This paper revisits Aquinas's understanding of theology as a science based on a participation in the divine scientia. Our modern presuppositions (in terms of “autonomous” reason and philosophy as a discipline utterly separate from theology) often appear to render Aquinas's claims implausible. In this contribution it is argued that (a) all sciences are fiduciary in the broad sense (with the exception of those that rely on principles per se nota) and (b) that first principles can only be accepted or rejected, but not refuted or demonstrated within the relevant discipline. From this, two conclusions can be drawn: first, despite its reliance on revelation theology's case is, therefore, not as peculiar as modern readers might initially assume: every discipline operates with key assumptions it simply accepts. Secondly, given the role of first principles, to characterise Aquinas's account of the assent of faith as fideist or voluntarist is beside the point, for you can only accept or reject first principles. The contribution ends by suggesting that assent to the articles of faith is not an extraneous acquiescence in assertions of divine authority either, as a reading of the first question of the Secunda Secundae makes clear. Indeed, the paper hints that we should not read the first question of the Prima Pars without engaging with the first questions of the Secunda Secundae.

That branch of the science of psychology, which perhaps is the most important branch, Medical Psychology, has without doubt become a permanent addition to Medicine.

One Catholic psychiatrist has called this contribution towards the Art and Practice of medicine ‘the other half of medicine,’ and the medical faculty would be inclined to endorse this opinion. Most of the teaching hospitals have now a special department in charge of a psychiatrist who acts as lecturer in psychological medicine as Well as being consultant to ‘out patients’ for functional nervous disorders.

Before the war the Institute of Medical Psychology, besides teaching and training an ever increasing number of doctors who wished to specialise in this subject, gave treatment to 14,986 new patients in the twenty-one years of its existence. The number of doctors who specialise in psychological medicine is now very large, and in this war all branches of the services have special psychiatric hospitals, where service patients are given treatment. This brief summary of the activities of psychological medicine should be sufficient guarantee that the medical profession has given an ‘imprimatur’ to what was perhaps considered at one time to be the happy hunting ground for cranks, faddists, and even charletans.

Towards the end of his many sided life Fr Vincent wrote “God knows how much I have striven and prayed to mend the shattered unity of Christendom”, words that may seem strange to those who only knew him in his later days, for he had developed other interests. But a study of his writing shows him to have been among the early Catholic ecumenists and to have kept up his interest throughout his life. His labours in this field span the formative years of the movement which is one of the glories of the Church in this century. Indeed it is plain that he not only laboured but suffered in the cause of Reunion -as it was known, and sometimes dreaded by many of his contemporaries.

In retrospect he traced his interest to lessons learnt at his mother’s knee, where he acquired “his first desire, never since quenched of seeking to love, even more than to convert, his separated brethren”. The uphill path he trod not only shows that ecumenism did not begin with Vatican II but how he dealt with problems that are still with us. While Prior at Woodchester, in the first years of the century, he was in correspondence with Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was host to his Cotswold neighbour, the Rev Spencer Jones, Rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, who became a leading Anglo-Catholic after the publication of his classic England and the Holy See. He was also writing in the early issues of The Lamp, a paper edited by Fr Paul Wattson, who after his reconciliation was to promote the Unity Octave through it for almost half a century.

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.'

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.

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.

The word ‘Psychology’ has become a capacious umbrella which covers a baffling variety of literature. ‘Contributions to Psychology’ covers, a still wider, indeed an almost limitless, range. Nihil humanum a me alienum: there can be no pre-established boundaries to a study or practice, which is concerned with the sources, motives and patterns of the totality of human experience and behaviour. A biography, a novel, a drama, even a painting or a quartet, often reveals depths of the human psyche unattained by works on medical or academic psychology. But these also have immeasurably widened their scope in recent decades. The hypothesis of primitive unconscious layers (whether or not accounted for in terms of a ‘collective unconscious’), which find expression in myths, ritual, and social patterns, has made ethnology, mythology, folk-lore, comparative religion, history, pre-history and countless other fields of research, all tributary in various ways to psychology, while psychology in its turn has given to them a new stimulus and orientation. The breakdown of the post-Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter, with its restriction of psychology to the former, has also added increasingly to the psychologists’ concern with the biological and physical sciences, while the treatment of psychological phenomena in dynamic rather than purely mechanistic terms has opened new horizons to the theoretical psychologist which are as yet too indistinct to be accurately defined.

In an article on ‘St. John’s Witness to the Blessed Sacrament’ in a former number of Blackfriars, Fr. Vincent McNabb wrote as follows:

This passage seems to me to be misleading on several points, and also to contain, at least implicitly, views which it is difficult to accept. In view of the importance of its subject no excuse need be offered for discussing it here. I venture, therefore, to set down as clearly as I can some of the objections which, it seems to me, can be legitimately urged against it. I will deal first with what Fr. McNabb calls the miracle of Transubstantiation, and secondly with the miracle of Multiplication.

It is necessary from time to time to withdraw oneself from the tangle of events and to contemplate the main trends of contemporary history. What are the most significant international happenings of recent months, and what conclusions may be drawn from them?

