The rue d’Ulm in the centre of Paris, a small almost insignificant street close to the Parthenon and the Jardin de Luxembourg, houses one of the most important and prestigious academic institutions in France: the École Normale Supérieure. Founded in the first decade of the 19th century with entrance by a nationwide competitive examination, it has educated many of the leading 20th century French intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are just a few of those selected in a nation-wide competitive examination to be schooled here. In 1969, when considerable student unrest still remained in Paris following the May riots a year earlier, Jean-Luc Marion, then 21, took up his place there. At an institution which had played an enormous role in disseminating the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger in post-War France, Marion began to work for his agrégation de philosophic. It was a time of les enfants terribles in French philosophy: when structuralism was gaining ground through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes; when Althusser was attempting to rewrite Marxism; when Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things) could enter the French best-sellers list; and Derrida launched, in the three books published in the same year, his deconstructive assault. Lacan and Derrida both gave seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (as Marion does now). The influence of German Idealism and its critics, Nietzsche and Heidegger, have remained throughout Marion’s philosophical work.

If ever there were grist for the Jungian mill it was, one might suppose, the Book of Job. It can be read almost as a paradigm of the ‘integration process’ as Jung himself has repeatedly described it. For here we have a man ‘perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil’—as well he might, never having experienced it, and abounding in cosy piety and worldly prosperity. He has, as Satan points out, ‘a fence about him, and his house, and his substance’. Anybody can be ‘good’ in such narrow, sheltered confines as these; but he can hardly be a grown-up man let alone a hero, a prototype of the way of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection. Any psychologist should know he is heading for a crash. Any theologian should know that such easy and complacent virtue cannot continue long in this post-lapsarian world. Job’s professed love for God—and God’s for him—must grow up from this agreeable but infantile and unconscious, autoerotic phase. Job’s idol of a merely intelligible and amiable God must be smashed: he must learn the lesson which the New Testament writers were to see it was the function of the Old Testament heroes to teach: that man’s righteousness before God is not wrought by moral works without ‘faith in the Absurd’, the Unseen and the Unknown. So the psychologically and theologically inevitable happens: Job’s fences are down; evils rush in.

Recent debate on the relationship between morality and religious belief has tended to cast the role of religion in a negative light. While there are certain facts that may support this view, a philosophical investigation of the link between ethics and religion can contribute to the debate by focusing on certain fundamental issues. Noting the importance of the debate and showing the implications of whichever side one takes, this article argues that the claims for a purely humanistic ethics can be supported by an empirical observation, a philosophical argument and even on theological grounds. At the same time, however, it defends the view that religious belief in a personal God can have a positive contribution to morality by way of vision and motivation.

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.

Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.

Two of the most striking and memorable features of Meister Eckhart’s treatment of the Trinity are these. First, in several passages in the Latin works he uses the metaphor of bullitio—literally ‘boiling’ or ‘bubbling’—to explain the inner trinitarian life of the Deity; that is, to explain how and why there is procession within God. Secondly, in several passages in his German sermons he distinguishes between the personal, trinitarian God and a distinctionless, nameless ground or Godhead that transcends this. The latter distinction, apparently, is considered to exist within God: prima facie, at least, the distinction is not merely economic or between ‘God within’ and ‘God without’. My intention in this study is to examine each of these aspects in turn, to suggest how they are related, and to consider what all this can tell us about the general character of Eckhart’s trinitarianism.

Our task presents us with a problem which must always arise in the study of Eckhart: that of bringing together the Latin Eckhart with the German Eckhart and attempting to take a unified view, and this while conserving the peculiarities of each. Bullitio is a Latin word and, as far as I know, the notion is applied to the Trinity only in the Latin works. It may be noted, however, that there is a related family of German words such as ûzbruch and ursprunc which Eckhart uses to denote the idea of the supreme fountain-head or source, or the original outpouring, outspringing or outbreak of being. One of the things I wish to suggest in this study is that the distinction between God as Trinity and as Godhead is not made in the Latin works.

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’

To develop a philosophical framework to address the specification of sex/gender in humans, I will begin by summarizing what we know about the biology of sex determination in human beings. Basically, sex/gender is specified by several networks of genes anchored in the genetic interaction between the two genes, Sry and Sox9. Next, I will propose that this biological mechanism is best understood within a philosophical anthropology that embraces insights taken from systems biology to articulate a hylomorphism that explains the integrity, dynamism, and teleology of the human organism. The systems perspective described here represents one attempt to reformulate the received philosophical framework of classical Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism so that it incorporates the insights of modern biology. Finally, I will use the systems perspective and key principles articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his philosophy of nature to identify criteria that could be used to specify the sex/gender of a particular human being: The most certain criterion for maleness would be the capacity to produce sperm while the most certain criterion for femaleness would be the complementary capacity to produce eggs. Deviations from this criterion would decrease the certitude of our judgment regarding the sex/gender of the individual.

There is a view that Jesus was not quite as human as we are—that he was the Son of God disguised as a man, not a real man. The authors of The Myth of God Incarnate some of whom I suspect of having been brought up on this docetist heresy, are in revulsion against it. They reject it, however, not because the Church long ago threw it out as an option incompatible with her life, a heresy, but because it is found to be incompatible with the European way of life in the second half of the twentieth century. It seems odd for Christians to reject a doctrine on these grounds, since it is the very heart of the gospel to challenge conventional and accepted attitudes in any age; still, they do reject docetism, and that can’t be bad.

