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Catholic Theology in Britain: the Scene since Vatican II
Part I
Aidan Nichols OP
A good place to begin this survey of the post-conciliar Catholic theological scene in Britain-which means, overwhelmingly,
in this context, England-is the symposium on theology and the Catholic Church in this country, held at Downside
under the presidency of Dom Christopher Butler in 1963.[1] Though, as that date indicates, the papers were written and published while the Second Vatican Council
was still in session (they were the product of the sixth of a series of Downside symposia on matters of intellectual
interest to Catholics beginning in the later 1950s), the majority of the authors consciously looked forward to
what would be, they imagined, the setting and general direction of Catholic theology in Britain after the Council.
In various respects, to be examined shortly, the Catholic contributors were right in their predictions, but not
in all. The historian will note the rôle of Christopher Butler as inspirer of the Downside symposia in general
and author in particular of the opening essay in Theology and the University: An Ecumenical
Investigation. As abbot of the only English monastery with a substantial scholarly
tradition, a writer of distinction on the Gospels, ecclesiology, spiritual theology and apologetics,[2] as well as a nationally known radio personality through the
panel programme Any Questions, his attendance at the
Council as that rare bird a theological peritus with
voting rights-owing to the accident that he was at the time abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation-gave
him the opportunity to become the single most influential interpreter in England of the Council's devices and desires,[3] especially when he was made a bishop auxiliary to Cardinal
Heenan with, in effect, a special portfolio for doctrine and theology.[4]
How, then, did the contributors to the Downside symposium see the English Catholic theology of the future, and
in what regards did subsequent events prove them both right and wrong? First, they expected that theology would
increasingly be practised by a collaboration-Newman's term conspiratio was invoked here-of priests and laity, such as their own gathering indeed represented. They did not foresee
the decimation of the ranks of the most able clergy, whether by laicisation or by outright abandonment of the Church.
The latter fate, in different senses, befell two out of three secular priests among the Downside essayists. Charles
Davis, professor of dogmatics at Heythrop and the chief haute vulgarisateur in England of the best European Catholic theology of the 1940s and 50s,[5] became after his marriage a professor of Religious Studies in Ontario.[6] Anthony Kenny, whom Heenan, as archbishop of Liverpool, had rudely uprooted from philosophy teaching
in the University there to become, for the good of his soul, a parochial curate rose effortlessly in secular academia
to become Master of Balliol College, and then Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford.[7] Subsequently, with the acceptance of laypeople as lecturers in the seminaries (though this had a late
Victorian precedent in the case of William George Ward), and the launching of such different ventures as the Catholic
Theological Association of Great Britain and the Maryvale Institute with their new opportunities for exchange,
in the first case, cooperation in the second, the hopes of the symposiasts in this connexion took on more flesh.
But the extent to which the teaching of theology by Catholics in British institutions and the production of Catholic
theology of an academic or quasi-academic kind is now, thirty years later, so largely the preserve of the laity
would, I think, have amazed them. The departures of Davis and Kenny were the results of crises of faith, one about
specifically Catholic Christianity, the other about any form of acceptance of revelation or indeed the existence
of God, though both men had criticisms of the Church culture they had known-in Kenny's autobiography expressed
with affectionate bemusement, but in Davis's with considerable bitterness.[8] The publication of A Question of Conscience marked
- at least this is the view of another distinguished critic of the Church, Adrian Hastings, subsequently professor
of theology at Leeds-the ending of an implicit agreement on the part of bishops, priests and laity generally in
England to take the best from the Council for the future, and the beginning of that endemic squabbling over its
significance which the national communications media identified, after 1966, as the progressive-against- conservative
Catholic divide.[9]
The second expectation of the Downside symposiasts was that Catholic theology in England would enter into closer
relation with the study of literature. Although that topic fell, in the 1964 collection, to another Downside monk,
Dom Illtyd Trethowan, to consider, and Trethowan was more a metaphysician and theologian of mysticism than he was
