bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lonergan and Poetry 1
Authors: Fitzpatrick Joseph
Published: July 2007

In one of the exchanges between Fergus Kerr and William Mathews on Lonergan, Kerr describes Lonergan’s treatment of literary language in Method in Theology as ‘jejune and unsatisfactory’, as lacking in ‘delicacy and inwardness’; a ‘lacuna’ in his sytematic exposition (New Blackfriars, February 1976, p. 60). This may seem a little harsh given that Lonergan’s overarching concern in that book is not literature but a viable method for contemporary theology. But even as a convinced Lonerganian, I believe Fergus Kerr, in reporting somewhat uncritically the findings of what is, overall, a bad book (Looking at Lonergan’s Method), has picked out a weakness or blind spot in Lonergan’s philosophical awareness. There can be no doubting the somewhat wooden and—the word is inescapable—external character of Lonergan’s pronouncements on literary language and, I would add, on art generally. William Mathews tends to agree, though he adds a tantalizing qualification: ‘I agree with Fergus Kerr that Method is seriously deficient in its treatment of the poetic but unlike the Republic, I believe that poets and dramatists will be welcomed in Lonergan’s theological democracy’ (New Blackfriars, August 1977, p. 367). Mathews lets the matter rest there, but I should like to take up and elaborate his suggestion (or what I take to be his suggestion) that Lonergan’s basic cognitional theory, or transcendental method, can be shown capable of integration with the nature and function of literary language, for it is surely a sound test of any account of how language functions that it can explain how and why poetry affects us as it does.
Dominicans and Humanism
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The past decade has seen a quickening of intellectual life among Italian Dominicans of the Roman Province, leading to certain initiatives and achievements which deserve to be better known than they are to Dominicans outside Italy and to others interested in the work of the Order. I refer to the activities of the group of friars, whose centre of operations is the splendid old “studium” of their Province at Pistoia, near Florence, who produce the excellent bi-monthly review Vita Sociale and have revived and wonderfully transformed the old historical journal of the Italian Dominicans, Memorie Domenicane. It is to this latter production that I want, in these brief notes, to draw attention; and along with it, to two important books from the same Pistoian workshop dealing-in; very different ways and in one case, it is true, only indirectly-with that same turning-point in the history of Catholicism, and indeed of western culture as a whole, on which the historical research that has gone into the new Memorie Domenicane (= M.D.) has tended to concentrate—the turning-point indicated in phrases like ‘the rise of humanism’, where this term is taken to signify a typically non-medieval outlook expressed in a new form of culture whose ‘rise’ coincided inter alia with the decline of medieval scholasticism. It need hardly be said that such a use of terms begs many questions, but that it answers to some historical reality needn’t be doubted; it being surely unquestionable that Petrarch and Erasmus, though separated by nearly two centuries, were ‘humanists’ in very much the same sense, and that this entailed in both of them a strongly critical attitude to the scholastic culture and mentality.
Women's Ordination: Can the Debate be Revived?
Authors: DiNoia Joseph A.
Published: July 2007

After the initial furore provoked by the Vatican Declaration nearly two years ago the discussion of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church has come to a virtual standstill. The debate has stalled largely because both defence and criticism of the Declaration have not always been on target.

For one thing insufficient attention has been paid to the significant developments which this document embodied. For the first time the Catholic Church officially abandoned many of the standard theological arguments which had been used in the past to legitimate the traditional policy barring women from ordination. The Declaration conceded that the patristic and scholastic arguments, previously accorded such weight, were in large measure conditioned by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs about women’s alleged innate deficiencies as compared with men or their inborn aptitudes for domestic and nurturing roles. The traditional policy thus came to be defended for wrong or inadequate reasons.

In the Declaration’s central argument traditional claims about women’s inferiority and subordination to men, or their alleged incapacity for pastoral responsibility played no part. Moreover claims about the direct bearing of gender-specific traits on female/male role differentiation in society and the church were used to highlight rather than to demonstrate the propriety of the traditional policy. Such claims were combined with ecclesiological doctrines to yield an argument for the complementary distribution of male and female roles in the church, and with christological doctrines to yield an argument for the necessity of maleness for the priesthood’s representational function. But the Declaration carefully qualified the persuasive force to be accorded these arguments in its overall case by designating them as illustrative rather than demonstrative.
Lonergan and Poetry II
Authors: Fitzpatrick Joseph
Published: July 2007

