Father Herbert McCabe, the Dominican theologian, shaped a whole generation of radical Catholic thought. He was one of the most colourful, audacious, brilliantly original figures in an English Dominican province which saw its role as interpreting the Christian gospel in the light of contemporary knowledge.
John Ignatius McCabe was born in Middlesborough in 1926. He studied chemistry and then philosophy at Manchester University, where he was a leading light in a circle of politically aware young intellectuals which included the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre. He joined the English Dominican order in 1949 and was ordained in 1955, taking Herbert as his religious name with what one suspects was a touch of self-irony.
After a brief spell in Manchester, he was posted to Cambridge in 1965 as editor of the Dominican journal New Blackfriars, which he turned into a vital focus of theological and political debate in the wake of the second Vatican Council.
From the editorial chair, he called for the abandonment of nuclear weapons, inveighed against the US enterprise in Vietnam, and as a friend of John Hume and other Irish politicians took a keen, constructive interest in the Northern Troubles. In an editorial on celibacy, he acknowledged quite freely that he had several times very much wanted to go to bed with someone.
In 1967, McCabe was ejected from the editorship of the journal, and briefly suspended from the priesthood, for an editorial on the departure from the English Catholic church of its leading theologian, Father Charles Davis. Ironically, McCabe's editorial actually defended the Church against Davis's strictures, but managed to scandalise Rome even so by describing the ecclesiastical establishment as "corrupt".
Hounded by the press, McCabe took refuge in Dublin, where members of the staff of this newspaper comforted him with double whiskeys in the Palace bar and loyally denied all knowledge of his whereabouts to blood-sniffing London hacks.
Readmitted discreetly to the editorial chair of New Blackfriars in 1970, he began his first editorial with the words: "As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted..." He was a wit and ranconteur in a venerable Irish tradition, a devotee of ironies, delighted collector of pompous absurdities, and penner of terse Chestertonian paradoxes. His theological writing resounds with such aphorisms: "God's an animal - more exactly, the Word made flesh"; "Jesus died of being human"; "Christ is present in the eucharist as the meaning is present in a word"; "If you don't love, you're dead, and if you do they'll kill you".
A lover of Aquinas who could be ferociously sardonic about modish, clap-happy Christians, McCabe's thought was radical precisely because of his loyalty to orthodoxy and tradition, not despite it. He saw that there was much in tradition which was deeply subversive of the present.
At the centre of his faith was the image of a failed, reviled, first-century political criminal whose execution was a grim sign of how far the powers of this world will go when their interests are threatened. For him, God was a matter of weakness rather than power. When we spoke of him (or "she", as he sometimes casually referred to the Almighty in his sermons), we literally could not know what we were talking about. His thought thus joined a long Irish tradition of negative theology whose source was the great medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena.
It was a characteristic McCabian irony, then, that the volume which he edited for the great edition of Aquinas published by the English Dominicans was entitled Knowing and Naming God. His other books were The New Creation, the dazzlingly original Law, Love and Language, and a collection of his essays and sermons entitled God Matters. In the 1980s he was invited by the hierarchy of England and Wales to rewrite the catechism, and his lucid, witty, humane interpretation of the Catholic faith won him thousands of grateful readers impatient with packagings of the gospel which insulted both their intelligence and their sense of human decency.
His answer to the question "How can we offend against chastity?" begins, with perfect theological orthodoxy, "By disliking sex".
A year before his death, he suffered a serious fall late at night in the Oxford Dominican house, and was saved by a passing young novice who broke his fall. McCabe later remarked that it was a miracle that there was anyone in the house at that time who was both awake and sober. He "died" briefly on the operating table, and on discovering later that the English Dominicans were compiling a collection of obituaries of their recently deceased brethren, demanded inclusion on the strength of his sojourn in eternity.
He was to die in earnest on June 28th. His memorial service in Oxford included a poetry reading from Seamus Heaney, and a Spanish revolutionary song sung by his blue-denimed, wild bearded, 80-year-old brother Bernard, a Joyce expert. Herbert would have been enraged that the event had been arranged at just the time when, owing to other pressing engagements, he was unable to be present.
T.E.