It would be fascinating to trace out in more detail the role of silence in modern thought. However, my aim here is necessarily limited to a selection of comments on silence rather than a comprehensive analysis of how this far from straightforward topic has been tackled.

There are, of course, varieties of silence. In an interesting paper in which he looks at silence in the work of Rudolf Otto and Harold Pinter, Bernard Dauenhauer notes that silence “does not always manifest itself as ‘safe’ and ‘benign’. It can, for example, be terrifying, menacing or awesome. Silence can express many states of mind, both trivial and profound and in spiritual training a distinction is often made between the silence of mouth, mind and will. And Arthur Danto, in an essay on “Silence and the Tao” makes a distinction between reaching and being reduced to silence.” One way of looking at silence, though naturally it is not applicable to every manifestation of this phenomenon, is to view it as what happens when metaphor fails.

If the methodology of Religious Studies is empathetic, is such empathy not likely to lead towards a situation where silence rather than words is what is encountered? And if this is indeed the case, how, if at all, can the discipline function in a situation where, apparently, metaphor cannot operate? Before attempting an answer, I think we need briefly to review something of the conceptual centrality which metaphor has claim to.

In her commentary on St John’s gospel in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Pheme Perkins writes:

It seems to me that an exegesis of Chapter 4 of St John’s gospel might throw further light on this judgement as well as illustrating the psychodynamics of ‘conversion’ and interpersonal encounter with Christ. Chapter 4 stands on its own in the gospel and is a brilliant theological construction. It is an intricately woven pattern of wordplay, humour, symbolism, obfuscation, at least on the part of the woman. An examination of the dynamic of interpersonal relating might begin with a reflection on how anyone of us feels when meeting someone for the first time. How do we decide whether or not we want the relationship to go any further than our simply remaining on polite or distant terms? The decision we take in such circumstances is very complex, acted out nearly always at the unconscious level and made in an instant. We decide that the person is interesting enough to reward further acquaintance or we just move away uttering a phrase of polite disengagement.

‘This is the Lamb of God’. These are the words used at the Eucharist to describe Jesus Christ present in the consecrated bread. Jesus, sacramentally present, is identified with the passover lamb, the sacrifice without blemish, and the dumb sheep of Isaiah 53, representing passivity and acceptance of suffering as in some way redemptive. However, for a fuller picture of what it means for Jesus to be ‘Lamb’, it is necessary to turn as well to the Book of Revelation. Here we find that, apart from brief references in Chapter 1 to other Christological ideas involving a figure which seems to combine the Ancient of Days, Jesus Christ and an Angel figure, Christ is always referred to as ‘Lamb’. The Lamb for the author of Revelation is the symbol of power.

The Lamb of Revelation is seen in heaven. The action that takes place in heaven is the judgement that takes place upon the world. This is an effective judgement which produces the dramatic events that will take the world through the End time to the End, the last Day of Judgement and the Renewal of the Cosmos, that is through the culminating events of world history in the broadest sense. The action is effected through Christ, represented by the image of the Lamb of God, a slain yet living Lamb.

This image holds together the heavenly court scenes and world history at two consecutive levels. The Lamb represents one who, now enthroned in heaven, has acted decisively in world history, one who has conquered (5.5).

The Hillsborough football disaster in 1989 left Tony Bland in what doctors call a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (‘PVS’). His heart still pumped, he breathed, and most of his other vital organs worked, all unassisted. His eyes opened and shut; he yawned and moved reflexively; he reacted to loud noises with a start. But as far as doctors could tell he could not perceive, think or feel, and would never regain consciousness in this life. The English High Court, the Court of Appeal and (last month) the House of Lords all ruled that all food, water and antibiotics might be withdrawn from Tony Bland and sedatives administered so that he would die peacefully and soon.

The judges were keenly aware of the moral, legal and social dilemmas which the case occasioned. In general they took the view that the law should closely reflect what is ‘morally right’ in such areas, or at least ‘what society accepts as morally right’. They thought there were three principles to be balanced and applied in this case; the sanctity of life; the autonomy of the patient; and the duty of care. The principle of the sanctity of human life was said to be deeply embedded in our law and ethics, in Britain and throughout the world, included in international human rights documents, and strongly felt by people of all religions and none.

