I came to know Gareth Moore’s work, initially, by being asked to be the publisher’s reader for what was later published as Believing in God (T.&T. Clark 1988). The book presents one of the most masterly analyses of “belief in God” in the philosophy of religion. The original title of the manuscript was “God as Nothing,” in which it was argued that we cannot understand belief in God without understanding what it means to become nothing before him. I suggested, foolishly perhaps, that the title should be changed. On the one hand, given a culture that emphasizes rights more than obligations, I feared that talk of human beings as “nothing” would be mistaken for a denigration of them. On the other hand, I feared that the denial of God as a “something” would be misunderstood as reductionism, or even atheism. The change of title, while it makes central the author’s concern with belief in God, does not indicate the distinctiveness of its discussions. In any event, the book has not had the attention it deserves.

I invited Gareth Moore to the annual philosophy of religion conference at Claremont Graduate University more often than any other speaker. He read the following papers: “Tradition, Authority and the Hiddenness of God” published in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (Macmillan 1995); “Death and Transcendence,” published in Religion without Transcendence? ed. D.Z Phillips and Timothy Tessin (Macmillan 1997); and “Hearing the Voice of God” to be published in Biblical Concepts and Our World ed. D.Z Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Palgrave).

In the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.

In the nineteenth century there lived in Norway a theologian whose religious development shows a striking resemblance to that of Cardinal Newman. Although the Norwegian theologian could not well stand an exact comparison with John Henry Newman, for he lacked the Cardinal’s unique genius, there is, however, a psychological likeness between the two men. They belong to the same kind of religious type. Both went through a very slow process of conversion. Both began as clergymen in their national churches, and both ended after much study and mental toil in the Catholic Church.

The name of this Norwegian was Knud Karl Krogh-Tonning. Unlike Newman, he did not have much influence on his contemporaries or on later generations. Until the present day he has been of no importance to the history of the Norwegian Church. In a way this situation is strange, for he made some remarkable contributions to theological literature.

Krogh-Tonning (born in 1842) was brought up in a very happy and cultivated home. His parents belonged to the Evangelical- Lutheran Church, which is the State Church of Norway. His mother differed from the ordinary Protestants by attributing great importance to the sacraments, and by stressing the ethical aspect of Christianity. Krogh-Tonning has said that his mother was the first to turn his thoughts towards Catholicism.

When Krogh-Tonning had entered the University of Oslo to study theology, he soon came under the influence of two most powerful professors, Gisle Johnson and Carl Paul Caspari. The theological faculty was under the direction of these two professors. However, their influence was not limited to the university.

This article develops the fruitful metaphor of musical performance to think about church-dividing conflicts over doctrine. In particular, I show that just as there is more than one way for a score of music to be faithfully performed, so there can be more than one way for shared fundamental dogma to be faithfully articulated in different confessional or doctrinal traditions. When the disagreements between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches over christological doctrine are reframed as contrasting but not contradictory “performances” of one shared scriptural and Nicene dogma, possibilities for ecumenical reconciliation are strenghthened. Indeed, while not articulating its practice by means of the metaphor of a musical performance, the Roman Catholic magisterium is already approaching doctrinal reconciliation in just this way.

This is the second stage of an attempt to make a fresh assessment of the foundations of Christian morality, or of Catholic moral theology, in the light of the ideas of some of the thinkers who are concerned with the possibility of an alternative society. We who are committed to living and thinking eschatologically are bound to be interested in every serious endeavour to transcend the existing state of things. This paper will try to bring out the analogy between Marcuse and Heidegger.

1 —Repression and Liberation

Herbert Marcuse’s work stands well outside the ordinary Anglo- American framework of academic social and political philosophy. The reason for this is no doubt that he belongs to a tradition in which the impact of Hegel has been undergone and assimilated. What this amounts to, as we should see, is that he can take for grant ed, in his philosophizing, the intimations about the nature of man and of meaning which we associate with the Romantic movement. This has become part of our common consciousness too, but on the whole extra-philosophically. Indeed, the specifying difference between English and continental philosophies at the present time is not so much to do with technique and approach as with acceptance or rejection of the Romantic idea of man.

It is instructive to reflect on the divided response to Marcuse's work. He is the most widely discussed thinker among the opponents of our way of life in America today. On the Old Left (orthodox communist Marxists and such-like) he meets with unanimous hostility: he is condemned as a defeatist, a pessimist, who thinks not scientifically but poetically.

