The commonplace that Dante is a religious poet prompts one to ask what this compound term means; but for my purpose it suffices to define religion as an interior state of submissive attention to God, and poetry as an interior state of creative attention to things—that is, an attention which tends essentially to express experience as completely as possible in words. Religion, in this sense, is not necessarily Christianity, though Christianity presupposes it; still less is it the doctrine or the external observances of any given religion. Similarly poetry, in this sense, is not any particular poem or poems, though these all presuppose it. Both terms refer to interior states which may be found in any human soul. And as defined, these two states are clearly distinct. And the distinction is supported a posteriori by the fact that most religious people are not, except in remote potency, poets and that many poets are not, except in remote potency, religious. The two states, however, though distinct, are not incompatible and have in fact often been found together; but when this happens there is a certain overlapping of interests, causing tensions and problems varying with the circumstances and characters of the religious poets concerned. In Gerard Hopkins, for instance, the tension was between poetry and his priestly vocation; and there is no more tragic case known to us, because in no one else have the two gifts and capacities appeared at a greater intensity simultaneously. Dante’s case is very different: if he felt this tension at all, he must have felt it less intensely; because for him there was no question of sacrificing poetry to religion, but (if anything) of sacrificing one sort of poetry (of secular inspiration) to another sort (of religious inspiration).

In his ‘Traite des Études Monastiques’ Dom Jean Mabillon quotes with evident approval the opinion of a contemporary writer that whereas all the Greek Fathers are summed up in St John Chrysostom so all the Latin Fathers can truly be said to be contained in St Augustine. From the year 431 when Pope Celestine I sang the praises of Augustine in his well-known letter to the bishops of Gaul, the teaching Church has not ceased to recommend in an altogether exceptional way his writings and doctrine.

Of course it is in the realm of divine grace that his authority is pre-eminent, but it would be inexact to confine his influence within such a limit. He is the Father of the Western Church, bridging the gulf between the old and the new; providing us with a summary of what had been thought out by his predecessors, and preparing the way for the great medieval development which was to follow. Living his life about midway between the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon—probably the most vigorous period of the Church’s history—he brought to bear on Christian revelation the elements of pagan philosophy which his powerful and essentially courageous mind had duly assimilated.

With Pelagianism in the fourth century something new appeared. It was almost as if the growing distance between then and the time of our Lord called for an increased self-reliance in him who would follow Christ, in order to bridge the gap. St Augustine, ever strongly aware of God’s transcendence and of man’s impotence before it, opposed and crushed this mistaken self-confidence by insisting on the exclusive omnipotence of love in grace.

There is such a thing as Progress, even with a capital P. The word has been discredited by those whose concept is superficial; who see plumbing as of the essence of progress, or a higher school-leaving age a gain regardless of what is taught in the schools. Over a short span progress is hard to plot. Fifty years ago people died of starvation in British slums: today no one need starve in Britain. Yet the majority are perhaps less happy in their work. Again, fifty years ago Russians who were sent to Siberia were at least treated as men: today in their slave camps their descendants are treated like beasts, and valued as such. British children are now kept longer at school: yet juvenile delinquency has increased and seems at the moment to become more vicious. In many ways do we see both progress and retrogression active in society, until there appears to be no constant direction, only a heaving flux in men’s affairs. Seeing it, some of us turn cynical or irresponsible, others turn to a brutal materialism, an idealism that condones diabolism as a means to an end that it poisons.

‘We are not islands’, we cannot dissociate ourselves completely from our fellow-men. The sons of Adam are one, although individual. That is perhaps why efforts to found ideal communities, cut off from the rest of the world, fail. Men are of their nature missionaries, they must share and pass on what they possess. Only in a very special way, by abnegation and withdrawing from normal social life, can religious communities survive:

Pope Leo XIII, in his letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, said the condition of the working classes was the pressing question of the hour; that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade were concentrated in the hands of comparatively few individuals, so that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.’

