized the first international Conference for Catholic television in Paris. It was attended by representatives from most western European countries, as well as Canada, the United States and Cuba, together with observers from UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

In a first gathering, with terms of reference so necessarily wide, the work of the Conference was largely exploratory, but it was soon evident that in many countries the potentialities of so powerful a medium of mass communication as television were already acutely realized by the Church. Indeed the Conference was prefaced by the ordinary Sunday morning religious programme from the French television studios, and the delegates were able to see for themselves how the French Dominicans (to whose charge the programme has been committed) have met the demand for Catholic worship and instruction through the new medium. It was a touching detail that the infant son of the producer of religious television features should have been baptized in the studio before the Mass began—perhaps a symbol of how actual is the inspiration of French religious television, now in its sixth year of active production.
Trade Unions and Responsibility
Authors: O'Brien Tom
Published: July 2007

Pope Leo XIII, in his letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, said the condition of the working classes was the pressing question of the hour; that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade were concentrated in the hands of comparatively few individuals, so that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.’

In that same year there met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the twenty-fourth Annual meeting of the Trade Union Congress, over which presided a miner—a Mr T. Burt. That Congress represented a little more than 1,300,000 organized workers. Last year it was my great honour, at the Isle of Man, to preside over the eighty-fifth gathering of the T.U.C. representing over 8,000,000 trade unionists.

The British trade union movement knew only too well the truth of the Pope’s words. Had it not waged for many years before an incessant struggle against the evil social conditions produced by the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism?

When the first T.U.C. met in Manchester in 1868, 34 delegates attended, representing 118,000 members. Barely thirty-four years after George Lovelace, a farm labourer of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, and five of his colleagues, had been convicted before the High Court for ‘treason’—i.e. administering ‘an unlawful oath’ and endeavouring to form a branch of the farm workers’ union— and transported to Botany Bay in the infamous convict ships of the day. The beginnings of our trade unions are rooted in struggle, hatreds, victimization and oppression. They were outlawed as conspirators, deprived of the right to hold property, handicapped by Governments, and ruthlessly opposed by employers.
The Imperfections of Criticism
Authors: Sharrock Roger
Published: July 2007

One of the paradoxes of the modern literary situation is that we have more criticism than ever before, while this critical activity has not been accompanied by any corresponding clarification of artistic values or by the emergence of a distinct literary tradition. In poetry, for instance, there is a bewildering variety of individual voices as well as a diversity of what may be called group- or coterie-styles; of course poetry is written by poets and not by traditions, but our present variety does not result merely from the healthy abundance of individual talents; it comprises utterly different solutions to the same fundamental problems, as in the contrast between the deliberately pedantic nicety in the use of words of Mr Empson and his followers, where the single irony or ambiguity is everything, and the blurred use of epithets for their vague suggestiveness in the verse of Miss Edith Sitwell and Mr W. R. Rodgers. In earlier periods, as in our neo-classical age, such intense critical activity was often the prelude to the emergence of a poetic school with a common programme.

To turn to the critics themselves, their numbers, the authority they command, and the extreme sophistication of literary argument to which they have accustomed us, would suggest that we are entering upon an Alexandrian age. To remark this now strikes a respectably commonplace, almost a trite, note; but until comparatively recently it would have been quite impossible to think in this manner. Thirty-four years ago in The Sacred Wood Mr T. S. Eliot deplored the lack of trained second-order minds on the English literary scene (he was at pains to indicate that his use of the term ‘second-order’ was in no sense derogatory).
Elizabeth Inchbald
Authors: Hamnett Ian
Published: July 2007

Elizabeth Simpson was born at Standingfield in 1753. Her parents were Catholic gentry-yeomen of Suffolk, whose simple way of life did not satisfy Elizabeth’s ambitious spirit. Growing up to be intelligent and attractive, she also suffered from an impediment of speech, the desire to conquer which probably inspired her to seek a living in that profession least suited to a stammerer—the stage. Eventually, she ran away from home and arrived in London—‘that perilous town’, as she later described it, ‘which has received for centuries past . . . the bold adventurer of every denomination’. As a distinct adventuress she was attracted by the glamour of the metropolis, but she soon learned that there was a seamier side. It is surprising that so attractive, so innocent and so penniless a girl, always ready for a flirtation, should have survived these perilous weeks unscathed. However, she found security quite soon by marrying a provincial actor called Inchbald, also a Catholic, who died a few years later in 1779. She had already joined a travelling repertory company, and shared its never very prosperous fortunes, but unlike the rest of her female companions, she learned, observed and hoped. She had begun a novel; but in 1784 she had the great joy of seeing her first play accepted and produced with great success before a London audience. The hard years were over and Mrs Inchbald’s career had begun.

