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.

Ours is a culture which, by and large, does not talk about death. We prefer to focus on life. Widowhood too is something we tend to ignore. Yet widows have a unique experience of death and resurrection to share with us. As they grapple day by day with death and suffering, they more than others can teach the Church about the mystery of Easter. What follows is an exploration of widowhood in the Christian tradition.

First century Christians inherited a rich theology of widowhood from their Jewish past. Luke makes this clear in his stories and parables about widows. He portrays Jesus teaching us about giving God all we possess in the story of the widow’s mite (Luke 21:1-4). His hearers would recall the ancient (8th cent B.C.) story of the widow who shared her last scrap of food with Elijah, instead of hoarding it for herself and her starving son. She gave life while staring death in the face, and her love was rewarded by an unfailing supply of flour and oil throughout the drought (1 Kings 17: 7-16).

When Jesus entered the village of Naim and brought resurrection to a near-dead family by raising a widow’s son to life (Luke 7:11-16), onlookers would have recalled how Elijah, who worked in the same area of Galilee, raised a widow’s son to life in similar fashion: “Elijah stretched himself on the child three times and cried out to the Lord, Lord my God, may the soul of this child, I beg you, come into him again!’

Hermes and Athena consists of the proceedings of a conference of philosophers and New Testament scholars. I think the sponsors of the conference are to be congratulated on bringing members of the two groups together; the interaction was salutary, for all that one of the most significant exchanges is very angry, and makes painful reading. The issues raised appear to me to be of quite fundamental importance.

As Michael Dummett sees it, the most influential New Testament scholars of the present day operate with two axioms, that the Gospels are not a reliable witness to Jesus’ words and deeds, and that Jesus had no powers and no source of knowledge that were not available to other human beings. In so doing, they not only offend and bewilder ordinary believers, but effectively deprive Christianity of any rational basis. However, there is good reason to disbelieve what these scholars seem to take for granted, that the central doctrines of Christianity were derived not from what was taught by Jesus himself, but from later reflection on his life. For this to have been the case, the disciples must have been either deliberate deceivers or mentally unhinged, and their subsequent behaviour is not consistent with either hypothesis. Another mistake that these scholars make is to assume that one should prescind from faith in trying to determine what is or is not likely to be historically true in the Gospel narratives; in general, probability cannot be assigned to alleged events without reference to background beliefs.

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the first theologians to take seriously the force of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a whole, which means he takes seriously Heidegger’s claims about the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In other words, when in the work of Martin Heidegger the whole of metaphysics is thrown into question, any and all of its determinations become “questionable”, that is, worthy of being questioned. Marion concedes the impact this may have for theology.

This study concerns itself with how Jean Luc-Marion attempts in the work God Without Being to speak of God after Martin Heidegger’s claims for the overcoming of metaphysics. This arises as a question about the extent to which Jean-Luc Marion has been attentive to what Heidegger says. Marion appeals to an accepted philosophical reading of Heidegger in order to inaugurate a fresh theological reading of Heidegger. Underlying this study is the view that Marion is insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Heidegger’s thinking.

In order to show how this is so in the limited space available here, I propose to undertake a re-reading of two of the key texts upon which Marion rests for his case against Heidegger in God Without Being, with, I hope, surprising results for Marion’s project. Finally, I wish to conclude with some more general remarks about the Icon, which may at least point us in the direction of a more constructive reading of Heidegger’s work.

In his recent study of the sources of the modem identity, Charles Taylor coined the phrase, ‘the affirmation of the ordinary life.’ He argues that modem culture has been marked not only by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings but also by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of the ordinary life—the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. Taylor calls this affirmation of ordinary life ‘one of the most powerful ideas in modem civilization.’ It has certainly become one of the predominant themes in Catholic theology in the second half of this century.

Taylor notes, however, another ‘extremely important fact about modern moral consciousness. . . . We are in conflict, even confusion about what it means to affirm ordinary life.’ So for example, Catholics may, almost unanimously, describe the post-Vatican II era as the age of the laity, but particular attempts to live the Gospel in the modem world and to theologize about that experience create storms of controversy. The debates surrounding liberation theology, which with its turn to the economic, social and political life of man is nothing if not an affirmation of ordinary life, are one such example.

One particularly illuminating instance of the debates surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life and liberation theology is Juan Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, 1985). In it Segundo responds to the ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’ issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Bernard Kelly was a regular contributor to Blackfriars and other Catholic periodicals over a lengthy period extending from the 1930s to the 1950s. Rayner Heppenstall, in his book on Léon Bloy, called him “a man of the purest genius”. In more recent times, however, he seems to have been strangely forgotten. If we speak of him now, it is because we believe that his insights, drawn from scholastic philosophy and especially from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, are of value not only for present-day Catholics, but for all Christians, and indeed for spiritual seekers of all faiths. Kelly once said: “There are some of us who can’t rightly pray without a pen in our hands.” Kelly was clearly no ordinary writer for him writing was prayer. He epitomized the view that prayer could only be accomplished on the basis of truth, and his writing was a means of determining and fixing the truth in his own mind and in the minds of others. A few years ago Barbara Wall published a moving account of Kelly’s life; here we shall concentrate chiefly on his writings and thought.

