In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.

Some persons are, by their nature, trailblazers, innovators, avant-gardists—just generally ahead of their times. In many ways, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the subject of this investigation, is representative of such a personality. Embodying enough of the intellectual eclecticism and enthusiasm for the arts and sciences characteristic of the historical period after hers, some twentieth century critics dub this talented polymath a Renaissance woman.

A list of Hildegard’s salient accomplishments and personal charisms confirms that appellation at a glance. Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine aristocrat, was a mystic, a visionary, and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre deals with subject matter as diverse as natural science, medicine, theology, biblical exegesis, dramatic poetry, music, hagiography, and linguistics. She was elected Abbess of a community of Benedictine nuns who were attached to the Abbey of Disibodenberg and subsequently founded two other Benedictine houses. Guided by her ecclesiastically sanctioned gift of prophecy, she launched into a missionary style of preaching and teaching aimed at the spiritual and moral reform of the clergy and laity throughout the kingdom of Germany. Undaunted by her lack of formal, classical education or by whatever misogynist tradition prevailed in secular or ecclesiastical circles, she managed to maintain a lively correspondence with kings, queens, emperors, saints, popes, and fellow religious.

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!’

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.