This ill-informed and totally inadequate scribe rushed in to translate Le Soulier de Satin almost before he had read it through. In his awe (of later date) at the magnitude of the task, he was much upborne by the encouragements of the illustrious author, and in the final revisions he had the precious aid of Monsieur and Madame Paul Petit, whose keen scrutiny eliminated many a slack rendering. To them also he is deeply indebted for a glimpse into the mental and spiritual history of the present ambassador of France at Washington. The said Ambassador has translated into French the Unknown Eros of Coventry Patmore.

Claudel began life—intellectual life—as an honest Monist. Possessed by this Calvinism of Philosophy, he realised vividly the interplay of all creatures and their reactions to one another. His high poetic instincts led him on to the mysticism of the mind, less vague and specifically graver than that of Shelley, and here the French genius was never more valuable. He brooded on the nature of things and discovered for himself an Hegelian mystery, that every single reality connotes its opposite : motion connotes rest, and a starting-place as well as a winning-post; reality connotes nothingness; and can it be that there is something which is motion and rest in one, and an All-in-all which can contemplate and contain and actuate the Nothingness? So one Christmas afternoon he discovered how the Infinite had fallen in love with and embraced our nothingness, made it His very own; and from that hour Claudel may be said to have lived anew.

Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions

A close reading of Hosea 2 seems to reveal some inconsistencies in a feminist approach to this particular text. This essay challenges a particular feministic reading of Hosea 2 with an analysis that contends for the hearing of Yahweh's voice as he addresses Israel with a determined and subjective love. The relationship between Hosea and Gomer is used by Yahweh as a sign-act and in no way should the psychology of Hosea and Gomer take centre stage in the reading of this text. When the text speaks, it reveals that Yahweh's love is enduring, proactive and emotional. It also sets the tone for how we may continue to understand the tension between command and promise which may give cause to reshape the responsibility of today's theologians and church leaders. Eventually this text rests on the promise of Yahweh, by way of command, that there will in fact be a great day of blessing to come for his people (Hos 1:11; 3:5).

Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him. He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning. The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel. This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.

In response to accusations leveled against the integrity of confirmation as a distinct sacrament, the author searches magisterial documents for a theology of confirmation. Two main theological explanations of the sacrament are explored: the ecclesial significance of the bishop's office as the original minister of confirmation; and the grace of the sacrament – that is, the gifts and Gift of the Holy Spirit. This grace is characterized as both defensive and offensive, from the perspective of defending the faith of the individual and the Church, and sharing in Christ's mission to evangelize the world. In a final section, the author addresses several popular but mistaken or one-sided approaches to explaining confirmation that have had negative pastoral consequences in recent decades.

The religious problems discussed most frequently in French intellectual circles are, in all probability, the suffering of the innocent, hell, the story of human origins and original sin, the salvation of non-Catholics, the value to be attached to other religions. All of these, it will be observed, represent points at which the positive economy of salvation comes into apparent conflict with the aspirations of modern man and his compulsion to give an account of human history and of human destiny in purely rational terms. Such circumstances cannot but guarantee a sympathetic public for a book of some four hundred pages bearing the promising title of The Salvation of the Unbeliever, especially when it comes from so distinguished an author as Father Riccardo Lombardi.

Profoundly aware of the distress caused by the fact that thousands of men and women have never come, and indeed never have had the chance of coming, to an explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ and his Church, Fr Lombardi approaches his subject with the avowed intention of trying to establish as wide and as optimistic a solution as possible. Such a solution appears to him to be justified, demanded even, by what St Paul says in i Timothy: ‘It is (God’s) will that all men should be saved, and be led to recognize the truth.’

Our inquiry is about two aspects of Eckhart’s theology of the Trinity. One aspect (treated in Part I, which appeared in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars pp. 169—181) is his use of the notion of bullitio (‘boiling’) in the Latin treatises to explain personal procession and plurality within God. The other is the distinction in Eckhart’s German sermons between the Trinity and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond the Trinity.

