The musical fortunes of the German composer Paul Hindemith (18951963) waxed and waned in his own lifetime. The recent centenary of his birth, however, has brought opportunities for re-assessment of both the composer and his work, and much interest has been focussed on his masterpiece, the opera ‘Mathis der Maler’ (‘Mathis the Painter’). Two recordings of this work are now available on compact disc, and the Royal Opera produced the first ever British staging of the work on what would have been Hindemith’s hundredth birthday. ‘Mathis der Maler’ has been revealed to be an enormously powerful music-drama, remarkable no less for the historical individual who inspired it and for the circumstances in which it was produced than for the beautiful music which it contains. Hindemith wrote his own libretto for this opera, which enabled him to put forward in it a number of his own ideas about both art and music, and also to raise profound spiritual issues. In its exploration of such themes, ‘Mathis der Maler’ has a relevance that transcends Hindemith’s own day, touching on issues both contemporary and timeless. To explain the motivation behind such a remarkable work, it is necessary to set it in the context of Hindemith’s life, and of his theories about music.

Hindemith was a precocious musical talent, playing violin and viola in orchestral and chamber ensembles from an early age. He rose to prominence as a composer in the years after the First World War, and his music was much performed, in Germany and further afield, during the 1920s.

Particular thinkers and their work seem to create significant intellectual waves at particular times and thus determine and define subsequent inquiry. We all know of the powerful consequences of Kant’s reading of Hume, but even more startling is the effect that Hegel had on the seventeen year old Ernst Bloch: ‘I read the Phenomenology of Spirit erotically—as I wrote at the time “the spiritual nightingale is singing within” in this park, this wilderness—and that is how I understood the Phenomenology as I have never understood it since’. One could respond to Bloch’s experience of the Phenomenology with the suggestion that he would have been better off reading Freud, but there is no doubting the excitement of an intellectual encounter that transforms our way of seeing the world. While Jean-Luc Marion’s book, God Without Being, cannot be placed in the same league as Hegel’s Phenomenology, it has nevertheless, in recent years, attracted much attention in English-speaking theological circles and for good reason. God Without Being, the first of Marion’s books to be translated into English, is a beautifully written book that blends a postmodern concern to overcome the impasse of ontotheology with a sensibility for things premodern—especially negative theology and the mystical tradition. This intellectual fusion of metaphysical and post-metaphysical themes is evident in one question which summarises Marion’s study: ‘Does God give himself to be known according to the horizon of Being or according to a more radical horizon?’ (xxiv) Thus the quest for a God without Being; a journey which Marion undertakes in order to expose that more radical horizon which is characterised by God’s ‘most theological name—charity’.

It is only comparatively recently that there has been an attempt to examine issues in environment and development together, rather than separately. The shift in attitude by the greens came as a result of the realisation that poor nations are forced to destroy their environment in order to survive and by the developers as a result of a new awareness that policies which destroy the very basis for change are invalid. The broad agreement in the notion that both environment and development are interconnected applies regardless of the particular models of development or environment.

Liberation theology identifies with a particular model of development which arose at a time when the global and political implications of environmental issues were largely ignored. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that environmental concerns are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the classical texts. The purpose of this paper is to explore both the challenge of the environment to liberation theology and its possible contribution to an inclusive environmental theology. Some models of development are more likely to be compatible with particular environmental philosophies. What contribution, if any, can liberation theology make to the current debate?

In the post-war era the conventional wisdom of the so-called ‘modernisation’ theory held that in order to achieve development so called ‘underdeveloped’ nations must adopt a profit incentive and find ways and means for economic productivity.

Latent in the moral teaching of the Catholic Church since Vatican II has been a conception of morality as a life project, a positive force for the shaping of human character. This marks a shift of focus beyond morality as a science of demarcations, separating good actions from evil, the permissible from the forbidden, a method of problem-solving when ambiguity confronts conscience about a particular choice. A broader vision has been sought in which subjects treated under the heading of the moral life can be concluded aptly only by connecting them to the life of holiness. While in some cases it can be difficult to observe a distinction between a treatment of morality and an exhortation to more serious spiritual life, this overlapping of subject matter is not unwelcome.

Veritatis Splendor is a recent case in point. While the middle portion of the encyclical offers a very precise analysis of the relations among human acts, conscience, and the moral law, the encyclical begins and ends with meditative chapters in which the moral life is described as nothing less than the road to sanctity. These sections require little familiarity with moral theology to inspire personal response. The pages on martyrdom, for instance, in their evocation of the cost of moral commitment in the modem world, are a striking appeal to the heroic courage that produces saints.

A less well-known example of this ‘spiritual’ approach to moral theology has been the incorporation of friendship as a thematic point of reference for the quality of a person’s moral life.