Philosophy and Theology in a Single Vision? A Faultline in ‘Grammatical Thomism’

In his review of Stephen Mulhall’s The Great Riddle, Fergus Kerr writes that ‘[w]ith his emphasis on riddles, even on religious language as nonsense in a positive, Wittgensteinian way, Mulhall goes much further than [David] Burrell or [Herbert] McCabe ever did in their readings of Aquinas.’[i] As Kerr notes in his review, McCabe and Burrell differed also between each other, the former (and not the latter) influenced by his teacher Victor White, the latter (and not the former) citing the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan and the American theologian Victor Preller.

In this paper, I aim to explore how several hallmark figures in ‘grammatical Thomism’—McCabe, Burrell, Mulhall, and the English theologian Nicholas Lash—explicate the relationship between the subjects of philosophy and theology. This is a key topic in ‘grammatical Thomist’ writings, especially in Burrell and Mulhall, who take care to explicate their position on the relation between the subjects quite explicitly. I argue that far from expositing a unified view of the relation between these two subjects, there is a sharp division between the ‘theologians’ McCabe and Lash, on the one side, and the ‘philosophers’ Burrell and Mulhall, on the other. I argue in this paper that the perspectives of both parties cannot be harmonized together without violence to the key insights of one or the other, and thus that for the grammatical Thomist project to continue into the future, serious thought must be given about how to articulate this relationship.

There are two significant developments this paper aims to accomplish. First is to highlight the tension at the heart in grammatical Thomism in the relation between theology and philosophy. The problem is this: grammatical Thomists agree that religious language is fundamentally apophatic, and their interpretation of Thomas on analogy demands that although we can confidently say that God is ‘good’ or ‘wise’, we cannot say how. All four thinkers treated here agree that theological language must be understood within the context of a Christian form of life: prayer and liturgy, as well as deeds of charity to the poor and seeking after justice. However, the difference arises in what the implications of this claim are seen to be. Whereas McCabe and Lash insist that religious language is still basically truth-functional, in the sense of describing states of affairs, Burrell and Mulhall insist that to see God-talk as truth-functional is not to take analogy and apophaticism far enough. For Burrell and Mulhall, theological language is about holding open a space of possibility, such that purely philosophical inquiry is incomplete, and oriented towards theological language as its endpoint and perfection. This means that McCabe and Lash differ with Burrell and Mulhall on the possibilities of interpreting theological language as theological: as something more than a holding open of possibilities that can never quite be deemed as ‘actual’.

There are problems with both the McCabe-Lash approach and the Burrell-Mulhall approach. The former adopts a view of theological language that cannot sustain or uphold the sort of doctrinal and theological claims they want to make. The latter denies, at least in a sense, that theological language should be interested in evaluating or offering such claims; this moves God-talk out of the realm of the truth-functional and descriptive. Eventually, though, Burrell admits that this approach on its own is unsustainable, as he confesses that the work of John Milbank pushes him towards making space for ‘participation’ in his account of theological language and doctrine of creation.[1] This sort of metaphysical claim stands in tension with Burrell’s broader approach to religious language.[2] For his part, Mulhall assents to a sort of participation on a model of kenosis (self-emptying), but as Judith Wolfe argues, this concession is not enough, since sharing in God’s own life should involve sharing not only in God’s self-abnegation, but also offer a promise (partial now, fulfilled in the eschaton) of sharing in God’s plenitude.[3]

The second aim of this paper is to claim Lash as part and parcel of this approach to Christian thinking, as much as Davies and Mulhall. Lash has been broadly neglected as a co-operator with ‘grammatical Thomism’. Lash, more than any other figure standardly thought of as within grammatical Thomism’s ambit, is a theologian in a broadly traditional sense: someone who seeks to illumine the doctrines of the faith in something approaching a systematic way, at least more so than McCabe. Thus, putting Lash in conversation with other figures could move grammatical Thomism towards dogmatics and systematics, rather than solely philosophical theology and philosophy of religion.

Ultimately, I argue that future advocates of grammatical Thomism must sort through this genuine dilemma—one which, as I see it, must be solved rather than dissolved. This claim is relevant not only for those interested in Thomism or Wittgenstein, but for anyone who sees philosophical theology and philosophy of religion as inextricably linked to the particularities of religious practice, especially those that seek to join an apophatic account of religious language with a robust sense of living a religious form of life.

[1] David B. Burrell, ‘Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language’, in Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow, eds., The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 96n28; see Oliver Tromans, ‘Similarity within (Ultimate) Dissimilarity: Burrell and Milbank on the Interplay between Positive and Negative Theology’, Heythrop Journal 61, no. 5 (2019): 749–762.

[2] See Jack E. V. Norman, ‘Burrell’s Critical Thomism: Aquinas and Kant Revisited’, Modern Theology 40, no. 2 (2014): 347–372.

[3] See Judith Wolfe, ‘European Philosophy and Original Sin in Stephen Mulhall’, New Blackfriars 98, no. 1076 (2017): …–….

[i] Fergus Kerr, Review of The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Philosophy and Theology, by Stephen Mulhall. Modern Theology 32, no. 4 (2016), 674.