Perhaps the most crucial single utterance of the Second Vatican Council, at least in terms of impact on our shared experience as Catholics, occurs at paragraph 14 of the Council’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first of the conciliar documents to be promulgated, and in many ways its most bloodily contested production. The paragraph in question runs like this:

“Full, conscious and active participation”, pastoral energy and liturgical pedagogy: these were momentous notions, laden with an agenda whose implications were sketched out in the rest of the document, and which were embodied in the reforms which followed. The summons to “active participation”, indeed, a phrase which occurs sixteen times in all, was singled out subsequently as the main refrain of the document.

The Secondary Modern School takes about 70 to 75 % of the children of England and Wales for their education from the age of eleven upwards. It is a type of school which is virtually the product of the 1944 Education Act: for what went before had a leaving age of fourteen instead of fifteen, and had a more limited objective: the addition of a year to the school life has brought with it both difficulties and opportunities.

Ubiquitous as the Secondary Modern school seems to be, a great many children do not have the choice of Secondary Modern or Grammar School. 141,000 children are educated in comprehensive schools; the number is growing: Anglesey is completely ‘comprehensive’: Coventry, London, Derbyshire, Birmingham are moving in that direction with varying degrees of conviction: Leicestershire has evolved a scheme different from any other, avoiding selection at eleven without embarking upon a scheme of comprehensive schools. The areas which have tried out some degree of ‘comprehension’ are not all controlled by the same political party. Southampton has avoided secondary modern schools altogether by giving every secondary school in the town some speciality of its own, leading up to some particular type of advanced course.

The Secondary Modern School is not the same thing in every area. Some areas have a very large grammar school entry; the secondary modern schools get on with a remnant, of which it could truly be said that there are not many gifted or talented among them; their more spectacular achievements are dependent upon the inefficiency of the selection process at eleven.

Little Tom is trying to watch the TV, but his even smaller sister Naomi, will not stop walking between him and the screen. Here is a conflict. How is it to be solved? Tom can slap Naomi, but it is very likely that a row will develop that will end up with both of them being packed off to bed. Or he may call in the strong arm of one of his parents, but—though Tom may not realize it—this could be a dangerous course too: his parents may disagree with each other and the conflict could spread. Even end in divorce! Or Tom could find himself having to accept a compromise for which he will have to pay either now or later. In fact he does not hesitate a moment: he knows what to do. He gets up and starts playing with his sister’s doll. Naomi, seeing this, runs to her doll, and Tom can go back to the TV to watch his favourite programme in peace.

All of us, children and adults, often make use of the same strategem, especially in our love affairs. We all know how hard it can be to resist desiring what somebody else, or some other group, much desires, and to resist wanting what others have. The Falklands became important for the British people immediately the Argentinians commandeered them; and, because they were British-occupied, the Argentinians had for many decades desired them. In that case the conflict got out of hand and exploded into violence.

Unless we candidly acknowledge, and begin to repair, the shortcomings in our own Christian life, our deeply-pondered schemes for ‘social reconstruction’ are in danger of misfiring. The danger in these war-time social plans of ours is that we over-emphasise the planning element and spend our time talking about how we are going to act in the future without attempting to put our principles into action here and now. Consequently when the time comes for setting our schemes before, a waiting world we shall have nothing more concrete to offer than the distillations of our academic ponderings. Such vagueness will stand little chance of survival against the more practical methods employed by such opponents as the Communist Party. Unless we realise that our plans must ‘be set in motion now and not kept till the end of the war, and unless by the end of the war we have a plan already coping in practice with the problems not only of the intellectual, but of that more influential body, the working class, we are going to be left like dogs baying at the moon while the community falls victim to the tender mercies of the Marxist propagandists. All this because we have talked too much and acted too little.

A second danger lies in regarding our plans as nothing more than ‘emergency measures.’ By definition, such plans fall into disuse the moment they have served their purpose, which in this case is to prevent chaos and disorder after the strain of war. This implies an attitude towards social reform that arises from a misconception of the causes of social injustice. If totalitarianism, and that alone, were the cause of all social evil, then indeed we need only trouble to destroy that and the world would be righted.

As John Noonan reads him, Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in everything except his sexology, in which he reverts to the rigours of the traditional Augustinianism. For the Angelic Doctor as for Augustine the marriage act is not a product of love and is not to be motivated by a desire for pleasure; it is justified only in its purpose of multiplying mankind. Noonan concedes (briefly, and reluctantly: ‘A case can be made . . he says) that late medieval theologians, Thomas included, were ‘somewhat in advance of their society in their declarations on the ideal of married love’, but, he adds and emphasizes, they failed ‘to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse’. (Contraception, Mentor ed., pp. 299-311.) The purpose of this article is to summarize St Thomas’s doctrine on marriage; to show that he did indeed teach that love and marriage go together, and did also teach that love—human, passionate, pleasurable love—not only entered into the purposes of the marriage act but was also the root and source of the act’s ultimate beneficial value for the spouses.

