Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.

The tradition that the third gospel was written by Luke the doctor dies hard. We may realize that the ‘Luke the doctor’ of Colossians 4, 14 is not necessarily the same Luke as the one to whom the gospel is attributed (just as there is no shadow of an indication that the Mark of the second gospel is any of the Marks mentioned in the Acts and the Epistles). We may know that all attempts to show that the author of the third gospel used medical language collapse, simply because there was no such thing as technical medical language in those days. Yet there remains a sympathy with human suffering and appreciation of the many-sidedness of men’s characters, a power to make a penetrating yet kindly assessment which is often —rightly or wrongly—associated with the medical man, the Dr Camerons or even the Dr Findlays of this world. But Luke is no country doctor from the highlands or the valleys, and it is because of this that his special preoccupation with rich and poor is especially significant to Christians of an affluent society brought face to face with poverty.

Luke stands out among the other New Testament writers by a certain grace and dignity. The gospel of Mark, on which a large part of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels is based, is undisguisedly Kleinliteratur, stories told uncomplicatedly in simple, popular form, without literary pretension; he writes the sort of Greek which was probably spoken by the lower classes in the cities of the Roman empire.

The Second Vatican Council taught that, in interpreting Holy Scripture, we must search out the meanings intended by the sacred writers, and that, in doing so, we must have regard for literary forms. I write as a layman in such matters, and will probably make mistakes on important points of detail: but I venture to write on the subject because I doubt that my general assessment is wrong. This is that, in the style of Biblical criticism now apparently prevalent within the Catholic Church, the appeal to literary forms has become little more than a formal device, serving to conceal, possibly from themselves, what the exegetes really mean; and what they mean is usually something inconsistent with any belief, however qualified, in the inspiration of Scripture, and often with more fundamental articles of Christian faith.

The general principle that we must take account of the literary form adopted is clear and evident. What is intended to be read as allegory must be read as allegory; what is written as fiction or as historical romance must be read as fiction or as historical romance. In reading historical accounts, we must try to assess what liberties the author was allowing himself, and not give a misplaced weight to details for which he was not meaning to vouch: we must distinguish reporting from reconstruction, must be aware of the use of devices such as compression and dramatisation. But, in applying this principle, we must, as much as in all other matters, submit to the evidence, not bend it to our will. Acceptance of the principle of literary forms is an acknowledgment of the more general principle that inspiration is not dictation. The inspired writers did not act as transcribing machines: it was not merely the hand that held the pen that was inspired, but the creative human mind itself.

I want to speak about the place of Fides et Ratio within the parameters of the twentieth century Thomistic revival. To do that I must first describe the revival Three strains of Thomistic interpretation characterized the revival before Vatican II: Aristotelian Thomism, Existential Thomism and Transcendental Thomism. The first two were a posteriori in their epistemology. The mind abstractly draws its fundamental conceptual content from the human knower’s contact with the self-manifestly real things given in sensation. Among the concepts abstracted are the transcendentals, chief among which is the ratio ends, the notion or concept of being. It is an analogical commonality, and so a sameness within difference, whose analogates are absolutely everything, actual and conceivable.

The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public funds, will be increasingly forced to turn to private means, sometimes under conditions which threaten the upholding of academic objectivity. There is, however, a possibly irony in the Newcastle case, an irony which should cause us to ponder more deeply the pros and cons involved: the professorial research fellow at Newcastle has a brief to reflect, theologically, on the situation in the inner cities, so although the appointment has been made against the background of governmental withdrawal of financial support from the universities, the results of the new professor’s research are much more likely to be a critical embarrassment to the government than the usual more abstruse, more detached and ‘scholarly’ products of research in religious studies.

Of course, pointing up the irony is not to resolve the argument. And old whiggish purists, like Mr Tony Benn, exhibit a proper integrity when they insist that we should not look to defeat Mrs Thatcher by disinterring the power of privilege, whether princely, aristocratic or religious.

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.

It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.

I (1) outline two accounts the Catholic Church gives of the human soul, calling them the Lateran and the Vienne doctrines, and (2) argue they are inconsistent. (3) I run over several difficulties in the more popular Lateran doctrine. (4) I look at three uses to which Catholics might want to put a theory of the soul, and question whether either of the theories on offer can meet their needs. (5) I distinguish the Biblical idea of resurrection from the Greek idea of immortality. Finally (6) I commend the Vienne doctrine as philosophy but advise supplementing it with a view of creation, salvation and sanctification as forming a continuum rather than a discontinuous series of episodes.

