When one takes account of the scale and range of Aquinas’s achievements it becomes clear why he deserves to be described as the greatest of the mediaeval philosopher-theologians, for he was the first thinker of the high mediaeval period to work out in detail the new synthesis between Catholicism and philosophy. It is sometimes supposed that this just meant ‘Christianizing’ Aristotle. Even were that the limit of his achievement it would have been considerable, but in fact he went further. For while he opposed unquestioning appeals to authority, he believed in the idea of cumulative philosophical and religious wisdom and sought to integrate Neoplatonist, Augustinian and Anselmian ideas, as well as Aristotelian ones, with scripture, patristic teaching and evolving Catholic doctrine.

‘The members of the Holy Office use methods which, if they were in Great Britain, would soon land them in court. The Holy Office ruins reputations and destroys people’s careers.’ The English Jesuit, Archbishop Tommy Roberts, formerly Archbishop of Bombay, made these grave allegations in a full session of the Second Vatican Council. They are well illustrated by the way the French worker-priest crisis was dealt with between the sumrtier of 1953 and the spring of 1954. Obviously I can only record such a richly complex period in summary form—almost telegraphically. But even such a résumé gives an eloquent demonstration of the way the hierarchical authority of that time functioned, particularly in regard to the human rights of the baptised.

The loss of the working classes to the Catholic Church in France in the nineteenth century had for a long while made social issues prominent in French ecclesiastical thinking. The spiritual humanism with socialist leanings to be found, for example, in the influential periodical Esprit (founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932) was gradually accepted even by some members of the hierarchy. The publication in 1943 of the book by A. Godin and Y. Daniel La France, pays de mission?—the question mark was included at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities— helped to spur concrete attempts to bridge the gap between the Church and the working class. By far the most outstanding among these was the decision by the bishops to permit some of the clergy to combine their priestly ministry with day-to-day sharing in the lives of manual labourers, in other words working beside them, joining their trade unions and living among them in working-class fiats.

Although other ages have seen a multitude of wars, in the twentieth century, we have developed a chilling efficiency for aimed conflict which seems to rise in intensity with each passing year. Historically, Catholic thought on the moral justification for war has tended to accept the possibility that, in strictly defined circumstances, a state has the right to engage in warfare. Yet, in recent years, papal statements have tended to severely limit even the few circumstances which have traditionally been permitted for the moral use of warfare by the state. In particular, John XXDI is often cited as an example of this trend.

This article will explore the thought of John XXIII on the particular issue of his interpretation of the criterion of just cause. This particular element of the set of criteria which govern the prospective use of lethal force by the state against another state, jux ad bellum, is significant for any discussion of modem just war theory. This criterion judges the moral end of the use of lethal force by the state. Traditionally, three reasons have been advanced as just causes: ad vindicandas offensiones (to gain justice over a completed offense), ad repetendas res (to retake property which has been stolen) and ad repellandas injurias (to resist an armed attack which is in progress). The trend of modern just war theories have been toward excluding the first two reasons and giving grudging acceptance to the third.

John XXIII unlike his predecessor, Pius XII, was not explicit concerning the moral permissibility of self-defense.

Dialogue between European Catholics and Marxists became significant in the 1960s and the English Province of the Dominicans had a major hand in its promotion. My personal memories of that episode focus upon three members of the Province in particular: Conrad Pepler, Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe. Each had a distinctive contribution to make to the dialogue. But all shared one particular gift. They were enablers. In other words, each of them helped to make things happen, by encouraging others more directly involved than themselves to have their say. Conrad Pepler’s contribution was as the Warden of Spode House, the Dominican conference centre where much of the dialogue took place. He gave house room to the variegated groups who wanted to take part; and by standing back from the in-fighting he made the dialogue ‘fizz’. Laurence Bright was the organiser at the centre of the network, and it was he who brought people into contact with each other at the beginning, and saw to it that what they said got into print, in various books as well as in the pages of Slant. In the later phases of the dialogue Herbert McCabe, as editor of New Blackfriars, opened the pages of the periodical to the participants in such a way that they were able to conduct their dialogue at leisure and at suitable (sometimes excessive!) length in between the conference gatherings at Spode. He also made lapidary observations of his own in editorial comments.

Conrad Pepler was a child of the Eric Gill ‘Ditchling’ circle. As such he was familiar with the early Catholic peace movement. The Catholic PAX society had been started on 8th May 1936 by a small group including a recent Catholic convert from Wales, J. Alban Evans, who had experienced difficulties over the concept of ‘just war’ in Catholic thought until he read a book by the German Dominican, Franziskus Stratmann (a leader of the anti-war movement in Germany) called The Church and War. By June of that year, Eric Gill himself had taken an interest in the new group—and he of course was a Dominican Tertiary, as was Conrad’s father Hilary. So the Dominican influence on Catholic thinking about peace, and conscientious objection, was profound from the beginning.

