Over the last three decades there has been a great outpouring of writings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity, almost all of which, ironically, have lamented the neglect of the doctrine. Again and again one reads that although the Trinity is central and crucially important to Christianity and Christian theology, it has not been given adequate treatment. It is unacceptable, theologians protest, that the Trinity has come to be regarded as an obscure and complex theological technicality, a piece of celestial mathematics impossible to understand and with little relevance to the life of the ordinary Christian. Karl Rahner remarked that modern Christians were ‘almost mere “monotheists’” paying lip service to the Trinity but in practice ignoring it. If it were announced that the dogma had been a mistake and was to be erased from official Christianity, nobody, he thought, would be too bothered, neither the ordinary believing Christians nor the authors of theological textbooks.’ Rahner’s diagnosis has been widely accepted and widely regretted. The consensus is that the Trinity is at the heart of Christianity, and both theology and piety have gone astray if it is regarded as belonging to the specialists. A retrieval (it is believed) is needed: the Trinity must be understood once again (one reads) as a positive and central element in the Christian faith rather than an embarrassing obscurity, and as profoundly relevant to the life of individual Christians, to the life of the Church, and perhaps beyond.

No one who studies savage societies would say, today, that there are modes of thought which are confined to primitive peoples. It is rather that we ourselves have specialised ways of apprehending reality. The contributors to this series may, indeed, have described notions which we do not easily take for granted, but which are commonplace among many peoples without our modern science and technology. But any historical sense of proportion—and our historical thought, our sense of relativities, is among our distinguishing characteristics—reminds us that it is some of our own habits of thought which are newly-formed and uncommon. We stand more or less alone, for example, in not taking witchcraft seriously, or distant kinship; and our indifference in such matters divides us equally from savages, and from those ancient cultures whose civilisation, in other respects, we are proud to inherit.

Further, since the eighteenth century at least, we have been rather disposed to forget that a satisfying representation of reality may be sought in more than one way, that reasoning is not the only way of thinking, that there is a place for meditative and imaginative thought.

The paper argues for new concepts in theological ethics: structures of virtue and structures of vice. The Catholic tradition's development of the ‘structures of sin’ in the 1970's and 80's was a significant contribution to magisterial teaching. However, this concept should be updated in light of the trajectory and concepts of post-Vatican II theological ethics. The article proceeds in two parts. Part one recapitulates the development of the concept of structures of sin in the Catholic tradition from the Second Vatican Council to Pope Benedict XVI's recent social encyclical, Caritas in veritate. Part two reflects on the findings of part one, and proceeds to define and defend the concepts structure of virtue and structures of vice. These related concepts more accurately capture the moral nature of social structures. Social structures have the capacity to produce just or unjust outcomes, and to play a significant role in the character formation of persons. Therefore, the structures of virtue and structures of vice are offered as insightful ways of discussing the moral status of social structures.

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schönberg, establishing private societies for the performance of contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composers have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:

Che sàrà, sàrà,

Whatever will be, will be,

The future’s not ours to see,

Che sàrà, sàrà.

The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.

We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.

It is a mark of realism that any inquiry should start from where one is and an inquiry into law should start from our everyday understanding of it. Such an inquiry would most likely register a variety of reactions, each in its own way instructive. Law may suggest ‘law and order’ of the sort that is usually associated with right-wing or repressive sections of the political spectrum. Law may suggest the police carrying out their duties; think of the colloquial expression, ‘I’ll get the law on you’. Law may suggest a judge or magistrate sentencing. Law may suggest Parliament at work. On the whole each of these spontaneous images builds on a central picture of law as a command to be enforced in case of disobedience. On longer reflection law would seem to exist to keep order, public peace and stability so that civic life can flourish and law does in some general way embody the predominant views of the community as a whole most of the time. Moreover our reflections would show that there is virtually nothing which could not be demanded or forbidden by law and in turn that there is no law which could not be changed. We have very little, except perhaps the fact that a Parliamentary majority, if not always right, can at least be changed to shield us from the possible content of law and the severity of its application.

