Meet René Descartes

Durham University have, in their wisdom, deemed me fit to teach some undergraduate seminars this year, which I'm looking forward to partly as an opportunity to feel cleverer than other theologians (a rare occurrence when you're a PhD student) and also as a chance to refresh my memory of or just, y'know, finally get around to reading some of the big names in the world of philosophy and theology.

One of the people I'll be teaching is René Descartes, one of the most important philosophers in the world, ever. Enrique Chavez-Arvizo, whose biography of Descartes is in the Wordsworth Classics Edition of Descartes' Key Philosophical Writing (the source of most of the information in this post) says that Descartes' acheivements 'rank second only to Plato's' and 'are the single most important source of our modern intellectual character'. Unlike poor Kant, Enrique thinks that Descartes' works 'display a lucid and rich literary style equalled by few', and over the course of his 53 years of life, he wrote important texts on geometry, algebra, physics, mechanics, cosmology, meteorology, optics, physiology, anatomy and medicine 'to name the principal ones' (!).

Descartes was born in 1596, in a town which was called La Haye at the time, but has since been renamed Descartes ('I think, therefore I've found myself a nice little cottage round the corner from the post office'?). His family were vaguely aristocratic, and rich enough for him to spend most of his life living off his inheritance. His mum died when he was three, so his grandmother raised him till he was ten, when he was packed off to study at a Jesuit-run school. He was a sickly kid, so he was given the privilege of being allowed a lie-in every morning, and he used these mornings in bed to, er, 'meditate'. He kept up the habit for most of the rest of his life.

After leaving school, he went and got a law degree in Poitiers, and wrote a Treatise on Fencing before setting off to travel round Europe because he wanted to study at the school of life instead of just reading books. Whilst in the Netherlands, he joined the army, and though he never actually got to see any action, he did have a mystical experience in a sauna on the Danube: three dreams which he interpreted as a message telling him to come up with a theory of everything. Afterwards, he went back to France and sold his family estate so he could set up as a full time philosopher, then off for some more travelling round Italy, before he settled in Paris for a couple of years. While there, he gave a speech which so impressed one of the cardinals listening to him talk that afterwards they cornered him and made him promise to dedicate his whole life to philosophy 'for the benefit of humanity'.

Next, Descartes moved to Holland, where he moved around a lot, trying to get away from people and be alone, though he kept getting embroiled in philosophical controversies with other people. In the early 1630s, he moved to a slaughterhouse district so he could learn about physiology. In 1629, a friend asked him to write something about the scientific phenomenon of parhelia (rings around the sun), so he wrote a scientific treatise, only to chicken out of publishing it when he found out how much trouble Galileo had recently gotten himself into for suggesting that the earth wasn't the centre of the universe. Around the same time, he knocked up a girl called Hélène, a servant in a house he'd stayed in, and she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Francine, who died aged five.

After writing various other treatises, Descartes published his most famous work, the Meditations on First Philosophy, which was basically an attempt to work out whether there is anything we can be sure that we really know. It proved to be a bit controversial. A theologian called Gisbertus Voetius (Gisbertus! What a name.) published an anonymous treatise attacking Descartes (I'd be keen on anonymity if I was called Gisbertus), and Descartes cheekily responded with an open letter entitled 'Letter of René Descartes to that Most Distinguished Man, Mr Gisbertus Voetius'.

Descartes' next bit work was The Principles of Philosophy, which was meant to be used as a university textbook. He dedicated it to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who'd been his penpal ever since he wrote the Meditations. At her request, he wrote his last major work, The Passions of the Soul, which was all about the passions (or emotions if you want to be all 21st century about it). But he kept getting himself into arguments with other philosophers and theologians, and eventually, getting a bit fed up with it all, he accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to join her court. Christina, evidently either a swot or an insomniac, made Descartes give her regular philosophy lessons at 5am. He eventually died of pneumonia when he was only 53, which just goes to show that early mornings are bad for you.

