Those whose enthusiasm for exploring the interweaving of religion and literature has encouraged them to reconstruct the history of theology so that the great tradition runs from Jesus’ parables and the Gospels through, say, Justin’s tale of the old man on the beach and Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the Grail Cycle, the novels of George Eliot and of Cardinal Wiseman, up to some manageable modern poet, have usually not found a place for the Schoolmen. Even those who content themselves with considerations of theologians as readers, and whose topics are illustrated by references to Paul’s reorganization of Menenius’ fable of the talking stomach, to Luther’s likening of the theologian to the literary critic who elucidates the Georgies, and to that most interesting and attractive of modern popes, John Paul I, writing fan letters to Mark Twain and Dickens as well as to Jesus, rarely bring even Aquinas into their conversation. The rest of us may pause at this. Willing enough, it may be, to get along without Albert and Biel, not feeling called to defend even Duns Scotus usque ad effusionem sanguinis, we would not think it respectable to surrender Aquinas.

It would be improper, certainly, to rummage in the Summa Theologiae for immediately modern answers to particular questions, but it must be in order to expect a theologian as methodically sensitive as Aquinas to have meditated on the general topic of the relation of the forms of a theological science to the literary forms he encountered in Scripture.

Recently in the Church a particular way of talking about homosexuals has become popular. Talk of perversion, sins against nature, and so on, has been less to the fore, giving way to a quasi-medical vocabulary, and a way of talking about gay people has developed which is more consonant with modern thinking. Now they are not so much wicked as sick; they suffer from something called ‘the homosexual condition’. It is not so much that they commit horrible and disgusting sins as that, unfortunately and through no fault of their own, they have a tendency or disposition to perform such acts. It is still a morally bad thing if they actually give way to this tendency, but it is not sinful that they have it; it is like a tumour in their moral insides. Thus homosexuality was described as a ‘condition’ in the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics:

There are many kinds of condition; we speak of social conditions, economic conditions, conditions of hygiene, and so on. But here it is the medical condition that is being taken as a model for homosexuality. That is clear from the reference to possibilities of cure and to ‘pathological constitution’.

We cannot escape the fact that at USAF Upper Heyford people are ready to kill the innocent. That readiness is at the heart of our deterrent policy. And if we support that policy, acquiesce in these plans, then that readiness to kill the innocent, however reluctantly, is in our hearts also. We harden our hearts. I think we can best explain why we did the limited and public damage that we did by telling a short Bible story, about that reluctant prophet Jonah. He too is hard-hearted. He wants to see Nineveh destroyed, even when the people have repented. He is cross with the God who has mercy on them. So God causes a gourd, a castor-oil plant, to grow up and shelter Jonah. And then God destroys it. And Jonah is furious.

Then God says:

On a superficial overview, the upshot of the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida seems to be to make nonsense of all human discourse and communication. When one looks at it more carefully, this impression is abundantly confirmed. Still, there are lessons of great importance to be learned from it; and I shall try in what follows to show what they are.

Esoteric and often frustratingly organised, his utopian philosophy has been dismissed, by Christians and Marxists alike, as a confused and idiosyncratic amalgam of heresies. Yet within his writings, which span half a century (born in 1885, he died at nine-two), there can be shown to be a remarkable unity of thought. Furthermore, themes and perspectives can be discerned which arguably continue even today to be of relevance to both Christianity and Marxism and to the dialogue between them, and which make Bloch a philosopher of more than just historical interest.