I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.

The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.

In 1988 David Braine, who has taught philosophy at the University of Aberdeen for many years, published The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, a metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Now, in this second book, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Duckworth, London, 1993) which certainly stands on its own although we are frequently referred back to the earlier book and forward to two (if not three) forthcoming volumes, he reconstructs the argument advanced by Thomas Aquinas in favour of our immortality, an even more audacious enterprise in the present intellectual climate.

The first move is to cut off every form of dualism which splits the animals that we human beings are into parts that then have to be related to one another. The traditional mind/body dualism to which Platonist Christians have always been attracted is, so David Braine argues, no different from the brain/mind identity theories which currently flourish under such labels as physicalism, behaviourism and so on. While of course he conducts the argument with reference in general terms to current literature he is surely right in saying that the modern debates raise no issues that would surprise Aquinas. The Platonists paid attention only to the immateriality of the human intellect while the pre-Socratic Ionians believed that knowledge is simply physical (cf Summa Theologiae, la 84, 2). The greater threat nowadays to the unitariness of the human being is, as Braine says, various forms of materialism and, in particular, some of the Artificial Intelligence theories.

Acts is a good story. But what kind of a good story it is has exercised scholars. For a long time Luke was regarded as an historian, but he was an historian who reported unhistorical speeches and constructed unlikely journeys. Theologians have tended-to sum up Acts as (I quote from the New Oxford Annotated RSV) ‘the triumphant narrative of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome’. More recently, scholars with literary interests have begun to argue that Acts is not meant to be historiography. Richard Pervo argues in Profit with Delight, that Acts is like ancient novels in its conventions and structures; therefore its fictionality is legitimate, and not a little bit of its agenda is to entertain.

Brian Reardon points out many elements of ancient romance in Acts: its setting in a near-contemporary familiar world, travel with the aspect of purposeful journey (quest) which generates plot, adventure with trials and successes, rescue or salvation. Richard Pervo finds in the ancient world a sizeable body of prose fictions which he calls ‘novels’ and which display numerous conventions easily discoverable in Acts: adventures (including arrests, persecutions, plots, trials, shipwreck and snakes), miracles, riots and rowdy scenes, exotic and utopian elements, an active providence, a robust hero, an episodic plot. We may assume, then, that ‘Luke’ was a fiction-addict, also steeped in Biblical narrative and prophetic literature, who employed received conventions of historiography and fiction-writing to make Acts a readable story with recognizable features. He structures his story through a progress which gets Christianity—largely in the briefcase of the apostle Paul—from Jerusalem to Rome.

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter's Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and discuss reincarnation, abortion—to refute it—; invoke the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities, but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his Catholicism, has never paraded it.

Return to the Sources

A Winter's Tale is a masterpiece of subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is sometimes discernible in Rohmer’s previous film, A Summer’s Tale, where references to Kant were a little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six films made during this ten-year period, especially My Soul’s Friend (1987), were far superior to the average film production.

In a recent review of Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago, 1991), Graham Ward comments: ‘It is possibly presumptuous at this point to say whether Marion’s theological argument for a God without Being succeeds. This book will need considerably more digesting by theologians before a judgment can be made about its success.’ It is a point well made, and the argument I will make in this article is intended only as a further contribution to the appropriation of Marion’s work in a theological climate that remains famously resistant to the roots of his work. That this is an important, indeed even seminal book for Theology should, it seems to me, be granted. And even if it is to be branded ‘postmodern’—which is itself very debatable judgement—it most certainly does not exhibit any of ‘the enthusiastic naivete’ that has marked so much of this expanding genre. Rigorous, even orthodox it may be, but still new.

Ward depicts Marion’s ‘odyssey’ as a ‘relentless foray into sophisticated, abstract thinking’, which is true enough. But this should not allow us to dismiss it to the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Parisian intellectuals. As I read it, its concerns are real and immediate, and by way of illustration of this fact I will begin with a brief anecdote.

