Gerald Vann
Biographic Data
| ID | 445307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerald Vann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerald |
| FAMILY NAME | Vann |
| SIGNATURE | VANN G |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 45 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1931 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Myth, Symbol and Revelation
It may be helpful to approach the subject of the place of symbols in Christianity from the consideration of two sets of difficulties or disabilities which seem to affect many Catholics nowadays in the western world.First, Catholics are often accused of not reading the Old Testament. If this is true, and by and large it seems to be, it is important for us to discover why it is so; and the likely explanation seems to be that to a great extent we ha…
Designs for Loving
What is this thing called love?' The question has been debated times without number: by the great poets, philosophers, mystics; by alert little logicians and portentous statisticians; by playwrights, novelists, songsters; and of course by lovers of various kinds, from those who indulge in a fever of passionate introspection to the simpler souls who sometimes briefly wonder in a bemused and befogged sort of way what has hit them. The plain man may…
Black Popes. Authority
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The Writer as Creator
Thou waterest the hills from thy high dwelling: the earth shall be filled with the fruit of thy works': St Thomas took this verse from Psalm 103 as the text of his inaugural lecture as Master in Theology at Paris, for, he says, it is ordained from eternity by the king and lord of the heavens that the gifts of his providence should come to his lowest creatures through the mediation of those that are higher, and so teachers and doctors are as mount…
Moral Dilemmas
The 'muddled marriage' is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic's instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church's teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great …
For the Month of May
The gulf today between body and spirit, between material things and the praise of God, is widening at a pace and to an extent never known before. It would be very easy to despair. It would be very easy to despair of this civilisation of ours; very easy to despair of the future of our race; very easy to feel that, so far from marching triumphantly forward to a golden age, we are sinking rapidly into an abyss; very easy to feel that man is doomed b…
Retreat Into Reality
That fine and distressing drama of Gian-Carlo Mcnotti, The Consul, does more for us than underline the tragic fatuity of the modem political world: it underlines the fundamental unreality of that world. The baby dies, the husband and wife, unable to reach each other, die: because they and the world are smothered by paper, the 'forms' without which nobody can stir, and nothing can be done, and which are never completely obtainable. The hypnotice d…
The Sinner Who Looks Like a Saint
Le pécheur est au cœur même de la chrétienté... .'The sinner J J stands at the very heart of Christendom. No one is more competent than he to say what it all means-no one unless it be the saint.' These words of Péguy might form a text for a great many contemporary Catholic novels: you think not only of Greene, but of Waugh too, of Mauriac. And as you follow the unfolding drama of the lives created by them you sometimes find that in the end the si…
The Perennial Philosophy
Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. 'Vivre?' he …
Modern Christian Revolutionaries
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Fatima and the People's Theology
For I am thy servant and the son of thy handmaid, a weak man and of short time, and falling short of the understanding of judgement and laws.' (Wisd. ix, 5.).What do we mean by the 'mind of the Church'? In the most obvious sense the Church is an autocracy : the life and the power and the wisdom are from above, from the Head which is Christ. But there is another sense in which the life of the Church has its democratic aspect: for the vitality and …
Contemplation and the Life of the Church
We are used to hearing the present age in the Church's history described as the age of catholic action: there is a possibility that we may not sufficiently realize that catholic action essentially demands and implies catholic contemplation. By catholic action we mean the sharing, by the laity, in Christ's redeeming work in and for the world: trying to make known the truth entrusted to the Church, trying to create a Christian order of society, try…
Mystici Corporis
Is the Church a democracy? It is a question which cannot be answered by a simple yes or no, and without preliminary definition of the term. Democracy does not necessarily imply the rule of all by all; it does imply first of all a society in which the citizens are complete individuals, persons, whose life and destiny the State must not subjugate to its own purposes, but serve; and it does imply, secondly, that the individuals contribute, according…
Christian Behaviour
Book reviewed in this article: CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR: A Further Series of Broadcast Talks. By C. S. Lewis THE PATH TO PERFECTION. By W. E. Sangster LIGHT BEFORE DUSK. A Russian Catholic in France, 1923–1941. By Helen Iswolsky THE RUMANIAN CHURCH. By Marcu Beza AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GERMAN PASTOR. By Hans P. Ehrenberg NATIONS AS NEIGHBOURS. By Canon C. E. Hudson AN OUTLINE OF EUROPEAN ARCHITECTURE. By Nikolaus Pevsner THE NEWSPAPER. By Ivor Thomas. How…
Confession and Health of Soul
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness.' We see the meaning of the Sacrament of Penance most fully if we see it against the background of the world-struggle between good and evil. The essence of sin is pride, the isolation of the self; the harmony of creation is split into warring fragments; there is no redress until created spirit, responsible for …
The Sacrament of Marriage
