The following essay is an attempt at bringing together two conceptions, the one theological and ascetical, the other philos–ophical. This confrontation may be attempted either from the point of view of theology, using revealed premises, or from the point of view of philosophy using the methods of purely rational analysis. It is the latter task I am undertaking here. I do not argue from revealed premises, but I do take account of the mighty phenomenon of the Christian revelation. It is, (...) as I see it, absolutely essential to keep theology and philosophy distinct as methods, but this does not prevent the one from providing useful material and suggestive hypotheses for the other. (shrink)

In his Introduction Fr. Delhaye tells us that the present work has its origin in two modern movements, the one theological, the other philosophical.

EXISTENCE EXISTS. I imagine that this statement will seem to many people to be either meaningless or false or pointless. In what follows I shall try to show that the statement is meaningful, true, important.

DR JOSEPH BOBIK’S article The First Part of the Third Way is a notable contribution to the literature on the subject. Anybody who has wrestled with the text itself—a text as profound and disconcerting as anything St Thomas has written—will be grateful for the many fine elucidations the article provides, and will be grateful especially for the fact that he has kept to the text itself as given in Summa Theologiae I, q 2, a 3 and has not read into (...) it some argument of his own. This method is particularly helpful and fruitful when there is question of pointing to a flaw in the argument. Against Kant and against most critics of the argument no defence is possible, for no real effort has been made to understand the argument in its own terms, within its own ‘thought-world’—one can of course insist that the attack is misdirected, but this kind of non-discussion scarcely serves the common pursuit of truth and will never enlarge anybody’s horizons. Dr Bobik, on the other hand, is able to point to the exact proposition in the text which he finds faulty and he is in a position to situate this proposition in the general context of Thomist metaphysics. In such circumstances there is everything to be gained by a further examination of the proposition and its context. (shrink)

PATHOS is not the same thing as suffering, though, of course, it is bound up with suffering, just as it is bound up with contingency and loneliness. We suffer when somebody dies whom we loved, but pathos makes its appearance only when we turn up a letter and find in it some characteristic turn of expression, brave and cheerful perhaps in face of pain or disappointment, or an old jacket, or a pipe, or things arranged in a certain way in (...) a bedroom or kitchen. Not that pathos has to wait on death: the boy in John McGahern’s novel The Dark sits by the fire at night after his father has gone to bed, and his mood of enmity and disgust is disturbed and broken by the sight of the heavy country shoes his father had thrown carelessly aside—he meets pathos for the first time, and is deeply changed by it, even though the external father-son relationship seems to remain unchanged.…What has happened in this case is that the boy’s personality has been extended in the direction of manhood; suffering was nothing new to him but this was something new, a new dimension, new horizons of the spirit. (shrink)

This is a follow-up to The Future of Belief, and it resumes and develops all the main themes of that very controversial book: the dehellenisation of philosophy and theology, the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, the identification of man and consciousness, the radical mutability of dogma, the assertion that God does not exist since He is beyond being, and the attendant distinction between being and reality. There is, in fact, little or nothing that is new in the way (...) of thesis or conclusion; Professor Dewart is concerned rather with re-examining and strengthening the foundations of his position. The Future of Belief was a kind of manifesto addressed to the world at large; the present book is more technical, and seems to be addressed to philosophers and theologians: at least it is doubtful whether anybody else will have the patience and mental equipment to read it through. Even at that the book is heavy going, and the task of reading it is not sufficiently lightened by the realisation that something important is being said. This, however, is a personal judgment : a very competent Catholic scholar has already hailed the Foundations as the book that will dominate Christian thinking for the next decade or so. (shrink)