bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Adrienne von Speyr and the Mystery of the Atonement
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) is this century’s most remarkable mystical theologian: a mystic, that is, become theologically articulate. Although her place in the history of Catholic theology is, thanks to her influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), entirely assured, her life and teaching—above all, her doctrine of the Atonement—are of considerable interest in their own right.Adrienne von Speyr was bom at La Chaux des Fonds, in a Frenchspeaking part of Canton Berne, Switzerland, on 20 September 1902. Her father, an eye surgeon, came from a Basle family distinguished for doctors, (Protestant) clerics and businessmen. Her relation with her mother was bad, but, to compensate, she enjoyed what her biographer, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, calls ‘a totally childlike existence in God and for God’. On such matters as how to be with God in prayer, and the value of sacrifice and renunciation she was instructed by an angel. Though she lived all her life in an academic milieu and became herself, as we shall see, a professional person, and, moreover, had as her confessor and biographer the most learned Catholic theologian of the present century, we cannot make sense of Adrienne’s mysticism unless we accept that, to her awareness, angels and saints were constantly coming and going in her life, and behind these the Holy Trinity itself. She got on well with her father, who allowed her to go with him on his hospital rounds in order to visit sick children. Similarly, in the holidays, when she stayed with an uncle who was director of a psychiatric hospital near Berne, she was found to have a great gift for calming the patients, getting through to them, and cheering the depressed. From these experiences came her resolve to become a doctor herself. Her own health was below par. She was often ill, and had recurrent backaches caused by inflammation of the vertebrae.
Immortality and the Soul
Authors: Selman F. J. 
Published: July 2007

Many people have thought you could have the immortality of the soul without the resurrection through not seeing that the body and soul belong to one another by nature. Now, however, we are getting the opposite view: the resurrection without the immortality of the soul. Although it may be vain to hope for immortality without the resurrection, it is not apparent that the same person is raised up without something of us continuing in existence after death. But there is no immortality of the soul anyway unless we have souls.To More, however, writing in 1515, and perhaps giving his own answer to those who, like Pomponazzo, denied the immortality of the soul, as well as showing an awareness of the view of those who, like Cajetan, did not think it could be demonstrated by reason, it seemed that a people practising a natural religion would hold that the soul is immortal. In the Second Book of Utopia, he tells us that whenever the Utopians discuss felicity or blessedness they add to the reasons of philosophy certain principles taken from religion, for the inquiry of which they think reason of itself weak and imperfect, and one of these principles is: That the soul is immortal. The Utopians themselves seem to have regarded not believing in the immortality of the soul as something inimical to society, for further on we read that, though their founder, king Utopus, wanted there to be liberty of religion among them, on this one point he laid it down that ‘no one should conceive so vile and base an opinion of the dignity of man’s nature as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body’. We find a similar connection between human dignity and the soul being made a little later, in 1512, by the Dominican, Fr Antonio de Montesinos, who, in his famous sermon pointing out to the Spanish conquerors of the New World that the native Indians possessed human dignity, appealed to the argument that they too had souls. ‘Are they not men?’, he asked, ‘Do they not have rational souls?’
Over the Ashes
Authors: Loughlin Gerard 
Published: July 2007

Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.
The Sound of the Analogia Entis Part II
Authors: Murphy Francesca 
Published: July 2007

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,
“. . . was excavated with sufficient success out of the ruins of atomistic psychology ... by Christian von Ehrenfels”.The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,
”... Everyone who has listened to Bach knows that in the classical fugue, the slow rhythmical arrangement is oppositional: the first theme is slow and reposeful, the second runs along swiftly, and the third contains a rhythmical hammering; and every hearer knows that this varied thematic construction is determined by the rationale of the fugue‘s total construction. Something similar occurs with the Gospel. The eschatological theme, … is incomprehensible without the cadence of Christ’s suffering. The vertical form of the Son of God who descends from the Father and goes back to him would be illegible without the horizontal fom of historical fulfilment …”
Philosophy and Theology in the Monastery: The Thought of Dom Illtyd Trethowan
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

Dom Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside, died on October 30, 1993. One of his last publications was a recent review in New Blaclfriars, but his writings, and his efforts to make available works of theology and philosophy by others, go back a very long way. His first article appeared in The Downside Review in 1935 (he subsequently came to be Editor of The Downside Review). His first book, Certainty, Philosophical and Theological, appeared in 1948. Before then he translated Eugène Masure’s seminal study Sacrifice du Chef (1944), and, as early as 1940 (together with Frank Sheed) he translated Etienne Gilson’s La Philosophic de Saint Bonaventure. Between 1948 and the time of his death he published 110 articles, plus numerous book reviews. He also produced seven substantial books, an edition of the writings of Walter Hilton, and several translations of important authors not much known in the English-speaking world—most notably, Maurice Blondel, Louis Lavelle, and Louis Bouyer.Dom Illtyd was not a monk who travelled to teach and spend lots of time outside his monastery. In 1969 he lectured for one semester in the U.S.A. (at Brown University in Rhode Island), but he was otherwise a fixture at Downside from the day that he joined the community there. Yet simply in terms of pages printed, his published works and translations clearly place him in the forefront of twentieth century British Catholics writing on religion and trying to make available the writings on religion of others.
The Human Person: Animal and Spirit
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

