Father Vincent McNabb in the Field

Extract

In a noble tribute to the late Hilaire Belloc at the Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral last year Monsignor Knox spoke in passing of Father Vincent McNabb—the champion-in-arms and inspiration of Belloc and Chesterton and the brilliant group of Catholics among whom they moved; ‘Father Vincent’, he said, ‘who has left us so little record of his splendid gifts’. Some of us could not help wondering what exactly the preacher meant by that little aside. Was it an appraisement of Father Vincent’s thirty-eight published books and the many pamphlets and articles which he buried in the back numbers of innumerable journals and reviews? Perhaps it only meant that Father Vincent has left us no great massive work of primary importance, accepted as a permanent contribution to knowledge. His acute mind, extraordinary capacity for original thought, and the vital intellectual energy he poured into everything he did would seem to have made such a magnum opus possible. His two earliest books on Faith and Prayer (recently republished in one volume) showed promise that his theological writing might have developed on the highest classical level. Those who knew him may be inclined to say that he was too much the poet and artist to be tied down to technical theology and that anyhow his romantic temperament gave another bent to his genius. But whatever the explanation, although there is so much that is profound, original and stimulating in his published writings, he has left us no full-length, sustained study comparable to one or other of the major works of Cardinal Newman. He has given us no Apologia or Summa.