The Influence of Modern Biology

Modern Biology may be said to date from the publication of Darwin’s great work which resulted in a general acceptance of the belief in Organic Evolution, for not only has the bulk of thought and work in the biological field since then been at the very least strongly influenced by the ideas which were then let loose to develop and breed in every sphere of human activity, but the theory itself has been the actual stimulus behind an unparalleled outburst of biological investigations.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that we are clear at the outset on two fundamental points : (i) that Charles Darwin was bv no means the first to propound a theory of Organic Evolution, the success of his effort being due to (a) the mass of argument which he produced in support of his particular theory of Evolution, and (b) the time at which he made known his views—a time which happened to be favourable for their acceptance; and (2) the actual title of the book which produced such momentous results. It was The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or The Survival of the Fittest, and it was the suitability of the second title in particular which helped to make the theory so acceptable to the Liberal school of thought which was developing with the rise of industry and of wealthy industrialists concomitantly with the degradation of their employees to a status of virtual slavery. The theory was fortunate also in gaining as its fairy-godfather, T. H. Hiuxley, who not only made the idea of evolution acceptable to a vast number of readers and listeners, but who also introduced it into the fields of ethics and religion. In Germany, too, it found ardent supporters.

The Jewish problem has become one of the most ominous and terrible issues of contemporary consciousness, which is tested by new waves of terrifying anti-Semitism. It must, however, be said that this ppves the way to a deeper realisation of the problem itself. It is raised to a new level, receives new definition and new illumination. Beneath the surface of the elemental outburst something far more essential, significant and decisive than all this sounding storm around the ‘Jewish question ‘is taking place. Above all, it becomes clear that it is not enough to oppose moral or legal standards to antiSemitism ; that the answer to the whole tragedy of Israel must be sought in its mysterious bond with the destinies of world-history.

There are several ways of approaching the Jewish problem. For sociologists, economists, for historians of culture and for moralists, Jewry will always be a social, economic or cultural unit, or an object of moral valuation. Racial nationalism turns the whole issue into biology. At the present time anti-Semitism is primarily concerned with racial arguments; yet often these only Conceal feelings of hatred and resentment. I will not speak of the approach to the problem which has become the chief source of the delirious ideas about the ‘Jewish conspiracy,’ the ‘Wise men of Sion,’ etc.—legendary tales, or rather blood-stained slanders, which still confuse some minds, not so much in this country as on the Continent.

‘We, the writers, friends, readers of “Temps Nouveau” do not pretend to consider ourselves the only or the sufficient expression of the hope of France; but we are firmly convinced that our “little flock’ is one of the armies—of the vanguards—of the reconquest and the restoration of France…

My purpose, in this article, is to say something about this ‘little flock’ with whom I was privileged to work up till the capitulation, and whose activities I have tried to follow in spite of the prison walls which to-day surround their country.

On June 18th, 1940, I was driving south towards Bayonne. A little way ahead, on a hill, a small boy-scout was directing the traffic. He beckoned us on. And as we continued down the long, straight, poplar-studded roads of the Landes, I knew that that little boy would go on with his job, and that he represented the real France—youthful in its enterprise and energy and courage, mature in its perseverance and devotion. We talked then, my friends and I, of all those other young people whom we had seen or of whom we had heard, who were directing refugees, housing and feeding people, giving information, carrying luggage, delivering post, in fact, governing—that is, doing the real work of administration—a country whose official bureaucracy and civil service had collapsed. For those who knew the French youth movements this was less a cause for surprise than for admiration : it was to have been expected that France’s Catholic Action should fulfil its magnificent promise at the moment of France’s greatest tragedy.

