Having got over the shock of being dead, Professor Hick began to settle down to enjoying life again. Naturally, he soon sought out some philosophers.

‘Which one,’ he asked a passing angel, ‘is Thomas Aquinas? Or has he, perhaps, gone to the other place?’

The angel looked scornful and flapped its wings in a rather frightening manner. ‘You are talking about my namesake,’ he retorted. ‘And, for your information, not only is he here, but he is also quite respected in the highest quarters. Perhaps you would like an interview?’

The Professor agreed, and some time later he was ushered into a large study filled with shining copies of the Blackfriars Summa. In the middle of a pile of books sat Aquinas himself.

‘Hic est Hick,’ announced the angel.

‘Welcome’, said Aquinas, lapsing into English. ‘What can I do for you?’

I’m interested in talking to you about faith,’said the Professor.

‘I don’t see there’s much to be said,’ replied the Dominican. ‘Isn’t all that sort of thing behind us now? Haven’t you read what I wrote in the Secunda Secundae?’

‘Well, my point,’ replied the Professor, getting himself comfortable, is just that. You see, I am quite sure that what you sayabout faith is wrong. Indeed, I said so myself in my book Faith and Knowledge. You might also look up my lecture ‘Religious Faith as Experience-As’. Don’t you agree that my criticisms of your view of faith were correct and that I did a much better job on the topic than you did?’

“No one has ever seen God; but the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, has interpreted him to us” (Jn 1:18). The early Christian theologians who develop the view that man cannot know God truly unless God reveals himself to him are conscious that they are not only following the teaching of scripture, but also echoing and confirming a belief which has deep roots in Greek tradition. Clement of Alexandria can quote several texts from the Greek poets expressing the difficulty or impossibility of any man on earth penetrating very far into the mind of God. An Orphic hymn is cited, which says that God is “utterable only by the immortals”; Pindar is shown echoing the sentiments of Isaiah 40:13: “Why hope for wisdom? One man is not much better than another. It is hard for a mortal mind to search out the counsels of the gods”. Hesiod too says, “There is no seer among men on earth who could know the mind of Zeus”. Solon similarly says, “The mind of the immortals is quite unclear to men”. Even more radically, Xenophanes is quoted by Sextus Empiricus as saying: “As far as anything clear goes, no man has seen anything nor will any man see anything concerning the gods and all the other things I am talking about; even if he should hit the mark with outstanding accuracy and say something quite perfect, he would not know it himself. Everything is subject to opinion”. In Sextus’ view, Xenophanes is one of the philosophers who have rejected outright the idea that there is some “criterion of truth” available to us; he interprets him as meaning: “at least in matters which are not apparent, no man knows what is true and knowable; even if he does happen to hit on it, he still does not know that he has hit on it, he is left simply With a suspicion and an opinion”. Xenophanes ridicules people for generating gods in their own image, and, in anticipation of Rupert Brooke’s delightful poem about fishes’ concept of heaven, says that if cows could draw, they would make their gods look like cows. For himself, he only claims to be saying what seems probable.

While Vatican I is commonly regarded as the council of papal infallibility, and much time and energy were indeed devoted to that matter, both inside and outside the Council, the key to the doctrine, and the real stumbling-block for Christian unity, surely lies in the third chapter of the Constitution “Pastor Aeternus”. This is the text which commits Catholics in communion with the Roman see to the belief that the bishop of Rome as pope is endowed ex officio with “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which relate to faith and morals but also in matters relating to the discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the world”. Our immediate concern at this stage of our enquiry must be to make sense of the notion of universal jurisdiction, but it should be stated now that the doctrine of papal infallibility needs to be situated in the perspective of the doctrine of papal jurisdiction. The right, and the duty, of having, on occasion, at last to define a matter of doctrine affecting the Church as a whole, must be treated as an implication, or an example of the exercise, of the claim for the successor of St Peter of an all-embracing pastoral care for the universal Church. “The supreme power of teaching”, in the words with which chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus” opens, “is included in the apostolic primacy which the Roman pontiff, as the successor of Peter, chief of the Apostles, possesses over the whole Church”.

St Simeon the New Theologian, telling the story of a young man called George writes: “For love for what he sought separated him from the world, and creaturely things and all affairs, and made him entirely of the Spirit and light. Yet all the while he lived in the middle of a city and was responsible for a house and occupied with slaves and free men, doing and achieving all the things that pertain to the present life.”

With only a little modification, this description applies equally well to Aquinas, at least if we accept the accounts of him handed down to us by his early biographers. Given to rapture and religious ecstasy, supposedly “bound with a bond of chastity that shall never be loosened” (Gui, Chapter 7) he spent his active life in an entirely urban context as writer, teacher, administrator and advisor. He wined and dined with kings; he had the ear of the papacy and highest nobility as well as the offer of the loftiest ecclesiastical preferment. The Lives of the Brethren says that : “One day somebody asked Master Jordan ‘What Rule do you follow’? He replied, ‘The Rule of the Friars Preachers. And this is their Rule: to live an upright life, to learn and to teach’.” We need to see Aquinas as a man whose rule shows itself in his life and its handling of study and teaching. In this respect, although he doubtless represents ideals common to more than one religious order, common to many Christians indeed, Aquinas is typically Dominican. The Prologue to the Primitive Constitutions observes that: “Our Order was established particularly for the sake of preaching and the salvation of souls, and that our whole study should be principally and earnestly devdted to our being useful to the souls of others.

The idea of holding a general council may be traced to a suggestion made to Pope Pius IX by a curial cardinal as early as 1849. The immediate background may be outlined as follows. In 1799 Pope Pius VI died in exile, a prisoner of the French. In 1813 his successor, Pius VII, a prisoner at Fontainebleau, was forced by Napoleon into signing documents which gave the emperor virtual control over the Church. With the collapse of Napoleon the pope was able to return to Rome to begin to restore his authority. When he died in 1823 the main issue at the long conclave that followed was whether a man could be found who would stand up for the independence of the Church over against the great Catholic princes. The man who was found, Leo XII, set about reorganising the Vatican with great vigour, but his reign lasted little more than five years. His successor, an old sick man who had once been among Napoleon's prisoners, died within two years. It was only in 1831, then, that, with the election of Gregory XVI after a conclave lasting seven weeks (the Spanish government intervened to veto the election of another candidate), the modern ascendancy of the papacy really began. Significantly enough, in the dark days of 1799, when he was still a young monk, lie had brought out a book entitled II trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa contra gli assalti dai novatori, combattuti e respinti colle stesse loro armi, which appeared (naturally enough) in a third edition in 1832 and was translated into German in 1838. Dedicated to Pius VI, then of course a prisoner, the book identifies the Church with the juridical structure of its government, insisting that it is monarchical, and goes so far as to say that the Church is infallible because the pope, its head and foundation, is so.

This is a fresh attempt to come to grips with the question of Christian involvement in politics. The object will be to decide if possible what involvement Christians ought to have with politics in virtue of their commitment to Christianity. I do not expect the conclusions to apply to all Christians, whatever their stage of life or position in society. I expect to come to general conclusions which will have to be separately applied by individuals to their own lives, as one would expect in an ethical enquiry of this sort, which intends to use the gospel as a source. The political context of this enquiry is that of Britain in the 1970s rather than say, Latin America or Southern Africa, though our very political relationships with those parts of the world will not be forgotten.

One of the difficulties of the discussion is the ambiguity of the notion of politics. In a general sense politics has to do with the distribution and use of power in society. So politics in one sense is simply a matter of engaging in the operation of the accepted institutions of society which are to do with the distribution and use of power. Here conflicts are institutionalised, as in the two-party system of British politics or the union/management structure of industry. The institutionalisation of conflict is typical of Western liberal democracies, which owe their continued existence to the successful achievement of it. It is politics in this sense that Catholic laymen of the recent past were urged to take part in, i.e. to play their part in the institutions of democracy such as the political party or the trades union.

Theological revision is taking place all the time. Theology is revision, in the sense that the faith which was once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) is constantly re-appropriated by a new generation, and in new circumstances, so that every fresh appropriation is inevitably a revision. There is no way of telling in advance whether you arc seeing things in a new perspective seeing (and saying) things differently, but still seeing (and saying) the same things; or whether you are simply saying something completely different from what previous generations have believed. In this respect the problem of interpreting the decrees of Vatican I is no different from the problem of interpreting the Christological affirmations of the Council of Chaleedon. Some reinterpretations will prove sooner or later to be distortions: illusory or even dishonest attempts to say substantially the same thing but in necessarily different language; but often it will take time for this to become clear, and in the meantime we must not fear to look again at what we have inherited.

To re-examine the decrees of Vatican 1 on papal jurisdiction and infallibility may seem peculiarly difficult because the papacy as an institution has clearly done as much harm as good, and the dark history may suggest that the Vatican I decrees should simply be rejected and that nothing can be salvaged. While Catholics should certainly seek to recover some of the highly critical attitude to the papacy which their forefathers displayed, and be ready to admit that much of the doctrine and the exercise of the papal prerogatives requires to be condemned and corrected, none can remain in communion with the church of Rome without having some vision of the Petrine ministry and that must include some interpretation of the Vatican 1 decrees.

“The struggle of the African National Congress is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by theiT own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my life-time I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

These are the last public words of Mr Nelson Mandela before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. He evidently thought then that democracy had a future in South Africa, though he had already been driven to the conclusion that it could only be achieved by some kind of revolutionary violence.

That ultimate responsibility for true Christian doctrine is included in the universal primacy which the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter possesses in the universal Church is a claim that should surprise no one who is prepared to entertain the notion of a universal primacy in the first place. This is, at any rate, the burden of the famous chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus”, the document in which Vatican I defined the infallible teaching of the bishop of Rome. What, with the approval of the Council, Pope Pius IX defined in the text that was promulgated on 18th July, 1870, as “dogma divinely revealed” runs as follows:

“The bishop of Rome, when he speaks ex cathedra, i.e. when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, is, by God’s, help promised to him in St Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals; and such definitions of the bishop of Rome are therefore of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, irreformable”.

Assuming, then, that the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter must in some sense be “the mouth of the Church and of the episcopate”, and must thus be able on some occasions at least to give voice to the faith that all alike hold, what are the problems of interpretation that this text contains? The fact that these problems have often been raised before, and that, in trying to resolve them, we have little new to say, will not deter us from covering the ground once again.

I would like to enter a debate which is centuries old and seems, for the most part, to admit of no satisfactory conclusion. The debate is between what is nowadays sometimes called ‘theological relativism’ and ‘(minimal) orthodoxy’. I am not at all happy about these terms (which, in this instance, are John J. Shepherd’s) because the issue being debated is, in some degree, to determine what ‘orthodoxy’ is; and hence, calling oneself ‘minimally orthodox’ seems to be a method of scoring points before the contest has started (that is, if orthodoxy is thought to be desirable). On the other hand, ‘theological relativism’ seems, if one looks at the work of exponents of this school, to admit of degrees of relativity. So we have a relative relativism. All this means that just who is being denominated by such labels might prove elusive of description or, at least, amenable to misrepresentation. For these reasons I shall not use these terms henceforth.

The debate centres on the issue of what (if anything) is essential to the Christian faith. Shepherd argues that ‘behind the bewildering diversity of forms of faith there is an essential continuing substance of Christian teaching which can, by and large, be traced back to Jesus’. This ‘enduring gospel’ consists of propositions about God’s nature and his actions, and about Jesus’ words and deeds. Professor Wiles, on the other hand, argues ‘that there is nothing intrinsically more secure in a knowledge of God which claims to rest on ‘certain historical events’ whose historicity is regarded as essential [than in] a knowledge of God which claims to rest on a more general historical experience (including that to which Scripture bears witness) but which does not treat any particular events within that broad spectrum as essential.’ (CHR, p. 12).