bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anglican Orders: The Growing Consensus
Authors: Hughes John Jay , Coventry John
Published: July 2007

The question of Anglican orders is often thought to be a mere side issue in the dialogue between Canterbury and Rome. In one sense this is true: even were Rome to recognize the validity of Anglican orders, it would not bring about reunion, as the example of the Orthodox clearly shows. Yet in another sense the question is important; for it involves nothing less than the recognition by Catholics of the true ecclesial character of the Anglican Communion. It was recognition of this fact which led the editor of this journal to commission a full-length review article of the writer’s Stewards of the Lord and to select Fr John Coventry, S.J., one of England’s leading Catholic ecumenists, for this important task. The present writer is honoured by this selection and is happy to respond to the editor’s offer of space for a reply. The review article unhappily contains serious misunderstandings as well as misrepresentations of the book’s argument. These make a reply essential—not in any spirit of personal self-defence, but in the interest of the issue itself.
R.W. Southern on the Middle Ages
Authors: Luscombe David
Published: July 2007

When Mr Southern produced The Making of the Middle Ages in 1953, he illustrated it with photographs and was praised for the way he scooped up such a revealing collection of personalities and instances. Now in his new general work on Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, the photographs have been displaced by graphs and tables, and the selection of ‘moments’ in the life of the medieval Church is disclaimed in favour of a study of the interplay and tension between medieval society and its Church, and of a study of the continuous adaptation of the institutional modes by which the medieval Church attempted to satisfy the changing requirements of society. All too often ecclesiastical history lapses into the history of the organization and life of the Church as seen from the inside, and no doubt this is the image which the phrase ‘Church history’ evokes in many minds, but what is here studied is the history of the Church looked at from the viewpoint of society at large. Already by the ninth century western Church and society were so closely identified that those outside the Church were usually outside society also, but there is no risk of confusion here if one grasps the fact that throughout the medieval period elements in the Church continually tried to tune its responses to changing social demands.

This book is structured according to a pattern of threes. Each of the five essays which form its core is planned in relation to the differences which separate a primitive age (c. 700-c. 1050) from an age of growth (c. 1050-c. 1300) and an age of unrest (c. 1300- c. 1550). Each essay is unquestionably a masterpiece. That on Byzantium and the West pursues the double theme of Rome as the source of western unity and the source of division in Christendom as a whole. The essay on the papacy shows theory evolving in relation to social change.
From Priesthood to Marriage
Authors: Bebb Andrew
Published: July 2007

It seems strange to think in terms of ‘conversion’ when reflecting upon the experience of leaving the priesthood. The transformation, of the priest into the husband and father has been called many things, A ‘betrayal’—that was a bishop; a ‘defection’, an ‘act of madness’ a ‘second adolescence of the late thirties’, a ‘good riddance’, but hardly a ‘conversion’. Yet, for me, that is exactly it.

I think it is worth the trouble to try to explain why. Not least because the witness, both theological and personal, of a growing number of stable, happy husbands and fathers who were once priests may be of positive value in the midst of the Church. We think so, anyway. Our families meet regularly. One resolution we all share: to love the Church and to meet the occasional rebuff without bitterness. Howsoever we may be regarded, and institutional rejection is surely understandable at the moment, there is no doubting that we do increasingly present a new phenomenon in the life of the Church. We are convinced that we have more than embarrassment to offer to the Church, but something creative and fruitful. Perhaps it may lie in the emergence of trained theologians who are also devoted and happily married men immersed in the secular society. Theology has surely limped long enough in the idealistic world of the professional celibate.

Let me offer my own reflections, anyway, as a first contribution. If one word could express the whole new orientation of my own world, it would be ‘incarnational’. And this in an experiential context. My own saddest experience of priesthood was directly contrary. This may be a commentary on my own inadequacy, but yet I feel that it is the obvious defect of the Church ministry as a whole.
From Adenauer to Brandt: Church and State in Western Germany
Authors: Lomax Michael
Published: July 2007

Bearing in mind Vatican II pronouncements on the desired relationship between Church and State, the Catholic Church’s relationship with the West German State appears well-nigh ideal. In Western Germany all Churches are by law disestablished, but most of them, including the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church, enjoy corporate legal status (Gemeinschaften des öffentlichen Rechts) in the same way as trades unions and similar bodies. This gives these Churches legal recognition and allows them to enter into legal agreements with the State. The legal relationships between the Catholic Church and the West German State are laid down in the so-called Reich Concordat of 1933 between the Holy See and the German Reich. Although promulgated under the Nazi government, it is, with a few modifications, still legally binding. Furthermore the West German constitution (Grundgesetz) guarantees freedom of belief, conscience, religious conviction, and the right of the Churches to give religious instruction in State schools. Those Churches with corporate status are allowed to gather Church Tax on the basis of government tax-rolls.

