Introduction

Social scientists show a surprising lack of interest in the influence of climate on social and cultural life. Montesquieu’s claim that climate influences social life usually falls on deaf ears these days. Can anyone seriously believe that the Economic and Social Research Council would fund a research project to test the hypothesis that “in cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations”? Yet, I know that my mood is affected by weather conditions. It is difficult, however, to know exactly what the effect is and whether the same conditions are invariably associated with the same effects. My responses to The Enchantment of Sociology are a good case in point. I read it in proof in bleak midwinter; I read the published volume under a blazing Umbrian sun. The responses were quite different, but, as I shall explain, it is not easy to see why my responses to the book’s arguments varied with these different climatic conditions. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive in some respects, so perhaps this is why Montesquieu’s climatic thesis is regarded as problematic.

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.

In this article I explore Newman’s theological understanding of the human person and the doctrine of original sin. The concept of sin plays a dominant role in Newman’s theological anthropology. He argues that human beings are slaves to sin and are in need of God’s mercy. He describes sin as a pestilence and disease which robs us of our spiritual life. Original sin is an indifference to the very work of God’s grace within us and as such strikes at the very core of our being.

Newman’s understanding of the doctrine of original sin admits monogenesis which passes on the fallen state of human beings to descendants of Adam. For Newman the sin of Adam and Eve was different in degree from any subsequent personal sin that we can commit as individuals. Original sin encompasses both the original sin of Adam and Eve and the state of corruption into which all subsequent generations are born. The personal sins of future generations are conditioned by the milieu of original sin and they resemble original sin insofar as they contribute to the overall sinfulness of humanity.

This essay started with the experience of teaching Loss and Gain to an English Literature research class. I was teaching a novel that illustrated an important aspect of the intellectual history of Victorian Britain; the class had been reading a psychological novel which they found (often simultaneously) both perverse and amusing. They were, of course, laughing at Newman rather than with him. I imagine that the response I encountered is not untypical: however Loss and Gain might have been regarded in the past, it is not going to be looked at in the same way today. And when we take account of the impact of critical theory, the picture becomes even more complicated: feminist and New Historicist critics, while not necessarily taking a hostile view of Loss and Gain, are inevitably going to discuss it in a way that challenges traditional approaches. This prompts the question I want to consider: whether current sceptical critical approaches can be reconciled with a sympathetic appreciation of the serious intent of Loss and Gain?

I

A split in criticism becomes apparent immediately if we consider a basic point: Newman is writing about a man’s world. And why not? The Oxford of his day did not admit women. But times change, and even nonfeminist readers today are likely to be struck by the effete remoteness of the university life he depicts, perhaps seeing it as an environment that encourages a fear of women. The problems are apparent in the breakfast party that the junior tutor, Mr Vincent, arranges for Charles Reding and other undergraduates.

I have long been puzzled by the Gospel prediction that at the resurrection I shall become like an angel in heaven. What does it mean, and did Jesus really say it? What follows is an attempt to settle the matter. I shall be arguing that the passage in its original form envisaged a non-corporeal existence (contrary to the view of some recent writers), but that it does not go back to Jesus.

After routing the Pharisees and Herodians and turning on the scribes, Mark’s Jesus in 12:18-27 slaps down the Sadducees. The Sadducees, who disbelieve in the doctrine of a resurrection, argue that Moses would never have prescribed levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-10) if he had believed in an afterlife, because of the confusion it would cause in extreme cases, such as that of a woman who married seven brothers in succession.1 Jesus defends the doctrine with the hard saying, ‘They are as angels in heaven’ (12:25), and goes on to argue for the doctrine of the resurrection on the strength of what to the present-day reader is very tendentious exegesis of an Old Testament passage: the fact that God calls himself ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ in Exodus proves that the dead rise.

My prime purpose here is, as I have said, to examine the meaning of the words ‘They are as angels in heaven’ and to see whether it is likely that they go back to Jesus. It will be necessary, however, to look at the passage as a whole. The words attributed to Jesus in Mk 12:24-27 are:

It has often been pointed out that drama—and theatre, its focused form—can be liberating to people who find themselves oppressed by what might be called ‘restricted personhood’, conditions of individual belonging which make it hard for them to be both independent and cooperative in their relationships with other people. Because of its combination of a definitive structure with a stimulating imaginative freedom, drama helps those contained within narrow personal boundaries, as in depression, or limited by the absence of recognisable structure, a stable and recognisable image of the self as distinct from other people, as in schizoid thought disorder.

These are not the only ways in which psychologically oppressed people are helped by the experience of participating, however sporadically, in an alternative world in which their difficulties no longer exert the same kind of hold upon them. Even those for whom theatricality constitutes a characteristic source of communication about their personal distress—hysteric personalities who act out their problems as an alternative to thinking about them—seem to gain insight from being included in other people’s scenarios. This happens when they take an active part in the proceedings, as in drama, or when the magnetic force of theatre draws them into the action of the play without any conscious effort on their part—unless it be the determination to remain aloof! The most noticeable difference in behaviour occurs among people suffering from what are generally described as anxiety states, particularly social phobias, when the dramatic milieu reproduces the effects of desensitisation techniques within a wider, more realistic context, one which is more easily harmonised with life in the outside world; comprising, as it does, an exercise of imagination in which everyone present co-operates—an interchange of ideas, feelings and expectations which is not merely life-like but is human living.

According to the Second Council of Constantinople (2 June 553) there is ‘one divinity in three hypostases or persons’. Today it is commoner to say that there are three persons in one God. No doubt these formulations come to the same thing, but what is that?

