In this paper I argue that Heidegger's critique of Aquinas on truth must be seen in light of Vallicella's critique of Heidegger. Heidegger criticized Aquinas for allegedly placing truth in the ‘subjectivity’ of the human mind via correspondence (adequatio). While the accuracy of this reading of Aquinas is highly contested, the criticism itself has sometimes been turned back upon Heidegger. In three forgotten articles in the 1980s, William Vallicella contended that Heidegger reduces Being to truth, and truth to the alleged ‘subjectivity’ of Dasein. Though Vallicella garnered some minimal attention at the time, his argument was soon forgotten, along with its potential implications for Heidegger's criticism of Aquinas. This paper will first establish the nature of Heidegger's critique of Aquinas, followed by Vallicella's critique of Heidegger, evaluating the former in light of the latter. It will be shown that Heidegger critiques Thomas for a mistake he does not make, then makes that same mistake himself, only to retreat to a position similar to what Thomas actually holds, but in a way that solves nothing, for he lacks Thomas’ anchor in a divine mind. These points will coalesce in the ultimate conclusion that Vallicella can be used to both undermine Heidegger's critique and undergird the value of Aquinas’ position on truth.

The present article examines the perspectives of two understudied, female spiritual writers, Elizabeth of the Trinity and Caryll Houselander, on the doctrine of ‘divine indwelling’. After a brief discussion of classical elaborations of this doctrine, the paper gives an account of Elizabeth's and Houselander's respective Trinitarian and Incarnational readings of God's indwelling of the human soul. This discussion shows that a given interpretation and experience of the divine indwelling is inevitably shaped by – and shapes – the particularity of one's concrete life context, as well as the doctrinal prism through which it is approached. It furthermore demonstrates that such different accounts nonetheless converge on key, and at times surprising issues, such as the reciprocal nature of divine indwelling, and its interdependency on the separation between God and the human being.

Mozart's operatic masterpiece Don Giovanni raises pivotal questions about freedom and society: should freedom be without constraints? Is absolute freedom possible? In certain key ways these concerns of Mozart's culture resonate with issues that preoccupy us today. Composed in 1787, during the final years of the liberal regime introduced by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, the opera reflects the shadow side of his “enlightened” reforms. The serial seducer Don Giovanni represents a liberty that has degenerated into libertinism. The freedom that Don Giovanni wants to retain at all costs is merely freedom as the absence of physical constraint. In the contemporary world many people aspire to a similarly riven freedom: they reject the dictates of external authority, and docilely submit to the promptings of instinctual drives. Christianity invites human beings to reach beyond themselves in love. Marriage exemplifies the self-giving of permanent commitment, and contrasts starkly with Don Giovanni's egoistic consumption and hasty disposal of women. Although the lyrics and plot of Mozart's opera never evoke the Trinity, the musical perfection of his work dances on the threshold of Revelation, and opens its hearers up to the liberating mystery of the freedom of Trinitarian 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.

Latent in the moral teaching of the Catholic Church since Vatican II has been a conception of morality as a life project, a positive force for the shaping of human character. This marks a shift of focus beyond morality as a science of demarcations, separating good actions from evil, the permissible from the forbidden, a method of problem-solving when ambiguity confronts conscience about a particular choice. A broader vision has been sought in which subjects treated under the heading of the moral life can be concluded aptly only by connecting them to the life of holiness. While in some cases it can be difficult to observe a distinction between a treatment of morality and an exhortation to more serious spiritual life, this overlapping of subject matter is not unwelcome.

Veritatis Splendor is a recent case in point. While the middle portion of the encyclical offers a very precise analysis of the relations among human acts, conscience, and the moral law, the encyclical begins and ends with meditative chapters in which the moral life is described as nothing less than the road to sanctity. These sections require little familiarity with moral theology to inspire personal response. The pages on martyrdom, for instance, in their evocation of the cost of moral commitment in the modem world, are a striking appeal to the heroic courage that produces saints.

A less well-known example of this ‘spiritual’ approach to moral theology has been the incorporation of friendship as a thematic point of reference for the quality of a person’s moral life.

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.

This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:

Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:

‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.

