² Hampson at times demonstrates a shaky understanding of Catholic fundamentals. Thus, for instance, it is not true that “the Latin Mass is a sacrifice which it is possible for the human to bring to God”(CC94): the sacrifice of the Mass is strictly and only the sacrifice of Christ Jesus on the cross: there is no other sacrifice which the human could bring to God save the single, perfect, sacrifice of His divine Son. Similarly she insists that “an indulgence is a remission of punishment still due in purgatory for sins after absolution”(CC88). An indulgence is a remission of the need to do earthly penance for sins that have in any case been forgiven: the references to days in indulgences until the very recent period were to the number of days’(earthly) penance they fulfilled. This is a recognition that even though we may be forgiven our sins, the wrong we have done has effects for which restitution is due and over which justice has a claim. The only reference to purgatory is that if we have done insufficient penance for our sins by the time of death, this must still in some way be fulfilled – as much for the sake of what it takes to lead us into perfection as for satisfaction of God's desire to punish.

³ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons, Vatican, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2003Google Scholar, §1.

⁴ Rogers, E., Sexuality and the Christian Body, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999, p. 121Google Scholar. (Emphases in original)

⁵ Rogers, E., Sexuality and the Christian Body, p. 120.

⁶ See in addition: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life, Vatican, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002Google Scholar. For a discussion of the issues surrounding natural law, see also Parsons, S. F., Concerning Natural Law: The Turn in American Aquinas Scholarship in Kerr, F. (ed.), Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation, London, SCM Press, pp. 163–183Google Scholar.

⁷ There are a number of minor errors in the book which better editing by the publisher should have picked up. Amongst these: Cardinal Ratzinger is Prefect, not President, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Gregory Dix, the Anglican Benedictine monk, is correctly named in the text but appears as D. G. Dix in the Bibliography. The Fourth Council of the Lateran took place in 1215 not 1216. Hampson argues that Schillebeeckx is the champion of the doctrine of transignification (CC93), and the work that is referred to on the same page is Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God. Schillebeeckx makes no mention of transignification in this book, but he does in the book he published after the Second Vatican Council, Christus tegenwoordigheid in de Eucharistie, the English translation of which she mentions two pages later.

⁸ Gemeinsame Erklärung zur Rechtfertigungslehre des lutherischen Weltbundes und der katholischen Kirche, signed in Augsburg, October 31, 1999.

⁹ Citing Ernst, C., The Theology of Grace, Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 1974, p. 88Google Scholar.

¹⁰ To understand this argument in full one would need to read Pesch, O.‐H., Martin Luther, Thomas von Aquin und die reformatorische Kritik an der Scholastik: Zur Geschichte und Wirkungsgeschichte eines Mißverständnisses mit weltgeschichtlichen Folgen, No. 12, Hamburg, Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994Google Scholar. A good summary of his main arguments exists in Pesch, O.‐H., ‘Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology’ in Kerr, F. (ed.), Contemplating Aquinas, pp. 185–216.

¹¹ Hampson seems unaware of this and of Pesch's considerable bibliography of studies of Luther (given in full in the notes of Pesch's chapter in the volume by van Geest, P., Goris, H. and Leget, C., Aquinas as Authority, Leuven and Utrecht, Peeters and Thomas Instituut, 2002, pp. 123–163Google Scholar). She compares Pesch's understanding of Luther unfavourably with another former Dominican friar, Stephan Pfürtner, whom she clearly thinks understands Luther better precisely because of his work in a Protestant environment as a Seminary teacher (CC139–142).

¹² Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, Ia, Q. 12, art. 7. “Nullus autem intellectus creatum potest Deum infinite cognoscere. Instantum enim intellectus creatus divinam essentiam perfectius vel minus perfecte cognoscit, inquantum maiori vel minori lumine gloriæ perfunditur.”

¹³ For just one presentation of the breadth of this, see the essays in Kerr OP, F. (ed.), Contemplating Aquinas.

¹⁴ See, for just one example of this, the reviews by the Editor, ‘Recent Thomistica I’ in New Blackfriars, Vol. 83, No. 975, May 2002, reviewing a number of books emphasising this point, but especially Valkenberg, W. G. B. M., Did Not Our Hearts Burn? Place and Function of Scripture in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leuven and Utrecht, Peeters and Thomas Instituut, 2000Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Valkenberg, W. G. B. M., Did Not Our Hearts Burn?, p. 208.

¹⁶ Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Lib. I, Cp. 6. “Hæc autem tam mirabilis mundi conversio ad fidem Christianam…”

¹⁷ Aquinas, De æternitate mundi, §1. “Supposito, secundum fidem catholicam, quod mundus durationis initium habuit, dubitatio mota est, utrum potuerit semper fuisse.”

¹⁸ At once justified and sinner.

