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The Mystery of God: Aquinas and McCabe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Brian Davies O P
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Extract

Herbert McCabe was the first Dominican I ever met. He answered my ring on the front door of Blackfriars, Oxford, when I came there in 1977 to see what Dominicans were like and whether I might be interested in joining them.’came to learn that Dominicans are not quite like anything. They are not easily typecast. But Herbert, as I also came to learn, is someone who holds that they have something which unites them in spite of their differences. His thoughts on this subject emerge in a sermon he preached to most of the members of the English Dominican province at their Provincial Chapter in 1982.

The sermon begins in a spirited fashion: “We are the ‘Friars Preachers’, the preaching brethren, a community which specialises in talk.” It then goes on to suggest that Dominican talkers are part of a mystery in which what they preach is also a mystery. The mystery of which Dominicans are part, says Herbert, is nothing other than the work of God in Christ. The mystery they preach, he adds, is nothing other than God. And God, Herbert insists, is indeed a mystery. God is “the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe” who “does not come within the scope of our interpretation of the world or our language”.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 77 , Issue 906 , July 1996 , pp. 335 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Divine providence was clearly operating on this occasion. For in my many years at Blackfriars I have never observed Herbert answering a ring on the bell of the front door there.

2 “On Being Dominican”, published inMcCabe, Herbert, God Matters (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

3 God Matters, p.238.

4 God Matters, p.241.

5 For the record, I should note that Aquinas virtually never speaks of God de deo uno as a mystery. A check on his language will show that “mystery” and “God” mostly come together in Aquinas's writings when he is speaking of the Incarnation and the Trinity. “Incomprehensible” and “unknown” are terms more commonly used by Aquinas when talking of God without special reference to Christian revelation.

6 For example, in question 12 of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae he cites Jeremiah 32:18‐19 and Exodus 32:20.

7 Summa Theologiae, Ia,2,1.

8 Summa Theologiae, Ia,12,12;88, l;88,3.

9 Herbert has written about Aquinas on esse in “The Logic of Mysticism – I” in Warner, Martin (ed.), Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Aquinas thinks it possible to distinguish between the persons of the Trinity, none of whom are essentially material. But the persons of the Trinity are not, for him, three members of a class. Nor does Aquinas think that we have anything like a comprehensive knowledge of what they are.

11 This is not to say that there is some property called “existence” which needs to be explained, though some have thought that there is such a property. Cf. my “Docs God Create Existence?”, International Philosophical Quarterly (June 1990). Also see Williams, C.J.F., Being, Identity and Truth (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For good accounts of Aquinas on esse see Stephen Theron, “Esse”, The New Scholasticism LIII (1979) and Herbert's “The Logic of Mysticism – I”.

12 White, Victor, God the Unknown (London, 1956), pp. 18Google Scholar f. Victor White, as Herbert will tell you, was a profound influence on him. For a recent study of White, one which contains a White bibliography, see Lammers, Ann Conrad, In God's Shadow: The Collaboration of Victor White and C.G. Jung (New York, 1994)Google Scholar.

13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, trans. Ogden, C.K. (London, 1933)Google Scholar; ‘Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review LXXIV (1965)Google Scholar. In “The Logic of Mysticism” Herbert attempts to relate what Aquinas says about God to what Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus.

14 Tractatus 6.44.

15 Tractatus 6.52.

16 Cf. Sent., I d.37. q.3, a.3; Sent., 1, d. 43, q.l, a.l; Sent., IV, d.7, q.l. a.3.

17 Herbert McCabe O.P., Appendix 3 to Volume 3 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae.

18 He understands what Frege would have called the distinction between “sense” and “reference”. Cf. Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy,ed. Brian McGuiness (Oxford, 1984), pp.157 ff.

19 “A Debate on the Existence of God”, reprinted in John Hick (ed), The Existence of God (London and New York, 1964).

20 Cf, for example, Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford, 1994).

21 Romans 4:17.

22 God Matters, p.237.

23 Those of his works which indicate this best, and which defend Aquinas on the unknowability of God better than I can, are: (1) the appendices to Volume 3 (Knowing and Naming God) of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae (London, 1964)Google Scholar; (2) Chapters 1,2,3,4,20 and 21 of God Matters; (3) “The Logic of Mysticism – I”.