The Church has produced much spiritual writing in the five and a half centuries which have elapsed since this extraordinary genius of the Middle Ages, this woman of strenuous action, left us the written expression of her contemplative life. She, and the friends who wrote it for her, always spoke of it simply as ‘The Book,’ and after five hundred and fifty years it may well retain the title, for it has lost none of its unique character in Christian literature. It was written under peculiarly arresting circumstances : dictated by a woman of thirty-one, while in ecstasy, to three or four members of her famous circle: Barduccio, Stephen, Neri, Tuscan youths of noble family, who were her ardent disciples, and Christopher, a Sienese notary. This is the Saint’s own description of her mental and bodily state when in ecstasy:

. . . . the bodily powers alone departed, becoming united to Me through affection of Love. Then is the memory full of nought but Me; the understanding uplifted to contemplate My truth as object; the will, that follows the understanding, loves and unites itself to what the eye of the understanding sees. These powers, being united and gathered together and immersed and inflamed in Me, the body loses its feeling, so that the seeing eye sees not, and the hearing ear hears not, and the tongue does not speak, except as the abundance of the heart will sometimes permit it for the alleviation of the heart and the praise and glory of My name.’

Many attempts have been made to fasten upon Capitalism the ‘blame for the evils of this age. In spite of the unrivalled eloquence of our leaders and the courage of their followers, no one has succeeded in making out an unanswerable case, founded upon unimpeachable authority, until now. It has remained for one unworthy to put his pen to the word, and therefore to the argument, which shall give Capitalism, and its attendant monster, Industrialism, their death-blow. The word is RESPONSIBILITY.

Before we proceed to the unanswerable argument we must name the unimpeachable authority and, as words are useless unless defined and definition is the one thing words lack in these days, we must first of all give definitions. But, we shall find, merely to define the words is to imply the argument. The words being understood, the compatibilities and incompatibilities are obvious. It will only be necessary to add some notes. This we shall do, and the blow will have been struck.

The first and most important thing to do is to define Catholicism; for the Catholic Church is the unimpeachable authority. Here we have our backs against the wall. Unless it be admitted that the Catholic Church speaks with the authority of God Himself, we cannot proceed. It is useless to proceed; for there is no other person or institution that makes even the claim to such authority, and no lesser authority can be called unimpeachable.

The recent visit to London of a troupe of players from the Comédie Française gave us a welcome opportunity of studying a few of Molière’s greatest works in the only completely satisfactory way in which they can be studied. For though we may read and re-read our Molière with never-failing joy till we know every line by heart and every character as well as the members of our own family, it is not until those familiar figures are actually moving before us and revealing their characters in every word they utter that we can realise quite fully the greatness of their creator’s genius.

Surely no dramatist has ever equalled Molière in his power of writing dialogue that is at the same time apparently so faithful a reproduction of real speech and so entirely characteristic of each individual speaker. The talk is all so natural, so spontaneous, that the fact that in many plays it is carried on in Alexandrine couplets never jars on our sense of reality in the least—it is not until afterwards, if at all, that we reflect that after all nobody ever did talk in Alexandrine couplets in real life. Molière wrote his plays for the stage and not for the study, consequently this quality of naturalness in the dialogue strikes us even more forcibly when we hear it spoken than when we read it. In the same way we have to see the characters not merely with the mind’s eye, but as actual living beings, in order fully to appreciate them.

In the south aisle of Westminster Abbey is a monument by Flaxman, with a long and sonorous inscription in the manner of the time, to the memory of Pasquale de Paoli, the Garibaldi of the eighteenth century. In Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, and in South Audley Street, we may see the homes in which General Paoli lived as an honoured exile. And in old St. Pancras Churchyard, the sexton will point out the spot where his remains long rested, until in our own day they were taken back to his beloved Corsica.

Our English Catholic forefathers, who heard Mass in the Sardinian and the other Embassy Chapels, must often have looked with interest at this foreigner of singularly noble bearing who shared in their devotions; and no one was more welcome than he at the meetings of the famous Literary Club, presided over by Dr. Johnson. Reynolds, Garrick, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Burke were his admiring friends. George III never signed a warrant for a government pension with greater willingness than that which bore the name of Paoli.

