It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.

English Catholic literature, invigorated by Celtic tributaries, has been of fast and luxuriant growth, rich in diversity and broad in achievement, contributing generously to the cultural mainstream. A torrent of poets, novelists, essayists, historians, journalists and spirituality writers have entertained, sustained, instructed, defended and promoted the Catholic community, and rendered it intriguing, even attractive, to outsiders by sharing their belief and their humanity. In so far as they are direct, Catholic writers reflect themselves in relation to Catholicism—their chief reference point. Lapsed writers are relevant if they continue to engage Catholicism in serious dialogue, or maintain Catholic values. Catholic writers can be spoken of as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative': the liberal values community, freedom and relevance, respects independence of mind, and aspires to understanding and toleration; the conservative values order, law and traditional forms, respects power, and aspires to conformity and exclusivism.

Since 1850 non-Catholics have generally thought that Catholicism is inimical to intellect and creativity; and the Church has indeed liked to picture itself as united, uniform, unchanging, righteous,infallible and ideologically lucid to the point of being mechanistic; and consequently there appears to be a conflict between the god-like Church and the human realities in which writers deal, between inflexible ‘Law’ and the fact that literature is of life, with the wind blowing where it listeth.

It is beyond the scope of this short paper to compare the views of Newman and Anselm on faith and reason. Lengthy debate continues to surround our understanding of both. My purpose is to understand a comment of Newman’s concerning the interpretation of Anselm, and in so doing to address the possibility of agreement between the apparently disparate views we would expect Newman and Anselm to have concerning the particular question: is it possible to ‘convert’ by rational argument? To this end, I will (1) look at what little Newman had to say about Anselm, in the context of his views concerning the use of logic in matters of faith, (2) address the issue of the relation of Thomas and Anselm, as raised by Newman, (3) consider the role of the Fool (Psalm 14) and the notion of ‘natural words’ in shaping how Anselm thought about God, and (4) identify a degree of congruence between Anselm, Thomas and Newman.

What did Newman know of, think of, Anselm? There is little reference to Anselm’s intellectual work in Newman’s writings. Yet, Anselm has an important place in the development of Christian theology and understanding. Newman refers, in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, to the fact that Anselm is interpreted by Thomas, going on to say, “in no case do we begin with doubting that a comment disagrees with its text, when there is a prima facie congruity between them”. We might infer from this statement that Newman is happy to take his reading of Anselm from Thomas. However, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo XIII, in response to his encyclical on the philosophy of Thomas, Newman writes:

Balthasar’s affirmation of the identity between the theology of the Bible and later church theology, like so much of his writing and work, poses a fundamental challenge to powerful tendencies in the contemporary church, both Protestant and Catholic, at the same time as it claims to be in harmony with the tradition itself. Where Protestant theology from Ritschl and Hamack wants to draw a sharp line between the Bible and the theology of the early church, Balthasar claims a continuity which sees in both the same process of reflection on the relation of the ‘Christ-event’ to the history of God’s love in the Old Covenant and the same interpretative effort to express the centra! mystery in the language of their contemporaries: Jewish or Hellenistic. If Catholic ‘school’ theology wants to emphasise the nature of theology as the formulation and exposition of ‘truths to be believed’, Balthasar asserts that theology, both in the Bible and the Fathers, is part of an inexhaustible and never-ending process of reflection on the experience of grace in the encounter between the Word made flesh and the community of believers. Such an experience of the outpouring of the divine love can never be encompassed by a reading of the Bible as a collection of prooftexts or what Balthasar calls a ‘mere “fundamentalism” of facts of salvation’, for all such attempts at meditation on and expression (Auswortung) of the divine reality fall under the law of the deus semper maior they can never exhaust the, reality of the divine mystery.

This is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him against my charges.

Von Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work, and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their theological insights about the significance of sexual difference. John Roten writes that “The very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated into theological categories” to such an extent that von Speyr sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in neoorthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.

Karl Barth suits the role of a kind of theological Petruchio. Petruchio, you will recall, bursts upon the stage in The Taming of the Shrew, with the ‘shrew’ herself, Katherina, in his sights. He is determined to win the right to the hand of a maiden whom he construes as hostile, just as Barth (the early Barth at least) saw the theological establishment representing all the arrogance and vanity of a liberal theology in thrall to bourgeois complacency. He invades this hostile world in the name of the Word of God; he elects to be ‘rough, and woo not like a babe’, as Petruchio puts it. And as much of the theological establishment in Europe at the beginning of the 1920s reeled back in shock at Barth’s onslaught in The Epistle to the Romans, so Katherina is thoroughly taken aback by this

Petruchio will not deal with Katherina on her own territory. He whisks her away to his own remote and inhospitable house, and then turns her every expectation on its head. This is ‘crisis wooing’. Just as, in the early Barth, for the world of the creature to cross over the threshold into the divine world would entail its destruction and immolation, because of the utter difference of God’s ways and humanity’s ways, God’s eternity and humanity’s time, God’s holiness and humanity’s sin, so Katherina’s entrance into Petruchio’s house is entry into an environment in which all her expectations and routines tire altered.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?

‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.

According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.