KNOWING and LOVING

By CLIFFORD BROWN
RECENTLY I watched a nonChristian philosopher on the Brains Trust warmly disclaiming any competence to deal with human problems of suffering and death. Had he had time to expand he would undoubtedly have qualified his remarks.
He would have admitted, I think, an academic interest in these problems, as phenomena to be classified and analysed according to the methods of his science. He did indeed go so far as to admit his possible competence as a man to offer comfort and sympathy. As a man, but not as a philosopher. And strictly speaking, of course, he was quite right. The job the modern philosopher has undertaken is to explore the working of mind and its hold on reality. And at the moment the mind itself is in doubt. along with the possibility of achieving certainty about any extra-mental world of experience.
So our Brains Trust Professor is compelled by this technical impasse in his subject to make a clear distinction between himself as a philosopher and himself as a human being. As a man, he will assure you, he acts on the normal, everyday assumptions of the normal everyday man. He will eat, drink and be merry. work, play and love, mix with his neighbours, hold political opinions in accordance with his temperament and judgment, for all the world just like the next man. But as a philosopher he is hedged around by doubt, a prisoner within his mind. unsure of the value of any apparent certainties he may cherish inn-philosophically about extra-mental reality.
IT'S EASY TO
LAUGH
Iis easy to laugh at 1 this departmental approaa. But we are all, nowadays. affected by it. Since the advent of inward-looking philosophy ("I think, therefore I am") and particularly since the popularisation of individual psychology. man has been increasingly pinned under the microscope and analysed into his component parts seen in isolation -a bundle of disparate elements rather loosely tied together in personal bundles, or like heads on a string. Whether you study man or whether you study the atom, what difference does it make? Each is an object, each can be subjected to research. each will respond in a definite way to particular stimuli if only you dig deep enough.
Admittedly, there seems to have been a change in atmosphere of late in the world of thought. Matter has become less tangible, less solid. more wayward. The individual man has been brought out from under the microscope and placed once more in the context of society. The organic approach is steadily displacing the atomic. But it takes many painful years for specialist attitudes to filter through into the form of popular climates of opinion.
We. as Catholics, are nevertheless children of our time and of our environment. We belong to this century. this country. this particular town, this particular family, and are made up of just such-and-such elements of inherited temperament and personality.
We may not be very intellectual, or even -religious" (so we may tell ourselves) by nature. We may, on the other hand, he enthusiasts about the world of ideas. How fascinating are the problems of life. How stimulating is the manipulation of concepts, the following up of clues, the spotting of error in reasoning, the experience of flashes of intuition that come from time to time to every enquirer after truth. It is very easy for us too to forget our common creaturedom. our essential involvement every step of the way.
THE a ICEMAN' AND OTHERS
LET me refer to three great contemporary plays : "The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams and "Epitaph for George Dillon" by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. I call them great plays because they are all, in their own way, dealing with real situations increasingly to be faced by modern man: they take us beyond the commonplace and touch of an emotional response in the depths of our being.
Not one of these plays is created out of a context in which God is seen to matter. Yet all seem to me to involve an implicit cry to God.
"The Iceman Cometh", a superbly complex meditation from the heart of suffering and disillusionment. deals penetratingly with the problems of salvation and love. its saviour-figure turns out to he a fraud. All hope, all promise of redemption and reform are seen to have been groundless. The enthusiasm turns sour. and the saviour-figure is revealed as a murderer and a madman. A Judasfigure turns to another for foreiveness and love, but this other is so paralysed emotionally as to be beyond response. Unable to hear with the stirrings of pity within himself, he consigns the nearrepentant Judas-figure to death.
In "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" the "hero". disillusioned by a fallen homosexual idol, and by the cornplete cynicism and absence of idealism in the rest of his family. is unable to believe any longer in the possibility of love. ,
In "Epitaph for George Dillon" we are shown a man of imagination and talent, again disillusioned in love, cashing in on ambiguous, everyday kindness and affection. with contemptuous detachment and scorn. The veil is lifted for a moment by an act of unexpected generosity by the others at a moment when he is sure of his
own complete degradation. But the context leaves no ground for expecting any flowering of hope.
LOVE IN OUR LIVES
DISILLUSIONMENT, despair, disgust with life and with all men. How often do we see this pattern displayed openly or thinly disguised in the lives of those around us. Yet for 2,000 years Christianity has been proclaiming its message of salvation, hope and love. Is that perhaps the trouble? Have we Christians proclaimed it with our mouths -one system against many One mustn't, of course. go too far along these lines. God Himself, incarnate in our midst. was. despised and rejected of men. He' was deserted, betrayed, by men who knew him intimately, as an immediate ohject of experience and love.
One gets a little tired. i admit, of repeated requests for a restatement of old truths in terms acceptable to the modem mind. But one sympathises with the disillusionment behind the request. Have you never been ashamed of stating your belief to some enquirer on realising its shaming incongruity on your own lips? I have.
Surprisingly enough. the devil is potentially the greatest theologian in the natural order. He is not, of course, in the order of grace. That place is reserved joyfully for Our Lady, the Mother at once of Truth and Love. She was, naturally, no scholar. The wife of a Middle-East carpenter 2,000 years ago was in no -position to be in the forefront of speculative inquiry. She was in a far happier. unique relationship to Truth. For Truth is a Person. She loved this Person at every moment of her life with the completest possible response of her own sinless self.
Her love; like ours, grew from the moment of its inception. Like ours, it was living, and subject to the laws of development. We are involved here in a great mystery. But we know at least that the demand made by Love is for love. mand? Am I conscious of love at all in the course of my daily life, in my prayer, in my relationship with others? Granted the difficulties and complications of dcfining the true theological love that we call Charity-does it exist as a principle in my own life?
"You are to love one another as
I have loved you; by this will all men know that you ate my disciples." Can we expect men to know our discipleship-yours and mine--here and now. by the quality and power of our manifest love for one another? Yet unless Daily Mass Guide
SUN., JUNE 15. "FHIRD DAY AFTER PENTECOST. d. Comm. of SS. Vitua and Comps. Creed. Preface of the Trinity. (Green).
MON., JUNE 16. Of the Feria. Mass of Sunday. IGreetr).
TUES., JUNE 17. Of the Feria. Mass of Sunday. (Green).
WED., JUNE 18. St. Ephraem.
d. Comm. of SS. Mark and Mareelliap. Creed. (White).
THURS., JUNE 19. St. Juliana Falconieri. d. Comm. of SS. Gervase and Protese. (White).
FRID., JUNE 20. Of the, Feria. Mass of Sunday. Comm. of S. Si lverius. (Green).
SAT., JUNE 21. St. Aloysius. d. (White).
SUN., JANE 22, FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST.
d. Creed. Preface of the Trinity. (Green). Pilgrims and travellers along the roads to Rome will be interested to see the contrast between what was once the pilgrim's way and what today is the way of car, coach and scooter. The pictures are taken from "Roads to Rome" in the " Beautiful Highways" series, published by Thames and Hudson (21s.).
With 92 really first-class photographs, each well described, this book will give promise of a wonderful holiday for those who have not yet followed a road to Rome and it will revive happy memories for those who have.
The first picture shows a road in Rome three hundred years ago. The second the tine modern road between Florence and Areezo (where the great Piero della Francesca frescoes are to be seen) and then through Orvieto, well photographed in this book, to Rome.