by Clifton Stringer, Ph.D.
Manifestior, he called it. In thus designating the first of his Five Ways “more manifest” than the others, Aquinas gave his lead proof of God’s existence a prominence many Thomists, at any rate, are wont to follow him in according it. It’s the proof dating back to Aristotle that starts with an act and potency analysis on the basis of change or motion in the world and concludes that there’s a prime mover, an unmoved mover, or, as one philosopher puts it today, a “purely actual actualizer.”1 But is this the most powerful argument for God’s existence in fulfillment of Vatican I’s strong claim that “God, the principle and goal of all things, may be known by the natural light of human reason from created things”?2 More broadly, is it a specifically Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysical procedure which is first philosophy? The late Herbert McCabe OP (1926-2001) didn’t think so. McCabe offered a winsome proof of God’s existence beginning with a dog named Fido. This proof is his own rendition of a kind of modern Rationalist proof which, as I’ll show, is more capaciously Platonist than specifically Thomist. The proof has come under strong criticism in recent years. I’ll here defend it, and try to strengthen its strengths.
Herbert McCabe has had significant influence among theologians, philosophers, and others, and his voice has been particularly heard in those conversations going under names like grammatical Thomism, analytic Thomism, Wittgensteinian Thomism, and extending more generally into the world of narrative theology. His association with all these overlapping Thomisms, an association to an extent warranted, is also the source of some of the ways he’s been criticized and, perhaps, misjudged. But first his fans. The list of notable thinkers influenced by McCabe includes: Brian Davies, Denys Turner, John Haldane, Anthony Kenny, Terry Eagleton, Alasdair MacIntyre, the Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, the poet Seamus Heaney, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who in his Gifford Lectures refers to McCabe as a constant inspiration. And it goes on. Called “one of the twentieth century’s finest Catholic thinkers” by Fergus Kerr, Denys Turner has called McCabe “the cleverest man I ever met.”3 Also, he’s cool.4 And very, very radical.5 So it is noteworthy for not being accidental that a number of Marxism-inflected Christian apologetic responses to the New Atheist writers appear downstream of McCabe’s influence.6 There’s also a reader of McCabe’s writings out, and a recent English monograph by an Italian philosopher.7 Yet the scholarly appraisal and reception of McCabe’s theology is still unfinished. This lag is partly due to McCabe himself: he spent more time arguing with friends in pubs over drinks than he did preparing scholarly articles, much less monographs. Thus Kenny also appreciates McCabe’s “Friar Tuck lifestyle”—recall that Robin Hood and his Merry Men were, like McCabe, for the poor—and Denys Turner has likened McCabe to Socrates the morning after the symposium, still thinking and arguing after everyone else has long since fallen asleep.8 In terms whether of output or of scholarly influence, then, McCabe did not place himself in the company of, say, a Lonergan, a Rahner, a Balthasar. Still, McCabe’s writing possesses a razor sharp surface clarity opening unto luminous depths which has allured many to the consideration of his thought, this writer included. Moreover, his style of arguing, theologizing, philosophizing, sermonizing is honed, not just in the study, but in the pub and among students and friends. McCabe had the ability to persuade and catechize others by a piercing philosophical argument, drink in hand—and this peculiar prowess is part of the exigency of this article, and the enduring worth of his footnoteless thought.9
McCabe has also attracted criticism commensurate with this influence, a fact that’s particularly the case with respect to his demonstration of the existence of God via the mutt Fido. In this paper, I address especially one of McCabe’s critics, the Roman Catholic theologian Francesca Aran Murphy.10 McCabe’s proof operates by way of a repeated question—“Why?”—about the dog Fido, a question answered at different levels of Fido’s historical and scientific backstory and of his material composition. So McCabe moves us from the “Why” that learns who Fido’s parents are through the “Whys” that find us discovering about different breeds of dogs, about the evolution of dogs, about the difference between life and nonlife, etc. We thus learn about Fido in wider and wider contexts corresponding to different natural sciences and over against other possibilities: so the biochemical science, for example, hopes one day to give the answer for why Fido’s a living thing rather than some kind of nonliving matter. This repeated “Why” question opens eventually into an “ultimate radical question”: Why Fido along with everything rather than nothing at all? This is the question to which “God”—apophatically uttered—is the only forthcoming answer. This all takes place in chapter 1 of McCabe’s God Matters.11 Enter Francesca Murphy, and dramatically: Fido meets Murphy in the course of her elegant polemic God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited.12 This is a book of broad erudition and incisive discernment within the complex currents of several streams of 20th and 21st century theology and philosophy. Murphy challenges McCabe on a number of scores. Most of these I set aside, focusing attention only on her criticisms bearing directly on knowledge of God via Fido. At the heart of her criticisms is the charge that McCabe illicitly assumes the absolute contingency of the world, hence presupposing, covertly or fideistically, the contingent world’s dependence on a necessary being which, in Thomas Aquinas’ idiom, “all men speak of as God” (ST I, q. 2, a. 3). Murphy argues that this illicit smuggling makes McCabe’s argument ineffective for engaging a Bertrand Russell style atheist who thinks that theists who ground knowledge of God’s existence on the “why” question (like McCabe and like Frederick Copleston, S.J., in Russell’s immediate case) give an atheist no reason to think the world itself is not the basic brute fact. It is just there. Murphy, who thinks of course that Russell is wrong normatively, wishes Christian thinkers would make a better case. In my view Murphy’s criticisms of McCabe, while not completely off the mark, are partially so: she judges McCabe as though he should be more Thomistic than he is, and so misses the force of what he’s doing in his proof, a style of proof which can stand and succeed apart from the methodological and metaphysical order of proceeding of which she’s convinced. “It is sad,” Fergus Kerr wrote in 2008, “that Herbert McCabe is not around to engage with Francesca Murphy’s intriguing critique of his reading of St Thomas.”13 Just so: and for McCabe the matter would turn ultimately not on whether he takes the order of proceeding Thomas or Murphy might, but on whether what McCabe’s doing is legitimate methodologically and successful metaphysically. I’ll argue that we can give it a more positive valuation than Murphy by contextualizing McCabe’s proof not simply as Thomistic (avid reader of Thomas Aquinas though McCabe surely was), but also as conspicuously Rationalist (as Murphy notices but doesn’t applaud) and, at once, as very Platonist (which she doesn’t dwell on beyond noting the Neoplatonic penchant for deduction).14 Lloyd Gerson’s account of Platonism allows me to resituate McCabe, Leibniz, and Aquinas in a context in which the force of what McCabe’s offering can be seen more clearly than in Murphy’s evaluation. Moreover, bringing out the Rationalist and Platonist proclivities going on in McCabe’s proof is the condition for the possibility of strengthening it as the kind of proof it is, rather than critiquing it for not being a kind of proof it isn’t trying to be. It’s certainly not all about method for Murphy; she seems to think that McCabe’s style of proof normatively fails, or even avoids proving. I disagree. Hence, past the engagement with Murphy and the recontextualization by way of Gerson, this article terminates in my own revised and revisited version of a Fido proof.
