Keywords

Introduction

Much has been said and written as to how we have reached the socio-cultural context of our time, which is also the context of the Christian university. The movement from modernism to postmodernism to hyper-modernism and now, we are told, to post-postmodernism, leaves one dizzy. However, in spite of an often-confusing social and cultural scene, Christians have grown in their understanding of the social context of preaching and proclaiming the Gospel. It would be an interesting study to see how often Christian universities have used the terms ‘society’, ‘social’, ‘societal’, ‘sociology’, and the prefix ‘socio’ as they reflect on their mission and purpose in the world. It is a reflection that is situated between history and culture as the theatre of Christian faith and belief, the world as the theatre of one’s salvation or one’s imprisonment. Christ’s call to follow him is an invitation to transcendence, with the reminder that his disciples are in the world but ‘do not belong to the world’ (John 17:16); indeed the injunction, ‘Do not love the world’ (1 John 2:15).

However, while openness to the world and situating the Gospel within history and culture have shaped the understanding of Christ’s call to follow him, there is the caution of an undifferentiated ‘openness to the world’ that has resulted in a crisis of values as well as confusion as to who the human person is, what is meant by human flourishing , and what is entailed in the pursuit of the human good. Furthermore, the rise of an autonomous culture is fraught with theological and philosophical difficulties, giving rise to the questions: ‘what kind of autonomy produces intelligibility?’ and ‘what does it mean to develop one’s self culturally?’ (Rowland 2003, pp.32, 36, 72).

Having banished universal theories, and seemingly celebrating the place of the individual in knowing , postmodernism actually cuts the individual off by diminishing who is doing the knowing—the nature of the person, the subject, particularly as the knower—and what is known—the nature of the real and reality. The individual’s subjectivity is celebrated as the authentic locus of meaning and values , but nothing seems to anchor the authority of meaning and values except a seemingly rudderless subjectivism, one cut free from religious, cultural, and social moorings.

Today, reality is understood in individualistic terms; one person’s reality may not relate to another’s, thus there is no necessary ’relationship between what is regarded as reality today and what will be regarded as reality tomorrow’ (Burns 2015, p.66). Consumption is what shapes and determines society. Persons are being sculpted by the political and economic ideology of neo-liberalism , reducing life ‘to market exchanges, and therefore to money value ’ (Crouch 2016, p.2). The market distorts knowledge, which in turn distorts the ‘knowledge that we have of ourselves. To act fully effectively in the market involves being a self-centered, amoral calculating machine’ (p.3).

This radically changes the notion of personal and communal freedom , and while choice shapes and determines personal freedom, the result is that language, shaped by neo-liberalism , is deprived of even the most basic, non-specialized vocabulary of philosophy and theology that would have been part of a general Christian lexicon a generation or two ago. Today’s public vocabulary is at the mercy of a one-dimensional lexicon where the hills and valleys of human experience are flattened as the market now shapes knowledge, and anything that falls outside the measurable, material, and malleable influence of the market is ignored. The neoliberal subject is characterized by change, but not change in relation to progress, for that would require knowing the external world. Change, rather, is not under the ‘control or direction of human agency [and] implies no telos of progress or increase in the bounds of human agency’. While change is outside the control of human agency, it emerges as a ‘product of human interaction and agential choices and behaviour’ (Reid and Chandler 2016, pp.13–14). Given the emphasis on change, the real is declared to be what can be measured, manipulated, and calculated. The success of the consumer market, then, depends upon subjects conceiving of themselves ‘as self-interested calculating machines’.

The neoliberal assault on knowledge has two additional features. First, the competence of educators to speak about education is contested and dismissed. Second, ‘knowledge itself is re-evaluated as that which is of use in the market or corporations; knowledge, culture and their pursuit have no intrinsic value’ (Crouch 2016, pp.27, 87–88).

