Holy Scripture is often tough; indeed I cannot think of passages that simply tread water or offer bland affirmation. When God speaks, he calls us to attention, and generally to reform and renewal. Also, what sounds like condemnation is often a warning to relocate one’s heart, to shift from false to true goals and values, and to be aware that God and not man is the measure of all things.

One reading of God’s authority, of his being the ruler, is the familiar moral or legal one. The idea that duty derives from divine commands can be traced back through figures such as Calvin, to the medieval philosopher-theologian William of Ockham, and from there through an Augustinian tradition back to interpretations of scripture, particularly the books of the Old Testament such as Isaiah. But there is another sense in which God may be thought to be a ruler of reality and this is worth mentioning in connection with higher learning. In discussing truth, Ockham’s near contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, draws on the philosophy of the Greeks filtered through the commentaries of Arabs and Jews. What Aquinas arrives at is the idea that the human intellect is ‘measured’ by things and that things are ‘measured’ by God; so that, indirectly, God is the measure of our minds. What he means is that knowledge involves conforming our minds to the structure of reality—grasping the way things are—and that the way things are in the world is a reflection of God’s own mind.

People have puzzled over the nature of the miracle reported in Acts 2 for centuries, and the passage is especially intriguing if you are a linguist. Did Peter really find himself speaking in languages he did not know?

Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.

Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.

It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.

This is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him against my charges.

Von Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work, and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their theological insights about the significance of sexual difference. John Roten writes that “The very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated into theological categories” to such an extent that von Speyr sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in neoorthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.