In an article on ‘St. John’s Witness to the Blessed Sacrament’ in a former number of Blackfriars, Fr. Vincent McNabb wrote as follows:

This passage seems to me to be misleading on several points, and also to contain, at least implicitly, views which it is difficult to accept. In view of the importance of its subject no excuse need be offered for discussing it here. I venture, therefore, to set down as clearly as I can some of the objections which, it seems to me, can be legitimately urged against it. I will deal first with what Fr. McNabb calls the miracle of Transubstantiation, and secondly with the miracle of Multiplication.

It began in the Clos-Poulet, it may be said to have ended in the Pacific—and yet I think that its true ending is at home where long ago it began; for it is written in grey, the colour of Brittany skies, the colour of tears—there is no heat or brilliance in it as of southern seas. Surely here or there, this is a breton tale, strayed but returning home at last; so that the record of it has to be pieced together, as it were, on two sides of the world.

It is not difficult to picture the beginning, though Clémentine will tell little of that. But there was a day some fifty odd years ago when there lay in the bay of St. Malo a little ship straining at her cables and shaking out her sails to catch the wind; a ship home-built and home-manned, launched in the harbour yonder and christened, like so many of her crew, by the curé from the grey cathedral that lifts its single spire above the close-walled little city. It is easy to picture her, to know her very make and shape and rig; for year by year her sister goélettes are still built and equipped and sent out from St. Malo to the Iceland and Newfoundland fishings. Year by year in the first days of spring they steal out into the bay from the harbour where they have lain during the winter; year by year they pass out, unchanging, familiar, with the same lines of paint fresh on graceful sides, the same gilding at the bow, the same well-remembered Marie-Joseph, it may be, or the Sainte-Anne, or the Etoile-de-Mer.

In a quite common and considered estimation, it is at once the strength and weakness of a scientific philosophy in general and of the Scholastic in particular to be considered abstract, universal, and necessary. A settled and valuable mood of the intellectual is satisfied when the mind is imagined as living its proper life in the timeless world of essences, forced only by the needs of its present state to shifting and momentary accommodations with a welter of contingent concrete individual things. But our deepest desire is to know the real, and the whole real. Now the real, if it is anything, is concrete, while for us the concrete is unique, inexpressible, and fugitive; antithetical to a scientific philosophy. Hence the feeling that the cost of a system is the sacrifice of the real.

While the structure of Thomism, as it appears in the text-books or even from a superficial reading of St. Thomas, cannot fail to strike the imagination with the vastness of its conception, the coherence of its parts, and the impregnability of its logic, there is to some a haunting air of unreality about it, which is none the less felt because well-nigh incapable of formulation in the face of such an impressive, or what I might even call crushing, perfection.

Of those who scan this page there are few, if any who have not gone to pay homage to the great medieval churches of France. And surely numerous pilgrims, at Chartres of the world-famous sculptures, or other Gothic fanes of coeval raising, have found themselves asking big questions. If the French school of artists, say from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, were authors of a wealth of fine religious work, did there come from them no fair things in the sphere, after the Middle Ages had passed away, giving place to the Renaissance Period? Or must it be owned, reluctantly, that the ecclesiastical fabrics in the pointed formula, with the carven figures which adorn them, and the embellished sacred manuscripts which were wrought by men who were linked with those halls of orisons, were the ultimate rare exploit of France, in the sacerdotal realm?

In offering tribute to those very few French artists who fashioned beautiful things definable as art of the Renaissance, it is desirable to spend a moment on recalling the character of that great movement. If it is often described as the advent of a new spirit of enquiry, this description is inadequate; for the affair might also be called a deliberate harking back to the Classic or Antique styles in art. Out of the new spirit of enquiry there came in Holland, in the fourteenth century, the inauguration of the printing press, and in Flanders, at the outset of the fifteenth, the inception of oil painting.

De nominibus non est curandum is one of those trite sayings of St. Thomas which, outside its context, could easily be gravely misunderstood. He is blaming those who concern themselves more with words than with the realities which words are meant to represent. Words are only signs, and the sign without the reality loses its reason of being. It is a sign-post which points to a place that does not exist.

There is abundant reason for thinking that the implicit criticism contained in these words of St. Thomas is especially applicable to modern times when men seem so strongly attached to words and symbols, and delude themselves into thinking that they possess the realities because they have the words. Democracy, efficiency and rationalisation are words to juggle with, though the realities they stand for seem to be very conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, you can never take for granted what the users of these words mean by them. A request for definitions is always worth while.