bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Christian Interpretation of Marxism
Authors: Langdale Eugene 
Published: July 2007

Two conceptions of the world are struggling for the possession of the soul of man, the Christian and the Marxist. And it would seem that nothing can ever reconcile their antagonisms. The Christian vision of the world involves a triple transcendence; that of spirit over matter, of the human person over society, of God over the world; whereas the Marxist vision of that same world seems to be built on strictly corresponding negations. Spirit does not transcend matter, since it is matter itself that makes spirit; the human person does not transcend society, since man can only become truly himself in and through society; and God does not transcend humanity, since ‘it is not religion that makes man, but man who makes religion’.Can a Christian content himself with such a rough and ready interpretation of Marxism? If it corresponds entirely to reality, then there is nothing more to be said and all doors are closed, since no possibility of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists can exist. There is a very real danger in simplifying doctrines, as theologians only know too well; and though Marxists are often guilty of crude generalisations about the Catholic position, Catholics themselves can over-simplify their assessment of the Marxist standpoint. ‘The low materialism, the shoddy history and the false messianism which made up Communist propaganda in the nineteenth century.... ‘I find these words in a Catholic manual of sociology published in recent months for use in schools. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from using rude words about one’s opponents; but it is a game that two can play, and go on playing indefinitely. And one can ask oneself: is it a game that Christians should play.
The Claudel‐Gide Correspondence
Authors: Ryan Mary 
Published: July 2007

The publication of this exchange of letters is in some ways unique, and of great religious and philosophical significance. The two men are of absolutely outstanding eminence and influence, and each in his way of outstanding experience. They are of the same generation, Claudel born in 1868, Gide in 1869. They were friends and have long since fallen apart. They stand for two absolutely opposite conceptions of man’s duty and destiny.During his recent visit to Rome, Claudel told an Italian interviewer (Mario Guidotti) that neither he nor Gide had taken the initiative in publishing this correspondence. It came from Robert Mallet, a friend of Gide’s (who has supplied the letters with a minute and enlightening factual commentary). Claudel consented, in the hope of exercising a moral influence: ‘I should like the letters to do good today to young people whom Gide may have harmed: the good that I tried to do, unhappily in vain, to a great writer and friend’.Both correspondents hold strongly to what they stand for. Both have allowed the letters to be supplemented by other documents: passages from Gide’s Journals, and one from a literary interview of 1947 in which Claudel utterly disavows the other’s position. That position is indicated in a typical passage picked out by the English, or rather American, translator of the Journals: ‘In the name of what God, of what ideal, do you forbid me to live according to my nature; And where would that nature lead me if I simply followed it? Until now I had followed the rule of Christ, or at least a certain puritanism that had been taught me as the rule of Christ.
The Touchstone of Juvenile Deliquency
Authors: Burns Charles 
Published: July 2007

I once gave a talk to sixth-form boys in a Catholic public school about delinquency, and at the end of it one of my audience remarked: ‘with all due respect, sir, I think you have been talking nonsense. I think that human beings are responsible and if they do wrong they should be punished, unless they are mentally defective’. That is a perfectly reasonable and refreshing statement concerning the freedom of the will and the essential simplicity of human action. At the other extreme we find the elaborate analyses of human motivation made by sociologists and psychologists, which appear to deny all freedom of choice and responsibility.The subject of delinquency is indeed nowadays a touchstone for everybody’s opinion—expert or not, and the trouble is that they are all in the right—in varying degrees. Every general statement needs qualification and particular application, but so often we get nothing but the general statement dogmatically pronounced.For example we are told that the main causes for the alleged increase in juvenile delinquency are to be traced to the lack of religion, with the consequent decline in the stability of family life and in respect for authority. But, for argument’s sake, a State could be imagined where there was no family life or religion, as we conceive it, but in which the social sanctions against theft were so stringent that delinquency of this type would be practically eliminated. We have no proof that in die Middle Ages or in Victorian England, there was less minor delinquency such as pilfering, than we get now. We have only exact figures for the past half century or so—a period which has seen two very major wars—themselves both a symptom of man’s fallen nature, and the causes of further depravity and lawlessness in Society.
The Universal Mission of the Church
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