So, that's Descartes, philosopher extraordinaire. His example has much to teach us: primarily that the route to philosophical genius lies through plentiful lies ins, multiple gap years, and being able to live off your parents' money. So there's hope for as all: all we have to do is to be upper to upper-middle class. Oh. Crap.

Meet Slavoj Žižek

I've mentioned him before, but I think it's time for a proper introduction. Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian academic, who writes about politics, culture, film, psychoanalysis, and pretty much everything else you can think of. He's probably most influenced by three thinkers: Hegel (a German philosopher), Marx (mostly Karl, with a good sprinkling of Groucho) and Lacan (a psychoanalyst who radically re-interpreted Freud by taking his ideas to be all about language), though he also loves Alfred Hitchcock and G K Chesterton and talks a lot about popular culture more generally. He's pretty important in certain areas of the arts - he's been called an intellectual 'rock star' (by, I'd guess, people who aren't really that into rock music), and 'the most dangerous philosopher in the West'. Weirdly, though, (is it weird? It's hard to tell from within the funny old world of academia) most people still haven't heard of him.

Žižek was born in Yugoslavia when it was still a 'Communist' country. He got a PhD in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana, and a second PhD in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris. He was a big name in Yugoslavian intellectual circles in the 70s, but got kicked out of his university job for not being Marxist enough, and in the 80s he moved to Paris, only to return in the early 90s when Yugoslavia got broken up into different countries to run against the socialist party's presidential nominees. He started publishing books in English in the late 80s, and since then has written stupidly lots - roughly 200,000 words every two years - as well as starring in several films: 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', 'Žižek!' and 'Examined Life'.

People seem to either love him or hate him: plenty of Eastern Europeans think he betrayed Communism/Yugoslavia; academics sometimes get sniffy because the more he writes the less he sticks to the 'rules' of academic writing (things like using proper references, structuring your book around a main argument, being boring); he often seems to say things just because they're controversial or will make people cross with him, and he has a funny habit of making similar arguments in several books by basically cutting and pasting whole sections of text. Also, he's increasingly communist, increasingly angry about capitalism, and often quite violent in his rhetoric.

On the plus side, he's fun to read: he'll move suddenly from talking about 19th century philosophy to analysing jokes to talking about that time Mel Gibson got arrested and started ranting about the Jews to discussing the psychoanalytical significance of Alien. He's original and engaging; passionate and inspiring; and he has a wonderful ability to make you feel like another world is possible.

Now, Žižek's not a (conventional) theologian, but there's a crucial shift in his work around the time he starts reading Schelling, who's a theological but not a very orthodox thinker. Around that time, Žižek's political philosophy moves, roughly, from advocating some form of radical democracy to wanting something more like a revolution and an authoritarian government, but he also turns more and more to theology to articulate his ideas: he writes books with names like 'The Fragile Absolute: or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?' and 'The Puppet and the Dwarf: the perverse core of Christianity', and he recently wrote a book with John Milbank, one of the big names in contemporary theology. He is, roughly, a 'Christian atheist', arguing that you can only be an atheist by being a Christian first, and that the way to be faithful to Jesus is to stop believing in God. Theologians get quite excited by the fact that a non-theologian is talking about incarnation and sin and Jesus, but they're not always sure Žižek is an ally or an enemy of theology. Žižek's mostly read by academics, but is starting to influence little bits of the non-academic-churchosphere, leading to some more debates about whether he's a friend or a foe.

So, readers: meet Žižek. I think you'll find we've all got lots to talk about.

