Christian theologians’ ruminations on the relationship between the commands to love God and neighbour in the New Testament traverse a broad spectrum. Some posit a unity or even the identity of loving God and the neighbour. Others insist on a clear distinction or disjunction between loving God and loving the neighbour, sometimes pointing to the variance of the scriptural formulations: we are to love God “with all our heart, soul, mind and strength,” whereas we are enjoined to love our neighbour “as ourselves” (cf. Mt 22: 34-40; Mk 12: 28-34; Lk 10:25-29).1 In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas deals with this issue under the rubric of charity (caritas) and the respective merits of the active and contemplative life (Il.n. 25-27; II.II. 179-182, 185.2, 188). In the following essay, I will analyze Aquinas’ thought on the relationship between the love of God and neighbour by examining these parts of the Summa. These articles will be the focus of my analysis as they represent the heart of Aquinas’ writing on this issue. However, I will occasionally refer to other parts of the Summa, which either reinforce, clarify or perhaps obfuscate his position.2 I will argue that Aquinas clearly emphasizes both the love of God and neighbour as constitutive elements of the moral life. However, his conception of the relationship between the two remains nebulous in various places. This essay will attempt to elucidate as far as possible the nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour according to Aquinas. As we shall see, his thought provides fertile ground for scholarly debate and various interpretations of the precise nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour. This essay will offer one possible interpretation.3

Felix Wilfred, a Catholic theologian working in an Indian context, provides a trenchant critique of traditional Western theology’s ability to find relevance in India’s multi-religious context. This article explores how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of world-pictures provides a philosophical support for Wilfred’s critique and indicates a different, more productive model of interreligious dialogue.

There is a large amount of interreligious dialogue that is interested in ascertaining what is indeed true about the world. When different religious traditions make different and sometimes conflicting assertions about the world, the question arises about the relationship between these various claims. As these claims are part and parcel of the traditions themselves, springing from the core of the various religions, the question becomes how the religious systems themselves are related and what is the relationship between the truth claims of various religions? Various approaches to this can be categorized in three broad categories, exclusivist, inclusivist and relativist.

In his last book, On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed the problem of making truth-claims, how anyone can validly say they were “certain” that something was indeed the case. He noticed that truth- claims were intrinsically connected to world-pictures with which they mutually arise, and that no truth-claim can therefore claim a status that transcends all world-pictures. This critique casts suspicion on the usefulness of the exclusivist-inclusivist-relativist categorization of theories of religious pluralism and points to a more productive model of interreligious dialogue that respects and utilizes the differences in different religions. Rather than comparing statements made by various faiths and determining which in fact are correct, I propose a model of dialogue that allows each side to attain a better perspective on their own position as they come to see a different way of understanding the world.

No one in the English-speaking academy would even try to write an exposition of ‘Thomism’, inhibited as we are by fifty years of the (no doubt salutarily) deflationary effects of analytic philosophy. More positively, the current wave of scholarly works suggests that a systematic exposition of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, if possible at all, would be premature. (We have noted some of the studies of his use of the Bible: New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 245-251).

Thomism is a tradition, long tracts of which remain unresearched. Two conferences have recently mapped some of the territory. Saint Thomas au XXe siècle (Paris: Saint-Paul 1994) contains more than twenty excellent papers tracing the history of Thomism since the foundation of Revue thomiste, the quarterly journal of the Dominican friars at Toulouse. The focus is on France, indeed on the Toulouse ‘school’; yet, as well as a fascinating picture of that particular tradition, we get a great deal of insight into the principal conflicts in Catholic theology during the twentieth century (how deep these were is not widely appreciated in the English-speaking world, where even Catholics themselves tend to believe that we all agreed, prior to the Second Vatican Council).

Saint Thomas au XIVe siècle, a special issue of Revue Thomiste (Janvier-Mars 1997), offers another set of fine essays on one generation of theologians, the first after Aquinas’s death, some of whom were devotedly Thomist, others (including Dominicans) much more critical and some even ferociously anti-Thomist. Largely unknown to any but specialists in medieval studies, these controversies show how contested Aquinas’s thought has been all along.