The purpose and scope of this paper may be conveniently formulated in the following two questions: what are the obstacles which prevent our fellow countrymen, who are Christian believers, and men and women of good will, from recognizing the Catholic Church for what it is, the visible society in the world, which alone is Christ’s Mystical Body and which alone speaks his word with the fullness of his authority; and, how far are these obstacles in the minds of the non-Catholics in question, and how far are they to be looked for in our presentation to them of the Gospel?

You will observe that I am prescinding altogether from any discussion of the mystery of the bestowal or non-bestowal of the gift of faith, which, however else we differ about it, we all agree to be a sheerly gratuitous gift of God, given by him when and to whom he wills. I am treating faith, in the context of this discussion, as divine faith in the authority of the Catholic and Roman Church, which seems to me to be very often an extension of faith in those who already possess it on a narrower, but at the same time very real, field. I am proposing to deal only with obstacles in the mind, obstacles, that is, in the non-Catholic mind which, we must presume, make it incapable of having this gift of faith bestowed; or obstacles in our own minds, which lead to the presentation by us of that faith in a form which is in fact incapable, psychologically speaking, of penetrating the non-Catholic receiving mind, and preparing it for the bestowal of the gift.

Many years ago I was discussing with Father M. a fairly obscure point of Catholic scholarship, and, rather out of my depth, asked him what Ronald Knox had had to say on the subject. ‘Ah, well’, he replied, ‘Ronnie Knox is of course hors de concours.’

And something slipshod in my mental French translation left me surprised at hearing Monsignor Knox spoken of as hors de combat! Later, amused at my mistake, I passed it on to Monsignor himself, thinking it would amuse him too; and ‘I expect I will be hors de combat next Wednesday’, he remarked; ‘I’m flying for the first time, out to Uganda.’

And I have since wondered what his mind did with that description of himself as hors de concours, for it was certainly by no visible act of diffidence that his comment had left it discarded on the floor. I was still to learn that this great prelate of modem times, this famous wit and scholar, was celled with humility like honey in the comb; an innate humility; he could no more keep it concealed than some people can conceal their innate arrogance. Yet by some spiritual poise he was likewise immune from having to supply those tiresome protestations of inferiority which Freud forgot to remove sharply into a wholly separate classification; true humility exists in its own air of freedom, and when we are in its presence perhaps we remark ‘there must be humility in the room’ as we might say ‘there must be violets in the room’. . .. But an inferiority complex is a miserable sandwich-man with boards front and back; and if their announcements are blatant, the person has an extrovert inferiority-complex: but if the sandwich boards get lugged about with their message turned inwards so that we cannot see what it is, they have an introvert inferiority-complex, just as tiresome.

Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, wandering among the souls of those damned for incontinence, meets the lovers, Paolo and Francesca. He is told that they fell from chastity after reading a book, the story of Lancelot. ‘Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. . . .’

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

‘The book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther.’ And as the commentators tell us, for ‘Galeotto’ we may read ‘pandar’. Here we have what is, I think, a locus classicus for the problem under discussion: the meeting-place of behaviour and literature and morals; and an occasion for apprehension for both the moralist and the writer, though for very different reasons.

The question of saving something would scarcely arise unless first it were worth preserving, and secondly in danger of neglect or oblivion. That the biblical interpretation of the Fathers is worth preserving in general, need not be laboured; but lest this fundamental premise should be evaded, it may be useful to quote the authoritative pronouncement of Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus. He quotes the Council of Trent ‘that it is permitted to no one to interpret Holy Scripture .. . against the unanimous agreement of the Fathers’, and later he adds in his own words, ‘The holy Fathers are of supreme authority whenever they all interpret in one and the same manner any text of the Bible, as pertaining to the doctrine of faith and morals; for their unanimity clearly evinces that such interpretation has come down from the Apostles as a matter of Catholic faith. The opinion of the Fathers is also of very great weight when they treat of these matters in their capacity of doctors, unofficially; not only because they excel in their knowledge of revealed doctrine, but because they are men of eminent sanctity and ardent zeal for the truth, on whom God has bestowed a more ample measure of his light. Wherefore the expositor should make it his duty to follow their footsteps with all reverence, and to use their labours with intelligent appreciation.’

When a saint reaches universality, his original background and personal characteristics sink into comparative unimportance. God’s possession of him has carried him beyond these things. Now, Charles de Foucauld, Brother Charles of Jesus, came from a very old family of the French nobility. His was a rich heritage of ancestral virtues and heroic chivalry. He himself was an officer and an explorer. He was thus quite thoroughly not only a man of his country, but a man of a particular period of his country’s history as well. In short, nothing would have seemed to have destined him in any particular way for a role as world-wide as the one we now know he was to have. Yet, once converted, he gave himself so utterly to our Lord, and his life turned into one so in keeping with the Gospel, that the witness he bore has in fact become universal. In other words, he became like a ‘little brother of Jesus’, as we say, and consequently, as he used to put it himself, a ‘universal little brother’.

