8. McCabe. St. Augustine and His Age
By Joseph McCabe. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1903 (published December, 1902). [Also: London:
Duckworth & Co. 1902.] 1 r. McCabe was formerly known as the Very Reverend Father
M Anthony of the Order of Saint Francis. He came, however, happily to see the error of his monastic ways, and very properly gave them up.
Discharging thus his duty to himself, he has further discharged it to humanity by revealing some of the abuses of the monastic system in two somewhat pungent and very profitable volumes published during the closing years of the last century—"Twelve Years in a Monastery," and "Life in a Modern Monastery." With the opening of a new century he has turned to new themes, and we are already his debtors for two interesting essays in Christian biography—one dealing with "Peter Abelard," published in the midsummer of 1901, and the other, this "St. Augustine," published but little more than a year afterwards. We would gladly forget his past distresses
and rejoice only in his present gifts. But Mr. McCabe will not permit this.
He drags his past on with him and persists in writing his biographical studies from the point of view of what he himself calls the "escaped monk."
In the study of Abelard, this was of little importance: Mr. McCabe's monastic experiences perhaps even prepared him the better to understand
Abelard and his times. In this study of Augustine, it has brought something very like ruin.
Our complaint is not merely that Mr. McCabe occasionally obtrudes reminiscences of his own experiences into his biographical sketches. This is a fault of taste. After all, we go to a life of Augustine to learn about Augustine and not about the author; and it is for the moment a matter of indifference to the reader that the author has, say, been injuriously spoken of (as e.g. p. 201) for having followed his bent and exposed the abuses of a mode of life he once shared. But there is not very much of this in the book and it could not in any event seriously injure its value.
Our complaint is not even merely that Mr. McCabe has brought with him into the broader life he now enjoys a cynical temper and a carping spirit which warp his judgment and deform his pages. Surely the bitterness he is constantly exhibiting against "ecclesiastics" and "hagiographers" is somewhat superfluous. And it is not rendered more engaging by the circumstance that he includes under these complimentary designations well-nigh the whole body of his predecessors in the study of his subject—so that there runs through his book a vein of scorn of previous biographers of Augustine. "Mr. Marcus Dods," for example, is an "ecclesiastic" and hence represents the facts of Augustine's life "in safe terms" (p. 38). The picture that "most of his ecclesiastical biographers" draw of Augustine's unregenerate days—though transcribed from Augustine's own account—is mere "pretense" (p. 54). When the biographers follow Ambrose's version of a matter they are "trustful hagiographers" (p. 113). Certain articles in Smith
and Wace's "Dictionary of Christian Biography" are recommended as "choice specimens of the literary art of tempering justice with mercy, which is so admirably cultivated by the ecclesiastical writer" (p. 312). Drs. Milman and Smith are satirically characterized as "safe commentators"; and it is added: "If we must have our Gibbon served up with an abundance of ecclesiastical sauce, it is at least time there was an improvement in its quality" (p. 111). This kind of thing is really very bad, and it is unfortunately pervasive (cf. e.g. pp. 58, 146, 206, 222, 281, 355, 397, 413).
And the unhappy facility of innuendo thus exhibited is permitted to cut much deeper than merely into the credit of previous students of the subject. "It is probable," Mr. McCabe tells us, "that Manicheism did no more than Christianity towards the purification of the Empire" (p. 64). "It is impossible," he says with a truly monkish skill of suggestion, "to discuss here what probability there was of Mithraism absorbing Christianity instead of Christianity absorbing Mithraism" (pp. 105 f.). Similarly,
"whether it be that 'Plato wrote a human preface to the Gospels,' as De Maistre said, or that the evangelists wrote a human appendix to Plato, as others think, it is hardly our duty to inquire here" (pp. 158 f.). Speaking of Augustine's commentaries on Genesis, he drops the incidental remark:
"One reads them with a feeling of pity now that Mr. Sayce and other reputable scholars have told us whence these stories were copied" (p. 217, cf. pp. 362, 379). Possibly some piquancy may be added to the page by this mode of writing. It will scarcely add to the confidence with which the reader will commit himself to the guidance of the author. But even such faults may possibly belong to the form rather than to the substance of a book.
Our real complaint begins when we note that Mr. McCabe's whole presentation of Augustine's life and character is affected by his point of view, and that not merely in tone and proportion but also in its very
substance. He has given us a very different Augustine from the Augustine of what we may call, to please Mr. McCabe, "the hagiographic tradition"— that is to say, of history, as that history is set down in contemporary accounts (including Augustine's own narrative in his "Confessions") and embodied in contemporary records. He looks at Augustine through spectacles which have distorted his figure out of all proportion—throwing up into great prominence subordinate elements in his character and unimportant aspects of his life, and obscuring the really significant features.
