Religion: Brother Bernardo

Devilish old George Bernard Shaw loved to kick a cloven hoof in the face of convention, complacency and the church. Many of his contemporaries considered him one of the world's leading atheists. Now, in the 100th anniversary of his birth, old G.B.S. is taking on a different look. Magazines on both sides of the Atlantic are currently carrying a touching correspondence between Shaw and the abbess of a Roman Catholic convent of cloistered contemplative nuns.* The letters reveal the warmth behind the mocker, the loneliness of the wit who was condemned to see every side of every question.

Dame Laurentia McLachlan, who died three years ago, was introduced to Shaw in 1924 by a mutual friend after she had expressed admiration of his play, St. Joan. G.B.S. and his wife called upon her at the Benedictine abbey of Stanbrook, and she wrote afterwards: "It seems that the life here, and therefore the Church does attract him. God give me grace to help this poor wanderer ..." Later Shaw sent her a copy of St. Joan inscribed "To Sister Laurentia from Brother Bernard," and a rich friendship was under way.

Square Root of Minus x. Their subject was always Christianity—a subject on which Shaw managed to maintain his Shavian air of omniscience while still showing an un-Shavian tenderness and humility. "I am quite aware," he wrote, "that Catholicism has produced much more audacious philosophic speculation than Protestantism. What is more, there is no Rationalism so rationalistic as Catholic Rationalism. When the monk [quoted by Dame Laurentia] said that Protestantism destroys the brain I think he meant that Protestantism leads men to break through the limits of reason, just as the mathematicians did when finding they could get no further with possible quantities, they assumed impossible ones like the square root of minus x. I exhausted rationalism when I got to the end of my second novel at the age of 24, and should have come to a dead stop if I had not proceeded to purely mystical assumptions. . . When we are next touring in your neighborhood I shall again shake your bars and look longingly at the freedom on the other side of them."

From the Holy Land he brought back two pebbles, "one to be thrown blindfold among the others in Stanbrook garden so that there may always be a stone from Bethlehem there, though nobody will know which it is and be tempted to steal it, and the other for your own self." The second stone he had mounted on a silver model of a medieval reliquary, surmounted by a figure of the child Jesus. When it was suggested that it bear some kind of inscription, he wrote: "Why can it not be a secret between us and Our Lady and the little boy? What the devil—saving your cloth—could we put on it? . . . Our fingerprints are on it, and Heaven knows whose footprints may be on the stone. Isn't that enough?"

Again and again Shaw asked for the nuns' prayers. "Nobody can tell what influence these prayers have. If the ether is full of these impulses of goodwill to me so much the better for me: it would be shockingly unscientific to doubt it. So let the sisters give me all the prayers they can spare; and don't forget me in yours."