To follow the history of Italy through the centuries is to penetrate to the very heart of western civilization. The artists, thinkers and statesmen of this small, but complex and vital country are part of our own past and have helped to make the present world what it is. What was achieved by the legions of Rome more than two thousand years ago has remained a powerful influence on history ever since. The cultures of ancient Greece and Israel took their dominant position in our western heritage through the medium of an Italian translation. Christianity was propagated from Rome, the fifteenth century Renaissance from Florence, and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in great part from Padua. European history would have been very different without the work of Columbus and Galileo in discovery, Raphael and Michelangelo in art, Aquinas and Vico in philosophy, St Francis and a long list of Popes from Gregory the Great to John XXIII in religion. Italian museums and churches contain what must seem a disproportionate number of the greatest masterpieces of human creativity.

This paper offers an account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of ‘the world’. As will be seen, this requires explanation of his view of religious attitudes in general, and of wonder at the world in particular. His religious position may appear to be unsystematic, or even inconsistent. Contrary to this impression, this paper will show that the same view of the world underlies his religious position, which manifests itself in different forms at different stages of his philosophy. For the world, as the logical limit to the expression of the human will, is a unifying idea in his philosophy. We shall be concerned with his early endeavour to express himself to the limit of the world and then with his later analysis of religious thought and action which construe as real that which lies beyond the world.

The world has always been a limiting concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. According to him, the world as reality presents itself to us as an unquestioned and necessary experiential fact. All of us believe in the world that has been handed down to us. It is the condition that makes possible every questioning and doubting. It is the background against which we judge in general between true and false. Its existence is so selfevident that it is even unnoticed, and its nonexistence is inconceivable. Language means only the world and can mean only it. In his endeavour to understand the world and man in it, Wittgenstein always holds on to the view that we should be concerned with things and events and situations in the world, and investigate it from within, taking the world as unquestioned and necessary.

The Jewish thought-world which influenced Christ and the first Christians was holistic. The Bible and extra-biblical literature picture God as rejoicing in His creation. If we are properly to understand Jesus and his first followers it is necessary to understand that thought-world, including ancient mythologies which predate the Exile and were still current.

It is now commonly accepted that during Jesus’s lifetime there was, even in Palestine, a varied spectrum of Jewishness, including different degrees of adherence to the Jerusalem establishment. Not everybody acclaimed Jesus’s execution, and the conduct of persons like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus’s own Galilean disciples (the women particularly) suggests pluralism. It has been suggested that it may have been not the gentiles but disaffected Galileans who first accused Jews of deicide or Christicide.'

According to the gospels Jesus understood his mission in terms of a cosmic conflict with fallen angels who tormented human beings. There is a remnant of this ancient mythology in Genesis 6:2 ‘The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.’ Christ and his contemporaries still lived in a world peopled by angels—good as well as bad. This mythology also included memories of ancient Jewish kingship. The good king moved between heaven and earth, maintained cosmic order, and was in conflict with the fallen angels and their monstrous offspring. The king, God’s holy one, preserved the integrity of creation: humans, animals, plants, their habitats and the elements. Our best account of this mythology, so important for understanding Christ and his ecology, is almost certainly in 1 Enoch.

A Newman Association day conference at Warwick University on the 9th March brought together nearly seventy delegates from different parts of the country to debate the rights of religious minorities in our society and to examine the potential for conflict between religious fundamentalism and secularism. Three specialists working in the field of inter-faith and intercommunity relations addressed the complex nature of these issues. They were the Reverend Dr. Clinton Bennett, the Reverend Dr. Christopher Lamb and Professor Edward Hulmes. Dr. Bennett is Executive Secretary for Inter-Faith Relations at the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, Dr. Lamb is Community Relations Advisor for the Diocese of Coventry and Professor Hulmes is Spalding Professorial Fellow in World Religions in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham and Fellow of the Centre of Theological Enquiry at Princeton in the USA.

Against the background of the Rushdie affair and the community tensions generated by the Gulf War the conference focussed on the contrasting attitudes of Islam and Christianity towards secularism. It also examined the different ways in which Christians respond to religious pluralism. Does the decade of evangelisation which all the churches have endorsed conflict with inter-faith dialogue? Should evangelism be directed at those in our society who have no religious belief rather than at theists like Muslims and Jews? What lessons has the Church learned from the gradual process of secularisation of British society and how should Catholics communicate those insights to their fellow citizens of other faiths whose culture and background make it difficult for them to engage positively with secular culture?

Timothy McDermott’s piece in New Blackfriars, March 1991, raised a number of fascinating themes. In this article, inspired by his, I would like to bring together two areas of thought not usually connected: the study of chance and coincidence and the study of the function of the human mind in the construction of its own perceptions. The link between the two will be a consideration of the metaphysical status of literature.

McDermott quotes Jacques Monod on coincidence: ‘The convergence of two totally-independent causal chains of events, the convergence itself being causeless.’ There is nothing unusual about either chain considered in itself. It is in the bringing together of the two chains that the coincidence lies. A coincidence only springs into existence when perceived by an appropriate, a ‘skilled’ observer. For example Leicester’s Moslems were recently excited by the discovery of the word ‘Allah’, in Arabic script, formed by the seeds on the inside of an aubergine. Many were the speculations about what this article portended. Had that aubergine instead been opened in the Leicester of 1931, few would have realised that they were in the presence of wonders.