bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Liberation and Contemplativity
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: August 2007

This is the second stage of an attempt to make a fresh assessment of the foundations of Christian morality, or of Catholic moral theology, in the light of the ideas of some of the thinkers who are concerned with the possibility of an alternative society. We who are committed to living and thinking eschatologically are bound to be interested in every serious endeavour to transcend the existing state of things. This paper will try to bring out the analogy between Marcuse and Heidegger.1 —Repression and LiberationHerbert Marcuse’s work stands well outside the ordinary Anglo- American framework of academic social and political philosophy. The reason for this is no doubt that he belongs to a tradition in which the impact of Hegel has been undergone and assimilated. What this amounts to, as we should see, is that he can take for grant ed, in his philosophizing, the intimations about the nature of man and of meaning which we associate with the Romantic movement. This has become part of our common consciousness too, but on the whole extra-philosophically. Indeed, the specifying difference between English and continental philosophies at the present time is not so much to do with technique and approach as with acceptance or rejection of the Romantic idea of man.It is instructive to reflect on the divided response to Marcuse's work. He is the most widely discussed thinker among the opponents of our way of life in America today. On the Old Left (orthodox communist Marxists and such-like) he meets with unanimous hostility: he is condemned as a defeatist, a pessimist, who thinks not scientifically but poetically.
The Encyclical and Niebuhr's ‘Impossible Possibility’
Authors: Ellis Ieuan 
Published: August 2007

The debate over Humanae Vitae reminds one strongly of the controversy—now much less pronounced than it was—over the nature of the ethic of Jesus. I want to suggest how an answer which emerged in that controversy may have a bearing on the present discussion among Catholics.The Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted in three main ways—as an utterly transcendental ethic, as an interim-ethic, and as an ethic realizable in terms of this present world. Broadly speaking, the first and third of these alternatives received most support and they have their counterparts in the present debate. The transcendental view commanded great respect; the ethic of Jesus was absolute, it promulgated a new sort of law demanding a superhuman obedience. The opposite view argued that the ethic could not be attained, and we had much better wrest significance from such principles of justice, fair play, equality, etc., as we had and attempt a progressive improvement of humanity with these. In practice, this often corresponded with the third view about the nature of Christ’s teaching: Christian morality was about a human ideal, a vision of a better world after which we must all strive.The most lucid critic of these positions was Reinhold Niebuhr, in a long line of books, notably Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in 1936. Niebuhr holds that the great mistake of most of the usual interpretations of the ethic of Jesus is their failure to realize the ‘true dialectic of the spiritual life’.
Christian Materialism
Authors: Hibbert Giles 
Published: August 2007

This paper could well have been called Christianity and Materialism, but since it is concerned with arguing, from the Christian side, for a more materialistic interpretation of Christianity than is usual, the present title seems more appropriate. It is addressed, however, not merely to Christians but to all those who are interested in bringing together the values inherent in Communism and in Christianity, without detriment to either and to the enrichment of both.Two things are to concern us. Firstly, how far it is possible (or indeed necessary) for a Christian to be a genuine materialist—even in some sense an atheist—without departing from traditional Christian belief in God; and secondly, how far it would be possible for a Marxist to believe in God, even to be a member of a Christian Church, without betraying his materialist philosophy and the political humanism to which he is committed. These questions could probably be dealt with more easily amongst either Christians or Marxists alone, but whilst much valuable progress is to be made in that way, it is also important that both sides should be able to discuss this matter together. To facilitate and further such dialogue is precisely the purpose of this contribution.What I want to be able to show to Christians is how necessary it is for them, if they are to be true to Christ, to appreciate and absorb the value of an atheistic materialism such as that of Marx; and in doing this, to show to Marxists that Christians,
Letter and Spirit: St Paul
Authors: Murphy‐O'Connor Jerome 
Published: August 2007

