The fact that a Bill proposing divorce after seven years’ separation has passed its second reading in the House of A Commons, and that a Royal Commission is to investigate Divorce Law in general, makes relevant some consideration of the existing German law which provides for divorce after a separation of only three years. As was said during the House of Commons debate, once granted the principle of separation as grounds for divorce, even a shorter time limit might be adopted; and, since the German law provides the evidence of the working of such a law over a period of some thirteen years, it should be possible, from German experience, to consider the similar British proposals and their likely effects.

It is significant that the German law which permitted divorce by the objective fact of separation, in addition to divorce on the grounds of adultery or misconduct, came into force when Hitler had reached the climax of his career in 1938. The Hitler law had for its background theories of race and population: the man who was physically able to produce nordic children must not be hindered by the matrimonial vows which he once gave to a now ageing woman no longer capable of bearing children. One needs just to mention this primitive idea of the sense of matrimony to understand its full bearing. It was very characteristic that the upstarts of the Nazi party—the Kreisleiters and Gauleiters—were the first to make use of this law; their womenfolk who had carried the burden of the past were no longer young and sophisticated enough to fit in with the ‘glory’ of the new class:

That fine and distressing drama of Gian-Carlo Mcnotti, The Consul, does more for us than underline the tragic fatuity of the modem political world: it underlines the fundamental unreality of that world. The baby dies, the husband and wife, unable to reach each other, die: because they and the world are smothered by paper, the ‘forms’ without which nobody can stir, and nothing can be done, and which are never completely obtainable. The hypnotice dance scenes, the dream-sequences, are far less unreal than this ‘real’ world which destroys life and love and all the deep human realities and leaves only an emptiness through which there shrills an unanswered telephone.

That is the pattern of our world, whether the precise regime we live under is expressing a deliberately cruel tyranny, or a benevolent stupidity, or a stupidity which is neither particularly benevolent nor particularly cruel but just subhuman. But when humanity is thus forced into an unreal mould, and debarred from all escape into reality, it will look for escape in further unreality: in drugs or neuroses, in fantasy-worlds of its own making which ape the world it has lost, in destruction—perhaps self-destruction —as a substitute for creation. So the night-club replaces the home; loveless sexuality replaces marriage; toys of one sort or another replace the children who should have played with them; hooliganism, savagery, murder and suicide become more and more common.

Obviously a world such as that cannot endure. It must either end in complete destruction, or it must undergo some radical change.

During the last five years, Ireland has probably had more visitors from overseas than at any time in her history, and we who are Irish (like most citizens of small countries, we tend to be self-conscious) often wonder what impression they take away with them. Do they just see Ireland as a land of steaks and bacon and eggs, with slow trains and reckless car-drivers, or have they tried to find out what is going on, and indeed whether anything noteworthy is going on? Do they wonder whether this ancient but youthful country, which in the political sense came of age only a few years ago, is living a life and producing a culture of its own, is, in brief, making a contribution to Christian civilisation?

‘The medieval divines’, I was reading, ‘strenuously resisted the profane philosophers who seemed to threaten the most cherished traditions of Christianity; however, the revolutionaries of yesterday are the respectabilities of tomorrow, and the aristotelean schoolmen themselves were to be the first to bear the brunt of the attack from the new scientific humanists, who...’—It was not the book, nor yet the chapter on Faith, Philosophy and Science, one would choose for reading on a wet afternoon, still less after the brown Windsor, mock cutlets with vapourish potatoes and khaki cabbage, topped by stewed pears and custard—all the Bishop and Mermaid at Barminster can rise to in these days. But it had to be reviewed. Still, I was not sorry for the distraction when three women were shown into the lounge.

They had that look of perennial middle age, of making for fifty but not a year beyond, presented by women who have never thought of marrying and who have occupied themselves with a routine without anxiety about a wage. Despite their differences, for one was stocky and bustling, the second vaguely rounded and languid, and the third rather angular and restrained, there was a family resemblance between them, elusive yet unmistakeable: the set of eyebrow or cheekbone perhaps, or a similar air of faint and well-bred insolence, the hint that they could never find themselves in circumstances to ask for permission. They might have been in their own drawing-room; they glanced at me with incurious interest as though I were of a piece with the leatherette armchair in which I was sunk.

Westerners who profess and call themselves Buddhists are, and will probably remain, few in numbers— however distinguished and worthy. Organised Buddhism in Christian or once-Christian countries is, and will probably remain, negligible. But a good Buddhist cares little for what he calls ‘names and forms’; and Buddhism is a force which a Christian even in the West can no longer ignore.

