The words ‘People and Freedom’ did not sound well to Catholic ears when a small group bearing that name was founded in London in 1936 under the inspiration of Don Luigi Sturzo. ‘Sounds to me like Bolshevism’, said an old lady to whom the Group’s news-sheet was offered outside Westminster Cathedral. And the old lady echoed the feelings of the majority of her co-religionists, who found the title slightly provocative and subversive, not knowing that it had once been the proud old Guelf motto of the City of Florence—the battle-cry of Pope and people.

It would be untrue to describe English Catholics as philo- fascists in the years immediately preceding the war of 1939. There were, of course, the devotees of General Franco and those who—in the words of Professor Brogan—considered Mussolini to be ‘a combination of Augustus, Constantine and Justinian’, but the majority felt that whilst Democracy worked well enough in England, it was not an article for export, especially to Catholic countries, where authoritarianism was the form of government not only best suited to the temperament of the people, but most in keeping with the ‘Catholic tradition’. Those who travelled on the Continent were told by their friends, especially in France, of the existence of a few extremists, best described as ‘Black Marxists’ or ‘Red Christians’, who were fortunately unrepresentative and insignificant. No one seemed aware of the existence of a vigorous Christian-Democratic movement with a tradition extending well over one hundred years—soon destined to play a leading part in saving Europe from Communism.

The first two or three centuries of the Christian era witnessed a luxuriant outcrop of sects which we nowadays group together under the label ‘gnostic’. But ‘gnosticism’, as the name of a religious movement, is a modem invention. True, some of these sects did like to style themselves ‘gnostic’; but the Greek word gnosis only means ‘knowledge’, and that is a thing to which not only heretical sects laid claim. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Christian Church’s history, it was part and parcel of God’s manifold gifts to his faithful, of which the Christian community believed itself to be the privileged recipient. St Paul himself writes to the Corinthians about the diversity of gifts and ministries in the believing community, under the One Lord: ‘But to each one’, he writes, ‘is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the profit of all: to one it is given to speak the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of gnosis, of knowledge, according to the same Spirit’, and so forth. And yet he, too, knew of ‘profane babblings and paradoxes of the falsely so-called gnosis’, and he warns his disciple Timothy against their seduction. This self-styled gnosis is, in his eyes, the parody of the God-given knowledge enjoyed by the faithful.

From St Paul onwards, gnosis has retained this two-faced character. On the one hand, for a Christian Father like Irenaeus, the ‘gnostic’ could become almost synonymous with the ‘heretic’; on the other, the no less orthodox Clement of Alexandria could write of the ‘true gnostic’ as the ideal of the Christian theologian, the model of the man to whom is vouchsafed a Spirit-given insight into the mystery which penetrates deeper than that of his fellows with a more easy-going faith.

No form of biography is more difficult to write than the life of a man or woman credited with sanctity. If the account is to be uniformly honest, the impression of transcendent goodness must inevitably be marred: the smallest fault is enough to invalidate the claim to perfection. If the picture is deliberately edifying, the impression conveyed is too remote to command admiration, still less affection. The conventional Lives of the Saints possess an advantage over modem essays in hagiography in that they are concerned with persons sufficiently long dead for their faults to have sunk into oblivion. If the subject happens to be near-contemporary, however, certain imperfections are bound to loom large. ‘God protect us from living saints’, wrote an ancient ecclesiastic. In the first biography of Edith Stein to appear in English, the author makes a genuine attempt at objectivity. She does not minimize a certain stiffness of character in her subject, while admitting that this gradually mellowed; and there is much criticism of her theological views. If the book suffers from one major fault, it lies in its refusal to allow us sufficient opportunity of judging the woman for ourselves. For every little fact we are given a disproportionate amount of comment. And this liberal comment, however fair in intention, is apt to come between us and the extraordinary woman about whom we feel we can never know enough on the factual plane alone.

This stricture apart, Miss Graef’s book is of compelling interest: one hopes that it will-be both widely read and vigorously discussed.

Dr Ernest Beaumont in his new book examines the ways in which two major Christian poets relate human love to the salvation of the soul, so that the former appears as a means, under divine grace, to the latter. Of such interrelating Dr Beaumont is rather suspicious; he smells heresy in it. He finds excuses however for Dante, reserving most of his disapproval for Paul Claudel, who is blamed both for misrepresenting (in his Ode Jubilaire for the Dante centenary, 1921) the role of Beatrice in Dante’s work, and for adding, in his own dramas, a series of more or less explicit expressions of a false idea of human love. The falsehood seems to consist chiefly in Claudel’s thinking (a) that if human (erotic) love could be ‘satisfied’ with its object, God would be ‘excluded’; (b) that since it cannot be so satisfied, this love implies a longing which only God can satisfy; and (c) that, this being so, lovers who refrain from carnal satisfaction may become, providentially, grace-bearers to one another and so, in a sense, mutually ‘necessary’ in a process of producing, reciprocally, ‘the child of God in each other’. This last ‘error’ is the more glaring in that the love in question is made to contrast with married love to the disadvantage of the latter.

Since I am far less acquainted than Dr Beaumont with the dramatic work of Claudel, my feeling that his critique of the French poet is somewhat partial is not in itself of much interest.

The arms of Christ on the Cross are represented on the crucifix as stretched out to their full extent. They not only bear the weight of man’s sin, but they are extended to include all men. There is no limitation to the act of sacrifice—it is offered for all men, and it obtains for all the possibility of eternal life in the presence of God. Christ is for all men the cause, the only possible cause, of salvation in the sense that he alone frees man from the consequences of sin and that no type of man is excluded from the newness of life his sacrifice gains—save only the one who, by the exercise of his freedom, shuts his mind and heart to faith when it is presented, or refuses, in pride, to repent.

The statement in the Creed, ‘He descended into hell’, means that Christ’s redemptive work is not confined to those who lived during or after his life on earth. The Cross of Christ is the central point in history in that it is an eternally decisive point, whose consequences are effective throughout the whole temporal process. Those who lived before Christ, and who tried to do the Will of God in so far as light was given to them, were not untouched by grace. Since they were born in a state of condemnation and death, they were as a people incapable of entering into the presence of God. As individuals who had looked for God, and by grace in hope, they were not condemned, but just.