Professor John Webster is not only a colleague and friend he is also someone with whom I have a good deal of theological affinity. Moreover, and more importantly, while he is an Anglican and I a Roman Catholic, we, on fundamental Christian doctrine, share a common faith. Because of this I read with special interest his article “‘Fides et Ratio”, articles 64-79’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 81 No. 948 (2000) 66-76). I knew that he might be critical of the encyclical at certain points, as would be expected from any serious thinking theologian examining a particular piece of work. What I did not expect was his almost complete lack of sympathy towards the encyclical’s aim, his almost thorough disagreement with its approach, arguments, and judgements, as well as at times, his dismissive attitude toward the encyclical, which on occasion, so it appeared to me, to border on the mocking. In response to Professor Webster I want to address some of the issues that he raised in an attempt to show that his reading of the encyclical is not the proper reading, and in so doing hopefully demonstrate that the encyclical is not as misconceived and flawed as he thinks.

The Philosophical and Theological ‘Rumpus Room’

Webster begins by noting the Pope’s leadership in addressing such an important issue as the relationship between faith and reason and in so doing intruding himself into what some academics might consider their privileged and private domain. However, Webster faults the tone of the document.

If the life of the twelfth century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis is anything to go by, intimacy with God should carry a health warning! After the death of her parents Christina’s elder sisters arranged that she should have the menial job of looking after the family’s herds. ‘Immediately’, we are told in her Life, ‘Christ did not fail to the lower and more humble office and He gave her the grace of an inward sweetness and very often visited her with heavenly secrets’. As a result of the ‘exertions of her inner contemplations’ Christina died. That was not, however, the end of the story, indeed it was the beginning of Christina's extraordinary vocation; to suffer for souls through voluntarily imposed penances. During the requiem mass the following day ‘the body stirred in the coffin and immediately was raised up like a bird and ascended to the rafters of the church’. When finally forced to descend Christina explained that she had been granted a vision of heaven and hell, before Christ commanded her soul to return to her body.

After this return from the grave Christina, her Life continues, ‘ran from the presence of men with wondrous horror and fled into the deserts and into the trees and perched on the peaks of turrets or steeples and on other lofty places’. She went on to develop mortifications which included standing in ice-cold rivers and throwing herself into hot bread ovens, not to mention suffering the cruelty of her alarmed family and other villagers who bound her in chains and put a heavy yoke on her shoulders.

The religious thought of Nikos Kazantzakis, particularly as contained within ‘The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises’, is still demanding attention. Although there have been recent welcoming attempts to elucidate his religious position in relation to Christian thought and process theism, these attempts still remain largely theoretically speculative. What the present paper hopes to contribute is a combination of both speculation and fact. Through an examination of Kazantzakis’ personal library housed in the Historical Museum of Iraklion, Crete, one can become affiliated with the literature that was occupying Kazantzakis immediately prior to and during the composition of the ‘Spiritual Exercises’. The speculative part naturally comes when one tries to ascertain the influence of such literature upon his subsequent thought.

It is clear that during the years 1922-23, when he was based in Vienna and Berlin, Kazantzakis was engaged with works of Freud, Rank, Spengler, Luxemborg as well as certain commentaries on Buddhist thought. These sources are generally recognised as shaping Kazantzakis’ thought during this time. However, one source that has not received any attention is the Bhagavad Gita, literally ‘The Song of God’. Kazantzakis had his own German translation of this Sanskrit poetic work and inside this copy may be found a ticket advertising an evening of readings dated ‘Berlin, Mittwoch 2 Oktober, 1922”. It thus appears fair to assume that this was a work that Kazantzakis was engaged with to a degree during his sojourn in Berlin.

During this time, Kazantzakis witnessed the crumbling German economic system, had first hand experience of profound poverty and became associated with an active group of communists.

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.

Last September Spode House sponsored yet another of the Catholic gatherings for which it is rapidly gaining a reputation. This time it was the philosophers who met. As Fr Columba Ryan remarked, in introducing the conference, the philosophers had an advantage over the artists, writers and musicians who had held weekends already: they could not only discuss their calling, but practise it at the same time. And practise it they did. During the weekend there were two lectures, two symposia and three open discussions; and in addition the debate could be heard continuing in every available moment, at the tea-tables and floating across the park during the afternoons.

The conference was called as a first move towards meeting what is a grave danger at the moment for the Church: the growing gap between the language of the traditional philosophy in the Church and that of contemporary thinkers. It was intended to provide an opportunity for discussion between philosophers of both kinds, so that they might learn a little of each other’s languages; and in this it was extraordinarily successful. The weekend started, one might say, in the shadow of the controversy that had for weeks been filling the correspondence columns of The Tablet. The opposite sides in that monumental discussion might be expected to be at each other’s throats from the beginning. And indeed at the beginning it seemed that this would continue. But it is a measure of the success of the conference that the philosophers quickly shed their official ‘isms’ as they got down to the business of arguing particular questions.

