Preached at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on Sunday, 9 February, three days after Kenelm Foster’s death, to a congregation that knew him well. The readings for that Sunday were: Isaiah 6:1—8 (the call of Isaiah); l Corinthians 15:1—11 (Paul’s testimony of Christ’s death for our sins’ and resurrection); and Luke 5:1-11 (the call of the first disciples).

Kenelm would have been delighted at finding this Pauline reading, if he had been preaching today. He loved St Paul. He was his clear-favourite New Testament writer. Paul, who often spoke in the First person. Paul, who was like a boxer, and not in vain. Paul, who was always arguing, full of polemic and self-polemic. Paul, who could chart in his experience, even on his own body, the workings of grace, of grappling with the Saviour. Paul, who wrestled with meaning. We can even imagine Paul to be like his thought—tough, full of wiry strength. Kenelm had been a boxer at Downside and always kept some of the instincts and reactions of a boxer. Kenelm, who always asked awkward questions, even as a Dominican student; so he was banished to a parish as a kind of punishment, he who was so obviously clever. (But questions were not encouraged by all in the Study House in those days.) Kenelm on his death-bed, listening to a fellow-friar reading to him Hopkins’s poems—but not just listening, arguing about the meaning; getting impatient. Tenacious, dogged in style. You will never understand Kenelm properly unless you read some of his writings.

At the time of the full moon at the Spring Equinox the people of the Messiani extinguish all their hearth-fires and every lamp and lantern and source of light from amongst them. They gather then on the hillside at midnight and in the darkness a Holy Man strikes the new fire from the rock of flint and with this a great sacred fire is made to blaze. This new fire from darkness represents, for the Messiani, the rebirth of Messia, their dying god, and also the rebirth of the year and the coming of new life out of darkness and winter.

An image of the risen god in the form of a tall candle is then lighted from the fire to symbolise his return to life from the dead, and adorned with certain sacred signs by which past and future and all time is made to centre on this time and this place. Led by the flame of the image the whole throng then moves in procession from the fire to the place of assembly. As they go they take new flame from the image for their own torches and lanterns and they dance and shout the praises of Messia ‘the new light of the world’.

When the crowd is once more assembled Messia is erected amongst green boughs and flowers and other signs of fertility and a Holy Man addresses it in song, bringing this Holy Night to coincide with the mythic nights of creation and of the birth of the Messiani people,

The year before Kenelm left Cambridge to enter the Dominican Order, A.E. Housman, in a famous, one might say notorious, lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, on 9 May 1933, deplored the choice made of him as Leslie Stephen lecturer and then said: ‘Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that Heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say; but Heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common’. This lecture by a poet and classical philologist in fact turned out to be an outstandingly original piece of literary criticism and one of the most characteristic utterances of the thirties. In spite of Housman’s gloom it was a time of literary critics of stature, writers who were at home in the borderland between poetry, philosophy and religion, discovering and rediscovering great poets in a rush of intellectual and political excitement. Though Kenelm’s writing work matured later because of his years of religious and theological training, he belonged essentially to the thirties, his seed-bed where, as Bede Bailey said, he remained firmly rooted. This era between two wars had an ‘escape-me-never’ hold on Kenelm and on his contemporaries, particularly those who returned to academic life after the war and all that the war had meant for European life and sensibility.

There is now general agreement that Christians, in virtue of their Christian commitment, should engage in social and political action, particularly on behalf of the poor and oppressed. That is the presupposition behind liberation theology. At the same time the conviction persists that social and political action is not properly religious action, but, strictly speaking, only the consequence or overflow of religion into a non-religious, secular sphere. Hence the felt necessity, especially on the part of those with religious authority, to qualify the acceptance of liberation theology with frequent warnings that the Christian religion should not be reduced to social and political action.