So far, so good. But in fact the picture is more complicated than it appears at first sight, as is shown by increasing criticism from both Catholic and non-Catholic quarters of the Catholic Church’s relations with the State since the war. The German mind is quick to draw the distinction between de facto and de jure (cf. the debate over the recognition of the GDR), and some have said that although there is no de jure establishment of the Churches in Western Germany, the Catholic Church has been as good as established de facto since the war. Such critics draw attention to the close working relationship between the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) governments of the fifties and sixties, the effects of this relationship on post-war legislation, the Churches’ privileged financial position, and the influence of the Catholic Church on the pattern of German education.
The Uniate Model and Anglican Ministry
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

Anglicans and Roman Catholics are exploring the Uniate analogy as a model for reunion of their Churches. In this paper we propose to discuss briefly the development of the Uniate analogy and, thereafter, to suggest a way for Roman recognition of Anglican ministry.

Proponents of the Uniate model point to an impressive precedent in Gregory the Great’s commission to Augustine in 597. They argue that Gregory favoured a distinctive patrimony for the Church of the Angles. Obviously this precedent should not be pressed too far. Subsequent Popes, such as Vitalian and Gregory VII, were less favourable to pluralism and more inclined to uniformity than was the first Gregory. Nevertheless, Gregory’s commission to Augustine of Canterbury does provide a useful precedent that might well be endorsed today.

‘My brother, you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church, in which you were brought up. But if you have found customs, whether in the Roman, Gallican, or any other Churches that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them, and teach the Church of the English, which is still young in the Faith, whatever you can profitably learn from the various Churches. For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Therefore select from each of the Churches whatever things are devout, religious and right; and when you have arranged them into a unified rite, let the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.’

The pallium given to Augustine by Gregory connoted recognition of a Roman primacy, a recognition that continued for nearly a millenium. Since the Reformation the Archbishop of Canterbury has served as a pastoral centre of unity for the Church of England and, later, for the world-wide Anglican communion.
Two Novels: Notes on the Work of John Fowles
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

Even in our present state of enlightenment it is relatively uncommon to find a novelist who can treat the physical climax of a love affair so brusquely—‘A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.’ It is the more remarkable if the girl stretched on the bed has not only engineered the loss of her virginity and purchased a small Toby jug —now in the author’s possession—but is actually a divine enigma. Place such a episode in the shadow of a West Country cathedral in the middle years of Victoria’s reign and it becomes as ironic as it is pleasing.

It has been my recent experience on belatedly reading The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman to realize that there is something to be said for not reading books when they first appear. There is the chance that one may more easily recognize the development of a coherent attitude, and it is the essence of my discovery that John Fowles is writing a more unambiguously religious novel than has been generally appreciated. Primarily, his treatment of his material differs in a marked degree from the methods of such writers as Graham Greene, Salinger or Mauriac, in that he creates in his characters a dimension of allegorical potential which cannot be precisely distinguished from their ordinary humanity. It appears to be a new approach, and one that stands—if at some remove—in the line of Bunyan and the medieval Morality. Throughout The Collector, Fowles’ first book, the allegory is implicit and muted; and this, I think, is an attitude one would expect in a writer who had still to establish his narrative powers and was perhaps less than fully aware of the ultimate direction of his abilities. In his preface to the new edition of The Aristos Fowles tells us that his purpose in The Collector was to ‘attempt to analyse through a parable some of the results’ of what he sees as a ‘confrontation’ between ‘the Few and the Many’.
Incarnation as Translation
Authors: O'Hara Frank
Published: July 2007

There has been a remarkable convergence in recent years between Catholic and Protestant theology in the field of christology. The old pattern was that Catholic theologians offered scholastic interpretations of the incarnation, centring on such conciliar and scholastic concepts as person, nature, subsistence and existence, while Protestants followed some form of kenoticism. Kenotic theories of the incarnation, ostensibly based on the ancient hymn in Philippians 2, 5-11, affirmed some sort of change of the Logos or Word of God into human form, and ran into insuperable difficulties concerning the immutability of God as taught by the Bible (cf. Wisdom 7, 27, James 1, 17, and especially Psalm 102, 25-27 and Ecclesiasticus 42, 20-21).

