There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

Research into liberation theologies has rarely had an interreligious perspective. To that end, I shall carry out a comparative study of Christian and Islamic versions of liberation theology and I shall highlight the similarities and differences in their approaches. It will be a thematic study that is structured around three key mentalities which are shared by the approaches of both religious traditions. Firstly, the need to reinterpret their own religions from the perspective of the poor; secondly the interrelated emphases on action, orthopraxy and the agency of the oppressed; and thirdly a rejection of excessive other-worldliness. I conclude from my analyses with the following hypotheses: firstly, due to the lack of an authority akin to the Catholic Church, Islamic liberation theology is comparatively more likely to create the potential for social upheaval and is more likely to lead to an attenuation of metaphysical religious feeling; secondly, all liberation theologies contain latently the potential for creating millenarian outbursts; the best example to offer from modern history of this latent feature becoming manifest is in the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.

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.

The word ‘Psychology’ has become a capacious umbrella which covers a baffling variety of literature. ‘Contributions to Psychology’ covers, a still wider, indeed an almost limitless, range. Nihil humanum a me alienum: there can be no pre-established boundaries to a study or practice, which is concerned with the sources, motives and patterns of the totality of human experience and behaviour. A biography, a novel, a drama, even a painting or a quartet, often reveals depths of the human psyche unattained by works on medical or academic psychology. But these also have immeasurably widened their scope in recent decades. The hypothesis of primitive unconscious layers (whether or not accounted for in terms of a ‘collective unconscious’), which find expression in myths, ritual, and social patterns, has made ethnology, mythology, folk-lore, comparative religion, history, pre-history and countless other fields of research, all tributary in various ways to psychology, while psychology in its turn has given to them a new stimulus and orientation. The breakdown of the post-Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter, with its restriction of psychology to the former, has also added increasingly to the psychologists’ concern with the biological and physical sciences, while the treatment of psychological phenomena in dynamic rather than purely mechanistic terms has opened new horizons to the theoretical psychologist which are as yet too indistinct to be accurately defined.

The age in which we live presents a rapidly growing cleavage between law and conscience; and this cleavage is resulting inevitably in the destruction of both. It is due almost entirely to the subjectivism which has been steadily gaining ground for the last four hundred years. Once private judgment is admitted as a principle in the conduct of human, affairs the objective norms of human action cease to function as such and both conscience and law are deprived of their vitality. As early as the sixteenth century an incipient subjectivism made its appearance in Philosophy as well as in Religion; it is possible, indeed, that the effort to segregate Philosophy from Religion was the source of the whole evil. For when Religion has ceased to provide a philosophy of life it is no longer true religion, and its sanctions lose their compelling force. Moreover, Philosophy unallied to Religion is as a ship without rudder; it follows the caprice of any intellectual wind that blows. The purpose and the very content of human nature is lost sight of; law becomes an unstable shadow of its real self; and conscience, left to stand alone, is no more than a blind guide leading the blind. This cleavage was not suddenly wrought; nor has it come about without protest; Thomas More, whom we now rejoice to call Saint, was amongst the first to protest against it and thought it worth while to seal his protest with his blood.

Money can only be understood in terms of power. In the hands of the consumer it is power over goods. In the hands of the creative capitalist it is power over the means to produce goods. In the hands of the finance-capitalist, or money-lender, it is not only power over producers and consumers, but power as well over nations and their governments. The technique of money-lending on its simplest level is to make an advance against security, draw interest, and at an agreed date receive back the capital sum—other things being equal, a perfectly honest transaction. If the more ambitious money-lenders kept to this even routine, however, they would be a very long time attaining power. What they desire, therefore, is that the money they lend shall either be repaid to them when its buying power has been greatly enhanced, or that it shall not be repaid at all, thus enabling them to foreclose on their mortgage and become possessed of their victim’s capital assets. These two motifs have long determined the course of economic history, explaining slump and boom, and enabling a small band of international lenders and manipulators to become the virtual masters of the world. The method was explained, with almost incredible candour, in an article which appeared in The U.S.A. Bankers’ Magazine on August 26th, 1934: —

’ Bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through a process of the law the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under the control of leading financiers.

In the minds of many the recent events in Spain must have raised an uneasy doubt as to the boasted Catholicity of that country. Crowds look on apathetically whilst a relatively small band of ruffians pillage and burn and desecrate those things most sacred to a Christian and a Catholic. For the outburst did not limit itself to a mere schoolboy prank, in undoubtedly bad taste, for the annoyance of the more militant elements of the clerical party; but from such beginnings it spread to an inexplicable fury against all Catholic beneficent institutions, and assumed in churches and chapels the proportions of classic and revolting sacrilege.

Can this, then, be a Catholic country, where such things are suffered without protest, where the people look on apathetically and see the benefactors of their children ejected and the most sacred Mysteries of their religion profaned? The answer, like most answers, requires a careful use of distinctions.

The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.

