THE THEOLOGICAL ETHICS OF HERBERT McCABE, OP: A REVIEW ESSAY L.

Roger Owens
ABSTRACT Herbert McCabe, OP (d. 2001), was a significant theological figure in England in the last century. A scholar of Aquinas, he was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Marx, his reading of whom helped him articulate a distinctive Thomistic account of human embodiment that serves as a critique of other dominant approaches in ethics. This article shows McCabe's contribution to moral theology by placing his work in conversation with other important approaches, namely, situation ethics, proportionalism, and the New Natural Law Theory. KEY WORDS: McCabe, situation ethics, proportionalism, New Natural Law Theory, moral theology McCABE, OP, DIED ON JUNE 28,2001, there were few ripples in the theological world this side of the Atlantic. A Dominican in England since 1949, McCabe, through his teaching and his editing of New Blackfriars, the Dominican journal of philosophy and culture, had considerable influence in England despite his rather small literary output. His two earliest books, The People of God (1964) and Law, Love and Language (1968) were originally given as lectures to Catholic student organizations throughout England. God Matters (1987) is comprised primarily of essays previously published in New Blackfriars and a few sermons. Except for the small catechism The Teaching of the Catholic Church (1985), which McCabe considered to be his most important work, these are the only books McCabe published in his lifetime. Another collection of previously published essays and sermons, God Still Matters (2002), appeared posthumously, followed by a collection of sermons, God, Christ and Us (2003), both edited by Brian Davies, OP. The recent republication o Law, Love and Language, which most clearly addresses issues of moral theology, will make McCabe's work more accessible to a wider readership. A note about the plan of this essay: As a United Methodist I will not pretend to be an insider to or an expert on the detailed debates within
WHEN HERBERT

1 want to thank Stanley Hauerwas and Charlie Collier for reading an earlier draft of this essay and making helpful suggestions.

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Roman Catholic moral theology. Nonetheless, to fully appreciate McCabe his work needs to be seen within the context of dominant debates in Catholic moral theology. Therefore, after a biographical introduction that places McCabe within the broader context of the English Dominicans in the last century, followed by an account of the most distinctive aspect of McCabe's ethics, I will contrast his work with that of supporters (John Finnis) and detractors (Richard McCormick) of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor as these positions are found in the collection of essays Considering Veritatis Splendor (Wilkins 1994). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that McCabe's relevance to theological ethics lies in how he might be pigeonholed in a debate the terms of which are already set and with which he would undoubtedly disagree. Rather, this essay will argue that McCabe's most important contribution lies in how his theological ethics cannot be separated from his sacramental theology. Therefore, a brief conclusion will point to the sacramental, and thus eschatological, telos of McCabe's ethics. 1. Situating McCabe McCabe inhabited both the earlier world of the Dominican theology of culture and the burgeoning political activism offriendslike literary critic Terry Eagleton. He entered the Order of Preachers in 1949, at the age of 23, having already studied chemistry and philosophy at Manchester.1 He was well prepared for the rigorous training he would receive among the "galaxy of major talents" of the English Dominican province of the 1950s and 60s (Duffy 2001). At that time the culture of the English Dominicans was at its height. Understanding it will show the influences that helped to create McCabe's unique position, and how he managed to combine a careful understanding of Aquinas as an Aristotelian with an "evolving political and religious radicalism'' (Duffy 2001). Aidan Nichols argues that the rigorous intellectual culture of English Catholicism in the 1930s and 40s was epitomized by the intellectual lights teaching in the Dominican Order (Nichols 1997). Fr. Bede Jarrett worked to create an intellectual culture in the English Dominican Province, a culture which flourished in the 30s and 40s when the study of church dogma and scholastic theology, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, was not done for its own sake, but so that culture more generally in all its aspects might be read and interpreted theologically. This intellectual culture involved "the saying of good, true and beautiful things about the whole range of culture It frequently turned to
For biographical information about McCabe see Maclntyre 2002, Davies 2002, Kerr 2002, Duffy 2001, and Ryan 2001.
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contemplate the life-giving dogmata of the Church in and for themselves. However, its more characteristic approach was to ransack the treasure house of the Catholic tradition of past and present to illuminate the varied modes in which the Christian spirit can put itself forth in the mentefacts and the artefacts that are in different respects both the materials and signs of God's Kingdom" (Nichols 1997, 2). The theologians who carried out this theological ransacking were many of McCabe's teachers and colleagues, including Victor White, Thomas Gilby, and Gervase Mathew. Consider the influence of Victor White, OP. White embodied the theological vision described by Nichols in the way he brought his scholarship of medieval scholasticism into conversation with Jungian depthpsychology. This allowed him to critique the characteristic notion that scholasticism is dryly rational; scholasticism itself was something more like a mystical enterprise. White writes that "our present-day understanding of the psychological function of symbols and beliefs may help us to understand how eminently practical and inherently salutary are such seemingly 'speculative' treatises as those on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist" (quoted in Nichols 1997, 69). This approach to scholasticism, which McCabe describes as finding "fascinating parallels with the anti-dualism and 'materialism' of St Thomas in the work of modern-depth psychology" (McCabe 1987, preface) would become very important for McCabe and especially for his moral theology, even if he approaches the same Thomistic doctrine from the perspective of Ludwig Wittgenstein.2 This is not all he learnedfromWhite. He also learned to read Aquinas as a thoroughgoing apophatic theologian, taking with utter seriousness Aquinas's contention that one cannot know "what God is" only "that God is" (Nichols 1997,72). This apophatic approach to God is practically ubiquitous in McCabe's work. As McCabe says of God Matters, "In the end, I suppose, I am only trying to say two not very original things: that the only God who matters is the unfathomable mystery of love because of which there is being and meaning to anything that is; and that we are united with God in matter, in our flesh and his flesh" (McCabe 1987, preface). The first he learned from Victor White and his own reading of Aquinas. The second shows what such an apophatic doctrine of God has to do with our embodied lives and thus how his moral theology always has the unfathomable mystery of God in view. Nichols's book chronicles what he sees as the intellectual "glory days" of the English Dominicans. He offers intellectual biographies of seven
2 Fergus Kerr has taken up this mantle, doing with Wittgenstein what White did with Jung. See Kerr 1997.