Instead of this dichotomy, there is now emerging a new type of christology, which I classify as ‘translation christology’. Among its supporters I would list J.-J. Latour, Christian Duquoc, Edouard Schillebeeckx, Christopher Butler and Charles Davis among the Catholics, and John McIntyre and Wolfhart Pannenberg among the Protestants. Many other modern authors can be quoted in support of the view, although few if any have explicitly made the concept of translation the heart and centre of their christology.

But pride of place must go to Eustace of Antioch, that staunch supporter of St Athanasius who was deposed from his bishopric by the Arians. ‘As God the Son, he says, is the image of the Father, so is the man whom He wore the image of the divine Son, though in a different material.’ A modern Catholic theologian would want to phrase this differently, and to speak of the manhood which Jesus assumed rather than of the man whom Jesus wore.
‘New and Non‐New’
Authors: Gregor Ian , Marshall Patricia
Published: July 2007

‘Speak that I may see thee’—a line from one of Ben Jonson’s plays serves to remind us that in language we reveal ourselves in a quite distinctive way. And perhaps nowhere is language more sharply revelatory than in those phrases which fall almost automatically from our lips, routine verbal gestures scarcely attended to.

I suppose, for the average layman, the most sustained theological discourse that he hears exists in the weekly sermon. Even with that general kind of context in mind, there would seem to have grown up in the last few years two kinds of vocabularies which stand in an interesting relationship to each other. As we look at the lists vertically we can see two quite distinct theological profiles—some features of more consequence than others, but taken together, an interesting whole.
Priesthood: Reflections on the Synod ‘Working Paper’ I. Priest and Parish
Authors: Quinn Edward
Published: July 2007

Then they sang the second verse of the Tantum ergo and Canon O’Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right... Canon O’Hanlon stood up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the card to read off and he read out Panem de coelo praestitisti eis ....

Sunday evening service in a West Riding town forty to sixty years ago was not very much different from the scene in the church at Sandymount on Bloomsday. For the priests it marked the end of a quite heavy Sunday, the climax of a by no means easy week. Two Masses in the morning with a sermon at each, fasting from midnight perhaps until 1 o’clock, baptisms and children’s service, rosary—or Vespers—or Compline, another sermon, and Benediction. On the Saturday five or six hours’ confessions. In this town as in many others of its kind, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, all the time left over from church services and absolutely necessary meals and rest, was spent in house to house collecting. The parish priest might reserve to himself the task of counting or he might share it with the curates, thus lengthening the weekend’s work to Monday midday. For some this might be followed by recreation on the golf links and dark murmurings with other clerical companions about the tyranny of parish priests. For the rest of the week, two hours of every day would be taken up with Mass and Office, there would be at least one evening service with a sermon, perhaps a confraternity meeting, instruction of converts (most of them marrying Catholics), a weekly visit to the school, visiting both of the sick and well (the latter being questioned, if necessary, about attendance at Mass and Easter duties). A conscientious priest might use some of the time left over to prepare his sermons.
Priesthood: Reflections on the Synod ‘Working Paper’. II. Priests or Clergy?
Authors: Hardwicke Owen
Published: July 2007

I recognize at once that any viewpoint I express on the Synodal Document on the priesthood is necessarily unrepresentative. There are relatively few of us who are priests in ‘secular’ employments. Because I have no specific mandate, as I would if I were a full-time priest-teacher in a diocesan seminary or school, or if I were a religious pursuing the community’s special ‘work’, it may be that I have put any opinion of mine out of court. I would hope, however, that there would be some who might accept that even two years’ experience in extra-diocesan work could be the basis of a small contribution to the debate on the nature and contemporary forms of priestly ministry.

While the Synodal Document has many indisputable matters in it, and also poses some questions more radically than one might have expected, I cannot help feeling that the difficulties it faces in the current crisis are intractable on the basis of its theological view of the ministerial priesthood. Almost by its own definitions, which have been our standard fare for centuries, it can allow for little development. The document seems to have settled, as matters not open to question, that the specifically priestly functions are clearly defined ontologically; and further that the priestly character pervades the whole life of the ordained man. In doing so, some facts of the church’s history are overlooked; or, if recognized, are touched on so lightly as to minimize their relevance to the contemporary situation.
The Earl of Shaftesbury and the ‘Papal Aggression’
Authors: Pearsall Ronald
Published: July 2007

The Earl of Shaftesbury and the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850 is an interesting example of how a man of sense and humanity can be driven by prejudice into taking a posture that contradicts everything he has striven for. What he did was of less importance than why he did it, for even at the time intelligent men were aware that Shaftesbury was obsessively involved in a storm in a tea-cup.

