It has been remarked that the Israelis have a ‘slightly morbid fascination with things Roman Catholic, especially in relation to the Holy See’. Until 1993 a meeting between the Pope and the Grand Rabbi of Israel was vetoed because the leader of Catholicism was regarded as a ‘source of impurity’. Since Israel is the focus of one of the most combustible problems in the world, it is important to understand every filament of that beleaguered nation’s anxieties, one of which is its anxiety about Catholics. Well-known is its concern about the Church’s role during the Nazi era, and its historic contempt for Jewry. Perhaps less familiar is Israel’s anxiety about the Church’s supposed historic antipathy towards Zionism and the State of Israel. Such amorphous perceptions are the stuff of the Middle Eastern scene, which is a mirage built on sand, an ocean of propaganda, designed to conceal the drive for domination. Are there any grounds for Israeli suspicions that the Church has looked for a greater role in Israel/ Palestine without announcing it, and that it has been hostile to and worked to undermine Israel? Church policy towards Israel can always be presented by the Vatican in terms of true Christian concern; but the question here is: what do Jews see, and how do they see it?

Many attempts have been made in the Christian tradition to name or describe the Holy Spirit. We have heard the Spirit of God termed ‘teacher’ (Jn 14:26), ‘love’ (1 Jn 4:13), ‘gift’, ‘go-between’. Each of these descriptions is helpful and each is at the same time partial.

In this paper, we wish to explore the Spirit of God (in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit) in relation to air, earth, fire and water. Interest in the four elements has an ancient recorded history, reaching back at least to the Greek philosopher Empedocles in the 5th century BCE. It has also had a history in anatomy and psychology. We note this in reference to the ‘four humours’ in Elizabethan literature. Today, study of the four elements has an impact on areas of astrology, health care and religious traditions. We will focus on the Christian story.

We suggest that there is particular value today in linking the Spirit with four of earth’s elements, mindful always that such connections are analogical. We maintain that an awareness from our Tradition of the close links made between the Spirit and the elements can assist us not only to view the Holy Spirit anew, but can also remind us to respect more deeply the earth in whose elements we as human beings share. First, we will reflect theologically on each element in relation to the Spirit. Second, we will discuss the adequacy for pneumatology of such an understanding. We begin our study with a discussion of the element ‘air’.

The ‘Holy Land’ is of particular interest to Christians everywhere, an interest intensified whenever they read their Bibles. There God intervened in human history through his dealings with the Israelites, and in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was crucified and raised in, and ascended from Jerusalem, and it was there also that the Holy Spirit descended on the Church.

There has been, of course, an unbroken Christian community in the land from the beginning, and it was those residing there who were the architects of a Christian ‘Holy Land’. But Christians outside also have their interests. Well before Constantine, Palestine was a place of pilgrimage. In the middle of the second century, Melito of Sardis went to establish accurately the books of the Old Testament’, and to examine the relevant places. Others went ‘for the sake of the holy places’, and ‘to trace the footsteps of Jesus’, and pray. Some stayed, living piously near the sites. Nevertheless, however important, the Holy Land never attracted more than a handful of (affluent) pilgrims from abroad, and the practice of pilgrimage was virtually moribund by the end of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, Western interests from then went beyond the religious.

I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.

The fall of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11th last year shattered the confidence of many people in the security of modem society. Modern society was supposed to guarantee a safe and happy human existence. It promised solutions of difficult problems through its impressive technological developments, it protected the individual against arbitrary decisions of government through its democratic institutions and kept poverty away thanks to the benefits of the free market economic system. The western world looked like a rather peaceful world, apart from some small pockets of violence such as Northern Ireland, the Basque country and Cyprus, and, at the edge of the western world, Israel and Palestine. Democratic states do not make war against democratic countries. It is difficult to count wars for it depends how one defines a war, but since the Second World War almost all the wars in the world were civil wars.

The destruction of the Twin Towers showed how vulnerable modern society is. Individuals and small groups can terrorize a neighbourhood, a community, or a state by killing key figures in society, by attacking power stations and destroying vital communication systems. In all those cases the use of rather simple weaponry suffices. There is no foolproof protection possible against those who carry a bomb on their body to make it explode on a market place, near a power station or a TV station. While in the 19th century churches often were the target of terrorist attacks and of mob violence, at present banks and large commercial buildings are the sacred places that symbolize the value system of society and thus are attacked.