For the next two decades, hardly a year passed in which a new play by Mrs Inchbald was not performed.
Pius the Tenth
Authors: Flynn Thomas Edward
Published: July 2007

A Catholic always finds a papal audience a thrilling experience and we know how men and women of every race, colour, creed and social station have been moved by the charm, graciousness and penetrating holiness of the present Holy Father. But it was a unique event in the life of a young priest, whose professional studies had synchronized with the first half of the reign of Pope Pius X, to see and hear and kiss the hand of that holy Pontiff as I did in 1912. Even then he was commonly regarded as a saint, as we now know that he was; and to have been in such close contact with a beatified or canonized saint is in itself something to remember for a lifetime.

I can see him now as he entered the large hall where he greeted many hundreds of people. He gave an impression of great age, but still more of extreme weariness. The years of responsibility and of constant strife had taken their toll. No longer was there the splendid physique and optimistic outlook which we recognize in the portrait of the Bishop of Mantua of thirty years earlier. I remember most vividly the tone of his voice and the rather sad and appraising eyes with which he gazed on each of us in turn; his very slow progress round the room; and, as a final impression, his quite different appearance as one glanced into a smaller audience chamber where a very small boy was almost romping about him and tugging at his cassock.
The Appeal to Sound Learning—II
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Against the general background, which we attempted to outline in a previous article, it is now possible to fill in with greater detail the main elements of the Catholic approach to truth in contrast with the Anglican appeal to sound learning; and this with no controversial intention, but with the eirenic aim, not indeed of resolving the contrast, but at least of showing it less in caricature, and in truer proportions and balance. The true following of Christ, in whatever Christian allegiance it is found, is the result of a union, intimate and ineffable, between two persons; a human person and the Person of Jesus Christ, God made man.

This union begins in the supernatural life of grace received in Baptism. It cannot spring from any power innate in human nature; it is wholly given. There comes a time to all who receive this gift when its purpose, the love of God in Christ, is consciously apprehended. The inmost self-hood is confronted by Christ, who is either rejected, or accepted in the obedience and love of divinely given faith. Where explicit knowledge of his person is absent the encounter would seem to be implicit in what conscience presents as good. The union so completed varies in intensity in each person. In some for a whole lifetime obedience is fitful and love lukewarm; the gift does not grow beyond an inchoate stage. In others it fructifies in a union of deep and perfect friendship. Once embraced it is never wholly lost except by an act of deliberate rebellion which theologians call mortal sin.
Journalistic Responsibility
Authors: Sewell Gordon
Published: July 2007

Recent protests against the publication of ‘obnoxious matter’ in the pages of certain newspapers have done little more than echo what the General Council of the Press had already said on this subject. At one of its earliest meetings— last October—the Council declared itself to be ‘deeply concerned by the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers and periodicals’, and placed on record its view that ‘such treatment is calculated to injure public morals’ and is contrary, to the standards of journalism which the Council is duty-bound to maintain.

Strong words! But verbal condemnation by itself is insufficient. The Press Council is a voluntary body representing newspaper proprietors, editors and working journalists. It has no statutory powers. Its apparent inability to do anything effective to improve matters raises anew, for the individual pressman, the whole question of journalistic responsibility.

Strangely enough, the Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49) had little to say on this subject of the unwholesome exploitation of sex, being concerned rather with cases of alleged political bias and of inaccurate reporting. What it did say, however, was often sound, and should be recalled. Sensationalism, for instance, it described as ‘partly an extreme manifestation of the peculiar values reflected in the popular newspapers, partly a desire to provide the excitement which the reader is believed, and has beat taught, to expect’. And this, as one witness expressed it, is done by publishing prominent and detailed reports of crime, of lie relations between the sexes, and of extraordinary or scandalous behaviour, which ‘minister... to the imaginative gratification of the reader’.
The Writer as Creator
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Thou waterest the hills from thy high dwelling: the earth shall be filled with the fruit of thy works’: St Thomas took this verse from Psalm 103 as the text of his inaugural lecture as Master in Theology at Paris, for, he says, it is ordained from eternity by the king and lord of the heavens that the gifts of his providence should come to his lowest creatures through the mediation of those that are higher, and so teachers and doctors are as mountains watered from on high by divine wisdom that they may pass on that wisdom to those they teach.

