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A Scholastic Universalist The Writings and Thought of Bernard Kelly (1907–1958)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Bernard Kelly was a regular contributor to Blackfriars and other Catholic periodicals over a lengthy period extending from the 1930s to the 1950s. Rayner Heppenstall, in his book on Léon Bloy, called him “a man of the purest genius”. In more recent times, however, he seems to have been strangely forgotten. If we speak of him now, it is because we believe that his insights, drawn from scholastic philosophy and especially from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, are of value not only for present-day Catholics, but for all Christians, and indeed for spiritual seekers of all faiths. Kelly once said: “There are some of us who can’t rightly pray without a pen in our hands.” Kelly was clearly no ordinary writer for him writing was prayer. He epitomized the view that prayer could only be accomplished on the basis of truth, and his writing was a means of determining and fixing the truth in his own mind and in the minds of others. A few years ago Barbara Wall published a moving account of Kelly’s life; here we shall concentrate chiefly on his writings and thought.
Kelly’s inspiration was the writings of the Medieval philosophers and, in particular, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. For him, the Summa was a vehicle of truth and a paradigm of spirituality. Many are aware of St. Thomas’s declaration towards the end of his life that, in comparison with the Divine Reality Itself, his writings were as a heap of straw. A differing and more important evaluation is less well known; Christ Himself appeared to Aquinas in a vision and said to him: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (“Thou hast written well concerning Me, Thomas”).
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Bowes and Bowes, London, 1953Google Scholar.
2 The Chesterton Review, Saskatchewan, May 1987Google Scholar.
3 Blackfriars (London), January 1959Google Scholar.
4 Blackfriars (London), January 1937Google Scholar.
5 For Kelly, communism (and the same can be said of the Teilhardian progressivism which persists even after communism has outwardly crumbled) signified a collectivist revolt against God. This is atheism in its crudest and most brutal form, and the very antithesis of both Platonism and Thomism.
6 Dominican Studies (London), Vol. 7, 1954, pp. 254–271Google Scholar.
7 ibid.
8 Blackfriars (London), January 1956Google Scholar
9 Autobiography (Jonathan Cape, London, 1940), p. 174Google Scholar.
10 Dominican Studies (London), Vol. 7, 1954Google Scholar.
11 ibid. Another highly literate Catholic who paid tribute to Guénon's seminal role was Walter Shewring, classical scholar and master at Ampleforlh College who, in The Weekly Review (London) in 1942, wrote: “René Guénon is one of the few writers of our time whose work is really of importance… He stands for the primacy of pure metaphysics over all other forms of knowledge… Guénon's writings…stress the intellectual decline of the West since the Renascence and expose the superstitions of ‘science’ and ‘progress’… Most of his theses are in better accord with authentic Thomist doctrine than are many opinions of ill–instructed Christians.” Yet another Catholic intellectual of the same period who wholeheartedly espoused the Guénon and Schuon perspective was Angus Macnab, author of a fascinating study of the interaction of Islam and Christianity during the Spanish Middle Ages entitled Spain under the Crescent Moon (Spanish translation: Olan̈eta, Paima de Mallorca, 1988).
12 ibid.
13 See The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon edited by Nasr, S. H. (Amity House, Warwick, New Yotk, 1986Google Scholar). In the informative introduction to this volume, Bernard Kelly is referred to on pages 14 and 56.
14 Amongst Titus Burckhardt's major works are Sacred Art in East and West (Perennial Books, Bedfont, England, 1967) and Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art (Quinta Essentia, Cambridge, England; State University of New York Press. Albany; 1987)Google Scholar.
15 See, in particular. “Notes on the light of the Eastern Religions” (Dominican Studies, London, Vol. 7, 1954, pp. 254–271; reprinted in Religion of the Heart, edited by S. H. Nasr and William Stoddart, Foundation for Traditional Studies, Oakton, Virginia, 1991); “A Thomist approach to the Vedanta” (Blackfriars, XXXVII, no. 430, January 1956); and “The metaphysical background of analogy” (Aquinas Paper No. 28, Blackfriars Publications, London, 1958).