The subject is a vast one. I cannot therefore give more than a few leading ideas on the general theme of art as it was used and understood in the Middle Ages. We could hardly begin from the early Christian artists and follow the history of painting, sculpture, music, stained glass and so on through the Byzantine period right up to the Renaissance. It is an inspiring and vast history, until modern times very much overlooked, but now studied in great detail through a whole library of volumes.

I should like first to deal with the general characteristics, because so often people have supposed that the lack of realism displayed by the artist of the Middle Ages represented a lack of skill. The earlier age of Greek and Roman sculpture reached an extremity of realism to be seen in such popular figures as the Venus of Milo, every detail of the human figure, every fold of the loosely falling clothes described in stone with a finesse of observation which today is called photographic. And later as the Middle Ages passed into the Renaissance we find the same accurate observation and skilful representation, culminating in the pathetic marble of Michel Angelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s at Rome. In between these two triumphant periods the Christian artists seem to have been like children unobservant of details and incapable of any but the crudest representation. The modem man trained in an age of photography and extremes of technique tends to measure all art by the accuracy with which the painting or the statue represents the natural object it depicts.

I must begin by saying how much I appreciate the honour of being asked to address a group of scientists on this subject; and my only hope is that what I have to say will not prove entirely irrelevant to the concerns of those who practise experimental science in one form or another, though I suspect that the kind of relevance which I shall suggest is rather a peculiar one.

While the experimental sciences—what is usually meant by ‘science’—have become highly diversified today, so much so that divisions of the sciences such as ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’, ‘botany’ and so on, are so general as to be pretty well unusable, one feature in particular distinguishes theology from all of them and indeed from any other intellectual pursuit whatsoever: the fact that theology itself belongs to the supernatural order. By ‘theology’ I shall always mean ‘sacred theology’ and not ‘natural theology’, which is properly a special way of practising metaphysics. To say that theology in this sense belongs to the supernatural order is not merely to say that its object, what it studies, is something supernatural, the Revealed. It is also to say that it is itself, in its intrinsic movement and apprehension of truth, something supernatural. It is not merely the application of procedures already practised in other fields to a special field, a special set of data, though it certainly is that too, as we shall see: but its very intellectual activity shares the specific character of the special field which it investigates.

For a number of years, cosmology has been a favourite science with the British public, and, with the development of radio astronomy and the recent launching of earth- satellites, the choice of a cosmologist to give the recent Reith Lectures was not surprising. Professor A. C. B. Lovell, who is well-known for the part he played in the development of the great Jodrell Bank radio telescope, took as his title ‘The individual and the universe’, and in his lectures he found three points of contact between cosmology and religion, each of which calls for comment.

The first occurred in his introductory lecture, which was devoted to the transition from the medieval geocentric and ordered cosmos to the infinite universe of the late seventeenth century. ‘In the three centuries since Galileo and Newton we have moved far, but the vital break with tradition belongs to their age, not ours.’ Now Professor Lovell shows that he appreciates that the revolution sparked off by the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus rapidly involved not only physical science as a whole, but also philosophy, religion, and in fact many of the features of man’s world picture. But it is on the religious aspect that he dwells. ‘The story’, he says, ‘is mainly one of persecution of the astronomers on religious grounds’, and in this way he produces a thoroughly distorted and unsatisfactory picture, for which he was rightly censured by Mr Arthur Koestler in a long letter to The Listener the following week.

That the earth is a sphere was already known to the Greeks by the time of Plato; and most of them were agreed that the sky too is spherical, as suggested by the daily wheeling motion systematically shared by all but seven of the stars. So far so good, but with the seven exceptions, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the attempt to understand the structure of the universe ran into difficulties. These seven circled the earth every day just like the ‘fixed’ stars, but in addition they moved against the background of the fixed stars without, it seemed, rhyme or reason. However, as the lunar month and the seasonal years showed, the apparently random movements of the ‘wanderers’ or ‘planets’ concealed regularities that were not always evident at first sight, and this raised the question of ‘saving the appearances’ of the planets, of explaining their movements by displaying the geometrical patterns underlying them.

This was the problem that dominated astronomy in the two thousand years that separated Plato from Kepler: a highly technical challenge, of such complexity that in the thirteenth century, Alphonso X of Castile, exasperated by the difficulties of preparing the Alphonsine planetary tables, said he wished God had consulted him when creating the world. Yet, despite its technicality, the problem of the wandering stars is one of the most significant issues in the whole history of science; for when in the sixteenth century Copernicus proposed a solution according to which the earth was itself merely one of several planets which circle round the sun, his specialist monograph sparked off one of the most profound revolutions ever to occur in human thought.