The term ‘Papal Aggression’ indicates how Shaftesbury’s contemporaries saw the Papal Bull of 1850; this Bull abolished the administration of Roman Catholics in Great Britain by Vicars Apostolic, and appointed instead two Archbishops and twelve Bishops with territorial districts clearly marked out. Shaftesbury was in Scotland recovering from illness when he heard about this. It was, he considered, ‘an act of great annoyance and audacity’ but not contrary to law, and he was prepared to simmer awhile.

When Dr Wiseman was appointed the first Archbishop of Westminster and raised to the dignity of a Cardinal, then Shaftesbury felt that he had no other course but to act, and the publication of the pastoral ‘From out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome’ was interpreted by him as a direct threat towards the Church of England. ‘Catholic England’, wrote the Cardinal, ‘has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished’.
The Focussing of God
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

The renewal of sacramental theology in the past fifty years or so has depended considerably on a recovery and development of the primitive insight that the primary and primordial sacrament is Christ himself, whose sacramentality is the ground and the culmination of all human existence in the world in time. It is because we are as we are (and it is good, ‘very good’, that we are as we are), because basically if not most interestingly we are men in virtue of a shared flesh and blood, unable to communicate or be men except as such, even with and before God, that we enact our human and our Christian existence sacramentally. We interpret ourselves to ourselves, discover what it means to be who we are and so find how to become who we are, by projecting ourselves on and realizing ourselves in external nature. By our bodily creativity, in words and symbols and the extraordinary variety of human art-forms we are able to make sense of our life in the world, to make its flux and chaos precisely meaningful, to focus the whole in a perceptible sign which in contracting the immensities allows us to live amongst them as those who are at home there. And the Jewish-Christian tradition at its classical moments has maintained that a particular history has redeemed us more deeply into our bodies, into being more authentically at home in our flesh and blood and sexuality, in our passions and emotions and instinctual drives.
The Brother or Sister is Not Bound
Authors: Byron Brian
Published: July 2007

The current spate of writings on the Christian attitude to divorce is remarkable for its almost complete unanimity in allowing for the possibility of dissolving the marriage bond. Moreover, there seems to be widespread belief that it is not only possible but highly desirable, if not desperately necessary, for the Catholic Church to change her discipline in this matter. Such a change would indeed be a drastic reversal of belief and practice, yet biblical and historical research indicates that the New Testament doctrine is not without its difficulties and that there was in fact toleration of divorce in the early Church both in the writings of certain Fathers and in the practical discipline of particular Churches. Many have concluded that these facts make it evident that the Church has more power in dissolving marriages than it exercises at present.

Whilst there is this frequent conclusion, authors nevertheless arrive at it by different routes. Some argue that our Lord’s teaching was meant as an ideal rather than a law; some hold that the Church, in exercising the power of the keys in this matter, is not a mere human authority, but that she is using divine power, hence it is not man who ‘puts asunder’ the marriage bond, but God acting through his Church; others, again, seem to base their case on the spirit of compassion for human imperfection which was such a marked aspect of Christ’s dealings with sinful man. These opinions may or may not assist the authorities concerned in their task of reviewing marriage legislation in Canon Law. They will wish to adhere with the utmost loyalty to the evangelical value proposed by Christ in his teaching on marriage and they will look for a clear biblical precedent before departing from the present position. For whatever else may be said about the Church’s marriage laws, they have enabled her to bear witness to the world that marriage is a union forged between man and woman by God himself, and man may not sunder it.
When they came in the morning
Authors: McGuffin John
Published: July 2007

On Monday, 9th August, 1971, I was kidnapped from my bed by armed men, taken away and held as a hostage for five and a half weeks. I was not in Uruguay, Brazil, Greece or Russia. I was in the United Kingdom, an hour’s flight from London. Belfast.

A crashing on the door awoke me. It was 4.45 a.m. I went downstairs in my pyjamas to answer. As I opened it I was forced back against the wall by two soldiers who screamed at me: ‘Do you live here?’ Overwhelmed by their perspicacity I admitted that this was so, whereupon they ordered me to get dressed. I foolishly asked why. ‘Under the Special Powers Act we don’t have to give a reason for anything’, the officer said. ‘You have two minutes to get dressed.’ Through the window I could see in the dawn light half-a-dozen armed men in our tiny front garden.

I was given exactly two minutes to get dressed while a young soldier boosted his ego by sticking a SLR up my nose. My wife, not surprisingly was almost in tears as I was dragged down the stairs and into the street. She ran after me to give me my jacket and was roughly ordered back into the house. Our quiet residential bourgeois neighbourhood hadn’t seen such excitement in years as I was frog-marched at the double down the avenue by eight soldiers. As we sped down we were joined by a dozen more who had been hiding in nearby gardens. Those who looked out into the early morning mist must have imagined that a Vietcong patrol had been sighted in the locale.