Objection: That McCabe’s “Why Fido” Proof Assumes the Contingency of the Cosmos Without Demonstration, And Bertrand Russell’s Not Impressed
Murphy has two closely linked objections to McCabe’s proof. First, Murphy argues that McCabe unjustly smuggles into his argument an unwarranted premise, to wit, the contingency of the world, implicitly over-against God’s necessary being. Second, and consequently, Murphy contends that those convinced by McCabe are not ferried over, as it were, on the boat of reason, but have been persuaded to take a fideistic leap. Murphy’s claim that McCabe smuggles in the contingency of the world runs thus:
To make the ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ question prove God’s existence requires that one edit into the chain of enquiry one’s knowledge that the existence of everything made is contingent upon the action of a divine Maker…. Before they have actually proven the existence of a God … philosophical theologians cannot assume there is anything odd about the fact that the universe is there. Fido doesn’t automatically provoke a contrast with No‐Fido, or ‘nothing’. The oddity of the world’s thereness is a contrastive oddity: it’s strange by comparison with the unique necessity of the God in whom being ignites or is identical to essence. In other words, we have to get hold of the unique necessity of God, the necessity of a being who exists by nature, or essentially, in order to espy the absolute contingency of the world. Without the former in view, we cannot see that Fido is precariously dangling over ‘nothingness’ and needs the rope of God’s necessity to explain him and thus save the story. With the former in the editor’s mind’s eye, the dog’s rescue is a foregone conclusion.15
Murphy argues that McCabe unfairly assumes the contingency of the world. Her suggestion that McCabe ‘edits in’ knowledge of the world’s contingency on a divine maker is significant: part of her overarching project is an aesthetic apologia for ‘drama’ (as in Balthasarian theo-drama) as more adequate to confessing the mystery of the Christian faith than ‘narrative’ or ‘story’—she is at once against “story Barthians” and Robert Jenson the paradigmatic “story Thomist” no less than “grammatical Thomists” like McCabe. Murphy thus draws on cinematic theory to lambast the way McCabe allegedly offers a proof which is rather a “Contingency Cliff-hanger” in which McCabe, in effect, subtly edits in the conclusion (God exists) by guiding us in an unwarranted way to the absolute contingency of the world. He uses a cliff-hanger strategy to make us grapple with Fido’s existence rather than nothing at all, thus letting God save Fido and “the story.” But, Murphy points out, the oddity of the world’s thereness “is a contrastive oddity”—she thinks it is a mistake to assume that the world’s non-existence is, in a sense, a straightforwardly knowable or self-evident possibility. McCabe’s error thus, for Murphy, renders McCabe’s demonstration fideist. She says:
The issue on to which the ‘why question’ latches requires a poetic jump or a logical intuition, whereby one sees the nature of God as necessary, and, by contrast, the contingent quality of the cosmos. One cannot set absolute contingency and God’s necessity side by side and see them for what they are until one knows that both are real. Such a sermonic or poetic intuition of contingency has moved many people—but to a leap of faith, not a reasonable inference.16
McCabe’s “demonstration” is thus, for Murphy, no demonstration, and is certainly not an example of what the ecclesiastics of the First Vatican Council meant. McCabe sets “absolute contingency and God’s necessity side by side” without showing his reader that the world is, in its depth, absolutely contingent. Murphy thus defends Bertrand Russell’s refusal (in the famous BBC radio debate with Frederick Copleston, SJ) to ask about the cause of the world as in line with his scientific method. This too is significant. Murphy is at pains to show that the ‘Why question’ has a philosophical pedigree which is rather recent, dating from Leibniz rather than Thomas Aquinas, and prevalent among Thomists only since the 18th century. So she will say (starting with a list):
Leibniz; Coplestone against Russell in their celebrated radio debate; [Denys] Turner; and Father McCabe intend to reduce the cumbrous passage of the original Five Ways, which wend through causes, movement, potentialities, actualities, and guided growth, to a single ‘why’ question. But the consequence is a considerable expansion of those specific arguments, into an overarching narrative.17
Where Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways “wend”, more subtly than it might at first seem, through a host of philosophical considerations, McCabe’s Leibnizian ‘Why question’, for Murphy, pares down all those weighty metaphysical subtleties into a single question that can then be the guiding trope in “an overarching narrative.” But there is nothing about what McCabe does that should have upset Bertrand Russell:
Bertrand Russell’s own response to this line of argument was ‘the universe is just there, and that’s all’. This was not an abrogation of scientific method: the world is obstinately there. The atheist factors what the believer takes to be the created orderliness of the world into his method. So long as God continues to throw causes, moves, delegated necessity and design into his creation, or so long as this field of investigation continues to exist and thus to operate, science has no reason to question the intelligibility of its method. Its method is clear to it; it is how the facts within the world work which is obscure to scientific minds. Scientists rightly recognize that the world, however weird, has an apparently necessary way of existing. We shall argue that the assumption that the world is, in a sense, necessary lies behind the Third Way. Without such an ‘in a sense necessity’ as part of one’s proof, one can only construct an artificial contingency cliff‐hanger, which posits an hypothetical Fido whose fall is arrested by the safety‐net of the ‘First How‐Comer’, the rationale which the movie presupposes. Although Russell’s remark, ‘the universe is just there’ is often cited with ironic bemusement by grammatical Thomists, their indignation is more appropriate to a sermon than to an argument for the existence of God; an audience of believers will naturally be bemused by Russell’s blindness, but they’re the only ones for whom the indignation is not metaphysically artificial.18
McCabe has argued, with Aristotelian aplomb, that to fail to ask “Why anything at all?” is to thwart human flourishing. Murphy points out that scientific minds like Russell’s think that the “why” questioning intrinsic to human flourishing can keep going on by asking “how this?”, “how that?” within the world: “so long as this field of investigation continues to exist and thus to operate, science has no reason to question the intelligibility of its method. Its method is clear to it; it is how the facts within the world work which is obscure to scientific minds.”19 With characteristic subtle elegance Murphy draws her reader’s mind back to Wittgenstein’s words, quoted by McCabe: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery”.20 Russell sees no reason to question the that of the world—the that is the that. It is only mysterious to the extent that one entertains a primordial counterfactual which, to Russell, the intra-worldly how does not warrant. Best for Russell to let the mind operate, dwell, and abide fully within the intra-worldly hows, and seek a human flourishing along these lines and in this space. Russell, for Murphy, has been given no reason to question the fundamental intelligibility or integrity of his intellectual method.
Does McCabe’s project falter tout court before Murphy’s agile criticisms? In a word, No. Though even many readers sympathetic to McCabe’s approach see Murphy’s criticisms having some purchase on McCabe. For example, Fergus Kerr writes:
As regards McCabe, Murphy has a point. The Five Ways, he repeatedly insists, 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 … turn the ‘cumbrous’ apparatus of the Five Ways … into the ‘why anything at all’ question.21
Yet Kerr next says, “this turn is not all that different from Thomas’s position.” He notes that Thomas’ Five Ways end, not “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.'”22
Respondeo: Re-Locating Fido Within the Rationalist PSR and Platonist Family of Proofs
Murphy’s correct, of course, that McCabe’s doing Leibniz as well Aquinas, and so Kerr surfaces a key question: Is McCabe justified in creatively identifying Aquinas’ cumbrously wending Five Ways with the perhaps elegantly essential Leibnizian question? Yes, I’ll argue. Yet, by way of entering into what I take to be the justification for McCabe’s admitted creativity here, I need to note that Murphy’s account also omits an important feature of what McCabe is doing. She reads his reiterated posing of the Why Fido question at different levels as the development of a narrative—and I’ll grant that it is a little bit like this and not hide that I agree that the question of existence is properly and wonderfully a cliffhanger—but this isn’t all McCabe’s doing.23 Moreover, Chapter 1 of God Matters reads more like a gifted lecturer’s script, a monologue which implies an audience or conversation partner and could easily become a classroom dialogue or discussion, than it does like a narrative in any straightforward sense. In any case, whether we take it as in some sense narrative or not, it is a course of inquiry into and understanding arising from a specific dog named Fido: “Fido’s parents brought it about that he is this dog not another, but in that act they also brought it about that he is this dog (not a giraffe), that he is this living dog, that he is this biochemically complex, living dog; that he is this molecularly structured, biochemically complex, living dog, and so on.”24 That’s to say, the progression of research into the particular mutt Fido is an increasing specification of what Thomists among others typically like to call his essence. And coming to know an essence, as reflective readers of Aristotle’s Metaphysics striving to lead an examined life know, is a contrastive business. The genius of McCabe’s levels of questioning is that it begins to make it clear (even if it could’ve been clearer) that the ultimate radical question about Fido and “everything”—the question of Fido’s existence, that is—isn’t a question about Fido’s backstory in the universe. Modern Physics deals with the big questions of natural history there. And this brings us back to the question of the relationship between Aquinas’ Five Ways and the Leibnizian question. I argue that it’s helpful to reframe our investigation here in three ways. First, we need to reframe Fido by attending to the way McCabe’s proof actually operates in the field, not of Aquinas’ specific order in making metaphysical moves (clarifying act and potency, say, or the necessary and the contingent), but in relation to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).26 If it is a proof—and Murphy complains that it’s not or that it fails—this is how it succeeds. Second, we need to keep an eye to the broadly Platonist context of McCabe, Leibniz, and Aquinas. Taking some hints from Lloyd Gerson’s work is helpful here: a brief attention to the “Ur-Platonist” philosophical stream Gerson specifies unearths the rationale to our answer “Yes” to Kerr’s question about the legitimacy of what McCabe’s doing. Grasping the Platonist “thing” also brings out the radically traditional character of McCabe’s approach (as of Leibniz’): there’s no reason the “Why Fido” PSR proof can’t serve as the “lead proof” in the Platonist and/or classical theist family of proofs as well as any other and, just perhaps, more manifestly than some. It has, as I say, an elegant and economical force going for it. We might thus begin to understand, third, that McCabe’s Fido proof is in some ways more obviously “Platonist” than “Thomist”, and that, within the classical theist family of proofs for God’s existence, its closest relative (as a PSR proof) is probably a Plotinian-inspired style of proof of the necessary simple source, rather than the motion or change proof Aquinas considered first, or even than Aquinas’ third way from contingency (in relation to which Leibniz’ PSR proof is sometimes considered). Herbert McCabe’s Thomism is, as Thomas Joseph White notes, downstream of Sertillanges (among others); the “nearly naked” apophaticism of Sertillanges is a reading of Aquinas big on Dionysian Neoplatonism. In fact, if one’s to think of upgrading or strengthening McCabe’s proof, it should be in these twin, and happily marriageable, Platonist and Rationalist directions: bringing out PSR and the way in which physical things, as composite, can’t possibly explain themselves.
To the first point, then: the importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason for McCabe’s proof’s functioning. Murphy complains that McCabe smuggles in the intuition of the world’s contingency without demonstrating it, and without demonstrating the existence of the necessary God on which creation depends. Thus, he has no compelling answer, she worries, to the Bertrand Russell who’s happy to accept the universe as a brute fact. But McCabe does not use language of contingency in the chapter under consideration. Not that he’d resist the description of the world being contingent on God—it would follow from what he does say, but it isn’t what he does say. McCabe’s mistake, if it is one, is to presuppose the Principle of Sufficient Reason without stating it.28 There are various formulations of PSR in the world, and some are better than others. Edward Feser’s recent one is straightforward and good: “The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) holds that there is an explanation for the existence of anything that does exist and for its having the attributes it has.”29 If this principle were to be stated or presupposed with respect to McCabe’s proof, the proof works: the ultimate radical question about all things is asked, and God is the explanation of the world’s existence, and God (because simple and eternal in essence) is the explanation of God’s existence, plenitudinously and fully intelligible in se. Moreover, though McCabe doesn’t formulate PSR in his proof, PSR’s the import of the analogy he’s after between scientific research and proving 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 … 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.”30 The venture into the unknown in search of understanding, whether in science or in the exquisitely metaphysical question of existence, presupposes that being is intelligible. “Being … is the objective of the pure desire to know…. Being, then, is (1) all that is known, and (2) all that remains to be known”, as Lonergan wrote.31 “It is completely universal: apart from the realm of being, there is simply nothing.”32 Lonergan didn’t balk about a bit of a contrast between being and nothing. In any case, McCabe’s presupposition is that being is intelligible, and this is a correlative claim to PSR, and if these aren’t true, then the practice of modern science is a waste of time. So McCabe’s right to criticize Russell’s arbitrary abandonment of the quest for knowledge. And Murphy’s mostly wrong to complain that McCabe is smuggling in the world’s contingency. The burden of proof is on, and must always be on, someone who claims that there’s such a thing as a brute fact: the existence of something physical and so composite just isn’t the kind of thing that could lack an explanation—and this is no less the case of the totality or whole of all physical things.
But I fear it’s worse for Russell’s brute fact assertion (and for Murphy’s objection) even than that. Eric Perl’s correct that:
To be is to be intelligible: on this law hangs all being and all thinking. This is not merely a common claim…. Rather, this claim is constitutive of metaphysics itself, as the thinking of being and the only alternative to nihilism. Just as the thinking of being, metaphysics always already regards being and thinking as commensurate to one another. Hence it is from this starting-point that the question ‘What is being?’ and, at least in the case of Plotinus, the question ‘Why are there beings?’ will be approached. The answers to these questions, and hence the entire content of classical metaphysics, follows from and depends on the law that to be is to be intelligible. It is, perhaps, dangerous thus to expose the very cornerstone of this tradition, for if this single principle is questioned the entire structure totters, and if it is removed or destroyed the structure collapses in ruin. But the result of such a removal is, once again, nihilism, which indeed just is the denial of the intelligibility of being. For if being cannot be thought, then whatever we may call ‘being’ or ‘reality’ is not reality but a construction, projection, or illusion…. Precisely as the denial of intelligibility, therefore, nihilism is the antithesis and exclusive alternative to the thinking of being which is metaphysics.33
The problem of Russell’s claiming a brute fact is that, by denying intelligibility at the limit case, at the horizon, the intelligibility of the whole is thwarted. If the sun were extinguished, more than the sun would go dark. If the universe isn’t intelligible, there isn’t a universe. If the universe were to lack explanation, reason’s findings—finding, as it does, things rationally knowable—would be a deceptive appearance; and, again, the things one thinks one’s understood would be likewise not understood. If Perl’s right, it follows deductively that the denial of PSR would be nihilism. That’s to say, not only is the burden of proof on the one who says there could be a brute fact, but the burden of proof would be impossible to reach because the acceptance of a brute fact just is the relinquishment of reason and the acceptance of absurdity: to say the existence of the universe might be a brute fact is, quite literally, a reductio ad absurdum.
