The title is that of one of Lord Acton’s Essays on Church and State (recently collected by Mr Douglas Woodruff and to be reviewed in a later issue of Blackfriars). What he wrote in The Rambler in 1859 might scarcely be expected to have an imperative meaning in the immensely changed circumstances of 1952, but Lord Acton’s prophetic quality of mind, his capacity to see beyond the immediately conditioning details of time and place, is remarkably revealed in this survey of the function of a Catholic review. His own difficulties as an editor are well known, and many of them belonged to the particular religious climate of his time. But his vindication of the absolute demands of truth is a reminder that the Faith can only be served by fidelity: fidelity to truth wherever it may be found, so that through its recognition the single Truth of all may be declared and served.

‘How often’, he writes, ‘has the eagerness and presumption which has based the defence of religion on proofs which later discoveries have exploded covered her with the appearance of ridicule! Those who are too impatient to wait till their wine is fermented are rewarded with a particularly nasty draught. Every branch of learning pursued for the sake of its own conclusions will result in the vindication of religion, and in the discomfiture of those who believe in their antagonism. The progress of knowledge is often more beneficial to the cause of religious truth than any professed apology.’

The controversy roused by the Pope’s address last autumn to Italian obstetricians was at its height when on a Sunday evening I sat listening to the second of Lord Radcliffe’s Reith Lectures. His scholarly exposition of the natural law seemed to silence the din of ill-informed and sentimental criticism which had assailed the Holy Father’s calm and authoritative statement of moral judgments which were the ordinary teaching of the Church. It was not that Lord Radcliffe stood forth as a champion of natural law; the pleasure one felt was due merely to this reminder of a concept which had been the corner-stone of ethics for a millennium. For the attack on the Pope’s teaching in this particular allocution, like the modem propaganda in favour of birth control and euthanasia, of divorce and artificial insemination, was made in ignorance or in contempt of that fundamental law of nature which in fact governs most of these grave problems. That law goes almost unrecognised outside the Catholic Church. It seems opportune, therefore, to introduce this series of articles in Blackfriars with an account of the natural law and its relationship with law in general.

The word ‘law’ is used in a variety of senses today. It may mean the decree of a legislator, usually the human ruler, regulating the external conduct of the human subject; or it may mean a scientific law, like the law of gravitation, which is regarded as merely the expression of the behaviour of inanimate objects as discerned by a process of induction from observation and experiment.

But the medieval mind took a wider sweep, and subsumed under the name ‘law’ all these various meanings. First of all it considered the eternal law which was the plan of the all-wise Creator for the harmonious progress of the whole universe of his creation.

This brief introduction to the African number of Blackfriars can only suggest some lines of thought in regard to the progress and future of Catholicism among the African peoples. The following notes relate to the territories under British administration which lie between the Sahara and the Zambesi. The first and in some respects the happiest impact of the Catholic Faith on the African mind belongs to the period of the pioneer missionaries, largely French in their personnel and to an even greater extent French in their direction, working in a series of wholly tribalised societies. In those areas where there existed a powerful and hereditary chiefship it was often not difficult for the missionary to persuade the chief and his councillors that his coming offered no threat to established African authority. Speaking generally, the chief did not himself become a Catholic, but he was the missionary’s equal and friend and the recipient of much wise advice. It was within this framework that there was built up the system of catechists and the practice of giving such teaching to the children as was necessary to enable them to lead a Catholic life. It may be said that the survival of tribalism and its modern counterpart, the sense of African nationhood, are conditions favourable to the development of the Catholic Church in Africa. Detribalism on the other hand is inevitably unfavourable and no group is more in need and less accessible than the detribalised urban proletariat.

No religion will appeal to the African who is still working on the land unless it respects ancient traditions and is not inimical to his pride of nationhood, whether that be Ibo or Yoruba, Baganda, Bahaya, Kikuyu or Chagga. This national consciousness should never be impeded either in the African priest or in the African layman.

Many years ago, when I was unsettled about the Anglican position, I read Salmon’s Infallibility with great care. It had been recommended to me as ‘a devastatingly unanswerable criticism of the validity of the Roman claims’.

Though I did not realise it then, this book was a determining factor in my decision to become a Catholic. I had read at the same time Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman and Newman’s own Essay on Development, the classical exposition in English of the doctrine of tradition. I saw at once that the infallibility which Salmon was attacking was not the infallibility which the Catholic Church claims and which had been defined with greater precision by the Vatican Council. I realised, too, that when Salmon wrote of tradition he meant something different from the tradition so clearly analysed and cogently expounded by Newman.

I knew that according to Catholic theology reason can go so far as to show the consonance of revealed truth with knowledge acquired by reason, and even to infer that what is revealed is true and should be believed. The assent of faith however is supernatural and cannot be produced by such knowledge, but is wholly dependent on the word of God in revelation. It was plain that Salmon had no clear conception of this distinction and was in constant confusion about the respective functions of faith and reason.

When the mother’s hfe is menaced, and the birth bears a threat not a blessing, is the baby then an aggressor, and accordingly to be disposed of as neatly as possible? Intervention to that effect, is it not demanded by plain common- sense, clear responsibility, a humane scale of values? The Christian Church, however, can never consent to the direct destruction of innocent human hfe—notice the qualifications direct and innocent, through the use of force to repel aggression is approved. Nevertheless our present question, which cannot be summed up in a single brutal or sentimental statement, has been charged with anxiety and misrepresentation: on one side, the Pope has been accused of preferring the unborn baby to the mother, and of a characteristically clerical unconcern for ordinary human tragedies; on the other, materialism and paganism can be too readily ascribed to some of his critics, and their reluctance to go to extreme lengths not allowed for.

