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.

This article is concerned with the practice of philosophy in religious institutions such as seminaries or the study-houses of religious orders. But it is clear that the possibility of such a limitation – the practice of philosophy in some particular setting – is itself problematic. Philosophizing would seem to claim that it is independent or can become independent of the setting of its practice in all relevant respects. Speaking as a theologian (as I intend to do throughout this article) and claiming therefore complete freedom to appeal to revelation in Scripture and the Church, I must maintain that there is one setting, one Sitz im Leben, of which philosophizing can never become independent: the concrete economy of sin and salvation which embraces humanity and the whole of creation with it. But to admit this is not yet to commit oneself to the view that the theological Sitz im Leben of philosophizing is philosophically relevant, i.e. that philosophical discourse is dependent for its shape and content on the theological existence of philosophers. If it is possible for any intellectual activity to release itself from the constraints of the concrete conditions of its exercise – we can think in spite of a feverish cold though not when we are delirious – then there would seem to be no obvious reason why philosophizing, the intellectual activity par excellence, should not precisely define itself as just that discourse which actively releases itself from the particularity of all and any concrete conditions of its exercise, including theological ones, by simple (though perhaps costing) pretermission or by reflexive objectivization.

It is noteworthy that in 1943, when the whole world was embroiled in war, the Holy See issued an Encyclical letter on Biblical studies and the opportune means of promoting them. Much stress is laid on new efforts, certainly, but also on new preoccupations, new investigations, new orientations, in a word, on the changed conditions of Biblical study, ‘for deeper archaeological research has given rise to new questions offering occasion for a closer investigation of the subject’. Indeed, we are urged to pay close attention to archaeological findings; ‘Archaeology’, or its equivalent, is referred or appealed to some six or seven times and unquestionably holds a high place among the many endowments expected of those whose duty it is to make known the Biblical authors’ meanings.

And so a note on some recent Biblical archaeology will not seem out of place.

Writers on Biblical archaeology like to refer to ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ evidence about Biblical narratives; and it is usually said that very few finds bear directly on the Bible, whereas the indirect contribution is very rich. But this division into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ seems fruitless and unessential; rather should we say that any little information, from any source whatever, however tenuous, if it throws light on the sacred text, is to be highly prized, and ‘receives an added and nobler dignity, a consecration as it were, when it is used to shed a brighter light on divine things’. It is true no doubt that we must widen the term ‘Archaeology’ and bring in considerations of topography, history, and in fact anything illustrative; possibly ‘sacred antiquities’ would describe better that ensemble of findings which help us to know the mind of the inspired writer and the way in which he expressed it.

‘L’immensite de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’, said Pascal, and we are all familiar with the ways in which European attitudes to the place of man in the universe have changed since astronomy rendered him small, lonely and vulnerable. But the idea of the expanding universe in infinite space, while it robbed man of a central place as lord of creation below the heavens, did not take away the idea of brotherhood between men. That deprivation has to do with another kind of frightening immensity: the unthinkable length of the human past.

It is less than two hundred years since educated Europeans believed that Adam was very close to them in time. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788, the work from which Keats took his knowledge of classical mythology, begins with a chronology following the guidance of Dr Blair and Archbishop Ussher: the creation of the world is given in 4004 B.C. and the birth of Moses in 1571. Thus the gap between Adam and Moses was of the same length as the gap between Moses and Basil the First at Constantinople in 862 A.D. Chronologies varied, but none placed the first man so far away in time that imagination could not encompass the distance. Moreover, this nearness was a matter not only of time but of human nature. Adam was no less human than they, no less intelligent, no less feeling: there was a real sense in which he was not only an ancestor but a brother. Made in the image of God, he was of noble appearance; fallen through sin, he was a fellow-sufferer of human misfortune; formed out of dust, he was lowly; speaking with God in Paradise he was touched with glory.

