The question I have been asked is: Must one always obey the laws? The first thing to say is that clearly this is not a legal question. By that I mean that you cannot answer the question by saying: but the law says you must. For then your questioner comes back with: and why must I obey that law ? The situation is rather like that of the pilot of a plane or the captain of a ship. The crew and passengers do not obey the pilot or the captain merely because he tells them to. Nor do they do it simply because he is a powerful man and would make them sorry if they didn't. Rather they obey him because they think he has a right to tell them what to do. He has the right because he holds a position of authority. Obeying a government is so like the situation of obeying a pilot, that in fact the word government derives from the Latin word for steering a ship. One obeys a government not simply because of its power, but because of its authority; and it does not get this authority simply by saying that it has it. You do not obey laws simply because the laws say that you must. Why then do you ?

We might ask what gives the captain of a ship his position of authority. There are two answers to this, because there are two questions hidden in it. If we mean, how did it come about that this particular man is filling this position of authority, then the answer would be that he was chosen by the legally approved methods.

My theme is really the Socratic proposition that knowledge is virtue. This is an idea which is never far from the minds of those concerned either with literature or with education. Yet when we look into our own lives, the proposition seems obviously false. We know from our own experience the truth of video meliora proboque. deteriora sequor. Most Catholics moreover, have been brought up to venerate (rightly but perhaps for the wrong reasons), sancta simp/icitas. the faith of a Breton peasant; to feel that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and that nothing good ever came out of Cambridge – at least not since the time of St John Fisher.

Nevertheless we can see that there is something in the proposition, at any rate negatively. If it is not true that virtue necessarily accompanies knowledge, it is commonly true that crime accompanies ignorance. Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School movement, wrote of the prisoners in Gloucester gaol for whom he was working in the 1770's; ‘extreme ignorance was the principal cause of those enormities which brought them into this deplorable situation, precluding all hope of any lasting or real amendment from their punishment'. The uneducated classes a hundred years ago were still referred to as the ‘criminal classes', and it remains true today that those social areas where education is least successful are also those where delinquency is most common. Ignorance is, in modern Western society anyway, at least a contributory cause of crime, and education, if not a cure for crime, would at any rate create, as Jeanne Hirsch said of politics, a vacuum within which something is possible.

In April of the year 1518 a young Augustinian friar was summoned by the order of Pope Leo X to attend the Chapter of his Province at Heidelberg. Four years previously. Martin Luther had reached his radical conclusions on justification and by 1517 they were beginning to cause a stir in the University of Wittenberg, where, in his capacity as professor in the faculty of theology, Luther had been lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans. In May 1517 he had become so confident as to write to the prior at Erfurt: ‘The lectures on scholastic theology are deserted and no one can be sure of an audience who does not teach our theology’.

Then, on the eve of All Saints that same year, Luther announced his 95 theses on indulgences – these, together with the earlier and more fundamental theses on faith and works, were the occasion of his summons to Heidelberg where Luther himself presided over the disputation and won the support of most of his brethren.

These Germanic vibrations reached the Netherlands and in particular a man – perhaps the most learned in Europe – who stood at the pivot of affairs, supported by the Pope and sought after by kings and bishops – Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the summer of 1518 Erasmus wrote to the Rector at Erfurt where Luther had studied:

‘Luther has said many things excellently well. I could wish, however, that he would be less rude in his manner. He would have stronger support behind him, and might do real good ... I can give no opinion about his positive doctrines ...’

If all the energy and ingenuity expended on criticizing television were diverted into creating for it, the face of the medium might well be transformed. At the highest level, television is a twentieth-century art form. At all levels, it is an artefact – but an artefact peculiarly subject to the limitations of time and money. Every producer and scriptwriter – cameraman and film editor too – knows the frustration of having to compromise because conditions (physical or economic) make it impossible to do otherwise. Three days of rain during filming and a whole plan must be re-thought. And they know, too, the second wave of frustration when critics, professional and lay, suggest the very things which would have been done if only television were the all-miraculous, ail-endowed medium which those who have little or no practical experience of it suppose it to be.

