The readers of Léon Bloy can be divided, on the whole, into two opposing camps. Those who read his work primarily for its religious content see him as a pious Christian who vehemently protested against the evils of the modem world; and, even if his imperfections are recognised, few critics have attempted to explain or even reconcile the conflicting tendencies of his character. There are others, however, who frankly scoff at his Christian principles, finding it impossible to believe in the religious sincerity of a man who could live, during the greater part of his life, on the generosity of his friends, and could cover his enemies with violent scorn and abuse.

Few writers have penetrated very far into the motives and principles of this puzzling man: he is either dismissed as a literary joke, or accepted unquestioningly for the sincerity of his faith. The complexity of his character is, nevertheless, bewildering. The more we study his correspondence and diaries, the more uncertain we become of what he is setting out to achieve. Bloy seems to have lived his life on two distinct levels. He certainly saw himself as a modem St Francis, an apostle of poverty in a world of materialism, reduced to begging and borrowing from friends to provide his daily bread; yet contemporary records show that he spent a great deal of money on absinthe and amusements, and his poverty could undoubtedly have been mitigated by more careful management and foresight. How can Léon Bloy, fighter and hater of his fellow men, be reconciled with the Christian evangelist he claimed to be? How can the devout Catholic have been attracted by some of the most obscene tendencies in the literature of his day? The answer to all these problems can, I suggest, be found in a deeper penetration into the piety and the religious outlook of Bloy himself.

Savonarola has been called the first Christian social reformer of modern times. It is as such only that I speak of him.

Social Christianity was for him the work which awaits both the body and the member, a vocation for all rather than the specialised task of a few not so much a struggle or a decisive battle, but a never-ending journey in which the traveller now slackens, now increases his pace, often retraces his footsteps, is ever watchful to the right and to the left of him, endures much hardship and meets strange travellers, but ‘in peace of mind makes always for the shore where he will embark upon the Eternal Sea’.

Writing nearly five hundred years before the secularist State and the Iron Curtain, Girolamo Savonarola reminded his generation that the time had come for words to give place to deeds, vain formula to real feeling. ‘Purify the spirit’, he said, ‘give heed to the common good, forget private interests. . . . Your reform must begin with spiritual things, for these are higher than material things, of which they are the Rule and the Life. And likewise all temporal good must be subordinated to the moral and religious good upon which it depends. And if you have heard it said that States cannot be governed by Paternosters, remember that this is the maxim of tyrants, of men hostile to God and the common weal, a rule for the oppression and not for the relief and liberation of cities.’

I had just switched on the light in my reputedly haunted room when the door of the cupboard swung slowly and purposefully open and a heavy thud behind it proclaimed that the skeleton therein had decided to take action.

It was a suitcase, precariously balanced on a mound of junk, that had, by its pressure, forced the door open at last, and the hollow sound of its falling was a proof that the policy of keeping a room tidy by throwing everything into a cupboard and slamming the door shut is no policy at all. It is a short cut, and a short cut is often an evasion of responsibility. Tidiness is not order.

Among the results of the fall of man, this attempt to take a short cut back to Paradise is perhaps the most disastrous in its consequences. Mankind was scarcely on the hither side of the flaming sword when it was first essayed, and Cain murdered Abel in order to obtain an illusion of order by destroying the evidence of a righteousness superior to his own. Abel’s sacrifice was visibly accepted, Cain’s rejected. The Lord God showed Cain that the cause lay in his own bad will. ‘If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? But if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door?’ Cain found the rebuke to his pride intolerable. He murdered his brother to remove the offending evidence of his own inferiority. Whatever his previous sin had been, he committed a far graver one to erase its consequences. It is the classic picture of fallen humanity failing to acknowledge its own perversity and sinning more deeply still in order to create an illusion of being in a state of justice. Slam the skeleton into the cupboard and close the door firmly.

When Monsignor John O’Connor slept peacefully in the Lord in his eighty-second year on the day which also saw the death of his late Majesty King George the Sixth—Father John would have chuckled at the coincidence— Blackfriars and the Dominican Order lost an old and staunch friend.

