‘The name (Personalism) was bom of a response to the expansion of the totalitarian drive, against this drive, in order to stress the defence of the person against the tyranny of apparatus.’

‘Just as, fundamentally, it is recollection and interiority, Personalism is at the other end of the scale from narcissism, individualism and egocentricity. It brings the whole of its weight to bear in the direction of the most obvious aspiration of modem man, whether this be called collectivist or communal.’

(E. Mounier What is Personalism? 1946. p 113 and p 176)

‘Insofar as man by his very nature stands completely in need of life in society, he is, and he ought to be, the beginning, the subject and the object of every social organisation ... There is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.’

(Vatican II. Decree on the Church in the Modem World.

Gaudium et Spes).

Thanks to the Gospel, the Church has the truth about man. This truth is found in an anthropology that the Church never ceases to fathom more thoroughly and to communicate to others. The primordial affirmation of this anthropology is that man is in God’s image and cannot be reduced to a mere portion of nature or a nameless element in the human city.... This complete truth about the human being constitutes the foundation of the Church’s social teaching and the basis also of true liberation. In the light of this truth, man is not a being subjected to economic or political processes.

The final version of the US bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, although it is not without its disappointments, is still an extraordinary document which is going to have an irreversible effect on the way the Catholic Church thinks about nuclear war. It is not out of the blue however, having spent a long time in gestation — at least since the bishops’ 1976 statement on deterrence, “To Live in Christ Jesus”. And it is the fruit of at least two major developments of thinking about modem war: on the one hand Papal and Conciliar teaching on total war, which began with Pius XII’s broadcasts during World War II; on the other hand modern American scholarship in the Just War tradition, which has been stimulated by the sense of responsibility for Hiroshima and Vietnam. If the main moral thrust — their “No to nuclear war” — comes from the former, it is the latter which set up the possibility for intelligent open debate in the United States on the morality of modern weapons and strategy. But one must give due recognition to a third influence: the profound effect which a handful of Catholic pacifists such as Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn and James Douglass have had on some of the American bishops.

The remarkable thing is the confidence with which the bishops have intervened in the debate in their own country: not merely with well-meaning generalities such as normally afflicts church documents, but with tough arguments on particular policies, many of which are clearly opposed to those of the US Administration.

In September of this year the Dominicans are holding their General Chapter in Rome at the same time as the Jesuits are holding their General Congregation. The occasion marks the opportunity for renewed dialogue and friendliness between these two great orders. As someone who has drawn from both spiritual traditions with great profit, I offer this article on Jesuit spirituality for those of a Dominican background, in the hope of contributing to mutual understanding and respect.

The last twenty years have seen a major upsurge in Ignatian spirituality and in the practice of the Spiritual Exercises - the form of retreat devised by St Ignatius and now given by Jesuits and many others all over the world. Inspired by the movement towards le ressourcement (or getting back to the sources) and by the Conciliar drive to rediscover the true spirit of each religious order, Jesuits began to research the early history of the Exercises.

They found that the lgnatian retreat had departed drastically from Ignatius’ original intention and practice in many ways, centring round one absolutely crucial respect: whereas the Exercises had come in modern history to be preached to groups of people, the true Exercises of Ignatius can only be given individually. There was consequently a movement from the ‘preached’ retreat to the ‘directed’ retreat, stressing the point that although a greater or lesser proportion of preaching may be suitable in some other kinds of retreat, the Spiritual Exercises as such can only be made in the process of private prayer under the individual guidance of a retreat-giver.

The work of C. G. Jung, in particular his theory of female and male archetypes, has had a marked influence on the way women and men see themselves in modem society. This influence has been particularly noticeable among some feminist writers, especially those with religious interests. How much reliance should be placed on this theory of Jung’s is debatable in the light of modern philosophical and anthropological thought. There are, of course, serious difficulties in any discussion of archetypes. As Jung himself said, “The archetypal representations (images and ideas) — Should not be confused with the archetypes as such. . . Every archetype, when represented to the mind is already conscious and therefore differs to an indeterminate extent from that which caused the representation.” In view of the changes that have been taking place in human consciousness in recent years and the fact that there is the possibility that these changes may lead to changes in human understanding, it may be helpful to examine Jung’s writing on the Syzygy. Anima and Animus, in relation to present day philosophical and anthropological thinking.

