Holiness Inspires Greatness In Others - Fr Vincent McNabb's Impact on Belloc and Chesterton

We can’t all be great, like Chesterton or Belloc, but we can all be holy like Fr McNabb.

Pontifex University Press is re-publishing two collections of essays by Fr Vincent McNabb,

an Irish Dominican priest who lived in England for over 50 years and was influential on the thought and writing of both Chesterton and Belloc, with both of whom he was good friends. It is through that association and with the land movement that Chesterton and Belloc championed that he is generally known today.

These collections have been chosen to deal with a range of subjects, but we deliberately chose essays that do not focus on what he generally known for, the land movement. As a result, they are a fascinating insight into a man who is a deep and intelligent thinker with a great love for God and man, and so, will give fresh insights indirectly into his motives for support of the land movement.

The first book, God’s Dealings With the Minds of Men - Essays on Biblical Inspiration, Mysticism, and the Imagination, edited by Matthew Horwitz and with a Foreword by myself, shows McNabb as an intellectual. These essays are written for his peers and are technical, reflecting his powerful intellect. They cover the nature of inspiration and revelation in treatments that are surprisingly fresh and relevant for today’s reader.

The more recently published collection is called The Wayside - A Priest’s Gleanings, which is a charming and touching series of essays that are descriptions of how his work with the poor and underprivileged in the tenements and prisons of London and Leicester affected him personally. Again this is edited by Matthew Horwitz, and has a Foreword by Michael Hennessy, who is the chairman of the Hilaire Belloc Society in the UK.

These include some reflections by a theologian and scholar of St Thomas, for example, The Dumb Ox of Thought, and St Thomas as a Controversialist, and an essay on the liturgy called The Riches of Ritual. But as much as these, it is his accounts of the joy he has in serving those around him, that give us insights into McNabb as a man, for example, Jane Seedcombe Wool Weaver: Of Certain Notable Things Heard From Her Lips.

In The Innocent, he describes his regular visits to an alcoholic prisoner called Patrick Glennon who, by his own account was justly serving time. One day he went in and Glennon was not there, but another prisoner whom he did not know.

I was talking with Patrick Glennon’s successor in A4, 22.

“You knew Patrick Glennon, I suppose,” he said.

“Yes! What of him?” I answered, in dread. “He died last month.” The A4, 22, shifted himself uneasily on his feet. I noticed a quiet flood filling his eyes.

“Died?” I asked.

“In the workhouse—”

We kept silence, as if before the presence of a great law. I was relieved when A4, 22, began the panegyric of the dead.

“He was a good one, was Pat. Never heard him say a wrong word of anyone. He was one of the best. He was—you know what I mean—holy!”

An uncontrollable “Amen” nearly rose up in my throat.

Most of us cannot hope to be great men in the manner of Belloc and Chesterton. But we can all aspire to holiness, even that of Fr Vincent McNabb. It is through personal holiness that we can inspire greatness in others. Here is what Belloc and Chesterton had to say about McNabb (again quoted in the book) and then some concluding remarks from Michael Hennessy’s Foreword to The Wayside. 

Here is what Belloc and Chesterton had to say about McNabb (again quoted in the book) and then some concluding remarks from Michael Hennessy’s Foreword.

The greatness of . . . [Fr. Vincent McNabb’s] . . . character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgment, was altogether separate from the world about him . . . But the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness . . . I have known, seen and felt holiness in person . . . Never have I seen or known anything on such a scale. 

— Hilaire Belloc

I will say briefly and firmly that . . . [Fr. Vincent McNabb] . . . is one of the few great men I have met in all my life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and practically; and that next to nobody nowadays has even heard of him . . . [but] . . . nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him.

