I was kindly asked to write something for the first number of Blackfriars, in 1920, and now, to suggest what changes may have occurred during those Forty Years Gone.

When the Archduke was murdered in 1914, our insularity may have asked: ‘Who was he? Where is Sarajevo?’, even, ‘Does it really matter?’ But a member of the Austrian imperial family, when asked: ‘But you don’t think it means the end of a dynasty?’ answered: ‘It’s the end of a world’. Exaggerated? Well, in 1918 many were exclaiming: ‘Now for a new world!’ and I too, though lastingly bruised by the sorrows of that war, felt full of hope. Why? One must select.

It was obvious that there would be an immense influx of students into the depleted universities. It was agreed that Catholic societies should be reinforced, or revived, or created, to welcome Catholic arrivals. It was hard to get the better of the idea that such societies existed only to ‘safeguard’ the faith and morals of their members. Some, however, hoped for the formation of a liberally-educated Catholic mind which would make a positive impact on public opinion. ‘The International Society of Intellectual Co-operation’ soon enough existed in Geneva alongside of, not part of, the League of Nations. But this impact seemed far more likely to happen if such societies were ‘federated’, learned to meet and know one another, and become more than merely local groups of which the members just ‘talked to one another’.

Two traditions, of the ‘necessary evil’ and of the ‘noble city’, contend in the Christian attitude towards the State.

Augustinist and Aristotelean alike profess the duty of obedience to the secular power, yet while to the former this is virtue there encountering its occasion to the latter this is virtue there findiug its proper object. Both agree that all power descends from God; the difference arises from how we conceive a causal order of subordinate agents and purposes. Here, as we shall see presently, a scholastic distinction, between instruments and means on one hand and principal, if secondary causes and intermediate ends on the other, is relevant to the contemporary debate about treating sins as crimes. For if the State is no more than a useful convenience then its rule, though providentially ordained to prevent anarchy, is devoid of moral value within itself. If, on the other hand, the State is endowed with a moral authority of its own then virtue and vice as such can be its concern.

You would not expect men of the Augustinist tradition to bow before the powers that be, nor men of the Aristotelean to warn off the government for not minding its own business. History however does not always follow a thin logic of ideas; those who have believed that true religion is other-worldly and not committed to politics have been left most defenceless before the encroachments of temporal power, while a strong thread runs from St Thomas to the sturdy radicalism, and perhaps some of the pressure-groups, of later centuries.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Ireland to Britain, so that by 1841 there were about 300,000 Irish-born men and women living in the country. Then, in 1846-7, came the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and famine stalked the land. The immediate result was that the flow of immigrants became a flood. By 1851 the figure for England and Wales had risen to 500,000, and ten years later it had increased to over 800,000.

The vast majority of these immigrants had landed at Liverpool and then fanned out through the mining districts of south Lancashire to the cotton towns of east Lancashire, on to the woollen mills of Yorkshire, south to the industrial Midlands and London, or north to the coalfields on the north-cast coast and Tyneside. At first they presented problems not unlike those of the Diaspora in Germany at the present day. They arrived in areas where there was little or no provision for Catholic worship, where the Catholics (what few of them remained) were emerging from three centuries in the catacombs, and where there was a great dearth of clergy. In the early days many thousands were lost to the faith due to their lack of opportunity to practise. For example, it has been estimated that had there been sufficient clergy the population of industrial Yorkshire would have been more than half Catholic instead of less than the third that it is at present.

Mr Gellner’s now celebrated little book is an attack on a philosophical school, centred in Oxford, called ‘linguistic philosophy’; in assessing it we have therefore to ask, ‘Is there such a school?’ The idea that there is, of course, is not original to Gellner. Professor Flew, for example, has long proclaimed the existence of such a school, membership of which apparently depends upon nomination by Professor Flew. Now it is certainly the case that there was before the war an identifiable and self-conscious group of révoltés among the professional philosophers at Oxford: men like Austin, Ayer and Ryle, who had been variously influenced by Moore, the Logical Positivists and Wittgenstein, and who formed a common front against Joseph and Prichard. Their cohesion derived from the contemporary Oxford situation: they could not even then be said by themselves to form a school against any wider background than that of Oxford. This group was so successful that after the war it captured almost all the philosophical posts in the University. Victory attained, its cohesion fell away; apart from certain publicists like Flew, philosophers at Oxford ceased to think of themselves as belonging to any definite group or party. This may, of course, be an illusion, or, as Gellner appears to think, a deliberate pretence: we have still to ask whether there are any tenets to which all the members of this ‘school’, and only they, subscribe.

Although Ayer was the only card-carrying member, the predominant influence on the group before the war was the Logical Positivist movement.

There are the old ideas and there are the new ideas, and there are the adherents of each, between whom there exist relations ranging from strife to mutual tolerance. Out of all this there arises an ill-defined problem for the Catholic, whose faith commits him to all truth, however, whenever, and by whomever it is found. Because the problem is seldom adequately posed, few Catholic thinkers really tackle it, so that one has come to expect a Catholic thinker to bear, predominantly, either the modern or the antique stamp. He is either taking into a modern system ‘all that is of permanent value’ in the thought of the ancient world or he is finding a modest niche in ‘thomism’ for the findings of modern science. But compared to what can be done, all this is in the dark. What can be done is to understand the old ideas. And once we are fairly launched on this enterprise we discover that what we are really doing is trying to understand simpliciter, to become more intelligent. The wrestle with Aquinas is a wrestle with one’s own stupidity. And then ‘the problem’ is radically transformed, from a worry to a well-defined and formidable programme of work. This is Lonergan’s approach, and it is the reason for something about him that is immediately striking, his refusal to be given a role in the drama of Ancients versus Modems. To a recent critic who thought he found dangerous tendencies in his Christology he replied with a few tags from Aristotle which the would-be traditional critic was, in effect though not consciously, contradicting.