Last year Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed gatherings of eighty bishops and of the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America, on the subject of Relativism as the central problem for the Faith today. In religion, what he calls relativism is what most writers in this area today call pluralism. He says of the ‘so-called pluralist theology of religion’ that ‘only now has it come to the center of the Christian conscience’ (Origins: CNS documentary service, Vol. 26, No. 20, October 31, 1996, p. 311). On studying the text I find that Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking of contemporary religious pluralism, identifies me as ‘one of its founders and eminent representatives’ (p. 312).

If I were a Catholic, owing allegiance to the Pope, I would probably not feel able to question Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncements. But as what he calls an American Presbyterian (I am not in fact an American, although I taught for a number of years very happily in the United States), I feel entitled to respond to the Cardinal as a fellow theologian—a much more eminent one than myself, but nevertheless subject to the same canons of accuracy when expounding views which one intends to criticise. The tone of the Cardinal’s address is courteous throughout and I can appreciate the concerns which he expresses from his own very conservative point of view. My regret, however, is that internal evidence reveals that he has relied on a secondary source which has provided him with a misleading version of what I have written.

The success of the Jubilee 2000 Campaign for the remission of the debts of the poorest countries of the world may depend on understanding the implications of certain kinds of unrepayable debt, in a way that relates less to any sort of charity than to an analysis of economic, social and political history. The debts of the poorest countries are unrepayable because of their huge scale in relation to the resources of the debtor, though not so huge in relation to the wealth of the creditors, in most cases the world’s richest countries, principally the G7. We may note to begin with that these debts were largely incurred in the 1960s and subsequent decades by the governments of newly-independent countries, mostly very poor and rather backward, in pursuit of a rapid development in their economies, infrastructure and educational resources, but that this incurring was almost entirely shaped on the advice of the creditors whose apparent expertise, monetary and technical, dominated the whole process. That is to say, western governments, international agencies and private companies presided over a process whereby relatively uninformed politicians in newly-independent countries accepted huge loans for inadequately thought-through projects, oblivious of the long-term consequences for their economies of the need to service such debts in the future. Doubtless the situation was made worse by the corruption and inefficiency of many of the governments concerned, but the effect of such corruption was greatly enhanced by the willingness of western financiers to play along with governments well known for their corruption, the loans of the IMF to Mobutu’s Zaire being just one particularly blatant case.

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong.

The development of theology into something like its modem sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory.

The aim of this paper is to draw to the attention of readers not conversant with Welsh the significance and importance of a work little known at present outside Wales but deserving of a far wider readership. This is the anonymous medieval Welsh prose treatise on mysticism called Ymborth yr Enaid (Sustenance of the Soul), the third and sole surviving book of a larger work called Cysegrlan Fuchedd (Holy Living). Ymborth yr Enaid has several claims to distinction. First, it is the only example of a medieval Welsh treatise on mysticism, and for that reason, as well as its intrinsic merits, it is important in the context of medieval vernacular mystical writings. Second, it is the work of a man who was not only a considerable theologian and philosopher but also a very gifted artist. Third, the work represents a unique fusion of native Welsh bardic learning and mainstream scholastic theology, a fact which is not only remarkable in itself but also, in this case, far-reaching in its implications for the Welsh prose literature of the period generally, both religious and secular, not least with regard to such fundamental questions as the dating, provenance, and authorship of much of it. Ymborth yr Enaid is a work rich in variety and pregnant with significance.