The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelhng and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the Liberal Protestant movement and dominated religious thought both on the continent and in this country during the later nineteenth century.

Today the situation is entirely changed. Both philosophic idealism and liberal Protestantism have been widely discredited and have been replaced by logical positivism and by the dialectic theology of the Barthians. The result is that the idea of a Christian philosophy of history has also suffered from the reaction against philosophic idealism. It is difficult to distinguish the authentic and original element in the Christian view of history from the philosophic accretions and interpretations of the last century and a half, so that you will find modem representatives of orthodox Christianity like Mr C. S. Lewis questioning the possibility of a Christian interpretation of history, and declaring that the supposed connection between Christianity and Historicism is largely an illusion.

This article possesses no continuous argument of its own, but consists in a series of replies to observations made by J. K. A. Smith, L. Malcolm, and G. Loughlin regarding my book The Beauty of the Infinite. Thus it addresses a great number of topics, often only tenuously related to one another, and in an order dictated by the pieces to which it responds. Certain themes, however, can be identified as dominant: the capacity of natural reason to discover spiritual truths, the proper rhetoric of evangelical persuasion, the ontological premises that inform (and perhaps justify) that rhetoric, the place of aesthetics within theological reasoning, the role of divine law within Christian ethics, the need for Christian rhetoric adequately to encompass the reality of suffering and loss, the Christian metaphysics of being, the nature of Christian hope, the value of ‘tragic theology’ and the Christian metaphysics of evil.

Since Vatican II the restored Permanent Diaconate in the Latin Church has played an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Is there a theology of the diaconate, and if so what are the contentious issues? How far is the diaconate really distinct from the priesthood and the ministry of laypeople? A way forward is to revive the subversive character of διακονία, both in practical pastoral ministry and in serious engagement with Catholic Social Teaching; this necessitates major changes to diaconate formation programmes. A clearly defined diaconate would be able to help the Church renew and reform its understanding of ministry.

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.

Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:

This article raises the question whether Christianity might itself, at least in part, be responsible for the modern waning of belief in God because of its New Testament teaching, unlike that of the Old Testament, that God is ‘love.’ After examining whether the Bible does in fact present two incompatible views of God, the article looks at some signs of how the traditional Western view of God might be changing, in response to modern sensibilities. It concludes by considering how it might still be possible to speak about the God of Christianity despite the new cultural conditions of today.

There is a danger in separating out just a small portion of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae for a detailed study while neglecting the larger framework from which this section comes. Yet students of Aquinas have failed to recognize the import of Thomas’ discussion of ends, both final and proximate, and how these are related to his later discussion of acquired and infused moral virtue and their relation to charity and prudence in the Prima Secundae of his Summa. In asserting that charity is necessary for all true virtue, the roles of the Church, the state, their members and even the place and role of grace and nature are confused. A proper understanding of the distinction between acquired natural moral virtue and infused moral virtue and their distinct ends assists in a more complete understanding of the position and responsibilities of each of these in building up a more just earthly society and the ultimate attainment of eternal beatitude.

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never”. We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.

Elaine Scarry’s text The Body in Pain offers an analysis of the human experiences of suffering and pain as effects of divine and human making and remaking. Assuming a Feuerbachian analysis of the human projection of the divine, she maintains that God is the primal human Artefact who, once made, remakes the human subject in his own image through wounding and healing. That which distinguishes the human from the divine is embodiment. Embodied as they are, human beings can be wounded. God, being bodiless, cannot be wounded.

Scarry’s thesis relies overwhelmingly on a Western notion of human work that she believes has been passed into our culture through two dominant sets of religious and politico-economic discourses, for her those of Judeo-Christianity and of Marxism. These discourses have been so influential in the formation of western subjectivity that they reveal much, she holds, about the way Western subjects are constructed by discourses of pain and illness. It is this aspect of Scarry’s monumental work that interests me, and which I will initially use to read the text of the 13th century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis, before moving on to a consideration of her medieval contemporaries Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In reading Christina’s text, the problem I will pose is how her performance of wounding and healing assist in constructing/reconstructing herself as a mystical subject. Secondly I will ask the question, what theological and literary purpose does the language of wounding and healing serve in the medieval texts of the Beguines Hadewijch and Mechthild? In other words, what does the text produce?

Baron Friedrich von Huegel wrote to Maude Domenica Petre in February 1910:

My dear, dear Maude,

You, now that Fr. T. is gone, are about the only English Catholic, with whom I have felt, with whom I feel, profoundly at one in these most complex and straining transition-problems (Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Huegel, p. 240).

Fr. T. was of course George Tyrrell, who had died, excomunicated in 1909. Maude, born in 1863, belonged to an old Catholic family which had combined dying for the Pope with a tradition of Cisalpine resistance to intolerable papal decrees. In childhood she resolved to become, when she grew up, a saint, a philosopher and a martyr (p. 6). When doubts assailed her, a learned Jesuit recommended that she should go to Rome to study the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Off she went, accompanied by a chaperon, and her puzzled aunt, Lady Lindsay, used to explain to inquisitive friends: ‘Maude has gone to Rome to study for the priesthood’ (p. 8). Though she wrote ceaselessly and well, her books have long been unobtainable. She has been referred to and exploited in all writings on the Modernist crisis, but she has always appeared as a subordinate figure, the devoted slave of Tyrrell and vestal virgin guarding his sacred flame. Clyde F. Crews has written the first book’ which treats her as interesting in her own right, and not merely as an appendage of others.

