You can take the reports of the resurrection of Christ as literally as you like; you can take them as simple accounts of the historical facts. There are some slight difficulties here because there seem to be some inconsistencies between the different stories, but one thing they all have most certainly in common. None of them says or implies or hints that Jesus simply woke up from death, as from a sleep, and got up and strolled out of the tomb back to ordinary life. There have been people who have said that Jesus did wake up in this way but that was because they thought he had not died, so there wasn’t a real resurrection anyway. Nothing whatever in the New Testament suggests this.

If you take the scriptures, the earliest creeds, the writings of the early Fathers, the whole mainstream Christian tradition through the Middle Ages to our own time—you find no one has ever suggested that the resurrection meant the resuscitation of a corpse. For this reason I get a little tired of modern clergymen telling me that this is not what the resurrection is. I never thought it was; my Church never thought it was; nobody has ever thought it was.

What we have believed is that Jesus, because of his loving obedience to his Father’s mission, obedience even unto death on the cross, was raised up by his Father through the work of the Spirit, and became transformed, transfigured and is now with us as the living risen Christ.

The celebrating of a Marian Year in 1987—8 helped to stimulate reflection on the process by which faith in God is evolving through the medium of the Church’s Marian tradition. By highlighting the figure of Mary, it posed the question: how are the Church’s Marian doctrines able to articulate their truth within the variety of contexts in which they are received?

In the period between Lumen Gentium and Redemptoris Mater* we have witnessed a theological debate concerning the symbolic character of statements made by the Church about Mary—a debate that questions whether the Church’s Marian doctrines are necessarily grounded in historical events. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the contours of the debate concerning theological statements about Mary and to suggest that Bernard Lonergan’s notion of conversion can provide a more adequate contemporary understanding of the ongoing role of Marian symbols and doctrines in the lives of believers.

The contemporary debate about the place and role of women in the Church is proving to be a painful and difficult business. Language itself contributes to the problems in the sense that certain tacit assumptions —overwhelmingly negative about women—are embedded deep in our talk about human persons. The answer is not to be found simply in tinkering with non-sexist language. The practical difficulties facing women are compounded by the fact that the language in which the discussion is conducted depends for its meaning on gender images that are implicitly discriminatory. The clue to this problem is to be found in certain key assumptions about the nature of human persons.

The experience of intra-human discrimination has certain common elements. Those discriminated against are in one way or another denied rights accorded to other human beings, their needs are subordinated to those of others, and their behaviour tends to be interpreted in causal rather than psychological terms. What is characteristic about this experience is that it involves a refusal to treat those discriminated against as persons in the full sense of that term, for to recognize someone as a person is precisely to accord them certain rights, to take note of their needs, and to see them as subjects whose experience can only be adequately explained in terms of psychology. In this essay we shall attempt to uncover those features of our talk about persons that give rise to the possibility of discrimination and following this we shall consider the particular difficulties facing women.

It has been customary for philosophers when analysing the concept of a person to begin by listing the kinds of things we say about persons.

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.

On 8 February BBC 1 broadcast a programme on the work of Dr. Robert J. White, the American neurologist based in Cleveland, who is world-renowned for his experiments, which he calls ‘body transplants’, in which the body of one monkey is transplanted onto the head of another, through a joining of the carotid arteries and jugular veins, and a clamping together of the two spinal columns. In his most successful experiment, the creature remained alive for seven days, though it was paralysed from the neck down. A photograph showed it lying down, its face contorted in a grimace.

Hundreds of such experiments, involving primates of all sorts, dogs, cats, and various other animals, have been carried out in many countries, notably the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Dr. White has been showered with awards by his peers, both for his research and for his work with brain-damaged human accident victims. At the same time he is vilified by animal rights campaigners.

He says he can ‘understand’ why some people feel outraged at his experiments and his proposals for further research; people also felt outraged at the thought of kidney and heart transplants—but they are now commonplace. True, he admits, the brain is different, as it seems bound up with the very existence of a person in the way that their heart or kidneys do not, but as long as helping human life is the goal, there is no reason why the brain should not also be treated as transplantable, either with its original head, or into another brainless head (though the latter operation has never succeeded and is technically much more difficult).