Shortly after the year 400 the poet Prudentius wrote that the Roman Empire had never been more flourishing nor so happy. All the evidence that we possess tends to show that it seemed eternal and impregnable to its citizens. It was impossible for them to conceive of their life without it. The Western provinces formed a single, carefully administered state, covering modern England, France, the Netherlands, Western Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and part of the Balkans. All were joined by a common culture, a common way of life, the common use of Latin. There were close economic links with the Eastern provinces of the Empire grouped round the other end of the Mediterranean. Here, Greek was the common language instead of Latin and great cities like Antioch and Alexandria had come to play roles paralleled today by New York and Chicago.

In the year 400, the young Emperor in the East was brother to the Emperor of the West and was thought of as his partner in a single sovereignty. The partnership seemed indissoluble. In the words of the greatest of fourth-century poets, ‘All Roman subjects were citizens of a single city, children round a single hearth’. The Roman way of life was prized as the common heritage of all free men. During the last forty years there had been a great increase in legislation in the West. For the most part, it had been enlightened and progressive and it regulated to the smallest detail the activities of every citizen.

I have often wondered how Communists can make their faith acceptable to their reason. Granted that in most cases the emotional forces released by their mystique leave little room for reasoning, yet man is a rational being and ultimately everybody is driven to rationalise, in however haphazard a manner, and thus to justify to himself the faith that is in him.

Most difficult of all to rationalise must surely be the ultimate foundation on which the whole structure of the Communist party rests, I mean belief in Stalin’s infallibility. And let it not be said that to use the term ‘infallibility’ is an exaggeration. Members of the Communist party are expected to hand themselves over entirely to its cause, to consider its claims as overriding those of any human tie, any interest, any personal conviction, and to be ready to sacrifice for it all they have or are, even their life. And for them this life is the end: they cannot be buoyed up by the expectation of any future reward, they cannot esteem this short present life of theirs as nothing compared with a future eternal life. They are pledged to an oboedientia cadaveris which for them is not a mortification of the will which brings its rewards, quite irrespective of whether the order obeyed is in itself right or mistaken, whether it will or will not further the end aimed at. Success—earthly success—is, for the Christian, suspect; for the Communist it is the only possible criterion.

For the Communist to hand himself over body and soul (as we would say) to the directives of the party can therefore only seem justifiable to himself, because only by following them does he think that success can be achieved. And the directives of the party are in the last resort of course those that are validated by Stalin. The course steered by Communism may be a zig-zag: it is for Stalin to say when the ‘zig’ is right, and when the ‘zag’. He is always right, unquestionably, because infallibly right.

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 modern liturgical movement has taken many years to find its dogmatic and really deep spiritual basis. It has received its confirmation in this regard from the two great Papal Encyclicals, Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei; while the whole movement has depended upon, as well as influenced, the abandonment of the post-reformation, literal explanation of the Sacrifice of the Mass and on the return to the priestly and sacramental understanding of it. This conversion of the theologians, the effects of which are now reaching the ordinary Catholic, is due in the first place to Père de la Taille, S.J., whose heavily documented Mysterium Fidei exploded like some doctrinal atom bomb just after the 1914-18 war. It is a happy coincidence that the second volume of the English translation of this revolutionising work should have just appeared,! for it deals with the Church’s sacrifice as offered by the priest at Mass and united with the unique act of Calvary. Although Père de la Taille did not fully escape from the unreal terminology of the post-reformation disputes he sets forth in this volume the principles which in fact underlie the point of view of the outstanding modem writers on the Eucharist such as Abbot Vonier or Dom Casel. His clear distinction between immolation and oblation has been regarded as his special contribution to the development of Eucharistic doctrine; yet the approach here is still the over-literal one which considers only the present sacrifice here on the altar and fails to appreciate the full significance of a sacramental sacrifice. It was easy to dispose of those almost crude theories of the ‘mystic sword’ which would slay Christ once again did he not remain impassible, but it was not such a straightforward task to escape being involved in the mechanics of the Mass as though it had to fulfil some man-made definition of a sacrifice.