It is a mistake to say, as many do, that ‘television is primarily a form of entertainment’. Television is primarily a medium of communication. That is its alpha and its omega. But entertainment is the use to which it is generally put and it would be naive in the extreme to presume that people buy, or rent, their television sets for any other purpose.

Consciences are neither born nor made, they develop. Development in living beings is the outcome of interaction between the individual and the environment; specifically, in the case of moral development, between the individual person and the culture. The child is born with the potential ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms other than those of immediate personal satisfaction to which the infant is limited, but the growing child can make assessments only in terms of the values which he is taught. He has. as part of his human make-up, the tendency to pursue the perceived good and to shun the perceived bad. What he actually perceives as good and bad depends largely on what the society into which he is born teaches him so to perceive. This is not to say that the individual's capacity for moral judgment is wholly dependent on the influence of external agents; the ultimate structure of conscience is unique because no two environments are entirely alike and no two individuals are entirely alike.

Though it has been said that moral development is the result of interaction between the individual and the culture one must be yet more precise. The child receives his values not from ‘the culture’ or from ‘society’ in a large and undefined sense but from a fairly circumscribed group of persons: parents and siblings, other adults in the family circle, school teachers and companions. This means that values are never transmitted to the child in a ‘pure’ state, they are always, in some way. modified by the person who mediates them.

How the valley awakes. At two fifteen in the morning there are no sounds except in the monastery: the bells ring, the office begins. Outside, nothing, except perhaps the bullfrog saying ‘Om’ in the creek or in the guest house pond. Some nights he is in Samadhi, there is not even ‘Om'. The mysterious and uninterrupted whooping of the whippoorwill begins about three, on spring mornings. He is not always near. Sometimes there are two whooping together, perhaps a mile away to the woods in the east.

The first chirps of the waking day-birds mark the point vierge of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence opens their eyes. They begin to speak to him not with fluent song but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, their state at the point vierge. Their condition asks if it is time for them to ‘be'. He answers ‘yes’. Then, they one by one wake up, and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves, and will even fly.

Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to ‘be’ once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was.

All wisdom seeks to collect and manifest itself at that blind sweet point. Man's wisdom does not succeed, for we are fallen into self-mastery and cannot ask permission of anyone.

How possible is it to design a first-rate new church in the middle of the twentieth century ? Our grandchildren, perhaps, will be able to answerthis question better than we can, because what is being built now will, if it survives at all. be much easier to evaluate after it has been lived with and used for a couple of generations. Meanwhile one can at least draw up a balance sheet of our contemporary advantages and disabilities. On the positive side, the apparatus of rationality, simplicity and appeal to first principles which the modern architectural movement wrought for itself should, anyway notionally. give its present-day followers a good start – or at the very least it should preserve them from the worser kinds of pretentiousness and vacuity. A generation reared on le Corbusier's dictum that ‘the plan is the generator’ ought to be able to devise liturgical spaces that are light, plain and sensible if they are nothing more. Further, the independence from ‘historic styles’ which the modern movement asserted should make our architectural idiom more readily responsive to changes in liturgical practice and indeed to all the new kinds of religious sensibility and orientation which, long latent, seem at last to have found expression in Pope John and the Council. If, as seems tremulously possible, the Church does in fact decide to enter the twentieth century, understand it and lead it, there is available at least the makings of an architectural vocabulary to suit the purpose.

The following letter, hitherto unpublished, was written by Father C. C. Martindale, S.J., to Edward Bullough, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and subsequently Professor of Italian in the University, on the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church in February 1923. Father Martindale was a contributor to the first number of BLACKFRIARS in 1920 and remained a faithful friend of the review until his death last year. He was closely associated with Professor Bullough in the establishment of Pax Romana, the international organization of Catholic university students. And in many other fields – liturgical, missionary, literary – he was a pioneer of prophetic understanding. A classical scholar of immense distinction, he brought all the resources of a fine intelligence to bear on an apostolate which, as the letter indicates, reached an astonshing range of people. No one seemed outside the orbit of his awareness and of his love.

In Edward Bullough he found a kindred spirit. Born of a Lancashire father and a German mother, educated in Dresden and Cambridge, he taught French, German, Russian and Italian at the University. His course of lectures on aesthetics was the first of its kind at Cambridge, and the scope of his interests was reflected by his election as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and by his membership of the Royal Commission on the Universities. His wife was the daughter of Eleanora Duse; his son became a Dominican priest, his daughter a Dominican nun.

