One may well wonder whether contemporary civilization does not create a type of man impervious to religious feeling.’ This sentence from the preface to M. Dansette’s book sets the general tone of the work, which is to show how this generalization applies in particular to France, and what the French Church is doing about it. Using the techniques of sociology applied to religious data, undertaken first by a professor of Canon Law, Gabriel Le Bras, M. Dansette paints a picture of a de-christianized France where there exists a Church in which old forms struggle against new ideals. Of course, Le Bras’ four categories of Frenchmen do no more than register external observances—it is only by and large that they reflect a religious mentality, and the categories themselves are very crude: ‘dissidents’ who do not belong to the Church, ‘seasonal conformers’ (those who go to church for baptism, first communion, marriage and death), ‘faithful’ who make their Easter duties and go to Sunday Mass, ‘pious’ who do more than that. Again, practice itself is often deceptive; though very faithfully observed in the eighteenth century, no one would describe that as a century of faith: ‘Un pratiquant peut être athée et un non pratiquant, croyant.’

The figures, even with the obvious reservations, are interesting. Three per cent of the French population is unbaptized; 3 per cent confessionally non-Catholic; of the 94 per cent baptized, 34.2 per cent make their Easter duties—but again this average figure is deceptive, since regional variations are so marked.

In April 1957 the Bishops’ Report burst upon Scotland with a minor explosion. It fanned the embers of national feeling in those who, having little interest in theology, saw in the proposals an attempt by the English to absorb one of the few remaining national institutions; it frightened many Godly Presbyterians who saw in it the thin end of a prelatic wedge and the beginnings of idolatry; but it did not arouse organized popular support for its own proposals. Probably several influential Scottish churchmen would welcome the acceptance of the proposals contained in this report, but they certainly cannot claim to lead a popular movement. And so the explosion which heralded the first publication of the Report turned out to be more of a firework display than the first rumblings of a serious battle, for there was only one fairly clearly defined party—the opposition.

The result of the first round in the discussions may have been a little misleading. The General Assembly in 1957 accepted the Report for study. This meant that the majority of ministers and elders in the Assembly refused to reject the Report out of hand, but decided that it should be studied by as many ministers, elders, and members of the Church of Scotland as possible; and it also showed that very many Church of Scotland ministers admit the urgency of finding a solution to the scandal of a divided Christendom. The Report was, therefore, widely distributed for unofficial study and discussion; and after the Assembly of 1958 was sent down to the local courts, the presbyteries, for official debate.

There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes—the primordial images and patterns of behaviour of a supra-personal character which the depth-psychologists find in their clinical work, and which have been expressed in manifold ways by human beings throughout the ages and throughout the world. Whatever else may he said for or against Jung’s concept of the archetype, it has undoubtedly provided a meeting place for specialists in the most disparate fields of inquiry.

This is particularly manifest at the yearly ‘Eranos’ meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, whose proceedings are subsequently published in the Eranos Jahrbuecher. The sciences, as distinct from the humanities, were, however, rather poorly represented at the 1956 meeting, which was devoted to ‘Man and the Creative’. But it had some notable contributions from Professor Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Chung-Yuan Chang, Laurens van der Post, Hellmut Wilhelm and Sir Herbert Read. Meanwhile we have another volume of previous Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks translated into English. Its theme is ‘Man and Time’, and here the sciences are represented by the physicist Max Knoll and the biologist Adolf Portmann. The arrangement of the contributions is somewhat haphazard, and readers may be recommended to begin at the end with the late Professor G. van der Leeuw’s brilliant essay on ‘Primordial Time and Final Time’, with its careful analysis of basic concepts and its profound theological and philosophical insights.

Refuge for Huysmans, inspiration for Péguy, Chartres has a secret allure which escapes analysis in terms of art or religion. The psychology of architecture, once sufficiently articulate, betrays the same elusive charm which graces men in the major changes of life, the succession of bewilderment and mastery in adolescence, the éclat of a James Dean or the universal teddy-boy catching the imagination of a decade aware of its crossroads. I looked therefore at Chartres with a questing eye— would I be caught? should I resist? could I diagnose?

Chartres is not, at least in the factors which combine to achieve its rare effect, the work of one artist. Excluding the crypt, alterations, and some superimposed decorations, its creation spans three centuries, from the last signs of classical souvenirs in certain motifs of the west facade, to the realization, but not the fulness, of the gothic plan in its corona. The charm lies in a certain awareness of opposites bursting one from another with the improbability of butterfly from chrysalis, an inclination of the masculine in its romanesque to flirt with the feminine in its gothic, of the earthbound yet mystic in the one to consort with the poetic yet mathematical in the other, liaison without lust, personality hovering between sexes, like a poet’s perception and gentleness which does not disgrace his manhood.

Once the romanesque artist had conceived the corona—the ensemble of apse, ambulatory, and radiating chapels—the sensibility of the building raced there, as that of a man concentrates on one fine experience, or as features express a deep emotion.

The publication now in progress of the second edition of this standard work of reference, thoroughly revised and refashioned, is an event not only for German-speaking Catholicism but for the entire Catholic world. In its new form the Lexikon can fairly be described as the flowering of a long process of growth within the Church beginning perhaps under Pius IX, in which she began fully to accept the challenge of the modern world. If there have been hesitations in this growth, and sometimes even the apparent rejection of the possibility of growth at all, as in the Modernist crisis, these have been precisely crises of growth, brought about by the unbalanced and uncritical pursuit of novelty on the one side, and an often unfounded suspicion of it on the other. We have not seen the last of these crises; how could we, if, as we must firmly believe, the Church will continue to grow under divine Providence and fed by the Spirit of Christ, until the Coming of the Truth of Christ at the end of time?

Meanwhile we can be grateful for this remarkable manifestation of Catholic maturity. It need hardly be said that the Lexikon maintains the highest standards of German scholarship, wissenschaftlich in the best sense. As far as publications go, Mgr Höfer of Rome is best known for his studies in nineteenth-century German Catholicism and as an editor of Scheeben; Fr Karl Rahner, S.J., is Professor at Innsbruck, editor of the current Denzinger, and undoubtedly the most influential theologian writing in German today.