The Subject and the Real

Asking university students, outside a class of philosophy, what real or reality means is likely to produce a stare of incomprehensibility, for the absolute reliance on the senses and the permanent fixity of the material world warrants such enquiry superfluous. However, it is surely one of the fundamental questions of human existence and flourishing , and should be a foundational question of the Christian university. Who is the person, the human subject, is a question that has occupied Western philosophers since Plato, with contributions from other religious and philosophical traditions . Choosing a philosophical theory as to who the human subject is seems daunting, but choosing as a Christian philosopher must surely be influenced by Jesus’ invitation to follow Him. Philosophers advocating for personalism and those calling for a turn to the subject, the knowing and intentional subject, offer a rich fair. The philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi famously said, ‘The freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must’. He held that while knowing, including scientific knowing, depend on our senses, it must transcend the senses ‘by embracing a vision of reality beyond the impressions of our sense, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an ever deeper understanding of reality’ (1974, p.309). Knowledge is both passive and active; passive in allowing reality to reveal itself according to its own laws and methods, and active in that the knower does not make or construct the real but discovers it. We are duty-bound by the truth. Persons must pour themselves ‘into an existence closer to reality’ (1974, p.335). To realize this, the subject is heavily dependent upon language and vocabulary in order to encounter the analogical diversity of the real, and to allow reality to reveal itself. The vocabulary of neo-liberalism is decidedly flat and one-dimensional, and this should alarm us as language enables subjects to reveal ourselves to others, but also for subjects to hear themselves through the self-revelation of language. The more constricted language is, the greater is the risk of concluding that the self to be revealed has been revealed, a revelation narrowed by a deterministic, mechanistic, materialistic, and an objectified vocabulary.

For Joseph Pieper , the real and reality is the foundation of our existence as created beings invited into a relationship with God. Pieper gives new meaning to the is/ought question of moral philosophy. The is of the created order cannot be fully revealed or understood without the ought to of our actions and intentions, what we must do as a result of who we have been created to be (Pieper 1989) . To do what is right, prudent, and good requires some knowledge of reality, a knowledge that does not emerge through a cold, antiseptic, scientific, and disinterested objectivity, but by becoming conscious of our own sins and biases that prevent us from perceiving the truth of things. Sin imprisons reality and the real (Pieper 1989). Selfishness and/or selflessness shape reality.

The speed of modern life is marked by constant activity and movement, which exalts making over doing. Such a mindset cannot comprehend that the real is not limited to merely existing things, what is made and materially external to us, but the real also as immaterial, and discovered through prudence and virtuous choices and actions (Pieper 1989). Choices and actions shape and determine reality. When the world is perceived merely as material reality and not as created and ordered by a divine plan, mysteriously hidden in divine providence, and discovered through the efficacy of human freedom and guided by the Holy Spirit, then the world is reduced to ‘raw material [for] human activity’ (Pieper 1989, p.117).

Bernard Lonergan offers a comprehensive understanding of the real and reality. The real and reality are not so much discovered by looking and seeing, what he refers to as picture thinking, naïve realism, but by first going through self-reflective acts of consciousness, as opposed to introspection. This is to counter a ‘dominance of analogy of ocular vision for knowledge. This signals a triumph of [the bias of] perceptualism in the West, which both legitimates and is justified by ontological primacy of the “already-out-there-now” as the really real’ (Lawrence 2000, p.101).

Knowing is more than looking, objectivity is more than identifying existing material things, and reality is more than the ‘immediate experience, of the senses’ (Lonergan 1974). In constructing an anthropology for Christian adulthood, indeed for all responsible adulthood irrespective of religious affiliation, Lonergan’s method—secured upon four transcendental principles: be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible, and three levels of conversion, intellectual, moral, and religious—enables adults to increasingly become conscious of themselves, their intentions, biases, and the effects of sin in their lives. Such awareness provides a reflective and intellectual structure to choose wisely amidst the buffet of plurality and diversity.

Today culture is understood empirically rather than normatively, which requires a new understanding in responding to Christ’s invitation to discipleship and the perennial reflection leading to personal conversion. The personal unity of the subject depends upon the subject’s knowing , choosing, and deciding, which establishes a normative pattern, and is not essentially external. In the absence of unifying universal principles, the subject is now situated within an empirical understanding of culture , ‘a set of meanings and values informing a common way of life, [thus] there are many cultures as there are distinct sets of meanings and values ’ (Lonergan 2004, p. 73). Lonergan distinguishes this with an older ‘classicist’ approach to culture, largely Western, declared normative, and considered the only expression worthy of the title culture. Thus a classicist understanding of culture consisted in ‘assimilating … tastes and skills, the ideals, virtues, and ideas that were pressed upon one in a good home and through a curriculum in the liberal arts’ (Lonergan 1974, p.160).

