If a man could take his shadow and accept it not merely as a sign of himself written by the sun but as an essential part of himself, he might begin to understand something of the mystery of prayer and poetry, suffering and surrender, religion and imagery. This is what Georges Bernanos, the recently dead French novelist, has tried to do. He is not a poet, except at those moments when his novels reach the limits of prose and cry for a barer and simpler statement; nor is he a mystic in the sense that he is trying to depict his own religious experiences directly. But that he has something of the mystic in him is evident both from the subjects he selects and the way in which he treats them. In his novel Joy, he is concerned with the terrifying experiences of a young visionary. Here, the visionary is seen as something very like a victim, a bearer-away of the sufferings which other men refuse. She confronts evil, even accepts it, yet she does not let it overwhelm her. In one of the later chapters of this novel, Bernanos describes Chantal’s surrender to God:

Those embarking upon a serious and constructive reading of the Old Testament usually have two basic questions to ask: first, ‘Where should I begin?’, and second, ‘How should I read?’ Though it may not seem obvious, actually I believe that the first of these questions is the more important. The second to some extent solves itself as one progresses. So it is a possible answer to the first question that I want to suggest here. ‘Where should I begin?’ Emphatically not, I suggest, at the beginning. The composition of the Old Testament is utterly unlike that of a modern book. It is a complex of traditions which has grown up round a central nucleus, and which has only subsequently been crystallized in book form. The most ancient and the most creative of these traditions constitutes the central nucleus and the later traditions have been either added on to it at the beginning and end, or else inserted into it. Thus von Rad speaks of the Einbau of the Sinai tradition, the Ausbau of the patriarchal narratives, and the Vorbau of the Primordial history (Gen. i-xi) into or on to what he regards as the central nucleus, namely the events of the exodus and the entry into the promised land. The first task then is to grasp this central nucleus, and to examine how and in what sense it influences or is presupposed by the later traditions. For these reasons, it seems to me, one should begin reading the Old Testament in the middle.

As I go through the notes I made on a recent trip to the U.S.S.R., three of these strike me as throwing a certain amount of light on the whole question of the information and impressions one gets in that country. In the first place, I had been told that the Moscow crowd was drably and poorly dressed; and certainly at first glance one does feel there is something odd about the Muscovite’s appearance. One could easily be led to conclude that this was due to the poverty of his wardrobe. But in Leningrad, where people in fact dress in much the same way as at Moscow, the impression left is quite different. All this would remain most mysterious did one not remember that whereas in Leningrad we find a population that has always been urban, the Muscovite is fresh from the country. Between 1917 and 1958 the population of Moscow increased from 600,000 to more than six million, and the immense majority of the newcomers are peasants unfamiliar with town ways. Thus what gives us the feeling of strangeness about Moscow is really the unexpected rustic appearance of these new inhabitants.

Again, I had heard the fact that even V.I.Ps. sit in the front of their cars beside their chauffeurs put forward as an example of the real democratic feeling one finds in the Soviet. During my visit, however, I discovered that the seat next to the driver is considered to be the place of honour.

It seems that all roads of thought, all mind-routes, lead into history; because, of any subject of study, even the most abstract, one is bound to ask, sooner or later, what has this to do with human life? And human life is necessarily historical. Every concept we use includes some reference to time, and as soon as we relate it to human life the reference at once becomes more or less explicit. In God himself our faith finds such a reference: he is not temporal, but his ways with man are; and in Christ he has seized hold of time in such a way as to compel us to acknowledge a divine mystery in it and to strive to penetrate this mystery so far as we can. This is a new compulsion, a peculiarly Christian one; it does not spring from the need to make sense of human life as such, but from the need, if one may so put it, to make sense of Christ. We certainly cannot separate human history, down to the present moment and on into the future, from Christ. But if this seems to commit us, as believers, to a ‘theology of history’, can we say that we are also committed, merely as reasoning animals, to a ‘philosophy of history’? Is such a discipline in fact conceivable? As philosophy it must be conceivable, if at all, and approachable, if at all, from the side of reason, not of faith.

If we wished to try and show how culture leads up to, and finds perhaps its finest expression in the ideal of the contemplative, or monastic, life, it would be essential at the outset to dispel from our minds the unfortunate overtones of affected superiority which have become associated with this word ‘culture’. Let us, then, bring the whole thing right down to earth, literally, and explain what we understand by ‘culture’. The English word comes from the Latin verb colo (I cultivate, tend, look after), which was originally used in connection with farming. Agriculture means ‘looking after fields’. But, of course, ‘the unconquerable mind of man’ is not limited to the consideration of material objects only: it strives ever upwards towards the immaterial and, ultimately, the divine. So it came about that the simple, essentially earthy, word of the farmer was used to express the care man had for the spiritual in himself, and his reverence for the gods.

Culture, then, is the quintessence of all those qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his material needs. They are not necessarily practical, but they belong to a truly human life: man could not do without them. Pope John XXIII recently emphasized this when he was stressing the importance of the humanism of classical studies. In his address to the International Conference of Students of Cicero on April 8, quoting the Pro Archia, he said that ‘such studies nourish youth and delight old age, ornament prosperity, provide refuge and solace in adversity, are a pastime at home, are no burden abroad, never abandon us, and even at night follow us, on our travels and into the country.