In this paper I want first of all to examine what the liturgy essentially (or rather existentially) is: and then, having made my view of that question clear I want to make some brief suggestions as to how this conception of the liturgy might be grasped by undergraduates taking a combined honours course in theology and English literature. I am going to discuss this particular combination of subjects, partly because it is explicitly mentioned by Laurence Bright in his paper in the symposium, but also because I think it is a combination particularly interesting in itself. What I have to say must not be construed as constituting a syllabus for a course let alone as a substitute for the teaching of the history of liturgical forms and their relation to the theological preoccupations of their periods.

Just over a hundred years ago Count Cavour enunciated the gran Principio: Libera Chiesa in libero Stato. Today, although there are still many places, not all of them professedly anti-Christian, where such a principle is not at work, theologians seem more eager to shew us that the freedom Christ has given us is not a freedom from opposition and contradiction but a freedom to live responsibly in the free Church. The emphasis on freedom is no rash and young intrusion, it is an emphasis encouraged by the first authority.

The special excitement that a layman like myself, untrained in the disciplines of theology, may find in the proposed seminar is inseparable from special difficulties and dangers. It is not merely that the task of thinking about such a course presses uncomfortably upon one's own equipment, but that there is here so little experience to draw on for nourishment or correction.

A Dominican who is at the same time an exegete tends to suffer from a lingering bad conscience which on days like this can become quite acutely painful. As a Dominican he should follow and esteem the teaching of St Thomas, but in actual fact his memories of the illustrious friar are of a friendly voice which he listened to once upon a time in his youth. Now other voices speak to him in the rough violent language of the Canaan he has entered, which make, I'm afraid, extensive demands on his thinking.

In order to relieve my conscience I will start off, at least, in the direction of Thomism and, true to the scholastic way of doing things, begin with the status quaestionis. We begin then by trying to clarify the sentence we have taken as our theme.

While the third session of the Vatican Council has many problems of the highest importance to consider, for the benefit of the whole Church and also for particular sections of it, there seems to be extant today a situation of comparatively recent origin which has never been thoroughly examined, discussed, or pronounced upon in any authoritative discourse, and yet it is one of which more people are becoming increasingly conscious: it is the problem of celibate women and the part they play the mystical body.

Among the picturesque figures of the Fathers of the Desert this Moses stands out like a silhouette against the white glare of the desert of Scete. In his youth he was a slave in the household of an official of the Egyptian government but was dismissed because of the flagrant immorality of his life, but more particularly because he was an inveterate thief and this of course would be harder on his master's purse and property than any spare-time debauchery.

Men of all ages and of every civilization have felt the need to offer worship to the being or beings on whom they acknowledge dependence. Their worship usually takes the form of animal sacrifices, the offering of food and drink and sacred meals, all of which are accompanied by dances, hymns and prayers, and regulated by the observance of sacred seasons and holidays. This is the pattern of what we call religion. It is the way in which man responds to the idea of the ‘sacred’, to the terrifying appeal of that aweful otherness of the being he believes to govern his existence. From the anthropologist's point of view Christian worship, in spite of all its distinctive traits, is one more manifestation of general religious behaviour. There is no need for believing Christians to run away from such a point of view. In spite of divine revelation and in spite of the institution of Christ, our habits of worship remain very human phenomena. In an age where the reasonableness of religious behaviour is widely challenged and rejected, it would be very foolish for Christians to forget this fact.

In my first article I suggested that the reader of Dom John's spiritual letters lost much because they are not arranged chronologically, I suggested that he should begin with the first three letters to a Jesuit, in which Dom John developed his rounded theological theory of the world, and then attempted to outline this theory; its outstanding characteristics seemed to me to be the importance given to God's will, both as ‘permissive’ and as expressing his good pleasure, and the importance given to contingency. In this second article I propose to follow the development of Dom John's theory and practice of contemplative prayer. In a final article I hope to be able to show how Dom John's study of de Caussade's writings enabled him to coordinate his spiritual life with his theological theory.

Towards the end of the long letter written to his Jesuit friend expounding his theological theory, Dom John said: ‘I always tell people that our spiritual life must be managed like the War Office on business principles.

In apostolic times unity among the faithful was understood as a direct consequence of assuming the new life in Christ. St Paul sees the reconciliation of man with man and particularly of Jew and Gentile as effected through the crucified Christ. ‘But now in Christ you who were once far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace who has made us both one—(that he) might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross’ (Eph. 2. 14-16). Through baptism we become members of this body ‘For by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free’ (1 Cor. 12.13) whose head is Christ while we ‘are one body in Christ and individually members one of another’ (Rom. 12. 5).