For several years now one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has been the problem of Tradition. The kernel of this problem consists in the relations between Scripture and Tradition and between Scripture and the Church. Several important studies have been published on this theme, and it is undeniable that continental Protestantism has become sympathetic to some notion of tradition. At the same time it must be admitted that Protestant theologians today are no more able than was even so conciliating a figure as Melanchthon at the period of the Reformation to get over the notion of a separation between Scripture and Church, a separation which inevitably leads to the subordination of a purely human Church to a tradition regarded as divine, external and superior to this Church.

However, there have been some excellent studies in this field from the Catholic side which have helped to clear the ground of certain false problems and inadequate notions. Professor J. R. Geiselmann and E. Ortigues have put us all in their debt by their efforts to lay bare the precise meaning of the Tridentine decrees. The Acta of the Council of Trent remain indeed a useful and fascinating quarry for the theologian of today. It is, for example, of the greatest importance for the advance both of Catholic theology itself and of the ecumenical dialogue to learn that the Fathers of the Council deliberately omitted a proposed text according to which Revelation was to be found partly in Scripture and partly in unwritten apostolic traditions.

Research scientists and manufacturing chemists lighten many of the burdens of existence, yet sometimes, as when they produce the means for individuals to make love and nothing more, they shift them from body to soul. Only a pill; all the same the weight may prove unsupportable when, leaving behind the world which has been given to us, we launch into another of our own making. The first is a harsh school, exacting recognition of our subordinate place in the scheme of things and acknowledgment of the established rules. Still there are compensations: we can know where we are and where to lay the blame, we can pit ourselves against resistance, we may be broken but at least we have belonged, and to something that was not us. Whereas if we rebel against our limits and adventure according to our merely personal wants, we lose all pattern, for each person as such is an original; we grasp for one shadow after another projected from ourselves, yet, being what we are, we keep our guilt-sense, no longer, however, with an object to prevent it turning morbid. It is as though we have strained to become pure persons and have ceased to be human beings, as though we have set ourselves the goal of absolute freedom and, having reached it, found ourselves empty.

I

Strip ideas and you simplify the opposition between the anarchism which stirs at the root of personality and the subjection to law which is the consequence of having been born into human nature as a specific kind of thing.

There would be fairly general agreement among those who can remember earlier days that Catholic interest in ‘the social question’ has declined. It is not difficult to find the reason for this present lack of interest, for ‘the social question’ no longer exists in the form it did a generation or two generations ago. The development of industrialization in this country, as in many others, brought with it the growth of a wage-earning proletariat; and for many the wage which was their sole source of income was insufficient to provide them with the requirements of a decent life. Even at the outbreak of war in 1939, our social order was marred by the effects of low wages and unemployment, the twin evils produced by the low level of economic activity. Thus in 1936, Rowntree’s survey of York showed that something like one-third of the working-class population of that city was living in poverty, and that the major cause of such poverty was unemployment and low wages.

Today the position is very different. In a more recent survey, it was shown that now only three per cent of the working class population of York is living below the poverty line, and that virtually none of this remaining poverty is the result of either unemployment or low wages. If we look at the level of unemployment, the comparison with the years even just before the war is startling. The Government White Paper on Employment Policy published in 1944 was still thinking in terms of an average level of unemployment of eight per cent, and this was the figure used for actuarial calculations in connection with the National Insurance Scheme.

Jacob’s ladder leads from earth to heaven: but the angels in his vision ascended and descended. It was a two-way traffic that he saw. The patriarch’s vision and its sequel were crucial for the destiny of the Jews. But they are, too, a primary statement of what the sacred means. The episode provides a cardinal text for the rites of consecration in the Roman liturgy, for Jacob, when he awoke from sleep, poured oil on the stone on which his head had rested and called the place Bethel, the house of God. A vow is made, and the symbol of it is the anointed stone, ‘set up for a title’ in the place where God has been.

The sacred, in this primeval sense, always speaks of God to man. Something has been set aside and offered to God: something sealed and ratified, usually by rites of consecration. It declares now a reality other than its own, for the thing—metal, stuff or stone—has been taken out of the context of profane use to point to a mystery itself inaccessible to man.

St Thomas, in his long and perceptive discussion of the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law, points out that ‘the divine worship regards two things: namely, God who is worshipped; and men, who worship him. Accordingly God, who is worshipped, is confined to no bodily place; wherefore there was no need, on his part, for a tabernacle or temple to be set up.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Ireland to Britain, so that by 1841 there were about 300,000 Irish-born men and women living in the country. Then, in 1846-7, came the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and famine stalked the land. The immediate result was that the flow of immigrants became a flood. By 1851 the figure for England and Wales had risen to 500,000, and ten years later it had increased to over 800,000.

