George Steiner in his subtle and richly suggestive essay, Real Presences, sees in the origins of modernism a breaking of the covenant between word and world which he regards as the significant characteristic of the decades following 1870. For Steiner, this sundering of continuities constitutes ‘one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history’. Mallarmé and Rimbaud represent the beginnings of a genuinely new aesthetic, ‘a parting of the semantic ways’. Before this time, he argues, we could have presumed upon a logocentric order, a Logos-aesthetic, which included the assumption of correspondence, understood as something ‘strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence’. Such a world presupposes ‘real presence’.

While there is much to appeal in this argument, I wonder whether the Christian tradition has always had a more healthy suspicion of the innocent collusion of word and world than Steiner allows. The monist ontology at which Steiner hints does not allow for the rich sense of mystery that confronts us in the world of which we are a part: things as things stand over against us, ultimately unfathomable. There are aspects of the Nominalist agenda deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and rightly so. We come to what is real by way of the particular. Steiner, of course, is far from unmindful of this and comments with some force:

For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.

The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.

‘I am a traveller’, Michel de Certeau liked to say. This he was literally, ploughing Europe from one university to another, or America, from north to south, from campus to conference; and even more, figuratively, moving from one place of knowledge to another, using in turns different modes of writing, or mingling several disciplines in order to explore one and the same subject more deeply. Thus, he was disturbing. He was never where one sought to catch him. He appeared all the more a stranger to any classification inasmuch as he had the art, in every thing he approached, to make something strange emerge from the reassuringly familiar, where the very ones who call themselves ‘researchers’ willingly stop. He moved rapidly, sometimes a little feverishly, from one place to another, always departing and in transit, as if he guessed that his days were already numbered. He never travelled, literally or figuratively, out of mere curiosity, still less by incapacity to settle in one place, but to learn something new and, much more, to share other experiences, the experience of others, out of passion for the human and the other. And what he questioned relentlessly, in human experience at its deepest and most ordinary, was the passion for believing. In this passion he perceived the very place of otherness and of the search for the meaning of existence and of history. This questioning was his own quest for God.

Michel de Certeau was bom in 1925, of an old Savoyard family. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1950, and followed the usual course of training until ordination as a priest in Lyons in 1956 and solemn profession in Paris in 1963.

Yesterday, 29 April, happens to mark the anniversary of the death at die age of thirty-three, of Catherine of Siena, in Rome in 1380. And for that day we find her listed in the Church of England’s Alternative Service Book under the heading of ‘Lesser Festivals and Commemorations’ as a mystic — a designation she shares with Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. In the Roman Catholic tradition she also shares with the latter the dignity of having in 1970 been accorded the title of Doctor of the Church. I note in passing that no women in the Church of England’s list are yet deemed to have been Teachers of the Faith!

By comparison with Teresa, Anglicans at least seem to have neglected Catherine and what she may represent for us — with the notable exception of that remarkable nineteenth century reformer, Josephine Butler, whose own day of commemoration falls on December 30. With these preliminary points in mind, therefore, I would like to take the opportunity provided by this occasion to make a small contribution to the consideration of Catherine.

Catherine’s book, her Dialogue, a biography and other memoirs of her, were among the earliest books in print, her Dialogue indeed in an English version by 1519. The book, the biography and the memoirs, copies of her letters and prayers, — all would be needed by those who wanted to advance her claim to sanctity, declared as it happened some eighty years after her death. And all these writings are now available to us in new translations and editions to provoke us to ask in our time what we might now make of her.

One of the most interesting features in Aquinas’s theory of mind relates to his view that the human intellect is inferior to that of an angel. St. Thomas gives the impression that if only our minds could act in the same way as those of the angels, many of our noetic difficulties would disappear. The weakness of the human mind is due, he believes, to the discursive process of human cognition which results from the application of our understanding to the potentially intelligible data that is acquired from the senses. Aquinas quite frequently deplores this mental condition, claiming that it represents a form of intellectual weakness (e.g. S.T. 1.58.3). The result of such a discursive process is that the human mind struggles to understand by means of lengthy and arduous mental efforts (S.T. 1.89.1). By comparison, the intuitive grasp of the angelic mind is swift and immediate, capable of directly obtaining knowledge of first principles (S.T. 1.58.3). Aquinas perceives the latter ability as a sign that angels are truly intellectual beings in a way that humans are not and he reserves for us the term rational (rationales vocantur) as a way of describing our slower intellectual ability. In such a context, rationality obviously does not constitute a positive description but rather denotes a form of mental weakness (ex debilitate intellectualis). The latter, according to S.T. 1.58.3, is quite clearly the result of our present mode of mental discursiveness in which the intellect proceeds gradually towards the knowledge of truth.

I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community.

For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith. But they became a community it seemed, perhaps again like every community, around a mourning for lost community, lost solidarity, lost hope of a religiously-tinged socialist ideal (which many more sympathise with than believe in).

