bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hicks, Haecs, Hocs: Diaries of a Good Bishop
Authors: Baldwin Barry
Published: July 2007

In the preface to his edition of Manilius, Housman lamented that ‘Our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester.’

Unlike Blomfield, and his own immediate predecessor at Lincoln, Edward-King, Hicks is not favoured with any mention in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Nor was he a giant among classical scholars. But thanks to the recent publication of a selection from his diaries*, we can see him as we can see few others of his kind; these glimpses afford welcome (especially in the light of recent turmoils at Lincoln Cathedral) evidence of a good man of versatile virtues, proof that moving from academe to a see need not be a stroke of doom for classical scholars, and refutation of the old adage that nothing improves by translation except a bishop.

There was no controversy over the Dean who welcomed Edward Lee Hicks to his see in June 1910. Though unremarked in Neville’s edition, he was none other than Hicks’ old Oxford tutor and examiner, E. C. Wickham, fellow-classicist and editor of Horace, whose death Hicks will presently lament, as was his wont, in choice Latin, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s instructions that ‘Epitaphs should be in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be.’ But ecclesiastical as well as secular immoralities were a constant thorn in Hicks’ side, thanks in large measure to the astonishing country parsons he encountered in his far-flung jurisdiction, a gallery of characters worthy of the Trollopes (Anthony and Joanna) and Barbara Pym.
Living on the Edge of Eternity
Authors: Burton‐Christie Douglas
Published: July 2007

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.
John of St. Thomas and François Annat
Authors: Van Hove Brian
Published: July 2007

João Poinsot (1589-1644) was a Dominican theologian of the commentator school, born in Lisbon of an Austrian father and a Portuguese mother, and briefly confessor to Philip IV of Spain. He was known as John of St. Thomas, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, though writers today refer to him as “Poinsot.” As Royal Confessor, he used his political influence at the Court of Madrid in favour of Louvain against the papal bull In eminenti which he believed was defective and based on false information. Poinsot protected the Doctors of the Faculty of Theology who were secular clergy, some of whom held a traditional Augustinian theology. His letter to John Schinckels (1581-1646) and the other Professors of the Faculty was written May 14, 1644, as a response to their Memorial in which they stated their case. Poinsot thought that the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen was as a whole unfairly judged, even if part of it might be erroneous. He also believed the King of Spain had the right to make a better judgment pending clarification and that it was his duty to help the Pope make a deeper study of the issue. Therefore Poinsot advised the Court to withhold the place in this doctrinal matter. He died soon thereafter on June 17, 1644. This was still during the earliest phase before the pejorative name “Jansenist” had permanently stuck. A royal placet was required to promulgate papal bulls in the Spanish possessions, and it was delayed until years after Poinsot's death, partly due to his initial efforts.
Translations and Liturgical Tradition
Authors: Gorevan Patrick
Published: July 2007

The perennial question whether translation is, in fact, possible is rooted in ancient religious and psychological doubts on whether there ought to be any passage from one tongue to another. So far as speech is divine and numinous, so far as it encloses revelation, active transmission whether into the vulgate or across the barrier of languages is dubious or frankly evil .... [thus] the belief that three days of utter darkness fell on the world when the Law was translatd into Greek (George Steiner, After Babel).

Such reflections may have a place when it comes to the translation of liturgical documents. They may even be required reading before the awesome task be undertaken. It would be indeed unfortunate if the next English version of the Roman Sacramentary in English were to spark off power cuts all over the English-speaking world!

Perhaps we need not worry. Recent articles in New Blackfriars by Eamon Duffy and Bruce Harbert have shown that the revised translation of the Roman Missal, now in draft form, shows some interesting improvements on the 1973 version: greater fidelity to the cadence, the nuances and, above all, the meaning of the original; a distancing from the Pelagian optimism which characterised the earlier translations and a return to the true Roman liturgical style: simplicity encrusted in a majestic flow and rhythm. In this article I would like to draw attention to the challenge this sort of translation faces: that of being faithful to the liturgical tradition.

