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.

In his 1977 book The Eucharist and Human Liberation, Tissa Balasuriya reminds us that “the Eucharist has an extraordinary potential for being an agent of personal and global transformation. Every week about two hundred million persons meet all over the world in Christian communities”. Yet, while the worldwide eucharistic congregations every Sunday probably make up the largest global assembly for any shared purpose, the influence of the Eucharist on the creation of a more just, more loving and (in fine) more Christian world is almost minimal. The paradox, in Balasuriya’s words, “is that while the example of Jesus should make the eucharistic community a champion of social justice and a contestant of social evil, this happens very seldom” (op. cit. pp 85-6). Gustavo Gutiérrez has tried to emphasize this matter by directing a hard hit at the quality of the Eucharist as celebrated in some gatherings:

But Gutiérrez oversimplifies here. The search to help resolve the paradox has to take into account not only attitudes of indifference but also the theological schizophrenia — the great divorce between faith and life, or religion and everything else — which underlies and has helped to form them. This has led, on the one hand, to the ‘idealist’ and ‘spiritualist’ attitudes which (as Gutiérrez maintains) avoid the sharp realities; and, on the other hand, to the huge loss of credibility sustained by the Church in the present century and hence by the Eucharist which lies, or should lie, at the heart of the Church’s work.

Thunder voices prefaced the breaking of the four seals in John's heavenly visions, but prior to the sounding of the seven trumpets and the blaze of fire on the heavenly altar ‘there was silence in heaven'. So, silence issues forth in trumpet calls and in the angelic prayer-action at the altar alight with flame. All public worship expresses itself vocally, for only such prayer can express corporate worship and fellowship prayer; but the Catholic Church has devised a service of silence, just as she has produced Orders of Silence, and that service is Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Rite begins with the O Salutaris; it ends with the Tantum ergo, but the interspace is Silence. The High Priest, Heli, was an unwise father but wise as a spiritual director, for how great was his wisdom when he bade the child Samuel respond to the voice of God with these words: ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.’ Here is the perfect counsel for those who kneel before the Host exposed. All is silence: the Word is silent; silently the candles immolate themselves in honour of the Unseen Light; the flowers praise their Creator by their beauty and fragrance, but silent is their tribute. Silence is the soul's receptive mood; it is the ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.’ When we say prayers, God listens to us; but when we are silent we become listeners to the voice of God.

I regard this article as part of a continuing debate in New Blackfriars concerning the relations of Christianity and Marxism. But it is also an attempt, within that context, to ask and answer the question why we should continue to believe in God. I raise the question here because, it seems to me, that most of the effort expended by earlier contributors, particularly Denys Turner has been towards showing that it is possible, and even necessary for a Christian to be a Marxist. Obviously, if a Christian must be a Marxist, as Denys Turner argues, then the question whether he can, or should, continue to believe in God is raised at once. For it is a pretty widely accepted opinion among Marxists that belief in God is incompatible with their own view of things, and that anyone who is a Marxist and believes in God is something of an oddity, a man with a private religious hang-up, and quite probably an unreliable ally. Denys Turner rightly affirms that, in holding to this view of religious belief, Marxists are themselves merely hanging on to a private opinion that has nothing to do with their Marxism as such. But a Christian cannot be content with remaining there. What the Christian needs to be able to show is that, if he ought to be a Marxist just in order to be a complete Christian, it is equally the case that the Marxist ought to be a Christian just in order to be a complete Marxist. Nothing short of this will do, from a Christian standpoint: to pretend otherwise is to connive at a sell-out. I believe that at the present stage of the game there is a real danger of just such a sell-out. For example, to say, as the editorial committee responsible for Crossleft do, that ‘there can be no question today ... of Christian modification of Marxist praxis’ (which, if it means anything, means that being a Christian Marxist makes no difference at all to what, as a Marxist you are prepared to do): or that ‘the Church is basically on the side of the oppressor’ (what else, strictly speaking, can ‘basically’ mean here but ‘from the very foundation’?)—to say things like this suggests to me a readiness for just such a sell-out as I have indicated.

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.

The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.

From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.

