Gareth Moore arrived at Corpus to read P. P. E. about two years after I did. We soon became friends, not least because we were always the last two people at the college philosophy society, finishing off the wine. Gareth (who was then known as ‘Gary’ — a fact he later denied) claimed that in his Finals, he — G. E. Moore — was the only candidate for the new optional paper ‘Russell and Wittgenstein’. In 1969, his first year as a graduate student, he moved into 50 Abingdon Road, where I also lived. The landlady was the widow of a man who was said to have taught Edward Heath the organ. Gareth had just returned to the Church. Although we knew that he liked going on retreats to monasteries, he had not, to that point, had any religious belief.

By the time Gareth came to Blackfriars, I had left Oxford to teach in Liverpool. But I kept an Oxford base for the vacations and we met regularly until the mid nineties. We were not in much contact when he was in Belgium and had just resumed normal dining and drinking engagements when he fell ill. We kept in telephone connection until his death.

During our long friendship, we discussed many things, most commonly connected with religion. (My views are those of a rather conservative ‘anglo-catholic’.) But we did not often discuss philosophy. There was one reason for this. Wittgenstein is a philosopher who divides people, and Gareth was a root and branch Wittgensteinian, whereas Wittgenstein has always struck me, from first reading, as being more or less a fraud.

A feature of much modem sacramental theology, and indeed theology in general, is a distrust of traditional metaphysical categories such as ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ Much of the impetus for this has arisen from the critique of metaphysics instigated by Martin Heidegger, which has sought to overcome the “totalising” tendency of traditional Western thought. In the theological sphere this position has generally taken the form of regarding metaphysics as imposing a straitjacketing framework upon the intersubjective dynamic of grace and symbolic mediation.

It is the aim of this article to question this critique as it appears in what is perhaps the locus classicus of the post-Heideggerian approach to sacramental theology, Louis-Marie Chauvet’s very fine book, Symbol and Sacrament. It is not the aim of this article to examine Chauvet’s sacramental theology per se, but, rather, to evaluate one of the principal motivating factors behind his theology, namely, the rejection of metaphysics. It will be argued that Chauvet’s concerns do not entail a rejection of metaphysics tout court. In addition, it will be argued that the non-reductive naturalist worldviews of modem mainstream British moral realists such as James Griffin, John McDowell and David Wiggins effectively undermine the dichotomies underpinning the rejection. This has the advantage of lessening the apparent differences between different theological camps through the establishment of a basis of common intelligibility. Although there have been other attempts to reconcile Chauvet’s theology with metaphysics, most notably with the process metaphysics of Whitehead, this article approaches the problem from a more traditional metaphysical viewpoint and thereby one more likely to command widespread agreement.