Friday 16 March 2007

Herbert McCabe: Faith within Reason

Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason, ed. Brian Davies (London: Continuum, 2007), 173 pp.

Reviewed by Kim Fabricius


Here is the latest collection of unpublished papers of the late Herbert McCabe, and what a treat it is. The combination of crystal logic, sparkling wit, and interrogative fides quaerens intellectum, deeply informed by Aquinas and richly modulated by Wittgenstein, are again on bravura display. McCabe was rather slipshod about his own work – we learn in the Forward by Denys Turner “how the first page of Herbert’s celebrated lecture on the politics of John’s gospel was eventually retrieved from his shoe where it was plugging a leaky sole” – so we must be immensely grateful to Brian Davies for his labour of retrieval.

McCabe defines theology as “thinking about what God has told us,” and, following Thomas, sees theology as a practical matter. Reason serves revelation properly (a) when it tests church doctrine to make sure that it is about God’s love and does not degenerate into a test of confessional loyalty, and (b) when it is concerned with human well-being. Wisdom is basically en-lightened common sense

“A Very Short Introduction to Aquinas” is just what it says on the tin (a mere eighteen pages), but it is packed with goodies. “Thomas Aquinas thought that theologians don’t know what they are talking about,” McCabe says. “He was, I suppose, the most agnostic theologian in the Western Christian tradition.” McCabe gives a helpful thumbnail sketch of Aquinas on virtue ethics, making clear that Aquinas believed that the foundation of Christian morality is our friendship with God. In turn, human society, when it is functioning rightly, is a community of friends. McCabe provocatively describes Aquinas as the first Whig (though, knowing McCabe, he might have said Marxist), declaring that he “would undoubtedly have welcomed the welfare state.” And how’s this for a great “Did you know?”: “Aquinas says in one place that separation from God by sin has so distorted our emotional life that we do not enjoy sex enough.”

Then there is “Forgiveness”. It must be a sermon. And, boy, does McCabe nail grace. How’s this for a winsome start: “It is very odd that people should think that when we do good God will reward us and when we do evil he will punish us. I mean it is very odd that Christians should think this, that God deals out to us what we deserve.... You could say that the main theme of the preaching of Jesus is that God isn’t like this at all.” In fact this image of a punitive God is “the view of God as seen from hell,” such that damnation “must be just being fixed in this illusion.” This is the illusion that defines the sinner. To see that this illusion is an illusion is to recognise that one is a sinner, and in this very self-knowledge one ceases to be a sinner.

This, in short, is McCabe’s take on the prodigal son as he comes to his senses. “The rest of the story is not about the father forgiving his son, it is about the father celebrating.... This is all the real God does, because God, the real God, is just helplessly and hopelessly in love with us. He is unconditionally in love with us.” So it is not that if we are contrite, God will forgive us our sin. On the contrary, “You confess your sin, recognise yourself for what you are, because you are forgiven.” Thus confession becomes a celebration, where you “come to put on the best robe and the ring on your finger and the sandals on your feet, and to get drunk out of your mind.” Could Barth himself have put the case for grace more vividly?

For a third taster, the outstanding “On Evil and Omnipotence”. McCabe says RIP to the theodicist’s free-will defence, agreeing with Antony Flew that it is “worthless”, but disagreeing why. It is not, as Flew argues, because freedom is not incompatible with determinism – it is, insists McCabe – but rather because there is a mistaken understanding of freedom at work here, namely that God’s activity and ours are in competition, as if (as I would put it) freedom were a zero-sum game. But as McCabe states: “The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature – a part of the world.” For the same reason “the famous ‘Argument from Design’ (commonly attributed to William Paley) is a silly one.”

McCabe is also excellent on evil as a privatio boni – and at his best with the funny example. Some people, he writes, assume that when we have described evil as a negation we are saying that evil isn’t real. “But we (or I anyway) do not mean this at all. If I have a hole in my sock, the badness of this consists in the absence of wool where there ought to be some. This does not mean that the badness is illusory or unreal. If I jump out of a plane and discover that I have not got a parachute, it is of no comfort at all to be told that the absence of the parachute is not a real thing at all.”

