A DISCERNMENT OF MOTES

Author(s): Herbert McCabe

Source: Blackfriars, Vol. 38, No. 448-9 (JULY-AUGUST 1957), pp. 311-315
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43816902
Accessed: 24-11-2018 19:08 UTC

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 311

A DISCERNMENT OF MOTES

Herbert McCabe, o.p.

about other people is sufficiently widespread amongst

THE about Christians opinion
Christiansother
to be toworth
thatattacking.
be peopleIt isworth it isa impossible
of course Christian is attacking. sufficiently to It make is widespread of course moral judgments a Christian amongst
doctrine that it is hardly ever my business to pass adverse moral
judgments on people, but that is an entirely different matter. It is
Christian teaching that I am very rarely justified in killing a man
by shooting him with a gun, but we ought not to confuse this
with the theory that it is impossible to kill a man by shooting him
with a gun. In practice the latter theory will lead to a whole lot
of death; similarly the theory that moral judgments are impossible
leads to a whole lot of slander.
The theory is that while we can judge the behaviour of a man
and say whether Iiis external actions are good ones or bad ones, we
cannot penetrate to his soul to see if he himself is good or bad. I can
say that Peter did something that was 'objectively' or 'materially'
wrong, but only God can say whether Peter was 'subjectively' or
'formally' committing a sin. This peculiar view is slightly
encouraged by a misreading of some novelists like Mr Greene and
M. Mauriac who have taken an especial interest in the paradoxical
case of the man who in spite of all external appearances is holy.
Of course this is a perfectly legitimate choice of subject matter,
and heresy-hunters have only themselves to blame if they mistake
novels for theological treatises de homine. It takes very little
thought to realize that the theory of the total invisibility of
sanctity and sin would undermine the whole dramatic contrast in,
say, The Power and the Glory . Indeed, if we cannot make moral
judgments it is difficult, in any case, to see why novels are usually
more interesting than descriptions of pieces of machinery.
One pernicious deduction from the theory of the invisibility
of morals is that it is no business of a court of law to decide on the
moral guilt of the prisoner, it is solely concerned with his legal
guilt. There is a good use for this distinction, but this is not it.
Legal crimes are a small sub-class of moral offences. They are
those which in the opinion of law-makers doa great deal of harm

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312 BLACKFRIARS
to the common good and can be check
too much public disturbance. A cou
sins just in so far as they harm the
far as they are offences against God
years for a comparatively minor sin o
more serious sin of blasphemy he m
policeman. And this is reasonable and
(not merely 'intolerant') to penalize a m
unless this harms the common goo
that legal guilt (liability to human
kind of moral guilt (liability to a quit
ments) is wholly different from the
invisible, courts are only concerned
with something quite different from
logical consequence of such a view is
the prisoner need not trouble the co
half the people condemned for crimes
not trouble us any more than the th
condemned have names beginning
supposed to be as indifferent to the o
The attraction which this view has
due to a certain moral attitude and pa
philosophical presuppositions. Those w
kindly people who try hard not to d
convicted of crimes; they recogniz
inappropriate about feelings of conte
for such men. But they are also peop
feelings by saying to themselves, 'Pe
guilty in the sight of God'. The noti
despise but rather to love a man even
is guilty in the sight of God is outside t
The argument by which this theo
runs somewhat as follows : the mora
action depends on the motives of the
we can easily see the external action t
see what his motives are inside him, t
One cannot say everything at on
criticized the suggestion that an ac
accompanied by an interior activ
extremely wicked people can and fre

