We are told in the First Letter of Peter: ‘Come to him, to that living stone rejected by men, but in God’s sight chosen and precious, and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’

In 1984 Christians in the village of Ibillin, in Galilee, said to a British group of pilgrims that visitors to the Holy Land should not confine themselves to visiting the ancient shrines of past ages; they should also visit the ‘living stones’ of the Land. From this originated the setting-up of an ecumenical organization in Britain called ‘Living Stones’.

Last year a group associated with this organization, but predominantly made up of Vincentians (namely, priests of the Congregation of the Mission, founded by St Vincent de Paul), decided to make ‘a retreat through pilgrimage’ in the Holy Land. It was my conviction that the Land, its peoples, and its history combine to provide an extraordinarily powerful context in which to ‘make a retreat’. What would be unique about this one was that it would include meetings with indigenous Christians, living in the throes of the intifada.

Some idea of what that meant both for the group and for the Christians that the group met is best conveyed in the words of some of those Christians.

Lecturing On the Philosophy of History in the United States in 1955, Jacques Maritain thus restated a theme he had elaborated in Spain in the high summer of 1934, 23 months before Franco’s uprising. I shall argue that we should answer Maritain’s rhetorical question, No: it is a philosophical and theological mistake to suppose, as he did, that the temporal vocation of the Christian—or the Christian’s conscience in political matters—requires a ‘comprehensive aim’ such as the ‘concrete historical ideal’ of building a new or better Christendom.

In March 1955 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, used words which have survived as expressing the reality of the nuclear age, and the hope which has guided the masters of the age: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. The West’s new armaments, he said, would increase ‘the deterrent upon the Soviet Union by putting her ... scattered population on an equality or near-equality of vulnerability with our small densely-populated island’—a vulnerability matched by that of the West’s populations. The threat expressed by Churchill, to destroy Soviet populations by ‘a crushing weight of nuclear retaliation’, has remained the indispensable element in the deterrent threats and accompanying operational plans of the U.S., Britain, and France ever since.

The Church’s liturgy calls on Christ as Rex gentium, ‘King of the nations’, the One whom they all ‘desire’, the Corner-stone that unites them. It appeals to him, therefore, to ‘come and save man whom you made from clay’. In this celebrated Advent antiphon, the Church affirms the relevance of Christ to world history and, more specifically, to the fate of the many peoples of the world whose histories contribute to the single history which is that of the world as a whole. The text intimates that this history constitutes an implicit call for his Coming, and it states quite explicitly that only Christ can unify their different and (presumably) divergent histories, and make them one.

My concern here is a vast subject which, it is probably fair to say, historians and philosophers in England, even when believers, would by and large regard as taboo ... and in this they would doubtless be joined by the majority of theologians. The relevance of Christ to world history, and, in particular, to the fact of its multiple national differentiations, is, they would say, simply too large a subject to talk sense about. English historians, with occasional exceptions like Arnold Toynbee, do not think it a proper part of the historian’s task to identify the structure of the historical process as a whole. The philosophy of history is not, in England, the study of the wider meaning of that process but, rather, the justification of any limited statement about the past. English philosophers of history avert their gaze in horror from their Continental counterparts, whose vaulting metaphysical ambition has produced schemes like Hegel’s (history as the coming of Reason to selfconsciousness) or Marx’s (history as the formation of a socialist society where the specific essence of humanity will be realised in uncoerced labour).

We cannot escape the fact that at USAF Upper Heyford people are ready to kill the innocent. That readiness is at the heart of our deterrent policy. And if we support that policy, acquiesce in these plans, then that readiness to kill the innocent, however reluctantly, is in our hearts also. We harden our hearts. I think we can best explain why we did the limited and public damage that we did by telling a short Bible story, about that reluctant prophet Jonah. He too is hard-hearted. He wants to see Nineveh destroyed, even when the people have repented. He is cross with the God who has mercy on them. So God causes a gourd, a castor-oil plant, to grow up and shelter Jonah. And then God destroys it. And Jonah is furious.

Then God says:

Theological pluralism has been pressed upon us with increasing enthusiasm over the past twenty years. It has been seen as the only appropriate response to the cultural fragmentation of our world, and also as the continuation of what has in fact been the nature of theological discourse from the first. We had been too easily misled, by a harmonizing biblical exegesis on the one hand, and a Denzinger-based version of doctrinal history on the other, into supposing that the articulation of what is believed by Christians to be true about God and the world naturally falls into a pattern of tidily unified correlations. The pendulum has now swung a fair way towards the opposite pole from this.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Waldheim is one of a generation of Austrians and Germans who have a vested interest in excusing themselves from guilt by association in mass murder, in the absence of hard evidence that they pulled the trigger or signed the warrant or turned the gas on. But the evasions and moral insensitivity of the Austrian President do not merit further discussion here. What is more important is whether it is the case that ‘there is no such thing as collective guilt’, because if there is not then certain aspects of traditional Christian theology are in big trouble.

