Thomas Aquinas is celebrated for many things in the history of Christian theology, but one is the revolutionary place he gives to the thesis that Christ acquired knowledge by way of empirical experience. That his claim should be so revolutionary strikes us today as odd. Any reflection on Christ's knowledge ordinarily begins today by stressing how the Word of God assumed our ordinary human limited ways of knowing. In medieval times, however, theologians found it extremely difficult to accept that Christ acquired knowledge by the normal empirical, experiential route. A crucial role in Aquinas's theological advance beyond this position was played by his philosophical commitments, within the wider context of the soteriological character of his Christology. However, there are problems involved in Aquinas's particular theological position on Christ's acquired knowledge and his wider picture of Christ's knowledge. The same philosophical means that enabled Aquinas to recognise the reality of Christ's acquiring knowledge also led him into an overall picture of the perfection of Christ's knowledge that was not so satisfactory. Part of the solution to the difficulties into which Aquinas gets himself can be found in a philosophical position already employed by him in his mature account of Christ's knowledge.

What the late Stephen J Gould baptized ultra-Darwinism is anti-evolutionary. In so being, it leads to the undermining of science, rationality, and, lastly, to ethical nihilism, wherein any notion of humanism is impossible, and this for one simple reason – there is now no such thing as a human. In addition, we argue that ultra-Darwinism is a progeny of crass philosophical dualism, and this leads it to despise matter and the material world, even though, paradoxically, it espouses materialism. We conclude that the theory of evolution invalidates ultra-Darwinism.

Whilst philosophers have argued that musical experience provides evidence for theism, their discussions often fail to consider the aesthetic properties which give musical experience its distinctive character, or ways in which musical experience might support the beliefs of particular religious traditions. This paper begins to remedy this omission by examining how attention to liturgical music can provide rational support for Christian faith. I first explore music's emotional nature and impact, and its ability to embody Christian narratives and doctrines. In light of this discussion, I then introduce two probabilistic arguments for the truth of Christian orthodoxy, arguing that liturgical music can provide distinctive evidence for their premises.

According to classical Christian doctrine, the human body is not a container for the soul but its “form”. In defending a form of this view, I suggest that the resurrected body of Christ represents the truth of human flesh. In the light of the resurrected and glorified body of Christ, who still bears his wounds, death can be understood as the loss of something irreplaceable and therefore mourned as a horrific deprivation of life; that is, because eternal life consists in the vision of God by our whole selves, and not just a separated soul, a proper Christian anthropology that began in some sense with the glorified body of Christ as the “truth of the physical” might suggest a very different biomedical practice than that with which we are familiar, which often proceeds from a methodological materialism underwritten by a dualistic metaphysics.

The sensus fidei is a crucial concept which has assumed growing importance during recent years of theological enquiry, however, it is not so easily defined. This article examines a section of the document. Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church. (ITC, 2014, Chapter 2, no. 48-65) and explores the underlying anthropological-epistemological assumptions which seem to be inherently shaping the idea of the sensus fidei fidelis (the sense of faith of the individual believer). What is the site of such a sense of faith in the personal life of the believer? Is there an adequate theological anthropological framework for imagining the operation of this special ‘faculty’? After commenting on the various definitions of the concept, I focus on the four classical theological key elements the document draws on in articulating a modern account: the Thomistic understanding of faith, virtue, connaturality and instinct. The third section of the article highlights inherent tensions between the traditional Thomistic scheme and a post-Enlightenment, anti-rationalist agenda which call for a more systematic elaboration of an adequate current anthropology of the human person.

A significant demographic event or the advent of a natural disaster sees a surge in demand for a particular good or service. Conventional liberal market economics dictates that vendors should increase their prices to restore equilibrium to the market. Such an increase in price would provide an incentive for vendors to increase output or redirect their resources to those areas where there is a peak in demand. In the case of ride-share operators such as Uber, this is reflected in their surge pricing models to encourage drivers to service those areas where demand has spiked. Is such an increase in price justified according to the ethical principles of St. Thomas Aquinas' economic philosophy?

This paper begins by exploring how Joseph Ratzinger's post-doctoral work on the Theology of History in St Bonaventure is shaped by his interest in how theology can be grounded in salvation history. Through this lens, he examines Bonaventure's multi-form theories of scripture and the place of St Francis in salvation history to show how prophetic interpretations of scripture are consistent with Christ as the apex of history. The paper goes on to demonstrate that these insights also influence Ratzinger's later work, particularly his reading of Dei Verbum, his recognition of the Mariological dimensions of hermeneutics, as well as his consideration of various prophetical manifestations of the life of the Church such as the monastic movement and the new ecclesial movements.