a literary critic, its future would be more closely bound up with a contributor who took as his theme Newman's
concept of an educated laity, and this was John Coulson, later Fellow in Residence at the Downside Study Centre
in the University of Bristol. In Newman and the Common Tradition (1970), Coulson would identify Newman's characteristic mode of expression as belonging with what the Bristol
scholar called a fiduciary language of 'ultimate concern', best represented by poets, and most reflectively, in
the English literary tradition, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and some ten years later, in Religion
and Imagination, would follow this up by a more general plea for a theological re-evaluation
of the rôle of disciplined imagination-of the kind exemplified by great literary figures and discussed by
their critics-in the apprehension and understanding of revelation.[10] Such concern for the marriage of theology and literary studies would prove an enduring feature of post-Conciliar
English Catholic theology. It played an important part in a very different movement, the early political theology
of Catholics rallying to the New Left-as witness for instance the twin studies Culture
and Liturgy and Culture and Theology by Brian Wicker, recently the president of the
Catholic Theological Association.[11] (The 'New
Left' had started as the search for a socialist 'third way' between Communism and social democracy-effectively,
a combination of Trotskyism and the native Guild Socialism of G. D. H. Cole, but it subsequently became more 'hardnosed',
under the influence of the rigorously 'scientific' interpretation of Marx in Louis Althusser.)[12] Wicker resisted absorption by Catholic Marxism, however: his The Story-Shaped World anticipates, rather, thev - largely American - 'narrative
theology' of the 1980s and 1990s.[13]
The connexion between theology and literature would become an important element, at least, in the complex theological
method of two of the few significant post-Conciliar fundamental and dogmatic theologians, Nicholas Lash, a secular
priest and erstwhile Dean of St Edmund's House, Cambridge, who, laicised in due canonical form, was able to retain
the confidence of the national hierarchy while simultaneously occupying the Norris-Hulse chair at Cambridge;[14] and the far less productive Sri Lanka born but British-educated
English Dominican Cornelius Ernst.[15] The theological
potential of literature either directly or via philosophical elucidations of the same would also count for much
in the work of a confrère and pupil of Ernst, the Scottish born philosopher of religion Fergus Kerr, not
least in his Stanton Lectures Immortal Longings, published
in 1997.[16] The revival of theological aesthetics
in European Catholic theology with the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar confirmed this trend - at least among those
open to his influence. It is embodied, with greater clarity of doctrinal affirmation, as well as a willingness,
shared with Lash and, in his comparatively small oeuvre,
Ernst, to extend one's sweep to the visual arts and music likewise in the work of two Catholic theologians currently
teaching in the more northern parts of the kingdom-Patrick Sherry, holder of the only University-funded lectureship
in Roman Catholic thought, at Lancaster (thus his Spirit and Beauty),[17] and Francesca Aran Murphy, at Aberdeen,
in the more commitedly Balthasarian guise of her Christ the Form of Beauty which also, however, attempts a revival of the Neo-Thomist aesthetics of Maritain.[18] The same impulse is apparent in the Cambridge philosopher of religion
Janet Martin Soskice, whose early interest in the language of metaphor has now broadened - stimulated no doubt
by marriage to a professional artist - to a concern with theology's relation to art.[19]
Why did this linkage of theology and literature (in particular) prove so attractive to theologians in England?
The probable reason, initially at least, was the inhospitableness of the prevailing philosophical culture to metaphysics
and hence to the largest questions with which theology must deal. The notion that, for instance, the literary criticism
of F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge School (for so it seemed) was performing the same sort of function which such
phenomenologists as Maurice Merleau-Ponty or, in his early period, Martin Heidegger played in the philosophical
world of France and Germany could be used as justifying the abandonment by theology of philosophy as at any rate
her exclusive handmaid and principal interlocutor.[20] The seriousness about life in its moral and cosmic dimensions
which informed Leavis's literary-critical judgments about the English novel, seemed more promising than the corresponding
Oxford philosophical school of linguistic analysis which, at its most trivial, could appear exercised by issues
no larger than whether 'and' could mean the same as 'but' or spotting the precise semantic difference between a
semi-colon and a comma.
