The Scriptures are God’s Word spoken. They are not simply word about God, or about his Word or about his saving work. They are his Word, and therefore his work: for his Word is creative; what it says it thereby does. (In Hebrew, Dabar means both Word and matter, affair, etc.) The words of Scripture do not point to what God does; they are what he does. And it is necessary not so much to follow their guidance as to participate in their Mystery. So it is, analogously, of a creative work of art. For example, a poem does not refer to something apart from itself which one must apprehend: it is something, into which one must enter.

In the words of Scripture a mystery of creation is contained. They are intrinsically creative. And what is there already created is the mind of the Prophet who utters them. For the prophet is one who conceives the Word of God in his mind (in his ‘heart’), by the power of the Spirit, and brings it forth, utters it. He possesses, that is to say he is really possessed by, the Word of God. The prophetic utterance of the Word of God involves a divine work of creation; it means that the Word of God has in some sense become incarnate.

What happens in the divine history, of which the Scriptures are not just a record but an embodiment or a sacrament, is to be compared to what happened in the very creation of the world. The mystery there displays the chaotic material of life being moved over by the Spirit and so enlivened that it becomes responsive to the Word of God and out of the womb of chaos the cosmos is born.

Husbandman’ is the word; for, if not wholly adequate, as one word could hardly be, it does, better than any other, express man’s status and function in the universe, and especially in the visible universe, so that its immediate concrete sense and the analogies to which it gives rise are verified essentially and verified to the full. Whatever is verified essentially of mankind is verified in Adam, the head of this family, and in Christ in whom this headship is restored. We should beware of any kind of mere generalisation—even the generalisation, ‘All men are sinners,’ is made at a level quite different from that of such an essential judgment —and emphatically we must not be understood to mean ‘in fact men are most commonly tillers of the soil’. Man has the cosmic function of husbandman whether this last statement is verified or not. But then it follows that our meaning is deeper than the level of fact and of generalisations of fact.

We should note that the whole of the sub-human creation is ordained in and through man in the cosmic unity. The sub-human world is not fully a world and not fully a cosmos by itself. From it may be drawn suggestions of unity but not really a unity of its own. In man as part (head) of the visible creation, the visible world has a unity of which man is the guarantee and ‘sacrament’ (in the same sense in which it may be said the Pope is ‘sacrament’ of the Church’s unity).

The current teaching in the Church concerning the relationship of the Spiritual or Mystical to the Literal Sense of the Scriptures is based on a synthesis arrived at by the Scholastics, and in particular on St Thomas’s formulations, which all our text-books merely set out to expound. It would seem a great advantage to possess a satisfactory technical solution of this age-long biblical issue. One might have hoped that it would have led to a general understanding and utilisation of the two Senses as being not only not in rivalry, but as being related together in the way that spiritual and literal are related together in the Scriptures; that is to say, in a union as harmonious and essential as that of the soul to the body. But no such general benefit has in fact resulted. These Senses have continued to be treated as rival claimants for consideration; with favour accorded sometimes to the Spiritual, sometimes to the Literal —but mostly, in these last centuries, to the Literal. At the present time there is a strong general tendency to depreciate the Spiritual Sense; to treat it as an extraneous addition to the Literal Sense, of definitely inferior quality. Frequently in practice it is identified with what is known as the Accommodated Sense, and accordingly denied any strict biblical validity. Or at least it is generally regarded as being of secondary importance; the Literal Sense being taken as capable of supplying all the meaning that is required for the purposes of theology and of sound edification, while the Spiritual is regarded as a luxury at the disposal of those who have a taste for deciphering pious symbols.

Vezelay is a place extraordinarily little known considering its beauty and historic interest. Situated some 150 miles south-west of Paris, in Burgundy, almost at the very centre of France, it was in the 12th century one of the great shrines of Christendom. To Vézelay pilgrims went from the whole of Europe to pay honour to St Mary Magdalen whose body the Benedictines claimed to have taken there from St Maximin. There in 1146 when the nave of the present basilica stood in all its newness, St Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade before King Louis VII and a multitude assembled from every Christian country. From the pulpit of the basilica 20 years later St Thomas Becket, in exile, solemnly excommunicated Henry II. To Vézelay went Henry’s son, Bichard Coeur de Lion, to take the Cross with Philip Augustus in the 3rd Crusade. St Francis’s first foundation in France was made there, the Cordelerie on the slope of the hill; Brother Pacifieus founded it, and it was to be honoured with a visit from St Louis as he went to the Holy Land. Today only the Basilica remains, and a great wooden cross to commemorate St Bernard’s preaching, and the ruined chapel of the Cordelerie. Vézelay stands a symbol of divided Christendom. The town was the birthplace of Theodore Béza, In 1568 the Protestants captured it, devastated the abbey which had for 30 years been secularised, its monks having long since become odious to the townsfolk, burned the relics, and subjected the Franciscans to the horrible sport of burying two of them up to their necks and playing bowls against them with the heads of their companions.

