Simone Weil (1909-1943) spent the last six years of her life considering whether it was God’s will that she be baptised into the Church. In her many discussions with priests, she sought to translate her mystical experiences of Christ, who had come down to take possession of her, into an acceptance of the Church as Christ’s Body on earth. It is widely believed that she died without the sacrament of baptism, the Church being an obstacle to her faith in Christ, and not a refuge for that faith.

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, Galileo 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 five in is also one shaped by science, and that science itself is a profoundly cultural activity.

The temptation for those engaged in the dialogue between science and religion is simply to examine the particular discoveries in science and then discuss their implications for theology. While this can take us some way in the process of mutual understanding, what tends to happen is that science becomes the active partner, while theology is merely the passive recipient of what science is discovering.

The Schelling revival has never quite reconciled itself to the Swabian’s religious anima. Schelling’s Hegel-critique may now be recognized as something like a proto-deconstruction of Idealism’s ‘paroxysmal’ self-assertion; but, we are told, this ‘anti-logocentric’ kernel has usually to be extricated from a mystical-theosophical shell. Likewise, there may be vast, fruitful depths to Schelling’s stricture that Being is irreducible to thought; nonetheless, Schelling’s “apparently dead theology” is best either forgotten or else ‘translated’ into the lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, Rortyian postmodern pragmatism, etc. The religious concerns of Schelling’s later work are, it seems, little more than an embarrassment for those driving the revival.

Despite profound gratitude towards those (principally Bowie) who have done so much to instigate the current Schelling renaissance, I want to suggest here that we should not be so quick to brush aside, or ‘translate’, Schelling’s theologico-religious interests—for such a dismissal leaves us not just decontextualizing Schelling’s Hegel-critique, but, as well, missing out on a crucial Schellingian contribution to contemporary debate about the question of onto-theology. Schelling’s continuing relevance is more than his blowing open the Hegelian Identity of Thought and Being; it is also his concomitant reinstatement—not merely incidental to but fundamental for his critique of Idealism’s auto-apotheosis—of the ancient Platonic conviction that the divinity ‘is’ epekeina tes ousias, beyond Being or any metaphysical construction.

I have only one point to make about the recent Papal Encyclical Fides et Ratio in this paper, albeit a complex one. I want to draw attention to the fact that the apparently simple and self-evident term ‘reason’ in English is deceptively so, so that when we hear the term ‘reason’ in the title “Faith and Reason” we hear named a marker for something with a long and difficult history. I do not intend to resolve that history in this paper— which would be much too ambitious a task, but rather to relate its complexity to some of the Encyclical’s underlying themes.

I want to begin by commenting on the sheer awfulness of the English translation of Fides et Ratio. The English translation is often frankly and mischievously inaccurate. Let me give you just one example (of very many). At §49 the English tells us “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others”. The Latin text has “Suam ipsius philosophiam non exhibet Ecclesia, neque quamlibet praelegit peculiarem philosophiam aliarum damno.” Those two last words “aliarum damno” emphatically do not mean “in preference to others” but rather “to the condemnation of the others”. The sense here is quite different: the English implies that one philosophy could be chosen by the Church from a range of systems: rather like preferring white wine to red for a meal. The implication of the Latin is much sharper: to choose one philosophy would be to pronounce a kind of judgement on the others. A quite different inference.

In Henry and Cato Iris Murdoch describes what it might be like for a priest to lose his belief in God - God understood ‘in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense’. In two later novels Murdoch returns to the theme of a priest’s loss of belief in God and, as was the case in Henry and Cato, she makes the priest’s acknowledgement of that loss central to her portrayal of his integrity as a man; in one case she also hints at the almost unbearable grief the priest suffers as he drifts into the darkness of atheism. In The Book and the Brotherhood, however, Murdoch takes a different path: she describes how a priest, who lost his faith in God ‘in the traditional sense’ long before, nonetheless uses ‘Christ’ to help a young woman recover from despair.

