He appeared at the end of the day. Suddenly. Out of nowhere. I had seen my last patient. I was ready to go home. The end of another day. Thank God.

I opened the door to leave my consulting room—and there he was. Standing still, staring—or so it seemed to me—fixing me with that gaze, that look I cam to know, and hate. And love. Those eyes which looked inside me until I could not bear it any longer. The emptiness. The loneliness. The endless horror of it all.

But now, that first time, he just stood there, passively, waiting. Waiting for me, it seemed. How long had he been there? What did he want? How could I get rid of him?—these were my first thoughts. Later I asked another question, simpler still: who was he?

Moments passed. I stood there awkwardly and as I looked at him I became aware of a kind of disgust rising in myself. He seemed hardly human. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old, carefree or past caring. His face was wrapped up, as if he had something terrible to hide. A wound, a scar, something so deep it would be there for all to see. But all I could see were the eyes, watching. Watching my disgust trying not to show itself.

He must once have been the tallest of men but now, now he was bent over, as if he was carrying a great weight on his back. The thought, the cliche, came into my head: he looks as if he’s carrying the problems of the world on his shoulders.

The Sabbath that immediately precedes Pesah (Passover) is called Shabbat ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. It is this day that is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a day whose mystical significance has not, perhaps, been sufficiently drawn to our attention.

Holy Saturday is in every way a Nothing Day. There is no liturgical celebration. The churches are empty. The altars are stripped. The tabernacles have been vacated and their doors stand ajar. Nothing whatever is happening. What does this mean?

It is the Great Sabbath—the Great Silence, the Great Nothing that precedes the Feast of Redemption, of liberation from slavery, of entry into the New Life of freedom.

To begin to appreciate it, to experience and savour it, we need to study the significance of the Sabbath in general. It is, no doubt, an endless study, for not only have scholars thought about it for thousands of years, but worshippers commit themselves to live it and experience it deeper and deeper throughout their lives.

‘Sabbath’ comes from the Hebrew shavat = ‘to rest’. It recalls the Creation and God’s rest when it was completed. It is characterised by cessation of creative physical activity.

Easter, 1990, was the first time that the greatest Christian festival could be openly celebrated in Romania for forty years. The coincidence of the Orthodox and Western calendars gave especial significance to the celebrations of the Easter Vigil in both Patriarchal and Catholic cathedrals in Bucharest and in churches throughout the capital and elsewhere. Romanian television celebrated the feast as it had Christmas, treating viewers to the incongruous sight of the presenters, all familiar faces from the past, surrounded by Easter eggs, intoning throughout the weekend, even before the weather forecast: ‘Hristos invitat’ (Christ is risen).

Although the joy of the crowds of worshippers able to process freely for the first time at midnight was common to all denominations, disputes about the relationship between Church and State under the Communist regime bedevilled the atmosphere. Shortly before Easter, more than forty leading intellectuals issued a petition calling upon the Patriarch Teoctist to abstain from celebrating the Easter liturgy. Teoctist had already abdicated once before in January after fierce criticisms of his compliant behaviour under Ceausescu and most particularly for his public congratulations to the Conducator for his stern measures to repress the ‘hooligans’ in Timiscara before Christmas. Teoctist’s abdication had placed the Orthodox Church in a dilemma, since his natural successor, the Metropolitan Antonius of Sibiu, had distinguished himself still more vigorously than the Patriarch when it came to rendering unto Ceausescu. For instance, Antonius was an indefatigable traveller to the West always ready to deny that the programme of ‘systemization’ had led to the demolition of churches and monasteries, insisting it had affected only ‘redundant’ buildings, of which there were apparently at least twenty-four, including some of the most ancient, in Bucharest—all concentrated in the area designated as the new Civic Centre containing Ceausescu’s Palace of the People.

