Having imprudently decided to speak to you tonight about a country in which I have never set foot ... an authentic inhabitant of which I’m not at all sure I’ve ever met... in short, since I decided to speak to you about the saints and sanctity, the miracle, the true ... incontestable miracle would be that you manage to listen to me without boredom.

The words could seem forced coming from someone whose novels were famous for their saintly characters, whose personal devotion to the cult of the saints was prodigious, and who was given to repeating that ‘our Church is the Church of the Saints’ and ‘the time of the saints always comes.’ But there in Tunisia in 1947, a year before his death, giving a talk to religious sisters, George Bernanos was not being falsely modest. Talking or writing about saints or sanctity he had been doing for much of a lifetime, but he had not for that become certain that he was altogether justified in doing so nor that his contemporaries would or should be prepared to listen to him on the subject. Francois Mauriac once said of Bernanos, ‘the misfortune of not being a saint, which we hardly suffer from at all, he assumed in our place and for us.’ If Mauriac was correct, then we would have to conclude that Bernanos failed his favourite subject, or at least in the purpose for which he had taken it up. For more surely his intention in both talking and writing about saints and sanctity was to make us reassume that misfortune ourselves. It is an historical question to know whether his contemporaries had; it is much more pertinent to know whether his present-day readers might.

João Poinsot (1589-1644) was a Dominican theologian of the commentator school, born in Lisbon of an Austrian father and a Portuguese mother, and briefly confessor to Philip IV of Spain. He was known as John of St. Thomas, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, though writers today refer to him as “Poinsot.” As Royal Confessor, he used his political influence at the Court of Madrid in favour of Louvain against the papal bull In eminenti which he believed was defective and based on false information. Poinsot protected the Doctors of the Faculty of Theology who were secular clergy, some of whom held a traditional Augustinian theology. His letter to John Schinckels (1581-1646) and the other Professors of the Faculty was written May 14, 1644, as a response to their Memorial in which they stated their case. Poinsot thought that the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen was as a whole unfairly judged, even if part of it might be erroneous. He also believed the King of Spain had the right to make a better judgment pending clarification and that it was his duty to help the Pope make a deeper study of the issue. Therefore Poinsot advised the Court to withhold the place in this doctrinal matter. He died soon thereafter on June 17, 1644. This was still during the earliest phase before the pejorative name “Jansenist” had permanently stuck. A royal placet was required to promulgate papal bulls in the Spanish possessions, and it was delayed until years after Poinsot's death, partly due to his initial efforts.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was very clear that he owed his most distinctive theological insights to Adrienne von Speyr. ‘On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated’; she often gave him suggestions for sermons ‘but only rarely ... did she read my books’; ‘following her advice’ he took the extremely painful decision to leave the Society of Jesus; he ‘strove to bring [his] way of looking at Christian revelation into conformity with hers’; and although she has no part in the writing, without her ‘the basic perspective of Herrlichkeit would never have existed’ (First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, 1981, page 13). ‘Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own’. He predicted, scornfully, that theologians would try to disentangle his insights from hers. Those who read the volumes of Herrlichkeit as they came out in 1961-67 (I was impelled towards them by the enthusiasm of Cornelius Ernst and Donald MacKinnon), of course, knew little or nothing about his indebtedness to von Speyr. Indisputably, some of his most characteristic themes draw heavily on her mystical experiences; other motifs, however, that are central and of great interest, seem independent of his meeting her.

There is as yet no proper biography. Born in 1902, in the Swiss Jura, in a comfortably-off family of doctors, clergymen and merchants, settled in Basel for centuries, Adrienne von Speyr was brought up as a Protestant.

Von Balthasar's attacks on Rahner are scattered over several works. Sometimes their expression is very technical, and complex personal factors also play a part. But von Balthasar expresses his concerns vividly and concisely in a bitterly satirical dialogue near the end of a polemical text which he published just after Vatican II: The Moment of Christian Witness.’ A ‘well-disposed commissar', a figure symbolising the culture of modernity both in its easy secularism and its nightmare terrors, arraigns a Rahnerian Christian. In less than three full pages, Raimer's theology is made to look ridiculous. For Rahner, God always transcends objects in space and time: we know God only in and through them, as their permanently mysterious, elusive ground.

A few years ago I was making a retreat in a Trappist monastery. There I met a man who, although a Protestant, would spend a few days at the monastery whenever he had to deal with a problem calling for serious prayer and sound advice. On this particular visit, the man's problem was a bitter dispute that was tearing his church apart. Two factions were at odds on abortion and women clergy. He told me the history of the conflict, and I offered him my analysis, which, he said, exactly reflected the situation (in fact, he urged me to write an article about it). Because we have an analogous problem in the Catholic Church, I offer these impressions, which are just that—impressions— and, I fear, rather obvious.

