Since the Second Vatican Council many developments have taken place which the Council itself did not and could not have anticipated. The Council did not foresee, for example, that the reform of the liturgy would cause the disintegration of popular Catholic piety and leave a fearful vacuum, providing nothing to put in its place. Neither did the Council anticipate that an increasingly educated Catholic laity would, in some way, radically alter its attitude to the clergy and to their ascendancy in the Church, demanding for themselves a place and authority of their own as ‘the People of God’. ‘From piety to criticism and back’ literally means looking back; it is a very difficult exercise. There are many reasons for this. We often absorb and integrate change in a semiconscious way and, once we have integrated it, there is a tendency to look back at the past in a hypercritical way through the lens of contemporary experience. Thus, we sometimes reach a distorted evaluation riddled with anachronisms, because we now live, move and breath in the air of a different world. However, despite the dangers, it is useful to look back, to engage in a process of recapitulation of the past, just as we do in old age, so that we can better understand the present.

What is piety? A working definition might be: the dutiful observance of religious practice. Within the Catholic Church that I knew, 1 consider it to have been a concentration of devotional worship at the expense of systematic theology and the study of scripture. However, this understanding of piety needs to placed in a particular context. Such a contextualisation can only be the Catholic Church of my youth, that is of the Irish/Lancashire variety.

Vladimir Vladimirovic Abrikosov, the future husband and cousin of the central personality of this article, was born on 22 October 1880. When his schooling was finished, he entered the faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, where he wrote a dissertation on the causes of the Western Reformation. In years to come he would deplore the manner of his historical studies as formalistic, lacking in attentiveness to history’s significance. A constellation of attitudes by no means uncommon among educated Russians liberal families of the period. In 1904 Abrikosov married a cousin two years his junior. Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born on 23 January 1882. She attended the first gimnaziya (high school) to be opened in Moscow for the education of girls, and in 1899 won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge. There she read history, assiduously, earning from her contemporaries the nickname ‘Deadly Earnest’. She was a gifted linguist with an excellent grasp of English, French, German and Italian, as well as considerable knowledge of Greek and Latin.

The household of the newly-weds was free-thinking. God was neither affirmed nor denied. Politically they supported the current which would lead to the constitutional Revolution of 1905. Their inherited wealth enabled them to live a carefree life, devoted principally to European travel and the arts. Thus, with the exception of a single month in 1905, they spent the entire period from 1904 to 1910 in France, Italy and Switzerland.

The advent of the end of the second millennium is unlikely to be greeted, in the historic Christian churches, with the mixture of enthusiasm and alarm which heralded the end of the first. Quite apart from the inroads of ‘de-mythologising’ and ‘existentialising’ before which traditional eschatology has lost ground, the number symbolism of biblical apocalypticism simply does not lend itself to two thousand years in the way believers with misplaced literalism applied it, in fear and awe, to the completion of the first thousand years of the agôn between the Gospel and the world. On the other hand, consider some presumptive ‘signs of the times’: the possibility, admittedly controverted, of eco-catastrophe; the ever-present threat of nuclear war—the more pressing as smaller powers, with less to lose and weaker traditions of rational policymaking, acquire weapons of mass destruction; the victories of secularist materialism which, it seems, only the Islamic powers will challenge—courageously as to substance, injudiciously as to mode; the creation of a medical technology that can encompass, at the ends of the life process, the manufacture of some human beings and the safe disposal of others; the new disparity between the technical means to feed the hungry, never before present, and the political will to do it. These provoke thought, and, in any case, the ending of a millennium reminds the Church of her faith conviction that, in this world, the human project is essentially limited in time.

To follow the history of Italy through the centuries is to penetrate to the very heart of western civilization. The artists, thinkers and statesmen of this small, but complex and vital country are part of our own past and have helped to make the present world what it is. What was achieved by the legions of Rome more than two thousand years ago has remained a powerful influence on history ever since. The cultures of ancient Greece and Israel took their dominant position in our western heritage through the medium of an Italian translation. Christianity was propagated from Rome, the fifteenth century Renaissance from Florence, and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in great part from Padua. European history would have been very different without the work of Columbus and Galileo in discovery, Raphael and Michelangelo in art, Aquinas and Vico in philosophy, St Francis and a long list of Popes from Gregory the Great to John XXIII in religion. Italian museums and churches contain what must seem a disproportionate number of the greatest masterpieces of human creativity.

What became clear to him? Almost all students of theology, and many students of philosophy, know that there is an argument for God’s existence called ‘the Ontological Argument’. Where is this argument to be found? The usual answer given is that it was first advanced by St Anselm (c. 1033—1109) in his Proslogion. Is the argument a good one? The usual answer is that it is not, and that Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) effectively showed why. In my opinion, however, these answers are wrong. In what follows I shall try to explain why this is so. The effort is worth while because it is important to know what Anselm did argue, and also because, as it seems to me, what he has to offer is much more cogent than what is normally attributed to him.

We can begin by noting the nature of the argument attributed to Anselm by those who see him as the father of the Ontological Argument. It runs like this:

My discovery of Semitism goes back to my first visit to Jerusalem in 1930, where I found the three religions derived from Semitic monotheism living side by side in the chaos of the Old City. I got the impression of a dense mass of people of various origins co-existing in mutual disdain, under the firm control of the British occupation. As soon as the British left Palestine, the fire hidden beneath the ashes broke out all over the region. A similarity of temperament on all sides, shaped by a common spiritual ancestry, became apparent, in which tenacity and terrorism were the salient features. Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian) had the same psychological reactions and instincts, shaped by their common inheritance derived from the mystical, spiritual and social teaching of the bible, the gospel and the Quran. These similarities could have provided a basis for mutual understanding, but in fact they led to disagreement, fostered by the interplay of international politics and local interests.

On March 24, 1958, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sent a remarkable memo to a member of his Cabinet, Dr Charles Hill, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The memo read:

Liberation theology emerged gradually in the period following the Second Vatican Council. At that Council there were present, as influences on the conciliar process, a wide variety of theologies- Neo-Scholastic, Neopatristic, anthropologico-transcendental (alias Karl Rahner), as well as the inter-related theologies of the ‘signs of the times’ and of ‘earthly realities’, the latter soon to be dubbed ‘secularisation-theology’ and chiefly worked out, like its brother movement, by the French. As succeeding events have demonstrated, the resultant compound was unstable. So far as the Americas were concerned although ‘CELAM’, the Latin American Episcopal Council, had functioned since 19S6, the Latin American influence at Vatican II, whether of bishops or theologians was negligible, with the exception of one or two individual voices like the Brazilian Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, who contributed to the making of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World.

Very different, during the Council’s closing sessions, was the state of affairs in Latin America itself. There a veritable theological ferment was brewing, as became clear from four meetings of theologians held at, successively, Petrdpolis (Brazil), Havana (Cuba), Bogota (Colombia) and Cuernavaca (Mexico) in the course of 1964-1965. What transpired from these pan-Latin American theological assemblies was the need for a new theology whose nature would be determined by, first, the conciliar ‘renewal’, but also by, secondly, confrontation with the often cruel human reality of that continent.

When I was a student in Cambridge forty-odd years ago a Capuchin friar said to me, ‘God is on the surface of things’. I want to talk about that, and about how it gets obscured by the abstractions of science on the one hand and the make-believe of religion on the other.