I have devoted a good thirty years of my life to the study of Catherine de’ Ricci, from the early 60s, when the Collana Ricciana began to appear, up to the two volumes of the Breviario Ricciano which appeared in 1990 to mark the opening of the sixth centenary of the saint’s death. Here I have nothing new to add to all that I have said already, only a brief synthesis of how over the years, I have come to see this extraordinary woman. But any synthesis involves a choice, and any choice involves excisions and gaps and is inevitably wide open to criticism. The risk is real and I have accepted it; I ask for the reader’s understanding. This present essay seeks only to present a simple and clear picture, unburdened by an excess of scholarly apparatus. In it I will try to highlight, often in the saint’s own words, three crucial points in her spirituality: love, which is its source and gives it its scope; obedience to the will of God, which is the golden rule by which this love is lived; and the joyful human and supernatural equilibrium which results from it.

It may seem obvious to the point of banality to say that love, or charity, is the soul and heart and root and fullness of the Christian life, that interior growth is measured by the progressive development of love, that the apostolic life in its entirety derives its fruitfulness from love, that any mystical advance is only the gradual process of union between God and the creature, whose means yet again is always and uniquely love. But no two saints are the same. Each has his or her own proper way, because God’s love for his creatures is not expressed in the abstract or in general. He loves each of us with a love which is quite personal, marked with its own peculiar purpose, and so for each one of us he maps out a path which is particularly our own. So no saint has the same countenance as any other.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Karl Barth’s work over the last decade in both this country and the States. It has been an interest paralleling a growing recognition that ‘postmodemity’ best characterizes (if such an chameleon noun can characterize anything) our cultural situation. It is no surprise, then, to find studies of Karl Barth’s work which interpret him as a deconstructionist avant la lettre and interpret his Weimar culture as “a first postmodemity”.But, in the main, what is understood by ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodemity’ in these studies is left inadequately defined. Therefore, there is a certain lack of clarity about why it is that Karl Barth’s theology resonates with contemporary culture. Furthermore, the majority of studies comparing Barth’s work with postmodern thinking concentrate upon his early, dialectical theology, in particular his metaphor of ‘crisis’ in the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans. In this essay, then, I wish to attempt two things. First, to try and provide a clarity concerning Barth’s relatedness to postmodernism and establish the rationale for the interest in Barth’s work today. Secondly, to show that the profundity of the parallels between Barth’s work and postmodernism lies not in the similar use of the ‘crisis’ metaphor, but in respective approaches to the nature of discourse itself.

Read positively, postmodernism is concerned with liberation; a liberation from self-legitimating structures. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard problematize this legitimation. They ask, what or who authorizes the power certain discourses have to explain the world ?

A map of Italy showing the birthplaces of its principal composers reveals that nine of its twenty regions can boast of no one: Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Umbria, Abruzzi, Molise, Basilicata, and Sardinia. Four of the nine are border regions; most are mountainous. Two regions have produced one composer: Calabria, Cilea (1866-1950); Liguria, Paganini (1782-1840) .Three regions have produced two: Sicily, Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) and Bellini (1801-1835); Puglia, Paisiello (1740-1816) and Giordano (1867-1948); Latium, Palestrina (1525-1594) and Clementi (1752-1832). Two regions have produced three: Marche, Pergolesi (1710-1736), Spontini (1774-1851), Rossini (1792-1868); Campania, Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), Cimarosa (1749-1801), Leoncavallo 1857-1919). Emilia-Romagna produced four, Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Corelli (1653-1713), Verdi (1813-1901), Respighi (1879-1936). Two regions have produced five: Veneto, Gabrieli (1557-1612), Vivaldi (1678-1741), Salieri (1750-1825), Boito (1842-1918), Wolf-Ferrari (1876- 1948); Lombardy, Monteverdi (1567-1643), Cavalli (1602-1676), Donizetti (1797-1848), Ponchielli (1834-1886), Menotti (1911- ). Tuscany is in first place with seven: Lully (1632-1687), Cherubini (1760-1842), Boccherini (1743-1805), Puccini (1858-1924), Mascagni (1863-1945), Busoni (1866-1924), Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968).

In terms of the Italian boundaries fixed by the Congress of Vienna (1815), eight of the above composers would come from both the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; one would come from the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,

The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,

We have been invited to discuss the justice of war because of the Kuwait case and its aftermath. But, I believe this is not the best place to begin. Let me start by saying why.