‘Tie him up and gag the fecker’ (sic), an educated English accent ordered. ‘That’s hardly necessary’, I said, as I was frisked for the second time up against the lorry (or pig as they called it). This was accepted albeit reluctantly by the corporal who was positively twitching with desire to practise his Boy Scout knots upon me. My shoes were taken off me and I was put none too gently into the back of the ‘pig’. Two men with Sten guns covered me.
Structures in Space
Authors: Martin Graham Dunstan
Published: July 2007

At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.
Death by Water
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus in his historical existence, the man whom God lived and who lived God for us, was God’s way of reading the world, God’s way of making sense of the world. His life amongst us was a hermeneutic of man in the world before God, an interpretation of the human condition which (in historical fact and not a fortiori) was and is a radical criticism of all other ways of reading the world; his life, and more particularly his death, which was the meaning of that life, shows that all other attempts to discover and express the significance of what it is to be human have been mistaken or deficient. The only true understanding of our living and dying is his living and dying; any other form of living and dying is to some degree perverted. Any living and dying that we might be able to manage ourselves is going to be less than true. Only his biography, his ‘name’, is able to make our biographies, our ‘names’, ultimately true readings of what it is to be human, to stand before God in the world. There is salvation in no other name. If we are to be whole, we have in some way to learn to abandon what we have received.

Baptism according to the tradition of the Church is ‘necessary to salvation’. That has come to be understood to mean that, at least so far as baptism in the straightforward sense of the sacrament of water-baptism is concerned, it is necessary to salvation for those who have been brought to see that it is so necessary. Baptism is the answer to a question, ‘What must (dei) I do to be saved?’ What shall we do?—The question asked by people who have heard the story of Jesus of Nazareth and felt themselves threatened by it, found themselves interpreted to themselves by it as out of true, as sinners.
Male, Mailer, Female
Authors: Lodge David
Published: July 2007

The Reviewer approached The Prisoner of Sex with a quickened heart-beat of keen expectation, but warily, unsure whether he hoped to find it a triumph or a failure. Norman Mailer was for his money one of the most interesting and entertaining of contemporary American writers, a man who had recovered from that direst of literary fates, the best-selling first novel followed by a string of failures, and by sheer effort and character remade himself as an artist in middle age. In particular the Reviewer admired semi-confessional, semi-documentary works, like The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago in which Norman wrote about himself in the third person, as the Novelist, the Historian, the Journalist, thus achieving a delicious ironic detachment from his own ego without which indeed his matter and manner could become tiresomely pretentious and irresponsibly extreme.

Peeking into the opening pages of the new book, the Reviewer was glad to see that it was written in the ironic third-person mode, but he was well aware too of what polemical purpose it in this case served. The same cultural trade-winds that had brought across the Atlantic tidings of the growing strength of the movement for Women’s Liberation, and the growing fame of its chief prophet, Kate Millett, had also conveyed whiffs of the excitement greeting Norman’s counterblast, originally rushed to the public in a single issue of Harper’s magazine, to Women’s Lib in general and Kate

Millett in particular. For Kate, in her monumental study of man’s oppression of woman, Sexual Politics, had singled out Norman, along with D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, as prime examples of male chauvinism in modern literature.
Egner on the Eucharistic Presence
Authors: Mascall E. L.
Published: July 2007

The interesting and provocative article entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence’, which appeared in the issues of New Blackfriars for August and September under the name of G. Egner, lead one to anticipate with eagerness the forthcoming book on which it is based. In the mean time I am glad to be allowed to make some comments upon it, and if these are largely critical it is simply because there is not much point in endorsing passages (of which there are many) with which one is in entire or almost entire agreement.

I think that a consecrated host is still bread’, Egner writes on p. 354, ‘bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread.’ If what is meant is that all the natural properties of bread remain, I fully agree, and I would emphasize that I have just said ‘natural’ and not (using words in their modern sense) ‘physical’ or ‘material’. There has been, from time to time, a lamentable tendency in Christian thought to assume that sacramental realities are concerned simply with the spiritual aspects of man’s being (his ‘soul’) and that his material aspects (his ‘body’) need only natural nutriment. In the Catechism of the Anglican Prayer Book of 1662 there is a most unfortunate statement that, in receiving Holy Communion, the benefits are ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the Bread and Wine’, in other words that, while our souls need supernatural nutriment, natural nutriment is sufficient for our bodies.
The Old Wine is Good
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In the great effort of ‘ressourcement’ in which the Church is currently engaged, while the Dominicans have set themselves to produce a massive new edition of St Thomas, the Cistercians have undertaken a multi-volume series of new English translations of the Cistercian Fathers.