God is love. God is creator, God's creation is the expression of his love.Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Man too is lover and creator. But for him, to love and to create is hard.It is hard to love, because so often when he sees a beautiful thing man wants to clutch at it, possess it, dominate, domineer, use it for himself, destroy it.It is hard to create, because creation comes only from love.There is no love and no creation wit…
The Human Person
Man is a paradox; and his life is unceasing tension between contradictories. Of fallen man this is true in the sense explained by Plato's horses and St. Paul's 'the flesh lusteth against the spirit'; but it is true also In a yet more primitive sense: of the human per. sonality itself in its inner structure. Man is a paradox because, being one thing, body-spirit, he is at the same time two things. He is a social animal, dependent physically, econo…
Prayer and Politics (I)
Nobody wants to live in a world that is blind and insane; and if that is what we are heading for, then we had better try to do something about it. Aldous Huxley makes this very plain in his latest book, Grey Eminence. One of the main points he makes there is this : that a world totally without prayer would be a world 'totally blind and insane.' His actual phrase is a 'totally unmystical world '; but I am going to keep to the simpler and less misu…
Prayer and Politics (II)
For some people the worlds of prayer and politics stand in direct opposition ; there can be no question of passing from one world to the other; prayer means a flight from activity, and if it attempts to pass over into the world' of activity it destroys itself. Now this is the typical Eastern view of prayer ; it is not the Christian view. Indeed in Christian eyes it is the great mistake of the East, just as a zest for action without prayer is the …
Grey Eminénce
Where there is no vision, the people perish; ... if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep' that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally" blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighte…
Man the Maker
And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein He placed man whom He had formed ... to, dress it and keep it.God the Lover and Creator made us in his own image and likeness, to be lovers and creators in our turn.He made us to know him and love him and serve him; and since we are made in his image it is by knowing and loving and making that we serve. Knowing and loving are not means to making; making is the effect,…
Begin Here
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Obedience and Freedom
Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of free…
Patriotism and the Life of the State
There must be many to-day whose minds are troubled because they find it impossible to accept without reservation the opinions and the policy which have been generally adopted with regard to the war, and because, in consequence, their patriotism-their love of their patria and desire to serve it-cannot find, at least without much self-searching, the outlet which the majority have accepted. Are they to resign themselves to the idea that this mental …
Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society
It can hardly be necessary at this date to summarize the contents of a book which, one notes with thankfulness, has been so widely described and discussed. It will be recalled that Mr. Eliot's purpose in writing it was to offer a 'contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come'; and the most fitting way in which to salute his work would therefore seem to be to confine oneself to suggesting the main points at whi…
The Perennial Philosophy
Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. 'Vivre?' he …
An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy
In the new religion of science God is supposed to have had the goodness to invite man to profiteer upon the universe.' When Daedalus found he could fly he got too far above himself-and the vanquished world: his wings melted in the sun's heat and, being dust, he unto dust returned.The science of the world, it would seem, is in fair way to conquering the world. Having measured the world, it cannot but think it has measured the master of the world. …
Marx and the Man
To run slap into infinity is a momentarily annihilating experience.' When a man has embraced an emotional faith in a supernatural, while, by force of puritanical environment, denying the natural, it is unlikely that the faith will live for long. What is not anchored to humanity is no safe and abiding refuge for a man. If he 'lives in a large modern city where existence is insecure, and change is rapid, and further change imperative; where chaos i…
St. Thomas and Humanism
St. Thomas's originality lies in the fact that he made his philosophy a welded, organic whole including and co-ordinating in the sweep of its horizon the entire panorama of being. To understand the humanism which is one facet of his philosophy. We must understand his W eltanschauung : his vision of the world, of reality, as a whole. It is the aim of this essay simply to set forth St. Thomas's teaching, hoping thereby to shew that his philosophy i…
No Time Like the Present
The desire for order is a primary need of our nature, of our minds and bodies .... In the sphere of society man desires primarily a clear order, the deep satisfaction of knowing himself bound up with that which is moving to some defined end.'There is nowadays no dearth of writers whose theme is the condemnation of our modern chaos. They fall, usually, into one of two distinct classes: there is the pure satirist, mildly mocking or disgustedly slas…
The Ethics of Modern War
Any nation," the present Pope has said, "so mad as to contemplate war would be guilty of monstrous homicide and almost certainly of suicide." There is, it would seem, a tendency to meet any proposal for the prevention of war and the promotion of peace with the argument that there is such a thing as a just war, and to leave it at that. There is a danger here of relapsing into the laissez aller attitude described by M. Maritain as "using the eterna…
Integral Humanism
To propose to man no more than what is human, Aristotle remarked, is to betray man, to will his unhappiness, for by the principal part of himself, the spirit, he is called to something greater than a merely human life. On this principle, if not on the manner of its application, Ramanuja and Epictetus, Nietzsche and St. John of the Cross are all agreed" (p. 10). Is the remark humanist or anti-humanist? Humanism, like so many other good things, is …
