After several years of decline, the British Communist Party is steadily growing in numbers and influence. The numbers involved are not, as yet, very great but the upward trend has been maintained for a sufficient length of time for it to be of some significance. The form it is taking and, more particularly, what app ars to be its underlying causes, should however cause Christians to stop and think.

In common with Communist parties all over the West, the British party lost some twenty-five per cent of its members during the months following the Hungarian People’s Rising. Among them was a high proportion of young intellectuals and some of its most promising younger leaders. The membership graph dropped sharply, then flattened out and more or less remained so until a couple of years ago when the Party began to recruit slightly more members than it was losing. Throughout the past year the graph has risen steadily month by month. Between early September and early November 1960, the Party’s membership increased by one thousand. The tempo of recruitment increased too. Before November was through the figure was up to 1,300. This represents, approximately, a five per cent increase in total membership in three months. The numbers recruited may not be spectacular, but the rate of increase is probably just about as much as the Party can effectively absorb at the moment. One must remember that the aim is to teach and train each member to become not just one more Communist but a well-instructed Marxist who is also fitted to be a leader wherever he goes.

It was in 1945 or 1946 that a group of Egyptian peasants, digging on the site of an early Christian cemetery near the village of Nag-Hammadi, unearthed an urn containing thirteen manuscripts. The contents of this urn have subsequently proved to be of epoch-making importance for the study of the New Testament and of early Church history.

In those early stages a few leaves of the papyrus were unfortunately burned. But the collection as we have it today comprises between eight hundred and one thousand papyrus leaves, most of them in remarkably good condition. On examination these have proved to constitute a library of forty-nine treatises written in Coptic about the fourth century a.d., and in several different dialects. It is clear that so fine a library must be attributed to the work of many different copyists, whose work extends over a period of more than a century. This in turn suggests that a religious community flourished at Nag-Hammadi some time in the course of the fourth century, and from the contents of the manuscripts it is obvious that its members must have been adherents of the dangerous and widespread heresy which extends, in manifold terms, from the second to the eighth centuries a.d., and which is nowadays known as Gnosticism.

The manuscripts found their way to Cairo in three separate lots. One of them, now entitled the ‘Jung Codex’, was illegally smuggled out of Egypt by a Belgian antiquarian, bought in America, and given to Dr Jung as an eightieth birthday present.

If one did not know their context, it would be easy to mistake many of the mystical poems of St John of the Cross for the most passionate declarations of profane love. Influenced in content and imagery by the Song of Songs, and in form and rhythm both by sixteenth-century Spanish court poetry and by traditional folk verse, the poems assimilate several traditions, several attitudes. In one of St John’s songs between the soul and the Bridegroom, the Bride cries,

If the reader did not know St John’s own commentaries on his Spiritual Canticle, it would not be difficult to assign such verse as this to the plane of physical love. The poem shocks because it is soTHE INNOCENT AUDACITY intimate. This is as true of the original Spanish as of the English translation; the problems involved in conveying, without loss, the extraordinary intensity of the original poems into another quite different language are well stated by the American poet John Frederick Nims, who has himself recently produced a very vivid rendering of St John’s poems: ‘My venture’, he says, ‘the windmill I am tilting at,

In these days, when it is fashionable to pay lip-service to what everyone calls democracy, one hears a good deal of verbal by-play with Rousseau’s phrase ‘All men are born equal’. No greater fallacy than that has ever been reiterated with more determined disregard of obvious truth. No matter how bitter it is, the fact remains that none of us has been born equal to anyone. Individually, we all enter and remain in this world either richer or poorer, cleverer or duller, stronger or weaker, quicker or slower, than everyone with whom we come into contact in our daily lives. This inequality of endowment stares us in the face even more conspicuously when we consider nationalities than it does on the plane of purely personal relationships. And nowhere in the international sphere does it stand out more clearly than when white men and black stand side by side amid the cataclysmic changes now taking place in Africa.

Today we live in an era when, throughout that continent, hitherto unsophisticated peoples are forming themselves into national organizations, which, although rudimentary and experimental by Western standards, will ultimately exert a very considerable influence upon our own national interests by their participation and possibly their opposition, vote for vote, in the great council chambers of the world.

It is therefore necessary for us to know something of the physical and mental heritage of African peoples in general, that our future relations with them, whether in commerce, in politics, in academics or in the mission field, may be conducted at least with understanding, if not with agreement.