So far I have attempted to explain from a Lonerganian perspective how literary art works and inevitably this has led to a consideration of how we, as readers, respond to literary art. To assess the capacity of Lonergan’s transcendental method to illumine the nature of critical response we could do no better, I think, than compare the structure of that method with the recorded practice of F. R. Leavis, the English critic who has arguably contributed more than anyone this century to our understanding of the nature of critical engagement with literature. Both Lonergan and Leavis emphasize the need to train and cultivate the feelings if moral maturity is to be achieved and, as a literary critic, Leavis is especially insistent on the ability of literature to effect this and, indeed, would partly justify the place of English in the university on these grounds (see ‘Education and the University’ in Scrutiny, Vol. 9). But it is on Leavis’s analysis of the structure of critical response to literature that I should like to focus. It may seem paradoxical to compare Leavis to a philosopher since he was at some pains to decline the invitation of the philosopher Rene Wellek to state ‘more explicitly’ and ‘more abstractly’ the assumptions underlying his practice and was especially resistant to the philosophical notion of a norm by which poets are measured. It has been suggested, however, that Leavis was less philosophically innocent than he protests to be and that it was the dominant logical-scientific paradigm of philosophy at that time (1937) to which he was so resistant. In any case, in his reply to Wellek and in several other places in Scrutiny he sets out the manner in which he comes to appreciate a poem and reach a critical evaluation. The importance of such recorded. practice to Lonergan’s method is that Lonergan claims to be thoroughly empirical in approach, that his mapping out of method is simply the objectification of the processes that occur spontaneously in actual practice (see Method, p. 4).
Body and Person
Authors: Cameron J.M.
Published: July 2007

The question of the relations between body and mind, the physical and the personal, this question is the strongest example one could cite of a philosophical question. If one wanted to teach someone just what the strange inquiry known as philosophy is, or has traditionally been thought to be, this, rather than the question about chairs and tables in untenanted rooms, would, I think, be the right question to choose, both for its richness and for its puzzling character. The puzzle about the relations between the mental, the personal, the spiritual, on the one hand, and the physical, the bodily, the material, on the other, is not (or doesn’t seem to be) a puzzle about what is in fact the case. It is not a question such as the question “What is the function of the pancreas?” might be. Even if we don’t know the answer to this question, we know the kind of observations that would be relevant to settling it. But if to the question “How are body and soul/mind/spirit/personality related?” we give the reply, “Look and see!” the point seems to have been missed. We have all the information we need in order to answer the question, surely; we know what it is to walk and run, to speak and sing, to add up a column of figures, to look out on the world and pick out the roses and the blackbirds, the sun and the moon and the constellations, to distinguish the smooth from the rough, the sphere from the cube, the animate from the inanimate, the past from the future; we can even, though this gets very difficult and our lives are filled with mistakes in this respect, distinguish friends from enemies, true lovers from false, the solidly good from the merely clever.
On Celibacy
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

After much thought and prayer I have come to the decision that I am free as a Catholic priest to marry. I have come to this after long years of wrestling with myself and of pondering both the pastoral and missionary needs of the Church and the basic nature of the Christian priesthood, marriage and freedom. I have for years argued persistently for a major change in the Church’s position in this regard, a change which I see as absolutely crucial for the wider effectiveness and coherence of the aggiornamento set in motion by Pope John. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that in this matter as in others one cannot go on indefinitely simply affirming in print and in speech a point of view completely at odds with the structured ordering of one’s own life. There comes a moment when it is morally necessary to pin oneself to the truth and importance of what one has affirmed to be true and important.

I have been a priest for twenty-two years. I accepted the obligation of celibacy at ordination without questioning because I wished to be a priest and this was the law of the Church, and I have kept it. In the cheerful, zealous, withdrawn atmosphere of a seminary it did not seem much of a problem. I was even convinced for a time that I did not want to marry, but for many years now I have wanted to very much. So this decision is first of all a response to an honest sense of my own need. Yet at present I am living happily with my mother; I have many dear friends, and I am extremely busy as a university lecturer and writer. I have certainly not come to this decision out of loneliness or depression or because I have lost interest in the Church or the Catholic priesthood. Quite the contrary.
Pasolini: The Last Days
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2007

So the British public is not going to be able to see Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom. Perhaps some mature reflections by one who saw the film as long ago as July 1976 at the quaint Pagoda cinema in Paris, might be of interest to the readers of New Blackfriars.