But McCabe concludes modestly. He hopes to have “disentangled a puzzle,” but “When all is said and done, we are left with an irrational but strong feeling that if we were God we would have acted differently. Perhaps one of his reasons for acting as he did is to warn us not to try to make him in our own image.”

Had I read McCabe two months ago, I would have written my Ten Proposition on Theodicy differently. But that’s just what a readerly tutorial with McCabe on any theme always does: sends you back to theology differently.

3 Comments:

Shane said...

Kim, thanks for bringing this volume to wider attention! I've been meaning to read McCabe for quite a while, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I worry, though, about a statement like this one:

"Thomas Aquinas thought that theologians don’t know what they are talking about,” McCabe says. “He was, I suppose, the most agnostic theologian in the Western Christian tradition.”"

This sounds a bit too Wittgensteinian to me. The problem with this statement is that Thomas believes that theology is a scientia, albeit in a somewhat different sense than the other sciences. (cf. ST 1a q. 1, a. 2) Whatever a science is, it says something meaningful, offers demonstrations and provides explanations.

The function of the doctrine of analogical names* in the Summa is to preserve God's transcendence while holding onto the idea that somehow the statements we make about him have some sort of reference. "God is wise" and "Socrates are wise" but they are not wise in the same way since God's wisdom is infinite and perfect whereas Socrates's wisdom is not. But we mean something when we say that God is wise. Explaining exactly what the relation is between Socrates's wisdom and God's wisdom takes us into deep metaphysical waters.**

What McCabe is saying is true: Thomas believes that at the end we don't really have a clear idea of what infinite and perfect wisdom or goodness or love really are. . . and yet we do have creaturely analogues to these. So it is not that Thomas Aquinas is fundamentally acognitivist, or that Thomas thinks that all our Godtalk is just language-games trying to give expression to some interior religious feeling. For Thomas theology is a science based on truths revealed in the scriptures.

sw

*For the sake of my nerves, please no one start up that whole "analogia entis is the anti-christ" bullshit. I'm begging you.

**Laurence Paul Hemming's recent piece in the IJST (Analogia non entis sed entitatis) arguing that 'analogy' has no metaphysical importance for Thomas is completely wrongheaded. Hemming's agenda seems to be to try to make Thomas escape from the point of Heidegger's "argument" against ontotheology by evacuating Thomas's doctrine of analogy of any metaphysical significance. However, Thomas's argument cannot be so evacuated without reducing it to nonsense. I don't take this as a problem, because I don't see any a priori reason to think that Heidegger's interpretation of ontotheology is right.

Shane said...

cf. the difficult argument in ST 1a, q. 13, a. 12 "Whether affirmative propositions can be formed about God?" (Thomas says that they can!) This is the culmination of Thomas's arguments about the analogy of names. The point of the doctrine of analogy, in other words, is to show how you can form affirmative propositions about a transcendent God.

Anonymous said...

Hi Shane,

I thought that you might get in on this one! Of course McCabe would agree that Thomas is not "acognitivist" (who would say such a thing about Thomas?), and deny that "all our Godtalk is just language-games" (as would Wittgenstein). He simply accents the crucial importance of revelation for Thomas in our knowledge of God. At the beginning of the essay McCabe quotes the Angelic Doctor himself:

"We even need revealed instruction in things reason can learn about God. If such truths had been left to us to discover, they would have been learnt by few over long periods and mingled with much error; yet our whole well-being is centred on God and depends on knowing him. So, in order that more of us might safely attain him, we need teaching in which God revealed himself."

McCabe goes on to suggest that for Thomas, "our proper and reasonable response to God is not one of exact analysis but of prayer" - though no doubt he would surely insist that no theologian gives a more holy reasoned exposition of what we can know about God. McCabe would say what you say - that "For Thomas theology is a science based on truths revealed in the scriptures" - as long as it is also understood that "God is a mystery beyond any understanding we can now have."

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