One of the paradoxical side-effects of the shift of interest in New Testament studies from historicity to tradition-history (Redaktions- geschichte) has been an increased awareness of the historical character of revelation. In the process of distinguishing sources and noting literary techniques we become very conscious of the personality of the writers. We discover human minds grappling with the problems of their communities, minds operating within the problematic imposed upon them by their culture and interests, minds limited by their resources. This discovery has destroyed the concept of the New Testament as an ageless monument. In its place we have a library whose volumes reflect the varied personalities of their authors. The inspired character of their insights guarantees that they cannot be ignored, but recognition of the fact that they have been conditioned historically means that they cannot be accepted without critical examination.This conclusion has implications for both dogmatic and moral theology. Attention has centred in the area of dogma, as is only natural given the traditional understanding of the relationship between the two, but unfortunately lack of adequate investigation into the relation of language to religious thought has rendered the discussion less fruitful than one might have hoped. This difficulty does not arise with regard to morals because here there certainly can be no question of simply modifying the verbal expression. The problem posed by moral precepts is not one of understanding but of relevance: to what extent are concrete specific directives given to first-century communities binding today?
Resolution and Community
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: August 2007

The point about being a Christian (other versions of this are no doubt possible!) is that one lives, loves, works, feels and thinks in the light of the disclosure/discovery of a sense of end (finis, telos), and hence of a possibility of happiness (beatitudo, eudaimonia), which in turn points to a whole style of being-with-others, a particular form of community (amicitia, koinonia). In principle this is both nuclear and global. As well as the smaller projects, such as the guerrilla bases, proleptic utopias, regenerating sanctuaries and the like which our local church-communities should be, there must be permanent transformation of the structures of interdependence, ongoing liberation of mankind as a whole, active sponsoring of the righteousness of God which happens as the righting of relationships within society. Salvation occurs as community: that is unmistakably the Christian emphasis. In other words, then, politics cannot be divorced from ethics. It is in the ethical, precisely, that the relation between the personal and the social-political is negotiated. And if that is a commonplace in the tradition represented by St Thomas Aquinas, as it is, however uncharacteristic it may be of many Catholics ‘in public life’, it is also a principle which is central in the literary- critical tradition developed and sustained by Scrutiny.The plan of this paper, then, is first to outline how the Scrutiny tradition forms an essential part of the long revolution against the society which inhibits and falsifies all reference to an ultimate source of meaning and an ultimate ground of being,
Violence and Misery
Authors: Camara Dom Helder 
Published: August 2007

I. Speaking to Willing EarsFirst of all, let me speak on behalf of the Third World, and thank those of you who represent the Haslemere Group for the Declaration which you are transforming into a programme of thought and action. I assure you, in my capacity as a man of the underdeveloped world, that your vision could not be clearer nor your attitude more courageous. This is what I have already said in Manchester, at the Manchester Student Congress, organized by the Student Christian Movement.I have come here to co-operate with you; to urge you on in your effort in spite of the obstacles before you. I have come here to testify to the truth of the theme of this Conference.I will try to show you quickly how the underdeveloped world is being crushed by a triple violence.II. The Triple Violence against the Underdeveloped World1. Internal colonialism, which means established violenceTaking Latin America as an example, when people ask me if I think our Continent is threatened by violence I feel that the question is looking ahead to the possible, eventual violence of those who are now oppressed, whereas it does not take into account the already existing violence of the oppressors—a small privileged group whose wealth is maintained at the expense of the misery of million of their countrymen.Those who are unfamiliar with Latin America may think I am exaggerating; they may think I am being demagogic, or deliberately provocative.
Culture and Revolution
Authors: Cameron J. M. 
Published: August 2007

This collection of essays discusses the issues that are important for Catholics and others who find in neo-Marxism, at least in some of its varieties, something that speaks to their condition. The situation is slightly complicated in that some of the writers, notably Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams, are also affected by a densely and peculiarly English background, that of the tradition constructed (if a tradition can be said to be constructed) by Raymond Williams and his circle out of their reading, in both senses of the word, of Cobbett, Arnold, George Eliot, Tawney, Lawrence, Leavis. I am not sure that I have ever wholly understood the theses advanced by these writers. In part this is because I find their style opaque. Certain terms seem to be terms of art, but one is left to pick up the sense as one goes along. ‘Totalization’ is one that is coming in; ‘structure’, of course, both as a substantive and a verb, but this is perhaps the influence of American sociological writing; losing and making connexions between ‘cultural meanings’ seem to be important but elusive processes; we have ‘praxis’, and so on.One would wish to press for examples. One of the great lessons of Wittgenstein’s later writings is the need to measure formulations against examples. At any rate, we are given by Mr Williams himself and by Mr Eagleton one of the theses over the interpretation of which I remain confused. Summarily it is that if we want to have or to bring about or to realize more fully a common culture in England—and it is always taken for granted that there is a moral imperative to work for this end—then we must strive for revolution or socialism or both as the only way of bringing this end about.
Calepin
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: August 2007