In a recent work M. Denis Saurat claims that reality is rendered comprehensible only by the “complete life of Christ”. Christ, Logos and Man, is the centre from which all life flows, unfolding “into the past and into the future". No doubt M. Saurat’s thesis is expressed in pantheistic thought forms, but this does not detract from the value of the imaginatively expressed intuition by which he has discovered that it is Christ alone who gives meaning and reality to the time process, and that it is the Incarnation that makes history intelligible.

Whatever reservations a Catholic is called upon to make regarding the details of M. Saurat’s vision, we are able to recognise that he is attempting to bring home to us a darkly seen variant of St Irenaeus’s doctrine of the recapitulation of all things in Christ. For by recapitulation St Irenaeus meant a recommencement in the opposite direction by which God, reversing as it were the process whereby sin infected the earth, gathers together and reunites all creation, including matter, but specially man, in a new economy of salvation. He gathers up his entire work from the beginning to purify and sanctify it in his Incarnate Son, who in turn becomes for us a second Adam.” (E. Mersch, S.J.: The Whole Christ: p. 230).

Creation points to the Incarnation, and this Christocentric preoccupation of St Irenaeus has important repercussions on his doctrine of man. M. Saurat, arguing from the same premise, has also described man in terms of Christ.

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.

Both St Teresa and Franz Kafka in The Interior Castle and The Castle explore the geography of the soul. The first is a sixteenth-century spiritual treatise cast in the form of an allegory, the second a modern piece of fiction presented as a novel. In each case, a failure to pursue these terms as definitions has led to a good deal of confused critical comment.

St Teresa begins: ‘While I was beseeching our Lord today that he would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down, in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. . . These words say exactly what the writer means them to; she is preparing the way to elaborate her image of the soul as a castle, just as St Augustine referred to Heaven as a city, or Bunyan to some of the landmarks on the way to the Celestial City as Doubting Castle and the Slough of Despond. Each example shows the language to be that of personal comparison—although, whereas the soul is a castle for St Teresa, for Bunyan Doubting Castle is the citadel of the Giant Despair.

Thomas states in the Prologue to the Summa theologiae that he intends to teach beginners (incipientes). This description of the Summa’s intended audience might lead us to ask what qualities identify beginners (incipientes) as beginners. Alternatively stated, we might ask what deficiencies these beginners must overcome in order to become proficient.

The Prologue itself suggests one answer to these questions. Beginning students, or as Thomas describes them in the Prologue, “novices in this doctrine” (hujus doctrinae novitios) are impeded in their efforts to learn sacred doctrine by a multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments. In addition, things which are necessary to a sound grasp of sacred doctrine are presented according to the order required for the exposition of a text rather than according to the order of learning. Finally, frequent repetition of material bores and confuses the student.

In his reading of the Prologue, Marie-Dominique Chenu suggested that Thomas would have understood beginners as those who lack a sufficient grasp of the intelligible principle that pervades sacred doctrine. Chenu argued that with the influx in the West of the Aristotelian corpus in the 13th century, theologians were forced to ask anew the question, “Is sacred doctrine a science?” It was in part to show that sacred doctrine is truly a science that Thomas sought to construct his Summa theologiae according to an intelligible order. This effort to show the scientific nature of sacred doctrine was no mere academic exercise, though. Effective learning required that the material taught be presented in such a way that the student might grasp the unifying principle of the material itself.

The inclusion of a monograph on St. Thomas in the ‘Leaders of Philosophy’ series is significant of the growing strength of the Thomist revival. Even in England, later than in the rest of Europe, St. Thomas is now coming to be considered as taking rank among the philosophers who have mainly influenced western thought; with Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant. Father Knox’s Lady Denham, with her ‘Sir Thomas who?’ after the game of ghosts, is a type already growing uncommon.

Perhaps there is no one in this country better qualified than Father D’Arcy to give an acceptable statement of St. Thomas’s thought. A high and dry Thomist can cut an awkward figure in modern philosophical society. Father D’Arcy is never that; his manner is always tactful, indeed at times even deprecatory. He is inclined to present a Thomist certitude almost hat in hand, as when he says that the problem of the One and the Many receives ‘an attempted explanation in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. By an employment of his fundamental distinctions and what he calls analogy he tries to find a via media’ (p. 109). Still, a wedge cannot be driven in thick end first, and it is possible that Thomists in the past have not been sufficiently ingratiating. And there cart be little doubt that Father D’Arcy has also entered well into the spirit of his subject, and has written a book profitable even to the practised Thomist; something better than a list of theses strung together and described from outside; a synthesis showing a real insight into St. Thomas’s thought and the meaning of the principles of act and potency, of analogy, and of knowledge.

The correspondence columns of the Catholic Press have carried frequent assertions of the duty of submitting to papal authority in the matter of contraception, and defences of the disciplinary measures taken against some priests to secure such submission. Few appear, however, to have raised any doubts about the justice of such exercises of authority, save those who have continued to deny the correctness of the papal teaching. My intention in this article is to conduct just such a scrutiny.