Photo credit: brechtjekeulen on Flickr

Meet Cyril and Methodius

As you doubtless know, 14th February is an important day: it's the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Cyril and Methodius were brothers, born in Thessalonika in the 820s. They became priests, and were living in a monastery on the Bosphorous, when some Khazars sent a request for someone to come and teach them about Christianity. The brothers set out, learnt the Khazar language, and set up a successful missionary enterprise. Next, they responded to a request from Moravia for Slavonic-speaking teachers, and off they both went. No one had ever written anything in Slavonic before so Cyril made up an alphabet, and they translated the gospels and various liturgical texts into their newly-invented script. They got in a bit of trouble for conducting services in the local language, and Pope Nicholas I summoned them to Rome for a telling off. Fortunately, he died before they got there, and his replacement, Adrian II, approved of what they were doing and made them both into bishops. Cyril died in Rome shortly after, but Methodius was made archbishop of the new Archdiocese of Moravia and Pannonia, and off he trundled, only to be locked up shortly after for being a heretic. He was set free after three years, but the spent the rest of his life being alternately condemned as a heretic and praised as a missionary, until he died, probably quite exhausted by it all, in 885.

Cyril and Methodius are (understandably) important saints in Slovenia and other bits of Eastern Europe, and the Cyrillic script was named after Cyril. There was also a radical political movement called the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, a secret society set up in Kiev in the 1840s which, inspired by Christian ideals, wanted to abolish serfdom, defend Slavic culture and traditions, educate the masses and set up a single nation to unite all the Slavic peoples. Good, eh? (Except maybe the last one: those projects tend to end badly).

Now, you may not care very much about Eastern Europe or the Slavs (shame on you); the translation of the Bible into local languages might not float your boat (heathen!); but the Feast of Cyril and Methodius has two things going for it which surely you can get behind: the rejection of Valentine's Day and the consumption of vodka. That's right, vodka: what could be more Slavic than potato-based liver poisoning? In the absence of any pre-existing Cyril and Methodius traditions (though do let me know if you find any), here are a few new ones that I would urge you to try:
- Gathering together (that's what church is all about, right?)
- Eating Russian food (or Slavic food, if you know what that is - I sure don't)
- Drinking vodka (Slavic, innit?)

You can even join the facebook group. So go on, ditch the valentines and party hard, Slav-style. It's what Cyril and Methodius would have wanted.

Meet Abélard and Héloïse

The story of Peter Abélard and Héloïse was considered one of the great love stories by medieval writers, which is funny considering it involves castration, theology, and the monastic life (although I guess you could argue that castration's the best guarantee of unrequitable love).

Peter Abélard was born in 1079 in France, and by the age of 22 he had set up his own very successful school of philosophy. In 1115 he began teaching at Notre Dame, where he met a young woman called Héloïse, the niece of one of the canons at the cathedral. She was about 17, and was unusually well-educated for a woman, and the two immediately hit it off. Abélard fancied her so much that he managed to persuade her uncle to let him move in and take on the role of Héloïse's tutor (on the pretext that he was struggling for money and would get a rent discount in return for his tutoring).

It wasn't long until Abélard's crush had turned into a full-blown affair, which he describes thusly: "Our speech was more of love than of the book which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms; love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our text. In order that there might be no suspicion, there were, indeed, sometimes blows, but love gave them, not anger; they were the marks, not of wrath, but of a tenderness surpassing the most fragrant balm in sweetness. What followed? No degree in love's progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it. And our inexperience of such delights made us all the more ardent in our pursuit of them, so that our thirst for one another was still unquenched."

Hot stuff. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when he eventually discovered what was going on, Héloïse's uncle was pretty miffed. Not long after, Héloïse discovered she was pregnant, and gave birth to a son called Astrolabe. To pacify her uncle, Abélard agreed to marry Héloïse, but secretly because being married would have damaged his career. Héloïse was reluctant, being unconvinced that a secret marriage would satisfy her uncle and also having a rather low view of marriage: she says in a later later to Abélard that "though I knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world and holy in religion; yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free. The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be necessitated to love always a man who would perhaps not always love me." She felt, amongst other things, that a philosopher shouldn't be bothered by the petty distractions of domesticity.

When her uncle made their marriage public, Abélard encouraged her to go to a convent for a while (though he was unable to stay away from her, and describes their later suffering as just punishment for their not-very-nunlike activities in a quiet corner of the convent). Taking this as a sign that Abélard was trying to get rid of his niece, Héloïse's uncle took the obvious next step to protect her, and persuaded some relatives to sneak into Abélard's house at night and, er, steal his family jewels.