At the outset it appears that Pasolini is using a device we find in his film Pigsty where he tries to tell two related stories at the same time and keeps cutting from one to the other. There is first the story from de Sade of the four, rich, degenerate men who, looking for some new stimulus for their jaded appetites plan a monumental orgy. They seek out beautiful and innocent boys and girls, take them to a remote castle and there indulge in all manner of depravities for 120 days at the end of which they torture and kill their victims. Then there is the story of the short lived fascist republic that was established at Salo in North Italy in 1943-4 and the enforced recruitment of young peasant boys to serve the Nazis in the war against the allies and their own countrymen. But it soon becomes apparent that the fascism that Pasolini is interested in is not so much Salo as the ‘nonfascist’ fascism of present day Italy under the capitalist system. The historic Salo is soon forgotten and the four men are shown as pillars of Italian society : Il Duca, Monsignore, Excellenza and Presidente. It is these contemporary figures who become the protagonists of the de Sade story. The orgies take place in three stages or gironi. A word chosen perhaps to remind us of the Dantean circles in hell. Each of them is introduced by a female character who recites the scene that is enacted before us.
Christianity and the Revolution
Authors: Castro Fidel
Published: July 2007

In October last year in Kingston, Jamaica, at a meeting presided over by the Prime Minister, Mr. Michael Manley,Dr. Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, addressed representatives of the Jamaican churches and answered questions about religion and the Cuban revolution. The following is a slightly abbreviated transcript of what was said.

It was stated here that I’d give a general outline of relations between the Church and the state in Cuba. It seems to me it would be convenient if I were brief in my opening remarks. I’d like to start by saying the following: in our country a very profound revolution took place which brought about a radical change in the relations of production and in social relations.

History shows that whenever such revolutionary events have taken place all sorts of conflicts have arisen, including conflicts between the Church and the state. This happened during the French Revolution, as you know; it happened during the Mexican Revolution, many problems of that nature arose; and it also happened during the Russian Revolution.

Well, also in our case, in Cuba, some conflicts arose in the beginning. Actually, in my opinion, this was due on many occasions to the leadership body of a given religious congregation or to the social group most closely connected with such a religious congregation.
Che, the New Man and the New Woman
Authors: McDonagh Francis
Published: July 2007

The ‘Catholic Left’ in Britain, during its short life, showed little interest either in spirituality or in political activity outside journalism. There are quite good reasons for these omissions, but it is interesting to find that they are not repeated in the practice of leftwing Catholics in Latin America. Action and spirituality, and the tension between them, are important themes of Sheila Cassidy’s account of her experiences in Chile, and her story is all the more interesting because she is so patently not a Catholic left groupie.

The personality which comes through this book is very much that described by Michael Hollings in his introduction: ‘enthusiastic . . . efficient, impetuous, starry-eyed, down-to-earth, practical, emotionally uninhibited, politically a child’. The rambling and occasionally gushing narrative almost makes one forget at times that its author was obscenely tortured with electric shocks by the Chilean secret police.

These qualities also give the story an appealing freshness. It is almost a classical adventure story, in which the author became involved largely by accident. No political or religious motives took Dr Cassidy to Chile. She had got to know a Chilean medical student during her own studies, and one of Chile’s attractions was the chance to gain surgical experience with less night work than in Britain. Dr Cassidy spent two years in Chile before returning to England to see her dying father, and a further two from the beginning of 1974. The military coup against the Allende government took place towards the end of the first period and Dr Cassidy’s imprisonment occupied the last two months of the second.
Sociology and Exegesis
Authors: Freer Fercus
Published: July 2007

Theology is a deeply conservative discipline, which is why the panic that breaks out immediately at the threat of new questions must always seem so exaggerated to people trained in other fields of study. Any new approach is usually rejected at first on the grounds that there is no evidence for it. As soon as the exponent of the new approach has shown that there is indeed evidence for his interpretation he is at once accused of reducing all the evidence to fit his thesis, and of wanting to reinterpret the whole of Christianity in function of his new insight. Finally, when he shows that he has no such intention, he is told that what he has found out has been well known all along. The new approach is first rejected because it is impossible, then because it is illegitimate, and finally because it is old hat.

Gerd Theissen has undertaken a sociological analysis of the earliest phase of Christianity, which he defines as “the renewal movement within Judaism brought into being through Jesus and existing in the area of Syria and Palestine between about AD 30 and AD 70” (p. 1). Far from enjoying august and exalted status as Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn, as the blurb proclaims him to be, he is (at the time of writing) still fully employed as a school-teacher. He gives lectures as a Privatdozent, for which of course he receives no salary. He thus has neither the leisure nor the technical apparatus to armour his research with the impenetrable shield of erudition and argument behind which most theological work is conducted. In fact, as he writes in the Preface, “the work came into being while I was involved in teaching religion and German, and is addressed to readers who are also involved in practical work of this kind”.
Mary Crawford and the Comic Heroine
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

You may perhaps like the heroine as she is almost too good for me.