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"Jarrett Dominicans" who shaped the intellectual culture I have already described. His chronicle ends at the Second World War after which, he argues, English Catholicism became increasingly activistic; to some degree "it suffered a closing in of cultural horizons" (Nichols 1997, 45). In many ways McCabe himself embodies what Nichols cannot help but describe as a decline. Many who have written on McCabe's life note that by "the beginning of [the Sixties], McCabe had become a leader of an emerging Catholic social radicalism" (Duffy 2001). He published essays in the "irreverent Catholic Marxist magazine Slant" another frequent contributor to which, Terry Eagleton, became McCabe's "life-long friend and comrade" (Duffy 2001). If his relationship with White shows McCabe's grounding in the theology-of-culture Catholicism of the inter-war period, his relationship with Eagleton epitomizes his turn to social radicalism and political activism. In two books published in the 1960s, Eagleton (Eagleton 1966,1970) offers a Marxist interpretation of Christianity, one of the main points of which is also an enduring point in McCabe (learned from Aquinas and Wittgenstein as well as from Marx). Language, he maintains, is not an internal phenomenon seeking expression through the human body, but the practical consciousness that is the body's living and working in the world. For both McCabe and Eagleton, the recovery of the significance of the body enabled innovative interpretations of Christ's presence in the world and his continued presence in the Eucharistie liturgy of the Church. For McCabe, this move toward a Marxist and increasingly Wittgensteinian interpretation of the body in the world was not a move away from the grounding in Aquinas he received from White. McCabe's achievement, as Alasdair Maclntyre notes, was "to understand Aquinas both in his own terms and in ours and so to overcome" the kinds of difficulties that plague expositors of Aquinas. As a member of the Order of Preachers who took the specific task of preaching quite seriously, McCabe could never become a mere commentator on Aquinas. He always had to approach Aquinas with the questions that were being asked in his own day. That involved, as Maclntyre notes, wrestling with the new philosophical scene in which Wittgenstein was playing a major role, but also the "new kind of radical vocation, one that involved rethinking our relationship to Marx" (Maclntyre 2002, viii). McCabe did not shift from a Thomistic inquiry to a Wittgensteinian/ Marxist inquiry, but combined them, however uneasily, into a single inquiry.3

There is not space in this essay to deal with the influence of Karl Marx on McCabe's thought. One can see, for instance, McCabe's essay "The Class Struggle and Christian Love" (McCabe 1987,182-98).

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Before situating McCabe in conversations in Catholic moral theology and more broadly in theological ethics, let me outline what I mean by McCabe's Wittgensteinian-Thomist anthropology, for his way of viewing humanity and the meaning of human action in a community lies at the heart of his distinctive contribution to theological ethics. His account of human beings as embodied minds constitutes the central thrust of his preferred way of thinking about ethics. Taking his cue from the shift in analytic philosophy made possible by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1997), McCabe approaches ethics from the perspective of a changed understanding of language and meaning. He attacks a dualistic theory of meaning according to which, as he says, "The interior mind is the home of concepts and it is where thinking takes place; actions, however, words, and other expressions of my thinking take place in the public world of the body. My words consist of public signs that stand for private thoughts" (McCabe 2003a, 85). It is precisely McCabe's Wittgensteinian-Thomism that furnishes him with the critique of this position and an alternative to it. From Wittgenstein McCabe learned that "such problems dissolve once we recognize that what we call concepts are nothing like experiences but are simply skills in the use of words The question of meaning is not a question about my secret thoughts but about the public language" (McCabe 2003a, 86-87). The meaning of words cannot simply be determined by the thoughts within my head, but meaning is at least quasi-objective, residing not in the mind but in the public use of language and a shared form of life. He writes: Meanings, then, are ways of entering into social life, ways of being with each other. The kind of meanings available in the language of a societytaking 'language' in its widest extent to include all conventionally determined signs and symbolsconstitute the way in which people are with each other in that community. To imagine a language/ as Wittgenstein says, 'is to imagine a form of life' [McCabe 2003a, 84]. McCabe's Wittgensteinian critique of this dualistic account of language allows him to offer an alternative account of human embodiment. Rather than being an instrument used to express internally produced meanings (or intentions), our bodies are "intrinsically communicative" (McCabe 2003a, 91). He writes, "It is not just that the human body can produce speech and writing: all its behaviour is in some degree linguistic. The range of bodily activity that we call man's 'behaviour' consists of those actions which are significant in this way A piece of human behaviour is not simply an action that gets something done, it also has meaning, it gets something saidn (McCabe 2003a, 91-92). As with the

