Thomas Aquinas is generally regarded as a pillar of orthodoxy, the cornerstone of an intellectual establishment. He achieved a synthesis that almost became something of this sort, although his impact is often exaggerated. In his own time he challenged accepted tradition on a number of points and was condemned by ecclesiastical authorities.

The principal point at issue in this condemnation is a doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that may sound bizarre to many today : the ‘unicity of the substantial form'. It is central to his anthropology and has serious consequences for his ethics. It was regarded by many of his contemporaries as heretical or at least dangerous. And if one were to attempt to place Aquinas in the Marxist-Leninist division of all thinkers into idealists and materialists, this doctrine would earn him a place among the materialists.

I shall not attempt a textual analysis of the problem involved. This would inevitably demand a highly technical discussion in the peculiar language of thirteenth-century scholasticism. Rather, I should like to attempt a description of what I believe to have been Aquinas’s view of man and ethics in terms of our own popular picture. I believe that this view can be substantiated through serious historical research and that it is, within the limits imposed by the language gap, a faithful picture of the position of Thomas Aquinas.

It is often assumed that the ethic of Thomas Aquinas is otherworldly, based on a spiritualist anthropology, and ultimately, rationalist. The first assertion is a half-truth; the second and third are false. Aquinas’s anthropology is materialistic, and he is no rationalist.

The first thing to be clear about when speaking of religious poverty is that we are using a metaphor, an equivocation. Religious poverty, whatever its exact form, is a certain renunciation of material goods voluntarily undertaken. On the moral level, therefore, it has only a superficial resemblance to actual poverty, the indigence of the people who are poor in the social sense. For actual poverty is not voluntary and its result is to reduce the person who suffers it to a kind of powerlessness, a slavery. The poor are by an inevitable social logic in the power of the rich. They have very little control over the course of their own lives. The poor in our industrial cities for instance are reduced to the exercise of that little bit of illusory freedom that is handed out to them by the rich in the form of choice of different brands in the supermarket, choice of programmes on TV, the unpredictability of the bingo game or the betting shop, the promise of something new in the amusement arcade where working-class housewives can be seen any day of the week trying to increase their housekeeping money playing the fruit machines. Economic poverty is one term of a relationship within society and not a mere simplicity of life. It is the foundation of other kinds of poverty: powerlessness to maintain local community in the face of council planners and property developers; educational deprivation; a ruined environment, and so on.

Poverty, then, is something suffered at the hands of other people and therefore worlds apart from a condition of life freely undertaken. The poor are not masters of their own lives. The religious, however, is a master of his own life. It is a matter of free choice from the outset.

Chesterton never gave a systematic account of what he meant by Distributism anywhere in his writing, but the outline of this sociopolitical philosophy is clear to anyone who is familiar with his work and that of the circle of writers to which he belonged. As the name implies, Distributism meant first of all that property should be distributed in the widest possible way. Belloc stated the case for this policy in The Servile State, which he published in 1912 and which became the text-book of the movement. He argued that Socialism and State Capitalism were helping to create the same kind of society in which power would be concentrated in the hands of a small ruling-class and security would be given to a permanent proletariat whose econonomic position would be fixed by law. The only alternative to the ‘slave’ state was the Distributist state of small peasant ownership and workers’ guilds. The nearest approximation to this simple society was found in medieval times. Consequently Distributists must be prepared to repudiate modern industrialism in its present form and work for a return to the past. The way in which this theory was interpreted among Belloc’s followers is best illustrated by a quotation from a Distributist manifesto published twenty-five years later:

‘Who are you? Without waiting for a reply people answer for themselves. All Communists and atheists regard me as a militant reactionary. All reactionaries regard me as a Communist and almost an atheist. All churchmen think I am a sectarian; all sectarians regard me as a churchman. Every ignoramus thinks me an intellectual; every intellectual regards me as a social reject and member of the Proletariat. Every Russian thinks me a Jew; every Jew regards me as a Russian’ (1966).

‘One (fellow prison) inmate called me Don Quixote ... I am a Don Quixote because he is the prototype of all revolutionaries and friends of truth. Dostoievsky wrote: “If God in the Last Judgment calls on Humanity to render account of what good it has done, it could hand him with tears Cervantes’ Don Quixote”’ (1970).

‘Only people who do nothing make no mistakes’ (1966).

These are the words of Anatol Levitin, pen-name Krasnov, spoken with typical irony. He has been the Don Quixote of Russian church life, tilting at windmills, putting tactless pen to paper on every burning issue. Bom in Baku in 1915, his father a Jew baptised into Christianity, he became a school teacher. He was ordained deacon in the small ‘Living Church’ which co-operated with the regime, until in 1944 he joined the Patriarchal Church as a layman. Like thousands of others, he spent the years 1949-56 unjustly in a labour camp. After his release he wrote regularly for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and was co-author of a history of the Living Church, but because of his criticisms he lost his teaching job in 1966 and found work as a church caretaker.

The second Vatican Council, in its constitution on the Liturgy, initiated a reform of the Divine Office to adapt it to the needs of modern times. The amount of Office that those bound to the Breviary were obliged to recite was to be reduced, and it was stressed that the Office is intended to sanctify the whole day, so that each Hour should be recited at the time appropriate to it, Lauds and Vespers being seen as the most important Hours. The Council also emphasised that the Office is the common prayer of the whole Church, and urged secular clergy and laypeople as well as religious to come together to recite it in common.

The publication in 1970 of the Liturgia Horarum, the Latin version of the revised Divine Office, was a major step towards the fulfillment of the Council’s intentions. It should not be seen as the end of the process, for liturgy as envisaged by the Council is a creative activity, demanding continual adaptation for the needs of particular groups and situations. For this reason, the Liturgia Horarum gives great scope for choice and adaptation : it is nearly always permissible to change the psalms, antiphons or readings to suit the individual or group that is celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours. This is emphasised in the fine ‘General Instruction’ with which the Liturgia Horarum is prefaced, a document that should be read by all for whom the Liturgy of the Hours forms a part of prayer. The published texts are a framework within which much variation is desirable and possible, and so a habit of reciting the Office that paid too much attention to discovering and observing precisely ‘what is laid down in the book’ would be alien to the spirit of the Council and its reformed liturgy.