When a saint reaches universality, his original background and personal characteristics sink into comparative unimportance. God’s possession of him has carried him beyond these things. Now, Charles de Foucauld, Brother Charles of Jesus, came from a very old family of the French nobility. His was a rich heritage of ancestral virtues and heroic chivalry. He himself was an officer and an explorer. He was thus quite thoroughly not only a man of his country, but a man of a particular period of his country’s history as well. In short, nothing would have seemed to have destined him in any particular way for a role as world-wide as the one we now know he was to have. Yet, once converted, he gave himself so utterly to our Lord, and his life turned into one so in keeping with the Gospel, that the witness he bore has in fact become universal. In other words, he became like a ‘little brother of Jesus’, as we say, and consequently, as he used to put it himself, a ‘universal little brother’.

After seven years generously devoted to life in a Trappist cloister, he felt himself irresistibly impelled towards a very literal imitation of Jesus working at Nazareth. He therefore set out on his quest in the self-chosen abasement of an all-but- penniless vagabond. From then on, he was to lead, first, the life of a domestic servant in Nazareth, devoting every hour he could spare from his chores to adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

Many who are interested in the growth of an eirenic theology which aims at solving some of the contradictions and oppositions of divided Christendom will welcome a sermon under the above title, printed in the December number of Theology. Implicit in its argument is an intimation that the historico-critical method, though an indispensable instrument in the hands of the theologian to assist him in establishing the true sense of Scripture, has proved itself insufficient as the final and decisive criterion in biblical interpretation. Something further is required and that something would seem to be a deeper understanding of the meaning and function of Tradition.

Very briefly summarized, the argument of the sermon is that the Reformation produced a stalemate between Catholicism and Protestantism, both sides becoming involved in a closed-system theology. Up to the sixteenth century Catholicism had developed harmoniously, but in such a fashion as to interpret the New Testament in ways other than the New Testament itself really allowed. The Reformation broke this development by recourse to the Bible only. But Protestantism, almost at once, began the busy construction of closed doctrinal systems, unconsciously imitating Catholicism in positing a single canon of biblical interpretation; Lutheran justification by faith alone or Calvinist predestination of the elect. From the embattled state produced by these closed systems of theology, in which Catholicism and Protestantism had alike become involved, arose the historical method. In the hope of breaking the deadlock between them this method asked the question: ‘What does the Bible mean when considered in its own right, and without reference to any doctrinal system?’

A serious and sympathetic study of Newman’s theory of development has appeared recently from the pen of Mr Owen Chadwick. He concludes a painstaking historical account of theories on doctrinal development with a challenge to Newman’s claim to interpret Catholicism. ‘The question then for those who think Newman’s theology is Catholic, is this: these new doctrines, of which the Church had a feeling or inkling but of which she was not conscious—in what meaningful sense may it be asserted that these doctrines are not “new revelation”?’

That development for Newman was, in a certain sense, from an ‘idea’ held wordlessly and unreflexively to a formulation in words, I agree. But I am sorry that Mr Chadwick has used in this summary a word as un-Newmanic as ‘feeling’. I agree that Newman was a notoriously untechnical writer, and it is true that, in at least one place in his letters, he uses the word ‘feeling’ to represent what he elsewhere calls our partial or unconscious recognition of a truth which we have not yet learnt to formulate. But it is also true that, at other times, Newman explicitly rejects both ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ as words too subjective to represent our relationship to the object of Christian faith or theology. Moreover, it is remarkable that, in his Sermon of 1843, on ‘Development in Religious Doctrine’, he never once uses either of these words. Nor does he, I believe, use them in the Essay on Development.

It is not usual, in this country at least, for Catholic moral philosophers and theologians to question the metaphysical status of the principles which they employ in their arguments. God and man are taken for granted, and morality is presented as a systematic description of the order which ideally obtains between them and of man’s defection from that order. The importance of such a procedure is hardly to be denied: a programme, a map of life, coherently and consistently recommended, answers immediately to our present perplexities. And yet these perplexities cannot all be satisfactorily resolved in a programmatic way. For our perplexities are not merely first-level perplexities, which may be defined in terms of a restricted number of possible courses of action in a world whose intelligible articulation is something securely achieved, and which may thus be resolved in terms of the recommendation of just one of these courses of action. Our perplexities are also (when they are acknowledged) second-level perplexities, concerned with the articulation itself, throwing into question the very nature of the order obtaining between man and God. Our morality cannot be wholly derived from a metaphysics established without explicit reference to morality. We can no longer merely insert our action into a programme; to attempt to do so, to refuse to admit the existence of second-level perplexity, is to evade a responsibility, the serious acceptance of which could and normally should creatively achieve a fresh, a more interior insight into our relationship to God by deliberately taking the strain of the question in order to offer an answer.

That the first biography of the Belgian missionary priest who devoted his life to the lepers at Molokai should be written by a Scots freethinker, a grandson of the manse, is curious. That it should be the cause of a controversy which made Father Damien’s name known throughout the world, and which may yet make it even better known and venerated, is an indication of the often seemingly round-about way in which God chooses that his will be done on earth. No two men with less in common and with less possible mutual sympathy than Father Damien and Robert Louis Stevenson could easily be imagined. The one a Belgian peasant who only just managed to qualify academically for ordination, and who took the ceremony of being covered with a funeral pall at his profession so seriously and so literally that he promptly volunteered to be exiled to a living death in the leper colony at Molokai: the other a brilliant young Scots writer whose one object in life appeared to be to achieve a reputation as a wit and conversationalist. Their paths never crossed even. But Stevenson landed at Molokai a month after Damien’s death, and was possessed shortly afterwards by a religious determination to defend Damien’s reputation. The story is well known but what is not generally realized is that: (1) Stevenson had little time for missionaries in general, either Catholic or Protestant (he was associated in South Sea politics with the anti-missionary faction); and (2) his first impressions of Damien (based on what observers in Molokai told him) were not too favourable —it was only after reaching Australia some weeks later that he became a fervent admirer of Damien.

The centenary of the apparitions at Lourdes has inevitably inspired a new literature which ranges from critical editions of the written sources to popular ballads. The variety of emphasis and the levels of taste revealed in these books reflect the universality of Lourdes itself—its capacity to engage the serious attention of the scholar as well as the uncritical affection of the simple believer.

Most important of the centenary publications is Lourdes: Dossier des Documents Authentiques, edited by Abbé Laurentin (Lethielleux). Four volumes are projected, of which two have already appeared (Vol. I: Au temps des seize premieres apparitions; 1,200 francs; Vol. II: Dix-Septième Apparition, Epidémie des Visionnaires, Gnoses et Faux Miracles, La Bataille Administrative, Fermeture de la Grotte: 1,500 francs). It is a matter for gratitude that a theologian such as M. Laurentin should undertake the necessary task of inspecting the sources of Lourdes. As he explains in his introduction, the apparitions at Lourdes are not a major subject for theological study, but they have an important place in the life of the Church, ‘if only because of the number of people they affect, and because of the fruits they produce as well as the dangers they present’. For that reason ‘God’s designs in this matter should be exactly established and stripped of exaggerations’.

The need, therefore, was to establish the authenticity of the record on which the story of Lourdes depends. M. Laurentin describes his task as comparable to a detective story, and indeed many of the relevant documents are in fact police reports made at the time of the apparitions. In the course of a century a mass of documents had accumulated in archives of all sorts (and, as M. Laurentin remarks drily, ‘France is a country where everything is kept’).