The vast majority of these immigrants had landed at Liverpool and then fanned out through the mining districts of south Lancashire to the cotton towns of east Lancashire, on to the woollen mills of Yorkshire, south to the industrial Midlands and London, or north to the coalfields on the north-cast coast and Tyneside. At first they presented problems not unlike those of the Diaspora in Germany at the present day. They arrived in areas where there was little or no provision for Catholic worship, where the Catholics (what few of them remained) were emerging from three centuries in the catacombs, and where there was a great dearth of clergy. In the early days many thousands were lost to the faith due to their lack of opportunity to practise. For example, it has been estimated that had there been sufficient clergy the population of industrial Yorkshire would have been more than half Catholic instead of less than the third that it is at present.

There is generally understood to be some special link between morals and the career of the politician. Every professional man, the business executive, the professor, the actor, the doctor and the barrister (to confine ourselves to laymen) encounters plenty of moral problems in the course of his career and in the case of the last two categories—lawyers and doctors—a number of well-known issues are recognized under the headings of forensic and medical ethics. But there is generally thought to be more to it than this in the case of politicians. They not only encounter personal problems in politics, but they assume a duty, consciously or unconsciously, of applying political principles which are often presented as an extension of the principles of ethics.

The three distinguished men whose lives are wholly or partly portrayed in three recent books were outstanding national figures in the 1930’s and it is tempting to compare them in their respective attitudes to the tremendous challenges of that period. There is bound to be something artificial in doing so, for whereas the first volume of Mr Bevin’s Life and the full life of Lord Lothian come to an end in 1940, Full Circle is the second volume of Sir Anthony Eden’s Memoirs (published first) and covers only the period from 1951 to 1957. And yet it is perhaps possible to abstract from all else, including Mr Bevin’s truly heroic creation of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and study one question only which faced Lord Lothian in the thirties, Mr Bevin, in fact, in the thirties and forties, and Sir Anthony Eden in the thirties, forties and fifties. It is a question which faces us still—the question of the moral reply in terms of political action to what one judges to be organized evil.

Le Phénomène Humain has been a best-seller in France since its posthumous publication in 1955. The initial impact of the recent translation, published as The Phenomenon of Man, has been considerable. Never before, one imagines, in English publishing history, has a book by a Roman Catholic priest received such remarkable tributes in all types of journals and newspapers. ‘Book of the year’ for a number of well-known critics, ‘possibly the book of the century’ for one Sunday Times contributor.

During the period when Teilhard’s works were available only in French, one had heard doubt expressed as to whether he would ever appeal to more than a few in this country. After the events of recent months there is now every indication that the teilhardian movement will become as international in character as was Teilhard himself. It looks as if the influence of this remarkable man will come to be felt more and more in many different branches of human endeavour during the next few decades. For myself, I would go so far as to say that Teilhard’s vision—he writes like a visionary but a visionary whose feet are always planted very firmly on or in terra firma— marks the most significant achievement in synthetic thinking since that of Aquinas. We cannot afford to neglect him, because, quite simply, he seems in so many matters, and those the most important, to be so essentially right. His genius has sown many seeds which, in so far as they fall on receptive and fertile ground, would seem destined to grow and flower according to the pattern of those same laws of development which lie at the heart of his system of thought.

During the last fifty years the majority of Western ideas have been conditioned, or rather dominated, by science. By the end of the last century scientists in Europe and America had become more or less intoxicated by the success with which mathematical reasoning had been applied to experimental observation, and this had bred a feeling of certainty that the ultimate knowledge of nature was at hand. The French mathematician Laplace, for example, believed that if the position and motion of every atom in the universe were known at a given instant, the whole future of the cosmos could be predicted. The work of Darwin was regarded as having established that every living thing was the logical consequence of a single chemical synthesis which had produced the first living cell. It thus seemed that the history of matter was predetermined and that the technological mastery of the clever and diligent Western nations over less inspired countries was ensured. This conception of an amoral, all-pervading science was gradually passed on through schools, colleges, lectures and newspapers to the public at large. Its impact upon intellectuals resulted in materialism and dialectical argument, while it produced among less-educated people a mixture of bewilderment and expectancy.

