Recently the Dominican Order has been formally and canonically established in Russia and the Ukraine. This is an event that would have been undreamt of only a few short years ago. But now the question poses itself very clearly: What lies ahead for this new phenomenon? To frame the question in more precise terms: What should be its field of action?

The history of the Dominican Order in the vast lands of Russia over the past five hundred years consists of spasmodic sallies, made by individual members of the Order which have left little trace. In the last decades of the 15th century there was a Croatian Dominican, Benjamin, among the equipe of scholars centred round the bishop of Novgorod, Gennady. One of this group’s works was the translation of the Books of Wisdom from the Vulgate Latin into Slavonic, A more exotic and enigmatic Dominican figure who had a part to play in the history of Russia was Maximus the Greek. An admirer of Savonarola, he entered the Dominican community of San Marco in Florence in 1501. After abandoning that life he is next heard of as a monk on Mt Athos at the monastery of Vatopedi. From here he was invited to travel to Moscow to help in the labour of translating Greek texts into Slavonic. As was the policy of the Russians at that time, Maximos was never permitted to return to Mt Athos (it was thought that he had learned too much about Russia’s internal affairs) and he was imprisoned for some years. He eventually died in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Serge outside Moscow in 1556.

In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous and apparently ever-increasing influence, it is notoriously difficult to spell out the essence and precise implications of his position. This is evidently due partly to his poetic and rhetorical style; but in my view there is a more important reason than this. I would maintain that his thought, when taken as a whole, is rather like a carpet which cannot be laid straight unless you cut off one or other of two bits. To make Nietzsche consistent, you have to reject or downplay one of two elements in his thought. If you reject one, what you get is cognitive and moral nihilism; if you reject the other, you end up with what I want to call the new enlightenment. In these respects the postmodernists, as represented at any rate by Michel Foucault, are Nietzsche’s true successors.

When in nihilistic mood, Nietzsche seems to imply that it is true that there are no truths, that it is really morally good to act as though there were no such thing as moral goodness. In the course of considering this self-destructive tendency of one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann remarks that consideration of problems like these was not Nietzsche’s strong suit. Now the basis of the new enlightenment is epistemological, and turns on theses and arguments which directly address such problems. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Denial that our judgments are ever true is self-destructive (is it supposed to be true that we never speak the truth?); and so is denial that we ever have good reasons for our judgments (do we have good reasons for this particular judgment?).

Spain in the Eighteenth century was in two minds about the economic thought of the Enlightenment reaching it from other parts of Europe. The first half of the century has been aptly characterised as a period of ‘ideological hesitancy’, but in the second half the hesitancy came to an end. The liberal cause, and its main instruments the Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais, made great strides. Political economy, then a brand new science, was welcomed by the liberal statesmen like Jovellanos and Campomanes who flourished under Carlos III. Their primary concern was that Spain might lose heavily if she were too slow getting into the new international market economy, and they regarded works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as important guides to the industrial and commercial policies Spain should pursue.

Others were more cautious. Intellectuals trained in the Aristotelian tradition were often more concerned about the moral quality of the new economics, and about the moral costs of pursuing the kind of policies that flowed from it. These are concerns which today, after a further two hundred years experience of market economy, are even more alive now than they were then. It is worth reflecting on whether these critics were entirely the reactionary flat-earthers they are customarily dismissed as being. History is written by the victors, and the Enlightenment won this engagement, so it is only to be expected that in our standard accounts the Aristotelian opponents of the Enlightenment come out badly.

Among those people who are conscious of and annoyed by the complete badness manifest in the building and decoration, in use in the Catholic Church in our days, there are very few who regard the matter as anything more than a superficial defect that can be, with care, remedied. There are few who realise the essentially malignant and even mortal nature of the infection that so ails us.