My interest in the Soviet became active when, after a course in the art of pantomime, one of my pupils was asked to demonstrate my technique for the American section of the M.O.R.T.(which I believe to stand for Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre). It is obvious that the Soviet-minded in New York, ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils exists,’ where also there are so many languages spoken, would like to be acquainted with a wordless drama. We reluctantly decided against the proposal. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I confess to sharing most of the Communist’s views with regard to the existing theatre, and even a few of his ideals for a future stage. I cannot disagree with his condemnation of ‘the revue of the bourgeois theatre distinguished for its extreme banality, absolute absence of political coherence, abundance of triviality, pomposity and out-and-out pornography.’ And not only citizens of U.S.S.R. might endorse the following: ‘The broad masses of workers and peasants, crushed by political and economic oppression, did not know the theatre, and when they did receive some crumbs of scenic art, it was perverted and vulgar . . . Inartistic, in the great majority of cases, and almost always devoid of ideas, offered for sale to the mercantile petty bourgeoisie, under the influence of uncultured impressarios and other business men of ill repute, the ordinary theatre presented a pitiful spectacle.'

The epoch known as the Renaissance is the most complex in all history. Various forces were at work moulding the national, economic, intellectual and moral life of the people. Religion was not the least important of these factors. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church was the sole means of civilization for the nations. From the time of Charles the Great, Church and State had worked hand in hand, with but little friction. Under the sway of Gregory VII and Innocent III, the temporal power of the papacy was secured. Philip the Fair and the exile in Avignon weakened papal rule. Pope after pope tried to protect and increase the so-called Donation of Constantine and the estates of Matilda of Tuscany which formed the bulk of the Patrimony of St. Peter.

During the fifteenth century there was a change among the people in their attitude toward the Church. The economic growth of cities, the increase of commerce resulting from inventions and discoveries, the strengthening of central governments and the rise of national kingships, lessened subserviency to papal authority. But above all, the intellectual Renaissance developed an independence of thought which in many cases led to a change of dogma.

The English Dominican Province has given to the Church five cardinals, seventy-two archbishops and bishops, several papal legates and nuncios, and to the state some ministers of prominence such as Archbishop William Hotham, the favourite minister of Edward I, and Bishop John Gilbert of Hereford, twice Lord High Treasurer. In theology, philosophy, Sacred Scripture and other branches of ecclesiastical science English Dominican writers of repute number more than a hundred, and it is easy to show that during the first three centuries of their existence they were by far the most prominent theological body in England, whilst extant MSS. of sermons and state documents testify to their ability and popularity as preachers. In contemplating this long list of eminent men the question has sometimes been asked why there are no English Dominicans officially enrolled in the Calendar of Saints either as canonized or beatified. The difficulty, which applies equally to the Irish Province with its lengthy list of martyrs, is not really hard to answer. At the time of the Henrican schism the feasts of six Dominicans only were kept in the Order, now the number is three hundred and four, of whom two hundred and ninety-four have been raised to the altars since 1600. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English Dominicans, persecuted and generally working in secret, and frequently in prison, had little leisure for gathering the information necessary to obtain the beatification or canonization of the many members of the Province noted for their sanctity or heroism as martyrs. It has been left to us in more propitious times to undertake this task, and surely we can hope that such a work will be blessed with success.

Catholic doctrine rests on two foundations: the revelation of God in nature, and the historic Revelation given to man which culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ.

We have already said something of how God is revealed to us in nature. We have seen that there is not a phenomenon in the world around us or within our own consciousness that does not tell us something of God, which can be so much as explained fully without some reference to a God, a creative, dynamic, supreme Intelligence and Will. The very existence of phenomena postulates the existence of such a One; their varied goodness and beauty tell us something of the goodness and beauty of God.

Yet, what nature has to tell us about God is not wholly satisfactory for many reasons. Although it is a fact that all phenomena in some measure reveal God, it is certainly not a fact that all men have found themselves capable of realizing that God is revealed to them in the world around them. The human mind is commonly too weak, too prejudiced, to be able to penetrate all that nature has to tell it; to see in phenomena the reflection of God’s attributes; to reason out patiently and accurately all that nature implies.

It is necessary from time to time to withdraw oneself from the tangle of events and to contemplate the main trends of contemporary history. What are the most significant international happenings of recent months, and what conclusions may be drawn from them?

It is a tribute to the immense power and responsibility of the United States in the world today that Governments outside the Communist orbit almost all marked time as they awaited the outcome of the recent American presidential election. The semi-paralysis of diplomacy has continued during the interregnum between General Eisenhower’s election and his official replacement of President Truman in the White House. The reason is not far to seek. The whole scale of the rearmament effort, which has been getting under way in Western Europe during the last year, depends more than anything else upon the policy of the new President and the appropriations of the 83rd Congress. The prospects of orderly control of the Middle East and Moslem North Africa—which constitute the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—depend upon the extent to which the new American Government can subordinate the sentimental anti-imperialism which is part of the stock-intrade of American politics to the solidarity of the alliance and long-range strategic requirements. In the Far East, no solution (if solution there be) can be found for the deadlock in Korea except through the leadership of the United States, which has shouldered the main responsibility for the war against the Communists and has suffered nine-tenths of the United Nations’ casualties.