This commemorative article, drafted for the 75th anniversary of Vincent McNabb's death in 2018 (it was also the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth), re-tells his story, visits the unresolved question of his sanctity, and, by considering his themes, seeks to point up his amor intellectualis, and not just cordialis, the generosity of a many-sided man.

“Aesthetics” is mainly devoted to the description of an assumed aesthetic experience. My intention is to try to show that this modern account, defining a large part of Aesthetics as a discipline, does not allow a correct description of our aesthetic life. Criticism of this modern and contemporary conception will be followed by the defence of a completely different thesis according to which we are made to apprehend in natural things and works of art those properties by which they signify, and in particular their aesthetic properties. Apprehension and appreciation of works of art presuppose the ability to respond to the aesthetic properties of things and works of art. We need to exercise virtues, intellectual and moral ones, to answer appropriately to aesthetic properties of works of art and natural things. Good in general, and good in our aesthetic life and in art, can be understood according to what Aquinas calls “the gradation to be found in things”. I will try to show that it is a reason to think that a successful aesthetic life is a form of desire for God as the source of all perfection.

This paper revisits Aquinas's understanding of theology as a science based on a participation in the divine scientia. Our modern presuppositions (in terms of “autonomous” reason and philosophy as a discipline utterly separate from theology) often appear to render Aquinas's claims implausible. In this contribution it is argued that (a) all sciences are fiduciary in the broad sense (with the exception of those that rely on principles per se nota) and (b) that first principles can only be accepted or rejected, but not refuted or demonstrated within the relevant discipline. From this, two conclusions can be drawn: first, despite its reliance on revelation theology's case is, therefore, not as peculiar as modern readers might initially assume: every discipline operates with key assumptions it simply accepts. Secondly, given the role of first principles, to characterise Aquinas's account of the assent of faith as fideist or voluntarist is beside the point, for you can only accept or reject first principles. The contribution ends by suggesting that assent to the articles of faith is not an extraneous acquiescence in assertions of divine authority either, as a reading of the first question of the Secunda Secundae makes clear. Indeed, the paper hints that we should not read the first question of the Prima Pars without engaging with the first questions of the Secunda Secundae.

Romano Guardini's theory of oppositions (Gegensatzlehre), which helped him forge a unity within multifaceted realities such as Church and liturgy, also inspired him to achieve a unity between the secular and sacred aspects of the Christian life, as the Second Vatican Council was later to do, particularly in Gaudium et Spes. While Gaudium et Spes 36 concentrated on a Christian view of the autonomy of created realities, Guardini diagnosed the gulf between faith and life in a neglect of the interplay of creation and redemption: ‘to save redemption by the Son, [man] has been forced to abandon creation by the Father’. In a way which was prophetic of later criticisms of Gaudium et Spes and also of fruitful applications and developments of its doctrine, Guardini called for a reflection on the light which the work of redemption sheds on the created world and on man's life within it, that the believer may stand with his faith amid the concrete, actual world, and rediscover that world in his faith.

This article is an inter-textual study of the play Angels in America (Part One), Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate and key Catholic writings on homosexuality. I hope to show how the play might inform future Catholic understandings of self-identity, self-acceptance and self-love and how in turn, Catholic writings on the nature of love, sexuality and holiness can assist audiences to understand more deeply the themes and dilemmas in the play. The Catholic Church is immensely forgiving of the human failure to live up to the lofty demands of love and has a strong tradition of asceticism concerning the positive and transformative effects of self-control. However, due to the cognitive dissonance set up by its teaching on homosexuality, and in particular, its claim that there is an incompatibility between gay identity and ordained priestly identity, the Church has tended to retreat into a world of silence about the importance of self-knowledge to assuage the dissonance it feels. The dramatic deleterious consequences seen in the play about the failure to love oneself are a stark warning to the Church that this might not be the best or most pastoral path to take.

Through an examination of Augustine's understanding of language and an exegesis of key passages in De trinitate, this article exposits and critiques Augustine's theology of the Incarnation. It attends to the distinctions Augustine draws between the two verba—the verbum mentis and the verbum vocis—and asks if conceiving of language differently might better account for the Incarnation of the Word in terms of De trinitate’s focus on substantial and relational predication. The author maintains that Augustine's impulse to interpret the Incarnation linguistically is the right one, but argues that drawing upon the resources of a Wittgensteinian approach to language sits more soundly with the rest of the grammar of Christian theology. Deploying the work of Wittgenstein's inheritors, especially Stanley Cavell and Stephen Mulhall, this article shows that while critique is in order, the final result is something broadly in line with Augustine's own best impulses concerning language as found in De dialectica and De doctrina christiana.