Burundi is very small by African standards, almost the same size as Belgium, its former colonial master. Situated at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, Burundi’s neighbours are Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. Hills like vast sandcastles rise from a narrow plain along the lake to heights of over 2000m on the Nile-Congo watershed. Burundi’s population is estimated at 3.7 million. Because the density of population is so high, and because there are no minerals or other natural resources worth exploiting commercially, all except the educated elite are poor subsistence farmers and herdsmen. The sale of coffee—nearly all of which is bought by the United States, supposedly for political reasons—accounts for some 80 per cent of all foreign exchange earnings, though attempts are now being made to diversify agricultural production with tea, cotton and rice as secondary cash-crops.

Three ethnic groups make up the population: the pygmoid Twa, only per cent of the total and politically of no account, the agriculturist Hutu, a Bantu tribe who make up 85 per cent, and the cattle-herding Tutsi (14 per cent). Legend and some facts assert that the Tutsi are of Nilotic-Hamitic origins, that they came late to Burundi and reduced the Hutu to client status by leasing them cows in return for personal service and food. ‘Tutsi’ is somewhat of a simplification : there appear to have been two separate invasions, first the Abanyaruguru clans, literally ‘those from the north’, and then later the Hima clans who entered and now occupy mainly the southeast part of the country.

Spokesmen for the present government claim that it is the colonialist who is to blame for the very existence of tribal conflict in Burundi

In this paper I defend a ‘strong compatibility’ thesis. According to this thesis Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity; Christianity is compatible only with Marxism. I further argue that for Marxists to accept this proposition on the grounds that they have no reason to object to the personal combination of Marxism and Christianity is to miss the point both of Christianity and of their own Marxism. This concession is, from the point of view of the Marxist, quite unprincipled. It is to misconstrue both the true nature of the Marxist critique of religion and the true nature of the religion of which Marxism is the critique. But more about this in due course.

First, though, what sort of reasons are invoked against the ‘compatibility’ thesis? They seem to fall, generally, into two categories. First, there are objections to the Christian belief system itself. Secondly, there are objections to the social and historical role of the set of institutions which has espoused that belief-system.

To the belief-system of Christianity on almost any account of what it maintains, defenders of the incompatibility thesis have a form of objection which I shall call ‘ontological’. This objection, taken on its own is, it seems to me, both the most widely canvassed and the weakest. It is roughly this : Christians believe that the universe is peopled with entities and agencies and activities and events—a God, an act of creation, an act of redemption, souls, grace, post-mortem survival and all the rest—all of which the Marxist is, as a Marxist, committed to the denial of. Christians are, thus, ontologically theists, spiritualists and mentalists; Marxists, on the other hand are ontologically materialists. Since ontological immaterialism and ontological materialism cannot both be true, one cannot consistently hold both.

Francis A. Sullivan says that the one Church of Christ continues to exist perfectly in the Catholic Church, and is present imperfectly in other churches and ecclesial communities. However, he thinks Lumen Gentium 8 also enables us to say that the many churches, non-Catholic and Catholic, are all in the one Church of Christ, since to say the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church means no more than “continues to exist in” the Catholic Church. In this way, he denies the identity of the one Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. We point out that magisterial documents since Vatican II have consistently refused this proposal, and have instead spoken only of the one Church being present or operative, according to degrees, in non-Catholic churches and communities. We argue that while it is true there is “ecclesial reality” outside the Catholic Church, in that there are elements of truth and sanctification outside of her, the one Church of Christ of which Vatican II expressly speaks is the Church with all the gifts of unity and instruments for salvation with which Christ endowed it. The Catholic Church is not contained in any larger divinely willed and dominically instituted ecclesial reality, and it is without qualification the one Church of Christ and the one Church of Christ is without qualification the Catholic Church.

The doctrine of divine simplicity in its denial of any real ontological distinction between God’s substance and His attributes commanded a special place within classical theism, finding a forceful expression within Augustine’s metaphysic. However, the simplicity of God is a relatively neglected doctrine within current metaphysical and theistic considerations. This is somewhat strange considering the profound implications it has for theistic matters. Its tenets are inextricably linked to such theistic concerns as immutability, aseity, sovereignty, divine volition and necessity. As such, it is well worth our effort to devote careful attention to the Augustinian conception of God’s simpleness, confronting head-on its seemingly counter-intuitive assertion that there is not any actual distinction between divine substance and its qualities. We will want to first expound the relevant texts to Augustine’s teaching on divine simplicity. After its main features have been identified, our analysis will measure Augustine’s doctrine against some of the more serious contemporary objections.