Back on track, then. We’ve grasped, thus far, that McCabe’s proof is Leibnizian, that it works to the extent that we grasp that he presupposes PSR, and that, as McCabe intimated with his Fido narrative which Murphy lamented, the stakes are high: everything or nothing, being’s plenary intelligibility or nihilism. Kerr’s question remains: should McCabe have taken the Leibnizian question and interpreted it as the essence or head of Aquinas’ Five Ways? I’ll here argue that McCabe’s move is justifiable by situating McCabe, Leibniz, and Aquinas in relation to the Platonist stream as specified by Lloyd Gerson. Murphy has a point on the face of it: when we see McCabe OP centerstaging Leibniz’ Why question as the essential against the backdrop of the Five Ways, it appears at the very least curious. But a deeper context dispels this worry. When we consider McCabe’s interpretation, as well as Leibniz and Aquinas, against the backdrop of, and within, the Platonist tradition as Gerson finds it, McCabe’s move appears in a new aspect. Suddenly McCabe’s take on Leibniz’ question as grasping something essential to Aquinas’ Ways—because essential to the Platonist stream of which the Five Ways are an instance—seems more plausible. If Thomas is essentially an Aristotelian, it is curious; if Thomas and Aristotle are essentially Platonists, much less so. To Gerson, then. Gerson’s project involves identifying an “Ur”-Platonist tradition in the West—overturning, interestingly, 20th century accounts of ancient philosophy in which Aristotle is pitted against Plato34—and identifying Plotinus in particular as a preeminent and faithful systematic interpreter of Plato.35 Gerson identifies the marks of Platonism both negatively and positively in his works. Their negative identification he calls “Ur-Platonism” (UP). Negatively, then, they run:
- antimaterialism (“the view that it is false that the only things that exist are bodies and their properties”);
- antimechanism (“the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order”);
- antinominalism (“the view that it is false that the only things that exist are individuals, each uniquely situated in space and time”);
- antirelativism (“the denial of the view Plato attributes to Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things, of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not””); and, finally,
- antiskepticism (“the view that knowledge is possible”).36
This negative set of Ur-Platonist positions is pedagogically promoted, for Gerson, in Plato’s dialogues. He argues that they are at their best all together, and that, taken together, they incline their defenders, who reach them by seeking the explanations of epistemic phenomena, towards some version or other of the positive systematic set of Platonist positions.
Note that Gerson’s not wedded to maintaining that Plato was an “Ur-Platonist” simpliciter: the UP positions are arrived at by seeing which positions, across the dialogues, are consistently rejected (by Socrates, first of all). Yet Gerson’s claim—against those who read Plato’s dialogues as orderable in a supposedly discernible historical trajectory of development and change, and with all of Plato’s readers in the ancient world—is that Plato’s own philosophy does point toward an overarching coherent system. This system is what is developed in the tradition of Platonism, and it turns out that most philosophers through the centuries, considered in this light, are trying, with varying success, to hold onto many of its aspects.
Gerson’s name for the family of positions opposed to UP is “naturalism.” Gerson himself is a Platonist and opponent of naturalism. He views the Platonist positions as a coherent whole and will even advance the provocative claim (following Rorty, but taking the other side of the argument) that Platonism and Philosophy are basically the same. Naturalism, then, is the undoing of philosophy as it has been generally pursued and practiced. Any alliance with naturalism ancient or modern—with, that is, materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and/or skepticism—will prove tenuous, brittle, and probably tragic for a philosophy. Such a perspective lets Gerson drop gemlike bombshells like the following: “Most of the history of philosophy, especially since the 17th century, can be characterized as failed attempts by Platonists to seek some rapprochement with naturalism, and, mostly in the latter half of the 20th century (and also now) failed attempts by naturalists to incorporate into their worldviews some element or another of Platonism.”37 Any treaty with the enemy here is, Gerson warns, a slippery slope, an invitation to catastrophe, for the naturalist as much as for the Platonist.
The Socratic demolitions of naturalist positions thus point towards Platonism, not only as a set of UP negations but as a positive system, variously systematically iterated and instantiated, yet itself having identifiable positions. These are:
- That the universe has a systematic unity
- That the systematic unity is an explanatory hierarchy
- That the divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category
- That the psychological constitutes an irreducible explanatory category
- That persons belong to the systematic hierarchy and happiness consists in achieving a lost position within the hierarchy
- That the epistemological order is included within the metaphysical order
For our present purposes, the second of these points is the most apposite. Gerson explicates it thus:
The Platonic view of the world—the key to the system—is that the universe is to be seen in hierarchical manner. It is to be understood uncompromisingly from the top-down. The hierarchy is ordered basically according to two criteria. First, the simple precedes the complex and second, the intelligible precedes the sensible. The precedence in both cases is not temporal, but ontological and conceptual. That is, understanding the complex and the sensible depends on understanding the simple and the intelligible because the latter are explanatory of the former. The ultimate explanatory principle in the universe, therefore, must be unqualifiedly simple. For this reason, Platonism is in a sense reductivist, though not in the way that a bottom-up philosophy is. It is conceptually reductivist, not materially reductivist. The simplicity of the first principle is contrasted with the simplicity of elements out of which things are composed according to a bottom-up approach. Whether or to what extent the unqualifiedly simple can also be intelligible or in some sense transcends intelligibility is a deep question within Platonism.38
For Gerson, the Platonist family of views privileges, at once, explanation and the simple. The first principle, to be absolutely explanatory of all else, is necessarily absolutely simple, “unqualifiedly simple.” The complex and composite universe is explained by way of reduction to a metaphysically simple first principle.
We’ve now grasped enough of Gerson’s specification of UP and Platonism to begin to notice the difference it makes once we see Aquinas, Leibniz, and McCabe as, to significant and varying extents anyway, members of this tradition. And it is helpful to remember here again that Platonism, for Gerson, specifies not one system but a historically discernible family of systems more or less sharing common marks while simultaneously containing sharp tensions and lively arguments. Nevertheless, we can see the difference Gerson’s analysis makes for the way in which we situate the Fido proof. Platonism privileges explanation. Moreover, Platonism privileges explanation of a particular kind: explanation of the composite by way of its reduction to its ultimately simple cause. McCabe’s Fido proof is not only a move to explain; it’s a move to explain the “molecularly structured, biochemically complex, living dog” in a way that includes but exceeds all the hierarchically graded and historically unfolded degrees of his compositeness. With due respect for Aquinas’ manifestior regarding his First Way ex parte motus, it is perhaps the argument from the composition of everything physical that best ferries the modern mind to the explanatory necessity of a simple metaphysical cause which is not at all a physical thing. Or certainly at least this is true of my mind, as it seemingly was of Plotinus’s. And this, in any case, McCabe’s Fido proof is already very close to doing. A Plotinian proof is cradled intimately in the bosom of the PSR proof, and vice versa. If McCabe’s Fido Proof needs strengthening, such strengthening would just be (1) making explicit its presupposition of the PSR and (2) making clear that the passage to the explanation of the existence of Fido and all physical things is the deductive reduction from the composite to the simple. These changes take the Fido proof beyond Murphy’s core criticism that McCabe presupposes without demonstrating the contingency of the world. Between the PSR and the composite condition of all physical things, we are in a position to deduce the existence of a metaphysically simple principle beyond and ontologically prior to the kaleidoscopic spree of cosmic composites ever cascading into our consciousness.
