Group action is the keynote to our modern society. No longer are men working as individuals, be it in business, in politics, or in religion. This group action is largely instinctive, but there is a desire for it and a realisation that through it something can be achieved, though unfortunately the ‘something’ is rather uncertain.

This desire for group action, this longing to be with and work with others, can be found in many spheres: Hitler and his mass regimentation, Mussolini’s fascist spirit, our own youth movements, in big business, and among Catholics.

Never before in the story of the Church has there been such interest in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. In all parts of the Church theologians and other thinkers are writing about and discussing the doctrine and working out its implications.

The Catholic layman should glory in the name of Catholic. It is no accident that, of the four marks of the true Church, Catholicity is the character that has prevailed. We are called Catholics, because the note of Catholicity in a sense contains and implies the others. Catholicity means unity diffused, spread abroad—unity everywhere. Unity absolutely demands a Hierarchy, oneness with the Apostolic tradition. Holiness means unity of belief and practice; the integral, personal unity of one who has perfectly harmonized faith and morals, whose life is the expression of his convictions of the one and only truth. Catholicity, therefore, means unity, vital and organized, unity magnificent, unity transcendent. Catholicity is the stupendous, resplendent unity of past and present, of all ages stretching out into the eternal years. The Catholic is one with Christ and one with all with whom Christ is one. The Catholic is the totalitarian Christian.

This totalitarian mark is conspicuous in the lives of the Church’s martyrs whose eminent charity led them to the last limit of self-sacrifice: their heroic constancy makes them one with the King of martyrs with Whom they are identified even to the shedding of their blood.

Few words are more ambiguous than ‘liberalism.’ Liberals of the Manchester school invoked liberalism in their efforts to liberate economic activity from state control, whereas modern liberals are even more anxious than Socialists to extend the sphere of the state’s activities. When Lord Shaftesbury, the Conservative, introduced the Factory Acts to liberate small children from the tyranny of the machines, John Bright and Cobden protested in the name of liberalism against any attempt to fetter the economic activities of the factory owners. Towards the end of the century, Mr. Lloyd George, in the name of Liberalism, imposed compulsory insurance on the nation.

My father’s Liberalism was derived not from Manchester, but from Nazareth. He was one of the last survivors of those Victorians who were Christian Liberals as opposed to secular Liberals. The Liberalism of the convinced Christian must always be qualified by the conclusions which he draws from the great premise that man is made in the image of God, and therefore has rights which no dictator and no democratic majority can over-ride. Secular Liberalism, on the other hand, with its deification of the ‘General Will,’ inevitably leads to the servile state. If man is nothing more than first cousin to the chimpanzee there is no reason why a dictator or a dictatorial majority should not put him behind bars. It is only man’s supernatural estate which alone guarantees his personal dignity and his inalienable rights.

‘Men may be evil in many ways, but good in one alone.’ So wrote wisely the unknown poet whom Aristotle quotes in the Ethics, and he wrote with deeper significance than he could have known. To be ‘good’ is, properly understood, to be on the way to the attainment of that essential perfecting which human nature of itself craves and must seek, and even mere reason can show that this perfection is to be found only in the attainment of the Universal Good, which can be none other than God, for God Who is the First Cause must needs be therefore the Final End. This much may be known by reason; but from a source of knowledge infinitely surpassing reason in profundity and certainty comes the revelation of a human destiny which a finite mind could not otherwise know nor finite power hope to attain to. The First Cause and Universal Good has revealed Himself as the Father and Friend of man. He has revealed man’s elevation from the natural order to the supernatural wherein it is possible for him to become the friend of God and to attain to a perfection such as ‘eye hath not seen nor ear heard.’ Once raised to this supernatural possibility, man can find no peace, no happiness until he attains to that perfection. ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart rests not until it rests in Thee.’

To supply the lack of a detailed treatise on the categories in English, Dom Augustine Osgniach has written this substantial book, supplementing his exposition of scholastic doctrine with critical studies of the historical fate of the ideas of substance, quantity, quality, relation. The method is well chosen, since the historico-critical studies bring into play the relevance to the fundamental problems of human thought of the scholastic doctrines in question; whereas a bald exposition modelled upon such Latin text-books as, e.g., Gredt (Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae), may indeed lay before readers what St. Thomas and his commentators taught, but will hardly gain access for that teaching into their minds without the support of an oral pedagogy. Not only does the method followed in this book secure the relevance of scholastic principles, but it enables the author to give them accurate development to a point which would perhaps weary’ the most hardy reader if reference to the later developments of philosophy were less constant and less close.

Perhaps the chief source of modern distrust of the categories is the fear, not by any means without foundation in the later developments of scholasticism, that the logical order is usurping the order of reality and imposing upon the real a system and framework of divisions and dependences which properly belong to the mode of our mind’s knowing and not to the mode of existence of things.

It can hardly be necessary at this date to summarize the contents of a book which, one notes with thankfulness, has been so widely described and discussed. It will be recalled that Mr. Eliot’s purpose in writing it was to offer a ‘contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come’; and the most fitting way in which to salute his work would therefore seem to be to confine oneself to suggesting the main points at which further elucidation appears desirable. The urgency of such continued discussion should also need no stressing; the background against which these lectures are to be read is the realization, in September 1938, of a ‘general plight,’ the conscious ‘doubt of the validity of a civilization and that doubt is not assuaged but intensified, the urgent need of following as best we may the lead here given us is not diminished but increased, by the constant iteration, from press and platform, that the conflict in which we are now engaged is quite simply one between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, between Satan and Christianity.’ The last thing we should like to do would be to examine that “Christianity” which, in such contexts as this, we say we keep.’ We can make much emotional capital out of the use of labels that have lost all definite meaning; but the facts are quite plain.