We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.

In a recent review of Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago, 1991), Graham Ward comments: ‘It is possibly presumptuous at this point to say whether Marion’s theological argument for a God without Being succeeds. This book will need considerably more digesting by theologians before a judgment can be made about its success.’ It is a point well made, and the argument I will make in this article is intended only as a further contribution to the appropriation of Marion’s work in a theological climate that remains famously resistant to the roots of his work. That this is an important, indeed even seminal book for Theology should, it seems to me, be granted. And even if it is to be branded ‘postmodern’—which is itself very debatable judgement—it most certainly does not exhibit any of ‘the enthusiastic naivete’ that has marked so much of this expanding genre. Rigorous, even orthodox it may be, but still new.

Ward depicts Marion’s ‘odyssey’ as a ‘relentless foray into sophisticated, abstract thinking’, which is true enough. But this should not allow us to dismiss it to the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Parisian intellectuals. As I read it, its concerns are real and immediate, and by way of illustration of this fact I will begin with a brief anecdote.

The English Dominican Province has given to the Church five cardinals, seventy-two archbishops and bishops, several papal legates and nuncios, and to the state some ministers of prominence such as Archbishop William Hotham, the favourite minister of Edward I, and Bishop John Gilbert of Hereford, twice Lord High Treasurer. In theology, philosophy, Sacred Scripture and other branches of ecclesiastical science English Dominican writers of repute number more than a hundred, and it is easy to show that during the first three centuries of their existence they were by far the most prominent theological body in England, whilst extant MSS. of sermons and state documents testify to their ability and popularity as preachers. In contemplating this long list of eminent men the question has sometimes been asked why there are no English Dominicans officially enrolled in the Calendar of Saints either as canonized or beatified. The difficulty, which applies equally to the Irish Province with its lengthy list of martyrs, is not really hard to answer. At the time of the Henrican schism the feasts of six Dominicans only were kept in the Order, now the number is three hundred and four, of whom two hundred and ninety-four have been raised to the altars since 1600. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English Dominicans, persecuted and generally working in secret, and frequently in prison, had little leisure for gathering the information necessary to obtain the beatification or canonization of the many members of the Province noted for their sanctity or heroism as martyrs. It has been left to us in more propitious times to undertake this task, and surely we can hope that such a work will be blessed with success.

Aquinas’ treatise on conscience was the culmination of a lengthy debate that had been going on for centuries. This debate is today known and carried on under the name “weakness of the will” or akrasia. In my article, I am aiming to demonstrate that this discussion, which started with the Aristotle's problem of incontinent (akratic) man, has been going on through Augustine's problem of “two wills”. I would like to demonstrate that Aquinas links this discussion to his conception of the conscience and synderesis. Despite the fact, that R. Saarinen in his book about “weakness of the will” proves there is no connection between Aristotle's incontinent (akratic) man and Augustine's problem of “two wills”, my aim is to explain that it is Aquinas himself who connects Aristotle's incontinent man with Augustine's “two wills” and that incontinent person is someone who acts against his conscience.

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

We are told that the first question asked by the infant Thomas Aquinas was: ‘What is God?’ The pursuit of that question became his life's work; to it he gave all his energy and ability. Yet from the time of his earliest writings he had reached the conclusion that in this life he would never find the answer. ‘Nescimus', he will say—'We do not know.’ And he will repeat St John Damascene's ‘In Deo quid est, dicere impossible est —.'It is impossible to say of God what he is.’ St Thomas says this over and over again in his writings, from the earliest to the last. He insists not only that we do not know what God is—the essence, nature and ‘whatness’ of God—but also that we cannot know it: non possumus. He loves to repeat the assertion of the Mystical Theology of'the pseudo-Denys that the most perfect union with God is union with the utterly Unknown.

In Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 Thomas Aquinas proposes five ways or models of atonement. These are, in order, the ways of merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption and efficient causality. In line with the patristic and mediaeval tradition, Aquinas presents these five models very much in terms of what Hans Urs von Balthasar might call a theodramatic ‘action’ between God and humanity—a drama centred on the person of the incarnate Son who in some sense or other offers recompense to his Father for our sins. This theodramatic approach to soteriology dominates Catholic thought from Anselm to Balthasar and Protestant thought from Luther to Barth and beyond, but it takes little account of the latest thinking in historical Jesus studies or of current interpretations of Paul and other New Testament writers, and in this article I would like to suggest a way of rereading Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 in the light of what might be termed the Schweitzer/Sanders/Wright understanding of Jesus and Paul.