As I face this audience I am overcome by that compounded feeling of fascinated envy and sheer fury which overtakes, in different proportions, my countrymen when confronted by the quintessence of English cultural achievement, Oxford; so profoundly attractive and so irreconcilably alien. As a child I thought that Englishmen were just the same, Scotsmen with a different accent; but now I know, through experience, that they are different; that environment and tradition have moulded their characters according to a different pattern, a difference which expresses itself in a thousand subtle contrasts of emotional reaction and temperament—perhaps most strikingly emphasised in the contrast (so difficult to define) between English humour and Scottish wit.Such contrasts, deeper experience shows, do not utterly divide. Quite apart from their common history, not always a uniting factor, both peoples recognise that they share a common culture pattern and, more important, that they are the same kind of beings. No doubt a platitude, but one pregnant with significance.Generalise the analogy! Within infinitely greater contrasts, beneath the most diverse cultures, breaking through cleavages due to colour, custom and opinion, which stretch back indefinitely beyond recorded history, man remains irreducibly man. Biologist and theologian are at least agreed in that.Irreconcilably opposed in everything save their humanity! If you doubt it look at the record of history: issues, so easy to settle, so simple at root, twisted and travestied beyond recognition and buried under the bodies of whole generations till the problems they beget are so beset by tension, so clouded by emotion, that they can only be solved by annihilation.
Eric Gill: A Retrospect
Authors: Chute Desmond 
Published: July 2007

Eric had an engagingly boyish, at times almost infantile, sense of humour. He delighted in a stock of comic stories which he retailed with inexhaustible relish both for their formal nearness and for their garnered wisdom. Among these was a dialogue between three men in a railway-carriage:—First man: ‘What lights are those?’Second man: ‘They’re the lights of Hanwell.’First man: ‘How strange they look!’Third man: ‘Not half so strange as the lights of the train look from Hanwell!’Perhaps this unassuming little allegory may enlighten the chequered history of the Money-changers from its thwarted beginnings in 1916 to its recent and painful aftermath in 1949.rA representation of the turning-out of the money-changers has been chosen for a war memorial, for it commemorates the most just of all wars—the war of Justice against Cupidity—a war raged by Christ Himself.’The sculptor had long dreamed of a great monument which should embody this struggle and at the same time be his crowning achievement. The original design—for a bronze group in the round—done in 1916 for a competition as a monument for L.C.C. employees, was rejected. It may be seen reproduced in Eric Gill published by Ernest Benn in 1927; it is also extant in a wood engraving. The upsurging rhythm of this bronze group is finer than the more geometrical movement of the relief ultimately carved in stone at Leeds.
Christian Education in the World of Today
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

We are all of us unconsciously influenced by the atmosphere or climate of thought of the world in which we live, though upbringing and mature thought may have taught us to analyse and at least partially discount this influence where it runs counter to the principles of our Faith. The children who come to us come from this same atmosphere; with some their upbringing in a truly Catholic home has gone far to fortify them against the absorption of what is bad in the atmosphere of the modern world, but with many more this is by no means so, and our main educational problem is how to train them in such a way that they grow up to judge the world in which they will have to live by a scale of values drawn, not from the general climate of opinion of that world, but from the principles of their Faith applied to the problems of every-day living.It would be an impossible task to give a complete analysis of the elements which go to make up the atmosphere or climate of thought which the children who come to us begin to breathe long before they come to the age of reason, and which they will almost inevitably absorb completely, unless they are fortified against it by their homes or their schools or, better still, by both.
David Jones
Authors: Grisewood Harman 
Published: July 2007

‘The only artist retaining the image and its allusions today is David Jones, and his paintings exhibit very clearly the enormous difficulty of finding pictorially the relation between it and the coherent whole—for unlike Rosetti and like Dante he is not content to see his image in the unknown.’These words are found in the concluding passage of Nicolette Gray’s study of the Romantic Image and of the dilemma to which it gives rise in the art of today. Her thesis is that Dante was not content to see the vision of Beatrice as prefiguring a reality beyond herself, but in addition he needed to know what is the nature of the relation. To Dante there was available the idea of a world order as really existing. But by the end of the eighteenth century this knowledge of the whole was reduced to an abstract idea of order so attenuated ‘that it had no place for the particular’. Thus the idea of the image became divorced from order, romantic from classical art. Henceforth the artist can with certainty use no valid terms in which the mind can rest.No one is more fully aware of the difficulty this thesis presents to the artist than Mr David Jones. He has met the difficulty frontally not only as painter but intellectually as a scholar, as shewn in his hitherto un-collected critical writing, and as a poet in In Parenthesis. He comprehends our cultural predicament and has allowed himself in his work no evasion of the formidable difficulties that arise for one who adds to an artist’s response to the material world a need to endow the result with a validity that stands the tests of the intellect.
Elgar's ‘Dream of Gerontius’ Aet.50
Authors: Taylor Eric 
Published: July 2007