Many of the ‘ordinary-speech’ translations of liturgical texts in the last twenty-five years have been faulted for falling short of the living tradition of the liturgy, reflecting rather the prevailing idiom and ethos.
Von Balthasar and the Problem of Being
Authors: Davies Oliver
Published: July 2007

The ‘question of Being’ is in a sense deeply against the spirit of the age since the rise of hermeneutics has substantially led to the eclipse of a traditional metaphysics of the self and the world. The central role of ontology in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar therefore makes him appear as a figure who is deeply against the grain of much current thinking, and who stands as a bulwark in defence of traditional, or classical, perspectives.

We can trace two primary sources for the role of Being in von Balthasar’s theology. The first is Martin Heidegger, whose vocabulary of Seinsvergessenheit (‘forgetfulness of Being’) sounds throughout von Balthasar’s discussions of Being. The very centrality of Being and of the Ontological Difference (which von Balthasar reads as a thomistic real distinction), is a sign of von Balthasar’s debt to the German philosopher, even if he proves highly critical of many aspects of the heideggerian project in its particularity.’ By far the more important influence is that of Thomas Aquinas, who is discussed in a section from the fourth volume of the English translation (The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity) and again in the fifth (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modem Age). According to von Balthasar, ‘what Thomas does is to use beauty to define being’. This is a resonant statement indeed, since, to a not inconsiderable extent, it holds also for von Balthasar himself and the whole of his Herrlichkeit project. Time and again during these central volumes, von Balthasar will return to the theme of Being as that which governs the most fundamental aspects of aesthetics, philosophy and theology, as well as the understanding of the human and the grounding of human experience.
Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Hans Urs von Balthasar was very clear that he owed his most distinctive theological insights to Adrienne von Speyr. ‘On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated’; she often gave him suggestions for sermons ‘but only rarely ... did she read my books’; ‘following her advice’ he took the extremely painful decision to leave the Society of Jesus; he ‘strove to bring [his] way of looking at Christian revelation into conformity with hers’; and although she has no part in the writing, without her ‘the basic perspective of Herrlichkeit would never have existed’ (First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, 1981, page 13). ‘Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own’. He predicted, scornfully, that theologians would try to disentangle his insights from hers. Those who read the volumes of Herrlichkeit as they came out in 1961-67 (I was impelled towards them by the enthusiasm of Cornelius Ernst and Donald MacKinnon), of course, knew little or nothing about his indebtedness to von Speyr. Indisputably, some of his most characteristic themes draw heavily on her mystical experiences; other motifs, however, that are central and of great interest, seem independent of his meeting her.

There is as yet no proper biography. Born in 1902, in the Swiss Jura, in a comfortably-off family of doctors, clergymen and merchants, settled in Basel for centuries, Adrienne von Speyr was brought up as a Protestant.
Von Balthasar as Biblical Theologian and Exegete
Authors: Riches John
Published: July 2007

‘[T]heology in the Bible can have no fundamentally different form from later theology in the Church: each is an interpretative act of standing and circling around a midpoint that can indeed be interpreted, but is always in need of interpretation and has never been exhaustively interpreted.’

Balthasar’s affirmation of the identity between the theology of the Bible and later church theology, like so much of his writing and work, poses a fundamental challenge to powerful tendencies in the contemporary church, both Protestant and Catholic, at the same time as it claims to be in harmony with the tradition itself. Where Protestant theology from Ritschl and Hamack wants to draw a sharp line between the Bible and the theology of the early church, Balthasar claims a continuity which sees in both the same process of reflection on the relation of the ‘Christ-event’ to the history of God’s love in the Old Covenant and the same interpretative effort to express the centra! mystery in the language of their contemporaries: Jewish or Hellenistic. If Catholic ‘school’ theology wants to emphasise the nature of theology as the formulation and exposition of ‘truths to be believed’, Balthasar asserts that theology, both in the Bible and the Fathers, is part of an inexhaustible and never-ending process of reflection on the experience of grace in the encounter between the Word made flesh and the community of believers. Such an experience of the outpouring of the divine love can never be encompassed by a reading of the Bible as a collection of prooftexts or what Balthasar calls a ‘mere “fundamentalism” of facts of salvation’, for all such attempts at meditation on and expression (Auswortung) of the divine reality fall under the law of the deus semper maior they can never exhaust the, reality of the divine mystery.
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Ethos of Von Balthasar's Theo‐drama
Authors: Murphy Francesca A.
Published: July 2007

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?

‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.

According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.
The Transparency of Grace: Bernanos and the Priesthood
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

I must withdraw so that God can touch the people whom chance places on my way, people that he loves. My presence is as indiscrete as if I were to be discovered between two lovers or between two friends.

Simone Weil

The Catholic faith of Georges Bemanos was simple if not uncritical. He claimed to be thoroughly of the Church yet he was dissatisfied with many aspects of its temporal existence. He sometimes rejected classification as a Catholic writer, regarding himself as a writer who was also Catholic. His books were not designed for a restricted audience, but were a kind of wayside preaching of the mysterious way of providence, and the dangers to humanity when God was written out of the story of its life.

His works were not designed to promote the self-protective certainties of contemporary bourgeois Catholicism. His clerical heroes, in particular, were all John the Baptist figures, raised up in the rural desert to uncover the superficialities of a compromised urban clerical Catholicism: la confiture de Saint Sulpice, as he allegedly referred to it. A truly Catholic existence lived under the unrelenting sun of divine grace was a demanding profession. Bemanos’ religion was for heroes and saints. Their heroism was their commitment to truth, their fidelity to the gospel in the smallest and most ordinary things of life, and their unstinting, sacrificial, gift of themselves in the self-abandonment of love for God and those whom he had made. Bemanos’ Church was the communion of saints, a place of exchange where ashes become fire and deserts bloom.
Illumination in Georges Bernanos
Authors: Barrett Richard
Published: July 2007

Given recent receptivity to the importance of aesthetics and the role of art and the imagination, an examination of an artist who managed to arrive at creative expression not in spite of faith but because of that faith will be both useful and, one hopes, inspiring.’ Georges Bemanos was to the early part of this century what Olivier Messaien has become to the rebirth of Opera today and is the chosen subject of this study for similar reasons. Even a cursory reading of the best known novel of Bemanos, the Diary of a Country Priest, will initiate the reader who is otherwise ill-versed in the central preoccupations of French literature or unlettered in the complexities of Catholic spirituality, into an entirely different perspective on the function of the novel and the drama of human redemption. For in a world of peer-assessment, target-determination, performance-related pay, this story as others from the Bernanos collection can contribute to the unravelling of the activism and success-ethic that lies at the heart of our conception of what it means to achieve fulfilment and self-awareness. Fifty years after the death of Bemanos, it is not too late to set our sights on this most original of French authors for a repristination of the function of the novel and the way that the supernatural can make a contribution to that function. This is a poignant exercise given the complaint of one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, that much contemporary English fiction has lost its creative edge to the tired hymns of suburbia and that much North- Atlantic fiction has been slowed by the relentless march of the grey ideologies of the contemporary academy.
‘The Time of the Saints Always Comes’
Authors: Edney Mark
Published: July 2007

Having imprudently decided to speak to you tonight about a country in which I have never set foot ... an authentic inhabitant of which I’m not at all sure I’ve ever met... in short, since I decided to speak to you about the saints and sanctity, the miracle, the true ... incontestable miracle would be that you manage to listen to me without boredom.

The words could seem forced coming from someone whose novels were famous for their saintly characters, whose personal devotion to the cult of the saints was prodigious, and who was given to repeating that ‘our Church is the Church of the Saints’ and ‘the time of the saints always comes.’ But there in Tunisia in 1947, a year before his death, giving a talk to religious sisters, George Bernanos was not being falsely modest. Talking or writing about saints or sanctity he had been doing for much of a lifetime, but he had not for that become certain that he was altogether justified in doing so nor that his contemporaries would or should be prepared to listen to him on the subject. Francois Mauriac once said of Bernanos, ‘the misfortune of not being a saint, which we hardly suffer from at all, he assumed in our place and for us.’ If Mauriac was correct, then we would have to conclude that Bernanos failed his favourite subject, or at least in the purpose for which he had taken it up. For more surely his intention in both talking and writing about saints and sanctity was to make us reassume that misfortune ourselves. It is an historical question to know whether his contemporaries had; it is much more pertinent to know whether his present-day readers might.
Does Finnis Get Natural Rights for Everyone?
Authors: Discher Mark R.
Published: July 2007