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meanings of words, the meanings of our actions, for McCabe, cannot be determined solely by what goes on inside the agent (the intention) but rather with the public, embodied nature of the actions as it is performed in a linguistically constituted community.4 McCabe realizes that most ways of doing ethics are preeminently concerned with judging the lightness or wrongness, the goodness or badness, of human behavior. Whether this is determined by considering the behavior's consequences or by whether a certain behavior has broken an inviolable law, the most prevalent forms of ethics are all playing in the same ballpark. In this game ethics seeks to address quandaries; it judges behavior as right or wrong. McCabe's discussion of ethics as language, however, and his extension of language to include the intrinsically communicative nature of all shared bodily life, allows him to offer an alternative account of ethics. Ethics, for McCabe, is precisely the study of human behavior as communicative: Now ethics is just the study of human behaviour in so far as it is a piece of communication, in so far as it says something or fails to say something. This does not mean that ethics is uninterested in behaviour in so far as it gets something done, that ethics is not concerned with the consequences of my acts, but its precise concern is with my action as meaningful [McCabe 2003a, 92]. Ethics is the literary criticism of bodily communication. Trying to decide whether a piece of behavior is good or bad, right or wrong, is analogous to saying that the job of literary criticism is to pronounce a poem good or bad. If literary criticism allows one to move more deeply into the significance of a piece of literature, and thus to enjoy it in a non-superficial way, so "the purpose of ethics is similarly to enable us to enjoy life more by responding to it more sensitively, by entering into the significance of human action" (McCabe 2003a, 95). Some actions we will find to be shallow and unworthy of our time (McCabe happens to think that this is the kind of behavior capitalist economies condemn us to) and some
This is part of the point that G. . M. Anscombe makes in Intentions, for example, when she writes that "you cannot take any performance (even an interior performance) as itself an act of intention; for if you describe a performance, the fact that it has taken place is not proof of intention; words for example may occur in somebody's mind without his meaning them. So intention is never a performance in the mind, though in some matters a performance in the mind which is seriously meant may make a difference to the correct account of the man's actionfor example, in embracing someone. But the matters in question are necessarily ones in which outward acts are Significant* in some way" (Anscombe 1963, par. 27). Both Anscombe and McCabe were influenced by Wittgenstein, and McCabe was likely influenced by Anscombe. That Anscombe's investigation is also significantly Aristotelian (see Anscombe 1963, par. 31-52) helps to show how McCabe's own Aristotelian reading of Aquinas is so compatible with the philosophical moves he learned from Wittgenstein.
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behavior will reveal deeper and deeper levels of significance. "So I want to say," he writes, "that there is no such thing as the moral level. Moral judgements do not consist in seeing something at 'the moral level' or 'in light of morality'; it consists in the process of trying to see things always at a yet deeper level" (McCabe 2003a, 97). What we find when we do this kind of literary criticism of human life together in light of humanity's divine orientation is that these deeper levels of meaning point to ever more human ways of living. Sometimes we will find that in "some activities a man has not lived into his medium, his action has made sense at some superficial level of meaning but it does not make full human sense" (McCabe 2003a, 100). The job of ethics is to help us discover this "full human sense"; to live morally is the attempt to live at the most human level of meaning (McCabe 2003a, 102). With this snapshot of McCabe's account of ethics in mind, we can take a look at one of McCabe's earliest and most significant debates, that with Joseph Fletcher and the situation ethics of love. His three arguments against situation ethics show us McCabe's distinctive approach in action; they also serve as the backdrop to the situating of McCabe within more recent debates in Roman Catholic moral theology. In McCabe's exchange with Fletcher, which became arguments in the first chapter of Law, Love, and Language, we can begin to see several crucial aspects of McCabe's approach to ethics relevant for our discussion of the debates surrounding the publication of Veritatis Splendor. 3. McCabe and Situation Ethics As John Gallagher argues, the situation ethics debate helped to erode in the American Catholic context important notions of the neo-Thomist moral philosophy. It is impossible to deny the affinities between situation ethics and the rise of proportionalism, though proportionalists deny that they are consequentialists (Gallagher 1990, 223-68). Second, and more importantly, from McCabe's response to Fletcher we can see what I have called his Wittgensteinian-Thomist anthropology put to work especially in his argument about the meaning of love and the relationship between intention and action. McCabe levels three arguments against Fletcher's situation ethics. (1) The basic tenets of situation ethics are well known (see Fletcher 1966). It claims that moral rules, what are often considered absolutes, are rules of thumb, mostly reliable guides to human behavior. Although what is most important is to act out of love. In some situations, when all the relevant circumstances are taken into account, it becomes clear that the most loving thing to do is break the rules. However, McCabe argues that words like "love," unlike more

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pedestrian words like "perhaps," have a range of meaning that cannot be governed by merely following rules of use. As McCabe says, "It is just that a word like love' will always have uses that are not constricted by such rules for its use as you have managed to formulate at any particular time" (McCabe 2003a, 18). Thus, the word is historical (the meaning develops over time through use in a community) and it is biographical (how any individual understands the word will largely depend on that one's biography) (McCabe 2003a, 17-20). Because love is such a "growing word" it cannot simply be associated with certain behavior. So far, the situation ethicist would agree. However, McCabe claims, for love not to be hopelessly vague there have to be some behaviors that would be impossible to count as loving. That is, while all human behaviors have a variety of relevant descriptions, there must be some descriptions which, if appropriate to a specific behavior, would guarantee that that behavior could not be counted as loving. McCabe writes, "We cannot be sure beforehand what might turn out to be loving behaviour, but if we can't say of any behaviour at all that it is definitely not loving behaviour, then I think the word 'love' would be hopelessly vague. I mean that if a word is to be meaningful there must be at least something that it doesn't mean, however openended it may otherwise be" (McCabe 2003a, 20). There must be some exceptionless prohibitions despite the fact that he knows these absolutes "will not, of course, serve as a foundation for ethics" (McCabe 2003a, 21). (2) The second problem McCabe finds with situation ethics is its inability to display the relationship between love and behavior: Ordinarily I should say that I loved Mary Jane only if I were concerned about her welfare, respected her and so on, and I should know this to be the case because I found myself disposed to act in certain ways when she was around or was in some way affected by my actions. The dispositions and actions involved may be exceedingly complicated love may express itself in the most surprising waysbut if there is literally nothing that would count as an expression of love, then it is hard to see how I could use the word at all. Theoretically I suppose I might use the word to mean some interior experience which may or may not happen to accompany my external behaviourrather like a sharp twinge of headache. But then it is hard to see why such an interior experience should be regarded as of fundamental ethical importance [McCabe 2003a, 15]. Here we see McCabe's anti-dualistic Wittgensteinianism put to work. The situation ethicist's refusal to say in advance that some actions are loving and some are not raises the question of the relation between

