Freud's metapsychology was in essence a theory of drives, in that it invoked the concepts of energy and structure to show that every human action has its basis in a fundamental and irreducible instinctual ground. Two drives were pre-eminent: the sexual drive and the drive for selfpreservation. Connected with the concept of drive was the notion of an object – the psychic economy was populated by a plethora of such objects, with the objects in question being related to the ‘discharge’ of an underlying drive. Indeed, Freud himself was not always clear or consistent on the relation between drive and object, and changed his position in subsequent writings or sometimes said incompatible things about objects in different parts of the same text. Across this inconsistency, the fundamental point remained: the psychic object is a result of the drive, and the relation to an object is the function of a drive's discharge. For example, the child's relation to the breast – trusting, untrusting, and so on – serves as a prototype for its subsequent relations to whole objects, such as mother and father.

The child's body, then, is a vehicle for drives, though the relatively unstructured character of the drives ensures they are polymorphous in nature. ‘Successful’ psychic development is then construed by Freud and his followers as the capacity of the individual psyche to form relations with whole objects. Subsequent thinkers in the psychoanalytical tradition such as Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm and Karen Horney criticised this emphasis on the individual psyche, and charged Freud with de-emphasising social relations and group ties, despite his attempts to deal with a range of these issues in such works as Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. Freud was said to have failed to consider adequately the mechanisms that link objects to drives and objects to each other (see, for instance, the work of Klein and Winnicott discussed below). These mechanisms – introjection and projection – are highly flexible in their operation, and blend objects with each other, as well as decompose objects into partial or part objects. Object creation can also be enhanced by the particular dealings an individual has with the external world.

Deleuze's employment of the concept of force (the same in English and French) can be grasped in terms of two distinctive but somewhat overlapping phases. In the first, associated with the “historical” emphasis on the works on Spinoza and Nietzsche (among others) that marked the earlier part of Deleuze's career, force is understood primarily in terms of its relation to notions of speed and movement. In the case of Spinoza, Deleuze is particularly impressed by Spinoza's philosophical ambition to view all of life as the expression of a fundamental striving or conatus, so that the body becomes an ensemble consisting of those forces that it transmits and those forces that it receives. Spinoza, says Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, “solicits forces in thought that elude obedience as well as blame, and fashions the image of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous innocence without merit or culpability” (SPP: 4). This fundamental insight is carried through in Deleuze's work on Nietzsche, where Nietzsche is depicted as someone who follows faithfully Spinoza's injunction that we think “in terms of speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements, nonsubjectified affects” (SPP: 129).

In the second phase, associated primarily with Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari, the notion of force is effectively generalized, so that it expresses a power that ranges over the entirety of the social order.

Deleuze endorsed repeatedly the well-known conviction of Michel Foucault and of Nietzsche that life had to be lived as a work of art. This raises the question whether the terms under which a life is led properly belong to ethics (this of course being the traditional or consensual position taken when it comes to answering the question “how should I lead my life?”). But to suggest that life be led as a work of art implies, palpably, that it is aesthetics, and not ethics, which superintends the question “how should I lead my life?” At one level the answer to this question can only be altogether commonplace and quite worn-out – of course the answer given depends on how “ethics” and “aesthetics” are defined! But at another level it certainly isn't trivial. If Deleuze had an ethics, then what kind of ethics is it, and is it an ethics with a depth and scope capable of superintending the question “how should I lead my life”? Or would this task be left to an aesthetics, and, if so, what kind of aesthetics did Deleuze have? Or are ethics and aesthetics related in such a way in Deleuze's thought that it is both ethics and aesthetics which oversee the terms of the question “how should I lead my life”? And if that is the case, then how does Deleuze conceive of the relation between ethics and aesthetics, and how do they function conjointly when dealing with the question of leading one’s life as a work of art?

