In order to understand what St. Thomas means by affective knowledge ‘or knowledge by ‘inclination ‘or ‘connaturality,’ something must first be said of what he understands by ‘knowledge,’ and what by ‘affect,’ ‘inclination,’ or ‘connaturality.’ Readers will not expect in this short article a full and detailed account, let alone a justification, of St. Thomas’s theory of knowledge and of appetite. A brief survey of some salient points such as is required for our present purposes is all we shall attempt; and to obviate the necessity of explaining St. Thomas’s medieval terminology we shall frankly paraphrase his thought in less unfamiliar language. Those readers who wish to study the matter further in St. Thomas’s own words will find at the end of the article a selection of ‘readings ‘in which they may investigate the various points raised.

St. Thomas’s account of the nature of knowledge is much more ‘phenomenological ‘than is often supposed by those who have not studied him closely. Nothing could be further from the truth than that St. Thomas’s epistemology is based on an a priori ‘ faculty psychology,’ or that he short-circuits the ‘critical problem ‘of knowledge by unwarranted assumptions based on illegitimate abstractions. It is a first principle with St. Thomas (as it had been with Aristotle) that potencies can be affirmed only as inferences from actualities; and” the whole structure of his ‘faculty psychology ‘(if such it can indeed be called) is based on a thoroughgoing empiricist scrutiny of the ‘given ‘fact of knowledge.

Three times in the last seventy years, a major encyclical has been devoted primarily to economic and social questions. Each has made its contribution to the social doctrine of the Church, setting forth the moral principles which should govern economic and social relationships, drawing attention to the chief social evils of the day, and suggesting the general lines of reform. The latest of these encyclicals, Mater et Magistra, makes important contributions to the social teaching of the Church in four areas. First, there is a clear and authoritative re-statement of the principle of subsidiary function at a time when the provision of social services has been and is being greatly extended in many countries, and when the proper role of the state in this field is a subject of considerable controversy. Secondly, in its discussion of wages, profits and the status of the worker, the new encyclical clarifies the Church’s teaching, and also shows that despite the reforms that have already come about, in some measure in response to the earlier encyclicals, much still remains to be done. Thirdly, it calls attention to the depressed state of agriculture relatively to industry, and sees in this an evil to be remedied. Finally, far greater attention is paid in this latest encyclical to international economic questions than in Rerum Novarum or even Quadragesimo Anno.

One Catholic M.P. appears to have found in the new encyclical support for the Welfare State as it exists in Britain to-day, whilst a correspondent writing to one of the Catholic papers has suggested that countries wishing to put the social encyclicals into practice would do well to copy our National Health Service.

In a general picture of world bewilderment before problems which have grown beyond the grasp of responsible statesmen, the bewilderment of Britain concerning India is peculiarly tragic, peculiarly ludicrous. Picture an aged burglar who, many years ago, on entering a house by force and stealth, found it occupied solely by naughty children at continual blows, with no one to control or smack them; picture him reformed and, Smee-like, turned governess, guiding the young into more orderly ways; picture him finally debating his position with the elder children, fully grown, eager now to control their own prosperity, rebellious against his dominion; picture his anxieties; are they really old enough, are not these tantrums proof of youthful lack of balance, are there not other burglars abroad? What will happen when, as still occurs, the young ones start to pull each others’ hair?

Dr. Zacharias’ book is a fairly detailed account of the growing up—socially and politically—of modern India— with special attention paid to the agitation of Congress against British domination. As a Jew by birth and a Catholic by belief Dr. Zacharias claims impartiality, but he makes no secret of his whole-hearted preference for Congress and is certainly not impartial in his account of events such as the Partition of Bengal or the Amritsar Massacre.

There are a number of places in his works where Thomas Aquinas writes about teaching and learning. Following a summary account of his understanding of education, this paper presents and discusses a neglected source on these matters. The sermon Puer Iesus, probably preached in January 1271, contains thoughts on pedagogy that are, in the words of its Leonine editor, ‘original and of great interest’. The sermon offers a broad sketch of human development in which the adolescence of Christ, the ‘most excellent of teachers’, is appealed to as an inspiration and an example. It raises Christological and pedagogical questions and it is the latter that are considered here. Encouraging his student congregation to listen generously, enquire diligently, respond prudently and meditate attentively, Aquinas outlines for them a practical method of learning that is at once critical and contemplative.

Slant, the journal of the Catholic left in Britain in the 1960s, began publication in 1964 and ended in 1970. Its formation and development were the result of factors both within and outside the Catholic Church. The development of the ‘New Left’ in Britain seemed to open up an area of potential middle-class radicalisation. After Hungary and Suez in 1956 what appeared to be required was a de-Stalinised, socialist humanism, responsive to the specific conditions of welfare-state capitalism whilst being at the same time internationalist in its perspectives. In the early 1960s the New Left was a political tendency—with all the vagueness which that term implies. It represented a hesitant, exploratory analysis, which was only later to refine its insights into a more rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism.

The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought—in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.

A quotation from the fearless and original thought of Baron Friedrich von Hugel will be our justification with those who may consider our praise of St. Thomas Aquinas unjustly superlative. He writes : . this Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul so apparently derivative and abstractive, is more complete and balanced and penetrates to the specific genus of Christianity more deeply than Saints Paul and Augustine, with all their directness and intensity. .... No one has put this point better than Professor Troeltsch : “The decisive point here is the conception peculiar to the Middle Ages of what is Christian as supernatural.”’

