Cartesian pictures of the human self and act-centred understandings of ethics dominate modern thought. Throughout his work, Herbert McCabe challenges these, and as such remains an important resource for philosophical and theological ethics. This paper lays out McCabe’s philosophical anthropology, showing how he draws on Wittgenstein to revive a Thomist account of the human person. It then shows how this anthropology feeds into a philosophical ethics, focused on human flourishing and the possibility of life being meaningful. This, in turn, underwrites a theological ethics, according to which the human person flourishes ultimately through graced participation in the divine life. The paper concludes with a discussion of McCabe’s account of faith as participation in the divine self-knowledge.

In this essay, I argue that Thomas Aquinas's and Herbert McCabe's soteriological paradigms are immensely compatible with one another. In contrast to the presuppositions held by certain interpreters of Thomas, I contend that Aquinas, like McCabe, rejects a primarily juridical/transactional understanding of Christ's Passion, and, in light of this fact, it is a mistake to assert that his soteriology is a precursor to later penal-substitutionary conceptions of the atonement. Once Aquinas's and McCabe's teachings are correctly situated within a relational/friendship rather than juridical context, their similarities and mutual aversion to penal-substitutionary atonement becomes explicit. Likewise, after appropriately identifying McCabe's indebtedness to Aquinas's thought, one can perceive his unique and substantial contribution to the Church's understanding of Christ's salvific work. The comparison between Aquinas and McCabe, in particular, provides clarity to a proper conception of the intrinsic disordering of sin and the essential character of Christ's meritorious love and obedience offered to God the Father.

Herbert McCabe was not an academic, he was a teacher and a preacher. He was a scholar also, but aiming to the truth for its own sake and, subsequently, for his own life improvement. Not in order to be ‘up-to-date’ with the intellectual fashions of the moment or to flatter his peers. Therefore he focused on the classics, most of all on Aquinas. The result of McCabe's peculiar intellectual attitude was the vast amount of original and impressive ideas he conceived and conveyed despite having written little, in terms of the number of texts and the length of them. The right tribute of praise to a thinker is the presentation of his/her ideas, the test of truth, coherence, originality and power they have in explaining the reality in which we live. This is one of the things that strikes a reader of McCabe's writings. While it is hard to name a single original idea of many authors in vogue, and of most of them only one, it is easy to name many ideas from McCabe. This paper focuses on two of them: 1) freedom as based on knowledge; 2) the meaning of life.

This paper defends Herbert McCabe OP against anti-realist charges, particularly Francesca Murphy's extended criticisms of McCabe as a ‘Story Thomist’. McCabe stands accused of reading Thomas Aquinas, in part through Wittgenstein, such that concern for method and language displaces concern for God. Rather, McCabe's story is one of God raising up human beings so that their language and activities develop as they grow in divine life. Beginning with his account of religious obedience, I argue that McCabe is a realist sensitive to the journey of finite creatures towards the mystery of God. Developing in divine life is not primarily informational, but is an entering into the mystery of God so as to share in God's own self-knowledge, a knowledge that humans cannot claim to possess on their own terms. McCabe's Wittgensteinian-inflected Thomism embraces the real gift of divine self-knowledge and the ongoing development of human language and activities in receiving this gift.

Over the eight hundred years of the English Dominican province, few of its members have matched the rigour and depth of thought of Herbert McCabe. This paper presents a brief overview of McCabe's thought, focusing first on his understanding of God and then on his conception of human beings. Like Thomas before him, McCabe thought it vital to think clearly and correctly about both God and humanity, an effort which in the case of God involves recognising the many ways in which we cannot think of God.

In the immortal words of Herbert McCabe, ‘Whatever we are referring to when we use the word “God” it can no more be a god than it can be a model aeroplane or half-past eleven’ (God Still Matters). This striking idea – the “atheism” of true Christianity – has, in fact, a long pedigree. This paper traces its history from the early Church to the Angelic Doctor himself. The essential point is this: if our God really is who Christians claim God is, then all our words about God – including the word “god” – must necessarily fall short.

Herbert McCabe was, by widespread acclaim, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers in the English speaking world during the final quarter of the last century. He was also deeply committed to radical left‐wing politics. What is the relationship between these two facts? I lay out what I take to be the key themes in McCabe's politics before arguing that, in contrast to significant strands in present day political theology, he had a keen sense of the respective roles of faith and reason in guiding political action. This allowed him to commit himself to a politics which was more radical than much of what has followed him, whilst having a clear sense of how Christian faith ought to be allowed to condition political engagement. The article concludes by drawing out lessons from McCabe for thinking about faith and politics. Not least of these is that we ought to avoid the lure, often articulated in terms of the ‘unifying’ role of the Church, to eschew conflict.

The work of Herbert McCabe offers a model for thinking about the world and human life in it that has yet to be fully appreciated. In this essay, I argue that McCabe's linguistic model provides invaluable insight into human communication and the moral life, showing the natural law to be more like scaffolding than a list of stipulations.