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loving intention and the action itself. McCabe charges that situation ethicists fall into a kind of dualism, separating the visible behavior from something called "love" which accompanies it. Indeed, sometimes it seems that human behavior, on this account, is composed of two acts, one the internal act of loving, the other the external, visible behavior, the expression of the internal. That there is no necessary connection between the two makes it impossible for someone to discern whether a particular piece of behavior is in fact loving. McCabe writes: I think, in fact, that the New Morality only becomes plausible on a dualistic view of man according to which moral values attach to events in an "interior" invisible life which runs alongside a man's public physical life. Activities in public visible world are in themselves morally neutral. We speak of them as virtuous or wicked according to whether they are accompanied or not by an act of loving in the interior life. The two lives are not intrinsically connected; we can make rough empirical generalizations about which public acts are usually accompanied by love, but such rules of thumb have no sort of necessity [McCabe 1970, 74]. What I have called McCabe's Wittgensteinian-Thomist anthropology is precisely aimed at undercutting this very view of intention and action. (3) McCabe provides one final critique of situation ethics when he asks how to determine where one situation ends and another begins. Situation ethics suggests that all the relevant circumstances, the whole situation, must be taken into account before a particular piece of behavior can be judged good or bad. Then McCabe asks, "How big is my situation? I mean does it mean the people immediately around me, whom I know, or does it extend to everyone who may be affected by my activities?" (McCabe 2003a, 32). McCabe thinks that it belies the bourgeois character of most situation ethics that they draw the situation rather narrowly. They miss that our actions have intelligibility from being situated in the midst of overlapping communities and indeed in the not-yet-fully-achieved community of humanity. If, however, the larger political and world-situation aspects of behavior are taken into account, the command to do the most loving thing in a particular situation becomes empty (McCabe 2003a, 33). 4. McCabe and Proportionalism Proportionalism does not name an entirely unified approach to ethics, but rather a set of family resemblances. Nonetheless, there are certain emphases that unite the members of this family. First, proportionalism

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rejects the notion of absolute prohibitions, and thus, of intrinsically evil acts. Second, proportionalism makes a distinction between the categories right/wrong and good/bad. Proportionalism itself is a method for determining the lightness or wrongness of a particular human action, but not the morality of the actor, which can only be ascertained by taking the actor's intention into account (Hoose 1987, 41-68). Third, proportionalism, in an effort to determine the lightness or wrongness of a particular piece of behavior, claims that all the relevant circumstances need to be taken into account and not just the physical act in isolation from its situation. The literature on proportionalism is too voluminous to look at in any detail. Thus, by looking more closely at the response of Richard McCormick, America's leading proportionalist, to Veritatis Splendor in his essay "Killing the Patient" (McCormick 1994), we will be able to outline more clearly what McCabe's objections might be to proportionalism if he entered the debate (and it happened to be a debate he liked to stay out of). McCormick's response to Veritatis Splendor is brief and to the point, and it involves two closely related arguments. The first argument is contained in McCormick's clarification of the position of the proportionalists. McCormick's fine summary of the heart of proportionalism is worth quoting in full: Common to all so-called proportionalists, however, is the insistence that causing certain disvalues (non-moral, pre-moral evils such as sterilization, deception in speech, wounding and violence) in our conduct does not by that very fact make the action morally wrong, as certain traditional formulations supposed. These evils or disvalues are said to be pre-moral when considered abstractly, that is, in isolationfromtheir morally relevant circumstances. But they are evils. Thus theologians sometimes say that they are morally relevant, but not morally decisive. They are morally relevant because they ought to be avoided as far as possible. The action in which they occur becomes morally wrong when, all things considered, there is not a proportionate reason in the act justifying the disvalue. Thus, just as not every killing is murder, not every falsehood is a lie, so not every artificial intervention preventing or promoting conception in marriage is necessarily an unchaste act [McCormick 1994,18]. The first argument here is for the existence of something called pre-moral evils or disvalues (others proportionalists call these ontological evils [see Janssens 2000]). While these are indeed evils, they can be described in morally neutral terms because the morality of bringing them about cannot be determined until all the relevant circumstances are taken into account. McCormick argues that in his defense of the notion of intrinsically evil acts John Paul II confuses acts considered abstractly with their being considered together with their morally relevant descriptions. John Paul II defines too narrowly the object of the act so that all the relevant