In that same year there met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the twenty-fourth Annual meeting of the Trade Union Congress, over which presided a miner—a Mr T. Burt. That Congress represented a little more than 1,300,000 organized workers. Last year it was my great honour, at the Isle of Man, to preside over the eighty-fifth gathering of the T.U.C. representing over 8,000,000 trade unionists.

The British trade union movement knew only too well the truth of the Pope’s words. Had it not waged for many years before an incessant struggle against the evil social conditions produced by the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism?

When the first T.U.C. met in Manchester in 1868, 34 delegates attended, representing 118,000 members. Barely thirty-four years after George Lovelace, a farm labourer of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, and five of his colleagues, had been convicted before the High Court for ‘treason’—i.e. administering ‘an unlawful oath’ and endeavouring to form a branch of the farm workers’ union— and transported to Botany Bay in the infamous convict ships of the day. The beginnings of our trade unions are rooted in struggle, hatreds, victimization and oppression. They were outlawed as conspirators, deprived of the right to hold property, handicapped by Governments, and ruthlessly opposed by employers.

Scholarship and reflection go together all too seldom. Two new books about the Middle Ages combine them in a quite exceptional way. It is no accident, but a sad commentary on present historical teaching, that one book was written by a professor in retirement, the other by a college tutor in a period of enforced rest. Both convey the rare and delightful impression of learning recollected in tranquillity. One remembers that the great Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, wrote his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe far away from his books and his students in a German prison camp in the First World War.

The Thirteenth Century (1216-1307) by Sir Maurice Powicke falls into two parts; the change in method and treatment is easily discernible. The first part covering the reign of Henry III draws on the author’s earlier book, Henry III and the Lord Edward, published in 1947. This large-scale work in two volumes summarized the findings of recent studies including the author’s minute researches into the reign of Henry III. Here he condenses it into a crisp and exciting narrative. A few details are new, since the first book provoked discussion, and some fresh studies have appeared. But the main difference is that judgments stand out more sharply and the characters have clearer outlines. If Henry remains very much the same, a naive, changeable, but ‘fundamentally decent’ person, his great friend and antagonist, Simon de Montfort, has become more sympathetic and intelligible. The incalculable trouble-maker, while still ambitious and erratic, now stands in closer relations with the knights and freeholders of the shires who supported his cause through their mistrust of royal promises.

Excuses that television is still only in the experimental stage are platitudinous but inevitable. Television criticism too is still forcedly exploratory, critics being of their nature parasites unable to advance beyond the medium which provides their material.

Television criticism hitherto stems from two sources: radio criticism and film criticism. To both the radio critic and the film critic television is, at present anyway, a more cumbersome, unwieldy, more realistic medium, more concerned with what it presents than how it presents it. Enjoying neither the incorporeal detachment of radio, nor the manoeuvrability of celluloid, it lacks the fluidity and flexibility of both radio and cinema. Until now, too, it falls far short of the purely visual achievements of the cinema, so that programmes of any visual appeal at all stand out in lonely splendour in the viewer’s memory: the Coronation of course (among its many other and more important achievements) was one, the St Denis High Mass another; but an otherwise often tedious and heavily criticized programme, Lime Grove’s Elizabethan evening, was also a pleasure to the eye as few TV programmes are.

Television in fact overlaps at many points with radio (not always to the disadvantage of ‘steam’ radio); at others it complements the cinema (by now it should be clear that each is going to need the other). More important for the critic is to determine where television differs from the other mechanised media of communication; what its own properties are..

There is to my mind little doubt that St Augustine regarded preaching as the most important of a bishop’s duties. It is the pastoral work par excellence, to feed the flock, to break the bread of the Word to the hungry. It is the bishop’s proper mode of almsgiving, of investing the talent which the Lord has given to him. ‘To lead a carefree life of leisure’, says Augustine, ‘little force would be needed to make me do that. There could be nothing more enjoyable than rummaging about in the divine treasure chest, with no one to plague me. While preaching, arguing, rebuking, building God’s house, having to manage for every one, who wouldn’t shrink from such a heavy burden i But the gospel scares me’—namely, the parable of the slothful servant. He also preached on that text, once when ‘the lords my brethren and fellow-bishops have been good enough to visit us and encourage us by their presence; and yet for some reason or other they refuse to give tired me a helping hand, and you a sermon when I ask them’. A short sermon, and very pointed. Poor blushing bishops in the apse!

