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.

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.

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

I want to speak about the place of Fides et Ratio within the parameters of the twentieth century Thomistic revival. To do that I must first describe the revival Three strains of Thomistic interpretation characterized the revival before Vatican II: Aristotelian Thomism, Existential Thomism and Transcendental Thomism. The first two were a posteriori in their epistemology. The mind abstractly draws its fundamental conceptual content from the human knower’s contact with the self-manifestly real things given in sensation. Among the concepts abstracted are the transcendentals, chief among which is the ratio ends, the notion or concept of being. It is an analogical commonality, and so a sameness within difference, whose analogates are absolutely everything, actual and conceivable.

Francis A. Sullivan says that the one Church of Christ continues to exist perfectly in the Catholic Church, and is present imperfectly in other churches and ecclesial communities. However, he thinks Lumen Gentium 8 also enables us to say that the many churches, non-Catholic and Catholic, are all in the one Church of Christ, since to say the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church means no more than “continues to exist in” the Catholic Church. In this way, he denies the identity of the one Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. We point out that magisterial documents since Vatican II have consistently refused this proposal, and have instead spoken only of the one Church being present or operative, according to degrees, in non-Catholic churches and communities. We argue that while it is true there is “ecclesial reality” outside the Catholic Church, in that there are elements of truth and sanctification outside of her, the one Church of Christ of which Vatican II expressly speaks is the Church with all the gifts of unity and instruments for salvation with which Christ endowed it. The Catholic Church is not contained in any larger divinely willed and dominically instituted ecclesial reality, and it is without qualification the one Church of Christ and the one Church of Christ is without qualification the Catholic Church.

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.

The doctrine of divine simplicity in its denial of any real ontological distinction between God’s substance and His attributes commanded a special place within classical theism, finding a forceful expression within Augustine’s metaphysic. However, the simplicity of God is a relatively neglected doctrine within current metaphysical and theistic considerations. This is somewhat strange considering the profound implications it has for theistic matters. Its tenets are inextricably linked to such theistic concerns as immutability, aseity, sovereignty, divine volition and necessity. As such, it is well worth our effort to devote careful attention to the Augustinian conception of God’s simpleness, confronting head-on its seemingly counter-intuitive assertion that there is not any actual distinction between divine substance and its qualities. We will want to first expound the relevant texts to Augustine’s teaching on divine simplicity. After its main features have been identified, our analysis will measure Augustine’s doctrine against some of the more serious contemporary objections.

We initiate our exposition by asking: What is Augustine’s notion of divine simplicity? Augustine’s doctrine rallies around the claim that God is what He has (hoc est quod habet). He remarks, “What is meant by ‘simple’ is that its [the Godhead] being is identical with its attributes,...” (CD XI.10). To gain a fuller appreciation of this pithy formula, it is necessary for us to consider its wider context.

Within De civitate Dei, Augustine begins the tenth chapter of Book XI by stating, “There is then one sole Good, which is simple, and therefore unchangeable; and that is God. By this Good all good things were created; but they are not simple, and for that reason are changeable.”

It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.

I (1) outline two accounts the Catholic Church gives of the human soul, calling them the Lateran and the Vienne doctrines, and (2) argue they are inconsistent. (3) I run over several difficulties in the more popular Lateran doctrine. (4) I look at three uses to which Catholics might want to put a theory of the soul, and question whether either of the theories on offer can meet their needs. (5) I distinguish the Biblical idea of resurrection from the Greek idea of immortality. Finally (6) I commend the Vienne doctrine as philosophy but advise supplementing it with a view of creation, salvation and sanctification as forming a continuum rather than a discontinuous series of episodes.

In this paper I defend a ‘strong compatibility’ thesis. According to this thesis Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity; Christianity is compatible only with Marxism. I further argue that for Marxists to accept this proposition on the grounds that they have no reason to object to the personal combination of Marxism and Christianity is to miss the point both of Christianity and of their own Marxism. This concession is, from the point of view of the Marxist, quite unprincipled. It is to misconstrue both the true nature of the Marxist critique of religion and the true nature of the religion of which Marxism is the critique. But more about this in due course.