In Love Alone is Credible (1963), Hans Urs von Balthasar discusses love in a way that “seeks to be faithful to the theological tradition of the great saints.” Conspicuously missing from the set of “great saints” whom Balthasar praises is Thomas Aquinas. Does Balthasar imply a negative judgment about Thomas's thought on love? If so, what is the judgment? On what grounds is it made? How might Thomas answer? To address these questions, I construct a dialogue between the two, privileging Love Alone and the Questions on charity from the Summa Theologiae. The dialogue begins with a survey of ground common to Balthasar and Thomas. A second step shows how three salient aspects of Thomas's treatment of charity appear from Balthasar's perspective. A third section deepens the critique, showing that for Balthasar, both divine and human love must be conceived as utterly gratuitous in ways that Thomas downplays or denies. A fourth section asks how the account of love given by Balthasar appears from Thomas's viewpoint. A final section asks what to make of these partly overlapping, partly clashing perspectives, and suggests why both are necessary.

In the recent collection of essays entitled ‘Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience’, Elizabeth Anscombe asks how it is that Cathohcs have been able to accommodate themselves with so little strain of conscience to modern war; and the answer, in her own telling phrase, is ‘double think about double effect’. We all know what she means; but perhaps it is not always easy to see just where double effect thinking becomes ‘double think’.

The principle of double effect is in itself by no means so mysterious and subtle a doctrine as it is sometimes thought. It is no more in fact than a rational and systematic explanation of what goes on in our minds when we wonder whether or not to perform a certain action which we see will have both good and bad effects. Thus a man who sells sporting shotguns in a district where there is a danger of violence many wonder whether to carry on with his trade. If he does, he will be carrying on his normal and legitimate occupation, and supporting his family; but at the same time, he will be adding to the danger of human injury. How is he to make his decision? Catholic tradition would suggest four principles (though found with many variations) to help him make his choice. An act with two effects, one good and the other bad, is lawful, according to this tradition, on four conditions. First, the action, viewed in itself, must be good or at least indifferent; secondly, the agent must not intend the evil effect, but only the good; thirdly, the good effect must be produced as immediately as - that is not by means of - the bad; and, fourthly, there must be a sufficiently weighty reason for permitting the evil effect. Now if we apply the principles to the case of the man selling shotguns, they begin to look like ordinary common sense.

Early European travellers among savage peoples generally related that they had little or no religion. Anthropological writers often give the impression that they have little else. This contrast is, of course, to some extent accounted for by the great increase in knowledge about these peoples, but it is also due to a wider definition in modern times of what may be regarded as a religious fact. If the early traveller found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions. As, however, the definition of religion was extended by anthropologists to cover ancestor cults, totemic observances, fetishism, and even magic and witchcraft, the part played by religious conceptions in the simpler societies received greater emphasis. The widening of the definition would seem to be due in part to changes in our own intellectual atmosphere. The early explorers were Christians. The early anthropologists were not. For the explorers had religion and the savage had not. But the positivism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, associated in most people’s minds with the name of Comte, had had so strong an influence that the positions tended to become reversed in anthropological theories from the middle of last century till well into the present one. Since it was then held that religion is a way of thinking characteristic of the earliest phase of human development, savages had to be portrayed as totally lost in its darkness. Sir James Frazer, speaking of primitive religion, asserted that ‘the life of the savage is saturated with it’. Lévy-Bruhl declared that ‘the reality in which primitive peoples move is itself mystical’.

The end of the war left the whole educational system in Germany in chaos and its rebuilding has had to start from scratch. This is obvious as far as external conditions were concerned; buildings were ruined, teaching material destroyed, teachers dispersed and in part forbidden to follow their profession. The children themselves were involved in the maelstrom of evacuation and in the disorderly flight from the bombed west to the east, and from the Eussian invader in the east the return again to the west. All this is clearly appreciated by now. Equally one understands the loss of a sane religious background that followed the breakdown of Germany’s former educational system and the scepticism shown by both teachers and pupils against any alternative system (and even against the re-introduction of pre-war arrangements), whether it was inspired by German teachers themselves, by the Church, the German authorities or the inter-allied military government. These problems are appreciated, in paid at least, everywhere. Their solution is seen to lie only in a very gradual and by no means as yet wholly satisfactory rehabilitation. This is the natural result of the various factors involved in the present situation in Germany, but more recently two new and somewhat unexpected elements have emerged to influence post-war development in a disturbing manner.

