After the initial furore provoked by the Vatican Declaration nearly two years ago the discussion of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church has come to a virtual standstill. The debate has stalled largely because both defence and criticism of the Declaration have not always been on target.

For one thing insufficient attention has been paid to the significant developments which this document embodied. For the first time the Catholic Church officially abandoned many of the standard theological arguments which had been used in the past to legitimate the traditional policy barring women from ordination. The Declaration conceded that the patristic and scholastic arguments, previously accorded such weight, were in large measure conditioned by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs about women’s alleged innate deficiencies as compared with men or their inborn aptitudes for domestic and nurturing roles. The traditional policy thus came to be defended for wrong or inadequate reasons.

In the Declaration’s central argument traditional claims about women’s inferiority and subordination to men, or their alleged incapacity for pastoral responsibility played no part. Moreover claims about the direct bearing of gender-specific traits on female/male role differentiation in society and the church were used to highlight rather than to demonstrate the propriety of the traditional policy. Such claims were combined with ecclesiological doctrines to yield an argument for the complementary distribution of male and female roles in the church, and with christological doctrines to yield an argument for the necessity of maleness for the priesthood’s representational function. But the Declaration carefully qualified the persuasive force to be accorded these arguments in its overall case by designating them as illustrative rather than demonstrative.

In some, perhaps most, cultures metaphysics and mysticism belong together. Even in our own society organizations which bear the name ‘metaphysical’ are likely, an examination, to be found to be concerned primarily with more or less mystical and esoteric doctrines and practices. But it is still typical of the Anglo-Saxon academic world that philosophers have, on the whole, not been frightfully eager to; tangle with mystics, nor mystics with philosophers. As a result of this it has been lamentably easy for philosophers to assume that they know what mystics are saying, without bothering to verify their allegations, and for a whole trend of spirituality to thrive off a naive rejection of the ‘God of philosophers’ in favour of the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and God knows who else’.

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis is an important symptom that this situation is changing.

Most of the contributions are not concerned directly with the philosophical issues posed for philosophers as such by mysticism. Intuition and the Inexpressible by Renford Bambrough tackles the logical problem of ineffability; Nelson Pike and George Mavrodes discuss the epistemological status of mystical experiences. But otherwise most of the essays are concerned with clarifying the methodology of investigation of mysticism, and with developing and studying the concepts needed for such investigation.

The ten contributors were left entirely free to choose their own topic and tactic; it is all the more impressive that a certain coherence definitely emerges from their various essays. Almost all the essays contain some kind of attack on two much loved doctrines: first, the belief that, underlying the diversity of expression to be found in mystical writings, there is either a single or at most a few varieties of essential mystical experience; and secondly, the belief that it is, in principle, fairly straightforward to disengage the essential experience or experiences from their interpretative garments.

In this article I return to a theme on which I wrote almost a decade ago in an essay entitled ‘The Holy Spirit, Authority and Doctrinal Development’. Later on I shall refer to points in the essay to illustrate my two main points in this article, (i) that doctrinal development is less a controversial matter than it was, (ii) that we can, I believe, bypass it if we pay proper heed to the more basic issues of pneumatology and of authority.

So to my title. Those who like duck to eat are constantly disappointed for there is little meat on a duck. So it will be with this article but I hope the meat there is will be nourishing. I am rather concerned that the bones should be prominent.

The first reason I would suggest that the development of doctrine is becoming, if it has not already become, a dead duck is that the debate is not being carried forward much. After I had written the article to which I have referred I did a good bit of research on the situation and I found it was almost impossible to continue writing in any profitable way upon the topic. (I have seen little fresh or additional up to the present.) If I had written further over the last few years I would be repeating myself. Secondly, the most essential factor in development of doctrine, namely, the operation of the Holy Spirit, seems very difficult to discern. Criteria about development and how we could know that it was the Spirit who was acting and also for deciding on satisfactory tests of right and lawful development were varied. There was extreme difficulty in getting areas of agreement. This point has been brought out in my earlier essay and in some of Rahner’s essays to which I referred there.

So far I have attempted to explain from a Lonerganian perspective how literary art works and inevitably this has led to a consideration of how we, as readers, respond to literary art. To assess the capacity of Lonergan’s transcendental method to illumine the nature of critical response we could do no better, I think, than compare the structure of that method with the recorded practice of F. R. Leavis, the English critic who has arguably contributed more than anyone this century to our understanding of the nature of critical engagement with literature. Both Lonergan and Leavis emphasize the need to train and cultivate the feelings if moral maturity is to be achieved and, as a literary critic, Leavis is especially insistent on the ability of literature to effect this and, indeed, would partly justify the place of English in the university on these grounds (see ‘Education and the University’ in Scrutiny, Vol. 9). But it is on Leavis’s analysis of the structure of critical response to literature that I should like to focus. It may seem paradoxical to compare Leavis to a philosopher since he was at some pains to decline the invitation of the philosopher Rene Wellek to state ‘more explicitly’ and ‘more abstractly’ the assumptions underlying his practice and was especially resistant to the philosophical notion of a norm by which poets are measured. It has been suggested, however, that Leavis was less philosophically innocent than he protests to be and that it was the dominant logical-scientific paradigm of philosophy at that time (1937) to which he was so resistant. In any case, in his reply to Wellek and in several other places in Scrutiny he sets out the manner in which he comes to appreciate a poem and reach a critical evaluation. The importance of such recorded. practice to Lonergan’s method is that Lonergan claims to be thoroughly empirical in approach, that his mapping out of method is simply the objectification of the processes that occur spontaneously in actual practice (see Method, p. 4).