Herbert McCabe OP
More than one of McCabe’s sermons ends with something like this summary of the heart of the Christian faith: "For God the Father, through his Son, is even now sending us the Holy Spirit so that we shall ourselves live that life of love and joy for eternity." That formula returns us to the main point of McCabe’s ethics. Ethics does more then help us make choices in difficult situations; it helps us to discover the deep meaning of life, a meaning deeper than our superficial wants and desires. The job of ethics is to aid us in discovering and living out the deepest desires of our fleshly, human hearts. And that deepest desire, the end of all our lives, turns out to be nothing other than sharing the life of God available to us through the body of the man Jesus and the Spirit whom he sent. - from Don‘t talk nonsense: Why Herbert McCabe Still Matters by by L. Roger Owens, The Christian Century, January 25, 2005.
I'm still thinking about virtue ethics, and someone kindly recommended I look at Herbert McCabe's book, Law, Love and Language. I don't know if I'll get to the book, but not knowing anything about Herbert McCabe, I looked him up - what an interesting guy! Here's a little from Wikipedia ......
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Herbert McCabe (1926–2001) was a Dominican priest, theologian and philosopher .....
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 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 applications of the tradition, such as the ban on contraception in Humanae Vitae, and the reservation of priestly ordination to men. He combined a commitment to the thought of Aquinas and Wittgenstein with a socialist political stance, influenced by Marxism .....
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Here's a bit about prayer from one of his books ......
"For real absolute waste of time you have to go to prayer. I reckon that more than 80 percent of our reluctance to pray consists precisely in our dim recognition of this and our neurotic fear of wasting time, of spending part of our life in something that in the end gets you nowhere, something that is not merely non-productive, non-money-making, but is even non-creative, it doesn't even have the justification of art and poetry. It is an absolute waste of time, it is a sharing into the waste of time which is the interior life of the Godhead. God is not in himself productive or creative. Sure he takes time to throw off a creation, to make something, to achieve something, but the real interior life of the Godhead is not in creation, it is in the life of love which is in the Trinity, the procession of Son from Father and of the Spirit from this exchange. God is not first of all our creator or any kind of maker, he is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly. It is into this worthless activity that we enter in prayer. This, in the end, is what makes sense of it."
- p. 75, God Still Matters
To learn more about him, see the article in The Christian Century I linked to above, and you can read one of his homilies online - The Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) (C), 14 June 2001
I'm still thinking about virtue ethics, and someone kindly recommended I look at Herbert McCabe's book, Law, Love and Language. I don't know if I'll get to the book, but not knowing anything about Herbert McCabe, I looked him up - what an interesting guy! Here's a little from Wikipedia ......
**********
Herbert McCabe (1926–2001) was a Dominican priest, theologian and philosopher .....
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 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 applications of the tradition, such as the ban on contraception in Humanae Vitae, and the reservation of priestly ordination to men. He combined a commitment to the thought of Aquinas and Wittgenstein with a socialist political stance, influenced by Marxism .....
**************
Here's a bit about prayer from one of his books ......
"For real absolute waste of time you have to go to prayer. I reckon that more than 80 percent of our reluctance to pray consists precisely in our dim recognition of this and our neurotic fear of wasting time, of spending part of our life in something that in the end gets you nowhere, something that is not merely non-productive, non-money-making, but is even non-creative, it doesn't even have the justification of art and poetry. It is an absolute waste of time, it is a sharing into the waste of time which is the interior life of the Godhead. God is not in himself productive or creative. Sure he takes time to throw off a creation, to make something, to achieve something, but the real interior life of the Godhead is not in creation, it is in the life of love which is in the Trinity, the procession of Son from Father and of the Spirit from this exchange. God is not first of all our creator or any kind of maker, he is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly. It is into this worthless activity that we enter in prayer. This, in the end, is what makes sense of it."
- p. 75, God Still Matters
To learn more about him, see the article in The Christian Century I linked to above, and you can read one of his homilies online - The Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) (C), 14 June 2001
posted by crystal | 6:47 PM
2 Comments:
Hey, that this posting cost me money :). I read some of it to Susannah who ten brought your site up on her computer, searched the internet and now has ordered two books by McCabe. She and I will probably be looking for more. He sounds fascinating, and from what little I have read so far, his ideas are much the same as mine, but much better expressed and more eloquently stated.
I need to thank you for pointing his works out to us. My wife and I both consider you a valuable resource for pointing out good, but not always well known authors and their books. This is not the first time such has happened, and I doubt that it will be the last. We own you a lot.
Again, thanks, and hope all is well with you and Kermit.
Hugs,
Mike L
Mike,
Thanks for the kind words. I can't take any credit, though. It's always someone else making a recommendation to me that leads me to these books - in this case it was James Alison.
Kermit is doing pretty well, thanks . I hope you guys are well too :)
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