The claim of that traditional teaching on contraception which was upheld by the Pope’s Encyclical was, of course, that contraception is contrary to the natural law, that is, that it is capable of being recognized as intrinsically and unconditionally immoral on the basis of ethical principles which can be arrived at by anyone who believes in God, independently of any special revelation. But, while a supporter of the traditional teaching is thus committed to holding that there are cogent arguments to such a conclusion taking only general moral principles as their starting-point, it is hardly to be supposed that even the most fervent adherent of that view claims that it is possible to achieve certainty on the point on that basis alone. Considered from the standpoint of ethical theory, the question is an intricate and subordinate one, requiring for its satisfactory solution a much firmer basis of general principle than philosophers and theologians have yet succeeded in providing: by relying purely on moral reasoning from general principles, no one could be expected to arrive at a conclusion to which he attached more than a limited degree of probability, and especially so when the question has such grave practical consequences.

In recent times there has grown up a strong feeling that our tradition of sanctity is inadequate, and that this inadequacy is connected with its isolation from the secular world. In Fr Rabut’s words, ‘La saintete traditionelle s’est coupé non seulement du peche mais souvent des espoirs et des travaux du monde’.

This period of comparative isolation from ‘the hopes and labours’ of the world has coincided with a period of strong establishment; so that the isolation has expressed itself in practice not in indifference but in active obstruction to most of the advances made in the post-reformation period. Is there a necessary connection between the obstruction and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, the period of establishment of Christianity in Western society?

Certainly, one of the most curious aspects of the Church in its social dimension has been its almost total opposition to change: not to this or that particular change, but to change as such. This has taken the form of an implacable opposition to a succession of radical or revolutionary philosophies which have fomented change over the past five hundred years. Nineteenth-century liberals met with the same treatment as their twentieth-century counterparts, those theorists and reformers who, at various positions left of centre, have learned not to count the Church as among their allies. They are tinged with ‘secularism’ and ‘utopianism’, are irreverent of precedent and tradition, and easily fit into that elastic ecclesiastical category of ‘dangerous’.

Since history is, almost by definition, change, it will be seen that this puts a great strain on the relationship between the church and a section of the world which has particular claims on the church’s sympathy.

There is a form of truth known as calumny.’ This howler appeared in the first Editorial of Blackfriars. The Editor, Father Bernard Delany, followed up by Father Vincent McNabb in the first article, was expounding ‘Our Aim of Truth’. The slip was quite out of keeping with Father Bernard’s character and its like never recurred while he was Editor. If he had a fault it was excessive caution born of selfdistrust. It used to be said of him that when he came to be beatified the Breviary would have to admit ‘Nimis demisse reputabat de se’. To us, his contemporaries, this initial slip seemed a cruel misfortune, a quite unnecessary manoeuvre by his heavenly patrons to safeguard his modesty. We feared it might discourage him and intensify his habitual shyness of publicity. The way his lapse was brought home to him made that the more likely.

Six of us, at least, were given his leader to revise. It must have been over-confidence in his diffidence that blinded us, for we saw nothing wrong. Nor, as far as we knew, did anyone else, until James Britten opened his copy of the Review. Britten, then a peppery old gentleman and a militant convert of many years standing, was joint founder of the Catholic Truth Society, which at that date was in the early stages of a post-war ‘Forward Movement’. He was learned, and zealous for the exaltation of Holy Church and the overthrow of her enemies. He was also incapable of silence or of keeping out of print when anything called for contradiction or correction.

Eschatology has found new respect at the heart of theology in the course of the twentieth century. The cross of Christ as a source, subject and description of soteriological concentration has secured a central place in the work of theology in recent decades. More remarkable is the communion of soteriology and eschatology, yielding an emphasized eschatology of the cross, still fresh in contemporary theology. The development of this vision in theology is particularly instructive in the work of five renowned theologians: Moltmann, Kasper, Ratzinger, Küng and von Balthasar.

In 1960 Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that eschatology is the “sign of the times” of contemporary theology. That significance has strengthened in the passing of over thirty years. The work of many theologians demonstrates the truth of this and one of those most active in the breaking of the eschatological silence is the German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann.

Denys Turner’s attractive argument for the compatibility, nay the virtual identity, of Marxism and Christianity (New Blackfriars, June 1975) is excellent as far as it goes, and I have little to quarrel with in it. But this is because it doesn’t go very far. So I’d like to press him to go on to the next step.

Marxism and Christianity are at one—indeed, are one—because each affirms that it is only by means of revolutionary socialist praxis that a community of human love can be attained, through the overturning of the capitalist system of human exploitation which for us in the present era is the incarnation of everything which is opposed to such love. All right: but then I have to ask myself am I a practising Marxist or only a sham Marxist? A practising Christian or only a sham Christian? Until some objective criteria have been established by which I can judge my own praxis, nothing has been done to help me except to juggle with words. Now it is at just this point, it seems to me, that Marxism fails because, unlike Christianity, it refuses to take the metaphysical basis of ethics seriously. Or, to put the point the other way round, it is at this point that Christianity, in going beyond Marxism, ceases to be wholly compatible with it.