More widespread among ordinary religious people is the manner in which the perennial need for reflection becomes a devaluing of social and political action in favour of interior contemplation as alone truly religious. People are urged to withdraw at regular intervals from their social involvement, which is dubbed external activity, in order to find God once more in the properly religious activity of personal, meditative prayer. The religious life is seen as the inner life in contrast to the outer life. The locus of the Transcendent and of religious experience is identified with the realm of interiority. To work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed may be demanded by religious faith, hope and love. It is applied religion, but it is not of the essence of religion, which is found in the inwardness of union with God.

This tendency of the Christian religion has been strongly reinforced by interest in the Eastern religions.

Walter Kasper’s name is by now well-known among English-speaking readers of theology: the 1984 translation of Der Gott Jesu Christi following on the translating in 1976 of Jesus der Christus established his reputation as a writer at once conceptually rigorous and historically well-informed. What is less understood, however, is the total context to which these works belong. From Kasper’s background in the Tubingen School his writings so far can be shown to represent a total theological programme of a quite distinctive kind. This programme is not only of considerable intrinsic interest. It also has a wider church-political significance in the light of Kasper’s selection as the official theologian of the Roman Synod Secretariat, encharged with the collation and theological analysis of the ‘submissions’ made to the Holy See by national conferences of bishops in readiness for the 1985 Synod on ‘The Church after Vatican II’. His appointment offers a useful key to the debate about the intentions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and more generally, of the Roman Curia in its higher echelons) in the middle 1980’s. In particular, it helps to determine whether these intentions are best described as ‘Neo-Ultramontane’, as argued (in effect) by a group of writers in New Blackfriars in June 1985, or rather, as the present author has maintained, as offering a via media or re-accentramento (‘re-centring’) for Church and theology, amid the competing voices of left and right-wing radicalism in post-conciliar Catholicism. This is a debate which has not ended with the ending of the Synod.

In a recent stock-taking essay on the current state of the sociology of religion, Richard Fenn writes:

Later, Fenn goes on to assert that

Most of what I want to say accords with Fenn’s account of what has happened, but presents a case against the conclusions he draws.

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.

This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:

Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:

‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.

The total number of Catholic sociologists in Great Britain could fit comfortably at the back of the Clapham omnibus. Among the many exotic ideological species of sociologists, the feminists, the cat fanciers, and the vegetarians, it is reasonable to assume a believing Catholic could be found somewhere. Those found seem to occupy a peculiar ideological limbo, their religious and sociological gaze doomed to be misunderstood by Church and discipline alike. This tiny band of sociological hopers forms a dispersed breed, invisible in their own Church, and for some, best kept so; within their discipline, they seem as a holy huddle on a tiny rock discernable in a sea of analytical uncertainty, odd, but interesting. Doubtless every occupation carries a burden, a witness to a calling out of improbable circumstances.

Although some sociologists wear their ideological beliefs heavily in public, most carry their burdens privately. Few biographies of sociologists have been written, and even fewer about those who are also Catholic. Sociologists are a reticent breed, and theologically they are unlikely to be able to say much about why they believe in Catholicism. Doubtless coming back to Catholicism was a surprise for some: maybe reading Althusser by candlelight, or an account of the ceremonies of the Dinka in bed, or spotting the moral similarities between the plight of Goffman’s actor and Job in a pub, drove some unsteadily further along the road to Damascus. To be a Catholic and a sociologist is to occupy a place not necessarily of one’s own choosing.

The intellectual climate in which Aquinas matured was one of conflict. The arrival of the works of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the Christian West an awareness of the natural world as an integrated, self-sufficient entity. Aristotle, as the first historian of philosophy, expressed the Greek philosophical tradition that ‘from nothing nothing comes’, a challenge to the Christian notion of creation. Let us mark but a couple of sayings discoverable in the tradition. Heraclitus, for example, wrote: ‘This world order (the same for all) did none of the gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Empedocles is even more adamant in his refusal to entertain any notion of making from nothing: ‘Fools—for they have no far-reaching thoughts—who fancy that that which formerly was not can come into being or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.’ Aristotle’s position, although subtler than his predecessors’, is consonant with the tradition: ‘We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said without qualification to come from nothing.’ To the ears of a growing population of Aristotelian disciples who equated Aristotle with truth, this seemed to amount to the philosophical denial of creation from nothing.

