It is occasionally said of Edward Schillebeeckx that he is a difficult theologian to understand because in the last analysis he does not have a theology! Instead, he is thought to have produced two, three, or more, quite distinct theologies, whose characteristics depend on the kinds of philosophical equipment he has marshalled in order to give conceptual embodiment to his theological convictions.

Over the past five decades, Schillebeeckx has published about four hundred and seventy theological studies. A perusal of these divulges that at different stages his writings have freely borrowed philosophical ideas from such diverse contexts as phenomenology, existentialism, Anglo-American-Scandinavian analytical philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, neo-Marxist critical theories of society, and twentieth-century revivals of Thomism—a list by no means exhaustive.

A survey of his publications further uncovers that for a period of about nine years, from 1963 to 1974, he did not write a single book. These years, particularly from 1966 onwards, were devoted to a determined study of hermeneutics and biblical exegesis as a preparation for interpreting Christian faith in a new way. In 1974, at the end of this incubatory period, he published Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, the monograph in which he effectively gave notice that he had radically changed his theological method. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, he had employed a method which took classical theological theories and texts as its point of departure. With the book Jesus, however, references to patristic, medieval, and papal documents have to a large extent been put aside in favour of an avowedly hermeneutical method, which is dependent on a bountiful array of exegetical data and which seeks to set past and contemporary human experiences in a mutually critical and interpretative relationship with each other.

The use of ‘Adam’ in the New Testament is by no means extensive. The name itself occurs only nine times (Luke 3:38; Romans 5:14a and b; 1 Corinthians 15:22; 45a and b; 1 Timothy 2:13 and 14; Jude 14), but in a wide variety of senses. Sometimes its use is built upon the Genesis account’s portrayal of Adam as the first human creature: Adam is seen as the historic progenitor of the race. This is most clear in Jude 14 (a quote from Ethiopian Enoch 1:9), where Enoch is described as ‘the seventh generation from Adam’. Here the meaning is quite straightforward. ‘Adam’ is simply spoken of as an historical figure. In the same way, the Lucan reference to Adam is set within the genealogical table of Jesus, beginning with Jesus himself, and running backwards until it climaxes in the first created man. By such a structure the historical relationship between Jesus and Adam is emphasized and Jesus is seen to fit within the flow of human history. We who live in the 20th century are immediately presented with a difficulty by such an emphasis upon the historical side of the Adam stories.

Fortunately, the complete meaning of ‘Adam’ within the New Testament is not restricted to such a narrow historical basis as we see in Jude and Luke. We do find, in some of the other passages, hints of typological significance of ‘Adam’. ‘Adam’ as a theological category is thereby rescued and is able to have some contemporary meaning.

A talk given in a retreat for eucharistic ministers in November 1988.

Sooner or later, in Christian ministry, we find we are having to talk to somebody about death, their death or the death of a loved-one, and we are not going to do this very well if we have avoided thinking about death ourselves, avoided asking ourselves what death means—or should mean—for the Christian.

In St Peter’s, Rome, there is a statue by Michelangelo. We have all at least seen photographs of it at some time or other. It is a pieta. That’s to say, a statue of the dead Christ with his mother. We see the broken bloody corpse of Christ lying gently in the arms and lap of his grief-stricken mother, his head facing upwards, his torn limbs drooping down. The statue tells even the most casual tourist a simple story: this is a mother holding the dead body of her son.

But Michelangelo’s Pieta does far more as well. It shows the deep trusting relationship that existed between the mother and the son. How many of us who have seen it cannot be moved by the face of Mary? She is truly beautiful and in a strange way serene. Her skin soft, gentle and warm. And in her beauty she shows her grief. In her tenderness is shown her pain. In the motherly embrace of her dead son is shown her great grief. The agony and joy of being a mother cry out at us from the stone.

Michelangelo uses other images to heighten our understanding and our empathy. We see, hidden under her garment, the gentle curve of her breasts—breasts which sustained life in the early months of her baby son. But above all there is the gaze of Mary into the face of her son—that gaze of total pity, total loss, total love.

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.

Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.