Theology in its normal sense is the science of God’s word. God’s word may be considered in the abstract as the revealed truth about God, in so far as this is expressible in human language. Alternatively it may be considered in the concrete as it lives and grows in individual human minds and hearts. Until the nineteenth century litde attempt had been made to describe and reflect upon the word of God in this latter sense. It would have been dismissed as unscientific. But scientific theology in its normal sense had existed for many centuries. The technical terms used in scientific theology were not, of course, revealed to us from heaven. Part of the achievement of the Christian theologian was to invent technical symbols to express what had been given to the Church untechnically in the inspired literature of the Scriptures and in the living tradition of the Church. Man’s capacity for scientific thought is one of his greatest gifts, and it was inevitable that he should apply it to the study of the greatest of all subjects, the revealed word of God. Christian man’s first attempts at theology came in the very beginnings of the patristic age. The need for clear-cut terms and arguments as a safeguard against heresy led to a great increase of theology during the golden age of patristics, the fourth and fifth centuries. But, contrasted with later theology, all this early period was a period of the literary expression of Christian life and tradition rather than of its systematic exposition and defence.

Within a very short time of entering the practice of medicine most Catholic doctors realize that by far the biggest single issue facing them in the arena of moral and professional responsibility is contraception. What may still be for us a controversial issue is a settled matter for our non-Catholic colleagues and almost a universal practice for our patients. As a community, Catholics have the tendency to protect themselves from disagreeable facts either by denying their existence or entertaining the most naive notions about them. This is an outlook which hitherto has spelled disaster in our handling of this problem.

We can begin a useful reassessment by examining the size of this problem. One of the studies of the Royal Commission on Population in 1949 was devoted to the subject of family limitation. They took a representative sample of married women, covering all parts of the country and the years of marriage from 1900 to 1947. The following facts emerge. Before 1910, the percentage of women who used birth control was 15%; in the thirties it had risen to a figure of 66%. I would go further than this and suggest for practical purposes we have to accept to-day the fact that almost all childbearing couples at some time resort to some form of birth control. The only reasons for its exclusion in marital life appear to be religious opposition, sheer ignorance and, rarely, aesthetic considerations. It is a practice accepted as sensible and practical, and to entertain an alternative demands in itself an explanation and evidence of sanity from the person who proposes such a contrary view.

The title of this article is also that of a recent book on the subject, which is a worthy attempt to evaluate certain hypotheses against an objective study of social and psychological factors. The author says: ‘Our fundamental aim was to make a comparison, critical for our theoretical understanding of later social maladjustment, of the divergent routes taken in emotional development by neurotic and delinquent children, from their early years’.

There is no hard and fast distinction between the two groups, any more than there is in any category of human beings, but by trying to find the relative frequency and importance of the various factors in the two groups, it was hoped to throw into sharper relief and render more clear, those factors which are most important in the making of delinquents. The stress of the book is in the main on delinquency rather than on neurosis, as is evident from the excellent ‘Historical Background’ of the first chapter. It is rightly stressed, and this cannot be repeated too often, that: ‘The term “delinquent” is in no way a psychiatric or diagnostic entity in the proper sense, but gives a description of certain types of behaviour in many recognizable personality types’.

The study was undertaken by the teams of the three child guidance clinics in West Sussex under the direction of Dr Bennett, who is a psychologist, originally from Australia. She gives credit to the late Dr Kate Friedlander who originated the project when she was psychiatric Director of the West Sussex child guidance service.

In January 1957 Professor Oscar Cullmann was invited to lecture in Zurich on the subject, ‘Primitive Christendom and The Ecumenical Problem’. Referring to the collection made by the early Gentile Christians for the Jewish Christians, he proposed that the separated Christians of today make a reciprocal collection at least once a year, as an expression of brotherhood. In a later article, Professor Cullmann defined the significance and the form of this collection more narrowly, and answered objections. We would like to reproduce his thoughts here and to assess their value.

For over fifty years Catholics and non-Catholics have been praying during the same octave every year for unity in faith. This is a promising sign, and we would not be far wrong if we saw here the basic fact and the supreme form of the movement towards re-union. Further, we note as novelty that theological work, which formerly accentuated differences, is now in many respects leading scholars back together along various directions. Thus, for example, for some twenty or thirty years there has been a lively and fruitful exchange in Biblical studies between Catholic and non-Catholic exegetes. Even in the sphere of systematic theology there have been many changes. Without applauding every attempt to seek a rapprochement in content and method, we must not underestimate the value of this tendency, first to reach agreement on several points, and then to make possible a non-polemical, even friendly conversation on the points which still divide. Cullmann is not content with this.

Eight hundred electric lights brilliantly outlined the facade and cupola of the new market that looks out on the Mediterranean quayside. On the top of the building, angled eastwards, was a large illuminated X P (Chi Rho) symbol, surmounting the words, Pan-Orthodox Meeting of Rhodes 24.9 - 1.10.1961.

