Why do Christians celebrate the Paschal Mystery again and again? “We did it last year,” one might say, “Why do it again?” One reason, of course, is the need to deepen our understanding and appreciation of what is in fact the heart of the Christian religion; and from this point of view the Mystery unfolds in two distinct phases. The first phase is linked with the catechumenate (RCIA). The entire Christian community is invited to journey through Lent toward Easter in company with the candidates for Baptism, who are in the last stage of their preparation for sacramental initiation into the Body of Christ. Here the obvious intention is to promote in the community at large a progressively deeper spiritual plunge into the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Rising. The second phase of the Mystery encompasses the fifty days following Easter, and culminates with Pentecost Sunday. During this period there is a cycle of readings from the Johannine gospel, which taken as a whole constitutes a second catechesis. Here the Catechist is the Risen Christ himself. The teaching unfolds in three stages. It begins with the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus on New Birth (Jn 3); then there is his discourse on the Bread of Life (Jn 6); and finally the words he spoke in the Upper Room, which reveal the Gift of the Spirit (Jn 14-17). Taken together these readings are a profound instruction on the Church’s two-fold endowment of Sacrament and Spirit.

Fergus Kerr, after a recent conference on St. Thomas Aquinas in the Netherlands, remarked on how a certain understanding of Heidegger’s history of being is now all but taken for granted in the Catholic theological imagination. Certainly the trajectory of the history of reason traced by the Holy Father in his recent encyclical letter Fides et Ratio would seem to owe more than just a little to Heidegger’s influence. Yet the genealogy of this influence is not easy to trace, nor is it direct. Heidegger’s work arguably exercises an influence more on those who have never read him, or at least not deeply, than on those who have (John Paul II must be counted among the latter). The increasingly common use of the word ontotheology by theologians, coined by Heidegger in a course of lectures on Hegel in 1930, though with roots at least as early as a course on Leibniz from 1928, and used by him in written texts at least until 1962, is testimony enough; but so is the fact that the vaguer uses of this term become progressively more detached from their precisely definite origins in the very occasions of becoming commoner.

British resistance to Heidegger’s work has meant that North- Americans interpreters are much more decisive for how Heidegger is understood in English. Their emphasis has tended to be on explanation and clarification, or the minute piecing together of a narrative framework into which his thought can then be fitted. Fr. William Richardson’s monumental work on Heidegger set both a tone and a framework for reading Heidegger whose reverberations still predominate.

John Macquarrie has written of John Henry Newman that “in emphasizing conscience, he is thinking along the same lines” as theologians such as Karl Rahner, “who have claimed that the human being has the capacity for transcendence towards God”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this claim, with specific reference to the similarities that exist in Newman and Rahner in their respective treatments of the ‘way to faith’. I shall show how the role of mystagogy as a way to faith in Rahner can help us understand the role of conscience as a way to faith in Newman. In particular, I shall address the issue of Newman’s proof of God from conscience, and how its effectiveness is dependent on its not being regarded as a proof of God in the sense of the traditional proofs. Finally, having responded to some Wittgensteinian objections to the apparently grandiose claims of Newman and Rahner, I shall show how a passage in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty can help us understand the pastoral effectiveness of the Rahnerian and Newmanian ways to faith, and shall suggest why Newman felt unable to publish the work he planned on the argument from conscience.

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.

Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:

It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in the Lysis and Symposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.

Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.

Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- received Politiques de l’amitié? in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.

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.

I once read a mystery novel where the main character, an author by profession, always finished one of his books by lighting a candle, uncorking a bottle of champagne, and toasting himself for a job well done. It was his way of celebrating the outpouring of his creative juices. It brought closure to his work, a festive spirit to his life, and release to pent-up tensions. The ritual became so much a part of his work that the two could hardly be separated. His creativity was sparked by the thought of the celebration to come; the celebration, in turn, derived its significance from the many hours of labour dedicated to the writing process. These two very different activities were closely related. Neither made any sense without the other.

This simple example from the world of fiction has led me to think of God’s “rest” from his creative action in a similar way. The Book of Genesis reminds us that, after six days, God completed the work of creation by resting, blessing, and making holy the seventh day (Gn. 2:1-3). To say that God “finished” or “completed” his work on the seventh day implies that the very activity of “rest” is itself part of the creative process. Without it, something would be missing; the creative act itself would not be complete; a new creative act could not begin.

It is already ten years since John Milbank published Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Its impact was immediately apparent, the journals Modern Theology and New Blackfriars dedicating entire numbers to discussing some of the many issues arising from it. For it is unquestionably a daunting achievement: a relatively simple thesis elaborated at considerable length and taking on in the process a whole range of authors from a variety of disciplines and across history. To do the book justice in a few words is almost impossible; but it surely remains the case that whatever one’s views of Milbank’s conclusions, it is difficult not to respect both the scholarship and ambition which it represents.

A number of the many issues raised in the course of the book have already been addressed by subsequent reviewers and authors. It might seem curious that there is still something left to be said fully a decade later; and yet there is so much meat contained in the book that it remains a banquet of inspiration and controversy in many ways. In this paper I wish to focus my engagement with Milbank’s ideas by considering his account of the work of Paul Ricoeur. Although he discusses Ricoeur only very briefly—a few pages (pp. 263-8) out of more than four hundred—I hope to show how dealing with this small part leads us to engage with a central element of Milbank’s thesis. Before embarking in earnest on this task, there are two points which need to be declared.

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisaged Summa Theologiae as a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently, beatitudo is a key to the unity of the Summa, then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.