After seven years generously devoted to life in a Trappist cloister, he felt himself irresistibly impelled towards a very literal imitation of Jesus working at Nazareth. He therefore set out on his quest in the self-chosen abasement of an all-but- penniless vagabond. From then on, he was to lead, first, the life of a domestic servant in Nazareth, devoting every hour he could spare from his chores to adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

In this essay no attempt is made to discuss Bultmann’s important contribution to Formgeschichte, which is, perhaps, the work for which he will be remembered. The purpose of the essay is rather to examine some of the assumptions that enter into Bultmann’s thought; assumptions that serve to shape, at the very least, his approach to Scriptural, and other problems.

This can be best understood if one of Bultmann’s typical preoccupations is considered. In his essay ‘New Testament and Mythology’ he attempts to explain in what sense he regards the New Testament as an historical document, in view of the amount of figurative language it contains. His explanation raises, among other problems, the question of what is meant by history, and this question in its turn, for Bultmann, forces the discussion into the realm of philosophy.

It is, perhaps, useful at this point to summarize Bultmann’s position about history, as set out in his History and Eschatology. History only begins when man frees himself from participation in a world that is full of gods; a world that he pictures, rather than analyses, in story forms that reflect both the regularity or rhythm of nature, and the irruption of awesome event. It is only when a human group becomes conscious of the processes that shape its experience that history, as self-conscious reflection on human relationships within a group, can be said to emerge. Both chronicle, with its selective character, and narrative, with its patterning of events, emerge from a reflection on, and an evaluation of, the causes and the interconnection of events regarded as significant in the experience of a people.

The education policy of the Labour Party is without any doubt of considerable importance and far more attention ought to be paid to the draft policy document, Learning to Live, than has been given in the popular press which concentrated on comprehensive schools and the fate of the public schools. When this document is considered at the October Party conference there may be some opposition that will lead to changes in detail, but it is unlikely that the conference will do other than endorse the document as a whole. The important thing to recognize is that a favourable vote at the conference will not stop the discussion on education, for of all topics this is about the most popular with Labour Party members. Furthermore, there cannot be another party with as many educational ‘experts’ as the Labour Party has—even if many of them are self-elected.

To discuss the development of an educational policy inside the Labour Party is not possible without recognizing that several schools of thought exist and that there are two other documents besides the official party policy document. One is the Victory for Socialism publication, Equality in Education, while the other, Education and Socialism, comes from the influential Socialist Union group.

It will have been noticed that the title of my paper is a timid one; even, it may be thought, excessively so. There are two reasons for this; and the first, which would alone, in my opinion, be a sufficient one, is that the questions raised by the phrase ‘Poetry and Belief’ are difficult ones, intimately involved in all discussion of the nature and function of poetry, and ones which have become especially problematic in our century. It is, I think, true enough to say that in the form in which they particularly concern us as Catholics, these questions begin to emerge fully with Matthew Arnold: they at any rate reach explicitness and are given very serious attention in the work of Dr I. A. Richards and Mr T. S. Eliot; without clear agreement being arrived at by those two critics—the most influential and, by and large, the most arresting and convincing critical theorists of our time.

If further reason for my timidity be thought necessary I shall only add that it is warranted by the way in which this paper has come about—and this I offer too as a declaration that what follows makes claim neither to scholarly exhaustiveness nor to formal completeness. I shall, in fact, be putting before you some questions rather than presenting you with any answers.

I have brought together five poems or passages from poems: and these you now have before you. They certainly raise the question of the place, the effect, of Belief (as we must understand it here), and show a significant variety, possibly a sufficient variety, of ways in which it may be raised.

A medievalist rarely has the experience of reading for review a book which impresses him at once as being definitive in its field. Père M.-H. Vicaire’s life of St Dominic gives this impression in the first chapter, and continues to give it till the last page is reached, many days later. No historical work as such is immortal; Thucydides and Gibbon live chiefly as great literature; new material will always be appearing and no two ages will seek for exactly the same answer from their sources. But when these reservations have been made, it may be confidently said that this life, like Vacandard’s Life of St Bernard and that of St Philip Neri by Ponnelle and Bordet, will remain standard for fifty years or more, and will influence all that is written about St Dominic far into the future. It will not put an end to writings on the saint; it will probably lead to their multiplication, for St Dominic is a figure that every generation and every nation will seek to understand and to interpret for themselves, but it will be from these volumes that the ore is extracted, to be moulded into this shape or that.

