‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.

This is the story of one Dominican’s following the Gospel with faith, hope and above all charity.

There was a restlessness about Herbert. All his life he was in some ways an adolescent. He had the virtues of an adolescent, and sometimes an adolescent’s infuriating ways. But our weaknesses, under God’s grace become our strengths. Immensely loyal to his friends, he liked to shock. Questing, critical, radical, ever seeking for the meaning of life, and for ‘meaning’ tout court, he could be quite arrogant in his own convictions. It did not mean that he could not brook disagreement. Intolerant he could be of what he called ‘playing games’, but he delighted in argument. He could not resist being outrageous at the expense of pompous authority. His Catholic orthodoxy, expressed in contemporary idiom, was unshakeable; his Dominican, questioning, obedience was absolute. Like adolescents, when asked questions which they find intrusive, he was economical in speech; this he honed into a fine precision, admirably editing out superfluous words. The adolescent’s unsureness of himself he turned into the humility of loving himself not for his own achievements, but for God’s gift of being God’s lover, able to speak with, and thank God. Still he hated going into print and agonised over sermons. Leaving instructions to any literary executor he talked about the “the bits of paper I leave behind. ... If I hear you have burnt the lot I shall merely add this to the eternal (no! perpetual) sufferings I shall be undergoing”

Frazer begins his work The Golden Bough with a brief treatment of the priesthood at the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi in classical times, concentrating on the rule of succession: ‘A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier.” Frazer is apparently troubled by this rite, finding it so bizarre and difficult to understand that it calls for clarification at a deep level. This is surely an understandable reaction. The rite is bizarre and repugnant, and provokes the questions: How could such a practice have arisen? How could people have lived like this and done these things? Though he does not say so explicitly, it seems to be such questions that send Frazer off in search of an explanation, a search that will take him several volumes and hundreds of pages. When he sets out to find an explanation of the rite of Nemi, Frazer thinks above all in terms of constructing a hypothesis as to the historical origins of the rite. An important stage in this process is to link the rite with other practices, particularly ones which depend on magical beliefs. These magical beliefs are in turn explained as primitive scientific hypotheses. Since we are familiar with the idea of a scientific hypothesis, understanding magical beliefs as primitive scientific hypotheses makes it readily intelligible to us why people in less advanced societies should have held such beliefs.

In the field of theological studies, subdivided specialties have been separated from each other with such a watertight seal that those of us who regret such dissociation might find cause to applaud Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s assessment of what made for his success as a journalist.

Asked to name a German city associated with the Lutheran Reformation, most people with any knowledge of the period would, I suppose, cite Wittenberg — the Saxon university town from which that Reformation was launched. But an equally serious candidate would be Augsburg in what is now northern Bavaria where the single most authoritative document of Lutheranism, the Confessio Augustana or ‘Augsburg Confession’ was promulgated in 1530. It was to Augsburg, where the Reichstag, the imperial Diet, was meeting, that the former Master of the Dominicans, Thomist theologian and Catholic church reformer, Thomas de Vio was sent in 1518 as papal legate with a mandate to bring Dr Luther, member of the Order of Augustinian Hermits and professor of biblical studies, to his senses. De Vio — better known from his birthplace, Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, as il Gaetano or Cajetan, was at first viewed by Luther with comparative favour. Although Luther shared the anti-Italian feelings common in Germany in this period, disliked what he knew of Thomism, and numbered several Dominicans among his harshest critics, he found Cardinal Cajetan learned and humane. There was, however, no real meeting of minds. So far as Luther was concerned, the encounter was to be a debate, like the Heidelberg Disputation from which he had just emerged with flying colours.

The demonic is mysterious because it appears to be without cause. It is an apparently unmotivated malignancy, which delights in destruction for its own sake. Or, as the saying goes, just for the hell of it. It is hard to know quite why Iago feels so resentful of Othello. The witches of Macbeth reap no obvious profit from driving the protagonist to his doom. This kind of wickedness seems to be autotelic, having its grounds, ends and causes in itself. It thus joins a privileged, somewhat underpopulated class of objects, which includes God and art. It is enigmatic because it is brutely itself, not because it has the inscrutability of something too deep to fathom. As St. Augustine remarks in the Confessions of his youthful debauchery, I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it’.