St Thomas’s reflections on love and marriage are found scattered here and there through his vast opera, but his teaching appears in full and concentrated form in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, dists. xxvi-xlii. This early teaching of St Thomas was, in the middle of the fourteenth century, incorporated into a Supplement to the Summa Theologiae by an unknown Dominican friar in an attempt to complete the Saint’s master work. Accordingly, it is these two loci that have served as the present paper’s principal sources.

Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, wandering among the souls of those damned for incontinence, meets the lovers, Paolo and Francesca. He is told that they fell from chastity after reading a book, the story of Lancelot. ‘Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. . . .’

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

‘The book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther.’ And as the commentators tell us, for ‘Galeotto’ we may read ‘pandar’. Here we have what is, I think, a locus classicus for the problem under discussion: the meeting-place of behaviour and literature and morals; and an occasion for apprehension for both the moralist and the writer, though for very different reasons.

In recent times there has grown up a strong feeling that our tradition of sanctity is inadequate, and that this inadequacy is connected with its isolation from the secular world. In Fr Rabut’s words, ‘La saintete traditionelle s’est coupé non seulement du peche mais souvent des espoirs et des travaux du monde’.

This period of comparative isolation from ‘the hopes and labours’ of the world has coincided with a period of strong establishment; so that the isolation has expressed itself in practice not in indifference but in active obstruction to most of the advances made in the post-reformation period. Is there a necessary connection between the obstruction and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, the period of establishment of Christianity in Western society?

Certainly, one of the most curious aspects of the Church in its social dimension has been its almost total opposition to change: not to this or that particular change, but to change as such. This has taken the form of an implacable opposition to a succession of radical or revolutionary philosophies which have fomented change over the past five hundred years. Nineteenth-century liberals met with the same treatment as their twentieth-century counterparts, those theorists and reformers who, at various positions left of centre, have learned not to count the Church as among their allies. They are tinged with ‘secularism’ and ‘utopianism’, are irreverent of precedent and tradition, and easily fit into that elastic ecclesiastical category of ‘dangerous’.

Since history is, almost by definition, change, it will be seen that this puts a great strain on the relationship between the church and a section of the world which has particular claims on the church’s sympathy.

It is only comparatively recently that there has been an attempt to examine issues in environment and development together, rather than separately. The shift in attitude by the greens came as a result of the realisation that poor nations are forced to destroy their environment in order to survive and by the developers as a result of a new awareness that policies which destroy the very basis for change are invalid. The broad agreement in the notion that both environment and development are interconnected applies regardless of the particular models of development or environment.

Liberation theology identifies with a particular model of development which arose at a time when the global and political implications of environmental issues were largely ignored. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that environmental concerns are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the classical texts. The purpose of this paper is to explore both the challenge of the environment to liberation theology and its possible contribution to an inclusive environmental theology. Some models of development are more likely to be compatible with particular environmental philosophies. What contribution, if any, can liberation theology make to the current debate?

In the post-war era the conventional wisdom of the so-called ‘modernisation’ theory held that in order to achieve development so called ‘underdeveloped’ nations must adopt a profit incentive and find ways and means for economic productivity.

Francis Barker’s argument to prove that Christianity is always ideological, and never scientific, won’t do. Since the reason for this is of some general theoretical importance, it is perhaps worth pointing out what is wrong with it.

Barker’s thesis is that being tautological is a mark of the ideological. (‘all ideological discourse is ... strictly speaking tautological’ p. 476). But he also wants to argue that not every utterance within an ideological discourse has to be tautological: some of them may be just false. Fair enough so far. So ‘God exists’ is not tautological after all, but just false. But this, he says, doesn’t stop Christian discourse in general from being tautological—i.e. from being set within a framework of tautology. Barker’s reason for saying this is that in Christian discourse, words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ are not used (as in science) in a diachronic way, but merely to ‘conjugate’ or ‘spatialise’ the optative paradigm. This dark saying is then illustrated by an argument that purports to show that ‘God made the world’ certainly is tautological. The reason for choosing this example is presumably that it is the fundamental case of a Christian discourse in which the use of ‘because’ is crucial. For ‘God made the world’ can be construed as equivalent to ‘the world exists because God made it’; and presumably in this sentence, according to Barker, the ‘because’ is simply ‘paradigmatic’. Now I think it is a fairly simple matter to show that this is quite wrong: pace Barker, ‘because’ in this sentence is used in just the same way as it is commonly used in ‘science’.