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 A DISCERNMENT OF MOTES 313
motives. It is at any rate true that an action done
motives is never morally good.
The difficulty about the general proposition that mo
invisible is that we often say about a particular ma
motives are unfathomable. We say, 'The trouble is, I d
what Peter's motives were in buying that house.' Here
to give information about a particular man. Had it bee
or Charlie, we imply, it would have been different
Peter you can never tell. But how can we say that just
inscrutable if everybody is necessarily inscrutable?
'inscrutable' was invented to distinguish people like Pe
people like Andrew and Charlie; clearly if we are go
that everybody suffers from inscrutability we must b
word in some uncommon sense.
Now there is nothing in principle wrong with using
an extended and uncommon sense (all philosophers
logians, for example, have to do this), but it is well to
it when we do it. There is an ordinary sense in whi
that some people are emotional and others are unemot
there is also an uncommon sense in which we say that
emotional (i.e. have emotions, unlike plants). From the
someone is emotional in the ordinary sense it perha
that he is more suitably employed on the stage th
laboratory; but from the fact that everybody is emot
the technical sense) it would be unsafe to conclude that
is more suitably employed on the stage than in the lab
In the same way, there is an ordinary sense in which I do n
Peter's motives (perhaps he is an inscrutable type, or p
just haven't been told enough about him), and this may
impossible to pass a moral judgment on him. But from
that in some uncommon sense I do not know anyone's
it can by no means be concluded that I cannot pass mo
ment on anyone.
What in any case is this uncommon sense in which a
motives are necessarily hidden from me? In what way
that all men are by nature inscrutable? That there is su
am perfectly willing to admit; the old-fashioned an
way of saying it was to say that a man can keep a secret
a man can hide his motives as he can hide his thought
could he play poker? A man can think that his friend

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314 BLACKFRIARS

silly without letting him know

having a thought and hiding it is a
just having a thought. You say, '
silly, but I hid it.' Here you hav
explaining what you would have sa
(i.e. you would have said that he
other way of describing thoughts.
Lots of things can be hidden but m
well hidden that only God can f
truth in the notion that we canno
may be deceived, and this means t
what another's inmost thoughts ar
elementary blunder to suppose
infallibly we do not know at all. A
I know a certain amount about che
Berkshire. None of this do I know
knowledge, what is?
One cause of confusion on this
about a man is that he killed his wi
more than a guess at his moral stat
I have only had his external act de
terior act which is known only to
difficulty is that I have not had e
described to me. If he is an intimate
years I may be fairly certain that he
is innocent, but this is not because
because I have seen a very great de
trist may tell us that a particular
murder, but a psychiatrist does no
is just a man who is more expert a
than I am. We could invent a pa
supposing that all I see is a fdm of
that the killer is really alive, perh
constructed robot. Nobody (except
would claim that this is a point kn
in question. Ordinarily we do not
knows if Harry is alive. We thin
consist in doing any particular exte
Harry is a living being or not by e
The difference between moral gui

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 A DISCERNMENT OF MOTES 3 15

determine than the difference between a robot and a

but it is possible to determine it.
I hope I have succeeded in showing that, however
may be to do it righdy, we can judge other people,
when we realize that it can be done do we understand
not to do it. We then realize that slander and detract
eliminated by the employment of such qualification
course I'm not impugning his motives' or 'No
innocent before God, but . . .' any more than they a
by the prefix 'It seems to me that . . .'. There are c
defined situations in which we have to pass mor
upon other men, and in which it would be wrong n
outside such situations it is forbidden not by logician

♦ ♦

ART AND THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 1

Hugh Dinwiddy

ART is the servant of beauty and beauty is God, 'Beauty's

/ ' self and Beauty's giver', and it is only when beauty is
JL jLseen by the artist and by those who study his work as
in no way reflecting God that art becomes an end in itself. We
know, of course, the fame of the Church as patron of the Arts;
yet her direct influence upon the kind of painting done began to
slip late in the fifteenth century.
'In the minds of many', writes Berensen, 'painting, although a
very familiar art, was too much connected with solemn religious
rites and with state ceremonies to be used at once for ends of
personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in under the patronage
of St Jerome, while romantic biblical episodes, like the "Finding
of Moses", or the "Judgment of Solomon", gave an excuse for
i The text of a paper read at the Newman Association Summer School, 1956.

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