Apparently eunuchs found it difficult to make a successful career out of academia at the time, so Abélard was forced into a monastery, where he had a rough time of it - quite apart from the doctrinal disagreements which led to his being accused of heresy, the monks he ended up in charge of tried to murder him by poisoning his drinks. Héloïse was consequently forced to become a nun. She was not happy, and wrote some fairly explicit letters to Abélard, detailing her sexual frustration and her dissatisfaction at being forced into a life for which she had no sense of calling. Abélard wrote back, and gradually persuaded her that they should write to each other about matters theological, and their passionate (at least on her side) correspondence eventually subsided into a more sober discussion of the monastic life, and how best to run a convent.

Their letters, and Abélard's biographical History of my Misfortunes form the basis of subsequent retellings of their 'romantic' tale, although Abélard also wrote several more substantial theological tomes, including the controversial Sic et Non ('Yes and No') which was a compilation of contradictory quotations from early Church Fathers, attempting to disprove the popular assumption that 'the Fathers' spoke with one voice and agreed on everything.

Meet the Sadducees

The Sadducees have, depending on how you look at it, either got off pretty lightly or been sadly overlooked in the popular imagination. We all know about the Pharisees and their hypocrisy, and they’ve become a symbol of hypocritical religion which only cares about outward observance of the rules, but what about the Sadducees? Can’t we make them a symbol of bad Christianity too? Why should the Pharisees get all the attention?

Why ‘Sadducees’?
The origin of the name isn’t quite clear. It's probably something to do with Zadok, who was the high priest during David and Solomon’s rule, but the double ‘d’ in the name suggests it might have got confused at some point with the Hebrew word ‘tziddik’, which means ‘righteous.’

Who were they?
The Sadducees emerged during the Maccabean times (around the time of Alexander the Great, in the bit between the Old and New Testaments). The Maccabees led a big revolution against Greek rule, and the old hereditary line of high priests got a bit lost in all the kerfuffle, so there was a need for a new high priestly dynasty. The Sadducees emerged into this gap, and were running the Temple right up to Jesus’ day, and for a little while after. They were made up of members of the Jewish aristocracy, so were pretty conservative, and they got rich off Israel’s tithes and the sale of sacrificial animals in the temple (so they were the ones who got their arses kicked by Jesus that time he went mental). They weren’t very popular – they collaborated with Roman rule in order either to ensure that Temple worship was able to continue under occupation (that’s the charitable view, and what the Sadducees would have told you), or in order to cling on desperately to what little power they still had. They often made concessions to Roman demands, and were accused of telling people that they animals they’d brought to sacrifice were impure, so that they’d have to buy new ones from them.

The Sadducees didn't believe in the afterlife, and so, unlike the Pharisees, rejected the idea of resurrection (who needs an afterlife when you're rich and powerful in this life, right? Also unlike the Pharisees, they didn't believe in the Oral Law - a set of traditions which had supposedly been passed down orally from Moses, and is the basis of what Jews now know as the Talmud.

The Sadducees were constantly at war with the Pharisees, and their relative political influence changed over time. At one point, there were rumours that John Hyrcanus, a Jewish leader, was the bastard child of a Roman soldier who’d raped his mother, and so that Pharisees opposed him and said he shouldn’t be allowed to rule Israel; when it turned out that the rumours were false, the person who’d started the gossip was punished by the Pharisees, but not particularly severely, so (perhaps unsurprisingly), Hyrcanus favoured the Sadducees instead. Hyracanus’ son, Alexander Janneus, also preferred the Sadducees, partly because he’d had a Greek education, and the Sadducees’ theology was closer to Greek thought than the Pharisees’.

