The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.

From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).

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.

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.

This essay surveys a range of claims that Aquinas is a foundationalist, along with the rarer position that he is not. It suggests the arguments for holding he is a foundationalist are fundamentally flawed, and that he cannot be considered to hold a foundationalist epistemology, although for reasons more radical than those hitherto suggested. It examines the account of scientia and sacred doctrine in Summa theologiae I.1, with particular attention to its account of metaphor. Sacred doctrine, often taken to be based on scripture, is in fact based on God's self-knowledge, which is mediated by scripture. Aquinas acknowledges that scripture is riddled with figurative language and that metaphor is necessary to sacred doctrine. He emphasises the propensity for human reasoning to go astray, and in virtue of its processes of inference, to be incapable to representing the simplicity of divine knowledge with complete accuracy. Both with respect to its structures of argumentation and the figurative base from which it argues, Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine is remote from foundationalist accounts of knowledge. Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine, the most sure of all scientiae, emphasises its fragility and provisionality; its purpose is not to provide certitude, but to provoke reflection.

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

This is the story of one Dominican’s following the Gospel with faith, hope and above all charity.

There was a restlessness about Herbert. All his life he was in some ways an adolescent. He had the virtues of an adolescent, and sometimes an adolescent’s infuriating ways. But our weaknesses, under God’s grace become our strengths. Immensely loyal to his friends, he liked to shock. Questing, critical, radical, ever seeking for the meaning of life, and for ‘meaning’ tout court, he could be quite arrogant in his own convictions. It did not mean that he could not brook disagreement. Intolerant he could be of what he called ‘playing games’, but he delighted in argument. He could not resist being outrageous at the expense of pompous authority. His Catholic orthodoxy, expressed in contemporary idiom, was unshakeable; his Dominican, questioning, obedience was absolute. Like adolescents, when asked questions which they find intrusive, he was economical in speech; this he honed into a fine precision, admirably editing out superfluous words. The adolescent’s unsureness of himself he turned into the humility of loving himself not for his own achievements, but for God’s gift of being God’s lover, able to speak with, and thank God. Still he hated going into print and agonised over sermons. Leaving instructions to any literary executor he talked about the “the bits of paper I leave behind. ... If I hear you have burnt the lot I shall merely add this to the eternal (no! perpetual) sufferings I shall be undergoing”

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”.

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.

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.

Despite the perceived ‘human rights revolution’ within Church teaching since Vatican II, a measure of dissonance survives between secular rights theory and practice on the one hand and, on the other, ethical thinking informed by the natural law tradition. This article examines some recent developments in that secular theory and practice for signs of possible rapprochement. In particular, it considers the way in which the emergence of ‘disability’ as a rights issue, for example in the recently ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, has contributed to the transformation of equality and human rights law and so has helped shape a broader transformation of rights theory and practice. Central to that transformation has been the ambition of establishing human rights as the basis of a progressive political programme, as witnessed for example by the work of Sandra Fredman and by the Hamlyn Lectures of Conor Gearty, whose Catholic provenance makes his approach especially salient. The article concludes by considering Herbert McCabe's interpretation of Aquinas’ ethics, especially in his Law, Love and Language, and proposes some potentially fruitful points of contact between McCabe's approach and the identified developments in secular rights theory.

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’.

In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”

The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.

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.

Before I begin I have a confession to make: it was not I who chose the subject of this address. It was understood, at first, that I was to speak about Faith, a task quite beyond my power. Then, without asking me, the organiser of this gathering changed from this high theological theme to the simple question: ‘Is the Christian of this earth'?’ At first I was disconcerted by the apparent simplicity of this question which demands the obvious answer: ‘Of course the Christian is of this earth. We have only to look at ourselves’. But, this first reaction over, it occurred to me that those who chose the question had not mistaken its importance, and the urgency of an adequate answer which it requires of us. It brings us, in point of fact, into the very heart of our own personal history, and the history of the Church. To have to give my answer to this question in the presence of your Eminence is an honour of which I am well aware, an honour which would certainly alarm me if I did not know that here we are all of one family and that I stand beside the most indulgent and most understanding of fathers.

If I begin by considering myself, and start with my own case, as one always should, then it is only too true that I am of this earth, as also the Académie Française ‘is of this earth, the Légion d’Hon-neur is of this earth, the theatres, the big newspapers, the editors are of this earth, my house, my lands and my loves are of this earth.

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.