During many years of consideration, I have grown into a firm conviction that two of the greatest masters of the human psyche have been Plato and St Augustine. There is a close connection between them. Both considered philosophy to be a sort of therapeia, both were personally and theoretically concerned with the problem of integration, and both saw clearly that the personal and the social problem are at bottom one and the same. That is why we can take so much of our material from Augustine’s City of God.

Everybody knows that Plato declares in the Republic that the individual is the state writ small. Usually this is taken to be a proposition of political philosophy, and this is true enough if we have a right understanding of what Plato intended by politics. If we read the Gorgias we shall find a remarkable sentence in which Socrates says that the science which takes care of the health of the body is medicine, but that that which takes care of the health of the psyche is—politics! The argument with Polus, near the commencement of which this statement stands, concludes by saying that the man who is sick with guilt ought to go to the judge and legislator and beg them for the punishment which will cure him. If we consider how much profit we ourselves could expect for our guilt-ridden souls by approaching Parliament or the minister of justice as the agents for our release, we can imagine the incredulity of Socrates’ hearers. But his point is clear: politics should be regarded as psychotherapy. The right environment for integrated personal living is a community under just laws.

Within the last seven years Britain has shed political responsibility for most of the areas she formerly governed, and France for all. With the waning and extinction of political power over Africa by former colonial countries, would it not be appropriate to disengage culturally as well?

The case is arguable. To survey the cultural confusion and desolation left in the wake of the withdrawing colonial powers is a deeply disturbing experience. It disturbs not merely the thoughtful Westerner, but, much more profoundly and lastingly, the sensitive African. Chinua Achebe shows the beginnings of disintegration in Things Fall Apart. Ferdinand Oyono in Le Vieux Nègre et la Médaille and Une Vie de Boy shows the growing cultural disorientation. Achebe, again, in No Longer at Ease and Cyprian Ekwensi in People of the City take the process a stage further into the cultural confusion and jumbled values of urban living in modern Africa. Surely the tale of harm is long enough; it is time to withdraw, with bowed heads. It is the West that is in need, of cultural and spiritual regeneration. Why send our disenchantment, our aridity overseas? Let us put our own house in order. If any African wishes to come and make his own gleanings amongst us, let him be welcome, but let him be warned that the pickings are thin.

But the snug haven of withdrawal is no longer open today. Suzerainty has gone but interdependence between states has taken its place. No country can withdraw into political isolation. Britain is still politically involved in Africa, and Africa in Britain, and the involvement will increase. Cultural withdrawal makes even less sense than the spurious neutrality of political disengagement. Cultural interrelationships will grow closer, and will provide the setting and much of the matter of political interdependence.

In recent times there has grown up a strong feeling that our tradition of sanctity is inadequate, and that this inadequacy is connected with its isolation from the secular world. In Fr Rabut’s words, ‘La saintete traditionelle s’est coupé non seulement du peche mais souvent des espoirs et des travaux du monde’.

This period of comparative isolation from ‘the hopes and labours’ of the world has coincided with a period of strong establishment; so that the isolation has expressed itself in practice not in indifference but in active obstruction to most of the advances made in the post-reformation period. Is there a necessary connection between the obstruction and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, the period of establishment of Christianity in Western society?

Certainly, one of the most curious aspects of the Church in its social dimension has been its almost total opposition to change: not to this or that particular change, but to change as such. This has taken the form of an implacable opposition to a succession of radical or revolutionary philosophies which have fomented change over the past five hundred years. Nineteenth-century liberals met with the same treatment as their twentieth-century counterparts, those theorists and reformers who, at various positions left of centre, have learned not to count the Church as among their allies. They are tinged with ‘secularism’ and ‘utopianism’, are irreverent of precedent and tradition, and easily fit into that elastic ecclesiastical category of ‘dangerous’.

Since history is, almost by definition, change, it will be seen that this puts a great strain on the relationship between the church and a section of the world which has particular claims on the church’s sympathy.

As presented to us in Europe at the moment, the American film is in a rum state of disproportion. Hurtling around in circuit like so many giant satellites go the blockbusters—El Cid and Ben Hur and West Side Story—and not yet generally released are the near three hours of The Cardinal, the three hours plus of Cleopatra, looming like Easter Island figures in the West End or on the boulevards of Paris.

And yet, in contrast to films of such enormous magnification, spatial and temporal, financial and technical, we have now been able to see a handful of American films which would almost appear to have been made by directors looking through the wrong end of the telescope, so deliberately small-scale are they.

The first of these was, I suppose, the memorable Shadows, made by John Cassavetes to please himself in a kind of sophisticated near-improvisation, which ran for months at the Academy Cinema, with the longest queues of the most enthusiastic young audiences that London had seen since foreign films reached us again after the war. This study of race relations in New York, made in a minor key but with major intelligence, was most absorbing, apart from its sheer cinematic interest, for the insight it gave one into the lives of real people, as distinct from film stereotypes, as prolific in the American cinema as in the British, but less easily detectible by the stranger. And now that one has read James Baldwin’s Another Country, Shadows seems even more impressive in retrospect. Then came Shirley Clarke’s The Connection—I do not think one can include The Savage Eye in this category, for it was essentially a documentary—which was a wonderfully entertaining piece of work. It dealt, you will recall, with the existence of junkies whilst they await the appearance of Cowboy—sinister black boy in white dungarees—who will bring them their dope, without which they cannot survive.