Fifty years have passed since Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was first performed at the Birmingham Festival. This great music now holds an established place in the general repertoire of choral societies: indeed, so secure is its present position that it is easy to forget how chequered has been its career in the half century, to what accidents it has been a prey, under what misunderstandings it has suffered—and does still suffer.When ‘Gerontius’ first appeared, Elgar was just beginning to attract attention as a national rather than as a provincial composer, very largely because of the enthusiasm Hans Richter had shown in conducting the ‘Enigma Variations’. Though the forty-three year old composer at this time, therefore, commanded a certain amount of respect among musicians, his new work must have seemed a strange affront to the old, but extremely vigorous, oratorio tradition of choral singing, well nurtured on a staple diet of Handel and Mendelssohn. Even Parry and other composers of the English musical renascence of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made no really significant advance in this genre, and while Elgar refrained from describing ‘Gerontius’ as an oratorio (although the proportions of the work make this seem a more suitable description than Jaeger’s ‘cantata’) the new durchkomponiert setting of Newman’s poem must have appeared as a determined tilt at the venerable oratorio tradition, to which indeed it virtually gave the death blow.
Catholics and The Stage
Authors: Milton Ernest 
Published: July 2007

It goes without saying that, before the Reformation, all actors or mummers or players—or whatever else those vagabonds performing in theatres or on platforms or on inn balconies or just in front of a circle of chairs on a bare floor were called—who happened, irrespective of race, colour or shape to be believing or practising Christians (in so far as this was allowed), were necessarily Catholics and members of the Church.The fine flowering of the English Theatre occurred during the later years of Elizabeth, far into the reign of James I, and was functioning throughout the most enthusiastic and novel period of Protestantism. There is no reason to suppose that any of the acknowledged great players illumined by the comet-brilliance of Marlowe or enveloped in the solar warmth of Shakespeare’s genius were Catholics—unless secretly; and even this last possibility is pure theory or wishful thinking. A great deal of delving into old archives might prove whether or no men like Alleyn, Burbage, Hemyngc and Condell had yearnings towards the Faith, and I daresay that with more time for a little research it would be easy to ascertain the final spiritual convictions of such writers for the theatre as Chapman, Webster, Tourneur, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others; but within the limits of this space it is hardly desirable to offer a directory or Who’s Who of all the eminent players or writers who have been, or who are, Catholics.
Andre Gide: The Ethic of The Artist
Authors: O'Flaherty Kathleen 
Published: July 2007

Writing so soon after Gide’s death, one would like to remember only his charm, the music of his prose and, above all, the prayers addressed to God in Numquid et Tu. Yet the influence of such a writer does not cease with his life; as long as French is read the sinuous harmonies of that prose will ceaselessly convey a definite message.That ‘message’ renders neutrality impossible. Gide, by subordinating a moral code to aesthetics, of which he declared it ‘a dependency’, raised fundamental questions which it would be inexcusable to evade. While he repudiated any wish to make ‘converts’, books are not published in a vacuum. Moreover the Journal reveals that, at times, Gide was fully conscious of the power of corruption which he wielded. In fact, if his basic postulate be accepted—the necessity of the full development of one’s individuality, unhampered by ethical considerations—a pagan moral code has been adopted. This invalidates the undoubtedly sincere advice which he gave to his readers to cast aside his book —to free themselves from his influence as well as from that of others.While this fundamental clash between Gide’s ethic and that of the Christian is continually touched on by Mr Thomas in his book published just before the French writer’s death, it might be argued that, because of the chronological presentation and a certain, perhaps inevitable, lack of synthesis, the idea will be insufficiently clear to the ordinary reader, less familiar than Mr Thomas with the texts.
The Christian View of History
Authors: Dawson Christopher 
Published: July 2007

The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelhng and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the Liberal Protestant movement and dominated religious thought both on the continent and in this country during the later nineteenth century.
Today the situation is entirely changed. Both philosophic idealism and liberal Protestantism have been widely discredited and have been replaced by logical positivism and by the dialectic theology of the Barthians. The result is that the idea of a Christian philosophy of history has also suffered from the reaction against philosophic idealism. It is difficult to distinguish the authentic and original element in the Christian view of history from the philosophic accretions and interpretations of the last century and a half, so that you will find modem representatives of orthodox Christianity like Mr C. S. Lewis questioning the possibility of a Christian interpretation of history, and declaring that the supposed connection between Christianity and Historicism is largely an illusion.
Catholics and The University: A Personal View
Authors: Armstrong A. H. 
Published: July 2007

