On Aquinas by Herbert McCabe, O.P.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 151 profoundly compatible. In this work, Fr. Bonino has self-consciously and quite convincingly shown how such theology can be done. Dominican House ofStudies Washington, D.C. THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, 0.P. On Aquinas. By HERBERT MCCABE, 0.P. Edited and introduced by BRIAN DAVIES, 0.P. Foreword by ANTHONY KENNY. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Pp. xii+ 180. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 9780860124610. The slender volume On Aquinas represents a posthumously edited and published set of lectures Herbert McCabe originally advertised and delivered as "An Introduction to Aquinas." Readers interested in a contemporary appropriation of Aquinas's thought in a movement recently labeled "Analytic Thomism" are greatly indebted to the diligent and persistent editorial labors of Brian Davies, O.P., who after McCabe's death in 2001 made available much of his unpublished material. On Aquinas is the most recent instantiation, preceded by God Still Matters (2002), God, Christ, and Us (2003), The Good Life (2005), and Faith within Reason (2007). In his brief, lucid, and predictably provocative introduction, Anthony Kenny utters the following pertinent caveat about this edited set of lectures: "The book is not a treatise about Aquinas, it is an exercise in philosophy with Aquinas" (ix). And Kenny is right. The lecture series begins with what looks like the usual opening chapter to a treatment of Aquinas's thought suitable to a contemporary audience of historically underinformed and most likely uninterested undergraduates ("Aquinas Himself"). But already with the second chapter ("Living Things") McCabe enters a particular trajectory of engaging Aquinas's philosophy that becomes clearer and more pronounced as the lectures progress. From exploring with and by way of Aquinas what it means to be alive, McCabe moves to the question, what does it mean to be a human being? The answer to this question constitutes the theme of the book: the human being is a linguistic animal. Subsequently McCabe unfolds, in a running dialogue with Aquinas's thought, what it means for a linguistic animal to think and to act, and most importantly, what it takes for such an animal to live well, that is, to flourish in all respects. The edited volume might have been served well by a subtitle like "The Linguistic Animal: EngagingAquinas's Philosophical Anthropology" as the sections from the Summa Theologiae McCabe draws upon, though does not discuss systematically, are to be found in the Prima Pars (soul, interior senses, rational soul, intellect, will), the Prima Secundae (happiness, action, deliberation and decision, passions, dispositions, virtue, law), and the Secunda Secundae 152 BOOK REVIEWS (prudentia, iustitia, fortitudo, temperantia, together with related virtues and the respective vices). He also draws in one important instance from De Malo as well as at least once from Aquinas's Commentary on 1 Corinthians. Furthermore, he carries in a wonderfully light way his impressive command of the Aristotelian corpus, especially the Categories, the Prior Analytics as well as the Posterior Analytics, On the Soul, On Sense and What is Sensed, On Memory and Recollection, and, of course, Aquinas's commentaries on some of these works. To put it in a nutshell: On Aquinas is a work of philosophical inquiry by way of a Wittgenstein-informed dialogue with Aquinas. However, McCabe-unlike other contemporary interpreters ofAquinas's philosophy-in no way shies away from the fact that Aquinas's project was ultimately, and all along the way, of a theological nature. He repeatedly acknowledges this fact by referring quite unapologetically to the beatific vision, the resurrection of the body, and the centrality for the Christian life of grace and the infused virtues, especially charity. This is indeed what Aquinas in the end is all about. But in good Thomist fashion, McCabe avoids two all-too-common mistakes, namely, either to understand Aquinas's philosophy as a mere entailment of the sacra doctrina (a philosophical minimalism necessitated "from above" by revelation, so to speak) or to understand his theology as an extrinsic (and philosophically ultimately irrelevant) add-on to what is first and foremost a philosophical project. What is tangibly absent in McCabe but utterly central for the whole project of the Summa Theologiae, though, is a confidence in limited, though tangible, analogical knowledge of...