Addressing a petition to the Legislature of Nova Scotia in 1866, Bishop MacKinnon described St. Francis Xavier College of Antigonish as having “spacious and commodious buildings’’ and an enrolment which had “reached the high number of fifty-eight.” He pointed out that “the said College is the only institution in Eastern Nova Scotia, inclusive of Cape Breton, in which the sciences of Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Moral and Dogmatic Theology are now taught,” and he asked that it “be empowered by charter to confer degrees on such of its pupils as after due examination shall have been. proved worthy of the honour.” The power was granted, and eighty years have passed since the Bishop signed his petition. The two wooden houses which seemed “spacious and commodious” to him have become a campus in brick and stone, and the student body has grown from fifty-eight to over seven hundred.

The institution with this humble beginning has become better known than perhaps any other small university in the world. The good Bishop would be pleased with that, but he would be amazed to find that it has achieved this fame for work which he never thought of as a university function. Eighty years ago—and indeed almost down to our own day—the university concerned itself solely with those attending regular intramural classes.

The subject matter of Social Anthropology, human societies, with special reference to primitive societies, has been a field of philosophic speculation from the earliest times. It has only very recently become a field of scientific inquiry; so recently that Sir Edward Tylor is sometimes spoken of as ‘the father of anthropology’. Tylor defined the scope of his inquiry in his classical work, Primitive Culture (1871) as culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, a definition which excludes what the rest of Europe calls anthropology and what in England is sometimes called physical anthropology: the study of racial characteristics, genetics, and so forth. But it covers what is generally called today in England social anthropology, or the sociology of primitive peoples. Tylor was himself the first occupant of a university post in the subject, from 1883 at Oxford.

Social anthropology is therefore still a very young discipline, hardly yet accepted as one of themselves by the august natural sciences. It has, however, taken the first step towards qualifying as a science by becoming inductive. The earlier social anthropologists were what are sometimes called ‘arm-chair’ anthropologists. When they wrote about primitive peoples they relied for the material from which they constructed their theories not on their own observations but on the reports of missionaries, administrative officers, and travellers. Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough is one of the best examples of this kind of work—polished, erudite, comprehensive, and occasionally profound. Such writings suffered, in the eyes of men of science, from a serious defect.

In the history of the Friars Preachers at the beginning of the 16th century, Dominican Scotland is of very special interest. While the other provinces of the Order were struggling, by the setting up of special congregations, to bring about a rebirth of stricter religious life, Scotland was able to effect, by and in herself, her own reform. Such an achievement was due to the activity of a religious, father John Adamson, whom Dominican chroniclers and Scottish historians have been pleased to describe as a Friar Preacher of great holiness and uncommon learning. It is, therefore, all the more regrettable that the work of fr. John Adamson has been somewhat eclipsed. The religious persecutions which the Scottish Dominicans had to undergo as a result of the introduction of the Reformation into the kingdom of the Stuarts, have led to the loss of many documents. Four briefs of Pope Leo X, preserved in the collection in the Vatican Archives known as Brevi Lateranensi, allow us to supplement the information supplied by various collections of documents in Scotland.

Colombes is a working-class district on the outskirts of Paris with a population of about 23,000. For the last five years it has been the scene of an experiment whose importance can scarcely be exaggerated, and the latest volume of Rencontres) is a detailed account of the work of the Abb6 Michonneau and the group of priests who are engaged in evangelizing a parish in which practising Catholics number scarcely five per cent, of the population. It would be impertinent to praise a document whose whole purpose is to make available to priests everywhere the fruits of day-to-day experience of the hardest apostolate of all. Much of the detail in these five hundred pages has special reference to conditions in France, but the methods described—and above all the spirit they manifest—are of the liveliest relevance for all priests at work in a pagan world.

