Of course others have faced this problem, and found their answer. It would be wanton, spiritual arrogance for the author in his academic seclusion to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, as he lays aside one or other of the various handbooks of Christian reconstruction with which the market is flooded in these days, a horrid doubt crosses his mind which passes into a nightmarish sense of unreality. We draught our charters, we hold our luncheons, we address our public meetings. We go to the world outside the conference-hall door with a smile, with a handbook, nearly always with a sense of assurance Again, we search the Scriptures not that we may have life, but that we may find a slogan for a Christian mass-movement, in which the demands ot the platform will blunt the sharpness of our truly Christian perception. Our attitude seems sometimes a curiously sorry compact of assurance and desperation. We are assured because we think we have a solution for the frightful torments of the present; we are afraid because we see the dreadful possibility that men will not listen to us, may in fact opt finally for other gods.

Is this altogether unfair? The picture is not intentionally spiteful. But there are moments when it seems hard to escape the conviction that some contemporary forms of Christian social activity are little less than highly subtle forms of escapism. They are ‘idealist’ in the sense assigned to that term by Marxist writers, for they rest on unconscious desire to escape the pressing demand to wrestle with social actualities in the here and now by passing into a world that analysis points out to be one of ideas only.

As a philosopher St Thomas had very little to say that was his own, and I suspect he would have looked askance at anyone who might have suggested that he was an original philosopher. If you try the experiment of dipping into one of his commentaries on Aristotle, I think you will get a vivid illustration of what I have in mind. Take any of his commentaries—on the Metaphysics or the Ethics, the de Anima or the logical works—open it at random, and what you will find is something like this: first you will have reproduced the Latin version which he used; this will normally be the word-by-word translation prepared by William of Moerbeke. This is practically incomprehensible, unless you go through the labour of turning it back into Greek first. Then the commentary. The standard pattern of this is to begin by relating the passage to be considered in each particular lecture to what has gone before: ‘having dealt with so-and-so, the Philosopher now discusses . . .’. The problem under discussion is stated, the reason why it is necessary to discuss this problem and discuss it at this stage; then you have the steps in the argument distinguished and their logical structure displayed, the various reasons given by Aristotle for holding a view tabulated, and so on. Within each of the closely mapped out divisions the text of Aristotle is paraphrased, usually in a slightly extended form. Criticism or disagreement is almost totally absent; the nearest we get to that is in the occasional hints in the interpretations adopted by St Thomas, the shifts of emphasis, the unobtrusive play of overtones.

Last year the Vatican issued a document, Christianity and the World Religions, prepared by its International Theological Commission and approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The document arises from a recognition that ‘The question of the relations among religions is becoming daily more important’, and that circumstances today ‘make interreligious dialogue necessary’. Accordingly, the Commission sets out to ‘clarify how religions are to be evaluated theologically’ by offering ‘some theological principles which may help in this evaluation’. And the Commission adds that ‘In proposing these principles we are clearly aware that many questions are still open and require further investigation and discussion’ (3-5).

Although the Report’s title continues the traditional conceit that Christianity is not itself one of the world religions, these opening statements suggest a tentative and relatively undogmatic approach which contrasts with the 1996 address by Cardinal Ratzinger himself, in which in presenting the traditional absolutist position he attacked two theologians extensively by name, seriously misrepresenting their views as a result of not having read their writings for himself. His Eminence’s failure to check the accuracy of the tendentious secondary source on which he relied is all the more surprising in view of the accurate and up-to-date section on the state of the discussion, based on a wide knowledge of the existing literature, in this Report of his own Theological Commission. Here all the main competing schools of thought, both Catholic and Protestant, are included and discussed. The Report was first drafted in 1993 and its expertise must have been available to the Cardinal, had he wished to have more reliable information.

In this essay I should like to raise the question: In what sense could we say that God’s providence was active in the last events of the life of Jesus, that is to say at Gethsemane and on the cross? I will proceed in three steps. First, I shall characterise Jesus’ encounter with evil. Second, I shall reconstruct the meaning attached to his life and to his relationship with the Father. Third, from the clash of evil and meaning represented in the passion of Jesus, God will be portrayed as absent-present in the midst of human suffering.