We initiate our exposition by asking: What is Augustine’s notion of divine simplicity? Augustine’s doctrine rallies around the claim that God is what He has (hoc est quod habet). He remarks, “What is meant by ‘simple’ is that its [the Godhead] being is identical with its attributes,...” (CD XI.10). To gain a fuller appreciation of this pithy formula, it is necessary for us to consider its wider context.

Within De civitate Dei, Augustine begins the tenth chapter of Book XI by stating, “There is then one sole Good, which is simple, and therefore unchangeable; and that is God. By this Good all good things were created; but they are not simple, and for that reason are changeable.”

The purpose of this essay is to explore, and clarify, some key features in Aquinas’ account of the virtue of temperance, with an eye to answering some common objections raised against a positive evaluation of temperance. In particular, I consider three features of Aquinas’ understanding of temperance: First, the role of the rational mean in temperance; second, the role of rightly ordered passions in temperance; and third, the ‘despotic’ control of reason over the passions in temperance. Along the way I consider three common objections to Aquinas’ account of temperance: the objection that temperance can be misused for evil, the objection that temperance devalues effort, and the objection that temperance devalues strong passions and thereby implicitly devalues the goodness of sexuality. In responding to these objections on behalf of Aquinas, I take the opportunity to clarify and slightly extend Aquinas’ account of temperance.

While Richard Dawkins' polemic against religion scores easy points against Christian fundamentalisms, he supposes his target to be much vaster: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods”. Given The God Delusion's lack of extended argument, historical ignorance and unfamiliarity with the literature, the praise it has received from some distinguished scientists is troubling.

This essay seeks, first, to examine some of the book's chief weaknesses – its ignorance of the grammar of “God” and of “belief in God”; the crudeness of its account of how texts are best read; its lack of interest in ethics – and, second, to address the question of what it is about the climate of the times that enables so ill‐informed and badly argued a tirade to be widely welcomed by many apparently well‐educated people.

The latter issue is addressed, first, by considering the illusion, unique to the English‐speaking world, that there is some single set of procedures which uniquely qualify as “scientific” and give privileged access to truth; second, by examining historical shifts in the senses of “religion”; thirdly, by locating Dawkins' presuppositions concerning both “science” and “religion”, his paradoxical belief in progress, and the reception which the book has received, in relation to tensions in our culture signalled, fifty years ago, by C. P. Snow.

At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The essay addresses the complex cultural historical claim that with modernity the earlier unity of reason and sensibility underwent a dissociation that has important consequences for our current predicament and for our present understanding of the relationship between reason, faith and sensibility. Three case studies (Géza Ottlik, T. S. Eliot and Blaise Pascal) are examined in order to establish the nature of the divide and provide an archaeology (with the help of Pascal) of one of its first conceptualisations as well as of an early attempt to heal the growing fissure between what is termed by Pascal as reason and the heart. The second part examines current thought concerning the need to enlarge the narrow Enlightenment conception of reason and the recent call to re-envision its theological contours. The argument is then made that the same procedure should be applied to the theologically long-neglected domain of human sensibility. Theology is registered as also being accountable for internalising and perpetuating the cultural dissociation due to its failure to preserve the traditional theological contours of affectivity and its naivety in leaving the exploration of this domain entirely to the competence of secular philosophy.

Did you know that last December 5 was the Day of the Disabled. No? I’m not surprised. Possibly more people have heard that 1999 is the Year of the Elderly. A large proportion of our population is now over 60, and, frequently with old age comes some degree of disability, so perhaps our disabled citizens will get their share of attention this year. After all, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1955 (Part III) which requires service providers to review their procedures to make sure they do not exclude disabled people, comes into full force in October of this year. Then there is the new Human Rights Bill several of whose clauses cover the disabled, and the setting up by the government of a Disability Rights Commission which will mean that in future those suffering discrimination will have a body to whom they can bring complaints instead of being faced with the need to bring a private prosecution.

So all that remains is to change the attitude to disability in the general community. How do we do this?

First, (this sounds like a Delia Smith recipe) we must bury the Great Disability Debate as to whether it is personal physical limitations which constrict the lives of disabled people (the physical model) or the fact that society is not prepared to adapt itself to encompass the disabled (the social model). The basis for the first of these two approaches is that the disabled must accept that their life-situation is going to be different to that of the able-bodied ; for the second, that the disabled have a right to equal access and opportunities however difficult the circumstances.