The attitude of the professional scientist of today is a much humbler one. As our knowledge of the very small and very large increased, almost all the cherished laws of classical physics have had to be modified as they cannot be applied to the atom or the cosmos.

It is a remarkable fact that the Church has been established in India for over fifteen hundred years and has had for the most part everything in its favour, and yet in all this time hardly one in a hundred of the people has been converted to the Christian faith. The position is, indeed, worse even than this figure would suggest, as the vast majority of Christians are concentrated in a few very small areas and in the greater part of India the mass of the people remains today untouched except in a very general way by the Christian faith. It is necessary to go even farther than this and to say that for the immense majority of the Indian people Christianity still appears as a foreign religion imported from the West and the soul of India remains obstinately attached to its ancient religion. It is not simply a matter of ignorance. This may have been true in the past, but in recent times there has been a remarkable revival of Hinduism, which is more or less consciously opposed to Christianity, and the educated Hindu today regards his religion as definitely superior to Christianity. These facts, which can scarcely be questioned, suggest that there has been something wrong with the way in which the Gospel has been presented in India (and the same remark would apply to all the Far East) and especially in the relation which has been established between Christianity and Hinduism.

It is probably true to say that there is no form of intellectual life more unfamiliar to the educated English Catholic than theology. If he were asked to name some topics which he supposed were discussed by theologians he would probably refer to the proofs of the existence of God, transubstantiation, the sacraments-the first of these in the context of ‘Thomism’, the second of apologetics, in school and pulpit, the third in the context of ‘liturgy’. The reference to the pulpit is a considered one; for if lay Catholics are open to the charge of naivety, the responsibility is by no means wholly theirs; can the clergy, and even the professional theologians among them (with some embarrassment I include myself, if only as a theological columnist, in this sub-category) , really claim to be practising theology with energy, fertility, learning and insight?

The attitude of Christendom towards Islam is part of a story much older than either of the two religions concerned; though Christianity being one of them gives the story certain important differences. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental, and also invigorating, factors of early civilizations was their habit of holding themselves superior to any other culture: of seeing themselves as the unique bearers of all that was best. This sense of superiority might be deemed essential to the process of advancing civilization at all: the process of wresting an area of order, and of grace, out of the mists of errant wildness. It was based on an obvious truth: one’s own patch was cultivated; so far as could be seen, the rest was not. Moreover, the rest was inimical. The patch of enlightenment and perfection needed protection. For this it had its exclusive deities. In course of time, associated with the obvious superiority of the area of life they guarded, these deities became The Deity in the mind’s of their protégés. When there was awareness of other patches of civilization, rivalling the one which had been thought unique, each considered its god the only True God, for now the gods were at war. Contests and comparisons between civilizations were contests between religions and, as the degree of polemic fervour in favour of the one civilization against the barbarisms without, of the one religion that is true against the others that are false, is indicative of the vitality of the polemicists’s cause, in later ages the sterner Christian attitude to its rival may be taken to show a degree of advancement in Christianity absent from Islam.

‘In time no less than in regions there are wastes and deserts.’ So I wrote Francis Bacon with medieval science in mind. And when Whewell two hundred years later spoke of‘the almost complete blank which the history of physical science offers, from the decline of the Roman Empire, for a thousand years’, he was only summing up a view of the Middle Ages generally accepted from the seventeenth century down to our own times.

Historians of science did not need much encouragement before passing rapidly and gratefully over the medieval period. Many of the works had never been printed and existed in manuscript only; and everywhere one was confronted with an unfamiliar terminology and barbarous style. That we now know as much as we do about medieval science is due in the first place to the French physicist Pierre Duhem. He re-examined works that had been untouched for centuries and in his monumental treatises of fifty years ago made some disconcerting claims for medieval physicists, especially for his fellow-countrymen of the fourteenth century. To take just one example, Nicolas Oresme emerged as the inventor of co-ordinate geometry, and even as a precursor of Copernicus, although he discussed the motion of the earth only to reject it. Not surprisingly, many took the view that Duhem had overstated his case, but now the medievals had their champion. Issues had been raised, and evidence must be heard.

Unfortunately, the evidence was not forthcoming, unless one accepted Duhem’s quotations at their face value, and overlooked his tendency to tear them out of context and to offer only his translation even when this meant imposing his own interpretation. And there, by and large, the matter rested for thirty years.