Metaphysics After Fido: From the Simple Explanation of Everything to the Divine Attributes
In closing, then, I offer my own revision of McCabe’s Fido Proof, revised and recontextualized along the trajectories of its strengths. Unlike McCabe, however, I don’t begin using the word “God” immediately on the basis of what is demonstrated by the Why question. Edward Feser’s approach in his own proofs is wiser, both metaphysically more helpful and apologetically more prudent, in that he does not use the word “God” until a rich metaphysical portrait is deductively unfolded.39 Only then does he roll out the proverbial et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum. By the Why question, then, I arrive at the primal conclusion that there is a metaphysically simple explanation at the heart of everything. I then deductively unfold the attributes of this metaphysically simple principle in the order that seems most fitting. In being so predicatively loquacious I depart from McCabe’s own habit—so shaped by the apophasis of the Sertillanges stream—without denying that the simple God transcends our comprehension, and that one is joined to God as to one quasi ignoto, and that the encounter with God in contemplation is an encounter with no thing at all, just dazzling darkness.40 Nevertheless, it is hoped that my concise metaphysical loquacity is true to the spirit of McCabe’s convivial, dialogue relishing, pub symposium attending philosophical spirit, and that my concision might let the present Fido proof be helpful for those who similarly relish a good argument, drink in hand. Finally, I note that this revised proof and metaphysical unfolding serves as this article’s conclusion, bringing it full circle, as it were, renewing the proof after our engagement with Murphy’s criticisms and the clarifying, recontextualizing, and revising that they prompted.
Proving the existence of God is a lot like proving the validity of science or philosophy. It has a lot in common with trusting in processes of reasoning and investigation themselves. Not, mind, with trusting in these processes as denoting sets of established conclusions which have already been discovered, understood and tested by judgment. Rather, it is like the growing edges of science or philosophy or any other area of radical reasoning, in which one sojourns forth into the unknown, in a kind of transcendence and ecstasy, in earnest inquiry, and discovers in the unknown, perhaps after long struggle, that what is there is intelligible, and that this intelligibility was itself all along the presupposition of one’s being able to direct one’s attention and inquiry toward it in the first place.
Let’s take an example. A mutt walks by. Suppose you happen to know that this particular mutt is named Fido.Having had your coffee before you see Fido and his owner walk by, you scratch your chin and ask, “Why Fido?”
You mean by this question something like, “Why does Fido exist? What’s the explanation of Fido?” You’re asking something that can be asked and answered at many different levels.If there is a particular spiritual and ethical summons at the beginning of our inquiry “Why Fido?” I would suggest it is this: to be open to all the levels, and to give each level its due research, its due investigation, its due reflection. So at the first level you just begin by good detective work. You can ask around and examine some dogs and discover Fido’s parents: this Corgi down the street plus that rambling Chihuahua drifter equals this lovable “Chiworgi” mutt named Fido. Hurray Fido! If you were immoderately zealous, you could confirm your discovery through genetic testing, and—question asked, question answered.
Or, question answered, at this level. For our question “Why Fido?” can also be (and should be) asked and answered at other levels. The answer we have discovered to our initial ‘Why’ question beckons us to a renewed asking.
By our question “Why Fido?”, we could now mean, “Why does Fido have these traits rather than those? Why is he this kind of mutt rather than that?” We place Fido within the world of dogs as a whole. We would be asking a question which would be answered, now, by a different kind of detective work, by researching the history and development of different breeds of dogs. And again: question asked, question answered—at this level. And so our answer leads us to another level.
At the next level, our question “Why Fido?” means, “Why dogs? Why is Fido a dog and not some other kind of animal, like a giraffe?” We place dogs, now, within the animal kingdom as a whole. We would seek our answer through the science of biology, and we’re now studying the evolution of dogs as a species.
At the next level, “Why Fido?” means, “Why is Fido a living thing instead of some other kind of thing, like stone or dust? What’s the explanation there?” Here we place Fido in the context of all the different kinds of things we find in the earth, and here we’re asking about the difference between life and non-life. Biochemistry is the relevant science, and it has not yet conclusively answered this question about how non-life becomes life, but it doesn’t seem improbable to think that it will someday.
More deeply still, “Why Fido?” could mean a question about the even more elemental kind of structure, the array of matter and energy, which is Fido, and here we would turn to physics to pursue our answers.
Notice, at this point, two things. First, all this time, we are asking our questions about one particular thing: that furry shedding cuddler Fido. Second, each time we ask, “Why Fido?” we’re simultaneously placing Fido in a wider and wider context and zooming into smaller and smaller parts of Fido: Fido has a long cosmic backstory—a backstory as old as the universe itself, even while Fido himself hasn’t existed but for 3 or 4 years; and there’s a way in which the deeper parts of that backstory correlate with smaller parts of Fido and of Fido’s parts. We want to explain Fido as a whole, we want to explain Fido’s existence and know “Why Fido?”, and at each level we find a new part of Fido which is itself its own whole made up of parts, and whose existence also begs for explanation. The various levels and contexts, of course, don’t exclude each other. Rather, the levels can be pursued independently, yet one seems to lead to the next. First, the context of his family. Second, the context of dogs. Then the context of the animal kingdom. Then the context of all life, and so on. We could perform this method of meditation (or one similar) on any particular thing that exists, and let our inquiry run in either direction.
We could also, of course, stop asking the question. We could stop using our mind to know the truth, stop asking “Why?” in ways that let our understanding grow.41 We could stop this way at any of the above levels. But that would be arbitrary and sad. It would thwart our human flourishing, because we would be closing ourselves off from knowable truth. Moreover, the premise of all our asking is that there is, as a matter of fact, an explanation to be found: as one formulation the principle of sufficient reason has it, “there is an explanation for the existence of anything that does exist and for its having the attributes it has.”42 Of course, one could be miserly and attack this principle, but without it being true, modern science, to say nothing of philosophy, would be pretty well futile; and all that’s to say nothing of the thousand and one ways we presuppose it each day as we use common sense in ways which are even more basic to our lives. If the things that exist can’t even in principle be understood, there’s not much sense asking about them. If we walk into the bathroom and the domestic feline we grudgingly feed—a cat which Fido hates with a perfect hatred—leaps from the top of the cabinet onto our head, clawing and scratching in her daily pitched battle against the goodness of existence, we never suppose that there might be no explanation for how the cat came to be in the bathroom on top of the cabinet. We rightly intuit and assume that there’s an explanation to be found. That’s to say, we rightly intuit and assume that what exists is all that we know and all that we don’t know—and apart from those two there’s simply nothing. The principle of sufficient reason (or PSR) simply gives formulation to that correct and inexorable intuition.
But perhaps I digress. Notice that each time we ask the question “Why Fido?” in a wider and wider context, we’re asking it over against some other possibility. “Why Fido instead of some other mutt?”—“Why Fido instead of a giraffe?”—“Why Fido instead of a rock?”
The “ultimate radical question” that we could ask about Fido would be the question that places him in the widest possible context and so asks “Why Fido?” over against the most radical rival possibility. This ultimate radical question goes something like, “Why does Fido exist, along with all the other physical things that exist, rather than no things at all?” We might think that we can’t know the answer to this question, and in a sense we can’t know it by asking questions like this: the answer remains mysterious, and importantly so, but we can also be luminously and exactingly clear about it in certain respects. For example, we can know that the answer to the ultimate radical question isn’t in any sense another physical thing like the universe and the things that make up the universe. If one posited a physical thing as the answer to the ultimate radical question, one would just be violating the terms of the question: we’re asking about the existence of all physical things individually and in toto and with Fido at the head, and that’s a question that can’t be answered by pointing to one of the physical things already in the mix: anything physical would already be something whose existence we’re trying to explain. We’re seeking to explain the existence of physical things as such. We noticed, I take it, that all physical things are, like Fido, made of smaller parts: in the philosophical term, they’re composite: they’re made up of, and so in that sense dependent on, their parts. The answer to the ultimate radical question must therefore be noncomposite or (in the technical philosophical term) simple. The answer to the question about the existence of each particular thing and all particular things—whether we call it a universe or speculate a multiverse, whether it turns out that it all started some 13 billion years ago or (if possible) stretches back endlessly into the past—we can be absolutely certain that the answer to the question about why all this exists is metaphysically simple. If it weren’t simple, our question wouldn’t be answered, for its being composite would mean that it itself stood in need of explanation—and if that were the case it would be on the side of the cosmos, on the side of the cosmic phantasmagoria in need of explanation, rather than being its explanation, and so again we’d be violating our question. So, the explanation of the existence of all things is metaphysically simple. We’ll call it a metaphysically simple principle.