John Macquarrie in his Jesus Christ in Modem Thought well formulates a criticism which is often raised about Schillebeeckx’s discussion of the resurrection of Christ. Macquarrie suggests that Schillebeeckx is arguing that the resurrection is better thought of as a powerful, but subjective, experience in the minds of the disciples. Macquarrie’s criticism echoes the point made by another of Schillebeeckx’s Anglican critics, David Brown, who is uncompromising in his characterisation of Schillebeeckx as a ‘deist’. Brown is certainly correct in identifying Schillebeeckx’s attempt at a more subtle account of God’s relationship to creation than a classic interventionist account might hazard, but I think the attribution of a deist position is wide of the mark. This is not the place to develop the general point other than to suggest that Professor Brown over-simplifies the issue in arguing that Christian discourse about God is inevitably either deist or theist in so far as it asserts the propriety of an interventionist or a non-interventionist account of God’s dealings with creation.

It is important to address the specific point which these critics raise in suggesting that Schillebeeckx is unable to maintain the objectivity of the resurrection. This can be better explored by considering the extended discussion in Peter Carnley’s important study of the resurrection, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford, 1987). Carnley goes rather further than either Macquarrie or Brown in acknowledging that, for Schillebeeckx, ‘the Easter faith certainly involves a post-mortem experience of encounter with the risen Christ’ (p 200). In spite of this Carnley is ultimately sceptical of Schillebeeckx’s account of the risen Jesus as fulfilling claims to objectivity.

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.

Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals:

In the preface to his edition of Manilius, Housman lamented that ‘Our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester.’

Unlike Blomfield, and his own immediate predecessor at Lincoln, Edward-King, Hicks is not favoured with any mention in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Nor was he a giant among classical scholars. But thanks to the recent publication of a selection from his diaries*, we can see him as we can see few others of his kind; these glimpses afford welcome (especially in the light of recent turmoils at Lincoln Cathedral) evidence of a good man of versatile virtues, proof that moving from academe to a see need not be a stroke of doom for classical scholars, and refutation of the old adage that nothing improves by translation except a bishop.

There was no controversy over the Dean who welcomed Edward Lee Hicks to his see in June 1910. Though unremarked in Neville’s edition, he was none other than Hicks’ old Oxford tutor and examiner, E. C. Wickham, fellow-classicist and editor of Horace, whose death Hicks will presently lament, as was his wont, in choice Latin, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s instructions that ‘Epitaphs should be in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be.’ But ecclesiastical as well as secular immoralities were a constant thorn in Hicks’ side, thanks in large measure to the astonishing country parsons he encountered in his far-flung jurisdiction, a gallery of characters worthy of the Trollopes (Anthony and Joanna) and Barbara Pym.

As science finally eliminates the moon as a living habitat telescopes probe ever further for extraterrestrial vitality. NASA expects, barring terrestrial catastrophes, to probe Mars every two years eventually recovering Martian rocks for laboratory investigation. These, with Martian fragments already found in Antarctica, may soon resolve whether or not life has existed, lives now, or will evolve on that frigid, thin atmosphered planet. The European Space Agency anticipates launching early next century an ‘Interferometry Observatory’ to seek signals of life from relatively earthlike planets. These explorations from both sides of the Atlantic, with advances in astronomical science, the popularity of space fiction, art, and para-religious phenomena make certain that, for the foreseeable future, people will wonder about extra terrestrial life, its possibilities, its traces, its evolutionary potential, and its unnoticed presence even now.

Humans have wondered about star folk for a surprisingly long time. In the golden age of Greece philosophers debated the possibilities of a plurality of worlds including planets with intelligent life. In the 5th century BC Pythagoras thought the moon, visible from earth then as now, was inhabited. So did Epicurus and famously somewhat later the prolific essayist and biographer Plutarch. Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle dismissed pluralism. But some early church Fathers, including Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Jerome, were open to possibilities of stellar life. Aquinas, like Augustine, thought this earth alone was habitable but resolutely affirmed Divine omnipotence. Three years after Thomas’ death the Bishop of Paris (Etienne Tempier) in 1277 fuelled speculation about extraterrestrials by condemning the proposition ‘that the First Cause cannot make many worlds’.

Last year the Vatican issued a document, Christianity and the World Religions, prepared by its International Theological Commission and approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The document arises from a recognition that ‘The question of the relations among religions is becoming daily more important’, and that circumstances today ‘make interreligious dialogue necessary’. Accordingly, the Commission sets out to ‘clarify how religions are to be evaluated theologically’ by offering ‘some theological principles which may help in this evaluation’. And the Commission adds that ‘In proposing these principles we are clearly aware that many questions are still open and require further investigation and discussion’ (3-5).

Although the Report’s title continues the traditional conceit that Christianity is not itself one of the world religions, these opening statements suggest a tentative and relatively undogmatic approach which contrasts with the 1996 address by Cardinal Ratzinger himself, in which in presenting the traditional absolutist position he attacked two theologians extensively by name, seriously misrepresenting their views as a result of not having read their writings for himself. His Eminence’s failure to check the accuracy of the tendentious secondary source on which he relied is all the more surprising in view of the accurate and up-to-date section on the state of the discussion, based on a wide knowledge of the existing literature, in this Report of his own Theological Commission. Here all the main competing schools of thought, both Catholic and Protestant, are included and discussed. The Report was first drafted in 1993 and its expertise must have been available to the Cardinal, had he wished to have more reliable information.

