The ‘muddled marriage’ is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic’s instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church’s teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great unhappiness in the lives of innumerable Catholics, but also for the fact that an appalling number are led, by their inability to ‘conform’, to leave the Church altogether. The equally grim fact has also to be faced that within the Church the growing conviction among lay people that the clergy either cannot or will not understand or sympathise with their very real difficulties is leading to a wider and wider cleavage between the two.

The case of preventive birth-control is a notorious example. There are married people who for one reason or another just cannot, at least temporarily, have more children: what an insult to tell them, sans façons, that in that case they must just ‘abstain from indulgence in sexual intercourse’. (Ecclesiastical jargon often indicates a lack of real theological thinking.) The whole point is that this is not a question of ‘indulgence’: it is of the very essence of their married, their Catholic married, life. From the layman’s point of view what too often happens is that first they are told how wonderfully God has blessed the mystery of human love and sex and marriage, and then in the next breath they are told to go off and do without it.

All Christendom, Catholic and Protestant, believes that God has spoken to men, and that his Word thus spoken is the Word of Life, the good news of salvation. All Christendom too, though not without reservations, believes that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain that Word written. Beyond this Christians begin to part company along a hundred different roads. The cause of their divergence is the variety of different answers given to the question how God’s Word written is to be understood. Is it self-authenticating j does it yield its meaning to each man’s conscience by the inner light of the Spirit, or are we to approach it by the aid of sound learning, relying only, for the conviction of faith, on the ordinary means of knowledge with which reason has endowed us? What part does the concept of the Church play in mediating God’s message to men’s minds, in terms which they can depend upon with certainty? Does God, in his written Word, stand in judgment over and reform the verdicts of the Church, or does Christ our Lord, living in it by the power of the Holy Spirit, guide its understanding of the written word and himself speak with its voice? If the Church is integrally necessary to the proclamation of the gospel, what is its nature and how can its voice be recognised and its verdicts guaranteed? The fundamental disunities of Christendom lie in the answers given to these questions. To the finding of a way which will lead from such diversity into a unity willed by God the world-wide ecumenical movement has addressed itself for over thirty years with a sincerity and depth of desire which must surely be the work of the Holy Spirit.

Riddles are out of fashion. They have sunk to an idle fourth form exercise. The classics, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ or ‘When is a door not a door?’ hardly kindle enthusiasm. Even the more promising ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ with its answer ‘The higher the fewer’ cannot take one far. The Mad Hatter and Mr Salteena had one or two up their sleeve, but they were both in their own way rather questionable company, and nowadays riddles do not figure in polite society. Still less does one meet them in poetry. Yet this is strange, for they once flourished in our literature, rhyming riddles whose remnants survive in nursery jingles—‘Long legs, crooked thighs, Little head and no eyes.’ Every mind with a bent towards poetry has in it something that engenders riddles, and the recognition of these and the attempt to solve them are among a writer’s most important tasks. The Sphinx in the mind propounds her dark saying and waits in her cave for the answer,

‘. . . that Theban Monster that propos’d Her riddle, and him, who solv’d it not, devour’d’, showing that inability to answer may have serious consequences.

It is convenient to collect Milton, and Thebes, here, for they are part of my riddle (which I set, not officiously for you, but for myself). It was set me two years ago, one gusty Sunday afternoon in September on a farm in the Hudson Valley. I had been invited to spend the day there, whiling away the brief uneasy week before the opening of an academic year.

Even those who are most insistent that architecture is an art will admit that there is a limit to what aesthetics can do to gild distressing human arrangements. The truth of this has been brought home to English people in a painful way by the dilemma of ‘housing’. For perhaps no modern building problem has had so much architectural skill lavished on it. But if its fruits are on the whole more seemly than they were forty years ago, this is on the surface only and cannot hide the fact that the conception— whether it is realised, in an estate or a neighbourhood or a new town—is humanly unsatisfactory. If we enquire why and how this is so, all objections lead back to the intractable defect that there is altogether too much of it. ‘Intractable’ because those who still want houses will explain that so far as they are concerned there is altogether too little.

It is not only monotony to the eye which is complained of—though this is at least an indication that there is something wrong—but the great distances which everyone must walk to get anywhere and the social defects which these distances produce and which are generally described as ‘thinning of the social fabric’. Distances so ‘take it out of’ people that they do less, participate less, see less of one another. And it is perhaps this toll on social life which we are chiefly aware of when we remark the lifelessness of our new localities. They are an aggregation of units which do not add up to a commune.

It is surely clear that no urbanity in the architectural arrangements can make up for defects of this kind; but that the fault must lie, if not with basic requirements, at least with the present mode in which they are supplied.

In The Anathemata (Faber and Faber; 25s.) Mr David Jones has rewarded admirers of his earlier period—that of opaque paintings, taut images, rare incised or rounded box-woods—by presenting them at length with another major work of sacred art.

Anathemata: ‘things patient of being “set-up to the gods”’: for matter, thoughts stirring as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’; for background, ‘the entire world of sign and sacrament’; for magnet and focus, the Body of the Lord.

Incarnation is here ‘no hint half guessed, [no] gift half understood’. In lieu of Mr Eliot’s ‘hardly barely prayable prayer’ we have an epic conterminous with recorded and unrecorded time, one vast eucharistic symphony, whose tempo is the velocity of thought; its music ‘unmeasured, irregular in stress and interval, of interior rhythm, modal’, moves stately as in breves, its tone akin rather to woodwind than to strings: ‘reeds then! and minstrelsy’. Great play is made with the more sombre vowels—‘the stone/ the fonted water/ the fronded wood’. Sharps are not to seek—‘if fifth the fire/ the cadence ice’, nor clash of consonants—‘skirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod’.