Our Western civilization can legitimately reflect that it has bestowed on the rest of mankind one or two valuable treasures in the domain of the things of the spirit. One such treasure is the unspoiled instinct for speculative truth. Greek philosophy, and Aristotle, first enabled us to realize the absolute value of wholehearted detachment from affective inclinations, and of chaste, severe, pure science, whose only function and purpose is the discernment of that which is—vision. Later the West was to know that the Word of God came into the world to the end that He might bear witness to the truth, to know too that eternal life is eternal vision; further, it came to be moulded by scholastic discipline and the stern claims of intellect: hence it is quite natural that it should have so long retained, in its concept of knowledge, an appreciation of the dignity of speculative truth.

Now the modern world is fast losing such an appreciation in every domain of knowledge save in the one wherein it really excelled—I mean in the science of phenomena. At the age of the Renascence a very general propensity of heart towards earthly goods conditioned the widespread success of the new scientific methods, and, with it, the preference given to Science rather than Wisdom. Note too that science, though capable of provoking many a cupidity in man, itself remained immune from the tarnish of appetitive elements. Science has been for the modern world the last stronghold of the sacredness of truth and of spiritual values—inefficacious spiritual values, because the spirituality concerned is not wisdom spirituality and because in the practical order it can be turned to evil as well as to good uses; and that is why present-day rationalism knows so much of melancholia.

Some few weeks before Archbishop Davidson died the present writer met him by his own gracious arrangement at the house of the late Lord Lovat in Bryanston Square. It was a wild rain-stormy afternoon sufficient to make younger men than the Archbishop find excuses for keeping indoors. Knowing his four score and two years, I awaited a telephone message telling me that the Archbishop dare not venture to leave home. But punctually almost to the minute of our prearranged time the old man arrived—with no complaints about the weather! His biographer was to let me into the secret of the old man’s contempt for our national weather at its worst. I was to learn that an old man’s fortitude which had instantly impressed me had been taught by a sport-loving father on the moors and hills of south-east Scotland.

I could not help feeling, and perhaps manifesting, that I was in the presence of one of the most noteworthy men of the day. Again his biographer by a sober presentation of the facts was to justify my feelings. Yet the prelate who had crowned an English king and had strengthened, as few of his predecessors had strengthened, the Church of England, became at once my fellow-wayfarer into the hill-country of the soul. Many a man of less note and position than he would have felt the need of condescending to a simple friar. Their condescending would have been of the nature of humility. But there was no condescension in the man whose words and attitude were all humility, yet whose humility was not an attitude but a quality of soul.

Dorothy Osborne, writing to her lover, Sir William Temple, in 1653 gives this description of her daily life at her home in Bedfordshire:

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep or cows, and sit in the shade singing ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but trust me these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings to their heels.

The picture of the shepherdesses singing at their task on an English summer’s evening catches the same pastoral beauty that one finds in Gray’s Elegy: to some it may seem romantic and a touch sentimental. The writer, however, was not of that temper: she shows in her letters a plain common-sense and humour, which gives this description a sense of exactness: nor is her picture exceptional. Sir Thomas Overbury had written this of milkmaids and shepherdesses a few years earlier:

She dares to go alone and unfold her sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say the truth she is never alone; she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones.

Of late years there have been signs of a considerable change in the study of comparative religion, in so far as it affects the origins of the Faith and its relations with the Pagan religions contemporary with its earliest period. Not so long ago it was almost assumed as a commonplace fact among scholars that the application of the Comparative Method to the religions of the Roman Empire had disposed of Catholic Christianity's claim to uniqueness; and on the Catholic side the study of Comparative Religion was generally regarded with suspicion and distrust. Plenty of examples of the first attitude could still be found, especially in the works of the older contemporary scholars; but on the whole students of Comparative Religion who concern themselves primarily with the Mediterranean world are becoming more and more disposed, to admit the uniqueness of Christianity. Works like W. R. Halliday’s Pagan Background of Early Christianity, Guthrie’s Orpheus and Greek Religion (though the authors’ very occasional expressions of their personal views on Christianity sometimes seem rather naive compared with the rest of their work), and Nock’s admirable Conversion are all examples of this tendency in the work of non-Catholic scholars. And on the Catholic side a really scholarly interest in Comparative Religion is growing up, as is exemplified in the new series of C.T.S. pamphlets on the subject and in many other works. This interest is only part of the general modern tendency among Catholics to pay more attention to that element in non-Catholic religion which is positively good and therefore Catholic, and not to contemplate so exclusively as sometimes in the past the negative element which makes it pagan or heretical.