But what if someone asks, “What’s the explanation for the metaphysically simple principle?” That’s a good question and it has a clear answer: the metaphysically simple principle, because simple, is also necessarily the explanation of its own existence. Its essence (what it is) and existence (that it is) are identical (because it is simple). They name the same thing under different aspects from our side. So, to answer that the explanation of all things is a metaphysically simple principle is, in fact, luminously explanatory, and note that doing this is categorically different than invoking a principle, a god, or the universe as a brute fact. Bertrand Russell supposed that he could keep the “Why everything?” question at bay by supposing that the universe is the ultimate brute fact. But this is just the denial of explanation and the arbitrary thwarting of reason. It is the denial of PSR, to be sure. And it’s also an intellectually illicit move: the complex and composite cosmos isn’t the kind of thing that might not have an explanation. The suggestion is patently absurd. Fido’s a composite thing, and so we know that Fido has an explanation. We’re just as right with the universe as a composite whole. Even if we resist the idea of defining the universe as a “whole”, and consider it as only, say, a sum or interrelated web of concrete composite particulars, it is conspicuously the case that nothing about the conclusion changes: the composite, if it is to be explained at all, is explained only on the basis of the logically prior noncomposite or simple. Brute fact-ism is the arbitrary, irrational, ideological denial of explanation to what in fact has a luminous and knowable explanation—and the metaphysically noncomposite or simple principle is that luminous explanation.
But, again, suppose someone offers the suggestion that, “What if there’s no limit to the composite particulars? What if what exists is finally only an infinite web or infinite series of concrete discrete composite particulars?” Here still, nothing changes. Even if the infinite series of composites is explained by another infinite series of composites which is itself explained by another infinite series of composites, such that the excited speculator eventually conjectures, amid intermittent brow mopping, an infinity of infinities of composite series of composite series—notice how, still, there’s been no explanation. The question posed by the existence of the composite is only answered at all by the logically necessary conclusion of the metaphysically simple. And, so concluded, the existence of all the composite infinities that one can juggle—however vast the array—are then satisfactorily explained by the metaphysically simple principle.
At this point, having arrived at a metaphysically simple principle as the explanation of all composite things individually and as a whole—all from inquiring after Fido’s explanation—we are in a position to wonder and deductively reason further about this metaphysically simple principle. What more must be concluded about it on the basis of its simplicity? Here, notice that something to be especially avoided is trying to imagine or picture the principle. We’d inexorably be imagining something metaphysically composite, which would deceive us. So when we notice that we’re imagining any kind of image of the simple principle—whether some depiction we’ve seen of Athena or Thor or the bearded deity on the ceiling of the Sisteen or a glowing point of light—we should let it drop. This is intrinsic and essential to the sort of deductive logical meditation and metaphysical investigation we’re pursuing. Rather than imagining it, we’ll try to deductively unfold more of what should be said about the metaphysically simple principle.
On this score, then, we can begin with the fact that it is one. If there were more than one simple principle, there would be some part, whether physical or metaphysical, that differentiates them. But the principle has no parts, because it is simple. So there can be no differentiating part or feature, and therefore the simple principle is one.
Further, the simple principle is not a body: it is incorporeal. For things that have bodies all have parts. But the metaphysically simple principle has no parts. Therefore it is incorporeal.
Further, the simple principle is changeless and unchangeable: it is immutable. If the principle were mutable, it would have some part or parts which were capable of change, but it has no parts because it is simple. Therefore, the simple principle is immutable.
Further, it is eternal. If it were temporal then its essence and its existence would be distinct, and its essence would then be a mutable part, and its existence a different metaphysical part, but this is not the case. Hence it cannot be temporal because it is simple. Therefore it is eternal. Again, because it is simple the principle’s essence is its existence, and so its essence is to exist, and therefore it is eternal.
Further, the simple principle is purely actual, with no potential to be different than it is, no unrealized potentials of any kind. If the simple principle had unrealized potentials of any kind then it would have parts making it capable of that further realization or actualization. But because it is simple it has no such parts. Therefore it is purely actual. Again, if the simple principle had unrealized potentials their realization would be a change. But the simple principle, as already demonstrated, is immutable. Therefore it it has no unrealized potentials, and therefore it is purely actual—and eternally so, in the simple identity of its existence.
Further, it is infinite. If it were finite then it would have some limited or limiting parts. But because it is simple it has no such limiting parts, but is always purely whole in the identity of its existence. Therefore it is infinite.
Further, it is perfect. To be imperfect is for a thing to lack the realization of its potential or to be finite. But, being infinite, the simple principle has no lack, and being purely actual it has no unrealized potential, and having no parts it lacks no realization. Therefore it is perfect.
Further, and extremely importantly, the simple principle is perfectly good. To be less than fully good is for a thing to fail to realize some aspect of its nature. But the metaphysically simple principle is perfect, is fully actual, and has no parts, and so there is no unrealized aspect or part of its nature. Therefore, it is perfectly good.
At this point we should introduce a correlative axiom which follows from PSR, on the one hand, and from the simple principle’s plenary explanatory power, on the other. The explanation of anything’s existence is either to be found in its own nature, in which case it is metaphysically simple, or in some other thing which causes it, in which case it is composite. Therefore, everything that is not the simple principle is composite in some way or other. Therefore also, the cosmos, as a composite whole and in each of its parts, is caused by the simple intelligible principle which is its ultimate explanation. And now we may continue with our deductions about the metaphysically simple principle which is Fido’s, and the cosmos’, ultimate explanation and cause.
The metaphysically simple principle stands in no need of the cosmos. For need implies lack, and lack, as shown above, implies composition, but the simple principle has neither. Therefore the metaphysically simple principle stands in no need of the cosmos which depends on it. Therefore, and further, the metaphysically simple principle has no lack which compels it to cause the cosmos in order to realize a potential or fulfill its nature: simplicity, as shown above, precludes all that. Now, causation may be necessary, accidental, or intentional. It is said to be necessary when it is required by the cause in order to fulfill some unrealized potential, and this has been already excluded. It is said to be accidental when a cause is either non-rational or when a cause does not know or anticipate its own effect. But these too are excluded, since they imply a lack in the simple principle: either a lack of reason, or a lack of comprehension of itself and its effect. Yet for the metaphysically simple principle to lack comprehension of its effect is for it to lack comprehension of its own act as causing that effect, and a part or parts and so composition are implied in either case. Therefore, because the cause is simple, its causing the cosmos may not be accidental. Therefore, having eliminated the other options, what remains is that the metaphysically simple principle causes the cosmos intentionally. Therefore, the metaphysically simple principle is mind (in the sense of analogous to a mind, more like a mind than anything else we know). Therefore also, it follows from the previous conclusions (1) that the simple principle stands in no need of its effect and (2) that it is a mind causing its effect intentionally that, therefore, its effect is freely caused. So the metaphysically simple principle is mind, and it is free. Further, as it is simple it is its own understanding, and it comprehends all things in knowing itself, and it is thus omniscient. Further, as cause of the world it is the total explanation of all power and change in the world, and it is therefore omnipotent, not being one worldly power among others, not one of the angels or gods (if there are any), but the condition for the possibility of their and our finite power.
