What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.

I examine the question of how tradition is received and passed on within the Church's Councils with specific attention to the problems of continuity and discontinuity. I use the example of Vatican II's ‘Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions’ to explore the question of hermeneutics in both receiving and passing on the teachings of the Church. By looking at the historical development of this document I try to show that three important factors at work: first, the question of biblical interpretation; second, the question of determining which elements of tradition are authoritative and which not; and third, the influence of non-theological factors upon theological articulations. Through examining these factors, I argue for one particular approach to Council hermeneutics that is able to include and correct three other approaches. I argue that correct interpretations of Council documents do not represent the closure of tradition, but the opening up of tradition to future reception and re-formulation.

A synodal church makes assumptions about our basic ecclesial experience which takes place when we assemble liturgically, especially when we act eucharistically. The basic assumption is that we are a genuine human community knowing and relating to one another as brothers and sisters in baptism. Only real communities can authentically image the church's nature. This is a ‘bottom – up’ activity. If we wish this, then we must rediscover our liturgy and celebrate it in a new way as flowing out from a community and helping it to discover its own nature. This, in turn, makes demands on our understanding of ministry and its structures. While many Catholics endorse synodality, their willingness to change the shape of the presbyterate is uncertain.

Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest—akin, perhaps, to a paper on the Second International or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism. But fascism is no longer of merely antiquarian interest, if indeed it ever was. As the crisis of world monopoly capitalism intensifies, fascism is once more a real political issue in the advanced capitalist societies; and some historical analysis of its constitutive structures is absolutely indispensable to the political task of rooting it out. This isn’t easy, for a number of reasons. For one thing, fascism is a phenomenon of considerable complexity, and for that reason among others lends itself temptingly to vulgarly reductive explanations whose theoretical bankruptcy leads straight to political impotence. For another thing, there isn’t always enough time to plough one’s way through the history and theory of fascism when the National Front are gathering at the local town hall. And so Front-hunting can become a seductive displacement of the real task of examining what fascism actually signifies. There is, too, the problem of knowing how seriously at the moment to take fascism in our society—of steering a line between that bland dismissal of it on which it historically thrives, and diverting one’s political energies from the major tasks which confront us—the destruction of the bourgeois state through the building of revolutionary proletarian leadership—to a more immediate but (at present) structurally less determinant issue. In this, the issue of fascism is rather like that of sexuality: it’s never easy to draw the line between pathological obsession and ascetic underplaying.

To risk a reductive formulation: fascism is essentially the attempt to ensure the rule of monopoly capitalism in its purest, most untrammelled, most invulnerable form. But of course monopoly capitalism is extremely reluctant to do any such thing.

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.

I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.

The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.

Andrey Bely was an important member of the Russian symbolist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This essay presents a summary of the development of his ideas regarding the origins of image and symbol in poetic language. For Bely language organizes chaos. The poet finds images in the internal world of dreams. Music has an organizing power beyond that of language, which language attempts to imitate. Under the influence of Vladimir Solovyov he looked to the union of Divine Wisdom or Sophia with the Eternal Logos as the principle behind symbolic images. Later, under the spell of Rudolf Steiner, he found the source of inspiration in the eternal dwelling of the Logos from which the human ego descends into flesh. The task of the poet is to recover the memory of the time before he left the realm of the Logos and to return to that realm by participating in Christ's ascent to the Cross. The autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev gives an account of recovering memory from before birth and the need to be joined with Christ crucified.

This paper shows the theological vision of Aquinas’ moral theology by exploring the intimate connectedness of his moral thought in the prima secundae of the Summa theologiae with his sacramental theology and Christology in the tertia pars. While some have disputed the theological and Christological character of Aquinas’ moral thought, both the structural presentation of the Summa and the key role grace plays in his treatment of the moral life point to the importance of the sacraments, which, empowered by the Holy Spirit, communicate the grace of Christ's Passion to men, who by themselves cannot act to attain their end in God because of God's infinity and man's sinfulness. The paper proceeds by exploring Aquinas’ moral writings on man's end, habits and human action, and law and grace to a discussion of why man needs a savior. The paper then discusses the Passion of Christ the savior and its function in forgiving sin and opening the way to the infinite God in heaven for finite men, and concludes with a discussion of the importance of the Sacraments in the moral life as the instruments through which the effects of Christ's Passion are transmitted to men.