Of course, collective guilt is a deeply unpopular idea. It involves the suggestion that someone who has not perpetrated a crime or some other shameful act in some way carries the guilt for that act by virtue of sharing a social identity with the criminal. Is our reluctance to accept this idea the result of genuine moral difficulties with attributing guilt to someone who might with some justification claim to be innocent, or is it the result of two centuries of social conditioning in a liberal individualistic society? It may be both.

Western liberal democratic society is individualistic in a cultural tradition that was traced by C.B. Macpherson some years ago to Hobbes and John Locke, who had prepared a philosophical account of the lone individual who observes the world and constructs a language to talk about it.

On a superficial overview, the upshot of the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida seems to be to make nonsense of all human discourse and communication. When one looks at it more carefully, this impression is abundantly confirmed. Still, there are lessons of great importance to be learned from it; and I shall try in what follows to show what they are.

On Clydeside in Glasgow, beside the early 19th-century Catholic Cathedral, there now stands a substantial modern glass building reminiscent of an oil company HQ or international bank. It is the new Curia for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, a gleaming symbol that the Catholics ‘have arrived’. Inside, the presence of a portrait of the Queen alongside one of the Pope underlines the political message behind the concrete and tinted glass. Catholics in the West of Scotland have come out of their mental and physical ghettoes and now feel secure enough to take to task, in a much more critical manner than hitherto, the establishments which govern Scottish society.

In one sense, it is amazing that the Scottish hierarchy, of all episcopal conferences, should take such a consistently radical stance, though I am sure most bishops would baulk at the phrase. The change was a long time in coming, in part because of the introversion of native Scottish Catholics and in part because the incoming Irish kept their heads below the parapet and concentrated on material improvements for their community. They faced considerable prejudice from a Presbyterian Scotland where the calvinistic version of the Reformation had taken deeper root than anywhere else in Western Europe. 1923 is not that long ago—the time when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a report on ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality‘.It was little wonder that the Catholic bishops kept stumm on social issues.

Yet lay Catholics, after 1906 and the emergence of the Catholic Socialist Society, gradually took an active part in Labour Party politics, breeding a mafia which is still strong in the City Chambers of Glasgow and other West of Scotland towns.

In his 1976 book New Testament Interpretation in an Historical Age, Denis Nineham advanced the thesis of cultural relativism in theology this way:

Broadly speaking this is the theory that the relation between facts on the one hand and language and interpretation on the other is perpetually shifting. Facts that will demand one kind of description in one cultural context will require a quite different kind in another and conversely a given term or description will mean different things in different contexts.

To begin, we need to say something in general about the cinema as a medium. To do this, let’s throw away the packaging, the ice cream, the popcorn, the advertisements. We are not dealing with television, so there are to be no advertising breaks within the film, no welcome or unwelcome intrusions from other people; we pay our money, settle in our place, the lights are lowered. We can’t escape, it is us and the film. We are in the dark or semi-dark, but around us there are others, an anonymous collectivity drawn together in the watching of a film. Film makes its appeal to a mass audience, so we laugh, we weep, we are scared, or we are just bored, with others. Afterwards we can talk about the experience, agree or disagree with the critics. Yet besides all this shared experience, those images on the screen can stir personal memories, stimulates desires, bring up from the subconscious dreams and fantasies, we can identify with the characters and with the situations. It is a way to escape from our everyday life. Like Wittgenstein, we can sit in the front row of the stalls and let the film take over, cleanse and purify us like a shower bath. It is a way in which we can indulge ourselves, let our imagination have free scope. Pope Pius XII in two allocutions in 1955, to the Italian Film Industry (June 21) and to the Congress of the International Union of Theatre Owners and Film Distributors (October 28) was eloquent about this power of the cinema to transfer the spectator to an imaginary world and so produce an effect of emancipation and liberation. Another Italian put it rather differently. Federico Fellini in his film The City of Women, recalling his visits to the cinema in his youth, shows us a row of schoolboys in the stalls who become a host of individuals in one vast bed, each fantasizing and masturbating.

Last July, while in Paris for this year’s most widely-covered anniversary, Mrs Thatcher pointed out—correctly—that the French Revolution was not the first move towards Human Rights.

