Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’

In the opening chapter of the book On Naming the Present, David Tracy engages with three “conversations” upon “difference and otherness” currently on stream in the West. Reflecting upon the “bourgeois subject” of modernity, the “communal subject” of anti-modernity and the “nonsubject” of post-modernity, Tracy concludes that the wealth of insight offered by these conversations still falls short of supplying the “Western centre” with the hermeneutical perspective necessary to a contemporary discernment of God’s presence among us. Holding such a perspective to be had subsequent to a multiplicity of conversations taking place, Tracy remarks upon the West’s need to “listen to other [i.e., non-western] conversations” which transcend the interpretative framework of our modern, anti-modern and postmodern narrative traditions. Only by opening ourselves to the discourse of those engaged “in the concrete struggle for justice against suffering and oppression and for total liberation” will we in the West be allowed “once again” to hear “the healing and transformative message of the Christian gospel.” (p. 18)

Responding to the findings of Tracy, and guided by his subject-centred focus, the following material endeavours to sketch the contours of a conversation currently under way among the Latin American community of liberation theologians. Focussing upon a theological understanding of the human subject as person, this particular conversation offers a valuable source of insight to those in the West who are concerned to ensure that the subjectivity which our own discourses narrate remains free from cultural solipsism and ever open to the novum by which the Divine is so often encountered in our own context.

This was not a journey I wanted to make. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Donald Nicholl, was dying of cancer in England. Travelling there to see him meant, I knew, saying goodbye. And this was something I did not want to do. I did not want to face up to the stark fact of his impending death. I did not want to consider how I would live with the immense hole that I knew his passing would create. Somehow, from a distance, I had been able to sustain the illusion that he would not die, that his disease would go into remission, that we would again walk the Pennines together, talking excitedly of our latest discoveries, of our hopes for the future. But now, handing my ticket to the stewardess and boarding the plane, I no longer harboured such illusions. Embarking on this journey brought home to me the harsh reality I had so far been evading: my friend was dying. In doing so, it also wakened me in a new way to Donald's journey, to his struggle, amidst much physical pain and loneliness, to make his way along the narrow, steep path toward death, toward God.

This was a path in many ways unimaginable to me. Certainly, I have faced up to the reality of death, struggled with it in my own way. But to be on the edge of death, to know that the end of life is near? No, I have not known that reality. But perhaps this was one of the reasons for my journey to see Donald in England: to be brought into the presence of this mystery in a way that I never would have discovered on my own. It is strange to consider this.

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.

Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals: