Here New Blackfriars is publishing for the first time a set of three talks given in 1979 by the distinguished Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe (1926-2001). It appears that the talks were delivered in Leeds, UK, during a Holy Week retreat (or something like that). The text below derives from a typescript put together by someone unknown on the basis of what seems to have been an audio recording. McCabe is clearly drawing on these talks in Chapters 7 to 9 of his 1987 book God Matters (chapters which are reprints of articles published in New Blackfriars in 1986). However, the original talks as they appear below have the brevity, freshness, informality, spontaneity, and blemishes characteristic of a ‘live performance’ rather than a reworking and development of them for publication coming seven years after they were delivered. That is why New Blackfriars is now publishing them in the hope that they might interest readers of the journal, which McCabe edited for many years. New Blackfriars is grateful to Marie Turner for drawing its attention to them and for sending it a copy of the typescript of the 1979 talks.

‘God,’ ‘Theos,’ ‘Deus’ is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes. This is quite a legitimate piece of borrowing and quite safe so long as it does not mislead us into thinking that the God we worship (or don’t) is a god. We always do have to speak of our God with borrowed words; it is one of the special things about our God that there are no peculiar appropriate words that belong to him, as with the language of carpentry or computer-speak. He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.

For this reason it is sometimes safer to use clothes that are quite obviously second-hand, words that have been quite scandalously ripped from their proper context and stretched and bent and distorted to suit our purposes. That is one reason for preferring ‘The Father’ to ‘God’ as a name for our God. ‘The Father’ is manifestly being used in a metaphorical or extended sense and so is unlikely to mislead us. It is also the word that Jesus prefers to use.

That God is one and three is, of course, for Aquinas a profound mystery which we could not hope to know apart from divine revelation, but we can only begin to understand what he has to say about it if we recognise that for him God is a profound mystery anyway. There are people who think that the notion of God is a relatively clear one; you know where you are when you are simply talking about God whereas when it comes to the Trinity we move into the incomprehensible where our reason breaks down. To understand Aquinas it is essential to see that for him our reason has already broken down when we talk of God at all—at least it has broken down in the sense of recognising what is beyond it. Dealing with God is trying to talk of what we cannot talk of, trying to think of what we cannot think. Which is not to say that it involves nonsense or contradiction.

This similarity is sometimes obscured for us by the fact that Aquinas thinks we can prove the existence of God by natural reason whereas such unaided natural reason could tell us nothing of the Trinity. This, however, does not, for him, make the latter a mystery where the former is not, for he thought that to prove the existence of God was not to understand God but simply to prove the existence of a mystery. His arguments for the existence of God are arguments to show that there are real questions to which we do not and cannot know the answer.

As the book of Exodus tells it, when the People of God was formed out of liberated slaves from Egypt (a kind of early Liberia), Aaron and his sons were made the first priests of the new community. Like all the peoples around them the Hebrews took it for granted that a real established society needed a priesthood, just as we take it for granted that a society needs some kind of civil service or some kind of school system. Aaron was the first high priest of the children of Israel, he had a job, an important job, within that community. The priest’s job was to arrange the transactions with the gods of the community, to ensure that the gods did not become hostile, for this could be disastrous for the people. The priest had to find out what the gods wanted and arrange for the people to give it to them. So he stood as mediator, on the frontier, looking both ways, to the gods and to the people; communicating to the people the messages of the gods, communicating to the gods the offerings of the people.

But, of course, the Children of Israel were no ordinary society, they were something unique in human history; they made a gradual but huge revolution from which all subsequent humankind has benefited and (as with all revolutions) suffered too. For by the time the Book of Exodus was put together it was becoming clear that their God was not one (or more) of the gods, and this was going to make a difference to what such things as priesthood meant.

On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).

When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.

Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.

You can take the reports of the resurrection of Christ as literally as you like; you can take them as simple accounts of the historical facts. There are some slight difficulties here because there seem to be some inconsistencies between the different stories, but one thing they all have most certainly in common. None of them says or implies or hints that Jesus simply woke up from death, as from a sleep, and got up and strolled out of the tomb back to ordinary life. There have been people who have said that Jesus did wake up in this way but that was because they thought he had not died, so there wasn’t a real resurrection anyway. Nothing whatever in the New Testament suggests this.

If you take the scriptures, the earliest creeds, the writings of the early Fathers, the whole mainstream Christian tradition through the Middle Ages to our own time—you find no one has ever suggested that the resurrection meant the resuscitation of a corpse. For this reason I get a little tired of modern clergymen telling me that this is not what the resurrection is. I never thought it was; my Church never thought it was; nobody has ever thought it was.

What we have believed is that Jesus, because of his loving obedience to his Father’s mission, obedience even unto death on the cross, was raised up by his Father through the work of the Spirit, and became transformed, transfigured and is now with us as the living risen Christ.

‘Nobody comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14 : 6b). Can we really take that literally? Can we even take it seriously? ‘Nobody’ (he is talking about the whole human race) ‘comes to the Father’ (he means God) ‘but by me’ (he means himself).

There are, I think, around four or five thousand million people alive today and countless millions have lived in the past; and most of them—apart from a few eccentrics—have thought about God one way or another, communally or individually. I mean they have thought about the mystery that things are, the mysterious purpose of human life, or however they have put it; and they have sought to come to God. There have been great religions devoted to meditating on these things, whole civilisations sustained by some kind of worship of God, there has been endless striving to come to the Father. And now, amongst all these teeming millions, it is being asserted that, after all, nobody comes to God except through this individual carpenter in Palestine.

The egoism is breathtaking. Surely there must be some mistake.

Let us then think about this for a minute or two.

First of all, St John is not saying that nobody sees or understands God except by getting to know Jesus of Nazareth. People can seek to understand God, they can wrestle with this problem or explore this mystery quite apart from faith in Jesus Christ. John does not think they will get very far, for he says ‘No one has ever seen God’; but having faith in Jesus Christ will not get them any further.

Take this scenario: I sin and so I offend God. He is angry with me, and I fear the wrath of God. Then I kneel before him and beg for his forgiveness, saying that I know I have done wrong and do not deserve his friendship; but will he take me back all the same? Then the wrath of God is appeased; he changes his mind and is no longer angry with me.

Now this is a perfectly good story, or picture, of God and ourselves. If we are going to imagine God at all we should sometimes imagine him as very angry—especially angry about injustice to his special people, the poor and the helpless. This is a very important image of God, but it is one image. We have to set this image alongside the image of the God who relents, the God who endures our sin and forgives us all the same.

I was asked to contribute something about St Thomas Aquinas to this collection in honour of Kenelm—an activity rather like offering a short paper on Karl Marx in a festschrift for Lenin. Much of whatever understanding I have of Aquinas I owe to the insights and scholarly precision of Kenelm’s writings and I shall not in this paper attempt to play in his league. This will be an elementary introduction to an important part of Aquinas’s thinking which was neglected for some centuries and is only in our own receiving the attention it deserves. I am concerned with the virtue he calls prudentia. I have nothing original to contribute here (except perhaps some mistakes); what I will say will be new only to those to whom Aquinas is new, but there are perhaps, enough of these to justify yet another simple introduction.

As is almost always the case with Aquinas’s technical vocabulary, the nearest English word to the Latin one would be a mistranslation: prudentia does not mean what we call prudence. Prudence suggests to us a certain caution and canniness, whereas prudentia is much nearer to wisdom, practical wisdom.

Fortunately, however, we have a nearly perfect English equivalent in Jane Austen’s phrase ‘good sense’. I take Jane Austen to be centrally concerned not with presenting the ethos of the new respectable middle class but rather with the failure of the new bourgeoisie to live satisfactory lives because of the inability of the older ‘aristocratic’ tradition to transmit to them a certain outlook and way of behaving and education that came down to the author via the remains of a Christian morality.

At the time of the full moon at the Spring Equinox the people of the Messiani extinguish all their hearth-fires and every lamp and lantern and source of light from amongst them. They gather then on the hillside at midnight and in the darkness a Holy Man strikes the new fire from the rock of flint and with this a great sacred fire is made to blaze. This new fire from darkness represents, for the Messiani, the rebirth of Messia, their dying god, and also the rebirth of the year and the coming of new life out of darkness and winter.

An image of the risen god in the form of a tall candle is then lighted from the fire to symbolise his return to life from the dead, and adorned with certain sacred signs by which past and future and all time is made to centre on this time and this place. Led by the flame of the image the whole throng then moves in procession from the fire to the place of assembly. As they go they take new flame from the image for their own torches and lanterns and they dance and shout the praises of Messia ‘the new light of the world’.

When the crowd is once more assembled Messia is erected amongst green boughs and flowers and other signs of fertility and a Holy Man addresses it in song, bringing this Holy Night to coincide with the mythic nights of creation and of the birth of the Messiani people,

I think the best way to begin is to ask why Christ died on the cross. That we can give some kind of answer to this question in terms of the meaning and purpose of the life of Jesus is presupposed by the Christian activity of ‘preaching Christ crucified’ two thousand years after the event. For our purposes, then, we can rule out the idea that it was all a tragic misunderstanding which need never have happened ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’, said Jesus of his executioners; but even if this means that they misunderstood him, the misunderstanding was not fortuitous. It was a misunderstanding that was in some way to be expected. In the gospels Jesus is presented not, indeed, as seeking his death or courting it but as realising that it was unavoidable. It is this unavoidability that we shall be looking at here, in Part Two of this ‘long sermon’.

Scholars dispute about the circumstances of the death of Jesus but two facts seem fairly well established: Jesus was executed by the Romans because they found him a threat to the precarious stability of their colony; and they were encouraged to do this because Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his own people. I think that, in the end, the reason why he was thus rejected was that he claimed to ‘speak with authority’; that is, he regarded attachment to his own person as more significant even than belonging in the ordinary way to the People of God in accordance with the Law.

I am here concerned with the paschal mystery; so, first of all, a few words about mystery.

