For English speaking readers of my generation Simone Weil was one of a galaxy of French writers who came to the fore just after the last war. I am thinking particularly of Congar, de Lubac, Daniélou, arid Marcel. Time has dealt with their reputations very differently. Who remembers Marcel now? If Cardinal Daniélou is known to more people than Father Daniélou ever was, it is for rather special reasons. But in total these writers were a major cause of that aggiormamento in the Church we are still learning to cope with. They put out ways of thinking about theology both radically new and very traditional and in the process they devalued utterly the bankrupt pseudo-scholasticism that then ruled the roost. The most important of these writers were unquestionably de Lubac and Congar: but Daniélou too, is not to be forgotten with his work on typology. These theologians were among the first to have what is now commonplace—genuine argument and discussion with non-papist theologians of similar status. Some of them took part in an ecumenical seminar in Paris out of which came Oscar Cullmann’s magisterial book on Peter. Less well-known than these is the Anglican Father Hebert, whose books on The Authority of the Old Testament and the Throne of David had considerable influence on Daniélou (to put it mildly). It is symptomatic of the time that I myself first heard of Hebert’s books through Daniélou’s review in Dieu Vivant. This periodical was the New Blackfriars of the day; although it was no more all-embracing of the Catholic intellectual milieu than is New Blackfriars, it was equally representative of an important current of opinion.

Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.

It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.

Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.

One of the tasks of the Secretariat for Non-believers is to study the diverse forms of atheism. It has not been easy to do this in Britain for lack of studies which map out the field. Now with Varieties of Unbelief Dr. Susan Budd has filled the gap. A literate sociologist, she has put us all in her debt by examining the minute-books and records of the various secularist societies. Her work is another contribution to the ‘sociology of the past’ which is indispensable if we are to understand the present. It occupies, as she puts it, the wasteland ‘between the tilled and fertile plantations of the sociology of collective behaviour and the history of ideas’ (p. 1). Such is her almost superhuman objectivity that it is quite impossible to determine from the book where she stands: her story takes her down some fascinating by-ways of English eccentricity (thus Annie Besant managed to remain a secularist and a theoso-phist to the bafflement of everyone except herself), but she stays resolutely cool and tries to resist the temptations of irony. Though she is prepared gently to chide her secularists for their repeated attacks on citadels long abandoned by the religious, she clearly admires them for their independence of mind and rejection of compromise, and can speak of them as ‘heirs to a great tradition, to the continued vitality of a radical culture which exists outside established methods of thought’ (p.80). But her tone is so very different from the propagandists of secularism whose account of the ‘great tradition’ tends to enrol Erasmus (a Catholic) and Voltaire (a deist) and indeed anyone who has in any way contributed to human progress. To the secularist, the world is full of ‘anonymous secularists’ who would reveal themselves if only they knew better.