Since the last of these chronicles (New Blackfriars June 1967), I should no doubt have been spending my time dutifully reading the Goncourt prize entries, or the latest offering of the nouveau roman, I have in fact been doing nothing of the kind. If I were to look for the two most interesting novels recently written in French I would plump unhesitatingly for two quite different books, both by established writers, one experimental in style, the other rigorously traditional. The first is a fascinating exercise in science-fiction by Robert Merle, Un animal doué de raison (Gallimard, 1967), the second is Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (Gallimard, 1968).I haven’t, either, been doing much in the reading of the fifty-odd books which have appeared on ‘the events of May’, having a suspicion that more of the ideologies, at any rate, were represented in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, where plaintive practicalities (‘Baby-sitters wanted’) mingled with political exhortations and various kinds of contempt for the past (‘Dire qu’il y a toujours des chrétiens!’).This is not because I feel there’s a good deal of I told you so’ about the student revolt in Paris and elsewhere, but rather because I believe there is a much more profound revolt going on in the comparatively unnoticed depths of society in the French provinces. The latter-day chouans of Brittany are no doubt the most spectacular of these rebels against a hyper-metropolitan government which knows little about their problems and cares less; but there have been manifestations of an aggressive provincial counter-attack in other quarters too, and two books by Robert Lafont give an interesting analysis of this: ‘Paris versus the provinces’ struggle in terms of colonialism.
Authority and Obedience in the Church Today—I
Authors: Torbet Ronald 
Published: August 2007

It is a truism—and one repeated so often that it is starting to become tedious—that the issue of Humanae Vitae has precipitated a crisis of authority and obedience in the Church. Indeed the Roman authorities have been talking in these terms for several years now.What, of course, is tedious about the phrase is the indiscriminate way in which it is employed. It may be helpful just to look at what the term ‘crisis’ basically means. It means, of course, simply ‘judgment’, ‘testing’, ‘questioning’. So, if we talk about a crisis of authority and obedience, we mean that authority and obedience are under question. But many jump immediately to the conclusion that this means that an attempt is being made to overthrow all authority and obedience in the Church. This seems to me a peculiarly obtuse misreading of the situation. There is undoubtedly a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction within the Church at the current theory and practice of ecclesiastical authority, but this is something quite different from wishing to throw overboard all authority in the Church, lock, stock and barrel. I do not see why this dissatisfaction in the Church should not be as much a ‘sign of the times’ for the Church as was the dissatisfaction with, say, the Church’s attitude to other Churches, or with the sclerosed ecclesiology that dominated in post-Tridentine times till our own days. These dissatisfactions had a fruitful result: the spirit and theology behind Vatican II. Why should we weep and be fearful regarding the dissatisfaction about authority?
Father Tyrrell and the Catholic Crisis
Authors: Goetz Joseph 
Published: August 2007

The title of this paper expresses a certain wilful, or at least studied, ambiguity. What Catholic crisis? you may ask; or, more realistically, which Catholic crisis? Upon the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July last year, there was a single point of agreement between those Catholics who welcomed the papal letter as a major contribution, in Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s memorable phrase, for stemming ‘the Gadarene slide into American morality’, and those other Catholics who recognized it at once as yet another offering for that ever-growing catena of documentary embarrassment which the Holy See, in a kind of reverse Peter’s Pence, has generously provided in the course of the last 150 years. The nearly unanimous response—one of the notable exceptions being the author himself, if we are to believe some observers—was that we were now on the threshold of a new crisis, of faith, of authority, what you will, which would reduce the dimensions of the Modernist crisis, 1894-1910, to something resembling a parochial squabble between the vicar and the mothers’ union.There are others, on both the ecclesiastical right and left, who would hold that the present crisis in the Church is simply chapter two, or the logical outcome of that earlier one, that the problems at the heart of the modernist controversy have re-appeared, sometimes in rather new garb, and that we must once again face them and come to terms with them.
Two Readings of St Augustine
Authors: O'Brien Denis 
Published: August 2007

