Six of the seven chapters in this book give us the texts, ‘thoroughly revised and supplemented’, of a series of lectures Peter Geach delivered in Liechtenstein, at the International Academy for Philosophy, one each on heaven, human nature, consistency, truth telling, God as truth and finally God and goodness. In his customary beautiful prose these chapters, replete with detailed argument – as one would expect – gradually build up, or slowly reveal, what I hope it is not pretentious to call a whole world view: distinctively and unapologetically Christian, typically with more polemics against his co-religionists than against anyone else. They comprise a splendid distillation of the thought of a fine philosopher.

The other chapter, placed as Chapter 6, seems to me problematic. It was not one of the lectures. Rather, it was composed in response to a request for a paper from the senior boys of Shrewsbury School. It evidently mystified the audience: ‘its content turned out to have so many difficult sides to it that no boy ventured upon a quick response’, Geach tells us, though he notes that, as he was informed, ‘it provoked discussion afterwards’. It deals with ‘the truth of prophecy’, which is why he decided it would fit in after the two chapters on truth. It is certainly fun to read, at least if you know something about the mostly unnamed enemies, but frankly it covers far too much material and is often disjointed. One is not surprised that the school boys were perplexed. Even an audience of professional philosophers might have had some difficulty in seeing what might profitably be discussed.

Prophecies are often fulfilled, Geach says, whatever sceptical people these days say, citing with characteristic panache examples from the Bible, Byron, and Savonarola, on the way to attacking as ‘irrational’ and ‘frivolous’ the not uncommon view among modern Christian theologians that the predictions ascribed to Jesus Christ in the gospels were put in his mouth by the evangelists, after the events.

These (as he thinks) deeply misguided theologians are Geach’s principal target. He first considers instances of mistaken inferences from alleged allusions in other, non-biblical texts. He quotes the famous lines from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad in which the poet laureate of the day is crowned by the Goddess Dullness with a bird, ‘a monster of a fowl’—‘Something betwixt a Heidegger and owl’. This Heidegger (sometimes cited by Karl Barth) was a Swiss theologian: a Calvinist whose doctrine Pope, a Roman Catholic, apparently disliked, so Geach says. Geach’s point is that, by the year 3000, scholars might think that ‘enemies of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’, regarding him as ‘a paradigm of dullness’, had corrupted Pope’s text ‘in order to have a bash at Heidegger’—which would be an example of a wrong inference.

Coming from the philosopher who famously made a good deal, many years ago, of Heidegger’s alleged doctrine that ‘the nothing noths’, I guess that this illustration of mistaken inference was all meant as a joke that would amuse the sixth formers. If so, it is all rather galumphing. ‘Dullness’, anyway, is not exactly what even enemies would see as Heidegger’s most characteristic feature: obscurity, lunacy, or whatever, but not dullness. Since, according to Geach, Martin Heidegger ‘spent the last years of his life in Switzerland’, we may assume (I think) that his knowledge of Heidegger’s work is as fallible as that of his biography.

The next paragraph jokes that an allusion in Alice in Wonderland might easily be taken as an allusion to the Dreyfus affair: if you know the dates, you know this could not be the case. One doubts if the schoolboys knew anything about Dreyfus and even, nowadays, if they were as familiar with Alice as Geach’s generation of analytic philosophers assume.

These examples, anyway, are only meant to show how people are inclined to ‘accept weak arguments for redating of documents’. The enemy is, obviously, the biblical scholar who claims that the predictions of the fall of the Temple (and suchlike) were all attributed to Jesus only after the Temple was destroyed. The problem with such scholars is their ‘strange reluctance to accept fulfilled prophecy as a fact’. Indeed, Geach contends, there are biblical scholars who ‘insinuate, or even boldly state, that the prophets of ancient Israel were not concerned with predicting the future fate of Israel and the coming of Messiah’, and who claim instead that the prophets were concerned ‘just with social evils and their remedies’. Even ‘the most casual reading of the Old Testament’ shows how totally false this conception of Old Testament prophecy is.