Letter 1815

The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic.. . . Letter 1815

If there is anything to be said for my suggestion (New Black-friars June 1978) that Jane Austen was unlikely to have been in sympathy with Fanny Price’s religious attitude, and in fact probably shared Mary Crawford’s cynical view of the Established Church and such overtly Christian institutions as matrimony, it may be wondered why she nevertheless gave Fanny Price and her clerical cousin, Edmund, such central roles in the novel. Obviously, there can be no definitive answer, but the problem becomes less intractable if we give sufficient weight to Jane Austen’s extremely lively sense of humour. There was nothing she enjoyed so much—especially of course in the affectionate intimacy of her correspondence with Cassandra—as laughing at her neighbours and the world, and it was above all this spirit of comedy that informed virtually all her writing prior to Persuasion. If Mansfield Park wears its humour with a difference then no doubt it was the more amusing to tease and confuse her admirers even when these also happened to be a favourite brother.

Henry is going on with Mansfield Park. He admires H. Crawford: mean properly, as a clever pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it.

Letter 1814
No Good at Grunwick
Authors: Hawthorn Jeremy
Published: July 2007

‘This book is a critical introduction to political theology, not an enthusiastic initiation into it’ (p 37). Such was the intention of Alfredo Fierro in making his own sizeable contribution to the subject. Drawing together a great variety of sources he tries to sketch the development of ‘political theology’, and suggests some directions for the future. This not without a sense of his own relative position: from the outset he states that ‘this book was written in Madrid, Spain, and finished in the summer of 1974 (xii). (The Militant Gospel, SCM Press 1977 xv + pp. 453 £4.50).

The book divides into three parts, Situation, Programme and Theory, eight chapters in all. In the first part, changes in the climate of thinking are described which have brought political theology into being; the second goes through the formulation of the new theology; while the third reflects on the significance of it and challenges the presuppositions of several authors.

First, though, some general comments about method. The term ‘political theology’ is used rather too frequently—I’ve already used it twice—and moreover as if one was always clear what is meant by it. Then, related to this, is Fierro’s tendency to put together several ideas about a concept without contrasting them very accurately or stating a clear view of his own. Often this makes no difference, and one appreciates the breadth of reference; but there are times when some distinctions have to be made (notably the discussion of ideology, pp 243-7), and a failure to do so is unhelpful.
Faith and Experience V: Religious “Natural History”
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

The Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford embodies a brave and ambitious project devised by Sir Alister Hardy, to turn theology into a science comparable with other modem sciences. As a biologist, Sir Alister is convinced that “religion” is a side of man’s experience which can no longer be neglected by empirical science. He believes that there are scientific, as well as philosophical, grounds for attacking materialistic monism (DF p. 23); and he considers such an attack necessary, for otherwise “civilization may yet cut its throat with Occam’s razor if it does not realize in time that materialism is ignoring a large part of the data of experience” (DF p. 228). In his Gifford Lectures of 1963-5, the second series of which make up The Divine Flame now happily made available to us again in the RERU re-issue, and in The Biology of God, he indicates what form this attack might take, and it is a powerful and many-fronted attack. Sir Alister’s own professional contribution, as a biologist, is essentially to be found in his evolutionary theory, in which he alleges that a purely mechanistic doctrine is untrue to the evidence. This means that the claim that religion and everything that might be meant by “spirituality” have been demolished by evolution is far from proven. The attack is furthered by evidence from a wide range of sciences, including psychology, neurology, social anthropology, and Sir Alister is particularly concerned to draw our attention to the claims of parapsychology. Obviously a lot of work remains to be done in all these fields, but a strong case can be made for saying that ideological scientism of the old school is not nearly as well grounded scientifically as some people would like to think.
The Coherence of Theism
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Richard Swinburne’s new book “is concerned solely with the central core of theistic belief, that God exists, that there is a God. It is not concerned primarily with whether this belief is true or with whether \ye can know it to be true, but with the prior question of what it means and whether it is coherent.” (p. 1) The discussion begins with a general analysis (Chapters 4-6) of the way in which talk of God is to be understood, whether it is analogical, propositional and so forth. There then follows (Chapters 7-15) a consideration of what Swinburne takes to be involved in the claim that there is a God. Swinburne concludes that theism may be coherent, but that a certain understanding of divine attributes is necessary to sustain this conclusion. In particular, God’s eternity cannot be equated with timelessness, and both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘omniscient’ need to be understood in more narrow a fashion than is sometimes the case. Swinburne also maintains that the coherence of theism may only be properly affirmed where there is good, inductive evidence for the truth of theism. There is no direct proof of coherence. Consequently, “those theists who claim to believe that there is a God ‘by faith’, in a sense of the latter expression which entails that they do not have good inductive grounds for this belief, will, if I am right, have to face the consequence that they do not have good grounds for believing that the claim which they make is a coherent or logicallly possible one.” (p. 296)