Nearly all theories of the origin of the universe, from the early philosophers to contemporary scientists, presuppose the existence of matter. Thus they are accounts of the genesis, or generation, of the world rather than its creation. The first to say that the world was made by Mind was Anaxagoras (d. 428 B.C.). He saw that what drew things out of matter that was mixed up to begin with could not be material like it. But he presupposed the matter.

When scientists today talk about the matter of the universe having zero magnitude and infinite density at the beginning, they seem to be running up against the idea of creation out of nothing. It is as though they recognise that the world came from nothing, yet they presuppose the existence of matter. But all matter has extension and no magnitude is quite zero. If there was matter in the beginning, it had a magnitude.

There is a great deal of writing about creation at present, both within theology and in the dialogue between science and religion. This dialogue will only help us to see the truth if it works with a clear concept of creation. Amid all the views that are being put forward, it will surely be useful to look at what Aquinas has to say about creation. His patient analysis of the topic is closely linked with his philosophy of existence. He both drew on Avicenna and worked out his ideas in criticism of the Neoplatonic influences that the Arab philosopher included in his exposition of Aristotle.

Yves M.-J. Congar (1904-1995) was the foremost French theologian of the twentieth century. The severe trials to which he was subjected by Roman Catholic Church authorities, notwithstanding, Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975: I am of the Church. I love the Church.’ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognised the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being. Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind. It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians:

In his Natural Law and Natural Rights, Fundamentals of Ethics, and other works, the Oxford professor of jurisprudence and moral theologian John Finnis has elaborated a theory of ethics and natural law that he presents as being based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Finnis has been influenced in this project by the moral theologian Germain Grisez, and has worked in cooperation with Grisez and Joseph Boyle on these issues, but I will confine myself to a discussion of Finnis’s thought, while noting that my conclusions will have implications for the views of Grisez and Boyle as well.) His account of natural law incorporates a particular account of human life as a good for practical reasoning, from which he concludes — in disagreement with Aquinas — that capital punishment is immoral. This conclusion has gained wide acceptance among Catholics, partly because of the influence of Finnis and Grisez’s moral theories. I want to examine his understanding of the good of life, contrasting it with the actual views of St. Thomas, and argue that it is mistaken. I will then explain why I think his mistake is an important one that needs to be avoided.

Finnis presents his account of natural law as being modelled on St. Thomas’s account of the first principles of natural law, which is given chiefly in the Summa Theologiae, la2ae q.94 a.2. It may be helpful to sketch St. Thomas’s understanding of practical as opposed to theoretical reason. Theoretical reason aims at knowledge of how things are, and its activity terminates in belief about how things are.

In August 1670 the Privy Council in Edinburgh considered reports that ‘Mr Patrick Primrose’ had been ‘used to say messe’ in ‘the house of Kinnairdie in the paroch of Aberchardour, within the shyre of Banff’. Indeed, ‘there is usuall resort publickly to masse every Lords day’; ‘four families of the heretours in the said paroch doe upon ringing of the bell goe to a roume in the said house where there is ane altar erected and preists doe officiat’. When the sheriff of Aberdeen had verified that Mass was being said, he was ‘to make inquyrie for the preist’ and ‘to apprehend and committ him to prison, and to seize upon any vestments or other popish ornaments made use of in their superstitious worship and service’. In November the Council discussed the priest’s capture; he was by then in the tolbooth1 of Banff. On 22 December, having been informed that he was a chaplain to the Queen, Catherine of Braganza, they set him free, on condition that he went into exile, never to return, ‘under the payne of death’, without permission of the King or the Council.

Early in January 1671, being evidently too frail to travel, he was allowed to stay in Scotland until 5 February. On 4 March 1672, the sheriff of Aberdeen was instructed to back the bishop and clergy in their efforts to root out popery and quakerism, this to include demolishing the ‘superstitious monument erected upon the grave of the deceast Mr Patrick Primrose’.