This is all a bit quick. The fact is, obviously, that the prophets of ancient Israel (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel, Amos, and so on, at least) often inveigh against social evils, though of course it would be silly to say that this is all that they do, if that is what these unnamed modern theologians claim.

There is no problem about having knowledge of the future: Geach returns to philosophical mode, citing Wittgenstein—‘there is one way in which any normal human being has knowledge of the future: each knows what he or she is immediately going to do’. Of course, as he goes on to say, this platitude is open to ‘philosophical attack’ by the usual ‘sceptical ploy’. However, as Thomas Aquinas says, as bearers of the image of God, each of us is, ‘in this little sphere’, ‘lord by knowledge and power’.

This leads to quite a lengthy consideration of God as ‘the Grand Master who has everything under control’. The ‘greatest difficulty’ about this conception of God is that, among events prophesied in the gospels, some turned out to be ‘specific sins by individuals’ (Judas’s betrayal of Christ, Simon Peter’s threefold denial), which raises the question of why the ‘Grand Master’ did not foresee and prevent these sinful acts. Well, we are like drunks at a party: we only dimly see what is going on. We just cannot understand sin. But one move we can make, Geach thinks: we must abandon the Free Will Defence: the claim in standard theodicy that God cannot create free creatures that are responsible for each other’s well being and yet rule out their doing wrong and even doing evil. Not at all, Geach says (rightly, to my mind, though very summarily): free choices need not lie between good and evil, we often have a free choice between two good courses where it would not be wrong to choose either. ‘So the Free Will defence utterly fails’.

On the other hand, ‘we can see in part why sin in general should be allowed’. Certain virtues, for example, such as the courage of martyrs, could not exist without their opposites. Mainly, however, since any event has multiple descriptions, we may hope that ‘where all is made clear’ – ‘as King Alfred said’ – ‘we shall see how the wickedest human acts have aspects under which they are positively willed by God’.

It is surprising that the schoolboys did not ask here about the ’Holocaust’ but perhaps Geach moved on much too quickly to the next target in his sottisier: people who use ‘a panoply of physicists’ terms’ as ‘the conjuror’s patter’ in order to maintain that the future is fully determinate. They cannot keep this up, Geach contends, citing ‘Thomist writers like Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange’ as affirming inconsistently that ‘there may be two contingently future propositions of which neither is “determinately” true’, while ‘God does know … which is in fact true’. Not at all, Geach thinks: ‘The Grand Master’s knowledge … would not exclude variable lines of play by human players, but would be adequate to cope with any moves they made’.

Geach concludes by drawing attention to John Buchan’s ‘excellent novel’, The Gap in the Curtain, in which human beings are imagined as sometimes glimpsing the fixed future: ‘Such fiction is harmless so long as it is not taken seriously; otherwise that way madness lies’. In fact, ‘in this life we have real choices’. Geach commends Churchill for using ‘the fine phrase: “the hinge of fate”’. ‘In reality the hinge of fate is human free will. On that hinge a door may turn, to open and then perhaps to shut for ever; and it may be a door to heaven or to Hell’.

These concluding sentences might awe more than a clever sixth former to silence. It is surely clear, from this summary, that this particular chapter covers far too much ground, raises too many difficult issues which are never teased out or patiently explored, alludes casually to figures unlikely to be familiar to many readers (‘Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange’), and appeals to a ‘Grand Master’ conception of God—all of which, cumulatively, makes it hard to see where to get into the conversation. Geach’s concern in this paper is with issues in recent Christian theology: specifically with wrongheaded, ‘fashionable’, even ‘heretical’ views (as he would say) that he believes are propagated by unnamed influential theologians, no doubt mostly Roman Catholic.

Each of the other six chapters concentrates on a single theme, clearly worked out; there are frequent semi-covert attacks on the stupidities of modern theologians but the main conclusion is always that what is taken to be the correct philosophical view is verified or fulfilled in some relevant Christian position or doctrine.

