A Homily Preached in Memory of Fr Leonard Boyle OP On the Feast of St Thomas Aquinas At Blackfriars, Oxford

When news of Fr Leonard’s death reached Canada, Michael Attridge, a young doctorate student at the Pontifical Medieval Institute where Leonard had taught for many years, immediately sent a letter of condolence to the convent of the Master at Santa Sabina. In his letter, Michael spoke of his first and only visit to the Vatican Library where he found himself overwhelmed by Leonard’s kindness: “Fr Leonard offered to give me a tour of the library ... Our tour culminated with a visit to the beautifully frescoed Salone Sistino. Fr Boyle took me around to each of the paintings of the various ecumenical councils of the Church. At the end he asked me a question that I’ll never forget—he asked me what was the common feature in each of the paintings. As I struggled, by reviewing all the paintings, to give an intelligent answer to his question, he simply and quietly said with a smile—‘It’s the Book, Michael’. I looked up at the walls and there in the centre of each of the paintings surrounded by the council fathers, was the Bible. He continued: ‘The Book is always at the very heart of the Church’s activity and life—never forget that’.”

I have always instinctively thought of Leonard as a man of the Book, and not only because of his enormous talent as a paleographer. Most of the times, in fact, when I heard him speaking in Rome, in public, he was preaching the Gospel.

It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.

Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) spent the last six years of her life considering whether it was God’s will that she be baptised into the Church. In her many discussions with priests, she sought to translate her mystical experiences of Christ, who had come down to take possession of her, into an acceptance of the Church as Christ’s Body on earth. It is widely believed that she died without the sacrament of baptism, the Church being an obstacle to her faith in Christ, and not a refuge for that faith.

Various narratives are incorporated into the The Message to the Planet which, on the face of it, should help the reader to understand the novel’s enigmatic and central ‘redemptive’ figure, Marcus Vallar. These include Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ (there are close textual echoes of Freud’s essay in Murdoch’s novel); this is closely linked to the narrative in which Alfred Ludens, Marcus’s ‘disciple’, wants Marcus to live and through which he wants to understand him—that of the archetypal quest for knowledge. An inescapable narrative background is that of the life of Christ: one Murdoch critic suggests that

There are also accounts of Marcus given by other characters, including highly perceptive ones by Dr Marzillian, the psychiatrist, and Daniel Most, the Rabbi. There is Marcus’s account of his own life, in which his attempt to understand the Holocaust figures largely. But there is also a narrative buried for most of the novel which fully surfaces only at the end. This, a story from the Holocaust, impacts on our understanding of Marcus more than any other in the novel and challenges the very words ‘understand’ and ‘redeemer’. In this article I will consider some of these narratives and the impact on the novel of the Holocaust story.

Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ is a classic of psychoanalytic biography; but there is much, Freud argues at the end of the essay, that psychoanalysis cannot explain.