Introduction

To many, linking the two words ‘critical’ and ‘theology’ will seem at best a tautology. After all, since Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, theology has been regarded firmly and explicitly as second-order reflection, which is of necessity ‘critical’ if it is genuinely reflective. And yet there is a sense in which this understanding of theology—and this understanding of reflection—as in some sense one single identifiable discipline is very uncritical. Some of the more recent developments in narrative theology, for example, do not lend themselves to such a generalised analysis. A concern with hermeneutic theory, too, leads one at least to doubt the notion that ‘theology’ is ‘always’ the same sort of enterprise; one need only consider the diversity of ‘local’ theologies in Central America, or Black Africa, to recognise the possibility of there being many different interpretations of ‘theology’. David Tracy’s magisterial study, The Analogical Imagination (London 1981), in which the vexed question of the relationship between theology and cultural pluralism is addressed, is arguably the finest recent examination of these issues.

What I want to do in this short essay is to reflect upon our modern definition of ‘theology’, and to consider to what extent it is genuinely critical. To facilitate this, I will concentrate upon two texts: Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination; and John E. McPeck’s Critical Thinking and Education (Oxford 1981). In the light of their work, I will advance some ideas and suggestions concerning the way in which theologians might conceivably go about their tasks.

In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.

On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).

Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.

We may speak casually of ‘salvation history’ and look for patterns in the Bible which bear out a claim that the sacred writers saw a movement toward a particular goal, the fullness of revelation in Christ Jesus (cf. Heb 1:1—2). Such a view can influence how we interpret both the Old Testament itself and its relationship to the New Testament. These interpretations may range from a searching out of phrases and themes which may then be applied to the New Testament—giving the impression that the New Testament author created a patchwork of sources—to a searching for patterns of God’s grand design which is manifested in the sweep of the Bible, irrespective of the time, place, or particular interest of the biblical author. What is proposed here is an examination of a mode of relating the past to the present which can be found throughout the Old Testament and to see how this relationship in a cultic context has far-reaching implications for the understanding of both the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover in relation to one another and to the memory of God’s saving acting.

A frequent pattern in the Bible is the recapitulation of origins to explain new beginnings. This is reflected in various ways.

One is to use the imagery of creation to describe a new creation. For example, the author of Gen 6—9 describes the punishment of the human race in terms of a return to chaos and a re-emergence of dry land from the waters as in Gen 1. One finds other references back to the days of creation throughout the Old Testament literature, where both the imagery of Gen 1—2 as well as extra-biblical myths (some unknown) are used.

Both the ‘coherentist’ and the ‘foundationalist’ theories of the justification of our claims to empirical knowledge are subject to considerable difficulty, as Laurence BonJour admirably brings out in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. (Coherentism is the view that justification of a proposition is always and exclusively a matter of its coherence with a whole system of propositions; foundationalism, that it is at least sometimes also a matter of its having foundations in things which are not propositions, typically a range of sense-impressions or observations of physical objects.) BonJour argues, however, that while the difficulties encountered by the foundationalist view are insuperable, a version of the coherentist position can be salvaged by considerations which render it proof against the usual objections. I myself maintain exactly the opposite view, which I shall try to defend in what follows.

If every empirical belief requires justification by another empirical belief, we seem to be faced with either a vicious circle or an infinite regress; and the sceptical conclusion appears to follow, that there is no reason to think that any empirical belief is true. The foundationalist tries to stop the regress by maintaining that some empirical beliefs are justified in a way that does not depend on inference from other such beliefs. One influential way of doing this (and the one which I shall try to defend) is to maintain that while indeed all empirical beliefs have to be justified, in the case of some of these beliefs, the justification consists of reference to mental states other than beliefs which do not themselves have to be justified; these are described in various ways by various authors, but are usually said to be ‘given’, ‘represented’, or something equivalent.

There are many reasons why Remembrance Day has to be taken seriously, especially by those among us who are wholly opposed to war. If we feel that we cannot join in the play as it is staged, we need to appreciate why others do, and why departures from the script—white poppies, public figures wearing duffel-coats—may seem to them like a desecration.