Of course others have faced this problem, and found their answer. It would be wanton, spiritual arrogance for the author in his academic seclusion to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, as he lays aside one or other of the various handbooks of Christian reconstruction with which the market is flooded in these days, a horrid doubt crosses his mind which passes into a nightmarish sense of unreality. We draught our charters, we hold our luncheons, we address our public meetings. We go to the world outside the conference-hall door with a smile, with a handbook, nearly always with a sense of assurance Again, we search the Scriptures not that we may have life, but that we may find a slogan for a Christian mass-movement, in which the demands ot the platform will blunt the sharpness of our truly Christian perception. Our attitude seems sometimes a curiously sorry compact of assurance and desperation. We are assured because we think we have a solution for the frightful torments of the present; we are afraid because we see the dreadful possibility that men will not listen to us, may in fact opt finally for other gods.

Is this altogether unfair? The picture is not intentionally spiteful. But there are moments when it seems hard to escape the conviction that some contemporary forms of Christian social activity are little less than highly subtle forms of escapism. They are ‘idealist’ in the sense assigned to that term by Marxist writers, for they rest on unconscious desire to escape the pressing demand to wrestle with social actualities in the here and now by passing into a world that analysis points out to be one of ideas only.

One who is outside the danger-zone, as we are in South Africa, must feel bound to apologise for asking those whose thoughts are preoccupied with the war to consider other things. When men are fighting for survival it hardly seems the time to speak of the uncertain future and lands as far away as dreams. So it is with diffidence that I write this. But I write for three reasons. First : the work of God must go on as ever among those who have no fault or part in the great quarrel, and it may be a consolation to those in the war to know that it is going on. Secondly it should introduce to their thoughts of post-war reconstruction a land that seems to be destined for construcion at a pace similar to that of the growth of the United States in the last century. Thirdly I believe that the place I am to speak of, the Gold Reef of South Africa, is a focal point in the war. When the German armies began the attack on France, the bells were rung (the German people were told) for the beginning of a battle that was to carve out for them a great empire. Empire where? Surely in Africa, where the German Empire had been. And which is the most minerally wealthy, and the most temperate part of Africa, that which the thorough German mind sees to be most capable of rapid development? Without a doubt it is South Africa. (The last German Emperor said he would never permit Britain to hold it). And the present centre of this desirable land and of its industrial possibilities is in the hills surrounding Johannesburg, called the Wit watersrand, or Ridge of White Waters.

‘What follows is ho more than some annotations on the very suggestive phrases towards a theory of art, thrown out almost casually by Aristotle in the course of his Poetics. All of these phrases must be taken together, as each may be seen to imply the other at almost every point: and taken together they help to clarify Aristotle’s position with regard to the nature of the aesthetic experience, its nature as an intellectual experience felt as physical or as a physical experience with strong intellectual overtones.

For the Platonic school the artist was a creator of myths, a pseudothinker who merely mirrored the mutable world of sense which in turn merely mirrored the world of Ideas, so that the poet’s creation was distant from life by two removes. ‘Aesthetic distance ‘for Plato meant deliberate withdrawal from the pressing and fundamental issues of life, the moral issues. We shall examine later how to put an Aristotelian complexion on the term. Aristotle, however, makes art an affair of language, and language whose adequacy can be tested by the closeness of its approximation to an experience, by its vividness in reproducing the experience for us. That is what he implies when he says that art imitates not merely the world of sense, but the world of man’s mind, his character, his emotions, his actions : and this world it presents with an almost physical vividness. He calls this artistic reproduction mimesis : ideas are suggested through physical things, just as mime (in the bodies of Greek maskers or Balinese dancers) reproduces emotion in the language of gesture. The master of mime proportions his gestures to the directives of the emotion he wants us to feel: and the lack of this proportion is evidence that the work of art is not under full artistic control.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century Ernest Renan wrote: ‘I have studied Germany and believed I entered a temple. All I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful and moving. O my soul, it is a treasure indeed, it is the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality fills me with admiration, how sweet and how strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there.’

What he meant by ‘Christ’ was: ‘A pure cult, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, resting entirely on the heart's feelings, on the imitation of God, on the Immediate relation of our conscience with the Heavenly Father . . . Jesus founded religion in humanity as Socrates philosophy . . . Jesus founded absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing except the sentiment.’ That is one of the strong currents which Germany sent into the maelstrom of modern European civilisation. Kant, Hegel, Strauss, ‘Baur, Goethe were the sources.”