The English word ‘person’ translates the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, expressions for the masks actors wore on the ancient stage. Since the same actor might appear in different masks, playing different roles, in the same play, the word suggests that the Persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit, are three roles the one God plays, three appearances or aspects he presents. The word ‘hypostasis’ is a philosophical term for something that exists on its own like a living organism; so to call the Father, Son and Spirit ‘hypostases’ is to suggest that they form a kind of three-membered society. Both these suggestions are unorthodox. The first is Sabellianism, the second tritheism, and these are the Charybdis and Scylla between which the speculative theologian is supposed to steer. But is such a course possible? The use of both terms by Constantinople II rather poses the problem than solves it.

In his ecumenical Marian theology, Fr. George H. Tavard has a fine chapter entitled “Mary in Anglicanism,” in which he traces the development of Marian teaching from Thomas Cranmer to the present. Tavard’s essay is not intended to be comprehensive and so. while he maintains that it would be “an exaggeration to speak of a Marian movement in contemporary Anglicanism,” nonetheless significant contributions have been made in recent times, for example, by Canon Donald Allchin and Professor John Macquanie. Had the nonagenarian Anglican priest-theologian Norman Pittenger’s Our Lady, The Mother of Jesus in Christian Faith and Devotion been published before 1996, no doubt Fr. Tavard would have included some mention of it as yet another contemporary Anglican contribution.

The aim of this paper is to draw to the attention of readers not conversant with Welsh the significance and importance of a work little known at present outside Wales but deserving of a far wider readership. This is the anonymous medieval Welsh prose treatise on mysticism called Ymborth yr Enaid (Sustenance of the Soul), the third and sole surviving book of a larger work called Cysegrlan Fuchedd (Holy Living). Ymborth yr Enaid has several claims to distinction. First, it is the only example of a medieval Welsh treatise on mysticism, and for that reason, as well as its intrinsic merits, it is important in the context of medieval vernacular mystical writings. Second, it is the work of a man who was not only a considerable theologian and philosopher but also a very gifted artist. Third, the work represents a unique fusion of native Welsh bardic learning and mainstream scholastic theology, a fact which is not only remarkable in itself but also, in this case, far-reaching in its implications for the Welsh prose literature of the period generally, both religious and secular, not least with regard to such fundamental questions as the dating, provenance, and authorship of much of it. Ymborth yr Enaid is a work rich in variety and pregnant with significance.

The postmodernist perspective is so amorphous as to almost defy description. A good deal of imprecision inevitably flourishes. Its description ranges from the superficial level of popularist culture and its images, to an anarchistic nihilism. Many of its adherents are refugee post-Marxists sheltering under the banner of a relativistic abandonment of all ideological absolutes. Where is one to find the link between the post-structuralism of literary criticism and the postmodernism in the field of architecture and art? There are many who regard the process as a fundamental transformation in human self understanding. They regard it as a radical de-centring of the self and as a comprehensive embracing of relationality and relativism, (which seems to be generating such concern in the breast of Cardinal Ratzinger and his colleagues), as a complete disavowal of the enlightenment project. Others, rather strangely on the other hand, see it simply as the next sequential stage in the modernising process, and equally a threat to the purity of faith. The emphasis, for them, is on its continuity with the past.

It is a difficult area and to be approached with diffidence. I am myself heavily dependent upon the contribution of Gerard Loughlin, who gave me my first introduction to the writings of Levinasian ethics in his article in New Blackfriars in January 1994.

Both the enlightenment and the reaction against it in postmodernity have at their heart an exploration of the significance of the self as it is confronted by a world in which it feels itself to be an alien.

With the publication of The Enchantment of Sociology, Kieran Flanagan becomes one of the contemporary sociologists whose work is shaped by the devastating indifference which dominates so many social and cultural relationships. This is an indifference of apathy and unconcern in the face of the sense of the emptiness of so much of what passes as the good life in our commodified and media-saturated culture. It means that all the things and qualities which could once be taken to make a difference to what it means to be a human being in the world have been thrown into the flux of the quest for perpetual newness. Indifference has emerged to the extent that there has been a collapse of the chance that some quality, some ideal, or some value, might possess the abilities to make a difference.

In itself there is little new about this sociological care about the absence and lack of care. It bears some comparison with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of dark times as those in which outrages can be perpetrated without a murmur of outrage (Arendt 1973). Meanwhile, and perhaps more pertinently for the purposes of this discussion, C. Wright Mills noted the prevalence of indifference in the late 1950s in The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959). Mills looked at the situation which had emerged out of the settlement of the Second World War and saw people who had been left lost and alone by the erosion of their ability to accept readily the time-honoured ways of making sense of the world. He identified the outlines of what amounted to an existential and hermeneutic vacuum.

To read Donald MacKinnon’s theology with the presupposition that he was a systematic theologian must be a great disappointment. Reading MacKinnon leaves one with the impression that his work is rather unfinished, yet this is its quality. Embodied in his work is the belief that any system cannot in the end do justice to the realm of irreducible fact. There is a sustained rigour in his writing which is so deep as to give the reader the sense that MacKinnon is involved in an interrogation so penetrating as to be at times harrowing in its execution. George Steiner, quite rightly, speaks the word ‘sombre’ of MacKinnon’s work, but I think ‘interrogative’, with the accent on the restless even painful questioning of MacKinnon’s genius to be the better description. If MacKinnon can be said to have a method it is Baconian. The question rather than the thesis is the cutting edge of his theology. There is a Barthian insistence about his thought which wants to put all understanding, all subjectivity to the question in order to disclose a deeper level: the subjective must give way to the ontological. Implicit in his writings is the belief that to be a theologian is to be a realist: to be sensitive to the limits of understanding, to let God be God.

[The Gospel: “I call you no longer servants but friends...”]