That God is one and three is, of course, for Aquinas a profound mystery which we could not hope to know apart from divine revelation, but we can only begin to understand what he has to say about it if we recognise that for him God is a profound mystery anyway. There are people who think that the notion of God is a relatively clear one; you know where you are when you are simply talking about God whereas when it comes to the Trinity we move into the incomprehensible where our reason breaks down. To understand Aquinas it is essential to see that for him our reason has already broken down when we talk of God at all—at least it has broken down in the sense of recognising what is beyond it. Dealing with God is trying to talk of what we cannot talk of, trying to think of what we cannot think. Which is not to say that it involves nonsense or contradiction.

This similarity is sometimes obscured for us by the fact that Aquinas thinks we can prove the existence of God by natural reason whereas such unaided natural reason could tell us nothing of the Trinity. This, however, does not, for him, make the latter a mystery where the former is not, for he thought that to prove the existence of God was not to understand God but simply to prove the existence of a mystery. His arguments for the existence of God are arguments to show that there are real questions to which we do not and cannot know the answer.

Much gratitude is due to Fr Herbert McCabe for his paper ‘Aquinas on the Trinity’ (New Blackfriars June 1999 pp. 268-83). Aquinas’ teaching on this central mystery in Summa Contra Gentiles 4 (CG 4) and Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars (ST 1) combines philosophical ingenuity with fidelity to the words of Scripture in a way that is perennially inspiring. But theologians can continue drawing upon it only insofar as it does not depend on philosophical doctrines unacceptable to modem philosophers. To judge if there is such dependence we need to have it expounded in the language of modern philosophy. This task McCabe accomplishes admirably.

I think McCabe has stated the crucial part of Aquinas’ argument correctly, but to preclude misunderstanding I shall start by restating it briefly in my own words. I hope he would agree that there is no substantial difference between my exposition and his. I shall then look at some of the philosophical presuppositions of the argument which might seem suspect today, and suggest that the most worrying lie not, as might at first be thought, in the philosophy of language or ontology, but in the philosophy of mind.

God, as a non-material, intellectual substance, has knowledge of himself; he knows that he exists and understands his own nature and his activities. This understanding of himself is a kind of action. It is not, like pushing, pulling or heating, a mode of causal action on something else. It ‘remains’, so to speak, ‘within him’. But it involves one thing’s arising out of or proceeding from another, what Aquinas calls a processio. There arises in God a concept of what he knows.

The full head of hair and the moustache are still there, though flecked with grey. The sideburns have disappeared and the sixties’ sports shirt with the rolled-up sleeves has given way to the coat and tie of an elder statesman. The ‘father of modern-day Bible prophecy,’ as the blurb on one of Hal Lindsey’s most recent books anoints him, is now 70 years old. For almost 30 years Lindsey has held his position as the guru of popular premillennial dispensationalism.

This article will compare the apocalyptic themes of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth (hereafter LGPE) with his recent 1997 work, Apocalypse Code (hereafter AC). The purpose of the comparison is to demonstrate the resiliency and adaptability of apocalypticism in face of changing cultural situations. The article will also demonstrate ways in which Lindsey intertwines culture and theology to produce an eschatological system that, ostensibly, is rigid and inflexible, but in fact turns out to be capable of almost endless mutations.

“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”

Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.

The most impressive attempt of which I am aware which argues that minimally decent treatment, human rights, for all human beings is a necessary requirement of reason is the one put forth by John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights.’ The object of Finnis’s project is to show that the liberal morality of human rights can be derived from the requirements of reason (per se nota truths), without having to invoke any special Divine revelation or metaphysics (although Finnis is careful to note that his theory is not incompatible with these). Finnis contends that every moral obligation, every ought and its cognates, is derivable from practical reason, and then, by extension that law should reflect this morality which is required by reason. It is in this sense that Finnis’s theory is one of natural law, as opposed to positive law. What is especially noteworthy about Finnis’s project is that he alleges that the minimal requirements of morality can in toto be got out of what he calls the principles of practical reasonableness. Practical reasonableness, for Finnis, amounts to the human capacity for exercising freedom and reason, the characteristics of human personality which enable one to grasp the requirements of practical reasonableness, which are requisites for one to express, shape and select one’s participation in what Finnis calls the “basic goods” or “basic values”. If one behaves in accordance with the principles of practical reasonableness and promotes the basic goods, i.e., if one acts in a manner which is self-evidently reasonable, human rights (what Finnis prefers to call “natural rights”), the minimally decent treatment of all persons, will result. But in order to see whether Finnis’s project succeeds, we will have to examine closely his assumptions and the philosophical moves he makes.

