One of the most interesting features in Aquinas’s theory of mind relates to his view that the human intellect is inferior to that of an angel. St. Thomas gives the impression that if only our minds could act in the same way as those of the angels, many of our noetic difficulties would disappear. The weakness of the human mind is due, he believes, to the discursive process of human cognition which results from the application of our understanding to the potentially intelligible data that is acquired from the senses. Aquinas quite frequently deplores this mental condition, claiming that it represents a form of intellectual weakness (e.g. S.T. 1.58.3). The result of such a discursive process is that the human mind struggles to understand by means of lengthy and arduous mental efforts (S.T. 1.89.1). By comparison, the intuitive grasp of the angelic mind is swift and immediate, capable of directly obtaining knowledge of first principles (S.T. 1.58.3). Aquinas perceives the latter ability as a sign that angels are truly intellectual beings in a way that humans are not and he reserves for us the term rational (rationales vocantur) as a way of describing our slower intellectual ability. In such a context, rationality obviously does not constitute a positive description but rather denotes a form of mental weakness (ex debilitate intellectualis). The latter, according to S.T. 1.58.3, is quite clearly the result of our present mode of mental discursiveness in which the intellect proceeds gradually towards the knowledge of truth.

The changes in Lamennais’s thinking after the papal condemnation of 1832 were in many ways anticipated in earlier works. In adopting a populist stance in his political writings, he was but extending into the social and political field the epistemological principal of le sens commun, as the final authority to which individual reason must submit. In an appendix to Des progrès de la révolution, published in 1829, he drew an analogy between his belief in the superiority of faith to individual reason in intellectual matters and the superior claim of social duty to individual liberty in the political world. I shall now outline how his thinking on religion and politics developed in the years following his break with the church.

The row over exorbitant salaries for the bosses of private monopolies has resurrected an ancient belief: namely that we can distinguish just from unjust prices. ‘Just prices’ — as distinct from prices set by market forces and the profit motive — once formed part of the ‘moral economy’. A just price for some article had to be proportionate to the amount of work that went into making it and to the contribution it made to the common good.

The great enemies of justice in fixing prices were (and are) ‘damnable avarice, sensuality and pride’ (as the fourteenth century writer Henry of Langenstein rightly remarked). His views resonate loudly today in the columns of the newspapers and on the tops of Clapham omnibuses. But they can hardly be squared with the economics of Adam Smith or his modem disciples. For the tradition which Smith initiated put things asunder which the earlier tradition regarded as having been joined together by natural law and ultimately by God: in particular, ethics and politics (and therefore economics).

A commentary by an eighteenth-century Spanish scholastic on Adam Smith’s political economy may seem an unlikely place in which to find a sharp and telling critique of ‘the state we’re in’ (to use Will Hutton’s punning phrase). Yet (as Scott Meikle’s recent article in the February 1995 New Blackfriars shows) Fray Antonio de la Santisma Trinidad, who was appointed in 1791 by the Spanish Inquisition to examine The Wealth of Nations, was able to reveal something fundamentally amoral with the ideology which afflicts contemporary Britain.

If you are keen to visit old buildings, some of the best examples of medieval ecclesiastical remains are to be found in East Anglia. On a recent visit I had occasion to spend some time church crawling and stumbled across Binham Priory, the remains of a Benedictine monastic settlement 4 or 5 miles from Walsingham. Why this place sticks firmly in my mind is the stark contrast between what now exists and what had been. Apart from the monastic ruins, the only utilised building (apart from a farm) is the nave of the church. The poignancy of juxtaposition makes the place special, a holy place in the sense that it has a continuity with the past and also a sense of dramatic personal history; it seems to have been a building that moved with the times as the different styles of architecture and furnishing show, but its truncated nave and aisles, gives the impression of a magnificent church built for monks and people in a remote place. Its setting is typically East Anglia, the rear approach is through a gatehouse, ruined, and then a paved way, into the door to face a magnificent medieval seven sacrament font, benches with carved figures on the poppy heads, the old holy water stoop, and a fine tapestry behind the Jacobean table altar.

I use Binham as an example of what one could call the ‘sacrament of building’, a place which engaged and still engages people with a transformative presence. This might be fanciful language but it hints at the importance of place and ritual in the context of human life.