blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

It’s not that I’m obsessed with sin. It’s just that last week as I was preparing to preach I stumbled across this great quote from Herbert McCabe, OP and couldn’t pass it up. I also realized that I’ve never really posted on McCabe even though he’s at the top of my list of most influencial contemporary theologians (He’s a Thomist who taught at Blackfriars College, Oxford). So I thought to myself, why not another post on sin, but this time from McCabe?

I feel like I need to give some background argument so the quote makes sense. But if you get bored, feel free to scroll to the bottom and check out the bold quote—that’s more worth your while.

In Love, Law and Language, McCabe argues that “ethics is just the study of human behaviour in so far as it is a piece of communication” (92). Humans are linguistic animals that develop ways of living with each other and speaking to one another about their common world. And ethics is the study of this communicative human behavior that helps us learn to flourish together: “the purpose of ethics is similarly to enable us to enjoy life more by responding to it more sensitively, by entering into the significance of human action” (95). So, ethics helps us enter more fully into this world all around us. And “moral judgement…consists in the process of trying to see things always at a yet deeper level” (97). Now this is where it gets interesting; this is where it’s obvious that any ethics for McCabe is theological ethics. For McCabe, seeing things at this deeper level is coming to see the common language (that always exceeds human constuctions) that mediates all our embodied communication. “In this quest,” he writes, “ethics points towards, without being able to define or comprehend, an ultimate medium of human communication which is beyond humanity and which we call divinity” (99). That means ethics names the way we think about our human behavior (which is communicative, mind you), and dig deeper into the reality around us in order to discover how this world in which we live, move, and have our existence is tied together, that there’s a logic that frames all human behavior, a logos that mediates all communication.

So, ethics merely names our journey deeper into reality; it’s the life-long training of our eyes so that we can see things more clearly. That’s why “the life of the evil man has meaning only at a fairly superficial level…. The point of evil is that it is a deprivation of reality” (101). Evil begins as we refuse to see reality and settle for our superficial illusions. We close down lines of communication, ways of interactive with some others (like the enemies we decide to kill), because we are afraid of the vulnerablity that comes with a reality that is out of our control. McCabe writes, “Through fear of becoming vulnerable to others by opening ourselves to them in communication, we seek to control them so that they fit into our own world. Communication disturbs our present world, lays it open to influence from others… [W]e may prefer to tailor others to fit our familiar patterns of living” (101). Thus ethics helps us see how reality always exceeds our control. And the moral life is one that uses these skills of perception to enter more deeply into this world of relationships. We reach for this reality that defies our mastery in hopes of discovering the beauty of the infinite (forgive the allusion). And all this is how McCabe works out the ethical import of his hero, Thomas Aquinas: “He has simply an account of the stumbling journey of the return of human animals to God, as creatures to their creator, as sinners to their forgiving healer” (The Good Life, 94). It’s a stumbling journey because the others we encounter along the way are God’s disrupting gifts of grace that lead us further into the divine reality mediating all creation (this reminds me of a sermon I preached a while ago: Disruptions). We can’t get to our end—i.e., communion with God—on our own. But God provides a way into the divine life that passes right through the neighbor; they help us to see the Truly Human One in whom we all subsist. We come into the divine life as God reveals the unity of all humanity in Christ’s body.

For McCabe, the call of God’s grace is the re-union of all humans in Christ’s ever-expanding body (that reminds me of a quote from Henri de Lubac at the end of this post). And this, says McCabe, “means being prepared to give up the security of my present self to venture into a larger context” (114). And all this brings into relief what McCabe identifies as sin. Sin names all the ways we divide humanity, all the ways we refuse communication. Sin is the satisfaction with fragmented humanity. This is the sin of Adam. For as Augustine puts it, “Adam himself is therefore now spread out over the whole face of the earth. Originally one, he has fallen, and, breaking up as it were, he has filled the whole earth with the pieces” (quoted in Catholicism, 376).

So, here’s the quote that sums it all up. Hopefully all that stuff I wrote above helps makes sense of this passage from McCabe:

“Life in Christ…is a seeking into the meaning of human behaviour which involves a constant reaching out beyond the values of the world. Sin consists in ceasing to reach out, refusing to respond to the Father’s summons, and settling for this present world. What makes it possible for us to reach out, to hear and respond to the summons, is that through the resurrection of Christ the future world is already with us as a disruptive force disturbing the order of the world. We are able to some extent to live into the mode of communication that belongs to the future world, the mode we call charity or the presence of the Spirit. Of course trying to live in the present world a life in accordance with the future is a dangerous business, as Jesus found out. The christian may expect to be crucified with him.” (Love, Law and Language, p.153)