This venture is warmly to be welcomed. The Cistercian corpus is intrinsically valuable, and is, historically speaking, one of the major monuments of western monasticism; it is also peculiarly significant as revealing the immediate context for the great theological synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas.

To take this last point first. It is often forgotten just how thoroughly monastic the early Dominicans were. The De modo studendi generally ascribed to St Thomas himself is thoroughly monastic. It is curious how Victor White, for all his insight, missed the reference to the Song of Songs in the bit about the wine-cellar—a monastic commonplace. St Bernard, for instance, says that anyone who proposes to teach others must himself have been ‘introduced into the wine-cellar’, that is to say, must have had personal experience of the intoxicating force of heavenly sweetness. A book written by an anonymous Dominican novice master, and enthusiastically approved by the General Chapter of 1283, leans heavily on Bernard and William of St Thierry. A little later, St Vincent Ferrer’s On the Spiritual Life teaches the same, monastic, spirituality.

It is this monastic context that shows the kind of experience of life underlying St Thomas’ whole moral theology.
Vietnamese, not Vietnamized
Authors: Hastings Cecily
Published: July 2007

It seems to be axiomatic, in most discussions about Vietnam, that the only important questions about that country’s future are ones relating to the Americans. To what extent are Vietnamese capable of efficiently taking over American policies and operations (i.e. just how good a substitute for an American is a Vietnamese) ? How worthy of American support is the Vietnamese Government? Will it survive American departure long enough to save American faces?, etc. During a seven-week stay in Vietnam last summer, I was lucky enough to avoid getting stuck in that foreign way of life in which Vietnam is seen simply as a function of American policy, and to meet some people and groups whose work and ideals vigorously make nonsense of the habit of defining everything Vietnamese in terms of American plans and expectations.

Not, that is to say, orphanages with teams busily arranging adoptions as a salve to Western consciences, in implicit denial that Vietnamese children have any Vietnamese future. Not relief organizations where the question is only what proportion of these supplies is being sold for private profit. Not the world on which a Vietnamese academic, met in circumstances of free and friendly discussion, commented bitterly, ‘We drink American drinks, drive on American petrol, fire American bullets and have our governments changed by American coups’. I saw that world too: you can’t miss it. But, luckily for me, I saw some very different things as well.

I met, for instance, some members of a team of people, the keyword in whose programme is ‘New Life’ (not to be confused with the once- notorious ‘New Life Hamlets’ of one of the pacification programmes).
A Third Reformation?: R. C Zaehner and Charles Davis on World Religions
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

“. . . . the old certainties are gone, and so departments of religion are springing up like toadstools throughout our demented Anglo- Saxon world. The less we believe, the more we talk about what other people believed. Are we really interested, or are we just kidding ourselves ?’

Thus, forcefully, the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. Certainly the fashionable currency of quasireligious mysticism, the resort to the private and aggressively anti-modern can, along with aestheticism and sexual liberation, remind one of the 1890s. Incense and beads abound; the lush, the exotic and the febrile. And Professor Zaehner reminds us that meditation takes time, and time takes unearned income, and is thus open to the same criticism as psycho-analysis. But it is not difficult to disengage from his testy remarks about washing machines and televisions, and his fine disdain for modern theology, matters which are of a substantial, complex and even hopeful contemporary relevance.

It has often been noted how imperialism helped produce anthropology and has left an abiding mark upon it. Imperialism also helped produce the enormous mass of philology, scholarship and translation which to this day means that a Hindu or Buddhist will probably turn to an European edition of, or critical commentary on, his own scripture. The study of religion shared also in the unreflexive nature of anthropology. The very confidence of imperialism inhibited, with a few exceptions, the open evaluation of the subversive problem of other religions—except as utopias, chinoiserie, or, in the hands of critics, a means of dismissing all religion as primitive.
Current trends in Chomsky
Authors: Crystal David
Published: July 2007

When the editor first suggested that it might be useful to have a short, article introducing some of Noam Chomsky’s ideas, I agreed, and was about to begin when John Lyons’ book appeared and made the exercise rather redundant. His introduction is unquestionably the most lucid and coherent account of Chomsky’s linguistic work that we have, and I thought it would be pointless to write at that time an article which would in effect be little more than a paraphrase of its topic sentences. There are, however, a few things that might be said about recent trends, not dealt with by Lyons, which are needed in order to complete an outline understanding of the contemporary scene in generative linguistics; also a few critical comments, from someone a mite less sympathetic to the Chomskyan approach than Lyons is, might be helpful to anyone wanting to reach an evaluation of this field. Hence the following remarks. But first, some background, and a review of what Lyons does say.