This and other doctrines apparently incompatible with Christianity caused a reactionary movement among many theologians, and what was already a fairly well-established theological tradition became more explicit. It was argued that, since the world was created from nothing, it tends towards nothing and will, in fact, finally return to nothing.

The Medea—in a Japanese version—performed outdoors—after dusk—in the neo-Classical courtyard of the Old College Edinburgh—late in what had been a cold and wet August: was it worth buying a ticket for that—even if Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth had been the sensation of the 1985 Festival? After all, that had been indoors, and the Shakespeare play had been part of my mind for over forty years. You had to choose between Greek and German, in my day, at a Scottish grammar school, and I had opted for German (entirely because I feared the principal Classics master). But then—I understand Japanese as little as I can follow spoken Greek, and would not that be the case for nearly everyone in the audience? We should all be relying on the eloquence of gesture, lighting, tone, and perhaps music. It seemed advisable, for all that, to study the text in advance of the performance. What follows is an attempt to capture my reading of the Medea. For the first time in my life I found myself gripped by the greatness of the play. I used, and am quoting, Philip Vellacott’s translation for Penguin Classics, and my interpretation is wholly dependent on a marvellous essay by Bernard Knox.

In a humorous, fanciful collection of stories by R.M. Rilke, Stories of God, God forgets about parts of the creation and then gradually comes to learn of them, sharing in their suffering and joy. The notion that God can forget about the created order or fail to know some of its basic features in not unique to Rilke. Some Christian philosophers believe that an essential feature of creaturely freedom is that God does not know what free acts will be performed. They claim that God either cannot know, or elects not to know, important events which will occur. More extreme is the deistic conception of God in which the creator is less than fully apprised of human history, past, present and future. Early gnostic myths envisioned God as being unaware of the created world, the world being the result of some demiurgic intermediary emanating from God. Aristotle held that God does not apprehend all the particular features of the world. In contrast to this sampling of deism, gnosticism, and Aristotle, the classical Christian conception of God is that God does not avert his gaze from the creation; the knowing presence of God is inescapable. Notwithstanding some disagreement whether the scope of divine knowledge includes future free acts, Christians have claimed God’s knowledge of the world is supreme and unsurpassable. God does not forget about the world, nor does the world blindly emanate from him. The creation and conservation of the world is deliberate and consciously willed.

In 1983 one of the most powerful nations in the world, the United States, fought one of the weakest, Grenada. Even in this lopsided affair, which lasted only a few days, twenty innocent people were killed when United States fire hit a mental hospital. The American people received this news with equanimity, in that they had become inured to the slaughter of innocent people, say by the Nazis against the Jews or by the Soviets against their own people, but also by their own government’s bombers at the end of World War Two or by its lieutenants at My Lai. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, the issue of noncombatant immunity poses the greatest threat to the continued efficacy of the just war theory.

At present James Turner Johnson, of Rutgers University, editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, offers perhaps the most sophisticated treatments of just war theory, specifically Christian just war theory, and he astutely claims that a primary task of the Christian ethicist is to reintroduce acquaintance with what has been lost in Christian tradition (HT, 300). But what is the Christian tradition regarding noncombatant immunity? Obviously no answer to this question can afford to ignore St. Thomas Aquinas, but exactly was his position on this issue? The American Catholic Bishops and various Thomistic textbooks, acting as distilling agents for the various drops of Catholic tradition, imply that for St Thomas it is always wrong to intentionally kill noncombatants, which leaves open the possibility of killing some noncombatants if such killing is compatible with the proportionality dimension of the principle of double effect.