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989), known universally as ‘CLR’, or ‘Nello’ to those who were closer to him, was born in Tunapuna, Trinidad (at that time a British colony), though he spent most of his adult life in Britain and the United States. James is probably cricket's greatest writer, but was also a renowned historian, Marxist scholar and interpreter of literary texts (Melville most notably); as well as being (more often than not several of these at the same time) a deeply engaged socialist organiser and militant, newspaper editor, cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, writer of novels and children's stories, and a polemicist and essayist who used his pen indefatigably on behalf of a wide range of causes (West Indian independence from Britain, the Pan-African movement, the plight of black sharecroppers in the American South, decolonisation and struggles against racism, the social and economic predicament of workers in the Lancashire cotton mills of the 1930s, to mention but a few).

Cricket, along with mountaineering, has been notable amongst sports for the quality of its associated literary productivity, and well-known authors who have written on the former include, to mention but a few, William Hazlitt, Siegfried Sassoon, Dorothy Sayers, P. G. Wodehouse and Hugh de Selincourt. These fictional depictions deal overwhelmingly with a form of the game known in England as ‘village cricket’, very far removed in terms of expertise and competitive rigour from the international, and the county (England), state (Australia) or island (the West Indies) forms of the game described and analysed by James.

Is it possible for a compatibility to exist between Althusser's well-known doctrine of the interpellation of the subject by the ideological apparatuses of the state and the theses regarding the assemblages of the state propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? Is there, more generally, a recognisable political subject whose ontological shape and character is limned in A Thousand Plateaus, even as it is ‘undone’ by Deleuze and Guattari? And is there a fundamental connection between this subject and the traditional metaphysical-epistemological subject that is also unravelled in A Thousand Plateaus? At first sight, the answers to these questions are probably going to be negative, though our ‘no’ will almost certainly have to be somewhat less emphatic where the second and third questions are concerned.

There are only a couple of references to Althusser in A Thousand Plateaus, but what is there indicates explicitly that Deleuze and Guattari consider Althusser's notion of the constitution of social individuals as subjects to be profoundly mistaken. To quote them:

Donald MacKinnon is widely regarded as one of the most influential post-war British philosophical theologians. The range of his published work is wide. The topics covered by his writings include (and the following list follows no particular order): the ethics of nuclear weapons, Kant's moral philosophy, Christian doctrines, the tragic vision, Marxism, metaphysics, religious language, the philosophy of history, ecclesiology, theological anthropology. (A full bibliography of MacKinnon's writings is to be found in Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland, eds., The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 239–48. The Preface in the same volume also provides biographical details in summary form.)

MacKinnon's work is characterized by a vast erudition, and his mode of thought is profoundly interrogative (rather than affirmative). In theological matters, he refuses to take up substantive positions, and prefers instead to ‘map’ the ramifications of the espousal of such positions. This task is invariably undertaken with great subtlety and a deep respect for the complexities of the subject matter treated. The reader is always left with the impression that what matters for MacKinnon is precisely what is left unsaid, though, typically, this too is somehow indicated in his texts.

In his so far unpublished ‘Introduction’ to the (also unpublished) lectures given by Oliver Chase Quick during his tenure as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Donald MacKinnon speaks favourably of Quick's treatment of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Describing the approach adopted by Quick in these lectures, MacKinnon says that

Acquaintance with this particular essay and other writings of MacKinnon on the subject of ‘incarnation’ will, I believe, soon convince the reader that the above estimation of Quick's work is one that is just as applicable to MacKinnon's own œuvre. It will also be just as evident to our (hypothetical) reader that MacKinnon does not have anything amounting to an elaborate and comprehensive ‘doctrine’ of the Incarnation. Rather, he provides the reader with a series of clues which point to those features that would have to be present in any account faithful to the Gospel narratives and the christological traditions of the Church. But no attempt is made to press these clues into any kind of systematic framework.

The papers in this volume represent the proceedings of a conference on the work of Donald MacKinnon, Norris-Hulse Professor Emeritus of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. Through the good offices of the conference chairman, Professor Stephen Sykes, it was possible to hold the conference at St John's College, Cambridge, on 22–5 July 1986. The editor is grateful to Professor Sykes for his work in chairing the conference and for facilitating the publication process.

