I am honoured and excited at being invited to preach in College on a theme of my choice. Honoured for obvious reasons—excited because as a Roman Catholic I am used to everything being forbidden unless it is compulsory. It is an exciting change to taste Anglican freedom, and to choose one’s texts and one’s theme.

So, I have chosen to reflect on angels, basing myself on those intriguing biblical texts we have just heard from the prophet Isaiah and from the book of Revelation. But has the subject of angels been a wise choice? Is there not something irresponsible in preaching on such an abstruse and specialised subject in our day and age? Is this going to be an exercise in Christian day-dreaming and telling fairy tales? It might be said that if angels prove anything, they prove the irrelevance of our faith today. Some will say that this is what you should expect if you invite a Dominican friar to preach; antiquarian theology. Some will say that this is the kind of concern that makes Christianity beautiful but of no real use; well-meaning silliness.

This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.

Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.

We are often told that there is something called ‘the problem of evil’. What is this supposed to be? And how should we respond to it?

It is usually understood as a problem for classical theism (sometimes just called theism), supporters of which are commonly called theists. According to classical theism, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and allgood. In the world around us, however, we discover a great deal of pain and suffering. We also find a great deal of moral evil—morally culpable actions (or refusals to act) which diminish both those who are morally bad and those around them. The problem of evil is commonly seen as the problem of how the existence of God can be reconciled with the pain, suffering, and moral evil which we know to be facts of life. And it has often been said that they cannot be. Thus it has been urged that the problem of evil constitutes grounds for disbelief in God.

The argument here has taken two forms. First, it has been said that evil is evidence against there being a God—that evil shows the existence of God to be unlikely. Second, it has been held that evil is proof that there could not be a God. The idea here is that theists are caught in a contradiction. They cannot say both that there is evil and that God exists. Since they can hardly deny that there is evil, it follows that God does not exist.

Do whales have souls and if so what follows ? How would Catholic theology have to change if it was discovered that whales were as rational as you or I ? If whales have souls can they become Catholics ?

For a traditional Catholic, to have a soul, in latin anima, is to be animate, to be alive. Having a soul is having a certain form, a certain organisation such that one can move oneself. One part moves another so that the whole moves itself. This self-moving quality, shown in the processes of nutrition, growth and reproduction, is common to all living things. To be alive is to have a soul. St. Thomas Aquinas would affirm that all living things from cabbages to whales, so long as they were alive, were so in virtue of a soul.

This broadly speaking, is the scriptural view, though it is often obscured by translation. In Genesis 1:20 God says,‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures’. In Genesis 2:7 God breathes into the nostrils of the man so that he becomes a ‘living being’. In both cases the word nephesh is used which in other places we would translate soul. So the waters brought forth swarms of living souls, and Adam became a living soul. Plants are a bit of a borderline case, for though clearly alive they are not very lively. However, with this small qualification, hebrew Old Testament, greek New Testament, and latin scholastic theology would agree.

Right intention is but one of the requirements that must be met for a war to be just, according to the Just War tradition. To treat it in isolation, as a basis for analysing the motives of the multi-national coalition which confronted Iraq in the Gulf war, requires isolating and dissecting certain elements of a complex whole, which may distort more than it reveals. That said, the exercise does provide a way of exploring one aspect of the war which was, and remains, the subject of speculation in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.

Both before and during the Gulf war there was much discussion, some of it covered in the Western media, on the war aims of the coalition. Speculation focused on the possibility that the members of the coalition had certain objectives in addition to those publicly professed by the various governments concerned. Any evaluation of the intentions of the coalition members must thus take into account not only what they said their aims were, but also the objectives implied by the strategy they adopted and the terms on which they were prepared to end hostilities. Actions, presumably, reveal as much as words.

Here the emphasis will be on defining the war aims of the coalition, both implicit and explicit, short and long term, so that they may be examined in the light of the requirement, of the Just War tradition, that the intentions of the combatants be just. As a reference point, some assumptions about the meaning of ‘right intention’ will be offered at the outset.

The journey towards Milbank’s representation of Augustine’s Civitas Dei calls for an epic heroism, as it passes through woods dense with philosophical thought and over chasms of vertiginous intellectual argument. Dante, then, provides a description of one’s experience of reading Theology and Social Theory. But more significantly, he provides us with a key to its method. Milbank’s polemic is aimed at modernity, the invention of the secular story and modem political theology’s collusion with it. This modernity or secularity arose following late-mediaeval/Renaissance self-awareness. Assisted by postmodern strategies of reading, Milbank allegorizes secular discourses, deconstructs their secularism and reveals their dependence upon metaphysical and theological assumptions. By doing this he therefore embraces secular discourse (whose inception and invention ‘began at least in the eleventh century’ [p.432]) within a theological metanarrative. And that is why Dante is significant; John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory is a contemporary Commedia. This does not necessarily condemn it as a piece of late twentieth century nostalgia, a fin de siècle pre-Raphaelitism. But it means that the teleological goal of Theology and Social Theory is the recovery of a pre-modem (but not antique) theological perspective. Or, put in another (albeit Dantesque) way: this book provides a new allegorical depiction of the operation of charity [pp.425-6]. Such a reading of the book has several important corollaries, binding upon both John Milbank and his readers.

Biography is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences in popularity. Literary biography seems to be particularly in vogue. But the purpose of telling the story of some great author’s life is no longer simply historical or even hagiographical. In this post-structuralist age, the intention of such a pursuit as biography has to be expository —to get behind the public face and reveal the real man or woman; to deconstruct the myth and reconstruct the person and their ‘emotional, intellectual and psychological makeup’.’ It is precisely this which Professor Martin tries to do in his most recent biography ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life’.

Hopkins, the enigmatic priest-poet of the nineteenth century, seems in one way a particularly suitable candidate for such a treatment. On the surface there seems to exist such a very great divergence between his public persona, a Jesuit priest dedicated to the discipline of the Ignatian ‘Spiritual Exercises’, and the private man, a poet of great imagination and originality. Whether this dichotomy is seen as responsible for the psychological imbalances which intermittently afflicted him, or as the dynamic which is at the centre of his creativity hardly matters. On the other hand, the facts of Hopkins’ life, both public and to a large extent private, are very well established. His poems were published in their first collected edition in 1918; the personal journals were published in 1937 and the letters between 1935 and 1938. Professor Martin did, it seems, have access to the originals of the journals and to Jesuit sources especially with relation to the final period of Hopkins life in Dublin.

Muriel Spark’s concept of faith is an essential feature of her work.lt supplies perspective and balance. Without an appreciation of it, her novels may only be valued for their wit, their irony, their unpredictability. These are indeed attractive aspects of her writing. However, they do not function merely to tease, surprise and entertain. They exist to illustrate a life which is essentially fragmented.

In a world where nothing can be fully grasped, there are dangers; the most threatening is a misplaced confidence in a single selfish viewpoint. Such an error constitutes an essential sin in Christian terms: it is philautia, love of self. St Augustine described sin as a turning away from God towards the self. Sin in Christian terms is negative: it is the opposite of all that comes from God. And so we find certain characters in Spark’s work mistakenly asserting themselves as the source of power and their own viewpoint as a criterion of truth. On the other hand we find characters who have a profound need to acknowledge a truth beyond themselves and who strive to come to terms with the essential inadequacy of a human perspective. These characters have a determination to identify what is true and honest in their existence; they have a sense of irony and sometimes a great sense of joy. All these characters describe themselves as Catholics. Although they are not portrayed as dependent on church ritual or practice, the dimension of faith is of the utmost importance to them.

Caroline in The Comforters is most explicitly bound up in her faith. She is a convert and finds herself patronized by cradle Catholics such as Mrs Hogg. She is irritated by this for she has a sense of her faith which lies beyond the smug platitudes of this woman. Although Caroline goes into retreat, she does not encounter her faith by turning her back on her life. On the contrary, the challenges, the irritations and the mysteries which nurture her faith are in her experience.

