In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature. Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious. He suggested that ‘the profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction’ and he proposed ‘Francis as a patron saint for ecologists’. The article sparked off a good deal of interest. Richard Means, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, took up the point and expressing fundamental agreement with White on the religious aspect of the crisis, put forward pantheism as the basis of a solution. While there is a superficial attraction in pantheism as a foundation of the unity of reality, ultimately it destroys the diversity of creatures through a fusion in the All and it makes change, finitude and even evil, intrinsic to God Himself. Francis A. Schaeffer, Director of L’Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland, submitted the proposals of White and Means to a detailed analysis. In conclusion he rejected both : ‘So pantheism is not going to solve our international ecological problem. St Francis’s concept, as presented by Lynn White, is not going to solve it—the concept that everything is equal and everything is spiritually autonomous. Romanticism is no solution because ‘firstly, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and secondly, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man’.

The Sleeping Lord brings together all that has been printed, sporadically, of David Jones’s work since The Anathemata was published in 1952, except The Narrows (in the Anglo-Welsh Review, Autumn 1973) and The Kensington Mass (Agenda, special issue, 1974). These nine pieces are described as ‘fragments’, but the word can hardly be used here in the sense in which it is applied, for example, to the fragments of Ennius (I choose Ennius because that dogged old hexametrist is specially dear to David—what would he not give to have half-a-dozen complete books of Ennius discovered?). There is nothing broken or incomplete in anything that is built into this work. The last piece, it is true, from The Book of Balaam’s Ass, starts with a ragged edge, but the context is restored and the continuity reestablished in a very few lines.

The collection falls into four parts: an introductory poem, A, a, a, Domine Deus, which comes close to, but leaves a loophole from, despair; then four sections, The Wall, The Dream of Private Clitus, The Fatigue, and The Tribune’s Visitation, which have in common (to put it crudely for the moment) an imperial Roman setting; then comes The Tutelar of the Place, which may be read as a prayer against the imposition of order at the cost of diversity and personality; and this acts as a natural bridge to the two ‘Welsh’ sections, The Hunt and The Sleeping Lord. Finally, Balaam’s Ass, which comes as an addendum : differing considerably in style, scale, and feeling from the preceding poems, and yet, in spite of its position in the book, serving as a link between David’s earliest and latest work.

Of the many works which comprise the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canonical scriptures in Pali, none has had greater appeal to the Buddhist, whether monk or layman, than the Dhammapada. It is the favourite vademecum of the devout Buddhist. The reason for this is mainly the fact that it is a small work which contains in concise, epigrammatic form ‘the concentrated essence of the religion’.

The Tipitaka is a collection of the traditionally accepted canonical texts of the Theravada (also called Hinayana), the form of Buddhism which with local variations is dominant in South-East Asian countries—Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia—and is therefore known as the Southern School of Buddhism, which is one of the two main branches of the religion, the other being the Northern School, the Mahayana, which once flourished in India, whence it spread into Tibet, Nepal, China, Korea and Japan, in which countries it counts large numbers of adherents.

Sociology is not a universally beloved human science. It may have gained prestige in some quarters in recent years but it has enemies and opponents, who believe that in the long run sociology does more harm than good. During the past year the Chilean generals removed it with good reason from the universities and have declared null and void all degrees heretofore awarded in the subject. In some of the ways in which it has developed during the past half century, it can rightly be called a science of debunking. The movement in part started with Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) who made it his task to explain the non-rational, non-scientific nature of ideologies, and similarly much in thought and action that is said to be based on the obvious, the rational, and the true. In a different direction, sociological surveys have pricked other kinds of bubbles, and by the use of statistics, interviews, and other ‘factual’ devices, they have been able to mirror the gap between the ideal and the real, between the image and what actually occurs, between social intention and social achievement. One contemporary example can be seen in the analysis of local government. The procedures and decisions that are made by the authorities are very far from being democratic, very far from taking into account the wishes of those for whom measures are enacted. An examination of the activities of the local town hall along with the experiences of those who are governed by it allow one to assume that Pareto was right—even in the heart of a country priding itself as being democratic, government is indeed carried out by an élite, professional or elected.