Knowing must guard against the traps of the purely empirical and the purely rational. The movement is from immediacy of sense experience to the more deliberate and reflective realization of meaning, value , and decisions leading to the ‘existential discovery … where one finds out for oneself that one has to decide for oneself what one is going to make of oneself’ (Lonergan 2004, p.145). When the real and reality are understood in terms wider than seeking and looking, beyond the senses, then the diversity of reality is affirmed, and one must then decide regarding the good and right thing to do as a result of what one knows and understands in order to avoid an existential contradiction (Lonergan 2004).

Lonergan’s method is particularly helpful regarding the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible means growing to be an authentic subject; it is a cumulative process. An authentic subjectivity grows into an authentic objectivity, (Lonergan 2004). Lonergan develops his understanding of genuine objectivity elsewhere (Lonergan 2007). While authentic subjectivity is open-ended and heuristic, subjects are present to themselves as subjects, not objects: objects are present by being attended to; but subjects are present as subjects, not by being attended to but by intending, (Lonergan 1993, p.210). Subjects are present to themselves by presence to the self, not by introspection or increasing one’s activity, relentless activism, but as beings who deliberate and choose, thus growing in their subjectivity and shaping the world. The subject and the world grow authentically insofar as the subject moves away from bias, selfishness, and sin through acts of self-transcendence.

Subjects know through their authentic subjectivity , and such knowing reveals more than just knowledge, ‘since we know by what we are, so also we know that we know by knowing what we are’ (Lonergan 1997, p.86). Most transformative is the realization that one’s knowledge of truth and one’s knowledge of oneself are inseparable. Thus, ‘the truths affirmed by judgment are so necessary that they couldn’t be otherwise’ (Lawrence 2000, p.116). The objectivity of truth and knowledge depends upon the relationship between knowledge and self-reflection.

The Christian University and Adulthood

Critics see the turn to the subject as fertile soil for relativism, individualism, and scepticism. Proponents see it as the only viable way of proceeding in the absence of a unifying worldview and amidst other diversities, and as the authentic way of assuming responsibility and appropriation for one’s learning , understanding, and decisions, maturing into adulthood. Discovering who and what we are depends upon our acts and reflection upon our acts (Giussani 1996).

Treating ‘the world strictly as an object of mastery’ (Steel 2014, p.236) is reductionist, and offers no clarity given the infinite number of things to be known. Such a subjection of the world does not provide a method for subjects to situate themselves amidst a multitude of things, or to understand how they shape one’s subjectivity and becoming. The secularization of universities—the term is not being used pejoratively, but as the academy’s attempt to play no religious favourites, hence questioning the place of theology, as distinct from religious studies—and the marginalization of the liberal arts and the humanities have left the university marooned, ripe for an endless scholarship: ‘the purpose of the university appears to be a conversation about the purpose of the university’ (Snell and Cone 2013, p.1). Apart from theology and biblical studies, Christian universities have depended upon the liberal arts and the humanities to communicate life as a whole, a comprehensiveness that depends upon meaning and value , and the education of the whole person. Early technical and scientific specialization has eclipsed these fields, and runaway philosophical and cultural theories have led to their further erosion. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Freud, for example, all point to the dreaded beasts at the bottom of the abyss, an abyss which today has been socialized, intellectually sanitized, rendering the beasts to be ‘only pale reflections of ourselves—of our particular race, class and gender; or worse yet, when we see only the metaphorical, rhetorical, mythical, linguistic, semiotic, figurative, fictive simulations of our imaginations’ (Himmelfarb 1994, p.25). Today a teacher would probably need to explain why The Confessions of St. Augustine are more formative compared to the confessions on reality television shows. Plato’s Republic, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and Dante’s Divine Comedy may be part of a great books curriculum, but what makes them great finds no common ground in the absence of an anthropology of the subject and human becoming. The hierarchies of knowledge and values that not long ago were taken for granted no longer exist, and referring to them becomes more difficult as students are bereft of such contexts.

What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem? God may be missing from the university, but is he missed? Is it not the role of the Christian university to show why God is missing and why he should be missed? Such a self-reflective turn depends upon a restructuring of consciousness whereby ‘God is not a being alongside other beings in the world’ (Lane 1997, pp.362–363).