Later, though, the Sadducees lost influence: Herod deliberately tried to undermine them, executing 45 Sadducees who’d supported his rival for kingship of Israel, and confiscating Sadducee property to give to Mark Anthony. Herod also changed the role of the high priest: where before, high priesthood had been a life-long role, by Jesus’ time the high priest had to buy his position from the government every year. By making the high priest less important, Herod made the high priest’s deputy, a Pharisee, more important, giving him control over the Temple and making sure that the high priest had to do the ceremonies Pharisee-stylee. After Herod, the Sadducees got steadily less important, until they disappeared completely after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

So that's the Sadducees. If you feel sad that they've been so overlooked by history, feel free to start referring to examples of the Church compromising in order to retain power and fleecing innocent believers to get money from them as 'Sadducaical'. We are, after all, short of examples from church history of people who've behaved like that. Oh, wait...

Photo credit: Erick on Flickr

Meet Dionysius the Areopagite

Pseudo-Dionysius/Dionysios/Denys the Areopagite, or, as we shall call him, plain Dionysius (I was once rebuked by a supervisor for referring to him as 'Pseudo-Dionysius': 'Poor chap'), is little known outside certain academic circles (most theology post-grads I have met respond to his name with a baffled “Who?”), but nonetheless very influential. He’s called ‘Pseudo’ Dionysius because, although he was a 6^th century Syrian theologian he writes as though he is the Dionysius who was converted by Paul’s sermon about the unknown God at the Areopagus in Athens. Because of the original Dionysius' relationship to Paul, the pseudo Dionysius' work was seen as a notch down from the authority of the Bible for many centuries. He is one of the three thinkers most-quoted by Aquinas (the others being Augustine and Aristotle, if I remember correctly), and is the most influential figure on the Western tradition of mystical theology. But in the 19^th century people started to suspect him of not being quite as old as he claims, and lost interest for a while, until in the 20^th century people started to get interested in apophatic theology and to write books about Dionysius and his relevance to modern theology.

People disagree about whether his pseudonym was just a naughty attempt to seem more important than Dionysius actually was, perhaps to settle doctrinal disputes, or whether it wasn’t really ever meant to be a big deception. People who think we shouldn’t be too cross with Dionysius for pretending to be someone he wasn’t often argue that his chosen name is meant to communicate something about what he was trying to do. In Paul’s account, Dionysius was a Greek, in Athens as Paul preached the gospel to the Greeks, and certainly the heart of Dionysius' theology seems to be an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy, especially Neoplatonism. Again, people disagree on whether this was a good thing: was Dionysius a brilliant thinker, engaging with the best philosophy of his day to make the gospel relevant, or was he a sell-out, compromising the core truths of Christianity for the sake of seeming more relevant to the educated people of his day?

The works we have by Dionysius are The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, and ten Letters. In The Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius identifies nine ranks of angels and describes them. In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius describes three ranks of lay Christians, three ranks of church leadership, and three crucial Christian rites which he describes in some detail (apparently baptism in the 6^th century Syrian church involved getting completely naked before being dunked in water and covered in oil). The Divine Names is all about, er, names for God, and The Mystical Theology is all about the ways in which all of those names are completely inadequate for describing God. There are also a couple of books - The Symbolic Theology and The Theological Reflections which we don't have but Dionysius claims to have written. No one's quite sure whether they exist but got lost or were never real in the first place.

Dionysius is interesting, fun, blessedly brief, and is also the only theologian I've read so far who argues that God is drunk. For that reason alone, he's well worth attention.

Meet Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar was one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century. He was born in Switzerland in 1905, joined the Jesuits in 1928 and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1936. In 1950, though, he left the Jesuits, believing that God had called him to found a secular order of lay people. Because he'd left the Jesuits, he was banned from teaching in any of the Catholic universities, and he struggled to support himself by going on lecture tours. He gradually became more respected, though, and in 1988, Pope John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal. Unfortunately, however, he died before he was able to accept the offer.