The most impressive attempt of which I am aware which argues that minimally decent treatment, human rights, for all human beings is a necessary requirement of reason is the one put forth by John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights.’ The object of Finnis’s project is to show that the liberal morality of human rights can be derived from the requirements of reason (per se nota truths), without having to invoke any special Divine revelation or metaphysics (although Finnis is careful to note that his theory is not incompatible with these). Finnis contends that every moral obligation, every ought and its cognates, is derivable from practical reason, and then, by extension that law should reflect this morality which is required by reason. It is in this sense that Finnis’s theory is one of natural law, as opposed to positive law. What is especially noteworthy about Finnis’s project is that he alleges that the minimal requirements of morality can in toto be got out of what he calls the principles of practical reasonableness. Practical reasonableness, for Finnis, amounts to the human capacity for exercising freedom and reason, the characteristics of human personality which enable one to grasp the requirements of practical reasonableness, which are requisites for one to express, shape and select one’s participation in what Finnis calls the “basic goods” or “basic values”. If one behaves in accordance with the principles of practical reasonableness and promotes the basic goods, i.e., if one acts in a manner which is self-evidently reasonable, human rights (what Finnis prefers to call “natural rights”), the minimally decent treatment of all persons, will result. But in order to see whether Finnis’s project succeeds, we will have to examine closely his assumptions and the philosophical moves he makes.
Fascism and British Catholic Writers 1924–1939: Part 1
Authors: Morris Kevin L.
Published: July 2007

The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs investigating.

George Orwell

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

Jacob Burckhardt

Christ’s Kingdom was a counter kingdom.

John Henry Newman

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.
Fascism and British Catholic Writers 1924–1939: Part 2
Authors: Morris Kevin L.
Published: July 2007

One of the best guides through the territory of the pro-Fascist sympathies of the British Catholic literati is Robert Speaight, who, in his biography of Belloc and his autobiography, achieved a dispassionate view of 1930s English Catholicism, while making no secret of his own moderate temperamental inclination to the Right, even admitting to having been attracted to Action Franchise. Speaking of the 1930s Catholic intelligentsia he remarks:

It was characteristic of a common train of thought that one of the most interesting ventures of [the Catholic publisher] Sheed and Ward was entitled Essays in Order, and that Order was the name of a . . . [Catholic] magazine ... we were so impatient with the shibboleths of the Left that the sophistries of the Right ... left us relatively undisturbed. The mystique of ‘order’ was worked for considerably more than it was worth, with an illegitimate extrapolation from the theological to the political field.

He refers to both the influence of continental Rightists and that of the Church in teaching Catholics to fear Communism. Of Belloc he observes he had ‘nothing but contempt for the representative government. ... he seemed to think that, on the whole, fascism was a good thing for foreigners.’
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: VI‐Pro Foco Non Foro
Authors: Walters Hugh
Published: July 2007

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,Though you have shelters and institutions,Precarious lodgings while the rent is paidSubsiding basements where the rat breedsOr sanitary dwellings with numbered doorsOr a house a little better than your neighbour’s.When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’What will you answer? ‘We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community?’And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.(T.S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock)

Social justice, which treats the common good as a purpose of action, and brings all the virtues into our relationships with others, is not the only requirement of living in society, but some understanding of it is fundamental, both to liberal societies and to those of a more ancient stamp. Social justice incorporates the question of distribution of wealth, of how to deal with possessions, property, things. The Church has recently uncovered the role of the laity in her understanding of the Christian life, and this aspect of social justice can perhaps be regarded as especially the province of lay people, who deal with the world of ‘ordinary life’: the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. It is not unreasonable to regard these aspects as central to modem life and indeed to Christian spirituality and philosophy. ‘For instance, my sense of myself as a householder, father of a family, holding down a job, providing for my dependents; all this can be the basis of my sense of dignity.’
Italy in the High Middle Ages 1150–1309
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

The Europe of the High Middle Ages (1150-1309) was principally divided between the Latin-speaking peoples and the Germanic peoples. Although the latter had once invaded and momentarily subjected the Latins, the attraction of the latter’s originally Mediterranean culture had conquered the invaders. The universal language of western Europe had become Latin. Despite the importance of the Germanic peoples, there is no doubt that Latin and its derivatives so dominated the cultural life of Europe that, if one were obliged to find a single adjective with which to qualify the word ‘Europe’ for this period, one would choose ‘Latin,’ and describe the whole as ‘Latin Europe.’

France and Italy led Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This may seem strange. Their cultural and military preeminence and their capacity to influence other parts of western Europe seem odd when their internal constitutions are examined. During the twelfth century French law spread far beyond her frontiers, yet France herself boasted no monarchy or state comparable to that of Plantagenet England, Norman southern Italy, or even the declining German Empire. The typical Italian state that produced Europe’s common law (ius commune) and published its most elaborate statutes was an urban republic, tiny when compared to the states of Spain, to England, and to Germany’s provinces, not to speak of Empire.

But the size of political units was not the principal criterion of inventiveness or importance in this period. In Spite of the Hohenstaufen revival, the German Empire had been irreparably weakened by the alliance of the Roman Church, the German nobility and the Italian towns.
Aquinas on the Trinity
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

That God is one and three is, of course, for Aquinas a profound mystery which we could not hope to know apart from divine revelation, but we can only begin to understand what he has to say about it if we recognise that for him God is a profound mystery anyway. There are people who think that the notion of God is a relatively clear one; you know where you are when you are simply talking about God whereas when it comes to the Trinity we move into the incomprehensible where our reason breaks down. To understand Aquinas it is essential to see that for him our reason has already broken down when we talk of God at all—at least it has broken down in the sense of recognising what is beyond it. Dealing with God is trying to talk of what we cannot talk of, trying to think of what we cannot think. Which is not to say that it involves nonsense or contradiction.

This similarity is sometimes obscured for us by the fact that Aquinas thinks we can prove the existence of God by natural reason whereas such unaided natural reason could tell us nothing of the Trinity. This, however, does not, for him, make the latter a mystery where the former is not, for he thought that to prove the existence of God was not to understand God but simply to prove the existence of a mystery. His arguments for the existence of God are arguments to show that there are real questions to which we do not and cannot know the answer.
Coercion in Augustine and Disney
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: July 2007

“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”

Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.
The Bishop of Rome Revisited
Authors: Jones David Albert
Published: July 2007

The Jewish community in Rome in the first century was indeed very large (some tens of thousands) and not unified but divided between several central synagogues. The early Christian community in Rome was also large, sprawling and diverse, accustomed to receive incomers from all parts of the world and somewhat subject to factions. It would have been difficult to exercise leadership effectively over such a body. This is not in dispute. What is at issue is simply and solely the question of whether, within Rome in the first century, there was an office of president of the college of ministers, that is, the office of a single presiding bishop of the church in Rome.

Dr Duffy writes that ‘we can afford to be honest historians, and let the evidence lead us where it will’. Yet what is at issue is what counts as evidence, and, in particular, whether it is legitimate to use the great wealth of second-century sources as a guide to first century practice. The Shepherd of Hermas says that the role of sending letters to other local churches was proper to Clement. Dr Duffy claims that this assertion ‘seems to imply [he was] the presbyter in charge of foreign correspondence’. If Clement dealt with other churches, are we to presume that this was all he did? The suggestion is left unexamined that Clement had authority to issue letters to other churches because it was he who presided over the local Church of Rome. Should not the fact that there are many other examples of bishops who wrote on behalf of the local church, and that Clement is counted by second century Roman lists as presiding over the local church, count as evidence?
“The Fishacre Tribe”: the Family Origins of Richard Fishacre OP
Authors: O'Carroll Maura
Published: July 2007

The starting point of the enquiry described here was a direct result of discussions at the Fishacre Colloquium. The existence of a Martin de Fishacre who was a witness in the early 1240’s to the Inquisition, now called Testa Nevill was identified. The place-name enquiry to find the Fishacre where Martin lived began with scrutiny of current Ordnance Survey maps and identified three places all with the element, Fishacre, in the name within a few miles of each other in the hundred of Haytor in South Devon. They are Fishacre Barton, a farm, in the parish of Broadhempston; Combefishacre, a string village settlement in a small deep valley about four and a half miles to the east; and Coleton Fishacre, a very small settlement above the cliff top between Kingswear and Brixham. Examination of the publications of the English Place-Name Society showed that there are no other settlements in England and Wales with this unusual element of “fishacre” in the name. This part of South Devon with the streams flowing towards the river Dart on its east bank and the coastal peninsula between Dartmouth and Torbay contains the origin of the name, Fishacre. So far, it is uncertain which place was the first to have the name Fishacre. In the Exon. Domesday Book Combefishacre is recorded as Comba while Coleton Fishacre is recorded as Coletona. Broadhempston is referred to in the Exon Domesday but not Fishacre Barton, which is about two miles southwest of the village.
Pastoral Training in the Time of Fishacre
Authors: Boyle Leonard
Published: July 2007

The original mission of the Dominican Order was preaching the word. It was a direct result of the constitution Inter Cetera of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 under Pope Innocent III, according to which bishops who were over-worked or who were not up to the demands of preaching should establish groups of preachers in their dioceses as their helpers and coworkers in the pastoral care.

Dominic Guzman, who was at the Council with his diocesan bishop, Fulk of Toulouse, was convinced that in the band of preachers he had set up in Toulouse, he had a means of making sure that this constitution would not remain a dead letter. A little more than a year later, in January 1217, he obtained from the new pope, Honorius III, a mandate that gave general approval to the work of preaching already begun at Toulouse.

This papal confirmation of Dominic’s Toulouse preachers, as preachers in general, was followed over the next three years, 1218 to 1220, by many ‘Letters to Prelates’ urging them to make use of the preachers and to encourage them in the office of preaching to which they have been deputed. Now in these letters of recommendation and in the mandate Gratiarum Omnium (the real foundation charter of the Dominican Order), there is no mention whatsoever of the sacrament of penance, the counselling of souls or the hearing of confessions. This is somewhat strange given that the Constitution Inter Cetera of the Lateran Council had explicitly joined the function of hearing confessions to that of preaching.
The Integrative Theology of Richard Fishacre OP
Authors: Long R. James
Published: July 2007

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the death of the first two Dominican masters at the University of Oxford, Robert Bacon OP and his student and successor Richard Fishacre OP. From the former there survives only a Psalms commentary and a sermon. From the latter, however, we have a number of works, including the earliest Sentences Commentary composed in England. Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences offered to their readers, which eventually included all candidates for the degree of master of theology at the leading medieval universities, a systematic exposition of texts from the Fathers, principally St. Augustine. It was therefore seen as the locus of speculative or “dogmatic’ theology as opposed to “moral” theology, the locus of which was the Scriptures.

This role for Lombard’s work, moreover, was reaffirmed in a so— called epistola secreta, a sealed letter, issued by Pope Innocent IV and addressed to Robert Grosseteste, who was at the time bishop of Lincoln but who still kept a close watch on developments at the studium where he had spent so much time and invested so much energy.
The Immortal Spirit of Creation: Kazantzakis and the Bhagavad Gita
Authors: Owens Lewis
Published: July 2007

The religious thought of Nikos Kazantzakis, particularly as contained within ‘The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises’, is still demanding attention. Although there have been recent welcoming attempts to elucidate his religious position in relation to Christian thought and process theism, these attempts still remain largely theoretically speculative. What the present paper hopes to contribute is a combination of both speculation and fact. Through an examination of Kazantzakis’ personal library housed in the Historical Museum of Iraklion, Crete, one can become affiliated with the literature that was occupying Kazantzakis immediately prior to and during the composition of the ‘Spiritual Exercises’. The speculative part naturally comes when one tries to ascertain the influence of such literature upon his subsequent thought.

It is clear that during the years 1922-23, when he was based in Vienna and Berlin, Kazantzakis was engaged with works of Freud, Rank, Spengler, Luxemborg as well as certain commentaries on Buddhist thought. These sources are generally recognised as shaping Kazantzakis’ thought during this time. However, one source that has not received any attention is the Bhagavad Gita, literally ‘The Song of God’. Kazantzakis had his own German translation of this Sanskrit poetic work and inside this copy may be found a ticket advertising an evening of readings dated ‘Berlin, Mittwoch 2 Oktober, 1922”. It thus appears fair to assume that this was a work that Kazantzakis was engaged with to a degree during his sojourn in Berlin.