Mr T. S. Eliot has often shown a preoccupation with childhood, and at times this preoccupation has shown itself as a search for a lost Eden. In Burnt Norton the leaves are alive with the laughter of children:

In Little Gidding there are

‘the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Moreover, as the waves of the sea recall the river-god from The Dry Salvages that ‘was present in the nursery, so the apple- tree, acting as a double symbol, recalls both the expulsion from the garden and the cross that made redemption possible.

This theme has found its repetition in the plays, notably in The Family Reunion, where Harry speaks nostalgically of the hollow tree in which he played ‘Injuns’ and regrets the summerhouse that has been put in its place ‘to please the children’. For the question that confronts Harry is ‘Who am I?’—a question, in some form or other, that all Mr Eliot’s dramatis personae have to answer. In The Confidential Clerk the problem is intensified because there the question or quest of self-identification is closely allied with that of heredity and illegitimacy. In The Cocktail Party the problem is the same, though there the quest is concealed in the question.

The gables of Saint-Séverin stand sentinel beside the Rue St Jacques as that historic artery of ancient France gains the Seine and the Ile de la Cité. Pilgrims passed by as they left for Campostella; the broad boulevard and the twisting streets of the old quartier are still the home of cosmopolitan youth flocking to the schools of Paris. Here in fact is a special welcome for them, for besides its native parish Saint-Séverin is charged especially with a mission to the university world of displaced youth struggling to keep body and soul together in a world of perpetual motion. A church with a history adapts itself more easily to broad and generous demands. And from the days of Séverin, a sixth-century south bank solitary, this church has a long history. Fulk preached the Fourth Crusade there; Dante prayed there in the thirteen hundreds; and if subsequently its fame declined somewhat, at least Huysmans at the end of the nineteenth century found the church ravishing and its Masses exquisite.

In 1947 something of a renaissance befell when Cardinal Suhard appointed the Abbé Connan to the parish of Saint-Séverin with a special mandate to revive and transform it into a church and community capable of ‘welcoming’ the students of the Latin Quarter. About the same time the Cardinal entrusted L’Hay-les-Roses to a Benedictine to establish a community capable of welcoming converts from the Mission de Paris. In each case the parish was to be given a chance to prove itself as a competent missionary instrument in the modern world.

As I go through the notes I made on a recent trip to the U.S.S.R., three of these strike me as throwing a certain amount of light on the whole question of the information and impressions one gets in that country. In the first place, I had been told that the Moscow crowd was drably and poorly dressed; and certainly at first glance one does feel there is something odd about the Muscovite’s appearance. One could easily be led to conclude that this was due to the poverty of his wardrobe. But in Leningrad, where people in fact dress in much the same way as at Moscow, the impression left is quite different. All this would remain most mysterious did one not remember that whereas in Leningrad we find a population that has always been urban, the Muscovite is fresh from the country. Between 1917 and 1958 the population of Moscow increased from 600,000 to more than six million, and the immense majority of the newcomers are peasants unfamiliar with town ways. Thus what gives us the feeling of strangeness about Moscow is really the unexpected rustic appearance of these new inhabitants.

Again, I had heard the fact that even V.I.Ps. sit in the front of their cars beside their chauffeurs put forward as an example of the real democratic feeling one finds in the Soviet. During my visit, however, I discovered that the seat next to the driver is considered to be the place of honour.

The story of the exile and extinction of die Dominican nuns of Dartford has been told elsewhere. It will be enough here to recall that by the intercession of the Spanish ambassador at London they were allowed by Elizabeth I to leave England as a community. They numbered nine nuns and a postulant, together with two Dominican priests. They sailed for Antwerp with the Bridgettine nuns of Sion and the Carthusians of Sheen in June 1559. They were assigned a part of a ruinous monastery occupied by a small community of Dutch Dominican nuns at Leliendael on the island of Schouwen in Zeeland.

The plight of these exiled contemplatives aroused considerable compassion. They were granted pensions of twenty crowns each by Philip II of Spain, who was the ruler of the Netherlands. The trouble was that these pensions were paid only fitfully, as the money had to be raised by local taxation and the Flemings were already heavily over-taxed to provide money for the war against the Dutch Calvinists who were devastating the country. There was also an annual donation of five hundred crowns from Pius IV, and the nuns had their share in this. There was however much delay and uncertainty in the payment of the papal alms.

The Dominican nuns were the object of special compassion because one of them, Elizabeth White, was half-sister of Bishop John Fisher whose martyrdom twenty-five years before had sent a thrill of horror through Europe that was still remembered. At least something might be done for her.

If I were given three words in which to summarize my feelings about church art today, I should choose difficult, dangerous and delicate; and I should add that the nearer we get to practice the more applicable do these words become. It is all too clear that we live today in a non-religious culture. Our current aesthetic ideas and values are secular, even when they are not actually materialistic. Thus the artist who dedicates his talents to the service of religion will inevitably have to work against the current trends and feehngs of the modern world. Then the practical, the technical and economic difficulties are, as will appear, both acute and numerous. It is also a disability that the artist who devotes himself to religion, in this country works in an intellectual vacuum. There is little philosophical or theological literature available to him, and though he is often unconscious of this serious deficiency in his equipment, it is none the less there.

So much for difficulty! But surely also, to jump a point, the practice of church art calls for delicacy and restraint, and in artists or craftsmen who are not of the first order there is a woeful lack of either. This makes the whole business exceedingly dangerous for those who engage in church art. I mean that below a certain level of competence the ‘artist’ is a menace! It is no light matter to seek to give aesthetic expression to Christian truth and mystery, which, I suppose, is what is really meant by church art.

The publication of the Wolfenden Report has re-opened an old debate. How far should human legislation enter the field of morals and condemn behaviour reprobated by the Christian tradition? The difference between crime and sin is pretty generally recognized at the extremes; thus a man will admit to a technical breach of the rules and regulations without concluding thereby that it is matter for the Sacrament of Penance. The difficulty is to know where to draw the line between what should be legislated against and what should be left well alone, even though it may be objectionable to many on grounds of ethics, religion, or culture. Let us attempt to mark the frontier, or rather to narrow the marches between the temporal” and spiritual powers in the culpability country.

Among Catholics the guarded approval which greeted the Report was presently followed by dissent. Perhaps their attitude will harden when the proposals come before Parliament, but for the moment it remains unsettled. The ambiguity reflects an oscillation between two opposite charges in the widespread suspicions entertained about our social mentality. Grumbles at one moment about clerical fussiness and intrusion into private affairs are followed at the next by mutters about condoning human frailties which do not interfere with ecclesiastical privileges. We are told of priests with blackthorns scouring the hedgerows for courting couples of a summer evening, of petulant sacristans shooing lightly-clad tourists away from the churches, of orders from the pulpit telling us how to vote: behind all this lurks an archetypal Mrs Grundy—crowned with a biretta.

In April 1957 the Bishops’ Report burst upon Scotland with a minor explosion. It fanned the embers of national feeling in those who, having little interest in theology, saw in the proposals an attempt by the English to absorb one of the few remaining national institutions; it frightened many Godly Presbyterians who saw in it the thin end of a prelatic wedge and the beginnings of idolatry; but it did not arouse organized popular support for its own proposals. Probably several influential Scottish churchmen would welcome the acceptance of the proposals contained in this report, but they certainly cannot claim to lead a popular movement. And so the explosion which heralded the first publication of the Report turned out to be more of a firework display than the first rumblings of a serious battle, for there was only one fairly clearly defined party—the opposition.

The result of the first round in the discussions may have been a little misleading. The General Assembly in 1957 accepted the Report for study. This meant that the majority of ministers and elders in the Assembly refused to reject the Report out of hand, but decided that it should be studied by as many ministers, elders, and members of the Church of Scotland as possible; and it also showed that very many Church of Scotland ministers admit the urgency of finding a solution to the scandal of a divided Christendom. The Report was, therefore, widely distributed for unofficial study and discussion; and after the Assembly of 1958 was sent down to the local courts, the presbyteries, for official debate.

The state of religion among Arab Muslims is much the same as among Western Christians. With both, religion survives in an active form among a minority; with both, the majority still cling to the name. Among both, men desire a high standard of living which most of them have always been denied; they have a new faith in scientific progress, which has brought about concrete results, and they accept the claim that it supersedes old beliefs. Both in Christendom and Islam there are conservatives who do not care at what cost they associate religion with inessential interests to which they are attached. Among Muslims there may be a greater pride in the name of their religion than among Christians; the national apostasy of the Arabs is as far advanced as ours if we reckon by mosque attendance, but less so if we remember their pride in being Muslim. The intellectual reaction of a minority against unbelief is less advanced among the Muslims. Our intellectuals have reached the reaction against reaction, scientific humanists against believers, and with this has come a further hardening of our differences. Among Arabs the modern intellectual approach to religion is both cruder and more fluid. These differences are not as important as the similarities. Modern preoccupations are everywhere secular. In this Arab world which is broadly similar, in detail different, to our own, can we trace the influence of religion upon the actual preoccupations of ordinary people?

One sometimes hears it said that ‘the Church’ has changed its mind about evolution; Catholics are now allowed to believe in it, whereas formerly they were not. This is a thoroughly confused remark. Evolution is a biological theory, and biological evidence tells us whether it is true or false. It would he very odd to speak of a theory concerned with neither faith nor morals being officially accepted or rejected as part of the Catholic faith. But because the theory has implications which touch on the faith, Catholics looked for guidance from authority about the attitude they should take towards it where those matters were in question: guidance now given them in the encyclical Humani Generis, which encouraged theologians to investigate those points where the theory bore on truths of faith. The present article is not concerned with the biological evidence, which I accept, nor with an extended theological investigation, but merely with difficulties which Catholics still seem to have about the theory, and which are really philosophical in kind.

The first difficulty lies in the conflict which people still find between the theory of evolution and divine providence. How can we say that God directs the whole course of history if rigid scientific laws determine the way in which living things developed from inorganic matter, and finally evolved man? The problem is really that of understanding how causes in the natural world are related to the causality of God. People tend to think that if natural causes are not independent of God, their dependence must imply his constant interference with them to bring about what he wills.

It seems that all roads of thought, all mind-routes, lead into history; because, of any subject of study, even the most abstract, one is bound to ask, sooner or later, what has this to do with human life? And human life is necessarily historical. Every concept we use includes some reference to time, and as soon as we relate it to human life the reference at once becomes more or less explicit. In God himself our faith finds such a reference: he is not temporal, but his ways with man are; and in Christ he has seized hold of time in such a way as to compel us to acknowledge a divine mystery in it and to strive to penetrate this mystery so far as we can. This is a new compulsion, a peculiarly Christian one; it does not spring from the need to make sense of human life as such, but from the need, if one may so put it, to make sense of Christ. We certainly cannot separate human history, down to the present moment and on into the future, from Christ. But if this seems to commit us, as believers, to a ‘theology of history’, can we say that we are also committed, merely as reasoning animals, to a ‘philosophy of history’? Is such a discipline in fact conceivable? As philosophy it must be conceivable, if at all, and approachable, if at all, from the side of reason, not of faith.

Probably no issue is more important for the Christian Church than that created by cultural contact. The problems raised are tragic and difficult; the prejudices created have led to misery, injustice and fraud, dishonesty and cruelty on a gigantic scale. Wellmeaning and gentle individuals have been, and are, transformed by social and cultural pressures into overlords and oppressors. Bad history, bad anthropology, bad biology have been, and are, invoked to mask the real issues involved. Very few people can bear to consider themselves exploiters, or are so far devoid of good sense as seriously to consider themselves a better kind of person than other people. Yet given a commercial issue, some point of security or prestige, and at once our real feelings hide themselves under noble-sounding verbiage. It used to be the white man’s burden, then it was the development of colonial areas, so successful have we been in hiding from ourselves that it is with surprise that we discover that colonialism is a bad word, and the honour of white men very comic.

It may be that our materialistic folly or criminal blindness have closed the East and Africa to the effective preaching of the Gospel for generations; before the rising tide of rejection and protest we may be able to do nothing save accept the judgment of God; but that at least we must do, and so doing clarify our minds and reform our activity.

In helping us to do this Professor Hawke’s book is a tract for the times.

To start on a personal note, let me say that while I see that the visual art of Mr David Jones is a joy for ever, I cannot read the Anathemata. Mindful however of the magical beauty of those pictures, I am ready to spring to attention as soon as Mr Jones starts discoursing in prose; and so, for the purpose of commenting on this collection of his occasional papers and essays, the trouble I have with his other, ‘creative’ writings does not perhaps matter. It is partly no doubt a question of the sort of poetry one is predisposed to admire; and in my own case a mainly ‘Mediterranean’ training, and in particular the example of Dante, make a certain degree of visible order and outline in large-scale poetry a necessity for me. But our present business is with this rich miscellany of reflective prose, and here I find no difficulty at all in taking Mr Jones as a sort of Virgil-guide, a dolce maestro—in this case a Christian one—through a world he knows so well, the obscure but enchanting regions explored in this book.

I must, however, qualify the above with respect to the Welsh and Early British (if that is the right expression) matter contained here (Sections I and III), for on all this I am too ignorant to be even a good pupil. The strings of Welsh names mean nothing to me.