Don't talk nonsense; why Herbert McCabe still matters

Christian Century, Jan 25, 2005 by L. Roger Owens

Law, Love and Language. By Herbert McCabe, O.P Continuum, 215 pp., $24.95 paperback.

God Matters. By Herbert McCabe, O.P Continuum, 264 pp., $15.95 paperback.

God Still Matters. By Herbert McCabe, O.P, edited by Brian Davies, O.P Continuum, 256 pp., $29.95 paperback.

God, Christ and Us. By Herbert McCabe, O.P, edited by Brian Davies, O.P Continuum, 224 pp., $21.95 paperback.

THOUGH HE WAS ONE of the most significant English theologians of the 20th century, influencing such figures as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and literary critic Terry Eagleton, Herbert McCabe, O.P. (1926-2001), has had relatively little impact in the U.S. That may be about to change with the republication of two of his early books, Law, Love and Language and God Matters, and the posthumous publication of a collection of essays, God Still Matters, and a book of sermons, God, Christ and Us.

Those of us on this side of the Atlantic have every reason to be glad. McCabe's theology merits attention not only because of its wit ("The reason why it is hard for me to envisage a Coke and frankfurter becoming the body of Christ is that I have difficulty imagining them as food in the first place") but also because of the care and precision with which he treats difficult questions. Theology needs such precision of language if it is going to do what McCabe thinks it should do: theology "is not concerned with trying to say what God is but in trying to stop us talking nonsense."

McCabe joined the Dominican order, the Order of Preachers, in 1949 at age 23. Having studied chemistry and philosophy at Manchester University, he was ready for the rigorous training he received under the tutelage of Victor White and other Dominican scholars. From his teachers and from his own careful reading of Aquinas, MeCabe learned that there "is no God who is a being, an item in the universe, a rival person; there is just the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe itself, the mystery at the heart of my being myself. In Christ, says St. Thomas, we are united to God as to an unknown."

The next two decades were a time of rapid cultural change. The situation in Northern Ireland was increasingly tense. Liberation theology was beginning to blossom in the Third World. The tragedy (and the sin, from McCabe's perspective) of the war in Vietnam loomed on the horizon. By 1965, when McCabe became editor of New Blackfriars, the Dominican journal of culture and philosophy, he had begun to combine his knowledge of Aquinas with a commitment to radical politics on behalf of the poor--a kind of politics he learned from both Marx and Jesus. He was sacked as editor of New Blackfriars in 1967 for remarking in one of his widely anticipated monthly editorials that the church "is quite plainly corrupt." After his reinstatement three years later he began his first editorial, "As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted."

Christianity is not just about saving souls, McCabe insisted, recalling Aquinas's claim that "my soul is not me." Humans are embodied creatures, and God's future kingdom will be no less bodily. And for McCabe, ethics is not about distinguishing between right and wrong--a model still popular in areas like medical ethics and Catholic moral theology. Ethics, rather, is more like literary criticism. It helps us to grasp and thus live the deeper meaning of our embodied lives, lives which find their fulfillment in sharing the life, the bodily life, of Jesus.

In the late 1960s McCabe challenged the influence of situation ethics (see Law, Love and Language, first published in 1968). For the situationists, moral rules are simply rules of thumb, rules which should be broken in favor of doing the loving thing in the concrete situation. Love trumps any rule. Situation ethics opposes any absolutist ethic that might say, for example, "It is always wrong to lie no matter what the situation." Obviously, said the situationists, one should not lie habitually; nevertheless, in some situations, lying is the most loving thing to do. For example, it is right to lie in order to save Jews from the Nazis. (Most of the time the arguments weren't about lying but about sex.)

McCabe's response to this approach to ethics shows the importance he gave to language. He notes with regard to the language of moral absolutes that "it is quite important to notice that being absolutely wrong is not the same as being very very wrong. A man might hold that lying is absolutely wrong while at the same time regarding it as often a rather trivial offense. All that 'absolutely' says is that whatever makes it wrong is independent of circumstances." Whether these kinds of absolutes exist was (and still is) precisely the debate.

It is true, McCabe says, that love is a basic moral concept. And he agrees that the word "love" is in some sense related to context. What counts as a loving act and how we recognize one will depend on our own biographies--whether, for instance, we were loved as a child. "Love" is a word one learns to use over the history of one's life, and in this respect it is unlike the word "tree." Once you've got "tree" down, you've got it.