In a pace-setting paper recently published in New Blackfriars, Fergus Kerr argues that Cartesian assumptions and presuppositions have entered so deeply into the thinking of the West that even those who profess to follow other traditions of thought can often be found to be working within the Cartesian paradigm. Here I hope to develop just one of the many lines of inquiry to which Father Kerr has pointed, arguing that there is a convergence between Cartesian anthropology on the one hand and the productive relations of capitalism on the other. Beyond this, I shall try to suggest that this convergence can tentatively be documented so as to form a real part of the “history of ideas” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than left as no more than an abstract, analytical congruence or aptness of fit.

The theoretical argument is straightforward and can be concisely stated. Thomist anthropology and psychology propose a unitary conception of man and of the relationship between soul and body. Kerr pertinently reminds us (p. 255) of Aquinas’s commentary on I Corinthians 15, and quotes his memorable reference to the soul as pars corporis humani. This unity is found in all living things, in vegetables, for example, and in “brutes”; the rational soul in man, moreover, is no exception to this unitary principle. A corollary of this is that, as Kenny puts it, “a human being is not something that has a body; it is a body, a living body of a particular kind”.

Now in his 77th year, the author was editor of “New Blackfriars” 1940—1950, and founder-editor of “Life of the Spirit” 1946—55, was Warden of Spode House 1952—81, and has written many books and articles on the spiritual life.

The elderly must often be sad when they look back. There is no escape. In those long-gone days they were fresher and more alive. Today energies are failing and powers of perception lack the briskness and sharpness that were theirs when the experiences they remember first occurred. It is possible to catch the excitement of those earlier times—so exciting, compared with the present—but it is a difficult task. As soon as comparison finds its way into present consciousness sadness tends to make its entry. Yet views of the past change as variously as do the views as one climbs up a hill, some thrilling, some depressing, according to light and angle of vision. Now, for example, the picture of the world of 1908 (the year in which I was born) and onwards looks like a picture of increasing physical violence, of death and hideous human slaughter. And yet, on the other side of the page, we can find another picture, in which intellectual violence seems to be decreasing just as much.

In the late 1920s, when studying first philosophy and then theology in preparation for the priesthood, we used to agonize about those passages in the Bible when the Lord seemed to interfere with the workings of the entire material universe in order to procure some victory for a rather unimportant leader of the Israelites.

The first part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984.

From very early times men have spoken of and to their gods in political images, just as they have ascribed divine characteristics to their earthly rulers. This has been the case no less in the judaeo- christian tradition than in pagan cultures. Some of the most persistent images used of God in this tradition are taken from political discourse: king, lord, judge, to mention but three. Again, abstract concepts applied to God such as sovereignty, power, majesty and dominion have a strongly political connotation. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by theologians and historians of doctrine.

In the first part of this paper (published here) I wish to consider the way in which analogies between divine and civil domination were employed among some groups in seventeenth-century England, and set this in the context of a more general thesis about the use of such analogies. I shall conclude, in the second part of this paper (which will be published in the next issue), by suggesting certain significant implications which may be said to follow from this manner of thinking and talking about God and the state.

The time is right for a good biography of Pope John XXIII. It is, of course, ridiculous that the Catholic Church—all 780 million of us, as I recently read—should be so decisively affected by the personality of a single man. It is only with the invention of railways, telephones, aeroplanes, and now television, that the solitary in the Vatican has acquired such power. The ‘modern world’, which Pius IX sought to keep at arm’s length from the Papal States, soon provided the media for an unprecedentedly intense personal veneration of the ‘Holy Father’. The successor of Peter now enjoys a supremacy in the Church that Peter himself evidently never had (see Acts 8:14 and 11:2, and Galatians 2:11). With the triumph of Ultramontanism, the whole body has been surrealistically distorted by a grotesquely inflated ear (I Corinthians 12:17). The traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as the communion of local churches has been re-established in theory—but, for the most part, we remain captured, and captivated, by media-promoted adulation of the individual. The power of the ‘world’ over the Catholic Church is as insidious as ever.

One of the worst effects of media domination is instant oblivion for yesterday’s men. In longer historical perspective, of course, the tolerance and the initiatives of Paul VI will seem obvious. At present, with men in control who cannot see the other side of a question, he is remembered only as a rather sad and dithering figure.