To start with, a tempting text for the anti-humanist; only let him take care how he reads it. In 1485-6 a Flemish Carmelite wrote to the Venetian scholar Ermolao Barbaro to compliment him on his work and ask some personal questions: is Barbaro married? Or is he a priest or a religious? Answer: I am neither this nor that nor the other: paganus et spontis meae sum. Duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras; cetero sum liberrimus . . . Obviously, the context saves us from misreading that paganus; Barbaro is using classical Latin and the word here means simply ‘layman’. And yet an unsympathetic reader might cavil still. That acknowledgement of two lords, Christ and . . . ‘letters’! Did not our Lord tell us we cannot serve two masters? Certainly; all the same it might be unfair to jump to conclusions: better, for the moment, to keep Barbaro’s phrase in mind as a kind of motto of the humanist mentality we shall be considering, epitomizing both the integration it aspired to and also, no doubt, the risks that it ran.

The literary sense of ‘humanist’ - as referring to ‘one devoted to or versed in the hterary culture called the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a latinist’ (O.E.D.) - is almost obsolete in modem English, except in history books, where Humanism designates the revival of classical studies in the later Middle Ages and the currents of thought and feeling that it occasioned. A discreet definition on these lines is offered by the American scholar E. H. Wilkins: ‘the scholarly strand in the Renaissance’; which in turn raises of course the question of what we mean by the Renaissance. As an historical term it obviously contrasts with ‘Middle Ages’; there was, it is implied, a rebirth bringing those Ages to an end; and they, as ‘middle’, intervened between a time when something was alive and a second time when it came back to life; and so were a more or less dead or dormant epoch, an interval of darkness between two luminous eras.

The dangers which threaten the Catholic historian writing on controversial topics were all too plain in the works of Hilaire Belloc. Great as Belloc was as a writer, outstanding as he was in his capacity to recreate the past, he was nevertheless primarily a controversialist with a number of bees in his bonnet, and tragically, in many ways, he was a man in a hurry who had to turn out many books in order to support his children, who were, he said, crying out for pearls and caviar. All this helps to explain why Belloc, who was capable of being on occasions so brilliant an historian, wrote a remarkable amount of bad history. Moreover, partly because he had been denied the opportunity of pursuing his work without the perpetual nagging of financial worries, he turned on the university which had failed to give him the chance of exercizing his undoubted talents, and built up a picture of official academic historians, stupid, prejudiced, deceiving their readers by a spurious critical apparatus and footnotes which on investigation did not support the text. The stupidity, the ignorance and the deceitfulness of the dons became something of an obsession with him, and he thought official historians had entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now it must be admitted that when Belloc started writing, there was accepted by most educated Englishmen a picture of, say, the Middle Ages or the Reformation which is vastly different from what would be accepted now, and it is probable that Belloc’s writing did something to break down the old myths and prejudices, but it is still true that if Belloc was not acceptable to many non-Catholic historians it was because much of what he wrote was unbalanced and unsound.

In all the wealth presented to us in Dante’s Divine Comedy nothing is so rich as the intention of the whole, and the methods of presentation and communication which Dante uses to body forth this intention. I want to draw out two themes, the first concerned with the medieval device of the Dreamer himself, the second with what might be called an existential concern for meaning, which realizes itself in Dante’s use of categories.

I want to talk in terms of Soren Kierkegaard, an analogy which at first may seem strange, but, seen in relation to his ‘indirect’ works and his Christian concern, like Dante’s, ‘by indirections to fmd directions out’, the analogy will I think throw light on those strange moments (such as the famous faint in Inferno, 5) when we see Dante himself - the figure of the Dreamer - in all his medieval clarity.

The tension between form and meaning can be pulled so tight, that the excitement of our engagement in the poem forces a reaction upon us before we have a moment to decide consciously what, by our ordinary moral standards and preconceptions, our attitude should be. Before we have, as it were, been tipped the wink by Dante as to what our reaction to Francesca’s story should be, we see him prostrate on the ground in a faint of sheer human pity. If we are honest we will admit that we have been taken unawares.

It was with a certain sense of guilt that in the depths of this cruel winter I abandoned, briefly, both London and the cinema to take off for Monte Carlo and television. A new kind of festival altogether for me, this, though the sixth actually to be organized by UNDA, the international co-ordinating body for Catholic television; and one which in the event turned out to be both rewarding and salutary. Five to six hours of television a day, however, proved to be considerably more taxing to the eyes than an equivalent amount of the larger screen; and since the entries were divided into three categories there was, inevitably, a certain sameness within each category. The shortest programme lasted eight minutes and the longest sixty, though most of them fell between twenty-five and forty minutes; it certainly seemed, on balance, that half an hour was the ideal length from the spectator’s point of view, though this may well be frustrating to the producer. Three out of the five prize-winners were programmes of precisely thirty minutes, it is relevant to note.

A few factual details may be of interest. Twelve countries, mostly from Western Europe, though the United States and French Canada were also represented, submitted entries for the competition and each competing country had one member on the jury, though this was not necessarily the head of their delegation. Entries were limited in number and selected by a preparatory commission; different production companies from the same country could compete in the same section - thus there were two German companies, and from this country both BBC and ITV put in programmes. Countries with autonomous hierarchies, like Scotland, were entitled to separate delegations and entries.