It is quite remarkable how Chomsky’s name has become a vogue word in intellectual circles. He is known about, sometimes, even when his discipline, linguistics, is not. To an academic linguist, of course, this can be embarrassing. I suppose it is always the way when a teenage discipline catches everyone’s attention through a famous practitioner: one does not know whether to be grateful, because of the publicity to the subject, or furious, because of the over-simplification and polemic which publicity invariably brings. In Chomsky’s case, in this country, the popular awareness of the man dates from the mid-sixties. I recall talking to a number of puzzled academics, in the spring of 1969, who could not understand why anyone should have queued in the rain to hear someone speak at Oxford, or queue without getting in at University College London, that same year. In common-rooms at that time, everyone seemed to be claiming his work to have particular significance to them—psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, educationalists, biologists—even, sometimes, linguists.
Does Moral Philosophy Pay?
Authors: Benson John
Published: July 2007

Thirteen years ago Professor G. E. M. Anscombe gave reasons for thinking that it is not at present profitable for us to do moral philosophy. The steady flow of books since then shows how little notice was taken. The three I shall be considering in this article present an opportunity to consider the case she made and its continuing relevance.

Miss Anscombe’s essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, is included in The Definition of Morality, together with twelve others which are meant to hang from the same peg: the question, ‘What is the meaning of “morality” ?’ The most interesting of them get up and walk away with the peg, opening up issues beyond the matters of usage which the editors tidily catalogue in their introduction. This is certainly true of Miss Anscombe’s. Her quarrel with modern moral philosophers is not that they are wrong in the way they use or define ‘moral’ and ‘morality’, but that in the way they use them these terms mean nothing at all. She argues that the concept of obligation, with its related moral sense of‘ought’, which has been given pride of place by moral philosophers since the eighteenth century, is intelligible only within a law-conception of morality. To speak of a moral ‘law’, of being ‘bound’, ‘obliged’ and so on, makes no sense unless one believes that there is someone who issues the law. The decay of divine law as a basis for morality has left these terms bereft of content, but not, unfortunately, of their ‘mesmeric force’. The smell remains for some time even when the gas-works has been dismantled. When ‘ought’ lacks the content provided by some actual law, telling a man that he ought not to commit adultery gives him no reason at all for not doing so.
Signposts Through the Hermeneutical Labyrinth
Authors: Mann Peter
Published: July 2007

Introducing the hermeneutical problem

It is a pity that theological communication so often gets bogged down because a key concept is never satisfactorily and clearly explained. The key idea then degenerates to a kind of magical word, periodically invoked, temporarily perhaps exciting, but ultimately mystifying. A few years ago the word ‘existential’ underwent this process of degeneration. Although the word had a clear meaning in Heidegger’s early philosophy, and indeed, as ‘existential analysis’, signified an enduringly valuable method, the basic insight represented by it failed to shape and illuminate the popular theological discussion. (A fine example of the kind of communication that should have taken place on a much wider scale regarding this word is still Cornelius Ernst’s 1961 Introduction to Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations.) Instead, the word ‘existential’ became used indiscriminately for anything remotely ‘relevant’ or ‘concrete’. This inflation ended by making the word worthless and unusable—where everything had to be ‘existential’, nothing could be any more. And the mystifying communicators and the befogged hearers concluded about the same time that the word had become meaningless. This need not have been the case: as so often before, a chance had been missed.

Perhaps something similar is happening now with the word ‘hermeneutical’. Wheareas ‘existential’ was used indiscriminately, ‘hermeneutical’ is often used in an almost gnostic fashion, as if allusion is being made to some arcane discipline allowing a privileged few access to philosophical and theological mysteries. And before the general meaning of the word has been assimilated within theological discussion and satisfactorily communicated, particular ‘hermeneutics’ have begun to proliferate, producing a situation at once labyrinthine and mystifying.
Human Relationships, Celibacy and Sexuality
Authors: McDonagh Enda
Published: July 2007

In the context of this colloquium it may be as well to begin by indicating the purpose and scope of an opening paper on this topic. The topic itself is so wide that any adequate treatment would presuppose expertise and experience far beyond the range of the author and perhaps beyond any single individual’s range. My approach is necessarily conditioned by my professional interest and experience, a moral theologian who is, in fact, a celibate by choice. The more precise meaning of these qualifications will, I hope, emerge later.