“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 dangers which threaten the Catholic historian writing on controversial topics were all too plain in the works of Hilaire Belloc. Great as Belloc was as a writer, outstanding as he was in his capacity to recreate the past, he was nevertheless primarily a controversialist with a number of bees in his bonnet, and tragically, in many ways, he was a man in a hurry who had to turn out many books in order to support his children, who were, he said, crying out for pearls and caviar. All this helps to explain why Belloc, who was capable of being on occasions so brilliant an historian, wrote a remarkable amount of bad history. Moreover, partly because he had been denied the opportunity of pursuing his work without the perpetual nagging of financial worries, he turned on the university which had failed to give him the chance of exercizing his undoubted talents, and built up a picture of official academic historians, stupid, prejudiced, deceiving their readers by a spurious critical apparatus and footnotes which on investigation did not support the text. The stupidity, the ignorance and the deceitfulness of the dons became something of an obsession with him, and he thought official historians had entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now it must be admitted that when Belloc started writing, there was accepted by most educated Englishmen a picture of, say, the Middle Ages or the Reformation which is vastly different from what would be accepted now, and it is probable that Belloc’s writing did something to break down the old myths and prejudices, but it is still true that if Belloc was not acceptable to many non-Catholic historians it was because much of what he wrote was unbalanced and unsound.

I begin with a number of propositions, which I shall try to develop in detail:

First, that allegory and symbolism are modes of analogy, that both present one thing or concept in terms of another thing or concept, even though the ways in which they do so have been contrasted and seen as vitally different.

Secondly, that the novel is, as a literary form, generally characterized by realism, and that realism as a literary technique would appear to be opposed to analogical modes.

Thirdly, that this opposition is only apparent because all literary discourse (and in a sense all language) is analogical, in so far as it is meaningful: and that this is confirmed by critical practice.

Fourthly, that the development of the novel therefore reveals a continuing compromise in which overtly analogical modes are allowed to permeate the apparently non-analogical mode of realism in the interests of meaning.

Fifthly, that in the modern period the value of realism as a technique begins to be called into question, and consequently the point of the compromise begins to be called into question, with significant repercussions on the form of the novel.

In putting forward these ideas, particularly the last one, I have been much influenced by The Nature of Narrative (1966), by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg. Surveying the whole range of Western narrative literature, they suggest that the primitive oral epic was a synthesis of two antithetical types of narrative, one which they call empirical, whose primary allegiance is to the real, and the other fictional, whose primary allegiance is to the ideal.

Thomas’ Compendium was composed in imitation of Augustine's Enchiridion, and with the intention of correcting features which struck Thomas, as they have struck other readers, as strange. The treatment of faith was the principal focus of Thomas’ discontent. In place of Augustine's wandering history of the engagement of divine goodness with the world, Thomas emphasised the cognitive aspect of faith and its concern with being. The two approaches differ in the extent to which they can allow a distinction of the cognitive from the voluntative in virtue. Augustine's insistence on keeping them together has definite strengths in resisting voluntarism, but Thomas’ emphasis imposes constraints on the moralising reduction of faith to action.

The question which Brian Wicker poses to Denys Turner—how is Marxism to accommodate the notion of ethical absolutes?—is clearly one of first importance to those who, like Denys Turner and myself, would regard themselves as both Christians and Marxists. I don’t think I can give any satisfactory answer to Wicker’s question, but I can perhaps at least prepare the context for such an answer by making some general remarks about the relations between Marxism and morality. In doing so, incidentally, I shall be elaborating on Turner’s own truly pioneering earlier article in this journal, ‘Morality is Marxism’ (New Blackfriars, February and March 1973).

The question of the relevance of moral values to Marxism is at the heart of one of the most theoretically crucial debates now being conducted within European Marxism : the conflict between those revolutionary theorists for whom Marxism is in essence a humanism—an historical praxis of love and liberation—and those for whom historical materialism is in the first place a science. The adherents of the former position espouse a Marxism deeply indebted to Hegel and the work of the young Marx; the latter believe that such a case is no more than an idealist ideology of historical materialism, and claim to be restoring Marxism, after this long twentieth-century heresy, on the truly scientific basis to be found in the mature Marx of Capital. The debate—one, roughly, between the followers of Georg Lukacs and the disciples of the most prominent European Marxist theorist of our own time, Louis Althusser—has created a good deal of dust and heat among revolutionary intellectuals.

For the Lukacsians, there is an essential continuity between the work of the earlv, humanist Marx and the later scientist of Capital; for the Althusserians, there is radical rupture and discontinuity between the two phases.

Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologiae to provide Dominican friars with solid theological instruction in moral theology and pastoral care on the firm foundation of scripture. Despite an increasing awareness among scholars of the importance of Thomas' scriptural commentaries to his thought, few have attempted to interpret his theology and philosophy in light of his scriptural commentaries and the mendicant context of the 13th century. This paper offers a reading of Thomas' theology of providence and divine government both as a mendicant friar and Master of the Sacred Page in order to understand some of the implications of the doctrine of providence for distributive justice in ecclesial practice today.

