I first met Gareth thirty years ago, almost to the day. I was a guest at Quarr Abbey. I was considering on which path the Lord was leading me; he was already a monk of Quarr. It was his duty that week to serve at the guests’ table in the refectory. One day, a Friday I think, he brought in a collection of dishes that included a very unappetizing looking fish, a kind of bloater or something, and a dish of white, lumpy sauce that looked suspiciously like rice pudding. The guests eyed each other nervously while Gareth looked at us encouragingly. All of us had heard of the horrors of the monastic cuisine, so we embarked on this voyage of gastronomic discovery obediently, if not with enthusiasm. I poured the white sauce on the bloater and stoically munched my way through it. The white sauce was, of course, rice pudding. Gareth had mixed the dishes up and brought them all at the same time! The first time I was treated to his wonderful smile was when he realized his mistake and saw the rueful expression of the guests. I shall not see that smile again this side of eternity, and how it pains me.

I have always thought that this first encounter said something about both of us. It showed Gareth’s flair, sense of adventure, experimentation and imagination; all qualities that he was to show to great effect in later years. It showed my docility and sense of obedience, all qualities that have been so absent from my own life ever since, as my brethren will confirm.

When Gareth did his degree in Theology at Oxford, he chose as an optional paper ‘Comparative Religion’. Typically it never occurred to him that he might study the texts in translation, and so over the summer he acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and Japanese. This was very disconcerting for his tutor who did not know a word of either language! So I had to find a tutor in the School of Oriental Languages who told me that he could not imagine how anyone could have so rapidly learned so much. So it is in honour of Gareth’s interest in this area that I wish to offer a few thoughts on the relationship of Christianity and other religions. Having been for nine years a Jack of all trades and Master of the Dominican Order, I have no special expertise, except about airports and exotic foods. But this never inhibited the vigorous arguments that Gareth and I had about everything, usually with copious whisky, and which I miss more than I can say.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel the risen Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Go and make disciples of all the nations’. Christianity was from the beginning a missionary religion. That is why it was transformed in the first few years from a Jewish sect into a faith that includes us. From the middle of the last century onwards we can see a growing doubt about this mission. What right have we to export our faith? And especially after September 11th, we may wonder if we are not adding to tensions around the world, as Christians and Muslims compete with claims for the truth?

Gareth Moore loved music, and he loved, in particular, the music of J. S. Bach. He owned an extensive collection of Bach recordings and could quote from the choral works, especially the chorales, from memory. One year, as I recall, he devoted himself to learning to play the Goldberg Variations on the piano. Gareth and I became acquainted through the Oxford Bach Choir, where our singing together grew into a long friendship whose conversational mainstays were music, theology and philosophy. One of the special joys of our friendship over the years was a series of conversations about the theology and tonal allegory of Bach’s great renderings of Christ’s Passion—the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion.

Bach’s Passions were the subject of several lecture series Gareth had given in his later years, and though at least one of the series of lectures (delivered in French!) was tape-recorded, it is our loss that Gareth did not collect more systematically his many insights into Bach’s musical theology. I was fortunate, however, to participate with Gareth in several colloquia on both Passions, occasions which allowed us both to explore in an intelligent though not strictly academic setting the meditative dynamic of Bach’s work. I am indebted to Gareth for much of what I know about Bach, as for so many other things human and divine. And however deficient my own appreciation of Bach may be, it is the product of a love which Gareth shared so generously in his gentle and penetrating conversation.

I came to know Gareth Moore’s work, initially, by being asked to be the publisher’s reader for what was later published as Believing in God (T.&T. Clark 1988). The book presents one of the most masterly analyses of “belief in God” in the philosophy of religion. The original title of the manuscript was “God as Nothing,” in which it was argued that we cannot understand belief in God without understanding what it means to become nothing before him. I suggested, foolishly perhaps, that the title should be changed. On the one hand, given a culture that emphasizes rights more than obligations, I feared that talk of human beings as “nothing” would be mistaken for a denigration of them. On the other hand, I feared that the denial of God as a “something” would be misunderstood as reductionism, or even atheism. The change of title, while it makes central the author’s concern with belief in God, does not indicate the distinctiveness of its discussions. In any event, the book has not had the attention it deserves.

I invited Gareth Moore to the annual philosophy of religion conference at Claremont Graduate University more often than any other speaker. He read the following papers: “Tradition, Authority and the Hiddenness of God” published in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (Macmillan 1995); “Death and Transcendence,” published in Religion without Transcendence? ed. D.Z Phillips and Timothy Tessin (Macmillan 1997); and “Hearing the Voice of God” to be published in Biblical Concepts and Our World ed. D.Z Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Palgrave).

Gareth Moore arrived at Corpus to read P. P. E. about two years after I did. We soon became friends, not least because we were always the last two people at the college philosophy society, finishing off the wine. Gareth (who was then known as ‘Gary’ — a fact he later denied) claimed that in his Finals, he — G. E. Moore — was the only candidate for the new optional paper ‘Russell and Wittgenstein’. In 1969, his first year as a graduate student, he moved into 50 Abingdon Road, where I also lived. The landlady was the widow of a man who was said to have taught Edward Heath the organ. Gareth had just returned to the Church. Although we knew that he liked going on retreats to monasteries, he had not, to that point, had any religious belief.

By the time Gareth came to Blackfriars, I had left Oxford to teach in Liverpool. But I kept an Oxford base for the vacations and we met regularly until the mid nineties. We were not in much contact when he was in Belgium and had just resumed normal dining and drinking engagements when he fell ill. We kept in telephone connection until his death.

During our long friendship, we discussed many things, most commonly connected with religion. (My views are those of a rather conservative ‘anglo-catholic’.) But we did not often discuss philosophy. There was one reason for this. Wittgenstein is a philosopher who divides people, and Gareth was a root and branch Wittgensteinian, whereas Wittgenstein has always struck me, from first reading, as being more or less a fraud.

A feature of much modem sacramental theology, and indeed theology in general, is a distrust of traditional metaphysical categories such as ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ Much of the impetus for this has arisen from the critique of metaphysics instigated by Martin Heidegger, which has sought to overcome the “totalising” tendency of traditional Western thought. In the theological sphere this position has generally taken the form of regarding metaphysics as imposing a straitjacketing framework upon the intersubjective dynamic of grace and symbolic mediation.

It is the aim of this article to question this critique as it appears in what is perhaps the locus classicus of the post-Heideggerian approach to sacramental theology, Louis-Marie Chauvet’s very fine book, Symbol and Sacrament. It is not the aim of this article to examine Chauvet’s sacramental theology per se, but, rather, to evaluate one of the principal motivating factors behind his theology, namely, the rejection of metaphysics. It will be argued that Chauvet’s concerns do not entail a rejection of metaphysics tout court. In addition, it will be argued that the non-reductive naturalist worldviews of modem mainstream British moral realists such as James Griffin, John McDowell and David Wiggins effectively undermine the dichotomies underpinning the rejection. This has the advantage of lessening the apparent differences between different theological camps through the establishment of a basis of common intelligibility. Although there have been other attempts to reconcile Chauvet’s theology with metaphysics, most notably with the process metaphysics of Whitehead, this article approaches the problem from a more traditional metaphysical viewpoint and thereby one more likely to command widespread agreement.