His first contacts with the Order are not known to the present writer, but he once quoted something which had been told him in 1894 by an old novice of Father Tom Burke. Many well- known members of the English Province were his friends, among them Fathers Bede Jarrett, Hugh Pope and Vincent McNabb. Some of them may even have been a little disconcerted and embarrassed by the familiarity with which he spoke or addressed them by their Christian names. Until the outbreak of the last war he used to invite one of the Friars to his parish every second year to conduct a parochial retreat, thus bringing the Dominican habit to a part of the world where it was otherwise seldom seen. It was unforunate that the death or absence of his friends left the Order unrepresented among the hundred-and-fifty priests who attended his funeral.

Though a great admirer of the Order, he never became a tertiary. He was too much of a free-lance for that. And while he held St Thomas Aquinas in high esteem and considered himself his disciple, he could hardly be called a thomist in any strict sense of the word. Nor did he claim to be a theologian: ‘reasoning on revelation’ was how he described his ruminations and declarations on theological topics.

Mr Blanshard has been at it again. This time he appears in the arena astride not one adversary but two: the twin steeds of the Vatican and the Kremlin, the Black International and the Red. His thesis is that there is a triangular war going on, between Communism and Democracy and Catholic power (he implies some distinction between Catholic power, which is his chosen concern, and Catholicism, which quite evidently is not)—a struggle in which each of the three is fighting the other two simultaneously, and in which there is room for only one ultimate victor.

But though in this book there are two horses in the ring,where in Freedom and Catholic Power there was one, it is really the same turn all over again. The net result is but a deeper denigration of the Catholic Church, by (this time) comparing it for three hundred pages with a Marxist institution whose blackness none of his readers except Communists will any longer doubt. The parallel is of course fascinating (there is never a dull moment): provided you are content for it to have extent without depth—for he never addresses himself to the problem of why, fundamentally, the Church execrates Atheistic Communism, nor vice versa. To him they are both primarily power machines, and anti-majority-rule. It is as easy as that. And parlous plausible.

In one respect there is more restraint than last time. There is none of the bombast about nobody being able to refute a single fact or quotation. On the contrary, his preface saddles responsibility for any mistakes upon himself rather than upon his consultants: though he is freer with the names of the ex-Marxists among these than of the ex-Catholics: ‘Unfortunately it would not be wise to mention all of my friends in Italy who have helped ... to show me the seamier side of Vatican policy’.

An essential aspect of Ortega’s philosophical outlook is his theory of perspectivism. According to this, every activity, every philosophy, for that matter, every individual point of view, constitutes a unique and irreplaceable perspective on reality. With this in mind, we may examine the following paragraph from one of his most fundamental works, En torno a Galileo (1933), in which he studies the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and from Christianity to rationalism:

I think that, carefully considered, there may be no objection to make to this view. The fundamental desire of man is life—life is the only thing which, in the logic of which man is capable, is without an ulterior justification: life justifies itself. All values, truth, goodness, beauty, justify themselves by the objective requirement of their external correlative and by the subjective demand of the human nature which creates them in the sense of acknowledging them. Truth acquires its raison d’être by the obligation it is under, in order to be itself, to conform to the reality it describes and because the man who utters it is unable (in the simplest meaning of the words) to live without truth.

There is an interesting little paragraph in St Thomas Aquinas’ works which refers to play. He has been describing how every action is performed towards some end, with some aim in view. Then he breaks off, and says that there are some actions which do not seem to be for any end, such as contemplating, playing—stroking one’s beard! Leaving aside the beard-stroking (which St Thomas accounts for as would a modem analyst), he sees close similarities between contemplation and play. That is to say, contemplation does not have any end outside itself, because it is its own end; likewise with play, for although we sometimes play so as to study better afterwards, we also play for the sheer delight which is in the game itself. Therefore there is obviously a close similarity between the playful and the contemplative attitudes: they have no end outside themselves.

St Thomas begins an exposition of Boethius by quoting from the book of Ecclesiasticus (XXXII, 15) where man is told on rising to run first to his home, and there recollect himself and play. St Thomas uses the quotation to explain that he is undertaking this exposition because to contemplate wisdom (the recollection) is itself a delightful game which requires no exterior aim for its justification. Furthermore, he points out, the Scriptures themselves compare the divine wisdom to the delight of play, for in Proverbs VIII, 30, we hear how ‘I was with him forming all things; and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times’. In view of which one is not surprised to discover St Thomas saying that a man may commit sin by not playing sufficiendy.