Augustine was above all else and before all else the "reformer of Christian piety," as even Harnack puts it—"even Harnack," for as Prof. West truly points out (Presbyterian and Reformed Review, xii. 1901, p. 183), Harnack does not himself do justice in his thought of Augustine to his "personal religion." He revolutionized the whole conception of the truly "Christian life" and introduced into Christendom a completely new ideal of Christian feeling and aspiration. Of all this Mr. McCabe has not a word to say. Of the real significance of Augustine's doctrine of Grace for his own inner life and for the history of thought, he betrays no conception. Here is Hamlet with Hamlet left out with a vengeance. On the other hand the wholly insignificant matter of Augustine's attitude towards marriage and his deflected opinions about the sexual passion are thrown out into a prominence beyond all reason. It might be unjust to say that every nasty story and every morbid expression is sought out and exploited to Augustine's discredit. But a very undue emphasis is certainly thrown on this aspect of Augustine's life and teaching.
Even such distortions of the figure he is drawing do not constitute, however, Mr. McCabe's worst fault as a biographer of Augustine. The fact seems to be that the whole portrait that is presented is dominated by the conception that its tendency was distinctly downward, and that, taken in its entirety, it was fraught with evil rather than good for the Church and the
world. To secure this effect Mr. McCabe is at considerable pains first to discredit Augustine's own account of the evil of his early life and then systematically to depreciate the attainments of his later life. His was, it seems, a bright and essentially good boyhood and his young manhood blossomed out into a high-minded devotion to "reason." But then, alas, he fell under the domination of "authority." Reason gradually ceased to be his
"darling" (p. 207, cf. pp. 233, 479). He steadily became more and more a dupe to silly miraculous stories (p. 466), a contemner of all that is valuable in life (p. 213), a slave to the ecclesiastical machine, an intolerant controversialist who stopped at no means to secure the defeat of his opponents (pp. 214, 232)—if not a blasphemer, yet certainly a persecutor and injurious. "The bloody pages of mediæval history rise before us as we dwell on his later ideas" (p. 398). Thus Augustine's progress according to Mr. McCabe was the opposite of Paul's: his development, like that of the Church itself, according to Harnack, was a "pathological" process. It is quite likely that (like Harnack, in the parallel case) Mr. McCabe might deny this and declare that "on the whole" there was, in his view, an "advance."
We should be forced to reply (as in the case of Harnack) that he has not so depicted it. The reader takes away from his book the distinct impression that Augustine grew steadily a worse man and a more evil influence as he grew older.
If we ask after the account we are to give of this low view of Augustine's character and work, we must probably make a distinction.
Ultimately, it seems to us, it must be traced to Mr. McCabe's point of view as an "escaped monk." He has approached the study of Augustine with a poignant hatred of the monachism of which Augustine was one of the founders in the West—with all that monachism implies of depreciation of the earthly life and its delights and duties alike: and with an equal hatred of the great ecclesiastical system of which monachism has ever been a part and
a stay and of which Augustine's teaching, on one of its sides, has supplied a chief theoretical support. This side of Augustine's character and teaching has loomed so big before him as to obscure all else. Augustine the monk,
Augustine the ecclesiastic: this is the Augustine he has known and this is the Augustine he has painted. This Augustine he has sought to portray with truth and justice: but he could not think Augustine the monk and ecclesiastic an admirable figure. Above all, he was consumed with zeal to set forth the monk and ecclesiastic as essentially unlovely and essentially injurious to all the higher ideals of living. Accordingly he has given us an Augustine who gradually grows hard and evil before our eyes under the influences of those erroneous—those destructive—views of life and religion, under the influence of which the Christian world has ever since grown harder and harder and more and more corrupt. This is as much as to say, of course, that Mr. McCabe's sketch of Augustine's life is not an essay in pure biography, but is essentially a polemic treatise. It is another assault of the "escaped monk" upon the system from which he has, doubtless through throes and suffering, separated himself. In his first books he gave us a picture of the working of monasticism in modern life: in his "Peter
Abelard" he gave us a picture of monastic life in its mediæval conception: in his "St. Augustine" he gives us a picture of the working of the monastic idea in its inception. If he had only put his book forward as a study of such evil tendencies as entered into Augustine's life it would not be so bad.
There were these evil tendencies in Augustine's life, and they ought not to be minimized or neglected. Cromwell was right in demanding that the artist should paint truly the wart on his nose. But it would hardly do to look at the wart through a microscope and paint it and it alone in this exaggerated light in all its hideous rugosities, and label it "Cromwell." It is something like this that Mr. McCabe has done to Augustine.
The process by which Mr. McCabe has been able to persuade himself that he was drawing a true portrait of Augustine supplies us with a not inapt illustration of "higher-critical" methods. He tells us in the Preface that his attempt is "to interpret by the light of psychology rather than by that of theology," or, as he otherwise expresses it, that he has "brought to the story a saving tincture of Pelagianism": that he has "tried to exhibit the development of Augustine as an orderly mental and moral growth." This, of course, involves the elimination of all "supernaturalism"—say, in this instance, obvious divine leading and cataclysmic conversion. The account given of his spiritual development by Augustine himself in what Mr.
McCabe calls "his seductive Confessions" is therefore set aside at once as "perverse." A very harsh judgment is passed, in fact, on the "Confessions."
