Throughout the course of his career, Anthony Kenny has remained in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas. In his introduction to Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969) - a book intended to make the medieval Dominican intelligible to philosophers brought up in the analytic tradition - he argued that although superseded in regard to the philosophy of nature and logic, Aquinas’s work in metaphysics, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind and moral philosophy entitles him to rank with the greatest of philosophers, in fact as ‘one of the dozen greatest of the western world’ (p.l).

Just over ten years later he presented a similar assessment. In logic, linguistics and scientific methodology Aquinas’s contribution is slight, he says, and his ‘most rewarding work’ is to be found in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophy of mind (Aquinas, 1980, p.30). The compliment is not as straightforward as it might seem, since Kenny goes on immediately to add that Aquinas’s ‘theory of Being involves philosophical confusions which not even the most sympathetic treatment can eradicate’ (pp.30-31). Not only confusion, though, since the chapter devoted to ‘Being’ concludes by charging Aquinas’s account with ‘sophistry and illusion’ (p.60). The significance of this, Kenny says, is that this is precisely the part of Aquinas’s philosophical work that is most cherished by his admirers and, in particular, by his theologian- admirers.

The modern tradition in ethics has been under attack since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.’ One of the more fascinating aspects of all this is that the demise of virtue ethics, in the sense discussed by Professor MacIntyre, had relegated ethics to a peripheral question discussed by Aristotle in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.

It is there that Aristotle considers what most translators have rendered as “continence” and “incontinence”, enkrateia and akrasia, although one can also describe the enkratic man as disciplined. Mostly applied to question of temperance, enkrateia involves imposing the judgement of reason on unruly passions. Aristotle notes “we must now discuss incontinence and softness (or effeminacy) and continence and endurance; for we must treat each of the two neither as identical with virtue or wickedness, nor as a different genus.” (Bk. VII, Ch. 1: 1145a35). If we are tempted, as people used to say, to do something foolish or wicked, but realize that it is foolish or wicked and overcome the impulse by the imposition of reason, we are enkratic. Reason has prevailed. Yet this is not, according to Aristotle, a question of virtue. It is something less.

The scientific mentality that demands warrant for all our beliefs permeates all of modem thinking. Of course, at the base of all those beliefs for which we demand evidence are more fundamental beliefs that are simply acquiesced in because they are part of our culture. They are the things that few of us scrutinize, but they have enormous influence upon the beliefs and doctrines that we do scrupulously think about.

This is especially true in the area of theology where theological doctrines are greatly affected by more fundamental notions of things like good and evil, sin, love, happiness, etc. We spend time debating and developing our theological doctrines but take for granted that we have correct ideas of what is good or evil — that we know what sin or love is — but do we? In fact, the notions most of us have of such things are simply unreflectively acquired through our experience as individuals and members of a language community and culture. My language community and culture taught me to understand such things in certain ways, and then my individual experience moulded my understanding without much reflection. But, although acquired unreflectively, these basic notions which have such an enormous influence upon our theology are philosophically loaded concepts. Although we take them for granted and treat them ‘as if’ they were somehow God-given, they in fact represent the philosophical views of the culture we were born or educated into.

The question of whether Peter was indeed the first bishop of Rome has recently gained popular prominence in the United States due to the best seller by historian and papal critic Garry Wills who vigorously dismisses the entire idea as myth. Although simplistically and sensationally presented, Wills’ thesis relies on the view of many, albeit more subtle, critical scholars that Peter could not have been a bishop at Rome because there were no bishops in Rome until the middle of the second century A.D. Several years ago, David Albert Jones O.P., challenged in this journal this common view of episcopacy in the first century. One scholar, Francis Sullivan S.J., recently responded specifically to Jones’ challenge by reaffirming the apparent majority view. This article will briefly refer to Sullivan’s critique of Jones, and will present in a new light the New Testament evidence showing that Jones’ questioning of the reigning critical view is indeed well-founded and long overdue.

The heart of Jones’ challenge is highlighting the flawed assumptions underlying the reasoning used to deny a first century episcopate: 1) the ideological tendency to view apostolic ministry as “free, loose, inspired and lay” while seeing “the emergence of clerical forms as a fall from primitive innocence” (Jones, p. 142); and 2) the denial of the existence of a first century episcopate based on the alleged silence of early documents. In essence, Jones rightly detects a pervasive bias in the critical literature against developed church structure as somehow contaminating the springtime of apostolic Christianity.