This article should be regarded, perhaps even more than others in this series, as the expression of a very personal point of view. Dons are individualistic people, liable to hold highly original and sharply divergent views on questions both of principle and policy within the university, and I am very conscious that I have no right whatever to speak as representing any considerable body of opinion among Catholic senior members of universities in this country; indeed it cannot be said at present that any such coherent body of opinion exists, though the sort of subjects about which I am going to write are certainly being increasingly seriously considered and discussed.
The appearance of a body of Catholics playing any noticeable part in the life of the universities of this country is a very recent phenomenon. It was the great movement of liberalism (in Newman’s sense of the word ‘liberal’) in the middle nineteenth century which opened the universities to Catholics; and they were permitted to take advantage of the new possibilities only after what must now seem to us an unnecessary and regrettable delay. It was regrettable, not only from the point of view of the standards of taste and intelligence of the Catholic body, but from the point of view of the university: for, though some sort of university reform was certainly urgently needed, the reform which actually took place broke the connection between religion and learning which still existed in the ancient universities ana effected a thorough-going secularisation of university life which has had very far-reaching consequences.
Catholic and Protestant in Western Germany
Authors: de Hirsch Donald 
Published: July 2007

Observers surveying the political scene in Western Germany immediately after the Second World War were apt to agree that the good understanding between Catholics and Protestants was one of the few positive results of the ghastly experience of Nazism, war and defeat. Everything seemed to point to the permanence of this new harmony. Catholic and Protestant Christians had both suffered for the same reason, both had learned to understand one another faced as they were by the totalitarian menace—first Nazi and later Communist. And both had reason to regard themselves as the ‘saving remnant’ that had redeemed the soul of Germany. The temporary disappearance of a German state had led finally to the emergence of the two Churches as the only remaining pillars of native authority which could give guidance and solace to a despairing and bewildered people.The situation is unfortunately radically different today. As long as the majority of Germans remained stunned by defeat and preoccupied with the burden of day-to-day existence, old feuds and rivalries seemed meaningless. The stabilisation of their currency, however, with its almost magical effect on the living standard, together with the re-emergence of German statehood—even though with limited sovereignty—have once more led to conditions in which echoes of the past can be heard with increasing and alarming clarity.
The Tradition of the Maries in Provence
Authors: Girdlestone C. M. 
Published: July 2007

Few local traditions of evangelisation have been maintained with as much tenacity and defended with as much passion as that of the Bethany household and the Maries in Provence. Among Catholics of the modern dioceses of Marseilles, Aix, Avignon and Fréjus, which have succeeded the medieval dioceses of the same churches and those of Orange, Carpentras, Apt, Arles and Toulon, now divided between the four survivors, the belief that their province was christianised by these Gospel figures is held with conviction and is still a source of devotion. Whereas elsewhere the name and legend of the first bishop are only matters of archaeology, in Provence the memory of Lazarus and his sisters, of Mary Salome and Mary the mother of James, is a living one, honoured by novena, procession and pilgrimage in the crypt of St Victor’s abbey in Marseilles and in those of the churches of Tarascon, Saint-Maximin and Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and in the cave sanctuary known as the Sainte-Baume.The knowledge of this tradition comes generally as a surprise to English Catholics. Nevertheless, at least one episode of the series— that of Mary Magdalen’s penance in the Sainte-Baume—has been frequently reproduced in works of art and provides, indeed the usual setting for fifteenth to nineteenth century paintings of the saint. For the rocky background against which so many pictures of her are placed is that of the cave near Marseilles where she is alleged to have dwelt for thirty years, expiating her early life of sin.
Metaphysics and Language
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

There are at present two moods in contemporary philosophy, the existentialist’s and the technician’s. The existentialist mood is disillusioned, sophisticated, desperately mature. The technical mood has no illusions; is without suspicion of naïveté, confidently accepts itself as adult. For they are both moods that belong to our time, one of the more terrible features of which is that its children go to the wall.To the existentialist, the world in which he lives, with its everyday concerns, its inventions and schemes, is through and through suspect. He sees past its pretences. At its noblest, at its most pretentious, no less than in its trivialities and ignominies, he knows it to be flat and uninteresting, a substitute world, unauthentic. He sees through it to the basic nothingness that its false pretences disguise. He knows, besides, his own core of nothingness. And he dares to face his consequent consuming passion for the destruction of that substitute world which it is the doom of his own unqualified freedom to project upon the undifferentiated ground of nothingness that encompasses him. So with the emancipated cynicism of a man not only lacking hope, but lacking even the desire of hope, he descends (impregnably arrogant in his anguish) into the pit of absolute despair. He recognises his proper human status as cast there; recognises the radical absurdity of his existence at the edge of the irrational abyss of un-being.