In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”

The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.

One easy way into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is to trace his references to the philosophy of Descartes. He ascribes the liberal-modernism in Protestant theology, to which he was so deeply opposed, to the grip of Cartesian epistemology on theological methodology since the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, he insists on a radicalization of Cartesian considerations about doubt and certainty when he comes to work out the doctrine of creation.

Very early in the first volume of Church Dogmatics (henceforth CD), Barth assails ‘Modernistic dogmatics’, ‘theology since the days of the Enlightenment’ (CD 1/1, page 36, first published in 1932, English translation 1936, revised 1975). He means, of course, Protestant theology: a theology, or a family of theologies one might say, in which ‘church and faith are to be understood as links in a greater nexus of being’, so that dogmatic theology becomes ‘a link in a greater nexus of scientific problems, from the general structural laws of which its own specific conditions of knowledge are to be deduced and its own specific scientific character known’. The mistake with this, according to Barth, is that theology is regarded as having the same epistemological status, requirements, methods and so forth, as any other scientific or scholarly discipline. More specifically, this ‘nexus of problems’ is ‘that of an ontology’, a conception of reality, a metaphysics of being, which— ‘since Descartes‘—is the ontology ‘of a comprehensively explicated self-understanding of human existence which may also at a specific point become the pre-understanding of an existence in the Church or in faith, and therefore the pre-understanding and criterion of theological knowledge’.

According to George Steiner, commentary is without end. No, strictly that is not quite accurate. What he said was that it was without end “in the worlds of interpretative and critical discourse”, where there are no final conclusions. “Essay speaks to essay, article chatters to article in an endless gallery of querulous echo,” he said in his book Real Presences'.

Functioning as whispering galleries is one of the things that small magazines can do very well. Inevitably, writing in the special number marking the 70th birthday of Herbert McCabe, the small magazine which jumps first to my mind is New Blackfriars, which Herbert edited so memorably for eleven years. However, another ex-editor, Allan White, is writing in this number about New Blackfriars in particular. It is all magazines with circulations of under 5,000—frequently well under 5,000—which I am writing about here (though not, I should add, house magazines or parish magazines or any magazines written entirely by the editor and his staff.) Of course, the echoes which Steiner speaks about come far faster in clashes between opposing pontificators on TV and in the newspapers than in these small magazines, but on TV and in the newspapers the echoes can get distorted out of all recognition.

>What sort of future, though, have the small magazines got? Unless your name is Rupert Murdoch, if you are working in any of the communications media you are beset from time to time with fear for the future—fear of being frozen out or eaten up. It is something that goes with the job.