Let us begin by recognising how rare is a classical case of Mother v. Child; their relations, from beginning to end, should be for the health of both, and indeed so they are, when the physical, psychological, and moral rules are observed. Women are well designed by God to be mothers. We speak of an ‘expectant’ mother; and certainly she can look forward with happy confidence to the birth of her child. The situation is not abnormal, the condition not pathological, the business not a dangerous operation. A woman when she is in labour hath pain, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.

Ethico-Medical controversy, as exemplified in the recent furore created by the Holy Father’s pronouncement on the natural right to life of the unborn child, is no new thing. More often than not the controversy revolves around problems that are sentimental in essence (the word is not used in any pejorative sense), and which are based upon false antitheses. As the eminent physician and neurologist, Dr F. M. R. Walshe, has acutely observed, ‘all these antitheses arise from the unguarded use of abstraction, and from a false simplification of the welter of things and processes we encounter when we seek to build a philosophy of medicine. If we are to achieve a philosophy we must escape from the fragmentation of ideas that comes of thinking too exclusively in the static terms of classifications.’ Dr Walshe is not concerned in this oration to consider the particular false antithesis of ethics and medicine; he is dealing with medicine in terms of ‘art in science’; but his terms of reference are most significant. ‘The truth is surely that every successive layer of thought in the analysis of nature . . . stops at a halfway house when tracing its ideas back to their basic elements, and is content with ideas of a generality sufficient for its immediate purpose. Yet each remains a field of discourse in its own right; one of the many layers in the palimpsest of natural knowledge, each of which has its own distinguishable intellectual content. Medicine is no exception to this rule. For philosophy alone there is no halfway house, for its ideas aim at a supreme generality. ... Yet we must surely aim at the highest degree of understanding of the foundations of our thoughts and actions. ...’

In the famous treatise on The Laws of England by Blackstone, published in four large volumes in 1769, there are but two pages devoted to the natural law and the law of nations. It is interesting in these days, when English judges and professors are apt to deride the whole conception of natural law or any law beyond the customary and the legislative, to see how far already the abandonment of any eternal or moral juridical reference had proceeded even in Blackstone’s day. His acknowledgement, perfunctory and abbreviated as it is, constitutes almost the last reference to any juridical principle (beyond parliamentary democratic desire), to govern the making or interpretation of laws in England: the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament has become unchallengeable.

Yet, under the heading ‘Of the nature of Laws in general’ Blackstone still writes:

It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ (John II, 50.) You will remember that those words are attributed by the Fourth Gospel to Caiaphas, and that it tells us that ‘he spoke not of himself, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied’. We are told that it was this official utterance of the High Priest that decided the authorities to put Jesus of Nazareth to death.

This remarkable fact is nowhere mentioned, so far as I can recall, in the twelve large volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Yet the pronouncement of Caiaphas might well have served as a motto for the whole work. Frazer, combining encyclopaedic knowledge with rare literary grace and dramatic effect, and with much of the excitement of a detective story, set out to solve a mystery—the mystery of a haggard, hunted ‘priest of the wood’ by the shores of Lake Nemi long ago, a priest who had plucked a golden bough, a priest who had murdered his predecessor, and who was now sleeplessly awaiting his own murderer and successor. And you remember how clue leads to clue as Frazer’s vast researches fan out into space and time, ransacking the annals of history, archaeology, the literature of all nations, comparative religion, anthropology, folklore. Slowly there emerges the hint of a worldwide pattern of belief and practice according to which it is expedient that one should die for the people that the whole nation perish not; that the slayer and the slain should alike be some embodiment of divinity, a divine king or priest or his son, or some representative or substitute or effigy, whose death and torment is somehow necessary if the life or power which he embodies, and on which the people depend, is to survive or revive.

For my part, I am not sure my mind is not made up one way or the other . . . but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man. . . .’

So wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine who, as a boy of fifteen, may have seen Savonarola hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Guicciardini was one of the cleverest Italians of his time and one of the most coolheaded of all time, and his mind was never cooler than when he penned his judgment on Savonarola. The dilemma it expresses can hardly be avoided unless one entirely disbelieves in ‘prophecy’. Certainly Guicciardini, for all his cool detachment, believed that God could still send prophets into the world; he used the term seriously; which may not have been the case with his near-contemporary and fellow-citizen Machiavelli who wrote off the ‘unnamed prophet’ as a failure. But even Machiavelli said ‘of such a man one should speak with reverence’; which, coming from such an observer, is a notable, if perhaps ironical, compliment to Savonarola, and is also valuable evidence of his reputation, in undevout circles, with the generation which followed his own.

A great prophet or a very great man: the Church has so far not resolved this dilemma by allowing or disallowing, finally, and officially, the first alternative. Certainly the name of Savonarola has been largely restored to favour. Nobody now calls him a heretic. His works are not on the Index. He has had public and recent praise from high authorities in the Church, for example from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin and from the late Master General of the Dominican Order.