One of the key relationships of Balthasar's life was with a woman called Adrienne von Speyr. Originally a Protestant, she converted to Catholicism partly due to Balthasar's influence. She had apparently experienced visions since she was a child, but afterwards began to have enormous numbers of visions, and other mystical experiences including stigmatisation (spontaneous pain or bleeding from which correspond to the wounds of Jesus. Cf. Francis of Assisi and the X-Files), and miracles. Between 1941 and 1965, every Easter she went into a trance from Good Friday until Easter morning, reliving the Passion of Jesus and experiencing a descent into hell with him. All pretty weird, no? Some of the content of the visions was pretty strange too, not least what they communicated about masculinity and femininity (sometimes coming dangerously close to describing God as divine rapist, which has been a bit passé since the death of Greek paganism).

Yet these visions were enormously influential on Balthasar. He described his and von Speyr's work as two halves of one whole, said that his work could not be properly understood without hers, and was reluctant to expose her work to criticism. The way he quotes her in some of his work resembles the way that fundamentalists quote the Bible, and her influence can be seen in many of his key concepts. All a bit strange, and problematic when you consider that Balthasar has been hugely influential on mainstream Catholic doctrine.

One of the issues Balthasar wanted to address was the question of why theology had become so boring. Apparently whilst studying Thomas Aquinas, he found his lecturers so dull that he would stuff his ears and read more racy material: Augustine and the early Church Fathers (hell, yeah). He though that by losing a sense of the beauty of God, theologians had missed the point and reduced theology to something dull and lifeless. He thought that the glory of God should be at the heart of theology, and wanted to build his whole theology around love: the glory of God, the essence of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Balthasar's magnum opus was the trilogy Herrlichkeit ("The Glory of the Lord"), Theodramatik, and Theologik.

Meet Kierkegaard

First off, it's not 'Keer-ke-gahrd', it's 'Keer-ke-gore', though you might want to stick with the former pronunciation outside of academic circles in order to avoid sounding like a nob. Unlike many other philosophers, his biography is incredibly important for understanding his philosophy, as will become clear as we go on.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (I'd be lying if I said I knew how to pronounce either of his first two names) was born on the 5th May 1813 in Copehagen (Denmark, in case you weren't sure). His mother was his father's second wife - she'd been his maid until after his first wife died, though he did have an affair with her before they tied the knot. His dad was exactly the sort of father you'd expect to produce a tortured, socially inept child: disciplinarian, overbearing, deeply pious and a devout member of the Lutheran church. He had a close but difficult relationship with Søren, and believed that he was under a divine curse, partly because of his extramarital rumpy pumpy with Søren's mum, partly because as a younger man he had, apparently, stood on a hill and cursed God, so it was only reasonable to expect to be cursed back. Cursed or not, five of his seven children died before he did, leaving only Søren and his older brother.

Søren didn't have many friends as a boy, and was lonely and introverted at school, though he did develop a good line in snarky witticisms. I think it's fair to say that all of these characteristics could equally be identified in his adult self.

After school, Kierkegaard began a degree in theology but got sidetracked by a life of dissipation and also put off by his sense that the ideas being bandied around within the university had very little relevance to life as a whole. He wanted something he could throw his whole self into. In 1843, eight years after he started his degree, his father died. Søren seems to have seen his father's death as some sort of sacrifice on his behalf, and, in an attempt to honour his deceased dad threw himself into work, finally finished his degree, began training to be a Lutheran pastor, started an MA and got engaged to Regine Olsen, the respectable daughter of civil servant. Not one to be half-hearted, even in an attempt to become an upstanding citizen, our Søren. But then it all went a bit pear shaped. Apparently he'd had misgivings about his engagement from the start, though it's not quite clear why: perhaps something to do with thinking that his melancholy disposition or his calling as an exceptional individual (modest too - I fancy him already) made him unsuitable for marriage. He wrestled with his doubts for a year, until finally breaking off the engagement.

This represented a crucial turning point in his life: he gave up on a career in the Church and began a very solitary existence living on money he'd inherited from his father. He started writing and was incredibly prolific, writing one or two books a year for about seven years. In 1845, a collection of essays was published, one of which criticised Søren not only for his writing but also for his treatment of Regine Olsen. He was furious. The author who'd been critical of Søren was an aspiring civil servant, and also worker for The Corsair, the Private Eye of its day, which had so far left Kierkegaard alone. Kierkegaard wrote a savage attack on the poor guy, seriously damaging his career prospects, and challenging The Corsair to 'Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough', which they did, mocking Søren verbally and pictorially for weeks on end. Kierkegaard took this pretty hard, though he literally had asked for it.

