¹ I am grateful to the Dominican community of Blackfriars, Oxford, for inviting me to give the Aquinas lecture in 2005 and thus offering me the opportunity to address the question of human rights from a theological perspective. An early and unpublished version of this paper circulated under the title ‘Divine Silence, Human Rights’ (seeGearty, Conor, Can Human Rights Survive?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 43–4, 48–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

² Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?. See also Douzinas, Costas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar who laments the loss of ‘nature’ as that which could exercise some restraining influence upon the rampant positivism of human rights thinking and legislation (see especially the summaries on p. 20 and p. 68).

³ It is this final theological move which corresponds to the challenge of the project ‘theology in the world’.

⁴ Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, pp. 86–7.

⁵ ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’, in Finer, S., Bogdanor, V. and Rudden, B., Comparing Constitutions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 208–10Google Scholar.

⁶ Habermas, Jürgen, Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 88Google Scholar.

⁷ But the appeal to the universal rights of human kind which was bound up with the Declarations did open a door to the possibility of a perspective which was external to the positivist legislation and thus a potential means of reviewing and correcting it. In the French case this was sufficiently strong to lead initially to a kind of international solidarity, as in the making of Thomas Paine (who exerted such an influence on the American situation) and many other foreigners into honorary citoyens. Within a few years however these were threatened with execution, Thomas Paine included, Paine himself only escaping on account ironically of his non-French nationality following an intervention by the American Ambassador. See Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, p. 105.

⁸ Hathaway, James C., The Rights of Refugees under International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Gen 1:27–9.

¹⁰ Ruston, Roger, Human Rights and the Image of God (London: SCM Press, 2004), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ecclesiasticus 34:25–7. Ruston, Human Rights, p. 123.

¹² Ruston, Human Rights, p. 67.

¹³ For all our claim to speak in terms which are consistent with ‘natural law’ for instance, the reality is that such claims only work if we have a conception of ‘nature’ which is at least in part indebted to a scriptural account of what ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ is. Reason requires such a prior consent if it is to function ‘autonomously’ within any system of natural reality which understands the natural order to be intrinsically orientated to the divine order in a way that is accessible to reason and thus ‘universalisable’. These modes of reasoning as coherence must be distinguished from modes of reasoning as persuasion: there are many positions we observe in others’ thinking which are perfectly reasonable, in the sense of coherent, given certain starting points or presuppositions, but we do not regard such positions as being necessary ones if we don't ourselves share the presuppositions which accompany them. On the parameters within which natural law theory can usefully inform our ethical thinking today, see Porter, Jean, Natural and Divine Law (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 303–18Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Dunn, James D. G., Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, 2^nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1990), pp. 203–31Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Commenting on Maimonides, Günter Bader argues that affirmations about God are a mode of speech which brings the speaker and God into closer relation, while negations allows the otherness of God to appear in its own truth (Bader, Günter, Die Emergenz des Namens, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), p.66Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Derrida, Jacques, ‘On How Not to Speak: Denials’, in Budick, Sanford and Iser, Wolfgang, eds., Languages of the Unsayable: the Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press 1989), pp. 3–70Google Scholar (here p. 8).

¹⁷ See the essay by Leclercq, Jean ‘Influence and Non-Influence of Dionysius in the Western Middle Ages’, in Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, ed. and transl. Luibheid, Colm (New York: Paulist Press 1987), pp. 25–32Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Pseudo-Dionysius’‘Mystical Theology’ actually begins with a hymn of address. See Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, p. 135. Günter Bader has a fascinating discussion of the genre of the hymn as theological address in the context of an apophaticism of the Divine Name (Bader, Emergenz, pp. 90–1): ‘Nun ist Hymnologie nach der griechischen Bedeutung des Begriffs nichts als Theologie’ (p. 91).

¹⁹ The exposition of this has been in a Christian format here, though I believe there is no reason why it could not also be expounded in specifically Jewish and Muslim terms.