For many commentators, the Holocaust would be the prime example of this phenomenon. Part of its horror lies in its apparent pointlessness. Even if you had wanted to rid the world of Jews, you could have found some less unspeakable way of doing it. As Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka, was asked later: ‘Considering that you were going to kill them all... what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?’ Or as Primo Levi inquires:

Our task is to read Augustine after Heidegger, in a double sense: first, chronologically, returning to read Augustine after having passed through Heidegger, re-reading the Confessions after reading Being and Time. But in a second hermeneutical sense, we are reading Augustine after Heidegger; that is, we are reading Augustine after/as Heidegger read him in the period of his earliest development. By doing so, we mean to let Heidegger’s sketch of factical life (Existenz) function as a “hermeneutical situation” of our reading of Augustine as well indicate the way in which Augustine’s Confessions functions as a horizon for Being and Time.

The impetus for returning to Augustine is found in Heidegger’s turn to the doctor gratiae in his early work on the phenomenology of religion. In the young Heidegger’s work in the phenomenology of religion, it is as much phenomenology as religion which is at stake; that is, the rigorous questions of phenomenological method find a limit case in the consideration of religious experience. Thus, a phenomenology of religion functions as something of a ‘testing ground’ for phenomenology understood as a hermeneutics of facticity. As Jean Greisch has noted, these “questions of method, which have an effect on the philosophy of religion, primarily take up the question of the status of phenomenology itself, and even the status of philosophy itself in the sense of an appropriate conceptuality.”

As we approach, and prepare for, the Johannesburg Summit—Rio plus 10—we need all the wisdom we can muster if the human family is to move, beyond the faltering steps of Rio ‘92, into genuine sustainable living on the earth. Anything less than genuine sustainability, considering our present population, consumption, and technology, will spell catastrophes within this century. The Earth Charter, an interfaith declaration of principles, says ‘Every individual, family, organisation, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, non-governmental organisations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership.’ The Earth Charter identifies no one religion, nor religion itself, as the global ‘mother church’, or pre-eminent pillar of earth ethics. Significantly, however, several important contributors to the Charter are Christian. One, Steven Rockefeller, observes, ‘Many of the critical concerns and spiritual ideals affirmed in the document resonate with values that have traditionally been important to Christians.’ The Christian religion has a cosmic dimension, for in Jesus incarnate, God unites himself with all humanity, and therefore with the whole earth community. Rockefeller argues that social ethics extends to the whole earth community. More strikingly still, an American astronaut, and Christian, James Irwin, says, ‘It is more important that Christ walked upon the earth, than that man walked upon the moon.’

When, as a student at Oxford, Johnson “took up Law’s Serious Call. . . expecting to find it a dull book”, he found it “quite an overmatch” for him. Taking up David Urquhart’s Effect on the World of the Restoration of Canon Law ... a Vindication of the Catholic Church against a Priest, I found myself in somewhat similar case—struck by the moral passion and remorseless logic. Urquhart’s luckless opponent was the Dominican friar, Fr. Rodolph Suffield—celebrated English Dominican preacher of the 1860s. Urquhart (1805-77) was an eccentric Scottish aristocrat, a Protestant papalist, who succeeded in pushing his concern over the morality of war on to the preparatory documentation of the first Vatican Council. Suffield (1821-91), by the late 1860s profoundly antagonistic to ultramontanism, left the Church to become a Unitarian minister shortly after the promulgation of the Infallibility Decree. It is perhaps timely to recall their contestation as contemporary British foreign policy impales itself upon the horns of its current moral dilemmas.

This paper is an attempt to respond to John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory from a perspective informed by hermeneutical phenomenology. In the first part, the ‘classical’ distinction of explanation and understanding was defended against Milbank’s critique by reference to Paul Ricoeur’s account of the distanciation/appropriation polarity. It was argued that Milbank’s account does not sufficiently grasp identity as a hierarchical synthesis of ‘ironic’ identities which reflect different degrees and kinds of distanciation from the paramount reality of everyday life (see Schutz 1962a, 1975). The explanation/understanding binary therefore retains a validity insofar as it draws attention to the way in which different readings variously manifest the moments of distanciation and appropriation.

