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In Portugal, from 1910 to 1968, there was no Faculty of Theology recognized by the Catholic Church. This did not mean that there was a complete absence of reflection and teaching of theology. This is evident from the example of the Centre for Catholic Culture of Oporto, founded in 1964, which had considerable impact on the renovation of the Church. Cases like the Instituto S. Tomás de Aquino (St. Thomas Aquinas Institute – ISTA) or the Instituto Superior de Estudos Teológicos (Higher Institute of Theological Studies – ISET) are good examples of a particular ‘style’ of doing theology. But it is also evident from the numerous publications that were being supplied from this ‘peripheral’ theological reflection. A thorough survey and study have still to be made, but a few steps have already been taken. This article is made up of brief notes that are echoes of these first steps.

The Humanities are thus designated because they derive from an anthropocentric conception of culture, knowledge and education predicated upon the human being. Enhanced by the biblical image of man created in the likeness of God, this idea prevailed in medieval thought and in Christian Renaissance humanism. Nowadays the Humanities are deemed essential to the construction of Europe in documents governing the European Higher Education Area. For more than two millennia (and notwithstanding the challenges faced by Humanities courses) educational institutions, and in due course universities, have been guardians of humanistic tradition and have promoted knowledge in all its facets.

Epigon of Martin Luther, John Calvin adhered to the Reformation, taking on the role of exegete and of theologian. As an exegete of the Scriptures, for him they are permanently the textual space where he learns to spell out the glory of God and the humanity of mankind. As a theologian, he feels connected to the ancient tradition of the Church, whose Fathers he visits as an attentive reader. Made a Genevan by the Genevans, it is from Geneva, as a figure facing two ways, that he contemplates his France and the Swiss cantons. It is a view that, combining reason and sentiment, takes a contemplative stance: how can the glory of God be made visible in people’s lives? It is also from there that he thinks of oikoumene as the means of overcoming all sectarian factionalism.

The unfinished journey that led to contemporary democratic regimes was unleashed both by the institutional systems created in ancient Athens as by the vision of inclusion generated in ancient Israel, a datum omitted in conventional narratives about democracy. Thus, theological and philosophical categories of the Judeo-Christian matrix are as indispensable as political categories to understand what is vision and what is system in the world of democracy. Without that Judeo-Christian matrix, any criticism of socialism degenerates into plain neo-liberalism and any criticism of liberalism turns into ideological socialism, two variants of uniform thought without a dialogical dimension.

“Go in peace!” With these words, Jethro, Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, says goodbye to his son-in-law, when Moses decides to go back to Egypt, along with Zipporah his wife and his children in order to check whether his Hebrew brothers, oppressed by the Pharaoh, are still alive. Moses had taken refuge in Midian, since the Pharaoh sought to kill him because he had mortally wounded an Egyptian. His process of integration in a foreign land was successful, especially because of his Midianite wife and the children that she gave him in Midian. Why return, then, to this society in turmoil? And how could this return be peaceful for Moses and his family? In this article, we will analyse exegetically the short narrative in Exodus 4.18-20. Although it is embedded in the larger story of the return of Moses to Egypt (Ex 4.18-31) and the macro-narrative of the exodus, it has a force of its own which gains its strength from both its literary configuration and the theological reflection that it promotes.

Taking Gn 2-3 as its point of departure, understood as an origin myth which does not, therefore, describe an ‘original sin’, this article puts forward a consequent new interpretation of Rm 5,12-21, a text cited at the 5th session of the Council of Trent, in the decree about original sin (17.6.1546). The exegesis that proposes it reads Paul’s text not as dogmatic theology, but as midráš, the Jewish method that explained canonical sacred text by searching for anthropological and theological sense for present situations. By reading the text as midráš, recourse to the uniqueness of ’ādām appears simply as a springboard to illustrate the universalist vision of the historical sinful condition of humanity before Jesus and, above all, to affirm the need – then – for gratuitous universal salvation mediated by Jesus. It is not a theology of ‘original sin’, but of redemption.

