The theological writings of Professor Tillich deserve the attention of students of St Thomas, both for their positive

content, which is of the highest interest, and because on fundamental matters they explicitly and sharply join issue with Thomism. They invite the presumption of a certain common ground, certain affinities, and at the same time throw out a challenge which we cannot ignore.

To read these works, especially the great Systematic Theology (1951), is to encounter a powerful and original personality, a mind organized to an uncommon degree around a single centre. Tillich’s peculiar gift is for synthesis; a constructive thinker with a very wide range of interests, he is always striving to correlate and organize these on the basis of a singularly vivid intuition of being in general, the primary datum of the mind, which for him—as for St Thomas—represents the mind’s first opening onto reality as a whole, as both containing and transcending human nature. It is this consciously ontological character of Tillich’s thinking that seems to distinguish him among contemporary Protestant theologians; as J. H. Randall observes, he ‘stands in the classic tradition of Western philosophy’, in the tradition, derived from the Greeks, of speculative concern with being itself and wisdom. Let us stress this ‘concern’. ‘Ultimate concern’ is Tillich’s definition of religion, and by ‘ultimate’ he means ‘that which determines our being or non- being’. Man for him is the being who ‘asks the question of being’, and since God is ‘the answer implied in the question of being’, theology is essentially a searching into the same question.

The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.

I was kindly asked to write something for the first number of Blackfriars, in 1920, and now, to suggest what changes may have occurred during those Forty Years Gone.

When the Archduke was murdered in 1914, our insularity may have asked: ‘Who was he? Where is Sarajevo?’, even, ‘Does it really matter?’ But a member of the Austrian imperial family, when asked: ‘But you don’t think it means the end of a dynasty?’ answered: ‘It’s the end of a world’. Exaggerated? Well, in 1918 many were exclaiming: ‘Now for a new world!’ and I too, though lastingly bruised by the sorrows of that war, felt full of hope. Why? One must select.

It was obvious that there would be an immense influx of students into the depleted universities. It was agreed that Catholic societies should be reinforced, or revived, or created, to welcome Catholic arrivals. It was hard to get the better of the idea that such societies existed only to ‘safeguard’ the faith and morals of their members. Some, however, hoped for the formation of a liberally-educated Catholic mind which would make a positive impact on public opinion. ‘The International Society of Intellectual Co-operation’ soon enough existed in Geneva alongside of, not part of, the League of Nations. But this impact seemed far more likely to happen if such societies were ‘federated’, learned to meet and know one another, and become more than merely local groups of which the members just ‘talked to one another’.

Some day no doubt an attempt will be made to probe the roots of the colour bar in the psychology of certain European nations. The colour bar did not originate in South Africa. It came with Dutch and British colonists. But it found a vigorous stimulant to its growth in the formidable challenge of that very thing, the black skin, in the dread of which it consists. It has been suggested that the list of capital sins needs amplification, for it contains no reference to one of humanity’s worst failings, the tendency to restrict the scope of the connatural love of the species to a particular community constituted by language, lineage, race, religion, politics, economic interest or colour. In our days, colour is one of the most fiercely sundering of these restrictive elements.

Colour dominates the South African social scene. It would be a mistake, however, to simplify the picture and put all the blame for the country’s ills on White oppressors. There can be no denying their guilt, but we need not add to it by making them responsible for all the tensions that have resulted from the meeting of Western sophistication and African backwardness. White colonizers have probably made all the mistakes in the book; but even without colonial conquest there would have been conflict a-plenty arising from the impact of Western dynamism on the social stagnation of Africa.

Some years ago, in a Hughlings Jackson lecture, I ventured to give some personal views upon the nature of the relationship of mind to brain. I said nothing original, yet something rather different from what we are accustomed to hear in those popular symposia on the brain-mind relationship, or upon brain mechanisms and consciousness, of which we have had a number of examples in recent years. The views I expressed had the sanction of philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, and, in a measure, of such physiological geniuses as Hughlings Jackson and Sherrington, but there is little interest in them at the present time in a scientific world still intensely preoccupied with the concepts of cybernetics and biophysics: preoccupied in the sense that some scientists find they cannot easily entertain any concepts which transcend these fragmentary ideas.

How we approach this problem depends largely upon our concept of nature and of natural science. Therefore, I define natural science as being ‘the study of nature as perceived: a study wherein nature is disclosed as a complex of entities whose mutual relations can be thought of and discussed without reference to sense awareness or thought about it’. This is to say that we can be perfectly good natural scientists without bothering our heads about the nature of perceiving, or the theory of knowledge—epistemology, as it is called. This is a complex definition, which I have taken from a great mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Its full import will appear later, but in the meantime I wish to point out that nature, that is, the world as perceived, does not comprehend all that the human mind can entertain.

