bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Lonergan's Awake: A Reply to Fergus Kerr
Authors: Mathews William 
Published: July 2007

Reading Fergus Kerr’s article “Lonergan’s Wake’ (New Blackfriars, July 1975) as well as the book which inspired it leaves one with a whole new insight into the plight of Jairus. Containing as it does many misleading comments about Lonergan’s thought (for instance on p. 308 Kerr identifies the very common and ordinary occurrence of having an insight with the quite distinct and extremely rare event of self-appropriation) as well as totally destructive criticism it requires a reply. The criticisms given in Looking at Lonergan’s Method are held to be irreparably damaging, mark a watershed, and make Lonergan’s work seem ramshackle. Method, Kerr concludes, is a gross error. However, Kerr’s own uncritical acceptance of the accuracy of the interpretations of Lonergan by the contributors, of the soundness and significance of their arguments and comments, as well as the severity of his own conclusions are not themselves beyond criticism.It is claimed (p. 307) that firstly Lonergan has never engaged in even the most elementary analysis of the central concepts of his method, understanding and knowing; secondly, that he systematically misunderstands these concepts and makes all the mistakes that Wittgenstein warned us to avoid in his Philosophical Investigations. The first of these claims is preposterous. Lonergan has both written and lectured on Aristotelian, Medieval, Rationalist, Empiricist, and Idealist theories of concepts of knowledge and has worked out a highly sophisticated dialectical technique for choosing between conflicting theories. Granted that his starting point is not the analysis of concepts of understanding but of the more basic human performance of understanding itself. To simply study concepts of understanding without relating them to the experience of understanding, theological or otherwise, is to build castles in the air.
The God and the Machine
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley 
Published: July 2007

Once Wodehouse transported Mike to Sedleigh from Wrykin and Mike hated it on sight, the god appeared. And from the very first the god began to send up not only Sedleigh but public schools and the public school story:‘Hullo’, he saidHe spoke in a tired voice.‘Hullo’, said Mike.‘Take a seat’, said the immaculate one. ‘If you don’t mind dirtying your bags, that’s to say. Personally, I don’t see any prospect of ever sitting down in this place. It looks to me as if they meant to use these chairs as mustard-and-cress beds. A Nursery Garden in the Home. That sort of idea. My name’, he added pensively, ‘is Smith. What’s yours ?’‘Jackson’, said Mike.‘Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen ?’‘The last, for choice’, said Mike, ‘but I’ve only just arrived, so I don’t know’.‘The boy—what will he become? Are you new here, too, then?’‘Yes! Why, are you new?’‘Do I look as if I belonged here? I’m the latest import. Sit down on yonder settee, and I will tell you the painful story of my life. By the way, before I start, there’s just one thing. If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths, and I don’t care for Smythe. My father’s content to worry along in the old-fashioned way, but I’ve decided to strike out a fresh line. I shall found a new dynasty. The resolve came to me unexpectedly this morning. I jotted it down on the back of an envelope. In conversation you may address me as Rupert (though I hope you won’t), or simply Smith, the P not being sounded. Cp. the name Zbysco, in which the Z is given a similar miss-in-baulk. See?’
A New Life of St Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

Perhaps Fr Weisheipl rather labours the point that it isn’t enough to see St Thomas in a ‘speculative perspective’, that he should be studied with ‘historical method’ as well as ‘philosophical acumen’. Surely, that can be presumed. Can it, on the other hand, be presumed right from the start that to us readers as well as to the author St Thomas’s doctrine seems ‘sublime’ and his insights ‘transcendental’ (pp. 1-2)? Such encomiums would surely come better further on in the book. Fortunately there is, in fact, far more sense than rhetoric in this work, and far more history than exercise of philosophical or theological ‘acumen’; neither of which is really Fr Weisheipl’s forte. And as a historian—or better, as a biographer—he has done a very good job. Indeed I would say that he has written the best biography in English, and probably in any language, of our greatest theologian.His aim was the large one of presenting ‘a rather full picture of the life, thought, and works of Thomas’, but his special achievement is to give the most complete and reliable account so far available of Thomas’s external existence, including in this of course the chronology and circumstances of his writings. And this is a great achievement. The subject bristles with problems and difficulties. To be sure, the background and setting of Thomas’s life are fairly well documented, intertwining as this does with the history of three great institutions whose official records are preserved: the Dominican Order, the University of Paris, and the Papacy. But such records do not, of course, interpret themselves except to the scholar’s eye, and it is often a very delicate matter to assess the exact meaning of this or that technical term (studium, for example, in its various official or semi-official connotations) or the relative importance—relative to St Thomas—of this or that contemporary movement or event or series of events.
The Papacy and the Historian II: Peter et al
Authors: John Eric 
Published: July 2007

