The medieval, contemplative tradition for the most part ended with the great 16th century Spanish mystics. The modern period of the 17th and 18th centuries was an age of reason that sought to eliminate mystery. Modern theology kept in step with the rational nature of the period and the contemplative tradition was lost to the modern age. Thomas Merton reintroduced a contemplative theology to the 20th century, but contemplative practices are much more popular today than they were in the mid-twentieth century when Merton was writing. This paper examines what it is about our present 21st century and the end of modernity that is so conducive to the popularity of contemplative prayer, and so conducive to bringing us to a deeper and richer understanding of the Gospel.

Social work might be described as the natural human response of one human being to another who asks for help, and case-work is a (very inadequate) name for the attempt to give the individual person in trouble the individual remedy he requires. A ‘case-worker’ is the substitute for the ‘good neighbour’ of a simpler society. In a small community the good neighbour steps in during a crisis with advice and help, able to provide an objective point of view, and ready to step out again when no longer needed, without disturbing the fundamental independence of the person concerned. In a community where everyone knows each other and social ties are firmly knit, this works very well; it was not till the growth of industry and the development of large towns where rich and poor were segregated into different areas that the system broke down.

The social workers of the nineteenth century found themselves complete strangers in experience and outlook to the people they were trying to help. To be the good neighbours they desired to be—intimate, wise, accepted friends— they had to evolve a technique based on principles which would enable them to help without patronage or sentimentality. They called this technique ‘case-work’. It came into being in 1869 with the Charity Organisation Society (now the Family Welfare Association) from which all other family case-work societies have developed.

Let us begin with dissolving inflated statements on the indissolubility of marriage which do nothing but distort the issue: statements such as marriage is indissoluble, or marriage between Christians is indissoluble, or marriage is indissoluble because it is a sacrament. In point of fact, the Church considers marriage to be generally dissoluble: she claims the power to dissolve marriages between unbaptised spouses and does avail herself of that power when she sees fit to do so. Since by far the majority of spouses that live on our planet are not baptised, the initial proposition must be reworded as follows: in the Church’s view, marriage is dissoluble, with the proviso that in some cases it is not.

What are those cases which are exceptions to the rule? Marriages between baptised spouses—or, to use the short-cut formula, marriages between Christians? The trouble is that the Church also claims the power to dissolve such marriages and actually goes on to break some, as when she grants a dissolution of the bond to validly married Christian spouses who have failed to ‘consummate’ their marriage.

What, then, about relating indissolubility to the reception of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Doesn’t everybody know that if you are baptised and validly married in the Church, your marriage is ipso facto a sacrament and indissoluble by divine law. . . ? Beware, however, of bringing God into the picture before the Church is out of it: for your marriage is a sacrament even though you may have chosen not to consummate it, yet the Church would have no qualms of conscience in regarding you a free man (or a free woman) if you wished, say, to join a religious order and actually made your solemn profession.

‘If good people feel disgust at a nation which—simply with a view to extending its dominion—spontaneously provokes a war with neighbouring States which are at peace with it and have done them no harm—then I can only say that I applaud their praiseworthy feelings.’—De Civitate Dei, IV, xiv.

Remarkably little seems to have been written on this subject. Yet Augustine is quite justly described as the Father of the Philosophy of History,’ and even if he had not treated of the subject almost ‘ex professo ‘—as we hope to show—no remarks of his on the part war has played in the history of the world could fail to be of interest. So far the only discussion on his attitude to the problems are a Paper by Fr. Vincent Scully, C.R.L., in the Clergy Review for Feb., 1932, and also Ypres de la Brière, La Conception de la Paix et de la Guerre chez S. Augustin, Revue de la Philosophic, 1916. See too R. Regout, S.J., La doctrine de la guerre juste de S. Augustin ii nos jours d'apres les théologiens et les canonistes catholiques, 1935, though the author is more concerned with Franciscus de Victoria who has, he thinks, broken with scholastic teaching on the requisites for a just war.

The above passage—so peculiarly apropos to the events of to-day—shows us what the Bishop of Hippo’s reactions to the present crisis would have been. Yet to gentle, peace- loving Augustine, ever absorbed in the needs spiritual as well as temporal of his flock, war was-—as indeed it must be to every thinking man—-something unspeakably horrible.

In a society such as our own (I am thinking particularly of Western European society) that sees little need for postulating the existence of God and no longer lives by specifically religious rules and rituals, it would seem that human intention and action could be quite adequately explicated in the language of ethics rather than theology : the opposite of good, consequently, is not evil, it is bad, that is to say, bad in the sense of being wrong morally, of willing and acting in ways that are in opposition to an accepted moral standard. The fact that it may be difficult to establish widely accepted moral standards does not invalidate the principle. When the word evil is used—and, of course, it is used—its semantic content is vague, or, if clear, then reductive, by which I mean that, more often than not, it acts merely as a kind of intensifier—so that, when one wants to express extreme outrage at an action of gross immorality, the word one reaches for is the word evil; but there would be no qualitative difference between a wrong action or intention and an evil action or intention. Given the nature of the relationship between art and its cultural context it would not be unreasonable to expect the literature of our own era to reflect this situation and, indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. We should expect the representation of evil in modem literature to take on an extremely etiolated and reductive form. But does it?

