A March afternoon. At Ascalon, five miles from the Gaza Strip, in a hot, windless silence smelling of orange blossom, three of us had picked up fragments of Roman glass and pottery two thousand years old, had looked down from the broken ends of the ruined Crusader walls to the long white beach and the dark Mediterranean. We had forgotten the huge factory and the new settlement to the north. We had forgotten our plan to drive on to Beersheba, thirty miles to the south-east. For the moment we were isolated from the pressure of work against time which makes Israel an invigorating, exhausting, nervous country.

Now there was no time to visit Beersheba. We must drive fast to reach Jerusalem before dark. Our guide, tirelessly informative, drove eastwards. As we approached the Jordan frontier a prospect of wild, hilly, stony, deserted country opened out, the edges of the Negev. We were suddenly aware of tension and anxiety. We stopped to pick up a young soldier who wanted a lift to the next military post. The tension dropped momentarily: we had a revolver aboard. That mound on the left; That was the mound of Gath. Yes, there was heavy fighting here during the war. Which war; The War of Liberation, the most recent of the endless conflicts which have raged across the landscape of Palestine.

A few miles further on, at an army camp which used to be a Palestine Police Station, the soldier got out. Tension mounted and we drove faster into the bare, rocky mountains of Judaea.

Antonio Rosmini, who died a hundred years ago, has a distinguished but rather singular place in Catholic history. Revered by many as a saint in all but name, founder of the Institute of Charity, a priest corde et animo, he was also, in the judgment of the relatively few who have studied his writings, a very great Christian intellect; while for students of Italian history he has an honourable if somewhat isolated place in the complex national revival known as the Risorgimento. Evidently a many-sided person and yet, just because of this, not one to be easily identified with any particular group or trend in Church or State. And this isolation, so to call it, is reflected in the fortunes of those voluminous philosophical writings which Rosmini himself considered his main life-work, along with the founding of the Institute. Among Catholics they are still shadowed, though less than formerly, by a suspicion of unorthodoxy; while anti-clericalism has hindered, until recently, their influence with lay academic circles especially in Italy. Moreover Rosmim’s literary style, though clear and dignified, entirely lacks the ease and grace and sting which so helped Croce, for example, to win the attention of his countrymen and hold it for nearly half a century. However there are now signs of a change; and in post-war Italy Rosmini’s influence is probably stronger, if still less widely diffused, than Croce’s.

The pleasures of literature may be classified as arising either from form or from content or else—and it is a classification which cuts across the first scheme—from the intellectual or architectonic element on the one hand, or the sensuous or harmonious on the other. By the pleasures of form one means the qualities of structure in novel or play, the satisfaction of speech sound in poetry produced by all the devices of the art— examples, widely different, are Spenser or Fray Luis de Leon, Swinburne or Jose Asuncion Silva, and T. S. Eliot or Luis Cernuda. By the pleasures of content one means either the incident-interest, the captivation of the attention that makes it impossible to ignore the command: ‘Now read on’, or the philosophical content, by which is meant the extent—if any—to which an author’s content and form contain any understanding of experience, any interpretation: here the pleasure that is exclusively literary is derived from the skill with which the interpretative element is presented or conveyed. The pleasure of rightness of interpretation is, of course, of a non-literary order. But the architectonic pleasure may arise from the form and the content taken together: it is the pleasure that is given by a wide sweep of subject matched by form on a grand scale. The Divina Commedia, the Faery Queen, Shakespeare’s tragedies—all procure us an aesthetic pleasure drawn from a power within the artist’s mind which sees and conveys an apprehension of life on a grand scale, and is not dependent on either subject-matter or form taken by themselves.

The lost literature of medieval England, as Mr R. M. Wilson and R. W. Chambers before him have shown us, would probably occupy as much space in our libraries as what has survived. The earliest records tell of such losses as that of the Ingeld-lay which Alcuin reproaches the monks of Lindisfarne with being so fond of; and to the end of the Middle Ages we can compile for each century a formidable list of works which have vanished, some through the indiscriminate ravages of time, others, we need not doubt, victims to pious zeal (it was Fumivall who at a meeting of the Early English Text Society complained of a lack of Lives of the Sinners). But yet from time to time sunken treasure Is washed up, to be chanced upon and dragged away in triumph by some more fortunate beachcomber, whilst the rest of us stare after him in envy. This present century is hardly likely to see another so sensational discovery as when in 1934 the lost ‘Book of Margery Kempe’ appeared in the Victoria and Albert Museum to have its contemporary binding repaired, and proved to be not at all the improving but genteel vade mecum suggested by the extracts by Wynkyn de Worde and Pepwell, but rather the spiritual autobiography of one of the crackedest pots in all the annals of religious enthusiasm. Twenty-one years have not been long enough for medievalists to recover from this discovery; and now Dr Price comes along with what may be a new work by Chaucer, The Equatorie of the Planetis, which caught his eye in MS. Peterhouse College, Cambridge, 75.1.

Forty days after the Resurrection Christ was, in the words of St Luke ‘taken up’ or ‘raised up’ (Acts 1, 9-11). He ascended into heaven and was hidden from his disciples. St Mark adds that he now sits at the right hand of God (Mark 16, 14).

These scriptural references speak for themselves. In the Epistle to the Hebrews the same doctrine is taught. Christ, who in his human nature has suffered and made ‘purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high’ (Hebrews 1,3). This is the entry of Christ, as the redeeming head of the redeemed people, into the presence of the Father. He is no longer subject to suffering and to the will of the world. He has put on incorruption, and having put it on, goes to the place of incorruption, the presence of the Father. In Christ, the incorruption and purity of the first state of man are restored, but at an infinitely higher level.

His ascension does not mean that he changes so far as his divinity is concerned, for the Son is equal to the Father; it is rather that the full effects of the union of the human nature to the person of the Word are released in that human nature. What was prefigured in the Transfiguration on the Mount is now realized as the body of Jesus, is totally possessed by the divine glory. As man he is so closely united to God, that once the will of the Father has been fulfilled he enters into the place of honour, for he has become much better than the angels (Hebrews 1,3).