Interest in the passions and their contribution to the moral life is enjoying a resurgence in the study of Thomas Aquinas. But much of that interest assumes that Aquinas’ position is simply propassion. This is certainly true of Robert Miner's exhaustive study, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions. In this essay, however, I question the adequacy of this assumption on two related grounds. First, I examine the implications for Aquinas’ account of the morality of the emotions of his use of the political analogy to account for the structural relation between passion and reason. Second, I suggest that accounts of the passions must consider the experiential differences in the passions of post-lapsarian agents. I conclude that Aquinas’ account of the role of emotion in the moral life is decidedly less positive than Miner's presentation suggests.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Herbert McCabe OP, the best theologian / have ever met, whose work will remain exemplary for all who aspire to think theologically in the twenty-first century.

George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ is presumably part of what this conference is about. Certainly, the intentional killing of the innocent, that is people who have done us no harm, must be one of the most blatant examples of evil anybody can think of. Dealing with this evil has, alas, become one of the pre-occupations of the present age. The last century saw enough of it, from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Srebrenica and Omagh. But today we are confronted by what many see as a new form of this evil: namely suicidal terrorism. Yet even this is not so unambiguously evil that people cannot find religious justifications of it. Indeed the existence of a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent is, I take it, part of the evil that we are dealing with at this conference.

Many Muslims, and perhaps some Christians too, think of those who perpetrate suicidal murders as martyrs for the faith, specially blessed by the Almighty with a vocation to kill. Some even find arguments for it in the Qu’ran or in Islamic law, or in the Old Testament. But before we rush in to condemn their arguments, we must remember some precedents. The most obvious is that of Samson.

I was asked to contribute something about St Thomas Aquinas to this collection in honour of Kenelm—an activity rather like offering a short paper on Karl Marx in a festschrift for Lenin. Much of whatever understanding I have of Aquinas I owe to the insights and scholarly precision of Kenelm’s writings and I shall not in this paper attempt to play in his league. This will be an elementary introduction to an important part of Aquinas’s thinking which was neglected for some centuries and is only in our own receiving the attention it deserves. I am concerned with the virtue he calls prudentia. I have nothing original to contribute here (except perhaps some mistakes); what I will say will be new only to those to whom Aquinas is new, but there are perhaps, enough of these to justify yet another simple introduction.

As is almost always the case with Aquinas’s technical vocabulary, the nearest English word to the Latin one would be a mistranslation: prudentia does not mean what we call prudence. Prudence suggests to us a certain caution and canniness, whereas prudentia is much nearer to wisdom, practical wisdom.

Fortunately, however, we have a nearly perfect English equivalent in Jane Austen’s phrase ‘good sense’. I take Jane Austen to be centrally concerned not with presenting the ethos of the new respectable middle class but rather with the failure of the new bourgeoisie to live satisfactory lives because of the inability of the older ‘aristocratic’ tradition to transmit to them a certain outlook and way of behaving and education that came down to the author via the remains of a Christian morality.

Apart from the conclusion that he draws, the fault that I find with Fr Herbert McCabe's paper is this: he connects the concept of natural law much too closely with the fact ‘that we are not isolated individuals, we are parts, fragments... of a larger community, the human race.’ It is true that some parts of the natural law are based on that fact – e.g. the prohibition on theft.

But the notion ‘against the natural law’ is simply equivalent in extension to the notion ‘what is wrong'. Belief in the natural law is the belief that the discoveries of reason about ethics are the promulgation of laws to the rational creature by the Creator. The content of the natural law is thus simply the content of ethics, so far as this is independent of revelation.

This essay argues that for Henri de Lubac, a sacramental ontology provides the link between a Eucharistically based ecclesiology and the issue of the relationship between nature and the supernatural. For de Lubac it is the sacramental order of reality that draws humanity to a deeper participation in the divine life. Maurice Blondel's substitution of Tradition for the dilemma between extrinsicism and historicism shapes de Lubac's sacramental ontology. The latter's concern for the social character of the Church and his opposition to an individualist ecclesiology are key to his understanding of the relationship between the supernatural and the Eucharistic character of the Church. Arguing that Eucharist and Church are mutually constituting, de Lubac wants to counter both extrinsicist and historicist approaches to the Church. For de Lubac, the Eucharist provides an avenue for the mutual interpenetration of nature and the supernatural, thereby overcoming the dualism between extrinsicism and historicism. It is through the sacramental means of Christ, the Church, and the Eucharist, that God is present in the world. This presence means for de Lubac neither an acceptance of the State on its own terms nor an exaggerated spiritualist critique of Constantinianism.

Organization and classification of material is essential as an aid to effective communication. Good teachers and writers will use labels to organize material, which play a valuable role in simplifying a debate. They provide a way in for the student or reader. However, this organization and classification of material is not a neutral and objective enterprise. One’s classification will hide certain basic decisions and options.

It is the argument of this article that the ‘theology of religions’ debate has been stifled by an over-emphasis on the standard threefold paradigm. I will be taking issue with John Hick’s judgment: ‘the simplest and least misleading classification is the now fairly standard threefold division into exclusivism (salvation is confined to Christianity), inclusivism (salvation occurs throughout the world but is always the work of Christ), and pluralism (the great world faiths are different and independently authentic contexts of salvation/liberation) ‘. I am not alone in wanting to point out the cracks in this paradigm, but I want to go a stage further and attempt to formulate one option which cannot be embraced by the traditional paradigm.