It is frequently remarked, both by historians and devout Catholics, that little is known of the life and personality of St Dominic. Certainly the lessons in the breviary on his feast day are more than usually successful in confirming such a view. One reason for this is undoubtedly the lack of an adequate contemporary biography. Dominic lived when the monastic centuries, with their tradition of literary education and classical models, had ended.

All suspicions that the Dominicans were indulging in kidnapping were soon laid to rest when the Prior delivered his prisoner into the hands of the Cardinal Archbishop at Milan on the morning of this same July 27. So far this boy’s vocation had involved merely one Pope, four Cardinals, the Master-General, a very worried Bishop and the English Queen’s agent in Rome. But they had reckoned without the Countess. As she was living in Antwerp there was an inevitable time-lag of about a month. She was as much distressed as her apostate husband, and was to prove far more active. Perhaps it was increasing illness that prevented the Earl from further participation in the dispute. Having written to Digby and to his wife, he seems to have left the matter in their capable hands.

The Countess did not hear of the fatal news until July 28, exactly a month after Philip’s clothing. By then he was safely lodged in the Archbishop’s palace at Milan, but of course she had no inkling of that. She wrote to her husband to express her sorrow, and to comfort him with the thought that there would be at least a year before Philip could be professed. The action of the Dominicans was so manifestly unjust that a letter to the Marquis de Velada, Governor of Milan, would, she hoped, be sufficient. He could if necessary call in the authority of the Nuncio there to force the fathers to surrender their ill-gotten novice.

Most of you will have seen, several years ago, André Labarthe’s film entitled La Vie commence demain, a film which speculated in quite a fascinating way on the future of the human race by seeing it through the eyes of certain great Frenchmen. A perhaps excessively ingenuous young man, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, puts questions to them, and their answers and what they are doing when he visits them reveal the way the world is supposed to be developing. The biological future is represented by some rather grisly experiments with a young calf in a rubber bath, carried out by Jean Rostand; the architectural future by Le Corbusier and his city of the sun; the future of the fine arts by Picasso sketching or making one of his plates complete with basso-rilievo knife, fork and sausages. One of these plates sent as a present via the ingenuous young man is the introduction to the next personage, who is demonstrating one of the possibilities of human speech in the future by handling a tape-recorder. To show the virtues of the instrument, its owner—this is, of course, André Gide—switches it on, and we hear his voice coming from it. And as it speaks, and develops a brief theme—what theme it is, matters very little—Gide’s face broadens with pleasure, with enormous satisfaction.

Lourdes has become a household word throughout the Catholic world and a reality that cannot be disregarded for the world at large. Yet, both in the one environment and in the other (to quote Bernadette herself), ‘I am afraid that many people skim over the surface of things.’ Be this as it may, it is certainly most important that Lourdes, and all that Lourdes stands for, should be seen not merely as a fact to be reckoned with but also as a sign to be interpreted. Like the Incarnation itself, in the light of which this sign must be interpreted, it was initially something unassuming in appearance, an affair of very simple people for the most part and one that must have seemed at first to promise little impact on the world at large. But in the course of a hundred years it has become a sign from heaven that all who run may read, and must read. The miracles wrought there have commanded attention; but it is not the miracles of Lourdes that are the most significant; it is the miracle of Lourdes itself.

Work for Christian unity must, of course, envisage the removal of what are called the non-theological factors, obstacles of divergence of ethos, outlook and idiom of thought, which separate Christians and Christian allegiances. These seem to bulk larger in the minds of many ecumenists than the primary and basic obstacles which are purely theological. Dr Mascall’s book wisely sets out to make theology the foundation of his approach to the problem of unity, and Christians of every allegiance, Catholics not least among them, have cause to be grateful for almost all of this ably written contribution to the solving of that problem. His work has been done with the learning and charity we should expect of him, and apart from one important section of it, the two chapters on the Papacy which we shall comment on later in this article, will prove of undiluted value in promoting the ecumenical dialogue.

The distinctive mark of Dr Mascall’s approach is a typically Anglican one; it is characteristic, as he points out, of the central theme of the Report Catholicity, namely the necessity of getting back behind the Reformation and the middle ages if the wholeness of the Catholic tradition is to be recovered. Much of what he says on this subject, in his chapters on Clearing the Ground, Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter, The Rediscovery of Liturgy, and The Church and the Ministry, will gain the cordial assent, exceptis excipiendis, of the majority of Catholic theologians, whether their particular interest is ecumenical or not.