One very obvious feature of the current theological scene is a divorce between—in Pascal’s celebrated distinction—the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is to say, the people most interested in religion, mostly members of the ‘counter-culture’, are generally hostile to the intellectual exploration of religion and religious language. Their religion centres on ‘love and consolation’, to use Pascal’s phrase, not upon rational argument or analysis. Another way of putting this is to say that the God of Religion is naturally spoken of in metaphorical language, while the God of the Philosophers can only be spoken of in analogical language. I am concerned to argue that, despite the anti-intellectualism of the ‘counter-culture’, it is still necessary to have a philosophical foundation for religion, and that this involves accepting the validity of analogical language, even if the most significant religious language we have today is to be found in the metaphorical speech of singers, poets and story-tellers. It is important, therefore, to establish the right relationship between analogical and metaphorical language. The following analysis of a sonnet by Hopkins is offered as a brief preface to a discussion of the two-dimensional structure of any language that purports to discuss God.

The interesting and provocative article entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence’, which appeared in the issues of New Blackfriars for August and September under the name of G. Egner, lead one to anticipate with eagerness the forthcoming book on which it is based. In the mean time I am glad to be allowed to make some comments upon it, and if these are largely critical it is simply because there is not much point in endorsing passages (of which there are many) with which one is in entire or almost entire agreement.

I think that a consecrated host is still bread’, Egner writes on p. 354, ‘bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread.’ If what is meant is that all the natural properties of bread remain, I fully agree, and I would emphasize that I have just said ‘natural’ and not (using words in their modern sense) ‘physical’ or ‘material’. There has been, from time to time, a lamentable tendency in Christian thought to assume that sacramental realities are concerned simply with the spiritual aspects of man’s being (his ‘soul’) and that his material aspects (his ‘body’) need only natural nutriment. In the Catechism of the Anglican Prayer Book of 1662 there is a most unfortunate statement that, in receiving Holy Communion, the benefits are ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the Bread and Wine’, in other words that, while our souls need supernatural nutriment, natural nutriment is sufficient for our bodies.

Man is conceived in aggression: too often, he dies in it.

The sexual act may be enhanced by its manner, exalted by its intent, transfigured by its context. But the instinct that impels to its performance is the aggressive instinct.

It is a primitive instinct, in the neutral sense that it strikes to the roots of our nature. In the past as in the present, it is often a necessary compulsion: the tribe of the timorous hunter was a hungry tribe.

Drives deeply rooted perpetually seek an outlet. But to find an outlet they must first be canalized. Therefore aggression seeks initially a focus, an object.

Now the world is full of objects; yet we direct aggression on our kind. It is on people rather than on things that we inflict violence. As the lover craves response from the beloved, so does the aggressor from his victim. The shattered window does not whimper; the smitten plane tree does not bleed. But the ravished woman whimpers. And the thrashing body bleeds. Thus does aggressiveness achieve its terrible catharsis.

Violence against the person is of two kinds, physical and psychic. The first is widely deplored: the second is hardly recognized as violence. Yet it is all but universal. Daily we inflict violence on one another. Hourly we crucify our fellows.

In the great effort of ‘ressourcement’ in which the Church is currently engaged, while the Dominicans have set themselves to produce a massive new edition of St Thomas, the Cistercians have undertaken a multi-volume series of new English translations of the Cistercian Fathers.

This venture is warmly to be welcomed. The Cistercian corpus is intrinsically valuable, and is, historically speaking, one of the major monuments of western monasticism; it is also peculiarly significant as revealing the immediate context for the great theological synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas.

To take this last point first. It is often forgotten just how thoroughly monastic the early Dominicans were. The De modo studendi generally ascribed to St Thomas himself is thoroughly monastic. It is curious how Victor White, for all his insight, missed the reference to the Song of Songs in the bit about the wine-cellar—a monastic commonplace. St Bernard, for instance, says that anyone who proposes to teach others must himself have been ‘introduced into the wine-cellar’, that is to say, must have had personal experience of the intoxicating force of heavenly sweetness. A book written by an anonymous Dominican novice master, and enthusiastically approved by the General Chapter of 1283, leans heavily on Bernard and William of St Thierry. A little later, St Vincent Ferrer’s On the Spiritual Life teaches the same, monastic, spirituality.

It is this monastic context that shows the kind of experience of life underlying St Thomas’ whole moral theology.