In 1920 Father Bede Jarrett, then provincial of the English Dominicans, wrote to a friend saying that he had just bought the Catholic Review for the province. The Catholic Review was a quarterly journal edited first by Father Benedict Williamson and then by Father Henry Rope. The new publication was to be called Blackfriars. In the view of its first editor, Father Bernard Delany OP (1890-1959), Father Bede had wasted the forty pounds he had paid for it since the journal was defunct and there was to be only a notional continuity between it and the one that was to replace it. In purchasing the title Father Bede was fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to establish a Catholic periodical which would express a specifically and characteristically Dominican voice in England.

As early as 1910 a similar project had been mooted by Father Hugh Pope OP (1869-1946), a celebrated apologist and exegete who had taught at the Dominican house of studies in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, but who was then teaching Scripture at the Angelicum, the Order’s Roman university.’ In the Hawkesyard Review, an in-house journal mostly edited by the Hawkesyard students, Father Hugh argued the case for a Dominican review suggesting that, in the contemporary world, it would be a sign of the Order’s commitment to the ministry of the Word. In the midst of the Modernist crisis, whatever Scripture scholars wrote was of interest to those in higher authority and was often carefully scrutinised. It was for this reason that Pope’s article in an obscure English Dominican publication with a tiny circulation attracted the attention of the Master of the Order, Father Vincent Cormier (1832-1916).

Herbert McCabe was the first Dominican I ever met. He answered my ring on the front door of Blackfriars, Oxford, when I came there in 1977 to see what Dominicans were like and whether I might be interested in joining them.’came to learn that Dominicans are not quite like anything. They are not easily typecast. But Herbert, as I also came to learn, is someone who holds that they have something which unites them in spite of their differences. His thoughts on this subject emerge in a sermon he preached to most of the members of the English Dominican province at their Provincial Chapter in 1982.

The sermon begins in a spirited fashion: “We are the ‘Friars Preachers’, the preaching brethren, a community which specialises in talk.” It then goes on to suggest that Dominican talkers are part of a mystery in which what they preach is also a mystery. The mystery of which Dominicans are part, says Herbert, is nothing other than the work of God in Christ. The mystery they preach, he adds, is nothing other than God. And God, Herbert insists, is indeed a mystery. God is “the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe” who “does not come within the scope of our interpretation of the world or our language”.

In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”

The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.

One easy way into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is to trace his references to the philosophy of Descartes. He ascribes the liberal-modernism in Protestant theology, to which he was so deeply opposed, to the grip of Cartesian epistemology on theological methodology since the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, he insists on a radicalization of Cartesian considerations about doubt and certainty when he comes to work out the doctrine of creation.

Very early in the first volume of Church Dogmatics (henceforth CD), Barth assails ‘Modernistic dogmatics’, ‘theology since the days of the Enlightenment’ (CD 1/1, page 36, first published in 1932, English translation 1936, revised 1975). He means, of course, Protestant theology: a theology, or a family of theologies one might say, in which ‘church and faith are to be understood as links in a greater nexus of being’, so that dogmatic theology becomes ‘a link in a greater nexus of scientific problems, from the general structural laws of which its own specific conditions of knowledge are to be deduced and its own specific scientific character known’. The mistake with this, according to Barth, is that theology is regarded as having the same epistemological status, requirements, methods and so forth, as any other scientific or scholarly discipline. More specifically, this ‘nexus of problems’ is ‘that of an ontology’, a conception of reality, a metaphysics of being, which— ‘since Descartes‘—is the ontology ‘of a comprehensively explicated self-understanding of human existence which may also at a specific point become the pre-understanding of an existence in the Church or in faith, and therefore the pre-understanding and criterion of theological knowledge’.

According to George Steiner, commentary is without end. No, strictly that is not quite accurate. What he said was that it was without end “in the worlds of interpretative and critical discourse”, where there are no final conclusions. “Essay speaks to essay, article chatters to article in an endless gallery of querulous echo,” he said in his book Real Presences'.

Functioning as whispering galleries is one of the things that small magazines can do very well. Inevitably, writing in the special number marking the 70th birthday of Herbert McCabe, the small magazine which jumps first to my mind is New Blackfriars, which Herbert edited so memorably for eleven years. However, another ex-editor, Allan White, is writing in this number about New Blackfriars in particular. It is all magazines with circulations of under 5,000—frequently well under 5,000—which I am writing about here (though not, I should add, house magazines or parish magazines or any magazines written entirely by the editor and his staff.) Of course, the echoes which Steiner speaks about come far faster in clashes between opposing pontificators on TV and in the newspapers than in these small magazines, but on TV and in the newspapers the echoes can get distorted out of all recognition.

>What sort of future, though, have the small magazines got? Unless your name is Rupert Murdoch, if you are working in any of the communications media you are beset from time to time with fear for the future—fear of being frozen out or eaten up. It is something that goes with the job.