Most of these people speak with varying degrees of confidence about ways and means of ‘improving the taste of the Faithful,’ of educating people up to this or that notion. Again, others propose the copying on a vast scale the works of certain respectable and accredited masters of the past centuries, thereby improving the ‘outward appearance’ of churches and images. By this manoeuvre they hope to get the unsuspecting worshipper used to the form and comeliness of the Italian primitives and other work of men who lived in more civilized periods than our own so leading them on until, after a very few years of this aesthetic welfare- work, the most suburban Catholic will revile the pink and white- Madonnas as supplied by the ‘church-furniture shop’ and have nothing less than exact reproductions of Giotto or sixth century Byzantine.

Whatever may be said for these sincere attempts of pious people, the root of the matter is left untouched; it is not even approached. The issue is usually confused by a notion of ‘giving the best to God.’ I say confused because it creates in the mind the notion that there can be constructed a kind of scale of beauty, extending from the merely useful objects required for a church (like shelves or pipes or rubber door-mats) to the culminating point in the vestments and the sacred vessels.

Some persons are, by their nature, trailblazers, innovators, avant-gardists—just generally ahead of their times. In many ways, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the subject of this investigation, is representative of such a personality. Embodying enough of the intellectual eclecticism and enthusiasm for the arts and sciences characteristic of the historical period after hers, some twentieth century critics dub this talented polymath a Renaissance woman.

A list of Hildegard’s salient accomplishments and personal charisms confirms that appellation at a glance. Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine aristocrat, was a mystic, a visionary, and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre deals with subject matter as diverse as natural science, medicine, theology, biblical exegesis, dramatic poetry, music, hagiography, and linguistics. She was elected Abbess of a community of Benedictine nuns who were attached to the Abbey of Disibodenberg and subsequently founded two other Benedictine houses. Guided by her ecclesiastically sanctioned gift of prophecy, she launched into a missionary style of preaching and teaching aimed at the spiritual and moral reform of the clergy and laity throughout the kingdom of Germany. Undaunted by her lack of formal, classical education or by whatever misogynist tradition prevailed in secular or ecclesiastical circles, she managed to maintain a lively correspondence with kings, queens, emperors, saints, popes, and fellow religious.

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.

If the life of the twelfth century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis is anything to go by, intimacy with God should carry a health warning! After the death of her parents Christina’s elder sisters arranged that she should have the menial job of looking after the family’s herds. ‘Immediately’, we are told in her Life, ‘Christ did not fail to the lower and more humble office and He gave her the grace of an inward sweetness and very often visited her with heavenly secrets’. As a result of the ‘exertions of her inner contemplations’ Christina died. That was not, however, the end of the story, indeed it was the beginning of Christina's extraordinary vocation; to suffer for souls through voluntarily imposed penances. During the requiem mass the following day ‘the body stirred in the coffin and immediately was raised up like a bird and ascended to the rafters of the church’. When finally forced to descend Christina explained that she had been granted a vision of heaven and hell, before Christ commanded her soul to return to her body.

After this return from the grave Christina, her Life continues, ‘ran from the presence of men with wondrous horror and fled into the deserts and into the trees and perched on the peaks of turrets or steeples and on other lofty places’. She went on to develop mortifications which included standing in ice-cold rivers and throwing herself into hot bread ovens, not to mention suffering the cruelty of her alarmed family and other villagers who bound her in chains and put a heavy yoke on her shoulders.

The Scottish Episcopal Church emerged in 1689-90 when the Catholic King James VII of Scotland and II of England was ousted in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Calvinist husband William of Orange. Although he preferred episcopacy to presbytery as an ecclesiastical system, no doubt for supposed ease of political control and rather against his theological judgment, William allowed the reformed Church of Scotland finally to rid itself of its episcopalian element. He had very little option, since the bishops felt that they could not break their oath to the deposed and exiled monarch. For that matter, it was only a small minority among the ministers who had presbyterian convictions. At the time, furthermore, it must have seemed that a fresh turn in political events might soon lead to a restoration of episcopacy. Anyway, led by a General Assembly drawn entirely from the south of Scotland, the convinced presbyterians succeeded in forcing out hundreds of ministers in ‘the most drastic purge the Church [of Scotland] has ever known’ (Rosalind Mitchison). It took years to establish Presbyterianism in Aberdeen and the northeast. In and around Edinburgh, however, a fairly fanatical Presbyterian party rapidly prevailed. The grim measure of their fanaticism may be estimated by their success in 1697 in having Thomas Aikenhead, an Edinburgh University student, aged about eighteen, hanged for blasphemy.

