‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.

The demonic is mysterious because it appears to be without cause. It is an apparently unmotivated malignancy, which delights in destruction for its own sake. Or, as the saying goes, just for the hell of it. It is hard to know quite why Iago feels so resentful of Othello. The witches of Macbeth reap no obvious profit from driving the protagonist to his doom. This kind of wickedness seems to be autotelic, having its grounds, ends and causes in itself. It thus joins a privileged, somewhat underpopulated class of objects, which includes God and art. It is enigmatic because it is brutely itself, not because it has the inscrutability of something too deep to fathom. As St. Augustine remarks in the Confessions of his youthful debauchery, I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it’.

For many commentators, the Holocaust would be the prime example of this phenomenon. Part of its horror lies in its apparent pointlessness. Even if you had wanted to rid the world of Jews, you could have found some less unspeakable way of doing it. As Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka, was asked later: ‘Considering that you were going to kill them all... what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?’ Or as Primo Levi inquires:

Fergus Kerr, after a recent conference on St. Thomas Aquinas in the Netherlands, remarked on how a certain understanding of Heidegger’s history of being is now all but taken for granted in the Catholic theological imagination. Certainly the trajectory of the history of reason traced by the Holy Father in his recent encyclical letter Fides et Ratio would seem to owe more than just a little to Heidegger’s influence. Yet the genealogy of this influence is not easy to trace, nor is it direct. Heidegger’s work arguably exercises an influence more on those who have never read him, or at least not deeply, than on those who have (John Paul II must be counted among the latter). The increasingly common use of the word ontotheology by theologians, coined by Heidegger in a course of lectures on Hegel in 1930, though with roots at least as early as a course on Leibniz from 1928, and used by him in written texts at least until 1962, is testimony enough; but so is the fact that the vaguer uses of this term become progressively more detached from their precisely definite origins in the very occasions of becoming commoner.

British resistance to Heidegger’s work has meant that North- Americans interpreters are much more decisive for how Heidegger is understood in English. Their emphasis has tended to be on explanation and clarification, or the minute piecing together of a narrative framework into which his thought can then be fitted. Fr. William Richardson’s monumental work on Heidegger set both a tone and a framework for reading Heidegger whose reverberations still predominate.

It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in the Lysis and Symposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.

Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.

Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- received Politiques de l’amitié? in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.

It is now too little discussed, but one key ingredient of 20th century ‘modernism’ has been its reaction to the writing of James Frazer in The Golden Bough. One can think of course of The Waste Land, but also of David Jones’s Anathemata, besides countless other examples. In some of these instances, notably that of Jones, implicit anthropological critiques of religion are turned on their head. Christ as one more sacred king sacrificed becomes instead the typological fulfilment of the sacrificial drama played out in so many cultural instances (though not all—under the influence of Christopher Dawson, Jones is quite specific) between sacred mother and sacred son. More recently, the debate between anthropology and theology concerning sacrifice and Christology has been dramatically renewed. Now, however, in the wake of the work of René Girard among others, the focus has been as much upon Christ’s exception to prevailing norms of sacrifice and power. Fergus Kerr was among the first theologians to make important contributions to this renewed debate (‘Revealing the scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard’ in Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life ed Michael McGhee (Cambridge: CUP 1992 161-75) and ‘Rescuing Girard’s Argument’ in Modem Theology 8 1992, 388-390). This was highly appropriate for one whose interests, rooted in literary studies, embrace theology, philosophy and the social sciences, with the cultural broadness so notable amongst British Catholics. The present article aims to continue this debate, and further to extend its scope, with reference both to Christ’s typicality and his exceptionality. I hope that this is a suitable tribute to Fergus Kerr.