The Europe of the High Middle Ages (1150-1309) was principally divided between the Latin-speaking peoples and the Germanic peoples. Although the latter had once invaded and momentarily subjected the Latins, the attraction of the latter’s originally Mediterranean culture had conquered the invaders. The universal language of western Europe had become Latin. Despite the importance of the Germanic peoples, there is no doubt that Latin and its derivatives so dominated the cultural life of Europe that, if one were obliged to find a single adjective with which to qualify the word ‘Europe’ for this period, one would choose ‘Latin,’ and describe the whole as ‘Latin Europe.’

France and Italy led Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This may seem strange. Their cultural and military preeminence and their capacity to influence other parts of western Europe seem odd when their internal constitutions are examined. During the twelfth century French law spread far beyond her frontiers, yet France herself boasted no monarchy or state comparable to that of Plantagenet England, Norman southern Italy, or even the declining German Empire. The typical Italian state that produced Europe’s common law (ius commune) and published its most elaborate statutes was an urban republic, tiny when compared to the states of Spain, to England, and to Germany’s provinces, not to speak of Empire.

But the size of political units was not the principal criterion of inventiveness or importance in this period. In Spite of the Hohenstaufen revival, the German Empire had been irreparably weakened by the alliance of the Roman Church, the German nobility and the Italian towns.

The religious thought of Nikos Kazantzakis, particularly as contained within ‘The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises’, is still demanding attention. Although there have been recent welcoming attempts to elucidate his religious position in relation to Christian thought and process theism, these attempts still remain largely theoretically speculative. What the present paper hopes to contribute is a combination of both speculation and fact. Through an examination of Kazantzakis’ personal library housed in the Historical Museum of Iraklion, Crete, one can become affiliated with the literature that was occupying Kazantzakis immediately prior to and during the composition of the ‘Spiritual Exercises’. The speculative part naturally comes when one tries to ascertain the influence of such literature upon his subsequent thought.

It is clear that during the years 1922-23, when he was based in Vienna and Berlin, Kazantzakis was engaged with works of Freud, Rank, Spengler, Luxemborg as well as certain commentaries on Buddhist thought. These sources are generally recognised as shaping Kazantzakis’ thought during this time. However, one source that has not received any attention is the Bhagavad Gita, literally ‘The Song of God’. Kazantzakis had his own German translation of this Sanskrit poetic work and inside this copy may be found a ticket advertising an evening of readings dated ‘Berlin, Mittwoch 2 Oktober, 1922”. It thus appears fair to assume that this was a work that Kazantzakis was engaged with to a degree during his sojourn in Berlin.

During this time, Kazantzakis witnessed the crumbling German economic system, had first hand experience of profound poverty and became associated with an active group of communists.

If you look in a popular atlas for the world of Las Casas—in other words, Central and South America and the West Indies—you will find it tucked away at the end. An afterthought, you might say. Our atlases very much help to shape our mental geography.

In fact the world of Las Casas covers one-sixth of the earth’s total land surface and now contains over 500 million people, the vast majority of them Catholics (they account for almost half the world’s Catholic population). However, still nearly half of the people in that world are illiterate, and nearly half of them are landless peasants; there is, in other words, still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Las Casas would be broken-hearted to know that today at least some of the ugly consequences of the colonisation which began five centuries ago are still there for every discerning foreign tourist to see. But who was Las Casas?

Men like Dominic and Francis in varying ways powerfully articulated timeless questions in the lights of their times, and we call them men of vision. We must not claim too much for them, for they were in and out of their times. At the same time, we must keep them alive in our collective memory in a living historical conversation rooted in discernment and interpretation. They took hold of the past, immersed themselves in a living experience of their present, decoded from all that some of the timeless questions of humanity, and humbly suggested a possible and perhaps better future by word and action.

There has been a tendency in recent years among feminist and liberationist theologians to read the Magnificat primarily as a proclamation of social justice and liberation for the oppressed. A publication called Mary, Mother of Socialism, offers a number of essays which evaluate the liberative potential of the Magnificat, including one by Graham Dowell called “The Magnificat — a Christian Manifesto?” which offers a side-by-side comparison of Mary’s Magnificat and Marx’s Manifesto, with some fascinating juxtapositions and resonances between the two.

This essay is not intended to detract from these imaginative rereadings of the Magnificat to challenge a dehumanising economic order, but I want to suggest that the prophetic vision of social justice which the Magnificat proclaims is secondary to its message that in the redemption of Mary, womankind is liberated from the consequences of the fall and invited into a new world of integrity, freedom and dignity through the incarnation. This is the way in which a number of patristic writers interpreted the Magnificat, and it has profound implications for some of the vexed questions of sexual difference and equality which risk tearing apart the fabric of contemporary Catholic theology. I should add that I do not think that the seamless robe of salvation history is so easily torn apart by theological squabbles, but I do believe that we could save ourselves much hostility and grief if we could only look anew at our rich theological heritage, and setting aside the rhetoric and polemics of secular feminism, ask in all honesty and faithfulness what it means to be woman who bears the image of God no more and no less than man does.

