As a teacher and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas sets out to investigate the nature of pedagogical activity in his treatise, On the Teacher in Articles 1-4, Question 11 of the Disputed Questions on Truth. His analysis of teaching and of the teacher’s role are informed, as one might expect, by his epistemological views and theological beliefs. One of the first issues that Aquinas has to confront is a theological one, namely, whether or not one can describe any human being as a teacher if one believes that God is the pre-eminent teacher as the primary source of all knowledge. While the latter proposition may seem rather problematic to contemporary Western thought, it was an acceptable issue for discussion in Aquinas’s time and is formulated by him in various ways in a number of the objections cited at the beginning of Article 1. Many of these appear to originate from the Augustinian tradition, together with some others from scriptural sources, and all of them argue along the lines that the Christian belief in God’s noetic power is difficult to reconcile with our human capacity to function freely as independent cognitive beings. In terms of pedagogy, this becomes a debate about the very existence of an authentic human pedagogy if God is believed to be teacher par excellence. Aquinas decides to deal with this problem at the outset.

Even if politics and theology are perceived to be fundamentally distinctive areas of enquiry, they share a common problem. Indeed, one could even suggest that thought itself—as a practice among disparate practices—is subject to the formidable difficulty of the formation and subsistence of community. ‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modem world,’ suggests Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This crisis of community, or its very possibility, is illustrated in a contemporary unwillingness to engage in the hard labour of politics that is part and parcel of either the espousal of individualistic, psychologistic and spiritualistic solutions to the existential problems of subjects and communities or the arrogation of secure and unequivocal identity claims based on nation, race or some other undifferentiated category. Nevertheless, a constant remains in the midst of this confusion. In the western context of modem liberal governance, the possibility of identity, whether individual or national, is predicated on the division of religious and political idioms and practices. There is no room for a tension-filled political/religious nexus which, according to Kierkegaard, produces an ‘arousing restlessness’. In the wake of religion comes a political subjectivity that is marked and re-marked by somnambulance and atomisation.

More than fifty years ago, on January 21, 1947, a debate took place in Paris between Gabriel Marcel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the following question: “To what degree does the material organization of humanity lead man to the point of spiritual maturation?” As Teilhard’s biographer Cuenot observes, “it was a fine subject for two great, but very different, minds to discuss.”’ In essence, the debate concerned the value of technology in human culture, and the character of the social organization attendant upon technical civilization. Do the astounding technological advances of the last century represent a true enhancement of human existence in all its dimensions, as Teilhard believes, or is Marcel right in suggesting that technological progress is of dubious value in relation to the authentic purpose of life? Clearly, this debate has not lost its relevance. In a time when technological mastery of human life itself, through the mapping of the genome, is a reality, and when the Internet has ushered in a global connectedness which has transformed the planet’s “noosphere,” there is reason to reflect on the spiritual value of these attainments.

As Alasdair MacIntyre sees the matter, moral discourse in the sense in which it once existed has broken down. This may be illustrated by numerous issues debated in contemporary society, none of which is in the nature of the case capable of being settled. Once there was a generally-accepted theistic world-view in which human beings had in general terms a definite direction or aim in life; against that background there were clear criteria for settling moral disputes. Since the Enlightenment this has no longer been so. It is true that ‘in everyday discourse the habit of speaking of moral judgments as true or false persists; but the question of what it is in virtue of which a particular moral judgment is true or false has come to lack any clear answer’. This is because ‘moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices’. Many efforts have been made, by Utilitarians, Kantians and others, to plug the gap; but they have all failed.