An old friar once remarked to me that, whilst he was glad to live in the midst of a community of young and high-spirited Dominicans, he often missed the companionship of a brother of his own generation with whom he could share his memories. At various stages in our lives we cast backward glances over our shoulders but there comes a time when we look to our beginnings, uncovering the summer in the seed. Father Anthony Ross’s book is an exercise not only in the uncovering of memory but in the sharing of memories, and in the sharing there is a healing too; the work is dedicated to his parents and step-mother in the belief that ‘love covers all offences.’ In this book he offers us a lyrical account of his boyhood in the north of Scotland, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Tomas O’Crohan’s The Islandman and Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A ‘Growing, his subsequent university career, his entry into the Roman Catholic Church and admission to the Dominican Order. Father Anthony is a historian by training and it is his particular gift to disclose ‘the past quivering in what is’. His own life has coincided with major developments in the political and cultural life of the Scottish people with related implications for the Catholic Church in Scotland in general and the Dominican Order in particular. His book is part of his own story but is also a chapter in the history of his country and his Church.

‘If God knows how people like Hitler are going to behave, why does he create them?’ One reply to this objection goes as follows. It is impossible both for God to know what Hitler is going to do and for God to decide not to create him. If He is not going to create Hitler, there will be no Hitler to do anything and no future act for God to know. God’s knowing what Hitler will do presupposes the decision to create. God does not first know how Hitler will act and then decide to create him. It is the other way around. It is as if God is ‘surprised’ by the results of his decision to create—not that he learns something he did not previously know, but that he knows from all eternity something he would not otherwise have known. The decision to create is, in a sense, taken blindly.

While it is true that God does not know what people are freely going to do unless He decides to create them, it is also the case according to many that without having to know whom he shall choose to create he knows what people will freely do in case they are created. He is able, therefore, to take into account these hypothetical choices when deciding to create. If this is true, then the problem of evil becomes more acute. God creates with the prior knowledge of moral evil. One then has to show that the good which comes from creation outweighs the evil byproduct.

One of the difficulties in understanding St Paul’s treatment of Justification is that the theme appears in two ‘second order’ documents: the epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans. These are obviously not secondary in terms of their importance, but they are second-order reflections, interpreting something that the recipients already knew. It is clear that, from time to time in his letters, St Paul makes explicit references to the initial Kerygma, the first annunciation of the salvation brought by Christ, but treats it as something already known. The frequency with which the formula ‘Do you not know?’ occurs points to this. When Paul berates the Galatians (Gal 1:9; 3:1—5) it is in terms of their infidelity towards that which they had received, or their bad interpretation of it. Famously, Paul on occasion (as in 1 Cor 11:23—26) repeats part of the original Kerygma—in that case what he himself had given in Corinth.

The exegetical problem remains: what we have is an interpretation of the original kerygmatic package, an interpretation of what was evidently a very powerful, exciting message, frequently accompanied (so it would seem) by signs and wonders of one sort or another. Yet our faithful interpretation of this interpretation demands that we supply a good deal inductively. There was clearly a message of salvation centred in Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2); it was from this that the ecclesial life was to flow; and it was from this that the signs and wonders abounded. It was clearly from this also that interpretations or misinterpretations arose which led Paul to formulate his doctrine of Justification.

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.

My main object here is to try to clear up some remarkably persistent confusions. What I am discussing is commonly called moral virtue. But since I believe that the translation ‘moral virtue’ frequently leads to misunderstanding of Aristotle’s views I shall use always ‘excellence of character’, which is, no doubt, an imperfect translation of ēthikē aretē, but less misleading than is ‘moral virtue’.

Aristotle distinguished between three broad types of excellence that may be displayed by human beings; these correspond to the three levels of complexity that living things display, the least complex shown by all living things including plants, that shown by all animals and that shown only by human beings. The first is bodily excellence, comprising health, strength, good looks and the like; this is not of direct concern to the student of ethics. Of the other excellences of the soul there are two kinds, those of the irrational or, more properly, non-rational element in the soul and those of the rational element.

Within the rational element of the soul Aristotle distinguished two main types of excellence. These we may call the excellences of intelligence, though they are commonly and absurdly called intellectual virtues. Of these excellences of intelligence one is theoretical; to have this excellence is to be good at such things as metaphysics and mathematics, which it is quaint to call a virtue. Like bodily excellence, theoretical excellence of intelligence lies outside our present scope.