Chapter 1 (‘Truth, Love and Immortality’) begins from the book which Geach wrote many years ago about the great Cambridge philosopher J. McT. E. McTaggart: indeed, as he tells us, the original draft dates back to 1939. In that book, Geach tells us, he sought to expound McTaggart’s views without committing himself to accepting or rejecting any of them. In this essay he wants to bring out what is correct in McTaggart’s philosophy. There are two matters about which McTaggart is absolutely right. First of all, Geach explains the ‘general ontology’ in McTaggart’s magnum opus The Nature of Existence, because a ‘thorough knowledge of it saved me from many endemic errors of English philosophy’. Roughly speaking, McTaggart saved Geach from logical atomism: ‘McTaggart utterly dismissed the idea of a “bare particular” which the mind can discern under the characteristics it wears, as a lady is naked under her clothes; taught by him, I have always rejected various allied notions, like that of the “pure ego” which has no mental states in its constitution because it is their “owner”!’

This provides an interesting sketch of the historical origins of Geach’s distinctive philosophical position. He goes on to list McTaggart’s main errors: ‘he disbelieved in God, in the reality of time, in the freedom of the will, and in the reality of matter’. But the second debt Geach owes to McTaggart is the belief that it could be shown philosophically to be a rational object of hope that ‘we shall obtain an eternal life of love, which he even often called Heaven’. McTaggart’s atheism, in other words, did not get in the way of his developing his view that all actual existence is timeless: ‘what seems to us to be successive experiences are, in his language, fragmentary perceptions, which do not really succeed one another but coexist with a total experience that subsumes and transcends them’. His conception of timeless experience, Geach contends, ‘the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons’, is effectively, ‘in a way that we cannot now begin to understand’, ‘the beatific vision’. Unsurprisingly, McTaggart was greatly impressed by the first Epistle of St John and the emphasis therein on an eternal life of love.

In practice, not without a few swipes at C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers—self appointed Christian apologists as Geach would no doubt think, Geach develops a remarkable account of the traditional Catholic doctrine of the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity which, he maintains, is a verification of McTaggart’s description of heaven: ‘we shall know nothing but our beloved, and those they love, and ourselves as loving them, and only in this shall we seek and find satisfaction’ (McTaggart’s words). McTaggart had mystical experiences, Geach reminds us, which ‘came to him unsought and quite unpredictably’: ‘these made him see the whole universe as a world of love’. He saw his vocation as a philosopher as seeking to validate by metaphysical arguments the truth he had grasped intuitively. Indeed, at the end of the Trinity College manuscript of McTaggart’s book, Geach says, these words in faint pencil may be discerned: ‘Heart of my heart, have I done well?’

Geach plainly believes that McTaggart came close to the ‘heart’ of orthodox Christianity. The ‘Victorian rationalist background’, the ‘muscular Christianity’, and so on, which was his only experience of actual Christian practice, prevented him from discovering how his metaphysical intuitions of eternity were anticipated in traditional Christian belief in the beatific vision. In short, what Geach is saying in this chapter is that the work of the atheist philosopher McTaggart offers a much sounder introduction to central Christian hopes about love, eternity, and beatific vision, than (by implication) much modern Christian apologetics.

Chapter 2 – ‘What is man?’ – defends the traditional definition of human beings as ‘rational animals’. What our rationality means is that we have ‘a capacity to acquire capacities’ (a phrase Geach borrows from Anthony Kenny, himself spelling out what Thomas Aquinas says). Geach dismisses those who claim that dolphins are rational, apes can be taught to speak, and so forth, arguing instead that solicitude for other species makes sense only ‘if man is God’s viceroy on Earth … it makes no sense at all if man is just one more species struggling for survival among others’. What we ought to reflect on is the ‘wonder’, the ‘miracle’, of the coming into existence of any single rational animal, any new baby: ‘In old language, the human rational soul is not developed but created’. Geach comes out with some curiously Heideggerian or anyway Gadamerian thoughts: ‘Man alone has a world; an animal has only an environment’.