This article will discuss the emergence of an increasingly cogent argument made by Pope John XXIII for a redefined role of episcopal pastoral governance in the (ante) preparatory phase of the Second Vatican Council and during early conciliar debate. Pope John will be presented as encouraging a renewed role for bishops in his public orations preceding the Council. This continued in his support of the conciliar process and encouragement given to senior bishops at critical moments during its first session. As contemporary understandings of episcopal governance were questioned before and at the Council, increasing numbers of bishops saw the possibilities of revitalising their governance role in a pastoral mode. Its contemporary relevance lies in Pope Francis’ call to build a synodal church in which episcopal governance is exercised at the local and universal levels. Today, this requires individual bishops ‘to assume their responsibilities to govern their own diocese, always in consultation with the faithful.’1

Most primitive peoples are without anything which we should call a theology, and civilised people often know as little about their systematic theology as though they were without it. Such people live their religions, without regarding them also as subjects for investigation. If they do investigate, it is with the intention of showing the truth of their religion, or of being reassured in its truth, or of understanding more of that truth. Religious controversy has always been about other matters than the value of religion, and between people who practise some form of religion this is still so. It does not occur to them that religion has a ‘value’ or alternatively no ‘value’ for society; what can be evaluated are particular religious beliefs and practices. The study of religious beliefs and practices, however, has tended to fascinate those who do not practise any religion, and would claim to have none. Mr Dawson has quite naturally found it impossible to ignore such a public, and the literature on which it has been formed and fed.

No man would attempt to write upon the legal system or economic transactions of another society, still less of Society, without first taking stock of his knowledge of such matters in his own country, and without in some way systematising what he supposed to be law and economics at home. Religion, unfortunately, has been served like art, which everyone supposes himself to be versed in, without either the labour of study or the familiarity of practice.

Theological pluralism has been pressed upon us with increasing enthusiasm over the past twenty years. It has been seen as the only appropriate response to the cultural fragmentation of our world, and also as the continuation of what has in fact been the nature of theological discourse from the first. We had been too easily misled, by a harmonizing biblical exegesis on the one hand, and a Denzinger-based version of doctrinal history on the other, into supposing that the articulation of what is believed by Christians to be true about God and the world naturally falls into a pattern of tidily unified correlations. The pendulum has now swung a fair way towards the opposite pole from this.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?

‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.

According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.

It is only right and proper in a world which seems to be going rapidly more and more insane that good Christians should make every effort to sound the recall to Reason. It is only our bare duty to reaffirm the elements and applications of the natural law in a world which seems to be becoming more and more insensible to the natural law. For this reason, it is impossible to over-estimate the debt we owe to those Catholic thinkers who have made it their task in recent years to re-state the natural ethics of war and peace and to apply it to modern conditions of international relationships and methods of warfare. It is salutary that the philosophia perennis of ends and means should be reasserted and applied realistically to new sets of facts such as aerial bombardment and bacteriological warfare, to the impending realities of war waged by the sovereign State conditioned by the exigencies of imperialistic capitalist economy.

Yet we shall be mistaken if, having done all these things, we imagine that we have done anything specifically Christian. We are perhaps too ready to call a Christian doctrine of war what are in fact only dictates of the natural reason. Grace does not destroy Nature; Revelation is not contrary to Reason. But the fact remains that we cannot give a distinctively Christian witness to the events in the world around us in terms solely of natural reason and natural law. Nor can I answer the burning question, ‘What am I as a Christian to do in the event of war?’ solely in terms of a natural ethic, however rigorous.

It might seem that to be a Christian and at the same time a feminist involves few conflicts for the individual. In John 10:10 Christ said: “I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly”. Surely this is what feminism is about too — enabling women to live their lives “more abundantly”, by utilising all the potential which lies within them. One of the major achievements of the women’s movement has been to give women a growing consciousness of how great that potential is and the realisation that the peculiar gifts of women are not necessarily worthless because a male-orientated world sees little value in them. Women have discovered in themselves a capacity for assessing their own value and utilising their various potentialities as fully as possible. Christians, too, male and female, have a duty to be fully human and to realise their own worth. Offering ourselves unreservedly to God involves of necessity a developing awareness of what it is we are offering. It would seem, then, that the feminist Christian should see her feminism as enriching her Christianity and her Christianity as reinforcing her feminism.

Nevertheless, in practice, areas of conflict do arise. One such is the issue of abortion. Feminists have consistently campaigned for abortion on demand and the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” has become one of the most familiar of the women’s movement. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that one cannot be a true feminist while not supporting the notion that abortions should be freely available to all women who ask for them.

The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.