A medievalist rarely has the experience of reading for review a book which impresses him at once as being definitive in its field. Père M.-H. Vicaire’s life of St Dominic gives this impression in the first chapter, and continues to give it till the last page is reached, many days later. No historical work as such is immortal; Thucydides and Gibbon live chiefly as great literature; new material will always be appearing and no two ages will seek for exactly the same answer from their sources. But when these reservations have been made, it may be confidently said that this life, like Vacandard’s Life of St Bernard and that of St Philip Neri by Ponnelle and Bordet, will remain standard for fifty years or more, and will influence all that is written about St Dominic far into the future. It will not put an end to writings on the saint; it will probably lead to their multiplication, for St Dominic is a figure that every generation and every nation will seek to understand and to interpret for themselves, but it will be from these volumes that the ore is extracted, to be moulded into this shape or that.

It is frequently remarked, both by historians and devout Catholics, that little is known of the life and personality of St Dominic. Certainly the lessons in the breviary on his feast day are more than usually successful in confirming such a view. One reason for this is undoubtedly the lack of an adequate contemporary biography. Dominic lived when the monastic centuries, with their tradition of literary education and classical models, had ended.

When in 1572 Thomas 4th Duke of Norfolk was attainted and beheaded on the charge of conspiring to marry Mary Queen of Scots and to dethrone Elizabeth, the Howard family lost the title of Duke for the best part of a century. His son however inherited through his mother, Mary Fitzalan, the title of Earl of Arundel, and this became the principal title of the family till the dukedom was restored in 1660. This son was Philip 23rd Earl of Arundel, who was still a minor when his father was executed. His father’s last act was to entrust him to the tender mercies of the great Lord Burghley, so that he was brought up a Protestant. But he married a good Catholic wife in the person of Anne, daughter of Thomas Lord Dacre, and Arundel House their London dwelling became one of the most noted citadels of the faith. Philip himself was converted in 1583 by William Weston, S.J., who was later Robert Nutter’s fellow-prisoner at Wisbech. Realizing that this step was high treason, Philip planned to flee to the Continent, leaving a letter for the Queen to be delivered only after his departure. But his flight was discovered before his ship left Portsmouth and he was arrested on board and lodged in the Tower. Four years later, when the Armada appeared in the Channel he was accused by a timorous priest, also a prisoner there, of procuring from the priest prisoners twenty-four hours non-stop intercession for the success of the Armada.

One of the effects of the restoration of the Holy Week liturgy and in particular of the Easter Vigil has been to re-direct attention to the Resurrection and its place in the Christian life. It is undoubtedly a new-found emphasis that does not chime very easily with the meditation-on-the-dolorous-passion mentality that has been the tradition since the later Middle Ages. The two are not of course incompatible and the Passion must always have a central place in the life of the Christian in via. But the liturgy does very definitely teach us that the climax of Christ’s redeeming work was not the Cross but the Resurrection and we are now faced with the task of re-incorporating it into our lives. For this at least two things are necessary: one is the rediscovery of what the New Testament has to say about the Resurrection and the other is to live it in and through the liturgy.

A word must be said about the New Testament material if only because it underlies the outlook of the liturgy. It may be divided for our purposes into three strata: the prophecies and accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels, the earliest kerygma or proclamation of the Resurrection in Acts and the teaching of St Paul. We can do no more here than refer to the Gospel passages in which our Lord foretells his Passion and Resurrection, noting meanwhile that the Resurrection is always mentioned, and to the passages in Luke 24, 26, 27 which seem to have become already a ‘theological’ scheme: ‘Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so enter into his glory?’ (and cf. verses 44-46).