Kelly’s inspiration was the writings of the Medieval philosophers and, in particular, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. For him, the Summa was a vehicle of truth and a paradigm of spirituality. Many are aware of St. Thomas’s declaration towards the end of his life that, in comparison with the Divine Reality Itself, his writings were as a heap of straw. A differing and more important evaluation is less well known; Christ Himself appeared to Aquinas in a vision and said to him: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (“Thou hast written well concerning Me, Thomas”).

Belief in the passivity of the female survives few honeymoons, and would appear to be largely confined to people of celibate life and retiring disposition who do not visit supermarkets and have little opportunity to note the skilled use of what the French appositely call un chariot. Aristotle was not long married — happily, it would seem — when he wrote his biological works, and if he says that in the act of reproduction ‘the male is the active partner and the female qua female is the passive one’, he goes on to remark more discreetly that ‘that which acts, is acted upon in return’. Indeed, ‘sometimes the extent to which it gets acted upon is greater than that to which it acts’. Quite so. Horresco referens, the male may on occasion be ‘mastered’ and then a female is born, one, to boot, taking after her mother. All of which suggests that Aristotle’s beliefs are not to be summarised in the simple schema: ‘female passive, male active’. The seemingly absolute assertion is attenuated when set in context.

The same applies to the much-cited statement ‘the female is as it were a deformed male’. One can appreciate the anger this phrase can cause when it is taken to encapsulate Aristotle’s metaphysical and ethical understanding of Woman. Phrases, however, have contexts, and this phrase occurs in a work on biology. A little reading of this biology shows that Aristotle also says that that elegant and beautiful creature, the seal, is ‘deformed’.

These words from a letter of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer mark one of the turning points in the history of systematic theological thinking in this century.

Hardly any other theologian has provided as strong a challenge to post-war theologians as Bonhoeffer. In this article I want to give an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology as a whole and his concept of ‘religionless Christianity for a world come of age’ in particular. Then, in the final section, I want to discuss the relevance of Bonhoeffer for doing systematic theology in the changing theological landscape of today.

This discussion concerns some difficulties which occur when we try to think about other, non-human animals. It takes the form of a reply to an article which appeared in this journal in December of 1992. The article, written by David Jones and entitled “Do Whales Have Souls?”, was a free-ranging attempt to ask theologically and philosophically inspired questions about whales and other life. This reply points out difficulties inherent in any thinking about other animals, and in particular those risks which such thinking faces if it relies on primary categories of Catholic theology. Failure to see the limitations of such categories can perpetuate the dismissal of other animals’ possibilities which has been characteristic of the Christian tradition.

Jones’ article contains the first mention of whales appearing in this journal, and it aims to be speculative and provocative. While at first we may smile at the range of the questions and the tendency to poetic observation in the article, the general subject matter—the existence of another group of species characterized by large brains, the occurrence of complex inter-individual communication, and both family structure and enduring social networks of distinct individuals—invites speculation of a very pointed sort. This reply argues that two sets of complications arise when Jones tries to think about whales. The first concerns the inherent limitations of familiar theological categories if we use them when trying to assess the significance of other living creatures, and the second concerns the viability of the familiar category of “species” when seeking to understand other animals’ value.

I once had the opportunity to travel to St.-Rémy-de-Provence and to celebrate Mass in the chapel of the convalescent home where Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) spent two years of his life painting some of his most striking canvases (e.g., Cypress Trees, The Sower, Starry Night). An epileptic who suffered from erratic bouts of depression, Van Gogh came to this former abbey-turned-sanatorium in a futile attempt to ward off the disquieting shadows that haunted him in both his sleeping and waking hours and which eventually caused him to take his own life. The space created by the stone walls of the chapel’s romanesque nave has a chilling effect on the heart. It seems haunted by the spirit of a man whose delicate sense of life’s inner beauty was strangely (and inexplicably) heightened by the tragic circumstances of his waning sanity.

The spirit of Van Gogh haunts the air and environs of his one-time place of refuge. During my short time there, I half-expected to catch his passing shadow in the comer of my eye ducking behind a column or escaping upon human detection into the lonely spaces of the nearby cloister. He lurks there, yes, in the chapel and adjoining gardens, down the long row of sycamores and beyond, in the surrounding fields. He lurks there, yes, in solitary isolation, always on the periphery—and never without evoking a deep sense of sadness. This place of healing could do nothing for the very man, whose brilliant swirling strokes and swift, contrasting colours continues to awaken a sense of wonder and yearning for transcendence in millions upon millions of searching admirers.