However, this is not to say that the Downside symposium, to return to our starting point, had no hopes at all of
University philosophy in England, nor is it to insinuate that all such hopes were misplaced. Anthony Kenny, making
clear his distaste for the eclectic Scholasticism in logic, psychology, cosmology and metaphysics generally of
the Gregorian University, identified several aspects of English philosophy that could be turned, he thought, to
the Church's purpose. Kenny noted first of all, the increasing influence of Wittgenstein's later philosophy-the
Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations - with
the body-blows this had struck logical empiricism, the most virulently anti-religious form of the British empirical
tradition.[21] The early political theologians-mostly
laymen though with two Dominican advisers, Herbert McCabe and Laurence Bright-would exploit Wittgensteinian notions
of the language of a community as embodying its form of life to interpret the sacramental language of Catholicism
as a social-indeed socialist-manifesto (thus the movement 'Slant').[22] In the significantly titled Theology after Wittgenstein Fergus Kerr would treat Wittgenstein as assisting Catholic theology not so much to emancipate people from
the atomism and superficiality of a culture shaped by consumerist capitalism (the Slant perspective) as to free them from the perplexities generated by both a hubristic metaphysics and an excessive
scepticism. Man, for a Catholic Wittgensteinian, is essentially a ritual or ceremonial animal.[23] However, in a retraction added to the second edition, Kerr conceded
he had gone too far in the way he opposed, with Wittgenstein, the Cartesian idea of the self as essentially immaterial
mind, and by treating it, in the words of Francesca Murphy's criticism, as simply an 'epiphenomenon of the social
narrative', had risked eliminating the soul altogether.[24]
These difficulties may suggest that Kenny was more felicitous in his second choice of emphasis:
namely, when he drew attention to the revival in philosophy departments of the study of that figure whom Aquinas
had called-quite simply-philosophus-'the Philosopher',
Aristotle. The renaissance of philosophical interest in Aristotle in England happens to coincide with the post-Conciliar
epoch. This enabled Catholic philosophers like the celebrated duo Elizabeth Anscombe, professor of philosophy at
Cambridge, and her husband Peter Geach, professor of logic at Leeds, to revive notions of the soul, of intention,
of the good, and of virtue which were singularly at home in Catholic thought,[25] and so to prepare the way for the present florescence of, in particular, virtue ethics, of which the
prize bloom is the Glasgow-born Alasdair MacIntyre, a convert to Catholicism after a journey which led through
Barthianism and a Trotskyism comparable to the Christian Marxism of the Catholic New Left to Aristotle and so to
Thomas.[26]
Kenny's third reason for thinking that English philosophy might not be so bad a partner for Catholic theology after
all was its interest in logical studies and notably in the modal logic and tense logic (lost to view after the
Renaissance) which late mediaeval thinkers had considered vital to the proofs of the existence and attributes of
God. Geach, at Leeds, and Michael Dummett, at Oxford, would take up this line, in partial debt to the independent
rediscovery of these ideas in late nineteenth century Germany by Gottlob Frege.[27] The significance of such logical studies lay in the first place in their usefulness for the clarification
of the propositions found in Catholic doctrine and theology, and hence for defending the intelligibility of the
same. Kenny, however, looked forward to something more constructive-what he termed a 'rigorously formulated natural
theology' without whose creation, so he wrote 'there seems to be little hope of commending theism at a serious
level to a philosophical public'. Just such a natural theology is under construction in the work of David Braine
of the University of Aberdeen whose planned trilogy is now two parts completed.[28]
Until recently, the philosophical theology found in recent English Catholicism has been predominantly,
then, of a kind suggested by the predominance of logic in secular philosophy and the esteem accorded to the principal
Christianised Aristotelian, Aquinas. The combination of elements of Thomism and the analytical method, as found
in writers like the Welsh Dominican Brian Davies, the Bristol philosopher Christopher Williams and, in Scotland,
John Haldane of St Andrews, enabled these writers to dialogue easily with the predominant school of philosophers
of religion in this country.[29] The question remains
open, however, whether some more ontologically oriented kind of metaphysics is not required by Catholic faith which,
after all, is ultimately interested in metaphysics because it wishes to display the pre-conditions in human nature
