My opportunities for studying Catholicism in the United States were fragmentary, in the course of a year devoted to university teaching and travel. I had the good fortune to be teaching at what is generally taken to be the best of the Catholic universities, Notre Dame, Indiana; and it was in the main from this particular listening post that I picked up my information and my views. I did travel a good deal in the Middle West and the Far West and this gave me an opportunity to see in passing some aspects of Catholic life. As well, I went to non-Catholic universities and was able to see both the reactions of non-Catholic Americans to Catholicism and the work of Catholics in non-Catholic universities, particularly through the Newman centres. I was also a steady and, in some instances, horrified reader of the Catholic press.

What I want to do is to examine American Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon. I do not think that anything I have to say is directly relevant to the problems of Catholic higher education in this country, except in so far as comparisons are always likely to turn out to be instructive. American society and its problems are so remote in many if not all respects from the problems of any European society that it is hard to see at first that American Catholic higher education offers either models for us to imitate or examples of what we should avoid.

Perhaps I ought to make it plain at the start that I conceived an enormous affection and respect for the society of the United States. It is possible that it will in fifty or a hundred years produce one of the great civilizations of the world. My critical comments, and there will be many in the remarks that follow, are those of an admirer. Perhaps I might even, before I begin my analysis, try to explain what it was about American society that fascinated me and filled me with affection and, it is not too much to say, a certain intoxication.

It is a fairly commonplace observation that the morals of groups fall far short of the morals of individuals—far short, even, of the ‘average’ morality of the individuals who compose the groups. The selfishness of nations is proverbial; it was a saying of George Washington’s that no nation is to be trusted beyond its own interests, and this saying has gained wide currency as an expression of political wisdom. The arrogance of powerful nations is as familiar to students of history as their selfishness. The late Professor Dicey, writing before the fear of world cataclysm had begun to darken men’s minds, advanced the theory that wherever British interests were at stake, these were to be advanced even at the cost of war—a theory that could be accepted as a reasonable political attitude, whereas if it were to be translated into personal terms, it would arouse the horror of any civilized person; for who in any circles would dare to assert that he was in favour of always advancing his own interests, however many murders he committed on the way?

Why should there be such a gulf between the moral behaviour of individuals towards each other, and the moral behaviour of groups towards each other? For make no mistake about it, this is not a question that concerns only the nation-group. Wherever recognizable social groups face each other, with or without political organization, we may expect scant justice, and less charity, in their mutual relations. There is no need, alas, to go into the world of profit-making industry to verify this fact; we have only to consider the attitudes of different religious groups towards each other—even the attitudes of different religious orders within the same Christian Church; the fact that these groups are composed of men and women individually dedicated to service of the same God seems to do litde to mitigate the conflicts arising from the selfishness and arrogance which everywhere accompany the behaviour of humanity ‘in the gang’.

In recent months there has been controversy in the Catholic press casting doubt on the expediency of the ‘reunion’ or ecumenical work taking place within the Church, and promoted by the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians at the Vatican Council. It is said to be drying up the normal inflow of conversions, because some potential converts are encouraged to stay where they are in order to work for eventual unity between the Church and their own dissident communion. It has been asserted, though the authority for this does not appear widely based, that in Germany, for this reason, there is a calculated refusal on the part of some priests to accept prospective converts for instruction and reception. Whatever the truth may be in this matter the question is certainly being asked by a number of priests and lay people in this country whether this new apostolate is not encouraging a kind of indifferentism, in the minds of Catholics, concerning the uniqueness of the one true Church as the way of salvation for all men and so hindering individual conversions.

The question came up for discussion at the Heythrop Conference and, as far as I know, the general conclusion reached was that the work of attracting, instructing and receiving individual converts, and the work of mutual penetration and understanding between ourselves and other Christians, which is the aim of ecumenical encounter, are specifically different from each other in technique and approach, but in the long run compatible because they are complementary. Catholic ecumenism is a preparation of the ground, on a wide and corporate scale, for a conversion to truth, which will ultimately lead by God’s grace to unity in faith.

