A brilliant young German New Testament scholar said to me recently in an e-mail message, “What is more, scarcely anything new can ever be said; mostly it is the arrangement of well-known thoughts from a new point of view that is helpful and releases new impulses. Really new thoughts are accordingly received with great scepticism. So I often ask myself what we are actually doing.” That on the one hand, and the spurious excitement of the “Honest to Jesus!” movement, publicising the work of the Jesus Seminar, on the other hand. The Jesus Seminar meets several times a year in the United States and sets itself to decide by vote the likely authenticity of the sayings of Jesus and of events in the Acts of the Apostles. It was founded by Robert Funk. His book, Honest to Jesus, aims “to set Jesus free”, to “demote Jesus”, and to “declare the New Testament a highly uneven and biased record of various early attempts to invent Christianity.” The show will be on the road in the United Kingdom when Funk visits the country from the end of March AD 2000 to the beginning of May to hold seminars and rallies. It seems that close detailed scholarship by individuals dealing with the New Testament is regarded as boring and that the only excitement is to be gained by joining with others and getting Bishop Spong to puff your book, trying to shock the public in echo of Bishop John Robinson.

A Homily Preached in Memory of Fr Leonard Boyle OP On the Feast of St Thomas Aquinas At Blackfriars, Oxford

When news of Fr Leonard’s death reached Canada, Michael Attridge, a young doctorate student at the Pontifical Medieval Institute where Leonard had taught for many years, immediately sent a letter of condolence to the convent of the Master at Santa Sabina. In his letter, Michael spoke of his first and only visit to the Vatican Library where he found himself overwhelmed by Leonard’s kindness: “Fr Leonard offered to give me a tour of the library ... Our tour culminated with a visit to the beautifully frescoed Salone Sistino. Fr Boyle took me around to each of the paintings of the various ecumenical councils of the Church. At the end he asked me a question that I’ll never forget—he asked me what was the common feature in each of the paintings. As I struggled, by reviewing all the paintings, to give an intelligent answer to his question, he simply and quietly said with a smile—‘It’s the Book, Michael’. I looked up at the walls and there in the centre of each of the paintings surrounded by the council fathers, was the Bible. He continued: ‘The Book is always at the very heart of the Church’s activity and life—never forget that’.”

I have always instinctively thought of Leonard as a man of the Book, and not only because of his enormous talent as a paleographer. Most of the times, in fact, when I heard him speaking in Rome, in public, he was preaching the Gospel.

It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.

Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.

While I was preparing this article, I read some remarks on the same subject by a U.S. politician with whom I found myself in substantial agreement. I then discovered, to my consternation, that the politician’s opinions had been compared with those of Adolf Hitler. So the reader must be warned that she can expect something pretty shocking in what follows.

We desperately need a philosophy of the humanities, both in the popular and in the narrower professional sense of the term ‘philosophy’. That is to say, we need to be able to spell out clearly and distinctly what the place of the humanities is in the good life, why they are important, and why (to put the matter in the most basic terms) they are worth paying for. I read that in parts of the U.S. the obvious obscurity and apparent triviality of the work of many representatives of the humanities has led to a cutting of funds and a precipitous fall in the number of students. I also note with some regret that, for the construction of a philosophy of the humanities in the sense that I have just given, recent trends in philosophy have been of very little help. In general I find a gaping hole in most prevailing modes of contemporary philosophy where the means for defending civilization— sustained reflection on the true and the good, and the best means of achieving them—should be.

One of the most notable features of Faith and Reason is its plea for metaphysics. The twentieth century saw interest in metaphysics recede to a low ebb. There were signs, however, that the tide had already begun to turn before Pope John Paul made his plea. Calls for metaphysics sometimes came from unexpected quarters. At the end of 1996, Clifford Longley wrote in The Tablet:

The title of this talk presupposes some important definitions. The conference title, “The Responsibilities of Theology”, struck me firstly as rather odd, but also as strikingly familiar. Many is the time I have seen the heading “The Responsibilities of Business”. In this light, such terminology implies that there is some kind of corporate (in its original sense) identity under the heading “theology” or “business”, to which some kind of responsibility can be ascribed. Lots of ink has been spilt over whether one can say in any meaningful way that the business corporation “acts” and can therefore “have responsibilities”, and this title seems to invite the same kind of approach to the “enterprise of theology”.’ I’ve taken a particular line on these questions, which is apparent in the thesis below. To take a particular line in order to get somewhere is the kind of thing that a business person would do. Results are important to businesspeople-an important point for theology to take on boarcbut the drawback in this is that to focus on results also tends to narrow down the discussion. In order to “get somewhed’ I am going to do the same thing, which will inevitably leave some avenues of possible discussion left untouched.

