Englishmen curious about the New Morality, and fatigued by the well-known but amateurishly incompetent exposition it has suffered from certain domestic divines, are benefited by the publication here of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (SCM: 1966; 25s). The author is professor of social ethics at the Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been active in ethical debate since the days when the Old Morality was the Newest thing around.

Dr Fletcher, if I understand him correctly, repudiates the Old Morality because it is legalistic. It takes the form of a code, a list of commandments which assign an invariable moral value to certain acts. The circumstances attending these acts may, it is granted, slightly modify their morality. But the ultimate and over-riding source of good and evil is the very nature of the acts. Against such a view Fletcher urges that no action is good or evil in itself. It cannot be judged in isolation from its meaningful and meaning-giving context of circumstances. The morality of any action is correlative to the love it expresses. Admittedly there are many deeds which are usually sinful (e.g., abortion, lying, arson, extramarital intercourse). This is not because they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they most often embody selfishness, exploitation of one’s neighbour, and irresponsibility. In certain extraordinary circumstances these actions might so bespeak commitment and caring and sincerity that, viewed in their contextual totality, they would be adjudged good and virtuous. Since morality is not intrinsic to acts, we can never resort to inflexible ethical laws or norms.

There is a parlour-game in which a whispered message is passed down a line from player to player and comes out unrecognisably distorted at the end. Sometimes the result is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, sometimes it is merely flat. Invariably it is ridiculous. Now this is not merely a game for parlours. It is a game which the succeeding generations of mankind have been playing with one another throughout history; and there we call it tradition (which is after all only a Latin word for handing on). Men of one generation after another have handed on their thoughts, their customs, their institutions to succeeding generations who have often made extraordinary and unrecognisable use of them. Sometimes the results are whimsical, more often they are tiresomely childish.

We in the Christian church have on our hands a great number of conceptions that started their life as adult, but, because they have been let slip from generation to generation by mere tradition without understanding, are now thoroughly and tiresomely childish. This article is an attempt to rescue one such conception from the childishness in which it is wrapped: namely, our conception of the Devil and his angels. It is an attempt to unroll tradition, so to speak, and catch our present conception in the making; to watch generation pass on its message to generation, and ask what message we would have received if each generation had made sure it understood what the previous generation was saying. Perhaps such an article can serve to start the original message on its way again.

Some few years ago I received a letter from Jacques Maritain, asking me if I could do anything to promote the performance in England of Arthur Lourié’s opera Le Maure de Pierre le Grand. This was based on a tale by Pushkin and extracts from it had been given by Stokovski with the Philadelphia orchestra. I did not know the work, and I had no influence in such matters. In the same letter Maritain declared that the time would come when Louri? would be recognized as the greatest composer of the century. That time has not come yet: Lourié’s work remains practically unknown, except to a few initiates. Until more performances of it have been given, and recordings from it made, it is obviously difficult for the rest of us to confirm Maritain’s opinion – whether we are musicians, or people like myself who are extremely fond of music. In the meantime curiosity is stirred by the publication of Lourié’s occasional writings under the title of Profanation et Sanctification du Temps.

Louri? and his wife are now living in Maritain’s house at Princeton and Maritain’s opinion is that of a close friend to whom this book is dedicated. It is supported, however, by independent and competent judges, like Henri Marrou, an eminent humaniste, and the musical critics Fred Goldbeck and Boris de Schloezer. Their testimony is printed as an appendix to this volume, which is admirably prefaced by Jean Mouton. The title is taken from a lecture given in 1963 at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette where the problem of Dieu et le monde moderne was under discussion. Lourié has no illusions about the monde moderne!

The most surprising thing about Mr Foot’s book is that it is there. When one considers the scale of the official war histories, one volume for the momentous events of El Alamein and Tunisia, one volume for Normandy, one volume for Singapore, one for Mandalay, military operations involving the deployment of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of men over wide areas of the globe, with final strategic issues in the balance, it comes as rather a shock to find that the compass of one volume is also required for a branch of operations directly involving a force of British and French agents numbered merely in hundreds. The reason is quite simply that these operations have become the focus of at least as much interest and concern as any other single aspect of the war in Europe. There can have been few supposedly clandestine operations bathed in a brighter glow of publicity. The organisers and agents of Special Operations Executive have written about its activities in many countries, and it was high time someone dredged through the archives and at any rate attempted a balanced and neutral account of what happened after Winston Churchill set Hugh Dalton at the head of the organisation with the dramatic order: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’

Mr Foot has worked under severe limitations. SOE controlled a good many activities in France, not all of which are fully covered by this book. He deliberately excludes the running of escape routes, and of the two sections which ran saboteurs into France, RF Section and F (French) Section, the latter is his real concern.

Writing of Eric Gill some years ago Graham Greene remarked that ‘Catholicism in England instead of producing revolutionaries, produces only eccentrics, and that Gill was a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics . . . That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anticlerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful.’ And we have seen quite a lot of those silly weary smiles yet again in the reception of Mr Speaight’s biography of Gill. Rarely can such a beautifully produced and expensive book have received such accolades for the biographer’s skill and such a confident dismissal of the subject. One sees the book being read with a nostalgic regret for the sunny days of such delightful chesterbelloc buffoonery with all the home-grunnit food, tunics and sandals, and placed on the shelf with a sad shrug, ‘Poor Gill’.

I do not want to be misunderstood, Gill was certainly eccentric in many respects, his views on monarchy and the indecency of husband and wife kneeling together in church, for example, and Mr Speaight has valuably stressed Gill’s Victorian formation which plays an important part in all this. He has also filled in many of the gaps in the Autobiography, particularly the incidents leading up to the removal from Ditchling, his documentation is wide and admirably integrated. Gill’s biography is perhaps an unenviable and delicate task, but I think the reception of the book and the confirmation of Gill’s place among the wayward cranks of English Catholicism owes something to the biographer’s interpretation of his subject, or rather the interpretation he fails to make.