Fr Vincent McNabb (1868-1943) was one of the most widely- known Dominicans of the English Province from the years prior to the First World War up to his death in the Second. Apart from his work internally within the Order he was well-known to Londoners for his appearances for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Speakers’ Comer in Hyde Park and for his involvement in social action, which sometimes made the tabloid headlines. He was involved in the ecumenical movement, in speaking and writing prolifically on all kinds of topics on all sorts of platforms and in all kinds of publications, sometimes far beyond Catholic or even Christian circles. He was a spiritual director and retreat giver of distinction, and he gave lectures on Aquinas under the auspices of the University of London Extension Lectures scheme — an unforgettable teacher according to many students. Clearly an apostolate of remarkable range.

He was a man who aroused strong feelings, and some within the Order were critical of him. One of the grounds for criticism concerned his involvement with Distributism, the social and philosophical movement most commonly associated with Belloc and Chesterton, and it is this area of his life which provides the focus of this article.

McNabb was unique in the influence he wielded in this most lay of movements, although in a private letter of 1932 Fr Vincent denied being a Distributist. His rejection of the label can perhaps provide a point of departure for trying to understand the place of Distributism in McNabb’s thinking.

Fr Vincent was quite clear that he was, first, a Dominican priest and, secondly, a theologian. From an early age he had held firmly that priests should not be involved in politics — in 1914 he wrote in The Tablet that ‘Tragic events during my school life in the North of Ireland have given me a deep-seated distaste for the priest-politician’.

The evangelists obviously assume that Jesus was a human being. What is less clear is what would be entailed by that assumption. There is very little in the New Testament that we would immediately recognise as an explicit exploration of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. It is often assumed that this is because the authors of the New Testament were philosophically naive and so did not have a developed conception of what it meant to be a human being, but maybe it is because we pose the question in the context of a discipline called Christology which predisposes us to accept as valid only certain ways of thinking.

Cornelius Ernst O P, in a provocative article called “Thinking about Jesus”, said, “the ‘ology termination (of Christology) does presuppose a certain kind of abstraction, a certain kind of theoretical approach, a certain conception of what constitutes reasonableness, and in fact what is meaning at all, what constitutes thinking. I think one of the problems we have to face today is just what does constitute rationality, what is thinking, what are the appropriate categories, not only for thinking about Jesus Christ, but about anything else”. The assumption within Christology has generally been that to claim that Jesus is a human being is to say what he is, to identify him as belonging to a particular class of beings, a species. And one’s membership of this species is defined by the possession of a mind, a certain sort of inferiority. To be properly human is having certain sorts of things going on in one’s head. That’s what it means to have a human soul. To be a human being is to have a mind that has thoughts which are then communicated to others, who are assumed to have similar minds, by means of language.

The first task, in the philosophical therapy that opens the way to constructive appropriation of the theological tradition, must be to examine one’s notions of the soul. The very idea of the mind, let alone of the soul, has been eliminated by one powerful philosophical school — exemplified here by Quine. We are far more likely, however, to endorse, or unwittingly host, a certain incipient Solipsism. John Stuart Mill’s argument from analogy for our knowledge of other minds may be classical, but it is not free from objections. On the contrary, it only confirms the myth of the Little Man inside the shell of the body which it is intended to refute. The problem is not intra-theological. The difficulty of the relationship between mind and body, and between myself and others, may be illustrated by some quotations from Proust. This brings us to the threshold of a re-examination of the work of Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology — but his work is best read in the context of further work by John Wisdom and Stanley Cavell, two of his finest interpreters, in this matter at any rate.

One line is to eliminate talk of the soul altogether. This could not satisfy Catholics, or any other Christians who regard themselves as obliged to make sense of the tradition which they have inherited. We may well feel strongly tempted by a Platonizing dualism that longs to release the soul from the barnacles and cirripeds with which it is encrusted in this present life (Republic, 612). But out and out behaviourism can have little attraction for people who find themselves at home, or even simply searching, within any Christian tradition. It is hard even for us to imagine what the allurements might be of any such strict materialist theory of consciousness. Quine’s eliminative physicalism will do as an example.