In 1928 Carl Dreyer directed The Passion of Joan of Arc, investing time in the representation of the faces of every character. It enabled the viewer to see into the soul of each of them in the stylized images of reality. Later, other directors like Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovski also used time as a means of revealing the t(T)ranscendent in the image in movement. In the early 2000s, a new genre of cinema appeared – expanded cinema – which has also made use of time as a form of resistance to consumer cinema, and which seeks to express the mystery of the world through its banality, which is also its beauty.

Even though ‘wisdom of the heart’ is both a biblical and a spiritual theological theme, this study articulates certain positions taken by St. Thomas Aquinas with certain others taken from recent philosophical reflection. For Aristotle wisdom is the theoretical intellectual habit that considers things in the light of ‘ultimate causes’. ‘Wisdom of the heart’ is practical and affective but also theoretical, for it maintains a reference to ultimate causes, to ‘divine things’, approaching the original sense of Philo-sophia. An essential point is that which refers itself to its ‘subject’: is it reason, is it the heart, or both? The solutions vary, it being for each of us to choose. First to be addressed is knowledge, the activity of ‘the power to be rational’, secondly, love, the driving force of ‘active life’, and, lastly, the chiasma between the two of them, stressing the range and the limits of feeling and of the ‘affective life’. This chiasma is not a simple one, for there are ‘things more loved than known’ – above all God, maximally loveable and incomprehensible.

The present article seeks to consider the multidimensional character of the believer’s life, taking as its starting point the metaphor of the heart, as an expression of mercy realised in manifold ways in the piety and rationality of the believer, but especially in devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Indeed, faith and piety cannot do without the contribution of cordial reason for a spirituality that transforms and leads to Christ. The text begins by stressing the Christian and incarnational realism of the “heart of Mary”, with its Biblical and anthropological bases, going on afterwards from devotion to theology and mysticism. In this way it seeks to show how devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary takes on the incarnation possible in the here and now, bearing witness to the silent drama of so vast a humanity that has lost its hope and its heart.

This text begins with a brief study of the concept of ‘heart’ in Holy Scripture, followed by an equally brief examination of this notion in the Holy Fathers and Middle Ages, with a view to coming to an understanding of how an authentic spirituality around the symbol of the Heart of Jesus open on the Cross came about; it then goes on to study the modern issue, from the development that it underwent from the 17th century to Vatican II, and the crisis from which this devotion has suffered since this Council. If finishes by putting forward forms of renovation, such as through a ‘semantic’ of the Heart, proposed by K. Rahner, and by setting out certain elements for a spirituality that might be valid in the Church of today.

The spear of the soldier that pricked/pierced the side of the Crucified reached His heart, committing the greatest trespass of all times. Human suffering passed through the heart of Christ until it reached up to God and divine compassion passed through the heart of the same Christ until it reached down to human suffering.

The present article, after a short introduction to the course and context of St. Augustine’s life, aims to set out a succinct note on the meaning of ‘heart’ for this author. After referring to the biblical and Christian sources that preceded St. Augustine, it goes on to consider how he sees the heart as the place of passage from the inner man (homo interior) to the spiritual man (homo spiritalis). Finally, after brief remarks on the Augustinian semantics of the word ‘heart’, the article concludes with the illustration of two biblical passages from the Gospel of St. Matthew, namely: “Blessed are the pure in heart” (5, 8) and “Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart” (11, 29), in the light of texts resulting from the pastoral activity of St. Augustine’s preaching.

The aim of this essay is to develop a theological reflexion with a view to articulating what can be gathered from the New Testament about the heart of Mary with what is to be found in the Message of Fatima centred on the Immaculate Heart, and on the practical appeals to a repairing participation in the appeal that it has been making to the Church ever since the wedding of Canaan, so that all, just like the servants at the wedding, might do whatever he says (cf. Jo 2,5). This invitation is made concrete in the great promise, which is the indication of a simple way that a person of contemplation might follow in the practice of the prayer of the heart, the individual or family prayer of contemplation of the mysteries of the life of Christ in the recitation of the Rosary.

