On Aquinas by Herbert McCabe (PDF)

Description

The revival of interest in Aquinas has run simultaneously with the rise of interest in Aristotle, on whose philosophy Aquinas based his own. On Aquinas is a masterly work of exposition written with breathtaking clarity. By the use of simple modern analogy McCabe really brings Aquinas`s thought to life and underlines the crucial influence of Aquinas on our own contemporary thought. It is rare to find a work of philosophical exposition which is exciting to read. Even those who are unfamiliar with Aquinas will find this book gripping to read. No wonder therefore that McCabe`s gifts are so greatly admired by people as diverse as P. J. Kavanagh (poet) Anthony Kenny (philosopher) Terry Eagleton (literary and cultural critic) and Alasdair MacIntyre, whose book After Virtue has had such enormous influence today. On Aquinas can only enhance McCabe`s reputation.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “[T]he book is a river of thought…I commend this fine work to both light and serious readers.” Reviewed by Timothy McDermott in The Tablet, May 2008″McCabe’s genuis was for explaining. For the reader new to Aquinas, this makes for an accessible introduction. He does not shy away from technical vocabulary but explains it clearly, translating the key Latin terms with imagination and insight… For anyone interested in Thomas Aquinas, this is the book of the year.” Reviewed by Andrew Davison in Church Times, 2008Reviewed in spanish by Miguel Garcia-Valdescasas in Anuario Filosofico, 2009 About the Author Herbert McCabe was a Dominican Friar and theologian of outstanding originality who died in 2001. He was deeply influential on philosophers such as Anthony Kenny and Alasdair MacIntyre and poets and writers like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Heaney.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The book was delivered very promptly. It was in very good condition. It was packaged very well for transit. Highly recommend!

⭐Saint Thomas Aquinas is considered by many as the greatest theologian / christian philosopher ever. This book, written by someone who went deep in the thought of Thomas, is a blessing. Many of his insights are new, not found – so far as I know – in other texts. A Foreword by Anthony Kenny testifies on the depth of the author.

⭐I would have given it 5 stars if it weren’t written through a Wittgensian lens.

⭐marvelous book. Brilliant analysis of Thomas thought through the linguistic turn.

⭐I wanted to add something for possible readers to make life easier for everyone: McCabe, who liked something called “radical orthodoxy”, supported the ordination of women “priests”, contraception, Marxism, and numerous other novelties. If you like those sorts of things and would appreciate an attempt to support them using St. Thomas, you’ll probably like this book. If not, you very probably won’t. My review details other problems with the book as well.It is obvious from the title of this review that I did not care for McCabe’s book. I will detail the problems of his little work and suggest some wholesome alternatives. It should also be noted that the book is just a collection of lectures given by McCabe in an extremely conversational style. He is of the analytic school of neo-Thomism and refuses to even acknowledge other schools of Thomism besides the Existential and Historical. He even goes so far as to say that no one understood St. Thomas until the 1940’s and that the period before that was a dead zone. Such a view is extremely uncouth and does a grave injustice to previous scholars.McCabe’s work fails from the start with a wildly cartoonish presentation of St. Thomas’s life and era. According to him, St. Thomas was made to enter the church because he would have been useless on the battlefield. The Middle ages are presented as something akin to a Monty Python skit. This view of that era, long held by many academics due to unfounded prejudice, has been corrected by historians of late. “Inventing the Middle Ages” by Norman Cantor is an enjoyable read on how these views came to be (as well as detailing where the really romantic notions of the era came from) and Regine Pernoud’s “Those Terrible Middle Ages” takes on the grosser myths of the middle ages in an entertaining fashion. Other books on the subject are readily available as well, but philosophy should be the primary concern here.Unfortunately, McCabe’s errors are not only in the field of history, which, if they were confined to that subject, would be excusable. He makes a series of bizarre comments on St. Thomas’s outlook and lauds him as-I do not make this up-a “proto-Protestant”. McCabe also bills Thomas as a Socialist. What we are given in McCabe’s book is a profoundly absurd portrait of one of the greatest thinkers in history, but St. Thomas doesn’t really even seem to be the focus. Instead, the work is divided into a number of generally unconnected chapters. On occasion, he does have some worthwhile and accurate depictions of St. Thomas’s thought, but the entire thrust of the work is McCabe’s ideas about St. Thomas’s ideas (which, as McCabe admits, are not the ideas of the historical St. Thomas!). McCabe refers to his own “Thomas” who holds ideas markedly different from the “historical” St. Thomas. In other words, he simply rewrites the angelic doctor according to his own (McCabe’s) progressive ideas of what he should have said. Such a position is wishful thinking at best and exemplifies the madness that has overtaken academia.In short, it is not really “On Aquinas” but “On McCabe” or “St. Thomas as seen by a non-solipsistic Wittgenstein (that is to say, blindly)”. He makes frequent digressions that generally devolve into pushing various social agendas, such as Socialism and post-conciliar theology. Much of the work is devoted to his own personal interpretation of ethics. He also makes the egregious mistake of assigning the rationale of Vatican II to the philosophy of St. Thomas, whereas the architects of that council tended towards more modern philosophies. That is a simple fact as the number of times Aquinas is cited in that council’s documents is far less than, say, Karl Rahner or Congar. As Rahner was not a Thomist but an existentialist and Hegelian, McCabe’s assessment is simply incorrect. In summary, McCabe’s work is a convoluted jumble of occasional facts (readily available elsewhere) blended with many tangents and personal foibles. It’s nonsense, admittedly readable nonsense, but nonsense all the same. The crumbs of truth sprinkled here and there are swallowed up by the tide of absurdities. Avoid it and do not assign it to students unless you wish to poison their minds and libel one of greatest philosophers and theologians of all time. It is a crude charicature of the angelic doctor at best.I had promised to give some alternatives, and so I shall. For a very good book on Aquinas as a person and as a thinker, G.K. Chesterton’s “The Dumb Ox” is emminently readable and concise. J.P. Torrell’s 2 volume work, “Saint Thomas Aquinas,” is a scholar’s text and quite dry, but it is very academic. For a consideration of his philosophical thought, Copleston’s “Aquinas” is largely good as is Joseph Pieper’s work. If one really wants to get down to brass tacks and tackle the fundamentals of St. Thomas’s thought, however, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s “Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought” is superb (be forewarned, it is challenging and requires some knowledge of systematic philosophy), and it is in print through LuLu’s Ex Fontibus imprint (it can’t be ordered through Amazon yet). In a word, there are better books than McCabe’s and they are in print. It is my hope that this review has been informative and helpful.