The historical study of the papacy begins with Peter and the study of Peter can only be undertaken in a scriptural context. I use the word ‘scriptural’ advisedly. Only if one gives the New Testament a special status as part of ‘Scripture’ does it make sense to sift its texts relating to Peter in the way traditionally done. Now one cannot accord the New Testament documents the status of Scripture on scholarly criteria alone. Scholarship has a very important part to play but it is necessarily subsidiary and incomplete.It is conceivable, though after the last few generations of international scrutiny improbable, that evidence might come to light, or some great scholar notice something previously missed, that would make it intellectually impossible to accord the texts we have scriptural status. It is conceivable that a scholar might demonstrate that the thought of the New Testament and the language that went with the thought were impossible for the first century AD, as Lorenzo Valla did with the Constitutum Constantini. But after a century of scholarship trying to demonstrate just this, we are left with texts, all almost certainly originally written in the first century and therefore much nearer the autographs than any Latin or Greek classical texts, that so far as scholarship can tell are ‘authentic’. But this has only negative value. It means it is not intellectually disreputable to take them as texts of the time and place they purport to come from. It means that arguments of the kind one still meets that there is no evidence that Jesus ever lived can only be accepted if the same criteria be applied generally and it be freely admitted that there is no evidence that Julius Ceasar ever lived, or that Cicero wrote a line in his life—if he ever had one— or that there ever was a people called the Germans.
Beyond Lonergan's Method: A Response to William Mathews
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

As I wrote in my review of the book (New Blackfriars, July 1975), all but one or two of the thirteen symposiasts in Looking at Lonergan’s Method initiate what seem like quite damaging lines of criticism, and in the space of an article Bill Mathews could no more refute them all (New Blackfriars, January 1976) than I could fairly present them all —and, like me, he has incorporated theological reflections of his own, which makes the debate so multilateral that it threatens to exasperate readers without access to the symposium or perhaps even to Lonergan’s own books. It seems to me, then, that extended argument about the soundness or otherwise of this phalanx of objections to Lonergan, and about the wisdom of my general endorsement of these objections, with all the grit of detailed claim and contradiction and the paraphernalia of criss-crossing page references and citations, would weary all but a tiny minority of our readers. These I am content to leave to judge for themselves between my reception of the symposium’s objections to Lonergan and the totally different assessment proposed by Bill Mathews (and by Hugo Meynell, forthcoming in The Month). For the rest, as regards readers without access to Lonergan’s books, I must of course emphasise—and after Bill Mathews’s article they will surely realise—that it would be unfair for them to take either the symposium itself or my review of it as the last word on Lonergan, enabling them in good conscience to defer for good the labour of reading Lonergan’s Method and allied works.What I want to attempt now—because it forced itself on me as I read what Bill Mathews had to say—is to bring out the difference in expectations and presuppositions which (I suspect) leads him and me to read Lonergan so differently. Since it is a difference in perspective that (I believe) divides theologians today, and not only theologians, the issue has the wider implications with which the majority of our readers may be assumed to have some acquaintance and concern. It is the question of the preconditions of any future theology.
History as Revelation
Authors: Walker Briefne 
Published: July 2007

Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.This passage takes us into the prison cell where Albert Camus’ Outsider awaits his execution, watching the changing colours of the sky in the daytime, and looking out for the stars at night. The chaplain had come before but he had refused to see him. He did not believe in God, and now, with the little life that was left to him, the question whether God existed or not had no importance. So he released everything inside him, and shattered the priest’s hopes of doing anything for his ‘soul’.During his life, Meursault had decided to do certain things and against doing other things, and all this time, he had been waiting for this moment, and the guillotine which was now very near. The priest with his talk about God and the after-life and divine justice, was merely an irksome interruption.‘I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an after-life’, the priest in Camus’ story persists. Of course he had, but it was no more significant ‘han wishing he could swim faster or that he had a better-shaped mouth. The memory of Marie, and those fleeting hours on the beach when they swam out into the deep water, clambered onto the raft and lay down together under the scorching sun: these were the only things worth having now. As for a life after the grave—well, all he wanted was a life in which he could remember this one on earth. The priest continued on the subject of God.
The Papacy and the Historian III: The New Ekklesia
Authors: John Eric 
Published: July 2007

The content of any notion of Catholicity must ultimately be referable to, and not incompatible with at the very least, Scripture. But the idea that it can be read out of Scripture as though such notions could be settled in scholarly footnotes to the text is quite mistaken. It is experiences of the development of the Church; discriminations about what went right and what went wrong, that illuminate what we read in Scripture. Now that experience and that development are continuous, so that Scriptural notions of Catholicity need to be scrutinised and refined, if not every generation, at least from time to time, but experience, both of the private and personal, and of the institutional is no more to be got easily than the truth of Scripture by a mere reading of the words on the page. The tendency is to be conservative, to interpret our experience as we have been taught to interpret it, and to accept the institutions of Christianity as we have known them. It is only occasionally, when things break down, when the fallacies we were brought up on, both in our personal experience and the nature of the institutions we have belonged to, are too manifest to be denied, that we are in a position to revalue the nature of Christian experience and particularly that experience of Catholicity that underlies our acceptance of some institutions and rejection of others. It seems to me that the age of the Fathers was very much not this kind of age.Patristic authors have been scrutinised almost as meticulously as the text of Scripture itself for justifications or condemnations of the papal version of the Petrine succession. Many such scholars have found their papalism confirmed—or their anti-papalism or even their indifference—because what you get out of the Fathers on this topic is very much what you took in in the first place. Of course, the Fathers as the interpreters of Scripture in the first instance, as the setters of the style of such interpretations, have and deserve special authority.
Speaking in Tongues: A Philosophical Comment
Authors: Davies Brian A 
Published: July 2007

Catholics with some biblical knowledge will clearly be familiar with the expression ‘speaking in tongues’. Those who have encountered what is known as ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’ or the ‘Charismatic renewal’ will be even more familiar with it. For within this, though not always considered essential, it certainly is regarded by many as a topic of considerable importance. Up to the present, however, there has been little of a philosophical nature said on the subject and the purpose of what follows is to go some way towards remedying the deficiency. My comments will be necessarily curtailed for the sake of space, but, hopefully, something of interest will emerge.Advocates of speaking in tongues undoubtedly have a biblical basis for introducing the topic. According to Acts, on the Day of Pentecost the apostles were ‘filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues’ (Acts 2.3, R.S.V. Cf. Acts 19.6-7; 10.66). In 1 Corinthians 14, although he has some harsh things to say on the subject, St Paul declares: ‘I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all’, and he makes it clear that speaking in tongues is a gift from God. The New Testament witness is not, however, a great deal of help in deciding what exactly speaking in tongues amounts to. It is not even clear whether the biblical authors regard the phenomenon as speaking in unknown but genuine languages. St Paul’s contribution is meagre enough and could hardly be called a fully worked-out analysis. He alludes to speaking in tongues only to make the negative point that this should not detract from Christian edification. Only when stating what he considers to be edifying does he begin to expand.
In Defence of Lonergan's Critics
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

Our editor has learned much about torture in recent years. Had he not done so, I doubt whether he would have had the ingenuity to think of inviting me to reply to Bill Mathews’s defence of Bernard Lonergan in the light of Fergus Kerr’s review of thirteen other people’s reflections on Lonergan’s Method!When we mounted that symposium at Maynooth from which Looking at Lonergan’s Method emerged we had a quite specific purpose in view. On the one hand, we believed that Method in Theology was far too important to be ignored. On the other hand, we knew that it would receive plenty of adulatory attention from those who have been so profoundly influenced by Lonergan’s work that they seem incapable of doing more than uncritically restating Lonergan’s position in Lonergan’s categories. We felt that there was room for a collection of essays which did Lonergan the honour of taking him sufficiently seriously to attempt critically to come to grips with some of the fundamental issues raised by Method (a similar attempt, by a group of Texan theologians, can be found in the Spring 1975 number of the Perkins Journal). It is, I think, a measure both of the importance of the issues, and of the perceived power of Lonergan’s contribution, that scholars as internationally distinguished, and from such varied cultural, philosophical and confessional backgrounds, as Hesse, Jossua, Pannen-berg and Torrance, should have agreed to take part in this enterprise. One shows respect neither for the issues, nor for Lonergan’s contribution to their clarification, if one simply leaps to his defence, as Bill Mathews tends to do, without—apparently—attempting first to understand the standpoints from which other scholars offer a critical response to his achievement.
Dr Karl Marx, your Lordship
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley 
Published: July 2007

