All theology springs from the fact that man, faced with a revelation that makes certain demands upon him, finds that at the same time he must accept the demands of his own humanity and of his life in the world. The reason is that man cannot accept revealed truth without submitting it to interpretation by his reason, in terms of truths he knows as a rational thinker. A man finds that he cannot be true to revelation unless he is true to himself as a man in the world.

And revelation is a very wide concept. Some revealed truths are not immediately concerned with matters of ordinary human experience. Of such a kind is the revelation of the Trinity. There is no particular rational factor that would automatically make us tend to interpret this truth in one way rather than in another. Other revealed truths however are concerned with matters of ordinary experience, and so experience itself provides a framework for a rational interpretation of the revealed truth, enabling us to accept the revealed truth as running parallel, so to speak, with the truth we have learned for ourselves. Where revelation concerns death, for instance, we have an example of this kind of ‘ready-made’ interpretation being used. Because death in our human experience means that particular event which is the termination of life in the world, we are inclined to think of death, where the word occurs in statements of revealed truth, as that event.

Islam and Christianity; or should it be, Islam and Christendom? In the difference between the connotation of the words Christianity and Christendom lies the explanation of one of the most essential differences between the two faiths. For Islam is a way of life, and perhaps, in selecting ‘Christendom’ in preference to ‘Christianity’ in the context of comparing the two religions, the tendency is evinced to seek a term referring to Christianity as if it, too, were a way of life in the same, all-embracing way that Islam set out to be. But Christianity is a religion; in some respects an institution that happens in spite of terrestrial life, although a life which it does not inform is death. Christendom remains a territorial concept, so that, though it does in a sense express an antithesis which the existence of Islam called into being, it cannot be used to mean what Islam meant-to refer to the way men worshipped, wrote, thought, practised the law, washed themselves, devised systems of finance that would not break the law and so forth. Christendom was a place; Islam a complete and monolithic concept of human conduct.

Christianity was never a way of life to the same degree because, for one thing, its founder, Jesus Christ, had not been at pains to legislate for this world, only to save it by symbolical and actual death to it. He had preached its unworthiness and left no doubt that what is God's is what counts, not what is Caesar's.

The term ‘liberal studies’ arouses responses of approval, derision and perplexity. Those who approve of it do so in post-prandial statements, amidst the fug of cigar smoke-industrialists lamenting the narrow education of new entrants to industry. Those who deride it do so because they identify the term with a superior culture to which they are not admitted, something to do with making the right noises during the interval at Glyndebourne. The perplexed command most sympathy for their attitude. They are in genuine doubt what the term means.

Most people can identify a liberal attitude and recognise a liberally educated man when they see one. It is difficult to find two people who agree what is the best education to produce this desirable end-product. And there the debate lies. There are many contestants in the field. Historically the strongest, though the one heard least, is the claim of Greats at Oxford. This degree produced the most complete man. But the voice is drowned in the general clamour of economists, sociologists and historians pressing their claims.

A liberal education has always been the concern of teachers, but only recently has the term ‘liberal studies’ come into prominence. Much of its impetus stems from a Ministry of Education circular issued in the midfifties and directed at technical colleges. The 1956 White Paper on technical education heralded an enormous advance in full-time education for technologists. Before the war, they had won their technical laurels via the hard grind of evening classes.

My theme is really the Socratic proposition that knowledge is virtue. This is an idea which is never far from the minds of those concerned either with literature or with education. Yet when we look into our own lives, the proposition seems obviously false. We know from our own experience the truth of video meliora proboque. deteriora sequor. Most Catholics moreover, have been brought up to venerate (rightly but perhaps for the wrong reasons), sancta simp/icitas. the faith of a Breton peasant; to feel that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and that nothing good ever came out of Cambridge – at least not since the time of St John Fisher.

Nevertheless we can see that there is something in the proposition, at any rate negatively. If it is not true that virtue necessarily accompanies knowledge, it is commonly true that crime accompanies ignorance. Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School movement, wrote of the prisoners in Gloucester gaol for whom he was working in the 1770's; ‘extreme ignorance was the principal cause of those enormities which brought them into this deplorable situation, precluding all hope of any lasting or real amendment from their punishment'. The uneducated classes a hundred years ago were still referred to as the ‘criminal classes', and it remains true today that those social areas where education is least successful are also those where delinquency is most common. Ignorance is, in modern Western society anyway, at least a contributory cause of crime, and education, if not a cure for crime, would at any rate create, as Jeanne Hirsch said of politics, a vacuum within which something is possible.

This is a symposium in which Archbishop Roberts and ten American Catholics argue that the usual teaching in the Church about contraceptives is in need of revision. They seek to show that their use in some circumstances may be morally justified. A great many Catholics will, like the present reviewer, open it eagerly; the more critical may not find their enthusiasm invariably sustained. Contributions to any symposium vary in value and the first duty of any reviewer is to indicate which, in his opinion, are important and which may safely be left until we have a lot of time to spare.

In this book there are three chapters which an educated Catholic in England must read if he is to inform his conscience properly in this matter: these are by Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth A. Daugherty and Leslie Dewart. If these alone had been published, I believe the effect on English-speaking Catholicism would have been electrifying; as it is their voice may be muffled by the wool in which they are wrapped. Next I would place articles by Gregory Baum and (with serious reservations), Justus George Lawler, the contents of which are good but not unfamiliar. After this we descend rapidly through the ponderous and the incoherent to two almost compulsively skippable essays by professors respectively of dogmatic and moral theology.

In his introduction. Archbishop Roberts says that the natural law arguments against contraception are inconclusive. He gives reasons for this which I do not find cogent. In the first place he holds that since precepts of the natural law do not depend for their validity upon revelation they must easily be known without revelation.

The Task of the Order is Study

'Our study should be principally and zealously directed towards fitting us to be of use to the souls of our neighbours.'

According to this early tradition, study is one of the proper means for forwarding the Order's special task of preaching the Word of God for the salvation of the world. Apostolic preaching, the passing on of God's truth to the world of men, necessitates a deep and thorough knowledge both of revealed truth and of the teachings and ideas of men. The task of studying belongs in the first place to the whole Order as such: to our Order there is committed a theological and doctrinal role. As Cajetan wrote in the 1513 General Chapter, ‘Let others enjoy their own privileges; but if we are not commended by sacred learning, then our Order is finished'. It is therefore of great importance that there be formed amongst us well-trained brethren, able to assist the Church in her teaching office. Study is such an essential means in the Order that a clerical brother will not be living up to his calling and not fit to go out on his apostolic work unless he holds study in high esteem and applies himself to it properly.