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circumstances, necessary according to the proportionalists to determine the morality of an act, are rendered superfluous. The description of the act in the abstract, for a very few acts, is enough to name that act morally illicit (McCormick 1994,18-19). McCormick's second argument is implicit in the first. The distinction between pre-moral and moral evil rests on the relevance of determining the morality of an act based on all the "morally relevant circumstances" (McCormick 1994,18,19). The bringing about of a pre-moral evil becomes morally wrong when performed under circumstances that cannot justify the bringing about of that evil (that is, when the evil is brought about without a proportionate reason). On the other hand, the bringing about of pre-moral evils can be justified when all the relevant circumstances offer a proportionate reason for bringing about the evil. McCormick writes: When contemporary theologians say that certain disvalues in our actions can be justified by a proportionate reason they are not saying that morally wrong actions {ex objecto) can be justified by the end. They are saying that an action cannot be judged morally wrong simply by looking at the material happening, or at its object in a very narrow and restricted sense. This is precisely what tradition has done in certain categories (contraception and sterilization, for instance). It does this in no other area [McCormick 1994, 18]. What becomes clear from these two closely related arguments is that the proportionalist debate with John Paul II and his supporters is one over act descriptions. When is it appropriate to describe a certain killing as murder, that is, when does the act of bringing about another's death causing a pre-moral evilbecome the morally illicit act of murder? When does the sometimes justified act of taking another's property become the morally illicit act of theft? In most cases, McCormick argues, the Pope and his supporters agree that the morality of an act is dependent on the description of its circumstances, but in a very few instances there are acts that, described in what the proportionalists would call their pre-moral, abstract form, are deemed morally illicit without the further specification of circumstances. McCormick points to sterilization. All agree that not all killing is morally illicit (that is, murder), so why then in the case of sterilization do we not need to specify the circumstances in which it is wrong? McCormick writes that "when the same tradition [that allows further specification before determining whether taking another's property is theft] deals with, for example, masturbation or sterilization, it adds little or nothing to the material happening and regards such a materially described act alone as constituting the object. If it were consistent, it would describe the object as 'sterilization against the good of marriage' This all would accept" (McCormick 1994,19).

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McCabe maintains that ethics is not primarily about making decisions, but about finding ways to live more authentically human lives. From this perspective, and given his critique of situation ethics, two criticisms of proportionalism emerge. First, McCabe's critique of the size of the situation in situation ethics transfers directly into a critique of the necessity of considering "all the morally relevant circumstances." McCabe points out the impossibility of determining and agreeing upon what constitutes all the relevant circumstances. Moreover, he worries about the tendency to consider too small a situation, making us forget that humans are members of the human community, that is, an eschatological community waiting to achieve its full human unity. Furthermore, he argues that "any man at any time is in a great number of overlapping situations, the demands of which will frequently conflict The problem is not so much to discern the demands of'the' situation as to discern the priorities amongst the different situations" (McCabe 2003a, 33-34). When one stops drawing the boundary too closely around a situation, one finds many overlapping, even competing, situations. Thus, one problem has been traded for another, both of which show the inadequacy of any admonition to consider all the relevant circumstances. Second, as we saw from his critique of the situationist's claim that "all you need is love," McCabe believes that absolute prohibitions are necessary to make morality intelligible; there are acts that so violate the deepest meaning of humanity that under no circumstances can they be deemed morally justified. He makes this argument in his own essay in Considering Veritatis Splendor. McCabe writes, Several commentators have found the most difficult teaching of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor to be its insistence that we can describe certain kinds of human acts which will be morally wrong whenever and however and for whatever reason they are performed. If, the document claims, an action falls under such a description, we know it to be wrong regardless of anything else we might know about it. Such description must, of course, be a human one: it cannot be merely an account of what physically happens; it must include reference to what the agent intends in his act (though not to any consequences he may intend). Unlike a number of Catholic moralists, I think there are good reasons for holding this position, though I do not find them in the encyclical [McCabe 1994, 61]. McCabe's way of describing how an act can be considered always and everywhere morally wrong is important here. He says that "we can describe certain kinds of human acts" which, independent of circumstances and consequences, are always morally wrong. What this does not mean, to use the language of the proportionalists, is that there are disvalues considered abstractly which under no circumstances can be morally justified to bring about. McCabe does not believe that there are anything

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called acts in the abstract. Absolute prohibitions prohibit human acts, for there are no other kind. When he says that the account cannot be "of what physically happens," he is arguing both against the encyclical if indeed it has a tendency to describe prohibited acts merely physically, but also against the proportionalist's imagining that there are "pre-moral" evils or disvalues (for example, deception in speech) which can be considered abstractly apart from any human circumstances. McCabe argues in favor of absolute prohibitions by use of an analogy. A game like football, he suggests, requires two kinds of books. The first is a training manual, a book "written by an experienced coach [that] tells you what the good and bad moves are in the game and how to practise the former and avoid the latter" (McCabe 1994, 62). A beginner will follow this manual quite rigidly, but as he becomes more experienced he will refer to it less and less. Finally, when he becomes an expert, he might find that the right play involves breaking one of the "rules" of the manual. Knowing when to break the rules of the manual is precisely what makes one an expert. The second book is the rule book. "This will tell you, amongst other things, what moves count as fouls. A foul is a bad or forbidden move, but it is not playing football badly; it is not playing football at all, but pretending to Given that what you are playing is football, there are no circumstances in which to make a foul move could be legitimate" (McCabe 1994, 62). The manual tells what moves make one a skilled football player; the rule book tells which moves are legitimate football moves and which are not. He concludes, Now it seems to me that the encyclical Veritatis Splendor is, in great part, an attack on those who want to read the rule book as though it were a training manual by those who want to read the manual as though it were a rule book. Neither seems to have adverted to the fact that they are logically quite different kinds of discourse. The rule book, for example, is about individual acts, whereas the manual is about how to acquire dispositions [McCabe 1994, 63]. McCabe makes explicit the analogy between football and life, writing: Human life... is a natural phenomenon (or gift from God) which we did not invent; though much inventiveness as well as experience has to go into finding out how best to live it. Like a game, it is difficult and challenging, involves successful and unsuccessful play; and, like a game, it has boundaries, to transgress which means playing some game which is not what human life is about; and these boundaries and transgressions can be set forth as rules [McCabe 1994, 63]. Just as he argued against the situationsists that there must be some acts which can under no circumstances and under no descriptions be counted