So much for the overall argument of the book. What about the cogency of its details? It seems to me that Swinburne’s whole discussion is spoiled by a fundamental error of approach, a pervasive wrong move. On this I shall comment presently.
The Rich Young Man
Authors: Mackrell G. F.
Published: July 2007

The Trojans heeded too late the warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts and admitted into their city a wooden horse full of Greek commandos. One had to be even more circumspect about Greek gods bearing gifts and the legendary Midas should have known better when he asked them for the gift of the “Golden Touch”. Yet when he touched his leaden goblet and saw the dull grey change to bright yellow he thought that his cup was overflowing. As indeed it was, until the wine touched his lips. Then the purple liquid congealed into solid gold. He stretched out a fatherly hand to pat his daughter’s head and withdrew it a fraction of a second too late; she froze there — a golden statue. For some people money is everything; for Midas everything was money.

The Synoptics recount the story of another gentleman with similar values:

“And behold, one came to him, saying, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good?-One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.’ He said to him, ‘Which?’ And Jesus said, ‘Honour your father and mother, and, you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ The young man said to him, ‘All these things I have observed. What do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19: 16-22).
Faith and Experience VI. Is Conventional Religion Necessarily Naughty?
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

One of the most intractable questions involved in the whole programme of research undertaken by the Religious Experience Research Unit is: “What kind of experience counts as religious?” Very wisely, RERU have not, as yet, given themselves any definite answer to this question. But at least some of them realise that an answer will have to be found eventually (This Time-Bound Ladder, 1977, p. 48). Sir Alister Hardy seems to envisage an answer emerging from the actual empirical research itself, but, as I pointed out in my last article, (New Blackfriars, February, 1979), he can be convicted of being more dependent on certain dogmatic presuppositions himself than he seems prepared to admit. I find it difficult to see how any collection of reports of experiences, backed up by any number of observations and investigations, could yield a definition of religion, independently of any kind of doctrinal principle. At some stage I strongly suspect that RERU will find them selves faced with the need to make a serious study of religious and metaphysical doctrines propounded by different individuals and schools of thought. This Time-Bound Ladder is a lightweight, but interesting, beginning. Obviously no one is going to regard a series of after-dinner conversations as a substitute for careful theological and philosophical enquiry; but it may well be the case that this kind of informal airing of issues picked more or less at random was, in fact, the most appropriate mode of encounter, at this stage of the investigation, between RERU and the theorists. The results, at any rate, make rewarding reading. But they make awkward reviewing material.
The Politics Of The Spirit
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

This is a fresh attempt to come to grips with the question of Christian involvement in politics. The object will be to decide if possible what involvement Christians ought to have with politics in virtue of their commitment to Christianity. I do not expect the conclusions to apply to all Christians, whatever their stage of life or position in society. I expect to come to general conclusions which will have to be separately applied by individuals to their own lives, as one would expect in an ethical enquiry of this sort, which intends to use the gospel as a source. The political context of this enquiry is that of Britain in the 1970s rather than say, Latin America or Southern Africa, though our very political relationships with those parts of the world will not be forgotten.

One of the difficulties of the discussion is the ambiguity of the notion of politics. In a general sense politics has to do with the distribution and use of power in society. So politics in one sense is simply a matter of engaging in the operation of the accepted institutions of society which are to do with the distribution and use of power. Here conflicts are institutionalised, as in the two-party system of British politics or the union/management structure of industry. The institutionalisation of conflict is typical of Western liberal democracies, which owe their continued existence to the successful achievement of it. It is politics in this sense that Catholic laymen of the recent past were urged to take part in, i.e. to play their part in the institutions of democracy such as the political party or the trades union.
Vatican I And The Papacy (I): A Proud Appellation
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