With this groundwork in view, the second part of the paper sets out to examine Milbank’s understanding of the role of Christian theology vis-á-vis other accounts of being and the adequacy of the category of narration.

What is it that makes us “modern”? When we think of ourselves as “modern people” —and thus distinguished from medieval or ancient or primitive peoples what are we in fact saying about ourselves? I wish to explore the suggestion of Max Weber that an important element in our being denizens of modernity is the “disenchantment” of our world. Further, I wish to explore some of the connections between Weber’s notion of disenchantment and his understanding of mysticism as a response to this disenchantment, in order to argue that the relegation of religion to “the mystical” is not so much a response to disenchantment as it is the condition for the very possibility of disenchantment. In Weber’s sociology, mysticism becomes the irrational “other” of the rational, bureaucratic use of coercive force that we, in our disenchanted world, call “politics.” In his work we can see clearly a process whereby the categories of the mystical and the political mutually create each other in such a way that mysticism—a private and irrational religious experience—becomes the only viable future for religion, and politics—the rational administration of territory through violence—becomes statecraft. In this respect, Weber seems a paradigmatic modern interpreter of religion and politics, one whose interpretive categories continue to shape our discourse. Finally, I will argue that the power of Weber’s story of disenchantment can be seen in current political and liberation theologies, even when they explicitly seek to reunite the “mystical” and the “political.”

Even if politics and theology are perceived to be fundamentally distinctive areas of enquiry, they share a common problem. Indeed, one could even suggest that thought itself—as a practice among disparate practices—is subject to the formidable difficulty of the formation and subsistence of community. ‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modem world,’ suggests Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This crisis of community, or its very possibility, is illustrated in a contemporary unwillingness to engage in the hard labour of politics that is part and parcel of either the espousal of individualistic, psychologistic and spiritualistic solutions to the existential problems of subjects and communities or the arrogation of secure and unequivocal identity claims based on nation, race or some other undifferentiated category. Nevertheless, a constant remains in the midst of this confusion. In the western context of modem liberal governance, the possibility of identity, whether individual or national, is predicated on the division of religious and political idioms and practices. There is no room for a tension-filled political/religious nexus which, according to Kierkegaard, produces an ‘arousing restlessness’. In the wake of religion comes a political subjectivity that is marked and re-marked by somnambulance and atomisation.

In March 1217 brother Dominic, a Castilian canon of the chapter of the diocese of Osma, returned to Toulouse from a visit to Rome. He, and the small community he had gathered round him, had been preaching against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc for the previous ten years. Soon after his arrival he summoned the community of canons which had just settled into their newly restored monastery to meet him. It rapidly became clear that the situation every religious dreads had arisen: the superior had an idea. The strategy involved the creation of a new religious force in Catholic Europe which was to take the form of an entirely novel religious Order. Its mission was to be wholly given over to the preaching of the Word of God. This was to take precedence over every other conventual observance. The Order was to be international; its members were to be called friars, brothers, they were to be bound to stability within the Order and not to any one particular house. They were to go wherever the needs of evangelisation and the defence of doctrine took them, living in poverty, holding no property, not even the houses in which they dwelt. They were to live out some elements of the monastic life, celebrating the divine office and the Eucharist solemnly and in common with, but without undue fussy ceremonial. They were to elect their own superiors, who in turn would be members of Provincial Chapters.

John Henry Newman once remarked to a friend that his Dream of Gerontius. “was written by accident — and it was published by accident”, yet his personal history proves otherwise; it was the fruit of many years of agonizing study and prayer leading him to the Roman Catholic Church. It is rightly considered a major contribution to Roman Catholic spirituality and doctrine which continues to inspire theology and piety.

The Dream of Gerontius expresses in poetical form many truths of Catholic dogma concerning creation, redemption and eschatology. This, Newman’s longest poem, composed in 1865, almost twenty years after his entrance into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, underscores his Catholic beliefs in the mysterious complementarity between God’s justice and mercy whereby at the particular judgment, some souls require a final preparation for heaven. In his Plain and Parochial Sermons Newman had rebutted the 19th century denial of possible eternal damnation. In the Dream of Gerontius, he emphasized God’s merciful dispensation. Eschatology is intertwined with Christology and Christian anthropology. Furthermore, the seeds of an ecclesiology of communion are present as a dominant theme.