A dictionary defines an archetype as “the original pattern from which copies are made — a prototype”; a stereotype is “something copied or constantly repeated without change”. It is in relation to the differences between these two concepts that Jung’s theory of male and female archetypal representations will be considered, for Jung claims that in his theory he has uncovered the original pattern of the female and male psyches i.e. archetypes.

What hope does ‘the hope that is in us’ (I Peter 3:15) offer to the world in which we live today? That is the question to which I will address myself.

Jesus said ‘when it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’ (Mt 16:2-4).

The Pharisees and Sadducees had just asked Jesus for some extra ‘sign from heaven’, and with these words he refused it to them: sufficient signs are already there, if they choose to see them: the signs of the times. Good Pope John frequently made use of this phrase, appealing to the modem church to read correctly to day’s ‘signs of the times’. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus is reported as prophesying extensively about ‘signs’ in the future — nearly all of them very fearful signs: earthquakes, wars, famines, and ‘all this is but the beginning of the sufferings’ (Mt 24:8). We have certainly no proof that we are now in the age when ‘the end will come’ (Mt 24:14), and it would be foolish to leap to that conclusion: Christians have tended to do so time and again in times of human disaster and have, afterwards, often been left looking a little silly. Nor can we begin to surmise what the last age, described uneschatologically, will be like when it arrives.

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The work in question is The Divine Legation of Moses; written by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester and literary controversialist in 1738. It was first set upon by Frenchmen in 1744, when the section of the work dealing with the origin of language was removed from its original theological context and translated by Leonard des Malpeines as the Essai sur les Hieroglyphes des Egyptiens. Warburton’s subsequent influence on thought concerning language has been compared to that of Saussure in our own day, it is felt at many places in the Encyclopédie, and in the writings of Condillac and Rousseau. With the revival of interest in the problematic of the origin of language in the climate of Post-Structuralism, Malpeines edition was republished in Paris in 1977, smothered with critical commentary by Patrick Tort and Jacques Derrida. For the latter Warburton has proved a significant influence.

In what follows I am going to give a brief outline of Warburton’s thoughts concerning the origin of language in the original context of his concern with biblical exegesis. Then I shall describe what is made of his reflections by the Post-Structuralists. Finally I will call in not one but three Samaritans, intellectually alien for Warburton in his own century, whose insights may yet rescue him from his 20th century predicament.

In this discussion-paper I look at certain general kinds of peace which certain general kinds of “education” are calculated to bring about, if they succeed; in order first to see which if any of them is ultimately worth having. I find at least one, and at present only one general kind of peace to be worth having; and then examine two broad “realistic” ways — the only “realistic” ways I yet see — in which we might think to achieve that peace. I find neither of those ways to be ultimately capable of delivering that peace, and nearly all the more sensible forms of “peace education” which I have yet heard canvassed, to be tacitly or expressly geared to one or other of those ways. (The present paper came in response to a review of literature on peace education which I was called upon to make, some time ago.) I then consider an “unrealistic” possible way to achieving the same sort of supposedly worthwhile peace, finding that the chances of ever achieving it by that way are slender in the extreme, and that the forms of “education” which I see to be needed in order to achieve it by that general route are themselves so dangerous that the “unrealistic” route too may well find no sensible takers.

After a discursive opening I present an argument with “small holes” in it. By that I mean that assumptions would have to be supplied, at various stages, to make the argument even formally valid; and that many of the steps I do express would have to be rewritten for a similar purpose.

Is God morally good? Is he morally bad? Confronted by the reality of evil his defenders have sometimes said that he is morally good, or, at least, that there is insufficient proof of his moral badness. Why? Because, so they say, the following argument is acceptable:

1. 1 In creating, God brings about or allows various evils.

2. 2 These evils are justified since they go along with some good or goods which depend on them in some way.

3. 3 Evil can therefore be seen as part of God’s justified plan in creating or allowing for certain goods.

But does it make sense to say either that God is morally good or that he is not? This is the question I raised at the end of my previous article on God and Evil.

Many people would find it odd, or even offensive, They would say that since God is good, he is bound by moral requirements in the way that human beings are, that the goodness of God is moral goodness, where that is understood in the same way as it is when ascribed to men and women. Richard Swinburne is a good representative of this view. God, he says, is perfectly good. What does this mean? It means, says Swinburne, that God knows which actions are morally good and which actions are morally bad, and that God always does actions which are morally good and never does actions which are morally bad. According to Swinburne, ‘God’s perfect goodness follows deductively from his omniscience and his perfect freedom’. Since God is omniscient he will ‘know the truth value of all moral judgments whether or not they are true or false’. Since he is perfectly free he ‘will always do any action which he recognizes to be over all better to do than not to do, and so one which he judges to be morally obligatory’.