Whilst I hesitate to give my master, St. Thomas, the praise of this latest panegyrist, I feel that his words will be a clue to my attempt to deal with St. Thomas and Law. Indeed, the names mentioned in the quotation are more akin to the subject of this paper than, perhaps, the writer thought. In the life of St. Paul the idea of Law had played almost the major part. The seeming opposition between Law and faith, or works and faith, had, for a moment, led him into opposition with a section of the Church; and even with St. Peter. Augustine, too, like St. Paul, had come to an intellectual and practical rejection of Manichean Dualism by the master-vision of a creative Law which was, at the same time, one, good, and all-powerful; indeed so powerful in its goodness as to be able to turn evil to good.

Why our interest in natural law still today? We can always criticize obligations and found human rights on the basis of natural law and we cannot accept a large gap between inclinations and desires on one hand and norms on the other. Natural law is not the lowest common denominator among men and is not always immediately apparent. We can find out it by a resolutio, going back from every day moral experience, from virtues and vices, from civil laws to the first principles. Natural law is the work of practical rationality, that makes order, looking with attention to reality and requires harmony between reason and inclinations towards perfect goods. Human desire is informed by reason and practical reason is always also speculative reason, because it knows reality. Desire “has eyes”, recognizing good. What goodness consists in is perfection. Since human being is open to infinity, the main and inclusive desire is desire for happiness and for God. Inclinations towards good are known, valued, interpreted by practical reason and they become moral norms thanks to the same practical reason.The normative dimension of law is also finalistic. The idea of conveniens is different from both Kantian and Utilitarian points of view. Ethical virtues are the flourishment of the seeds of natural law and there is no necessary opposition between freedom and natural law.

This article claims that the strict methodological considerations of contemporary philosophical naturalism do not hinder serious philosophical reference to the thought of Thomas Aquinas because his methodological principles are just as rigorous. The methodology of Thomas Aquinas is not explicitly stated in the Summa Theologiae. Therefore, the Summa contra Gentiles and On being and essence are referenced to clarify what Thomas seems to have thought about relationship between philosophy and theology. The work of Fiona Ellis is an example of how a contemporary philosopher can methodologically justify taking a position of qualified naturalism. Ellis calls this expansive naturalism. This methodology desires to accept a type of naturalistic philosophy. Yet, Ellis holds that expansive naturalism is able to employ theology as a resource for philosophy without falling into the trap of superstition. In order to arrive at this contemporary reflection, there is a very brief sketch of recent intellectual history concerning the relationship between philosophy and theology.

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’.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the important Swiss theologian, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on August 12th.

Pope John Paul’s singling out of Hans Urs von Balthasar for the Paul VI award, for his contribution to Catholic theology, almost certainly marks his emergence as the preferred Catholic theologian of the pontificate. Interest in his thought is bound to increase, especially with the English translation of his master-work Herrlichkeit, now proceeding. Our aim here is to present what can only be an introductory picture of the man and his work, still—amazingly—so little known in the English-speaking world in spite of the fact that his eightieth birthday is at hand and he has been writing for fifty years. We are not attempting to summarize everything (that would be an impossibility) but considering the central theme of his writing, his Christology.

Balthasar was born in Lucerne in 1905. It is probably significant that he was born in that particular Swiss city, whose name is virtually synonymous with Catholicism in Swiss history. The centre of resistance to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in the nineteenth it led the Catholic cantons in what was virtually a civil war of religion, the War of the Sonderbund (which they lost). Even today it is very much a city of churches, of religious frescoes, of bells. Balthasar is a very self-consciously Catholic author. He was educated by both Benedictines and Jesuits, and then in 1923 began a university education divided between four Universities: Munich, Vienna, Berlin—where he heard Romano Guardini, for whom a Chair of Catholic Philosophy had been created in the heartland of Prussian Protestantism—and finally Zurich.

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).

Like the Messianic Banquet, the Messianic Torah is a concept frequently encountered among New Testament scholars. It seems to be presupposed as a category well known to first century Judaism and, therefore, to be a yardstick against which Jesus’ ‘legislative’ activity could and can be measured. An examination of this concept begins with the tension in Jewish thought between the eternity of the Mosaic Law and the various strategies designed to supplement its inadequacy to deal with contemporary situations. Given that the unique circumstances of the Messianic Age involve a further complication, the relevant texts are reviewed for their contributions to the problem. The Old Testament writers look to a deepening of observance of the Mosaic Law in the eschatological times. The Pseudepigrapha offer little more apart from a hint of Messianic legislation in Psalms of Solomon 17. Even the gospels do not show us a Jesus who fits readily into the model of a Messianic legislator. In fact St John probably pictures him as the embodiment of the Torah, the Word made flesh. The conclusion is that, whatever the later rabbinic teaching on the subject, the idea of the Messianic Torah is a scholarly construct as far as the New Testament is concerned.

It must not be thought, because the Christian Church condemns Marxist Communism, that she thereby identifies herself with those who attack it because it seeks to uproot the ‘existing order.’ The Christian's case against Communism is not that it is revolutionary but that it is counter-revolutionary; that it is, in theory and practice, diametrically opposed to the principles of the Christian Revolution, to the Christian conception of Society, to the Christian conception of human personality and destiny. The Christian Church has a long memory, and she cannot fail to recognize in salient features of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy a resuscitation of the pre-Christian and pagan conceptions from which the Christian Revolution delivered civilization. This reactionary re-paganization of society is by no means a peculiar or distinctive Eeature of Communism, but it is in Communism that it finds at present its most explicit, logical and ruthless expression. A sincere and authentic Christianity will not oppose ‘Marxism by joining forces with liberalism, individualist-capitalism, bourgeoisism and suchlike representatives of the ‘existing order’ (which it finds hardly less abhorrent), but by reasserting the principles of the Christian Revolution and by revitalizing its forces. In these pages we shall attempt, so far as space permits, to sketch the basic conceptions of this Christian Revolution, as a concrete and dynamic historical reality, with a view to suggesting how it may again become a real, positive and dominant factor in social reconstruction.