²⁰ See Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion (London: SCM Press, 2001), pp. 240–4. See also the recent study by Matthew B. Schlimm, ‘Different Perspectives on Divine Pathos’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly (forthcoming).

²¹ Cross argued that the name Yahweh, which also stands in close relation to Ex 3:14, was originally the hiphil form of the verb h ^•y ^•h, meaning ‘to cause to be’ (Cross, Frank M., ‘The religion of Canaan and the God of Israel’, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Israelite Religion, Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 60–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar), a view for which Walter Brueggemann shows sympathy (Theology of the Old Testament, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997, p. 172)Google Scholar.

²² This occurs for instance in the passage from the midrash Rabbah on Exodus 3:14: ‘Rabbi Abba bar Mammel said: God said to Moses: I am called according to my acts. At times I am called El Shaddai, Seba’ot, Elohim and Yahweh. When I judge creatures, I am called Elohim; when I forgive sins, I am called El Shaddai; when I wage war against the wicked, I am called Seba’ot, and when I show compassion for my world, I am called Yahweh’ (see Lehrman, S. M., Midrash Rabbah III, London: The Soncino Press, 1961, p. 64Google Scholar).

²³ Dt 14:29.

²⁴ Lk 1:78.

²⁵ Phil. 1:8.

²⁶ Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Compassion: the Basic Social Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 27–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ E.g. Deut 10:18.

²⁸ Hintikka, Jaako, ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance’, in Doney, Wallis, Descartes: a Collection of Critical Essays, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968, pp. 108–139Google Scholar (especially pp. 113–114). According to Hintikka, the relation of the cogito to the sum may not be that of ‘a premise to a conclusion’ but rather that of a ‘process to its product’ (p. 122).

²⁹ See Morrison, India, ‘Mirror Neurons and Cultural Transmission’, in Stamenov, Maxim I. and Gallese, Vittorio, eds., Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), pp.333–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Giacomo Rizzolatti, Laila Craighero and Luciano Fadiga, ‘The Mirror System in Humans’, in Stamenov and Gallese, eds., Mirror Neurons, pp. 37–59.

³¹ Martha, Nussbaum, ‘Compassion: the Basic Social Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 27–58Google Scholar.

³² Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another (transl. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 191Google Scholar.

³³ By this argument, human beings who show no capacity for empathy, cannot be guilty of cruelty, though of course they may be very capable of inflicting random violence.

³⁴ There is also the possibility that these neural responses may have comparable effects in other higher primates. See Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, ‘The Neural Correlates of Action Understanding in Non-Human Primates’, in Stamenov and Gallese, eds., Mirror Neurons, pp. 13–35.

³⁵ Gearty, Conor, ‘at ’, The Tablet (30 December 2006), Vol 260, no. 8671), pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

³⁶ Buddhism, especially Mah^•y^•na Buddhism, also gives particular place to compassion of course. See M. Vanden Eynde, ‘Reflections on Martha Nussbaum's Work on Compassion from a Buddhist Perspective’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics (2004), p. 46 (quoted by Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?, p. 44).

³⁷ Habermas, Jürgen, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 62Google Scholar.

³⁸ Habermas, Jürgen, The Inclusion of the Other. Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 39Google Scholar.

³⁹ Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 40.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Habermas, Pragmatics of Social Interaction, p. 60.

⁴³ Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 41.

⁴⁴ For the relation of his work to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, see the essays in Habermas, , Religion and Rationality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)Google Scholar and Habermas, , The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)Google Scholar. See also his dialogue with Ratzinger, Joseph, The Dialectic of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (Ft Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ E.g. ST 1. q.79.a.12.

⁴⁶ See note 26 above.

⁴⁷ Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 193Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?, p. 4.

⁴⁹ Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?, p. 157.

⁵⁰ This issue is one to which I hope to return in a future paper.

⁵¹ Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?, pp. 140–57.