In 1936 Abbot Ildefons Herwegen spent four weeks in Italy. In an audience the late Pope said that he had himself been able to establish that liturgical life in Germany was on the increase, and that this was a strong support for Holy Church in these days of strife and suffering. And this is another current of which Maria-Laach is the source.

Europe is one. Its unity is not an opposition of races and nations overcome by commercial, diplomatic or cultural contacts.

The title I have chosen ‘for this brief essay is both comfortable and soporific. Come what may—like the earth on which we stand— by very reason of our existence, the family will always be with us. But (here’s the rub) what do you mean by family? The greatest clanger to it is perhaps our complacent disregard of its history. The popular conception of the family as an unchanging political entity is a snare as well as a delusion, for it blinds us to the possibility of another and disastrous stage in its ‘evolution.’

Already, the family is regarded by many as a quaint relic (like marr’age or Sunday worship) of the Christian era. ‘The unit of ancient society,’ in the well-known words of Sir Henry Maine, ‘was the family, of modern society the individual ‘(Ancient Law, p. 121). The movement of progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation and privilege in its place. The individual, Maine continues, is steadily substituted for the family as the unit of which civil law takes account. Professor F. G. Peabody in his brilliant book (Jesus Christ and the Social Question) comments on the fact that this substitution has been for several generations the key of English jurisprudence, philosophy and economics; and to show that this is true also of the spiritual life and thought of Protestantism h,e quotes the judgement of Hecker’s biographer that Protestantism is mainly unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism whose Christ deals with men apart from each other, furnishing humanity with no cohesive element.

The Brains Trust once set the following question : Would the nation be better governed by men of science and great thinkers rather than by professional politicians? The problem is of paramount importance in these days when civilisation, as we know it, totters on the brink of destruction and when thinking men of every party and creed are endeavouring to find a sure basis for post-war reconstruction. According to Professor C. E. M. Joad, the man of science is certainly not fitted to guide the destinies of his country. In his specialised capacity he is as methodical and as efficient as the worker bee, but out of his laboratory he appears as stupid as the insect on the window pane. This view was severely criticised. Surely, it was said, the training of the man of science, his careful weighing of facts, his patient analysing, his impartiality, should fit him more pearly to approach the ideal legislator than his unscientific fellows. Are not the scientists the ‘disinterested men’ of J. B. Priestley— men dealing in hard facts without prejudice? Professor Joad’s reply pointed to the heart of the problem. He showed that the politician, too, was dealing in hard facts—the facts of human welfare—but, whereas the scientist was faced with the problem of yes or no, the politician’s job was a question of right or wrong. In other words, moral value was the primary consideration of the politician and morality was beyond the field of science. It is true, of course, that the scientists have contributed greatly to the potential welfare of man as they have also (for example by the invention of the internal combustion engine) contributed to his doom.

The Apostolate of Christ the Worker, what does it convey? . . . It is a call going out from our Lord’s sacred humanity to all men, asking them to heed the lesson of the thirty years he spent in the carpenter’s home at Nazareth, supposed to be ‘the son of Joseph.’

This call goes out to a world which takes its values mainly from material criteria, forgetful of the interior preparation of the life of the soul, which alone is the safeguard of worth and stability. We are so easily caught by pride, the self-complacency of the ‘practising Catholic,’ self-seeking, and self-pity, or we are downtrodden, worn out through drudgery, forgetful of the divine instinct, by which every man longs for God in his heart.

A great number of the faithful continue to practise their devotions, while taking a thoroughly materialist view on all practical issues and clinging openly to a materialist mode of life. One part of their lives is ‘devotionalised,’ the other part ‘materialised,’ whereas the whole of their lives should be ‘spiritualised.’ This is the great lesson of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that he as Christ the Worker has reconciled matter and spirit in his daily working life. It is this reconciliation of which the world stands in need to-day, and towards which the Apostolate of Christ the Worker strives.