When Christians do this it is customary for them to do so in the name of the incarnation, the doctrine that the one person, Jesus, was both fully human and fully divine. What is peculiar to these authors is that they think the rejection of docetism involves also the rejection of its contrary, the incarnation. At least I think they are rejecting it. Professor Maurice Wiles at first talks definitely about a “Christianity without incarnation”, but then goes on to speak of it as a ‘myth’, and it is not at all clear whether a myth is always meant to be an untruth. Sometimes the authors merely seem to mean by ‘mythical’ the same as ‘subject to the limitations of religious language.’

When Werner Heisenberg presented his views of the fundamental indeterminism to which his uncertainty principle pointed in the basic levels of reality described by quantum mechanics, he used the Aristotelian technical terms of act and potency, affirming that the quantum system is in potency before the measurement and that the potency was actualised when the measurement took place, speaking thus of a ‘new ontology’ of quantum mechanics. I argue that Thomas Aquinas’ Aristotelian account of indeterminism in nature, through his analysis of the notions of matter as potency and form as act, can provide a suitable framework to understand Heisenberg's philosophical intuition about the nature of quantum systems.

In the immortal words of Herbert McCabe, ‘Whatever we are referring to when we use the word “God” it can no more be a god than it can be a model aeroplane or half-past eleven’ (God Still Matters). This striking idea – the “atheism” of true Christianity – has, in fact, a long pedigree. This paper traces its history from the early Church to the Angelic Doctor himself. The essential point is this: if our God really is who Christians claim God is, then all our words about God – including the word “god” – must necessarily fall short.

Von Balthasar's attacks on Rahner are scattered over several works. Sometimes their expression is very technical, and complex personal factors also play a part. But von Balthasar expresses his concerns vividly and concisely in a bitterly satirical dialogue near the end of a polemical text which he published just after Vatican II: The Moment of Christian Witness.’ A ‘well-disposed commissar', a figure symbolising the culture of modernity both in its easy secularism and its nightmare terrors, arraigns a Rahnerian Christian. In less than three full pages, Raimer's theology is made to look ridiculous. For Rahner, God always transcends objects in space and time: we know God only in and through them, as their permanently mysterious, elusive ground.

There is no high level Magisterial teaching directly on gender dysphoria nor on gender non‐conformity in matters of dress. Nevertheless, the relationship of gender identity to biology raises profound theological questions. Transitioning between gender roles has been construed as an attempt “to alter what is unalterable” and “to establish a false identity in place of one's true identity”. However, the anthropological reality of incongruent gender identity is complex. It has something in common with body dysmorphia, something in common with the feminist criticism of gender roles, something in common with being a eunuch or with having a divergence of sexual development and something in common with homosexuality, but in each case with important differences. This paper sets out a further analogy, between legal gender recognition and legal adoption. Intellectual humility is required to help develop more adequate concepts in this area. At the same time, practical considerations require that one comes to a provisional judgement, at least, concerning this phenomenon. The analogies from divergences of sexual development and from adoption demonstrate that it is possible in principle to affirm the incongruent gender identity without being untruthful or contradicting a sound Catholic anthropology that is adequate to this complex human reality.

Starting from a statement of Thomas Aquinas to the effect that even though a saw made of glass would be more beautiful than one made of iron, it would not fulfil its artistic end, it is argued that we have largely lost an awareness that the fine arts in their pursuit of beauty must also have a connection to some end, just as the saw does to cutting, and that seeking beauty in the abstract and divorced from such an end has had deleterious effects, including the loss of the artist's social role, the disappearance of the fine arts from everyday life and their replacement by objects of mass culture. This process is particularly illustrated by the history of the connection between poetry and music.

In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas discusses the biblical account of Creation and deals at length with the production of the body and soul of the First Man and the First Woman. The soul of each, being immaterial, was created by God. But whereas the human body is normally produced by parents from the substance of their own bodies, God himself produced both the body of Adam and the body of Eve. He produced the body of Adam from earth, the body of Eve from the body of Adam. The matter used may have been different, but Adam and Eve were equally God’s own handiwork and Eve was not a child of (and hence not a dependent of) Adam.

He asks himself why God followed this (asexual) method of production and replies that it was to show that reproduction is a relatively peripheral activity in the life of the human being. The specific goal of human existence is to understand. He uses the word homo: the activities of mind are the central work of the human being qua human being, of woman therefore as of man.

In accordance with medieval practice, he states objections to his own position and seeks to refute them. Perhaps God should not have made woman at the beginning of the world? The suggestion by a theologian that God should not have done something he actually did is obviously academic. But Aquinas was an academic, and academics of all centuries find that the discussion of highly theoretical issues assists them to clarify their understanding of the real world.

I have called this paper ‘The involvement of God’ because I want to take part in a discussion about such questions as whether God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures, in order to ask how far God is involved in his world. I shall first try to defend what I take to be the classical doctrine of God derived from Augustine and Aquinas: that it is not in the nature of God to be involved in the suffering of the world as spectator, sympathiser or victim, but that it is in God’s nature nonetheless to be involved with his creatures more intimately than any creature could be involved with any other. Secondly I shall argue that the Christology of Chalcedon does make sense of the notion that God suffers and indeed was tortured to death; indeed, in large part it just is this notion. Thirdly, and a bit more tentatively, I shall suggest that a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The subject of God’s suffering is so popular amongst theologians today that I am quite incapable of even beginning to give a survey of recent literature—this is partly because I haven’t read enough and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent authors by isolated quotation. I shall quote very little; I am concerned with certain ideas, how they hang together and how they fall apart.