In point of technique, the great triumph of the Wodehouse novels was in the use of first-person narrative. It is curious how little he in fact used the first person. As Usborne has noted, the novels consist of Laughing Gas (1936) which, involving a switch of personalities, really needs something like this, Love Among the Chickens (where Wodehouse was very nervous about it) and the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. The stories told by the Oldest Member, Mr Mulliner and the Drones Club Crumpet have very little action by the narrator: from time to time the Oldest Member plays a small part in one of his own stories (although on the only occasion when Mr Mulliner does so, to any degree, in ‘George and Alfred’, the result is poor). The Ukridge short stories give a good deal of action to Corky. The Reggie Pepper episodes brought out the weakness and strength of the technique. Wodehouse brooded on the problem when writing his first Jeeves novel:
By the way, it’s not all jam writing a story in the first person. The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him, and Bertie can know only a limited amount himself.What he came to do was to capitalise on this, turning the novels into a series of shock discoveries, part thriller, part increase of psychological perceptions. Usborne very properly notes the great debt to Conan Doyle at this point (ibid., 152-3). The model is clearly The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle’s one unflawed Holmes novel. If Wodehouse learned from Moriarty that an absent Aunt Agatha could be far more effective than her presence, he also drew the lessons on how to keep the Holmes figure off-stage for much of the action, especially when the mysteries loomed darkest.
Art and the Anthropologists
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).
Some Thoughts on Divorce
Authors: Fitzpatrick P J 
Published: July 2007

Some twenty years ago, that wise and good man Gerald Vann wrote an article in Blackfriars about ‘The Muddled Marriage’. It was concerned with the plight of those spouses whose unions are canonically irregular, and apparently without remedy; it contended that they deserve a love and a sympathy they do not usually get; and it suggested they should be told that they were not in a state of grievous sin or cut off from the life of the Church. Such assertions could hardly go unchallenged, and a lumbering attack, Roman in origin, appeared shortly afterwards. Indeed, rumour attributes to the incident the subsequent residence of Father Vann in the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, whither he was sent, like some latter-day Ovid, to expiate his sins by the Black See.Times have changed, and even Canon Law is not exempt. Ever more is being written on the matter of divorce and re-marriage. The bibliography at the end of this article (to which all references are made) shows that an up-to-date survey is available of how things stand in France, Germany and the United States; New Blackfriars, in June 1973, published several interesting articles to do with African attitudes in the matter; and the items by Harrington and O’Callaghan give useful accounts of scriptural and theological reflexion, with some further reading. Still more recent are the two works that provide the starting-point for this article. The first is an essay on the theology of indissolubility, the second an account, by a former presiding judge of the marriage-tribunal in the archdiocese of New York, of his own pilgrimage towards a change of heart in the matter. The two books contain between them most of the themes to be encountered elsewhere in what is being written : I wish to use them as an occasion for some remarks on the point myself.
Catholic Faith and Easter Stories: Reflections on Hubert Richards
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Is it possible for a Catholic to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ while at the same time classifying the resurrection narratives in the New Testament as examples of a special kind of fiction? Is faith in the resurrection compatible with treating the gospel accounts of an empty tomb and appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples as ‘stories’ ?With the recent publication of The First Easter Hubert Richards has presented Catholics with problems about the literary status of the resurrection narratives which cannot be ducked by theologians and preachers because for one thing the ready availability of the book means that many Catholics who have not been able to keep abreast of current biblical exegesis have suddenly been shocked into reconsidering how they should regard the gospel stories. It is depressing, but not surprising, to hear that some enquirers are being headed off with the information that Hubert Richards has resigned from the priesthood. His faith in God and in the resurrection shines through so manifestly in his writing that we need not linger over this futile manoeuvre.