² See my preceding article: P.J. Hampson 2006, ‘Credible belief in Fides et Ratio: I Explanatory constraints in philosophy, science and religion’, New Blackfriars September 2006, pp. 482–504.

³ See Turner, Denys, Faith, Reason and The Existence of God. (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Turner cogently explains that through faith in Christ we trust that a route, through reason, from natural creatures to God cannot be ruled out; therefore there are reasons why, on reason's own terms such a route is intelligible, even though what it leads to is the ultimate mystery.

⁴ See for example, Hampson, P.J., ‘Beyond Unity, Integration and Experience: Cultural Psychology, Theology and Mediaeval Mysticism’, New Blackfriars, 2005, 86(1006), 622CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an initial discussion; also Hampson, Peter, ‘Cultural Psychology and Theology: Partners in Dialogue’, Theology and Science, 2005, 3, 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more extended treatment.

⁵ FR, therefore, sets the scene for more extended arguments on the nature of reason such as those recently elaborated by Oliver Davies in Davies, Oliver, The Creativity of God. (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, to some extent, by Denys Turner in Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, op. cit.

⁶ It is possible to discern how we might lay the foundations needed to build this argument, ‘bottom up’, from psychology as opposed to top down from theology. Although questions of epistemology and ontology are clearly logically separable, the one concerning how things are known, the other what there is to be known, the psychological study of perception shows that the systems and structures used for perceiving are in fact exquisitely attuned to what is to be perceived. How we perceive and know thus depend on what we (need to) perceive and know. In that reasoning can then be seen to be rely, in part, on more basic and embodied perceptual-motor mechanisms, it too will be shaped to fit and point its goal. Premature ‘closure’ of ontological possibilities will artificially restrict reasoning, while curbing reason will limit our account of what there is.

⁷ Faith, Reason and The Existence of God. Op. cit., pp. 18,121.

⁸ See for example: Rom Harré, The Singular Self: An Introduction to the Psychology of Personhood. (London: Sage, 1998); also, Andersen, Susan and Chen, Serena, ‘The relational self: an interpersonal social-cognitive theory’Psychological Review 109 (2002), pp. 619–645CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For a classic example see: SirBartlett, F.C., Remembering. Cambridge: CUP, 1932)Google Scholar; and for a more recent one, see: Donald, Merlin, A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. (New York: Norton, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For example Moltmann, Jürgen, History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology. (London: SCM Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Personal communication, 2004.

¹² A Mind so Rare, op. cit., p. 157.

¹³ ‘The engine of the symbolic mind, the one that ultimately generates language to serve its own representational agenda is much larger and more powerful than language which is after all its own (generally inadequate) invention.’ Ibid., p. 75

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 75. It is fascinating to note the close similarities here between Donald's claim from psychology and Denys Turner's recent corresponding assertion from a theological perspective that ‘ … although language … is simply how bodies are significant, how they possess and exchange meaning … .(Yet) it is important to understand verbal communication as a specific case of the wider human activity of transacting meanings.’ (italics added). Symbolic consciousness and the reason it supports, Turner suggests, thus have the power to go beyond closed, language-based ratiocination. Following this argument through to its philosophical conclusion, he then highlights the point at issue for theology namely ‘ … all that power to point beyond itself can be supposed to point beyond a nihilistic vacuousness, only if reason can justify the name of God to that which it points’, see Faith, Reason and The Existence of God.. op. cit., pp. 93, 119.

¹⁵ Eagleton, Terry, After Theory. (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 60–61Google Scholar, (first published by Allen Lane 2003). He continues, humorously: ‘Some of this overestimating of the role of language in human affairs may spring from the fact that philosophers were traditionally bachelor dons who had no experience of small children. English aristocrats who on the whole prefer hounds and horses to human beings have never bulked large in the ranks of linguistic inflationists.’ Ibid.p. 61.

¹⁶ A Mind so Rare, op. cit., p. 213.

¹⁷ We can discern a parallel between all three levels of consciousness discussed by Donald, and patterns for following Christ found in the New Testament. Briefly we can distinguish between forms of address in terms of rules (e.g, Rom. 14:1, 15:7), principles (e.g. Rom.14: 4), paradigmatic example in Christ (e.g. Rom. 15:3) and working within an ultimately cosmic symbolic world (Rom. 14: 8–12), which presuppose episodic, imitative, narrative and symbolic skills. Now, while it would be mistaken to argue in any simple-minded sense for a perfect one-to-one-correspondence between these discourse modes and levels of consciousness or for a simple linear progression from one to the other, there is a development in psychological terms from imitation to full symbolic understanding. In this shift, from imitating Christ and following him, to becoming Christ-like or conforming to him, we can see how this process of enculturation or enclothing works. Clothing ourselves in Christ, changes our very substance. We do not merely take on the appearance or style of Christ, adopt a role or entertain a new narrative. Here, surely, is an example of what Donald would call ‘deep enculturation’.

¹⁸ See Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, op. cit., for an extended discussion.

¹⁹ See Sheldrake, Philip, Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998)Google Scholar; also, D'Costa, Gavin, Theology and Education: The Virtue of Theology in a Secular Society. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁰ David Lodge discusses the difficulty of bridging first and third person accounts of consciousness in his intriguing essay, ‘Consciousness and the Novel’, see David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Lodge points out that novelists over the last hundred years or so have managed to negotiate this boundary successfully, especially with the use of ‘free indirect speech’ rendering accurate accounts of private experience more publicly accessible, and open to more objective evaluation. Thus avoiding, in turn, any tension between the so-called ‘realism of assessment’, which favours the narrator, and the ‘realism of presentation’ which favours the subject.

²¹ Credal rationalism (credibilism), universalism, the New Wisdom or even Postaevalism, spring readily to mind as possible cultural labels. And the following may also prove useful in more philosophical contexts: following FR‘s usage we have: recta-rationalism or ortho-logical; or perhaps: sapientalism; epistemic-mutualism; convergent rationalism, but none has quite the punch or popular appeal of, say, ‘positivism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Each captures some aspects of the message, and any could be adopted as common currency, but there are undoubtedly other, probably better, culturally pithier possibilities. Suggestions warmly welcomed!

²² Duffy, Eamon, Faith of our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition. (London: Continuum, 2004) p. 18Google Scholar.