‘The proletariat is pagan. Not because it doesn’t “practise,” but because its mentality is pagan, wholly alien to the Christian spirit, indifferent to the teaching we offer, careless of the demands of the moral standards we proclaim.’ At once, then, it is necessary to distinguish between the Christian parish, where the Church is still recognized for what she is, and the missionary parish in a pagan environment. ‘Our methods must be revised if not totally changed.’ As Cardinal Suhard has remarked, ‘We must free ourselves from every sort of narrow traditionalism and adapt ourselves to present needs.’ Hence, ‘since 95 per cent, of the Church’s children don’t come to her, 95 per cent, of the Church’s concern and activity must be directed towards them. And not only by groanings and optimistic hopes, but in reality.’

What, then, is the ‘parish’? Is it the faithful few or the apostate many? ‘The life of my parish is the life of everybody who lives in it.

The renascence of Christian art brought about by the Gothic Revival of the last century did not come easily. There were still those who quibbled and spoke of pasticheurs, as though architects who raised Doric town halls and Corinthian façades in the nineteenth century were not pasticheurs.

Earlier, Constable, the painter, had said acidly: ‘A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd than a new ruin. The Gothic architecture, sculpture, and painting, belong to peculiar ages. The feelings that guided their inventors are unknown to us.’ Coleridge, however, with a nobler vision, had said: ‘The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is, no doubt, a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. ‘ The Classicists continued to murmur. Some suggested that Gothic was a mummy exhumed for exhibition in market-places already slowly greying with the first smoke of industrialism; others said that Gothic was an entirely new, a Victorian, product.

The nomination of the Christian-Democrat, Alcide De Gasperi, as Prime Minister of Italy, marks the breaking of the Liberal and anti-clerical tradition of Italian politics. It is true that the first to be “President of the Council of Ministers’’ (the historic Italian title), in March, 1848, was Cesare Balbo, a Catholic belonging to the Neo-Guelf current, but after him came a series of Presidents, Catholic indeed, but known as Liberals because they stood for the abolition of the rights and privileges of the Church. The true founder of Italian Liberalism—of a conservative type both politically and economically—was Camillo Benso di Cavour.

Once relations between State and Church were broken, and Catholics constrained to follow the system of political abstention (the non expedit), no more opportunities came for the nomination of a Presilent openly professing himself a Catholic, outside the Democratic-Liberal Italian tralition, till the advent of the Popular Party (1919).

The first case presented itself in April, 1920, when the Popular Party had provoked the crisis of the Nitti Cabinet, but then the King chose Nitti himself to form a new ministry. However, through an imprudent move (his decree on the price of corn on the eve of the reopening of the Chamber), Nitti was obliged to present himself to the Chamber as resigning, with all his Ministry. This time the King called upon Giolitti, indicated by agreement of the Right and Centre (including many members of the Popular Party), and Giolitti once more came to the top.

True to his pagan, military code, the SS officer was a full Nazi, even in defeat. He was haughty, even truculent, and stayed with his SS men apart from the amorphous mob of German Wehrmacht prisoners. When casually asked by an American soldier how he felt about the defeat, he did not accept the role of a prisoner being questioned; he lectured: “You Americans have not won. You are only deceiving yourselves. We have suffered a defeat but we shall rally again and beat you in another war. You think you have crushed us, but we will show you one day that we have not been completely defeated.”

Furthermore, when shown pictures of concentration-camp victims, he showed no sorrow, no sympathy. It was a regrettable necessity. This callousness so infuriated an old soldier that he threatened the SS officer with his M1 rifle.

“You wish to kill me? Why certainly you can,” he said, as he theatrically opened his overcoat and stood erect. “I am your prisoner of war and you can do with me what you wish. I am not at all afraid to die and you cannot frighten me.” .

He was playing the same role in defeat that he had played before and during the war. He was not only playing it out to the bitter end of the tragedy, but even after it. His unit had surrendered, together with a whole army, five days before V-E day. He was not a part of the ultra-fanatical SS groups sent for the mythical last stand in the south of Germany—he was simply a typical SS officer. He had been proud before the war, courageous and cruel in the war, sullen and haughty when captured. One unknown thing about his character remained—how will he be in national defeat He had seemed to answer that by his conduct and it seemed to leave no room for optimism.

In January Russia is decked out like a bride, snow covering the merciless scars of war, and glistening in the reflection of the sun . . . For the countryside is as beautiful as ever, untouched by politics and strife ... It is easy to wander back with the mind's eye and see the Russia of Tolstoy, the land so noted for its generosity in the sight of God, that it was called “Holy Russia”.