Yet, even as the simple principle causes the cosmos including Fido and each of its other parts out of no lack and by no necessity, and even as this causation is a free act, yet it is also inevitable. For the metaphysically simple principle causes the cosmos from no lack or necessity but from its own willing of the eternal goodness it is and knows, and this eternal goodness it is and knows is itself, and—here is the wonderful mystery of us before the foundation of the world—in the metaphysically simple principle’s knowing and loving its own goodness it also knows and loves us and our existence as identical to its knowing and loving itself.
In any case, our walk with Fido is nearly finished, and it is time to sum up. By inquiringly meditating on Fido we have proven that there exists a simple metaphysical principle which is the total explanation and cause of the cosmos as a whole and in each of its parts, and that this principle is, moreover, self-explanatory, identical in essence and existence, one, incorporeal, immutable, eternal, purely actual, infinite, perfect, perfectly good, a mind or more like a mind than anything else we know of, free and intentional, omniscient, and omnipotent. But that a principle like this exists just is what is meant when people say that God exists. So, God exists.
Footnotes
[1] Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2017), 17ff. While Feser dubs this, not inappropriately, his “Aristotelian Proof”, he follows Aquinas in giving it the front-and-center spot in his own five proofs (which, note, don’t correspond to Aquinas’s Five Ways), and the metaphysical grammar of potency and act he establishes in this first proof is significant in subsequent proofs as well, such that they have a kind of cumulative character. Aquinas’ famous statement of this proof is in Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3. Aristotle’s versions are in the Metaphysics book 12 and the Physics book 8.
[2] “… Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse….” Pope Pius IX, Dei Filius, II.
[3] Turner’s comment comes in his foreword to Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason (New York: Continuum, 2007), viii. Kerr’s remark about McCabe is corroborated in chorus by thinkers like Brian Davies (“one of the most gifted thinkers of his generation” et al), Sir Anthony Kenny (“one of the most talented English-speaking philosophers of the twentieth century”), and Terry Eagleton (both “razor-sharp logician” and “creative artist”). These remarks come from respective forewords and introductions to the above cited work as well as Herbert McCabe, On Aquinas (New York: Burns and Oates, 2008), and Herbert McCabe, God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (New York: Continuum, 2010).
[4] Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, “Theological Cool: The McCabe Reader,” Modern Theology 34:4 (2018): 664-676.
[5] Gene McCarraher, “Radical, OP,” Commonweal, October 4, 2010.
[6] Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books 28:20 (2006):32-34; Rupert Shortt, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity (London: Hurst, 2016). Denys Turner, whose research agenda has been broader over the decades than McCabe’s, has the same feel in this regard.
[7] Brian Davies and Paul Kucharski, eds., The McCabe Reader (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016); Franco Manni, Herbert McCabe: Recollecting a Fragmented Legacy (Eugene: Cascade, 2020).
[8] Kenny’s remark is from his blurb on The McCabe Reader; Turner’s remark is from Denys Turner, “The Price of Truth: Herbert McCabe on Love, Politics and Death” (Las Casas Institute Lecture, 2015), YouTube video, near 23:15. Turner also, near the same place in that interview, describes McCabe: “Its hour after hour in the pub…. He did his thinking in the pub…. That’s where you learned from Herbert…. He was a street thinker, a street talker, and he’d talk to anybody.”
[9] Turner is the source of the descriptor “footnoteless mind” as apt of McCabe’s thinking and writing. Turner, “The Price of Truth,” YouTube video, near 7:20.
[10] In addition to Murphy’s critique, another set of criticisms of how McCabe and Turner operate, as representatives of the Sertillanges-Gilson-Pegis apophatic/Neoplatonic “existentialist” line of Thomism, comes from Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology, (Ave Maria: Sapientia Press, 2009), chapter 8. As will become clear by the end of this article, while I’m sympathetic with McCabe’s version of a PSR-style argument on broadly Platonist grounds, I’m closer to White than to the apophatic Thomists when it comes to unfolding attributes of the simple divine essence.
[11] Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2005), 2-9.
[12] Francesca Aran Murphy, God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Chapters 3 and 5 engage McCabe directly.
[13] Fergus Kerr, “God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited by Francesca Aran Murphy,” New Blackfriars 89 (2008): 488-490.
[14] Murphy’s well aware that there’s some Platonism (again, of the limiting Plato v. Aristotle kind) upstream of McCabe, not least on his “story” relishing side: she notes the convergence of “grammatical Thomists” and “story Barthians” in being deductivists (92), and on 91-2 records Lindbeck’s early enthusiasm for Aquinas as essentially deductivist and so Neoplatonic.
[15] Murphy, 97, 100-101.
[16] Ibid., 101.
[17] Ibid., 96.
[18] Ibid., 100.
[19] Ibid., 100.
[20] McCabe, God Matters, 5.
[21] Kerr, ibid.
[22] Kerr, ibid., 489.
[23] For Murphy, the “cinematic” or “movieish” quality of life and theology she finds in McCabe and other authors is part of the problem; better, she argues, is a (Balthasarian) dramatic orientation.
[24] McCabe, God Matters, 4.
[25] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1:981a. To this extent, there’s something dubious in Murphy’s worries that McCabe contrasts the existence of Fido and everything with nothing. Once we grasp that we’re talking about the question of a physical thing’s existence (rather than just its evolutionary backstory which perhaps helps us specify its essence) its fairly easy to unfold in any number of ways the intuition that, as physical, it could well not exist and the question as to why it does exist appears bottomlessly profound. So it is not quite right, as Murphy argues, that “[t]he issue on to which the ‘why question’ latches requires a poetic jump or a logical intuition, whereby one sees the nature of God as necessary, and, by contrast, the contingent quality of the cosmos” (101). God’s existence, or the existence of a necessary cause of all contingent things, or of a simple explanatory cause of all complex things, is the conclusion of these arguments, not a conclusion-held-ever-in-view: the existence of things is contrastive (both methodologically and ontologically) not first with God’s necessity but with their own non-existence: measured against even a single human life, Fido does not exist most of the time. So, why does he exist some of the time at all? Reason can get this far. Again, the contrastive process by which we attend to a thing and then have insights into and judgments about its essence is in this way seen to be in a hierarchical continuum with our wondering contrastively about its existence. Aristotle’s wise man grasps theoretically that the particular ailments across a number of people are in fact a single sickness; McCabe wonders what the theoretical basis is of all the physical things existing rather than nothing: in each case, the pursuit of understanding is a pursuit of explanation on a vector to ultimate explanation. Having said this, I’d concede (to Feser and White and Murphy) that there’s problems with McCabe’s seeming supposition that it might be possible that nothing (not even God) exist, even as I’d resist White’s move to frame this as McCabe imagining a possible world in which nothing exists; McCabe would just say that an empty possible world isn’t yet nothing. McCabe’s radical formulation here, whether licit or not, might be thought of in terms like: either there’s a simple cause of all physical (and so composite) things, or there would be no things. What McCabe aims to omit as absurd would be a situation where there’s physical things but no simple cause. Feser’s indirect comment vis-a-vis McCabe’s ultimate radical question and like formulations comes in Edward Feser, Five Proofs, 155 n 8: “This is sometimes, and famously, put by asking, why is there something rather than nothing? However, this is a potentially misleading way of framing the issue, since some interpret this question as implying that there could, at least in theory, have been nothing at all. And the arguments of the previous chapters, as well as the argument of this one, imply that it is not the case that there could have been nothing. What is purely actual, what is absolutely simple or noncomposite, what grounds all necessity and possibility, what just is subsistent existence itself, and what exists in an absolutely necessary way could not possibly not have existed—in which case, if there really is something that fits these descriptions, then it is not true that there could have been nothing at all. The better way of framing the question is, why are there any contingent things at all?” My way of honoring Feser’s point but putting it in the register of the composite and the simple would be to change McCabe’s ultimate radical question to something like, “Why does Fido exist, along with all the other composite things, rather than no things at all?” Since all physical things are composite, “physical” might helpfully be substituted for “composite” at times, and at a minor cost in precision which is not likely to matter if one’s not talking to a philosopher.
