St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

Anglicanism's relationship with its Reformation heritage represents a tension. It looks to the Reformation as the movement from which an English Church, independent of papal authority, was inaugurated. At the same time, it refuses to be labelled as a “church of the Reformation”, pointing to its continuity with a much longer history of Christian practice in Britain. The growth of the Anglican Communion and current controversies over church order, the interpretation of scripture and the exercise of authority make Anglican identity difficult to define. Identity would once have been sought in liturgy, but the view that liturgy completely enshrines Anglican doctrine has been convincingly put to rest by scholarship since the 1970s. This paper argues that the liturgical legacy of the Reformation (especially use of the vernacular, concern for the orderly reading and interpretation of scripture, and attention given to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist) offers categories that can help to form possible approaches to the current crisis of Anglican identity.

The story of the gallant attempt of the later Middle Ages to win Asia for the Church is so often passed over with the scantiest reference, even by Catholic historians, that it is almost unknown. It covered more than a century; a century whose short opening years of high hopes were followed by long dreary ones of disappointment, persecution and martyrdom, to end in the destruction of all achievement and the expulsion of the missionaries.

The first great missionary movement, which converted the northern barbarians, was the work of the Benedictines, while the glories of the sixteenth century in the East belong to the Society of Jesus. The great missionaries of the later Middle Ages were the Franciscans and Dominicans. Both Orders bore the brunt of the battle equally throughout Asia, but Cathay and Central Asia was particularly the sphere of the Minorites, while India, Persia and the Caspian Steppes was that of the Preachers.

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

I examine the question of how tradition is received and passed on within the Church's Councils with specific attention to the problems of continuity and discontinuity. I use the example of Vatican II's ‘Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions’ to explore the question of hermeneutics in both receiving and passing on the teachings of the Church. By looking at the historical development of this document I try to show that three important factors at work: first, the question of biblical interpretation; second, the question of determining which elements of tradition are authoritative and which not; and third, the influence of non-theological factors upon theological articulations. Through examining these factors, I argue for one particular approach to Council hermeneutics that is able to include and correct three other approaches. I argue that correct interpretations of Council documents do not represent the closure of tradition, but the opening up of tradition to future reception and re-formulation.

Cornelius Ernst once sought a pattern to English Dominican recruitment and found none. We often come to the Order of Friars Preachers by the strength of chance encounters or even reading; the force of example of one or many witnesses may play its part in leading us there and certainly it is individual witness that plays a part in keeping us there.

Names such as Bede Jarrett, Vincent McNabb and Hugh Pope were on the Catholic Truth Society pamphlets which an eleven-year old convert read in self-education, before and after his entry into the Church.

Raimond Gaita's moral philosophy is distinguished by, among other things, its attention to the role of embodied, enacted witness in disclosing certain moral values, and its understanding of the emotions as forms of thought. In this paper, I consider how Gaita's insights on these matters may be applied to certain questions in the philosophy of religion, paying particular attention to the nature of religious experience and ‘the problem of evil’. I suggest that Gaita's discussion of how we come to recognise moral values or ‘meanings’ can be extended to the question of how we might recognise religious meanings. On this view, religious experience may take the form of an appreciation of the meaning borne by a material context (rather than, for example, some supra-sensory encounter with a supernatural agent), and our sense of the goodness or otherwise of the world may be answerable to the authoritative example of particular lives.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.

In the wake of the (almost) universal rejection of neo-Thomism after the Second Vatican Council it was normal to view St. Thomas's theology within the prism of certain stereotypes. A particularly favoured generalisation said that in Thomas's theology Aristotle had trumped the Bible turning theology away from its principle source and power. In recent years however there has been a renewal in what this paper argues is a more holistic reading of St. Thomas focussing especially on his sapiential understanding of theology. Names synonymous with this renewal are Torrell, Emery, Pinckaers, Cessario, and Levering. It is the purpose of this paper to highlight the source of this more sapiential reading of St. Thomas by discussing four key dimensions of his understanding of theology: 1) what Thomas means by wisdom 2) the contemplative nature of theology 3) the unitive nature of theology 4) the importance of prayer and holiness for theology.

Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest—akin, perhaps, to a paper on the Second International or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism. But fascism is no longer of merely antiquarian interest, if indeed it ever was. As the crisis of world monopoly capitalism intensifies, fascism is once more a real political issue in the advanced capitalist societies; and some historical analysis of its constitutive structures is absolutely indispensable to the political task of rooting it out. This isn’t easy, for a number of reasons. For one thing, fascism is a phenomenon of considerable complexity, and for that reason among others lends itself temptingly to vulgarly reductive explanations whose theoretical bankruptcy leads straight to political impotence. For another thing, there isn’t always enough time to plough one’s way through the history and theory of fascism when the National Front are gathering at the local town hall. And so Front-hunting can become a seductive displacement of the real task of examining what fascism actually signifies. There is, too, the problem of knowing how seriously at the moment to take fascism in our society—of steering a line between that bland dismissal of it on which it historically thrives, and diverting one’s political energies from the major tasks which confront us—the destruction of the bourgeois state through the building of revolutionary proletarian leadership—to a more immediate but (at present) structurally less determinant issue. In this, the issue of fascism is rather like that of sexuality: it’s never easy to draw the line between pathological obsession and ascetic underplaying.

To risk a reductive formulation: fascism is essentially the attempt to ensure the rule of monopoly capitalism in its purest, most untrammelled, most invulnerable form. But of course monopoly capitalism is extremely reluctant to do any such thing.

What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.

The ‘naturalizing’ agenda in contemporary secularist philosophy is often presented in opposition to traditional theism. But looking at the history of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ reveals a discontinuity between how these terms are currently understood and how they were understood in the past. The modern ‘naturalist’, in insisting that all phenomena should be brought within the domain of the natural, is advancing a thesis that many classical, medieval and early-modern philosophers and theologians would have regarded as fairly self-evident. What has changed is not that there is a new determination to include within the natural domain what was previously excluded from it, but rather that there is a radical shift in how the natural domain is to be understood. This paper argues that the philosophically interesting question is not whether or not we should be naturalists, but which of two naturalisms we should adopt: secular naturalism, with its neutralist conception of nature in general and of human nature in particular, or theistic naturalism, according to which the natural world and our own nature bear the stamp of the divine. It turns out the former (secularist) view is vulnerable to serious difficulties, on both the epistemic and the moral fronts.