“Perhaps the definition will limit the Pope’s power”: thus Newman wrote, less than a fortnight after the Vatican Council issued its decrees on papal jurisdiction and infallibility, to one of the many anxious Catholics who turned to him for explanation and comfort (Letters, XXV, 170). A few weeks later, answering the wife of the founder-editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, he pursued the same idea a little further: “As to this particular doctrine (Papal infallibility) I am not at all sure it will increase the Pope’s power— it may restrict it. Hitherto he has done what he would, because its limits were not defined—now he must act by rule” (p. 204). But he goes on to say that he cannot prophesy how it will be. With a century behind us since 1870, during which many Catholics have accepted, and allowed other people to believe, that the pope is infallible and that he has the right to do what he likes with the Church, it is surely evident that, if we return to the decrees and read them in peace, Newman’s hunch is verified that they mark an end, rather than an aggrandizement, of papal power. The attempt to secure fat more (because many Catholics at the time plainly were seeking to commit the Church to a form of permanent papal dictatorship) finished by securing far less than the practice of papal authority had often assumed in the past. Now that we can read the decrees without being intimidated by the ultramontanist interpretation so frequently put on them, almost from the outset, it is possible to appreciate, as Newman did at the time, how drastically the texts limit the pope’s prerogatives. Indeed, as he suggests, the miasma of triumphalist propaganda with which the decrees have been so successfully obscured must itself derive its animus from the frustration, on the part of Manning and his publicists (such as Ward and Herbert Vaughan), at their at least half recognizing that so little had been secured.
Vatican I and the Papacy 2: Conditions for an Orthodox Pope
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

While Vatican I is commonly regarded as the council of papal infallibility, and much time and energy were indeed devoted to that matter, both inside and outside the Council, the key to the doctrine, and the real stumbling-block for Christian unity, surely lies in the third chapter of the Constitution “Pastor Aeternus”. This is the text which commits Catholics in communion with the Roman see to the belief that the bishop of Rome as pope is endowed ex officio with “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which relate to faith and morals but also in matters relating to the discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the world”. Our immediate concern at this stage of our enquiry must be to make sense of the notion of universal jurisdiction, but it should be stated now that the doctrine of papal infallibility needs to be situated in the perspective of the doctrine of papal jurisdiction. The right, and the duty, of having, on occasion, at last to define a matter of doctrine affecting the Church as a whole, must be treated as an implication, or an example of the exercise, of the claim for the successor of St Peter of an all-embracing pastoral care for the universal Church. “The supreme power of teaching”, in the words with which chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus” opens, “is included in the apostolic primacy which the Roman pontiff, as the successor of Peter, chief of the Apostles, possesses over the whole Church”.
Christians or Capitalists ?
Authors: Smith Lewis
Published: July 2007

I had better start by declaring an interest: Cosmas Desmond (hereinafter CD) is a friend from South African days, and it is in his flat that I write this review, of his book. Readers will be able to allow for any possible loss of objectivity; in another way the location is a positive advantage since CD’s flat is a centre of South African contacts and involvement. This is directly relevant to the work done in the book, since it is self-confessedly a committed work and a socialist work, not a piece of arm-chair theorizing but a thoughtful statement arising directly out of work in a traditional communalist (President Nyerere’s useful word, see p. 131) society, ruined as it is by White political and economic exploitation, work that is for a future African socialist state. It is refreshing to read a marxist argument in which “theoria” and “praxis” do not bespatter the pages till towards the very end, and this refreshment is directly related to the rootedness of the book: I remember a weary paper on “Theoria and Praxis” delivered by an Afrikaner philosophy teacher at Wits University, but the South African philosophical association is not the locus out of which any revolution, even a peaceful one, will come.

The thesis of the book is that the only Christian option in South Africa now is a socialist one. This is carefully argued both theologically-politically and politically-theologically (Part I and Part II); only theology has the right and duty to confess the emptiness of theology when faced with positive political option, only politics can argue positively for a particular political option — for one thing it has to be a realistic possibility, and theology can hardly calculate that.
Vatican I And The Papacy 3: The Attitude Of The English Bishops
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The idea of holding a general council may be traced to a suggestion made to Pope Pius IX by a curial cardinal as early as 1849. The immediate background may be outlined as follows. In 1799 Pope Pius VI died in exile, a prisoner of the French. In 1813 his successor, Pius VII, a prisoner at Fontainebleau, was forced by Napoleon into signing documents which gave the emperor virtual control over the Church. With the collapse of Napoleon the pope was able to return to Rome to begin to restore his authority. When he died in 1823 the main issue at the long conclave that followed was whether a man could be found who would stand up for the independence of the Church over against the great Catholic princes. The man who was found, Leo XII, set about reorganising the Vatican with great vigour, but his reign lasted little more than five years. His successor, an old sick man who had once been among Napoleon's prisoners, died within two years. It was only in 1831, then, that, with the election of Gregory XVI after a conclave lasting seven weeks (the Spanish government intervened to veto the election of another candidate), the modern ascendancy of the papacy really began. Significantly enough, in the dark days of 1799, when he was still a young monk, lie had brought out a book entitled II trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa contra gli assalti dai novatori, combattuti e respinti colle stesse loro armi, which appeared (naturally enough) in a third edition in 1832 and was translated into German in 1838. Dedicated to Pius VI, then of course a prisoner, the book identifies the Church with the juridical structure of its government, insisting that it is monarchical, and goes so far as to say that the Church is infallible because the pope, its head and foundation, is so.
The Future of Democracy in South Africa
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