[26] While there are various versions and formulations of it, the PSR states in general that for everything that exists or obtains there is an explanation, a reason. While Leibniz is accredited with its modern formulation, it is not unusual to see the PSR as having a backstory in some form or other stretching even to the Presocratics. One can see Leibniz argue in relation to it in, e.g., sections 36-39 of the Monadology.
[27] As Murphy notes, “the ‘why is there not nothing’ proof has been a Thomist standard since the eighteenth century” (89). This point supports the larger re-orientation I’m going for by seeing Aquinas as an in some ways particularly Aristotelian figure in a larger Platonist stream: Inasmuch as “Thomism” names an effort not only to think that Aquinas was right, but an effort to fill out the philosophical worldview Aquinas offers, a Leibnizian proof can become a standard: Thomism as a phenomenon itself shows itself as a variant or school within Platonism.
[28] Analytic philosophers who deny divine simplicity have to offer weakened, and ultimately unsatisfying and self-defeating, versions of PSR, because for them God’s existence isn’t self-explanatory, and so God is something of a first brute fact. This is a catastrophe for its evacuation of being’s intelligibility.
[29] Feser, Five Proofs, 161. Feser offers some lines of argument on behalf of the truth of PSR, but points out that the difficulty with demonstrating the truth of PSR is that PSR is itself more self-evidently true than any of the arguments that can be offered on its behalf. See further Michael Della Rocca, “PSR”, Philosopher’s Imprint 10:7 (2010). Leibniz’ arguments for God along PSR lines appear in sections 36-39 of The Principles of Philosophy Known as Monadology and The Ultimate Origin of Things.
[30] McCabe, God Matters, 2.
[31] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 372, 374.
[32] Ibid., 375.
[33] Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition (Boston: Brill, 2014), 7.
[34] See Lloyd P. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
[35] Lloyd P. Gerson, From Plato to Platonism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). It is noteworthy that this resituating of the Aristotle-Thomas stream within Platonism, which makes both McCabe and Leibniz—albeit to very different degrees—more plausible as heirs of Thomas, makes possible a different narrative of the history of philosophy and of its relations with Christian teaching. Gerson isn’t the only figure who supports this “re-integration” or renarration of Aristotle and Thomas within Platonism writ large or, as it were, in the tradition of classical metaphysics as such. Eric D. Perl, for instance, also reads the antique and medieval story of philosophy—the most significant figures of which are, for him, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Aquinas—in such a way that the weight falls on Plato and Plotinus rather than on Aristotle and Aquinas. Plotinus is, for Perl, the best heir of Plato and so the retriever and resolver of Parmenides’ lopsided insight about Being’s changelessness. Again, what is of most interest in the present article is the way in which shifting the weight of the story to Plato and Plotinus might help the philosophical heirs of Aristotle and Thomas. It should be further noted that while Perl’s narrative differs from the neoscholastic heirs of Thomas in the figures which it emphasizes in Western philosophy, Perl’s narrative at the same time continues to mirror Thomas and his heirs in the clean division, as it were (in I q. 1 a. 1 etc.), between theological/natural philosophy and specific Christian (or other) revelation. That is, Perl’s narrative elides the way in which, relatively early in the course of the centuries between Plotinus and Aquinas, Nicene trinitarianism radically revises Plotinus’ metaphysics (no less than those of his older peer Origen), seeking a new kind of coherence in which the second hypostasis and the third share the simplicity of the first, while having and being fully the intelligibility of the second and the life of the third. What if universally accessible reason itself, illuminated as it always is by the Father of lights as its ultimate source, actually adduces reasons which apply pressure for this sort of revision of the Plotinian system? Interesting, then, that such reasons do occur. When one attends to this story, the metaphysics of a Maximus Confessor or a Bonaventure become no less interesting than those of Aquinas, and the metaphysics of an early Latin Nicene Platonist like Marius Victorinus deserves more engagement than it receives. See particularly Question 3 in Zachary Hayes, trans., St. Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1979); Ambiguum 7 (for starters) in Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua vol. 1, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard, 2014); Marius Victorinus, Theological Treatises on the Trinity, trans. Mary T. Clark (Washington: CUA, 1981). For apposite secondary literature on Maximus’ theological metaphysics, start with Jordan Daniel Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor,” Modern Theology 34:1 (2018): 82-102 and his The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 2022). If a Nicene thinking Christian who affirms divine simplicity were to think, further, that Plotinus is right that the reality of the cosmos still requires or strongly suggests an intelligible reality which is at once unified, whole, and complex, then that thinker might be on the way to having a sophiology in the “created” place of Plotinus’ second hypostasis left vacant by the Nicene simplification of the begotten Son/Logos. Perl succinctly opposes taking Aquinas’ reasoning to God as equivalent to “modern arguments to God as a “first being” or a “necessary being” which is the cause of “contingent beings”” in Eric D. Perl, “Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask ‘Why Is There Anything at All?’”, in Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, ed., Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom (Washington: CUA Press, 2021), 179-206: adjudicating the agreements and disagreements between Perl’s perspective and the perspective here developed isn’t possible in this breviloquium.
[36[ Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, 9-19.
[37] Lloyd Gerson, “Platonism Versus Naturalism” (Duquesne Liberal Arts, Philosophy Series Lecture, 2014), YouTube video, near 9:45.
[38] Lloyd Gerson, “What is Platonism?”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 (2005): 261.
[39] Feser, Five Proofs.
[40] For a description and critique of the stream of heavy apophaticism characteristic of Sertillanges’ understanding of the ipsum esse subsistens, a stream which includes, after Sertillanges, Gilson, Pegis, McCabe, and Denys Turner, see Thomas Joseph White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity, 255-68.
[41] McCabe, at this point, avers with incisive restraint to the existence of whole societies which stop asking the question “Why?” at certain ideologically enforced points. McCabe, God Matters, 2.
[42] Feser, Five Proofs, 161.
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Dr Stringer serves as Pastor of First Methodist Church of Lockhart, TX. He received his Ph.D in theology at Boston College (2018) and has taught at St. Edward’s University (Austin, TX) and St. Mary’s University (San Antonio, TX). Check out some of his published work at academia.edu.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 