The Catholic and a Future War
The horror of the war of to-morrow is that no fever of collective exaltation, no lyricism of poet or orator, will be able to ennoble it or mark it with the authentic sign of the spirit. The apparent ideological character with which no doubt it will be invested will not long obscure its true nature: the conflict of the selfishness of classes, adding a new complication to the selfishness of nationalisms, will make it wholly inhuman. Not only in its…
The Psychology of War-Mongering
God," said Voltaire's Quaker, "God, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers, cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two feet high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass's skin extended." The ass's skin has largely given place to the broadcast bray and the journalistic bellow; the effect remains the same. And the ce…
Humanism and the Claims of God
Can there be an heroic humanism?" It is to ask, in effect, whether Christian humanism is possible, a humanism not merely compatible with sanctity, but essentially directed to the achievement of sanctity as to the achievement of its own purpose. But the adjective is significant. Heroism implies a more than human effort, a strain therefore and tension; and the persistent presence of tension implies for the Christian humanist two outstanding dangers…
Diversity in Worship
There is no reason in the world" wrote Augustus Welby Pugin, "why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-courses, and conveyance of gas, may not be erected in the most consistent and yet Christian character." There is, in this engaging statement, an implication which Pugin, alas, did not see. "Our domestic architecture," he had said very truly, "should have a peculiar expression illustrative of our manners and habits"…
The Necessity of Freedom
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Constantin Leontieff
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Aux Origines D'une Tragedie
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Introduction to Thomist Politics
Plato by a goodlye similitude declareth," said Sir Thomas More, "why wise men refraine to medle in the common wealthe. For when they see the people swarme into the streets, and daily wet to the skinne with rayne, and yet cannot persuade them to goe out of the rayne and to take their houses; knowynge wel, that if they should goe out to them they shoulde nothinge prevail, nor wynne ought by it, but with them be wette also in the rayne, they do kepe…
Ends and Means
That "to raise up hatred against hatred is to prepare the ruin of political life"; that violence is a boomerang, the attempt at violent repression of an evil merely causing it to spring up elsewhere with renewed virulence; that "Christendom will re- create itself by Christian means, or it will collapse completely"; in a word, that the "problem of means ... it of absolutely central importance' '; and that only the Christian means of patience, unit…
Contrition and Action
The preaching of the truth," said the Pope last year to the French bishops, "the preaching of the truth did not bring many victories to Christ: it brought Him to the cross. It is by charity that He won souls and drew them to follow Him. That is the only way in which we shall win them." The importance of the question of means cannot be overstressed. Over and over again, great enterprises, Christian enterprises, have been brought to nought because …
Questions de Conscience
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In Tempore Belli
Our first duty, now that war is upon us-and it will be increasingly our duty until the conflict is ended-must be to remind ourselves of what our attitude towards it should be as Christians. Morality is not Christian unless it is subsumed under religion; right action is determined primarily by our whole attitude to God; and in the context of war there is a Christian attitude of mind towards it in general as well as a detailed system of ethical pri…
The Jews
One of the most terrifying of contemporary phenomena is the emergence of virulent anti-semitism, not in Germany or in Italy, not under this or that political regime, but within the Church. It is terrifying; because it means that the devil is active in the Church in a way for which there is perhaps no previous parallel. Evil has always been active in the Church; but it has taken the form of lust, avarice, ambition, pride. This is something far wor…
War and the Catholic
Begin Here
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Obedience and Freedom
Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of free…
Patriotism and the Life of the State
There must be many to-day whose minds are troubled because they find it impossible to accept without reservation the opinions and the policy which have been generally adopted with regard to the war, and because, in consequence, their patriotism-their love of their patria and desire to serve it-cannot find, at least without much self-searching, the outlet which the majority have accepted. Are they to resign themselves to the idea that this mental …
Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society
It can hardly be necessary at this date to summarize the contents of a book which, one notes with thankfulness, has been so widely described and discussed. It will be recalled that Mr. Eliot's purpose in writing it was to offer a 'contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come'; and the most fitting way in which to salute his work would therefore seem to be to confine oneself to suggesting the main points at whi…
The Sacrament of Marriage
God is love. God is creator, God's creation is the expression of his love.Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Man too is lover and creator. But for him, to love and to create is hard.It is hard to love, because so often when he sees a beautiful thing man wants to clutch at it, possess it, dominate, domineer, use it for himself, destroy it.It is hard to create, because creation comes only from love.There is no love and no creation wit…
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