The starting point of the enquiry described here was a direct result of discussions at the Fishacre Colloquium. The existence of a Martin de Fishacre who was a witness in the early 1240’s to the Inquisition, now called Testa Nevill was identified. The place-name enquiry to find the Fishacre where Martin lived began with scrutiny of current Ordnance Survey maps and identified three places all with the element, Fishacre, in the name within a few miles of each other in the hundred of Haytor in South Devon. They are Fishacre Barton, a farm, in the parish of Broadhempston; Combefishacre, a string village settlement in a small deep valley about four and a half miles to the east; and Coleton Fishacre, a very small settlement above the cliff top between Kingswear and Brixham. Examination of the publications of the English Place-Name Society showed that there are no other settlements in England and Wales with this unusual element of “fishacre” in the name. This part of South Devon with the streams flowing towards the river Dart on its east bank and the coastal peninsula between Dartmouth and Torbay contains the origin of the name, Fishacre. So far, it is uncertain which place was the first to have the name Fishacre. In the Exon. Domesday Book Combefishacre is recorded as Comba while Coleton Fishacre is recorded as Coletona. Broadhempston is referred to in the Exon Domesday but not Fishacre Barton, which is about two miles southwest of the village.

John Paul II’s recent letter on faith and reason is the thirteenth encyclical of his twenty year papacy. Three of the thirteen are social encyclicals in the traditional sense. They explicitly place themselves within the line of social encyclicals which stretches from Rerum Novarum, published by Leo XIII in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, John Paul II’s encyclical to mark the centenary of Leo’s letter in 1991. This line of encyclicals has dealt with social, economic and political questions and reflects all the great events and changes of the 20th century. John Paul II marked the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum by publishing Laborem Exercens (1981) and the twentieth anniversary of Paul Vi’s great encyclical Populorum Progressio was honoured with the publication of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987).

But John Paul’s encyclicals include also a number which might be termed ‘cultural encyclicals’ or ‘encyclicals of cultural critique’. Where the traditional social encyclicals, charting a middle road between the extremes of communism and capitalism, work within the general social and democratic drift of twentieth century development, these cultural encyclicals sound a more critical and, it may be, a more radical note. The letters I include under this rubric are Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae (1995) and Fides et Ratio (1998). It is the middle one I want to consider here.

In philosophy the question about God has developed, historically, parallel to and intimately connected with metaphysics. In metaphysics, the onto-theological thought of God arises from its dependence on the ontological difference, the thought of the ‘unthought as such.’ Within this philosophical construct, God is ultimately thought as the ‘ground’ of all that is, the Being of beings, the causa sui. This paper, mostly inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, argues in favour of a post-metaphysical way of thinking about God: a thinking which releases God from the onto-theological category of Being, and addresses the radical and irreducible alterity of God; a thinking which critiques thinking, in order to address the dilemma of our discourse of Transcendence to be shared within a community-indialogue.

This work is divided into three major sections. Beginning with Marion’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the analytic of the Dasein, the first section will suggest that one starts the question of God from God alone—the gift of Love that precedes Being—rather than from Being. The second section will introduce Emmanuel Levinas’ account of the ethical pre-condition of discourse and reason. For Levinas, discourse starts with, or is preceded by, the gaze of the face of the Other who refuses to be reduced into a category of the same. Subsequently, the questions of language and reason, their limits, necessity, and ethical reach will also be addressed. Finally, this paper will revisit the question of God and reflect on the philosopher’s and theologian’s call to dialogue with, and service to, the community.

The Christian theological tradition has always found discussion of the Holy Spirit difficult. In early patristic writings, for example, the Holy Spirit was often treated as an adjunct to discussions about the relationship between Jesus and God. For both Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, the Spirit was ‘love” or “gift”—designations which are indeed real, but also to a certain extent elusive. Today, some contemporary theologians find the task of describing the Holy Spirit no less difficult. William Hill and Colin Gunton both speak of the “self-effacing” Spirit; Leonardo Boff speaks of the Spirit who “cannot be imagined” while Paul Evdokimov speaks of the “mysterious face” of the Spirit. Other contemporary theologians speak of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Spirit’s function of making connections. Some time ago, John Taylor called the Holy Spirit The Go-Between God. Latterly, Mary Grey and Elizabeth Johnson have been exploring the Spirit’s function as that of bringing different entities into relationship. Kilian McDonnell suggests that the Holy Spirit is the “horizon” in which believers pray and reflect, but the Spirit is never an “object.” Such comments about the Holy Spirit from believers prior to and contemporary with Edward Schillebeeckx provide a background for discussing and assessing his treatment of the Holy Spirit.

