Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.

It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.

Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.

In the discourse of a number of theologians there is a perceived gap between spirituality and ‘theology proper’. This gap would not have been perceived or understood by Aquinas, Augustine or others of the long tradition of theological enquiry, since they saw union with God as the highest fruit of theological thinking. There is another gap today between the term ‘spirituality’ used in a loose and decontextualized fashion by the Mind, Body, Spirit industry and those for whom its study is part of mystical theology and its practice part of the church's mystagogia. The fact that many otherwise orthodox believers, as well as those alienated from regular church belief and practice, turn to more esoteric spiritual paths may be a sign that a return to a better-informed and theologically grounded knowledge of the mystical tradition is long overdue.

Robert Barry argues that man's condition in a state of pure nature and man's condition in the state of original sin are one and the same. This article aims to show that this thesis is false and is not the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor teaches that man in pure nature would be more capable of doing the good proportionate to his nature and would be able to love God above all things with a natural love. Important here is the truth posited by many in the Thomist commentatorial tradition, namely, that on account of sin man is directly averted from his supernatural end and at least indirectly averted from his natural end. Furthermore, this thesis has undesirable consequences, albeit consequences unintended by Barry, for Christology and soteriology. We must understand what pertains to human nature as such if we are to understand the various states in which we find human nature, including in Christ. If a natural analogue to supernatural charity cannot even in principle obtain, charity will be something alien to human nature. Christ came not only to elevate us to supernatural life and divine friendship, but to heal human nature.

“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”

Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.

Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:

Baron Friedrich von Huegel wrote to Maude Domenica Petre in February 1910:

My dear, dear Maude,

You, now that Fr. T. is gone, are about the only English Catholic, with whom I have felt, with whom I feel, profoundly at one in these most complex and straining transition-problems (Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Huegel, p. 240).

Fr. T. was of course George Tyrrell, who had died, excomunicated in 1909. Maude, born in 1863, belonged to an old Catholic family which had combined dying for the Pope with a tradition of Cisalpine resistance to intolerable papal decrees. In childhood she resolved to become, when she grew up, a saint, a philosopher and a martyr (p. 6). When doubts assailed her, a learned Jesuit recommended that she should go to Rome to study the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Off she went, accompanied by a chaperon, and her puzzled aunt, Lady Lindsay, used to explain to inquisitive friends: ‘Maude has gone to Rome to study for the priesthood’ (p. 8). Though she wrote ceaselessly and well, her books have long been unobtainable. She has been referred to and exploited in all writings on the Modernist crisis, but she has always appeared as a subordinate figure, the devoted slave of Tyrrell and vestal virgin guarding his sacred flame. Clyde F. Crews has written the first book’ which treats her as interesting in her own right, and not merely as an appendage of others.

She emerges with enhanced reputation from this full-scale treatment.

This article possesses no continuous argument of its own, but consists in a series of replies to observations made by J. K. A. Smith, L. Malcolm, and G. Loughlin regarding my book The Beauty of the Infinite. Thus it addresses a great number of topics, often only tenuously related to one another, and in an order dictated by the pieces to which it responds. Certain themes, however, can be identified as dominant: the capacity of natural reason to discover spiritual truths, the proper rhetoric of evangelical persuasion, the ontological premises that inform (and perhaps justify) that rhetoric, the place of aesthetics within theological reasoning, the role of divine law within Christian ethics, the need for Christian rhetoric adequately to encompass the reality of suffering and loss, the Christian metaphysics of being, the nature of Christian hope, the value of ‘tragic theology’ and the Christian metaphysics of evil.

There is a danger in separating out just a small portion of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae for a detailed study while neglecting the larger framework from which this section comes. Yet students of Aquinas have failed to recognize the import of Thomas’ discussion of ends, both final and proximate, and how these are related to his later discussion of acquired and infused moral virtue and their relation to charity and prudence in the Prima Secundae of his Summa. In asserting that charity is necessary for all true virtue, the roles of the Church, the state, their members and even the place and role of grace and nature are confused. A proper understanding of the distinction between acquired natural moral virtue and infused moral virtue and their distinct ends assists in a more complete understanding of the position and responsibilities of each of these in building up a more just earthly society and the ultimate attainment of eternal beatitude.

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never”. We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.

Some three years ago I was asked to write an introduction to a new journal of radical catholic opinion. I sent along, to what proved to be Slant, what seemed to me at the time a slightly rash note of welcome, and was much impressed, when the first number appeared, to find that I had been understood as cautious, suspicious, and even vaguely minatory. Such ambivalences will doubtless recur. The Slant position, if we are to believe Catholics and the Left, is now well established. It has already been honoured by an attack in the Spectator, and I suppose it is just another mark of its success that it must now face the rigour of its friends.

The Slant manifesto, which is what Catholics and the Left amounts to, is very uneven: not so much in quality as in level. Its first part, Christians against Capitalism, by Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton,is a vigorous piece of pamphleteering, of a properly manifest kind. I hope I do not wrong it when I say that it seems to me the best short statement that I have read of the general position of the New Left. Its Christian interpretation of community, which is inevitably its starting point, is unforced and organic, and it gains in specificity by being able to talk frankly (as in other traditions is not always possible) about loving relationships as the heart of community. At the same time it is powerful in negative criticism: the chapter on Liberalism is especially astringent and wholly convincing.