In the literature that survives from the ancient world Augustine is unrivalled, except perhaps by Cicero, for the range and intimacy of his writings. The lovely folio pages of the edition published in Paris by the Benedictines of St Maur from 1679-1700, still the most recent more or less complete edition of the extant works, contain by far the greater part of the titles catalogued after Augustine’s death by his disciple Possidius. Certainly enough has survived for us to see the personality and ideas of Augustine unfold over more than forty years, from the first flush of conversion at Cassiciacum, expressed in the almost adolescent idealism of the Soliloquia and the De beata vita, until his death at Hippo in 430, with the last chapters of the De civitate Dei completed some years before, and the Retractationes cut short, as scrupulosities should be.The Confessions were written in the earlier part of this period. In book seven Augustine tells us that he finally rid his mind of the lees of Manichaeism by his reading ‘certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin’ (vii 13: I have cited throughout the paragraph divisions of the Maurist edition, without the chapter divisions of the editio princeps). In book eight Augustine is converted to Christianity by reading St Paul. But the conversion has still a Platonic element, for Augustine describes his experience in the garden at Cassiciacum partly in language that Plotinus had used to describe the soul’s ascent to the beautiful.
Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages—II
Authors: Parmisano Fabian 
Published: August 2007

As John Noonan reads him, Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in everything except his sexology, in which he reverts to the rigours of the traditional Augustinianism. For the Angelic Doctor as for Augustine the marriage act is not a product of love and is not to be motivated by a desire for pleasure; it is justified only in its purpose of multiplying mankind. Noonan concedes (briefly, and reluctantly: ‘A case can be made . . he says) that late medieval theologians, Thomas included, were ‘somewhat in advance of their society in their declarations on the ideal of married love’, but, he adds and emphasizes, they failed ‘to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse’. (Contraception, Mentor ed., pp. 299-311.) The purpose of this article is to summarize St Thomas’s doctrine on marriage; to show that he did indeed teach that love and marriage go together, and did also teach that love—human, passionate, pleasurable love—not only entered into the purposes of the marriage act but was also the root and source of the act’s ultimate beneficial value for the spouses.St Thomas’s reflections on love and marriage are found scattered here and there through his vast opera, but his teaching appears in full and concentrated form in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, dists. xxvi-xlii. This early teaching of St Thomas was, in the middle of the fourteenth century, incorporated into a Supplement to the Summa Theologiae by an unknown Dominican friar in an attempt to complete the Saint’s master work. Accordingly, it is these two loci that have served as the present paper’s principal sources.
Winter Rose
Authors: Cameron-Brown Aldhelm 
Published: August 2007

There is a story about two monks who lived long ago and who had taken a vow never to touch a woman. One day they were walking together through the forest, when they came to a clearing. Through the middle of the clearing ran a stream, rather wide and deep, and at this season rather turbulent. By the banks of the stream stood a pretty girl, obviously in some distress because she wanted to cross the stream but was afraid to. Hardly pausing in his stride, the elder and taller of the two monks picked her up in his arms, waded through the water, set her down safely on the further side, and walked on without waiting for her thanks. The younger monk was astounded. He crossed the stream—with some difficulty, because he was smaller—and then bounced along behind his companion, seething with suppressed criticism. At last he could stand it no longer. Catching up with the other, he said, in a voice that showed how deeply scandalized he was, ‘Brother—your vow!’ The elder monk looked round at him in surprise, and then said, rather sharply, ‘What! Are you still carrying that girl?’Of our Lady above all people it can be said that her spirituality consisted in eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.
Character and Liberalism—II
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard 
Published: August 2007

A similar concept of character to John Bayley’s was presented by Iris Murdoch, in an influential essay called ‘Against Dryness’, published in Encounter in 1961. Her approach is more overtly philosophical: she argues that in the face of the failure of traditional liberal philosophy to develop an adequate concept of man, the novel can give us a full sense of the uniqueness and mysteriousness of human personality. She finds these qualities exemplified in the great novelists of the nineteenth century, particularly the Russians, and contrasts their kind of novel with the typical fictional modes of the twentieth century: the ‘journalistic’ novel of accumulated fact and information, a degenerate descendant of literary naturalism, which is often a formless, inflated daydream; and the ‘crystalline’ novel of dry aesthetic concentration, which is more concerned with an ideal of form than with conveying the variousness of reality. A normative note emerges at the end of Miss Murdoch’s essay:Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for the imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency of course may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always present a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.There is a clear consonance between Iris Murdoch’s ideas and John Bayley’s, and, again, the contrast between these ideas and the characteristic utterance of the Continental or American avant-garde is striking.