She emerges with enhanced reputation from this full-scale treatment.

The editor asked me to write something about how Blackfriars came into being. It was over thirty-three years ago and I am now six thousand miles away. So at this distance in time and place my task has its difficulties. I have little more than my memory to rely upon, and I feel like old Kaspar in Southey’s poem sitting in the sun indulging in reminiscences, perhaps as remote to many people as the Battle of Blenheim must have seemed to little Wilhelmine and her brother Peterkin.

It was Father Bede Jarrett who decided to start the review and it must have been among the many schemes that filled his thoughts when he became Provincial at the end of the year 1916. The idea of such a review was by no means new. The Hawkesyard Review, which had been in existence for about twenty years, was an occasional review edited by the students at Hawkesyard and a kind of depository for their written efforts, literary, philosophical and theological. It began as a collection of manuscripts later it appeared in typescript and finally blossomed out in the full glory of print three times a year. During Father Vincent McNabb’s priorship the students were actually printing it themselves on a hand press, and printing it well enough to win the praise of experts. The Review provided a training ground for aspiring writers whose contributions naturally varied in style and quality: it was just a family affair and strictly for private circulation only. There was another collection of manuscripts of a different kind, produced annually by the Hawkesyard students, called The Mince Pie.

Recently several works that study Thomas Aquinas’s ethics have been published. Why is it, too, that a return to Thomas’s ethics yields insights into his writings that have escaped us for decades, even centuries? Why is he a perennial font of reflection that prompts new writers to find fresh insights at the end of the second millennium?

The answer rests, I believe, in the fact that he captures an understanding of the moral life that is enormously helpful in forming a vision of the type of people we ought to become. In an age that wants to respect the individual conscience while maintaining a sense of the objectively right and wrong, Thomas provides a framework in which we can achieve both. In order to demonstrate how Thomas accomplishes this, I advance along the way ten key points that Thomas makes that serve as sign posts to our conclusions.

1. Rather than retreat from public life. Thomas believes that good religious life, like good theology, can be at home in the life of the city. At the age of six, Thomas’s parents sent him to the famous Benedictine Abbey, Monte Casino, where they (reasonably) hoped that he would become abbot. At fifteen, he leaves the order and, after five years of studies in Naples, enters the relatively new order of SL Dominic. As urban areas emerge for the first time in human history, the fifteen year old Thomas makes his first adult decision to leave an order that requires a vow of permanence and enters a new order already known for their work of preaching in the cities and teaching in the medieval universities.

It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.

Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.

The ‘muddled marriage’ is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic’s instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church’s teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great unhappiness in the lives of innumerable Catholics, but also for the fact that an appalling number are led, by their inability to ‘conform’, to leave the Church altogether. The equally grim fact has also to be faced that within the Church the growing conviction among lay people that the clergy either cannot or will not understand or sympathise with their very real difficulties is leading to a wider and wider cleavage between the two.

The case of preventive birth-control is a notorious example. There are married people who for one reason or another just cannot, at least temporarily, have more children: what an insult to tell them, sans façons, that in that case they must just ‘abstain from indulgence in sexual intercourse’. (Ecclesiastical jargon often indicates a lack of real theological thinking.) The whole point is that this is not a question of ‘indulgence’: it is of the very essence of their married, their Catholic married, life. From the layman’s point of view what too often happens is that first they are told how wonderfully God has blessed the mystery of human love and sex and marriage, and then in the next breath they are told to go off and do without it.

This essay questions the theological position developed by Stanley Hauerwas over three decades. It first traces the origins of his thought, and argues that the alliance of radical Reformation ecclesiology with postmodern philosophy leads to an intensely idealistic ecclesiology. Hauerwas's exaltation of particular communal practices is ultimately unreal, as he fails to locate these practices in a particular institution. Due to the unreality of his ecclesiology his attack on Christendom and Constantinianism lacks substance. In the end he undermines his own position by identifying the truth of Christianity with the concrete practices of a distinctive community that he cannot identify.

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.

Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.

So very great is the range and complexity of the issues now raised by the New Black friars debate that it is impossible even to state, never mind argue, a position in relation to all of them. Nonetheless, since two main contributors, Barker and Wicker make some serious criticisms of my views, at least some of them on the strength of equally serious misunderstandings of what they are, some reply is, even if insufficient, also necessary. So I shall concentrate a lot on clarifiication.

First of all, then, I shall try to be clearer about what my basic contentions are, for they obviously cannot be clear from what wrote. Barker, for example, purports to agree with my thesis about Marxism and morality. This thesis was, in short, that they are historically, and therefore contingently, identical. But he then accuses me of lapsing from this thesis and offers a reason which can only show that he does not, after all, understand the nature of the identity I was maintaining there is between Marxism and morality. So I must first of all clear this up.

Having done that I propose, secondly, to challenge the conception of Marxist science and of its relationship to ideologies which underpins Barker’s main criticisms of the Marxism and Christianity “strong compatibility” thesis.

The clarification of this thesis is the third, and most obviously necessary task. Wicker, at least, has badly misconstrued it. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, for in the “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” paper I only mentioned, but did not formally spell out, what the “strong compatibility” thesis holds you to maintaining.