Herbert McCabe > Quotes

“If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“Revolution is not intelligible and certainly not reasonable within the thought forms and language of this current world; revolution requires faith. When he speaks of the new world, the world to come, the revolutionary cannot describe it as a change of conditions within this world which, upon calculation, will be found to be preferable, he can only speak in parables, hoping that he will awaken his listener to share his vision and faith.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters

“The story of Jesus is nothing other than the Triune life of God projected onto our history, or enacted sacramentally in our history, so that it becomes our story . . . I use the word projected in the sense that we project a film onto a screen. If it is a smooth silver screen you see the film simply in itself. If the screen is twisted in some way, you get a systematically distorted image of the film. Now imagine a film projected not on a screen but on a rubbish dump. The story of Jesus—which in its full extent is the entire Bible—is the projection of the trinitarian life of God on the rubbish dump that we have made of the world . . . That the Trinity looks like a story of (is a story of) rejection, torture and murder but also of reconciliation is because it is being projected on, lived out on, our rubbish [heap]; it is because of the sin of the world.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters

“... if we are to see the order of nature as a kind of story, then there has to be some kind of intelligence, some kind of wisdom, some kind of storyteller that makes it a story. There must be some kind of singer that sings this song. Not, of course, with our particular human, linguistic kind of intelligence and wisdom and singing, but with something analogous to these ... I want to appropriate the word "God" ... and use it to refer to the wisdom by which the world is a story, the singer by which nature is not just sound and fury but music. What I refer to as God is not any character in the drama of the universe but the author of the universe, the mystery of wisdom which we know of but cannot begin to understand, the wisdom that is the reason why there is a harmony called the universe which we can just stumblingly begin to understand. Our lives are a subplot in the story of the universe, but that story is not one we can comprehend, and it is one that often puzzles us and troubles us and sometimes outrages us. But it is a story. And I say this not because I have FAITH, or BELIEVE it, but simply because I cannot believe that existence is a tale told by an idiot. If I were to tell you what I believe, I would tell you much more. I would tell you that by the gift of faith I believe ... that the wisdom which made this drama so loved his human characters that he become one himself to share their lives; he chose to be a character in the story, to share their hopes and fears and suffering and death.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“The societal and political manifestation of disbelief (of belief that we make ourselves and are only what we make ourselves) is, of course, the world of liberal individualism - the world of isolated individuals asserting their freedom against each other. And, of course, if this is what society is like, you need a state whose job it is to control and limit the freedom of its citizens. The world that believes in the autonomous free individual also has to believe in the bureaucratic state. Society is seen as a perpetual struggle between these two - sometimes emphasizing the individual, sometimes the collective. But all this is the world of disbelief, the world without God.

This is the world from which Jesus came to redeem us, to give us faith in his Father's love so that we do not need to assert ourselves and our innocence and our lightness, so that we can relax and confess the truth about ourselves, so that we stop judging ourselves and others, because we know that it doesn't matter: God loves us anyway, so that we are liberated enough to risk being vulnerable to others - liberated enough to risk loving and being loved by others, liberated enough to know that we belong to each other because we belong to God. In that world we will not cling fanatically to particular formulas and doctrines simply because they are our security, any more than we cling to our own righteousness. We can be relaxed either way. In such a world a belief that we are called to share in divine life, and do already share in it, can go with a clear awareness of our own weakness and inadequacy and sin. And in such a world believing in God's love can go with a critical awareness of the weakness and inadequacy of our ways of expressing it. Our belief can, and indeed must, go with a certain kind of searching and questioning, a certain kind of doubt. Faith will exclude doubt altogether only when it ceases to be faith and becomes the vision of the eternal love which is God.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“[I]t seems to me that what we often call atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters

“In metaphor we say what we mean, but we don't mean what we say. In analogy we mean what we say, but we don't know what we mean.”
― Herbert McCabe