Let us recall that Russia, so as to get a clearer picture of the Russia of today.

It was an Agricultural land, where most of the education still clung to the religious houses, and the rest of the countryside were simple, trusting folk, who loved to see foreigners because they were different and therefore interesting. They were exceedingly hospitable, as all people are in lands where the climate is rigorous: if you do not put up the stranger for the night, and the next village is many a verst away, then he could easily perish, if not from the cold, then from the wolves on the way, which have aiways been numerous in Russia. As children we used to wonder whv our Lady did not come to a Russian Bethlehem, for there was always room for everybody, she would not have been homeless.

The great Dominican Order of which St Thomas Aquinas is the finest flower may still be, in the minds of many Englishmen, ‘in a special way associated with the Inquisition in Spain. It may therefore come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the work of Francisco de Vitoria, to learn that it was a Spanish Dominican, who died four hundred years ago, who was in his day Europe’s foremost champion of the rule of international law and of human rights. Of Basque origin, Vitoria was an active university teacher at the violent epoch when the Spaniards, having defeated the Moors at home, were founding their American colonies. Vitoria's opinions commanded wide attention among his contemporaries; so much so, that his idealism incurred for him considerable opposition in powerful governmental circles at a time when interests and passions combined to obscure impartial thinking on international affairs.

It may be instructive, in what follows, to compare some of Vitoria’s principles (as set out and expounded in the collections of his works produced and introduced by J. B. Scott for the Carnegie Endowment for international peace) with the principles now to be found in the United Nations Charter, the latest constructive attempt to create an international order.

No doubt the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, when Vitoria was young, was an event just as stupefying as the discovery of the atomic bomb is to us. The mariner’s astrolobe of 1480 may be compared with the cyclotron of today. Neither of these wonders has prevented international lawyers from facing the future and applying their principles to new problems and unthought-of circumstances.

Seeing that Professor C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology has been introduced to the Catholic public by the writings of Fr Victor White, O.P., and by Fr Witcutt’s Catholic Thought and Modem Psychology, it seems appropriate to discuss this subject from the practical point of view of the psychotherapist. It is the purpose of this article to illustrate one or two practical points of Jung’s method by a few examples in the endeavour to dispel the current notion that analytical psychology is an art intelligible only to the initiated. Yet it contains no greater mystery than the familiar phenomena of biology, e.g. the partition of cells. Jung continually stresses the point that his method is empirical, dealing with facts which emerge from the unconscious. Admittedly, these phenomena are often very surprising; however, they should not be disregarded even if they cannot always be explained satisfactorily.

Analytical psychology is not concerned with the soul in the full theological sense of the word but only with its manifestations, with the psyche, which, as Dr Strauss defines it, is the sum total of the experiences made during a person’s lifetime as well as those which have come down as a heritage from his ancestors. Modem man, as he is, separated from his divine origin and unable to balance his experiences in accordance with true values, is conscious of a deep-seated dissatisfaction and sense of frustration. This is the breeding-ground for that modern complaint termed ‘neurosis’. In essence, the neurotic person does not differ from his normal fellow. It is only that the ‘war with himself’ is fought with greater intensity and leads to embarrassing conflicts with the outside world. To deal with the complexities of this situation—often disguised under physical diseases like asthma—Jung’s method has been developed.

It would be interesting to trace to its origin that hidden language which is familiar to every adult male, and to a large proportion of women, but which is hardly ever written down, except on walls: and to know whether it arose because it is natural to man to use a special set of terms to indicate strange forces more powerful than himself; whether it is a consequence of the psychological disintegration of the Fall, which made human beings afraid of God and ashamed of their bodies; how it has been affected by the immense change in Western human ecology which began about 1750 and is still in progress; why it has flowed more deeply underground at one time than at another; and what significance lies in the fact that its terms, and the knowledge of its existence, have during the last fifty years come far nearer the surface of communal life.

An immense learning would be necessary fully to discuss all these points; and many of their implications have to be left aside by a writer without experience of the organic cultures of the East or of the mechanized economy of the U.S.S.R. It should be possible without this, however, very briefly to sketch the nature, function, and recent history of submerged language, at any rate in this country; and to suggest possible reasons for its slow invasion of ordinary speech.