The Industrial Revolution had progressed through the earlier decades of the nineteenth century before there arose any true appreciation either of the vastness of the economic changes that were in progress or the extent of the social evils that were in rapid growth. Agriculture continued to fall back before the viiles tentaculaires of Verhaeren’s vision and a huge new and debilitated population crowded into the sordid streets as fast as they sprang up. It is true that as early as 1839 the Comte de Montalembert, stirred in his Catholic conscience by rumours as to the conditions under which the factory workers lived, journeyed up to Lancashire to see for himself ‘these appalling towns ‘which filled him with a ‘triple horror,’ but this was the gesture of a singularly kind-hearted politician rather than an experiment in scientific investigation. The emergence on every side of vast fortunes was guarantee enough to the average citizen that great material progress was being made, while the political economists of the day unhesitatingly enunciated the principles on which such progress could be relied on for the future.

Unexpectedly enough, it was in Germany that a new appreciation on Christian lines was to present itself on a wide scale with social and religious results of the highest importance. It was in the Western parts of the Empire, and more especially in the Catholic Rhineland, that industrial development first showed itself on lines similar to those in England, and these were the districts that had been most severely affected by the principles of the French Revolution and by the disasters of the Napoleonic wars.

The modern practice of prayer, meditation, and study for Unity on the basis of our Lord’s words as they are recorded in the seventeenth chapter of St. John can be traced to the striking letter on the reunion of Christendom which Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1894, on his completion of fifty years of episcopal life. The aged Pontiff, who was to remain active for nearly ten more years, prefaced his appeal to Orthodox and Anglican, pagan and lapsed, with the following commentary :

‘As this Divine prayer embraces not only the souls who then believed in Jesus Christ, but also every one of those who were henceforth to believe in Him, it gives us an excellent reason for confidently expressing our hopes and for making all possible endeavours that men of every race and clime may be called and moved to embrace the unity of Divine faith.’

My part to-day is to show some of the practical consequences of the impact of science on society. To indicate results, however, without pointing out their causes would be of little value. I hope, therefore, that my colleagues in the papers introductory to these discussions will forgive me if I encroach a few steps on to the domain of principle, allotted to them, in developing my own domain of practice.

In three directions in particular has science exerted an important influence on society : in altering man’s mental outlook, in aiding his physical welfare, and in changing his environment. My comments will follow these paths.

Science and the Mental Outlook of Society.

The most important of the effects of science on the mind of the community, so it appears to me, has been through the example of single-minded search for truth which is the hallmark of all genuine scientific work. The truth to be attained may be limited to a particular plane, with a corresponding restriction in its range of influence ; but within that range the manner of the scientific worker’s approach to the unknown is outstandingly direct and fearless, animated solely by the desire for truth.

But that brings in its train a second reaction on the mental attitude of society. The course of a scientific enquiry would be sadly hampered if the heart were allowed to sway the head. The man of science has to keep his intellect at white heat, but his emotions in cold storage, till the end of his search, when certainly the feelings may be powerfully stirred in the arrival at a satisfying conclusion.

The first monastery of the Carmelite Friars of St. Teresa’s Reform consisted of a small house with a porch for church, one single room for dorrnitory, a kitchen which also served as the refectory, and, a garret for choir. Its roof leaked, and in winter the snow would fall on the coarse habit of Fray Juan, who had changed his name of St. Mathias to John of the Cross, for it was the Cross with which he was in love, and the mystic teaching he gave to the Church is sealed with the sign of our salvation.

Mystics, alas, seem to be en vogue again among writers Christian and otherwise — alas, because mysticism by its very name seems to suggest mystery, dark and wonderful experiences, losing oneself in the One or the All (it does not matter which), tempting men to spiritual experiments which can only end in disaster. But mysticism is nothing of the kind, and anyone who longs for mystic experiences or who would understand Christian mystics with such notions in . his head is grievously deceived. ‘Do not seek Christ except on the Cross,’ St. John once said to one of his friars, and the Christian mystic who always seeks God through Christ, will also be found only on the Cross.

