This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.

Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.

It is probably true to say that there is no form of intellectual life more unfamiliar to the educated English Catholic than theology. If he were asked to name some topics which he supposed were discussed by theologians he would probably refer to the proofs of the existence of God, transubstantiation, the sacraments-the first of these in the context of ‘Thomism’, the second of apologetics, in school and pulpit, the third in the context of ‘liturgy’. The reference to the pulpit is a considered one; for if lay Catholics are open to the charge of naivety, the responsibility is by no means wholly theirs; can the clergy, and even the professional theologians among them (with some embarrassment I include myself, if only as a theological columnist, in this sub-category) , really claim to be practising theology with energy, fertility, learning and insight?

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

Cornelius Ernst once sought a pattern to English Dominican recruitment and found none. We often come to the Order of Friars Preachers by the strength of chance encounters or even reading; the force of example of one or many witnesses may play its part in leading us there and certainly it is individual witness that plays a part in keeping us there.

Names such as Bede Jarrett, Vincent McNabb and Hugh Pope were on the Catholic Truth Society pamphlets which an eleven-year old convert read in self-education, before and after his entry into the Church.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

The story of the gallant attempt of the later Middle Ages to win Asia for the Church is so often passed over with the scantiest reference, even by Catholic historians, that it is almost unknown. It covered more than a century; a century whose short opening years of high hopes were followed by long dreary ones of disappointment, persecution and martyrdom, to end in the destruction of all achievement and the expulsion of the missionaries.

The first great missionary movement, which converted the northern barbarians, was the work of the Benedictines, while the glories of the sixteenth century in the East belong to the Society of Jesus. The great missionaries of the later Middle Ages were the Franciscans and Dominicans. Both Orders bore the brunt of the battle equally throughout Asia, but Cathay and Central Asia was particularly the sphere of the Minorites, while India, Persia and the Caspian Steppes was that of the Preachers.

We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.