The division of Germany into four zones has had an immense bearing on the political and social life of the country, but no less has it had its repercussions in the educational field. This is most marked of course in the division between east and west; but it is true also of the division of government within the west itself.

Some years ago, in a Hughlings Jackson lecture, I ventured to give some personal views upon the nature of the relationship of mind to brain. I said nothing original, yet something rather different from what we are accustomed to hear in those popular symposia on the brain-mind relationship, or upon brain mechanisms and consciousness, of which we have had a number of examples in recent years. The views I expressed had the sanction of philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, and, in a measure, of such physiological geniuses as Hughlings Jackson and Sherrington, but there is little interest in them at the present time in a scientific world still intensely preoccupied with the concepts of cybernetics and biophysics: preoccupied in the sense that some scientists find they cannot easily entertain any concepts which transcend these fragmentary ideas.

How we approach this problem depends largely upon our concept of nature and of natural science. Therefore, I define natural science as being ‘the study of nature as perceived: a study wherein nature is disclosed as a complex of entities whose mutual relations can be thought of and discussed without reference to sense awareness or thought about it’. This is to say that we can be perfectly good natural scientists without bothering our heads about the nature of perceiving, or the theory of knowledge—epistemology, as it is called. This is a complex definition, which I have taken from a great mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Its full import will appear later, but in the meantime I wish to point out that nature, that is, the world as perceived, does not comprehend all that the human mind can entertain.

Whatever he did was quickly done, but neither hastily nor in a hurry. This is particularly true of his reading and writing, both of which in sum mounted up imperceptibly to a great deal. His published books and pamphlets, of which even his most intimate companions rarely knew anything until they suddenly appeared ready for printing, are but a small part of the writing he left behind him. This consists of official documents, letters and postcards, plans of sermons and lectures, quotations from books read, and the student’s notes to which he was forever adding something. Considering the busy life he led and the little leisure he was allowed, the extent of his reading and his accurate memory of what he read are very remarkable. Much of it was done in trains and on long voyages. At one time he devoted the time spent in the noisy Underground trains in London to the study of Russian, and made some progress with it. He read history seriously all through life. He returned constantly to his early theological and ecclesiastical studies, refreshing them and keeping them up to date by reading new work as it appeared, preferably such as had a practical bearing on his own special duties. For the nourishment of his own soul and those others whom he had helped in their spiritual life he persevered with his study of the mystics.

In these days of widespread anxieties with little trust, owing to small belief, anything, any influence which may bring assurance, in whatever degree, should be welcomed. It is fortitude based on confidence that we need, as we face the issues of life seeking how they may emerge, whether to our welfare or our undoing, before all things asking—do we see guidance or is it chaos that confronts us?

It is to the great towns and cities, particularly the industrial and manufacturing, that we would draw attention here, and to London imprimis, the World City; our quest —how these influence their indwellers especially their outlook visual and mental; for the business of the thronging multitudes is wont to obscure the sight by interposing a pall of smoke and dust betwixt them and the skies. Nor is this all of obscurity that results from the activities of men, for strange to say their very efforts to illumine the darkness of their thoroughfares by night, do but hide the more effectively the lights of heaven: —in the glare of the street lamp even thy glories, Orion, are extinguished; and thus it comes about that the more brilliant the near light, the more are our eyes blinded for far-vision, to our incalculable loss.

What is to be said of Westminster Cathedral? Is it a great building? Is it more than a big building? The almost universal verdict is in the affirmative. It is not petty. It is a work of genius.

Now, genius has been defined as the will and ability to “put the first thing first,” and certainly Bentley did so at Westminster. Whatever others may have said, Bentley did not say : the first thing is to make a big Byzantine Church. The first thing he did was to envisage a great building suitable for Christian worship, and, again putting the first thing first, he did not say it shall rival Beauvais in height or Rheims in sculpture ; he said : this great Christian Church shall be built of massive piers of brick spanned by vaults of concrete—these are the available materials, and I am not crying for the moon of medieval delight. He did not use such words, nor could he have used them. He was an old-fashioned English architect and was not aware of the social problem. He even dreamed of a building covered with a veneer of marble and mosaic ! But though that was his dream, and even partly his achievement, he saw his church as a great building first and only second as a much adorned one.

This is obvious from the accomplished thing and is admitted even by those people who still, in this pagan age, hanker after pointed arches and pinnacles.