To those of us who reside in countries where Catholics and dissident Eastern Orthodox live, as regards one another, in practically ‘water-tight compartments,’ it would not appear that the death of an Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem (Mgr. Damianos Kassiotis, died August 14th, 1931) is of much interest to those in communion with the Holy See. Nevertheless, it must be realized—as it is realized in the Levant—that such an event has not merely interest for local Christians of all the ancient churches, but might conceivably result in events which would have significance for the Church at large. For the death of a patriarch involves the election of a successor; such an election involves ecclesiastical and even secular politics; and in the Near East politics of all sorts are fruitful of religious changes. Ever since, and even before, the break-up of Catholicism, religion in Palestine and Syria has gone hand in hand with politics ; and many of the numerous small mass-reunions of Eastern Christians to the Catholic Church that have taken place during the past three or four hundred years were directly traceable to ecclesiastical politics, and sometimes to grievances of a secular nature. Precisely for that reason some of them have not subsisted, and the reunion has collapsed in renewed schism, bringing upon Eastern Catholics an undeserved stigma of ‘tendency to disunion’; others have remained, and what began as a political move has developed into a soundly religious state of affairs.

The works attributed to Albert the Great make a very long and imposing list. Some of his authentic writings have never yet been; printed. His printed works fill twenty-one folio volumes in the 1651 Lyons edition; thirty-eight quarto volumes in the Paris edition of 1890. They include amongst the theological works, scriptural commentaries, sermons, a commentary on the Sentences and on the semi-mystical works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. But his scientific and philosophical writings represent his greatest achievement. When he began his career as a teacher, the works of Aristotle were still suspect in the ecclesiastical world, for they were as yet only known through the translations and commentaries of Arabs who had interpolated and coloured them with neoplatonism, Mahommedanism, and other oriental admixtures. Moreover, the parts best known (excepting the Organon with which, thanks to Boethius, the West had always been in some degree familiar) were the Physics, which were read in the first instance by laymen interested in Arabian medicine, alchemy, and astronomy.

We hear much of the ideal of European unity, and much more of the difficulties lying in the Way of its realisation. But for a satisfactory definition of this unity we ask in vain. The trend of public and private comment is largely negative—let us avoid war at all costs. It may be of some use to consider the problem from a strictly Thomist standpoint and to discover whether it can be solved in the light of Thomist principles.

All conflict is ultimately metaphysical and every war a battle of philosophies. Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes, by teaching that reality is reducible mathematically, have made the unity of number identical with that of being. Unfortunate man not so reducible, has become ‘res cogitans’ cut off from reality, thinking intuitively, and the body, as Maritain observes, an instrument not of perception, but of conquest. Intellect is shut up in the brain, and body goes forth to organise matter and subdue the Universe. This situation is further complicated, on the one hand, by Kant’s doctrines of unknowable reality and the supremacy of the moral consciousness, and, on the other, by Hobbesian and nineteenth century evolutionary materialism. Small wonder the heirs of such thought find themselves clamouring for a European unity they cannot define but for which they are ever more or less consciously striving.

Pure philosophy is no longer unfashionable. In the last few years, scientists of repute have impressed the general reader with its capital importance. The brilliant expositions of contemporary science by Sir A. S. Eddington and Sir James Jeans mount to a philosophical enquiry. They make it quite clear that physical science as such cannot arrive at the nature of things.

The Cambridge University Press has now given us an account, in a small volume the size of The Mysterious Universe, of a voyage into metaphysics launched in the true spirit of Plato, St. Thomas, Spinoza and the pure philosophers of the past. It does not set out to discover and provide a popular map of reality. But when philosophy has been too often confused with so much that is inferior, it is agreeable to read of ‘a resolute direction of thought to the problem of Being’; of an effort to attain truth through Ideas and not images; of a search for causes that are at the same time reasons.

May I introduce this article by giving two personal reminiscences? I once asked the Headmaster of a well-known choir school whether he had ever noticed that boys gifted with a keen musical perception remembered what they heard more easily than what they read. It was an unusual question, but the answer was immediate and unequivocal. Such, he agreed, was his experience. He had often wondered why many of his boys remembered so little of what they read; if, for example, he asked a class to sit down and read silently an Act of Hamlet and then afterwards examined them on their knowledge of it, he invariably found that the majority remembered far less than if he himself had read the Act aloud to them.

On another occasion, when I happened to live for several months with a musician of rare talents, I was always amused to find on entering his room a heap of garments in the middle of the floor. My amusement bewildered him; quite seriously he could not understand why such raiment should not occupy the centre of the room, provided, of course, the floor was clean. In this matter he was unteachable. I labelled him in my own mind the most untidy fellow I had ever met, until one evening, whilst he was playing, the simple truth dawned upon me. My friend was not untidy at all—he was non-tidy in the usual sense of the word ‘tidy.’ Tidiness for him was a musical, auricular, euphonic thing; it was harmony; and discord, dissonance, was untidiness.