When I was a student in Cambridge forty-odd years ago a Capuchin friar said to me, ‘God is on the surface of things’. I want to talk about that, and about how it gets obscured by the abstractions of science on the one hand and the make-believe of religion on the other.

When I received a letter from The Summoner of Preachers inviting me to preach this Sermon before the University, I felt deeply honoured. But this turned to alarm when I discovered that there was no set text or topic. I was invited to talk about anything I wished. And this disturbed me because, within my tradition at least, what differentiates a sermon from a mere expression of opinion is that it starts from a text, a text that you have not chosen, may not like, and may well not understand.

Anyone who attends the Eucharist will have to listen to some extraordinary texts, which celebrate the squashing of the Amelekites, Moab becoming one’s footstool, the cleansing of houses suffering from leprosy, and the torments of the damned. And after we have listened, we say: ‘Thanks be to God’. The purpose of the sermon is to help us to be thankful, to discover some apparently bizarre or alarming text as a gift. The preacher should be the perfect host who shows us how to welcome the strange text, an exercise in hospitality of the heart and the mind.

But there was no text. And then I spotted a text at the top of the letter, Dominus Illuminatio Mea, ‘The Lord is my light’, the motto of the University. It is a quotation from the beginning of Psalm 27 in the Vulgate, Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea. Quem timebo? The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?’

If not from the beginning then from a very early time of his life, Mozart knew both that love in all its diverse manifestations is the rare wonder of our experience and that it is always under attack. At a London breakfast party in 1765, the nine-years old boy was asked by the distinguished lawyer, Daines Barrington, to extemporize a song for the castrato Manzuoli. The singer had befriended the little boy on this London visit and Mozart, with a grin, at once sat down at the harpsichord and began an air composed to the single word Affetto. ‘If this extempore composition was not amazingly capital’, Barrington reported to his fellows at the Royal Society, ‘yet it was really above mediocrity, and shewed most extraordinary readiness of invention’. He had asked for another song, one that might be ‘proper for the opera stage’. Immediately, the boy began a song of Perfido. ‘And in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a person possessed’. That Love will ever be dogged by Treachery is the continuing theme of Mozart’s dramma in musica. The writing of operas became, as he told his father in February 1778, ‘an obsession with me’, and, taken together, these operas present as rare an assessment of the great matters of our experience as the philosophy of Aristotle, the sculpture of Michelangelo, or the novels of Henry James. ‘I cannot write a poem, for I am no poet; I cannot get the light and the dark into verse. Neither am I a painter.

In 19821 drove with friends from the city of Puebla to Mexico City by the rather hazardous route between the volcanoes Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. That is the route which Cortés and his followers travelled in 1519. From the top, they caught Europe’s first glimpse of the Aztec capital, glistening below. Bernal Diaz, in his eyewitness chronicle, describes their amazement at its size and beauty. Now you cannot see the city, but only the pulsating orange-brown glow of its pollution. What was more interesting to me was that in order to find the right track to the pass, we had stopped in a village to ask the way, and had been guided by indians speaking the Spanish of Cervantes, rich in forms and courtesies quite unused in modem Spanish.

In 1990 I spent a weekend in Sucre, the historical capital of Bolivia, a beautiful university city in the Andes. I was attending a national charismatic conference, which had borrowed a military academy during the summer holiday. In the evening there was a big Mass in the Cathedral, presided over by the newly appointed Bishop, a Spaniard. The next morning the Feast of the Epiphany, I stumbled out of bed to celebrate Mass at six with the (enclosed) Carmelite sisters in their 17th century Carmel. To my amazement, the church was full, mostly of indians , in multi-coloured costume; the sisters in their choir made sprightly song with the help of a number of Spanish and Andean instruments, and every time they did so, a small indian girl, quite unprompted, danced with delight in front of the image of Our Lady.

Someone once said that death is a tragedy only when we know nothing about it. If this is true, then just how much do we know of death that to die would not be a tragedy? If we had some idea what it is like to die, would there be less fear in us? Would we be less scared at the prospect of it since it would not be a plunge into the unknown or a leap into the dark?