It was an uneasy summer. Yet all seemed usual enough on the crowded freeways, the trailers loaded with the burdens that Americans bear for their annual love affair with what they imagine to be the past: guns and fishing rods, plaid shirts and folksong records, bags of charcoal nuggets for the forest cook-outs, stickers on the rear window of Yoshe-mite, Virginia City and Gettysburg. But the papers they read as they sat at the teakwood tables in Oregon camping grounds or lay by the motel pools in Florida always told the same story: a single theme whose only variations were Bull Connor’s police dogs savaging the Negro boys or the high-pressure hoses mowing a black mob down, or, as summer ended, the exploded bomb in Birmingham, Alabama, and the broken bodies of children in the street. And there had been the Washington march and a quarter-of-a-million witnesses to all this huge iniquity.

James Baldwin’s book had headed the best-seller list in the NewYork Times all summer long. And The Fire Next Time, enraged and apocalyptic, matched the new mood. Somehow the old arguments had become as irrelevant as war-time rationing. And even the high-minded, faithful over the years to the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (and how suddenly archaic that had come to sound!), seemed still to be speaking of another time, another place and certainly another people. The religious leaders, with various degrees of caution, sounded trumpets—mostly of tin, it must be admitted. And Catholic Bishops spoke afresh, or at least again, of the Natural Law.

If the question whether it is better to be red than dead or vice versa is stultifying, the reason is not so much that it poses a false alternative as that it masks what may be the true nature of the critical problem that mankind, and Christians specifically, face at the present moment of man’s time. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, the magnitude of the explosive power or the extent of personal and property damage did not materially change the nature of modem war, though its magnitude and that of even more powerful, later weapons has served to bring to consciousness the qualitative difference between modem and traditional war. Of course, no one will argue that it makes no difference whether to the arsenals of World War II we add the refinements of fusion warheads and ballistic missiles, not to speak of the bacteriological and chemical weapons to which we pay little attention in our fascination with the quantity of heat liberated by a nuclear firestorm. But one could become so entranced with the terrors of nuclear war that one might spend all one’s efforts in the de-nuclearization of war; just as one could become so pragmatic about legitimate spiritual values that one might squander all one’s conscience in the justification of an unjustifiable war. I would suggest, against both, that nuclear weapons are the effect of nuclear war and, in sum, that nuclear war is not evil because it is nuclear but, on the contrary, that nuclear war is nuclear because it is evil in the first place.

Less epigrammatically, the point is that we might consider very seriously whether any modern war can be just. One may grant that, in principle, defensive war can be justified and yet question whether any total war, nuclear or conventional, can be but essentially offensive.

Most scientists today have ceased to bother about the famous nineteenth-century ‘conflict with religion’. It is over. They do not think that religion has been defeated; more seriously, they think it has become irrelevant to them. And unfortunately the scientists who do believe in Christianity, even those who are Catholic, contribute to this notion. Their religion is best kept at arm’s length, kept for Sundays. Those who write about the matter have found the perfect formula to ensure that no conflict should be possible; they insist that no point of contact can be found. Science and religion are about quite different realms, they say; science deals with the laws that govern the material universe, while religion is about spiritual truths, ultimately about a remote and immaterial God.

Such a picture is thoroughly false and misleading. But it is true that a lot of popular Catholic teaching does contribute to the existence of a general attitude of this kind in the community at large. It is still far too ‘spiritualist’ in outlook; children are still being taught, often enough, that their bodies are not really necessary, that the great moment to hope for is the escape of their souls from imprisonment in matter, from this wicked world of flesh (and, by implication, from all those nasty people) in order to wing away alone to God. No wonder there is a general impression that matter is not quite nice, and in consequence Catholics leaving school still receive nothing like the same encouragement to take up science as they do to take up arts. Or if they have been allowed to go to the science side at school, this is because of the great openings it offers: science is the gateway to influence and power, to be used naturally enough for the Church’s advancement. That scientific work can in itself be a spiritual activity is mentioned much less often.

