As I write this a number of Catholic nationalists are on hunger-strike in protest against the operation of the courts and prisons by what they see as a repressive regime which discriminates against Catholics, which was set up by and is now supported by the armed might of another country. There are twenty six of these hunger-strikers and all of them are Polish. Very understandably, the British media which have been giving a good deal of space and time to Polish anti-government protest have not had much to say about this. Nor, indeed, have those clerical super-patriots who have felt impelled to comment on the smaller hunger-strike taking place in Ireland. For the most part these comments have shown a triumph of class-solidarity and national feeling over the free play of reason that must be most gratifying to any marxist. St Thomas says that the eye can see and distinguish any colour because it is itself colourless: if we have rose-tinted spectacles the rose-tints of the world are indistinguishable from white. Some of these clergymen seem equipped with mental spectacles through which the operations of the security forces, the interrogation centres, the courts and prisons of Northern Ireland become indistinguishable from pure white; they are indignant to find that the rest of the world sees in them more of the colour of blood.

These remarks should suffice to alert the reader to the tints he must look out for in my own mental spectacles. It is a great function of debate and argument to clean each other’s glasses, that is why hard thinking has to be a communal affair and why argument, even apart from the courtesies of debate, is itself an act of fraternal charity.

The world being what it is, a ‘peace movement’ is bound to be a haven for odd-balls, eccentrics, the awkward squad: people who go against the direction of the current and resist the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, a movement composed solely of such people will always lack effective organisation, and its protests will peter out into mere idiosyncrasy. I think that these two facts go far to explain why the English Dominicans have been somewhere near the centre of the Catholic peace movement in Britain ever since it began (if one can talk of a beginning) with the founding of PAX in the mid-thirties of this century. For the English Dominicans — at least as far as my experience goes — are themselves an awkward squad: a regiment of misfits and individualists. I don’t know much about the Dominican Order elsewhere in the world: I suspect that outside Britain they may be very different. Neither do I know much about their history in this country. So I speak ‘existentially’, as the jargon goes, from my own personal observation only.

My first experience goes back to the Oxford of the early nineteen-fifties: and to feel the difference then between, say, the atmosphere of Jesuit Campion Hall and the atmosphere of Dominican Blackfriars was to experience an almost tangible shock. As I remember it now, Campion Hall was like something out of Henry James: a rich tapestry of dark browns and reds, complex and subtle in its visual as well as its intellectual organisation. Its inhabitants wore their black suits and soutanes as a uniform: one had to dig quite deep to discover the person within. Dominican Blackfriars, by contrast, was light and airy; a set of variations upon the theme of whiteness and transparency.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

Another one safely on the shelf, with only five more to come, and then all fourteen thick volumes of Karl Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie (1954-1980) will be translated into English, in some twenty-one slimmer and somewhat more manageable ones. This particular instalment is the second part of the volume which Rahner put together shortly after the celebration for his seventieth birthday (the volume itself was dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday).

The only comparable oeuvre by a Catholic theologian of Rahner's generation would no doubt be that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, but the translation into English is lagging far behind.