Is the analogical nature of the English mind useful here?
AN: There seems to be a particular affinity between the English mindset and an insistence on concreteness. Now, if we were to explain what was involved in all of that, then one might very well draw on the idea of analogy and link up that insistence on concreteness with a feeling for the transcendentals—a matter of our attraction to the way in which being, with all its qualities of goodness, beauty, truth, integrity, unity, and so forth, has epiphanies on different levels of reality that are all interconnected. But you know the English are not so good at laying this out in theory form. That’s why I think that we need the great theologies of Christendom to assist us. That’s why we need Thomism, Barthianism, the great Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century like Bulgakov and Lossky. The English insistence on concreteness is more of an instinctive sense that what we say about nature and grace in Christian discourse must be really rooted in the concrete, rather than always spelling ou