More than fifty years ago, on January 21, 1947, a debate took place in Paris between Gabriel Marcel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the following question: “To what degree does the material organization of humanity lead man to the point of spiritual maturation?” As Teilhard’s biographer Cuenot observes, “it was a fine subject for two great, but very different, minds to discuss.”’ In essence, the debate concerned the value of technology in human culture, and the character of the social organization attendant upon technical civilization. Do the astounding technological advances of the last century represent a true enhancement of human existence in all its dimensions, as Teilhard believes, or is Marcel right in suggesting that technological progress is of dubious value in relation to the authentic purpose of life? Clearly, this debate has not lost its relevance. In a time when technological mastery of human life itself, through the mapping of the genome, is a reality, and when the Internet has ushered in a global connectedness which has transformed the planet’s “noosphere,” there is reason to reflect on the spiritual value of these attainments.

The flower power of the sixties was ultimately anthropocentric in its, ‘make love, not war’. In America Philip Rule, S.J., observed that flower power died trampling flower beds during a demonstration at Harvard. Nevertheless, the tramplers had a point: love conquers conflict. Conflicts damage the whole earth, or soil, community, for whose health, people, under God, are responsible. Environmentalists, therefore, who increasingly include a significant percentage of Christians, are among peacemakers’— and earth lovers’—best friends. The peace movement, and environmentalists everywhere, are in at least partial ‘intercommunion’, they recognise each others’ ministries.

And their mutually supportive ministries are (literally) vitally necessary. For human aggression among people and against the earth, remains wanton and, fortified by modem technologies, increasingly life threatening to all living beings on earth. The causes of conflict are myriad, including transnational corporation led globalization itself. Human beings are neither wise nor clever enough to manage the biosphere without conflict. World banks, trade organizations, and conglomerates fail to understand that the real, fundamental economy is the earth’s economy, within which all other economies are dependant and derivative. For humans to attempt to manage the world’s trade, or services, is like a child trying to manage a panther, which is pretty much the point of God’s words to Job (Job 38-39). Relentless population growth, with unsustainable demands on the earth’s water, soil fertility, and climate, brings conflict, not only in developing regions, but even in North America. Vanderbilt University’s Howard Harrod argues that anthropocentric utilitarianism, which devalues animals, triggers conflicts over human treatment of other animals.

As soil organisms, people depend on other soil creatures. Biologist Thomas Lovejoy observed in a recent Reith Lecture, ‘All organisms need to eat. Even green plants which use the energy of the sun have to take in nutrients to live and grow.’ All earth creatures are an interdependent soil, or earth, community. While geological evidence shows that the community flourished before the arrival of humanity, people are not as expendable as ‘ecological age’ gaia gurus would have us believe. For especially through human hands and voices, and through sustainable cultivation, the soil community praises God in an ordered, biodiverse symphony. Sustainable horticulture in and near sustainable settlements provides a foretaste, a sign or parable, of God’s awaited kingdom.

This paper seeks to spell out the consequences of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of rationality for the debate between faith and reason. In the modem period, commitment to authority came to be understood as a hindrance to the discovery of truth. Understanding rationality as tradition-constituted, however, puts that assumption into question. Traditions of enquiry are the bearers of rational resources; it is impossible for inquirers to perform rational work outside some tradition of enquiry. A tradition’s formative texts and its rational resources occupy a place of authority in the practice of critical reflection. The reintroduction of the notion that commitment to authority can be rational has important consequences for the debate between faith and reason: critical reasoning and acceptance of authority are not antithetical. Rather, reason depends on authority for resources to perform its task. This paper thus argues that the apparent conflict modem philosophers of religion attribute to committed faith and critical reflection dissolves once rationality is understood as tradition-constituted.

Understanding rationality as constituted by traditions of enquiry avoids the complaint that commitment to authority entails a pluralism that cannot rationally be eliminated. To see why this is so, it is necessary to attend to a particular feature of traditions of enquiry. Using their standards of rationality, traditions progress as they solve the problems that are inherent within their point of view.

If the adherents of a tradition cannot solve a problem using their rational resources, then the tradition lapses into a state of epistemological crisis. At this point, it is uncertain whether the epistemological crisis will be solved.