Besides preaching tirelessly himself, he also provided in the De Doctrina Christiana what really seems to be a manual on preaching for the clergy. Most of this work, it is true, is concerned with how to interpret Scripture; but this means, for Augustine, how to acquire the matter for your sermons.

Thou waterest the hills from thy high dwelling: the earth shall be filled with the fruit of thy works’: St Thomas took this verse from Psalm 103 as the text of his inaugural lecture as Master in Theology at Paris, for, he says, it is ordained from eternity by the king and lord of the heavens that the gifts of his providence should come to his lowest creatures through the mediation of those that are higher, and so teachers and doctors are as mountains watered from on high by divine wisdom that they may pass on that wisdom to those they teach.

What is true of the theologian is true in a different way of every creative writer: he too is a mediator, he communicates a vision. But in what sense is he a creator? My concern here is to suggest questions rather than the answers to them: and here at once two different types of problem suggest themselves. The writer creates with words, but he also creates words. I am not thinking of the invention of neologisms: words are like living things, they grow, change, decay, die; and the fact that great Christian words can thus decay and die presents us with one of our most pressing problems. Some words become sterilized by over-familiarity, become labels empty of real meaning: do we stop to think what we really mean when we speak of grace or redemption? Some of the great Christian words have lost their virility, like ‘meekness’ and ‘mildness’.

Since Newman’s death in 1890 there have always been those who have pictured him as being in some way cut off from his age, so that, although his life traversed the nineteenth century, they think it would be difficult to gather evidence from his writings of the precise period to which he belonged. Now this opinion has been held not only by those out of sympathy with Newman, who have held it as a kind of reproach against him that contemporary secular affairs seemed to interest him so little, but has often been held also by many who were so convinced of the sanctity and otherworldhness of the great Oratorian, that they thought it quite too much to suppose that mundane matters, like a war in the Crimea or a Trust Bill in Parliament, could succeed in gaining his attention. The limit in this direction has been reached, now that a recent writer has portrayed, in a brilliant and informative book, a Newman, saintly indeed, but quite oblivious of the political world about him, or beyond his shores; a man, in fact, who would best be represented, at the time this author was writing, by a churchman of eminence who did not seem aware of the war in Korea. With this judgment what before was a matter of over-emphasis, or misconception, becomes a definite mistake, which as long as it lasts makes an adequate understanding of Newman impossible.

Now in trying to arrive at the truth about Newman’s attitude to contemporary events, it is not necessary to take into account the social and political philosophy which can be found in his works, though the value of this would be lessened if it were decided that Newman had simply no interest in social or political matters; but what is essential to bear in mind is the peculiar standpoint from which Newman viewed the social and political world.

Religion as a perspective intensifies life and enhances it from within more efficaciously than any other (objectively speaking; subjectively and in practice there may be any number of gradations possible in this). But is it to the exclusion of every other perspective? Does the religious perspective, once adopted or taken up, or, to allow for a more passive process, slid into, impose the renunciation of every other? This is the much discussed question of Christian humanism, the eschatological question that claims to dominate every other, the question of the precise significance of asceticism in the Christian life. Christian tradition in all this has been complicated by the fact that at different epochs there has appeared an extremism which has made it difficult to focus the question with a calm judgment. There seems to be a contradiction between the Gospel and History. Christ speaks of the Cross and of abnegation, even of total abnegation, but he leaves no room for doubt that he proposes to all men the specifically new relationship with the Father which he came to implant in humanity, nor that he reserves for the stronger souls a more intense religious cultivation: this means that ordinary human life is to be taken up into that new relationship and that the intenser cultivation of religion is neither the norm nor intended to supplant ordinary human living. The evangelical teaching gathered up and handed on by St Paul, in the same way, leaves no room for any out-and-out rejection of the ‘world’.

