Tan Tei Wei in ‘Mr Young on Miracles’ (Religious Studies, X (1974), 333–7) takes me to task over certain contentions of mine regarding the best understanding of ‘the miraculous’. I claim that the notion of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by a particular interposition of a god, founders on the difficulty of rendering such a notion coherent. I offer instead the following account which is not subject to such a difficulty. Namely, that a miraculous event would be one brought about by God acting as a factor in the causally operative set of factors (out of the perhaps several possible sets sufficient for the event in question's occurrence), such that his activity alters the outcome from what it perhaps would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been actively involved. It is open to a theist employing this account to say as well that had God not thus actively involved himself as a (specifically rather than just generally) active agent-factor, the (miraculous) effect would not have come about.

Social and political scientists, historians and others, have put forward a number of widely differing views concerning the ‘character’ of Islamic millenarian and/or Mahdist movements in Africa. The same is true of course with regard to the opinions ofscholars concerning the transformative capacity of Islam as an ideology. In this paper I want to look at one aspect only of Islamic millenarianism in the West African context, viz. its allegedly revolutionary character.

O.I. When we ask ‘Does God exist?’, what kind of question are we asking and, further does it make a difference that it is one kind of question rather than another? To find answers to these we will begin by investigating the various kinds of questions to which it seems ‘Does God exist?’ belongs, including questions about physical states of affairs, questions requesting reasons, and questions concerned somehow with the difficult notion of ‘existence’. As part of this initial inquiry we will also examine the relation of presupposition to question and the significance of both negation and assertion in questions.

Religion is widely practised in Poland. This fact is well known in the West, though it is always a matter of some amazement. What is less well known and perhaps more amazing is the extent to which religion is studied in Poland. Before World War II there were of course the well-established faculties of theology in Warsaw, Wilno (now in the U.S.S.R.) and the fourteenth-century foundation in the ancient capital of Krakow. The Catholic University of Lublin is a private institution set up by the Church in 1920. It has some very distinguished scholars and its degrees are recognised by the State. Some courses in theology are also taught there, mainly for the training of priests but also for lay people who may intend to work with, for example, K.I.K., the circle of Catholic intellectuals.

Ever since the work of Horace Hayman Wilson in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Purānas have had a certain fascination for Western scholars which, if not rivaling the fascination that they have had for Hindus themselves, has at least been substantial. This seems particularly to have been the case in recent years, as both anthropologists and textual scholars, their appetites whetted by the development of various scholarly methods, have cultivated the Purānic field with diligence, and apparent fruitfulness. Especially when considered in conjunction with the often allied inquiry into the Hindu epics, it seems safe to say that we have here a field in which the labourers are many, and the crops diverse.

We are all of us by now familiar with the argument that God's existence is necessary. The argument takes many and varied forms but generally contains a premiss to the effect that our conception of God, or God's nature, entails necessary existence. Professor H. D. Lewis writes:

It is not part of the nature of anything normally that it must exist. We find that there are certain things — we could not deduce this from the concept of them. We also sense that in the last resort nothing could just be by chance, but the element of necessity here is not to be found directly in finite things themselves but in a Reality beyond themselves and in their dependence, in some way we cannot further comprehend, upon it. It is thus part of the nature of this Ultimate Reality that it must be; and this, along with the perfection which this kind of existence carries with it, is all that we can know directly about God. He is a Being who exists by necessity.

This comparison of some aspects of the treatment of religious experience in the writings of Bernard Lonergan and Alfred North Whitehead is intended to be a contribution to the continuing dialogue between process thought and classical theism, especially as the latter is represented in proponents of a newer or renewed Thomism. Continued exchange will hopefully be fruitful for the common theistic task, as well as a source of insight on the problems and limitations faced by each approach.

In his article ‘Infallibility’ (Religious Studies, March 1980) A. P. Martinich has argued that the logical character of infallible utterances has been generally misunderstood. Opponents and supporters of the doctrine of papal infallibility have both assumed, he claims, that infallible utterances are statements; but this is incorrect, for such utterances are not statements, but declarations. Consideration of this point, he believes, would enable us to see that the doctrine of papal infallibility is both coherent and correct.

