Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.

Few, least of all the Catholic, will deny that the present social system with its manifest injustice cries out urgently for radical reforms, and it is to this task that some of the best Catholic minds in Spain are now applying themselves. The main problem is to win back the masses to the Church and to convince them that a true remedy for the social ills that afflict society is to be found in the papal encyclicals, and there alone. That the task is a difficult one will be realized from an analysis of Spain’s political panorama as it affects the proletariat. At the present time liberalism, democracy, and ‘reformist’ socialism are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival. A clear-cut alignment of social forces is taking place through the gradual elimination of all intermediary or ‘compromise’ parties. The issue daily narrows itself down to the choice between ‘integral’ Marxism and one of the brands of anti-Marxist Fascism; a Soviet workers’ republic or a strong government able to alter the whole structure of the State and introduce a measure of planned economy. Social unrest is no new feature in Spanish history of the twentieth century, but never has it reached such aggravated proportions as to-day. The introduction of lay education has provided the revolutionary parties with a rich recruiting ground, a none too surprising fact if we consider that no less a person than Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, once declared in a moment of frankness, ‘Give me the lay school, and I guarantee to provide you with a generation of revolutionaries.’

We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.

Jerome of Moravia was born on the 30th of September 1200, at Olmutz, the Fortress gate of Bohemia, where his father, one of the Minnesingers attached to the Emperor’s Court, had been rewarded with an estate by Frederick Barbarossa. As these Court musicians were, to a man, the creatures of the Ghibelline sovereigns, the son could not altogether escape the taint of heterodoxy that stamped the enemies of the Church, though this malign spirit was largely neutralised by the fidelity of his mother, Ysen-trude, who, as a maid.of honour to the wife of Conrad II of Hungary, had caught some measure of the intense piety that distinguished his daughter St. Elizabeth. At an early age the boy was placed in the care of the Archbishop, who wisely recommended the tempering influence of the severe discipline of the Song School. During his leisure hours between school and chancel Jerome found delight in fingering the psaltery, rota, gigue and symphony, and made the day merry with the simpler songs of the Troubadours. He would listen wide-eyed to his father’s tales of the fifth Crusade and the Wartburg Tournament, though more frequently—for his father’s visits were rare—he would fall asleep to his mother’s stories of Tristram, Parsifal, the Nibelungs, and the Holy Grail. Soon ambition awoke and made the Cathedral school with its midnight Lauds distasteful. At fourteen he entered upon his trivium at Brunn, but he was old enough even then to find a magnet in Cologne, which was nearer Eisenach, the home of Reinmar, Wolfram and other stars in the Minnesingers’ firmament; and nearer also to his father. He attained his immediate goal in 1216. At Cologne the quadrivial course was lightened by his passion for harmony and acoustics, but his hopes were dashed when his father made it plain to him that the knightly singers’ calling was hastening to decay.

While friendship with God is an important theme for Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas never explicitly delineates what such friendship looks like. In this article, I present a systematic description of friendship with God according to Thomas Aquinas. I examine three dynamics (mutuality, benevolence, and communicatio) and two effects (mutual indwelling and union) which Aquinas attributes to human friendship, and I show how they can exist analogically in friendship with God. Such a presentation reveals that friendship with God effects the deification of the human person, and such a deified condition is the intended state of the human person, in which he or she can be most fully human. This conclusion allows me to propose a way to define a human person as a relation (using the term deificatus), analogous to Aquinas's definition of person for the Trinity. In turn, I show how this reality impacts a Thomistic understanding of genuine human friendship, whereby one friend loves the other qua deificatus.

Newmah's Anglican days made him acutely aware of how the language of Catholicism sounds strange in unaccustomed and indeed suspicious ears and how readily misunderstanding ensues. Infallibility is taken to be a claim to be right on everything, the Immaculate Conception is confused with the Virgin Birth, and the remission of sins becomes a permission to continue in evil ways. It is, he saw, a general problem in dealing with the unfamiliar, and he wondered what a hostile foreigner would make of the maxims of the laws of England. Might he not, reading in Blackstone's incomparable Commentaries that ‘the power and jurisdiction of parliament is so transcendent that it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds’, see a blasphemous claim to divine omnipotence? Might not the assertion that ‘the king can do no wrong’ seem an arrogant claim to divine sinlessness? In truth, of course, all that is meant is that in English law there is no higher authority than Parliament and that the King cannot be sued in his own Courts: nothing more. Newman could but ask the hostile foreigner to abide a while and abate his hostility.

Aquinas, writing in a highly technical Latin and within a philosophy and theology alien to modern ears, is no less prone to be misunderstood, and the modes of misrepresenting him, often unwitting, are many. What he has to say about marriage and related issues has been the object of recent attacks: often he is read as if he were a Lutheran or Calvinist. It may be well to note some of these types of error before dealing with his own understanding in these matters.