Despite the perceived ‘human rights revolution’ within Church teaching since Vatican II, a measure of dissonance survives between secular rights theory and practice on the one hand and, on the other, ethical thinking informed by the natural law tradition. This article examines some recent developments in that secular theory and practice for signs of possible rapprochement. In particular, it considers the way in which the emergence of ‘disability’ as a rights issue, for example in the recently ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, has contributed to the transformation of equality and human rights law and so has helped shape a broader transformation of rights theory and practice. Central to that transformation has been the ambition of establishing human rights as the basis of a progressive political programme, as witnessed for example by the work of Sandra Fredman and by the Hamlyn Lectures of Conor Gearty, whose Catholic provenance makes his approach especially salient. The article concludes by considering Herbert McCabe's interpretation of Aquinas’ ethics, especially in his Law, Love and Language, and proposes some potentially fruitful points of contact between McCabe's approach and the identified developments in secular rights theory.

Burundi is very small by African standards, almost the same size as Belgium, its former colonial master. Situated at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, Burundi’s neighbours are Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. Hills like vast sandcastles rise from a narrow plain along the lake to heights of over 2000m on the Nile-Congo watershed. Burundi’s population is estimated at 3.7 million. Because the density of population is so high, and because there are no minerals or other natural resources worth exploiting commercially, all except the educated elite are poor subsistence farmers and herdsmen. The sale of coffee—nearly all of which is bought by the United States, supposedly for political reasons—accounts for some 80 per cent of all foreign exchange earnings, though attempts are now being made to diversify agricultural production with tea, cotton and rice as secondary cash-crops.

Three ethnic groups make up the population: the pygmoid Twa, only per cent of the total and politically of no account, the agriculturist Hutu, a Bantu tribe who make up 85 per cent, and the cattle-herding Tutsi (14 per cent). Legend and some facts assert that the Tutsi are of Nilotic-Hamitic origins, that they came late to Burundi and reduced the Hutu to client status by leasing them cows in return for personal service and food. ‘Tutsi’ is somewhat of a simplification : there appear to have been two separate invasions, first the Abanyaruguru clans, literally ‘those from the north’, and then later the Hima clans who entered and now occupy mainly the southeast part of the country.

Spokesmen for the present government claim that it is the colonialist who is to blame for the very existence of tribal conflict in Burundi

The text of a paper presented at the Upholland Theological Consultation, 25—27 April 1984, the gathering which founded the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain.

With all the welcome emphasis, since Vatican II, on biblical studies, patristic ressourcement, the historical approach, the ecumenical dimension, pastoral and missionary relevance, and so on, there is still a need, in Catholic theology, for philosophy: that is the thesis to be ventilated here

With the tradition we have inherited, constructive theology is something that people have a right to expect from the Catholic community. There can be no constructive theology—because there can be no constructive thought on any matter of human concern—without a measure of philosophical reflection. Certainly, if theologians work in the belief that they are doing without philosophy, they will simply be the prisoners of whatever philosophy was dominant thirty years earlier—or 350 years earlier. For it is with Descartes that Catholic theologians have not yet settled their account. A great deal of theology today displays the marks of a certain Cartesianism. That is why some of it is so popular. The philosophy which it was the main purpose of pre-Vatican II theology to exclude has never really been expelled. We failed to keep Cartesianism out of our system because we did not realize how deeply rooted inside the system it had been all along.

It is worth going into this here because it indicates one of the ways in which a more self-critical (and therefore more self-confident) Catholic theology might connect with some of the deepest arguments in Anglo-American philosophy today.

If it’s magic to believe that merely saying something can make it so, then J. L. Austin’s account of the so-called ‘performative utterance’ is an account of a magical belief. For that, though not quite true without qualification, is what Austin maintains is the nature of a performative utterance. On the other hand Austin is not the first person one would think of as a believer in magic. And his undoubted credentials for unsuperstitiousness have given authority to the notion of the performative utterance which some theologians have thought to exploit for their own purposes. And some sociologists too. For these reasons respectively.

Theologians do not have a reputation so clear of superstition as Austin has. In particular, Roman Catholic theologians don’t and even more, among Roman Catholic theologians, those who concern themselves with rituals and sacraments don’t. And some of these have wanted to go along with the likes of Aquinas and the Tridentine formulae about sacraments and wish to legitimate propositions, such as that of Aquinas, that a sacrament is a sign which “effects what it signifies”. As this appears to mean that merely saying a thing, such as “This is my body” uttered over what is prima facie bread, or “I baptise you ...” said while pouring what is on any account water, is to make what it says so, and as such theologians are sensitive to the charge that this is mere magic-making, there is an evident temptation to exploit Austin on performatives in the prospect of de-mystifying such claims.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.