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as loving, so there must be some acts which cannot count as legitimate moves in the game of life. McCabe does not think that there are very many of these rules and he certainly does not think that there are enough on which to base all of ethics. Indeed, he is not arguing in favor of specific absolute prohibitions but simply for their necessity. Indeed, I doubt that he thinks sterilization is absolutely prohibited; he is much more interested in the manual (as he thinks Thomas Aquinas was). Nonetheless, if we take sterilization as our example we can see his exact disagreement with McCormick. McCormick said that anyone would agree that the act described as "sterilization against the good of marriage" is prohibited. The argument is over whether "sterilization against the good of marriage" is a tautology. McCabe would say that the phrase "sterilization against the good of marriage" is analogous to "fouling against the good of the game" In the same way that there is no other kind of foul, so, if sterilization really is one of the forbidden moves in the game of life, then there is no other kind than that against the good of marriage. Despite these imagined objections to McCormick's proportionalism, his most fundamental objection to proportionalism, as it is with any other mode of ethics determined with discovery of the good or bad, right or wrong, in particular situations, is that ethics most fundamentally is not about decisions. McCabe objects to proportionalism as a form of quandary ethics, mistaken on the grounds I have outlined above, but more fundamentally misdirected. As we turn to put McCabe in conversation with the so-called traditionalists, those supporters of the Veritatis Splendor, also known as Basic Goods Theorists, we will see that McCabe's Aristotelianism, his preference for the manual over the rule book, sets him equally at odds with this other dominant approach. 5. McCabe and the New Natural Law Theory Often called traditionalists because they uphold what they view as the traditional position on the legitimacy of absolute prohibitions, the traditionalists stress that these prohibitions are part of the natural law, written on human hearts. They are also to an extent revisionists, in that, led by Germain Grisez, they have taken up the call of Vatican II to reinvigorate moral theology. Part of this reinvigoration involves for them a critique of the tradition of the manualists, which, they believe, fails on logical grounds insofar as it reads moral norms off of human nature; it commits the naturalistic fallacy. Thus, they offer their theory of basic goods as an approach to natural law that does not commit the naturalistic fallacy, maintains absolute negative prohibitions, and provides guiding principles for specific behavior. I will contrast John Finnis's essay "Beyond the Encyclical" (Finnis 1994) with McCabe's "Manuals

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and Rule Books" in order to see more clearly the nature of McCabe's Aristotelianism and his view of natural law.5 After arguing that Veritatis Splendor is less about sex than about laying out a foundation for objective morality to secure inviolable human rightsand after arguing that theories of proportionate reason jeopardize this very foundationFinnis argues that in a post-Christian society an objective foundation for morality is more crucial than ever. Along the way he makes claims that show his view that the New Natural Law Theory (the Basic Goods Theory) provides just such a foundation. He writes: As God's image, man shared in his dignity, and man's innate grasp upon the principles of right and wrong was confirmed as participation in God's wisdom and love. While the goods which fulfil human beings here below life, knowledge, friendshipretained the value they always had, they took on a new value as anticipated ingredients of a far grander fulfilment in the heavenly kingdom [Finnis 1994, 72]. Of course, these truths are no longer widely accepted in a post-Christian culture. Nonetheless, he writes that the objectively binding moral norms "are still accepted by many people as divinely given, and conformed to by many others out of cultural inertia. Indeed, the natural law remains written on the post-Christian heart (cf. Rom. 2:1415), so that, to a considerable extent, contemporary non-believers still know, communicate and act on moral truth" (Finnis 1994, 73). Thus he concludes: God's commandmentsconfirming what is accessible to practical reasonableness even without divine revelationsprotect innocent human life and other fundamental goods of persons These are goods meant to last forever as elements of the divine-human communion for which God created humankind. Those who violate such elements of the everlasting kingdom refuse to make themselves ready for that kingdom. By God's gratuitously promised gift, those who respect those fundamental goods in every choice as the tradition's exceptionless norms requirethereby build up the material of the kingdom... [Finnis 1994, 76]. These extracts illustrate the aspects of the New Natural Law Theory with which McCabe's Aristotelianism puts him at odds. The first principle of practical reasoning is that good is to be done and evil to be avoided. This, however, does not have the specificity needed to give direction to action. To this principle the New Natural Law theory adds eight basic goods and a first principle of morality. The basic goods give content to
For an argument for the anti-Aristoteilian nature of the New Natural Law Theory see Davis 2001.
5