In 1988 David Braine, who has taught philosophy at the University of Aberdeen for many years, published The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, a metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Now, in this second book, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Duckworth, London, 1993) which certainly stands on its own although we are frequently referred back to the earlier book and forward to two (if not three) forthcoming volumes, he reconstructs the argument advanced by Thomas Aquinas in favour of our immortality, an even more audacious enterprise in the present intellectual climate.The first move is to cut off every form of dualism which splits the animals that we human beings are into parts that then have to be related to one another. The traditional mind/body dualism to which Platonist Christians have always been attracted is, so David Braine argues, no different from the brain/mind identity theories which currently flourish under such labels as physicalism, behaviourism and so on. While of course he conducts the argument with reference in general terms to current literature he is surely right in saying that the modern debates raise no issues that would surprise Aquinas. The Platonists paid attention only to the immateriality of the human intellect while the pre-Socratic Ionians believed that knowledge is simply physical (cf Summa Theologiae, la 84, 2). The greater threat nowadays to the unitariness of the human being is, as Braine says, various forms of materialism and, in particular, some of the Artificial Intelligence theories.
Scripture for Christian Conversion
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

The church employs its scriptures for the attainment of human authenticity in Christian conversion, conceived as both event and lifelong process. Its pedagogy aims at the transformation of the cognitive and affective consciousness of human subjects, of the decision-making and activity of responsible human agents, in every sphere of their relational existence (intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, national, international). The theocentric and Christocentric process of self-transcendence in Christian conversion entails four complementary aspects: metanoia (transformation), kenosis (generosity), diakonia (service), and koinonia (friendship).Scripture is both informative and above all transformative. The Old Testament is a call to theocentric self-transcendence in religious conversion. The New Testament is a call to Christocentric self-transcendence in Christian conversion. Christocentricity guarantees the authenticity of theocentricity in religious conversion.Conversion entails the transformation of the human and its world in all the spheres of human intentionality and conscious operations. As subjects, our cognitive and affective consciousness undergoes a transformation in both the event and continuous process of conversion. The transformed or ‘converted’ subject has a new way of knowing and loving: it is no longer the center of its world. The theocentric self-transcendence of religious conversion becomes Christocentric when we are enabled by Jesus Christ to know as we are known and to love as we are loved (1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2; Gal 4:9). The theocentric sel-ftranscendence of Jesus Christ enables our own, it transforms our cognitive and affective consciousness by making us sons in the Son.
Creating Options: Shattering the ‘Exclusivist, Inclusivist, and Pluralist’ Paradigm
Authors: Markham Ian 
Published: July 2007

Organization and classification of material is essential as an aid to effective communication. Good teachers and writers will use labels to organize material, which play a valuable role in simplifying a debate. They provide a way in for the student or reader. However, this organization and classification of material is not a neutral and objective enterprise. One’s classification will hide certain basic decisions and options.It is the argument of this article that the ‘theology of religions’ debate has been stifled by an over-emphasis on the standard threefold paradigm. I will be taking issue with John Hick’s judgment: ‘the simplest and least misleading classification is the now fairly standard threefold division into exclusivism (salvation is confined to Christianity), inclusivism (salvation occurs throughout the world but is always the work of Christ), and pluralism (the great world faiths are different and independently authentic contexts of salvation/liberation) ‘. I am not alone in wanting to point out the cracks in this paradigm, but I want to go a stage further and attempt to formulate one option which cannot be embraced by the traditional paradigm.The underlying problem with the traditional classification results from the conflation of three matters:1. The conditions for salvation.2. Whether the major world religions are all worshipping the same God.3. The truth about the human situation.The traditional paradigm emphasizes the first, is confused about the second, and, with regard to the third, links truth questions with soteriology. This is easily exposed as unsatisfactory.
On Baptising the Visual Arts: A Friar's Meditation on Art
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.
George Steiner and the Theology of Culture
Authors: Ward Graham 
Published: July 2007