Before engaging in our reflections, a methodological note is in order. When we examine New Testament texts reporting Jesus’ words and actions, we find out that ‘the accounts are not mutually consistent either in detail or in the interpretation they offer.’ Each of the scriptural narratives or comments on the passion not only does not attribute the same words to Jesus, but casts the saving event into a particular theological vision. Therefore, most exegetes try very carefully to avoid concordism.

Next, the Gospel narratives are not ‘historical’ in the sense we moderns ascribe to this adjective. Surely they have an historic basis, but each of them tells a story the purpose of which is to highlight what it entailed for the faith of believers several decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament texts are not meant to give us some information about the inner psychology of Jesus. The details and dialogues presented are not directly biographical, but they are part of a narrative whose organizing principles are, in a sense, closer to those of a novel.

A quotation from the fearless and original thought of Baron Friedrich von Hugel will be our justification with those who may consider our praise of St. Thomas Aquinas unjustly superlative. He writes : . this Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul so apparently derivative and abstractive, is more complete and balanced and penetrates to the specific genus of Christianity more deeply than Saints Paul and Augustine, with all their directness and intensity. .... No one has put this point better than Professor Troeltsch : “The decisive point here is the conception peculiar to the Middle Ages of what is Christian as supernatural.”’

Whilst I hesitate to give my master, St. Thomas, the praise of this latest panegyrist, I feel that his words will be a clue to my attempt to deal with St. Thomas and Law. Indeed, the names mentioned in the quotation are more akin to the subject of this paper than, perhaps, the writer thought. In the life of St. Paul the idea of Law had played almost the major part. The seeming opposition between Law and faith, or works and faith, had, for a moment, led him into opposition with a section of the Church; and even with St. Peter. Augustine, too, like St. Paul, had come to an intellectual and practical rejection of Manichean Dualism by the master-vision of a creative Law which was, at the same time, one, good, and all-powerful; indeed so powerful in its goodness as to be able to turn evil to good.

In order to understand what St. Thomas means by affective knowledge ‘or knowledge by ‘inclination ‘or ‘connaturality,’ something must first be said of what he understands by ‘knowledge,’ and what by ‘affect,’ ‘inclination,’ or ‘connaturality.’ Readers will not expect in this short article a full and detailed account, let alone a justification, of St. Thomas’s theory of knowledge and of appetite. A brief survey of some salient points such as is required for our present purposes is all we shall attempt; and to obviate the necessity of explaining St. Thomas’s medieval terminology we shall frankly paraphrase his thought in less unfamiliar language. Those readers who wish to study the matter further in St. Thomas’s own words will find at the end of the article a selection of ‘readings ‘in which they may investigate the various points raised.

St. Thomas’s account of the nature of knowledge is much more ‘phenomenological ‘than is often supposed by those who have not studied him closely. Nothing could be further from the truth than that St. Thomas’s epistemology is based on an a priori ‘ faculty psychology,’ or that he short-circuits the ‘critical problem ‘of knowledge by unwarranted assumptions based on illegitimate abstractions. It is a first principle with St. Thomas (as it had been with Aristotle) that potencies can be affirmed only as inferences from actualities; and” the whole structure of his ‘faculty psychology ‘(if such it can indeed be called) is based on a thoroughgoing empiricist scrutiny of the ‘given ‘fact of knowledge.

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.

That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.

In years gone by, November was the month most closely associated with death. The month, which Ted Hughes appropriately describes as the ‘month of the drowned dog’, opened, having remembered All Saints, with the Commemoration of All Souls, the black draped catafalque in the aisle, the three Masses, and a hymnody recalling death’s pains and anguishes. Think of the words of the popular hymn, O turn to Jesus, Mother, turn, in which it was recalled that those who died,

... have fought a gallant fight;
In death’s cold aims they persevered;
and, after life’s uncheery night.
The arbour of their rest is neared.