This article has three parts. The first two explore contemporary philosopher Bonnie Kent's important contributions to the role of the weakness of the will in actions of the morally incontinent in Thomas Aquinas treatment of human action. While Kent's treatment gives many important insights, nevertheless, she fails to recognize that the weakness of the will does in fact have role in the actions of the morally incontinent. Kent is correct that, for Aquinas, the passions cause the incontinent act to act as such. She fails, however, to recognize that the role of the passions does not exclude the weakness of the will as a cause, and even a principal cause. The third part takes up the criticisms of Gary Watson to which Kent's remarks were meant as a reply and shows that even with the causative role of the weak will, Aquinas' account does not fall prey to Watson's criticisms.

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.

The value of theology as a discipline has been challenged in recent years by a number of high-profile scientists, most prominently perhaps Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. It has been questioned whether theology can bring anything to the table, particularly when compared with the clearly evident successes of modern science. This paper will take this challenge seriously and explore what value theology may have in the context of a scientific age, where the successes of the sciences have clearly reshaped how we think about the world. It will argue that theology offers a space and a language for discourse on the ineffable and intangible aspects of human experience, and can address the implicit philosophical and theological connotations of the scientific worldview.

This essay falls into two parts. In the first I offer a panorama of my book, In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013), highlighting its main features. These comprise: its rhetorical position; its opposition to the “the virus of wishful thinking”, pacifism, legal positivism, and liberal individualism; and its promotion of the early Christian tradition of just war reasoning and of three kinds of realism – moral-ontological, Augustinian-anthropological, and practical. Then in the second part, I consider four controversial issues that the book raises: love, proportionality, Britain's entry into the First World War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This paper seeks to explore the impact that the Council had upon moral theology, and vice versa, along with some of the main debates and methodological questions that have preoccupied Catholic ethicists since. Seeking to chart both that, as well as how, moral theology was transformed, four key points arise. First, the emergence, even prior to the council of a more participatory approach to moral theology. Second, the retrieval of an understanding of the provisionality of much moral teaching. Third, an appreciation of the circular relationship between ethics and ecclesiology. Fourth, the ‘work to be done’ in relation to continuing disagreements over method and the ‘yearning for continuity’ that emerged in reaction to the transformations in moral theology and indeed the Council in general. We close with consideration of constructive proposals for the future concerning whether and how Catholics might live with difference and indeed with less certitude, reminding ourselves that morality is not a precise and exact science, as if any such thing exists.

I regard this article as part of a continuing debate in New Blackfriars concerning the relations of Christianity and Marxism. But it is also an attempt, within that context, to ask and answer the question why we should continue to believe in God. I raise the question here because, it seems to me, that most of the effort expended by earlier contributors, particularly Denys Turner has been towards showing that it is possible, and even necessary for a Christian to be a Marxist. Obviously, if a Christian must be a Marxist, as Denys Turner argues, then the question whether he can, or should, continue to believe in God is raised at once. For it is a pretty widely accepted opinion among Marxists that belief in God is incompatible with their own view of things, and that anyone who is a Marxist and believes in God is something of an oddity, a man with a private religious hang-up, and quite probably an unreliable ally. Denys Turner rightly affirms that, in holding to this view of religious belief, Marxists are themselves merely hanging on to a private opinion that has nothing to do with their Marxism as such. But a Christian cannot be content with remaining there. What the Christian needs to be able to show is that, if he ought to be a Marxist just in order to be a complete Christian, it is equally the case that the Marxist ought to be a Christian just in order to be a complete Marxist. Nothing short of this will do, from a Christian standpoint: to pretend otherwise is to connive at a sell-out. I believe that at the present stage of the game there is a real danger of just such a sell-out. For example, to say, as the editorial committee responsible for Crossleft do, that ‘there can be no question today ... of Christian modification of Marxist praxis’ (which, if it means anything, means that being a Christian Marxist makes no difference at all to what, as a Marxist you are prepared to do): or that ‘the Church is basically on the side of the oppressor’ (what else, strictly speaking, can ‘basically’ mean here but ‘from the very foundation’?)—to say things like this suggests to me a readiness for just such a sell-out as I have indicated.

Since Vatican II the restored Permanent Diaconate in the Latin Church has played an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Is there a theology of the diaconate, and if so what are the contentious issues? How far is the diaconate really distinct from the priesthood and the ministry of laypeople? A way forward is to revive the subversive character of διακονία, both in practical pastoral ministry and in serious engagement with Catholic Social Teaching; this necessitates major changes to diaconate formation programmes. A clearly defined diaconate would be able to help the Church renew and reform its understanding of ministry.