The conclusions drawn from the first part of this study were as follows:

Bullitio is a metaphor depicting the generation of the Son from the Father. It also depicts the procession of the Holy Spirit, but this aspect is less developed in the texts we have considered. The metaphor represents an attempt to explain and to understand not only the nature of this generation but also the reason for it. I have argued that Eckhart, unlike Aquinas, allies himself with the tradition of a priori proofs of the Trinity. Bullitio is a metaphor for the self-diffusiveness of the good, and is related to Bonaventure’s notion of fountain-like fulness (plenitudo fontalis). Bonaventure finds in the latter attribute, which he regards as a property of the Father, the reason for plurality in God. There are no grounds to suppose that the idea of bullitio involves a distinction between God as Trinity and as the hidden Godhead.

Ebullitio, the first moment, as it were, of the creative emanation from God, is rooted in bullitio, and these two ideas are linked by that of formal emanation. The generation of the Son is a formal emanation; it is also the formal cause of creatures, insofar as this cause is considered in abstraction from their efficient and final causes.

There is now general agreement that Christians, in virtue of their Christian commitment, should engage in social and political action, particularly on behalf of the poor and oppressed. That is the presupposition behind liberation theology. At the same time the conviction persists that social and political action is not properly religious action, but, strictly speaking, only the consequence or overflow of religion into a non-religious, secular sphere. Hence the felt necessity, especially on the part of those with religious authority, to qualify the acceptance of liberation theology with frequent warnings that the Christian religion should not be reduced to social and political action.

More widespread among ordinary religious people is the manner in which the perennial need for reflection becomes a devaluing of social and political action in favour of interior contemplation as alone truly religious. People are urged to withdraw at regular intervals from their social involvement, which is dubbed external activity, in order to find God once more in the properly religious activity of personal, meditative prayer. The religious life is seen as the inner life in contrast to the outer life. The locus of the Transcendent and of religious experience is identified with the realm of interiority. To work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed may be demanded by religious faith, hope and love. It is applied religion, but it is not of the essence of religion, which is found in the inwardness of union with God.

This tendency of the Christian religion has been strongly reinforced by interest in the Eastern religions.

Asked to name a German city associated with the Lutheran Reformation, most people with any knowledge of the period would, I suppose, cite Wittenberg — the Saxon university town from which that Reformation was launched. But an equally serious candidate would be Augsburg in what is now northern Bavaria where the single most authoritative document of Lutheranism, the Confessio Augustana or ‘Augsburg Confession’ was promulgated in 1530. It was to Augsburg, where the Reichstag, the imperial Diet, was meeting, that the former Master of the Dominicans, Thomist theologian and Catholic church reformer, Thomas de Vio was sent in 1518 as papal legate with a mandate to bring Dr Luther, member of the Order of Augustinian Hermits and professor of biblical studies, to his senses. De Vio — better known from his birthplace, Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, as il Gaetano or Cajetan, was at first viewed by Luther with comparative favour. Although Luther shared the anti-Italian feelings common in Germany in this period, disliked what he knew of Thomism, and numbered several Dominicans among his harshest critics, he found Cardinal Cajetan learned and humane. There was, however, no real meeting of minds. So far as Luther was concerned, the encounter was to be a debate, like the Heidelberg Disputation from which he had just emerged with flying colours.

Padre Pio da Pietrelcina is not widely known, in England, and the occasional references to him give the wrong emphasis. If he is mentioned, it is usually as ‘that supposed stigmatist somewhere in Italy'; so that the immediate impression is adverse, even damning. Now that is as it should be. The masters of the spiritual life cry out to us: Beware of hysteria! Avoid strange phenomena! Live by Faith!

Early in the morning, before five, the sacristy door at St Giovanni Rotondo, near Foggia, opens and Padre Pio comes in to say Mass. He comes in slowly, almost shuffling. A tired face, the beard tinged with grey; a large nose, slightly splayed-out from suuff-taking; eyes that pierce and laugh, while the mouth and cheeks follow the eyes; a face serene, radiant, simple. Quite stout, quite short—you see such figures every day on the roads of Italian towns and countryside—the Cappucini.