What is true of the theologian is true in a different way of every creative writer: he too is a mediator, he communicates a vision. But in what sense is he a creator? My concern here is to suggest questions rather than the answers to them: and here at once two different types of problem suggest themselves. The writer creates with words, but he also creates words. I am not thinking of the invention of neologisms: words are like living things, they grow, change, decay, die; and the fact that great Christian words can thus decay and die presents us with one of our most pressing problems. Some words become sterilized by over-familiarity, become labels empty of real meaning: do we stop to think what we really mean when we speak of grace or redemption? Some of the great Christian words have lost their virility, like ‘meekness’ and ‘mildness’.
The Sociology of Catholicism
Authors: Stark W.
Published: July 2007

In the whole vast field, of the social sciences, there can hardly be a more neglected subject than the sociology of Catholicism, that is to say, the study of the structure and of the life-processes of the Catholic Church, with the means and methods usually applied by sociologists to other societies or associations. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The Catholic Church is an organization to which it seems well-nigh impossible to assume an objective and unprejudiced attitude. To the classical Protestant she is the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, the devil’s most dangerous death-trap; to the atheist, whether liberal or communist, she is the main bar to progress, a hateful anachronism; to the Catholic she is a dear mother, and indeed the very Body of Christ. In so far as sociology is a scientific pursuit, a pursuit of the truth without favour or disfavour, the Church of Rome must be one of the most difficult objects to handle. Nevertheless, it is and remains surprising that she has never been properly studied by sociologists. After all, even the Protestant and the atheist cannot close their eyes to the fact that she is in all probability both the oldest and the most numerous social body in our western civilization, and even the Catholic cannot gainsay the fact that if she is the Gate of Heaven, she is necessarily at the same time a human society, showing human, even secular, aspects besides her religious and transcendent traits—aspects which are no less worthy of attention than the others.
Dating the Past With Radiocarbon
Authors: Hodgson P. E.
Published: July 2007

One of the most striking manifestations of the underlying unity of all knowledge is the way in which a discovery in one branch of science often finds fruitful application in another. A recent example of this is the development by Professor Libby in America of a new method of dating archaeological samples using the techniques of nuclear physics. The basic fact underlying the method is that all archaeological specimens containing carbon also contain a small amount of radioactive carbon, or radiocarbon, which becomes progressively less in quantity as time goes on. The fraction of radiocarbon present can be measured, and hence the age of the sample deduced. To explain this in more detail, it is necessary to explain what is known as the carbon cycle and then to discuss some of the radioactive transformations which take place in the earth’s atmosphere.

The chemical element carbon, which plays an essential part in all vital processes, continually takes part in a cyclic series of interchanges between the earth and its atmosphere. Plants obtain the carbon they need to grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and, with the aid of sunlight, build up complex chemical compounds containing carbon by the process known as photosynthesis. Some carbon is also absorbed by roots from the soil, where it is present as a weak solution of carbonic acid. When a plant dies it is often burned, and the complex compounds are broken up and the carbon returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Morals and Language
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

In his study of the tradition of thought in the early Middle Ages, a distinguished historian (Mr Richard Southern) remarks that it should be easier for us today than it was a hundred years ago to understand the fascination of logic for scholars of the eleventh century; for them as for us, ‘Logic was an instrument of order in a chaotic world’. Mr Southern speaks as a historian and a humanist, for whom thought is more immediately apprehended as an orchestral scoring of the themes of human need and of moral concern than in its own proper cogency. Yet the paradox of moral philosophy lies in just this incommensurability of the humane and the analytic: the task of moral philosophy is somehow to mediate; to explore the complexity of the humane and to map it with a disciplined fidelity.

