McCabe: Philosophy and Theology

by Paul O'Grady

Herbert McCabe (1926-2001) was a philosopher, theologian and Dominican friar whose work and friendship had a significant impact on a range of influential thinkers and writers, such as Terry Eagleton, Anthony Kenny, Alasdair MacIntyre, Timothy Radcliffe and Brian Davies. His life, however, was marked by curious contradictions. Despite his wide influence he never held down a formal academic post in a university. Despite being an English Dominican he held an Irish passport. Rooted in the work of Thomas Aquinas he was nevertheless immersed in modern intellectual life (Wittgenstein, Marx, Freud, Ryle). A skilful preacher, he never extemporized, writing out his lectures and sermons. He published more after his death than in his life. In some ways of a conservative mindset, he had little time for pomp, remarking of a particular bishop, in an editorial of New Blackfriars, that he only opened his mouth to change feet. He also, famously, began an editorial after a three-year suspension for noting that the church was obviously corrupt, with: “As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted, ecclesiastical authorities can behave in some fairly bizarre ways”.

Franco Manni has written the first book-length study of McCabe’s work, Herbert McCabe: Recollecting a Fragmented Legacy, Cascade Books, 2020. His stated goals are to make readers aware of the complexity and consistency of McCabe’s thought, to set them in historical context, and to make manifest the profundity, sophistication and brilliance of his thought. He has succeeded well in all of these goals. As well as mining McCabe’s works, he conducted interviews with friends and colleagues to present a multi-faceted picture of a man who emerges as brilliant, funny, acerbic and troubled.

McCabe was influenced by his teacher, Victor White (a friend of C.G.Jung), who taught an approach to Aquinas deriving from the French scholar A.D.Sertillanges, which emphasized the unknowability of God. McCabe used this approach to great effect, showing how it can be used to respond to serious challenges to religious belief from science and the problem of evil. Furthermore this apophaticism deepens one’s understanding of specifically Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation. McCabe was convinced of the importance of good philosophy in theology and deplored the widespread impact of what he regarded as bad philosophy there – especially dualistic views of human beings which downplay our physical reality, or mistaken views on God’s causal powers which make God look like a very powerful creature.

Manni’s book divides into 4 main sections. The first, called Herbert McCabe (four chapters), concerns McCabe’s life, writings, influences and legacy. The second, Philosophical Theology (six chapters), deals with the existence of God, the knowability of God, God as creator and the problem of evil. The third, the Philosophy of Human Beings has two lengthy chapters on Anthropology and a System of Ethics. The fourth is Revealed Theology (five chapters), including Christology, Trinity, Church and Sacraments and Eschatology, with chapter eighteen as a Conclusion. I shall discuss each of these sections in turn.

An interesting aspect of this book is the author’s interviews with friends and colleagues of McCabe, who offer perspectives on his life and work. McCabe wanted to “share the ‘treasures’ he found in Aquinas, Wittgenstein and the Gospels” [p.17]. This combination was unusual. Traditional Thomists tended to steer clear of contemporary philosophy, but McCabe was at home there, having studied with Dorothy Emmet in Manchester before becoming a friar. In particular he took insights from Wittgenstein on language to reformulate distinctive positions of Aquinas. For example, the thorny and contested distinction between passive and active intellect is formulated as that between a capacity for language in general versus knowledge of a specific language. Rationality is understood as the capacity for language-use. Meanings are not seen as private psychological states, but as objective common realities shared by language users. McCabe believed that much traditional religious language had become infected with bad philosophy, especially talk about ‘soul’, so he self-consciously set out to avoid it. He thought that Marx’s account of political and economic life is correct and deeply congruent with the Gospel. Preaching the Kingdom of God has revolutionary consequences and a recurring theme is that “you cannot live without love, but, if you love enough, you will be killed”[p.13].

McCabe’s work on Philosophical Theology is deceptive. He avoids jargon and unnecessary technical sophistication. Nevertheless the material is difficult and subtle. Manni introduces the theme of talk about God with McCabe’s focus on questions, who thinks we are driven to ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’. This is a genuine question and McCabe pushes back against attempts to say it is mistaken or ill-formed. The answer to this question is God, but we do not know what this means. Part of the reason we don’t understand what God is has to do with a philosophical distinction between essence (the structure or ‘what’ of things) and existence (the actuality or ‘that’ of things). We don’t grasp existence in the same way as we do essence – “McCabe thinks that Wittgenstein would have observed that it can be ‘shown’ but it cannot be ‘said’”[p.70]. And on Aquinas’s classical view, God is self-subsistent existence, God’s essence is to exist and this is something beyond our comprehension. That God is so construed means that there is a vast gap between creator and creation. God is not like a very powerful creature, God is not a competitor with us. Hence McCabe can agree with Nietzsche in rejecting the idea of God as a benevolent paternalistic protector; but because this makes God look like a very powerful creature. This conception of God colours his treatment of the problem of evil. He rejects the traditional free will defence, which separates God’s causal powers from our causal powers. McCabe thinks God is causally active in all our actions, yet God’s causality is of such a different order that it does not compete with ours, but is rather a precondition of human freedom. Evils which occur in the natural realm (such as disease, or lions eating lambs) are to be expected in a biological world such as ours. Why did God make such a world? We don’t know. As McCabe says “it will remain a mystery why he has done what he has done” [p. 131]. Moral evil is understood as a lack or deficiency of some form, a misfiring in rationality, the taking of an apparent good for a real one. Why does God allow it? We do not know this either. But it is important for McCabe to hold that God is not a moral agent like us. We might condemn another human for not intervening in an evil situation – when God does not intervene this is part of the ineffability of God, on the classical view. However, McCabe links this with his theological picture. Christians are not mere general ‘theists’ – it is central to the Christian worldview that God became human and suffered and died – more on this in the section on revealed theology.