The opening address at the 18th World Conference of the Society for International Development (S.I.D.), Rome, 1 July 1985

Together with the Catholic Bishops of the United States (in their first draft of the pastoral letter on the economy) I would like to affirm:

This World Conference is at the same time an opportunity and a responsibility. It is an opportunity to take up again one of the most difficult of world debates: the relation between the North and the South. And it is a responsibility because even though this Conference is one of analysis and dialogue we must take steps so that its influence goes beyond this level. We have reached a point in history where debate and dialogue without international action have become an offence and an insult to those who are suffering in North and South because of international economic policies. This morning I would like to speak of the meaning and the validity of the topic that was given to me. We all, rich nations and poor, want poverty to be the centre of world concern. But, in my view, the reasons for our concern are fundamentally different. And it is this that I would like to develop in the first part of my presentation.

Like the man who gathered from the vicar’s sermon on sin that ‘he were agin it’, one gathers from reading the literature that ‘creativity’ is something to be approved of. Exactly what this creativity consists in, however, and how it relates to the concept of divine creation on the one hand, and the spheres of art and work on the other, is far from clear. It is the purpose of what follows to investigate these relationships.

The terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, as opposed to more mundane alternatives such as ‘making’ and ‘productivity’, seem to be used in many contexts because of the positive feel they carry over from the idea of divine creation. It is much harder, for example, to disagree with an activity called ‘wealth creation’ than to object to the same process labelled ‘making money’. ‘Creation’ and ‘creativity’ are thus not merely neutral, descriptive terms; they alter our attitude to the activities that they designate. To designate an activity ‘creative’ is—for good or ill—to legitimate it, not just to describe it.

In some cases, however, the activity so legitimated is less obviously wholesome than is divine creation itself, and the designation then serves to conceal dubious aspects of human behaviour. In such a case, the use of language acquires ideological overtones. In what follows I shall examine three examples of the use of the idea of creation, or the use of the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, in recent literature. In the first two I shall detect tendencies towards such a descent into ideology. The examples chosen are deliberately extreme in order to make my point.

Kenelm was appointed a Lecturer in Italian in the University of Cambridge from 1 October, 1948. Professor Vincent showed flair and imagination when he made this far from obvious choice for the post which had become vacant following the retirement of Miss K.T. Butler. He had been one of the two examiners of Kenelm’s thesis on St Thomas and Dante, and was impressed by its quality. Kenelm had, I believe, some family connection with Italy and had spent some time there in the past, but he had had no formal training in Italian literature, apart from the deep knowledge of Dante he must have acquired while preparing his dissertation.

We were never formally introduced. After three years as Lector, I became an Assistant Lecturer on the same date on which Kenelm was appointed to a Lectureship, and a few days later, in the morning of 18 October, we bumped into each other in the Departmental Library, a gloomy and not much frequented room now occupied by University offices on the top floor at the back of the Old Schools, facing Clare College. I vividly remember that the first thing he said after a few words of introduction was a defensive and characteristically modest ‘I don’t know any Italian’. We must have felt a liking for each other from the beginning. Five days later he came to the house my wife and I rented in the Hills Road area for what was meant to be a brief afternoon visit and to meet my wife, and stayed till late in the evening.

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.

The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.

From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.

Fifty years ago Sheed and Ward published a book called Peace and the Clergy. It was attributed anonymously to ‘a German priest’ because its author, Fr. Francis Stratmann OP, a Dominican, was the persecuted leader of the German Catholic peace movement, Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken. With about 40,000 members, this was one of the first organisations to suffer the full force of Nazi oppression. It had been dissolved by the Nazis on 1 July, 1933.

Stratmann was born in 1883 and ordained in 1912. After the First World War he had become a university chaplain in Berlin, and it was there that he had begun his struggle against National Socialism and for peace. His book, The Church and War, published in 1924, drew on Scripture, Catholic moral theology and papal pronouncements to challenge the justification of war. When, in 1936, Peace and the Clergy appeared, it was in its English translation. ‘A work of this kind cannot be published in Germany today’, the preface explained. Temporarily arrested by the Gestapo after the Friedensbund was banned, Stratmann survived the war by going into exile, first in Rome, and then to Venlo, in Holland, where he was working as chaplain to Jewish converts in the Sluis refugee camp when the Nazis invaded. Going into hiding, he was sheltered in the Flemish Dominican convent at Lint, in Belgium. In exile he kept a diary, later published, and, in addition to other books, wrote a five-volume work on The Saints and the State.