What does it mean to say that we live in a ‘scientific age’ when that is contrasted with ‘a religious age’? Or again, to say that ‘Because we live in a scientific age we don’t need religion’?

What sort of competition is this, in which two apparently very different kinds of concern are seen as embattled? In particular, what does ‘scientific’ mean when one talks of a scientific age, and just what are the needs that science is now held to satisfy? (The spotlight is usually turned on religion, but I think we should sometimes turn it the other way). These are not just disinterested, sociological questions. We have all been hearing the voice that expresses this rather mysterious faith in science all our lives. The force with which it comes home to us must, I think, show that some of the things it is saying are important. Yet in a dozen obvious ways what it says is muddled and wildly wrong.

I must talk here somewhat crudely, because I am talking about something crude. The voice is part of the imagery out of which our conscious thought arises, merging into a dark background of which we are hardly aware. It is full of crude notions. But they can be very influential. Let’s have a closer look at this one.

Npstra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the church to NonChristian religions issued by Vatican II, notes that the Church regards God’s election of Israel and the dispensation brought by Christ as intimately connected with one another. It is indeed important for Christians to realise that the dispensation of Israel and the disposition represented by the Church are continuous, that each forms part of a continuous and integral history of salvation. The Church acknowledges the salvific character God’s covenant with Israel, and of divine revelation to Israel in the Torah of Judaism. Indeed, the Church cherishes the Hebrew scriptures, uses them extensively in its liturgy, and views them as fundamental to its Christian faith.

Some Christians argue that the new covenant in Christ supersedes and abrogates the older covenant with Israel, and that the coming of Christ marks the end of the covenantal and salvific value of the Torah. Such Christians also argue that post-Christie Jews are rejected by God, and that the Israel of the old covenant is eliminatively replaced in the economy of salvation by a new Israel comprising gentiles who have accepted Christ. On this account, part of Christ’s mission was the destruction of the Torah and the rejection of Israel in favour of the gentiles, and the good news of Christ’s coming is not good news for the Jewish people at all but rather a curse. This flies in the face of some of our Lord’s own sayings. Does our Lord not state that he has not come to abolish the Torah, but rather to bring it to perfection, and that not a jot and a tittle of the Torah will pass away until all things are brought to their eschatological perfection, presumably in the general resurrection and judgement? For that matter, our Lord acknowledges the magisterial authority of the Pharisaic forbears of the Rabbis, saying that they speak with the authority of Moses, and that their rulings in matters of observance must be obeyed. The burden of our Lord’s criticism of the Pharisees is not that their tradition and authority is false or invalid, but rather that they fail to live up to it. As for the claim that our Lord comes to disown and reject the Jewish people, it should be noted that he tells us that he has come to the lost sheep of Israel, that he commissioned the twelve apostles to go not to the gentiles ‘but... rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and states emphatically that salvation itself is of the Jews.

Jesus has a reputation as a story-teller. He is known for his announcement of the Reign of God in stories of a merchant buying a pearl, a traveller being mugged on the road, a woman sweeping her floor. His theology had always the form of fiction. ‘He did not speak to them without a parable’. This was a peculiar theological method. Whatever likenesses there may have been between the people of the Dead Sea scrolls and the first company of disciples, they did not have such a story-teller at their centre. And though there have been several attempts to establish that speaking in parables was an ordinary style of preaching with Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries, these attempts have resulted rather in some further confirmation of Jesus’ individual distinction. There was no preacher like him. No one telling such stories. Paul, as a youngster, had clearly enjoyed the hebrew Exodus legend about a rolling stone, and the greek fable of Menenius about a talking stomach. But, if he is anywhere near as representative of the pharisee tradition as he claims to be, it must be significant for our view of contemporary jewish teachers that he thought it sufficiently daring in his theologising to elaborate a little allegory from the story of Abraham.