John Henry Newman came to see the need to frame what was in effect a new discipline of the history of theology, with rules and subject-matter which would make it a practical working instrument, but with a flexibility which would allow for insights about the interconnectedness and coherence of a living body of knowledge which was sustained in a vital community. This recognition, and Newman’s own response to it are instructive because, mutatis mutandis, we stand in much the same need now. Unlike the history of (say) philosophy or science, the history of Christian theology deals with subject-matter which is understood to be of its nature continuous and semper eadem But it clearly changes within that continuity. And that poses special problems historiographically.

We can get a glimpse of the way one thing led to the other in Newman’s arriving at these perceptions in a letter written in 1826. Newman begins by suggesting that it might be put to the test whether the Anglican divines from the sixteenth century onwards, if read so as to eliminate the adversariality of the polemic in which many of them had been engaged, had amongst them set out an account of their beliefs which formed a coherent and harmonious whole.

Yes, Christology is the logos or science of the Christ. But science is the invention of the Greeks, and while Christos is Greek, too, it does duty here for “Messiah.” The word contains the encounter of Jerusalem and Athens that has been the sustaining event of the whole of Western culture, which, in these days, and notwithstanding the abiding vigour of Indian thought, is increasingly the culture of the world. And already thus far “Christology” proves itself a weasel word. For if indeed we speak of an “encounter” of two “cultures,” then Athens bids fair to absorb Jerusalem as just one more collection of human conventions and nomoi. But if we say that “Christology” signifies the destruction of proud arguments (logismoi) and the capture of every thought unto the obedience of Christ (see 2 Cor 10:4-5), then it may be thought that logos can no longer recognize itself here.

Or maybe this meeting of Jerusalem and Athens inscribed in “Christology” is just a confusion. “Messiah,” originally a title, here means the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and functions as a proper name. So Christology is the science of an individual man. According to the most thoughtful of the Greeks, however, there can be no logos, no science, no episteme, of the individual as such.

Neither for us moderns is science of the individual as such. Chemistry may be about radium, but it isn’t about this radium atom. It’s about the nature of radium, and so tells you about this atom insofar as it has the common nature. But it doesn’t give you the history of this atom, or that one, or any one.

In her recent book Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Caroline Walker Bynum once again delineates with consummate skill the profoundly and peculiarly bodily character of Christian medieval piety. The cult of relics with its veneration of the dismembered limbs of saintly people, the belief in the curative powers of bodily effluvia, the austere self-disciplinary practices of certain male and female ascetes — observances such as these are cited by Bynum as illustrating the medieval notion of the human body as a locus of sacrality. The concurrent theological development of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the conviction that behind the external accidents of bread and wine lay the actual flesh and blood of Christ, also laid emphasis upon the corporeal and led to an increasing sense of the eucharist as ‘symbolic cannibalism’ in which communicants ‘ate God’. Christian art and iconography of the period reflected a similarly literalist approach to the humanity of Christ, often drawing attention to his genitalia for example, or depicting the Passion scenes with a force of graphic detail quite repugnant to modem minds.

According to Bynum each of these three strands, theology, piety and art, brought out the religious significance of the body in an unprecedented manner during the Middle Ages as a means of access to the divine, but whilst physicality was a theme which ran throughout all medieval spirituality, it was taken up with particular enthusiasm and intensity in women’s lives and writing. Women, it would appear, were unable to avoid being inculcated with contemporary androcentric articulations of their association with the body, weakness, lust and irrationality.

Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.

In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.

