If ever there were grist for the Jungian mill it was, one might suppose, the Book of Job. It can be read almost as a paradigm of the ‘integration process’ as Jung himself has repeatedly described it. For here we have a man ‘perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil’—as well he might, never having experienced it, and abounding in cosy piety and worldly prosperity. He has, as Satan points out, ‘a fence about him, and his house, and his substance’. Anybody can be ‘good’ in such narrow, sheltered confines as these; but he can hardly be a grown-up man let alone a hero, a prototype of the way of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection. Any psychologist should know he is heading for a crash. Any theologian should know that such easy and complacent virtue cannot continue long in this post-lapsarian world. Job’s professed love for God—and God’s for him—must grow up from this agreeable but infantile and unconscious, autoerotic phase. Job’s idol of a merely intelligible and amiable God must be smashed: he must learn the lesson which the New Testament writers were to see it was the function of the Old Testament heroes to teach: that man’s righteousness before God is not wrought by moral works without ‘faith in the Absurd’, the Unseen and the Unknown. So the psychologically and theologically inevitable happens: Job’s fences are down; evils rush in.

The remarkably violent storm which raged around the two talks broadcast last January by Mrs Margaret Knight has now happily subsided and I do not want to start it again. Some of the attacks on Mrs Knight’s views looked like simple manifestations of bad temper, if not of actual hysteria, and very few showed much real understanding of her position. Although there is rather more rhetoric than logic in some of what she says, it seems to me that on the whole her talks present an understandable and moderate non-Christian view.

One who believes that religion is an illusion could do very much worse than follow Mrs Knight’s line of thought and action. She maintains, quite rightly, that it is inconsistent to ask your children to believe what you yourself think to be false. The Christian, of course, thinks it better that a non-Christian should sometimes be inconsistent in practice; just as a liberal humanist prefers a communist or fascist to act inconsistently with his principles, and rejoices to hear that children in Russian schools are brought up to respect ideals of scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty which a true communist might not accept. However one cannot expect a non-Christian to prefer to be inconsistent, one cannot blame Mrs Knight for wanting to be reasonable, and given that religion is an illusion it seems to me that her views are very reasonable. The question on which everything else turns is simply: Is religion an illusion or not?

Mr Blackmur is an American critic of considerable reputation—to judge from this book, not undeserved. This is the first substantial work of his I have read: I knew him previously as an authority on Henry James’s Prefaces, which I thought he overrated as criticism. The frequent bracketing of them (as of equal critical interest) with Flaubert’s Letters is unfortunate: James’s greatness in criticism is more unequivocally manifest in the essays on French poets and novelists and in the book on Hawthorne. Mr Blackmur, however, himself shows (not always with happy results) the influence of the James of the Prefaces (and sometimes of other Jamesian manners: the autobiographical anecdote on page 9 is told in the style of A Small Boy and Others). His own virtues as a critic are a refreshing absence of the genteel kind of academicism and some powers of analysis of poetic effects—in which he shows the influence of Mr Empson. His general value-judgments and ascriptions of importance are not always to be trusted, and his critical tact (or ‘touch’) can be questionable, but we may usually expect intelligent and unexpected comments from him—though they sometimes are rather marginal. The characteristic vice of his writing is corrugation—unnecessary difficulty; he falls into ‘pseudo-botanical’ jargon of the kind D. FL Lawrence objected to, fails satisfactorily to tackle his themes or even, at times, to make them intelligible, and at his worst shows a peculiarly American kind of externality—a lack of inner understanding of the work, or the man, he is considering.

When church building became possible again after the second World War there must have been many English Catholics who looked forward confidently to an era of vigorous and inspiring new churches enriched with the best examples of contemporary art. Among them were certainly a number of architects who, after a long enforced separation from their calling, longed for an opportunity to express, in the creation of a new church, their gratitude for a safe return and their hope for the future.

Now, after nearly ten years during which many new churches have been built or planned, the prospect is so bleak that most of these architects, and many laymen with them, are feeling nothing but discouragement and frustration. A few of the new churches really do express a living art. The rest are pitiful proof of timid conventionality and of the still powerful effect of Pugin’s teaching that Gothic is the only proper and morally defensible style of architecture for churches, or for any buildings even remotely connected with them. Even where the strict Gothic is abandoned, the alternative seems only too often to be a veritable fruit salad of mixed conventional forms, something for all tastes.

Art, it has been said, is the mirror of society. Just as Classical Greek culture produced the refined beauties of the Parthenon, so the vigorous and exuberant background of the four centuries following the Norman Conquest produced, by gradual development from the staid Romanesque, all the upsoaring excitement of Gothic architecture.

The fall of man is the result of man’s choice—he chooses to live centred on himself. This choice cuts him off from God and plunges him into a morass of unreality, for life apart from the Creator loses all meaning. The only reality that remains is the choice, the first sin that parts man from God. All men are born in disobedience, in a situation created by sin. Man by reason of his history, his origin from Adam, cannot fulfil the purpose of his first creation; fallen from grace, with his natural strength impaired, his state is that of original sin. The world is the system man builds up in self seeking; the flesh is man’s desire, greedy for life, asserting itself against God. Each actual sin he commits is his personal endorsement of the state in which he is born.

Though he is prone to sin, though he is often sinful, man is not evil by nature; he tries to escape, he longs for beauty, for justice, for truth, above all for love. He can pervert these things, for he is free; for the same reason he can choose them, and pursue them when they elude his grasp. He has imagined beings who will bring these things to him, he has followed prophets and elaborated techniques. He has known failure and he has seen himself as failing; sometimes he comes near to a knowledge of sin.