Mystery is a depth of meaning. There are two things to notice here. Firstly, mystery belongs to what has meaning, to the signs and symbols and gestures through which we understand. (If we see event as mystery it is because we see it as word.) Secondly, mystery always refers to the not-so-obvious, deeper meaning that is perhaps hidden at first. So mystery concerns what shows itself but does not show itself easily. Mysteries are not for concealment but for revelation; it is because the revelation is so important and so profound that we have to work to understand it.

This is not meant to be a very difficult idea. Take, for example, a play like Macbeth. It is quite clear that you can appreciate the meaning of this play at many levels. In the first place it is a good thriller about murder and intrigue at court. At another, slightly deeper, level it is a piece of English political propaganda slandering the memory of a perfectly decent king who was, however, Scottish. At a deeper level still it is a tragedy about a man over-reaching himself; about the relationship of human life with nature and especially with time. It is about how we belong to the cosmos and to the time that is given to us and yet seek to transcend this and to belong to ourselves, and it is about the revenge that time and nature take upon us.

I have called this paper ‘The involvement of God’ because I want to take part in a discussion about such questions as whether God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures, in order to ask how far God is involved in his world. I shall first try to defend what I take to be the classical doctrine of God derived from Augustine and Aquinas: that it is not in the nature of God to be involved in the suffering of the world as spectator, sympathiser or victim, but that it is in God’s nature nonetheless to be involved with his creatures more intimately than any creature could be involved with any other. Secondly I shall argue that the Christology of Chalcedon does make sense of the notion that God suffers and indeed was tortured to death; indeed, in large part it just is this notion. Thirdly, and a bit more tentatively, I shall suggest that a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The subject of God’s suffering is so popular amongst theologians today that I am quite incapable of even beginning to give a survey of recent literature—this is partly because I haven’t read enough and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent authors by isolated quotation. I shall quote very little; I am concerned with certain ideas, how they hang together and how they fall apart.

A talk given to the Dominican Sisters at Rosary Priory, Bushey, England, on 12 March 1983.

Let’s begin with the case against obedience, I mean the case against obedience in general. There is a very widely held view that obedience is a necessary evil. I think more of the sisters and brethren subscribe to this view than would admit to it, even to themselves. The view is not confined to people at the receiving end, those who have to do the obeying; it is shared by quite a lot of people who do the commanding. I don’t want to make this a matter of obedience’. To put someone under obedience is thought of as a sort of last resort. We ought to be able to get along without obedience but, the world being what it is, and interests conflicting as they do, we just have to use it from time to time, like war or surgical operations.

The root of this opinion is a certain view of what it is to be a human being. The view that we are each unique individual subjects with our own personalities and desires and talents and that the good life consists in each one of us developing her/his individual personality as far as possible. As far as possible; because the full and complete development of the personality of Sister Ermyntrude may turn out to be incompatible with the full and complete development of the personality of Sister Gladiola: they therefore have to find some kind of compromise, a little give and take on each side.

Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.

Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.

We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.

As I write this a number of Catholic nationalists are on hunger-strike in protest against the operation of the courts and prisons by what they see as a repressive regime which discriminates against Catholics, which was set up by and is now supported by the armed might of another country. There are twenty six of these hunger-strikers and all of them are Polish. Very understandably, the British media which have been giving a good deal of space and time to Polish anti-government protest have not had much to say about this. Nor, indeed, have those clerical super-patriots who have felt impelled to comment on the smaller hunger-strike taking place in Ireland. For the most part these comments have shown a triumph of class-solidarity and national feeling over the free play of reason that must be most gratifying to any marxist. St Thomas says that the eye can see and distinguish any colour because it is itself colourless: if we have rose-tinted spectacles the rose-tints of the world are indistinguishable from white. Some of these clergymen seem equipped with mental spectacles through which the operations of the security forces, the interrogation centres, the courts and prisons of Northern Ireland become indistinguishable from pure white; they are indignant to find that the rest of the world sees in them more of the colour of blood.

These remarks should suffice to alert the reader to the tints he must look out for in my own mental spectacles. It is a great function of debate and argument to clean each other’s glasses, that is why hard thinking has to be a communal affair and why argument, even apart from the courtesies of debate, is itself an act of fraternal charity.

In the previous article, (New Blackfriars October 1980) I spoke of the radical questionableness of the universe and suggested that it seems anomalous to ask “How come?” about individual events or things or whole classes of things and yet refuse to ask this question about the whole world. The belief that such a question is unaskable is based, firstly, on the fact that we have no answer to it, and, secondly, on the fact that the language in which it is asked is exploratory; we are using words in ways that are stretched beyond their familiar use. I suggested that both these things are characteristic of the creative growing points of our understanding whether in science or in the arts. To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system but to claim the need for exploration; it is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe: the question “How come the whole thing instead of nothing?”

By “creation” we mean the dependence of all that is, in so far as it is. We do not know what it is that it depends on, we do not know the nature of God. There is, as I suggested, a great gap between creation and making or causing in our familiar sense. Other causes bring things about in a “world without them”, (X is brought about in a world with an X-shaped gap in it). What is caused comes about in a world in which it is in some way potential, a world, for example, containing what can be made into it, but there is nothing within which resides the possibility of the whole world before.it is created. Creation is a matter of the existence of the world over against nothing at all.

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science; (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that; by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.