Harkening to a golden age when university students were united by a curriculum of the liberal arts and the humanities is a chimera, for it was largely an elitist education, secured upon a classicist view of culture and learning . The Preface to Newman’s The Idea of the University opens with the affirmation that the university ‘is a place of teaching universal knowledge… [and] that its object is … intellectual, not moral’ (Newman 1976, p.5). Even though the modern Christian university cannot, even with an undergraduate curriculum of the humanities and the liberal arts, make such a claim, proponents of Newman’s model rarely refer to his major epistemological work, The Grammar of Assent, where he develops what knowing, understanding, and certitude involve, demonstrating that his vision for the university is not founded on a classicist model of learning and culture . While the university’s means and methods are intellectual in nature, the will and the heart must be enlightened by the intellect. And though the greater impediment to education may be not ‘ignorance but the existential disorder of sinfulness’ (Snell and Cone 2013, pp. 8–9), the Christian university is neither a seminary, nor is it meant to view the world suspiciously from a distance. And though the intellectual dimension distinguishes any university, the Christian university must accept this responsibility by educating its students to use this intellectual lens to see the world as the theatre of God’s gift of salvation, and how learning and knowledge are transformed into a sense of love and service of one’s neighbour.

Diversity and plurality are usually celebrated as ends in themselves, which confuses more than it clarifies. While diversity and plurality brighten the world and acknowledge the colours of human expression of meaning and value, living amidst religious diversity and cultural plurality, particularly in the West, requires something more solid than the obvious realization that plurality and diversity reveal a variety of expressions of human engagement and cultural and religious practice. Celebrating diversity for diversity’s sake is not an end; it is a cul-de-sac. Lonergan’s reflective method provides an anthropological foundation, but it is the task of the Christian university to show how there is a unity of the intellectual community brought about by reflection, acts of judgement, and the pursuit of meaning and value though choices and decisions. Such an intellectual foundation is more unifying than an exclusive reliance upon sensory knowledge. The history of Christian universities is based upon the relationship between faith and knowledge, but that relationship needs a new expression, more than just reliance upon tradition. The heart of that expression is the acknowledgement that the Christian university is ultimately not about courses, essays, and degrees earned, but about people, their hopes, fears, and the burden of sin and the freedom of forgiveness. Its telos directs the gaze of such an institution of humanity redeemed and offered the gift of salvation, but that still needs to be realized and actualized in the life of each person. Technocratic society has ‘no interest in ultimate goals but only in realizing whatever goals people actually choose’ (Kalb 2016, p.4).

A Christian anthropology enables an enunciation of the common good and the nature and purpose of life in society. Neo-liberalism and materialism reduce the common good to the good of the solitary, solipsistic individual, with the social networks and agencies of the state as the protector of the good of all. The common good, however, is not a collection of individual goods lumped together. It is the common good in that it is ‘the good human life of the multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living … the common good of the city implies an intrinsic ordination to something which transcends it’ (Maritain 1972, p.51). Ultimately, the common good is not ‘only a system of advantages and utilities but also a rectitude of life, an end, a good in itself, … [the] bonum honestum’ (Maritain 1972, p. 3). And while material life and progress make their contribution to the good, the betterment of life, given the spiritual nature of the person, is ‘principally moral and spiritual’ (Maritain 1947, p.43) . The human person needs society to actualize all those potentialities that constitute personhood, and realized in authentic subjectivity . For a Christian anthropology , persons are wholes unto themselves, ontologically distinct. Indeed the concept of person is an ‘analogical idea … realized fully and absolutely only in its supreme analogue, God’ (Maritain 1972, p.56). With such a view of the common good and the nature of society, the purpose of the Christian university is ‘to enable, as it can and in its own way, the collaboration of humans with each other and cooperation with God towards the goal of self-transcending love—authentic cosmopolitanism’ (Snell and Cone 2013, p.181).