The vitally important doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ has found a valuable exponent in Mgr. Fulton Sheen, in whose recent book is to be found a popular exposition of this hitherto somewhat neglected teaching of St. Paul and the Fathers. Unfortunately, however, there does not appear in it a clear notion of the union of the Mystical Body, without which the significance of the doctrine must inevitably escape the lay reader. In this book, as elsewhere, one finds a very useful distinction between an organization and an organism, which serves to set the Church apart from any other type of social unit. Yet many of the terms, such as “body,” “organism,” “life,” “cells,” commonly used in this context swing to and fro between mere metaphor and strict analogy, so that it is not always easy to pierce the cover of resemblance and lay hold of the reality beneath. Further, analogy is of the lower with the higher, and represents the attempt to arrive at a knowledge of the invisible by comparison with the visible and the material. Continual stress on material likeness is apt to shape the hidden truth according to the unreality of the looking-glass; so that when there does exist a notion which is immediately applicable to the truth itself, and which is commonly understood by the general reader, that notion should be used with insistence. We may gain a considerable knowledge of the nature of “art” by studying it in terms of lines and masses, but we can hardly obtain by these means a clear idea of the vital spirit which makes a work of “art” something beyond either line or mass.

That the problem of Universals was one of the most discussed topics of the twelfth century is an undeniable fact. But to regard it as the keynote of that age, reducing all its activities to a mere concern about that old dispute, as for quite a long time has been the fashion, is as unfair as it is untrue. Recent research has shown beyond dispute that the twelfth century was, on the contrary, an age of extraordinary and comprehensive vigour and witnessed exceptional achievements in all branches of learning. It was indeed the beginning of a new era in the history of Europe and prepared the way, to a large extent, for the “golden age” of the thirteenth century; it was a true “renaissance.” The School of Chartres and John of Salisbury are only two of the striking instances of the general culture of the time.

The most typical figure of the twelfth century, and assuredly the most remarkable one, is Peter Abailard. He is the personification of the genius of that age of quickening and restlessness, with all its virtues and all its defects. Born in 1079 in Britanny at Palais, or Le Pallet, a village near Nantes, from his ancestors he inherited an excellent and prompt disposition to learning. Eager to learn and as quick to assimilate all he had learnt, he excelled in all branches of knowledge, from music to theology, leaving his contemporaries far behind. Mathematics, it seems, was the only science to which he did not feel any inclination: “Ea quoque scientia cuius nefarium est exercitium, quae mathematica appellatur; . . . quia eius artis [arithmeticae] ignarum omnino me cognosco” (Dialect, ed. Cousin, 435, 182). Vain, presumptuous, thinking of himself as the only learned man of his time, of fighting spirit and bitter in criticism of all and sundry, he passed from one school to the other, from Roscelin to William of Champeaux, to Anselm of Laon, only to attack his masters and scorn them to ridicule.

Mucking in Again. Penguin has learned, with some surprise and distress, that his paragraph in last month's Extracts and Comments on Mucking-In and Sanctified Detachment has been interpreted by some readers as a condonation, if not an approval, of “activism,” the secularization of religion, and of the “Americanismus” concerning which Leo XIII had such strong things to say. He has himself, in previous issues (e.g. in November, 1934, August and September, 1935) expressed himself unequivocally on these lines of approach to the position of the Catholic in the modern world, and has constantly reiterated, both in extracts and in comments, that the only effective and specifically Christian and Catholic action in secular society can be brought about only by a deepening of specifically supernatural life. The Christian can pull his weight in the world only by withdrawing from the spirit of the world and, in the traditional sense, despising it. Nor does the policy of “mucking-in” as he understands it, in any way involve, as some critics seem to suppose, approval of the existing order of society—whether it be the Nazism of Germany or the suburbs of England— but it does mean the determined and deliberate acceptance of the existing historical situation, not as our ideal, but as our God-given material. We cannot be too grateful for students like M. Maritain and Mr. Christopher Dawson for their analyses of the evils inherent in that material. We would only draw attention to the danger—and we think it is a real one—that we become so disgusted with it, and so preoccupied with the preparation of our tools, that we neglect to tackle it and, perhaps, find pretexts for ignoring it.