The young woman, Tamar Hemshaw, takes the advice of another character (who suggests that ‘Abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth control’) to have her pregnancy terminated. Resolving not to ‘think about babies thrown away with the surgical refuse, dying like fishes snatched out of their water, dying like little fishes on a white slab’, Tamar enters the clinic ‘as one in a dream’ and leaves it ‘all raw anguished tormented consciousness’. Murdoch does not spare the details of Tamar’s self-torture:

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never’.We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.

Sed contra: we should always be able to provide ‘an accounting for the hope that is in us; the bishop, the prime pastor,’ must have a firm grasp of the word that is trustworthy in accordance with the teaching’ (1 Peter 3:15b; Titus 1.9). We need therefore a responsio that engages with the objections, admitting their force, but somehow suggesting a more positive account of what theology might contribute to good pastoral practice.

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never”. We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.

The Dominican theologian and cardinal, Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), known as Cajetan after Gaeta, his birthplace, is best remembered for two things. Firstly, he is the expositor of Aquinas, whose monumental commentary on the Summa is included in the Leonine edition of Aquinas’ works. As a consequence of this canonisation, Cajetan’s commentary is either treasured or vilified, to the extent that it is judged to represent Aquinas accurately or not; meanwhile, more subtle developments, not to mention overt disagreements, tend to be overlooked. Secondly, and more widely. Cajetan is remembered as the Roman prelate who met with Martin Luther for three days in October 1518. At those meetings, characterised typically as a dialogue of the deaf, Cajetan sought to persuade Luther to withdraw a number of unorthodox theological opinions. Several years later, Cajetan was involved, albeit peripherally, with the Roman commission that drew up the formal condemnation of Luther’s teaching.

It is commonly and plausibly assumed that the rest of Cajetan’s work is to be understood in the light of his involvement with Luther, especially his commentaries on biblical texts, which he worked on from 1524 until his death in 1534. The conventional view of the biblical commentaries (found in various forms in Iserloh, Weisheipl, Parker, Janz and others), runs roughly as follows: the Reformers had appealed to scripture alone, and on the basis of scripture were challenging the papacy and Roman traditions; Cajetan, therefore, set out in his biblical commentaries to meet his adversaries on their chosen territory, and to demonstrate, with scholastic patience and rigour, that the Roman use of scripture was sound, that the Bible belonged to the Catholic Church.

My friend Tom Weinandy has taken my admittedly polemical words very seriously, so that a paper which was intended to provoke seminar discussion has also provoked dismay on the part of a theologian and colleague whose judgment I respect very highly. What I have written, I have written; others must judge its truth. But some things in Tom's response call for a brief reply.

First, the tone of my remarks, Tom says, betrays ‘almost complete lack of sympathy’ with Fides et Ratio and a ‘dismissive attitude’ bordering on ‘the mocking’; ‘if he tells me, ‘one restrains one's impatience and focuses one's mind'—which it looks like I have failed to do—things can be seen to be a good deal better than I have made them out to be. Maybe, though on re-reading Fides et Ratio I remain unconvinced that it is a first- rate piece of apostolic teaching. What I must make clear—and what the polemical tone evidently obscured—is that I am not at all opposed to bishops intervening in the academy: far from it. I entirely agree with Tom that much in the academy is ‘inimical to the Christian gospel', and that Christian theologians can be victims of academic terrorism. My protest is not intended to suggest that the teaching office should leave the academy alone, but that its interventions must betray a consistently apostolic character. An episcopal judgment, if it is to be received as apostolic, has to commend itself by indicating the truth, and the rather bullying tactics deployed in some bits of Fides et Ratio simply do not help.