It is alleged (such rumours arc hard to check) that in several European countries images of the Buddha outsell crucifixes and madonnas by a considerable margin; it is certain that there are British manufacturers and merchants who will supply you with both or either with detached impartiality. It is astonishing to find in how many British homes—and those by no means only of the more ‘educated’ classes—a Buddha is installed. Of course, to their owners they are just ‘art’ or ornament, as inevitable almost as the Van Gogh Sunflower or the crazy pavement. And, lest there be any mistake about it, the Buddha will, as often as not, be found fulfilling some such utilitarian function as supporting an electric lamp or propping up a row of novels. But, if the owner is deceived, the good Buddhist is not—and the good psychologist will understand him. An image of the Buddha inculcates Buddhism (whether we call it that or no) more effectively and profoundly than many books about it. Even if we set aside the subtler symbolism of Buddhist iconography (and to those in the know, every single feature is charged with significance—the posture, the gesture of the hands, the curve of each finger, the very folds of the drapery), the appeal of a Buddha-image to a modem Westerner is understandable, however little he may consciously avert to it.

Discussion of the impact of Christian criticism on the cinema would be premature. Both are too new. ‘The art of the film is not yet formed’, Herbert Read wrote in his essay Towards a Film Aesthetic (helpfully reprinted in The Cinema 1951: Penguin Books; 2s. 6d.); ‘and to theorise about something which is not yet fully in being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion.’ Without fixed principles, tradition or terms of reference, critics, like other members of the film body, are still making up the rules of their job as they go along doing it; and among them the Christian critic is a late starter. Conscientious Catholics for too many years have passed the cinema by, neglecting, either from fear of its evil or scorn of its stupidity, to learn the alphabet of the language of moving pictures.

Pope Pius XI saw the folly and danger of this attitude already in 1936. But the Catholic community responded slowly to the challenge of his encyclical on films, Vigilanti Cura. Only now is it possible to discern even the rough outlines of a body of Catholic film criticism. Last April, Christian film critics from all parts of the world gathered in Lucerne for a study conference arranged by the O.C.I.C. (Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma). I keenly regret having been prevented at the last moment by illness from being present; for this was a first concerted attempt to define the principles and functions of Christian film criticism.

We are all of us unconsciously influenced by the atmosphere or climate of thought of the world in which we live, though upbringing and mature thought may have taught us to analyse and at least partially discount this influence where it runs counter to the principles of our Faith. The children who come to us come from this same atmosphere; with some their upbringing in a truly Catholic home has gone far to fortify them against the absorption of what is bad in the atmosphere of the modern world, but with many more this is by no means so, and our main educational problem is how to train them in such a way that they grow up to judge the world in which they will have to live by a scale of values drawn, not from the general climate of opinion of that world, but from the principles of their Faith applied to the problems of every-day living.

It would be an impossible task to give a complete analysis of the elements which go to make up the atmosphere or climate of thought which the children who come to us begin to breathe long before they come to the age of reason, and which they will almost inevitably absorb completely, unless they are fortified against it by their homes or their schools or, better still, by both.

There are at present two moods in contemporary philosophy, the existentialist’s and the technician’s. The existentialist mood is disillusioned, sophisticated, desperately mature. The technical mood has no illusions; is without suspicion of naïveté, confidently accepts itself as adult. For they are both moods that belong to our time, one of the more terrible features of which is that its children go to the wall.

To the existentialist, the world in which he lives, with its everyday concerns, its inventions and schemes, is through and through suspect. He sees past its pretences. At its noblest, at its most pretentious, no less than in its trivialities and ignominies, he knows it to be flat and uninteresting, a substitute world, unauthentic. He sees through it to the basic nothingness that its false pretences disguise. He knows, besides, his own core of nothingness. And he dares to face his consequent consuming passion for the destruction of that substitute world which it is the doom of his own unqualified freedom to project upon the undifferentiated ground of nothingness that encompasses him. So with the emancipated cynicism of a man not only lacking hope, but lacking even the desire of hope, he descends (impregnably arrogant in his anguish) into the pit of absolute despair. He recognises his proper human status as cast there; recognises the radical absurdity of his existence at the edge of the irrational abyss of un-being.