Chapter 3 – ‘Consistency’ – defends the value of a certain ‘inconsistency of theoretical judgement’: it at least saves us ‘from going the full length in drawing conclusions from false premises’. Geach commends the ‘very demanding work’ in modern logic on consistency proofs. which allows him to note that many philosophers are ill informed about their importance; Richard Swinburne, for one, ‘has no real grasp of the distinction between nonsense and self-contradiction, and is quite unaware of the nature and difficulty of consistency proofs’. No substantial evidence is offered for this judgment. But, here again, Geach’s interest is primarily in a theological matter: ‘in life and character’, there is a place for inconsistency. Without ever quite saying so, he is attacking Thomas Aquinas’s thesis of the unity of the virtues, an attack he has conducted with greater vigour and transparency in previous writings. Indeed it is not quite clear what happens here with respect to Aquinas. As Geach says, according to Aquinas even people who lack charity can do some good, such as ‘cultivating the soil and defending their country’ (actually: ‘working the fields, drinking, eating , having friends and suchlike’, cf Summa Theologiae 1a 2ae q109 article 5); we do not need to say that they are ‘totally depraved, and all they plan or say or do, however fair seeming, is evil continually’. Right enough: yet though Aquinas does not speak of ‘total depravity’ he certainly says that such activities in no way bring people to eternal life: ‘Such activities good of their kind are of themselves unavailing towards salvation and the vision of God; but they are not on that account wicked activities’. Right enough, one wants to say; but Aquinas’s position surely requires some discussion: what is this notion of friendship which is supposed to be possible in the absence of charity? Clearly Geach wishes to steer between Pelagianism and doctrines of ‘total depravity’; but here he surely needs to say a little more about the relationship between nature and grace as Aquinas presents it.

In chapter 4, Geach argues that, since ‘epistemically no man is an island’, ‘life could not be carried on unless lying and fraud were the exception rather than the rule’; and in chapter 5 that we must ‘reject out of hand any religion whose god or gods were supposed capable of deceit’. This conclusion seems less than exciting: after all, which is the religion in which we are happy to worship gods who deceive us? It is a disappointing conclusion after the excellent pages on Frege: ‘Criticism of Frege’s mature view is often superficial, put across by people whose logical insight is incomparably dimmer than his’. To be specific: ‘Anyone who holds, for example, that a sentence is neither true nor false unless it is used to make an assertion is unworthy even to read Frege, let alone criticise him’ (Vintage Geach!) On the other hand, Geach contends, it was a serious error on Frege’s part to abandon his previous insight that the content of an expression must be the content of a possible judgement. Indeed, in saying that in judging everyone recognises two entities, the True and the False, Frege opened up what Geach calls ‘logical Manichaeanism’. His own view, in contrast, is that in all judging there is an endeavour to orient one’s mind to one thing, namely truth. Here Geach indicates his debt to Anselm’s de Veritate: ‘all truths thought and uttered are oriented, however lowly the subject matter … to the unique Thing that is Truth’. We are on the verge of a proof of the existence of God.

Chapter 7 – the concluding chapter – simply begins with God’s goodness, ‘the source of all goodness’. In effect this chapter is a reconstrual of Thomas Aquinas on divine simplicity and goodness. The main point on which Geach insists here is that we ‘get a wholly false image of God’s goodness if we think of it as a morally good disposition which regularly chooses good courses of action and rejects bad ones’. Here we return to unnamed theologians who suppose that God does ‘have a range of emotional affects’ . On the whole Geach is content to repeat Aquinas, whose discussion of God’s goodness takes place in the middle of a discussion of the way God is not. What is to be said positively, Geach concludes, takes us to Hobbes, who said that the reward promised in the beatific vision is one that ‘we shall no sooner know than enjoy’; and then to an anecdote from Bishop Challoner’s memoirs of his time as a missionary in Australia—the tale of a man being hanged but the rope broke; he recovered, ran back on the scaffold and told the sheriff that ‘If you had seen that which I have just now seen, you would be as eager to die as I am now’—so with a stronger rope round his neck he was sent to ‘see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living’.

With that tale the chapter and the book concludes, very much in Geach’s provocative and unsettling style.