For three years when I asked myself the question, I thought I knew the answer. A D.P. was a human being who had lost his country, and all that was needed to stop his being one was to give him another. But during those three years I decided myself, and ten years of subsequent experience have confirmed the lesson of my initial error: you cannot give a man a new country. All you can do is just make it possible for him to dream free from care of the old.

The D.P., this man uprooted from his native soil, torn from his social setting, and cowed by want and the kind of regulation ill- luck that attends all state-aid, has been thrust into an unreal world. He has been taken out of his own time and projected into this superneolithic present which we may call ‘The Age of Hutments’, and he begins to acquire a special sort of mentality. His personality disintegrates to a larger or smaller degree, according to his level of intelligence and strength of will, and becomes merged in the mentality common to all D.P.s.

A dull new world takes shape, a realm of shadows. For three years I deceived myself; I mistook the refugee for a pauper. But ‘poverty’ is not the word to describe his misfortune, the refugee is primarily someone who has been uprooted and who drifts between the East from which he has fled and the West which very often will not admit him unless he has retained his muscular strength.

Ease of communications brings all men together: but the contiguity of bodies does not necessarily entail the crossfertilization of minds, and the mere fact that we can now move round the world at incredible speed does not mean that we are any better equipped to appreciate the ideas and cultures of other lands. Indeed it can be argued that the enormous development of the tourist traffic in Europe has done more to emphasize national peculiarities than to promote international good will: mere physical contact between nations does not necessarily lead to better understanding.

That there is need for better understanding, however, few would deny; and it is only since the last war that Europeans have come to realize it. For it is quite certain that the last war put an end to European supremacy for ever; and Europeans, so long the master race, will now have to learn the hard way how to get on on equal terms with peoples they had previously dominated. Moreover, their recent attainment of freedom has given the Asiatics a new self-confidence and a new faith in their ancient civilizations.

Christianity benefited greatly from the imperialist expansion of nominally Christian powers, and Christian missions have made most progress where European political power has been strongest. With the retreat of Europe from imperialism all that has changed, and the newly liberated peoples of Asia see Christianity not so much as a rival religion to be judged according to its own merits as the religion of their late masters who so often seemed to behave in a singularly un-Christian way.

The history of the ecclesiastical breach between East and West, and of the attempt to heal it, is very long and obscure. There was the Photian schism of the middle of the ninth century, but that was over within a few years. Two centuries later the Patriarch Cerularius was excommunicated by an over-zealous papal legate and retaliated in kind; but that quarrel was not final. The Fourth Crusade captured Christian Constantinople and never went any further, but set up a Latin kingdom there which lasted less than sixty years and did as much to antagonize the Greeks as anything else. Yet, a little more than ten years after he regained his throne, the restored Greek Emperor—but not the Greek Church—had accepted the Latin faith and union in the Second Council of Lyons (1274). His purpose, however, was political, to win the Pope’s help to prevent any attempt to re-establish the Latin kingdom of Constantinople.

From then on over the next century, whenever Constantinople was more in danger than usual by reason of the rapid advance of the Turks, the Byzantine emperors approached the pope of the time, as head of western Christendom. They asked for military aid, and they offered the possibility of union of the Churches through the medium of a general council. The offer was, of course, a sort of bribe, but not entirely so. Both East and West sincerely deplored the schism that divided them and would have wholeheartedly welcomed a genuine union.

In our day the Church is present, as it were, only on the margin of politics. Even in those countries, such as Ireland and Spain, where the Church is in one sense an obvious power in politics, the action of the Church is still marginal; for the substance of politics, however it may be constituted and whatever analysis of it we may offer, is what it is by reason of those secular forces which determine the character of politics in other states where the Church institutionally is of little or no account; and the fundamental decisions of the political authorities are always in the last resort swayed by secular considerations of precisely the same kind as those operative in non-Catholic societies. There is, outside the Soviet Union, the popular democracies, and China, a common social pattern, diversified in appearance and in its degree of maturity and in the political superstructure it bears, but still a common pattern: that of the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.

Moral indignation is no substitute for moral information, not least on the subject of homosexuality, and therefore two recent books are recommended. The first, which is free from preoccupations with the circumstances of criminal proceedings or clinical treatment, is an examination of the family background, social behaviour, and activities of one hundred and twenty-seven cases; that they amount to a representative sample is not claimed, yet they do help to dispose of some popular misconceptions, for instance, that male homosexuality spells effeminacy or that seduction has any appreciable effect on the perpetuation or development of the condition. The second is a revised edition of a summary account of the modern evidence, mainly anthropological, biological, and physiological, together with suggestions for treatment.

Yet among the items in the bibliographies, 134 and 203 respectively, only two are directly concerned with morals, and through no fault of the authors. Have, then, the English theologians failed to fill a gap which affects perhaps one Englishman in every twenty-five? Or have they good reason?

Let us reflect that however much a misfit a homosexual may appear to some systems of reference, to an interior theology devoted to the growth of friendship with God and our neighbour he is not a queer or an odd man out, but one with the rest of us, heir to the same original sin and the same promise, beset by temptations and fortified by the graces which arc fundamentally the same for him and for us.