And we are still just about within the echo of this moment, which determines that the new public visibility of Christian Socialism, concentrated around the Elisha figure of Tony Blair, has an elegiac, melancholy feel to it. There is nothing here for anyone to triumph in; least of all Christian Socialists. For if a surprising number of still remaining socialists are Christians, or indeed Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, then this may be precisely because socialism, like religion, now assumes a merely spectral reality in the modern secularised world. It has ceased to appear either plausible or rational, and has instead been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity in the west, we remain haunted by its excellence, because nothing has emerged to replace it; we sense that just as the story of a compassionate God who became man was the ‘final religion’, so also, the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was ‘the final politics’. With its demise, we are delivered over to something somehow more secular than politics—to a future of infinite utilitarian calculation by individuals, states and transnational companies, of the possible gains and losses, the greater and the lesser risks.

This paper is the result of reflection upon both my doctoral thesis and my present research. There is a four-fold structure: first an emphasis on the voice of people on the margins; this is followed by an indication of how the collection of empirical data was facilitated by listening, dialogue and conversation and the theological significance of these elements; thirdly I give a brief indication of how the mystery of God at work amongst the marginalised is a feature of certain contemporary ecclesiology; and finally I indicate how the dimension of listening may be facilitated through a contemplative imperative, how this is in accord with the spiritual tradition and is a potential source of enrichment for the church.

There are striking features about those who are marginalised. Very often they are in a position where they are not involved in the central factors which determine their lives. Dependency is an inevitable development, as they are educated to believe that others will always know best, and that some “professionals” in social security, or housing, or education or local planning, or possibly anybody other than themselves, will have the next determining voice in their lives. From the beginning then, possibly at the early age of childhood, they cease to be participatory subjects in life, but rather form objects of concern for one or another agency. Such a process ongoingly undermines the value and self-worth of an individual and progressively renders them more and more inadequate to cope with life. Considered economically irrelevant, and increasingly impoverished, marginalised individuals and groups present a shocking discontinuity to mainstream society.

Newmah's Anglican days made him acutely aware of how the language of Catholicism sounds strange in unaccustomed and indeed suspicious ears and how readily misunderstanding ensues. Infallibility is taken to be a claim to be right on everything, the Immaculate Conception is confused with the Virgin Birth, and the remission of sins becomes a permission to continue in evil ways. It is, he saw, a general problem in dealing with the unfamiliar, and he wondered what a hostile foreigner would make of the maxims of the laws of England. Might he not, reading in Blackstone's incomparable Commentaries that ‘the power and jurisdiction of parliament is so transcendent that it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds’, see a blasphemous claim to divine omnipotence? Might not the assertion that ‘the king can do no wrong’ seem an arrogant claim to divine sinlessness? In truth, of course, all that is meant is that in English law there is no higher authority than Parliament and that the King cannot be sued in his own Courts: nothing more. Newman could but ask the hostile foreigner to abide a while and abate his hostility.

Aquinas, writing in a highly technical Latin and within a philosophy and theology alien to modern ears, is no less prone to be misunderstood, and the modes of misrepresenting him, often unwitting, are many. What he has to say about marriage and related issues has been the object of recent attacks: often he is read as if he were a Lutheran or Calvinist. It may be well to note some of these types of error before dealing with his own understanding in these matters.

Students of the Thomistic synthesis have always had to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the project of bringing together an Aristotelian vision of ethics and the inevitable-—for a Christian—intrusion of the law-centred vision of the Bible. And because of the centrality of the Bible in Western culture, discourse about ethics has remained largely law-centred. We think of ethics in terms of law, even, as been suggested, long after belief in, or acceptance of, a notion of divine law had been largely eroded. In the Church, in spite of Aquinas's espousal of Aristotelianism, the law-centred idiom remained dominant. And it can be argued that this conception of ethics is a source of many of the problems faced in discussions of ethics in the Church today.

In the light of this, it may be worthwhile to look again at Aquinas's attempt to reconcile the ethical discourse of Christianity, based on the Torah, with that of Aristotle. For reasons that may in fact be familiar to readers of G.E.M. Anscombe’s now famous 1958 article on modem moral philosophy, Aquinas chose to make the Aristotelian account the centre of his own thought on ethics, to the extent of incorporating theological elements such as the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity into an Aristotelian format.

This year sees the centenary of the foundation of the Dominican sisters of Newcastle, Natal (South Africa), now based at Bushey Heath on the outskirts of London. A cause of rejoicing and of thanks to God for all that the sisters have been and done, but also for asking why we should be having such a celebration at all. Why was this religious institute founded only 100 years ago, when the history of the Dominican order as a whole goes back to the 13th century? Throughout the world, there are 158 autonomous congregations of sisters, with 35,000 professed members and 950 novices at the last count, while there is one international institute of the brethren, comprising nearly fifty provinces and forty vicariates, numbering some 7000 men, a thousand of whom are in formation. Why is there so much fragmentation amongst the sisters when the brothers have maintained, relatively speaking, a great degree of unity in their structure? It is not as if there were no sisters before the massive expansion of the numbers of women religious in the 19th century. Marie Poussepin, recently beatified, started what was recognisably a congregation which she put under the patronage of St Dominic 300 years ago. At the time of St Dominic, there were groups of women who were not following a specific rule, some later becoming enclosed monasteries and others, monasteries of the third order. Why is there not the organic connection between the convents of the Dominican sisters today and these forebears, as there is between the medieval convents of brothers and those of today?