that make the hope of the beatific vision a reasonable option for us. Persistence in asking that question, the
question of 'The Absolute and the Atonement', namely, our at-one-ing with the Absolute, the Unconditioned, was
the peculiar mission to the Catholic Church in England of Illtyd Trethowan, whose own philosophical theology was
built on a combination of Augustine, Blondel, and such earlier twentieth century French 'philosophers of spirit'
as Louis Lavelle.[30]
The question also remains open as to whether the influence of Continental Post-Modernism will
eventually displace analytic philosophy from its dominance in the English Universities. Those University departments
are, on the one hand, more generously eclectic than once they were; on the other, the beauty of the analytic method
is that, while in practice the majority of its practitioners, as Elizabeth Anscombe has lately lamented,[31] suppose it to be an instrument of the secularisation of thought,
in principle a believer can use it quite as well as a non-believer-whereas when a theologian, such as the Anglo-Catholic
John Milbank, makes use of Post-Modernist categories he must quickly show how he also goes beyond them on pain
of ceasing to be a believer at all.[32] The same involvement with Post-Modernist discourse can be observed in an English Roman Catholic writer
in some ways comparable to Milbank, Gerard Loughlin of the University of Newcastle on Tyne.[33] The two men are linked in the Cambridge-based
and largely High Anglican theological movement which claims the name 'Radical Orthodoxy'.[34]
So far I have mentioned three sorts of expectations entertained by the Downside symposiasts, representative as
they were of the intellectual cream of English Catholicism as the Council entered its second session-their belief
that the theology of the future in England would take the form of a conspiratio of clergy and laity; that it would be closely concerned with literary studies; and that it would make
its peace, not without profit, with Anglo-Saxon philosophy. All these expectations were well-founded, as was a
fourth-and that was their conviction that theology as practised by Catholics would increasingly find its true home
in University faculties-but I shall reserve my comments on that last example of accurate prophecy for when I make
a brief tour d'horizon of the institutions in which Catholic theology in England currently finds itself embodied-towards
the end of this article.
I want to turn now, rather, to an expectation that was not so manifestly fulfilled, and that is the assumption,
articulated by Abbot Butler, that, while the well-known specialisations of theology, including positive theology-biblical
studies, patristics, Church history, liturgics, spiritual theology, moral and pastoral theology-would continue
to flourish, the main contribution of Catholics on the national scene at large would be in that mode of theologising
for which the entire previous history of their theological culture-unlike the Anglican-had prepared them, namely,
systematic theology of a speculative but dogmatic kind.
If we are to consider the work done by Catholic writers in England since the middle 1960s, we might well be tempted
to consider as its greatest weakness that very aspect in which Butler imagined it would most strongly make its
mark. Since the Council, we can certainly think of figures who, in all the specialisations I have mentioned, have
done work of quality, albeit from different angles of vision, angles which that happy device of moderate relativists
'perspectivism' may not be able always to render synoptic. In New Testament studies, the defence of the priority
of Matthew and Luke made by Dom Bernard Orchard of Ealing, in co-operation with other members of the Society for
the Study of the Gospels which exists in part precisely to fend off the ill consequences for the Church's portrait
of Jesus that unquestioned acceptance of Marcan priority carries, can hardly be reconciled with the much more median
position-within the world of historical-critical New Testament scholarship - occupied by his fellow monk Dom Henry
Wansbrough of Ampleforth (though we note that it is Dom Henry, and not Dom Bernard, who is a member of the Pontifical
Biblical Commission).[35] And if the Catholicism
of Fr John McHugh of Ushaw was palpable in the doctrinal underpinnings of his The Mother
of Jesus in the New Testament,[36] it can also be detected in the notably theologically-minded
Old Testament exegesis of Fr Robert Murray of Heythrop.[37]
Patristics has been represented not only by Murray's marvellous study of the symbolic ecclesiology
of the Syrian speaking church of the early centuries,[38] but also by the Cyprian studies of his confrère Maurice Bévenot, important as these were
ecumenically owing not least to the disputed interpretation of Cyprian on the Roman primacy.[39] English Jesuits, in fact, made their mark in this period chiefly in