It is now some thirty years since a group of High Anglicans, moved by the disorder of the times—the first world war having recently ended and the promises of its ending being unfulfilled—were inspired to study and promote a Christian sociology which would be based on definite doctrinal assumptions. Before their decision, two approaches to the social problem were in vogue in the Church of England, the one an attempt to encourage amity between employers and their men, an endeavour illustrated by the work of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a cautious movement encouraged of late years by many of the Bishops, and the other, more specifically aggressive and political, a propaganda which found expression in the Church Socialist League by a body indifferent, on the whole, to doctrine, but persuaded that Socialism was not incompatible with, if not essential to, true modern Christian practice.

To neither of these objective did the new ‘League of the Kingdom of God’ (later to be renamed the ‘Christendom’ group) subscribe. Its principal inspirer, much influenced by the earlier beliefs of Maurice and his follower, Canon Widdrington, insisted that Christian living postulated a common life in which Christian values are embodied. He criticized what he called the ‘Mani- cheism’ of the modem Church in ignoring social justice as essential. The loss of the regulative, basic idea of the Kingdom of God, come out of the Passion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, had been disastrous.

‘We have on the one side auoided the scrupulositie of the Puritanes . . .; as also on the other side we haue shunned the obscuritie of the Papists, in their Azimes, Tutiike, Rational, Holocausts, Praepuce, Pasche, and a number of such like.’

. . . [Catholic] correspondence of a singular freshness, authentic eighteenth-century, and authentic English, mere English, indeed, and utterly free from the stereotyped halfforeign jargon that later generations were to experience.’

‘The fruits of the bloody sacrifice are superabundantly applied by the unbloody sacrifice.’

‘I saw Pfuff’s “Interrelated Harmony” described in the catalogue as a neo-amorphist experiment in intra-abstractionism. It is also an embodiment of universal mode-concepts, and the absence of stress emphasizes the integral tranquillity. Whirlpools of space would be a more accurate description of these non-emotional facets of dynamic passivity.’

The first of these quotations is from the address to the reader of the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible; the second is from a review in The Times Literary Supplement; the third is a contemporary theologian quoting from cap. 2 of session xxii of the Council of Trent; the fourth is from a satirical jape of ‘Beachcomber’. They are part of the harvest of a little desultory reading, and serve well enough as an indication of what I want to talk— or rather, muse—about: words.

Everything, however small, that can be a hindrance to faith is of importance; and as an experienced missioner has said, ‘language can in fact be a pretty effective hindrance’.

Since the later middle ages the Church has commonly taught that five main conditions must be fulfilled before a war may be entered into with justice and therefore graciously. These conditions are that the war has to be undertaken only as a last resort when all other methods of retaining or achieving peace have failed; that there are serious prospects of success; that the war must be waged only for a grave and just cause proportionate to the evils of war; that it must be declared and prosecuted only by the legitimate authority; and that the whole prosecution of the war be guided by the right intention. There is no need to discuss this tradition; it is sufficiently well-known and in certain circles has been discussed at such length as to become wholly complex and unreal. What is urgently needed is an objective view of the application of the principles involved in this tradition to the modem scene of international strife; in other words, we need to discover the full stream of Christian life and thought as it meets the ocean of the present at this point.

Tradition teaches—and we will accept it without argument— that war may be undertaken only as the last resort. As things exist today we can say that if and when a country suffers armed aggression and she is forced into a defensive war, then war is permissible under this heading because there is no alternative; but that international politics are so complicated that it is often extremely difficult to discover who is the real aggressor.

Latin America accounts for more than a third of the world’s Catholic population but for less than nine per cent of the world’s priests. The disproportion between these figures is the cardinal factor in the religious situation of a vast area almost wholly Catholic in nominal allegiance but which today presents one of the most urgent of the Church’s missionary problems.