What is troubling about the moment of death, thereby causing much distress and anxiety, is that we all know that one day each of us will die; yet there is much uncertainty about death. Consequently, the thought of it grips our whole being, leaving us bewildered. Or could it be the parting with loved ones or perhaps leaving behind an unfinished task which makes death a sad and unwelcome moment? John Keat’s poem ‘Terror of Death’ certainly expresses the tragedy of being separated from loved ones or an uncompleted work. Maybe it is the fact that there is no turning back after—to use Alfred Tennyson’s words—one has ‘crossed the bar’ that terrifies. Dylan Thomas’s advice, therefore, is:

We are afraid that death may reveal our lives to have been a sham and it has rendered us powerless to change them.

‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeney in T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Sweeney is telling the awful parable of the man he knew who ‘did a girl in’ and wasn’t sure which of them was alive and which dead. In the world of Sweeney’s experience ‘That’s what life is. Just is ... Life is death’.

Words here are strained to accomplish their explanation (how can ‘life’ be ‘death’ when the words signify opposites) and as they stretch they give up multiple significances to unfold un-thought-of meanings. If Sweeney’s friend Doris says (whether of Sweeney’s ‘canibal isle’ where life is ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, or of the proposed ‘crocodile isle’ idyll of ‘Morning/Evening/Noontime/Night’), ‘That’s not life, that’s no life/Why I’d just as soon be dead’, she may not only be expressing a simple equality of preference, but saying that on an isle with no telephones, gramophones, cars or trains, only fruit and flowers and sameness, death will come just as surely and as soon as in the busy world of sights and sounds and doings. When Sweeney picks this up and says ‘That’s what life is. Just is’, he may allude to the quality of life—hurried, mechanised, or slow-dropping hypnotised—as death or to the incontrovertible fact that the end, the fulfilment, of all life is death.

Before beginning to try to define what kind of Green theology is most likely to have an enduring place, let us try to define what Green theology certainly should not be.

The prophets call us to account. The tone of the call is certain, because there must be no risk of our not seeing the difference between our present failure and what they propose. The ecological problems which now occupy some portion of every week’s news produce prophecies of doom and demands for action. Our inertia, our denials and the plausible reassurances of governments necessitate both subtlety and strong language, if there is ever going to be a widespread change of attitude. For, to our minds, the villains are always other people.

In this situation the voices loudly resound of self-proclaimed prophets who declare that they alone have done the proper thing and bowed the knee to Baal. For it is the fertility rites of Baal that now so they say have first claim on us. So, again and again, when the theology of Environmental or Green issues is considered, Christianity is the system of religious belief most severely attacked.

Its reputedly negative attitude towards a fallen world and its anthropocentrism are set off against the virtues of more earthy religion, religion considered to show a greater reverence for the natural order and to be more in line with modem developments such as feminism and a greater valuation of sensuality, developments with which Christianity has had some trouble.

In the Hebrew, Jewish and Christian religions—for there are three religions, the Hebraic, the Judaic and the Christian, and not one or even two, just as there are two new testaments, the Christian and the Talmudic, and not one alone—everything begins with a ‘word’ of ‘God’ and remains founded on that primordial or very topical utterance. A human statement, embodied in a language, concepts and images, is understood as a pronouncement so ‘inspired’ by ‘God’ that we may call it ‘the word of God’. (In a fourth religion of the same family, Islam, the word practically ceases to be human, and that position, regarded by Muslims as fundamental, has been a constantly recurring temptation for the preceding faiths).

This paper offers an account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of ‘the world’. As will be seen, this requires explanation of his view of religious attitudes in general, and of wonder at the world in particular. His religious position may appear to be unsystematic, or even inconsistent. Contrary to this impression, this paper will show that the same view of the world underlies his religious position, which manifests itself in different forms at different stages of his philosophy. For the world, as the logical limit to the expression of the human will, is a unifying idea in his philosophy. We shall be concerned with his early endeavour to express himself to the limit of the world and then with his later analysis of religious thought and action which construe as real that which lies beyond the world.