The object of this article is to present a picture of educational work among the African population, particularly that undertaken by the Church in British East Africa, with special reference to Tanganyika Territory, since the school organisation and the various problems connected with it in Tanganyika can be taken as typical of educational work in the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Kenya.

These three territories, which are as large as Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and the British Isles put together, meet about the shores of Lake Victoria. The total population is 17,600,000, of whom 7,500,000 are in Tanganyika and roughly 5,000,000 in each of the other two territories. The European population is very small in proportion, and is made up mostly of Government officers, save in Kenya where there is a white settlement of nearly 20,000. There are 11,000 Goans and an Indian community of nearly 170,000, small in numbers but economically very influential, since most of the trading, in Tanganyika in particular, is in Indian hands. The natural African unit is a tribal one, each with its own taboos, customs, laws, languages and chiefs; and where the administrative boundaries cut across tribal areas or group them into districts or reserves, the tribal organisation, with the chiefs’ barazas, is respected as far as possible.

The three territories which constitute British East Africa and the island of Zanzibar come within different political categories. Uganda and Zanzibar are Protectorates, Kenya is mainly a Colony with a narrow coastal strip formerly belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar and now a protectorate area, and Tanganyika is a British Mandate. The territorial boundaries are entirely the result of the European occupation of East and Central Africa at the end of the last century.

Sitting in club rooms, with cigars and brandy at call, there ‘is a stage in the evening when old colonels talking to younger officers will glance through the day’s news, saying: ‘World’s over-populated, you know. Needs a blood-bath now and then. Terrible things, wars, but they have to be. We’ve had our go. Be your turn soon.’ If the secret thus handed down from generation to generation is a professional one, at least it has the merits of being an open one; and, easy as such a secret is to scoff at, there is still a good deal of sense in it—even though that sense may be considered by some to be a primitive kind of horse- sense. For it conjures up a picture of the world such as it might be today had the Incarnation not yet occurred and, viewed from different angles, this is a theme which has interested Mr Evelyn Waugh for the past two decades.

In Vile Bodies (1930) one comes across its first statement:

M François Mauriac has left us in no doubt that in his view a work of art and a work of spiritual edification are two quite different things, rarely if ever combined within the pages of one book. The artist must conform to truth, that perception of truth which is peculiar to himself, and M. Mauriac implies that this truth will not, generally speaking, be edifying. In the ultimate analysis he has made the aesthetic truth which the artist must express dependent on the spiritual condition of the author, in so far as the spiritual elevation of the work is concerned. It is a matter, he has said, of purifying the source, the source from which the creatures of the imagination spring, if the artist is to produce work which testifies to the enduring strength of the spirit. Only a saint could write a novel free from taint, a novel in which sinfulness was not a dominant characteristic, provided of course that he possessed the necessary artistic genius, but the writing of works of fiction does not appear as a form of activity consonant with saintliness. The novelist, then, who is cursed with the gift of artistic creation, must go on perpetuating his sinfulness with all the aesthetic skill at his command until he has spiritually progressed to the point where he would cease to write novels. Such, if we are to believe M. Mauriac, would seem to be the unfortunate predicament in which the Christian writer finds himself, unfortunate, that is, if he does not achieve the saintliness that would end his artistic career.

The classical acceptance of the term ‘apologetics’ comprehends in general whatever bears upon the defence and justification of religion. And in the specifically Christian and Catholic context this becomes particularly a question of establishing the reasonable credibility of the revelation made by Christ and mediated by the Church. Hence the traditional treatises de Revelatione and de Ecclesia. But there is no question in the present paper of engaging in any discussion of these venerable themes. The problem is the more general one of communication in a certain context. It is the problem, namely, of communicating the Word of God to the contemporary mind. This is the perennial concern of every apostle. The solution brought to it will determine the whole course of his apostolate. And the first necessity of all is to recognise that the problem exists, and is novel with every new generation. Perhaps never so novel in its implications as in our own time.