Looking at Lonergan’s Method is a collection of thirteen papers issuing from a conference held at Maynooth in the spring of 1973 at which scholars from differing traditions and disciplines gathered to assess the significance of the recent work of Bernard Lonergan.

These are not the papers written for the meeting; they represent the authors’ reflections after it, in the light of the discussions that took place. Perhaps the momentum for the book was the convergence of fundamental doubts about the viability of Lonergan’s method. At any rate, for all the respect and gratitude that some of the Catholic contributors voice for what Lonergan has done over the years to loosen the hold of a certain way of doing theology, it is very striking that all but one or two of these papers make what seem such irreparably damaging criticisms of his recent work that it becomes very difficut to regard it any longer as a promising trail in the reconstruction of Catholic theology which is now so urgent a task. The book thus marks a watershed in the history of Lonergan congresses.

That Bernard Lonergan is the only figure in the English-speaking world whose achievement in Catholic theology ranks, in influence and reputation, with that of the leading theologians of our time, cannot be disputed. The years he spent lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome (1953-1965) afforded him a unique opportunity to reach the minds of a whole generation of candidates for the priesthood—either directly or through the countless future seminary professors whom he must have taught (he sometimes had classes of 650 students!).

The concluding part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984. In the first part of this study of the relationship between the religious use of political images and concepts and their use in political rhetoric (published in January) the author focussed on the political and religious language of early seventeenth-century England.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a kind of stability returned to England; conflicts and controversies there, of course, were in the political sphere, and even a ‘glorious revolution’, but compared with the preceding decades a certain peace and order is evident. There was a strong desire for peace among various sections of the population, and the economic and social foundations were being established upon which was to rise the political stability of the following century. By 1688, writes J. Carswell, ‘Englishmen were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics rather than fighting about them’. Ideas of arbitrary power were assailed and the notion of a law depending not simply on the dictate of a sovereign once more became predominant. This is particularly evident in the deist and rationalist writers of the period. God is not ‘an arbitrary being’, insisted Matthew Tindal, but the reasonable governor of a regulated universe. The order, stability and rationality of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ provided a model for social and political relationships. It would be little less than horrid and dreadful blasphemy, declared the influential archbishop John Tillotson, ‘to say that God out of his sovereign will and pleasure can do anything that contradicts the nature of God, or the essential perfections of his deity’.

This paper addresses the foundations of the Church systematically as it originates in the Triune God's plan of salvation. The Church is an extension of the missions of the Son and Spirit in history. Analogies are invoked to help ground the nature and the mission of the of the Church. The paper further explores the implications of Ecclesia de Trinitate in light of Vatican II, the visible and invisible missions of the Son and the Spirit, the role of Mary and the multi‐religious context.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.

Newman was formed in the Church of England and all his major theological concerns were developed in an Anglican context. The rebuttal of utilitarian scepticism in the University Sermons; the ecclesial context of Christian faith and life in The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church; the strong sense of mystery in Newman's epistemology and apologetic; the sacramental character of Christian truth are all significantly part of the Anglican inheritance that he took to the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore Newman's early formation was ‘pre-Victorian’– he was engaged when writing his Essay on Scriptural Miracles with earlier debates with the Deists, as well as sharing in the rediscovery of the imagination that characterised Coleridge and the Romantic Movement. This paper explores these and other issues to show an important part of Newman's enduring Anglican inheritance.

This paper explores the meal scenes in Mark's gospel and examines the theme of Divine Hospitality in the Old Testament. In doing so, a connection is made between the table fellowship of Jesus and the Kingdom of God. The article concludes by reflecting upon ecclesiological practices of the Eucharist in light of the inclusivity of table fellowship. The argument is that by attending to the meal scenes in the gospel of Mark, an understanding of the Kingdom of God manifests and should shape the way the Church practices hospitality.

This article is a study of how Augustine's ethics of belief shaped his arguments against unbelief and its legacy in using coercion to settle disputes. After considering the arguments for belief presented by Augustine, the article studies how these were shaped by his understanding of the problem of evil and how the Fall influenced free will. What is noted to be of benefit in Augustine is that he offers arguments in favor of belief, and is convinced that he has shown unbelief to be based on unsound reasoning. By way of contrast, a number of theologians (such as Tertullian, John Calvin, and those under the heading of Reformed Epistemology) are considered who do not believe that arguments are necessary to support belief or reject unbelief. These are contrasted with Augustine and it is argued that they have significant shortcomings in this respect. However, the article concludes that Augustine could have gone farther in supporting the claim that it is clear that God exists, and his own shortcomings have been used to justify coercion in religious belief. If common ground is to be achieved this problem must be corrected and an adequate foundation for clarity must be established.