Mr Gellner’s now celebrated little book is an attack on a philosophical school, centred in Oxford, called ‘linguistic philosophy’; in assessing it we have therefore to ask, ‘Is there such a school?’ The idea that there is, of course, is not original to Gellner. Professor Flew, for example, has long proclaimed the existence of such a school, membership of which apparently depends upon nomination by Professor Flew. Now it is certainly the case that there was before the war an identifiable and self-conscious group of révoltés among the professional philosophers at Oxford: men like Austin, Ayer and Ryle, who had been variously influenced by Moore, the Logical Positivists and Wittgenstein, and who formed a common front against Joseph and Prichard. Their cohesion derived from the contemporary Oxford situation: they could not even then be said by themselves to form a school against any wider background than that of Oxford. This group was so successful that after the war it captured almost all the philosophical posts in the University. Victory attained, its cohesion fell away; apart from certain publicists like Flew, philosophers at Oxford ceased to think of themselves as belonging to any definite group or party. This may, of course, be an illusion, or, as Gellner appears to think, a deliberate pretence: we have still to ask whether there are any tenets to which all the members of this ‘school’, and only they, subscribe.

Although Ayer was the only card-carrying member, the predominant influence on the group before the war was the Logical Positivist movement.

The liturgical congress, held at Uden near Nijmegen in Holland last September, was in a sense a successor to those which were held in recent years at Lugano and Assisi, and one may hope that it will be of no less importance in the history of the Church. By turning attention to the problems of the Liturgy in the missions its scope was in one sense more restricted, but in another sense it was much enlarged. There is, on the one hand, more scope and freedom for the development of the liturgy in the missions where the field is less trammelled by the past than in Europe, and on the other hand, the problems of the liturgy in the missions have an even greater urgency. This was brought out by Bishop Blomjous of Tanganyika in his opening address, when he showed how the Church has reached a moment of crisis in the missions. When we speak of the ‘missions’, we are speaking of the new world of Asia and Africa which is coming into being at the present time and which is undergoing a radical transformation year by year. The problem of the liturgy in the missions is nothing less than the problem of the Church in the face of this new world.

The Congress was admirably representative of this new world. It was presided over by Cardinal Gracias and included about thirty bishops and thirty priests from different parts of Asia and Africa, besides experts on the liturgy from all parts of Europe and America.

A hundred years ago there were four fairly well defined attitudes in the Catholic Church to the question of the papal prerogatives, and to infallibility in particular. First of all there was the Gallican position. Gallicanism, though still strong, had been on the wane in France since the revolution. It may be described—perhaps not quite fairly—as the idea of a constitutional Church in the interests of an absolute monarch. It was really the residue of the late medieval conciliar theory propounded at the Councils of Constance (1415-18) and Basle (1431), carried over into the post-renaissance Europe of absolute rulers. It is conveniently summarized in the four Gallican articles drawn up in 1682 and which (1) reject the pope’s power of deposing princes and of interfering in civil affairs; (2) assert the validity of the decrees of Constance (never ratified by any pope) on the authority of general councils over the pope; (3) declare that the exercise of papal authority is to be regulated by the canons, and in France by the customs of the Gallican Church; and (4) declare that in matters of faith and morals, while the pope has the chief part, his judgments are not irreformable of themselves, but only if ratified by the consent of the Church.

At the Vatican Council there was only one full-blooded Gallican bishop present, Maret, and he submitted to the Council’s definitions.

The contrary position to Gallicanism was the Ultramontane. It held to the papal, as opposed to the conciliar, view of papal authority.

The Eddington Memorial Lectures were founded to foster interest in the relationship of the natural sciences to religion or ethics, with the hope of finding some common basis between different methods of seeking truth. In particular, as Professor Polanyi says at the beginning of this year’s lecture, the founders were preoccupied with the tardiness of moral improvement as compared with the swift advances of science; this aspect, neglected by his predecessors, he proposes to examine. But in the first place he doubts the assumptions which lie behind the ‘problem’, for, he writes:

Never in the history of mankind has the hunger for brotherhood and righteousness exercised so much power over the minds of men as today. The past two centuries have not been an age of moral weakness; but have, on the contrary, seen an outbreak of moral fervour which has achieved numberless humanitarian reforms and improved modern society beyond the boldest thought of earlier centuries.

He is not, in fact, here saying that moral improvement does or does not lag behind the advances of science, but that the problem with which we should concern ourselves is something quite different.

With the subject to be discussed, and the first stage in Polanyi’s answer laid before us, we can already see some of the difficulties which lurk within the lecture, although others, scarcely less important, will arise as the arguments develop. Leaving aside for the moment Polanyi’s criticism of the problem, we may doubt its validity for more fundamental reasons.