The evidence of statistics is never the whole of any story, but the facts are so grave and their significance so little appreciated that this weakening of the Church’s essential function in South America must be further illustrated. It is usually assumed that a proportion of one priest to a thousand faithful is the barest minimum for assuring the Church’s basic ministrations. (In countries predominantly Protestant the ratio is much higher. Thus England and Wales have a proportion of one priest to about 450, the United States one to 622.) For the whole of Latin America the proportion is one to 7,000, with considerable variations in the different republics. (In Chile it is one to 3,000; in Argentina one to 4,750; in Brazil one to 8,000; in Honduras one to 10,350; in Guatemala one to 28,000.) The effective ministry of the priests there are (and in most countries many are in any case old) is hindered above all by the brute facts of geography. Thus in Venezuela a population of 4,500,000 is served by 800 priests, of whom 160 are at work in the diocese of Caracas alone. The remaining 640 are dispersed through a territory six times the size of France.

One of the paradoxes of the modern literary situation is that we have more criticism than ever before, while this critical activity has not been accompanied by any corresponding clarification of artistic values or by the emergence of a distinct literary tradition. In poetry, for instance, there is a bewildering variety of individual voices as well as a diversity of what may be called group- or coterie-styles; of course poetry is written by poets and not by traditions, but our present variety does not result merely from the healthy abundance of individual talents; it comprises utterly different solutions to the same fundamental problems, as in the contrast between the deliberately pedantic nicety in the use of words of Mr Empson and his followers, where the single irony or ambiguity is everything, and the blurred use of epithets for their vague suggestiveness in the verse of Miss Edith Sitwell and Mr W. R. Rodgers. In earlier periods, as in our neo-classical age, such intense critical activity was often the prelude to the emergence of a poetic school with a common programme.

To turn to the critics themselves, their numbers, the authority they command, and the extreme sophistication of literary argument to which they have accustomed us, would suggest that we are entering upon an Alexandrian age. To remark this now strikes a respectably commonplace, almost a trite, note; but until comparatively recently it would have been quite impossible to think in this manner. Thirty-four years ago in The Sacred Wood Mr T. S. Eliot deplored the lack of trained second-order minds on the English literary scene (he was at pains to indicate that his use of the term ‘second-order’ was in no sense derogatory).

As you approach Buenos Aires, sailing slowly through the dredged channel of the vast brown River Plate, you are aware of a skyline that is exceedingly strange. It is not just the fact of the towering skyscrapers. This is America, and north and south alike seem committed to this monolithic invasion of the sky. What is extraordinary is that you can see through so many of these blocks of stone: the blue that fills the window-spaces is innocent air. It is bomb-damage in reverse, or even, you may think, in anticipation. Later you will be reassured. Here, it appears, building goes on as long as the money lasts, and work can be suspended for years at a time. (In a suburb one saw a completed ferro-concrete steeple, improbably balanced on the bare skeleton of a church yet to be built.)

Building is a South American disease, or, more accurately, it is the symptom of a disease. In Argentina, as in Brazil, the fantastic growth of the cities has gravely disturbed the national equilibrium. Buenos Aires, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, has a population of four million, and including the province of the same name, accounts for half the total for the whole republic. Even though Argentina were far more developed industrially than she is (and the facts of nature have determined the primary role of the country as one of the greatest food-producing areas of the world), so disproportionate a head for such a body induces a sort of vertigo whose effects are immediately seen.

As newly discovered television ‘stars’ blaze into incandescence, or at least into headlines, and as one parlour game succeeds another, radio programmes begin to sound a defensive note. The strong emotions which are revealed when the House of Commons debates the future of television colour most discussions by the professionally engaged of the claims of sound broadcasting in a world which is rapidly switching from loud-speaker to screen. In the Autumn 1953 number of the B.B.C. Quarterly Louis MacNeice made ‘A Plea for Sound’. The word ‘plea’, with its overtones of advocacy and partisanship, suggests some of the passion which this controversy can provoke. And one of the unfortunate results is that the opposing sides in this pointless warfare have resorted to that most tedious of stratagems which forbids the praise of X without the condemnation of Y. Not that I think Mr MacNeice guilty of this. ‘Television, obviously’, he says, ‘is an exciting and fertile medium in which many fine things can be done that sound could never attempt. The point is that sound can do many fine things that will never be possible in television. We should all therefore hope both that television may develop to the utmost and that sound broadcasting may survive.’ In which future directions are these fine things likely to be found?

