While the resonances between classical Christian negative theology and the discourse of deconstruction have been explored for the last twenty years, there has been scant attention paid to the resonances between negative theology and the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To be sure, theologians have shown much interest in Wittgenstein, but that interest often links Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life to religious practice. Such writings have sought to view Wittgenstein in terms of philosophy of religion. In this essay, I am not concerned with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, but am interested in the connections between his writings on language and the view of language held in negative theology, specifically in the writings of the Pseudo-Denys. In the same way that Mark C.Taylor, John D.Caputo et al. see similar strategies at work in negative theology and in Jacques Derrida (specifically, the connection between apophasis and differance), I see similar strategies at work in Wittgenstein and Denys. I will argue that there are important points of intersection between the two, especially on the issues of the limits of reference in language, the necessity of communal understandings for meaning, and the view of the self within a community of shared practices and shared language.

One word of explanation before I continue. In making Denys and Wittgenstein interlocutors, I am not saying they were interested in the same things. Denys was concerned about liturgy and how liturgy does or dries not praise God properly, and Wittgenstein was interested in how language works and how proper use of language frees us from philosophical problems.

One oppressively hot night in 1985 in the south of Pakistan I lay on my bed punching the wall. I was very angry. A local landlord was mistreating some of our Christians in a dreadful way. I had been several times to speak to him and at first thought I was doing some good, but now realised that my intervention would change very little. The landlord was a particularly violent man, but the system itself was brutal and too old and too ingrained to give way just because one Western missionary thought it should. The people I was trying to help were powerless and so was I and that made me furious. The landlord had lots of enemies. If only one of those enemies would take a revolver to him, put out a contract on him - it happened all the time in this violent society - then our problems would be solved

These passages from the conciliar and post-conciliar documents of Vatican II make emphatically clear the Church’s tradition of prayer at the beginning and ending of the day, and connect this tradition with dawn, the rising light of the new day, and dusk, the waning light of the evening. In the Church’s tradition of prayer, these two Hours are given a Christological significance: Lauds recalls the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and Vespers commemorates his death and burial. This paper looks at the biological as well as the liturgical rhythms involved in praying at dawn and dusk, and invokes a sacramental understanding of time, which was common throughout earlier ages, but has been lost in more recent times. It then examines the custom of prayer at dawn and dusk in other religious traditions besides Christianity and collates all this evidence to ask if there is any justification for arguing that human beings are biologically programmed for such activity.

Today, as in his own day, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is a contested site, the name for different ways of being Catholic. Competing views of Catholicity still seek for legitimacy by appealing to the authority of Newman’s thought, of his intellect, and, not least, his Cardinal’s red hat, conferred on him by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. At the beginning of the last century, those known as Liberal Catholics or Catholic Modernists appealed to Newman as their patron saint. George Tyrrell (1861-1909) declared himself a ‘devout disciple of Newman’, and confessed to having been ‘brought into, and kept in, the Church by the influence of Cardinal Newman and of the mystical theology of the Fathers and of the Saints’. Today, however, it is not Catholic Modernism, but religious postmodernism that might be in want of Newman’s imprimatur.

Professor Terry Wright, for example, has recently suggested that Newman’s reading of the Bible offers a via media to postmodemity. For Newman recognised the ‘multiplicity of meanings’ to which a critical, open and historical reading of the Bible gives rise. ‘The All-wise, Allknowing God cannot speak without meaning many things at once’, Newman declared.

Felix Wilfred, a Catholic theologian working in an Indian context, provides a trenchant critique of traditional Western theology’s ability to find relevance in India’s multi-religious context. This article explores how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of world-pictures provides a philosophical support for Wilfred’s critique and indicates a different, more productive model of interreligious dialogue.

There is a large amount of interreligious dialogue that is interested in ascertaining what is indeed true about the world. When different religious traditions make different and sometimes conflicting assertions about the world, the question arises about the relationship between these various claims. As these claims are part and parcel of the traditions themselves, springing from the core of the various religions, the question becomes how the religious systems themselves are related and what is the relationship between the truth claims of various religions? Various approaches to this can be categorized in three broad categories, exclusivist, inclusivist and relativist.

In his last book, On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed the problem of making truth-claims, how anyone can validly say they were “certain” that something was indeed the case. He noticed that truth- claims were intrinsically connected to world-pictures with which they mutually arise, and that no truth-claim can therefore claim a status that transcends all world-pictures. This critique casts suspicion on the usefulness of the exclusivist-inclusivist-relativist categorization of theories of religious pluralism and points to a more productive model of interreligious dialogue that respects and utilizes the differences in different religions. Rather than comparing statements made by various faiths and determining which in fact are correct, I propose a model of dialogue that allows each side to attain a better perspective on their own position as they come to see a different way of understanding the world.

When Gareth did his degree in Theology at Oxford, he chose as an optional paper ‘Comparative Religion’. Typically it never occurred to him that he might study the texts in translation, and so over the summer he acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and Japanese. This was very disconcerting for his tutor who did not know a word of either language! So I had to find a tutor in the School of Oriental Languages who told me that he could not imagine how anyone could have so rapidly learned so much. So it is in honour of Gareth’s interest in this area that I wish to offer a few thoughts on the relationship of Christianity and other religions. Having been for nine years a Jack of all trades and Master of the Dominican Order, I have no special expertise, except about airports and exotic foods. But this never inhibited the vigorous arguments that Gareth and I had about everything, usually with copious whisky, and which I miss more than I can say.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel the risen Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Go and make disciples of all the nations’. Christianity was from the beginning a missionary religion. That is why it was transformed in the first few years from a Jewish sect into a faith that includes us. From the middle of the last century onwards we can see a growing doubt about this mission. What right have we to export our faith? And especially after September 11th, we may wonder if we are not adding to tensions around the world, as Christians and Muslims compete with claims for the truth?

The modern tradition in ethics has been under attack since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.’ One of the more fascinating aspects of all this is that the demise of virtue ethics, in the sense discussed by Professor MacIntyre, had relegated ethics to a peripheral question discussed by Aristotle in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.

It is there that Aristotle considers what most translators have rendered as “continence” and “incontinence”, enkrateia and akrasia, although one can also describe the enkratic man as disciplined. Mostly applied to question of temperance, enkrateia involves imposing the judgement of reason on unruly passions. Aristotle notes “we must now discuss incontinence and softness (or effeminacy) and continence and endurance; for we must treat each of the two neither as identical with virtue or wickedness, nor as a different genus.” (Bk. VII, Ch. 1: 1145a35). If we are tempted, as people used to say, to do something foolish or wicked, but realize that it is foolish or wicked and overcome the impulse by the imposition of reason, we are enkratic. Reason has prevailed. Yet this is not, according to Aristotle, a question of virtue. It is something less.

Though relatively unknown to twentieth-first-century students of literature, Hannah More was one of the most prolific and most read literary and religious figures of her day. Born February 2, 1745, near Bristol, she was educated by her schoolmaster father and began writing poetry and drama at an early age. On a visit to London in the 1770’s, she came to the attention of David Garrick, who introduced her to many of the leading personalities of the day, including Dr. Samuel Johnson. She continued her seasonal visits to London but became increasingly dissatisfied with its worldliness and frivolity. In 1789, at the urging of William Wilberforce, she began a school in Cheddar, one of twelve that eventually dotted the Mendip Hills in the west of England. The primary object of study was the Bible; her primary purpose, to improve the moral conduct of both the children and the adults, most of whom could not even read. She spent the rest of her life writing tracts, pamphlets, and, at least one novel — all of them moral, if not religious, in nature. She died in 1833 in Clifton, then a suburb of Bristol.