Rhodes gave a warm official welcome to the congress. Ecclesiastics and civic dignitaries spoke. There were dinners, concerts, trips. Perhaps the visiting naval vessels of the United States and Britain did introduce what someone described as ‘unfortunate over-tones’ to the atmosphere in which religious matters are best discussed. But, on the whole, everything was calm, apart from puzzled speculation among journalists and observers; the extra hundred or so attracted by the congress were easily absorbed among the sun-worshipping late season holidaymakers; taxis did a roaring trade; excitement seemed to be well contained within the closed church where the delegates met generally in private.

Religious inscrutability is intensified when ecclesiastics are bearded. Of the nine or ten Catholic priests on the island that week, four wore beards, but only Father Dumont, with the added advantage of his white Dominican habit, looked in place. The impression was forced on one that here was a man fully aware of the issues involved at Rhodes, who understood what the dignified prelates and their theologians were about: so far, an Orthodox might say, as a Latin can understand us.

The most serious and perceptive assault on Lady Chatterley's Lover, in the recent flurry of controversy, issued from Dr Leavis in his review of the Pelican Special which told the story of the trial. Apart from his judgment that it is a bad novel, and the persuasive rationale that he offers there to support this decision, which, though much sharpened and more circumstantial, is essentially the one he reached in his book on Lawrence in 1955, Dr Leavis makes an interesting sociological comment on the significance of the Defence’s success. The Prosecution, he observes, was defeated, ‘not by the presentment of any sound or compelling case, but by its realization that it was confronted by a new and confident orthodoxy of enlightenment’. The verdict, in fact, registered a change in the values of educated people—a change which owes a good deal, in ways that it would be instructive to examine, to the deep impact of Lawrence’s work on a whole generation, and of Dr Leavis’s own faithful interpretation of it (the terms in which the novel was, and is, generally defended, and even read, were originally put about by him). Now, if it is true, as it seems to be, that our moral environment has been sensibly modified, so that people brought up on admiration for Lawrence can now carry the day, it is important to insist, as Dr Leavis does in his review, and has always done, on how intimately and indissolubly the worst in Lawrence is related to the best.

This is not a statement of a political kind: a manifesto for yet another Catholic Guild; nor is it what Field Marshal Montgomery would call an excuse for belly-aching. It is rather an agenda for further study—a plea for a new attitude of mind. I say attitude of mind, because my own experience of Catholics has been that in this country they still tend to look at social questions differently from their fellow Christians—as aliens, not as members by birth of a society which ‘belongs’ to the members of the other denominations, in their capacity as citizens. This attitude is expressed in terms of keeping oneself to oneself, or the halfresentful assumption of a superiority which is not felt: ‘They have the society, but we have authority’.

But as far as social questions go, what does this authority amount to? A few half-remembered phrases from St Thomas, a couple of encyclicals? If so, this is not authority, but mere slogan-thinking.

I have also met Catholics who say that social problems do not really exist as such. The only problems are theological. It is all a question of applying the answers already available in the deposit (that is, I think the term) of the faith. Thus an exact study of social questions is unnecessary, especially as the Welfare State has eliminated poverty, starvation, bad housing, and all the normal objects of Christian charity.

‘Every creative writer worth our consideration.......is a victim: a man given over to an obsession’, wrote Graham Greene in an essay on Walter de la Mare. Critics have not been slow in applying this statement to Mr Greene himself. He has been considered almost exclusively in terms of a few recurring obsessions: the vision of evil; the concept, borrowed from Peguy, of the sinner at the heart of Christianity; the theme of pursuit, and so on.

This critical approach has contributed much that is valuable to the study of his work. Unfortunately it has, by obscuring its variousness, inadvertently supplied ammunition to those critics who like to dismiss him as a mere manipulator of rigid and repetitive formulae. We can, for instance label both The Confidential Agent and The Power and The Glory as ‘Pursuit’ novels. But this does not take us very far. Apart from the fact that The Confidential Agent is an ‘Entertainment’, and The Power and The Glory a ‘Novel,’ the two books are of course entirely different. To determine the identity of each we must probe deeper than the obsessive symbol of pursuit, to the obsessive word. The key-word in The Confidential Agent is ‘trust’, presented mainly in its negative aspect as ‘mistrust’ or ‘distrust’. These three words occur at least sixteen times in The Confidential Agent. The irony of its title is therefore clear: the hero is a confidential agent who has confidence in nobody, and in whom nobody has confidence.

It may be helpful to approach the subject of the place of symbols in Christianity from the consideration of two sets of difficulties or disabilities which seem to affect many Catholics nowadays in the western world.