To this second edition of his now famous Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow has added fifty pages of further thoughts provoked by the extraordinary amount of attention it received. One can say ‘extraordinary’ without irony, or with little. In itself the lecture was not very remarkable— neither deep, nor subtle, nor closely reasoned, nor witty. But it made its points with force and it was exceedingly topical. Moreover Sir Charles is an interesting and versatile man, and as a writer he has a beguiling knack of combining a certain high seriousness—solemnity even—with the common touch. One feels that he has tried hard not to be spoiled by success—not, in a sense, to be changed by it at all. He brings the whole of himself, his feelings as well as his gifts and experience, into all that he writes. He does so here. Allusions to Rutherford and G. H. Hardy, dropped with a tone at once admiring and affectionate, and to high table conversations, evoke the Cambridge background and the thrill of having been a young research student there at ‘one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics’. Allusions to the working class origins widen the perspective and humanise it; reference to important tasks well performed in the civil service add the impression—and a perfectly just one— of a man who knows much front the inside about power and the workings of power. Indeed the only ‘inside’ allusion one misses is to the novelist’s art; which is a pity since so much of the lecture, on its more polemical side, and so much of the comment now added to it, amount to an indictment of the ‘literary intellectual’ and, indirectly or by implication, of a good deal of the literature which he either produces or spends much time and energy discussing.

Theology and Social Theory is a book that prompts conversation on almost every page - conversation of both the ‘yes, and..and the ‘yes, but . kind, as well as something like a ‘no, but. . .’ on occasion. An adequate review would have to be a kind of gloss, a talmudic margin. It is no small tribute to Milbank that this work is so hard to discuss briefly. What follows is not a review, but a few fragments of this reader’s side of the conversation, assembled round a focal area of unease within an overall admiration for the learning and boldness of the enterprise. My title will hint at something of my discomfort: is Milbank’s commitment to history and narrative, to time as the medium of benign creativity and non-competitive difference, fully realised in his exposition? Does he ‘save time’ in a theological sense or only in the colloquial one of getting more expeditiously to his goal than the circumstances might seem to warrant?

The project of reconstructing a Christian ontology by retelling the story of the Christian Church’s origins, so as to display it as the history that makes sense of all histories, is heralded as one of the indispensable moments in the rehabilitation of a properly theological critique of secular order (e.g. p.381). ‘The metanarrative. . . is the genesis of the Church’ (p.387). This is an intriguing and exhilarating prospect; I am not sure if it has been carried through. Christian universalism is opposed to the ‘orders’ of non-Christian antiquity—the Roman sacralisation of dominion, with its programmatic refusal of a properly common good, and the Jewish commitment to law as the defining structure of a common good, at least for one specific community.

The increasing prevalence of forms of dementia poses some profound challenges, not least to our Christology and soteriology. In particular, it exposes the degree to which faith, grace and salvation are all still linked to the concept of the self-conscious individual, and how this approach limits the range of possible theological responses to dementia. In this paper, the author argues that a theological response in depth requires us to consider the possibility of saying that Christ ‘demented’ on the Cross. Some implications of making such an assertion are explored, both for Christology in general and for the ways Christ may be spoken of as ‘present to’ those with dementia.

This paper charts the emergence of environmental themes in Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST). I argue that not only has this strand not been adequately acknowledged, but also that the theological basis for these ideas are rooted in core Roman Catholic teachings on creation, Christology and anthropology. In other words, concern for environmental issues is not an optional extra for Christian practice, but expresses in a fundamental way deep incarnation and human image-bearing as responsible stewardship. I argue that a particular concern with issues of social justice shapes the way environmental problems are addressed, so terms such as human ecology, ecological conversion, solidarity, the common good and world peace all take up ecological threads that are then woven into the account. While Pope John Paul II arguably laid the foundation for the theological bases for these ideas, Pope Benedict XVI applies these ideas more explicitly to current concerns. Yet while the former gave witness to the power of contemplation of the natural world, the latter is more concerned with distortions in philosophical reasoning in the Western world, including dangers he perceived in naturalism and pantheism. Both pontiffs show a lack of specific understanding of ecological systems and tend to idealise both nature in terms of harmonious relationships and humans in terms of mastery.

