2 Catherine Pickstock has described this process very ably in her book After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford Blackwell 1998), 12–45Google Scholar. For Pickstock everything went wrong in philosophy with Duns Scotus because he broke with the philosophical tradition of centuries and deduced facts from concepts where before Aquinas, for example, deduced his concepts from facts (Aquinas was an empiricist of sorts). Scotus begins with concepts and works from the possible existence of things to realities. The process was brought to a head by Descartes whose “I think—therefore I am” begins with a concept and tests reality against clear and distinct ideas. Descartes “conducts an intellectual funeral procession” which closes the human mind against reality. The rest is history. Reason became divorced from reality.

3 Newman concludes his tour de force on the university with some apposite reflections on the lyceum at Athens. He asks whether Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Horace or Gregory of Nyssa, in coming to Athens as youths bent upon an education, did so for love of wisdom or love of truth?“He goes to the Parthenon to study the scriptures of Phidias; to the temple of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus … onward he proceeds still and now he has come to that still more celebrated Academe … and there his eye is arrested by just one object—the very presence of Plato. Had our stranger got nothing by his voyage but the sight of the breathing and moving Plato, had he entered no lecture‐room to hear, no gymnasium to converse, he had got some measure of education, and something to tell of to his grandchildren” (cf. Newman, J. H., The Idea of a University, Chicago 1987, 494–495Google Scholar).

4 Plato, , The Republic, London 1964Google Scholar, bk iv, 484, at p. 244.

5 Paul, John II, Fides et ratio, London 1998, no. 80, at p. 119Google Scholar.

6 There are theologians who argue, however, that Scotus was qualifying problems in Aquinas and who suggest that Aquinas was not the empiricist that many believe him to be. In particular they argue that Aquinas' epistemology, notably his idea of the phantasm, forced a break in the mind's perception of reality, so that for Aquinas it is an intellectual concept that is first intuited by the mind not empirical reality. The same theologians also argue that Aquinas' distinction between form and matter must be revised in the present age due to the discoveries of the sub‐atomic structure of matter pioneered by physicists and cosmologists of our own time. These show that we can no longer hold to a distinction between matter and form in the way that Aquinas understood it. This is a position, incidentally, that they share with a number of cosmologists from the Vatican Observatory.

7 MacIntyre wrote in the Eighties that “what we possess […] are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality” (cf. MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame 1981, p. 232Google Scholar).

8 Cf. Pickstock, After Writing, p. 123.

9 “In the hands of a generation of ultra‐Darwinists, modern biology seeks to explain everything in terms of DNA. The biology of the future must overcome this crude reductionism” (Steven Rose, “A New Biology,” in Prospect 49, Feb. 2000, p. 27).

10 Rose, “A New Biology,” p. 28.

11 Similarly in the selfish gene view of the world, the organism is DNA's way of making more DNA in order to ensure its safe replication. But as Rose points out, DNA is an inert molecule (hence the possibility of recovering it intact from amber many thousands of years old as in Jurassic Park). What brings it to life is the cell in which it is embedded. DNA cannot makes copies of itself unaided; it cannot therefore replicate itself in the sense in which this terms is usually understood. Replication requires an appropriately protected environment, the presence of a variety of complex molecular precursors, a set of protein enzymes, and a supply of chemical energy (Rose, “A New Biology,” p. 29).

12 Cf. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 152.

13 Aquinas and Albert are here contrasted with Abelard and Scotus. The former built their systems on empirical observation (not the essentialism later attributed to them by existentialists) while the latter tended to see logic as the principal means of verification (for more on this see my article “St. Thomas the Exegete,” in Milltown Studies 44 [1999] 14–15 and the article by Stump, Eleanor, “Biblical Commentary and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge 1993, pp. 252–268)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 I am referring to Heaney's rewritten version of the encounter between Apollo and the Sybil in the Aeneid, bk vi, lines 98–148 (in Heaney, Seamus, “The Golden Bough,” in Seeing Things, London 1991, p. 1Google Scholar).

15 This is why the philosopher‐pope made the first literary essay of his pontificate an exercise in Christian anthropology when he wrote the encyclical Redemptor hominis (1979).

16 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 83, at ibid, p. 123.

17 Cf. Rose, “A New Biology,” p. 28.

18 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio no. 83, at ibid, p. 123.

19 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 83, at ibid., p. 123.

20 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 84, at ibid., p. 124.

21 Cf. Bryan Magee, “Sense and Nonsense—the Writing of Philosophy,” in Prospect 49, Feb 2000, 23.

22 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 84, at ibid., p. 124–125.

23 The Pope cites the statement of the Fourth Lateran Council (cf. Lateran IV, 1215, De errore Abbatis Joachim, II, at DS 806.

24 Cf. Hyman, Gavin, “Hick and Loughlin on Disputes and Frameworks,” in New Blackfriars 79 (1993) 391–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Cf. Loughlin, Gerard, Mirroring God's World: A Critique of John Hick's Speculative Theology, unpublished dissertation Cambridge 1986, p. 22, nt. 24Google Scholar.

26 Cf. Hyman, “Hick and Loughlin,” p. 393.

27 Cf. Loughlin, Mirroring God's World, p. 58.

28 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 85, at ibid., p. 125.

29 This is the criticism sometimes made of scripture scholars who venture into dogmatics without a corresponding jog through the vale of church history.

30 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 85, at ibid., p. 126.

31 “Hic florent artes, caelestis pagina regna Stant leges, lucet jus, medicina viget” (cf. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, Lyon 1959, I, 120).

32 “Because Tertullian sees the need for rational theological enquiry he has been placed among the first philosophical Christians.” I am using an expression that appears in Tertullian to signify the move from faith to reason and from dogmatics to apologetics (cf. Eric Osborn, Tertullian, p. 35).

33 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 86, at ibid., p. 128.

34 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 87, at ibid., p. 128.

35 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. S7, at ibid., p. 128.

36 Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth, San Francisco 1997, p. 66.

37 “The scientistic mentality has succeeded in leading many to think that if something is technologically possible it is therefore morally admissible” (cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 88, at ibid., p. 130).

38 One is reminded of the postcard adage which a seminarian in the heady Seventies had pinned to his wardrobe: “change as an unchanging ideal itself becomes changeless.”

39 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 90, at ibid., p. 131.

40 Cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 91, at ibid., p. 134.