In 1896 Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae declared definitively that the Anglican orders of the past and of his own day were ‘absolutely null and utterly void’. His principal reason was defect of sacramental form, but to that was added a second reason, namely, defect of sacramental intention. In other words, the sacrament of holy order was not conferred among Anglicans on account of the deficient form found in their Ordinal dating from the reign of King Edward VI, but also on account of a defective internal intention to perform the sacrament on the part of Anglican ministers.

When, as a student at Oxford, Johnson “took up Law’s Serious Call. . . expecting to find it a dull book”, he found it “quite an overmatch” for him. Taking up David Urquhart’s Effect on the World of the Restoration of Canon Law ... a Vindication of the Catholic Church against a Priest, I found myself in somewhat similar case—struck by the moral passion and remorseless logic. Urquhart’s luckless opponent was the Dominican friar, Fr. Rodolph Suffield—celebrated English Dominican preacher of the 1860s. Urquhart (1805-77) was an eccentric Scottish aristocrat, a Protestant papalist, who succeeded in pushing his concern over the morality of war on to the preparatory documentation of the first Vatican Council. Suffield (1821-91), by the late 1860s profoundly antagonistic to ultramontanism, left the Church to become a Unitarian minister shortly after the promulgation of the Infallibility Decree. It is perhaps timely to recall their contestation as contemporary British foreign policy impales itself upon the horns of its current moral dilemmas.

This paper seeks to spell out the consequences of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of rationality for the debate between faith and reason. In the modem period, commitment to authority came to be understood as a hindrance to the discovery of truth. Understanding rationality as tradition-constituted, however, puts that assumption into question. Traditions of enquiry are the bearers of rational resources; it is impossible for inquirers to perform rational work outside some tradition of enquiry. A tradition’s formative texts and its rational resources occupy a place of authority in the practice of critical reflection. The reintroduction of the notion that commitment to authority can be rational has important consequences for the debate between faith and reason: critical reasoning and acceptance of authority are not antithetical. Rather, reason depends on authority for resources to perform its task. This paper thus argues that the apparent conflict modem philosophers of religion attribute to committed faith and critical reflection dissolves once rationality is understood as tradition-constituted.

Understanding rationality as constituted by traditions of enquiry avoids the complaint that commitment to authority entails a pluralism that cannot rationally be eliminated. To see why this is so, it is necessary to attend to a particular feature of traditions of enquiry. Using their standards of rationality, traditions progress as they solve the problems that are inherent within their point of view.

If the adherents of a tradition cannot solve a problem using their rational resources, then the tradition lapses into a state of epistemological crisis. At this point, it is uncertain whether the epistemological crisis will be solved.