The end of the war left the whole educational system in Germany in chaos and its rebuilding has had to start from scratch. This is obvious as far as external conditions were concerned; buildings were ruined, teaching material destroyed, teachers dispersed and in part forbidden to follow their profession. The children themselves were involved in the maelstrom of evacuation and in the disorderly flight from the bombed west to the east, and from the Eussian invader in the east the return again to the west. All this is clearly appreciated by now. Equally one understands the loss of a sane religious background that followed the breakdown of Germany’s former educational system and the scepticism shown by both teachers and pupils against any alternative system (and even against the re-introduction of pre-war arrangements), whether it was inspired by German teachers themselves, by the Church, the German authorities or the inter-allied military government. These problems are appreciated, in paid at least, everywhere. Their solution is seen to lie only in a very gradual and by no means as yet wholly satisfactory rehabilitation. This is the natural result of the various factors involved in the present situation in Germany, but more recently two new and somewhat unexpected elements have emerged to influence post-war development in a disturbing manner.

The division of Germany into four zones has had an immense bearing on the political and social life of the country, but no less has it had its repercussions in the educational field. This is most marked of course in the division between east and west; but it is true also of the division of government within the west itself.

The four Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus might be compared to four portraits of him. Rembrandt or Velazquez would present a rather traditional and historical likeness. El Greco presents almost translucent features and elongated limbs, a more mystical likeness. Roualt, who gives perhaps no more than a torso in bold striking colors, brings out the human suffering. Dali presents a cosmic view, the cross hovering over the world. Each presents the same story but with differing emphases; the crucifixion is, at the same time, historical, traditional, mystical, full of human suffering and cosmic.

Similarly, each Evangelist has created a portrait of the death of Jesus. We must ask why. The Evangelists were not just writing biography, nor were they concerned with the purely historical. They were writing from the resurrection faith, from which stems all the theology of the New Testament. They narrate the death of Jesus from this perspective; consequently, the meaning of his death, rather than physical detail, is their central concern.

Gareth Moore arrived at Corpus to read P. P. E. about two years after I did. We soon became friends, not least because we were always the last two people at the college philosophy society, finishing off the wine. Gareth (who was then known as ‘Gary’ — a fact he later denied) claimed that in his Finals, he — G. E. Moore — was the only candidate for the new optional paper ‘Russell and Wittgenstein’. In 1969, his first year as a graduate student, he moved into 50 Abingdon Road, where I also lived. The landlady was the widow of a man who was said to have taught Edward Heath the organ. Gareth had just returned to the Church. Although we knew that he liked going on retreats to monasteries, he had not, to that point, had any religious belief.

By the time Gareth came to Blackfriars, I had left Oxford to teach in Liverpool. But I kept an Oxford base for the vacations and we met regularly until the mid nineties. We were not in much contact when he was in Belgium and had just resumed normal dining and drinking engagements when he fell ill. We kept in telephone connection until his death.

During our long friendship, we discussed many things, most commonly connected with religion. (My views are those of a rather conservative ‘anglo-catholic’.) But we did not often discuss philosophy. There was one reason for this. Wittgenstein is a philosopher who divides people, and Gareth was a root and branch Wittgensteinian, whereas Wittgenstein has always struck me, from first reading, as being more or less a fraud.

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.

The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.

In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.

According to John Polkinghorne, the Fall is the major Christian doctrine that is the most difficult to reconcile with contemporary science. Like him, however, I believe it is vitally important, even in this regard, to try to pinpoint the extent to which taking science seriously requires us to modify traditionally held beliefs. In this paper I focus on two problematic ideas associated with the Fall: (i) the idea of a primordial human couple (Adam and Eve), and (ii) the idea that this couple was subjected to bodily death as a result of their original misdeed. I argue that, contrary to appearances, it is possible to harmonize these beliefs with contemporary science – at least if one presupposes some kind of soul-body dualism. I also try to show that this dualism, although philosophically non-fashionable nowadays, is yet to be refuted or made redundant by current evolutionary theory or neurophysiology.

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.