How ought evil to be dealt with in Christian theology? In what follows I will approach this question by reflecting on what is arguably a different intellectual tradition—the production of theodicies—and on the relationship between theology and this other tradition. What I shall try to show is that Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer, and to be committed to affirming things it cannot make sense of.

The Common Man (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950). 177.

Collected Works (San Francisco: Ignatius, [1908] 1986), I, 214. Italics added.

Having lived in Europe for the last forty years, I have enjoyed the experience of my historical and cultural roots. My residence of the last thirty-five years, for example, was constructed the year that the Church of Scotland was founded, that Madrid became the capital of Spain, and the tobacco plant was imported to Western Europe by Jean Nicot. The buildings in my immediate Roman neighbourhood are much older. The Colonna Palace, half a block away from my front door, was described by the Italian humanist Petrarch (1304-1374). The final discovery-scene of ‘Roman Holiday’ was filmed there.

Living in Europe is living in a place where the stones speak; however, if you have not done your homework, you will not understand what they are saying. Returning annually for three months to the United States, I have the experience of what the anti-Western-Civilization lobby would call ‘freedom’ from the obscurantism and oppressive burdens of a democratic Christian—especially Roman Catholic—tradition. I can enjoy the ‘freedom’ of a world without history, tradition and roots, the world of what Vance Packard called ‘fun culture,’ the realm of a superior and untethered virtual reality. In short, I return to a place where both the educational system and mass media assiduously avoid the ‘homework’ without which we cannot hear or understand what the stones of our European heritage have to tell us.

An expatriate American author and actor living in Rome expressed his dismay to me, as far back as the early sixties, about the cultural tabula rasa that radically handicapped young Americans for understanding or appreciating their Roman experience in churches where they had no idea of what the religious paintings and sculpture represented because they were culturally un-equipped for any meaningful experience.

Religion has not fared very well under psychoanalysis. Freud is construed as reducing religion to a form of obsessional neurosis or wish- fulfilment; Jung had little respect for tradition offering up only universal archetypes, while today’s trendy psycho-dynamic counselling dispels the question altogether. What about Lacan? I think Lacan offers the theologian some valuable tools not only for the analysis of theological debate, in particular the theology of religions, but also and not unrelated, sorting out just what it is we name when we name religion. I suggest that a Lacanian view of religion refuse the pluralist stance that religion is a universal genus, thereby allowing traditions differences to be taken seriously. However, he also refuses an exclusive position suggesting that there are only separate traditions and no common meeting points.

I shall begin by outlining the thought of Lacan. I shall then argue that the subject positions diagnosed by Lacan, psychosis, obsessional neurosis, and hysterical neurosis correspond to the three positions delineated in the theology of religions debate, the pluralist, the exclusivist, and the inclusivist. I suggest that Lacan’s strategy in the psychoanalytic situation be used with regard to the debate between religions. In the final part I shall draw on the work of Slavoj Zizek. I shall use his Lacanian working of ideology to give a Lacanian definition of religion.

As part of the broad project of reconceptualizing the world in theological as opposed to secular terms, some “radical orthodoxy” theologians have begun to address the issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and marriage. These include, most notably, Graham Ward, Eugene Rogers, and (perhaps better classified in the post-liberal “Yale School”) Miroslav Volf. These theologians, however, have made only limited (or poor) use of the extensive conceptual apparatus that has been built up over the last two decades by postmodern feminists and queer theorists. By using these tools in a Christian, orthodox manner in accord with the radical orthodoxy project, I will show that we are led to drastically different conclusions, to a sexual ethic that is no longer “sexual,” but rather refocuses on friendship and celibacy.

