Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
These lines evoke about my earliest memory of Davis McCaughey. They are the refrain to ‘Long-Legged Fly’, a poem by W. B. Yeats, and were recited by McCaughey to the motley group of hairy students who attended his Sunday poetry evenings in The Lodge, when he was Master of Ormond College in the University of Melbourne. Yeats makes several surprise appearances in this book, indicating two particular strands of continuity in McCaughey’s thought, his trust in the Irish poetic inheritance, and his skill at bringing the past to bear on the future.
Wherever we meet McCaughey in these papers, his voice is confident, measured, considered. His argument is presented in a characteristically inclusive manner, each essential idea left open for our reflection. There is nothing forced, but he is regularly forceful. The direction of each piece—whether lecture, article, sermon, or eulogy—is handled with seeming ease, though the scale of the material he controls is sometimes grand and multifarious. His rare digressions are ever vital to the context. Fearless in support of his own assertions, McCaughey still keeps asking questions. Assertion very often leads to ‘an overwhelming question’, not so often the other way around. He is not in doubt about what he says, but allows us to keep uncertainty as well as certainty in our own minds. He respects his reader. The editors praise his ‘unyielding rigour’ and ‘lightness of touch’. Other pleasing features of the McCaughey style are a soundness of purpose, a defiant clarity, and an elevating irony.
McCaughey’s writings are intended for public speech. The content is never self-indulgent or trivialising. They are models of logical argument, leavened by a disarming sensitivity towards his listeners. ‘This leads to the third and last observation with which I shall weary you,’ he says, after a lengthy paper of closely reasoned lucidity. In discussing Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue he warns, ‘MacIntyre must not be held responsible for my use or abuse of his thought.’
The editors draw attention to ‘the effortless transition into poetry or literature’ in McCaughey’s theological writing. This is his practised art, but also displays his intuitive championing of literary criticism in theology and biblical studies, a movement that gained speed mid-century and today is a minimum requirement. He knows that ‘Christianity has been a great literary event’. Literary critical readings of the Bible, literature as a means to