For Albert Schweitzer, Jesus was an eschatological prophet who saw himself as heralding the end of the age and who, when his preaching did not result in the anticipated apocalypse, effectively ‘broke himself on the wheel of history’ in order to bump human history over into the next phase. Paul picked up on this, and (according to Schweitzer) his ‘Christ-mysticism’ explored the various ways (being ‘in Christ’, dying and rising with Christ, mystical body, Holy Spirit) in which Christians become bound up with the Messiah whose death has inaugurated the eschatological kingdom.

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter's Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and discuss reincarnation, abortion—to refute it—; invoke the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities, but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his Catholicism, has never paraded it.

Return to the Sources

A Winter's Tale is a masterpiece of subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is sometimes discernible in Rohmer’s previous film, A Summer’s Tale, where references to Kant were a little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six films made during this ten-year period, especially My Soul’s Friend (1987), were far superior to the average film production.

Money can only be understood in terms of power. In the hands of the consumer it is power over goods. In the hands of the creative capitalist it is power over the means to produce goods. In the hands of the finance-capitalist, or money-lender, it is not only power over producers and consumers, but power as well over nations and their governments. The technique of money-lending on its simplest level is to make an advance against security, draw interest, and at an agreed date receive back the capital sum—other things being equal, a perfectly honest transaction. If the more ambitious money-lenders kept to this even routine, however, they would be a very long time attaining power. What they desire, therefore, is that the money they lend shall either be repaid to them when its buying power has been greatly enhanced, or that it shall not be repaid at all, thus enabling them to foreclose on their mortgage and become possessed of their victim’s capital assets. These two motifs have long determined the course of economic history, explaining slump and boom, and enabling a small band of international lenders and manipulators to become the virtual masters of the world. The method was explained, with almost incredible candour, in an article which appeared in The U.S.A. Bankers’ Magazine on August 26th, 1934: —

’ Bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through a process of the law the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under the control of leading financiers.

Cruelty to children is not new, though no doubt we are an inventive enough species to come up with some new forms. It could be that some of us may be more disposed to it than others, but it seems safer to assume that we all share a capacity for cruelty. Such a capacity does not have to be exercised: cruelty can be understandable without being right. Some societies and some social situations may increase the likelihood of its occurring, but they neither excuse it nor explain it away.

But if cruelty itself is not new, new in our own time is its categorisation. When we talk of ‘child abuse’, we are putting forward views on both cruelty and children which in some ways are new, or at least newly accepted, and which incorporate our contemporary notions of how human beings should conduct themselves. This categorisation is crucial to any discussion, since it provides us with the basic forms which it must take, but it does incline us to treat the phenomenon of cruelty to children as especially characteristic of our own time. The broad range of cruelty from deprivation through violation to murder is fully evident, in England at least, from a succession of court cases and official inquiries, yet it still cannot be asserted with any certainty that child abuse is more common now than in the past. Evidence from the past is lacking precisely because our forebears did not share our categorisations (or our interest in statistics).

In 1575 a Welsh priest in Rome wrote down a plan which he had cherished in his long years of exile, since the time when the death of Mary Tudor had extinguished his hopes of becoming Bishop of Bangor. He imagined the galleys of the Papal fleet coming to anchor at Menai, and disembarking an army led by Catholic exiles. The mountain passes from Harlech to Conway were to be blocked by Welsh Catholic sympathizers, and when sufficient English Catholics had made their way into this bridgehead, he proposed a breakout into the Midlands to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the English throne.

Dr Morys of Clynnog, the author of this scheme, made Wales his landing place for three reasons: her potentialities for resistance, her separate language and history, and her fidelity to the Catholic faith. All these points are made, from the opposite side, by Morys Clynnog’s supplanter in the Bishopric of Bangor, the Protestant Nicholas Robinson. ‘I have found’, he wrote in 1567, ‘since I came to this country images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and indecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the country full of beads and knots.’ Fr Robert Persons, s.j., likewise turned his attention to Wales at the start of his famous missionary journey with Blessed Edmund Campion in 1580 as a region where priests would be welcome and would do great work for the Catholic cause.

Our enquiry leads us to consider the way in which the Catholic Church adapted her mission to the Welsh nation in the unprecedented circumstances of the Elizabethan persecution. First we must study the part played by the seminary priests from Douai in North Wales. At the very beginnings of the Douai seminary we find associated with Cardinal Allen a Welsh priest from Anglesey, Dr Owen Lewis, like Morys Clynnog, an Oxford graduate and an exile.