In spite of the greater ease with which dispensations to marry are being granted to laicized priests, it is becoming increasingly evident that the subject of celibacy is being approached from very different angles by the Holy See, and by those seeking a change in the law and many of those seeking dispensations. And the procedure being used, the delays and the secrecy are tending towards a loss of confidence in authority similar to that precipitated by the encyclical Humanae Vitae. There is a tendency to a stalemate on the subject of celibacy, between very large numbers of priests and laity on the one hand, and the Holy See and the majority of bishops on the other, which could have widely damaging effects unless true dialogue can be reopened.

In the encyclical of 1967 On Priestly Celibacy Pope Paul VI indicates the point of view of the Holy See. If a priest is ‘unfortunately unfaithful to the obligations accepted’ it is due either to a mistake, ‘a judgement on the fitness of the candidate for the priesthood which was not always adequate or prudent at the proper time’, or to a moral failure in the ‘way in which sacred ministers live their life of total consecration’ (ibid., 83).

This is a development on previous times. The Codex of Canon Law only provides for release from celibacy owing to ordination having been received under the compulsion of grave fear and a complicated legal process, analogous to that needed for release from a non-consummated Christian marriage, is required (Canons 1993-8).

In the first part of this paper, I suggested something of the nature and justification of our current questioning of authority in the Church, and tried to indicate the relevant scriptural criteria for evaluating the issues. Towards the end of this first part, brief reference was made to some of the actual questions being raised in the present crisis of authority. A great many of these deal with what we could call ‘outward’ and disciplinary matters. But there are others which belong more directly to the realm of doctrine, where teaching authority comes in. These would seem to give rise to a more serious inner sense of anguish than many of the others, since they penetrate more deeply into the inmost reserves of our Christian commitment.

It should be noted that the more disciplinary difficulties date mainly from the Middle Ages, whereas the doctrinal are more peculiar to the post-Reformation Church. Of course, heretics were burned in the Middle Ages, but the theory at least was that this took place because they were a threat to the social cohesion of the Christian world. It was only when the Church was progressively robbed of her grip on society, from the sixteenth century onwards, that there was added the intense preoccupation with a demand for a thorough-going conformity of conscience all along the line, even in detail, in matters of doctrine, according as these were examined, decided and prescribed entirely from above.

A brief report of a congress on the pastoral relationships of priests, held at Louvain, and published in France in 1968, shows encouraging signs of a serious wish on the part of a team of both reputable clergy and of qualified psychiatrists to assess the psychological implications of the priestly role in the contemporary world. That its conclusions should be tentative is only to be expected, for there is so much new ground to cover, and an English translation is probably not to be looked for. It is, in any case, doubtful if, as it stands, it is an eminently exportable product outside a French-speaking milieu. But in raising, as it does, some of the more profound sexual implications for the figure of the priest and being bold enough to make articulate the latent ramifications of his relationship to money, it blazes a trail along which others are bound eventually to follow. The truth of the most universal of its observations can scarcely be disputed, namely that to the conscious reaction to the very notion of the priest there is ‘not sometimes, but invariably’ a normally, unconscious affect which is exactly its contrary. ‘On the image which arouses a conscious aggressiveness, another image imposes itself in the unconscious which arouses a feeling for its antithesis. Indeed this phenomenon is translated into noteworthy sociological terms in our contemporary society. Consciously anti-clerical, it nevertheless throws up a mass of books, films, etc., dealing with the person of the priest. A fact which shows well enough that it is not indifferent to him.’

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.

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.