Manni discusses McCabe’s view on the nature of human beings in two chapters. A recurring problem for Thomists is that they tend to present their views in ways that are “stuck to the mindsets and the terminology of thirteenth century writers” [p.150]. McCabe escaped this Neo-Thomistic ‘ghetto’ with the help of thinkers such as Anscombe, Geach and Kenny, all steeped in Wittgenstein. Exploring the meaning of ‘meaning’, an apparently recherché activity, allows for a clearer presentation of human nature, community and rationality. Aquinas and Wittgenstein both reject views that link meanings or concepts to sensations (a view common in early modern thought). Rather, meaning involves linguistic capacity, which also presupposes community. They steer between views which downplay community (making meaning merely biological) and those which underplay materiality (forms of Platonism or Structuralism which speak of universal mind or culture as the source of thoughts). Human beings are linguistic animals and freedom consists in having various concepts available to us to interpret reality. Human reason is also historical “and we should acknowledge that historically embedded Christianity has played a large part in the making of human decency” [p.193]. McCabe advances a virtue theoretic account of ethics, “Virtue, whatever else it means, at least means being more human; it would not be virtuous if it did not” [p. 201]. While there is an endorsement of Aristotelian naturalistic ethics as a view of human flourishing, there are further aspects to McCabe’s approach. His penchant for Marx led him to think positively about the notion of revolution and to the justness of unmasking the lies of the rich and powerful. Historical revolutions seeking to restore justice are of a part with the Christian revolution which addresses the “ultimate alienation of humans, sin and the ultimate transformation that is death. The church and the sacraments are not this revolution themselves but are simply means invented to cope with our lives warped by sin”[p.208]. While rooted in a biblical sensibility, such a picture is very different from those whose picture of the church is more idealized and less attuned to its historical and political reality. And it makes more sense of McCabe’s occasional acerbic asides about ecclesiastical authority. Yet McCabe thinks that ethics on its own is not sufficient, one has to engage with revealed tradition.

Manni nicely connects McCabe’s reflections on revealed theology with both his philosophical theology and with his ethics. “The life and beliefs of a Christian are not the same as those of a generic theist” [p268]. “We could have been able to conceive the idea of the Creator God just contemplating the world, but without a divine revelation we would never have been able to know that God loves is, not just to make us flourish and be happy, but also to share in his friendship and divine life” [p.255]. The theme of apophaticism from philosophical theology runs through all this. Revelation is no less apophatic than philosophical theology. Hence, as we gain greater knowledge of Jesus’s life – the archaeological, political, linguistic and social settings of the Gospels – this improvement in knowledge of Jesus’ humanity does not involve a better knowledge of his divinity. Nevertheless McCabe’s claim is that revelation adds something crucial to thinking about God. “The picture of the creator God surrounded by his creatures, all dependent on him, is in the end an infantile picture. It does not allow God to experience the mature relationship of love. The announcement of Jesus is that this picture is out of date”[p.243].

Having clear philosophy is important for revealed theology. A central Christian claim is that Jesus is both God and man. Since God, on the classical conception, is not in the same universe as man it is not flatly contradictory to say this, unlike saying a man is a sheep. And we do not understand what it means to say a man is God. This is a part with McCabe’s insistence that revelation is not about new information – “what we are offered in the Church and its scriptures is not a further information but a share in his life” [p. 96]. Philosophy helps here in a clarificatory role – words change their meaning in theological contexts, for example ‘substance’ in transubstantiation and ‘person’ in Trinity. Boethius’s definition of a person is an “individual substance of a rational nature” McCabe notes “the persons of the Trinity are not individuals, not substances, not rational and do not have natures” [p.237]. The meaning of ‘persona’ in this context is closer to that of ‘relation’ – and McCabe in his account of the Trinity never uses the term ‘person’ (just as he tends to eschew ‘soul’ because of its misleading Cartesian resonances).

Manni notes that McCabe loved conversation and conviviality and was not conventionally pious. This shows through in his dismissal of views he regarded as untenable, no matter how venerable. In discussing Redemption and Atonement McCabe canvasses traditional theories before summarizing, “Therefore Jesus’ mission is just being in history, being human, nothing but being the Son of Man. His life was tragic only because that is what being human implies; most of the time we are not human enough, because, if we are, we will be crucified. His crucifixion was just the manifestation of the wicked and unjust world we made; we do not need theories to explain why the Father wanted Jesus to die” [230].