The world has always been a limiting concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. According to him, the world as reality presents itself to us as an unquestioned and necessary experiential fact. All of us believe in the world that has been handed down to us. It is the condition that makes possible every questioning and doubting. It is the background against which we judge in general between true and false. Its existence is so selfevident that it is even unnoticed, and its nonexistence is inconceivable. Language means only the world and can mean only it. In his endeavour to understand the world and man in it, Wittgenstein always holds on to the view that we should be concerned with things and events and situations in the world, and investigate it from within, taking the world as unquestioned and necessary.

The Transfiguration of Christ—both the narrative (Matt 17:1—8, par.) and the feast we celebrate on 6 August—has such an importance in the Eastern Church today that we do not always realize that it emerged relatively late in the theological thought of the first centuries of the Church. However, if it took the Church several centuries to realize the central importance of the Transfiguration to Christian life, modern western Christianity seems to have forgotten it. In a world where men are tempted to seek the goal of human destiny in systems worked out by the human mind alone—be these systems philosophical or technological—we are tempted to focus on what can be accomplished here and now and tend to ignore the reality of death, which frustrates the plans of so many individuals. Christians, to say nothing of the world as a whole, must be reminded that, however laudable activity to better the human lot here and now may be, the ultimate goal of the human race is bound up with what God has wrought in Christ Jesus. The interpretation of the Transfiguration, as the Church’s awareness of its importance grew, makes a fascinating chapter in the history of theology. A re-examination of the past role of the Transfiguration in Christian thought may help Western Christians to recapture in our own lives the fascination which this event from the life of Christ once had for the whole Church. God’s revelation at this unnamed mountain is as important for understanding human destiny in Christ today as it was to Peter, James and John.

How fruitful is this Decade of Evangelization going to be? The analyses and proposals offered in this essay refer specifically to the missionary enterprise in Africa south of the Sahara. But the implications are much wider, touching even the raison d‘être of each one of Christianity’s multiple ecclesial manifestations.

Because the world‘s irreducible cultural pluralism cannot be ignored with impunity, much less scorned and replaced with alien cultures, the declining esteem for what missionaries have done may be seen as an inevitable consequence of the European and American cultural monomania that produced a network of dependent Western spiritual colonies through sub-Saharan Africa.

Much lip-service was, of course, given in official ecclesiastical documents to the goal of establishing culturally integrated, self-sustaining, indigenous Christian churches with their own vibrant missionary outreach and original cultural contributions to the universal family of Christians. Far from ignoring the local cultures of the people being evangelized, much less destroying them with foreign ways of being human and religious, missionaries were supposed to accept and evangelize the cultures themselves. This has been the official position of the Catholic Church, in theory, ever since St Paul, on this very issue of cultural pluralism, ‘withstood Cephas to his face ... in front of everyone’ (cf. Gal.2; Acts 15).

‘We must remain absolutely silent on what we cannot talk about’. Wittgenstein’s interdict would surely apply to the mystery of human suffering; at certain intensities of pain it becomes literally as well as idiomatically unspeakable. Even to allude to the educative value of pain is to risk an inhuman glibness, a coldblooded reduction of the specificity of suffering to chill, abstract formulae. We must begin by confessing the ultimate intractability of the problem. Against pain and death we fight a losing battle; and the mystery, always insoluble, has, if anything, become more agonisingly problematic in our own time. Caring for the chronically and terminally ill has always been intensely difficult; in the modem world, technological advances notwithstanding, it has become immeasurably more so.

