This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.

Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.

Do whales have souls and if so what follows ? How would Catholic theology have to change if it was discovered that whales were as rational as you or I ? If whales have souls can they become Catholics ?

For a traditional Catholic, to have a soul, in latin anima, is to be animate, to be alive. Having a soul is having a certain form, a certain organisation such that one can move oneself. One part moves another so that the whole moves itself. This self-moving quality, shown in the processes of nutrition, growth and reproduction, is common to all living things. To be alive is to have a soul. St. Thomas Aquinas would affirm that all living things from cabbages to whales, so long as they were alive, were so in virtue of a soul.

This broadly speaking, is the scriptural view, though it is often obscured by translation. In Genesis 1:20 God says,‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures’. In Genesis 2:7 God breathes into the nostrils of the man so that he becomes a ‘living being’. In both cases the word nephesh is used which in other places we would translate soul. So the waters brought forth swarms of living souls, and Adam became a living soul. Plants are a bit of a borderline case, for though clearly alive they are not very lively. However, with this small qualification, hebrew Old Testament, greek New Testament, and latin scholastic theology would agree.

Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.

A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.

If it is the case that ‘every age adopts an image of itself—a certain horizon, however blurred and imprecise, which somehow unifies its whole experience’, then we may enquire: in what does such a contemporary image consist? Perry Anderson suggests, with characteristic elan, the following: ‘The radical internationalization of the forces of production—not to speak of circulation—that defines the spearhead forms of capital in the final years of the 20th century promises to render all national correctors. . . increasingly tenuous in the future. In that sense no society ...will be immune to the unpredictable tides and tempests of an uneven development whose elements are acquiring a well-nigh meteorological velocity around the world.’ The intimation of apocalyptic in this image of tides and tempests hints at the possibility of epochal change; and indeed, it is a feeling that has grown into a conviction on the part of many theorists, as the world economy lurches towards the 21st century. ‘Post-industrial’, ‘informational’ or ‘hyperreal’: however the revolutionary force of capitalism is to be described at the close of this century, it is becoming increasingly clear that the sheer magnitude of these changes are installing, not only new patterns of economic production and exchange, but also, and more profoundly, new realms of human experience. The world is changing, a feeling uncannily and often disturbingly present to many, as they search to establish the lineaments of the human in this Promethean age.