There is so sharp a glare of the miraculous about Blessed I Martin of Lima, and sometimes such a haze of mere emotionalism, that it is hard to see the man as he was, the hard-working, patiently enduring Dominican lay-brother in the flesh. What follows is an attempt to depict him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and is based on ten of the seventy-six accounts given twenty years after his death at the Diocesan enquiry by people who knew him.

The background needs to be realised: a huge old Spanish-style convent, its several hundred religious occupied in all the work needed in a city of the New World: preaching, teaching, care of orphans, children, poor, sick. Lima, even when Martin died at the age of sixty, had existed a bare hundred years, a city of Spanish immigrants or first descendants of the conquistadores, merchants, soldiers, religious of every description. Side by side with these lived the dispossessed Indians, the imported Negro slaves. In the priory were not only religious, but the boys they looked after, and men staying there on retreat or learning a trade. There were Negro servants in the kitchen and the laundry and at all the menial tasks in the place. The Dominicans themselves comprised priests, student-novices (from fourteen and upwards), lay-brothers, and donados (not strictly religious, but ‘familiars’ living in the house). They had their cells; not necessarily small rooms, but places with alcoves and closets off them shared by visitors and children.

Lord Ponsonby ofShulbrede ended a debate on Euthanasia in the House of Lords on 1st December, 1936 with these words: ‘If the vote is against me, no doubt the discussion will continue in the country and at some future date will be taken up again’. The subject was in fact re-opened recently by the Dean of St Paul’s, who said, ‘Surveying the arguments for and against, I have come to the conclusion that the proposal of this Society (The Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society) is quite in accordance with the Christian conception of human right and duty.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury has dissociated himself from this opinion. And in the House of Lords debate on the subject last November, the Archbishop of York has expressed the strongest opposition

Euthanasia today signifies the termination of life by painless means for the purpose of ending severe suffering. It is enough to say that easy dying is not quite the same thing as a good death or dying well.

Dr Killick Millard, a retired Medical Officer of Health and secretary of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society, has said that ‘patients qualifying for mercy killing—we prefer to call it merciful release—would mainly be cases of incurable and inoperable cancer.’

Fifty years have passed since Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was first performed at the Birmingham Festival. This great music now holds an established place in the general repertoire of choral societies: indeed, so secure is its present position that it is easy to forget how chequered has been its career in the half century, to what accidents it has been a prey, under what misunderstandings it has suffered—and does still suffer.

When ‘Gerontius’ first appeared, Elgar was just beginning to attract attention as a national rather than as a provincial composer, very largely because of the enthusiasm Hans Richter had shown in conducting the ‘Enigma Variations’. Though the forty-three year old composer at this time, therefore, commanded a certain amount of respect among musicians, his new work must have seemed a strange affront to the old, but extremely vigorous, oratorio tradition of choral singing, well nurtured on a staple diet of Handel and Mendelssohn. Even Parry and other composers of the English musical renascence of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made no really significant advance in this genre, and while Elgar refrained from describing ‘Gerontius’ as an oratorio (although the proportions of the work make this seem a more suitable description than Jaeger’s ‘cantata’) the new durchkomponiert setting of Newman’s poem must have appeared as a determined tilt at the venerable oratorio tradition, to which indeed it virtually gave the death blow.

Few local traditions of evangelisation have been maintained with as much tenacity and defended with as much passion as that of the Bethany household and the Maries in Provence. Among Catholics of the modern dioceses of Marseilles, Aix, Avignon and Fréjus, which have succeeded the medieval dioceses of the same churches and those of Orange, Carpentras, Apt, Arles and Toulon, now divided between the four survivors, the belief that their province was christianised by these Gospel figures is held with conviction and is still a source of devotion. Whereas elsewhere the name and legend of the first bishop are only matters of archaeology, in Provence the memory of Lazarus and his sisters, of Mary Salome and Mary the mother of James, is a living one, honoured by novena, procession and pilgrimage in the crypt of St Victor’s abbey in Marseilles and in those of the churches of Tarascon, Saint-Maximin and Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and in the cave sanctuary known as the Sainte-Baume.

The knowledge of this tradition comes generally as a surprise to English Catholics. Nevertheless, at least one episode of the series— that of Mary Magdalen’s penance in the Sainte-Baume—has been frequently reproduced in works of art and provides, indeed the usual setting for fifteenth to nineteenth century paintings of the saint. For the rocky background against which so many pictures of her are placed is that of the cave near Marseilles where she is alleged to have dwelt for thirty years, expiating her early life of sin.