Introduction

The title of this talk presupposes some important definitions. The conference title, “The Responsibilities of Theology”, struck me firstly as rather odd, but also as strikingly familiar. Many is the time I have seen the heading “The Responsibilities of Business”. In this light, such terminology implies that there is some kind of corporate (in its original sense) identity under the heading “theology” or “business”, to which some kind of responsibility can be ascribed. Lots of ink has been spilt over whether one can say in any meaningful way that the business corporation “acts” and can therefore “have responsibilities”, and this title seems to invite the same kind of approach to the “enterprise of theology”.

I’ve taken a particular line on these questions, which is apparent in the thesis below. To take a particular line in order to get somewhere is the kind of thing that a business person would do. Results are important to businesspeople—an important point for theology to take on board—but the drawback in this is that to focus on results also tends to narrow down the discussion. In order to “get somewhere” I am going to do the same thing, which will inevitably leave some avenues of possible discussion left untouched.

Over the last three decades there has been a great outpouring of writings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity, almost all of which, ironically, have lamented the neglect of the doctrine. Again and again one reads that although the Trinity is central and crucially important to Christianity and Christian theology, it has not been given adequate treatment. It is unacceptable, theologians protest, that the Trinity has come to be regarded as an obscure and complex theological technicality, a piece of celestial mathematics impossible to understand and with little relevance to the life of the ordinary Christian. Karl Rahner remarked that modern Christians were ‘almost mere “monotheists’” paying lip service to the Trinity but in practice ignoring it. If it were announced that the dogma had been a mistake and was to be erased from official Christianity, nobody, he thought, would be too bothered, neither the ordinary believing Christians nor the authors of theological textbooks.’ Rahner’s diagnosis has been widely accepted and widely regretted. The consensus is that the Trinity is at the heart of Christianity, and both theology and piety have gone astray if it is regarded as belonging to the specialists. A retrieval (it is believed) is needed: the Trinity must be understood once again (one reads) as a positive and central element in the Christian faith rather than an embarrassing obscurity, and as profoundly relevant to the life of individual Christians, to the life of the Church, and perhaps beyond.

On the evening of the first of August, 1996, the Dominican Bishop of Oran in Algeria, Pierre Claverie, was murdered by a bomb placed in a side-road near his house. He had been warned many times about the danger of remaining in the country, especially since an underground group of Muslim terrorists had begun deliberately targeting people like himself. But he chose to stay. In the days after his death, against the wall near the place where he and his driver had been blown up, the local people placed flowers and small written tributes in his memory. Among them was a card from a young Algerian woman called Yasmina. On the card she wrote: “Ce soir, mon Pére, je n’ai pas de paroles. Mais j’ai des larmes et de l’espoir”. (“This evening, Father, I have no words. But I have tears and hope.”) Because these words are both heart-broken and hope-filled, I can think of no words more fitting to use as a title for this paper on martyrdom. “I Have Tears and Hope": Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century.

I say “tears”, first, because looking back over the last one hundred years, one soon comes to realize that perhaps no other century in history has witnessed the death and martyrdom of so many people, or has seen so much systematic and deliberate torture of the innocent. And, added to the usual tragic circumstances associated with martyrdom, a vast number of people in the 20th century, found themselves caught up helplessly between the two great opposing ideologies of Fascism and Communism.

David Hume first raised the “is-ought” problem in this famous passage from A Treatise of Human Nature:

Behind Hume’s quietly persuasive comments lie at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that the way language is ordinarily used is wrong; rather than take note, in an empirical fashion, of how moral discourse is normally conducted, Hume chooses to be negatively prescriptive in respect of “all the vulgar system of morality”.