Mozart's operatic masterpiece Don Giovanni raises pivotal questions about freedom and society: should freedom be without constraints? Is absolute freedom possible? In certain key ways these concerns of Mozart's culture resonate with issues that preoccupy us today. Composed in 1787, during the final years of the liberal regime introduced by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, the opera reflects the shadow side of his “enlightened” reforms. The serial seducer Don Giovanni represents a liberty that has degenerated into libertinism. The freedom that Don Giovanni wants to retain at all costs is merely freedom as the absence of physical constraint. In the contemporary world many people aspire to a similarly riven freedom: they reject the dictates of external authority, and docilely submit to the promptings of instinctual drives. Christianity invites human beings to reach beyond themselves in love. Marriage exemplifies the self-giving of permanent commitment, and contrasts starkly with Don Giovanni's egoistic consumption and hasty disposal of women. Although the lyrics and plot of Mozart's opera never evoke the Trinity, the musical perfection of his work dances on the threshold of Revelation, and opens its hearers up to the liberating mystery of the freedom of Trinitarian love.

Ethics has captured the attention of many today—for a variety of reasons. However, different conceptions and expectations of what is involved in addressing the ethical challenge have also arisen. Clarifying the nature of the ethical task, this essay argues for the need to think through the judgments we make and the decisions we take on ethical situations and to investigate more critically the basis of such judgments and decisions. Furthermore, it claims that in ethics, as well as in other areas of life, it is important to have an overall vision that should ground, inform and support any judgment or decision we make. Maintaining that ethics is a rational activity undertaken by rational agents, it shows how ethical thinking, particularly when it draws on philosophy, can help one to develop a moral sense and enable one to take a moral stance.

In this essay I examine the idea that evil is to be understood as a kind of absence or a privation. I put forward two arguments against this idea. The first claims that if evil is an absence it becomes causally powerless, which seems strongly contradicted by experience and revelation. The other argument says that the idea that evil is an absence cannot do justice to the evil of depression. Depression is a set of feelings which are all too real, and so cannot be understood as literally identical with a set of absences.

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.

The model of the bourgeois or Victorian family that received its idealized expression in the 19th century has its roots in complex processes of socioeconomic and cultural changes going back to the late medieval period. It was a long time before this type of family really became standard or normative for most people in Western societies, and it has remained more an ideal than an actuality for many people. For well into the 18th century, and even later in rural and frontier areas, other types of family patterns still predominated. For peasant and farming families in Europe and America, the home continued to be a workshop where a variety of goods used by the family were produced. The family members had little private space, for most of the house was taken up by the workshop where goods were created. Farm animals might live in sheds under the rooms where the family lived, a practice that still continues in peasant families today. Grandparents, unmarried aunts and uncles, apprentices and other dependents quite often swelled the ranks of persons living in a household.

Aristocratic families also did not correspond to the modern nuclear family type. In 18th century palaces a large court of retainers dwelt in attendance. Still sometimes legitimate and illigitimate children of a great noble, as well as the children of servants, lived together. Servants often slept in the same rooms as their masters or outside in the halls. Functions that we think of as intimate and private, such as a great magnate’s eating or going to bed, were public events.

This paper looks first at the scope of religious experience, offering some representative examples of phenomena that typically give rise to spiritual experiences. This leads on a consideration of the phenomenology of such experiences – the particular way in which they present themselves to the conscious subject. Lastly, the paper tackles the vexed question of the source of such experiences, and suggests that this is best understood in terms of a (certain kind of) theistic framework.

Matthew’s gospel contains passages difficult for Jewish Christian relations for the final text, as we have it, seems to contain passages hostile to Jews which irritate Jewish Christian dialogue. History, however, may show these so called ‘anti Semitic’ passages of this gospel in a new, and quite different light.

The key text which today causes perhaps the greatest agony for those involved in Jewish Christian dialogue is the verse in the passion narrative of Matthew’s gospel: Mt. 27: 25 ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’. For these commentators, the idiom ‘his blood be upon’ means ‘the responsibility of the death of Jesus is on our heads’. The action of Pilate washing his hands, seems to be drawing a contrast between Pilate and the people: Pilate seems to be declaring his innocence of the death of Jesus and says ‘My hands are clean of this man’s blood . . .’ By contrast the people seem to be accepting responsibility for the death of Jesus. Pilate is not guilty, but the ‘people’ are guilty. By this saying, they also incriminate their heirs in this guilt Some try to get round these ‘anti-semitisms’ (Matt. 23: 32-36, 7: 21-23, 8:11-12, 23: 33-46, 27: 25) by saying that ‘anti-semitic montages’ are only a secondary element introduced to the text added at a later, Greek, stage of the development of the gospels.

There is, of course, at present a fairly strong lobby, even among some Christians, who want to find ‘antisemitisms’ within the new Testament, for reasons which are sometimes distant from the academic interests of biblical criticism. It is necessary I think to examine these texts anew, both in the interest of the historical evidence available and in the interests of integrity within Jewish Christian relations.