A world without anaesthetics would be a hell; deprived of analgesics even so routine an event as a visit to the dentist would be something to be dreaded and shunned. To avoid or to minimise pain is an instinctive natural reflex; the deliberate search for suffering is a perversion to which we give the name masochism. Yet it is equally true that a world without pain would be calamitous. Pain is essential to survival—without it we would perish. It is an early warning system, a defence mechanism, vital in preventive medicine against incipient and impending evil. Without pain teeth would rot insensibly in our gums, limbs quietly crumble to ash in the flames or be mangled beyond repair in the machinery, cancers placidly proliferate in our bodies. Once bitten, twice shy. The old adage crystallises the argument that pain educates, teaches us to avoid certain courses of action harmful or destructive to us. Pain is a necessary part of a rational world, regulating behaviour, signalling the need for treatment.

Recent just-war discussion over the Gulf Crisis has focused attention once again on what are, by now, the familiar mysteries of that particular rosary: just cause, last resort, proportionality, legitimate authority, right intention. Bishops and theologians who cite the theory in order to justify military actions consistently fail to recognise that the cultural vantage points from which they conduct their calculus cannot be guaranteed free of distortions which render their solemn judgments as erroneous on a moral plane as calculations of the position of the stars taken from within the earth’s atmosphere are on a physical plane. In both cases observations vital for a correct analysis are ‘refracted’ through a medium which distorts the information without telling prima fade that it is doing so. The assumption that the just-war theory can always be adjusted to accommodate ‘advances’ such as in the technology of modem weapons systems or the status of the U.N. fails to take any notice of the complexities of modem communications and their impact on the set of perceptions and judgments crudal to the conditions of classical just-war theory.

There are numerous problems involved in trying to describe this dilemma: ‘mass media’ are by no means a trifling difficulty for just-war thinking, nor do they lend themselves to simple, hasty analysis. But even if only the contour of some of the issues can be described it may still become clear that what is required now is the application of a more critical hermeneutic to just-war theory.

Noche Oscura

There is probably no more serious threat to the Church throughout the world than the multiplication of fundamentalist sects. According to Robin Gill, ‘Fundamentalism may be defined tentatively as a system of beliefs and practices which treat scriptural absolutism as the way to counter the pluralism and relativism engendered by modernity.’ In our new ‘age of anxiety’, they offer certainty and security. God has spoken and He has spoken clearly and this is what He has said. A proper analysis of fundamentalism would have to examine its rise in various forms in different faiths, including our own, and its political and social implications. In this article I wish to perform the much more limited task of suggesting how it is that a fundamentalist reading of the text relies upon thoroughly modern presuppositions as to how a text should be read. It is as contemporary as the relativism against which it protests. All narrative assumes a particular perception of space and time, the fundamental framework of any story. If we wish to break the hold of such a literalistic reading of the text we must become sensitive to its conventions of chronology and geography. Upon what clock and map does it rely? In particular I wish to suggest that a fundamentalist reading of scripture relies upon a modern understanding of time.

It is difficult if not impossible to live hopefully the fulness of human life without men and women of vision. But the term ‘vision’ is, perhaps, too often carelessly used.

Vision is concerned with a better possible future. And it depends upon both imagination and creativity. Yet those who possess it, or are considered to possess it, must be inhabitants not only of what is possible, but also, and more importantly, reflective upon, sensitive to, critical and understanding of, their past and present. Indeed, it is their very rootedness in and conversation with both past and present which essentially ratifies any claim to vision. A paradox rests, therefore, in the fact that men and women of vision, though about a future, are only about that future because of their critical understanding of a past and a radical belongingness to and immersion in a present.

The woman and man of vision are, to be sure, creative and imaginative. But they are, more often than not, wholly unconscious of being people of vision. Dominic and Francis, for example, turned out to be men of vision not because they saw a new future, but heard the cry of a present demand and measured it against a past. For us, then, the men and women of history whom we perceive or name people of vision become ‘classical symbols’ in our understanding of and quest into the complicated and demanding questions of our own times.