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.

That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.

Around ten years ago the Order for Christian Funerals (henceforth OCF) was published. Given personal extended pastoral and liturgical use, I would like to make one suggestion which may prove equally useful to others involved in preparing the Funeral Liturgy. I have found the use of “Night Prayer” of The Divine Office a real boon in celebrating the Vigil for the Deceased with Reception at the Church.

In memory of Conrad Pepler OP (1908-1993)

Sixty years ago, Conrad Pepler wrote “The Spirituality of William Langland,” a short study of the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman (Blackfriars 20 (1939): 846-854). This book-length medieval religious poem, by a Londoner usually called William Langland, narrates the life story of a commoner, Will, in a series of ten dream-visions which give him insight into life, the community, evil and sin, and the search for God. In this poem, Father Pepler found “a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay” ("Spirituality” 846). In his Blackfriars essay and in a chapter of his 1958 book, The English Religious Heritage, Father Pepler saw Piers Plowman as “delineating the beginning and growth of the spiritual life in the common man” {ERH 56). He defined the spirituality of Piers Plowman as “objective,” reflecting “the restrained, austere and majestic treatment of the liturgy” in sharp contrast to the subjective, “realistic and emotional devotion to the humanity of Christ, so typical of fourteenth century piety” ("Spirituality” 853). He noted the centrality in the poem of the idea of relationship: “from the very fact of the Incarnation all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church” (ERH 56; cf. “Spirituality” 850).

Father Pepler's article was written at a time of great scholarly interest in Piers Plowman as a religious work. It was preceded by the work of such giants as R. W. Chambers (1924, 1939) who compared Piers to the Divine Comedy.

Feminist religious-language reformers wish to eliminate or make substitutions for such masculine-loaded words as “lord,” “king,” “master,” and “father.” One substitute word, “mother,” is of particular interest because it is sometimes used to replace “father,” and sometimes it serves as a counterweight to “father.” The appropriateness of these terms as encountered in Christian liturgical prayers, Scripture, the Creeds, and the Trinitarian formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is often discussed nowadays. My first contention is that mother/father stand in linguistic opposition to each other, preventing interchangeable or parallel use. My second contention is that the Trinity represents an hypemymy blocking the use of feminine hyponyms.

The terms opposition, contrast, and antonymy are sometimes used without careful distinction, for they all illustrate at bottom a linguistic and philosophical fact: to establish the meaning of any word it is necessary to set up oppositional considerations. This hardly profound observation is matched by other, similar assertions by any number of structural semanticists. Trier even goes so far as to attach some psychological association of opposites in the mind of speaker or hearer upon each utterance (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, J. Trier, Heidelberg: Winter, 1931) even though perhaps most linguists would consider psychology to be more a part of a theory of language behaviour than structural analysis.

Everywhere we look in the universe we see opposites: forces of attraction and repulsion, left and right crystals, concave and convex, rest and movement—the list is very long. In his important little book, Opposition, C. K. Ogden reminds us that Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, discusses the oppositions of unity and multiplicity and being and not-being, and that other philosophers make reference to hot and cold, odd and even, good and evil, and so forth.

Since this is the last lecture in the series about The Seven Deadly Sins, it might be a good idea to stand back and think for a moment about the point of such a list. That seven is a good, mystical number obviously makes us suspicious about any claim (if one was ever made) that the list of the deadly sins was arrived at by the exercise of pure reason. It is not difficult to add to them. Why is cruelty not a specific deadly sin? Cruelty does not obviously come under wrath, nor, for that matter, under pride, envy or lust. Aquinas lists cruelty (ferocitas) as a sin against temperance. He distinguishes it from ferocity and savagery (saevitia and feritas), which are ‘bestial’ vices. Cruelty, for Aquinas, is the vice of excessive severity in punishment. Its opposing virtue is clemency—the rational tempering of punishment—which Aquinas considers to be part of temperance. These are fairly persuasive distinctions. Yet Aquinas’s idea of cruelty seems to have little if anything to do with the sort of cruelty that has most caught the attention of the modern world, which was touched on by Nietzsche—the deliberate infliction of pain upon another for pleasure. This was philosophised upon even more interestingly by Jean-Paul Sartre as being part of a project to reduce the Other to objecthood, revealing and at the same time cancelling his freedom. That would seem a good candidate for an additional deadly sin.