patrology-for to Bévenot and Murray one must add the names, not only of Edward Yarnold of Campion Hall,
Oxford, with his investigations of the liturgy of initiation in the Greek and Latin Fathers,[40] a topic of more than historical interest with the re-introduction,
in neo-patristic style, of an adult catechumenate in the Latin church after Vatican II, but also of Anthony Meredith
of Heythrop whose The Cappadocians, appearing in an ambitious
series of 'Outstanding Christian Thinkers' edited by Brian Davies, placed in context that kind of Greek Trinitarian
thinking, never lost sight of among the Orthodox, which increasingly influenced the revival of Trinitarian theology
among both Catholic and Reformed Christians in the West in the 1980s and 90s.[41] With this quartet belong the solo voices of two Mendicant students of patristic Triadology, the Oxford-based
American Capuchin Thomas Weinandy and the English Dominican Edmund Hill who has done more than any other scholar
to render intelligible the structure of Augustine's De Trinitate-partly through the characteristically whimsical
device of comparing it to Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass - and thus, for those who could hear, righting the negative record which anti-Augustinian Anglicans and
Protestants (especially) were registering.[42]
Our Church historians have sought, it would seem, by a conspiratio of their own, to make possible
a more seamless grasp of a Catholic continuity which the shock of the post-Conciliar crisis could sometimes seem
to imperil: thus Eric John of Manchester and Henry Mayr-Harting, the first Catholic to be Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at Oxford, have taken the Anglo-Saxon period;[43] Jack Scarisbrick of Warwick, and Eamon Duffy and Richard Rex of Cambridge the late mediaeval and Reformation
eras in which, it is hardly excessive to say, their efforts have brought about a veritable revolution in the more
positive assessment that is now general of the immediately pre-Reformation Church,[44] and then, for the post-Reformation community there is Professor John Bossy of York, Professor Alan McClelland
of Hull, editor of Recusant History, and the late Fr
J. Derek Holmes of Ushaw.[45] In liturgics, the
work of Lancelot Sheppard, Mgr J. D. Crichton and Fr Clifford Howell presented, belatedly, the main lines of the
twentieth century Liturgical Movement to British Catholics and, in Crichton's case, expounded the texts and explained
the rubrics of the reformed rites.[46] They could
not have expected the cat among the pigeons loosed by Dr Kieran Flanagan of the Department of Sociology at Bristol
when he took up the criticisms of the reformed Liturgy-or at any rate its current presentation-made by such Catholic
cultural anthropologists as Victor Turner and Mary Douglas as well as fellow sociologists from other Christian
traditions, declared deficient the notions of rite, community and celebration with which pastoral liturgists had
been operating, and called for the re-enchantment of the Liturgy by a re-thinking of these notions with assistance
from such German-language theologians as Joseph Ratzinger and Balthasar.[47] In spiritual theology, the prematurely deceased Eric Doyle of the Franciscan Study Centre in Canterbury
opened up Bonaventure and Francis himself [48];
and at Blackfriars, Oxford, Simon Tugwell the early Dominican sources.[49]
The Welsh Germanist scholar Oliver Davies has done a great deal to make the Flemish and Rhineland mystics accessible
to us,[50] and Dom Sebastian Moore of Downside
produced his own idiosyncratic spirituality,[51]
a mixture of theology with philosophy and psychology centring on themes of desire, hope, pain and the elusive nature
of selfhood which has not been without its influence, I think, on the choice of themes orchestrated by his nephew
Professor Lash, while in a more classical vein for a monastic theologian was the exploitation of Eckhart made by
the Ampleforth monk Cyprian Smith.[52] From the
Quidenham Carmel of Ruth Burrows (Mother Rachel, O.C.D.), a somewhat disputed interpretation of the great Carmelites,
notably St John, provided at any rate an analogical reading
of what the 'nights' of the sanjuanist tradition entail.[53] Other much-read spiritual theologians (if, in the absence of an underlying structure for ascetical and
mystical commentary, the phrase can still be allowed) were the Jesuit Gerald W. Hughes whose God of Surprises[54] owed something to
the early twentieth century Friedrich von Hügel (a hero of Lash's) and the layman Donald Nicholl whose Holiness drew on the Russian Orthodox tradition as well as those of the
non-Christian East: an example, but not a dogmatically irresponsible one, of the 'wider ecumenism'.[55] At the other end of
the spectrum where the integration of spirituality and doctrine is concerned, stands the work of John Saward, formerly