“The struggle of the African National Congress is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by theiT own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my life-time I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

These are the last public words of Mr Nelson Mandela before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. He evidently thought then that democracy had a future in South Africa, though he had already been driven to the conclusion that it could only be achieved by some kind of revolutionary violence.
Agreed Statements. Hazards and Possibilities
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

At the end of their frank and comradely talks, the Presidents issued an agreed statement. . . . Not only politicians, it would seem, should concern themselves with such things. Official custodians of doctrine in Churches which claim to teach truth on an important range of issues are showing marked enthusiasm for talks — le dialogue even, in some places — and for issuing agreed statements. Precisely what, however, is being agreed on in an agreed statement? Or, what is it that political negotiators or separated brethren are to be understood as really doing when issuing an agreed statement? That question will not quite be answered in the present inquiry, but enough hazards risked by the well-intentioned when they make such statements will be exposed, to make it easier for someone with enough real knowledge of a wide enough and fair enough sample of agreed statements in doctrine and in politics alike to work out a good answer. My direct interest is in theological doctrines here, and in hazards arising from inadequate analysis. It may well be, however, that in producing agreed statements in doctrine that are of real worth, the crucial issues are neither theological nor analytical, but rather political. I conclude therefore by discussing some of the significant points raised by a jurist only a few years ago in a paper which should be taken into account by those concerned before a new wave of agreed statements comes out.

Agreed statements, it should be acknowledged, have played no inconsiderable part in Christian doctrine and in Christian theologies: ‘It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us ...’, ‘This sacred synod decrees . . .’ ‘We believe in God . . .’, and so on. They have played their part in Heilsgeschichte too: There came false witnesses, but their witness did not agree. . . . Then came two false witnesses, who said . . . Simply by agreement false witness does not become true, nor false doctrine trustworthy.
The Challenge of the Gospel Miracle Stories
Authors: Robinson Bernard
Published: July 2007

Among the many questions raised by the Gospel stories of Jesus’ miracles, half a dozen are perhaps particularly pressing. How do the miracles differ from magic (if they do; Morton Smith’s recent book Jesus the Magician argues that they do not)? What criteria is one to invoke to distinguish authentic from inauthentic miracles in the Gospels? What have Form and Redaction Criticism to say about the miracle narratives? Do the Gospels see the miracles of Jesus in a different light from the oral tradition and from the historical Jesus? Are the ways that Jesus, the oral tradition and the evangelists saw the miracles valid and/or mandatory for Christians today? I hope to say something by way of answer to each of these questions, but my method will not be to examine the questions in the abstract, but to look at three specific miracle stories and to attempt to cope with the problems that each throws up.

First, though, one general point. Namely, that the New Testament evidence makes it very difficult to subscribe to the view that Jesus did not work any miracles at all. In the Gospel of Mark, 209 out of 666 verses (the figures come from Richardson) deal directly or indirectly with miracles. Press back into the Gospel sources, if you will, and look in turn at Q, Mark, special Matthew, special Luke, and John and in each (probably independent) source Jesus is seen as a miracle worker.
Father Vincent McNabb ‐ Pioneer Ecumenist
Authors: Keldany Herbert
Published: July 2007

Towards the end of his many sided life Fr Vincent wrote “God knows how much I have striven and prayed to mend the shattered unity of Christendom”, words that may seem strange to those who only knew him in his later days, for he had developed other interests. But a study of his writing shows him to have been among the early Catholic ecumenists and to have kept up his interest throughout his life. His labours in this field span the formative years of the movement which is one of the glories of the Church in this century. Indeed it is plain that he not only laboured but suffered in the cause of Reunion -as it was known, and sometimes dreaded by many of his contemporaries.