It might very well seem that the scholastic metaphysical tradition exhibits its inadequacy more patently here than anywhere else, with its manuals of moral theology, its solutions of problems of conscience by the numerical assessment of probable opinions, its approximation of moral philosophy to a demonstrative science, and more radically, with just this very metaphysical character itself. It is this last reproach which will specially concern us here. How, it may be felt, can a metaphysics, admittedly taking its point of departure in a physics, practise a fidelity to the complexity of a moral sensibility? Such a metaphysics can only be a bogus physics, setting up a fictitious world of quasi-physical entities, the behaviour of which could only serve as an excessively crude model for the delicately particular moral decisions and options of our humane activity.
The Church and Worker Education in the U.S.A.
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

The first attempts in the realm of worker education in the United States were made by Father Paul Dietz, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, more or less at the same time as Father Plater, S.J., was laying the foundations for the Catholic Social Guild in England. In 1910 he started to organize the scattered activities of individual Catholics in the fields of social education and action. He was spurred on by the hostile attitude of a number of Catholics to the American Federation of Labour (AFL), an association of craft unions headed by Samuel Gompers, and so with a group of Catholic AFL officials he founded the Militia of Christ for Social Services. The object of the Militia was to prevent socialist influence from increasing in the unions and to combat the ‘integrist’ Catholics who would have condemned the AFL out of hand. In the following year the Social Service Commission of the American Federation of Catholic Societies was formed with Father Dietz as its secretary, and with its growth the Militia gradually declined. In 1920 came the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the peace-time successor of the National Catholic War Council, set up by the American bishops to minister to general Catholic life in the U.S.A. They appointed as head of its Department of Social Action Mgr John A. Ryan, who had been the author of the progressive ‘Bishops’ Programme of Social Reconstruction’ published in 1919.

Until the depression of the 1930’s most of the social study and social action of Catholics in the U.S.A. was stimulated, encouraged and initiated by the Social Action Department under Mgr Ryan’s dynamic leadership.
Garthewin: A Welsh Festival of the Drama
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Garthewin is the name of one of the most gracious of Welsh houses, but by this it has come to mean even more for the life of Wales. For here, serenely set in the hills and looking down to the vale of Elwy, a Georgian mansion, with all its privilege of place, has become a centre for the Welsh theatre. In 1937, Mr Robert Wynne, the owner of Garthewin, decided to convert a bam on his estate into a little theatre. The barn itself was built about 1770 of undressed stone, but within it had two remarkable features—a pair of brick arches—which lent themselves to the perfect adaptation of a simple building into a place where plays could be worthily, and audibly, performed. One arch forms the proscenium, and the theatre itself can accommodate about two hundred people. At Christmas it is the setting for the celebration of Midnight Mass.

To begin with, Garthewin was used for occasional performances by amateur companies. It is not easily reached, and its immediate audience is drawn from the villages and scattered farms nearby. But at once its autonomy as a theatre, free from the irrelevant associations of chapel vestries and village halls where plays are generally only a means of raising funds for some local cause, gave a new seriousness to Welsh drama. Experimental plays and translations of European classics found a home at Garthewin, and the theatre, lying in the very shadow of the mansion, seemed to symbolize the emergence of the Welsh drama as the new inheritor of that unbroken cultural tradition which is the glory of Wales.
The Seventh Skin: The Novels of François Mauriac
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Above the bedclothes, over the sheets, sometimes men awaking will stare at their hands in amazement—dead fish gleaming in the moonlight; and, if it is stormy outside and the wind is howling, sometimes those fish will seem to twitch as if a fin or flipper moved. But reach for the nearby lamp, flick it on and such ghostly imaginings vanish. Like the rest of the body, the hands become taken for granted: men forget the mystery of their flesh, and not for one instant when they look at it do they remember those seven mysterious layers of skin which protect them. Custom has dulled their eyes to the miracle of consciousness.