The conference would not have been held but for a very generous subvention provided by St John's College. A subvention and conference reception were also provided by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A grant from the College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham, subsidized the cost of organizing the conference, and the travelling expenses of the conference speakers were met by grants from the British Academy and the Cadbury Trust. Illness prevented Dr Paskins from presenting his own paper, and the editor is very grateful to Professor Rowan Williams for reading Dr Paskins's paper at short notice, and to the Revd Dr Peter Sedgwick for auditing the subsequent discussion. Professor MacKinnon was present throughout the proceedings, and the speakers are grateful to him for his generous and penetrating responses to their presentations. These essays, by colleagues, students and friends, are presented to Professor MacKinnon on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday.

The heart of St Thomas Aquinas's views on the nature of language about God is his thesis that all assertions about God are to be construed analogically. Aquinas offers this as one thesis, but it is fruitful to regard it as consisting of two separate claims: a linguistic subthesis, which provides for the formulation of analogy rules governing the meaning derivations of terms in natural language; and a metaphysical subthesis, designed to facilitate the application of these rules to theistic language, by expressing the truth (as Aquinas saw it) of the cosmological relation that exists between God and the objects of creation. One of the main purposes of this essay will be to argue that the theology of revelation requires us to construe this relation between God and the world as an ontic (or ontological), and not a cosmological, relation. That is, the theology of revelation behoves us to construe the relation between God and the world as an ‘isomorphism’ of being, antecedent to any act of divine creation, and not as something which is the mere consequence of God's creative act (as would be the case in a cosmological relation).

Aquinas's two subtheses

(AL) Natural language has two analogy rules, one for ‘attribution’ and the other for ‘proper proportionality’, which specify that the instances of a term are analogues if they instantiate a semantic property (of the term in question) which conforms in its use to either or both of these rules.

‘Proving God's existence’

The first part of David Brown's The Divine Trinity is devoted to a vigorous apologetic undertaken on behalf of a God who ‘intervenes’. Brown is convinced that, given the appropriate ‘interventionist’ assumptions, ‘religious experience’ can provide genuine knowledge about the existence and character of God. This conviction prompts Brown to formulate an alleged ‘proof’ of God's existence, which is worth reproducing in full, since it provides an accurate insight not only into Brown's understanding of ‘religious experience’, but also places into sharper focus the epistemology which lies at the heart of his argument in this book:

1. (1) Religious experience is a distinct type of experience.

2. (2) Whenever a type of experience occurs with which one is not personally acquainted, then the only rational course is to accept claims made on the basis of this experience, unless sufficient grounds can be adduced for doubting the coherence or intelligibility of such claims.

3. (3) Therefore, if cognitive claims are made on the basis of religious experience, the only rational course is to accept these claims – with the same proviso.

4. (4) But all those who have these experiences sincerely claim that they give knowledge of the divine.

5. (5) Therefore, the only rational course is to accept the existence of the divine – again, with the same proviso.

6. (6) But the proviso in (2) is met – there are no such sufficient grounds.

7. (7) Therfore, the divine exists. (p.35)

One of the more important issues raised in the debate connected with The Myth of God Incarnate concerns the relation soteriology has to the incarnation. Is the Christian understanding of salvation, as traditionally formulated in the doctrine of the atonement, inextricably bound up with the incarnation? If it is, do we necessarily have to reject the doctrine of the atonement if we think there are adequate grounds for questioning the tenability of the notion of the incarnation? Or can we at least retain the fundamental insights of the atonement by modifying our understanding of the incarnation, perhaps by opting for a ‘functional’, as opposed to an ‘ontological’, christology? In any case, the doctrine of the atonement and the christological question cannot be discussed in isolation from each other. Our interest in the relation soteriology has to christology may also be heightened by the fact that in recent years particularly impressive ‘functional’ christologies have been developed by Geoffrey Lampe and Edward Schillebeeckx. Our preference for one or the other type of christology may be determined, in part, by our basic theological approach. As Stephen Sykes, following J. F. Bethune-Baker, has pointed out, there are two basic approaches, with different starting-points: ‘The anthropological approach defines man and his needs and finds in Christ a saviour…. The other approach is theological, which starts with God and his sovereign activity. Christology is possible because God has acted. Man is saved because God acted to save him.’