Herbert McCabe

Recollecting a Fragmented Legacy

Franco Manni

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725253322
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Herbert McCabe struck those who met him (Alasdair MacIntyre, Anthony Kenny, Terry Eagleton, Denys Turner) or those who read his writings (David Burrell, Stanley Hauerwas) for his high intelligence. He was the most intelligent philosopher after the death of Karl Popper. His philosophical inquiries on God and the Human Being have yet to be properly understood, not because they were abstruse (clarity was McCabe's inexorable sword!) but because of their dizzying depth, for which many are not yet prepared.This is the first comprehensive study of McCabe, a person who preferred speaking to writing and left only the short--fragmented and dispersed--texts of his lectures and sermons. But in this book, to use David Burrell's words, Manni has "managed to get inside McCabe's mind" and assemble together for the first time the disiecta membra of a powerful system of thought.

Philosophical Theology

5

Why God?

When McCabe formulated the question “Why God?”226 he did not mean to ask why God exists, that is, the reason for the existence of God himself. He did not intend ask how—from our human point of view—we can think and argue any demonstration of God’s existence. Instead, he wanted to clarify the reasons why speaking of God is important.

It is possible to classify several kinds of situations/motivations experienced by those people for whom speech on God is important and several other kinds of situations/motivations experienced by those people for whom it is not.

It could be observed, as McCabe does,227 that God is important also to those atheists who are consciously convinced, and committed to their conviction, because for them too, the question of the cause of the existence of the universe is an important one; furthermore, when they deny that the cause of the universe is some kind of Top Person who rules over everything because of his great power, they are as “atheist” as Aquinas was.

According to McCabe, God is important also to those “creative” scientists who, while facing new, radical, and courageous questions, challenge already existing knowledge; it is important also to all those who think that science will attain amazing new achievements that today we cannot even imagine: this attitude, in McCabe’s opinion, is equivalent to stating a belief in God.228

In addition, some philosophers—take Aristotle and Hegel—thought that speaking about God was important, because, even apart from the so-called “positive/revealed religions,” it allows all our knowledge to be organized under a general principle of intelligibility.229

Obviously enough, God is important also to all genuine believers in Christianity and in other “positive” religions. They are believers because they have “faith/trust” in the adults of the previous generation, who in turn had inherited the same faith, and so forth, going back through intergenerational tradition, as far as the apostles (if we speak of Christianity), who in turn had had faith in Jesus, for what they were not able to get themselves, whereas, since he claimed he had indeed got a special insight, he was able to say, for instance: “I and the Father are one.”230

In particular, McCabe explicitly gave two reasons that, in his opinion, can show to whatever person (believer or not, scientist or not, philosopher or not) that speaking of God is important. The first one, of a more intellectual kind, springs from a question that we can all ask ourselves, and sometimes throughout our lives we do actually ask: “Why is there anything rather than nothing?”231 We are unable to give an answer to this question, because, in McCabe’s opinion, only God can be the answer (albeit in ways we cannot imagine). Therefore, inasmuch as we are interested in the question, speech concerning God is important to us.

A second reason for God’s relevance, of a more moral kind, is the following: in order to have a good life I have to acquire virtues, but I can do this only while inserted within an interpersonal context. Such a context, in turn, cannot be any one; it must be “in tune” with human nature and nature in general. However, “nature” itself cannot be just something that exists; it must be structured and aiming towards a good end. God, if God exists, is the cause of this good end, without which the human quest for a good life would be inane. Therefore, there must be, in McCabe’s opinion, someone who makes nature have a meaning (a striving toward an aim), who makes it a “story,” not just a “span of time.” This “someone” must be, therefore, a being endowed with a sort of intelligence, which is unlikely to be the same as that of human beings, but which is somehow analogous to ours.232 (Though not “a being” within nor alongside the universe.)

On the other hand, which are the kinds of people/situations for which speech on God is not important? In McCabe’s opinion, it is not important to us when we think we have already got science (for instance, Newton’s) and thus there is not anything to be searched for any more. This attitude could be ours whether we are Third Reich citizens or we are committed Christians in the days of Galileo.233 The real or “genuine” atheists are those people (all of us sometimes) who assume there is nothing conceptually problematic in thinking of God as a being inside the universe, the most powerful of all other beings, but anyway internal. Even though we hold that we are believers in God, if we do not see that that thought is problematic then, in McCabe’s opinion, speech about God is not important to us. In particular (and this applies just to believers), speech about God is not important when we mistake him for a “god,” that is, a powerful force friendly with us, one that helps us overcome ou...

Table of contents

• Foreword by David Burrell
• Herbert McCabe
• Philosophical Theology
• Philosophy of Human Beings
• Revealed Theology
• Conclusions
• Bibliography