In 1990 George Steiner was invited to give the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University. They were well received. In fact, in Donald MacKinnon’s words, they were ‘an outstanding series’. They are as yet unpublished. While we still await their publication, the paperback version of Real Presences, his most outstanding explication so far of a theology of culture, has appeared. Furthermore, in 1993 John Hopkins University Press are publishing, under the editorship of Nathan Scott, a collection of essays on various aspects of George Steiner’s work. This article attempts to assess the preoccupation with theological issues evident in Steiner’s work from the beginning.That culture and its meaning are underwritten by God is a thesis with a long history in literary studies. From the Greeks to Proust, from the Torah to Thomas Mann, the argument that the great artist is ‘inspired’ and communicates that which transcends both himself/herself and his/her public is an ancient one. When George Steiner began defending this argument (in opposition to the formalism of New Criticism in the States) in the late Fifties and early Sixties, he might appear therefore as a late believer in the traditions of liberal humanism. He could be seen as a man ascending a path into the mountains well- trodden before him by the likes of Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and T.S.Eliot. Aware, from his examination of the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of ‘genius [who] had fallen into the hands of the living God’ (T.D. p.44), he began by exploring the frontiers of language. In 1961 we find him writing about ‘the retreat of the word’ in contemporary culture in an essay with that title. Silence threatens, he prophesies. But it is the silence of the meaningless, the illiterate; the silence of ossified cliche. In the early Sixties we find him preoccupied with this silence and countering it with another form of silence—the silence of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of Dante’s Paradiso—where language arches back towards its origin, ‘where the word of the poet ceases, [and] a great light begins’ (L.S. p.59). In 1966, in the remarkable essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner goes on to make the claim that here at the frontiers of language is ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. . . [W]e experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God’ (L.S.p.58).
On Not Starving the Unconscious
Authors: Fisher Anthony 
Published: July 2007

The Hillsborough football disaster in 1989 left Tony Bland in what doctors call a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (‘PVS’). His heart still pumped, he breathed, and most of his other vital organs worked, all unassisted. His eyes opened and shut; he yawned and moved reflexively; he reacted to loud noises with a start. But as far as doctors could tell he could not perceive, think or feel, and would never regain consciousness in this life. The English High Court, the Court of Appeal and (last month) the House of Lords all ruled that all food, water and antibiotics might be withdrawn from Tony Bland and sedatives administered so that he would die peacefully and soon.The judges were keenly aware of the moral, legal and social dilemmas which the case occasioned. In general they took the view that the law should closely reflect what is ‘morally right’ in such areas, or at least ‘what society accepts as morally right’. They thought there were three principles to be balanced and applied in this case; the sanctity of life; the autonomy of the patient; and the duty of care. The principle of the sanctity of human life was said to be deeply embedded in our law and ethics, in Britain and throughout the world, included in international human rights documents, and strongly felt by people of all religions and none.
Strangers to Ourselves
Authors: Reilly Patrick 
Published: July 2007

In our time, solidarity has become a term increasingly used by people in relatively affluent parts of the world to express their sense of pity for, of sympathy with, of reaching out to, some oppressed or disadvantaged section of fellow human beings, invariably so submerged that they are unable to speak for themselves: the starving masses of Africa, the exploited poor of South America, the new underclass who live, surplus to requirements, redundant ciphers, without hope or dignity, in the decaying ghettos of our great western cities. Some such sentiment is the driving- force behind liberation theology—the conviction, justified by that unforgettable passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, that if we are to find Christ in our world, it can only be in the dispossessed and wretched of the earth (when you did this to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me); together with the chilling corollary that when we ignore the poor, we are slighting the Saviour himself, telling the Son of God that his sufferings are no concern of ours.It is no purpose of mine to disparage or belittle liberation theology, to fault the modem Church for its wholly admirable decision to identify with the poor, to choose Lazarus above Dives—this is, after all simply a copying of the Master, the imitation of Christ. If he chose to be bom powerless, it would be foolish and idolatrous for his followers to worship power. If he spoke so trenchantly about the risks of wealth, his Church, far from admiring, should feel a special compassion for those poor rich people so at risk of suffering the same catastrophe as the wealthy fool in the parable.
This is the Lamb of God
Authors: Inman Anne 
Published: July 2007

‘This is the Lamb of God’. These are the words used at the Eucharist to describe Jesus Christ present in the consecrated bread. Jesus, sacramentally present, is identified with the passover lamb, the sacrifice without blemish, and the dumb sheep of Isaiah 53, representing passivity and acceptance of suffering as in some way redemptive. However, for a fuller picture of what it means for Jesus to be ‘Lamb’, it is necessary to turn as well to the Book of Revelation. Here we find that, apart from brief references in Chapter 1 to other Christological ideas involving a figure which seems to combine the Ancient of Days, Jesus Christ and an Angel figure, Christ is always referred to as ‘Lamb’. The Lamb for the author of Revelation is the symbol of power.The Lamb of Revelation is seen in heaven. The action that takes place in heaven is the judgement that takes place upon the world. This is an effective judgement which produces the dramatic events that will take the world through the End time to the End, the last Day of Judgement and the Renewal of the Cosmos, that is through the culminating events of world history in the broadest sense. The action is effected through Christ, represented by the image of the Lamb of God, a slain yet living Lamb.This image holds together the heavenly court scenes and world history at two consecutive levels. The Lamb represents one who, now enthroned in heaven, has acted decisively in world history, one who has conquered (5.5).