The Christian university must be ultimately concerned with religious literacy and fluency, a way of helping faculty, staff, and students to see themselves in the world but not of it; to see themselves as pilgrims in time called into relationship with God, but whose pilgrimage depends on allowing God’s providence and love to shine forth in the world through their choices, decisions, and actions. Religious literacy and fluency need to be expanded beyond knowledge of creeds, dogmas, and morals, for without a sense of historical consciousness and appropriation for one’s time and culture, they are rendered meaningless. In such a vacuum, the materialistic constriction of earthly life becomes the model for eternal life. Heavenly life is envisaged as the continuation of earthly life, where we shall want for nothing, and be freed of the contingencies of existence, particularly suffering and death. With such a mindset, the Christian pilgrimage of life becomes meaningless, as does a collective Christian journey. Religion is reduced to religious practices, its moral and ethical teachings are seen as legislative and intrusive, and the social is viewed narrowly through a communitarian lens of social justice. Eternal life, it would seem, has nothing to do with one’s heavenly relationship with the Trinity and one’s presence before the absolute holiness of God. However, to be worthy of such company requires that Christians love their neighbour and strive for the common good , but it also requires the continual struggle for freedom from the perniciousness of personal and communal sin. Education, as distinct from training, means choosing not to drift through life, an easy trap that reduces persons to conduits of neoliberal consumerism, comforted by the illusive security of materialism. But such literacy for a Christian sense of adulthood is hardly the sole responsibility of the Christian university. The other agents of education—families first, and the Church second—must each share a third of this role.

Isolated thinking and learning are dehumanizing; there is always a personal dimension to knowledge, and so serving the life of the mind, in the context of Christian faith , requires that a Christian university be grounded in academic excellence. But it must also show how the traditions that gives it birth shape and influence concrete living (Hughes 2003).

Education is often reduced to jumping through academic and professional hoops. But in its claim to educate, the Christian university must attend to the rigorous search for truth; second, the intellectual engagement with the plurality and diversity of the world; and third, judging, deciding, and choosing from that diversity and plurality (Hughes 2003), that provide a method for students to understand how their personhood, their subjectivity , grows through a reflective and responsible intellectual engagement.

But the bridge between professionalism and education as human development will require a Christian understanding of freedom. This stands in opposition to a constricted materialist notion of freedom where autonomy and choice serve individualistic moral and political goals based on the narrow choices of economic rationality , but offers no enlightenment when it comes to the ultimate questions of human flourishing and choosing the good. For such flourishing and choosing, the varieties of knowing and knowledge will need to be identified and distinguished.

A diversified curriculum enables students to understand the diversity of knowledge and the diverse ways of knowing truth. Physics, chemistry, and biology demonstrate truth , but so do history, literature, music, and sports. Knowing and truth depend upon an analogical frame of mind, rather than an equivocal or univocal mindset. It is an analogical framework that sees God as the ground of all reality, and that the expression of that reality is multidimensional, and shows the richness and variety of human experience expressed through different ways of knowing and understanding. This stands in opposition to a narrow scientific and materialist mindset, one that boxes truth and verification into the confines of the observable, measurable, and what can be consumed. Early school specialization robs students of the diversity of knowledge, and the demands for technical competency narrow the focus of the university to professional competence and technical training. It is one of the main reasons why, in North America at least, the university is seen as the mandatory culmination of education, a culmination that is meant to prepare one for a profession and earning a living. The demise of more and more polytechnic institutions and vocational colleges has meant that university has assumed skills training as well, and so it no longer claims to impart an integrated knowledge. That universe of integrated knowledge is replaced by solitary disciplines, getting increasingly more specialized and technical, and thus more solitary, and unable to communicate with each other. Ironically all the disciplines of the university, in one way or another, concern the person, the subject, and the university’s inability to communicate across the disciplines only further diminishes the human subject.

A Christian anthropology affirms the relational and dialogical nature of the person, and rejects ‘the idea of individuals as faceless components’ (McArdle 2005, p.225). What is the relationship of knowledge and learning to the rest of one’s life? The choices and mindset of a career and profession are hardly neutral. How are work and employment related to the rest of life, or do they determine the rest of life? Our therapeutic culture obsesses as to who we are and have become through our psychological history. But it is an atomized conception of the person, rather than a responsible and relational one. An ‘opening of the Christian mind’ must confront ‘values relativism’, ‘the loss of a worldview’, and a ‘lack of personal responsibility’, and why human flourishing requires that they be replaced by ‘the objectivity of values’, ‘the theocentric nature of truth’, and ‘the nature of persons’, and how and why they are realized and integrated when faith and learning come together (Holmes 2003, pp.111–113).

