Not long ago different branches of the Church seemed to be univocally associated with certain translations of the Biblical text: Protestantism with the King James Version, Roman Catholicism with the Vulgate and, less centrally, with the Douai Version. Doctrine could be immediately referred to a single standard and official translation. This older situation has in recent years quite suddenly dissolved, and no one quite knows what will take its place. It is far from clear that new translations can or should come to occupy the position which the older ones had. For one thing, there are too many of them, with still more to come, and the search for finality would seem to be an infinite regress. One hears that modern scholarship is solving age-old problems, and this is partly true; but it is also increasing the complexity of factors which have to be taken into account and thus (I suspect) making more remote the possibility that a single translation, fully correct from the scholarly point of view, can be produced. It is not long ago that one heard in discussions of theological education that new and accurate translations might make less necessary the training of ordinands in the biblical languages; but on the contrary, the variety of translations may in course of time make the original languages more indispensable as a means to discrimination (thereby incidentally re-creating something of the situation in which St Jerome himself was led to learn Hebrew!).

The Afrikaans daily Die Burger for Saturday, 26th August, 1967, reports the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, as saying the following to a Nationalist Party gathering in the Transvaal: ‘We have developed a way of life in South Africa. We have learned from experience, so that we have been able to find a solution (to the problem of race relations) which the world can learn from. South Africa has never expected the world to subscribe to its policy or accept it; our standpoint has always been that we should be given credit for being honest. I think more and more people are giving us credit for our honesty. They are asking whether we haven’t perhaps got something. South Africa is being looked at with new eyes.’ Mr Vorster asked the United States and Britain whether they had found the solution to the colour question. ‘We have reached the stage when we can tell the world that we have the solution. We have reached the stage when we can invite the world, and say: “Come and see what it looks like where people can live in a country according to the policy of separate development.” In South Africa there is peace and calm, and this is not because of pressure from the government. South Africa has no need to call out an army, in order to let people live together like this. Everywhere in the world there are problems and strife. This is not the case in South Africa, because we have been dealing with the question for generations. We can discuss these matters, because the evidence is there for any unprejudiced person to see.’

I have been invited not only to comment on the essays published in this collection, but also to try to ‘place’ Bernard Lonergan and his work. The first task is not easy, the second is virtually impossible. In saying this, I am not denying that it is reasonable to ask questions such as: cWhat is Lonergan up to?’, ‘Where does he stand in contemporary debates?’. The list of contents alone would invite such questions. What is the common factor, beyond the mere fact of common authorship, in sixteen essays, originally published between 1943 and 1965, on such disparate topics as: ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility’, ‘The Assumption and Theology’, and ‘Cognitional Structure’? Another reason for wanting to have Lonergan ‘placed’ is that, while the sheer difficulty of most of his work renders him inaccessible to many people, he has profoundly influenced such very different spirits as David Burrell, Bishop Butler, Charles Davis, Sebastian Moore, John Courtney Murray and Michael Novak. Yet, while I believe that Lonergan is one of the most profoundly original and creative Catholic thinkers of our time, it is his very originality that makes it almost impossible to place him. It may seem paradoxical to describe as ‘original’ a man much of whose writing bears the terminological hallmark of neo-scholastic theology and metaphysics. But then, the originality of Beethoven did not consist in the notes of the scale which he employed, but in the conception and structure with which they were ordered.

Frederick Crowe’s editorial introduction to the collection is an excellent biographical and interpretative summary of Lonergan’s work.

One of the fundamental problems that any critique of Capitalism must face is that such a critique should, if successful, isolate features of a capitalist society that are specifically ‘capitalist’ from, for example, general features of industrial societies. This problem is most acute in the case of the human implications of the system. After all, the quality of life of an industrial worker does not differ as greatly between the United States and the Soviet Union as ideology, official and unofficial, would have one imagine. Indeed an examination of numerous features of American and Soviet society reveals strong similarities in social organization, and the distribution of power and income. The existence of such similarities has sometimes led observers to conclude that a process of ‘convergence’ is taking place; that as the Soviet Union becomes increasingly industrialized and wealthy, and as technical change takes place in both countries, the systems continually produce similar solutions to similar problems.

In an extreme form such a view can become a kind of technological determinism. The vast and complex technology of our time determines for us power and social relationships and there is little we can do to change them. In such an extreme form this is akin to a rather crude Marxism, but one that logically applies the idea that the social structure is largely determined by the structure of production even to societies in which, officially, the means of production are in the hands of the people. However, even if one admits a larger role than this for political and social choice, there are clearly bounds on the social reforms and reorganizations that would be consistent with the continued working of the industrial system.

La Pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin was first published at Paris in 1962. It has been admirably translated by René Hague and forms an authoritative commentary. It is authoritative because Père Lubac had been a close friend of Père Teilhard de Chardin for over thirty years and had discussed his thought with him and because it is by Père Lubac with his clarity and his gift for understanding other viewpoints than his own.

In his first chapter ‘The Essential Core’, Père Lubac distinguishes between two groups of Père Teilhard’s writings ‘the first in which the line of thought is still scientific or, one might prefer to say philosophical, is developed from the data of experimental science; the second, more strictly mystical and religious, is often explicitly based on the data of Christian revelation. Central to the first is The Phenomenon of Man, to the second Le Milieu Divin.’ Inevitably Père Lubac places his emphasis on the group that centres on Le Milieu Divin and attempts to penetrate ‘to the heart of Teilhard’s mystical teaching’. In what sense was Père Teilhard a mystic?

Père Lubac’s eighth chapter is entitled ‘Scientist, Prophet and Mystic’. In it he describes Père Teilhard as a scientist of the first order. This is perhaps a simplification. From the time of his scholasticate and his first unfortunate association with Mr Dawson and the Piltdown Skull, Père Teilhard’s primary subject of study was prehistoric archaeology and it was this that finally made his name in China.