I am grateful to Philip Quinn for his thorough and penetrating critique of my paper on classical theism and pantheism. He has given me much to think about, and it would be philosophically remiss of me not to acknowledge that – in the light of his remarks – the argument which I employed in defence of the thesis that classical theism implies a version of pantheism might well benefit from some amendment. However, the purpose of this brief counter-rejoinder is to establish that the nexus of my argument has emerged from his commentary in reasonably robust health, i.e., to demonstrate that if the argument of my former paper is to be rejected, it will take something more than Professor Quinn's critique to make that clear. Very concisely, then, my response is as follows:

(1) At a preliminary point, Professor Quinn claims that my argument ‘merits careful scrutiny’ because, if it succeeds, ‘something shockingly at variance with received views’ will have been established (p. 290). I find this to be somewhat odd. For it seems clear that St Paul was a ‘classical theist’, indeed a very special one in so far as the shaping of Christian theism is concerned. And while his famous and oftcited dictum that God is the One in Whom ‘we live, move, and have our being’ may be such that it is permissible to construe it in ways which do not imply any version of pantheism, it clearly seems unjustified to maintain that pantheistic doctrines are ‘shockingly at variance’ with that most intriguing statement of St Paul's.

I propose to begin with some fairly unexciting and uncontroversial remarks about possibility-statements, and then in their light to examine two problems philosophers have raised about certain statements of this kind which might be made in Christian theology where it touches on the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The quest for the historical Jesus was assumed by Schweitzer to have started from Reimarus in the eighteenth century; in fact it began with Mary, John, Peter, Caiaphas and many others in the first, and was found by them to be futile and doomed to frustration. The Gospels are a witness, all the stronger for being unreflective, implicit and probably unwitting, that Jesus was impossible to know as men are known. The Gospels tell you what people heard Jesus say, and what they saw him do. They record the effect he had on people, the things he prompted and provoked them to do and say. They enable you to know about Jesus, about his teaching, his activity and even his emotions. But to know Jesus, to enter his mind and heart, to see the world from his point of view, they recognized to be not susceptible to ordinary human empathy, and therefore to be beyond the scope of their narrative. Knowing Jesus is an act of faith and spiritual recognition or it is nothing. Getting to know others is a human gift, but getting to know Jesus is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Morality's relation to religion stands among the broad cultural issues that pull people towards philosophy and religious studies. We hope for insight, but what we find when we get there is another matter – a debate on ‘is’ and ‘ought’ with all the marks of a dead end. While the intellectual goals and strategies that led in this direction have elicited little scholarly attention to date, the time and the tools for an effective critique may now be at hand.

This paper has been prompted by the conviction that a number of ethical and political doctrines in Plato remain obscure and somewhat unintelligible unless related to the contemplative experience of the Platonic philosopher.1 I shall concentrate here on one such doctrine, the distinction between philosophic and popular virtue, especially as it appears in the Phaedo and the Gorgias. But in order first to clarify our conception of the relationship between contemplation and virtue, I shall examine the fourteenth-century English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, which is mainly concerned with the practice of contemplation and only remotely connected with Plato.2 One finds in The Cloud a perceptive account of the contemplative's acquisition of ‘perfect’ virtue which enables us to see the distinction between philosophic and popular virtue in Plato in a fresh light. After discussing the important passage in the Phaedo (69A–C) where the distinction is drawn, I shall criticise the account of virtue in Plato given by D. Z. Phillips and H. O. Mounce in Moral Practices where the contemplative context is minimised by their endeavour to see morality wholly in terms of conventions (albeit, for Plato, ‘non-conventional’ conventions).3 In this section, the argument between Socrates and Polus in the Gorgias will be discussed in light of the way Phillips and Mounce distinguish their respective ethical positions. The object of the paper is not only to point to the significance of contemplation in Plato's ethics which has been overlooked by many modern philosophers, but also to note the way our understanding of the dialogue form in Plato depends on the unique perspective of the contemplative philosopher.

Professor Gill's recent defence of the notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ in religion1 depends upon Polanyi's view that through ‘tacit knowledge’ of lower levels of reality we can come to know something of higher levels - even, I take it, of God, himself, as the highest level of all. Unfortunately, Polanyi's argument for such a hierarchy of being is confused and depends for its apparent strength on an illicit mixing together of ontological and what may be loosely called methodological claims. Because of this and other confusions, the argument is difficult to state concisely. For convenience I will first use Marjorie Grene's formulation.