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the principle of practical reasoning while the first principle of morality guides moral reflection concerning the basic goods. The latter, however, is so broad that the new natural law theorists posit intermediate principles connecting the first principle of morality with particular moral norms (Salzman 2003, 22-23). The New Natural Law Theory, as these extracts from Finnis show, is an ethic of choice based on principles of morality discerned through practical reasoning. As we have already seen, McCabe's approach to ethics is farfroman approach based on principles. Rather, ethics is the study of the meaningfulness of the intrinsically communicative nature of human bodies sharing a common life. In the earlier section on McCabe's Wittgensteinian-Thomist anthropology we saw primarily how what McCabe learned from Wittgenstein allowed him to offer an alternative to situation ethics of any form, even proportionalism. In his essay "Manuals and Rule Books" he shows more clearly why that anthropology is a Wittgensteinian-7%orasra. In short, McCabe's account of humans as embodied minds sharing bodily life together is also the account of why an ethic focused on virtuean ethic of the manualis superior to an ethic of principlean ethic of the rule book, especially since an ethic of virtue needs at least some absolute prohibitions. This needs filling out. We have seen that for McCabe, ethics is about living more deeply human lives together. He sees this approach embodied in the way Aquinas transformed Aristotle's ethic for the polis. For Aristotle, the polis 'liad its basis inphilia Philia does, of course, involve affection, but precisely the affection arising from solidarity in a shared important project (such as marriage), a solidarity which Aristotle regards as the precondition for justice itself. It is acts incompatible with this philia that are the ones absolutely ruled out" (McCabe 1994, 64). Aquinas, according to McCabe, develops Aristotle in two ways. First, Aquinas extends the analysis of the good for the humanpolis to the entire human community under the rule of God the Creator. Second, Aquinas "takes Aristotle's political notion of philia (amicitia in his language) as his model for the caritas which is the foundation of the community of the human family as, not merely creatures, but children of God" (McCabe 1994, 65). Thus absolute prohibitions become the prohibition of "acts which are incompatible with membership of a community sustained and defined by caritas" (McCabe 1994, 65). For McCabe's WittgensteinianThomist account, ethics concerns the best form of life for embodied human creatures to live together in light of their destiny to share in the life of God as God's very own community. So how, according to McCabe, do we discover those prohibited acts which strike at the heart of caritas and thus at the foundation of human community? "St. Thomas's answer is: by the use of our practical reasoning and also by faith in divine revelation; and the deliveries of

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these two sometimes overlap. In its primary meaning, for him, 'natural law' just is our capacity for practical reasoning" (McCabe 1994, 65). "There is, for St. Thomas," McCabe writes, "no built-in code or Voice of conscience,' no innate grasp of moral truths" (McCabe 1994, 66). Rather, he argues, natural law is for Aquinas precisely our human capacity to reason about action, and thus every activity about which humans can reason practically falls under natural law. Of course, since our practical reasoning is fallible "it was kindly of God to reveal (at least to his chosen people) the ten commandments: not as principles from which practical thinking should start, but as markers of the boundary where it might as well stop" (McCabe 1994, 66). He continues: God reveals what we might have worked out for ourselves but 'only after a long time and with the admixture of many errors.' A corollary of this, however, is that although we may have been too scatterbrained to work it out for ourselves, we could, by hindsight, recognize that it is not unreasonable. To see this we must recognize that the commandments are limits rather than principles [CVS 66]. The commandments are like the rule book. They set the limits to appropriate behavior in our lives as humans with one another and in our friendship, through the Spirit, with God. "For St. Thomas," he writes, "a direct contravention of the revealed precepts of the decalogue is a 'mortal' sin because the life in the Spirit it rejects can only be restored by a miracle equivalent to the resurrection from the dead" (McCabe 1994, 67). McCabe is arguing that laws and principles have their place within ethics, but not as the foundation of ethics, and surely not as the principles from which we reason practically about particular behavior. Rather they set the limits, the boundaries, for growth in virtue, the virtues necessary to sustain friendship within the human community and with God. The place of principles in the New Natural Law Theory's and McCabe's respective approaches to ethics shows their fundamental difference. In the former account various principles are used to determine what particular behaviors rightly seek the basic goods for humanity and how to choose when those goods conflict. In the latter approach, on the other hand, principles have a much more limited, though essential, role in providing appropriate space for the acquisition and embodiment of the virtues. 6. McCabe and the Naturalistic Fallacy I want to conclude the discussion of McCabe's relationship to situation ethics, proportionalism, and the New Natural Law Theory by highlighting a fundamental agreement which these three approaches share and which McCabe's Wittgensteinian-Thomism cannot accept. Each of these

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three approaches considers that any adequate account of ethics must avoid the "naturalistic fallacy," in which a moral principle, imperative, or value, an "ought," is derived from reflection on the facts of reality, an "is." Situation ethics avoids this fallacy in its insistence, as McCabe puts it, "that no moral character attaches to any piece of external behaviour as such" (McCabe 2003a, 4). Proportionalism avoids this fallacy by distinguishing good and bad from right and wrong. An act itself can be judged right or wrong, but only an agent's intention can be judged good or bad; the goodness of the agent's will, the agent's culpability, cannot be determined from considering the facts of the situation. Ironically, the fear of committing the naturalistic fallacy drives the basic goods theorists to the same conclusion. Todd Salzman explains that "to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, the BGT [Basic Goods Theory] denies the causal relationships posited by traditional moralists between an act and a willing subject that provides objective grounds for morally assessing the agent's will" (Salzman 2003, 51; see also Black 2000, 1-45). McCabe would say that all three approaches share a post-Enlightenment anthropology that persists in positing, however subtly, a dualism between the inner seat of the will and intention and the external world of physical behavior. According to McCabe, Aristotle and Aquinas did not share this anthropology and Wittgenstein has allowed post-Enlightenment thinkers to recover the substantial insights of Aristotle and Aquinas for a new age. McCabe thinks that his account of ethics as language, his antidualistic account of the intrinsic, quasi-objective meaningfulness of human behavior, that is, his account of ethics as the study of the meaning of shared, embodied human life undoes the naturalistic fallacy because it, to use language he would never use, deconstructs the distinction between the language of fact and the language of value. Of the position that no "simple fact of what is the case can logically entail anything that ought to be the case; or, as we might say, no account of a situation in physicist's language can entail an account in moralist's language," McCabe writes: I think that this doctrine is an irrelevance because an account of human behaviour as such is never in physicist's language. To say that Fred killed Charlie is to say something of quite a different kindfrom'this particle movedfrompoint at time Tl to point q at time T2.' To describe an event as a killing is already to describe it in terms of its significance; it is to describe it as having a place in afieldof communication and not simply in a gravitational or electro-magnetic field [McCabe 2003a, 94]. That we are embodied, moreover, is the very grounds of the fact that our human behavior has significance, meaning, as behavior, without recourse to a hidden intention and private meaning. As we have already seen, for McCabe,