It is a tribute to the immense power and responsibility of the United States in the world today that Governments outside the Communist orbit almost all marked time as they awaited the outcome of the recent American presidential election. The semi-paralysis of diplomacy has continued during the interregnum between General Eisenhower’s election and his official replacement of President Truman in the White House. The reason is not far to seek. The whole scale of the rearmament effort, which has been getting under way in Western Europe during the last year, depends more than anything else upon the policy of the new President and the appropriations of the 83rd Congress. The prospects of orderly control of the Middle East and Moslem North Africa—which constitute the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—depend upon the extent to which the new American Government can subordinate the sentimental anti-imperialism which is part of the stock-intrade of American politics to the solidarity of the alliance and long-range strategic requirements. In the Far East, no solution (if solution there be) can be found for the deadlock in Korea except through the leadership of the United States, which has shouldered the main responsibility for the war against the Communists and has suffered nine-tenths of the United Nations’ casualties.

It has long been recognized that there is a psychology not only of individuals, but also of groups. As with the hypothetical units of physics— electrons and atoms—so with the real units of the animal kingdom and of the human race, the group has a definite constitution and definite laws expressing its behaviour which are not the same as those which express the behaviour of the individuals of which the group is composed. Man is not merely an intelligent animal : he is also essentially a social animal, and, if the human race is to make progress, it is of supreme importance that the factors in social life which make for progress or for deterioration should be analysed out and critically discussed in their concrete historical setting.

This is the main aim of Professor McDougall’s latest work, The Group Mind., a book no less interesting than the other psychological works which Prof. McDougall has given us, and no less provocative of thought. It purports, in fact, to be the continuation of his Social Psychology, and assumes that the factors and principles of social life, as there laid down, are already familiar to the reader. These it now discusses from the point of view of the group. In the First Part the characteristics of different kinds of groups are set forth, notably those of the crude group or crowd and those of the most highly organized group—the army. Then there is a discussion of the group spirit, of the interrelation and interaction of groups, and of the peculiarities of certain types of group.

The age in which we live presents a rapidly growing cleavage between law and conscience; and this cleavage is resulting inevitably in the destruction of both. It is due almost entirely to the subjectivism which has been steadily gaining ground for the last four hundred years. Once private judgment is admitted as a principle in the conduct of human, affairs the objective norms of human action cease to function as such and both conscience and law are deprived of their vitality. As early as the sixteenth century an incipient subjectivism made its appearance in Philosophy as well as in Religion; it is possible, indeed, that the effort to segregate Philosophy from Religion was the source of the whole evil. For when Religion has ceased to provide a philosophy of life it is no longer true religion, and its sanctions lose their compelling force. Moreover, Philosophy unallied to Religion is as a ship without rudder; it follows the caprice of any intellectual wind that blows. The purpose and the very content of human nature is lost sight of; law becomes an unstable shadow of its real self; and conscience, left to stand alone, is no more than a blind guide leading the blind. This cleavage was not suddenly wrought; nor has it come about without protest; Thomas More, whom we now rejoice to call Saint, was amongst the first to protest against it and thought it worth while to seal his protest with his blood.

Father Bede Jarrett and America would probably appear to most of those who knew him as a natural juxtaposition. Yet it ought perhaps to be rather surprising, for he was so completely and even so typically English. The truth is, of course, that though he was English he was not insular, and he escaped the narrowness of insularity because he was also so typically Dominican. (We call him typical not in the sense that he was like many others cast in the same mould, but in the sense that he was himself a model from which a true mould might well be fashioned.) He was thus tvpically Dominican not merely in his apostolic spirit, but also in his discernment and appreciation of truth and true values. It is this, more than anything else, that explains his interest, and perhaps his success, in the United States. He, who loved youth for its fineness, its enthusiasms, its unaffected (even if sometimes quixotic or unformed) idealism, and all its possibilities of greatness as yet unspoiled nor disillusioned, saw and appreciated these qualities of youth in the American nation. He was big enough, too, not to expect perfection but to overlook the failings which were the outcome of unbounded energy and activity, and not of malice. And if he found there a more eager response than in England, it was because we have perchance grown old and sluggish. He did not cease to love what was old and set, but he saw greater hope for the future in what was young and still plastic. He found this in America; but he found, too, the signs of a fruitful maturity, evidences of a true scholarship, of new-born literature and art, and above all a vigorous and sincere Catholic life. It is still the purblind fashion of many of us to think of Americans in terms of gangsters, racketeers, and go-getters, or of superficiality, hustle, and graft. Perhaps we are not helped in this matter by the American movies or tourists that do not always show us the true American. In any case, it is high time we should remove the beam out of our own eye and stand prepared, as Father Bede was, to find in the United States a new Saul amongst the prophets, a source of rejuvenation for the hardening arteries of Western life and culture, a ‘New Deal’ for civilization at large.

Jesus of Nazareth is said to be the sacrament of the saving grace of God and of man’s response to God in that grace. In himself Jesus is the encounter between God and mankind, the Immediator of man and God, the Word of God made world and history, man in his concrete dimensions and the total nexus of his relationships taken up into God. According to the apostolic preaching, in him alone, in his ‘name’ alone, is there the means of passing from a lethal situation into the possibility of survival. If men are going to pass from the world that is doomed to death, that can only be by entering into him, into his name, by in some way becoming him, by living out the biography of the one who, alone, no longer belongs to the dead past. Living it out, amongst other ways, sacramentally. Sacramentally we put on Christ, we are conformed to Christ, we are made one body, one spirit, with him.

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.