Book Review, 08 May 2008
Reviewed by Timothy McDermott

Living in the material world

On Aquinas
Herbert McCabe OP
Burns & Oates, £12.99
Tablet bookshop price £11.70 Tel 01420 592974

Since his death in 2001 we have had four highly acclaimed books from the estate of the Dominican philosopher and theologian Herbert McCabe, edited by his confrère Brian Davies. This fifth volume, as fine as the others, is a lightly edited series of talks given by McCabe at Oxford a few years before he died. As Sir Anthony Kenny says in his foreword: "The book is not a treatise about Aquinas, it is an exercise in philosophy with Aquinas."

It redeems a promise McCabe made to himself over 50 years ago. When he came up to Blackfriars, Oxford, after three years of study of Aquinas in the Dominican house of philosophy at Hawkesyard, he proposed to fellow students Cornelius Ernst and me a book on Aquinas to be sold to Penguin. His first chapter was to be entitled "Words", my second "Things", and Cornelius' third "Deeds". Days later he came to us with a brow like thunder, saying he had just heard "a Jesuit" (Fr Frederick Copleston) announcing Penguin had commissioned a book on Aquinas from him. That book, when it came out, was a highly successful "treatise about Aquinas". Now, 50 years later, McCabe has written a book on words, things and deeds, making good his student promise to himself and to us.

Because it is an exercise in philosophy, and started as talks, it is quite a difficult book to read well. As talk, there is of course an easy level at which it can be "heard": what talk of McCabe's was ever not easy and charming and stimulating to listen to? But the thought behind the talk is deep and requires committed attention. Indeed the book is a river of thought, and two things go on in any river. At its banks it is continually spilling over, exploring new ground, dallying a little and moving on; but the main thrust - sometimes on the surface, sometimes below - is one strong true current relentlessly pursuing its journey to the sea. The serious reader must pay attention to frequent paragraphs in which McCabe rallies his listeners, apologises for a little dalliance here and there, and launches into his main argument again. Otherwise that reader will suffer continual fits of giddiness.

Consider, for instance, the pages on prudentia - the virtue of good decision-making. In quick succession, McCabe heralds "two major problems", but then spends two pages on a third minor one: the fact that the English "prudence" doesn't properly translate the Latin prudentia. When he comes back to the two main problems, he digresses first on the fact that Aristotelian prudentia is replaced by New Testament caritas in Aquinas' theology, then  on "the rather curious structure" of part two of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae (punctuating the digression with the remarks that he "mustn't get carried away by all this"), before the river of his thought returns to the first of his major problems. At the actual talks, all sorts of McCabian mannerisms would have warned us when to relax and when to come to attention again, but now we must do all that for ourselves. (If I may myself digress: it would have been helpful to know what sort of expertise the original listeners had: McCabe talks of "reminding them" of the Summa's rather curious structure and seems to assume some familiarity with Aquinas' Latin.)

The analogy of a river throws some light on Fr Davies' chapter headings. Rightly, I think, he has not imposed his own view of the book's structure, contenting himself, so to speak, with chronicling the pools along the banks that McCabe's river visits. But this means that the chapter headings suggest that certain pools are visited more than once on separate occasions. The references to "Individuals" in the heading to chapter 4 and "Change" in the heading to chapter 5 refer to a digression on "Matter and Form" straddling the two chapters. This excursus interrupts a single discussion of "Language" which carries forward the genuine current of McCabe's thought, disappearing in chapter 4 and resurfacing only in chapter 5.

McCabe starts from the notion of life as self-movement: auto-mobility of a sort that our engineered automobiles only pretend to have and which belongs in reality only to natural living things. That self-movement is expounded first in relation to animals - which respond to their environment with behavioural "tendencies" laid down by their genetically determined neural structures, and then expanded to human animals - inventing their reactions to their environment in accordance with communally determined "linguistic" structures.

The second part of the book takes a required step back from the word "linguistic". Our behaviour is not primarily determined by the linguistic structures of articulate law, but by the "as-though" linguistic structures generated by practising living with others in a linguistic community and pursuing friendship - namely, the moral virtues, with a foreshadowed extension of the notion of friendship to the divine friendship of caritas. From the word "movement" through the word "tendencies" to the word "virtues", McCabe's current is, in Aristotelian style, tracing our kinship with all the material world.

I think there is one exaggerated emphasis in the book. McCabe ignores Aquinas' explicit teaching on the morality - the goodness and badness - of human actions in 1a2ae 18-21. He deals with what he calls Aquinas' psychology of human actions (1a2ae 12-17), noting that this is not a treatment of their morality. But instead of going on to Aquinas' treatment he finds goodness and badness in virtuous and vicious dispositions of the agent rather than in what he calls "episodic" good and bad acts. He is led to this by a hostility to legalism, to Kant, and to the bugbear of scholastic Thomism. But I don't believe you can define the goodness or badness of an act by saying it's the sort of act a good or bad person would do. You've got to get closer in to the act itself.

I commend this fine work to both light and serious readers. It is the sort of work that Aquinas himself pioneered with Summa Contra Gentiles, and the sort of work one continues to hope for from Dominican theologians: a bold, bridging work not content to meditate on spiritual matters behind the walls of faith, but to step out into the secular and scientific and material world in which we all live.

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