One reason is that Remembrance Day is not simply an occasion for private grief. It is a ritual enactment of our national story about peace—how it was won at immense cost by a whole generation of young men in 1914-18; how it was snatched from the jaws of defeat in 1940 by the bravery of the few. It recalls the sacrifice of two generations of youth who gave their lives so that we could live in safety, especially the women and children. It is meant to recall the story of our salvation as a people, in the sense of our national liberation from tyranny and fear. It is meant to acknowledge the sacrifices that ensured it. It gives meaning to the bloodshed. Remembrance makes private grief tolerable by connecting it with national salvation.

If war itself usually creates strong feelings of solidarity, the aftermath of wars is always a time of doubt and division. The Remembrance ceremony has been part of the apparatus for coping with this. After the Great War the nation was seriously divided, especially as between those who had experienced life in the trenches and those who had not.

Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with the question de sacra doctrina, qualis sit et ad quae se extendat. Readers of this question often assume that he is here asking about the nature of Christian theology. This assumption is open to question and in what follows I shall briefly explain why that is so and what Aquinas actually does mean by sacra doctrina.

I

The most obvious reason for refusing to equate sacra doctrina in Aquinas with ‘theology’, as that word is commonly used, is that much that would now pass for theology would not be recognised by Aquinas as sacra doctrina. In most modern discsssions, ‘theology’ does not mean ‘teaching we agree with’. It means what people who earn their living as theologians say or write. On that basis, editors and librarians, whether Christian or not, will class as theology the views of people as different as Augustine and Troeltsch, Luther and Cajetan, Schillebeeckx and Ratzinger. These pairs of authors, and others one could mention, have wildly divergent things to say, but all of it counts as theology. For Aquinas, however, not all of it would constitute sacra doctrina. That, for him, is nothing but true teaching. For him, sacra doctrina is indeed ‘teaching we agree with’. Or, more precisely, it is teaching we ought to agree with. As we read in la, 1,1, it is something revealed by God.

In the second place, ‘theology’ does not translate sacra doctrina. The proper translation is ‘holy teaching’ or ‘sacred doctrine’.

We see the AIDS epidemic first and foremost as exposing a crisis which goes beyond it and which emphasises how urgent and exacting is the challenge facing us all: the challenge to become, both personally and collectively, the subject—or subjects—of our own history.

In approaching this subject, clarification of the obscure relations between AIDS and the question of truth plays an indispensable part. That is why we desire to return to it by tackling it from the angle of the patient/practitioner relationship. This offers us the advantage of a concrete approach to the question of truth and AIDS without exempting us from facing the question at the deeper level of an analysis of our desire to control everything. Also it enables us to stress the close bonds which link this question of truth with that of deficiency.

The patient-practitioner relationship is a particular instance of human relationship in general. It also can be subjected to the same fundamental ethical analysis. As we have shown elsewhere, no true human relationship is possible if those involved do not fulfil the following three conditions: to be present to one another, to accept their differences in fact, and, above all, to cultivate their moral equivalence. But their moral equivalence would be denied by one lying about the other. Why, in fact, pretend to recognise another person as morally your equal if, by hiding the truth from that person, you seal him or her up in a lie?

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.

‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:

The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.

Historically speaking, human beings have now lived for centuries in multi-religious or multi-ethnic societies. It is very difficult to ensure uniformity of faith or ethnicity in a human society, much less so in a modern industrial one with its own migratory inducements and shifting patterns. Faith as an identity, not as an ideology, has been one of the most powerful factors responsible for much bloodshed in modern history, particularly in the third world countries. Most of the third world countries are multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and these cleavages have often caused grave situations of violence and bloodshed.

India saw a great bloodbath in 1947 when it got divided apparently on religious lines. More than a million people were slaughtered then and thousands continue to be killed even now manifestly on account of religious differences. Similarly, the ethnic conflict in far-away Southern Africa and next-door neighbour Sri Lanka is rocking our conscience. Hundreds of innocent persons are getting killed in these ethnic conflicts. It is, therefore, necessary to understand not only the political and socioeconomic causes of this conflict but also its religious and ideological dimensions. If communal violence is to be successfully combated it is necessary to grapple with the religious aspect of the problem too.