In everyday parlance, the term “reconciliation” is used in at least two distinct senses. Think of someone saying: “They were reconciled with each other after all those years”. The picture which comes to mind is the establishment of some kind of peace or harmony after years of disagreement. “Reconciliation” in this sense is seen as eminently good and well worth striving for by active means. In religious terms, when one talks of reconciliation, one tends to think of an almost eschatological situation, when all human beings are consciously reconciled in Christ, and God is “all-in-all”. There is, however, another, more ambiguous sense of the term, although it is not as common, and does not spring as readily to mind as the unambiguously positive usage of the term. Consider hearing someone say: “They have reconciled themselves to the probability of being made redundant next week”, or something of the sort. Here, the term “reconciliation” is used in a manner not unlike “resignation”. “They are now resigned to their situation.” It is not necessarily positive, and implies a passive and perhaps grudging acceptance. It is worth bearing both of these senses of the term in mind, since different models of the tensions created in the Middle East by the existence and behaviour of the State of Israel use different senses of “reconciliation” in positing ways in which the conflict could be brought to a resolution.

My brief is to talk about “reconciliation in the Middle East”. It is my intention not to talk about the Middle East in general, but rather to focus upon Israel, to examine those things which demand reconciliation, the actors in the Israeli situation, and factors making for reconciliation.

In distinguishing between character and role in Shakespeare’s plays, Peter Ure once wrote:

Few critics spoke with greater conviction about the “inward self’ of the Shakespearean protagonist, but it is with the outward selves of the protagonists of The Merchant of Venice that we shall be concerned in what follows. It is at least arguable that the somewhat confused state of debate about this play is owing to the resolute concentration of attention upon the “inward selves” of Portia, Antonio, and Shylock, and to the too-easy assumptions that are made about the nature and importance of their roles. To suggest that the fabric of meaning in The Merchant of Venice depends absolutely upon the identification of roles in the terms in which Shakespeare conceived them is not to underestimate the interest and importance of the ways in which character regularly pulls against role, for what Peter Ure said is perhaps more true of this play than of many. This, nevertheless, is a truth which can be apprehended only if the conception of role is properly appreciated; if it is not appreciated, neither is the nature or purpose of the tension Peter Ure was attempting to define.

In the first part of this article, I described how a small group of Christian feminists, concerned with issues of sexual justice and the role of women in the creation of a just society, found themselves involved in the establishment of a new eucharistic community, where women had the opportunity to preach the good news of our calling — as we were beginning to understand it. I looked at some of the resistance that we encountered in ourselves as we moved into this new sphere, and at the nature of the ideology, which at psychological level, preserves the sexual status quo, and hinders women from taking their full part in Christian ministry, and their full responsibility for proclaiming the Christian gospel. Here I hope to continue reflection on the experience of our community, and show how it has contributed to my understanding of the sacramental body of Christ and its true ministry.

At the time that our community was in the thick of its problems with the organisation of itself and the Mass, I happened to read Schillebeeckx’ essay on Ministry in the book Minister? Pastor? Prophet? and felt that it threw a great deal of light on the problems that we were undergoing. The questions he was asking about the role and nature of priesthood were importantly related to questions which were on our own practical and theological agenda. In taking the Mass into the context of the women’s community, it was rather as if we had removed the string from a set of rosary beads.

The doctrine of God’s timelessness is now very unpopular. Several major objections have been levelled against it, and these can be summarised thus:

1. 1 If God is timeless, he cannot be a person.

2. 2 If God is timeless, his knowledge entails absurd consequences or is restricted.

3. 3 If God is timeless, he cannot act.

4. 4 If God is timeless, he cannot command our admiration or love.

5. 5 There is Biblical precedent for rejecting the view that God is timeless.

6. 6 There is no good reason for supposing that if there is a God, then he is timeless.

I think these objections are answerable, and here I propose briefly to say why.

What might be meant by the assertion ‘God is timeless’? The most detailed discussion of this question known to me is Nelson Pike’s God and Timelessness (London, 1970). And, as Pike suggests, it seems reasonable to argue as follows:

As Pike indicates, these views can be found in writers like Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Aquinas.