It is possible, as I know from recent experience, to spend three years studying theology in a secular university, and even with a majority of that time devoted to the New Testament barely touch on anything that might credibly be called ‘New Testament Theology’. The texts of the New Testament are studied in considerable detail, with careful attention paid to the theological positions of each individual writer—or at least, for the most part, of Mark, John and Paul—but with no attempt to create a synthesis, to trace theological themes that link disparate books, or to allow a reading that goes beyond narrow exegesis to inform the exercise of speculative systematic theology. There are honourable exceptions to this general trend: Gerd Theissen’s A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion attempts something in the way of a synthesis, but explicitly goes beyond the texts of the New Testament in a way that makes his programme more a historical study of early Christian theology than New Testament theology properly speaking. Arguably one has to look back to the likes of Barth and Bultmann for authentic New Testament theology, theology based on the scriptural texts themselves rather than on a historical reconstruction of the theological milieu that produced them, and addressing modem theological concerns.

This article proposes one route towards developing this sort of theology, beginning with the significance of Jesus’s name. Though the Holy Name was once an important Catholic devotion, it receives little attention today, either spiritual or scholarly: yet when properly explored through readings of, in particular, the Letter to the Hebrews and Matthew’s Gospel, the fact that Jesus’s name is identical to that of Joshua (in Greek lesous, in Hebrew Yeshua) proves to be far from trivial, opening the way to a theologically powerful and spiritually refreshing approach to Christology and ecclesiology.

What have Advent Sunday and Holy Week in common? Which theological motif is present in Gospel readings both for Advent and Passiontide? In both Mark’s eschatological discourse and in his story of Gethsemane there is a repeated call to watch. The present imperative ‘gregoreite’ (keep awake, be watchful) occurs twice within a comparatively short section of the Gospel in 13.35,37 and 14.34,38, and the same verb is used also at 13.34 and 14.37. This repeated charge to watch seems to be a deliberate part of the evangelist’s theological design. Mark’s repetition here is often not noticed because of our usual practice of reading such short sections of text. Yet the evangelist’s narrative sequence may become for us a rich spiritual resource, not only on Advent Sunday and in Holy Week, but throughout the year, if we are attentive to his textual repetition in these chapters.

Kant thinks that our judgments in all three parts of Critical Philosophy: metaphysics, practical judgment, and aesthetics, entail antinomies, antinomies that were to be resolved in analogous ways. For example, in aesthetics, the dictum de gustibus non disputandum is antithetical to the claim that if we could not dispute questions of taste, we could contend for them and expect others to agree (Kritik der Urteilskraft paras. 56, 57, B232-240; A229-237). He putatively resolves the antinomy by claiming that the judgment of taste in the thesis does not presuppose ‘distinct’ concepts, but the judgment of taste in the antithesis presupposes an ‘indistinct’ concept, a super-sensed substratum of appearances.

I agree that our judgments in questions of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics face philosophical problems. There seem to be two ways in which we engage with others in discussing these judgments, the mode by which we say, “Don’t argue! Hutton’s Hams are the best”, and the mode by which we submit to the invitation, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1.18). I argue that our judgments in questions of fact and of morals and of beauty are made with authority. I argue, further, that our expressed judgments in all three spheres are required to be submitted to the authority of others. This is not an antinomy, since each proposition is consistent with, and even entails, the other.

But, you may say, I rarely, if ever, have any authority, since I am compelled by the facts to think what is the case, what is true.

No one in the English-speaking academy would even try to write an exposition of ‘Thomism’, inhibited as we are by fifty years of the (no doubt salutarily) deflationary effects of analytic philosophy. More positively, the current wave of scholarly works suggests that a systematic exposition of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, if possible at all, would be premature. (We have noted some of the studies of his use of the Bible: New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 245-251).

Thomism is a tradition, long tracts of which remain unresearched. Two conferences have recently mapped some of the territory. Saint Thomas au XXe siècle (Paris: Saint-Paul 1994) contains more than twenty excellent papers tracing the history of Thomism since the foundation of Revue thomiste, the quarterly journal of the Dominican friars at Toulouse. The focus is on France, indeed on the Toulouse ‘school’; yet, as well as a fascinating picture of that particular tradition, we get a great deal of insight into the principal conflicts in Catholic theology during the twentieth century (how deep these were is not widely appreciated in the English-speaking world, where even Catholics themselves tend to believe that we all agreed, prior to the Second Vatican Council).

