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.

While I was preparing this article, I read some remarks on the same subject by a U.S. politician with whom I found myself in substantial agreement. I then discovered, to my consternation, that the politician’s opinions had been compared with those of Adolf Hitler. So the reader must be warned that she can expect something pretty shocking in what follows.

We desperately need a philosophy of the humanities, both in the popular and in the narrower professional sense of the term ‘philosophy’. That is to say, we need to be able to spell out clearly and distinctly what the place of the humanities is in the good life, why they are important, and why (to put the matter in the most basic terms) they are worth paying for. I read that in parts of the U.S. the obvious obscurity and apparent triviality of the work of many representatives of the humanities has led to a cutting of funds and a precipitous fall in the number of students. I also note with some regret that, for the construction of a philosophy of the humanities in the sense that I have just given, recent trends in philosophy have been of very little help. In general I find a gaping hole in most prevailing modes of contemporary philosophy where the means for defending civilization— sustained reflection on the true and the good, and the best means of achieving them—should be.

In the early 1930s the artist Stanley Spencer committed himself to working on the never-achieved Church-House project. It was intended to reflect his understanding of God and religion as love, and, furthermore, of the sacred being fully integrated in secular times and places. The first painting he finished for the project was Villagers and Saints (1933), now in the collection of the University of Hull. This paper uses Villagers and Saints as a way into a reading of Spencer's work, drawing on insights from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to explore how Spencer sacramentalises the material world. The first part of the paper contextualises Villagers and Saints, and the second part identifies its vision with what appears to have been a conversion experience, discussed by Spencer in his public writing.

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.

A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.

Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.

Nobody who cares about the future of religious life should fail to study the recent essay on the subject by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an Irish Dominican who teaches at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem— an entire issue of Supplement to Doctrine and Life is given over to it (No. 45, May-June, 1973). What he has to say is so illuminating that it is worth repeating the main idea here, adding some comments and observations to back up his argument.

1—The raison d’etre of religious life

The question of priorities is crucial. What service do religious have to offer the Church and society? As they proceed to retrenchment and reform, the dilemma that confronts religious today is as follows: are they to decide what work they should be doing (teaching, nursing, preaching, whatever) and then allow the style of their life to be determined by that, or are they to make the form and quality of their community life the priority? Fr Murphy O’Connor is categorical : ‘What is important is that religious recognize that the primary service they render to the Church and to the world is the witness of their life together as a community’. Though religious increasingly do regard their service to the Church and to society as teachers, nurses, preachers, etc., as the primary determinant and seek to define the nature of religious life in terms then of work, this job- oriented approach in fact distorts religious life and leads to the disintegration of religious orders and communities.

For how can religious define and justify their existence as religious primarily in terms of the jobs they undertake ? Does a woman have to become a nun in order to teach or to nurse ?

Theology is both a human endeavor and something of Divine origin, insofar as it is a human attempt to make sense of certain Divinely revealed propositions. How does one reconcile these two elements? One attempt to do so was on the part of the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams. In sections I and II of chapter 1 of his work ‘On Christian Theology’, Williams speaks of the nature of authentic theological discourse, that is, theological discourse that has integrity. In his work on theological integrity, Williams explores how human intentions or hidden agendas can potentially warp our attempt to make sense of the truths contained within Divine Revelation. He then goes on to speak of how to avoid such pitfalls. In this article, I will respond to the epistemological implications of William's thoughts on this topic. I will use various ideas from Catholic theology, including the development of doctrines and the notion that faith has both a subjective and objective element, to explore both the strengths and weaknesses of Williams's thought.

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.

Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.

But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.

Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.

This article has three parts. The first two explore contemporary philosopher Bonnie Kent's important contributions to the role of the weakness of the will in actions of the morally incontinent in Thomas Aquinas treatment of human action. While Kent's treatment gives many important insights, nevertheless, she fails to recognize that the weakness of the will does in fact have role in the actions of the morally incontinent. Kent is correct that, for Aquinas, the passions cause the incontinent act to act as such. She fails, however, to recognize that the role of the passions does not exclude the weakness of the will as a cause, and even a principal cause. The third part takes up the criticisms of Gary Watson to which Kent's remarks were meant as a reply and shows that even with the causative role of the weak will, Aquinas' account does not fall prey to Watson's criticisms.

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.

Eighty Catholic priests who live and work among the working classes in Chile met in April in Santiago to study the most effective way priests and lay people could help in building socialism in Chile. What follows is a summary made up from answers given to questions asked at a Press Conference on 16th April, to some questions asked later of some of the priests taking part, and from statements made in some of the papers read.

It has been compiled by the Uruguayan journalist MARUJA ECHEGOYEN.

Background

During the final Session of the study group, eight priests held a Press Conference at which they read out a prepared statement and answered questions from journalists representing both Chilean and overseas papers. Among these priests were Fr Gonzalo Arroyo, chaplain of the Catholic University of Santiago, and Fr Alfonso Pujadas, Director-General of the Workers’ Movement at the same University. The journalists mostly represented left-wing organs. Not long before, the Christian Democrat daily La Prensa had published, tendentiously and without prior authorization, with misleading headings, a private document circulated in November last year among a group of priests, wrongly making it out to be the starting-point for this meeting of Socialist priests. Gonzalo Arroyo attacked this action at the Press Conference, and it is indeed one more example of the growing inability of the more right-wing sector of Christian Democracy in Chile to listen and discuss rationally.