The title of this article could be considered misleading in many ways. It does not at first sight disclose what I am actually writing about, i.e. marriage and ordination as sacraments. It also makes one wonder whether the two parts of the title connected with the conjunction ‘and’ actually present an alternative: i.e. does Christian ministry refer to those in specific or ordained ministry while marriage refers to those who are not in Christian ministry? Or have they got more in common than one would expect? Maybe this article ought to be more aptly named: ‘sacraments of commitment and commission’ as that briefly describes what marriage and ordination are about. Yet there are other common aspects which shed an interesting light on the topic. Both are rites which put one way of life, one form of commitment over many others. The idea of sacramental marriage makes one wonder why in an age of pluralism and plurality the church decides to bless one form of relationship, but not many possible others. The publication of John Boswell’s contentious book The Marriage of Likeness as well as the contemporary debates about blessings of same-sex relationships are signs of this phenomenon as is the question of single people whether their form of life is less valid than that of married couples. The debate over the distinction between clergy and laity makes one wonder whether the church does not support a system of privilege and expertise which devalues the work of those who do not participate in this form of privilege.

I want to speak about the place of Fides et Ratio within the parameters of the twentieth century Thomistic revival. To do that I must first describe the revival Three strains of Thomistic interpretation characterized the revival before Vatican II: Aristotelian Thomism, Existential Thomism and Transcendental Thomism. The first two were a posteriori in their epistemology. The mind abstractly draws its fundamental conceptual content from the human knower’s contact with the self-manifestly real things given in sensation. Among the concepts abstracted are the transcendentals, chief among which is the ratio ends, the notion or concept of being. It is an analogical commonality, and so a sameness within difference, whose analogates are absolutely everything, actual and conceivable.

Various narratives are incorporated into the The Message to the Planet which, on the face of it, should help the reader to understand the novel’s enigmatic and central ‘redemptive’ figure, Marcus Vallar. These include Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ (there are close textual echoes of Freud’s essay in Murdoch’s novel); this is closely linked to the narrative in which Alfred Ludens, Marcus’s ‘disciple’, wants Marcus to live and through which he wants to understand him—that of the archetypal quest for knowledge. An inescapable narrative background is that of the life of Christ: one Murdoch critic suggests that

There are also accounts of Marcus given by other characters, including highly perceptive ones by Dr Marzillian, the psychiatrist, and Daniel Most, the Rabbi. There is Marcus’s account of his own life, in which his attempt to understand the Holocaust figures largely. But there is also a narrative buried for most of the novel which fully surfaces only at the end. This, a story from the Holocaust, impacts on our understanding of Marcus more than any other in the novel and challenges the very words ‘understand’ and ‘redeemer’. In this article I will consider some of these narratives and the impact on the novel of the Holocaust story.

Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ is a classic of psychoanalytic biography; but there is much, Freud argues at the end of the essay, that psychoanalysis cannot explain.

In responding to the Second Vatican Council’s call for a renewal in moral theological reflection, Servais Pinckaers, Benedict Ashley, and Romanus Cessario, all Dominicans, are engaged in the earnest labour of authentically interpreting that call to renewal via a systematic examination of the sources of ethics contained in Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and natural reason.

The years since the Second Vatican Council have seen many divergent trends in moral method, not least the adoption of a widespread adherence to the methodology of proportionalism, particularly in the United States. The above mentioned Dominicans reject such a method as being incompatible with those crucial sources of our faith. In contrast to the popularity of proportionalism, they are engaged in a quiet, patient, and determined project, centred on virtue theory, that is gradually bearing fruit.

In Sources of Christian Ethics, Pinckaers tackles the distorted picture of an ethic based solely on the demands of obligation. The search for the minimal content of obligation in Christian ethics has been corruptive of a fully integrated approach to ethical understanding, and its latent effects are manifested in the minimalism of proportionalism that reduces the moral life to a form of quasitechnical calculus based on the will of the acting subject. Quite simply, proportionalism as a method seems incapable of adequately accounting for our profound sense of personal integrity, and with it, the control we exercise over the constitution of our character expressed in virtuous and unvirtuous conduct.

Understanding of our acts operates on two layers. The first layer is the externally observable act. The second layer, lying near the centre of our being, goes much deeper.