Saint Thomas au XIVe siècle, a special issue of Revue Thomiste (Janvier-Mars 1997), offers another set of fine essays on one generation of theologians, the first after Aquinas’s death, some of whom were devotedly Thomist, others (including Dominicans) much more critical and some even ferociously anti-Thomist. Largely unknown to any but specialists in medieval studies, these controversies show how contested Aquinas’s thought has been all along.

The scientific mentality that demands warrant for all our beliefs permeates all of modem thinking. Of course, at the base of all those beliefs for which we demand evidence are more fundamental beliefs that are simply acquiesced in because they are part of our culture. They are the things that few of us scrutinize, but they have enormous influence upon the beliefs and doctrines that we do scrupulously think about.

This is especially true in the area of theology where theological doctrines are greatly affected by more fundamental notions of things like good and evil, sin, love, happiness, etc. We spend time debating and developing our theological doctrines but take for granted that we have correct ideas of what is good or evil — that we know what sin or love is — but do we? In fact, the notions most of us have of such things are simply unreflectively acquired through our experience as individuals and members of a language community and culture. My language community and culture taught me to understand such things in certain ways, and then my individual experience moulded my understanding without much reflection. But, although acquired unreflectively, these basic notions which have such an enormous influence upon our theology are philosophically loaded concepts. Although we take them for granted and treat them ‘as if’ they were somehow God-given, they in fact represent the philosophical views of the culture we were born or educated into.

Presupposing that science and religion can share dialogue, can this be informative and come to bear fruit in the future? As a Catholic Christian who studies social evolution and Christian ethics, I shall answer “yes”, notwithstanding the challenge mounted by conflicts inherent in this debate. My interest lies in the dialogue between Christian moral philosophy and the theory of Darwinian evolution, as first published in On the Origin of Species (1859). The information flow arising out of a shared understanding of knowledge from these disciplines may be mutually beneficial. By contextualizing Jesus within evolutionary history, I shall argue that evolutionary theory can inform the Christian conception of human nature in relation to the world and equally, that Christian thinking can contribute to the ethics of scientific and secular engagements with the world. Despite the continued confrontation between science and religion, I hope to negotiate some of the impasses so as to trace a path towards conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Early on, Creationism impeded the improvement of relations between science and religion. Creationists (they are not yet extinct!) support a literalist reading of Creation as described in Genesis. In short, they hold that God, from intelligent design, created all species separately. Hence, for Creationists there is no genetic relatedness between species and no need to invoke evolution as an explanation for life on Earth. Yet, thanks to Darwin, the theory of natural selection radically undermined the notion of intelligent design—and with it the pre-evolutionary alternative of life as an outcome of random physical processes.

In a society such as our own (I am thinking particularly of Western European society) that sees little need for postulating the existence of God and no longer lives by specifically religious rules and rituals, it would seem that human intention and action could be quite adequately explicated in the language of ethics rather than theology : the opposite of good, consequently, is not evil, it is bad, that is to say, bad in the sense of being wrong morally, of willing and acting in ways that are in opposition to an accepted moral standard. The fact that it may be difficult to establish widely accepted moral standards does not invalidate the principle. When the word evil is used—and, of course, it is used—its semantic content is vague, or, if clear, then reductive, by which I mean that, more often than not, it acts merely as a kind of intensifier—so that, when one wants to express extreme outrage at an action of gross immorality, the word one reaches for is the word evil; but there would be no qualitative difference between a wrong action or intention and an evil action or intention. Given the nature of the relationship between art and its cultural context it would not be unreasonable to expect the literature of our own era to reflect this situation and, indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. We should expect the representation of evil in modem literature to take on an extremely etiolated and reductive form. But does it?