Abstract:
The English Dominican Herbert McCabe highlighted some ideas of Thomas Aquinas on the knowability of God and on creation, which can usefully challenge some widespread commonplaces. The purposes of this article are two: to present McCabe’s sophisticated doctrine on the knowability of God and on creation in a systematic way, and to put this doctrine into its historical context. In the scattered and meagre scholarship on McCabe, both points are missing. In fact, despite being highly praised by leading intellectuals such as Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair McIntyre, Terry Eagleton, David Burrell, Rowan Williams, Denys Turner, and Eamon Duffy, McCabe has remained widely unknown. According to McCabe, both the American creationists and some atheist scientists believe that God—given that he exists—is a powerful entity within the universe, and thus both the atheist and the creationist expect exactly the same elements in the universe. However, according to McCabe, God does not act like natural causes; he is not an element within the universe and not even the most powerful of all the elements, because he created the universe from nothing and is not part of it.
Machine summary:
An Apophatic View of God and Creation / 83 In his philosophical theology, McCabe criticizes the idolatry of the polytheism which did not emancipate itself from images and thus presents “gods” who suffer from three weaknesses: they perpetuate a warped vision of the nature of things (e.
(McCabe 2005a, 194) 84 / In fact, Aquinas often underlines that human mind—thereby both reason and faith—is not able to know the nature (essence, quidditas) of God: since we cannot know what God is in himself, we should search for what he is not more than for what he is (ST, I, qu.
As for McCabe, he avoided this confusion because he had received this apophatic emphasis from his teacher at Blackfriars Studium in Oxford,1 Victor White,2 whose major theological work is titled God the Unknown but is better known nowadays for his correspondence with Carl G.
” 1 Afterwards, not surprisingly, his “left-wing” follower Ludwig Feuerbach inaugurated the modern atheism while maintaining the same Hegelian premise—the equalization of human mind with God—but denying the existence of an Absolute, or God. On the other hand, we can trace a “tradition” of apophatic thinkers throughout the centuries: Clement of Alexandria, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckart, and Saint John of the Cross.
1 Moreover, McCabe’s first philosophical mentor, Dorothy Emmet, who taught McCabe at Manchester University prior to his joining the Dominicans, quotes Gilson’s God and Philosophy extensively in her book on Metaphysics and writes: Can we go on to say anything about absolute being beyond that ‘He is’?