The underlying problem with the traditional classification results from the conflation of three matters:

1. The conditions for salvation.

2. Whether the major world religions are all worshipping the same God.

3. The truth about the human situation.

The traditional paradigm emphasizes the first, is confused about the second, and, with regard to the third, links truth questions with soteriology. This is easily exposed as unsatisfactory.

I have a very simple point to make in what follows. For all I want to say is that God does nothing. I do not wish to deny that God brings or brought things about (e.g. that the universe continues to exist or that St Paul was converted). So my “God does nothing” has a special sense (it does not deny that action can be ascribed to God). But what I intend in saying it is, I think, something of great importance when it comes to thinking about God in a sensible way. To grasp the point I want to make will save one from following all sorts of false trails when it comes to reflection on divinity.

Let’s start with what is going on when you or I act. Examples of human actions could include opening a door, wiping one’s nose, making a telephone call, baking a cake, and waving goodbye to a friend. But what is common to these examples, and to others which might be mentioned?

There is at least one thing common. For they all involve people going through a process. I open a door by reaching for the door handle and exerting a continued pressure on it. I wipe my nose by transporting with my hand an object to my nose and moving it about. I bake a cake by walking around a kitchen and following a recipe. I wave good-bye to a friend by lifting my arm and going through a waving motion.

Gustavo Gutierrez, in a recent visit to Cambridge, told this story about the Medellin conference of 1968. (This is my recollection of his story and not an exact quotation.) Following that important gathering, the South American bishops received a letter from Rome. ‘We can see’, it read, ‘that your circumstances are very different from those we experience here in Europe. To enable us to help you, please send experts on South American economics, politics, sociology and anthropology to Rome. . . But don’t send any theologians because we have our own theologians here.’

Despite the fashionable sound to the phrase, theology has always been done ‘in context’. Augustine was no less contextual a theologian than Bonhoeffer, with each page attesting to the writer’s particular education, formation as a Christian, pastoral concerns and so on. Does this alarm us? Should this alarm us? If we admit to, and even delight in, the diverse contexts for the doing of theology are we ‘going soft’ on any claim to a universally valid Christian message? How do we speak of the truth and yet speak from our particularity? These are the questions I wish to consider here, questions whose significance for contemporary theology, now a global and ecumenical enterprise, need not be underlined.

I would like to begin, however, at a place seemingly remote from our own—Europe in the sixteenth century. I should like to look at one of those Reformation debates which, while distant in time and sensibility from those of our century, have repercussions which all Christians to a greater or lesser degree must still feel. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I should like to begin this discussion of ‘truth’ with a look at an exchange of letters in 1539 between Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin.

Thus Hick has shown little reason to change the traditional Christian paradigm of the world religions from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican model of the universe of faiths; from a system with Christ and his church at the centre, around which the other religions revolve, to a Copernican model with all the religions, including Christianity, revolving around the central mystery of ultimate reality. It must be said that D’Costa’s critique is both powerful and ingenious. But is it correct?

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Gavin D’Costa argued that Professor John Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions is both unnecessary and incoherent. It is unnecessary because the paradox it is intended to resolve can be met without radically changing Christianity’s traditional selfunderstanding; and incoherent because it assumes a premise denied by its conclusion, namely the Christian conception of an all-loving God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ.

In order to answer our question we must first assess whether or not Hick’s argument has been adequately represented. For we will be in danger of wrongly dismissing Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution if we have not rightly understood the reasons which have led him to make it. And it is precisely at this point that we may suspect several of Hick’s commentators and critics, including D’Costa, of misunderstanding the nature and force of the considerations that weigh with Hick—and should be weighed by us when considering his proposal.

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.

The decree of the Council of Mâcon (585 AD) that women do not have a soul has the honoured place in liberal demonology given to historical events that never happened. It is a tale to treasure. As the eponymous wine is sipped at elegant tables, the misguided deeds of bishops can be recalled, and the only regret must be that no Synod of Brie or Council of Camembert offers occasion for further mirth. On these occasions, facts become such skimble-skamble stuff as puts men from their dreams.

For the Council, of course, never decreed any such thing, if only for the persuasive reason that some of the bishops may themselves have been married. The penalties applied to a bishop who decrees that his wife does not have a soul are not recorded in canon law presumably as surpassing male imagination. The decrees do indeed contain stuff to fuel fires: the fifteenth requires laymen to doff their hat to a cleric the sixteenth forbids the widow of a sub-deacon to marry on pain of being confined to a convent. But neither the word ‘woman’ nor the word ‘soul’ occurs even once in the decrees.

One does not hope ever to be free of the myth—but it may be interesting to trace its history, which is complex. Briefly: in the late seventeenth century some Dutch publications alleged that the Council had debated whether women are human; this was linked in nineteenth- century France with earlier satirical literature from Italy which claimed to ‘prove’ from the Bible that women do not have a soul, and the upshot was the allegation that the Council had issued a decree to this effect. The allegation was refuted by scholars but persisted as a myth which later reachcd England first, and then Ireland, where it flourishes today.

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong.

The development of theology into something like its modem sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory.

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.

For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.

The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.