Some years ago, in an essay outlining Christian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust and the future of Christianity in light of that complicity, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz wrote: ‘We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz: to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz.’ When first read this statement strikes one by its boldness, and later by its depth. For Metz, the Jewish victims of Christian triumphalism and power stand before the Christian community, challenging the past but also serving as the key to the future. Of course, Christian and Jew had travelled together on a tortuous and bloody road for almost two millennia before the Holocaust; the present calls for a radically new way of journeying together, one of trust and ultimately of embrace.

Over the past months, as the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has erupted in a veritable civil war, Metz’s statement had assumed a new relevance in a different context. For on the other side of power, the Jewish people have assumed a new and unaccustomed role in relation to the Palestinian people: that of oppressors. As some Christians continue to have difficulty in admitting their complicity in the suffering of Jews, the Jewish people find it almost impossible to admit to their own complicity in the suppression of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish empowerment, mandated by the suffering of the Holocaust, should be affirmed as a good, the present impasse in Israel and Palestine cannot be addressed outside the most obvious, to some the more contradictory, of options: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in all beings other than God has been the focus of much debate among Thomists. And this is how it should be, for all agree to its central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Is the distinction a deduction we make from our knowledge of God’s essence, or an insight drawn from our experience? And if it is the latter, is this insight from multiplicity to unity based on the inevitable mental distinction we draw between the concept of essence and that of existence, or is it the fruit of a metaphysical penetration of the material things we meet within our world? Let us look first at the argument based on an intuition into God’s simplicity and a deduction from that intuition, and then turn to an examination of the arguments which move from the diversity of our experience to the simplicity of the source of that experience.

In the first argument, the claim is that we have a direct insight into being as being, into existence itself, that is, God. ‘Being (esse), insofar as it is being, cannot be diverse.’ If it differs, it must be by something other than it, that is, by particular essences. Is this the main-line argument for the real distinction? Many commentators (among them O’Brien and Fabro) have thought that it is. However, I believe they are mistaken. For the proof as it stands is incomplete, not in failing to offer a conclusion, but in failing to ground its major premise.

What can recent theories in evolutionary biology about the problem of altruism contribute to a Christian perspective on the nature of humanity?

Altruism is considered a ‘problem’ because Darwin’s theory of natural selection leads us to expect all organisms, including humans, to be selfish. According to the theory of natural selection those traits which we expect to see in the natural world are the ones which have conferred on their bearers the greatest reproductive success. As altruism means the giving of aid, a preliminary reading of Darwinism suggests that altruism poses a challenge to the whole theory of adaptation by natural selection. Sociobiology has a great deal to say about the evolution of altruism in non-humans. How far does the study of altruism in non-humans help us to understand altruism in us?

Sociobiological theories for the evolution of altruism Sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour, dates as a named discipline from only 1975, when E.O. Wilson’s now much-discussed book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, was published. As altruism manifestly requires social behaviour—an organism cannot be altruistic on its own!—theories for the evolution of altruism lie at the centre of sociobiology.

The first biological explanation for altruism was, however, proposed by none other than Darwin himself. Having developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin went on to consider how the sterile castes in many social insects could have evolved. He realised that it might be argued that such castes could not have evolved by natural selection because the bearers of traits associated with sterility leave, by definition, no offspring, but he proposed that sterility in such circumstances could evolve by a process he termed ‘family selection’.

Professor Michael Dummett, in the article in New Blackfriars which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’ (October 1987, pp. 424—431), seems to have taken as a criterion of Catholic faith what Avery Dulles, calls in his book Models of Revelation a propositional model of revelation. Professor Dummett is a distinguished logician. No doubt, then, he is accustomed to think of abstract logical thought as a norm of human discourse. But, if it is religious discourse we are considering, this is an assumption which can be extremely misleading. As Avery Dulles says, it tends to ‘reduce meaning and intelligibility to the narrow confines of conceptual logic’. In place of this Dulles suggests a symbolic model of revelation, which seems to me to give much more meaning to faith and to present a much more convincing model of the Church.

The proposition which Professor Dummett proposes as fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the Church, that ‘it is enjoined on us, whatever the provocation, never to take any step to disrupt the unity of the Church’ (p. 424), seems particularly unsatisfactory. In the first place, as Dummett acknowledges in regard to the schism between the Eastern and the Western Church, there is the problem of who was responsible for the split. And there is the further problem, that Dummett thinks that the Protestant Reformers ‘did not even pretend to form a rival Catholic Church’ (p. 425).

This, however, is a minor point. It is the whole idea of a propositional model of revelation which needs to be questioned—even at the risk of repeating here much that is familiar.