Social sciencesObituaryHerbert McCabe
Theologian, philosopher and radical supporter of ChristianityWith the death of Herbert McCabe at the age of 74, theology and philosophy in these islands have lost one of their most distinctive and radical controversial voices.
He often expressed a Chestertonian bafflement that the development of, for the most part, traditional and orthodox positions should be in the slightest controversial.
Born John Ignatius McCabe in Middlesbrough, the son of a teacher, he went to Manchester University to study chemistry, but switched to philosophy, much influenced by Dorothy Emmet.
At Manchester, he contributed to the largely Catholic journal Humanitas, whose guiding spirit, Walter Stein, helped form his abiding concern with the immorality of nuclear warfare. Among other close friends from that time were Louis Allen, Robert Markus and, a little later, Eric John.
He joined the Dominican Order (the Order of Preachers) in 1949, and with possibly deliberate irony was given the religious name Herbert, after a seventh-century Lakeland hermit.
While there were many lively and learned brethren, the climate of formation and study was decidedly arid, and it was only Victor White's lectures on Aquinas that fired him to his lifelong commitment to the Aristotelian roots of Aquinas's philosophy.
It was fitting that he was asked to translate the third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae on the knowing and naming of God, for he always emphasised that for Aquinas, philosophy can say nothing positively of the mystery of God. Investigation can only proceed by saying what God is not.
Along with several of his Dominican contemporaries, McCabe found in the later work of Wittgenstein a modern complement to the essentially social understanding of the human being in Aquinas - the mutual constitution of self and others in linguistic community.
In his innumerable talks and lectures, these insights were applied to the understanding of liturgy, sacraments (especially eucharistic presence) and politics.
He was ordained in 1955, and after three years in Newcastle went to found the Dominican house in Manchester. In the early 1960s, he joined fellow Dominican Laurence Bright and Neil Middleton of the publishers Sheed and Ward in founding the December Group, which met in that month to examine social issues from a Catholic stance independent of any official organisation.
By 1965, the group became, in effect, the annual conference of people associated with the Cambridge-based journal Slant. The political views expressed in Slant reflected a spectrum of left positions, but the phrase "Catholic Marxist" stuck and McCabe delighted in it.
He made no detailed study of Marxism. Since the early discussions of nuclear war he took sin to be an essentially social, or rather antisocial, matter. He favoured tough-minded explanations and followed Aquinas in openly considering materialist arguments in both philosophy and politics.
He viewed political power structures as the primary sources of sinfulness. The heart of his position was to find a balance between two views expounded in his Law, Love and Language (1968):
"The relevance of Christianity to human behaviour is primarily a matter of politics", and in the conclusion, "Like Peter and the 12 we remain Christians because there is nowhere else to go: if Christianity is not the revolution, nothing else is."
McCabe was ejected as editor of New Blackfriars in February 1967 for readily conceding Charles Davis's claim that, with the American Cardinal Spellman's support for the Vietnam war and the finagling of the Vatican commission an contraception, the Catholic church was "quite plainly corrupt".
Painful as it was, he saw the vow of obedience as a form of solidarity. Restored to the editorship in 1970, he memorably started his editorial: "As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted . . ." In 1989 he had the rare distinction of becoming a master of sacred theology in the order.
In his view, preaching was a form of talking, and the compelling conversational style of his writing - no footnotes, no bibliographies - follows from this. Though an immensely quick, tenacious, sometimes harsh debater, he never gave a sermon or talk except from a long-laboured-over text.
There was a restlessness to McCabe that went deeper than passionate inquiry and penetrating interest in people. There was a dark insecurity in his personality that he turned into incessant activity, which may come as a surprise to the thousands who listened to him or the many who spent hours and days in conversation with him.
In periods of silent meditation in public daily prayers he would read the bible or Aquinas. "We are not preaching brothers who pray; we are just preaching brethren, that's all. If prayer comes into it, well and good; if not, not" (God Matters, 1987).
Just as he invariably wore his Dominican habit for sermons and formal teaching, he needed the defensive/ offensive persona of the Irish Catholic Marxist that often infuriated others.
In his essay On Being Dominican, he wrote so truly of and from himself: "Being one of the brethren is the whole of our human identity."
Herbert (John Ignatius) McCabe, theologian and philosopher, born August 2 1926; died June 28 2001
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9paGiipaF8coKOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0etKomqKZnKiwqrHNnJys