François Mauriac, I would submit, might be described as a novelist of the seventh skin. He is concerned not with outward appearances, but with the heart; not with neat artistic designs executed as an end in themselves, but with words as a means of testifying to the Word. Reality is the aim of his fiction—a reality whose drama is heightened because it is played against an eternal background. He has written a Life of Jesus (1937) and knows that only Jesus, had he so decided, could have written the perfect novel because, being perfect man, his vision was perfect. Others can only hope to report upon the world as they see it and, being fallen creatures, their vision may be faulty. It is the load that all artists who are Christians must accept and carry on their backs.
The Authority of St Augustine
Authors: Schlegel Dom Desmond
Published: July 2007

In his ‘Traite des Études Monastiques’ Dom Jean Mabillon quotes with evident approval the opinion of a contemporary writer that whereas all the Greek Fathers are summed up in St John Chrysostom so all the Latin Fathers can truly be said to be contained in St Augustine. From the year 431 when Pope Celestine I sang the praises of Augustine in his well-known letter to the bishops of Gaul, the teaching Church has not ceased to recommend in an altogether exceptional way his writings and doctrine.

Of course it is in the realm of divine grace that his authority is pre-eminent, but it would be inexact to confine his influence within such a limit. He is the Father of the Western Church, bridging the gulf between the old and the new; providing us with a summary of what had been thought out by his predecessors, and preparing the way for the great medieval development which was to follow. Living his life about midway between the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon—probably the most vigorous period of the Church’s history—he brought to bear on Christian revelation the elements of pagan philosophy which his powerful and essentially courageous mind had duly assimilated.

With Pelagianism in the fourth century something new appeared. It was almost as if the growing distance between then and the time of our Lord called for an increased self-reliance in him who would follow Christ, in order to bridge the gap. St Augustine, ever strongly aware of God’s transcendence and of man’s impotence before it, opposed and crushed this mistaken self-confidence by insisting on the exclusive omnipotence of love in grace.
St Augustine and Religious Life
Authors: Smith Aloysius
Published: July 2007

About two years before his actual conversion St Augustine evinced the first signs of the kind of life he would embrace. He had reached the stage when it was no longer a matter of being sure of God but of ‘how to become more steadfast in God.’

He hoped to be directed by Simplicianus as to which should be the best course for one in his case to walk in the way of God. He witnessed the church full of faithful and one went this way and one went that, and he felt unhappy that although he had renounced all desire of honour and gain because of the attraction he felt for the ‘sweetness of God and the beauty of his house which he loved’, there yet remained entanglements which he found it hard to sever.

Augustine was aided in the last stages towards his conversion by the Striking accounts he heard of the numbers of those who devoted themselves to the monastic life. Pontitianus, his fellow countryman, a high official of the Milanese court, related to him the history of the Egyptian monk, St Antony, who on reading in St Matthew (19, 21): ‘Go, sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come follow me’, entered upon the religious life. He discovered that at that very time there was flourishing just outside Milan a monastery ‘full of good brethren’ under obedience to St Ambrose and this interested Augustine intensely. ‘Hitherto’, he says, ‘we knew nothing of it.’
The Cosmic Dance
Authors: Squire Aelred
Published: July 2007

Religious thought and feeling in the West have never, for a reason which will become apparent, evolved so direct and satisfying a symbol of divine activity in the world as that of Shiva dancing. Those who are even slightly conversant with the iconography of this Hindu god will recognize that, whether we find him represented in the wild, destructive dance which expresses his purgatorial power, as in the seventh-century stone-carvings of Kanchi, or in the gracious pas seul of the later bronzes, where his primitive force has been confined within the flowing rhythms of an exquisite art-object, here at least we are faced with the embodiment of an experience of the universe which is prior to all commentary. Our ability to recognize this fact is, however, the most immediate and sufficient proof that the experience as such is not the peculiar property of the peoples of India. I do not know whether it has ever been suggested that St Augustine’s De Musica may be considered as a fully developed treatise on this theme, perhaps even unique in its kind, but I propose in the following pages to present it in this way. Certainly I myself have found that with the representations of Shiva as an imaginative support, many of the more hidden connections in a work which involves not a few obscurities become psychologically intelligible, and that what might be judged to be a dialogue of purely antiquarian interest assumes a quite contemporary importance. As the divine activity in the world takes more than one form, so Shiva has more than once dance, and at first sight it is difficult to convince oneself that the hostile destroyer and the wholly sympathetic performer of a dance which is pure delight are figures of one and the same god.
An International Augustinian Congress: Paris, September 21st–24th, 1954
Authors: Camelot Thomas
Published: July 2007