⭐Superb. Though it is not a sufficiently complete exposition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s ideas (McCabe focuses on practical matters), it is coherently exposed and very easy to read.

⭐I wonder if the review by Keiser isn’t a bit uncharitable. First of all, I should say that I have not yet read this book by Herbert McCabe. However I am familiar with Aquinas, I am a (lay) Dominican and perhaps most important of all I knew Herbert reasonably well. One should remember that most of the published books by Herbert (with the exception, mainly of ‘God Matters’) were not written by him. They were put together after his death from his unpublished papers. Herbert was a perfectionist who was extremely wary of publishing his lectures, talks, sermons and of course his working notes. We often write in our notes things that we would not be prepared to put into our final published and public works. That said, while one might sometimes dislike Herbert’s politics, his views on the institution of the Church, and perhaps too his views on some moral issues Herbert knew only too well that there are many different ways of reading Aquinas (see Fergus Kerr’s ‘After Aquinas’), and his contemporary way of using Aquinas in the context of analytic philosophy was only one approach to the Angelic Doctor. Herbert was not really a historian, and knotty historical issues of the exact intepretation of Aquinas in his historical context – areas in which e.g. Torrell is the master – were not his primary interest. For Herbert, the issue was interpreting Aquinas for analytic philosophy and for the modern (mainly philosophical) world. And in that he was superbly successful. Perhaps more importantly, he has been enormously influential. That is why any book by Herbert McCabe, even a book put together from his notes, is significant and worth reading even if we disagree with him. To that extent I think Keiser’s review does Herbert an injustice, and even though – as I say – I have not yet read the book I think the injustice should be corrected by giving the book the five stars that it will certainly deserve.

⭐Herbert McCabe, O.P. was one of the great, yet often unheralded, twentieth century commentators on Aquinas. Other great thinkers who have acknowledged McCabe’s positive influence on their thought include: Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Anthony Kenny, Terry Eagleton, and Seamus Heaney. In this set of lectures, McCabe shows how Aquinas was a careful and original philosopher who argued for positions that remain defensible today (even in light of important innovations in contemporary philosophy). Above all, McCabe shows that Aquinas was neither dogmatic nor authoritarian, and grounded his philosophical positions on sound reasoning and argumentation; and thus McCabe does us the great service of helping to ‘rescue’ Thomas from some of today’s more dogmatic and simple-minded ‘Thomists’.

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