In retrospect he traced his interest to lessons learnt at his mother’s knee, where he acquired “his first desire, never since quenched of seeking to love, even more than to convert, his separated brethren”. The uphill path he trod not only shows that ecumenism did not begin with Vatican II but how he dealt with problems that are still with us. While Prior at Woodchester, in the first years of the century, he was in correspondence with Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was host to his Cotswold neighbour, the Rev Spencer Jones, Rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, who became a leading Anglo-Catholic after the publication of his classic England and the Holy See. He was also writing in the early issues of The Lamp, a paper edited by Fr Paul Wattson, who after his reconciliation was to promote the Unity Octave through it for almost half a century.
Trotsky's Morals And Ours Political Morality And The Revolutionary Christian
Authors: Macpherson Duncan
Published: July 2007

This article is based on Trotsky’s article Their Morals and Ours (New International, February 1938) which I will refer to as TMO. Taken together with his second article The Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism (New International, 9 June 1939) which reiterates many of the same arguments TMO is important because it represents a clear and consistent account of the moral philosophy of Revolutionary Marxism. In passing I should point out that even talking about the moral philosophy of Marxism is a little contradictory since for Marxism political philosophy and moral philosophy are the same thing. In classical times no distinction was made between the political and the moral obligations of man. In the Greek city state a good member of the polis was quite simply a good man. Only with the rise of capitalism did it become necessary to posit the Kantian moral imperative as something external to the social and political life of man. In his essay on Kant Herbert Marcuse argues that Capitalist ideology was faced with two conflicting needs. On the one hand it was necessary to foster individualism as an essential component of the growth of capitalist economy but on the other hand it was necessary to subordinate the individual to the needs of the bourgeois state. If the individual were subordinated by crude repression this would expose the mythological character of capitalist freedom of the individual. By positing the moral a priori, a call to duty above class, Kant provided bourgeois ideology with the solution to this problem. Like Marx but unlike Marcuse TMO is polemical rather than speculative in tone, written in a specific historical situation to meet specific charges against Marxism.
Faith And Experience: X The incomprehensibility Of God
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

Traditional Christian theology draws on a remarkable number of terms to express its conviction that God is beyond reach of human concepts and language. More than forty different words have been noticed in the works of Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, referring to the incomprehensibility of God in one way or another. Some of them derive from scripture, others from Philo, others from Greek philosophers; some of them find their way into the liturgical texts of eastern Christendom. They leave us in no doubt that it is radically impossible for the mind of man, or of any other creature, to fathom God. “The being of God is incomprehensible to the whole creation”, as Chrysostom concludes.

Not surprisingly, the theological tradition of divine incomprehensibility overlaps to a considerable extent with the kind of philosophical speculation we have been considering in the previous articles. But the theologians have their own slant on the matter, and it is with this that we shall be concerned in this article.

In the first place, the theologians are convinced that it is an essential part of Christian doctrine to assert that God is unfathomable; it is part of revealed truth.

This comes out in the orthodox response to the claim made by the Anomocans in the fourth century. Apparently they were saying, “I know God just as he knows himself’ Eunomius is quoted as saying, “God knows nothing more of his own essence than we do”. This provoked St John Chrysostom to preach a series of sermons in Antioch on the incomprehensibility of God's nature, as being an article of Christian faith. Though he does sometimes use simple arguments of a more philosophical kind, he concentrates chiefly on scriptural and doctrinal evidence.
Faith And Experience XI Revelation And Human Experience
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

“No one has ever seen God; but the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, has interpreted him to us” (Jn 1:18). The early Christian theologians who develop the view that man cannot know God truly unless God reveals himself to him are conscious that they are not only following the teaching of scripture, but also echoing and confirming a belief which has deep roots in Greek tradition. Clement of Alexandria can quote several texts from the Greek poets expressing the difficulty or impossibility of any man on earth penetrating very far into the mind of God. An Orphic hymn is cited, which says that God is “utterable only by the immortals”; Pindar is shown echoing the sentiments of Isaiah 40:13: “Why hope for wisdom? One man is not much better than another. It is hard for a mortal mind to search out the counsels of the gods”. Hesiod too says, “There is no seer among men on earth who could know the mind of Zeus”. Solon similarly says, “The mind of the immortals is quite unclear to men”. Even more radically, Xenophanes is quoted by Sextus Empiricus as saying: “As far as anything clear goes, no man has seen anything nor will any man see anything concerning the gods and all the other things I am talking about; even if he should hit the mark with outstanding accuracy and say something quite perfect, he would not know it himself. Everything is subject to opinion”. In Sextus’ view, Xenophanes is one of the philosophers who have rejected outright the idea that there is some “criterion of truth” available to us; he interprets him as meaning: “at least in matters which are not apparent, no man knows what is true and knowable; even if he does happen to hit on it, he still does not know that he has hit on it, he is left simply With a suspicion and an opinion”. Xenophanes ridicules people for generating gods in their own image, and, in anticipation of Rupert Brooke’s delightful poem about fishes’ concept of heaven, says that if cows could draw, they would make their gods look like cows. For himself, he only claims to be saying what seems probable.