— G. K. Chesterton

In the Foreword to The Wayside - A Priest’s Gleanings, Michael Hennessy, chairman of the Belloc Society in the UK wrote:

Some writers are famously less than their oeuvre. If great books are the products of great writers, they are not always the product of great men. Fr. McNabb’s close friend, Hilaire Belloc—and Fr. McNabb accompanied Belloc through the darkest days of his life, immediately after the early death of his wife, Elodie—wrote over 150 books; yet the consensus is that even this great mass of writing, and the gems of literature and thinking within it, does not match the magnificence of the personality, genius, haecceitas, of Belloc. They do not encapsulate the astonishing breadth of his subject material, the depth of his thinking, or the extent of his energy. They form an incomplete jigsaw or a partial map, the cartography of which is not only imperfect through what it lacks but on which even what is visible is indistinct. Even more partial a map is fashioned by the works of Fr. McNabb.

McNabb wasn’t as great a writer as he was a thinker; and he wasn’t as great a thinker as he was a lover of God, and of His creation in an order to Him. Sometimes his mind moves too fast for his pen clearly to express his thoughts; and sometimes his thought is caught up in an emotion that, amidst all the hardness of his scholastic reasoning, yet retains strains of a vivid Irish sentimentalism.

Two of the essays in The Wayside particularly express, beyond his “book-learning,” the deep, unstinting charity he felt towards others—in respect of the non-conformist wool-weaver, Jane Seedcombe, and the convict, Patrick Glennon. An effulgent sensitivity in how he writes of others, seeing all those around him in the light of Christ, fills his work. The context of rustic Irish emotion in which his young Faith was nurtured reveals itself in some of these essays, which show a gentleness before beauty and an acuity of spirit before truth. In other essays, his mind fastens hawk-like on apologetic arguments and criticisms, and the condensing of logical argument becomes so great as occasionally to defy easy understanding.

Reading these essays, it is clear that their author was a man consumed by love for God and for his fellow man, and determined, in that charity, to oppose arguments and error that sought to dethrone Christ and take away from the people their rightful, loving King. For his task was to show God to all, in all that he wrote, said and did.

There was an old lady, bed-ridden, who lived in a tenement by Camden Lock. For years, someone came regularly to visit her, to talk to her and to tidy her room and scrub her floor. A few weeks after Fr. McNabb died, people who used to live nearby talked about how visits by this kind old lady had stopped. One of the bed-ridden lady’s best friends knew that this visitor had in fact been Fr. McNabb, in his homespun habit and cloak, on his way to Parliament Hill to speak at the Catholic Evidence Guild. Even his fellow friars hadn’t known about these visits. Such was the man who wrote this little, beguiling book.

Here is my interview with Michael about the book in which he offers other fascinating insights into McNabb and his connection to Belloc.

Mike Hennessy’s email: michael.hennessy4@btinternet.com

The Belloc Society Blog: thehilairebellocblog.blogspot.com/

And here is a talk by Mike Hennessy on Belloc’s love for wine!

Re-Published Series of Essays by Fr. Vincent McNabb O.P.

God’s Dealings with the Minds of Men: Essays in Biblical Inspiration, Mysticism, and the Imagination by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P., available online here.

Vincent McNabb, O.P. (1868-1943), is perhaps best known today as one of the fathers of the Catholic Land and Distributist movements. Irish by birth, he would join the English Province Dominicans as a young man and spend much of his life in England, where he became friends with another leader of the Distributist movement, G.K. Chesterton. He also spent periods living and teaching in the United States, and through this, as much as through his writing and close association with Chesterton, became known to American Catholics.

Less appreciated now is that McNabb, a well-rounded theologian steeped (as one might expect of a Dominican) in the works and method of St Thomas Aquinas, wrote extensively not just on agrarianism and economics, but on a wide range of issues. In this collection of essays, first published in 1903 under the title Where Believers May Doubt, he addresses subjects with which his name is no longer usually associated: the distinction between divine revelation and inspiration, the nature of mysticism, the challenges that imagination can pose for belief, and the relationship between theology and natural science. Some of these topics have been, and continue to be, the objects of contentious debate, and the insights that McNabb offers in regard to each of them remain relevant in the present day.