Jesus’ story-telling talent has proved to be as singular in the history of Christian theology. The vaster number of those who have thought it their vocation to articulate the peculiar Christian appreciation of God have been as useless at story-telling as Paul. It may be, confronted by a demand for imaginative narrative, determinedly unfictionalising theologians should have claimed that ‘the logical consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole’ is to be understood, as Leslie Stephen observed in a fine essay on ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, as ‘an aspect of the imaginative power’ by which we harmonise our strongest and subtlest feelings.

Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) is this century’s most remarkable mystical theologian: a mystic, that is, become theologically articulate. Although her place in the history of Catholic theology is, thanks to her influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), entirely assured, her life and teaching—above all, her doctrine of the Atonement—are of considerable interest in their own right.

Adrienne von Speyr was bom at La Chaux des Fonds, in a Frenchspeaking part of Canton Berne, Switzerland, on 20 September 1902. Her father, an eye surgeon, came from a Basle family distinguished for doctors, (Protestant) clerics and businessmen. Her relation with her mother was bad, but, to compensate, she enjoyed what her biographer, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, calls ‘a totally childlike existence in God and for God’. On such matters as how to be with God in prayer, and the value of sacrifice and renunciation she was instructed by an angel. Though she lived all her life in an academic milieu and became herself, as we shall see, a professional person, and, moreover, had as her confessor and biographer the most learned Catholic theologian of the present century, we cannot make sense of Adrienne’s mysticism unless we accept that, to her awareness, angels and saints were constantly coming and going in her life, and behind these the Holy Trinity itself. She got on well with her father, who allowed her to go with him on his hospital rounds in order to visit sick children. Similarly, in the holidays, when she stayed with an uncle who was director of a psychiatric hospital near Berne, she was found to have a great gift for calming the patients, getting through to them, and cheering the depressed. From these experiences came her resolve to become a doctor herself. Her own health was below par. She was often ill, and had recurrent backaches caused by inflammation of the vertebrae.

My original title for this paper asked a question: The Church—Focus for European Integration? Of course there is a great deal that the Church, whether we mean those of us in communion with Rome or include Christians of the Reformed and Orthodox Churches, is able and likely to do to focus integration in Europe. But as I come now to write it I find that the emphasis in what I want to say suggests a fairly modest proposal for some work at national level which would necessarily be ecumenical in character.

Christians, in Europe at least, are perhaps more of an obstacle in the way rather than any kind of focus of integration. True, not all the ancient and venomous conflicts that you see almost wherever you look in ‘Europe’ have religious or if you like ecclesiastical origins or dimensions. The problem of Basque separatism in Spain doesn’t have any religious dimension. But whether it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Croatian Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, or Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, to mention only the three bitterest conflicts (and religion is not the only factor in any of these cases), it is tempting to suggest that if there were a lot less religion around it would be easier to see how Europeans might be united in peace and prosperity. There are ancient Christian countries in Europe where anti-semitism isn’t totally absent and it may be wondered whether Christians in Europe are any better placed to cope with Islam than our ancestors were at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

One word that often creeps into the active vocabulary of religious people is ‘miracle’. Many would say that miracles occur, or that they have occurred. It is also sometimes suggested that they provide evidence for various things, notably the existence of God, or the truth of some particular religion, or die teaching of certain religious leaders. The topic of miracle has occasioned much philosophical and theological debate. But what should we say about it?

Perhaps the obvious question to turn to at the outset is that of the nature of miracles. What are we discussing when we talk about miracles? The answer is not all that obvious, for those who refer to miracles have offered various understandings of what it is that they are talking about

One of the most important social realities today, one which holds theological importance is the well documented and yet chilling fact of the feminisation of poverty. With the increasing global and national polarisation of poor and rich, the majority of the newly poor continue to be women and children. Overwhelmingly, women with children spend the major portion of their lives in a downward spiral, struggling for economic survival for themselves and their children. Politically, these same women hold little or no social power.

This social reality of the feminisation of poverty in the USA finds its counterpart in the Catholic Church in the economic relationship between the institutional church and women, particularly women religious. In this articler I will first describe the social process of the feminisation of poverty. Second I will briefly demonstrate how and why U.S. congregations of women religious partake in this social process through their relationship with the institutional Church. Finally I will discuss what implications this has for the theology of religious life, for women and for the Church.

