Dr Murphy teaches theology at Aberdeen University. According to this fascinating book, currently fashionable narrative theologies may be divided into three schools: story Barthianism (George Lindbeck, Hans Frei), grammatical Thomism (David Burrell, Herbert McCabe, Denys Turner), and story Thomism (Robert Jenson).
Lindbeck and Frei are charged with grounding Christian faith on an idea of the resurrected Christ, rather than on the resurrected Christ. Jenson is accused of treating God as a character in a story.
Grammatical Thomists are allegedly concerned not with naming God but with naming God: not with the divine reality but with how to talk about it. (Following Wittgenstein, Murphy presumably assumes, they think philosophy is all ‘talk about talk’.) For them, the Five Ways, St Thomas's arguments for God's existence (Summa Theologiae I, 2, 3), prove, not that God exists, but that the question is: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Moreover, God is not as unknowable in Thomas's own theology as these Thomists make out.
There is much that exhibits Murphy's own theological views. Granted that Thomas's arguments are empirical, for example, she argues that Hans Urs von Balthasar builds on them to deliver an argument which is primarily objective and realistic, but which takes the subject and his/her experience into account, by beginning from the interaction between mother and child which first ‘moves’ the child into reality. (Smiling, crooning, talking, etc., Balthasar means.)
However, there is a second very damaging criticism. The grammatical Thomists, like the Barthians, are modalist/Sabellian in their Trinitarian doctrine.
Finally, though only in Jenson's case, narrative theology recoups the millenarian tradition, as it surfaces in, for instance, Joachim of Fiore.
Over against all this, Murphy proposes that we follow Balthasar into rethinking the relationship between God and free creatures in terms of ‘theo-drama’.
Let the Barthians take care of themselves. As regards McCabe, Murphy has a point. The Five Ways, he repeatedly insisted, are ‘sketches for five arguments to show that a certain kind of question[McCabe's italics] about our world and ourselves is valid’ (cf. God Matters, page 40). He even claimed that this is what Thomas thought that he was doing, something it would be hard to document. Rather, it is surely something of a leap, a philosophically creative and perhaps justifiable leap, to read the Five Ways as articulating Leibniz's question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ McCabe, but also F.C. Copleston and Denys Turner, as Murphy notes, misspelling the former's name (as most people do), turn the ‘cumbrous’ apparatus of the Five Ways (potency and act, necessity and contingency, etc.) into the ‘why anything at all’ question.
However, this turn is not all that different from Thomas's position. When she notes that the only question that Thomas asks is ‘Whether God exists?’ Murphy moves a bit fast (page 98). The ‘why anything’ question, she suggests, prescinds from empirical reality, it distracts attention from the purpose of the arguments into concerns about the logic of religious language. Well, perhaps — but in fact Thomas asks three questions: ‘Is it self-evident that there is a God?’; ‘Can it be made evident?’; and only then ‘Does God exist?’ The first two questions bring us, if not into the ‘why anything’ question, then at least into questioning what kind of knowledge of God's existence we might have. Against those who regard God's existence as either perfectly obvious (ST I, 2, 1) or purely a matter of faith (article 2), Thomas insists on the place of reasoning. The Five Ways reason from features of the world to the existence of ‘some first mover not itself moved by anything’ (etc.); but in context the emphasis is on what reasoning can do, ‘within the potentialities of epistemology’, as we might say (cf. page 105). Moreover, while admittedly none of the Five Ways ends with the ‘why anything’ question, nor do they conclude, as Ralph McInerny pointed out years ago, with the proposition that ‘God exists’ but rather with the reflection that what has been shown to exist is what everybody means by ‘God’. We remain within the realm of what we say—‘hoc dicimus Deum’.
Question 13 has always been a key text for Murphy's grammatical Thomists — a grammatical analysis if there ever was one. Anyway, as David Burrell noted, language and reality for Thomas are isomorphic, such that ‘the form of one's discourse reveals something of the structure of the world’ (Aquinas: God and Action, 1979, page 4). On the other hand, McCabe's insistence that analogy for Thomas is ‘not a way of getting to know about God’ but only ‘a comment on our use of certain words’ (Blackfriars edition, 1964, page 106) looks rather like an unnecessary alternative — perhaps even entangled in the ‘talk about talk’ myth.