I said in a previous New Blackfriars (October 1975) that Marxism has had on the whole little to say about morality, because one doesn’t engage in moral debate with men who can only grasp morality in moralistic — and so ideological — fashion. It’s in the provisional silence of those who refuse the term ‘morality’ that, perhaps, something of its true meaning may finally emerge. The condition for the emergence of that discourse is Marxism itself — the theory and practice of political revolution. Until that condition is fulfilled, our ‘moral’ discourse is bound to remain imprisoned within the ideological, that’s to say, that when we speak ‘morally’, we won’t, for much of the time, know what we are meaning. We’ll be in the condition of all those imprisoned within the ideological, who, in the very act of speaking, fail to recognise that they themselves are being ‘spoken’, being constituted, by certain discourses quite independent of themselves, quite concealed from their consciousness, discourses which they betray, despite themselves, in the slips, contradictions, inconsistencies which fissure and deform their speaking. It’s of the essence of the ideological that in speaking, in constituting myself as a subject, I must necessarily repress, remain in ignorance, of the very determinants of my discourse — determinants which are visible only to science, to that science of social formation which is historical materialism, or that science which is psychoanalysis. As ‘I’ speak ‘I’ the coherent historical subject Terry Eagleton, it — the unconscious — speaks through me, constantly disturbing and displacing my discourse.

'Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5.17). ‘Neither circumcision or lack of circumcision means anything, but a new creation’ (Gal. 6. 15). Such is St Paul's clear teaching.

The life of a Christian is a new life, a new life in Christ and in the Spirit. We find this divine promise of a newness of life even in the Old Testament, in prophecies which can be said to have announced the mysteries of God's grace in a unique way. In Ezekiel God tells us about the last times, the days of Yahweh, the days in which he will manifest his glory, that is, his living presence among us in this world of ours, the days of the redemption in Christ. ‘Cast away from you all your transgressions, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit’ (Ez. 18.31).

A navigator in charge of the steering of aship, in addition to the compass and other aids, has to keep a constant look-out for rocks, some of which are visible, others submerged. The locality of these submerged rocks is as a rule well known and is marked on the chart, but from time to time we read that a ship has struck on some uncharted rock or reef and has gone down, or at least has suffered some damage.

There is something analogous to this in the life of a human being. He has a course to steer, a goal to reach; he has rocks to encounter and keep clear of. As long as these are visible—as long as he is conscious, that is to say, of these rocks—it is an easier matter; but from time to time he strikes something which, so to speak, is not on his chart and yet profoundly influences his life. Disturbance of an emotional character may ensue, the root of which lies in the uncharted rocks of the sub-conscious mind.

This is merely a simile introduced by way of illustration to show the fundamental thought which runs through this treatise on the psychology of emotion.

The part which emotion—or, as older writers would say, passion—plays in human life is so obvious that the fact is barely worth mentioning. Without emotion life would resemble the existence of an oyster, fixed on its bed, immovable, impervious to any stimulation other than that which procures for it its daily diet of animalculae. It is in the quality of the emotional life that we find those oscillations of the personality which are familiar to us all.

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?

This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.

There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.

The true speaking absolutely is prior to the good, as appears from two reasons. First because the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to good. . . . Secondly, . . . knowledge naturally precedes appetite.” (Summa, la Qu. 16, Art 4, Eng. trans.)

The object of the intellect (i.e. Truth) “is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will” (i.e. goodness). Therefore the intellect in itself and absolutely is higher and nobler than the will—yet “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God ; but on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is better than the will.” (Ibid., Qu. 82, Part 3.)

These two texts from the Summa of the Blackfriar St. Thomas Aquinas must outline the attitude of Blackfriars towards Truth.

This article investigates the relationship between love, law, and human nature in the thought of McCabe and Aquinas. The article puts McCabe and Aquinas into conversation in order to illuminate McCabe's estimation of the natural law as an “insufficient ethic” and a feature of ethics that sheds a “great deal of light” on the matter of human morality. The article seeks to articulate the integrity of natural morality as a feature of the Divine Wisdom that ultimately perfects natural morality via the incarnation of the Son.

This article examines the ways in which Anglican theologians have reflected on the doctrine of transubstantiation. The article notes that there is substantial agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion on the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and that this agreement has been forged by the long established and continuing dialogue of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). At the same time the article notes that official responses from the Roman Catholic Church, while acknowledging the worth of the dialogue, have insisted on particular theological and philosophical definitions of the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist concerning a change in the substance of the elements. While Anglicans have not accepted this particular definition of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as defined by the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation, they have nonetheless accepted the notion of the real presence and reflected in modern times on transubstantiation. Examples of this reflection on transubstantiation by Anglicans are discussed in the hope of allowing the dialogue to continue at new levels of understanding.

Yves M.-J. Congar (1904-1995) was the foremost French theologian of the twentieth century. The severe trials to which he was subjected by Roman Catholic Church authorities, notwithstanding, Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975: I am of the Church. I love the Church.’ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognised the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being. Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind. It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians: