The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.

Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.

In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.

Fifty years ago, as a glance at standard textbooks would confirm, history as taught in school and university was mostly about battles and wars and the doings of kings and queens. Since then, however, there has been a massive shift of interest to the doings and sufferings of ordinary people— much more difficult as it of course is to reconstruct their lives. More recently still, historians have turned their attention to retrieving the experience of women—ordinary women, in different societies, but also (as in such recent books as Woman Defamed and Woman Defended edited by Alcuin Blamires or Medieval English Prose for Women edited by Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne) women who played a distinctive and much more significant part in history than has previously been acknowledged. Here too, it has become possible to read between the lines of familiar material to discover what was (no doubt inadvertently and unconsciously) played down, skewed, marginalized, concealed or so blatantly omitted that the silences themselves have become eloquent. Texts written, by men for men, although nobody realized that, inevitably operated with a male-oriented system of interests and values. Once the ‘androcentric’ agenda of a document or a cultural artefact is allowed for, we can begin, cautiously and tentatively of course, to look for the lacunae and distortions that might reveal the absent and unidentified women’s experience.

For once, work in Christian theology has not lagged far behind this much wider shift in cultural interest and awareness. There are, of course, always predecessors, belatedly discovered—above all Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) in this case. She stands as the precursor of Christian feminists for whom equal rights for women is the issue.

On a wet and windy evening last February over five hundred people gathered in a fine eighteenth century church in central Edinburgh to discuss the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Given that the population of the city is about 500,000, one need not exaggerate the significance of the event. The interior of the church, modelled on St Andrew’s in the Via Quirinale in Rome, and thus neither cruciform nor circular but elliptical, provides a good arena for discussion. It is the church to which the dissenting ministers and elders went in procession when they withdrew from the General Assembly in 1843, to constitute the Free Church of Scotland.

The present controversy about the factual basis and importance of accepting the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is unlikely to split the Kirk, although the main Scottish newspapers were inundated with letters during the weeks after the Moderator of the Church of Scotland (the Right Reverend James Weatherhead) took the occasion of a Christmastide address to note that Scottish Presbyterians might believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation while being free to regard the stories in Scripture about the virginal conception of Jesus as purely ‘symbolic’.

The sermon was given in St Giles Cathedral, another site of great symbolic significance in Scottish history. Only a single scallop capital survives from the original early twelfth century building, in what is now substantially a fourteenth century structure. The central tower received its famous crown spire sometime before 1500.

In part I, I examined William Hood’s recent attempt to understand Fra Angelico as a propagandist for the Observant reform in the Dominican Order. In his magisterial treatment of Fra Angelico at San Marco (Yale University Press, 1993) Professor Hood interprets each of the works against the background of its predecessors elsewhere in Dominican or other art, or elsewhere in Angelico’s own corpus. His particular concern is with the institutional tradition out of which Angelico spoke: the spaces, spirituality and devotional practices of the friars, which conditioned the subject matter and significance of the works. He persuasively argues that Angelico’s art is to be understood as an expression of a particular view of Dominican community and tradition. I proposed that Angelico’s art would be better understood if there had also been some examination of the doctrinal tradition out of which the painter preached: in particular its Scriptural and Thomistic Catholicism. Essential are some understanding of Angelico’s aesthetic (its Thomist view of beauty, light, reality, analogy, the senses ...), his understanding of the function of religious art (as worship, visualizing spiritual exercise, source of instruction, tool of preaching), and his theology of the Incarnation and the Passion as the way to the beatific vision for the various audiences to whom he preached. Admittedly very little has been written to date on Angelico’s theology. Hood’s book is a great jumping off point for such an endeavour.

On the Feast of the Epiphany 1443 the high altar of San Marco was consecrated in the presence of the pope and all the cardinals, patriarchs and bishops present at the Council of Florence.

Anybody who has been to Tuscany will have pleasant memories of the sunshine striking hilltop villages. But Florence, which is one of the two cities at the centre of this study is not a hilltop village, unlike Siena, Volterra, Cortona San Gimignano or Arezzo. What is important about Florence is the river Arno. The Arno answered all Florence’s need for water, it contributed to her hygiene, fish from the river helped to feed her whilst the river’s race turned the millwheels that ground the flour for the people’s bread. Equally important was the effect of the river on the Florentine economy. A plentiful supply of water was necessary for the washing, fulling and dying of cloth which was the basis of Florentine wealth. By the end of the thirteenth century the two pillars of Florentine political policy had been well-established: the pre-eminent cloth industry which promoted the establishment of branch houses of Florentine merchants all over Europe, and an alliance with the papacy which helped to promote the independence and security of the commune of the city.

In the fifteenth century the city was dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families. The constitution was republican, but there was scope for only limited participation in government. Florence could in no way be called democratic. Government rested with the ottimati, the ‘best men’ of the community. This group itself was divided up into various parties built around family alliance systems. Over the years through marriage contracts, trading partnerships and, business ventures, patterns of association were forged which lent a certain stability to communal politics. By 1429, when Fra Angelico was about 42 years old, the leading figure in Florentine politics was Cosimo De Medici, a wealthy merchant and financier who had increased his fortune through acting as the papal banker. Cosimo’s economic activity had made him one of the richest men in Europe.

Brendan,

I am sure that you are here only because of God’s mercy. It is what you seek but it is also that which motivates you and has brought you to this point in your life, and our lives. What you are about to do is to make public your conversion. That which in most of us is a slow process of becoming aware of the God who is at work in each us. Making profession is making others aware of what has happened within you. Not for us a private, personal drawing closer to God, but today we all want the outward sign of the inward grace which has been nibbling away in you for some time. On your personal journey of faith you want to take others with you. You want to tell others the good news that you experience. So in a few moments you will make profession and vow obedience— two things.

Dominican profession is more than just making a vow, though it includes it. What is actually going on is more than the simple act of placing your hands in mine and taking an oath. In making profession you are taking steps in your conversion. These public steps are a preaching. You are publicly stating that you are converting away from at least three aspects of life to show the world that there is more to life than that which our senses perceive.

This paper purports to deal with a non-existent subject in holding that there was no Dominican hagiography before the canonization of St. Dominic nor for some time afterwards.

Dominic Guzman died and his obsequies were presided over by his friend and patron Cardinal Ugolino on 6th August 1221. The same Ugolino, having ascended the papal throne as Gregory IX, issued a bull on 3rd July 1234 ordering annual celebration of the feast of St Dominic and likening the Order of Preachers he founded to those of St Benedict and Citeaux as an historic achievement for the faith. The first life of St. Dominic written by a Dominican (or by anyone) is the Legenda S. Dominici of Peter of Ferrand composed between 1235 and 1239 for liturgical use in the new office of St. Dominic which was established throughout the Order in the latter year.

It is at first sight astonishing that no earlier Dominican life exists and that none was produced specifically for submission in the canonization proceedings as had become standard practise at this time: these facts this paper seeks to explain. To do so will involve answering two questions: 1. What was the procedure which had become established for the canonization of saints by 1234 and what factors affected its operation in the case of St. Dominic? 2. What material had in fact been produced from Dominican sources about Dominic up until his canonization and why did this not include a life of the saint?

Of course I bought them when I saw the reference to my own ‘brilliant’ work in these books. With Types of Christian Theology (Yale University Press 1992) and Theology and Narrative (Oxford University Press 1993), both edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, we now have two substantial posthumous volumes of essays by Hans W. Frei, one of the most influential American theologians in recent years. It is not just the glancing mention of my book that invites attention, although that will turn out to be an instructive entry into critique of Frei’s typology of modem theology. The first thing is to outline the significance of his work.

Born in Breslau in 1922, Hans Frei was baptized as a Lutheran but, since the family was of Jewish ancestry, they had to flee to the United States in 1938. Hans won a scholarship to study textile engineering, in which he graduated, but a lecture by H. Richard Niebuhr, visiting from Yale, completely changed his life. He enrolled as a B.D. student at Yale. On graduation he became minister of a small-town Baptist congregation in New Hampshire. After much internal struggle he decided to become an Episcopalian and to pursue an academic career. He returned to Yale in 1947, married a year later, got ordained in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1956 for an enormously long thesis, supervised by Niebuhr and still unpublished, reconstructing ‘Barth’s break with liberalism’. In a way, the rest of his life was spent trying to subvert liberalism in theology by making Barth’s Church Dogmatics accessible. He taught at Yale from 1956 until his unexpected death in 1988.

The notion that one cannot see God was established early in the Jewish tradition. The idea that the vision of Naples is so magnificent that there is nothing further to live for: “See Naples and die”, is taken one stage further in the Bible: see God and you will die. “But”, God said to Moses, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex. 33.20).

In fact God is said in the Bible to have put in a number of appearances to the Patriarchs. To Abraham: “Then the Lord (Yahweh) appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’” (Gen 12.7); “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him I am God Almighty (El Shaddai); walk before me and be blameless and I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’” (Gen 17.1-2). To Isaac: “The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I shall show you ... for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath that I swore to Abraham your father’” (Gen 26.2-3); at Beersheba “And that very night the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am the God of Abraham your father, do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake’” (Gen 26.24). To Jacob at Bethel: “God (Elohim) appeared to Jacob again . . . and he blessed him. God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name ... be fruitful and multiply ... the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you”’ (Gen 35.9-12). Exactly how God “appeared” is not made clear except in the second appearance to Isaac which was in a dream (Gen 26.24) and this may be true of all of them. It is not clear that anything was seen in any of these stories but in each case something was heard (or at any rate the recipient woke up with the conviction that God had communicated and this, of course, was expressed in certain words). All these five appearances to the patriarchs were covenantmaking events relating to land and descendants.

I have a very simple point to make in what follows. For all I want to say is that God does nothing. I do not wish to deny that God brings or brought things about (e.g. that the universe continues to exist or that St Paul was converted). So my “God does nothing” has a special sense (it does not deny that action can be ascribed to God). But what I intend in saying it is, I think, something of great importance when it comes to thinking about God in a sensible way. To grasp the point I want to make will save one from following all sorts of false trails when it comes to reflection on divinity.

Let’s start with what is going on when you or I act. Examples of human actions could include opening a door, wiping one’s nose, making a telephone call, baking a cake, and waving goodbye to a friend. But what is common to these examples, and to others which might be mentioned?

There is at least one thing common. For they all involve people going through a process. I open a door by reaching for the door handle and exerting a continued pressure on it. I wipe my nose by transporting with my hand an object to my nose and moving it about. I bake a cake by walking around a kitchen and following a recipe. I wave good-bye to a friend by lifting my arm and going through a waving motion.