In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.

To be catapulted, at very short notice, into the deliberations of a worldwide gathering of Catholic bishops and religious was inevitably something of a culture shock, compounded no doubt by the sheer effort of concentration involved in listening, five hours a day for the first fortnight, to individual members’ interventions in their own languages (with instant translators whose command of Latin idiom tended to survive in their English versions). Yet the comprehensive overview of the present situation of the consecrated life in all its manifestations that emerged could hardly have been projected in any other way. We heard moving accounts from sisters, still young, from the countries of eastern Europe of the way they had not only maintained the religious life underground in the face of communist government restrictions, but continued to attract new vocations and to carry out their formation. We heard from African bishops (speaking confidently, I thought, for a church come of age) of an explosion of vocations that promises to give the lie to the assumption that celibacy will always be something alien to the African male; of the inherent dangers in a society where so many, in the secular sphere, are looking for ways of self-betterment; of the need for higher levels of education, for which outside help will be needed, and at the same time for a process of inculturation which the indigenous can only achieve themselves, and to which the assumptions and living standards of expatriates can be a serious hindrance.

What do we mean when we say ‘Europe’ and write about Europe as ‘a challenge to Christians’? What does it mean to be a European Christian, or rather to be a Christian in Europe? What is the identity of Europe? Identity is closely linked to memory. When a person loses his or her memory, this person’s identity is in danger of getting lost as well. There is a common European memory. This memory is weaker than our national memory and our personal memory, but it exists. It is built up out of numerous elements including: the boundaries of Europe, interdependence, cultural heritage, technological civilization, justice, individualism, fear of Islam, and the Christian past.

Boundaries are vital in determining one’s identity. They fulfil the need for belonging and help to structure life. The boundaries of Europe, however, are very uncertain. When I arrived in Oxford in 1966 as a postgraduate student, I was told that this city of dreaming spires and towers was not a part of Europe. Europe was ‘the continent’; the British Isles did not belong to Europe. Ten months later I travelled to Spain. I learned that, surely, Oxford belonged to Europe, for everything north of Spain was Europe; Spain, however, was not a part of Europe. When I lectured for some days in the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, in 1988, I was told by my hosts that Poland really is the heart of Europe. The little medieval chapel of Lublin castle was supposed to prove their point: gothic on the outside, Byzantine on the inside.

Now I have already indicated that the picture I have painted of what I believe to be post-1945 socio-economic reality corresponds after a fashion to the picture of the cultural and intellectual world to be found in the works of writers who concern themselves with what since 1975 has been called ‘postmodernism’. I should like as the next stage in my argument just briefly to survey the correspondences.

Firstly there is the question of politics, which seems to me intimately linked with the term ‘postmodern’ itself. I regard ‘postmodern’ as corresponding to what I have today called ‘post-1945’, for I believe that post-modernism is inseparable from the development of the global market. This is not an obvious point, for there has been much discussion among those who have taken up the term on whether ‘postmodern’ is a chronological term at all. Most have taken the view that it is not, that what they mean by postmodernism is something that runs in parallel with modernism or is even a permanent possibility of the human spirit — it is suggested that Montaigne, in the 16th century, is postmodern, but the brothers Schlegel, in 1800, are only modem. (It is of course a Frenchman who makes the suggestion.) As it is part of a postmodernist approach to deny — at any rate from time to time — the significance of chronology this is an understandable ploy. Indeed the term ‘postmodernist’ is a good one precisely because ‘modernism’ in all the arts depended on the belief in an opposition between the present and the past. To be modern was to do things differently.

Exclusive language is becoming increasingly problematic. Not only has the Feminist movement demonstrated the alienation and exclusion felt in male dominated language, but our post-Freudian environment forbids us to accept androgyny as convincing. One is female or one is male. That has to be reflected in our language. This scenario leaves us with great paradoxes in regard to our religious language, particularly in view of our ‘talk’ about the Christian sacrifice. I found an equally paradoxical source of inspiration on this issue in the writings and art of David Jones. His work is paradoxical because while hardly being a feminist (far from it!) or Freudian (he was nearer Jung), he can in the liberation of the artistic communicate the female as well as male.

In this limited exploration I am going to focus on his attitude in visual and written form to Mary and her relationship to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, her son and God. Then I will examine the role of the feminine in Jones’ handling of the Eucharist. Finally I will examine the claim that the painting ‘Aphrodite in Aulis’ is a picture of the crucifixion.

