time: the refreshing river 

 Be most at home, 



'5 



Among the sterile, prove 

 Your vigours, love. 



Those of us who have loved the habitation of God's house and 

 the place where his honour dwells, would be well content if the 

 traditional forms of rite and liturgy could survive the coming storm.^ 

 We would like to fill the old botdes of Catholic doctrine with new 

 wine. The words of the Fathers on equality and social righteousness 

 seem more likely to be fulfilled than we had hoped. But if this revivifi- 

 cation of the ancient faith cannot be accomplished, then we shall 

 accept the judgment with a Nunc dimittis; those who love both the 

 spirit and the letter will not complain if the spirit be taken and the 

 letter left. 



. Before leaving the question of the possible forms which numinous 

 feeling may take in future ages, a word should be said of the part 

 which dramatic representations are likely to play. Cinema films of 

 great power (such as Eisenstein's celebrated "Cruiser Potemkin") and 

 also many documentary films portraying the natural and normal life 

 of mankind in its struggle against the external world and its attainment 

 of inner solidarity (such as the "Night Mail" of Grierson and Auden), 

 generate in those who see them emotions to which it would be 

 dangerous to refuse the term "numinous." After all, the religious 

 origins of drama are well known, and it is surely significant that in 

 the Soviet Union, the first great socialist state the world has ever 

 seen, drama, poetry, and all cognate arts flourish as never before.^ 

 The catharsis of tragedy is only an extreme form of the effect upon 

 individual human beings which any dramatic representation based on 

 fundamental common human values must necessarily have. As the 

 following interesting passage shows, religious exhortations in the 

 old sense will not be needed in the future to awaken men to a sense 

 of their social duty: 



"In one of the novels of Ilya Ehrenburg there is a description 

 of a play given by a ti-avelling company at a collective farm 

 somewhere in northern Russia. Othello was to be played, and 

 the actress who was to take the part of Desdemona (the only 



^ Cf. what George Tyrrell said: "Houtin and Loisy are right; the Christianity of the 

 future will consist of mysticism and love, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive 

 form as the outward bond" {Autobiography and Life, London, 19 12, vol. 2, p. 377). 



2 Cf. the article on the theatre in the Soviet Union by Herbert Marshall (University 

 Forward, 1941, 7, 10). 



60 



