Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph McCabe

McCabe’s line lands like a dagger wrapped in a metaphor: it doesn’t argue with any one doctrine so much as it discredits the conditions that produced doctrine in the first place. “Creeds” aren’t framed as timeless truths but as artifacts, and the Dark Ages aren’t invoked as a precise historical period so much as a mood: low literacy, institutional monopoly over knowledge, fear dressed up as certainty. The comparison to “drawings made in dark rooms” is doing quiet, brutal work. A drawing made without light isn’t just inaccurate; it’s confident in its inaccuracy, the hand moving while the eye can’t verify. That’s McCabe’s accusation against theology-as-system: it becomes elaborate precisely when it’s least accountable to evidence.

The subtext is anti-clerical and modernist, very much of an early-20th-century freethought milieu in which McCabe operated after leaving the priesthood. He’s not merely calling medieval creeds “wrong”; he’s calling them epistemologically compromised. The line also needles a familiar rhetorical move of religion: the claim that mystery is a feature, not a bug. McCabe flips that. Mystery isn’t sacred depth; it’s poor lighting.

It works because it’s hard to unsee. Once you accept the premise that intellectual clarity depends on the availability of scrutiny, creeds start to look less like revelations and more like the best guesses of people structurally prevented from checking their work. The metaphor turns “faith” into a production problem: you can’t build reliable blueprints in a blackout.