an Anglican priest, whose exactly researched and beautifully crafted writing is better known in the United States,
where he has taught for a number of years, than in his native England-though thanks to the Oxford connexions of
the International Theological Institute, he has now returned home.[56] Two writers who combined metaphysics with mysticism must also be mentioned here: the wonderfully synthetic
thinker Noel Dermot O'Donoghue, an Irish Carmelite based in Edinburgh, and his crisply analytic counterpart Denys
Turner, now Nicholas Lash's successor at Cambridge.[57]
Moral theology proved the single most controverted area of post-Conciliar Catholicism: in a sense, after all, the
divergences of view not only about ecclesiology and so the sacraments but about the theology of revelation and
so doctrine at large, are traceable at least in England to the initial crisis caused in the Council's wake by Paul
VI's first hesitation and then intervention over artificial contraception. And so it was in English moral theology,
where proponents of Proportionalism reached more accommodationist ethical conclusions, as with the Heythrop moralists,
while across London the members of the Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics were absolutists, under the influence
of the Thomist Aristotelianism of Professors Anscombe and Geach, but also the firm opposition to all forms of covert
Consequentialism insisted on by Professor John Finnis of University College, Oxford, British-based collaborator
of the influential American moralist Germain Grisez.[58]
Before the style of this essay degenerates completely into that of an end-of-term school report, let me come to
my main point in this section. That the production of a speculative systematics - in other words, of a Catholic
dogmatics capable of giving an overall view of the context in which these various specialisations should live,
move and have their being - though Butler considered it the main gift English Catholics could make to their non-Catholic
counterparts, has hardly happened. Three people at least, at the beginning, middle and end of our period respectively,
were capable of it: Mgr Francis Davis of Oscott at the start; Cornelius Ernst of Blackfriars Oxford in the middle
and Nicholas Lash of Cambridge at the end. Davis, schooled by Newman, Thomas and Karl Barth, could have taken a
wider view, but perhaps through over-heavy teaching duties, at Birmingham University and Oscott, produced chiefly
theme articles like those in the unfinished Catholic Dictionary of Theology, 1962-1971, which he edited, and which came to a regrettable stop with the pregnantly entitled volume
III, 'Hegel to Paradise'.[59] Cornelius Ernst suffered
from over-complexification and writer's block, though his short Theology of Grace and posthumous essay collection Multiple Echo
are vastly rewarding.[60] Nicholas Lash is by far
the most prolific of those authors, and, after a period in which his early doctrinal interests seemed eclipsed
by considerations of theological method, produced in 1992 a commentary on the Apostles Creed which, though the
closest thing to an original dogmatics we have, is too compressed and allusive really to serve our need.[61] I believe that this failure of English Catholics to produce
systematics is bound up with the institutional circumstances in which Catholic theology is carried on. It derives,
in other words, and here I come to the question I earlier noted but reserved for my penultimately closing section,
from the all too marked success with which the Downside symposiasts prophesied of future Catholic theology in England
that increasingly in the State faculties would it find its home.
Without in any way regretting the new opportunities for rendering Catholic theology more fully a public enterprise
which comes from the professionalisation of Catholic theologians, chiefly laymen and laywomen, through employment
in the Universities (both the ecumenical dimension and the contact with a broader constituency of' thinkers and
scholars can only be beneficial per se), we can still,
I think, register disquiet that so little is done by collaboration among Catholics themselves in settings where
there is taken for granted a Catholic liturgical and spiritual ambience, and a general consensus about the elements
which should enter into a Catholic systematics-a suitable philosophical preamble, linked in some way to the ontological
concerns that are central for Catholic thought; the Scriptures regarded as an inspired body of literature; the
monuments of Tradition that Catholic theologians have customarily consulted in their scanning of Scripture; the
rôle of the magisterium in the making of doctrine and the refraction of its teaching in the lives of the
faithful.
Catholic Theology in Britain: the scene since Vatican II - part 2
This version: 18th July 2009
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