One aspect of modernity which is of particular theological significance, and whose existence is intimately linked to the twentieth century’s distance-shrinking communications networks, is our new awareness of the sheer diversity of human religiousness. Those who live in a world where TV, radio and the press are commonplace features of a sophisticated media environment, cannot be blind to the fact that different people believe different things. This simple insight has profound implications for the way in which we formulate our theologies, communicate with each other and treat the natural world which is our common home.

Many theologians and philosophers have begun to acknowledge the quantum shift in thinking which the contemporary experience of religious pluralism demands. Langdon Gilkey, for example, considers the encounter with other religions to be ‘the most important new issue confronting Christian theology at the present time’. Wilfred Cantwell Smith predicts that ‘the religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism’. And Ninian Smart has suggested that ‘the earth has become in our time more or less a planet, a single globe. It is now a kind of city, the geopolis’ where the different faiths are brought into inevitable contact with each other.

In Act One of ‘A Man for all Seasons’, Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More’s pilgrimage to martyrdom, More’s impetuous son-in-law, William Roper, argues that the Devil does not deserve benefit of law. In the course of the discussion More pushes Roper into the stark claim that obstacle to the conviction of the Devil must be overcome, even if it meant failing to follow due process of law. Roper, in his hunger and thirst for justice, declares that he is prepared to tear down every law in England in so worthy a cause. More, with his finely-tuned jurisprudential mind, answers him:

In this passage from Bolt’s play More focusses some of the issues raised by the recent War Crimes Act, which obtained the Royal Assent on 9 May 1991.’ The Act’s long title states that its purpose is ‘to confer jurisdiction on United Kingdom courts in respect of certain grave violations of the laws and customs of war in German-held territory during the Second World War.’

More than in the case of any other school of theology, it is important to assess liberation theology in its social context. Liberation theology not only asserts a necessary correlation between belief and action; its adherents are also normally active in work with poor communities or one of the many church-linked sectoral support organisations. Liberation theology has also acquired wide influence within the magisterium of the Latin American church: the meeting of the General Conference of Latin American bishops (CEL AM) in Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979) adopted key concepts, and for the past twenty years a liberationist outlook has shaped the thinking of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, the largest on the continent.

The impact of liberation theology in the Latin American church has been profound, though not universal. Where its ideas have been adopted, the church, from being in alliance with the elites and out of touch with the and a new following among the poor, and is treated with a new seriousness by non-Christian radicals. Bishops, who formerly entered the political arena mainly to defend their privileges, now commonly champion the rights of workers, the landless, indigenous peoples and other oppressed groups There has been an explosion of creativity, not only in theology, but in church structure, pastoral practice and liturgy. Liberation theology’s influence has spread beyond Latin America, stimulating similar contextual theologies in other parts of the Third World, and securing recognition of one of its key concepts, the ‘preferential option for the poor’, as an essential element of papal social teaching and a permanent question for Christians in the affluent world.

Theological attention to St Thomas Aquinas, from over one hundred years ago to the present day, has featured in the work of a great number of theologians, many of them outstanding in the formation of twentieth-century theology. There is, however, another important aspect to the revival of interest in Aquinas: the very effective official ecclesiastical promotion of Thomistic philosophy and theology led by the succession of popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

A point of entry for these observations is provided by the occasion of the inauguration of the Chair of St Thomas Aquinas at the Lateran University, Rome on 10 March 1963. Archbishop Dino Staffa, as Secretary of the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, delivered a paper on the ‘Revival of Thomism’. His comments, as indeed much in the early years of the revival of Thomistic studies, had been largely inspired by another inauguration, that of the officially stated fundamental place of St Thomas in Catholic philosophy and theology by the encyclical Aterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII, dated August 4, 1879. The specific interest of the encyclical was the restoration of scholastic philosophy in general and that of St Thomas Aquinas in particular. It emphasized the Church’s concern for teaching ‘true philosophy’ because of its relation to theology. Declaring false philosophy to be the root of ‘many modern evils’ and mentioning the esteem in which St Thomas had been held, the encyclical urged the revival of St Thomas’ philosophy and of the spirit of investigation.