During this time, Kazantzakis witnessed the crumbling German economic system, had first hand experience of profound poverty and became associated with an active group of communists.
McCabe on Aquinas on The Trinity
Authors: Charlton William
Published: July 2007

Much gratitude is due to Fr Herbert McCabe for his paper ‘Aquinas on the Trinity’ (New Blackfriars June 1999 pp. 268-83). Aquinas’ teaching on this central mystery in Summa Contra Gentiles 4 (CG 4) and Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars (ST 1) combines philosophical ingenuity with fidelity to the words of Scripture in a way that is perennially inspiring. But theologians can continue drawing upon it only insofar as it does not depend on philosophical doctrines unacceptable to modem philosophers. To judge if there is such dependence we need to have it expounded in the language of modern philosophy. This task McCabe accomplishes admirably.

I think McCabe has stated the crucial part of Aquinas’ argument correctly, but to preclude misunderstanding I shall start by restating it briefly in my own words. I hope he would agree that there is no substantial difference between my exposition and his. I shall then look at some of the philosophical presuppositions of the argument which might seem suspect today, and suggest that the most worrying lie not, as might at first be thought, in the philosophy of language or ontology, but in the philosophy of mind.

God, as a non-material, intellectual substance, has knowledge of himself; he knows that he exists and understands his own nature and his activities. This understanding of himself is a kind of action. It is not, like pushing, pulling or heating, a mode of causal action on something else. It ‘remains’, so to speak, ‘within him’. But it involves one thing’s arising out of or proceeding from another, what Aquinas calls a processio. There arises in God a concept of what he knows.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: X ‐ Looking backwards, forwards and around
Authors: Mills John Orme
Published: July 2007

Over the past two years eight people—all of them in one way or another concerned with social justice or peace issues—have written in New Blackfriars about how one very old and in many ways unique Catholic religious order has responded to justice and peace issues in the course of 784 years: the 784 years from its foundation to the end of the Second Millennium. The authors have not set out to write a comprehensive history, but to focus in each article on one individual or group of individuals, placing them in the context of the world they belonged to. Let us start this epilogue by asking ourselves whether we can see in the achievements of these Dominicans any kind of consistent pattern, any recognisable stance—in other words, a distinctively “Dominican” way of reacting to what is going on in society.

This, though, is a question much easier to ask than to answer. Some of you think our choice of subjects has been too esoteric to make an assessment of this kind possible. Of the personalities we have written about, neither Eckhart, Antoninus, Vitoria, Las Casas, nor even McNabb could be called “typical” 14th, 15th, 16th or 20th century Dominicans by any stretch of the imagination. Eckhart’s contemporary, William Humbert, the Inquisitor who in 1310 sent the Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete to the stake, was much more a “typical” 14th-century Dominican than Eckhart, who shared some of his most original thoughts with a throng of Beguine women. One or two of you have also criticised us for not devoting an article to St Thomas Aquinas, surely the Dominican who most profoundly shaped the Dominican way of seeing the world.
The Responsibilities of Theology to Business (or the Responsibilities of the Butcher, the Baker, and the Imagemaker)
Authors: Alford Helen
Published: July 2007

Introduction

The title of this talk presupposes some important definitions. The conference title, “The Responsibilities of Theology”, struck me firstly as rather odd, but also as strikingly familiar. Many is the time I have seen the heading “The Responsibilities of Business”. In this light, such terminology implies that there is some kind of corporate (in its original sense) identity under the heading “theology” or “business”, to which some kind of responsibility can be ascribed. Lots of ink has been spilt over whether one can say in any meaningful way that the business corporation “acts” and can therefore “have responsibilities”, and this title seems to invite the same kind of approach to the “enterprise of theology”.