The moral sensibilities of Americans have received many shocks in recent years on disclosures of misbehaviour in the worlds of entertainment, labour, and government. The discovery that ethical practices were no better in some of the most highly regarded of the large corporations gave public opinion a far heavier jolt. In February 1961 Judge Ganey, in the Federal court at Philadelphia, pronounced sentence on the leading corporations in the electrical manufacturing industry and their executives found guilty of violating the antitrust laws. He imposed fines totalling $1,924,500 and handed down seven jail sentences and twenty-four suspended jail sentences. Never before had so many highly placed business executives been marched off to jail. By the usual standards they were good men, most of them family men, pillars of church and community, who had won success by years of hard work. Among those who went to jail was George Burens, father of a family of four children, whose career to this point had been another Horatio Alger story. He had risen to a vice presidency in the General Electric Company with annual compensation of $127,000 from his first position with the company at age fifteen as a stockroom boy paid 33 cents an hour.

Corporate failure, though less dramatic than individual failure, was perhaps more unexpected. Just a few months before the grand jury began its investigations, the chairman of the board of General Electric had testified before the Kefauver subcommittee that his company was pursuing a vigorous policy of compliance with the laws and quoted a distinguished jurist who ranked General Electric as the No.

To start with, a tempting text for the anti-humanist; only let him take care how he reads it. In 1485-6 a Flemish Carmelite wrote to the Venetian scholar Ermolao Barbaro to compliment him on his work and ask some personal questions: is Barbaro married? Or is he a priest or a religious? Answer: I am neither this nor that nor the other: paganus et spontis meae sum. Duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras; cetero sum liberrimus . . . Obviously, the context saves us from misreading that paganus; Barbaro is using classical Latin and the word here means simply ‘layman’. And yet an unsympathetic reader might cavil still. That acknowledgement of two lords, Christ and . . . ‘letters’! Did not our Lord tell us we cannot serve two masters? Certainly; all the same it might be unfair to jump to conclusions: better, for the moment, to keep Barbaro’s phrase in mind as a kind of motto of the humanist mentality we shall be considering, epitomizing both the integration it aspired to and also, no doubt, the risks that it ran.

The literary sense of ‘humanist’ - as referring to ‘one devoted to or versed in the hterary culture called the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a latinist’ (O.E.D.) - is almost obsolete in modem English, except in history books, where Humanism designates the revival of classical studies in the later Middle Ages and the currents of thought and feeling that it occasioned. A discreet definition on these lines is offered by the American scholar E. H. Wilkins: ‘the scholarly strand in the Renaissance’; which in turn raises of course the question of what we mean by the Renaissance. As an historical term it obviously contrasts with ‘Middle Ages’; there was, it is implied, a rebirth bringing those Ages to an end; and they, as ‘middle’, intervened between a time when something was alive and a second time when it came back to life; and so were a more or less dead or dormant epoch, an interval of darkness between two luminous eras.

The Church exists among men, men of flesh and blood who are, for the most part, in what we shall call ‘the world’. It is not a simple thing. While men are free to change the world they live in, this same world exercises, now as in the past, a great influence on men, including those who make up the community of believers that is the Church. It is true that the Gospel must be numbered among the forces at work in the world, since the men who respond to the Gospel are also in the world. There is an interplay, a complex relation between the world and the Gospel, a relation that varies from time to time, and which cannot be solved by a simple affirmation of a common divine origin of both societies. St Paul, having commented rather sharply on aspects of the world in his time, says later on: ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God’.

Nevertheless, history has seen a considerable assimilation of elements from the world within the structures of the Christian community, even before Constantine. In the Eastern Churches, the conciliar procedure followed that of the Roman senate, and the division of ecclesiastical dioceses followed that of the civil dioceses. Byzantium was a place of little importance in the Church until Constantine established his capital there. Even in the realm of faith, the influence of Hellenism is undeniable. Contact with the Greek intellectual world raised questions, while at the same time it provided tools, for a theological reflection which is a permanent part of our Christian heritage. To admit a certain assimilation of elements from the world, a certain ‘conforming’ to structures which do not have their origin in the Gospel is not to say that these elements are always corrupting influences.

The Commedia is not just an aesthetic, but an existential, work. As such, it demands an interpretation which relates it not merely to art and art-history but to our own human concerns, to our situation and existence in life, to life and life-history. That is the note which I wish to strike in this essay, and with this emphasis: the Comedy demands such interpretations; its demand is an integral part of its art.

Of course, though the point is often ignored or forgotten, it is not strictly an original one. Already in the Letter to Can Grande the note is struck, either by Dante or on his behalf, when, having affirmed that the poem has to do with ethics, the Letter goes on to say that its aim is not merely instruction but inculcation. In the previous paragraph it is struck more forcibly still: the work is intended to be nothing less than a means of grace, to produce nothing less than ‘conversion’: ‘Finis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis’ (§ 15). The words are ambitious indeed, and it is hard, at first, to take them more seriously than we are generally wont to take the high-minded professions of moral purpose which conventionally preface a great part of the Renaissance’s literary output. But we should, I think, make the attempt, and test them, to see if, at least in a part—since the whole cannot be studied in an article—the Comedy will substantiate them. We shall try to see how, in spite of the fact that its narrative is compounded of events and phenomena which are miraculous, or fantastic, the Commedia is a communication paradoxically spoken from and to ‘existence’ much as we know it, by an art which, at times, comes close to defining itself as something perhaps quite unique: the art of converting through art, ‘de statu miserie ... ad statum felicitatis.’

A traveller from a far country has the obligation to entertain his hosts with tales of strange customs and mythical monsters, heroes and spells. The country of which I am to tell you today is a very strange one indeed. I do not know if President de Gaulle ever became acquainted with English philosophy during his stay in England, but certainly it would entirely justify his claim that England does not, today, at least, belong to Europe. Perhaps, however, as a middleman of ideas, I shall be permitted here to enter the intellectual Common Market; fortunately there are no tariffs on ideas, though as we all know only too well, there are more serious barriers to communication, cultural, existential, confessional—and linguistic.

It is the strangest of paradoxes that the philosopher who was perhaps more influential than any other in giving modem English philosophy its character and stance was an Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was more utterly dedicated to philosophy than anyone I have ever met; and I think the main benefit I gathered from his lectures, most of which I did not understand when I heard them as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the academic year 1946-7, was the encounter with a living example of philosophical depth and integrity, a standard of seriousness, by which I could, and can now, measure my own deficiencies. It is, I believe, important to remember that he was a kind of philosophical ‘primitive,’ a Douanier Rousseau of philosophy, who came to philosophy by way of engineering and the mathematical logic of Frege and Russell. Like all young Austrians of his time, no doubt, he had read Schopenhauer and been deeply impressed by him; but his acquaintance with the great philosophers of the past was extremely fragmentary. In what follows I shall try to indicate certain features of his thought, with particular reference to the problems it sets for metaphysical theology.

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.

How is Christianity involved in the Negro struggle? Dr Martin Luther King has appealed to stricty Christian motives. He has based his nonviolence on his belief that love can unite men, even enemies, in truth. That is to say that he has clearly spelled out the struggle for freedom not as a struggle for the Negro alone, but also for the white man. From the start, the non-violent element in the Negro struggle is oriented toward ‘healing’ the sin of racism and toward unity in reconciliation. An absolutely necessary element in this reconciliation is that the white man should allow himself to learn the mute lesson which is addressed to him in the suffering, the non-violent protest, the loving acceptance of punishment for the violation of unjust laws, which the Negro freely and willingly brings down upon himself in the white man’s presence, in the hope that the oppressor may come to see his own injustice.

The purpose of this suffering, freely sought and accepted in the spirit of Christ, is the liberation of the Negro and the redemption of the white man, blinded by his endemic sin of racial injustice. In other words, the struggle for liberty is not merely regarded by this most significant sector of the Negro population, as a fight for political rights. It is this, and it is also much more. It is what Gandhi called Satyagraha—a struggle first of all for the truth, outside and independent of specific political contingencies.