Philosophically speaking, an infinity of angels may stand for as long as they wish on the point of a needle. But what is the point? The latest episode in Cardinal Desmond Connell's not infrequent needling of the Church of Ireland raises the question yet again.
Does love mean never having to say you're sorry, as a very bad old movie proclaimed? Or have Irish philosophy, theology and the main Christian churches sunk to such a low that the best analogy with their current states is Woody Allen's movie, Love and Death, a meditation on one man's quest for truth?
Love and Death shows a conference of village idiots who assemble to determine the meaning of life. What is it? How is it? And when we know, if we ever do, how will we know for sure? Allen answers with the device the UCD philosophy department used to teach when the cardinal was its professor. In the best tradition of the syllogism, he proves conclusively that all philosophers must be homosexual, by virtue of logical argument.
Something of that crazy rhetoric echoes through the cardinal's penchant for making statements he apologises for but never actually withdraws. In Woody Allen's terms, it might go something like this: Protestant theology is for wimps; no wimps are Catholic; therefore all Protestants are wimps.
Factor in the cardinal's assertion about the Church of Ireland's theology tending to be "very positivistic", and it gets darker. Any metaphysical insider will tell you that positivism is a very British phenomenon. The threat to Irish national identity may become clear.
Positivism includes some fairly eccentric thinkers too. The question of the afterlife, for example, was addressed by P.F. Strawson, who was Cardinal Connell's opposite number in the University of Oxford. Can an afterlife exist, he wondered. After a series of propositions that would outshine Woody Allen, he concluded that there was such a thing as a logical afterlife. You existed after death for so long as your name was used as a noun.
The headaches such reasoning generates belie the fact that philosophy remains a core discipline for anyone interested in figuring things out. The word means a lover of wisdom, and the activity is supposed to be open-ended.
But the inbreeding between philosophy and theology in this country closes at least as many doors as it opens. Among the reasons why over the last century is that the Roman Catholic Church insisted on controlling appointments to the main professorships involved in philosophy, politics and ethics, lest unsavoury reasoning practices enter our wild Celtic heads. Trinity College remains outside its control.
News of the cardinal's remarks about Archbishop Walton Empey's lack of theological muscle were greeted by the usual claims that the cardinal works with abstractions, lacks pastoral experience and talks before he thinks. The cardinal seems happy enough to play along.
This misreads the task of philosophy, and the skills of Cardinal Connell.
To believe that the cardinal did not know what he was saying, you need to believe that philosophers live on a plane far away from real life, except when they deign to play football in a Monty Python sketch.
If so, the cardinal has changed since the days when he was professor of philosophy at UCD. Then, his use of language was fastidious, and his political acumen sharper than most.
Saturday mornings at Prof Connell's ontology class were the closest you could get to having a psychotropic experience without the use of mind-altering drugs.
His mellifluous tones unravelled the mysteries of Being faster than you could say "how many angels can stand on the point of a needle?" while his authority as a teacher meant most of his students actually got the joke.
Over a few decades, Dr Connell rose from being a junior lecturer in an undistinguished philosophy department to being a member of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
There, he makes arguments that affect the lives of millions of people all over the world. This is not an abstract achievement.
The congregation has taken a wholly pragmatic approach to maintaining its own power. It borrows in the work of some key philosophers to bolster its own attitudes, while at the same time dropping parts that don't suit it.
The congregation doesn't like opposition, so it bans contrary argument.
Women priests? Discussion forbidden. Intercommunion? Only on the congregation's terms.
I think it more likely that Cardinal Connell's remarks arise because he is unaccustomed to being challenged, as a member of a cabal that won't let people do so.
The free speech to which the cardinal's supporters argue he is entitled is one he does not permit opponents within his own church to voice.
Matters like a popular Protestant archbishop who finds flaws in papal infallibility are outside his control, but over the years Cardinal Connell finds ways to put those voices down, and keeps doing so, whatever the consequences.
Cardinal Connell is no longer a true philosopher, whatever his academic background. David Norris's comments about the relative merits of angels and fairies are wholly to the point.
mruane@irish-times.ie