Each of the books here under review testifies in its own way to the predicament in which philosophy finds itself. But ‘predicament’ has to be taken in a much wider sense than in the title of Professor Barnes’s book. For the predicament of philosophy is this: that the eminent who claim to speak its tongue (and there can be little doubt of the genuine eminence of such thinkers as Russell or Whitehead or Heidegger or Husserl or Maritain or Gilson, to name but several) speak languages not translated, and perhaps not translatable, to each other, about subjects not related, and perhaps not relatable, to each other; and by the very fact of engaging in the conversation of one the would-be philosopher appears to forfeit not merely the right but the very possibility of conversing intelligibly or interestingly with the others; nor (such is the predicament) is he permitted to make any preliminary enquiry before committing himself to one or other company, since to do so is, by the very fact of doing it, to commit himself, in the eyes of one or other group, to an investigation or to some facon de parler vicious and vitiating from the outset. So the contemporary positivist has no use for and is not interested in, and, for the most part, is quite ignorant of, the thought of the existentialist, and the existentialist of the positivist, and each of the thomist, and the thomist of them both. To read the books here reviewed together is to feel the disconcerting difficulties of this predicament.

I have been interested in University Extension since 1915. But it was only a little over four years ago that circumstances combined to make a new scheme possible. Its success has been so astonishing—and the movement is destined to grow apace—that a brief explanation may be of general interest. It is hardly necessary to stress the importance of adult education for workers —and indeed for employers. It is absurd to suppose that men and women can be adequately equipped for life and for their social responsibilities while they are attending a primary school or are still in their teens. It is equally absurd to suppose that education teases when the boy or girl finally leaves school; the most influential part of education or miseducation continues through press, radio, cinema, and social intercourse. In our arithmetical democracy the real power lies ultimately not with the highly educated but with the mass of men and women with the minimum of formal education. I am not referring to technical training such as tradesmen receive; I mean education of human persons as such, particularly as regards social principles and current ideologies. Even for Catholics the Sunday sermon is not enough, nor even does the sodality suffice. What is required is a further education which will enter fully into men’s daily secular lives and deal with their responsibilities as citizens, as workers, as trade unionists. I think that we have now made a real beginning in Ireland. There are already over three hundred adult students, in ten centres, attached to University College, Cork; and next year, if we could cope with them, these numbers could be doubled.

According to Edmond Malone, the poet’s most considerable biographer, Dryden’s family after being long established at Staff hill in Cumberland migrated south about the middle of the sixteenth century and settled in Northamp- shire, where the then head of the family, John Driden, married the daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope, through whom he became possessed of the estates and manor of Canons Ashby which had been seized from the Austin Canons by Henry VIII some twenty years before. His eldest son Erasmus, who was created a baronet by James I in 1619, had three sons, of whom Erasmus the youngest became the father of the poet born in 1631. As this Erasmus had thirteen other children to provide for, it is not surprising to read that on his death in 1654 he left John but a small patrimony, although he was the eldest child. This was the inconsiderable property of Blakesley, about three and a half miles from Canons Ashby, reckoned as bringing in an annual sum of -£60, of which a portion had to be paid by John to his widowed mother, so that he had to look elsewhere for a living. Already at Cambridge he had shown ability in literature, and now he embarked seriously upon the career of a poet and dramatist with such success that before he had completed his thirtieth year he was already accepted as a writer of eminence and had even attracted the notice of the newly restored Stuart king, Charles II.

This article should be regarded, perhaps even more than others in this series, as the expression of a very personal point of view. Dons are individualistic people, liable to hold highly original and sharply divergent views on questions both of principle and policy within the university, and I am very conscious that I have no right whatever to speak as representing any considerable body of opinion among Catholic senior members of universities in this country; indeed it cannot be said at present that any such coherent body of opinion exists, though the sort of subjects about which I am going to write are certainly being increasingly seriously considered and discussed.

The appearance of a body of Catholics playing any noticeable part in the life of the universities of this country is a very recent phenomenon. It was the great movement of liberalism (in Newman’s sense of the word ‘liberal’) in the middle nineteenth century which opened the universities to Catholics; and they were permitted to take advantage of the new possibilities only after what must now seem to us an unnecessary and regrettable delay. It was regrettable, not only from the point of view of the standards of taste and intelligence of the Catholic body, but from the point of view of the university: for, though some sort of university reform was certainly urgently needed, the reform which actually took place broke the connection between religion and learning which still existed in the ancient universities ana effected a thorough-going secularisation of university life which has had very far-reaching consequences.