Some twenty-five years ago, the fifteenth centenary of the death of St Augustine (August 28th, 430) occasioned a considerable output of articles, mélanges, and full-length studies. The sixteenth centenary of the birth of the great African doctor (November 13 th, 354) occurs this year, and the well- known Augustinian scholar Père F. Cayré, A.A., had the happy idea of organizing a congress to bring together theologians and historians, philosophers and patristic scholars, in order to see exactly how research on Augustine had developed in the past twenty-five years. This congress, which was held in Paris from September 21st-24th, was extremely successful. Some three hundred and fifty congressistes from within France and abroad, priests and laymen, religious and seculars, Catholic and nonCatholic, met in Paris at the Institut Catholique. Forty universities were officially represented. Among English-speaking scholars we noticed Professors Armstrong, Baxters, and Burnaby, H. Chadwick, O’Meara (from Dublin), Quasten (from Washington), Dr Cross and Fr Callus, and doubtless many more whose names escape us. One hundred and ten communications were sent which fill two large volumes of 1,160 pages. To avoid the wearisome reading of papers and prevent the congressistes being split up into small groups, the contributions were ranged around certain main themes, were presented by a reporter, and discussed at each session. One was thus able to hear and discuss the reports of Mile. Mohrman, on philosophical and literary questions, of Professors Mandouze on mysticism, Pincherle on Platonism, Marrou on the theology of history, etc. The discussions, often close, sometimes decidedly animated, were invariably of great interest.
The Muddled Marriage
Authors: Lumbreras Peter
Published: July 2007

Having heard that some persons involved in ‘muddled marriages’ thought they could find a justification for their condition in an article written by my English confrere, Father Gerald Vann, O.P., and had so quoted it to their parish priests, I am reminded of the old story of the prisoner at the bar who at the question of the Court: ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ promptly replied: ‘Your Honour, I always thought myself to be guilty; but after listening to my lawyer’s plea I am beginning to wonder if I did any wrong’. The accused was misled by his counsel’s speech, and those Catholics have been misled by Fr Vann’s article.

In each case, the source of the error lies in a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding over who is being addressed. The plea of the counsel for the defence was addressed to the court, and Father Vann’s paper was addressed to the clergy. The defendant thought his lawyer was speaking to him; and the Catholics in ‘bad marriages’ thought that Fr Vann was writing to them.

St Thomas, in drawing a comparison between a judge and a lawgiver, shows that the latter is in much the better position in that he deals with human actions as future, while the former must deal with them as present; towards that which is present one is easily moved by love or hate, whereby one’s judgment becomes vitiated.
Anglo‐Catholic Sociology Today
Authors: Slesser Henry
Published: July 2007

It is now some thirty years since a group of High Anglicans, moved by the disorder of the times—the first world war having recently ended and the promises of its ending being unfulfilled—were inspired to study and promote a Christian sociology which would be based on definite doctrinal assumptions. Before their decision, two approaches to the social problem were in vogue in the Church of England, the one an attempt to encourage amity between employers and their men, an endeavour illustrated by the work of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a cautious movement encouraged of late years by many of the Bishops, and the other, more specifically aggressive and political, a propaganda which found expression in the Church Socialist League by a body indifferent, on the whole, to doctrine, but persuaded that Socialism was not incompatible with, if not essential to, true modern Christian practice.

To neither of these objective did the new ‘League of the Kingdom of God’ (later to be renamed the ‘Christendom’ group) subscribe. Its principal inspirer, much influenced by the earlier beliefs of Maurice and his follower, Canon Widdrington, insisted that Christian living postulated a common life in which Christian values are embodied. He criticized what he called the ‘Mani- cheism’ of the modem Church in ignoring social justice as essential. The loss of the regulative, basic idea of the Kingdom of God, come out of the Passion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, had been disastrous.
Science and the Map of Knowledge
Authors: Caldin E. F.
Published: July 2007

There are many unresolved questions about the relations of the natural sciences to Aristotelean-Thomist philosophy, and the accurate placing of science on the map of intellectual activities is one of the most important objectives of our time. The prestige of science is still so high that the relative neglect of it by Thomists is unfortunate, and a positive approach is of great value. The American Dominicans have therefore done wisely as well as boldly in setting up a permanent institution where scientists and philosophers can meet and collaborate, with a permanent staff most of whom have been trained in one of the natural sciences as well as in the Thomist tradition. This institution is called the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science and is situated in a suburb of Chicago. Its leaders hope that, by bringing men engaged in specialized research into contact with a homogeneous intellectual tradition, they will be able to help scientists towards a synthesis that they feel to be necessary for the health of science itself as well as for modem culture generally. Clearly this venture could be of the greatest importance.