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The human body is not, therefore, a medium but a source of significance, and this distinguishes it radically (substantially)fromother things As the Thomist said, human life is the substantial form of the body, that which makes it what it is; or, as Wittgenstein put it, "The best picture of the soul is the body." It is because there are human bodies that there is a world of communication and it is by my bodiliness that I belong to this world [McCabe 1970, 71-72]. Thus we have come full circle, back to what Maclntyre calls McCabe's "Wittgensteinian and Thomistic understanding of human beings as embodied minds and of the human body as expressive in its deeds and its words," the crucial insight that makes the most substantive difference between McCabe and other dominant approaches to ethics (Maclntyre 2002, viii-ix).

7. Conclusion: Ethics and the Eucharist The substantial amount of space devoted to situating McCabe in intraCatholic debates suggests, I fear, that these are the most important contexts in which his work might be read. Indeed, it was necessary to put McCabe in conversation with Roman Catholic moral theology in order to highlight the critical function his distinctive approach might play in relationship to other dominant approaches. I think, however, that the most important aspect of McCabe's work is the thoroughly theological framework in which the distinctive approach displayed above finds its proper place. In this concluding section, I want very briefly to point to the way McCabe's ethics as language finds its fulfillment, so to speak, in the sacraments of the church. So far we have seen that, for McCabe, ethics is the study of the bodily presence of humans to one another, of human communication, in the community of humanity. McCabe, in fact, is writing primarily of the church, which for him is the sacrament of the eschatological unity of all humanity. When we realize with McCabe that human unity is not a given of our nature but "that human unity is something towards which we move, a goal of history" (McCabe 2003a, 67), then we realize that his ethics is distinctively Christian because the humanity about whose bodily communication McCabe writes is an eschatological reality. As McCabe says, "The fact that mankind is split into fragments which are in imperfect communication with each other means that within these fragments, too, full communication is not achieved" (McCabe 2003a, 99). Human unity will be achieved in the eschatological future when our communication, our shared bodily life, is most fully human, lived in perfect fellowship with one another and with God in a way that is not predicated on exclusion, as our fragmented communities are now.

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Until then, the world has the church as the sign of its eschatological future. McCabe writes, "Jesus Christ is himself the medium in which men will in the future communicate, he is the body in which we shall all be interrelated members... he is the language in which we shall express ourselves to each other in accordance with the promise and summons of the Father. Now this language, this medium, this expression, this body which belongs to the future is made really present for us in the church" (McCabe 2003a, 141). Through the sacraments of the church Jesus is present bodily as the language of the future. "I mean that the church makes the presence of Christ articulate as a language, as an interpretation of the world, as a means of communication" (McCabe 2003a, 142). For McCabe, intention and action are embodied human communication, meaningful in their public expression in the community of humanity. Since this humanity is fragmented, however, intention and action find their fullest, deepest, most human significance in the sacramental life of the church as it articulates to the world the truth of the world's future unity. "The resurrection meant not just that a church was founded, it meant that the world was different: the church exists to articulate this difference, to show the world to itself" (McCabe 2003a, 142). McCabe argues that human communication cannot be achieved until all humanity shares bodily the life of God. Until then, we share now sacramentally in that life through the eucharistie celebration. In the context of debates about situations and rules, principles and prohibitions, McCabe offers an alternative approach to ethics. His approach is not likely to be terribly helpful getting us out of quandaries, but it can point us to a way of life and guide us to the deepest meaning of human life; it can point us to the virtues as the most appropriate communication between one another and, through the Spirit, with God; and, finally, it can point us to the eschatological calling to grow up, to grow into our humanity, until we have achieved, through Christ, a share in divinity. At the end o Law, Love and Language, McCabe writes: I have not, in this book, tried to apply christian principles to particular moral questions because it seems to me that christiantiy does not in the first place propose a set of moral principles. As I suggested in myfirstchapter [on situation ethics], I do not think that such principles are out of place in Christianity; without them the notion of love may collapse into vagueness or unmeaning, but Christianity is essentially about our communication with each other in Christ, our participation in the world of the future [McCabe 2003a, 172]. We would do well to remember that this participation is what Christian ethic is about.

The Theological Ethics of Herbert McCabe, OP: A Review Essay REFERENCES

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McCabe, Herbert 1964 The People of God: The Fullness of Life in the Church. New York: Sheed and Ward. 1970 "The Validity of Absolutes." In Situationism and the New Morality, edited by Robert L. Cunningham, 67-77. New York: Meredith Corporation. 1987 God Matters. Springfield, 1.: Templegate Publishers. 1994 "Manuals and Rule Books." See Wilkins 1994, 61-68. 2000 The Teaching of the Catholic Church: A New Catechism of Christian Doctrine. 1985. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 2002 God Still Matters. Edited by Brian Davies, OP. London: Continuum. 2003a Law, Love and Language. 1968. London: Continuum. 2003b God, Christ and Us. Edited by Brian Davies, OP. London: Continuum. McCormick, Richard 1994 "Killing the Patient." See Wilkins 1994,14-20. Nichols, Aidan 1997 Dominican Gallery: Portrait of a Culture. Loeminster, Herefordshire: Gracewing. Ryan, Columba 2001 "Homily at Herbert McCabe's Funeral." New Blackfriars 82.965/966:308-12. Salzman, Todd A. 2003 What Are They Saying about Catholic Ethical Method? New York: Paulist Press. Wilkins, John, ed. 1994 Considering Veritatis Splendor. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1997 Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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