‘God,’ ‘Theos,’ ‘Deus’ is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes. This is quite a legitimate piece of borrowing and quite safe so long as it does not mislead us into thinking that the God we worship (or don’t) is a god. We always do have to speak of our God with borrowed words; it is one of the special things about our God that there are no peculiar appropriate words that belong to him, as with the language of carpentry or computer-speak. He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.

For this reason it is sometimes safer to use clothes that are quite obviously second-hand, words that have been quite scandalously ripped from their proper context and stretched and bent and distorted to suit our purposes. That is one reason for preferring ‘The Father’ to ‘God’ as a name for our God. ‘The Father’ is manifestly being used in a metaphorical or extended sense and so is unlikely to mislead us. It is also the word that Jesus prefers to use.

Frazer begins his work The Golden Bough with a brief treatment of the priesthood at the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi in classical times, concentrating on the rule of succession: ‘A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier.” Frazer is apparently troubled by this rite, finding it so bizarre and difficult to understand that it calls for clarification at a deep level. This is surely an understandable reaction. The rite is bizarre and repugnant, and provokes the questions: How could such a practice have arisen? How could people have lived like this and done these things? Though he does not say so explicitly, it seems to be such questions that send Frazer off in search of an explanation, a search that will take him several volumes and hundreds of pages. When he sets out to find an explanation of the rite of Nemi, Frazer thinks above all in terms of constructing a hypothesis as to the historical origins of the rite. An important stage in this process is to link the rite with other practices, particularly ones which depend on magical beliefs. These magical beliefs are in turn explained as primitive scientific hypotheses. Since we are familiar with the idea of a scientific hypothesis, understanding magical beliefs as primitive scientific hypotheses makes it readily intelligible to us why people in less advanced societies should have held such beliefs.

In March 1217 brother Dominic, a Castilian canon of the chapter of the diocese of Osma, returned to Toulouse from a visit to Rome. He, and the small community he had gathered round him, had been preaching against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc for the previous ten years. Soon after his arrival he summoned the community of canons which had just settled into their newly restored monastery to meet him. It rapidly became clear that the situation every religious dreads had arisen: the superior had an idea. The strategy involved the creation of a new religious force in Catholic Europe which was to take the form of an entirely novel religious Order. Its mission was to be wholly given over to the preaching of the Word of God. This was to take precedence over every other conventual observance. The Order was to be international; its members were to be called friars, brothers, they were to be bound to stability within the Order and not to any one particular house. They were to go wherever the needs of evangelisation and the defence of doctrine took them, living in poverty, holding no property, not even the houses in which they dwelt. They were to live out some elements of the monastic life, celebrating the divine office and the Eucharist solemnly and in common with, but without undue fussy ceremonial. They were to elect their own superiors, who in turn would be members of Provincial Chapters.

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.

Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisaged Summa Theologiae as a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently, beatitudo is a key to the unity of the Summa, then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.