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God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Herbert McCabe. Edited and introduced by Brian Davies. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. xviii + 205 pp. $24.95 (paper).
The so-called problem of evil arises from fundamental theological misunderstandings. One of the distinct pleasures of studying the work of Herbert McCabe, the late Dominican who (thanks to his fellow Dominican and literary executor Brian Davies) has now published more since his death than he did while alive, is the brilliant wit and insight with which McCabe takes us from theological muddle to the blinding light of mystery. As McCabe notes: "When we speak of God we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery" (p. 128).
McCabe's argument derives from a perceptive reading of Aquinas. We need to understand mat "good" is not a normal property of things, like "red." A red washing machine and a red skillet have something in common: redness. But two good things do not have goodness in common, because when something is good it is not that it has something else - "goodness" - added to itself. Rather, a good thing is just succeeding as itself; it has those particular properties which that kind of thing is supposed to have. So...