It is not often that a single work of literature can be earmarked as a watershed in its author’s intellectual development, but Les grands cimitieres sous la lune seems to offer an almost incontestable case for such an honour. Before its publication in 1938, its author, Georges Bernanos, had been widely known as conservative royalist who had had no qualms about openly supporting Charles Maurras and L'Action franqaise, even after their condemnation by the pope in 1926. Thus it was only to be expected that a book by Bernanos, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, would at least echo the staunch support that Maurras and his followers were giving General Franco. Yet Les grands cimitieres was not only bitterly critical of Franco and the Falange, but it also wasted no opportunity to launch some especially vitriolic attacks on Maurras himself, attacks which signalled a definitive break with the French conservative establishment. How could Bemanos’ outlook and central convictions have undergone such a radical transformation?

I shall argue that to pose the question in such terms can prove highly misleading. For if it is true that Les grands cimiti?res marks a watershed, it is no less true that it was primarily the scandal that the book caused among Bernanos’ French readers, rather than any fundamental change in Bernanos’ basic thinking, that caused such a watershed. Indeed, as the emphatically reluctant tone of the book attests, Bernanos himself was acutely conscious of this danger. ‘I am not a writer,’ he tells us, ‘The mere sight of a blank page fills me with anguish.”

Any reader of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with the slightest interest in beauty, the arts and literature must remember the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the fatuous fathead, Lynch, on aesthetics, with special reference to the definition of beauty by St Thomas Aquinas. In this short piece I shall compare Stephen's interpretation of Aquinas's definition and succinct analysis with some notes on the aesthetic from Wittgenstein's Notebooks 1914-1916.

Aquinas's definition - Pulchra sunt quae visa placent - defies elegant direct translation. Literally it means ‘Those things are beautiful which give pleasure [merely on being] seen'. Joyce’s translation (which involves interpretation) is as good as any: ‘that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases'. He expands the notion of visa from the visual to, as he (Stephen/Joyce) puts it: ‘aesthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension.’ This would include the beauty of floral smells, the taste of fruit, the taste of an imaginative cuisine, the feel of a hot bath in winter or a cool pool in summer. In Joyce’s view all these would be, on his interpretation of Aquinas, aesthetic apprehensions.

There follows a good deal about aesthetics which is Joyce's own. Then he returns to Aquinas and his threefold analysis of beauty: Ad pulcritudinem tria requirunlur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. This Joyce translates for his own purposes as: ‘Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.’ In his original and personal interpretation—none the worse for the that—Stephen draws Lynch's attention to a basket which a butcher's boy ‘had slung inverted on his head'!

‘Lift up a Living Nation’: I take these words of G.K. Chesterton’s well- known hymnic poem, ‘O God of Earth and Altar’, as a suitable emblem for a study of Bernanos’ ‘polemical’ works. In fact, the three stanzas of Chesterton’s divine apostrophe — called simply, in the Collected Poems, ‘A Hymn’ - perfectly match the spirit and content of Bernanos’ political writings. Nor is this entirely surprising, for the two writers belong to a stream of intellectual reflection and spiritual endeavour in early twentieth-century England and France, where writers in a Catholic tradition (both Anglo-Catholic and Roman) sought to envisage and commend a new Christendom, on the basis of what was best in the English and French anciens regimes as well as humanity and the Gospel — all with the aim of countering and overcoming that extended cultural and political crisis which in England opened with the Edwardians and ended with the Second World War and in France coincided with the Third Republic and the division of the country between Vichy and the Occupied Zone. It is noteworthy that Chesterton’s ‘hymn’ was first published in The Commonwealth for November 1907 — the very year of Bernanos’ earliest published work, seven short stories on the themes of kingship, childhood and heroic death in the Royalist monthly Le Panache.

The prayer in Chesterton’s poem addresses a God who is named at once for the land (‘earth’) and for the traditional cultus of a Christian people (‘altar’). It speaks of the faltering of a political elite, and the disorientation of the masses; the excessive power of money (‘the walls of gold’) and the internal division that follows on party conflict (‘the swords of scorn’).

It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.

‘The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life.’ ‘The liturgy is the lex orandi'. These were the principles of Romano Guardini’s liturgical writings, both theological and pastoral. He sought to bring the liturgy into the centre of the Christian’s life, at the heart of the many other, more private, expressions of prayer and reverence. He offers an overview of Christian public prayer:

According to Aidan Nichols, if the principles of Romano Guardini on liturgy had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, his influence might have stopped the post-conciliar liturgical reform from backing modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism. This short sketch points to some of Guardini’s insights in the liturgical area, especially on questions which have recently been taken up anew by liturgical thinkers.