‘Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ It is possible that this is more literally true than we realize.

This article is an attempt to discover what kind of thing is going on in people who get into ecstatic states of one kind or another, whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, and whether they tell us anything about the more ‘normal’ requirements for spiritual ‘conversion’ and growth.

‘Ecstatic states’ covers a multitude of—let’s say experiences. The phrase includes the L.S.D. ‘trip’, the ‘speaking in tongues’ of the charismatic movement, the deep trance of the shaman and the dark ‘unknowing’ of the mystic. Can one lump all those together? They don’t seem to be a well-assorted party, especially if we include (and maybe we should) sexual ‘ecstasy’, and the experiences induced by voodoo rituals, or in ‘covens’ of latter-day witches, and possibly even the ‘pink elephants’ of the alcoholic. Imagine a T.V. programme in which the interviewer collected individuals each of whom had experienced one of those kinds of ‘ecstasy’. It seems likely that the discussion would be inconclusive, to say the least, though the affair would probably have some lively moments.’

On the 1st of November, 1950, Pope Pius XII announced in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, as an indispensable part of Christian belief, revealed by God, that ‘Mary, the immaculate and perpetually virgin Mother of God, after the completion of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven’. It is difficult to know what sort of sense to give to this kind of dogmatic formulation, but it would seem that sense has to be made of it because it has been accepted by the general consensus of the Church and defined by the highest authority as being an integral part of Christian doctrine for all Roman Catholics. We have to make theological sense of it in order to be faithful to the transmission of the Marian traditions throughout the ages of the Church. This is not to suggest that we should relax our criticism of these tranditions, but I take it that we cannot be faithful to Christian tradition and at the same time adopt the liberal attitude of dispensing as irrelevant with those dogmatic traditions which do not meet our taste. Marian dogma cannot be shrugged off by Roman Catholics as being a Catholic aberration of Christian tradition; after the Papal definitions of the immaculate conception of Mary in 1854 and of her bodily assumption in 1950 the dogmas have to be taken with the utmost seriousness, and if it is found to be difficult to reconcile an easy understanding of these dogmas with more fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine then we must adopt a more broad-ranging interpretation of these beliefs. What is required in this instance is an exercise in dogmatic hermeneutics.

The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.

American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.

I would like to regard this review of Professor James R. Flynn’s book, Humanism and Ideology, as a kind of appendix to Denys Turner’s recent articles on ‘Morality is Marxism’. This is because of Flynn’s thesis that we need to return to classical conceptions of morality if we are to be able to justify the social and political activities of those today who are agitating for social justice. Though it is far from being a Marxist book, Flynn’s work is certainly in line with Turner’s view of what Marxists ought to say about morality.

The first thing to say, quite simply, is that not only is Flynn’s a good kind of book, but a good example of its kind. By a good kind of book—and I’m speaking of philosophical books primarily—I mean one which combines a passionate sense of its relevance to the urgent problems of life with scholarly fairness, precision of thought and a due recognition of the difficulties that stand in the way of proving its thesis. Flynn’s book has these qualities. But it also has clarity, economy, and a sense of occasion. And it reads like the best kind of philosophical discussion—i.e. like a serious conversation with an opponent in the civilized atmosphere of a good pub.

The task to be undertaken is to show that a sound philosophical case can be made for adopting the ethic of a ‘humane’ humanism rather than any other. Professor Flynn sees the most obvious alternative to such humanism today in some variety of the Nietzschean ethic—that is to say, an ethic which values outstanding personal achievement, the thrill of power and competitive success. He wants to prove that, over against the Nietzschean ethic, a humane humanism can be shown to be best for all mankind and is thus worthy of regard not only by those who already espouse it but also by those who don’t.

The title of Volume 52 of the new English version of the Summa Tkeologiae, ‘The Childhood of Christ’, could be misleading if it suggested a biographical work. As Fr Potter remarks it is ‘essentially a theological treatment of some Gospel events’, and these are predominantly pre-natal, though they include Christ’s manifestation to the shepherds and the magi and his circumcision. St Thomas is concerned, in most of this treatise, to bring together two realms of thought of very different importance and authority, namely orthodox Chalcedonian Christology and the accepted genetics and embryology of his time. The latter have, of course, been completely superseded by later biological research, and the reader is therefore repeatedly confronted with the question of the manner and degree in which St Thomas’s arguments need revision and reassessment, though this has little bearing on the strictly theological, or at any rate on the strictly dogmatic, aspects of the matter. Fr Potter devotes a little space to these considerations in his appendix on ‘Jesus in his mother’s womb’; one might have wished for more, even at the expense of inflating the volume and its price. It is, in fact, remarkable how little attention seems to have been paid by theologians to the embryological and obstetric aspects of the Incarnation in recent years; medieval theologians did not feel that reverence necessitated this kind of reticence. The only modern work that I know on the subject is The Mother of God: Her Physical Maternity, a reappraisal (River Forest, 111., 1964) by Fr Cletus Wessels, O.P., though A.