Theology and Social Theory is a book that prompts conversation on almost every page - conversation of both the ‘yes, and..and the ‘yes, but . kind, as well as something like a ‘no, but. . .’ on occasion. An adequate review would have to be a kind of gloss, a talmudic margin. It is no small tribute to Milbank that this work is so hard to discuss briefly. What follows is not a review, but a few fragments of this reader’s side of the conversation, assembled round a focal area of unease within an overall admiration for the learning and boldness of the enterprise. My title will hint at something of my discomfort: is Milbank’s commitment to history and narrative, to time as the medium of benign creativity and non-competitive difference, fully realised in his exposition? Does he ‘save time’ in a theological sense or only in the colloquial one of getting more expeditiously to his goal than the circumstances might seem to warrant?

The project of reconstructing a Christian ontology by retelling the story of the Christian Church’s origins, so as to display it as the history that makes sense of all histories, is heralded as one of the indispensable moments in the rehabilitation of a properly theological critique of secular order (e.g. p.381). ‘The metanarrative. . . is the genesis of the Church’ (p.387). This is an intriguing and exhilarating prospect; I am not sure if it has been carried through. Christian universalism is opposed to the ‘orders’ of non-Christian antiquity—the Roman sacralisation of dominion, with its programmatic refusal of a properly common good, and the Jewish commitment to law as the defining structure of a common good, at least for one specific community.

There is a tendency among critics of ‘patriarchal’ culture or religion to point to the high status of women in early Irish or other Celtic societies as a model for change, suggesting that these societies displayed what one might call ‘actually existing feminism’. The assumption appears in otherwise scholarly works. Thus Dillon and Chadwick:

Elsewhere we are invited to ‘think of the superior place of women in early Celtic society’2. But what is the evidence for these claims?

Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.

A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.

The last resort criterion was employed by many critics of the war who believed that sanctions ought to have been given more time. Because sanctions were not given the chance to work fully, but were in effect preempted by the November 8th decision to double the American forces in the Gulf in preparation for a military solution, many people—including myself—held and still hold that claims for the overall justice of the war were seriously compromised. But we must consider a counter-argument to this, powerfully put by Oliver O’Donovan among others, which says that comprehensive sanctions such as were approved against Iraq are themselves a form of war: indeed of indiscriminate warfare, particularly aimed at the weakest and most defenceless members of the opposing nation. According to this view, morally speaking, there was little to choose between on the one hand bombing Iraqi civilians and destroying their essential life-support systems (water, electricity etc.), not to mention the wretched conscripted victims of Saddam’s military machine; and on the other hand starving them to death by sanctions. This case has force and we must not suppose that sanctions are anything other than ferocious and indiscriminate. The Ahtisaari report to the UN in March makes this perfectly clear. Nevertheless, distinctions do have to be drawn. Comprehensive economic sanctions first of all are clearly a legal means of pressure: the UN Charter says so in Article 41. Use of them is a case of upholding, not undermining, the rule of law. Furthermore the UN charter makes it plain in Article 42 that sanctions are clearly to be used first, before the use of force is permitted. To this extent, international law gives an obvious priority to sanctions over military operations.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Europe is the scene of what would appear to be two diametrically opposed processes of political development. We are witnessing the development of a European superstate in the West, while in the East we see the fragmentation of a major political and military alliance. Some six centuries ago, in a very different Europe, Thomas Aquinas argued that, because human beings live and act in society, there must exist some means whereby the group or society may be governed for the common good, so that it does not degenerate into a collection of people each concerned only with his own interests1. My purpose is to examine what contribution the thought of Aquinas may have to make towards an understanding of what is happening in Europe at the present time.

A number of preliminary questions may be formulated:

1. a Do both of the political processes described above reflect a search for a better way of achieving the common good and attaining the common end of man?

2. b Are these apparently opposing trends in fact in opposition, or are they simply different stages of the same development?

3. c Can they both be interpreted as positive in terms of their likely contribution to the common good?