A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.

The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.

Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?

Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.

Among the authentic writings of St Thomas Aquinas is one, addressed to the question: Utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem? (‘Is the truth is stronger, when you compare it with wine, with the king, and with a woman?’) Slight as it is, it reveals both an attitude and a sophisticated approach to university education, which it would do us no harm to reflect on.

The piece is quite literally a quodlibet, which in modern usage sounds as though it ought to be a trifling thing anyway, an intellectual bagatelle. The question considered here, you may think, confirms as much. In fact the Disputatio de quolibet was something of a high-point in the intellectual life of the faculty in which it was held. And we find there, much more typically, the mature thought of the faculty’s most eminent teachers. But we do find bagatelles too, and perhaps even that, or the reasons behind it, can be instructive.

In medieval universities, the teaching was directed by a double aim: to impart coherent and substantiated bodies of knowledge, scientias; and to instruct in crafts in which those sciences could not only be developed, but could be put to use. To instruct, as the statutes sometimes put it, in the usus scientiarum. In accordance with this aim, there were two main types of teaching-vehicle. One was the lecture (lectio), in which coherent bodies of knowledge could be transmitted economically and in a context minimising distortion in transmission.

The seductions of centrism

Professor Michael Dummett, in the New Blackfriars article last October which opened what is now quite a long debate, questioned the propriety of Catholic theologians espousing views which contradict traditional Catholic beliefs; to contradict such pronouncements in his opinion makes nonsense of belonging to the Catholic Church. It was Thomas Sheehan’s 1984 article, arguing that the ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars is irreconcilable with traditional or official Catholicism, which prompted Dummett to write in the first place, and it has been mentioned several times since then in the debate.

Here I would like to draw attention to the way an eminent scripture scholar, Professor Raymond Brown, responds to Sheehan’s charge. Brown is a particularly good example to consider, firstly because he has frequently addressed himself to precisely this issue, but mainly because among Catholic scholars his standing is unquestioned. Professor Nicholas Lash, in his response to Dummett, wrote—surely correctly—that Brown’s ‘massive erudition, unswerving loyalty to Catholic Christianity, and endless painstaking judiciousness of judgement have made him (in seminaries and elsewhere) the most widely respected Catholic New Testament scholar in the English-speaking world’.

Consider how Brown addresses this problem of the apparent contradiction between traditional Catholicism and what biblical scholars are now saying. First, he repudiates the picture of Catholic scholarship painted by Sheehan. The ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic scholars, says Brown, is a figment of Sheehan’s imagination. As he says again in a March letter quoted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe in ‘Interrogating the Consensus’, the vast majority of Catholic scholars are ‘centrists’, like himself.

In a recent issue of Building Design, a journal which every architect in Britain receives, a review of Glasgow’s Garden Festival comments that one would expect it to be about gardens but that it turns out to be also about architecture.

A few weeks earlier the Tate Gallery organised a one-day symposium on art, architecture and Deconstruction. A piece of architecture which the philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of Deconstruction, claims as a rare incarnation of his ideas is the Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed by the architect Bernard Tschumi with Derrida’s, and other architects’, participation. One would expect such an architectural ‘demonstration project’ to be about buildings but in fact it turns out to be also about gardens.

And both are also about science and industry.

I want to ask some questions about this conflation of buildings, gardens and technology. My argument asks whether the technique of Deconstruction is applicable, even meaningful, in the context of architecture; it ‘deconstructs’ Derrida’s writing about La Villette, and finally tries to answer the question about buildings, nature, art and technology in terms of power.

Deconstructing architecture

The best way to start the discussion is to start where Derrida starts—with language, and especially the written text. Much of Derrida’s work questions the logocentric basis of Western philosophy. That is, the idea that speech, one step away from directly perceived truth, is the pure form of argument, and the written text, one further step away, is a dangerous and second-best necessary evil, brought into being by the need to give philosophy a history.