Perhaps, though, we should think about the deadly sins as a sort of mirror image of the virtues—as these appear, for instance, in Aristotle.

In the opening chapter of David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, set in 1952, two Catholic students at London University are comparing the merits of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh:

In the assertive English Catholic culture of the time the achievements of Catholic novelists, like those of Catholic sportsmen or soldiers, could be flaunted as marks of the superiority of the Faith. Waugh was happy to appear before the world as a Catholic writer, but Greene disliked the term and preferred to regard himself as a writer who happened to be a Catholic.

I was born in Scotland in 1952, so that I belong to the very last generation of those who personally experienced preconciliar Catholicism. The saints played an important role in the spirituality in which we were brought up. Some were Scottish saints, such as Columba the missionary (+597) and Margaret the queen (+1093); but the Scottish church under Pius XII and John XXIII was not encouraged to be too Scottish. We were proud of being an outpost of the international church, and our spirituality was to be that of the universal church. This meant that most of the stories we heard concerned persons whose veneration was officially approved by Rome. Some were to be admired (great missionaries and martyrs, but also still living persons such as the stigmatised Padre Pio), while others were consciously presented as models to be imitated. Maria Goretti (1890-1902) belonged to this second group.

Churches and chapels were built in her honour, pious associations were founded. We heard about her in sermons and in religious instruction in school. Pamphlets with her biography could be bought for a few pence. Holy pictures in our prayer-books reminded us of her. Indeed, her face was very familiar to us—in classrooms, in churches, sometimes in our own bedrooms. What kind of image was this?

Against the background of an Italian landscape, one saw the radiant face of a beautiful girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old. A narrow halo encircled her head. She looked up to heaven with a smile. Sometimes she carried red roses as a symbol of her love for Jesus, sometimes there were snakes at her feet as a symbol of her struggle against the devil.

The idea that theology might have something to say to science, especially if we see this as one of its responsibilities, might seem to us to be an odd question to ask. Ever since C.P. Snow proposed the idea of the ‘two cultures’, the impression of many, apart from those with a keen interest in interactions between science and religion, is that sciences are best left to their own devices. It seems obvious, at first sight, that it is primarily in the realms of history, language, literature, art and music that theology can find welcome dialogue partners. In popular culture, too, there is a residual memory that over-zealous religious fanatics in some way constricted science. The stories of conflict between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, Galtleo and the Holy See, have become inflated into mythologies of distrust and suspicion. The fact that the real historical accounts show many more nuances than this is important to establish, but is not really the point I am making here. Rather, I am suggesting that we have become so used to seeing the two areas of theology and science as separate, that we fail to notice in what ways the culture we live in is also one shaped by science, and that science itself is a profoundly cultural activity.

Professor John Webster is not only a colleague and friend he is also someone with whom I have a good deal of theological affinity. Moreover, and more importantly, while he is an Anglican and I a Roman Catholic, we, on fundamental Christian doctrine, share a common faith. Because of this I read with special interest his article “‘Fides et Ratio”, articles 64-79’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 81 No. 948 (2000) 66-76). I knew that he might be critical of the encyclical at certain points, as would be expected from any serious thinking theologian examining a particular piece of work. What I did not expect was his almost complete lack of sympathy towards the encyclical’s aim, his almost thorough disagreement with its approach, arguments, and judgements, as well as at times, his dismissive attitude toward the encyclical, which on occasion, so it appeared to me, to border on the mocking. In response to Professor Webster I want to address some of the issues that he raised in an attempt to show that his reading of the encyclical is not the proper reading, and in so doing hopefully demonstrate that the encyclical is not as misconceived and flawed as he thinks.

The Philosophical and Theological ‘Rumpus Room’

Webster begins by noting the Pope’s leadership in addressing such an important issue as the relationship between faith and reason and in so doing intruding himself into what some academics might consider their privileged and private domain. However, Webster faults the tone of the document.