Whether the Kuwait War was a ‘just war’ is still controversial. The ad bellum case for using force against Saddam was strong. The cause—a plain case of invasion by one sovereign state of another—was surely just by the traditional standards. Furthermore it is unlikely that sanctions alone could have got Saddam out of Kuwait (though I accept that they were not given enough time and that this meant that the ‘last resort’ criterion was not fully met). The force to be used was assembled under the authority of UN resolutions (although some have argued that these were themselves unconstitutional). The intention was at least partly to restore peace (even though putting the Sabah family back into Kuwait hardly amounted to justice and peace for the Kuwaitis). On the other hand, the in bello criterion of proportionality was always in danger of being breached. The Pope’s warning that such a war was likely to do more harm than good was timely and valid.

In his important study of The New Era in Religious Communication, Pierre Babin offers a startling juxtaposition of two very different thought- world. First, he introduces us to the practice, among some Indian tribes living in the Canadian wilderness, of plugging children’s nostrils and covering their eyes soon after birth, the better to attune them to the noises of the forest in which they will have to survive. Then, in stark contrast to these “hyperauditory” individuals, made alert to the subtlest natural sounds: the whisper of snow falling on the leafless branches of aspen and birch, the footfalls of deer in soft summer mud, the long indrawn breath of a hibernating bear and so on, Babin invites readers to consider a modem American adolescent reared in front of the brash sights and sounds of the TV screen. Such an individual will have logged some 20,000 hours of viewing by the age of sixteen. How, Babin asks, can these two individuals be supposed to have the same reference range or to have a similar idea of God and the transcendent? Is it possible that their sense of the holy could follow even remotely similar contours or be effectively explored or addressed by a single method of approach?

To some extent, the hyperauditory Indian and the media-saturated American can be taken as representing two forms of consciousness and communication which Babin spends much of his book outlining. On the one hand there is the linear, analytic, and alphabetical mode.

The church employs its scriptures for the attainment of human authenticity in Christian conversion, conceived as both event and lifelong process. Its pedagogy aims at the transformation of the cognitive and affective consciousness of human subjects, of the decision-making and activity of responsible human agents, in every sphere of their relational existence (intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, national, international). The theocentric and Christocentric process of self-transcendence in Christian conversion entails four complementary aspects: metanoia (transformation), kenosis (generosity), diakonia (service), and koinonia (friendship).

Scripture is both informative and above all transformative. The Old Testament is a call to theocentric self-transcendence in religious conversion. The New Testament is a call to Christocentric self-transcendence in Christian conversion. Christocentricity guarantees the authenticity of theocentricity in religious conversion.

Conversion entails the transformation of the human and its world in all the spheres of human intentionality and conscious operations. As subjects, our cognitive and affective consciousness undergoes a transformation in both the event and continuous process of conversion. The transformed or ‘converted’ subject has a new way of knowing and loving: it is no longer the center of its world. The theocentric self-transcendence of religious conversion becomes Christocentric when we are enabled by Jesus Christ to know as we are known and to love as we are loved (1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2; Gal 4:9). The theocentric sel-ftranscendence of Jesus Christ enables our own, it transforms our cognitive and affective consciousness by making us sons in the Son.

Universities are curious, contrary institutions, and Oxford and Cambridge more curious and contrary than most. At one level they are centres of intellectual innovation and advance, places where the atom is split, new wonder-drugs developed, old orthodoxies overturned. And yet they are also the most conservative of institutions, wedded, with a fidelity which our society hardly grants to any ordinary marriage, to extraordinary rituals and ways of doing things whose sole commendation seems to be, that it has always been so.

The contradiction is more apparent than real; a strong sense of tradition is often a help, not a hindrance, to intellectual openness. But is not always easy to see how that works in practice, and much that we do and value in the ritual side of our common life has, to an unsympathetic eye, a faint air of the ridiculous about it. Today’s service is a case in point. Just what is all this about? Some of you may know the spoof commemoration-day address given by a lunatic clergyman at the beginning of W H Auden’s The Orators:

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’