I’ve taken a particular line on these questions, which is apparent in the thesis below. To take a particular line in order to get somewhere is the kind of thing that a business person would do. Results are important to businesspeople—an important point for theology to take on board—but the drawback in this is that to focus on results also tends to narrow down the discussion. In order to “get somewhere” I am going to do the same thing, which will inevitably leave some avenues of possible discussion left untouched.
Theology and the Culture of the Sciences
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia
Published: July 2007

The idea that theology might have something to say to science, especially if we see this as one of its responsibilities, might seem to us to be an odd question to ask. Ever since C.P. Snow proposed the idea of the ‘two cultures’, the impression of many, apart from those with a keen interest in interactions between science and religion, is that sciences are best left to their own devices. It seems obvious, at first sight, that it is primarily in the realms of history, language, literature, art and music that theology can find welcome dialogue partners. In popular culture, too, there is a residual memory that over-zealous religious fanatics in some way constricted science. The stories of conflict between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, Galileo and the Holy See, have become inflated into mythologies of distrust and suspicion. The fact that the real historical accounts show many more nuances than this is important to establish, but is not really the point I am making here. Rather, I am suggesting that we have become so used to seeing the two areas of theology and science as separate, that we fail to notice in what ways the culture we five in is also one shaped by science, and that science itself is a profoundly cultural activity.

The temptation for those engaged in the dialogue between science and religion is simply to examine the particular discoveries in science and then discuss their implications for theology. While this can take us some way in the process of mutual understanding, what tends to happen is that science becomes the active partner, while theology is merely the passive recipient of what science is discovering.
A Man of the Book
Authors: Murray Paul
Published: July 2007

A Homily Preached in Memory of Fr Leonard Boyle OP On the Feast of St Thomas Aquinas At Blackfriars, Oxford

When news of Fr Leonard’s death reached Canada, Michael Attridge, a young doctorate student at the Pontifical Medieval Institute where Leonard had taught for many years, immediately sent a letter of condolence to the convent of the Master at Santa Sabina. In his letter, Michael spoke of his first and only visit to the Vatican Library where he found himself overwhelmed by Leonard’s kindness: “Fr Leonard offered to give me a tour of the library ... Our tour culminated with a visit to the beautifully frescoed Salone Sistino. Fr Boyle took me around to each of the paintings of the various ecumenical councils of the Church. At the end he asked me a question that I’ll never forget—he asked me what was the common feature in each of the paintings. As I struggled, by reviewing all the paintings, to give an intelligent answer to his question, he simply and quietly said with a smile—‘It’s the Book, Michael’. I looked up at the walls and there in the centre of each of the paintings surrounded by the council fathers, was the Bible. He continued: ‘The Book is always at the very heart of the Church’s activity and life—never forget that’.”

I have always instinctively thought of Leonard as a man of the Book, and not only because of his enormous talent as a paleographer. Most of the times, in fact, when I heard him speaking in Rome, in public, he was preaching the Gospel.
‘One can only understand what one identifies with’: the Redeemer and the Holocaust in Iris Murdoch's
Authors: Hardy Robert
Published: July 2007

Various narratives are incorporated into the The Message to the Planet which, on the face of it, should help the reader to understand the novel’s enigmatic and central ‘redemptive’ figure, Marcus Vallar. These include Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ (there are close textual echoes of Freud’s essay in Murdoch’s novel); this is closely linked to the narrative in which Alfred Ludens, Marcus’s ‘disciple’, wants Marcus to live and through which he wants to understand him—that of the archetypal quest for knowledge. An inescapable narrative background is that of the life of Christ: one Murdoch critic suggests that

The numerous Christ-references take in his Jewishness, his ‘resurrection’ of Pat, his regarding Ludens as John the Baptist... Other characters frequently compare him with Christ in a mocking tone.

There are also accounts of Marcus given by other characters, including highly perceptive ones by Dr Marzillian, the psychiatrist, and Daniel Most, the Rabbi. There is Marcus’s account of his own life, in which his attempt to understand the Holocaust figures largely. But there is also a narrative buried for most of the novel which fully surfaces only at the end. This, a story from the Holocaust, impacts on our understanding of Marcus more than any other in the novel and challenges the very words ‘understand’ and ‘redeemer’. In this article I will consider some of these narratives and the impact on the novel of the Holocaust story.

Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ is a classic of psychoanalytic biography; but there is much, Freud argues at the end of the essay, that psychoanalysis cannot explain.