“We have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“The divine life does indeed grow in us even on earth, but we never reach full maturity; we never dispense with faith until we actually see God face to face. Now the question is: what is the relation between this divine life (and divine knowledge that we call faith) and human life (and human knowledge)? Some people have held that they are actually opposed to each other. You know that kind of person who thinks that you can't be a saint unless you're very slightly ill; this sort of person tends also to think that you can't have faith unless what you believe is humanly incredible. They think of faith not as a matter of knowing or of learning, but rather as a matter of courage, a leap into the unknown, a quixotic championing of the absurd. Now faith is certainly a leap into the unknown in the sense that what you believe is something that cannot be known by ordinary human power. But it is a leap which precisely tries to make this known. It is not a rejection of knowledge, it is an effort to know more - to get to know more by trusting in a teacher.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“The object of theology is to see the traditional teachings of the church as a unified whole, unified around the gospel that God loves us. Only when we see what the church teaches about sin or grace or the eucharist or the Trinity as all part of a revelation of the love of God - only when we see this - do we begin to understand these doctrines. And the only way to see this is to question them and to question our understanding of them.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“Think some more about the very young child. First of all, her faith that she is loved is not something that she works out by assessing her world and coming to a conclusion. It is something given, taken for granted (in the literal sense). Indeed, if it is not granted, if she is deprived of the belief that she is loved, she will not even be able to assess her world at all. She will go more or less crazy.

The child doesn't arrive at or achieve her belief that she is loved. It is a precious gift which is just there, like the gift of life itself. But it can, of course, be destroyed. It is notoriously possible for adults, and especially parents, to erode a child's faith, to leave the child insecure and uncertain that she is loved, uncertain therefore of her own value, uncertain that she matters. The love of parents, and later of other friends may fail; they may betray us. Indeed, I think we have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“In our world 'justice' has come to mean simply fairness, paying what you owe, fulfilling your obligations, obeying the law. And this is an excellent thing. But it is not a fundamental thing. When the Bible speaks of justice, tsedech or dikaiosune, it means first the generosity of God, the righteousness of God: the generosity conveyed to us in the Son of God, who was ready to be killed for the sake of sharing fully in our humanity, a generosity in which we have been allowed and called to share, so that we can live with each other not just by fairness and strict obligation but by friendship, so that we give each other space to be, so that we can live in what Paul calls 'the freedom of the glory of the children of God' (Rom. 8.21).”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“I should say that there is such a thing as arrested development in human things (and a very bad thing it is) when people refuse to think for themselves and look around for some human authority to tell them what to think. Such people are afraid of the responsibilities of growing up. They want to remain children for ever - like the loathsome Peter Pan. What is wrong with such people is that when they have an opportunity of thinking for themselves they refuse it and cling to their faith. They are offered a higher and more mature way of knowing, but they won't have it.

In divine things, however, this is not the situation. These are things that we cannot know any other way expect by having faith in the teacher, God, who tells us about them. They are not things we could find out for ourselves. They are not the kind of things we could naturally know. Our knowledge of them is super-natural. We are not refusing an offered opportunity, we are not avoiding a higher, more grown-up approach, because there is in this life no higher way available. The boy who refuses to have faith in the teacher may be acquiring a grown-up critical sense and beginning to think for himself, or he may be simply refusing to learn. I imagine it must be one of a teacher's most difficult jobs to decide which of these is happening.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“The sacraments of the Church are precisely the imagery in which she speaks of the world of the future, the coming kingdom of God. What sort of relationship is there to be among men? The kind that is hinted at, symbolized in the Eucharist; it is to be a political reality but not one that can be described in today’s political terms. A revolutionary is not merely one who tries to make political changes; he is out to change the meaning of the word politics. When the kingdom can be described in political terms, in its own political terms, the Eucharist will be no longer necessary. But until then we point toward it in symbolic terms. And, of course, there exists an equivalent of neo-capitalism to emasculate the revolutionary character of the Church. This takes the sacraments not as symbols of the future, but as literal realities. We may see the liturgical movement, the whole concentration on the parish community, the people of God gathered around the altar and so on, as in some danger of embodying this “neo-capitalist” mistake. The sacramental life has been valued literally for its own sake—as somebody might value the nationalization of steel for its own sake—instead of seeing it as an image of the world at which we are trying to arrive.”
― Herbert McCabe

“The societal and political manifestation of disbelief (of belief that we make ourselves and are only what we make ourselves) is, of course, the world of liberal individualism - the world of isolated individuals asserting their freedom against each other. And, of course, if this is what society is like, you need a state whose job it is to control and limit the freedom of its citizens. The world that believes in the autonomous free individual also has to believe in the bureaucratic state. Society is seen as a perpetual struggle between these two - sometimes emphasizing the individual, sometimes the collective. But all this is the world of disbelief, the world without God.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason