The past decade has seen a quickening of intellectual life among Italian Dominicans of the Roman Province, leading to certain initiatives and achievements which deserve to be better known than they are to Dominicans outside Italy and to others interested in the work of the Order. I refer to the activities of the group of friars, whose centre of operations is the splendid old “studium” of their Province at Pistoia, near Florence, who produce the excellent bi-monthly review Vita Sociale and have revived and wonderfully transformed the old historical journal of the Italian Dominicans, Memorie Domenicane. It is to this latter production that I want, in these brief notes, to draw attention; and along with it, to two important books from the same Pistoian workshop dealing-in; very different ways and in one case, it is true, only indirectly-with that same turning-point in the history of Catholicism, and indeed of western culture as a whole, on which the historical research that has gone into the new Memorie Domenicane (= M.D.) has tended to concentrate—the turning-point indicated in phrases like ‘the rise of humanism’, where this term is taken to signify a typically non-medieval outlook expressed in a new form of culture whose ‘rise’ coincided inter alia with the decline of medieval scholasticism. It need hardly be said that such a use of terms begs many questions, but that it answers to some historical reality needn’t be doubted; it being surely unquestionable that Petrarch and Erasmus, though separated by nearly two centuries, were ‘humanists’ in very much the same sense, and that this entailed in both of them a strongly critical attitude to the scholastic culture and mentality.

The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.

However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.

Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.

The death of T. S. Eliot in the first month of the seventh centenary of Dante's birth could be an occasion for examining a particular poetic influence; or, more generally, for reflecting on Dante's contemporary ‘image'. The subject, however, of the present note is an aspect of Dante's poetry in itself—though considered, as befits the occasion, with an eye to its general relevance to us today. That it has some such relevance is no doubt already implied in allowing this of Eliot's work – in particular of the Four Quartets; for no one, I suppose, would deny that these poems have a contemporary importance, and certainly they, like Ash Wednesday and Animula and even The Waste Land, are inconceivable without the influence and example of Dante. Yet one may doubt whether Eliot's own example has been much followed, in this respect, by more recent poets. Eliot did his best, certainly, and to re-read now the famous essay of 1927 is to be struck once more by its admirable concentration on Dante as artist and a master in his art. The essay was not addressed to scholars, nor even primarily, I think, to the common reader, but to the writer's fellow-poets. The emphasis was all on Dante ‘the master', ‘the greatest master of the simple style', from whom ‘more can be learned about how to write poetry’ than from any English poet. How many of our contemporaries, I wonder, look to Dante in this way? For the modern educated public the Comedy— that epitome of Western pre-Renaissance thought and feeling – remains an important historical document; it is hardly felt as a stimulus to fresh creative writing.

When I was young a book with this sort of title and written by Catholics would have been intended as an answer; the Church would have been defended. One can plausibly imagine some of the contributors: Belloc and Chesterton, not yet, respectively, too old or dead; Fathers Martindale and McNabb; Mr Waugh speaking for youth and perhaps Eric Gill (a bit uneasy with some of the company) for art. Count de la Bedoyère's team are of a different kidney. All but two of them seem far more concerned to raise than to answer objections, and if the formula of our imaginary book might have been ‘Yes, but . . . ‘, that of the present one is rather ‘Yes, and...', followed by a strong recommendation that it is high time something was done about it. The common mood, in short, is one of protest, the common aim is reform. Hence it isn't surprising, given the Church's established structure, that the general tone may fairly, if loosely, be described as anticlerical. And it is perhaps here, rather than in the particular views and arguments put forward, that this book's chief interest and significance lies, – not, of course, simply in its being slanted towards anticlericalism, but in its being so in a new, contemporary way.

In the twenties and thirties there were currents of anticlerical feeling in English Catholicism, but they were small and scattered, and, more important, they neither claimed nor expected much support from theology.

To this second edition of his now famous Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow has added fifty pages of further thoughts provoked by the extraordinary amount of attention it received. One can say ‘extraordinary’ without irony, or with little. In itself the lecture was not very remarkable— neither deep, nor subtle, nor closely reasoned, nor witty. But it made its points with force and it was exceedingly topical. Moreover Sir Charles is an interesting and versatile man, and as a writer he has a beguiling knack of combining a certain high seriousness—solemnity even—with the common touch. One feels that he has tried hard not to be spoiled by success—not, in a sense, to be changed by it at all. He brings the whole of himself, his feelings as well as his gifts and experience, into all that he writes. He does so here. Allusions to Rutherford and G. H. Hardy, dropped with a tone at once admiring and affectionate, and to high table conversations, evoke the Cambridge background and the thrill of having been a young research student there at ‘one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics’. Allusions to the working class origins widen the perspective and humanise it; reference to important tasks well performed in the civil service add the impression—and a perfectly just one— of a man who knows much front the inside about power and the workings of power. Indeed the only ‘inside’ allusion one misses is to the novelist’s art; which is a pity since so much of the lecture, on its more polemical side, and so much of the comment now added to it, amount to an indictment of the ‘literary intellectual’ and, indirectly or by implication, of a good deal of the literature which he either produces or spends much time and energy discussing.