Death was cold; death was pain and loss; sickness unto death was struggle.

Now, it seems, we have possessed death, we have brought it close and made it our own, not to be feared and fled from, but friendly and familiar. The theology of death has come of age and now faces death with that anticipatory resoluteness of which Heidegger speaks. Thanatology speaks the language of ontology. Subjectivity, formerly snuffed out in death, now appropriates, as integral to its own life, death, and reasserts its mastery. Mature in Christian faith, we have authentically managed to appropriate what otherwise we would rather forget. What I would like to suggest in this article is that this repatriation of death into life, rather than yielding death’s meaning, actually leads to a situation in which, as Blanchot says, we have lost death, and obscured its significance.

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.

Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

The period between the publication of the encyclical ‘Divini Red-emptoris’ (On Atheistic Communism) in 1937 and the election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, was marked by a definite and fundamental change in Vatican/Communist relations. This study attempts to chart this development, explaining exactly how and why this transformation has occurred. The few other studies of this subject have all lacked a historical perspective, and have therefore tended to encourage the false notion that the views and action of the successive popes have remained the same. Part I of this essay examines the hostile intransigence of Pius XI and Pius XII during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, and centres upon the startling change of attitude promoted by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The more cautious but perhaps more significant promotion and extension of this Joh-anine ideal by Paul VI over a longer period of time will be analysed (along with a brief look at the state of Vatican/Communist relations in the present day). In Part II this study is essentially Vatican centred; the Church is large and often ambiguous, and local hierarchies, groups of militant lay Catholics, Christian Marxists, prominent theologians, and individual clergy, have only been analysed when they influence or have helped to change the Holy See. Papal speeches and letters, promulgations and edicts from the Holy Office and the other Vatican Congregations, and particularly Papal encyclicals, have been used extensively, and other primary material such as journals, reviews, newspapers and other contemporary writings have been consulted where necessary. The change in the nature of communism and the policies of the communist world (primarily the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, but also China, Indo-China, Latin America and the European Communist parties) I have treated as a secondary development due to limitations of time, space and sources.

This overview of de Lubac's work considers his background in French Catholicism at the opening of the twentieth century; the intellectual currents a-swirl in his formative years; his own education in Jesuit institutions; the mosaic of his highly disparate writings, and the broad lines of his ‘career’ as priest and cardinal. This ‘panorama’ is complemented by a proposal, intended to illuminate the ‘mosaic’ referred to: the author's suggestion is that unity – in a variety of analogical senses of that word – constitutes the key to de Lubac's entire enterprise.’

To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.

No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.

Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.

The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:

1. 1 God is omnipotent

2. 2 God is good/loving

3. 3 Evil/suffering exists

The origin of the Urban Theology Unit resides, I fancy, in a quite fundamental question which has seemed to me to be elemental in any search for Christian discipleship. It was something like: Where do I have to place myself so that Gospel things happen to me?

I had satisfied at least myself that the peculiar and distinctive genius of Christianity lay in its uncovering and empowering certain secular dynamics which were for the wholeness of humanity.

The call to be a disciple, in this light, was therefore the call to place oneself strategically, so that the dynamics of the Christ-events could be recognised and entered into. The evangelical motive, “What must I do to be saved?” was therefore secularised into “Where must I be that salvation happens?” The church therefore had to be discovered around and within those events, people and movements which could be part of the on-going secular dynamic which continued the acts of Jesus. The acts of Jesus, in turn, were the immediate and often microcosmic happenings which embodied and pointed to the Kingdom of God.

It seemed to me, further, that the calling of a theologian always had to be secondary to the calling to be a disciple — or, more pertinently, that a theological vocation was impossible except as a development of a discipleship vocation. This meant that theorising had to issue from commitment, speaking from acting, systematising from experimenting. Indeed, I later learned that the whole life pattern of Jesus reflected this kind of dialogue between engagement and withdrawal, conflict and spirituality, politics and privateness, and that the peculiar group that he called into being likewise existed as alternative communal society (the New Israel) and as his own alternative inner being (the Body of Christ).