The present volume is a report of an ambitious five-week meeting held in 1952, at which a varied group of experts in philosophy, logic and the natural sciences considered the relations between modem science and the Aristotelean tradition. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology were allotted a week each, and the final week was devoted to an attempt at synthesis.
Sacred, Holy or Religious Art?
Authors: Chute Desmond
Published: July 2007

There is a very real sense in which everything that is is sacred. We say, or at least said, that life is sacred; motherhood is sacred, and so on. Far be it from me to deprecate this usage. For does not the root evil of our time, the secularization of life, he precisely in atrophy of the religious sense? It was this very tendency of the historical process which caused voices to be raised amid the wilderness of nineteenth-century industrialism, reaffirming the holiness not only of God’s creation but also of the works of man.

Holy: holiness: here we have le mot juste. We say God is holy. The word is inadequate but not erroneous. It would never occur to us to say God is sacred: not only would that be erroneous, it would be absurd. Sacred to what? This question alone is enough to make it clear that whereas the concept of holiness is absolute, that of the sacred is relative. It might be said that holy is predicated of God and of his gifts to us, sacred of our gifts to him.

Whatever is sacred is holy, but not all that is holy is sacred, save in the very diluted sense of meriting our respect. Be it clear from the outset that in these pages the word is not used in this its most generic meaning but in the truest and most positive sense by which sacred signifies set apart by man for the worship of God.
An American Critic
Authors: Robson W. W.
Published: July 2007

Mr Blackmur is an American critic of considerable reputation—to judge from this book, not undeserved. This is the first substantial work of his I have read: I knew him previously as an authority on Henry James’s Prefaces, which I thought he overrated as criticism. The frequent bracketing of them (as of equal critical interest) with Flaubert’s Letters is unfortunate: James’s greatness in criticism is more unequivocally manifest in the essays on French poets and novelists and in the book on Hawthorne. Mr Blackmur, however, himself shows (not always with happy results) the influence of the James of the Prefaces (and sometimes of other Jamesian manners: the autobiographical anecdote on page 9 is told in the style of A Small Boy and Others). His own virtues as a critic are a refreshing absence of the genteel kind of academicism and some powers of analysis of poetic effects—in which he shows the influence of Mr Empson. His general value-judgments and ascriptions of importance are not always to be trusted, and his critical tact (or ‘touch’) can be questionable, but we may usually expect intelligent and unexpected comments from him—though they sometimes are rather marginal. The characteristic vice of his writing is corrugation—unnecessary difficulty; he falls into ‘pseudo-botanical’ jargon of the kind D. FL Lawrence objected to, fails satisfactorily to tackle his themes or even, at times, to make them intelligible, and at his worst shows a peculiarly American kind of externality—a lack of inner understanding of the work, or the man, he is considering.
Architecture and Society
Authors: Purcell Donovan
Published: July 2007

When church building became possible again after the second World War there must have been many English Catholics who looked forward confidently to an era of vigorous and inspiring new churches enriched with the best examples of contemporary art. Among them were certainly a number of architects who, after a long enforced separation from their calling, longed for an opportunity to express, in the creation of a new church, their gratitude for a safe return and their hope for the future.

Now, after nearly ten years during which many new churches have been built or planned, the prospect is so bleak that most of these architects, and many laymen with them, are feeling nothing but discouragement and frustration. A few of the new churches really do express a living art. The rest are pitiful proof of timid conventionality and of the still powerful effect of Pugin’s teaching that Gothic is the only proper and morally defensible style of architecture for churches, or for any buildings even remotely connected with them. Even where the strict Gothic is abandoned, the alternative seems only too often to be a veritable fruit salad of mixed conventional forms, something for all tastes.

Art, it has been said, is the mirror of society. Just as Classical Greek culture produced the refined beauties of the Parthenon, so the vigorous and exuberant background of the four centuries following the Norman Conquest produced, by gradual development from the staid Romanesque, all the upsoaring excitement of Gothic architecture.