There is, perhaps, no other Saint whose life as well as whose doctrine bear the imprint of the Cross so openly, so challengingly even, as the life and the writings of St. John, whom the Church calls in the Collect of his Feast ‘Perfectae sui abnegationis et Crucis amatorem.’

This is not a subject on which I would dare to dogmatise or attempt to say the last word at this stage. It would, however, be an affectation to pretend to more diffidence than I feel. Soon after I took my degree, I worked for two years in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Research Department; later I became a Labour City Councillor and prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford. Brought up a Protestant, I was received not very long ago into the Church. I should indeed be a poor creature if the topic under discussion aroused in me no individual reactions.

The Editor of the Catholic Herald has recently computed that out of three million or so Catholics in England, 90 per cent, vote Labour. Be the figure 90 per cent or 75 per cent., as more often suggested, the fact in any case is striking. It is seldom animadverted to by those who exploit the authoritarian tendencies of a small group of gifted Catholic laymen in the service of an argument that the average British Catholic is a British (not too British) version of General Franco.

It cannot be pretended, however, that the substantia! Catholic element in the Labour vote exercises a distinctive influence on Labour principles or policy remotely proportionate to their number or to their merits as citizens. They do not vote Labour because of their Catholicism, nor yet in spite of it. For the most part poor men and women living in large towns, many of them of Irish extraction, their natural bias is towards the party of the under-dog. Individual leaders such as the late John Wheatley have done splendid work.

To get to Wales is a morning’s journey from London. Yet to reach the Welsh that is the language of the poets is one of the rarer English achievements. Returning anthropologists are apt to say that the poetry of the llbangi is unrivalled, but there are few who will be impressed, since Ubangi is not usually found on the English curriculum. There is perhaps a chauvinism of the mind that looks for some connection between great art and national prestige. The lesser breeds may be conceded a memorable folk-tale, but the growth of imperialism has given a quantitative, and therefore false, importance to the artist who uses the imperial language—English, French or German.

Ideally, the particularism of the artist who springs from a small nation should be absorbed by the unity of a larger tradition. But poetry is not at its best following!a flag, even a federal one. The conflict between the local language and the wider world of Europe did not in the 14th century relegate the former to a parochialism that has been the lot, for instance, of Welsh poetry since the Reformation. Welsh poetry has indeed survived, and most gloriously, but, as cut off from the fertilising contact with Europe, it has too often seemed moralising, repetitive and trivial—the inevitable results of any sort of isolation.

For Dafydd ap Gwilym, an older contemporary of Chaucer, there was no conflict between Wales and the world outside. He wrote in the traditional Welsh metres (though not usually in the strictest) which had become exactly formulated by generations of professional bards, themselves an enclosed body demanding an allegiance to canons of procedure and expression which we associate nowadays with the Law Society rather than with poets.

What is an Art Museum for? As the word ‘Curator’ implies, the most essential function of such a Museum is to take care of works of art which are no longer in their original places or no longer used as was originally intended, and are therefore in danger of destruction. This care of works of art does not necessarily involve their exhibition.

If we ask, why should the protected works of art be exhibited to the public, the answer will be made, that this is to be done with an educational purpose. But before we ask, Education in or for what? a distinction must be made between the exhibition of the works of living artists and that of ancient or relatively ancient or exotic works of art. It is unnecessary for Museums to exhibit the works of living artists, which are not in imminent danger of destruction; or at least, if such works are exhibited, it should be clearly understood that the Museum is really advertising the artist and acting on behalf of the art dealer whose business it is to find a market for the artist; the only difference being that it makes no profit. On the other hand, that a living artist should wish to be ‘hung’ or ‘shown’ in a Museum can be only due to his need or his vanity. For things are made normally for certain purposes and certain places to which they are appropriate, and not simply ‘for exhibition’; and whatever is thus made by an artist for a consumer is controlled by certain requirements. Whereas, as Mr. Steinfels has recently remarked, ‘Art which is only intended to be hung on the walls of a Museum is one kind of art that need not consider its relationship to its ultimate surroundings.