He was never particularly widely read, though believed that he would be read hundreds of years into the future and that his thought would become profoundly influential. He was, of course, right, or we wouldn't be here now talking about him.

Towards the end of his life, he became increasingly hostile towards the Church, arguing that it had become basically secular and was really only interested in forwarding the interests of the bourgeoisie. He increasingly called on his readers to disengage from any form of official worship.

In 1855, at the age of 42, Kierkegaard collapsed suddenly in the street and died a few weeks later in hospital

Meet Karl Barth

Karl Barth was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. He was born in Switzerland, and grew up in the Reformed tradition (i.e. Protestant). He studied theology under some of the big names in liberal theology, and then started work as the pastor of a small church. Frustrated by his sense that everything he'd learnt at university was irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people (I know, it's hard to empathise), he came to the realisation that it was all about the Kingdom of God, and proceeded to write a range of impenetrable books, including the Church Dogmatics which, while not quite so monumental as Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, still ran to a hefty thirteen volumes (like the Summa, it was never finished as Barth died before completing it). Take that, academic elitism!

He didn't, to be fair, spend the rest of his life in an ivory tower. He was one of the founding members of the German Confessing Church, which tried to stand up to Hitler, and had to resign an academic post because he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler. After the end of WWII, he co-authored the Darmstadt Statement of Guilt on behalf of the Confessing Church, acknlowedging the responsibility of the German people and Church for the atrocities of the war and the rise of Hitler.

And y'know, he also had a whole range of interesting theological ideas, but we'll get into some of those some other time.

Meet Thomas Aquinas

I thought that Thomas Aquinas deserved a whole post about him and his life - I suspect I'll come back to him more than once in the future, so you ought at least to be introduced. Aquinas is one of the great theologians, like, ever. He wrote about pretty much everything theological topic you can imagine, and was influential enough to be one of the few theologians still studied outside of the world of theology by people writing about ethics, law, politics and philosophy. He's one of only 33 people the Catholic Church have designated a Doctor of the Church (33 might sound like a lot, but bear in mind that's 33 people over 2,000 odd years), and some would argue that he's the Catholic theologian. He's famous for being one of the main people to rediscover Aristotle in the West, for basically inventing the doctrine of transubstantiation, for writing about natural law, and for lots of other things. His most famous work is the Summa Theologiae, possibly the longest theological work ever (if you can fit it on one shelf you're doing well). I reckon a good few days of my life so far have been spent reading Aquinas, and I've read maybe 1% of it.

Thomas was born in 1225 or 1227. His family wanted him to be a Benedictine abbot, which was a very respectable career for a younger son of a noble family in those days. But he decided he wanted to join the Dominican order, much less reputable – where the Benedictines were wealthy landowners, the Dominicans earned their keep largely through begging. His family were unhappy about that, so did what any loving relatives would do – kidnapped him and locked him in their castle for two years. At one point, his brothers tried to break his will by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, but he fought her off with a burning stick. Later on, he told a friend that he'd prayed for God's help in resisting the temptation and had a vision of two angels who gave him a white girdle and told him that it was the girdle of perpetual virginity. In the end, his family let him escape, and off he went. He went to the university in Paris, and began a life of studying and teaching, which continued until his death. He got involved with all sorts of theological controversies, but none of them were that funny, so I won't go into details.

The later years of his life were spent writing his massive Summa Theologiae – basically a comprehensive work about the whole of Christian theology, broken into three parts: the first about God and his creation; the second about humanity and ethics; and the third about Christ and his saving work. Part way through part 3, Aquinas stopped writing, and told his scribe that he couldn't write any more because “it all seems like straw.” Shortly afterwards he became ill, and died on 7 March 1274.