Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.

In a book on Aquinas and beauty, Fr Armand Maurer starts with an apology. For, so he notes, ‘we look in vain in the immense body of Aquinas’s writings for a detailed and comprehensive treatment of beauty’. In general, says Maurer, ‘Thomas seems to have given short shrift to beauty or to have avoided it altogether’. And I might say something similar when it comes to Aquinas and the academic life. In his writings, the word ‘academic’ occurs in two allusions to St Augustine’s Contra Academicos. Otherwise, it is not to be found at all whether as a noun or as an adjective. There is a common 16th and 17th century English use of ‘academic’ according to which someone academic is a disciple of Plato. But Aquinas is heavily critical of Plato. And he has no treatise on the nature and purpose of centers of higher learning and the like. No work of his remotely corresponds to studies such as Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University.

I might add that some famous academics have been throughly skeptical of Aquinas’s own academic value. He is often presented as an important philosopher. But was he? Not, for example, according to Bertrand Russell. As Russell himself put it: ‘There is little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead ...

Yves M.-J. Congar (1904-1995) was the foremost French theologian of the twentieth century. The severe trials to which he was subjected by Roman Catholic Church authorities, notwithstanding, Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975: I am of the Church. I love the Church.’ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognised the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being. Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind. It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians:

In his Natural Law and Natural Rights, Fundamentals of Ethics, and other works, the Oxford professor of jurisprudence and moral theologian John Finnis has elaborated a theory of ethics and natural law that he presents as being based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Finnis has been influenced in this project by the moral theologian Germain Grisez, and has worked in cooperation with Grisez and Joseph Boyle on these issues, but I will confine myself to a discussion of Finnis’s thought, while noting that my conclusions will have implications for the views of Grisez and Boyle as well.) His account of natural law incorporates a particular account of human life as a good for practical reasoning, from which he concludes — in disagreement with Aquinas — that capital punishment is immoral. This conclusion has gained wide acceptance among Catholics, partly because of the influence of Finnis and Grisez’s moral theories. I want to examine his understanding of the good of life, contrasting it with the actual views of St. Thomas, and argue that it is mistaken. I will then explain why I think his mistake is an important one that needs to be avoided.

Finnis presents his account of natural law as being modelled on St. Thomas’s account of the first principles of natural law, which is given chiefly in the Summa Theologiae, la2ae q.94 a.2. It may be helpful to sketch St. Thomas’s understanding of practical as opposed to theoretical reason. Theoretical reason aims at knowledge of how things are, and its activity terminates in belief about how things are.