Philippa Foot is a good philosopher. She is a good person too, insofar as her manner of thinking, conversing, and asking questions are evidence of who she is ‘as a human being’. I begin with reference to Foot as good philosopher and human being for a few reasons. For one, I do so in order to introduce particular uses of the word ‘good’. The guiding question in Foot’s recent Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) is whether my ‘she is good’ is simply equivalent to T like it’ or ‘it strikes me in a favorable way’. Do I have some objective basis to make my claim, in reference not only to ‘good philosopher’ but also to ‘good human being’ ? Foot argues that I can be objective in both descriptions, that a non-subjective account of ‘good’ is necessary to make sense of how practical reason is both practical and reasonable. By staking out the non-subjective constraints of practical reason, she suggests that the modern ‘turn to the subject’ has come to its dead end. This dead end is a leading concern of my remarks on Foot’s Natural Goodness, and my principal aim is to advance her arguments for a teleological conception of nature, particularly human nature. But first, there is more to say about what is good.

One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.

One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.

Many attempts have been made in the Christian tradition to name or describe the Holy Spirit. We have heard the Spirit of God termed ‘teacher’ (Jn 14:26), ‘love’ (1 Jn 4:13), ‘gift’, ‘go-between’. Each of these descriptions is helpful and each is at the same time partial.

In this paper, we wish to explore the Spirit of God (in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit) in relation to air, earth, fire and water. Interest in the four elements has an ancient recorded history, reaching back at least to the Greek philosopher Empedocles in the 5th century BCE. It has also had a history in anatomy and psychology. We note this in reference to the ‘four humours’ in Elizabethan literature. Today, study of the four elements has an impact on areas of astrology, health care and religious traditions. We will focus on the Christian story.

We suggest that there is particular value today in linking the Spirit with four of earth’s elements, mindful always that such connections are analogical. We maintain that an awareness from our Tradition of the close links made between the Spirit and the elements can assist us not only to view the Holy Spirit anew, but can also remind us to respect more deeply the earth in whose elements we as human beings share. First, we will reflect theologically on each element in relation to the Spirit. Second, we will discuss the adequacy for pneumatology of such an understanding. We begin our study with a discussion of the element ‘air’.