Herbert McCabe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Herbert McCabe (1926–2001) was a Dominican priest, theologian and philosopher. After studying chemistry and philosophy at Manchester University, he joined the Dominicans in 1949, where under Victor White he began his life-long study of the works of Thomas Aquinas.
He became editor of the journal New Blackfriars in 1965 but was removed in 1967 following a now-famous editorial in that journal in which he criticised the theologian Charles Davis for leaving the Church. Davis left the Catholic Church publicly, denouncing it as corrupt. McCabe countered that of course the Church was corrupt but that this was no reason to leave it. He was reinstated three years later, and began his editorial that month in characteristically combative style: "As I was saying, before I was so oddly interrupted..."
He spent many years teaching at Blackfriars, Oxford University, writing four books, The New Creation, a study of the Sacraments, in 1964; Law, Love and Language, on the centrality of language in ethics, in 1968; The Teaching of the Catholic Church, a short catechism, in 1986; and God Matters, a collection of his articles, in 1987.
He was a member of the Slant group and while firmly committed to Catholic orthodoxy, he was nonetheless unafraid to criticise what he perceived as erroneous presentations of the tradition, such as the ban on contraception in Humanae Vitae. He combined a commitment to the thought of Aquinas and Wittgenstein with a Marxist political stance.
Above all, however, McCabe was a brilliant preacher, who crafted his sermons with immense care and preached with intelligence and wit. A major theme of his was a caution against making God a god, of reducing the Creator to an object within this world. A selection of sermons, edited by Brian Davies, has been published under the title God, Christ and Us.
He was an acknowledged influence on the thought of Terry Eagleton and Alasdair MacIntyre.