‘It was the pattern of Michelangelo’s life’, writes Mr Michael Ayrton, introducing a translation of the great artist’s sonnets, ‘that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed . . . whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him’. A story, then, of disappointment by distraction: an artist of outstanding genius in several media, but profoundly drawn to one in particular, finds himself repeatedly diverted, by circumstances and his patrons, from the work he most wanted to do; the result being the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment on the one hand, and on the other the unfinished tombs for Julius II and the Medici. And while those paintings are superb, they are unmistakably, almost pathetically, the work of a man whose deepest impulse was to carve in stone. ‘Say a good word, John’, wrote Michelangelo in the bizarre sonnet-letter to a friend about the discomforts of painting the Sistine vault lying on his back, ‘for these dead paintings of mine... for this place is no good and I’m no painter’. And many years later, in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, he tries to define what he felt about the two arts. It is a hesitant, halting letter because the old man was genuinely puzzled. Varchi, writing ‘philosophically’, had declared painting and sculpture to be really ‘the same thing’, and though Michelangelo knew by experience that they weren’t, he was too humble to contradict. He had always assumed, he replied, that painting was good ‘the closer it approached relief and relief was bad the nearer it got to painting, so that I’ve always thought of sculpture as the guiding-light (la lantema) of painting and that the two differ as the sun and the moon’. Now however he has changed his mind, yielding to Varchi’s metaphysics, agreeing that these arts ‘are one and the same’.

To start with, a tempting text for the anti-humanist; only let him take care how he reads it. In 1485-6 a Flemish Carmelite wrote to the Venetian scholar Ermolao Barbaro to compliment him on his work and ask some personal questions: is Barbaro married? Or is he a priest or a religious? Answer: I am neither this nor that nor the other: paganus et spontis meae sum. Duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras; cetero sum liberrimus . . . Obviously, the context saves us from misreading that paganus; Barbaro is using classical Latin and the word here means simply ‘layman’. And yet an unsympathetic reader might cavil still. That acknowledgement of two lords, Christ and . . . ‘letters’! Did not our Lord tell us we cannot serve two masters? Certainly; all the same it might be unfair to jump to conclusions: better, for the moment, to keep Barbaro’s phrase in mind as a kind of motto of the humanist mentality we shall be considering, epitomizing both the integration it aspired to and also, no doubt, the risks that it ran.

The literary sense of ‘humanist’ - as referring to ‘one devoted to or versed in the hterary culture called the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a latinist’ (O.E.D.) - is almost obsolete in modem English, except in history books, where Humanism designates the revival of classical studies in the later Middle Ages and the currents of thought and feeling that it occasioned. A discreet definition on these lines is offered by the American scholar E. H. Wilkins: ‘the scholarly strand in the Renaissance’; which in turn raises of course the question of what we mean by the Renaissance. As an historical term it obviously contrasts with ‘Middle Ages’; there was, it is implied, a rebirth bringing those Ages to an end; and they, as ‘middle’, intervened between a time when something was alive and a second time when it came back to life; and so were a more or less dead or dormant epoch, an interval of darkness between two luminous eras.

A drawing of Dante on the dust-cover of this new study of the Divine Comedy gives the poet a slightly Oriental look—and is that a helmet he is wearing? The suggestion, anyhow, of the Mongolian and the martial, whether intended or not, may perhaps be linked with the fact that the author is a young North Korean who served with distinction in the Korean army against the Communists before going to America to study philosophy at Yale. Mr Swing is a convert to the Catholic faith and, to judge from this book, his Dante studies have a good deal to do with his religion. He has fed his mind on the strong Christian meat of the Comedy: it has formed in fact his introduction to theology, and he now repays the debt with a theological introduction to it. And because his mind is exceptionally vigorous and original, and because he is very well acquainted with Dante’s poem (though not, I think, with its literary and historical background) he has given us an extremely interesting and even valuable book. So much had better be said at once, and emphatically, because it would be only too easy to multiply objections in detail to Swing’s work, while missing or only half-appreciating its merits as a whole. It is likely to irritate scholars—that irritable race—and on the other hand it takes its subject too seriously to prove easy reading for people who do not already know the Divine Comedy fairly well. Thus it may in effect fall between two stools, leaving the scholars full of their ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, and the others somewhat bewildered. And that, I am sure, would be a pity; but before I go on to say why, it may be of interest to glance round the field which our young Korean critic has entered as a newcomer.