Over the past two years eight people—all of them in one way or another concerned with social justice or peace issues—have written in New Blackfriars about how one very old and in many ways unique Catholic religious order has responded to justice and peace issues in the course of 784 years: the 784 years from its foundation to the end of the Second Millennium. The authors have not set out to write a comprehensive history, but to focus in each article on one individual or group of individuals, placing them in the context of the world they belonged to. Let us start this epilogue by asking ourselves whether we can see in the achievements of these Dominicans any kind of consistent pattern, any recognisable stance—in other words, a distinctively “Dominican” way of reacting to what is going on in society.

This, though, is a question much easier to ask than to answer. Some of you think our choice of subjects has been too esoteric to make an assessment of this kind possible. Of the personalities we have written about, neither Eckhart, Antoninus, Vitoria, Las Casas, nor even McNabb could be called “typical” 14th, 15th, 16th or 20th century Dominicans by any stretch of the imagination. Eckhart’s contemporary, William Humbert, the Inquisitor who in 1310 sent the Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete to the stake, was much more a “typical” 14th-century Dominican than Eckhart, who shared some of his most original thoughts with a throng of Beguine women. One or two of you have also criticised us for not devoting an article to St Thomas Aquinas, surely the Dominican who most profoundly shaped the Dominican way of seeing the world.

Enablers was how, in last month’s New Blackfriars, Brian Wicker described the Dominicans who provided a forum—whether at Spode House or in the pages of New Blackfriars—where radical Christian debate could flourish. Companions is the word I would add to describe the role of Dominicans as they have accompanied Christian peace activists in the second half of the twentieth century. On that journey Dominicans have helped fellow pilgrims with their theological mapreading, and literally walked the same road, to Vézelay, Canterbury, Porton Down and Greenham Common.

PAX began in 1936 with the aim of ‘resistance to modem warfare on grounds of traditional morality and principle’. Its founders had come to the conclusion that modem methods of warfare, with air attacks on civilians, violated the conditions for a ‘just war’ and that Catholics had the right, and even the duty, to refuse participation in future wars. This immediately set PAX on a path to confrontation with the hierarchy, whose attitude was conveyed in a letter from the Diocese of Westminster:

As a result PAX could only continue its work by calling itself a society ‘of Catholics and others’ rather than a Catholic society.

Under the heading ‘Vitoria, Founder of International Law’ Blackfriars of October 1946 devoted a whole issue to the Spanish Dominican who had died 400 years earlier. The timing could not have been more appropriate: what one might call the ‘legal audit’ of the Second World War was in full swing. Uppermost in the minds of the contributors were the Nuremberg Trials (verdicts delivered that month). Article 6 of the Tribunal Charter defined crimes against ‘humanity’ (the contemporary, secularized version of natural law) in terms that would have been recognizable to Vitoria, and indeed—via 400 years of development—owed much to his original concept of the law of nations. Then there were the atomic bombs used the previous year. The end of the world war had left a legacy of guilt about the practice of destroying whole cities by strategic bombing, culminating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This put the principle of non-combatant immunity—fully integrated with just war theory for the first time by Vitoria—at the centre of the arguments for and against the new weapons. Further, the revival of international law in the first half of the twentieth century had issued the previous October in the United Nations Charter and would lead in 1948 (just 50 years ago last month) to the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention; and three years later, in 1949, there was to be the first of the Geneva Conventions on the limitation of warfare.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbour’s.
When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community?’
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
(T.S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock)

Social justice, which treats the common good as a purpose of action, and brings all the virtues into our relationships with others, is not the only requirement of living in society, but some understanding of it is fundamental, both to liberal societies and to those of a more ancient stamp. Social justice incorporates the question of distribution of wealth, of how to deal with possessions, property, things. The Church has recently uncovered the role of the laity in her understanding of the Christian life, and this aspect of social justice can perhaps be regarded as especially the province of lay people, who deal with the world of ‘ordinary life’: the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. It is not unreasonable to regard these aspects as central to modem life and indeed to Christian spirituality and philosophy. ‘For instance, my sense of myself as a householder, father of a family, holding down a job, providing for my dependents; all this can be the basis of my sense of dignity.’

John Henry Muirhead once said that British Idealism was from the first in essence a philosophy of religion. He saw it as an appeal to the ideas of the German Post-Kantians for the purpose of defending religious belief against the many new challenges mounted to it during the second half of the nineteenth century, challenges which had rendered untenable the less critical faith of preceding generations. Muirhead’s interpretation could be disputed, for it is not clear that it accurately describes the principal motivation of all members of the British Idealist school, but if there is truth in it, and I think that there is, nowhere is this more so than in the case of the Scottish theologian and philosopher, John Caird, for Caird’s entire oeuvre revolved around the project of reconciling Christianity and Idealism.

A celebrated preacher, then innovative professor of theology and finally much respected Principal of Glasgow University, John Caird was in his time a well-known and highly regarded figure. Today however his work is almost entirely forgotten, along with that of many others in the idealist movement; such ways of thinking having passed from favour as completely as they once held dominance of the intellectual scene. Yet we run the risk of misunderstanding our history, and thus our own present, if we insist on simply turning our faces from certain eras of thought or movements of ideas and deeming them fallow or uninteresting. For that way we simply construct a history which reflects our current prejudices but never can challenge them. In this paper I shall outline the work of John Caird in an attempt to show why it deserves to be remembered, but first let me provide just a few biographical details.