In 1988 David Braine, who has taught philosophy at the University of Aberdeen for many years, published The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, a metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Now, in this second book, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Duckworth, London, 1993) which certainly stands on its own although we are frequently referred back to the earlier book and forward to two (if not three) forthcoming volumes, he reconstructs the argument advanced by Thomas Aquinas in favour of our immortality, an even more audacious enterprise in the present intellectual climate.

The first move is to cut off every form of dualism which splits the animals that we human beings are into parts that then have to be related to one another. The traditional mind/body dualism to which Platonist Christians have always been attracted is, so David Braine argues, no different from the brain/mind identity theories which currently flourish under such labels as physicalism, behaviourism and so on. While of course he conducts the argument with reference in general terms to current literature he is surely right in saying that the modern debates raise no issues that would surprise Aquinas. The Platonists paid attention only to the immateriality of the human intellect while the pre-Socratic Ionians believed that knowledge is simply physical (cf Summa Theologiae, la 84, 2). The greater threat nowadays to the unitariness of the human being is, as Braine says, various forms of materialism and, in particular, some of the Artificial Intelligence theories.

Universities are curious, contrary institutions, and Oxford and Cambridge more curious and contrary than most. At one level they are centres of intellectual innovation and advance, places where the atom is split, new wonder-drugs developed, old orthodoxies overturned. And yet they are also the most conservative of institutions, wedded, with a fidelity which our society hardly grants to any ordinary marriage, to extraordinary rituals and ways of doing things whose sole commendation seems to be, that it has always been so.

The contradiction is more apparent than real; a strong sense of tradition is often a help, not a hindrance, to intellectual openness. But is not always easy to see how that works in practice, and much that we do and value in the ritual side of our common life has, to an unsympathetic eye, a faint air of the ridiculous about it. Today’s service is a case in point. Just what is all this about? Some of you may know the spoof commemoration-day address given by a lunatic clergyman at the beginning of W H Auden’s The Orators:

The cruelties committed in the war in former Yugoslavia profoundly shock us. Villages are completely destroyed, children, women and men, even their cattle, are killed. Women are raped and forced to give birth to the children of their rapists. The perpetrators are ordinary citizens, pleasant people, good neighbours. We do not have to look for violence that far away. Bombs go off in the city of London, children are killed in Warrington, and in revenge innocent young men are massacred in Belfast. Violence exists outside war situations as well. Domestic violence is probably the most common form of violence: incest, beating, or simply bullying. It is often hidden; in spite of everything, loyalty to parents and other members of the family overrules the urge to confide in someone, to complain and to accuse in public. Though violent novels and films may be very popular, articles and books on violence are generally not. The Bible is full of violent events, but there is relatively little literature on violence in Scripture.

Why do we accept violence relatively easily as a part of life? Why do peaceful people resort to violence in certain situations? It seems to me that violence is closely linked with justice. Violence is used to redress wrongs or to prevent injuries. The source of much violence is the thirst for justice. People always try to justify their use of violence by appealing to their right to restore injustices done to them in the past or in the present.

‘Desire nothing except to be pleasing to him and to do his most holy will’ [CRE I 28]. This simple formula, inspired by the relationship between Christ crucified and his Father, and lived ever more intensely in the most radical way by Catherine, provides the key to an integrated reading of her spirituality, of which it is the heart. But how does it actually take shape in practice? Will it not don the emaciated face of renunciation, gloomy earnestness, human frustration, all-enveloping pain, self-denial and deprivation? The reality is in fact quite different. There is not a single letter in which Catherine does not invite people to be ‘cheerful’ [cf. CRF VII. 3 163-167], This certainly does not mean a superficial, silly cheerfulness which is only skin-deep and unpredictable in its durability. What Catherine encourages is a cheerfulness which does not exclude the heights and the depths of the various states of spirit people find themselves in as their circumstances vary, whether internally or externally, but which remains constant even in times of pain and tribulation. It is a cheerfulness which is rooted in its depths in the very mystery of God and whose intensity flows from faith, hope and the love with which it abandons itself to God’s plan in the specific life of each individual.