I can at once outline my approach and summarize my position by saying that I regard the celibate state as a form of human relationship in the way I regard the married state; that I see it as having in common with all other human relationships a sexual dimension; and that I am naturally concerned as a Christian theologian with the Christian meaning of human relationships and their sexual dimension.

It may appear a little unusual to begin a discussion of Christian celibacy in terms of human relationships. In its more conventional presentation, whether in terms of ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of God’ (Mt. 19) or of nuns as ‘brides of Christ’ the emphasis was on the ‘relationship to God’. It is perhaps one more (overdue) example of how we have begun to translate ‘God-talk’ into ‘man-talk’, but it does not need to have the reductionist consequences which some such translations involve. Whatever its fashionableness the procedure will in this instance, I hope, lead to a more careful consideration of the full meaning of Christian celibacy, including its ‘relationship to God’ dimension.
The Burden of the White Man's God
Authors: van der Hart Rob
Published: July 2007

In the land of our fathers there are many strangers. They have drifted away from their homes, across the sea, into the New World which they held to be ‘undiscovered’. Why did they seek a new land, and why did they leave their own? Why did they leave behind the soil from which they were born; why did they break away from the womb to which they belong?

With their minds disconnected—and freed—from the earth, they could master the forces of nature. And so they took possession of the land that seemed so empty, so much there for the taking, because no one claimed it. They did not know that man does not naturally possess the land to which he belongs; he does not say: I own this soil’. For how can we own the soil from which we are born and to which we will return? Is not man’s life encompassed by the earth and her dark forces, as in a wider dimension from which things and deeds receive their meaning?

Primitive man still knows this: he knows that the heat of the sun is only a blessing when it enkindles the potentialities of the earth, not when it scorches, burns into things so that everything withers. The warmth of God is felt in the fire that burns within the dark energies of the earth and that brings them to life. The God of natural man is an inward God whom he meets when dwelling with the mystery of his own existence, birth and death: the womb from which he is born and into which he will return. The earth is not God, but God is the earth, for here is the place where the divine presence is felt.
The Descent of Christ into Hell
Authors: van der Hart Rob
Published: July 2007

In the Apostles’ Creed the Christian professes to believe ‘in Jesus Christ who was crucified, dead and buried, descended to hell, on the third day rose from the dead... ‘; the Catholics are told by the Fourth Lateran Council that Jesus Christ ‘descended into hell, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven’; the Anglicans are taught (Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 3) that ‘it is to be believed that Christ went down into hell’; and the Lutherans accept (art. 9 of the Formulae Concordiae) that ‘the entire Christ, God and man, after his burial descended to hell, overcame the devil, destroyed the power of hell, and deprived the devil of his prestige’.

For once there is a doctrinal unity among the Christian confessions. But what is the Descent to me, a Christian of the twentieth century?

Shall I drag you before the Inquisition, threatening eternal damnation if you refuse to submit to the collective teaching of the Christian Churches?

But why should anyone want to force us into believing that Christ did indeed descend into hell when neither hell nor descent seem to have a real place in our lives?

Besides, it will not prove difficult to get acquitted of such charges of unbelief. It is easy to relegate abstract and fanciful religious information to the colourful mythological flourishing which Christianity appears to have picked up on its journey through religious traditions from all over the world. Is there not also that grave warning from St Paul against man’s tendency to leave his proper abode, concerning himself proudly with the affairs of the divine, or bending too eagerly over the hideous and dark places at the unapproachable centre of existence?
Sinning and Forgiving Sins
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

The key to what follows is to be found in knowing how to sin. Or again, it is not, for that could suggest that some appropriate advice was going to be given to those with practical difficulties in sinning. Now this is a matter on which advice may well be as undesirable as it is, for most of us, otiose; and in any case no such advice will be given here. No Kama Sutra of barratry, no Teach Yourself Embezzlement will be found in what follows. What will be found is some explanation of what is involved in saying that someone has sinned, which is far from otiose. For though sinning may be as easy as lying, the word ‘sinning’ can conceal a plurality of senses. Once this has been done, ‘forgiving sins’ is more than halfway to being explained. By way of a corollary it will then be shown why ‘forgiven- ness’, much talked of by some sensitive people today in connexion with forgiveness, cannot serve for explaining ‘forgiving sins’.

A first step in the explanation proposed is to distinguish ‘sinning’ as simply designating some particular piece of sinning, some event or process in the world, from ‘sinning’ in its proper sense, as not only designating ... (as before), but in addition also connoting that what is so designated has been held to have been done, or has been done, out of disobedience to God, or whatever. (In medieval innocence I shall speak of ‘disobedience to God’: let theologians or catechists substitute the phrase of their choice.)