The language deals mainly with three subjects: with God; with sexual life; and with digestion. God, mystery beyond all thought, all argument, all imagination, “to whom all angels cry aloud’’ and Whom all non-reasoning things worship by being alive; sexual life, through which humans consciously, as other creatures unknowingly, share in the almost incredible Divine activity of creating new selves, each sentient and unique, where before there was nothing; digestion, the unconscious process of transmuting into human bodies pieces of the outside world upon which their continued life depends.

The present Holy Father wrote his biblical encyclical in 1943 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Leo XIII’s great encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which is such a landmark in modern biblical studies. Pius XII starts with a retrospect, a review of the work done under papal aegis during that half-century, and it is with pride that we Dominicans have noticed that he calls attention to the fact that before ever Leo XIII launched his encyclical he had already in 1892 commended by Brief the Dominican Ecole Biblique at Jerusalem, founded with papal approbation two years before. This foundation was due to the efforts of P&re Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P. (+10 March, 1938), and here the pioneer work of scientific scholarship had already begun and the famous Revue Biblique had already been started. Next year, in 1893, Providentissimus Deus appeared.

Pius XII goes on to describe the present state of biblical studies and to prescribe the equipment necessary to the modern Catholic exegete. Not only does he develop the ideas of the preceding encyclicals, but several times he gives more precise definitions of the attitude of the Catholic scholar.

He concludes with a reiteration of his predecessors’ call for zeal for scriptural study, with a special urgency “in these unhappy times” when ignorance of Christ is so widespread in the world.

According to Father Rommerskirchen (Guide des Missions Catholiques 1937, p. 165) we owe the word ‘missiology’ to the French—the term ‘missiologie’ having been popularised by P&re Charles, S.J. German Catholics, under the inspiration of Professor Schmidlin, have preferred to use the word ‘Missionswissenschaft’ and it is perhaps unfortunate that English speaking Catholics did not follow their example and talk of the study or science of missions, rather than the clumsy and pretentious ‘missiology’.

Granted, however, that the term is in common use, the purpose of this essay is to attempt to explain its meaning. The explanation is really quite simple. Missiology is the scientific investigation and description of the history and conditions of the apostolic action of the Church in pagan countries. It is that part of Dogmatic Theology which provides us with a justification for what are termed Foreign Missions, and which discusses the ‘mode’ of missionary activity in relation to the data provided by the anthropologist, the historian of culture and other allied specialists. In so far as it is a self-conscious discipline Missiology is recent, but in principle, in its dogmatic foundations, it is part of the theological heritage of the Church. .

The Fathers and the great Scholastics dealt with its fundamental presuppositions as parts of the treatises on Providence and Faith. The discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, in that they revealed vast groups of persons ignorant of the Gospel, led to an extension of these treatises in relation to the problem of the salvation of the infidel. Lastly, in our own day the growth of the sciences of Anthropology and relevant discoveries in the fields of Comparative Religion and Psychology, have led to the accumulation of a vast mass of data which demands theological interpretation and application in practice. It is against this background that the pioneers, too numerous to mention, of Missiology have developed their discipline.

Without falling into the detestable errors of racialism, we can say that national cultures enshrine, at least in a measure, qualities both good and bad truly characteristic of the nation. Thus we may see in Spanish history, literature and art, a great emphasis on man’s natural dignity, an emphasis which at times passes from virtue to vice in the pride which is at present so curiously insisted on by some who pretend to a special understanding of things Spanish. The great Spaniard, Francisco de Vitoria, although far from approving an unhealthy national pride, does in fact bring out very clearly that man, by his own proper nature, is invested with a dignity which is involved in the moral consideration of the most diverse activities.

In his day the Spanish tendency to boasting—pilloried in the Rodomontades—had real and marvellous achievements to rest on, and the reconquest of Christian Spain was at last an accomplished deed. Moralists and theologians were imbued with a feeling for man’s greatness. Vitoria in particular was concerned in his thought with the dignity of man as such, rather than man as Spaniard. In the Relectio de Indis he brings out most clearly that the treatment of barbarians must be governed by what is worthy of man in himself. Nothing does so much credit to Spanish culture as that, even while the baroque style in sentiment and manners was elaborating its less admirable features—ostentatious display, excess of pride, of panache, and the absurdities of pundonor—Spain could still produce a man like Vitoria whose simplicity, austerity, and firm adherence to principle give us the Spanish feeling for dignity in its best form, as expressed by gravedad.