G E OD AND VIL This page intentionally left blank G E OD AND VIL In the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas H M C OP ERBERT C ABE Edited and Introduced by Brian Davies OP Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11York Road Suite 704 London New York SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Herbert McCabe, 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2010 British LibraryCataloguing-in-Publication Data Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0826–41304-8 Designed and typeset by Free Range Book Design &Production Ltd Printed and bound by … C ONTENTS Foreword Terry Eagleton vii Introduction Brian Davies OP xiii One The Statement of the Problem 1 Two Metaphysical Preliminaries 13 Three Good and Evil 51 Four The Creator and Evil 71 Five The Cause of Evil 109 v God and Evil Afterword 131 Appendix 1 ‘Categories’ 139 Appendix 2 Editions of St Thomas’s Writings Cited in this Volume 187 Bibliography 191 Index 195 vi F OREWORD Terry Eagleton Those who were fortunate enough to know Herbert McCabe personally were aware that he had, at a highly conservative estimate, two sides to his person- ality. There was Herbert the razor-sharp logician who would pursue an argument with relentless precision and persistence; and there was Herbert the creative artist, with his flights of imaginative wit and edgy, perverse, Chestertonian delight in paradox. In some ways, the first persona acted as a defence against the passionate excesses of the second. It is the former McCabe, as Brian Davies notes in his Introduction, who holds sway in this wonderfully lucid, bracingly ambitious essay on evil; but the latter, later writer runs as a subdued subcurrent through the work, as though Thomas Aquinas were to have handed Herbert a clutch of his ideas with the injunction ‘Here, make this stuff sound a bit more lively.’ There are continuities as well as differences, then, between early and late McCabe. One such continuity is the first unveiling here of a character called Fred, who was to make frequent guest appearances in the later oeuvre. Some of the paradoxes and aperçusin the book belong to Aquinas himself, while others are the work of his faithful interpreter. We learn, for example, that it is vii God and Evil proper in Aquinas’s view to say ‘The human being exists’ but not ‘The Englishman exists,’ a claim that will no doubt be greeted with acclaim in a good many outposts of the post-colonial world. We are informed that one dog can be more doggy than another, a proposition the English, if they existed, would surely be eager to endorse. God is not a moral being, and there is nothing that is natural or unnatural for him to do. Before he does something he has no reason for doing it rather than not doing it; rather, he isthe reason for what he does. For St Thomas, so Herbert writes, ‘to have a concept of goodness in the sense in which we have a concept of redness would be to comprehend God’. As for evil, the other termin the book’stitle, Herbertargues that there cannot be anything evil which is not also in some respect good, since evil belongs to created things, and creation is good in itself. It does not make sense to say that the essence of anything as such is evil. It is good in itself that there are lentils and equilateral triangles around the place. This, of course, also commits us to the unpalatable proposition that it is a good thing that Britney Spears exists, or that Michael Jackson once did; but however palpably absurdthe claim might appear,we simply have to cling to faith here against all the seductions of reason. Astone, Aquinas tells us, is more perfect the nearer to the centre of the earth it gets; and this is the cue in this book for a surreally Beckettian disquisition on the difference between stones and rats. We are also told that God accounts for causes being causes and purposes being purposes. Creation is that kind of causing which is no particular kind of causing – one which makes all the viii Foreword difference without making a difference at all. It is not possible to create well or badly, Herbert points out, in the sense that it is possible to do something well or badly. The opposite of creation is nothing; but since we cannot conceive of nothing, we cannot conceive of creation either. Some philosophers regard it as conceivable that the world emerged from nothing, while others respond that this is impossible. Thomists, by contrast, argue that it is incon- ceivable that the world came from nothing, but that it did. As a devout disciple of Aquinas, Herbert McCabe was of course an essentialist – a doctrine that for postmod- ernism is only mildly less reprehensible than paedophilia. In postmoderneyes, essences restrict the free play of the world, freezing its incorrigible plurality into a sort of Platonic stasis. It is striking, then, that this book, following Aquinas, sees essences and plurality as intimately related. The essence of something, which simply means what kind of thing it is, tells us what kind of language is appropriate in speaking of it; and given that there are many kinds of things, there are enough sorts of languages in the world to delight the heartof the most pluralistic of postmodernists. There is no general way of talking about the world. On this the Thomist and the postmodernist are at one. There are just specific idioms. If we don’t ask what things are, we are in danger ofconfusing one language-game with another; and this, Herbertconsiders, is where the problem of evil arises. It is more a problem about our language than a problem about God. ‘The problem of evil is not a question about what we are prepared to allow God to do. It is a question about what our language will allow us to say.’ ix