As the General walked the quiet London streets, what memories were his ! His early days in his native Corsica, his hatred of the Genoese oppressors of the island, his friendship and his rivalry with the Bonaparte family (some have it he was Napoleon’s godfather at baptism), his exile and military education in Naples, his return to Corsica, his nomination as Dictator and Generalissimo, his terrible struggle first with Genoa, then with France; his wise rule and excellent laws, the birth of a nation his own work; the years of splendid guerilla warfare, the expulsion of the foreigner, the final terrible battle, the cutting his way through the flower of the French troops, the refuge found on a British frigate; the enthusiastic welcome in London, the kindly words of George III.

The Incarnation may be said to have for Its object the drawing of men from misery to happiness. Being the act of God It is the greatest of all rhetorical acts and therefore the greatest of all works of art. And as from the fatherhood of God all paternity is named in heaven and earth, so from His creative power all art is named. In the Incarnation we do not only know a fact of history or a truth of religion; we behold a work of art, a thing made. As a fact of history It is the most interesting and illuminating of all historical happenings. As a truth of religion It is of primary and fundamental importance. But It is as a work of art that It has a saving power, power to persuade, power to heal, power to rescue, power to redeem.

But the word ‘art,’ in spite of the obsequious worship which the modern world gives to the works of painters and sculptors and musicians, is not a holy word in these days. Art, the word, which primarily means skill and thus human skill and thus human skill in doing and making, has, in literary circles and among the upper classes, come to mean only the fine arts, and the fine arts have ceased to be rhetorical and are now exclusively aesthetic; they aim only to give pleasure.

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.

When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.

This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.

Arguably one of the most well received of the documents of Vatican II, this article considers the gestation of Dei Verbum and whether it remains key to Catholic thinking on revelation, exegesis, hermeneutics and the use of the Bible in the Church.

Insofar as Dei Verbum enabled Catholicism to rediscover its own sacramental paradigm of revelation, it can be said to have effected a decisive move away from a propositional view which risks reducing the drama of salvation to a combination of bullet points and performance indicators. Moreover, Catholic biblical theology has enjoyed a welcome renaissance in these subsequent decades and scripture now plays a more obvious part in liturgy and piety.

Though there are lacunae (e.g. anthropology, ecology), and though some of the exegetical tensions have been by-passed by postmodern hermeneutics, perhaps the more interesting questions that remain will centre not on the scriptures but on a renewed understanding of the nature of tradition and the creativity of its relationship with the magisterium.

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,

The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,

Descartes was personally a believer, a sincere Catholic. His education by theJesuits of La Flèche, and the philosophy they had taught him there, had markedhim profoundly. This man, whose mind is so free and enquiring, who was always soconscious of a vitally important intellectual vocation, who grounded all hisphilosophy on a daring effort to doubt everything, that he might vanquish doubtby doubt and is discover the unimpeachable certainties implied in the veryexistence of the thinking self, this founder of modern rationalism never doubtedthe Catholic creed; he could even be blamed for being insufficiently aware ofthat anxious questing restlessness of the soul that is worked upon and deepenedby Faith. To the Protestant theologians who tried to force the religious issueon him, he answered smiling that he preferred to remain in the religion of hisking and his nurse.

He was not giving them his reasons for believing; he meant merely that hepreferred to be left in peace on this matter. His death was nobly and genuinelyChristian. That fine sense he always had of the dignity of reason andintellectual integrity, of the grandeur of created nature, was itself religious.I am sure that at the opening of his philosophical career, with the illuminativeexperience of November 10th, 1619, still vivid within him, he was equallydesirous of establishing the principles of physical geometry—his workpar excellence— and of grounding Christian doctrineon such firm foundations that atheists and sceptics would be silenced for ever.And with all this his hostility to Theology was stubborn and bitter andcalculating. How explain this paradox?

It is generally admitted that the Catholic Church is distinguished by an insistence on the reality of the objects of her faith. For those who are in one way or another alienated from the Church this realism often appears unenlightened and superstitious, a kind of primitive surrender to the principalities and powers of a magical world which lies behind and yet permeates the world of everyday, and heightens its common-sense obviousness by charging it with a mana derived from supposed agencies like, but more powerful than, the agencies and objects of the tangible world. Within the Church this sense of the reality of the object of faith has; become incorporated in devotions of many kinds, and also in a metaphysical theology. It would be interesting to examine in some detail the various forms taken by this incorporation of a living and sensitive faith, stretching out to touch and handle its objects