I have long been puzzled by the Gospel prediction that at the resurrection I shall become like an angel in heaven. What does it mean, and did Jesus really say it? What follows is an attempt to settle the matter. I shall be arguing that the passage in its original form envisaged a non-corporeal existence (contrary to the view of some recent writers), but that it does not go back to Jesus.

After routing the Pharisees and Herodians and turning on the scribes, Mark’s Jesus in 12:18-27 slaps down the Sadducees. The Sadducees, who disbelieve in the doctrine of a resurrection, argue that Moses would never have prescribed levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-10) if he had believed in an afterlife, because of the confusion it would cause in extreme cases, such as that of a woman who married seven brothers in succession.1 Jesus defends the doctrine with the hard saying, ‘They are as angels in heaven’ (12:25), and goes on to argue for the doctrine of the resurrection on the strength of what to the present-day reader is very tendentious exegesis of an Old Testament passage: the fact that God calls himself ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ in Exodus proves that the dead rise.

My prime purpose here is, as I have said, to examine the meaning of the words ‘They are as angels in heaven’ and to see whether it is likely that they go back to Jesus. It will be necessary, however, to look at the passage as a whole. The words attributed to Jesus in Mk 12:24-27 are:

Arguably one of the most well received of the documents of Vatican II, this article considers the gestation of Dei Verbum and whether it remains key to Catholic thinking on revelation, exegesis, hermeneutics and the use of the Bible in the Church.

Insofar as Dei Verbum enabled Catholicism to rediscover its own sacramental paradigm of revelation, it can be said to have effected a decisive move away from a propositional view which risks reducing the drama of salvation to a combination of bullet points and performance indicators. Moreover, Catholic biblical theology has enjoyed a welcome renaissance in these subsequent decades and scripture now plays a more obvious part in liturgy and piety.

Though there are lacunae (e.g. anthropology, ecology), and though some of the exegetical tensions have been by-passed by postmodern hermeneutics, perhaps the more interesting questions that remain will centre not on the scriptures but on a renewed understanding of the nature of tradition and the creativity of its relationship with the magisterium.

Education and schooling are not the same thing. Education, correctly understood, is a lifelong process. Schooling occupies our young days. Although it is a generalisation, I think it is true to say thal modern schooling is the product of the Industrial Revolution.’ Education, by contrast has a longer pedigree. We have schooling because an industrialised nation requires skills best imparted by a schooling process. Recent education reforms (1988 onwards) — particularly under the influence of Toryism — have tried to cement schooling to current economic theory.

The Catholic Church cannot afford to dedicate too many of her resources to reinforcing a particular economic or social theory. Indeed, history shows that the Church has demonstrated wary resistance to such trends. A turning-point arose at Vatican II. In the Decrec Gravissimum Educafionis we read: “Holy Mother Church … is under an obligation to promote the welfare of the whole life of man.” (In modern — politically correct — speech, we would say person, of course). Many, though not all, diocesan education departments concentrate on schooling. This falls under the spell of a myth. The myth suggests that schooling educates. Reality suggests that schooling may open avenues, but education is a most complex process. As the Church slowly climbs out of the shadows of medievalism, we are discovering the need for broader minds, broader concepts of formation. Trends are gradually changing.

This paper aims at delivering a definition of modernity as offered by modern Jewish theology: a theological capturing of the modern era as an epoch possessing its own unique and positive religious characteristics. This positive theological evaluation of modernity seems to derive uniquely from the Jewish perspective which sees in modernitas a hopeful repetition of the narrative of Exodus: the story of liberation and autonomous self-constitution of man helped by God who wished his subjects to stop being just subjects, but also wanted to offer them freedom. This emphatically affirmative definition of religious modernity has only one equivalent in Christian theology: the millenarist notion of a “new age” – die Neuzeit, or modernitas – as the third age of the spirit, which greatly influenced the most ambitious strain of modern philosophy: German Idealism and Hegel in particular. In referring to the writings of Jacob Taubes (most of all his Occidental Eschatology) I will attempt to show that the twentieth-century Jewish messianism tends to perceive modernity, also in its Christian version, as an epoch of the reawakening of the original spirit of the Hebrew revelation, conceived most of all as the emancipatory event of Exodus.