A difficulty constantly confronting the writer of obituary notices is the question of what mood and tense to employ, and it is a difficulty which comes very much to the fore with the death of a man like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Somehow neither the subjunctive mood nor pluperfect tense comes readily to mind since the bereavement seems too personal and world-wide to allow of such historical impersonality; instead the loss is so great that it seems to call for something less final, less absolute. Better the present indicative, especially as there can be little doubt that his influence in India will grow rather than diminish with the years, and that the effect of such an influence on a country so vast will have repercussions which are not only global, but which internationally will be more or less immediate. Certainly the indecision as to which style to adopt in the tributes paid at his death, and the vacillating already apparent in the numerous leaders and notices over what mood and tense to choose, are proof enough of his importance, even if the true significance of that importance cannot be fully estimated until it is seen how many more similar violent deaths will flow out of that policy which he inaugurated. Upon such a determination must rest the final verdict of history. Yet, irrespective of the level of political home rule and contemporary affairs, there are other and deeper reasons for his prestige; reasons that to be genuinely understood call first for an evaluation of his philosophy since it was from that philosophy that his political actions sprang.

Saint Paul insists, as we know, on the idea that the whole of Christianity depends on the fact of Christ's Resurrection. ‘If Christ has not risen’, he says, ‘our faith is vain and our hope groundless’, adding at once, ‘No, Christ really has risen from the dead, and I am witness to that’.

In Poland this thought of Christ’s Resurrection in addition to being a fundamental article of religious faith, had also a deeply patriotic and national meaning. During the period of enemy domination the feast of the Resurrection, the Christian Easter, became as well a symbol of national resurrection. Each of the faithful who spoke of the risen Christ, the conqueror over death, joined thereto in his heart another thought and sentiment—his lively and fundamental hope in the resurrection of Poland. That is what gave Easter, on both the traditional and the religious side, a very special colour which made its old popular customs still dearer, more intimate and more venerable. We do not know how the Easter festival can be observed in Poland at the present day, but we may be sure that no Pole behind the Iron Curtain ever lets go his steadfast hope of seeing his country really free and returning to life.

The season of Lent has had in Poland for centuries a special popular service, the singing of the Lamentation*, or Bitter Mourning for the Passion. This must not be confused with Tenebrae in Holy Week. It is sung in church several times a week, usually on Wednesdays and Fridays and also on Sunday evenings.

I suppose there is no greater and more devoted authority on the classic Thomist tradition than Father Garrigou-Lagrange. For well over forty years he has been writing in defence of that tradition. His first works were written at a time of crisis, when the very bases of faith were attacked by the Modernists. He was an apostle of Thomist realism against the immanentist, evolutionist and phenomenalist philosophies before modernism was condemned by Pius X. Writing now in his old age, long after that struggle of his youth, Father Garrigou feels that there are once again danger-signals of a falling away from St Thomas, and he is as convinced as he ever was that such a falling away will bring disaster to many. ‘Whither goes the new theology?’ he writes at the end of his book. ‘It is returning to modernism.’

In view of the urgency, as he sees it, he considers it timely to give us a constructive and concise statement of the whole system of philosophy and theology of St Thomas. In all controversial questions he takes, as he always has done, the more traditional view, almost always under the guidance of the classical commentator, Cajetan.

An English Catholic, aside from the main stream of Catholic thought, must wonder that there could be any foundation in present-day Catholic thinking for Father Garrigou-Lagrange’s fears. It is more in France than in England that much of the older theological tradition has been questioned in recent years.

Fully to understand Claudel’s theory of poetic-expression we must follow his analysis of movement. Being, self-existent, is motionless; created things, both matter and spirit, are in movement. This motion imprinted on them by the Creator-Spirit gives them their sense : we have seen how much Claudel means by that word. He uses the metaphor of flight (/wife) to express their movement out from the Creator; but their origin is also their end (fin, goal and limit) and they are moving back thither. ‘Now every movement results in the creation or maintenance of a state of equilibrium’ (p. 75), but only through a constant tension because everything other than complete and self-sufficing Being is in a condition of ‘interplay and contradiction’ (p. 147). Man, like other creatures, is perpetually in movement for ‘there is movement wherever there is variation in existence’.14 It may be a movement of inner vibration tending to produce the form; or a movement of efference or outward process.

That the whole of creation, even inanimate, is in a state of alternating movement is also a hypothesis of modern science. But while its materialist exponents ‘observe the working of a machine’, the Christian thinker ‘enjoys the use of an instrument’ (Art Poetique, p. 28). For these changes, contacts, responses, man has, in common with the animals, senses: sensation is the first phenomenon of our activity, but we are not, like the animals, passive under it. Our senses are our tools: ‘as we learn the use of a tool by apprenticeship so we educate our senses’ (id. p. 91).

In writing about the new Latin translation of the Hebrew Psalter there is a temptation (to which I see some have yielded) to use , some such title as Psallite sapienter; then one can follow up the title with St Augustine’s commentary on these words: ‘David here teaches us to sing the psalms intelligently, to seek rather the heart’s enlightening than the sounds that strike the ear’. But under the circumstances I thought I had better first look up the 46th Psalm in the new translation, and there I found that I should have fallen at the very first fence. The phrase does not appear; it is psallite hymnum instead.

You see how warily we shall have to walk, if the new translation becomes official, both in quoting the psalms and the Fathers’ commentaries on the psalms. Not only that, but we shall have to say farewell to many of our favourite verses: such verses as have, rightly or wrongly, nourished the piety of the faithful ever since Latin became the common language of the Western Church. No longer will the priest be able to pour out his soul at the foot of the altar with the words Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetijicat juventutem meam.. There is no mention of anybody’s youth in that verse, apparently. And, horribile dictu, we may have to begin the canonical hours not with the gloriously resounding Dens in adjutorium meum intende but with the more modest if more correct Placeat tibi Deus ut eripias me.