¹⁹ Hampson has an odd understanding of the reception of Aristotle in the Mediaeval context. Thus she argues that (CC92)“Anselm's context was after all not that of an Aristotelian philosophy, but rather feudalism”. In fact the political context of the reception of Aristotle was also entirely feudal – Anselm's philosophical context was the Christian neo‐Platonism that immediately preceded the recovery in the West of many of the lost texts of Aristotle concomitant with the inception of the great Mediaeval Universities, especially Paris. It should not be forgotten that neo‐Platonism had itself been profoundly influenced by Aristotle, nor that these texts were never ‘lost’ in the same way in the East.

²⁰ Quoted in Ott, H., Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, p. 123Google Scholar. “Für Bultmann galt er als der Luther‐Kenner, wie er an seinen Freund Hans von Soden…schrieb.”(Emphasis in Ott's text)

²¹ Understood strictly as being‐the‐there, rather than in Sartre's incorrect translation of ‘être‐là’, ‘there‐being’. For a full discussion of this see Hemming, L. P., Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice, Notre Dame University Press, 2002, pp. 5–7Google Scholar.

²² As an aside, Hampson having stressed that Luther's thought‐structure is not a result of his (personal) experiences, it was perplexing to say the least to find in the following chapter her admiration for Luther's Catholic interlocutor, Gaspari Contarini, whose sympathy for Luther she traces to the fact that “Contarini underwent experiences and came to conclusions which bear a marked similarity to Luther’s”(CC58).

²³ I am grateful to Dr. Bernd Wannenwetsch of the University of Oxford for his remarks on my understanding of this. I hope I have done justice to his explanation. If I am right, Luther stands in a venerable Mediaeval tradition. Elsewhere, just to cite one parallel example, I have traced the way in which Eckhart spiritualises Aristotle's understanding of place, τ?πος”, to describe why Mary has the relationship to God she does. See Eckhart, Von Abgeschiedenheit in Largier, N. (Ed.), Meister Eckhart: Werke, Stuttgart, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993, Vol. II, pp. 434–458 (459); Hemming, L. P., ‘On the Nature of Nature: Is Sexual Difference Really Necessary’ in Parsons, S. F. (ed.), Challenging Women's Orthodoxies in the Context of Faith, Farnborough, Ashgate, 2000, pp. 155–174Google Scholar.

²⁴ At times Hampson's imprecision is frankly exasperating. For instance, after numerous paragraphs where we are chided that under no circumstances should justification ever be thought of as a doctrine (“justification is not to be conceived of as a ‘doctrine’”[CC177]; “Catholics suppose [i.e. erroneously] that ‘justification by faith’ is a ‘doctrine’”[CC178]) we suddenly discover that what Lutherans want to say “is most neatly expressed through the doctrine of justification”(CC179).

²⁵ We are exhorted that we must not fall into the routine Catholic error that “the Reformation resulted from Luther's personality”(CC103) and so must not concentrate on Luther's psychology, thus whilst it is “beside the point” for “Catholics to show that Luther was foul‐mouthed, misogynist and anti‐semitic”, Hampson supplies us with an entirely psychological explanation for this behaviour herself – this was she tells us, “particularly in his latter years when he was not well”(CC104).

²⁶ Heidegger, M., Der Begriff der Zeit in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 64, Tübingen, Niemeyer Verlag, 1995Google Scholar. From a lecture originally given to the (Protestant) Marburg Theology Society, July 1924, p. 19. “Das Grundphänomen der Zeit ist die Zukunft.”(Emphasis in original)

²⁷ It is important here to stress that Heidegger is not taking a Lutheran structure and ‘secularising’ it, as authors like Macquarrie and Löwith have occasionally attempted to suggest he does in his analysis of Christian theological ideas: rather the other way around, he seeks to show how it is that Christian insights, although developed as faith‐positions, nevertheless arise on the basis of the originary structures of the being of being‐human, that is to say, they have an ontological basis.

²⁸ Descartes, R., Meditationes de prima philosophia(Third Meditation) in Adam, C. and Tannery, P., Descartes, Paris, VrinGoogle Scholar, VII, p. 45. “Dei nomine intelligo substantiam quandam inifinitam, independentem…a quâ tum ego ipse, tum aliud omne, si quid aliud extat, quodcumque extat, est creatum…Nam quamvis substantiæ quidem idea in me sit ex hoc ipso sim substantia, non tamen idcirco esset idea substantiæ infinitæ, cùm sim finitus, nisi ab aliquâ substantia, quæ revera esset infinita, procederet.”

²⁹ Cf. Kant, I., Opus Postumum in Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1936, Vol. 21, p. 50Google Scholar.

³⁰ Although one must take with a hefty pinch of salt her claim that “Luther[’s]…system is quite extraordinarily integrated and internally consistent”(CC111). She admits herself that the phrase simul iustus et peccator simply disappears from the later Luther, so that an interpretative hermeneutic is required to demonstrate that it is still at work in texts where it is never mentioned.

³¹ Hence why the Church ‘stands or falls’ on the simul iustus understanding – the individual believer now embodies in his‐ or herself what the church needs to be.

³² Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the understanding of the importance of baptism which Luther holds to.

³³ Hampson, D., Theology and Feminism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990, p. 73Google Scholar.

³⁴ Cf. AC200–203.