To be catapulted, at very short notice, into the deliberations of a worldwide gathering of Catholic bishops and religious was inevitably something of a culture shock, compounded no doubt by the sheer effort of concentration involved in listening, five hours a day for the first fortnight, to individual members’ interventions in their own languages (with instant translators whose command of Latin idiom tended to survive in their English versions). Yet the comprehensive overview of the present situation of the consecrated life in all its manifestations that emerged could hardly have been projected in any other way. We heard moving accounts from sisters, still young, from the countries of eastern Europe of the way they had not only maintained the religious life underground in the face of communist government restrictions, but continued to attract new vocations and to carry out their formation. We heard from African bishops (speaking confidently, I thought, for a church come of age) of an explosion of vocations that promises to give the lie to the assumption that celibacy will always be something alien to the African male; of the inherent dangers in a society where so many, in the secular sphere, are looking for ways of self-betterment; of the need for higher levels of education, for which outside help will be needed, and at the same time for a process of inculturation which the indigenous can only achieve themselves, and to which the assumptions and living standards of expatriates can be a serious hindrance.

Yes, Christology is the logos or science of the Christ. But science is the invention of the Greeks, and while Christos is Greek, too, it does duty here for “Messiah.” The word contains the encounter of Jerusalem and Athens that has been the sustaining event of the whole of Western culture, which, in these days, and notwithstanding the abiding vigour of Indian thought, is increasingly the culture of the world. And already thus far “Christology” proves itself a weasel word. For if indeed we speak of an “encounter” of two “cultures,” then Athens bids fair to absorb Jerusalem as just one more collection of human conventions and nomoi. But if we say that “Christology” signifies the destruction of proud arguments (logismoi) and the capture of every thought unto the obedience of Christ (see 2 Cor 10:4-5), then it may be thought that logos can no longer recognize itself here.

Or maybe this meeting of Jerusalem and Athens inscribed in “Christology” is just a confusion. “Messiah,” originally a title, here means the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and functions as a proper name. So Christology is the science of an individual man. According to the most thoughtful of the Greeks, however, there can be no logos, no science, no episteme, of the individual as such.

Neither for us moderns is science of the individual as such. Chemistry may be about radium, but it isn’t about this radium atom. It’s about the nature of radium, and so tells you about this atom insofar as it has the common nature. But it doesn’t give you the history of this atom, or that one, or any one.

Gentlemen, I read in the June 1994 edition of this Journal your Open Letter to Bishops Saier, Lehmann and Kasper (hereafter NB) concerning their joint Letter regarding Pastoral Ministry to the Divorced and Remarried (hereafter PL) and their Principles of Pastoral Care (hereafter PPC). Both their letter and yours concern me to the extent that, as you correctly point out, they concern “the entire Church” (NB, 321). As a theologian in the Church, entrusted with the theological education of the Church, married, divorced and remarried and celibate alike, I was both delighted to read your letter and intrigued by its argument. I thought you and I and the body of the Church might benefit from further clarification. You will be aware that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF) and the three Bishops issued in September 1994 further communications on this topic, published in Origins, October 27, 1994 (hereafter OS). I shall return to these in my final section.

Your letter delighted me because it sought to do the theologian’s task, the pursual in the scientific manner proper to theology of a deeper understanding of the Word of God and the communication of that understanding. I am delighted to pursue the matter further with you, for your argument intrigued me, as much as from what it left unsaid as from what it said. For the sake of conciseness and clarity, I choose to deal with only two focused, and not unconnected, matters which are of concern to me as both a theologian and a marriage (and divorce) counsellor.

Belief in the passivity of the female survives few honeymoons, and would appear to be largely confined to people of celibate life and retiring disposition who do not visit supermarkets and have little opportunity to note the skilled use of what the French appositely call un chariot. Aristotle was not long married — happily, it would seem — when he wrote his biological works, and if he says that in the act of reproduction ‘the male is the active partner and the female qua female is the passive one’, he goes on to remark more discreetly that ‘that which acts, is acted upon in return’. Indeed, ‘sometimes the extent to which it gets acted upon is greater than that to which it acts’. Quite so. Horresco referens, the male may on occasion be ‘mastered’ and then a female is born, one, to boot, taking after her mother. All of which suggests that Aristotle’s beliefs are not to be summarised in the simple schema: ‘female passive, male active’. The seemingly absolute assertion is attenuated when set in context.

The same applies to the much-cited statement ‘the female is as it were a deformed male’. One can appreciate the anger this phrase can cause when it is taken to encapsulate Aristotle’s metaphysical and ethical understanding of Woman. Phrases, however, have contexts, and this phrase occurs in a work on biology. A little reading of this biology shows that Aristotle also says that that elegant and beautiful creature, the seal, is ‘deformed’.