McCabe on the Triduum

I have played a (very) small role in helping Brian Davies, OP at Fordham bring to posthumous light some writings of my late friend Herbert McCabe, OP (1926-2001). Spending an afternoon or evening with Herbert in an Oxford pub was one of life’s great intellectual delights. Herbert was an acknowledged influence on many, including Alasdair MacIntyre (who partly credits McCabe in the preface to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? with changing MacIntyre’s view about Thomism), Denys Turner, Anthony Kenny, Stanley Hauerwas, Seamus Heaney, and Terry Eagleton. Herbert died ten years ago this summer, and I still think about him every day.

One of the best things Herbert ever wrote was a set of three sermons for the Triduum, which is available in his volume God Matters, much of which is on Google Books or for purchase at a reasonable price. As he says in his sermon for Good Friday: 

[M]y thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist. The cross, then, unmasks or reveals the sin of the world. In this sense the crucifying of Jesus is the archetypal sin of mankind, the root and meaning of our original 'sin', which is the lack of grace and moral weakness we suffer from, not (first of all) by committing any sin, but just by belonging to, originating in, the human species, the animal that has not come to terms with its new kind of animality. This twist in the human condition is what St Thomas calls the materia, the psychological expression, of the sin of the world. What gives it its real significance (its forma) is the rejection of God's love that was most clearly demonstrated in the killing of Jesus. As we all know only too well, even when we have been liberated by faith and baptism from the sinfulness of original sin and become children of God in Christ, the psychological distortion in our human nature remains with us until we are fully restored at the resurrection. With the cross the alienation of humankind is recognized as sin, and for that very reason recognised as something that can be forgiven.

....

The cross and resurrection are the eternal dialogue of Father and Son as projected on to the screen of history, what it looks like in history. If you want to know that the Trinity looks like be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified: Ecce homo.