Given recent receptivity to the importance of aesthetics and the role of art and the imagination, an examination of an artist who managed to arrive at creative expression not in spite of faith but because of that faith will be both useful and, one hopes, inspiring.’ Georges Bemanos was to the early part of this century what Olivier Messaien has become to the rebirth of Opera today and is the chosen subject of this study for similar reasons. Even a cursory reading of the best known novel of Bemanos, the Diary of a Country Priest, will initiate the reader who is otherwise ill-versed in the central preoccupations of French literature or unlettered in the complexities of Catholic spirituality, into an entirely different perspective on the function of the novel and the drama of human redemption. For in a world of peer-assessment, target-determination, performance-related pay, this story as others from the Bernanos collection can contribute to the unravelling of the activism and success-ethic that lies at the heart of our conception of what it means to achieve fulfilment and self-awareness. Fifty years after the death of Bemanos, it is not too late to set our sights on this most original of French authors for a repristination of the function of the novel and the way that the supernatural can make a contribution to that function. This is a poignant exercise given the complaint of one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, that much contemporary English fiction has lost its creative edge to the tired hymns of suburbia and that much North- Atlantic fiction has been slowed by the relentless march of the grey ideologies of the contemporary academy.

This paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange-value, money, and universal equivalents. Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti-fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti-fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Žižek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti-fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia.

Aquinas’ five ways are often criticized because, unless further argumentation is supplied, their conclusion is not obviously identical to the God of classical theism. Such criticism overlooks the semantic and hermeneutic functions of natural theology. By fixing the referent for the word ‘God’, the five ways allow the philosopher to provide an intelligible account of divinity. This knowledge of the cause through its effects follows the systematic structure of the triplex via (causation, negation, and eminence), a program that guides Aquinas’ account of divine attributes all the way through Summa Theologiae I qq.2-26 and Summa Contra Gentiles I. By following this rational itinerary the demonstrative power of the ways can be better assessed, looking at them not as an apologetic exercise, but as a first step in the seek for a deeper understanding of the divine source of Creation.

‘Synod’ and ‘synodality’ have become synonymous with Pope Francis. Since Pope Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops as a permanent office in 1965, there hasn't been any pontificate that has given these matters as much profile and attention as his has. Why is this the case, and what is Pope Francis’ vision for a synodal Church? More fundamentally, what is synodality, according to tradition of the Church, and Pope Francis? Several years into both local and global synodal-type processes and formation gatherings, it seems many people, even prominent Church leaders, readily admit that they still do not fully understand it. For this reason, this article sets out to provide a general overview and introduction.

Thomas Aquinas's use of the terms libero, libertas, and liberum arbitrium in the Summa theologiae gives us a wealth of information about free will and freedom. Human beings have free will and are masters of themselves through their free will. Free will can be impeded by obstacles or ignorance but naturally moves toward God. According to Servais Pinckaers, our freedom can be that of indifference (the morality of obligation) or that of excellence (the morality of happiness). The difference is that of free will moving reason versus reason moving free will. The freedom of indifference is the power to choose between good and evil. The will is inclined toward neither and freely chooses between them. The freedom for excellence is the power to be the best human being we can be. Here the rules, or what makes for a good human being, are the grounding for freedom. One who observes these rules has the freedom to become excellent. According to Aquinas, intellect and will have command over free will. This then is true freedom, and on this Aquinas and Pinckaers agree. We do not have freedom of indifference, we have freedom for excellence. Anything else makes us slaves.

Apart from a certain number of discreet and limited meetings between Christians and Marxists, it was not until comparatively recently that these discussions came to the public notice. There was a Catholic participation at the Semaines de la Pensee Marxiste in early 1964 and then a reciprocal Marxist presence at the Semaines des Intellectuels Calholiques at the beginning of the following year. From France, the lead in this field has now passed to Germany, and more precisely to Austria, where in the spring of 1965, the Paulusgesellschaft, an association of German-speaking Catholic university teachers, organized a meeting specifically devoted to a dialogue between Christians and Marxists from both West and East Europe. There have since been two more meetings of this nature; the most recent, in 1967, was held at Marienbad in Czechoslovakia.

Of course, the idea of a meeting between Catholics and atheist movements (of which Marxism is presently the most important) was mentioned quite clearly in 1963 by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris. He there made a distinction, since become familiar, between static theories condemned by the Church and the movements inspired by these theories, but which evolve in time. He said: ‘In as far as these movements are in accord with sound principles of reason and are a response to the just aspirations of the human person, who would refuse to recognize in them elements that are positive and merit our approval? It could happen that certain meetings with a view to practical co-operation that had up till now appeared inopportune or sterile, could now produce real advantages or at least contain the promise of such for the future.’

Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about ‘the standard meter’? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a ‘mystical’ line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to ‘God exists’. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response-dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of ‘God’. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate ‘beautiful’ (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of ‘what we call God’? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead.

The new ontology of meaning proposed by Fr Cornelius Ernst OP as a means of articulating the Thomistic synthesis in the idiom of the modern era coheres around ecclesiology. Drawing upon the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Ernst sees meaning as the distinctively human praxis by which man ‘subdues’ and ‘transcends’ the world to which he belongs, thereby transposing it into the world that belongs to man. The Church, as the Body of Christ – who is personally the ontological meaning of history – is the distinctively Christian linguistic community of meaning, in which ultimate meaning – the ‘meaning of meaning’, i.e. God – is present in each successive era. Established in the illuminating event of Christ's incarnation, the Church is the sacramental institution that makes present Christ's re-integration of the plurality of human meanings, realising itself as a concrete community within the world, and realising the world authentically within itself. As the sacrament of the Trinitarian mediation of meaning, therefore, the Church is irreducibly both human institution and mystical communion, serving as the ontological a priori of faith, and thus the authentic locus of Christian theology.