The evangelists obviously assume that Jesus was a human being. What is less clear is what would be entailed by that assumption. There is very little in the New Testament that we would immediately recognise as an explicit exploration of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. It is often assumed that this is because the authors of the New Testament were philosophically naive and so did not have a developed conception of what it meant to be a human being, but maybe it is because we pose the question in the context of a discipline called Christology which predisposes us to accept as valid only certain ways of thinking.

Cornelius Ernst O P, in a provocative article called “Thinking about Jesus”, said, “the ‘ology termination (of Christology) does presuppose a certain kind of abstraction, a certain kind of theoretical approach, a certain conception of what constitutes reasonableness, and in fact what is meaning at all, what constitutes thinking. I think one of the problems we have to face today is just what does constitute rationality, what is thinking, what are the appropriate categories, not only for thinking about Jesus Christ, but about anything else”. The assumption within Christology has generally been that to claim that Jesus is a human being is to say what he is, to identify him as belonging to a particular class of beings, a species. And one’s membership of this species is defined by the possession of a mind, a certain sort of inferiority. To be properly human is having certain sorts of things going on in one’s head. That’s what it means to have a human soul. To be a human being is to have a mind that has thoughts which are then communicated to others, who are assumed to have similar minds, by means of language.

When it comes to the crunch, how does one know what other people are thinking, feeling etc? One way — the classical modern-philosophical way — of dealing with this question is to say that one knows what others are thinking etc. from analogy with one’s own case. Another way, however, is to go back to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as form of the body — which rules out radical scepticism about other people’s minds. In comparison with the Platonic story, at any rate, Aristotle’s view seems like plain common sense. On the other hand, the imaginative power of the Platonic story is so immense that liberation from it cannot be easily achieved. It is possible to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as an intervention in this long debate. By resorting to St Augustine’s picture of how (why) an infant acquires language, as he does at the beginning of the Investigations, isn’t Wittgenstein inviting his readers to learn to tell a different story about the soul from the one that is so entrenched in the Christian spiritual tradition?

Scepticism about our knowledge of other people’s minds, feelings, etc., may thus be met by the argument that one infers the existence of such hidden entities from analogy with one’s own case. But this concedes far too much to scepticism. This argument remains under the spell of the myth of the homunculus peeping suspiciously through the eyelet-holes of his face-mask at the surrounding horde of similarly masked creatures, all no doubt engaged in equivalent inferences. One alternative to this radically paranoid-solipsist conception is to return to the relatively ‘physicalist’ approach to be found in Aristotle (and perhaps, by qualified extrapolation, in Thomas Aquinas).

Professor Mary Hesse wrote as follows:

No doubt that is a provocative formulation of the problem of understanding other people. In fact, as the context shows, what she means by understanding her dog is that she can teach him tricks and predict his visible behaviour. What she is suggesting, then, is that, confronted with people of a radically different culture from our own, we might find it impossible to teach them anything because their behaviour was unpredictable — so unpredictable as to make communication between us impossible. With the nearing prospect of inter-planetary, and eventually of inter-galactic, travel, of course, the question of communication with deeply alien beings is no longer entirely academic. But for a long time now, certainly, since the expansion of ethnography and social anthropology in the wake of the European colonisation of the rest of the world, we have been increasingly troubled by the thought that, even on Earth, human beings may already be, or may always have been, hopelessly unintelligible out of their own culture. It might even be something of a relief, in view of the appalling atrocities that have occurred this century, to accept that some people may simply see everything in a completely different conceptual framework from others. It would explain the horrifying breakdowns of consensus about moral and political values.

The first task, in the philosophical therapy that opens the way to constructive appropriation of the theological tradition, must be to examine one’s notions of the soul. The very idea of the mind, let alone of the soul, has been eliminated by one powerful philosophical school — exemplified here by Quine. We are far more likely, however, to endorse, or unwittingly host, a certain incipient Solipsism. John Stuart Mill’s argument from analogy for our knowledge of other minds may be classical, but it is not free from objections. On the contrary, it only confirms the myth of the Little Man inside the shell of the body which it is intended to refute. The problem is not intra-theological. The difficulty of the relationship between mind and body, and between myself and others, may be illustrated by some quotations from Proust. This brings us to the threshold of a re-examination of the work of Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology — but his work is best read in the context of further work by John Wisdom and Stanley Cavell, two of his finest interpreters, in this matter at any rate.

