The time is right for a good biography of Pope John XXIII. It is, of course, ridiculous that the Catholic Church—all 780 million of us, as I recently read—should be so decisively affected by the personality of a single man. It is only with the invention of railways, telephones, aeroplanes, and now television, that the solitary in the Vatican has acquired such power. The ‘modern world’, which Pius IX sought to keep at arm’s length from the Papal States, soon provided the media for an unprecedentedly intense personal veneration of the ‘Holy Father’. The successor of Peter now enjoys a supremacy in the Church that Peter himself evidently never had (see Acts 8:14 and 11:2, and Galatians 2:11). With the triumph of Ultramontanism, the whole body has been surrealistically distorted by a grotesquely inflated ear (I Corinthians 12:17). The traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as the communion of local churches has been re-established in theory—but, for the most part, we remain captured, and captivated, by media-promoted adulation of the individual. The power of the ‘world’ over the Catholic Church is as insidious as ever.

One of the worst effects of media domination is instant oblivion for yesterday’s men. In longer historical perspective, of course, the tolerance and the initiatives of Paul VI will seem obvious. At present, with men in control who cannot see the other side of a question, he is remembered only as a rather sad and dithering figure.

Leonardo Boff, a 47-year old Franciscan from Brazil, has become one of the best known names in Catholic theology owing to the controversy surrounding his book lgreja: Carisma e Poder (Ed Vozes, Petrbpolis, 1981). The close coincidence in time of Boff’s interview with Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome about the book, and the publishing of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s criticisms of some aspects of liberation theology, has caused some misunderstanding about the issues at the core of the controversy. Two widely-held misapprehensions had better be cleared up now, before we venture any further. They have been repeated over and over again in the press—when Boff and Ratzinger met, at the beginning of last September, one of the things they warmly agreed about was the shoddiness of the media coverage of the affair.

First of all, it was not—this time—Rome that made the first move. On the contrary. Boff had appealed to Rome. When his book was attacked by Dom Romer, Assistant Bishop of Rio de Janeiro and President of the Archdiocesan Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, he turned to the Vatican. His own very detailed account of the affair, “Minha convocaçao à Sagrado Congregaçeo para a Doutrina da Fé: um testemunho pessoal” (which appeared in Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira vol. 44, fasc. 176, Dec. 1984, pp. 845—852) confirms this.

Secondly, and more importantly, the book does not in fact appear to be about liberation theology specifically. Any controversy involving so prominent a writer of liberation theology is bound to have a “political” dimension,

The concluding part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984. In the first part of this study of the relationship between the religious use of political images and concepts and their use in political rhetoric (published in January) the author focussed on the political and religious language of early seventeenth-century England.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a kind of stability returned to England; conflicts and controversies there, of course, were in the political sphere, and even a ‘glorious revolution’, but compared with the preceding decades a certain peace and order is evident. There was a strong desire for peace among various sections of the population, and the economic and social foundations were being established upon which was to rise the political stability of the following century. By 1688, writes J. Carswell, ‘Englishmen were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics rather than fighting about them’. Ideas of arbitrary power were assailed and the notion of a law depending not simply on the dictate of a sovereign once more became predominant. This is particularly evident in the deist and rationalist writers of the period. God is not ‘an arbitrary being’, insisted Matthew Tindal, but the reasonable governor of a regulated universe. The order, stability and rationality of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ provided a model for social and political relationships. It would be little less than horrid and dreadful blasphemy, declared the influential archbishop John Tillotson, ‘to say that God out of his sovereign will and pleasure can do anything that contradicts the nature of God, or the essential perfections of his deity’.

Baron Friedrich von Huegel wrote to Maude Domenica Petre in February 1910:

My dear, dear Maude,

You, now that Fr. T. is gone, are about the only English Catholic, with whom I have felt, with whom I feel, profoundly at one in these most complex and straining transition-problems (Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Huegel, p. 240).

Fr. T. was of course George Tyrrell, who had died, excomunicated in 1909. Maude, born in 1863, belonged to an old Catholic family which had combined dying for the Pope with a tradition of Cisalpine resistance to intolerable papal decrees. In childhood she resolved to become, when she grew up, a saint, a philosopher and a martyr (p. 6). When doubts assailed her, a learned Jesuit recommended that she should go to Rome to study the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Off she went, accompanied by a chaperon, and her puzzled aunt, Lady Lindsay, used to explain to inquisitive friends: ‘Maude has gone to Rome to study for the priesthood’ (p. 8). Though she wrote ceaselessly and well, her books have long been unobtainable. She has been referred to and exploited in all writings on the Modernist crisis, but she has always appeared as a subordinate figure, the devoted slave of Tyrrell and vestal virgin guarding his sacred flame. Clyde F. Crews has written the first book’ which treats her as interesting in her own right, and not merely as an appendage of others.

She emerges with enhanced reputation from this full-scale treatment.

Given at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 16 February 1984.

Anselm, called doctor doctorum by those who came after him, died in 1109, 116 years before Thomas Aquinas was born. So the sort of distance in time between them was something like that of Byron, or Napoleon, or even Kant, from us. In the writings of Thomas his name seems only less weighty than that of Augustine. It was not Thomas’ way to express disagreement much with revered authorities; so he does this little or not at all with Anselm. Indeed, it looks as if he had found him very valuable and some things he certainly took from him.

Let me first give a brief sketch of the most significant early parts of Anselm’s dialogue On Truth. He proposes to his pupil that they look through the various things that are said to have truth in them. They will begin with propositions, where, he also tells us, most people stop too; in any case, we rather often call propositions true or false. It is clear that he does not mean ‘abstract propositions’, but vocal utterances; and he remarks that the nature of truth in these can be equally considered in any signs that come about to signify something’s being the case or not being the case, e.g. writings or speech with the fingers. .

The striking things about his discussion are two. First, the identification of truth with rightness of assertion. What is assertion for—i.e. what has it been created for? Answer: to signify as being the case what is the case.