There still appears to be a firm view in the minds of many people that science and religion are somehow inescapably opposed to one another. On the one hand (such a view might allege), to be a scientist means that one can’t take religion seriously: on the other, to be a religious believer one has to sit light to many of the findings of science, either quietly ignoring them or perhaps even flatly denying their validity. Anyone saying that modern science and Christianity are quite compatible is often looked at askance, as though either his or her science, or his or her theology, or both, must be suspect. However, a growing number of theologians are now writing about the theological implications of science; and, in addition, some scientists are also providing more or less explicit comments on the theological implications of their work.

This should not surprise us. In his recent book Art and the Beauty of God, Bishop Richard Harries makes the remark that ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension,’ in that they can provide us with comfort or solace. It is surely also true that all the sciences necessarily have a theological dimension, in that they all investigate one aspect or another of the material universe, and, Christians believe, that universe is itself, in some sense, the creation of God. We ought therefore to expect to discover something about the Creator in our analysis of the creation, whether we conclude, at one extreme, with the deists, that God somehow initiated the Big Bang and then abandoned the cosmos to get on with it; or whether we conclude, at the other extreme, that the universe may be regarded as being so intimately connected with its originator that it is reasonable to call it in some sense the Body of God.

The principle “You can’t be judge in your own cause” is both selfevident and powerful. It is the principle that compels us to recognize that the ethical enterprise entails submitting to a higher judgment than our own first judgment. Moreover, it is the principle that commits us to conceding that ethical judgments are objective. Those two conclusions are accepted by many moralists. There is a third conclusion that, unless I am mistaken, follows just as inexorably as these two, but is rarely, if ever, accepted in modem discussions. If you can’t be judge in your own cause you commit yourself to depend on the praise and blame of a judge who is competent to judge your cause. The principle “Not judge in one’s own cause” entails an ethics of reward and punishment, because praise is a reward and blame a punishment.

“Notjudge in one’s own cause”

The principle “You cannot be judge in your own cause” is self-evident. It ordinarily applies in cases where I am in dispute with someone else over property: perhaps over ownership of land or fishing rights or the proceeds of a will. The principle is extended to cover issues such as the ban on an examiner from examining a relative, or a magistrate from presiding at the trial of a business associate.

No one doubts the applicability of the rule in these relatively unproblematic cases. What could be easier, it might be argued (but never is) than discounting one’s tendency to severity or to leniency when examining one’s own child? Yet most moral dilemmas are far more difficult than property disputes and arguments over examination grades. Every dispute inevitably involves the “cause” of every disputant.

To many outsiders the Catholic Church still appears authoritarian and monolithic, yet closer inspection reveals a very different picture. Indeed it could be argued that in some instances the Church gives the appearance of quasi-congregationalism, set within networks of prayer groups, which themselves reflect a spirit of loose independence and quietism. This paper raises the question of the place of the laity within the organisation and structure of the hierarchic church. Recently The Universe carried the headline “More power to the laity”, suggesting radical changes as the increasing priest shortage begins to bite. The report cites concerns in Scotland, Hexham and Newcastle, and Hallam Dioceses. It appears as if at last the Church is beginning to take up matters first raised at the Second Vatican Council.

The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity makes specific reference to establishing national congresses and pastoral councils at diocesan, deanery and parish levels. Unfortunately the decree permits a “cop out” by adding the phrase “where possible”. This provokes the obvious questions: why has this aspect of the Council been virtually ignored, or, at the very least, haphazardly implemented, and further why has the laity so tamely acquiesced? Even more interesting is the knowledge that the Church in this country immediately before and after the First World War seems to have been well organized, with federations at city and diocesan levels, a national Confederation and annual National Congresses, which admittedly became triennial in 1920 before petering out after 1929.

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”

Do It Yourself Culture

Perhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.