Especially in the 16th and 17th centuries the protestant reform and the Catholic reform were articulated particularly through a genre that is little remembered today, books with engraved emblems. This genre is of interest to confessional studies, because it involves its readers in a joint interpretation of images and texts. In this study a comparison is made between the works Iesv amanti sacrvm (The Sacred Heart of Jesus [devoted] to whoever Loves him), by Anton Wierix of 1586 or 1587, and Schola cordis, by Benedictus van Haeften of 1623. The present article focuses on the different visual strategies of the two authors, on their distinct structures and their respective spiritual accents. While Wierix promotes the ideal of the mystic union, van Haeften focuses on the conformity with Christ crucified, bearing the cross in his daily life.

This article is a synthesis of the Doctoral Thesis Eroticism and metaphor in mystical discourse: Portuguese authors of the Renaissance and of the Baroque. A study that considers a set of mystics representative of different experiences and inspirations, such as: Iehudah Abrabanel (1464-1535), also known as Leão Hebreu, D. Manoel de Portugal (1516-1606), D. Gaspar de Leão (?-1576), Frei Heitor Pinto (1528?-1584?), Frei Tomé de Jesus (1529-1582/83), Frei Amador Arrais (1530-1600), Frei Agostinho da Cruz, (1540-1619), Frei António das Chagas (1631-1682) and Father Manuel Bernardes (1644-1710).

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Daimōn is an ambiguous concept in Greek Religion, specially when we try do define it in opposition to theos: already in Homer the boundaries between what is considered a proper theos and a nameless and supernatural daimōn are not easy to grasp. In this study we propose an etymological study of all Greek words derived or composed from daimōn (e.g. daimonaō, deisidaimonia, daimonoblabeia, dysdaimonia, eudaimonia, etc.) in a corpus of Hellenistic authors, providing linguistic arguments to what Jonathan Smith (ANRW 2, 16, 1978) already put forward: that daimōn ought to be considered not so much as a substantive category, but as a situational or relational one.

The aim is merely to confront these great players: the Angel, the nations, and the beast. This presupposes that the primary place is occupied by the Lamb. Before the Lamb the reactions and the intentions of these three players do not coincide, because the words they hear or refuse do not coincide either. The reader/listener is left with the hermeneutic task of reading and interpreting what these players hear or refuse, in order, thereby, to stand beside them before their angels and their beasts, before the angels of the world and the beasts of history. The reader/listener has to carry out the same hermeneutic operation as the nations do throughout the stage of the Apocalypse, placed between positive and negative characters, as is proper and normal in human life. But the author of the Apocalypse does not stop at presenting the two sides of a combat.

The paper examines Augustine’s polemics in Book 11 of the City of God against Origen about protology and especially the creation of the angels. Augustine locates the latter at the very beginning of the hexaemeron, in this way refusing Origen’s idea of the fall of rational souls, originally created identical, into angels, human beings and demons. In Augustine’ views, intelligible and sensible creation was made contemporarily, so that Origen’s two-phase protology makes no sense. Also in Augustine’s apparently compact scheme, however, there is an interruption related to the consciousness of the angels before and after the fall of some of them. This fact affects also Augustine’s anthropology and reverses Origen’s angelology, who considers angels in function of human beings and their salvation, while for Augustine their fate depends upon the angels’ previous events. Key words: Augustine, City of God,

The aim of this contribution is to illustrate the issue of the language and communication of the angels in mediaeval thought, particularly taking the thinking of St Thomas Aquinas as a starting point. We know that in the mediaeval Latin cultural context word and language are called upon to assume an essential role, not only as instruments of pastoral work and preaching, but also as an object of abundant theological and philosophical speculation. In this study the aim is to present the principal theories on the language of the angels present in mediaeval philosophers and theologians; there are, in fact, a great many mediaeval sources that deal with this subject. As it is not possible to include all, particular attention is given to the doctrine of St. Thomas.