Peter CostelloThe World of Books
Catholic writers in previous generations, such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene – not to mention Chesterton and Belloc – were wont to extol the Church's profound understanding of the human person and human nature acquired over centuries.
They may have had in mind those large manuals for confessors, published, of course, in Latin, "the decent obscurity" of a classical language hiding the content from most people. James Joyce had one of these manuals at hand when writing Ulysses. "The heart is perverse above all things and unsearchable. Who can know it?" claimed the prophet Jeremiah. The Church appeared to have the answer.
In recent times this knowledge seems not to have been much in evidence, at least in Ireland, if we are to judge by the deeply disturbing revelations about clerical child abuse. These reflected, it seems to many, a misunderstanding of human relations, as well as the controversies over complicated issues of human sexual identity and behaviour.
The death in early August of Dr Jack Dominian will have brought this issue to the minds of many. The psychiatrist and Catholic theologian passed away at the age of 84 after a 50-year career exploring the interaction and interdependence of these two modes of inquiry. Over his career, he was the author of many books which proved deeply influential as well as controversial. His application of psychological profiling to Jesus in One Like Us: A Psychological Interpretation of Jesus (Darton, Longman & Todd, £10.95) was an attempt to bring out his true humanity as an approach to understating the personhood of God.
Validation
In his book dating from 1977, Proposals for a New Sexual Ethic, he had suggested to Catholics that the presence of love between two people was itself a validation of the sexual act. It was love that should be the primary focus of the theologian, not merely the mechanics of sexuality. He was even extolled as a lay prophet by his admirers, though his insights into the perversities of the human heart lead to very different conclusions than those of Jeremiah.
Dr Dominian was a trained psychiatrist, a product of the Maudsley Hospital. There he specialised in marriage counselling. As a senior consultant to the Middlesex Hospital at Acton he was struck – as many were – by the raw evidence of marriage breakdown. He set up the Marriage Research Centre, now One-to-One, to investigate the cause and provide remedies for this tragic situation.
But in his role as Catholic theologian, he was dismayed to find that counselling married couples was not enough. The solution had to be sought before marriage. Couples had to be prepared for marriage, for the covenant of love, so to speak. This is now the completely accepted thing. In this sense his work has added much to the happiness of humanity.
But there were other aspects of human sexuality that proved more difficult. While having to accept what the scriptures seemed to say concerning same-sex relationships – though one has to wonder about the admission in the Bible that the love of Jonathan for David was "God's greatest gift" – Dr Dominian also saw in such relationships an expression of the divine gift of love. But such a view proved contentious, and still does.
His ideas and his career as doctor and theologian over more than half a century are summed up in his recent book Being Jack Dominian (SPCK Publishing, €20/£15.67). Just as his espousal of pre-marriage courses has become an accepted part of Catholic life, so to in time his other insights as a man and a doctor may well be incorporated into the teaching of the Church. For surely, just as we can regard the development of new insights in theology as a part of revelation, so too we shall in time come to accept the insights of science.