Recently the Dominican Order has been formally and canonically established in Russia and the Ukraine. This is an event that would have been undreamt of only a few short years ago. But now the question poses itself very clearly: What lies ahead for this new phenomenon? To frame the question in more precise terms: What should be its field of action?

The history of the Dominican Order in the vast lands of Russia over the past five hundred years consists of spasmodic sallies, made by individual members of the Order which have left little trace. In the last decades of the 15th century there was a Croatian Dominican, Benjamin, among the equipe of scholars centred round the bishop of Novgorod, Gennady. One of this group’s works was the translation of the Books of Wisdom from the Vulgate Latin into Slavonic, A more exotic and enigmatic Dominican figure who had a part to play in the history of Russia was Maximus the Greek. An admirer of Savonarola, he entered the Dominican community of San Marco in Florence in 1501. After abandoning that life he is next heard of as a monk on Mt Athos at the monastery of Vatopedi. From here he was invited to travel to Moscow to help in the labour of translating Greek texts into Slavonic. As was the policy of the Russians at that time, Maximos was never permitted to return to Mt Athos (it was thought that he had learned too much about Russia’s internal affairs) and he was imprisoned for some years. He eventually died in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Serge outside Moscow in 1556.

In her recent book Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Caroline Walker Bynum once again delineates with consummate skill the profoundly and peculiarly bodily character of Christian medieval piety. The cult of relics with its veneration of the dismembered limbs of saintly people, the belief in the curative powers of bodily effluvia, the austere self-disciplinary practices of certain male and female ascetes — observances such as these are cited by Bynum as illustrating the medieval notion of the human body as a locus of sacrality. The concurrent theological development of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the conviction that behind the external accidents of bread and wine lay the actual flesh and blood of Christ, also laid emphasis upon the corporeal and led to an increasing sense of the eucharist as ‘symbolic cannibalism’ in which communicants ‘ate God’. Christian art and iconography of the period reflected a similarly literalist approach to the humanity of Christ, often drawing attention to his genitalia for example, or depicting the Passion scenes with a force of graphic detail quite repugnant to modem minds.

According to Bynum each of these three strands, theology, piety and art, brought out the religious significance of the body in an unprecedented manner during the Middle Ages as a means of access to the divine, but whilst physicality was a theme which ran throughout all medieval spirituality, it was taken up with particular enthusiasm and intensity in women’s lives and writing. Women, it would appear, were unable to avoid being inculcated with contemporary androcentric articulations of their association with the body, weakness, lust and irrationality.

The principle “You can’t be judge in your own cause” is both selfevident and powerful. It is the principle that compels us to recognize that the ethical enterprise entails submitting to a higher judgment than our own first judgment. Moreover, it is the principle that commits us to conceding that ethical judgments are objective. Those two conclusions are accepted by many moralists. There is a third conclusion that, unless I am mistaken, follows just as inexorably as these two, but is rarely, if ever, accepted in modem discussions. If you can’t be judge in your own cause you commit yourself to depend on the praise and blame of a judge who is competent to judge your cause. The principle “Not judge in one’s own cause” entails an ethics of reward and punishment, because praise is a reward and blame a punishment.

“Notjudge in one’s own cause”

The principle “You cannot be judge in your own cause” is self-evident. It ordinarily applies in cases where I am in dispute with someone else over property: perhaps over ownership of land or fishing rights or the proceeds of a will. The principle is extended to cover issues such as the ban on an examiner from examining a relative, or a magistrate from presiding at the trial of a business associate.

No one doubts the applicability of the rule in these relatively unproblematic cases. What could be easier, it might be argued (but never is) than discounting one’s tendency to severity or to leniency when examining one’s own child? Yet most moral dilemmas are far more difficult than property disputes and arguments over examination grades. Every dispute inevitably involves the “cause” of every disputant.

Bernard Kelly was a regular contributor to Blackfriars and other Catholic periodicals over a lengthy period extending from the 1930s to the 1950s. Rayner Heppenstall, in his book on Léon Bloy, called him “a man of the purest genius”. In more recent times, however, he seems to have been strangely forgotten. If we speak of him now, it is because we believe that his insights, drawn from scholastic philosophy and especially from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, are of value not only for present-day Catholics, but for all Christians, and indeed for spiritual seekers of all faiths. Kelly once said: “There are some of us who can’t rightly pray without a pen in our hands.” Kelly was clearly no ordinary writer for him writing was prayer. He epitomized the view that prayer could only be accomplished on the basis of truth, and his writing was a means of determining and fixing the truth in his own mind and in the minds of others. A few years ago Barbara Wall published a moving account of Kelly’s life; here we shall concentrate chiefly on his writings and thought.

Kelly’s inspiration was the writings of the Medieval philosophers and, in particular, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. For him, the Summa was a vehicle of truth and a paradigm of spirituality. Many are aware of St. Thomas’s declaration towards the end of his life that, in comparison with the Divine Reality Itself, his writings were as a heap of straw. A differing and more important evaluation is less well known; Christ Himself appeared to Aquinas in a vision and said to him: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (“Thou hast written well concerning Me, Thomas”).