The remarkably violent storm which raged around the two talks broadcast last January by Mrs Margaret Knight has now happily subsided and I do not want to start it again. Some of the attacks on Mrs Knight’s views looked like simple manifestations of bad temper, if not of actual hysteria, and very few showed much real understanding of her position. Although there is rather more rhetoric than logic in some of what she says, it seems to me that on the whole her talks present an understandable and moderate non-Christian view.

One who believes that religion is an illusion could do very much worse than follow Mrs Knight’s line of thought and action. She maintains, quite rightly, that it is inconsistent to ask your children to believe what you yourself think to be false. The Christian, of course, thinks it better that a non-Christian should sometimes be inconsistent in practice; just as a liberal humanist prefers a communist or fascist to act inconsistently with his principles, and rejoices to hear that children in Russian schools are brought up to respect ideals of scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty which a true communist might not accept. However one cannot expect a non-Christian to prefer to be inconsistent, one cannot blame Mrs Knight for wanting to be reasonable, and given that religion is an illusion it seems to me that her views are very reasonable. The question on which everything else turns is simply: Is religion an illusion or not?

For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.

The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.

Before beginning to try to define what kind of Green theology is most likely to have an enduring place, let us try to define what Green theology certainly should not be.

The prophets call us to account. The tone of the call is certain, because there must be no risk of our not seeing the difference between our present failure and what they propose. The ecological problems which now occupy some portion of every week’s news produce prophecies of doom and demands for action. Our inertia, our denials and the plausible reassurances of governments necessitate both subtlety and strong language, if there is ever going to be a widespread change of attitude. For, to our minds, the villains are always other people.

In this situation the voices loudly resound of self-proclaimed prophets who declare that they alone have done the proper thing and bowed the knee to Baal. For it is the fertility rites of Baal that now so they say have first claim on us. So, again and again, when the theology of Environmental or Green issues is considered, Christianity is the system of religious belief most severely attacked.

Its reputedly negative attitude towards a fallen world and its anthropocentrism are set off against the virtues of more earthy religion, religion considered to show a greater reverence for the natural order and to be more in line with modem developments such as feminism and a greater valuation of sensuality, developments with which Christianity has had some trouble.

My discovery of Semitism goes back to my first visit to Jerusalem in 1930, where I found the three religions derived from Semitic monotheism living side by side in the chaos of the Old City. I got the impression of a dense mass of people of various origins co-existing in mutual disdain, under the firm control of the British occupation. As soon as the British left Palestine, the fire hidden beneath the ashes broke out all over the region. A similarity of temperament on all sides, shaped by a common spiritual ancestry, became apparent, in which tenacity and terrorism were the salient features. Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian) had the same psychological reactions and instincts, shaped by their common inheritance derived from the mystical, spiritual and social teaching of the bible, the gospel and the Quran. These similarities could have provided a basis for mutual understanding, but in fact they led to disagreement, fostered by the interplay of international politics and local interests.

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisaged Summa Theologiae as a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently, beatitudo is a key to the unity of the Summa, then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.

Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist turned theologian, accepted Christ's personal resurrection but not his bodily resurrection from the grave. He argued from Paul's silence about the discovery of the empty tomb, from Christ's sharing fully in our human condition, and from the irreversible processes of nature. John Polkinghorne, a physicist turned theologian, has maintained that Paul's view of resurrection implies an empty tomb, that Christ's resurrection from the grave has revealed the transformed destiny of matter, and that, for good reasons, God can suspend and change the laws of nature. In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's vision of an evolving world, Christ's resurrection from the grave released a new force of love and revealed the spiritual destiny of matter. With Polkinghorne he shared a hope for the transformation of the universe, a process initiated by the glorious raising of Jesus’ crucified body.

It was my original intention to write this article about black theology in South Africa, where I first encountered the movement. But two things have led me to form the opinion that black theology is of crucial importance to Christianity all over the world, and not just in South Africa, or in the United States, where the idea was born. One has been my reading of two books by the black American theologian James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, and A Black Theology of Liberation ; and the other has been my introduction, very recent and superficial though it is, to the race question, and kindred political questions, in Great Britain. So I will, after all, devote this article to the subject of black theology as such, and chiefly in the form of a review of Cone’s two books. But I will lead into this subject by way of black theology in South Africa.

In writing this article I incur the risk of bringing down on my head the hostility and scorn of black theologians, or quite simply of blacks. As a white man I have no business to poke my long Caucasian nose in. Cone is quite scathing in BTL (p. 194) on two white liberals who presumed to write on the black power movement; and on the same page he writes: ‘To whites who want to know what they can do (a favourite question of oppressors) black theology says, “Keep your damned mouth closed, and let us black people get our thing together.” ‘ Still, just as in the dominant white ethos of today, or at least of a generation ago, it was possible for a black man to be a good nigger, and sometimes even earn the supreme accolade of being told that he was a true white man, in spite of his skin (You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din), so in the black ethos of the dominated which we are going to be looking at, it is possible for a white man to be a good honky.

I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.