It was not the purpose of Theology and Social Theory (whose argument has been so accurately precised by Fergus Kerr) to imagine the Church as Utopia. Nor to discover in its ramified and fissiparous history some single ideal exemplar. For this would have been to envisage the Church in spatial terms—as another place, which we might arrive at, or as this identifiable site, which we can still inhabit. How could either characterize the Church which exists, finitely, not in time, but as time, taken in the mode of gift and promise? Not as a peace we must slowly construct, piecemeal, imbibing our hard-learned lessons, but as a peace already given, superabundantly, in the breaking of bread by the risen Lord, which assembles the harmony of peoples then and at every subsequent eucharist. But neither as a peace already realized, which might excuse our labour. For the body and blood of Christ only exist in the mode of gift, and they can be gift (like any gift) only as traces of the giver and promise of future provision from the same source. This is not an ideal presence real or imagined, but something more like an ‘ideal transmission’ through time, and despite its ravages. Fortunately the Church is first and foremost neither a programme, nor a ‘real’ society, but instead an enacted, serious fiction. Only in its eucharistic centring is it enabled to sustain a ritual distance from itself, to preserve itself, as the body of Christ under judgement by the body of Christ, which after all, it can only receive. In a sense, this ritual distance of the Church from itself defines the Church, or rather deflects it from any definition of what it is. In its truth it is not, but has been and will be. (Here I am much indebted to Kieran Flanagan for pointing out that my book omitted the ritual dimension).

It may seem strange, now that the hierarchies of the world have begun to put the Council's recommendations into practice, to see an introductory article on a linguistic framework for discussing liturgical language. But there are several good reasons why such a perspective is necessary. First, any decisions licensing the use of certain forms and withholding others must always be kept under review, as language is in a continual state of change. In a hundred years time, the language of today may well seem as archaic as the (never-defined) ‘Victorian English’ which biblical translations are frequently accused of being in. One must beware of complacency. There is bound to be further modification, and much future discussion. Secondly, the perspective would be valuable as a therapy for much recent popular discussion, whose utility is lessened by using undefined or irrelevant critical terminology, when words are condemned for being ‘ugly', ‘un-English', ‘incorrect', ‘debased', and so on – all highly subjective and misleading criteria. Thirdly, a linguistically-orientated basis for discussion would provide a means whereby the public's suggestions and views could be of use to any committee working on the liturgy. At the moment, sporadic opinions sent to the Catholic press about the kind of language vernacularization should bring make interesting reading, but because of the haphazard, occasional origins of this information and the variety of critical principles on which views are based (everything from a vague impressionism to a precise logic), the resultant mass of data is unco-ordinated, of little generality, and hence of little assistance. But it is just this knowledge about popular attitudes to language which a committee needs.

When academically inclined atheists critique arguments for the existence of God, they commonly target arguments of Intelligent Design as proposed by Paley, Dembski, and Behe. In so doing, it is not uncommon for them to include within the scope of their criticisms Aquinas's fifth proof for the existence of God – the proof from final causality. In this essay, I shall argue that there are very significant differences between the Fifth Way and the more modern arguments of Intelligent Design which means that any critique offered in regard to the latter normally leaves the former unscathed. Moreover, I shall also argue that the Intelligent Design approach concedes some of the erroneous premises of the atheists’ own arguments and that these are in no way conceded by Aquinas in the Fifth Way or elsewhere.

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas's account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a naïve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas's doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas's ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas's account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas's account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species.

I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community.

For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith. But they became a community it seemed, perhaps again like every community, around a mourning for lost community, lost solidarity, lost hope of a religiously-tinged socialist ideal (which many more sympathise with than believe in).

And we are still just about within the echo of this moment, which determines that the new public visibility of Christian Socialism, concentrated around the Elisha figure of Tony Blair, has an elegiac, melancholy feel to it. There is nothing here for anyone to triumph in; least of all Christian Socialists. For if a surprising number of still remaining socialists are Christians, or indeed Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, then this may be precisely because socialism, like religion, now assumes a merely spectral reality in the modern secularised world. It has ceased to appear either plausible or rational, and has instead been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity in the west, we remain haunted by its excellence, because nothing has emerged to replace it; we sense that just as the story of a compassionate God who became man was the ‘final religion’, so also, the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was ‘the final politics’. With its demise, we are delivered over to something somehow more secular than politics—to a future of infinite utilitarian calculation by individuals, states and transnational companies, of the possible gains and losses, the greater and the lesser risks.

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.