It seems strange, at the time the Oedipus complex was being unravelled, that the case history of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 350-434) and his mother Monnica should not have been more generally used as basic illustrative material. Perhaps it was too firmly embedded, in the lay mind, in the bracket of salvation-history to be eligible for general use. Fortunately, however, the portrait of this provincial Roman-African mother has been preserved simply because it was safely insulated within the pages of a ‘devotional’ book—the Confessions of Augustine, a writing that itself has barely begun to disgorge its total psychological treasures. To excise and examine the history of Monnica will tell us a lot about Augustine, which in its turn could tell us a lot about Augustine-style Western Christianity—a grass-roots examination that is becoming a popular lay pastime.

The biography of Monnica presents a complex study. At times Augustine almost persuades us into believing that she is actually the theme of the Confessions:

But even when he presents her ‘straight’ he depicts a complicated love-hate relationship, however much he attempts to polish up the love aspect. Added to which is the immense difficulty presented by Augustine’s own dichotomous style of writing and thinking whereby he presents Monnica to us through a series of quite contradictory lenses.

It is well known what confusions and misunderstandings have arisen in the history of Christianity by translations from one language into another. They can be worse when attempts are made to translate religious literature from a European language into languages of peoples with cultures very different from ours, such as the peoples of Africa. I have recently come across an illustration of this in a C.M.S. hymn book in Zande (Buku Aimina, The Religious Tract Society, London, n.d.). I shall present a few specimens of translations into this Central African language of familiar verses as examples. Before doing so I should say that Zande is a tonal language and that the translations are made to conform to English metre and to be sung to the English tunes. This in itself is enough to render the hymns more or less meaningless. I am not trying to make fun of the missionaries, for whom I had great respect, but I must say that I am astonished at their attempts not only to translate hymns to be sung to a foreign system of notation but also to translate them, where possible, literally. Thus:

This would have sounded quite remarkable to an ordinary Zande (one who was not an instructed Christian convert).

A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.

In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?

The delay in publishing the Dead Sea scrolls, long a quiet academic scandal, was recently thrust into the forefront of the news by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception?. Its authors, M.Baigent and R. Leigh, two qualified experts in discerning arcane conspiracies, manifestly Find the world a threatening place. They give reality to their nightmare of Vatican world domination by claiming that the moment the scrolls were discovered a prescient Vatican, foreseeing the damage that first-century documents (then still unread!) must inevitably cause the faith, inserted its inquisitorial minions, the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, at the beginning of a process which to date they have consistently subverted. An hilarious thesis to those who know the facts, but disturbing to those forced to rely on titillating innuendo.

A major archaeological discovery is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Time and time again chance, not planning, is the decisive factor. Had Heinrich Schliemann dug another sector of Troy, he would never have found the spectacular gold objects he identified as Priam’s treasure. If Kathleen Kenyon had placed her main trench 15 metres further north she would never have brought to light the 8000 BC tower which is the earliest evidence of urban organisation.

My interest in the Soviet became active when, after a course in the art of pantomime, one of my pupils was asked to demonstrate my technique for the American section of the M.O.R.T.(which I believe to stand for Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre). It is obvious that the Soviet-minded in New York, ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils exists,’ where also there are so many languages spoken, would like to be acquainted with a wordless drama. We reluctantly decided against the proposal. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I confess to sharing most of the Communist’s views with regard to the existing theatre, and even a few of his ideals for a future stage. I cannot disagree with his condemnation of ‘the revue of the bourgeois theatre distinguished for its extreme banality, absolute absence of political coherence, abundance of triviality, pomposity and out-and-out pornography.’ And not only citizens of U.S.S.R. might endorse the following: ‘The broad masses of workers and peasants, crushed by political and economic oppression, did not know the theatre, and when they did receive some crumbs of scenic art, it was perverted and vulgar . . . Inartistic, in the great majority of cases, and almost always devoid of ideas, offered for sale to the mercantile petty bourgeoisie, under the influence of uncultured impressarios and other business men of ill repute, the ordinary theatre presented a pitiful spectacle.'

This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.

The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.

Newmah's Anglican days made him acutely aware of how the language of Catholicism sounds strange in unaccustomed and indeed suspicious ears and how readily misunderstanding ensues. Infallibility is taken to be a claim to be right on everything, the Immaculate Conception is confused with the Virgin Birth, and the remission of sins becomes a permission to continue in evil ways. It is, he saw, a general problem in dealing with the unfamiliar, and he wondered what a hostile foreigner would make of the maxims of the laws of England. Might he not, reading in Blackstone's incomparable Commentaries that ‘the power and jurisdiction of parliament is so transcendent that it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds’, see a blasphemous claim to divine omnipotence? Might not the assertion that ‘the king can do no wrong’ seem an arrogant claim to divine sinlessness? In truth, of course, all that is meant is that in English law there is no higher authority than Parliament and that the King cannot be sued in his own Courts: nothing more. Newman could but ask the hostile foreigner to abide a while and abate his hostility.

Aquinas, writing in a highly technical Latin and within a philosophy and theology alien to modern ears, is no less prone to be misunderstood, and the modes of misrepresenting him, often unwitting, are many. What he has to say about marriage and related issues has been the object of recent attacks: often he is read as if he were a Lutheran or Calvinist. It may be well to note some of these types of error before dealing with his own understanding in these matters.

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.

As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.

This paper begins by exploring how Joseph Ratzinger's post-doctoral work on the Theology of History in St Bonaventure is shaped by his interest in how theology can be grounded in salvation history. Through this lens, he examines Bonaventure's multi-form theories of scripture and the place of St Francis in salvation history to show how prophetic interpretations of scripture are consistent with Christ as the apex of history. The paper goes on to demonstrate that these insights also influence Ratzinger's later work, particularly his reading of Dei Verbum, his recognition of the Mariological dimensions of hermeneutics, as well as his consideration of various prophetical manifestations of the life of the Church such as the monastic movement and the new ecclesial movements.