In spite of the advances of electronic forms of technology and communication, the world seems even heavier with matter. Joseph Ratzinger writes,

(W)hen it comes to being, the art of existence, [the world] looks very different indeed. We know what can be done with things and people, but what things and people are is something that we do not talk about . (Ratzinger 1991, p.10)

In the midst of the weight of the world added by consumerism and materialism, the philosopher Leibniz’s historical question, why is there something rather than nothing, takes on new urgency. Our world would see this as an unnecessary question: the material world is the real world, and our engagement with that world requires there to be infinite somethings. For the Christian, intentionality and choice render the materiality of the world intelligible. The good is not something external; it is constituted and realized through intention and choice. So Leibniz’s question is no longer just philosophical; it is, for the Christian, a deeply religious question as well. It is a question that is enlightened by the Incarnation, the reality of God taking on human flesh, God living in space and time, living amidst the diversity of the things of the world, the Son of God who encounters things as the son of a carpenter.

In spite of our seeming freedom made possible through material and technical progress, human society seems imprisoned by the material and the tangible. A perceptible tension lies between earthly existence defined in immaterial and spiritual terms, and, on the other hand, economic progress and democratic security as ends in themselves, but a vision of life that offers nothing beyond the gates of death. The clash in the West is more than just a clash between consumerism and materialism versus faith and religious belief. It appears more like a clash between two societies in time, one with a philosophy of history, life with a telos beyond the material and sensory existence, and one without; two different and opposing conceptions of the purpose of existence and the inevitability of death. Life is either the theatre of redemption and salvation, or life is confined to material and economic satisfaction, but nothing beyond that. It is the reduction of the world to mere materiality. Leibniz’s question can be asked with a twist: ‘Is it really good to be alive and be a human being [today]?’ (Ratzinger 1994, p.156). It is a difficult question to answer if one’s context is a secular-material culture where there are ‘no longer values apart from the goals of progress’ (Pope Benedict XVI 2007, p.227). To limit human progress to scientific, economic, and technical accomplishments changes the understanding of history. Human flourishing requires ‘a vocabulary less charged by matter’ (Maritain 1943, p.15).

Conclusion

The question why is there something rather than nothing offers students the framework to take the materiality and technical and scientific progress of the world seriously. Such a question offers them a broader framework to reflect upon their lives and their being and becoming in wider terms compared to the prevalent mechanistic and deterministic rationality and vocabulary of today. The willingness and desire to go beyond such a rationality and vocabulary are, ultimately, matters of religious conversion and faith. To see the world as created by God liberates the materiality of the world, and in placing technical and scientific progress to a higher order, demands of them a greater level of accountability in serving persons and society. Such accountability is necessary, for Christian education is ultimately about the internal and spiritual freedom of the student and growing into their personhood.

A Christian anthropology offers the Christian university an intellectual means to reflect on Christian revelation , particularly the relevance and appropriation of the message of the Gospels and Christ’s call to discipleship . Such an anthropology enables students to grapple with the existential question of the Christian life: what has Jesus Christ have to do with life in a society and culture that is radically different from his? Is the religious worldview of his world and its conception of the human person the result of superstition and ignorance—medicine and psychology, for example, have taught us so much about who the human being is—or is his message still relevant to us today in our being and becoming? Jesus’ question to the disciples, ‘but who do you say that I am?’ (Matthew 16:15) is one that every adult Christian must ask perennially, and the answer to that question shapes who one is and who one must continually grow into becoming.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council , Catholic universities often operated from a classicist understanding of culture and learning , a largely Western-based curriculum. In particular, the study of philosophy and theology were based on a manualist method, truths and first principles set down in manuals and fixed for all times. As Lonergan notes so pithily, ‘truth [becomes] … so objective that it gets along without minds’ (Lonergan 1974, p.30) . The task of the Christian university is undoubtedly a difficult one, but one that is surely intellectually exciting. Keeping with Lonergan’s remark, the Christian university can offer a deep reflection showing why Boethius’ definition of the person as ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’ (Aquinas 1946, p, 155) is both true but also needs to be understood anew and afresh in the context of religious diversity and cultural plurality. The second challenge is to make a bold counter-cultural assertion and say why human beings, as Jesus reminds Satan in the desert, ‘do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). There is more to life than the bread of materialism and consumerism. And finally, to reflect on the injunction of St. Basil the Great’s sermon , ‘Be Attentive to Yourself’:

Be attentive, then, to yourself, that is, neither to what is yours nor to what is around you, but be attentive only to yourself. For we ourselves are one thing, and what is ours is another, and the things around us are another. (St. Basil 2005, p.96)