St Simeon the New Theologian, telling the story of a young man called George writes: “For love for what he sought separated him from the world, and creaturely things and all affairs, and made him entirely of the Spirit and light. Yet all the while he lived in the middle of a city and was responsible for a house and occupied with slaves and free men, doing and achieving all the things that pertain to the present life.”

With only a little modification, this description applies equally well to Aquinas, at least if we accept the accounts of him handed down to us by his early biographers. Given to rapture and religious ecstasy, supposedly “bound with a bond of chastity that shall never be loosened” (Gui, Chapter 7) he spent his active life in an entirely urban context as writer, teacher, administrator and advisor. He wined and dined with kings; he had the ear of the papacy and highest nobility as well as the offer of the loftiest ecclesiastical preferment. The Lives of the Brethren says that : “One day somebody asked Master Jordan ‘What Rule do you follow’? He replied, ‘The Rule of the Friars Preachers. And this is their Rule: to live an upright life, to learn and to teach’.” We need to see Aquinas as a man whose rule shows itself in his life and its handling of study and teaching. In this respect, although he doubtless represents ideals common to more than one religious order, common to many Christians indeed, Aquinas is typically Dominican. The Prologue to the Primitive Constitutions observes that: “Our Order was established particularly for the sake of preaching and the salvation of souls, and that our whole study should be principally and earnestly devdted to our being useful to the souls of others.

I am writing this in a rural area of the Rivers State, Nigeria. This is relevant to the rest of what I have to say, because it means that I have very few reference books available, and so I must ask the reader’s patience for my failure to give accurate references. However, as I do not expect to be within reach of appropriate library facilities for quite some time, I feel I should write what I have to say without the appropriate backing of footnotes.

Long-time readers of New Blackfriars will no doubt groan on finding that I want to revive in some measure the controversy over artificial methods of birth control which filled so many pages in the late sixties. My intention is not to go over the whole ground, Papal authority, rights of conscience, and so on, but to argue that the “conservative” position is intelligible, given a certain number of presuppositions, which, admittedly, are far from being generally made explicit by those who in this matter are conservatives; and, moreover, if these presuppositions, which are not tied to specifically Catholic dogmatic positions, are denied, then those who deny them seem to be faced with problems of ethical philosophy much wider than the single question of contraception. To put it rather differently, the dispute over contraception seems to be a’ a very close analogue of the process outlined by T. S. Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s argument is that scientific research is advanced neither by great minds making great discoveries nor by a multitude of small discoveries opening the way for major innovations; rather, once a scientific discipline is established, it possesses a “paradigm”, a set of mutually consistent accepted ideas within which research is conducted and discoveries made.

One of the most intractable questions involved in the whole programme of research undertaken by the Religious Experience Research Unit is: “What kind of experience counts as religious?” Very wisely, RERU have not, as yet, given themselves any definite answer to this question. But at least some of them realise that an answer will have to be found eventually (This Time-Bound Ladder, 1977, p. 48). Sir Alister Hardy seems to envisage an answer emerging from the actual empirical research itself, but, as I pointed out in my last article, (New Blackfriars, February, 1979), he can be convicted of being more dependent on certain dogmatic presuppositions himself than he seems prepared to admit. I find it difficult to see how any collection of reports of experiences, backed up by any number of observations and investigations, could yield a definition of religion, independently of any kind of doctrinal principle. At some stage I strongly suspect that RERU will find them selves faced with the need to make a serious study of religious and metaphysical doctrines propounded by different individuals and schools of thought. This Time-Bound Ladder is a lightweight, but interesting, beginning. Obviously no one is going to regard a series of after-dinner conversations as a substitute for careful theological and philosophical enquiry; but it may well be the case that this kind of informal airing of issues picked more or less at random was, in fact, the most appropriate mode of encounter, at this stage of the investigation, between RERU and the theorists. The results, at any rate, make rewarding reading. But they make awkward reviewing material.