In some ways we ‘know’ so little about Francis. We have many legends and accounts of his life, some written by those who were closest to him, some collated from earlier accounts by the Order as it grew in the century after his death. However, all of these chroniclers and interpreters shared one thing, they did not write as would an academic historian of today: they wrote to explain their devotion, to explain why one man should have had such a devastating and transforming affect on the religious life of his day. We can neither ignore these accounts because they do not fit the criteria that we demand of ‘history’ , nor unthinkingly accept them as a ‘scientific’ biography. We are called always to interpret.

We know that Francis underwent a conversion and gave up a wealthy life to become one of the poorest of the poor. We know that gradually there gathered around him a body of followers who formed themselves under his guidance into a Brotherhood, and were eventually transformed into the more organised structure of an Order. He travelled far from his base in Assisi, from France to the Middle East, but always returned. Francis continually struggled to resist the urge to become anything but one of the poor, always fighting the acquisition of houses, possessions, learning, or any self-conceit. Eventually he gave up control of his Order to people with a different vision of their mission, preferring to become just another brother to fighting for control as the head of a large and expanding organisation. Two years before his early death he received the stigmata on the feast of the Holy Cross. His standing when he died in 1226, the victim of a life of fasting and near continual illness, was as great as it had ever been.

When he painted his numerous alterpieces on the theme of Madonna and Child Enthroned, Fra Angelico accepted a traditional image and used it again and again, with variations. The archetypal scene of Our Lady sitting in state, holding her Son and surrounded by the trappings of a royal court, was inherited from the Eastern Church, where the underlying notion seems to have been that since the Byzantine Empress was presented in court finery, the Mother of God should be presented in no less splendour; and the idea had an immediate and wide appeal. For centuries, Our Lady was portrayed in painting and sculpture as a reigning monarch, not precisely as Queen of Heaven, but as a queen of men and women on earth, surrounded by angelic and saintly courtiers. So the image was part of Angelico’s mental furniture. It was not, of course, the only image of Our Lady then in vogue.

The impact of Masaccio’s Madonna and Child, now in the National Gallery, London, is hard to exaggerate, and its influence is more evident in an altar panel which Angelico did for the nuns of St Peter Martyr Convent, Florence, than anywhere else. Angelico follows Masaccio in so positioning the figure of Our Lady as to bring the right shoulder slightly forward, presenting an almost straight line from the elbow to the top of the head. The resulting bulkiness of figure suggests maternal protectiveness and an air of mystery. Documentary evidence points to 1428 as the likely date of Angelico’s painting, which is interesting in the light of Orlandi’s surmise that Angelico was ordained in 1429; he must have been still a student of theology when he painted the work.

My main object here is to try to clear up some remarkably persistent confusions. What I am discussing is commonly called moral virtue. But since I believe that the translation ‘moral virtue’ frequently leads to misunderstanding of Aristotle’s views I shall use always ‘excellence of character’, which is, no doubt, an imperfect translation of ēthikē aretē, but less misleading than is ‘moral virtue’.

Aristotle distinguished between three broad types of excellence that may be displayed by human beings; these correspond to the three levels of complexity that living things display, the least complex shown by all living things including plants, that shown by all animals and that shown only by human beings. The first is bodily excellence, comprising health, strength, good looks and the like; this is not of direct concern to the student of ethics. Of the other excellences of the soul there are two kinds, those of the irrational or, more properly, non-rational element in the soul and those of the rational element.

Within the rational element of the soul Aristotle distinguished two main types of excellence. These we may call the excellences of intelligence, though they are commonly and absurdly called intellectual virtues. Of these excellences of intelligence one is theoretical; to have this excellence is to be good at such things as metaphysics and mathematics, which it is quaint to call a virtue. Like bodily excellence, theoretical excellence of intelligence lies outside our present scope.