Whether this was worth saying (especially during the celebrations of that Revolution) is questionable. Previous moves towards Human Rights had been countered either deliberately or by neglect, so that the French Revolution was perceived to be necessary, and some of the previous moves towards Human Rights cited by Mrs Thatcher had never had any effect in France. This, though, is not the only question, nor even the most important one.

Among steps towards Human Rights, Mrs Thatcher cited the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Now, were these in fact reall anything at all to do with Human Rights‘?

Certainly, ‘I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’—suggesting slavery is antithetical to people’s good and God’s desires—makes a good start in this direction. But ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ denies the Right to religious freedom. (I am not arguing that this, or any other of the Ten Commandments, should be abandoned. What I am questioning is whether this has anything to do with Human Rights.)

Mary’s role in the first chapter of St Luke’s Gospel is integral to the author’s overall design, introducing his major themes of Christian discipleship and social justice. This chapter, which forms part of Luke’s infancy narrative, has been neglected by many modem biblical scholars. On the one hand historical critics have relegated it to the realm of ‘secondary source material’. On the other hand it has not readily attracted the serious attention of new hermeneutical schools that have arisen in the area of biblical studies, in particular feminist theology. Perhaps this is because one of the main characters featured in these chapters is Mary, the mother of Christ, who is a figure radical feminists tend to dismiss rather than use as a role model. One notable exception to the body of feminists who have rejected the figure of Mary is Rosemary Ruether. She has demonstrated that devotion to Mary and allegiance to feminist ideals do not have to be mutually exclusive. Although the Church has concentrated on certain aspects of the Marian tradition which centralise Mary’s passivity and immaculate nature, these are not central themes in her portrayal in the New Testament. Like the Liberation theologians of the Third World, Ruether puts the biblical evidence at the heart of her argument and assesses the tradition of the Church in its light. She takes as her evidence Luke’s Gospel, where Mary is portrayed as a character with an active role to play in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Here I shall extend Ruether’s insight into Luke’s portrayal of Mary to suggest that this character provides an important clue to understanding the purpose, unity and integrity of the Gospel itself.

There can be little doubt that British education is in a state of crisis, and that Kenneth Baker’s so-called education reforms have simply compounded that crisis. We are likely to witness in Britain in the next decade perhaps more than at any other time since the passing of the Shaftsbury Act over a hundred years ago, the fiercest ideological battles around issues to do with the purpose and function of education and schooling in a liberal democratic society, the rights of the child and of the student, and the relationship between education and the national economy. In such battles the Church will be heavily involved—Catholic schools will see to that. Government legislation may hit Catholics hard in other areas and receive scant criticism, but schools are where the hierarchy believes the Catholic community finds and passes on its own identity. Perhaps bishops also think that Catholic schools are among the last places where the hierarchy has real power. Thus in recent months we have seen the dispute between Cardinal Hume and parents over whether one school should or should not ‘opt out’ of the State system. The danger, exemplified by the case of the Poll Tax in England and Wales, is that the Church will fight what it sees as its own corner, but will then keep silent in the wider battle. Its intervention may be dangerously misplaced.

This article seeks to set out what has happened to British education and the vision which a prophetic Church should champion.

Our sense of history should tell us that we have a responsibility to safeguard and to extend the hard-won rights that generations before us have secured through their struggles and their blood, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives.

Our inquiry is about two aspects of Eckhart’s theology of the Trinity. One aspect (treated in Part I, which appeared in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars pp. 169—181) is his use of the notion of bullitio (‘boiling’) in the Latin treatises to explain personal procession and plurality within God. The other is the distinction in Eckhart’s German sermons between the Trinity and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond the Trinity.

The conclusions drawn from the first part of this study were as follows:

Bullitio is a metaphor depicting the generation of the Son from the Father. It also depicts the procession of the Holy Spirit, but this aspect is less developed in the texts we have considered. The metaphor represents an attempt to explain and to understand not only the nature of this generation but also the reason for it. I have argued that Eckhart, unlike Aquinas, allies himself with the tradition of a priori proofs of the Trinity. Bullitio is a metaphor for the self-diffusiveness of the good, and is related to Bonaventure’s notion of fountain-like fulness (plenitudo fontalis). Bonaventure finds in the latter attribute, which he regards as a property of the Father, the reason for plurality in God. There are no grounds to suppose that the idea of bullitio involves a distinction between God as Trinity and as the hidden Godhead.

Ebullitio, the first moment, as it were, of the creative emanation from God, is rooted in bullitio, and these two ideas are linked by that of formal emanation. The generation of the Son is a formal emanation; it is also the formal cause of creatures, insofar as this cause is considered in abstraction from their efficient and final causes.

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.

Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.