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The Church is like a noble house and estate, and we are welcome to the run of it—to wander through the apartments, explore the galleries and secret courts, go roof-climbing, sample the cellars, walk in the garden, exclaim at the vistas, inspect the stables, swim in the lake, take our ease, and contemplate the domain stretching to the distance, over the hills and far away. Non est hie aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli. And it is our home. Of course we know that in a sense, but in fact are we not inclined to think of it as National Trust and behave like respectful trippers? The motor-coaches crunch on the gravel and we follow the guide inside, stare at some of the treasures, buy our postcards and then have tea.
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- Copyright © 1957 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Summa Theologica. ia-2ae. iii, 3; iv, 2, 6; v, 3; xxiv, 3; lvi, 4; lix, 1, 2, 3, 5; lxvi, 4; lxxvii, I; cxii, 5; 2a-2ae. xxviii, 2, 4.
2 I cor.iv, 4.
3 Job x, II.
4 Ia-2ae. i, I; xvii, 2,3,4.
5 Ia.lxxxiii, 4; Ia-2ae. lxviii, I; 2a-2ae. ii,3.
6 Ps. lxxxiii, 2.
7 Luke xiv, 21; Matt, xxii, 12.
8 ps.cxxxviii, 4, 7.
9 Mysticism, Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural experience. By R. C. Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford. (Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press; 42s.)
This book, which prompts this article, is heartily recommended to all who seriously reflect on the life of prayer, and to the librarians of religious communities. The author's own informed convictions of the truth of orthodox Catholic principles do not dispose him to the grinding of axes. Perhaps he betrays some temper against Mr Aldous Huxley, concludes too easily that Master Eckhart was an intermittent monist and that the condemned propositions reproduced his teachings, and is too roughly Western about some Eastern techniques and doctrines. These are but minor corrugations.
It will, I think, prove a freshener to those who may ruefully confess that they are growing rather bored with minor classics belonging to the conventional genre of spiritual reading. Their eyes will be opened and their hearts warmed to Christian truths reinforced from traditions outside Christendom. They will find nothing to emulsify their assent to the dogmatic teaching of the Church. They will appreciate the cautious use of Jungian psycholigy to illustrate the aptness of the Christian mysteries. Passing the mescalin palace of Mr Aldous Huxley, the patiently and exquistely contrived foundations left by Proust and the heroic perversion eventually rejected by Rimbaud, they will come to the temples of India and to the Muslim world which derives both from Christianity and Hinduism and is stressed between them. At the end they will see again their own house of which we spoke at the beginning of this article.
Their own—and everybody's.
10 ia. cxiv, 4; cxv, 5; 2a-3ae. clxxi, 5, 6; clxxviii, 2.
11 The treatise on the motions has much to say in this connection, ia-2ae. xxii-xlviii. Note xxxiii, I on dilatatio.
12 T. Gilby.Poetic Experience. An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetic. (London, New York, 1934) Ia-2ae. lxviii, 1.
13 Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, p. 132.
14 I John iv, 16.
15 Matt, xxv, 35-6.
16 Ia. lxiii, 3.
17 Isa. xiv, 12,14.
18 Matt. xii,44. Luke xi, 25.
19 2a-2ae. clxxxiv, 1.
20 I Cor. xiii,1.
21 2a-2ae. lxxxi, 5. xxxiii, 7.xxv, 1. Ia-2ae. lxv, 4.