For example, the manner and extent to which modern historical-critical methods of approaching the Bible can be harmonized with the traditional approach to Sacred Scripture taken by the Church Fathers continue to be a live issue for Catholics. (No less a thinker than Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has seen fit to devote his attention to it in recent years.) McNabb ventures into these dangerous waters; the result is two thought-provoking essays on inspiration and revelation, in which he manages to avoid the excesses of an extreme literalism that would ignore the insights of modern scholarship, and of a critical approach that would compromise the Catholic Faith.

Another example: 20th-century Thomists Norris Clarke, S.J., and Cornelio Fabro, C.S.S., encouraged the creative retrieval of St Thomas in light of the data of modern science. Decades before either of them had begun his scholarly career, McNabb was endeavoring carefully to show the significance of St Thomas’s understanding of the Biblical account of creation to the possibility of reconciling the discoveries of modern science with the truths of divine revelation.

In other interventions, McNabb offers general principles that are readily applicable to the modern-day problem of how to re-evangelize an increasingly post-Christian culture. His essays on the topics of mysticism and the imagination are particularly relevant here.

At the conclusion of his essay on mysticism, McNabb laments the “sad dearth” in the modern age “of that truly Christian luxury, the Mysticism of Christ’s Saints.” The qualifier is important: one of the questions to which McNabb will turn his attention in the essay is that of how to distinguish between true and false mysticism.

In the first decades of the 21st century, mysticism of a sort is apparently not all that uncommon. According to a 2009 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49% of Americans surveyed reported having had “a religious or mystical experience, defined as a ‘moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.’ ” Yet the title of the report, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” should give Catholics pause. Distinguishing between true and false mysticism is no less imperative today than it was when McNabb’s essay was first published.

Imagination, too, is presently a topic of significance in the Catholic milieu. Many Catholics today regard beauty as a forgotten quality and insist that we must rediscover ways to harness its power so that creative Catholic can once again become cultural leaders in a secular world. In this way, it is envisaged, the Church will be able to draw people to the Faith by manifesting the glory of God in all things, and especially in the everyday aspects of life. For those invested in the rediscovery of beauty, discussions regarding the place of the “Catholic imagination” in artistic creativity are commonplace. All too often, the investigation of these questions is distorted and misdirected by an adoption, usually unconscious, on the part of the investigator of aspects of the Romantic ethos that still dominates the secular worldview. The result is an approach that overplays the role of emotion in creativity. This is common, in my experience, even for Catholics who would consider themselves orthodox, even traditionalist, in their faith, and who might even argue their point of view with the aid of scholastic terminology.

The approach of Fr McNabb is a refreshing antidote to this tendency. While he is interested in the positive role of the imagination in creativity, he is just as quick to warn against the possibility of its undermining right reason at the foundational level. This line of thinking leads him to some conclusions that may surprise the 21st-century reader—for instance, that “[o]ne of the most common triumphs of the imagination is the disdain felt for miracles.” This stands in stark contrast to the assertion that one frequently encounters today, that such disdain comes about for the opposite reason, due not to the use of an overly wild imagination, but to its suppression.

Similarly, for McNabb, a poem is a work not purely of the imagination, but—fundamentally—of reason. The imagination has a role to play in setting the poet off in the right direction, but it is right reason that ensures that he expresses what is true and, hence, beautiful. Some creatives today, Catholic and otherwise, may regard this judgment as a dismissal of the art of writing from one who is himself unimaginative, but that is not so. McNabb was a lover of poetry and wrote regularly and insightfully on the subject. His desire was to understand deeply, perhaps more deeply than some would appreciate, how the poet can create under the guidance of inspiration and use both the imagination and reason in harmony.

These are lessons that contemporary artists in any creative discipline would do well to learn.

You can view and order online here.