One line is to eliminate talk of the soul altogether. This could not satisfy Catholics, or any other Christians who regard themselves as obliged to make sense of the tradition which they have inherited. We may well feel strongly tempted by a Platonizing dualism that longs to release the soul from the barnacles and cirripeds with which it is encrusted in this present life (Republic, 612). But out and out behaviourism can have little attraction for people who find themselves at home, or even simply searching, within any Christian tradition. It is hard even for us to imagine what the allurements might be of any such strict materialist theory of consciousness. Quine’s eliminative physicalism will do as an example.

I should like to begin this paper on a personal note. I suppose it was in my late teens that God began to make a really personal claim on me and over the next four years or so I found that more and more of what I experienced and read spoke to me of God — not only the Mass and spiritual books but all my experience and reading: travelling in the London underground in the rush hour as well as visits to the country; my first experience of girls as well as my discovery of contemplation; films, novels, articles in the secular as well as Catholic journals. It was as if my experience of the present enabled me to begin to understand what I received from my culture and Christian past, but also as if what I thus, so variously and fragmentarily, received from the past put in question, corrected and filled out what I experienced in the present. Present and past thus interacted, sometimes challengingly, sometimes consolingly, sometimes shockingly, but vitally. Everything tended to become a medium and an occasion of the experience of God.

Then I entered the Order and was gradually initiated into traditional Church studies, and little by little I had it impressed on me that the right and proper way to become a theologically-minded persdn was to start from the beginning in the person of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and then to move through the various reformulations of this fontal inspiration in the various forms of the Tradition (to be spelled now, I discovered, with a capital T).

In this article I shall be making some attempt to look at Christian ritual from the particular angle of its nature as a medium for the communication of theological ideas. Ritual, and particularly sacramental ritual, is itself a specific kind of human discourse, one particularly suited to the description of religious experiences and the codification of religious thought. Ritual is a language. The structural principle according to which all language operates is the identical principle underlying any kind of human understanding: the neurological function of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate between percepts. Just as the formation of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate ‘this’ from ‘that’ - whatever ‘this’ and ‘that’ may actually be — so the communication of ideas both to oneself and to other people has discrimination and differentiation as its main purpose, for the action of distinguishing is also the action of relating, and once we are able to hold the objects of perception in tension we can organise our experience into articulated statements about the world: we can relate our own experience to that of other people.

A language, then, is a way of distinguishing between experiences in order to relate them to one another. By relating one thing to another, we are able to alter the meaning we ascribe to similarity and division, so that we now see connections when we were once only aware of oppositions, and logic where there used to be nonsense.

Warburton’s theological opponent. Robert Lowth, later Bishop of London, published (in Latin) in 1758 his seminal Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. It is evidence of the staggering lack of interest of English theology today in historical enquiry that there exists no study of this work, described by Meinecke as one of the prime sources for later historicism, and by E. S. Shaffer as vital for the development of biblical criticism. After its reprinting a few years later at Gottingen it exercised a great influence in Germany, but it is interesting to note that while Herder praised Lowth for attempting to isolate the cultural peculiarities of the Hebrews, he thought that his enquiry was too technical, failing to penetrate the spirit of an age. It is Lowth’s strictly formal attempt to position Hebrew poetry vis-a-vis the categories of classical rhetoric and poetics rather than a romantic trust in empathy or pure subjectivity which leads him to a new depth of cultural analysis. The Lectures thus represent a moment in the history of ideas that was quickly forgotten.

For another reason also, it is hard to categorize Lowth. His formal, aesthetic treatment of the Old Testament opened up the possibility of accounting for it (without recourse to the wilder absurdities of deist slander) in purely human terms. However Hans W. Frei is, I think, wrong to conclude that because Lowth is not concerned to expound the truth of the scriptures, nor to establish their factual veracity, the work is theologically neutral.

The Emmaus story, Luke 24:13-35, is a bifocal narrative. It pivots on two moments of disclosure and the puzzle is how they relate. The first is on the road, when Jesus interprets the Scriptures: ‘“Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v 26). The second is in Emmaus, when they recognise him in the breaking of bread, but Luke cleverly links it with the first by having the disciples immediately remember what happened on the road: “And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts bum within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures’” (v 3 If). Finally, the two climaxes of the story are brought together in the last line of the pericope, when they report back to the disciples in Jerusalem: “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v 35). The first moment of insight is in the perception of the necessity of Christ’s death; the second is in the repetition of the gesture of the Last Supper, Jesus’ free appropriation of that death in the breaking of bread.