Saint Paul (2 Cor. 3:6) is often quoted in support of a position of leniency, though some would say laxity, with regard to the precepts of the law, whether it be those of the state or those of the church. Or he may be cited in support of an anti-literalist, anti-fundamentalist interpretation of scripture generally. But what is wrong, exactly, with that aspect of fundamentalism, or that approach to church rules, that can be characterized as literalism? Consider two instances in which literalism is decried. First, a parish priest “proves” that scripture is not to be taken literally by relating the story of Abraham, Isaac and the attempted or would-be sacrifice of the son by the father. He explains that, since we know that God is loving and could not have commanded such a sacrifice, we can be sure that this story is not literally true, but must have some other significance: it must be symbolic or allegorical, or is possibly intended only to be thought-provoking. To take it literally is to fail to understand the goodness and love of God. Second, a parishioner wonders whether attendance at mass late on Saturday afternoon falls within the period when Saturday evening observance stands good for Sunday, fulfilling the weekly obligation. She is considered to have misunderstood, through too literal a conception of rules, the nature of the duty to attend mass once a week. There are of course different forms of literalism, but my plea below is for tolerance of what they have in common: a straightforward acceptance, when possible, of the letter.

Gentlemen, I read in the June 1994 edition of this Journal your Open Letter to Bishops Saier, Lehmann and Kasper (hereafter NB) concerning their joint Letter regarding Pastoral Ministry to the Divorced and Remarried (hereafter PL) and their Principles of Pastoral Care (hereafter PPC). Both their letter and yours concern me to the extent that, as you correctly point out, they concern “the entire Church” (NB, 321). As a theologian in the Church, entrusted with the theological education of the Church, married, divorced and remarried and celibate alike, I was both delighted to read your letter and intrigued by its argument. I thought you and I and the body of the Church might benefit from further clarification. You will be aware that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF) and the three Bishops issued in September 1994 further communications on this topic, published in Origins, October 27, 1994 (hereafter OS). I shall return to these in my final section.

Your letter delighted me because it sought to do the theologian’s task, the pursual in the scientific manner proper to theology of a deeper understanding of the Word of God and the communication of that understanding. I am delighted to pursue the matter further with you, for your argument intrigued me, as much as from what it left unsaid as from what it said. For the sake of conciseness and clarity, I choose to deal with only two focused, and not unconnected, matters which are of concern to me as both a theologian and a marriage (and divorce) counsellor.

The Letter of James reminds Christians that an authentic Christian faith cannot be completely separated from works:

Similarly, a number of theologians have recently suggested that an authentic Christian spirituality cannot be separated from an active concern for and pursuit of justice. These theologians argue that a Christian cannot truly strive to grow in a relationship with God without a real concern for the well-being of other persons. One cannot hope to attain a transcendent union with God without a lived concern for the present circumstances of other men and women.

The present article attempts to offer further insight into the connection between justice and spirituality by focusing on the relational aspect of each and by viewing them in relationship to a contemporary understanding of Christian love. In short, it will be argued that justice, love, and Christian spirituality are all concerned with the establishment of authentic relationships with God, with other persons, and with the created order—ultimately as a transcendent hope but also as a task in present historical circumstances.

Science as we know it today has a long history stretching back to the Greeks and the Babylonians. It is essentially the results of our continuing attempts to understand the natural world, and as such it is conditioned by our culture, by our beliefs concerning what is important and what is not about the nature and purpose of knowledge, and about the structure of argument and the criteria of proof. These factors vary from one culture to another, and together they determine the style of scientific thinking.

It was very difficult to get started, and fatally easy to become trapped in a blind alley. Early civilisations amassed much natural lore, and extensive astronomical observations were made, notably by the Babylonians. But the chief credit for initiating the scientific enterprise belongs to the ancient Greeks.

The whole scientific enterprise, as Alistair Crombie points out in his magisterial treatise, depends first of all on the underlying vision of reality, and then on the arguments used to support and verify that vision. The Greek philosophers provided both the vision and the argument. The first idea was that the vast complexity of the world can be understood in terms of simple elements; once we know these elements we can see how everything else follows from them, giving an integrated knowledge of the whole. The rules of rational inference were codified into the science of logic, and an outstanding example of the power of rational argument was provided by Euclid.