The Church has always demanded free speech for herself. Faith is obedience given to God through hearing and obeying the preached Word of God; and for that preaching no human authorization is necessary or even possible, but only a mission from God. ‘How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed ? Or how shall they believe him of whom they have not heard ? And how shall they hear without a preacher ? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?’ (Rom. 10.14). If freedom to preach is not granted by the secular authorities, then they are to be ignored, and the necessary freedom to speak is to be exercized, whatever the cost. Peter's defence still stands: ‘We ought to obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5.28).

From the times of the apostles onwards the Church has never hesitated over this basic freedom of speech which she must claim for herself. There has been greater unsureness over whether others should enjoy a like freedom. The weight of history has left the Church with an apparently negative approach to toleration in matters of religion or morals. But the publication of Pacem in Terris brought a new note, with the customary openness and optimism of ail Pope John's utterances. ‘By the natural law every human being has the right... to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions . . . within the limits laid down by the moral order and the common good; and he has the right to be informed truthfully about public events. . . Every human being has the right to honour God according to the dictates of an upright conscience, and therefore to worship God both in private and in public’.

But this Samaritan did not have the leisure to live a long time on the earth; he had to return to the place from which he had come down. And so ‘On the next day’ – which is the next day? Surely it is the day of the Lord's resurrection about which it is said. This is the day which the Lord has made?’ – ‘he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, take care of him’. What are these two denarii except the two testaments which have impressed on them the image of the eternal Father? By the price of these our wounds are healed. We have been redeemed by the price of blood to avoid the pains of eternal death. These two denarii, though it is not out of place to understand their faces as the four gospels, the innkeeper took.

'When Our Lord said “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom”. He was calling down upon it long life and blessing. The praises of this life were first sung by the apostles, who learned it either from our Lord or from the Holy Spirit, with whose grace they had recently been clothed from on high. They established a way of life such that the multitude were of one heart and one soul. They had all things in common and with one accord they would all meet in the temple. Since that time there have always been men to imitate the community of the apostles . . . ‘

The quotation is from William of Saint Thierry, a Cistercian, writing not very long after the famous dictum of Etienne de Muret: ‘If you are asked which order you belong to, say you belong to the order of the gospel. I will not be monk, canon or hermit: the titles are too holy for me'. A period of evangelical revival was beginning, which would culminate a century later with the beginning of the friars under Innocent III. And so it is not really surprising to find a monastic author like William, in the twelfth century, identifying the scope of a life which we have tended to think of as enclosed, exclusive and specialized, with the most basic demands of the Christian life.

Of course we have always known that the monastic life was essentially nothing more or less than a concentration on Christian ideals.

Now the Lord went forth to the combat in which he was to make plain to all the triumph that he would win over the devil. They clothed him in a scarlet robe, put a crown of thorns on his head and a reed in his hand, and came and knelt before him. What an unheard of, unbelievable miracle, a sure measure of his great victory! They had condemned him as a man, but now one after another they worshipped him as God. They had considered him cheap and worthless, but now they acknowledged him as a king. Not knowing what they did, they had covered him with reproaches, but now against their will they hailed him as a prophet. They had laughed at him and struck him, but now they gave him the fruits of victory – the scarlet robe, the crown woven from thorns, the reed. Little did they know that against their will he was taking as his spoils of battle all the things they were using to mock him.

Then don’t let him engage a decorative artist of the second, third or any subsequent rank to apply fiddling little bits of art to a structure which will probably at least have the humble merit of plainness. Again and again as one turns these pages one is struck by the pity of it ‣ messy ceramic plaques, vacuous mural reliefs, busy semi-abstract stained glass windows of overblown cosmological significance, facile streamlined statues of sacred personages appliqué to fine blank walls with about as much relevance as if one were to stick a Valentine card on a Mondriaan abstract … if only they’d refrained! So unless you can afford the prices payable to the Chagalls, Rouaults or Légers of this world, let the architecture do the talking: it has a far better chance of avoiding the arbitrary, the personal, and therefore the distracting.