This discussion has three parts. I will first describe the theology of the Holy Spirit presented in the theological writings of Edward Schillebeeckx between 1974 and 1994; second, I will offer some critique on his treatment of the Holy Spirit; third, I will draw on Schillebeeckx’s theology to suggest future directions for pneumatology.

Did you know that last December 5 was the Day of the Disabled. No? I’m not surprised. Possibly more people have heard that 1999 is the Year of the Elderly. A large proportion of our population is now over 60, and, frequently with old age comes some degree of disability, so perhaps our disabled citizens will get their share of attention this year. After all, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1955 (Part III) which requires service providers to review their procedures to make sure they do not exclude disabled people, comes into full force in October of this year. Then there is the new Human Rights Bill several of whose clauses cover the disabled, and the setting up by the government of a Disability Rights Commission which will mean that in future those suffering discrimination will have a body to whom they can bring complaints instead of being faced with the need to bring a private prosecution.

So all that remains is to change the attitude to disability in the general community. How do we do this?

First, (this sounds like a Delia Smith recipe) we must bury the Great Disability Debate as to whether it is personal physical limitations which constrict the lives of disabled people (the physical model) or the fact that society is not prepared to adapt itself to encompass the disabled (the social model). The basis for the first of these two approaches is that the disabled must accept that their life-situation is going to be different to that of the able-bodied ; for the second, that the disabled have a right to equal access and opportunities however difficult the circumstances.

The original mission of the Dominican Order was preaching the word. It was a direct result of the constitution Inter Cetera of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 under Pope Innocent III, according to which bishops who were over-worked or who were not up to the demands of preaching should establish groups of preachers in their dioceses as their helpers and coworkers in the pastoral care.

Dominic Guzman, who was at the Council with his diocesan bishop, Fulk of Toulouse, was convinced that in the band of preachers he had set up in Toulouse, he had a means of making sure that this constitution would not remain a dead letter. A little more than a year later, in January 1217, he obtained from the new pope, Honorius III, a mandate that gave general approval to the work of preaching already begun at Toulouse.

This papal confirmation of Dominic’s Toulouse preachers, as preachers in general, was followed over the next three years, 1218 to 1220, by many ‘Letters to Prelates’ urging them to make use of the preachers and to encourage them in the office of preaching to which they have been deputed. Now in these letters of recommendation and in the mandate Gratiarum Omnium (the real foundation charter of the Dominican Order), there is no mention whatsoever of the sacrament of penance, the counselling of souls or the hearing of confessions. This is somewhat strange given that the Constitution Inter Cetera of the Lateran Council had explicitly joined the function of hearing confessions to that of preaching.

One of the best guides through the territory of the pro-Fascist sympathies of the British Catholic literati is Robert Speaight, who, in his biography of Belloc and his autobiography, achieved a dispassionate view of 1930s English Catholicism, while making no secret of his own moderate temperamental inclination to the Right, even admitting to having been attracted to Action Franchise. Speaking of the 1930s Catholic intelligentsia he remarks:

He refers to both the influence of continental Rightists and that of the Church in teaching Catholics to fear Communism. Of Belloc he observes he had ‘nothing but contempt for the representative government. ... he seemed to think that, on the whole, fascism was a good thing for foreigners.’

A good place to begin this survey of the post-conciliar Catholic theological scene in Britain—which means, overwhelmingly, in this context, England—is the symposium on theology and the Catholic Church in this country, held at Downside under the presidency of Dom Christopher Butler in 1963. Though, as that date indicates, the papers were written and published while the Second Vatican Council was still in session (they were the product of the sixth of a series of Downside symposia on matters of intellectual interest to Catholics beginning in the later 1950s), the majority of the authors consciously looked forward to what would be, they imagined, the setting and general direction of Catholic theology in Britain after the Council. In various respects, to be examined shortly, the Catholic contributors were right in their predictions, but not in all. The historian will note the role of Christopher Butler as inspirer of the Downside symposia in general and author in particular of the opening essay in Theology and the University. An Ecumenical Investigation. As abbot of the only English monastery with a substantial scholarly tradition, a writer of distinction on the Gospels, ecclesiology, spiritual theology and apologetics, as well as a nationally known radio personality through the panel programme Any Questions, his attendance at the Council as that rare bird a theological peritus with voting rights— owing to the accident that he was at the time abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation—gave him the opportunity to become the single most influential interpreter in England of the Council’s devices and desires, especially when he was made a bishop auxiliary to Cardinal Heenan with, in effect, a special portfolio for doctrine and theology.

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.