In Jones’ use of Mary as a picture of the Temple of the body of Christ he creates a layered effect of separate allusions each resting on the one before. The layering of imagery gives a different effect to a lineal arrangement so the finished picture takes on a perspective that is allowed because of all that has gone before.

Philip Howard remains an enigmatic character — clearly influential in Church and State in his time — but a shadowy figure in the history of English Recusancy. Yet his career opens a window on all the major problems which dogged the English Catholics in the 17th century — episcopal government, relations between religious and secular clergy, loyalty to the Stuarts, the ramifications of the Oates plot and, of course, finance. He played a crucial role in the most turbulent period of Recusancy between the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement, yet because he spent the last six months of his life destroying papers his influence is not easy to assess. Howard was the subject of a lengthy unpublished biography by his later confrere Father Godfrey Anstruther OP. This was a project which began in 1955 when Anstruther was living at Santa Sabina in Rome and was Spiritual Director at the Venerable English College. He wrote to a friend, “... I have been rereading Palmer’s Life of Howard, and I never realised before how uninspired it is. It has all the matter but no literary merit and, alas, no references. Shall we do a new one?” His new one occupied much of the rest of his life and it was a source of frustration that he was never able to get it published. This paper draws heavily upon it and I am grateful for the late Father Anstruther’s exhaustive research and to Father Bede Bailey OP for access to his files at the Dominican Archives in Edinburgh.

The rue d’Ulm in the centre of Paris, a small almost insignificant street close to the Parthenon and the Jardin de Luxembourg, houses one of the most important and prestigious academic institutions in France: the École Normale Supérieure. Founded in the first decade of the 19th century with entrance by a nationwide competitive examination, it has educated many of the leading 20th century French intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are just a few of those selected in a nation-wide competitive examination to be schooled here. In 1969, when considerable student unrest still remained in Paris following the May riots a year earlier, Jean-Luc Marion, then 21, took up his place there. At an institution which had played an enormous role in disseminating the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger in post-War France, Marion began to work for his agrégation de philosophic. It was a time of les enfants terribles in French philosophy: when structuralism was gaining ground through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes; when Althusser was attempting to rewrite Marxism; when Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things) could enter the French best-sellers list; and Derrida launched, in the three books published in the same year, his deconstructive assault. Lacan and Derrida both gave seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (as Marion does now). The influence of German Idealism and its critics, Nietzsche and Heidegger, have remained throughout Marion’s philosophical work.

In September 1989, while the dominoes were falling in the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, a very minor revolution occurred in our national newspapers: the face of the German philosopher Hegel suddenly and briefly, and surely for the first time, was allowed to dominate the centre pages.

The deputy director of the American State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, had published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’ in the right-wing journal The National Interest, suggesting that contemporary events were vindicating Hegel rather than Hegel’s unruly disciple, Karl Marx: that ideas and ideology were a genuinely motivating force in history, rather than mere economics; that Hegel had seen the ideas of the French Revolution, which Fukuyama identified with modern liberal democracy, as the ultimate goal of history; that we were witnessing the worldwide extension of those ideas through the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and that since no further ideological conflict or development was possible, history had come to an end. In other words — and though Fukuyama did not say it, it was soon enough said— America had won the Cold War and though things would undoubtedly continue happening, nothing much, nothing big, would ever change again. In the Independent the much-regretted Peter Jenkins aptly quoted Arnold Toynbee’s childhood memories of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:

In years gone by, November was the month most closely associated with death. The month, which Ted Hughes appropriately describes as the ‘month of the drowned dog’, opened, having remembered All Saints, with the Commemoration of All Souls, the black draped catafalque in the aisle, the three Masses, and a hymnody recalling death’s pains and anguishes. Think of the words of the popular hymn, O turn to Jesus, Mother, turn, in which it was recalled that those who died,

... have fought a gallant fight;
In death’s cold aims they persevered;
and, after life’s uncheery night.
The arbour of their rest is neared.

Death was cold; death was pain and loss; sickness unto death was struggle.

Now, it seems, we have possessed death, we have brought it close and made it our own, not to be feared and fled from, but friendly and familiar. The theology of death has come of age and now faces death with that anticipatory resoluteness of which Heidegger speaks. Thanatology speaks the language of ontology. Subjectivity, formerly snuffed out in death, now appropriates, as integral to its own life, death, and reasserts its mastery. Mature in Christian faith, we have authentically managed to appropriate what otherwise we would rather forget. What I would like to suggest in this article is that this repatriation of death into life, rather than yielding death’s meaning, actually leads to a situation in which, as Blanchot says, we have lost death, and obscured its significance.