This article joins others in assessing the role of Christ in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas. It investigates one specific phrase in the Summa Theologiae in four stages. First, there are some foundational considerations of Aquinas's overall framework. Second, I examine the evidence supporting Aquinas's original description of Jesus as our ‘dearest friend’ and as further disclosed in the Tertia Pars, specifically in His Passion and in His role as Teacher. Third, this leads to a consideration of Jesus as ‘wisest’ as the Incarnate Word and Wisdom. Fourth, I probe this sapiential aspect further in terms of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, specifically, that of wisdom, and, in particular, as construed in recent work on the second person perspective and Joint Attention. By investigating this phrase of Aquinas, it emerges that its sapiential, soteriological and inter-personal character is illuminated further by its Christological and ecclesial dimensions.

Jose Maria Salaverrίa, the well-known publicist, writing some months back in the monarchist daily A.B.C., bitterly lamented the lack of tolerance and compromise which characterized Spain’s political life. The reason, he stated, was to be sought in the age-old problem .... what must Spain do to keep up with the march of ‘progress’?.... a problem that has perplexed the greatest minds of the Peninsula and yet remains unsolved. Two solutions have been offered, one the europeizaciόn of Joaquin Costa, a renunciation of the past, a purging of all traditional elements, the double lock on the tomb of the Cid; the other the traditionalism of men like Ramiro de Maeztu whose desire was for a regeneration of his country on the old lines. Here in a nutshell is the tragedy of modern Spain, the struggle of opposites. The modernists have wished the complete elimination of traditional elements as incompatible with ‘progress,’ the traditionalists have viewed innovations with mistrust and have desired to maintain the old Spain without any concession. Other nations, confronted with the same problem, reached a solution through a process of transition, but Spain maintains partisan intransigeance to an extent unknown elsewhere, rendering political life a question of all or nothing, a violent oscillation of the pendulum from extreme to extreme. Political fanaticism of the Right or the Left is equally at fault and breeds nothing but continual alarm, violent polemic, and fruitless struggle. That ‘sweet reasonableness’ which is the essence of democracy is completely lacking.

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.

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.

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.

Within the framework of the “empiricist” philosophy widely assumed in English theology, there is a serious problem about how to represent God’s action in the world. This applies equally to God’s action in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to God’s action today through the Holy Spirit. Here I will argue that the problem can be eased by a change of philosophical framework. I will do so in dialogue with Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine which reveals with outstanding honesty and clarity the difficulties that the empiricist framework throws up.

By the “empiricist” framework I mean a general set of philosophical presuppositions that are deeply entrenched within our culture in general, and widespread within our university departments of science, philosophy and theology in particular. Of these (often only implicit) presuppositions I am interested in just two: firstly, that the chief function of language is to represent or “picture” reality; secondly, that “action” must take place via some causal mechanism, the model for which is given by the causal mechanisms of the natural sciences. Thus the only relation that language can have to action is to “picture” it.

This pair of assumptions is peculiarly deadly for theology, because it pushes back our possibilities for conceptualizing God’s action to only two. Either we think of God’s action as the communication of knowledge about a state of affairs—a picture of reality—or else we must see it as an intervention in the causal nexus so as to rearrange the course of events in the physical world.

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.

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.

Although other ages have seen a multitude of wars, in the twentieth century, we have developed a chilling efficiency for aimed conflict which seems to rise in intensity with each passing year. Historically, Catholic thought on the moral justification for war has tended to accept the possibility that, in strictly defined circumstances, a state has the right to engage in warfare. Yet, in recent years, papal statements have tended to severely limit even the few circumstances which have traditionally been permitted for the moral use of warfare by the state. In particular, John XXDI is often cited as an example of this trend.

This article will explore the thought of John XXIII on the particular issue of his interpretation of the criterion of just cause. This particular element of the set of criteria which govern the prospective use of lethal force by the state against another state, jux ad bellum, is significant for any discussion of modem just war theory. This criterion judges the moral end of the use of lethal force by the state. Traditionally, three reasons have been advanced as just causes: ad vindicandas offensiones (to gain justice over a completed offense), ad repetendas res (to retake property which has been stolen) and ad repellandas injurias (to resist an armed attack which is in progress). The trend of modern just war theories have been toward excluding the first two reasons and giving grudging acceptance to the third.

John XXIII unlike his predecessor, Pius XII, was not explicit concerning the moral permissibility of self-defense.

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.

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.

This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:

Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:

‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.

Elaine Scarry’s text The Body in Pain offers an analysis of the human experiences of suffering and pain as effects of divine and human making and remaking. Assuming a Feuerbachian analysis of the human projection of the divine, she maintains that God is the primal human Artefact who, once made, remakes the human subject in his own image through wounding and healing. That which distinguishes the human from the divine is embodiment. Embodied as they are, human beings can be wounded. God, being bodiless, cannot be wounded.

Scarry’s thesis relies overwhelmingly on a Western notion of human work that she believes has been passed into our culture through two dominant sets of religious and politico-economic discourses, for her those of Judeo-Christianity and of Marxism. These discourses have been so influential in the formation of western subjectivity that they reveal much, she holds, about the way Western subjects are constructed by discourses of pain and illness. It is this aspect of Scarry’s monumental work that interests me, and which I will initially use to read the text of the 13th century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis, before moving on to a consideration of her medieval contemporaries Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In reading Christina’s text, the problem I will pose is how her performance of wounding and healing assist in constructing/reconstructing herself as a mystical subject. Secondly I will ask the question, what theological and literary purpose does the language of wounding and healing serve in the medieval texts of the Beguines Hadewijch and Mechthild? In other words, what does the text produce?

The Montessori Method of Education may be said to be based on the twin principles of “Freedom” and “Prepared Environment.” This is an inadequate definition, but it will suffice for our present purpose.

It is now over twenty years since the first “Casa dei Bambini” was opened in Rome, and hundreds of visitors came from every quarter of the globe to observe the behaviour of those small slum children from the tenement houses. During this time the Method has spread to the most distant corners of the world—not only amongst Europeans, but also amongst Indians, Chinese, Africans, South Sea Islanders and many others. The results have been always the same, and can be summed up in a sentence. The Montessori Method has proved beyond a doubt that the child loves work.

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 ?

The Open Church Group in Great Britain has been campaigning to persuade homosexuals who “feel separated from their churches because of their nature to reconsider their position and return to the practice of their faith”. The problem which the group envisages is a real, though variable one. Attitudes among theologians may be slowly changing (though not all of us would agree that in this field all change is for the good); but, as two American writers on female homosexuality have put it, “Inroads into religious thought and re-evaluation are a slow and cumbersome process. [Lesbians] live in the now.” It is scarcely sufficient to shrug the shoulders and say “In time, it will all work out”. This is not enough for Christian fellowship, because Christian fellowship belongs to the now, not to the contingent future.

Attitudes in the Churches which go so far as to deny Christian fellowship to ‘sexual minorities’ may be reduced to one simple, if generally unrecognized factor: dread. Mystery misconceived is dread: it is distracting, zwiespältig — dividing the mind against itself, making neutrality impossible. It is the negative side of holy fear: it is what St Paul presumably meant when he warned against the destructive consequences of unworthy communion. Whatever the aetiological reasons which might be adduced in hard clinical fashion to ‘explain’ what has been called ‘sexual deviance’, it remains at the end of the day for a great many ‘normal’ people, and therefore for a great many Christians, an object of dread, something which unsettles their security.