Theories of punishment arc sometimes divided into retributive theories, deterrent theories, and remedial theories. The remedial theories frequently take the form of denying that there is any such thing as a just punishment: the task of society is to cure its criminals, not to punish them. In this paper I shall take it for granted that there are some punishments which are just: hence I shall not be concerned with remedial theories in the sense indicated. Retributive and deterrent theories have as common ground the assertion that punishment may be justly inflicted; they differ in their explanation of what constitutes the justice of a just punishment.

The retributive theory of punishment is very difficult to state accurately. Indeed, I shall be concerned to argue that it is impossible to state it coherently: but this must be the result, and not the premiss, of our investigation. I shall begin, therefore, by stating the theory as baldly as possible, and then go on to consider the defects of the theory so stated with a view to discovering whether they can be refined away.

To avert misunderstanding, I should remark that there can be no objection to saying that a person who is justly punished for a crime has met with just retribution. The question at issue is whether the notion of ‘just punishment’ is to be explained by means of the notion of ‘retribution’ or vice versa. According to the retributive theory of punishment which I wish to criticize, ‘retribution’ is not a synonym for ‘punishment’ (or a genus of which reward and punishment are species), but rather a quite independent concept which serves as an explanation of the justice of a just punishment.

The Russian Orthodox lay theologian Komiakov once said that the Pope of Rome was the first Protestant in the world, and this saying is generally taken to mean that, like the Protestants, the Pope proclaims doctrine as truth ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.

Without going so far as this, Dr E. L. Mascall in The Recovery of Unity makes it the thesis of his two final chapters on the Papacy that its claim to universal jurisdiction has resulted in its becoming, in part at least, an excrescence on the life of the Church, impoverishing the function of the episcopate and setting itself, as a preponderantly juridical entity, above and apart from the inner life of grace and truth that it should exist to foster.

Such criticisms as these and others closely connected with them appear fairly constantly in ecumenical writing, and much patient elucidation is needed to meet them and set them in their true perspective. The purpose of this article is to point to certain considerations concerning the phrase ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae in the Vatican Definition which tend to show that it does not separate the Pope from the Church and set him above and apart from its true inner life, but on the contrary, integrates him into the Church’s teaching authority as the final and decisive step in its exercise.

Faith is a gift of God, the beginning in us of eternal life. It is given in baptism and comes to us as an encounter with Christ in his Church. The content of our faith is the saving truth of God,

When I was considering what subject to treat in the Aquinas Lecture, which you had so kindly invited me to deliver, in the state of near-despair one reaches on such occasions I went to an Oxford bookshop where a selection of volumes may be bought for sixpence each and bought one at random in the hope that I might derive some guidance from it. The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) was an at-one-time popular work of fiction by a socialist republican, Eliza Lynn Linton, though it was published anonymously. It is a story of Jesus returning to earth in mid-nineteenth-century England and of how he acted in the situation then confronting him. At the end of the book the authoress says that ‘if sociology is a scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised not only in vain, but against unchangeable Law’. This gave me an idea for my address for, though she was speaking of the doctrines of Political Economy current at that time and as she understood them, it appeared to me that it might be of interest to you were I to discuss the attitude of sociologists, and social anthropologists in particular, towards religious faith and practice. It has been for the most part bleakly hostile.

It is scarcely possible to discuss social science in this country without some reference to its French background. We may regard it, if only for convenience, as beginning with Montesquieu in his great book L'Esprit des Lois (1748). In it he set out to discover the laws of social life, the necessary conditions of its existence in its various forms, but he did not, in my opinion, think of these laws in a deterministic or mechanical sense.

Two traditions, of the ‘necessary evil’ and of the ‘noble city’, contend in the Christian attitude towards the State.

Augustinist and Aristotelean alike profess the duty of obedience to the secular power, yet while to the former this is virtue there encountering its occasion to the latter this is virtue there findiug its proper object. Both agree that all power descends from God; the difference arises from how we conceive a causal order of subordinate agents and purposes. Here, as we shall see presently, a scholastic distinction, between instruments and means on one hand and principal, if secondary causes and intermediate ends on the other, is relevant to the contemporary debate about treating sins as crimes. For if the State is no more than a useful convenience then its rule, though providentially ordained to prevent anarchy, is devoid of moral value within itself. If, on the other hand, the State is endowed with a moral authority of its own then virtue and vice as such can be its concern.

You would not expect men of the Augustinist tradition to bow before the powers that be, nor men of the Aristotelean to warn off the government for not minding its own business. History however does not always follow a thin logic of ideas; those who have believed that true religion is other-worldly and not committed to politics have been left most defenceless before the encroachments of temporal power, while a strong thread runs from St Thomas to the sturdy radicalism, and perhaps some of the pressure-groups, of later centuries.