There is a paradox—one, no doubt, among many—about contemporary Euro-American culture. On the one hand it has developed a capacity for systematic, and critical, ‘self-consciousness’, unequalled by any other, or by its own ancestral cultures. This is exemplified by the development in the last hundred years, practically from zero, of the human sciences, in particular of psychology and sociology. In Academe, at any rate, the intellectual leaders of our culture live in a world of ‘meta’s’—‘metahistory’, ‘meta-science’, ‘meta-psychology’, and meta-sociology too, I shouldn’t wonder. A capacity and techniques for reflexive thinking have been carried much further than ever before. In the Christian dimension of our culture the ecumenical movement and above all the Second Vatican Council illustrate the same trend; the Church ‘self-consciously’ reflecting on what it means to be Church—and whether and how far it is succeeding in being Church. Ecclesiology (the Church reflecting on itself), is now a most important branch of theology. A hundred years ago, when the word ‘ecclesiology’ itself had a different meaning, the Church’s reflecting on itself was rarely more than one weapon in an arsenal of polemical apologetics.

On the other hand Euro-Americans, in their cultural leaders and in the mass, still retain by and large the serene uncriticised assurance that their—or should I say ‘our’?—culture is normative, and that it is the only authentic realisation of human potentialities. It is, to be sure, not the only way of being human or organising human society, but it is certainly the best, and the only one that has a future.

Popular enthusiasm for spirituality has mushroomed in the past two decades. The analyses of the human sciences and the impact of secular self-help programs have challenged the religious basis of spiritual pursuit. The influence of gurus from the East has transformed the problematic. The need for a systematic spirituality that can sort out the issues and relate them insightfully grows more urgent. In different ways, the thought of Bernard Lonergan, summarized in Method in Theology, speaks to the present need. Here I shall suggest some of those ways.

Introduction: The Need for Theory

Spirituality is a broad field. It entails many practical issues. These include: prayer and how one does it, from vocal prayer and lectio divina to discursive meditation and contemplation and mysticism; the possible physiological correlates of religious experience: postures, breathing, fasting, sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abstinence, anatomical and neuro-chemical bases, and even drug ingestion; spiritual direction and questions of discernment of spirits; the social dimensions of public prayer and liturgies, group prayer, and group psychic and religious experience; prescriptions for ‘holy’ living; and study of the various traditions, both Western and Eastern, and of modern psychology. These all have to do with practice, and they are not to be minimized. If spirituality has any real significance, it must be in the practice. This field can less tolerate mere thinking and talking about the subject than can other fields of theology as currently conceived.

This is an attempt to see what some of the underlying assumptions in the current debates on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic priesthood are. It seems to me that the debate is not getting anywhere because of the lack of common language of discussion. In such a quandary, the best thing to do would seem to be to look at the implicit assumptions of both sides. Perhaps we are really present at one of those night battles which both Newman and Matthew Arnold saw as characteristic of controversy in their own day, where neither side understands either the explicit arguments or the implicit assumptions of the other. If so, the best service an observer can do would be to see how these implicit assumptions plug into wider world-views.

One of the major arguments for the ordination of women is that the Church is inevitably affected by the social structures and cultural values of the age it is living in. Therefore the supposed argument from tradition lacks weight. There were not women priests for the same reason that there were not women lawyers or engineers. Objection to the ordination of women is just another case of the way in which religion of any sort seems to become a bulwark of extreme conservatism in social ideas, perhaps because of religion’s sociological role in stabilizing society and maintaining identities over time. Another form of this argument is that the Church cannot afford to continue neglecting the very great pool of ministerial talent that undoubtedly exists among women.