By ‘communication’ I mean simply the ‘getting across’ of something to others. But it is in a particular context that we have here to do with communication—in the context of the Word of God vis-à-vis the contemporary situation. First, therefore, we should avoid the mistake of supposing that to ‘get across’ the Word of God is like ‘getting across’ anything else. For, strictly, it is not we who ‘get across’ the Word of God. He himself alone speaks to the faith of men. Nevertheless, he does use us, reasonable beings, as communicative instruments, and there is the problem of how we shall render ourselves apt tools to this work. We do, also, even in our own right act dispositively upon those to whom he, by our instrumentality, addresses his Word, and so prepare them for its reception; and this imposes upon us a problem of approach.

The year 1950 marked the centenary of the publication by Forshall and Madden of their monumental edition of the Lollard Bible; and since then two works have appeared to remind us how many problems their edition and the scholarship which has been founded on it have failed to solve.

Professor Margaret Deanesly can claim special authority for her lecture, and our respectful attention, for it comes as an agreeable echo of her pronouncements, thirty years ago, in The Lollard Bible, upon almost every matter connected with this field of study. Her major work received Coulton’s imprimatur, and although it shows her, as do all her writings, as an impartial, generous and urbane figure, it served further to show that the facts were on Coulton’s side, in his vast and unedifying conflict with Gasquet, when he contended that St Thomas More, writing that he had seen English Bibles, ‘fair and old’, in the houses of his friends, who used them with the approval of the Church, could not possibly be referring to an orthodox, post-Wycliffite translation, because no such new translation was ever made.

In this recent lecture, Professor Deanesly presents the Lollard Bible to us not as Coulton saw it, as a great act of charity that Christ’s hungry might be fed, but rather as an instrument of Wycliffe’s policy, the grand design being the replacement of canon law by an English text of the Scriptures as the authority to which he might appeal. Wycliffe the Poor Preacher she regards as a romantic invention; and she shows us to him instead as an adroit and agile theologian, a trained controversialist, a don high in the esteem and secure in the protection of his university.

In a recent paper Professor John Macmurray has attacked illegitimate extensions of the use of the word ‘history’. He contends that strictly speaking the solar system cannot be said to have a history, though we can speak of a history of astronomy. This is so because history is concerned with what men have done, why they did it and their doing of it. He is not, I think, suggesting that one cannot carry on fruitful discussions in one sphere by making use of simple analogies drawn from another; as for instance, when the search for significant new resemblances leads us to speak of ‘x’ as if it were ‘y’, and in this way to talk about the unknown on the analogy of the known. Examples of this method are the ‘clock’ and ‘pump’ analogies of the seventeenth century, or the more recent use by biologists of ‘government offices’ and such like as concepts of illustration. All this is not denied, but the ‘as if’ is stressed, for the danger of this kind of thinking is that it tends to confuse the picture or model with that which it is intended to exemplify.

There is a further point to be made. It is helpful, though in some cases dangerous, to use ‘pictures’ which stimulate the formation of partial exploratory hypotheses. It is less helpful, and even more perilous, to commit oneself to a master ‘picture’, for in doing so we become impatient of distinctions and unscrupulous in our manipulation of evidence. For Professor Macmurray history is an enquiry into the past actions of human beings. This statement, which seems so straightforward at first sight, is in fact very difficult, as it raises the question of what it is that we study when we study history.

This has been called ‘the century of the child’; and with justice, because never before has there been such intense interest shown in the world of childhood. This interest, and the knowledge that has resulted from observation and study during fifty years and more, has found application in our day, which has seen the tragedy of homeless children and disturbed homes to an unparalleled degree. There have been set up, all over Europe, children’s colonies, schools, hostels of a new kind for orphan, abandoned and delinquent children. Congresses and Committees are constantly discussing these problems. Books and articles on the subject are innumerable.

In the world of education too there has been an evolution, almost a revolution, of which we are hardly aware: the almost purely intellectual or instructional idea has given way, or is giving way, to one which has more regard for the whole child—body as well as mind, the senses and the imagination as well as the cognitive faculty alone. There is far more stress on doing and making; on music, painting and drama: on things, so to speak, as well as just facts. The application of this to the teaching of religion and the escape from the tyranny of the mere catechism is something so obvious and fruitful that, to Catholics, it should hardly need saying.