Imagine a future in which sound and television are equally available to most people, in which several alternative television programmes are transmitted for the greater part of the day, and in which the present technical limitations of television have been to a considerable extent overcome.

About two years before his actual conversion St Augustine evinced the first signs of the kind of life he would embrace. He had reached the stage when it was no longer a matter of being sure of God but of ‘how to become more steadfast in God.’

He hoped to be directed by Simplicianus as to which should be the best course for one in his case to walk in the way of God. He witnessed the church full of faithful and one went this way and one went that, and he felt unhappy that although he had renounced all desire of honour and gain because of the attraction he felt for the ‘sweetness of God and the beauty of his house which he loved’, there yet remained entanglements which he found it hard to sever.

Augustine was aided in the last stages towards his conversion by the Striking accounts he heard of the numbers of those who devoted themselves to the monastic life. Pontitianus, his fellow countryman, a high official of the Milanese court, related to him the history of the Egyptian monk, St Antony, who on reading in St Matthew (19, 21): ‘Go, sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come follow me’, entered upon the religious life. He discovered that at that very time there was flourishing just outside Milan a monastery ‘full of good brethren’ under obedience to St Ambrose and this interested Augustine intensely. ‘Hitherto’, he says, ‘we knew nothing of it.’

In his study of the tradition of thought in the early Middle Ages, a distinguished historian (Mr Richard Southern) remarks that it should be easier for us today than it was a hundred years ago to understand the fascination of logic for scholars of the eleventh century; for them as for us, ‘Logic was an instrument of order in a chaotic world’. Mr Southern speaks as a historian and a humanist, for whom thought is more immediately apprehended as an orchestral scoring of the themes of human need and of moral concern than in its own proper cogency. Yet the paradox of moral philosophy lies in just this incommensurability of the humane and the analytic: the task of moral philosophy is somehow to mediate; to explore the complexity of the humane and to map it with a disciplined fidelity.

It might very well seem that the scholastic metaphysical tradition exhibits its inadequacy more patently here than anywhere else, with its manuals of moral theology, its solutions of problems of conscience by the numerical assessment of probable opinions, its approximation of moral philosophy to a demonstrative science, and more radically, with just this very metaphysical character itself. It is this last reproach which will specially concern us here. How, it may be felt, can a metaphysics, admittedly taking its point of departure in a physics, practise a fidelity to the complexity of a moral sensibility? Such a metaphysics can only be a bogus physics, setting up a fictitious world of quasi-physical entities, the behaviour of which could only serve as an excessively crude model for the delicately particular moral decisions and options of our humane activity.

Those who consider theology worth talking about, form perhaps a very small minority in the country; but at least, apart from Marxists, or humanists at our older Universities, very few of them would still maintain that it has finally been disposed of by science. Against the background threat of total destruction, modem efforts are preferably directed to integrating what has been inherited; so it is the relation rather than the conflict of science and religion which now provides the usual theme in public lectures on those subjects. Two recent publications may exemplify this contrast of styles between old and new.

There is little to show that the greater part of Professor Price’s Eddington memorial lecture was not written thirty or more years ago. Its argument begins with the claim that ‘the materialistic conception of human personality ... is accepted nowadays, almost as a matter of course, by the majority of Western educated people’. Though there is a disagreement as to the exact form materiahsm takes (Epiphenomenalism, Behaviourism, Marxism are suggested ways), it is at least certain, according to science, that ‘mental processes are inseparable from bodily ones’. Since theism, our natural knowledge of God exclusive of particular revelation (though Professor Price’s scope is wider, the essential point lies here), depends on some direct awareness of him, unmediated by the senses, it is thoroughly discredited in a scientific age. But a ray of hope shone through the general gloom on the day ‘when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a brilliant group of Cambridge men’.