In order to understand how God could know evil intentions, two things are requisite: an understanding of how God knows and an understanding of the nature of evil. It is a well-known doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that God knows his creation through knowing himself. As the ultimate explanation of potentiality and change in the world, it could not be that God himself is in any way potential. Hence he does not learn about his creation from his creatures. Rather, God knows all his creatures and their actions through knowing his own simple nature. It is also a well-known doctrine that evil is the privation of good, and that evil is only known through knowing good. Putting these two doctrines together, it follows that God knows evil in the world by knowing the good that he is. While this explanation seems adequate to explain physical evils (e.g., the mouse’s demise is explained by God’s understanding himself as able to be participated by the good which is eagle), it is not clear how this explanation can handle God’s knowledge of evil intentions since these intentions do not seem capable of being explained in terms of something essentially good.

In order to better understand this problem and set up the grounds for some legitimate answer, it is necessary to treat each of these issues separately and in some greater detail. Thus, in the first section, God’s knowledge as it concerns his creation in general and in particular will be discussed.

The abundant variations of Gnosticism in the second and third centuries A.D. testify both to its popularity and to the threat that it posed to the early Christian church. This threat is all the more evident in that some forms of Gnosticism were espoused by men, for example Valentinus and Basilides, who considered themselves faithful Christians. Yet, as is well known, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and other Church Fathers believed that Gnosticism was radically inimical to the authentic Christian gospel as professed by “the Great Church”. I wish to argue here that many contemporary theologians, who equally profess to be Christians, have proposed soteriological theories which are at their heart Gnostic, and constitute an equally grave threat to the integrity of the gospel today.

Before examining instances of what I consider contemporary variants of Gnostic soteriology, I will briefly state what I believe to be at the heart of the ancient Gnostic systems. I am not so much interested in the particular details of the various Gnostic Schools, but rather I want to highlight what exactly it is that gnosis consisted of for the Gnostics. What is it that the Pneumatikoi knew which brought them salvation?

The various Gnostic Schools taught elaborate cosmological systems or schemes. These were normally composed of the utterly transcendent and, often, unknowable good God, followed by the assorted lesser aeons of spirits (such as, Sige, Ennoia, Nous, Logos, Zoe, Pneuma, Sophia, angels, etc., depending on the Gnostic school). These made up the Pleroma and filled the infinite void between the transcendent God and the world of matter.

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.

Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.

I

A gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?

This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.

John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred.

It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.

What reflections might occur to a veteran student of the works of St Thomas Aquinas after reading Jean-Luc Marion’s remarkable book God without Being? Of course, it is not primarily about the thought of Aquinas. But we are persistently encouraged to reject an approach to the question of God which thinks in terms of a concept of ‘Being’, in favour of an acceptance of the reality of God in an economy of ‘Gift’. Thus, one is certainly sent back to the text of Aquinas with provocative questions. For myself, I have to say that I was prompted first of all to return to the magnificent account in the Summa Theologiae of the epistemology of the beatific vision (Section I)—not that Marion himself discusses it (he doesn’t), but his whole approach is a reminder of the radical ‘theocentricity’ of Aquinas’s thought. Next, it proved interesting to compare Marion’s approach with philosophy of religion in the English-speaking context (Section II). Much else might be mentioned, no doubt, but, given that context, the intelligibility of speaking of God either with or without reference to ‘Being’ could not but become questionable (Section III).

I

Question 12 of the Prima Pars must be one of the finest in the Summa Theologiae. Composed in 1266-67, when St Thomas was teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome, it has no precedent or exact parallel in the rest of his work, although of course he treated the same material in several different places.

The commonly accepted opinion of Newman’s adoption of the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration and rejection of Calvinism follows his account in the Apologia that it was Hawkins’ gift, in 1824, of

This statement in the Apologia is based upon a journal entry of August 1824:

Undoubtedly, the Apologia continues to be an invaluable insight into the religious development of its author, but yet we need to be aware of its tendency to pass over the details of what was a very complicated and lengthy development.

Newman divides his spiritual journey into four broad phases: Evangelical, Liberal, Apostolical, and lastly Roman Catholic. This has the great advantage that the broad sweep of his brush portrays the dynamic of his pilgrimage towards a definite goal, but this is at the expense of some of the background to significant changes in his life, for neither the Evangelical nor the Liberal stages of his progress were entirely unmixed with other strands of thought. In particular, the Apologia does not do justice to the whole spectrum of influences to which he was subject before he went up to Oxford.