First, though, what sort of reasons are invoked against the ‘compatibility’ thesis? They seem to fall, generally, into two categories. First, there are objections to the Christian belief system itself. Secondly, there are objections to the social and historical role of the set of institutions which has espoused that belief-system.

To the belief-system of Christianity on almost any account of what it maintains, defenders of the incompatibility thesis have a form of objection which I shall call ‘ontological’. This objection, taken on its own is, it seems to me, both the most widely canvassed and the weakest. It is roughly this : Christians believe that the universe is peopled with entities and agencies and activities and events—a God, an act of creation, an act of redemption, souls, grace, post-mortem survival and all the rest—all of which the Marxist is, as a Marxist, committed to the denial of. Christians are, thus, ontologically theists, spiritualists and mentalists; Marxists, on the other hand are ontologically materialists. Since ontological immaterialism and ontological materialism cannot both be true, one cannot consistently hold both.

The purpose of this essay is to explore, and clarify, some key features in Aquinas’ account of the virtue of temperance, with an eye to answering some common objections raised against a positive evaluation of temperance. In particular, I consider three features of Aquinas’ understanding of temperance: First, the role of the rational mean in temperance; second, the role of rightly ordered passions in temperance; and third, the ‘despotic’ control of reason over the passions in temperance. Along the way I consider three common objections to Aquinas’ account of temperance: the objection that temperance can be misused for evil, the objection that temperance devalues effort, and the objection that temperance devalues strong passions and thereby implicitly devalues the goodness of sexuality. In responding to these objections on behalf of Aquinas, I take the opportunity to clarify and slightly extend Aquinas’ account of temperance.

This essay surveys a range of claims that Aquinas is a foundationalist, along with the rarer position that he is not. It suggests the arguments for holding he is a foundationalist are fundamentally flawed, and that he cannot be considered to hold a foundationalist epistemology, although for reasons more radical than those hitherto suggested. It examines the account of scientia and sacred doctrine in Summa theologiae I.1, with particular attention to its account of metaphor. Sacred doctrine, often taken to be based on scripture, is in fact based on God's self-knowledge, which is mediated by scripture. Aquinas acknowledges that scripture is riddled with figurative language and that metaphor is necessary to sacred doctrine. He emphasises the propensity for human reasoning to go astray, and in virtue of its processes of inference, to be incapable to representing the simplicity of divine knowledge with complete accuracy. Both with respect to its structures of argumentation and the figurative base from which it argues, Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine is remote from foundationalist accounts of knowledge. Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine, the most sure of all scientiae, emphasises its fragility and provisionality; its purpose is not to provide certitude, but to provoke reflection.

While Richard Dawkins' polemic against religion scores easy points against Christian fundamentalisms, he supposes his target to be much vaster: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods”. Given The God Delusion's lack of extended argument, historical ignorance and unfamiliarity with the literature, the praise it has received from some distinguished scientists is troubling.

This essay seeks, first, to examine some of the book's chief weaknesses – its ignorance of the grammar of “God” and of “belief in God”; the crudeness of its account of how texts are best read; its lack of interest in ethics – and, second, to address the question of what it is about the climate of the times that enables so ill‐informed and badly argued a tirade to be widely welcomed by many apparently well‐educated people.

The latter issue is addressed, first, by considering the illusion, unique to the English‐speaking world, that there is some single set of procedures which uniquely qualify as “scientific” and give privileged access to truth; second, by examining historical shifts in the senses of “religion”; thirdly, by locating Dawkins' presuppositions concerning both “science” and “religion”, his paradoxical belief in progress, and the reception which the book has received, in relation to tensions in our culture signalled, fifty years ago, by C. P. Snow.

Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’