First, Catholics are often accused of not reading the Old Testament. If this is true, and by and large it seems to be, it is important for us to discover why it is so; and the likely explanation seems to be that to a great extent we have lost the clue to the reading of the book, we have forgotten the ‘language’, the idiom, in which it is written. Again it seems undeniably true to say that the modern Catholic, however deep and vivid his belief in the efficacy of the sacraments, often finds little meaning if any in their ritual, the ritual for instance of the baptismal waters; whereas it is clear that in the days of primitive Christianity this same ritual had on the neophyte an immensely vivid impact.

Secondly, many Catholics nowadays seem to feel that the formulas, the propositions, in which the Christian faith is stated and propounded to them in creed or catechism have about them a certain unreality: they seem so dry, so technical, so remote from ordinary everyday speech and everyday reality, that they may easily come in the end to seem meaningless: the dogmatic formulas, the definitions of faith, so remote and so dry as to be unreal; the moral principles, so neat and tidy as to seem lacking in validity.

This is the study of an anomaly, an inquiry into a paradox. It is an examination of how and why the apparently unexceptionable tenets and standards of one very distinguished literary critic can so often lead him to the most erroneous conclusions.

Yvor Winters is an American, a man who has had a formative influence on a number of young poets in the United States but who, until very recently, was almost unknown in this country save for a few of his stylish and fastidious poems which had appeared in anthologies of American verse. He is a great teacher, a teacher who has been honoured in a fine poem by Thom Gunn who has studied with him; he is also a self-appointed arbiter of taste who is spoken of by his devotees with an almost hushed reverence and awe.

Let us first examine Winters’s credentials, his beliefs. In one very real sense, he is a Schoolman, a scholastic who rates human reason higher than every other faculty or function; but he is a Schoolman who pays homage to no Church, a man who gives allegiance to no established system but who creates his own fearlessly and sometimes defiandy. Winters is not afraid to be either didactic or dogmatic. Indeed, what first strikes the reader of his essays is, above all, the enormous assurance of the writer; there is no timidity, no demurring. The judgments are never tentative, the appraisals never ambiguous. And Winters is as confident and precise in his generalities as when he applies those generalities to particular poems or poets.

Contemporary study of the Old Testament appears to be dominated by three trends, associated with three broad groups of scholars. For practical purposes these groups may legitimately be described as ‘schools’, but only in a sense broad enough to allow for the intellectual independence of each individual scholar. The designation ‘school’ is often resented and repudiated nowadays.

The first group, led by the German scholars, A. Alt, M. Noth and G. von Rad, is usually called the ‘History of Tradition’ school. The second, consisting primarily of Scandinavian scholars with S. Mowinckel and J. Pedersen at their head, is sometimes described as the ‘Comparative Religion’ school. For reasons which will appear later I personally prefer to call it the ‘Palaeo-anthropological’ school. The third general trend is that of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. It is characteristic of the new awakening of Catholic Old Testament scholarship, especially in France, and here the leader is unquestionably R. de Vaux. The approach of certain American scholars such as W. Albright, G. E. Wright and J. Bright is markedly similar to that of the French, and it would not be wholly inaccurate to classify these too under the same general heading of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. Let us very briefly consider the distinctive approaches of each of these schools as exemplified in their most important and most representative works.

The characteristic approach of the German school may be described by means of a double simile. The enormously complicated amalgam of tradition which we call the Old Testament is regarded as a sort of snowball. The nucleus of the snowball is constituted by the Grundlage, the central ‘pan-Israelite’ traditions recording the events of the exodus, Sinai and the entry into the promised land.

No doctrine of jurisprudence has so distinguished a history as the theory of the natural law. One of its earliest and noblest expressions is to be found in Sophocles, when Antigone refuses to obey Creon’s unjust commands and appeals to a law greater than human ordinance. In the form given to it by Greek Stoicism it was received and developed by the Roman philosophers and jurists; through St Isidore it passed into the middle ages where it found its most perfect expression in St Thomas Aquinas. It was adopted and applied by the Dutch Protestant jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it is still embraced by most Catholic thinkers today. It links the pagan and Christian traditions from classical antiquity to the twentieth century; and while its independence of supernatural revelation can be said to give it value as a praeparatio evangelica, its perfect consonance with dogma has led to its almost universal adoption in Catholic thought.

This very acceptance by Catholics has, however, led to a great deal of confusion and to the advancement of some exaggerated and often meaningless claims. It may be useful to subject the natural law doctrine to an analysis based largely on theoretical and practical jurisprudence. Such an analysis will reveal the inadequacy of much that is commonly said about the doctrine as a possible theory of law and will illustrate, perhaps, why few lawyers show much enthusiasm for it.