On the unknowability of God, McCabe certainly liked to quote Thomas: ‘we are considering how God is, or rather, how he is not’ (Question 2, prologue). However, as Thomas Gilby noted in his introduction to McCabe's translation, Thomas is saying ‘how[God] is not’, quomodo non sit, rather than ‘what[God] is not’, quid non sit—‘as though to anticipate what will appear later, that to deny of God a creaturely mode of existence is not to hold him void of the values and noble forms we discover in the world’ (page xx). McCabe may have laid too much emphasis on the ‘agnostic’ side. On the other hand, in his notes on Question 12 —‘how God is known by us’— McCabe insists, to cite Reinhold Hütter's neat summary, that ‘the ultimate state of knowing is one in which God is the primal knowing subject in whose act we participate’, while ‘this divine act by which God is God, knows and loves God, is an exchange of love that can only take place in human terms by means of the loving interactions of communal life’.
‘Realism revisited’— if Murphy's subtitle were hinting that the theologians she discusses are non-realists of a Cupittite kind this would be ridiculous in McCabe's case. If the tomb was not empty he saw no reason to be a Christian. He did not doubt that the risen Jesus ate fish with his disciples, ‘as a sign of the messianic banquet and as a sign that they were not seeing a ghost’. He mocked people who say that Jesus rose from the dead ‘spiritually’—‘they mean he didn't rise from the dead but something else happened instead: something less vulgar and easier to swallow, something private and conveniently invisible, like the disciples acquiring a new or deeper faith’ (New Blackfriars May 1989: 213). And much else in the same vein.
According to Murphy, McCabe's account of the Eucharist ‘presents a raw or totalizing presence, rather than a real presence, the presence of one person to another’ (page 186). This is because ‘he does not perceive the personal idiosyncracy or bodily poetry of the human creature as intrinsically good[Murphy's italics], and thus intrinsically analogical’ (page 185). To disentangle her terminology before attempting to understand her problem with McCabe would take us beyond a mere review.
On the modalism charge, the problem lies in McCabe's ‘cinematization of the Trinity’ (page 22). For Murphy, ‘the presence of Christ to us in narrative theology is like that of a screen actor to a movie-director’ (page 6). In keeping with the ‘low-brow tone’ of her book, she illustrates the ‘cinematization of the Trinity in Thomistic and Barthian narrative theology’ by reference to Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Ealing comedy in which Alec Guinness played all eight of the characters who were murdered one by one by the character played by Dennis Price (cf. page 238).
The argument may baffle readers who are not film buffs. McCabe often attacked the doctrine that God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures (e.g. God Matters, 1987, pages 39–51). He defends the classical doctrine of divine impassibility as in Augustine and Aquinas. He then sought to show that Chalcedonian Christology properly understood delivers as profound an account of God's suffering as any orthodox Christian needs. Finally, he suggested that ‘a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity’ (page 39). The ‘story’ of Jesus — which he took to be the entire Bible —‘is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history’— in the sense analogically that a film is ‘projected’ on a screen (page 48). ‘Watching, so to say, the story of Jesus, we are watching the procession of the Trinity’: ‘The historical mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal mission of the Son from the Father; the historical outpouring of the Spirit in virtue of the passion, death and ascension of Jesus is nothing but the eternal outpouring of the Spirit from the Father through the Son’.
Murphy's complaint is that the cinematic metaphor ‘effaces all trace of personal drama from the Triune life’ (page 243). Old-fashioned Thomists would be inclined, when they hear of ‘personal drama’ in the Triune life, to ‘beg a return to apophatic caution’, to quote Matthew Levering. Admittedly, while St Thomas certainly holds that the Paschal Mystery is revelatory of the Trinity (cf. ST III, 46, 3), he does not project anything of that drama into the immanent Trinity in his lengthy analysis of the doctrine (ST I, 27–43).
Anyway, when Murphy gets back to McCabe (pages 275–80), the problem turns out to be his claim that the divine persons simply are their relations (e.g. God Still Matters pages 48–50). She cites other grammatical Thomists with the same problem: Nicholas Lash, for whom the Trinity is ‘relationship without remainder’, and David Burrell, who insists that ‘God's own life must be thought of as a kind of relating’. Like many others, including Karl Barth, they are so worried by the modern sense of ‘person’ as a distinct centre of consciousness that they recoil from the spectre of tritheism into some form of modalism, to such an extent that they fail to do justice to the divine persons as defined by their ‘self-constitutive or self-receptive acts’ (page 277). For them, ‘no person actually is itself; each is what it is over and against a limiting other’. Seeing being as otherness only, as they do, is to take being as ‘for-ing’ rather than as ‘is-ing’, so Murphy says, appealing to The Metaphysics of Love by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, one of the most frequently cited authorities in her book. It is sad that Herbert McCabe is not around to engage with Francesca Murphy's intriguing critique of his reading of St Thomas.