At the present time the problem of priest-workmen is once more to the fore. This is not due to any advertisement of their experiences which such priests have made, for they dread nothing so much as publicity. Their action can only develop in silence. Moreover, it is difficult to present their work to the public in its true light. Many of the superficial or impulsive judgments which one hears passed on the priest-workmen come from an insufficient knowledge of the milieu they are trying to reach and of the conditions of their apostolate. Today the silence is broken but the necessity of prudence remains, a requirement which is not always observed as it should be.

For practical purposes, the first publicity in the press dates from 1946, when several articles on the apostolic side of their activity were published in Témoignage Chrétien. The second phase dates from 1949. In March of that year an account of ‘The Paris Mission’ (which remains one of the best and most solid explanations of the task undertaken by the priest-workmen), appeared in Etudes. A little later, in July, articles of the ‘sensational’ type began to appear. Almost at the same time, Jean Balensi published an extensive inquiry in Paris-Presse under the title ‘'Shock-Christians’, and Jean-Loup Dariel published an article in France-Soir under the title ‘The Church’s Commandos’. It was just at this time that a decree of the Holy Office excommunicated all those adhering to the materialist and anti-Christian teaching of the Communists, and particularly those who defended or propagated it. M. Dariel’s account was afterwards reissued as Chez les prêtres ouvriers (Editions Chambriand). These inquiries and accounts were confined to the superficial aspects of the mission of the priest-workmen.

Recently I was standing on a bridge crossing the main approach to the new railway station in Johannesburg: below, the last touches were being given to the fifteen new platforms, while gangs of natives were busy with pneumatic drills, cranes and trucks, already demolishing the old station, and singing shanties as they worked. In the skyscraper flats all round thousands more natives were busy cooking their masters’ dinners on electric stoves: others were handling goods in the warehouses, working as pump-boys at filling stations, setting up linotype for tomorrow’s edition of The Bantu World, or, several thousand feet underground, were manning mechanical plant, and lashing the reef rock from a gold mine.

In all outward appearances, South Africa is as modem, progressive, and industrialised as any country in Europe or America. But it is also a country of contrasts and seeming contradictions, of bright lights, hard outlines, cruelty, and laughter. As soon as the observer says Chicago has nothing on Johannesburg, he must immediately ask himself, is this not in truth darkest Africa? To ignore that question would be almost as foolish as to ignore the question, whether Paris could have a culture which was independent of neon fighting.

For the thousands of Africans who are riding bicycles, delivering refrigerators and patent medicines, who, in a word, are caught up in the techniques and efficiency of our mass-producing age, have roots in an older culture whose coherence and whose hold on them are only just crumbling. The good old days of law and order and of values they could understand are still there in the reserves, even if clouds presage the approach of night.

In the great pastoral effort of contemporary Catholicism, a return to sources seems to provide one of its most powerful inspirations and also to give some of the finest results. Catholics are re-discovering an interest in the Bible, the Fathers, the Liturgy, an interest which completes and perfects what the return to the texts and teaching of St Thomas has contributed to Christian thought during the last fifty years. But since in this case a purely scientific perspective is not sufficient, what is required being not only to admire but to assimilate, the problem of the approach to, and interpretation of, these sources cannot fail to arise. And, primarily, the problem of how to read the Bible, how to discover anew a constant source of spirituality and of triumphant Christian energy in the Old Testament which modem exegesis seems at first sight to have drained of its spiritual value. A more extensive reading of the Fathers, by revealing innumerable possibilities and resources, has made the problem of the Bible more acute. We know that the Fathers, like the men of the Middle Ages moreover, were familiar with the sacred text through and through; many of them knew it by heart; it formed the subject of their prayers, the theme of their sermons; their language, even when there is no explicit quotation, is of the very warp and woof of the expressions of Holy Scripture. For them the Scriptures truly and unceasingly provide a meeting place with God, a discourse and a lesson given by God to man repeated over and over again in a thousand different forms, but (the point is an important one) directly and totally translatable, in terms of Christianity and the mystery of the New Covenant.