Since the Second Vatican Council many developments have taken place which the Council itself did not and could not have anticipated. The Council did not foresee, for example, that the reform of the liturgy would cause the disintegration of popular Catholic piety and leave a fearful vacuum, providing nothing to put in its place. Neither did the Council anticipate that an increasingly educated Catholic laity would, in some way, radically alter its attitude to the clergy and to their ascendancy in the Church, demanding for themselves a place and authority of their own as ‘the People of God’. ‘From piety to criticism and back’ literally means looking back; it is a very difficult exercise. There are many reasons for this. We often absorb and integrate change in a semiconscious way and, once we have integrated it, there is a tendency to look back at the past in a hypercritical way through the lens of contemporary experience. Thus, we sometimes reach a distorted evaluation riddled with anachronisms, because we now live, move and breath in the air of a different world. However, despite the dangers, it is useful to look back, to engage in a process of recapitulation of the past, just as we do in old age, so that we can better understand the present.

What is piety? A working definition might be: the dutiful observance of religious practice. Within the Catholic Church that I knew, 1 consider it to have been a concentration of devotional worship at the expense of systematic theology and the study of scripture. However, this understanding of piety needs to placed in a particular context. Such a contextualisation can only be the Catholic Church of my youth, that is of the Irish/Lancashire variety.

‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeney in T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Sweeney is telling the awful parable of the man he knew who ‘did a girl in’ and wasn’t sure which of them was alive and which dead. In the world of Sweeney’s experience ‘That’s what life is. Just is ... Life is death’.

Words here are strained to accomplish their explanation (how can ‘life’ be ‘death’ when the words signify opposites) and as they stretch they give up multiple significances to unfold un-thought-of meanings. If Sweeney’s friend Doris says (whether of Sweeney’s ‘canibal isle’ where life is ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, or of the proposed ‘crocodile isle’ idyll of ‘Morning/Evening/Noontime/Night’), ‘That’s not life, that’s no life/Why I’d just as soon be dead’, she may not only be expressing a simple equality of preference, but saying that on an isle with no telephones, gramophones, cars or trains, only fruit and flowers and sameness, death will come just as surely and as soon as in the busy world of sights and sounds and doings. When Sweeney picks this up and says ‘That’s what life is. Just is’, he may allude to the quality of life—hurried, mechanised, or slow-dropping hypnotised—as death or to the incontrovertible fact that the end, the fulfilment, of all life is death.

Theological attention to St Thomas Aquinas, from over one hundred years ago to the present day, has featured in the work of a great number of theologians, many of them outstanding in the formation of twentieth-century theology. There is, however, another important aspect to the revival of interest in Aquinas: the very effective official ecclesiastical promotion of Thomistic philosophy and theology led by the succession of popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

A point of entry for these observations is provided by the occasion of the inauguration of the Chair of St Thomas Aquinas at the Lateran University, Rome on 10 March 1963. Archbishop Dino Staffa, as Secretary of the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, delivered a paper on the ‘Revival of Thomism’. His comments, as indeed much in the early years of the revival of Thomistic studies, had been largely inspired by another inauguration, that of the officially stated fundamental place of St Thomas in Catholic philosophy and theology by the encyclical Aterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII, dated August 4, 1879. The specific interest of the encyclical was the restoration of scholastic philosophy in general and that of St Thomas Aquinas in particular. It emphasized the Church’s concern for teaching ‘true philosophy’ because of its relation to theology. Declaring false philosophy to be the root of ‘many modern evils’ and mentioning the esteem in which St Thomas had been held, the encyclical urged the revival of St Thomas’ philosophy and of the spirit of investigation.

And what is that, this something than which nothing greater can be thought? Why it is God of course.

‘Now we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be thought’ (Anselm). Here is the stuff of philosophy, or at least of a certain sort of philosophy. Here are thoughts and things and relations between them, and God also. Anselm tied them together in such a complicated knot that thinkers have had difficulty untying them ever since. But perhaps Anselm’s knot is like the knot of the conjuror, a sleight of hand, and all one needs to do is to pull the rope taut and the knot will disappear?

Brian Davies (‘Quod Vere Sit Deus. Why Anselm Thought that God Truly Exists’, New Blackfriars, 72 (1991), 212—221) has also suggested that Anselm’s knot is often misunderstood, that, for example, Kant untied Descartes’ and not Anselm’s knot. But Davies still thinks Anselm’s knot a good one. When properly understood (tied) it works. Whether Davies has really untied and retied (understood and explained) Anselm’s knot or a similar but different one, just like Gaunilo, Descartes and Kant before him, is not here important. What matters is that Davies has an argument for God’s existence and that he thinks it is a good one.