They "may be fine literature, but they contain an utterly false psychology and ethics" (p. 24). In them, Augustine is "sternly bent on magnifying his misdeeds" (p. 39). Something like this is said by others also, as, for example, by Harnack and Boissier and with the same general intent. But they speak far less extremely than Mr. McCabe and never dream of carrying
"reconstruction" practically so far. The only documentary evidence being thus discredited, the way is open to give to Augustine an "orderly mental and moral growth"—that is, of course, to attribute to him such a development as on the whole seems to the special biographer natural in the circumstances. There is assigned to him, therefore, a noble heathen youth, breaking down into a sort of weariness toward early middle life, under the stress of which he flees to "authority" for refuge, and then progressively deteriorates to the end.
It is rather odd to observe how different the constructions of this "orderly" life are in different hands under this method. To make the life
"orderly," that is, to give it the appearance of a continuous development in one natural line, Boissier and Harnack represent Augustine as having been
essentially a Christian from his infancy. There is no "Prodigal son" here, says Harnack. "Rather do the Confessions portray a man brought up from youth by a faithful mother in the Christian, that is, in the Catholic faith."
Boissier takes his start from that wonderful conversation which the converted Augustine held with his dying mother at Ostia, when he seemed borne by the mystic breath of her devotion up to heaven itself. "I picture to myself," he says, "experiences on his part of something of the same sort in his infancy, while his mother talked to him of Christ, as she tried to make a perfect Christian of him and spoke to him words he could never forget."
Seeking precisely the same end, Mr. McCabe pursues a precisely opposite course. Monnica, he tells us, showed no particular zeal in imbuing the early years of her son with Christian principles, and her later devotion can be supposed to have had only some indirect influence on the course of his development. He grew up frankly heathen: and betrays in the "Confessions" some embarrassment with respect to her early neglect (p.
10). It was not until he was about twenty that his mother "entered upon the long and passionate devotion to her son's conversion which has earned for the simple, ignorant woman an immortal place amongst the mothers of men" (pp. 66–67). Even then, the low-born (p. 194), ignorant, but earnest woman had her limitations as a religious guide. She did not object very much to Augustine cherishing a concubine, but she objected very much indeed to his cherishing a heresy (p. 66). From all which it appears that the picture drawn of Monnica is as much "lowered" in tone as that drawn of Augustine himself.
The mention we have just made of Augustine's concubine leads to raising the question whether the treatment Mr. McCabe gives this certainly sufficiently disgraceful episode in Augustine's life is thoroughly judicious.
His attaching himself to a single mistress and living in faithfulness to her for fourteen years is rightly pointed to as implying "(for those days) a rare
moderation of character" (p. 40). To say this is, however, probably inadequate. The truth seems to be fairly expressed in the words of Dr.
Marcus Dods that are scoffed at on an earlier page (p. 38), viz.: that in this union Augustine formed "a connection which was not matrimonial in the strict sense." That is to say, it was matrimonial in a secondary sense, fully recognized as legitimate by the Lex Julia and Papia Poppæa, and entailing no moral dereliction, though of course not ranking in social standing with "connections that are matrimonial in the strict sense" (cf. Plumptre, in Smith and Cheetham's "Dictionary of Christian Antiquities," i. 1875, p.
422; Moyle, in Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities," i.
1890, p. 526; Leonhard, in Pauly-Wissowa, "Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft," iv. 1 [siebenter Halbband], 1900, coll.
835 ff.). It was, in a word, a form of marriage, adapted to the case of women of the lower classes, who could not legally become wives of citizens of Rome. So fully was it recognized as a legitimate relationship that there was a strong tendency to give it ecclesiastical sanction. A Synod at Toledo, a.d.
400, for example, decreed: "If anyone who has a believing wife has [also] a concubine, let him not communicate. But let not him who has no wife, but instead of a wife has a concubine, be repelled from communion; only let him be content with union with one woman, whether wife or concubine, according to his pleasure: but let him that lives with others be rejected, until he desists and is restored through penitence" (Mansi, "Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio," iii. 1901, col. 1001; cf. Loofs, in Herzog, "Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche," ed.
3, ii. 1897, p. 261). Here we have simply a repetition in an ecclesiastical ordinance of the existing civil law and the general judgment of society. It doubtless represents the usage in Africa in the fourth century, and indeed is thought by many to represent the usage of the whole Church up at least to the fifth century (cf. Herzog, as cited, x. 1901, p. 746). Perhaps a due
recognition of this fact will account for any winking at the relation which Monnica may be supposed to have exhibited—although the remark of Mr.
McCabe (p. 66) that "she seems to have accepted his companion without a murmur" appears to be only an inference from the silence of the "Confessions."
Such unions, however, though irreproachable under the law of the Empire and involving no moral degradation in the estimation of the highest heathen circles—in which, accordingly, there was more or less tendency among the Christians themselves to acquiesce—nevertheless were discouraged in the Church. When Augustine came to prepare for baptism it appears to have been treated accordingly as a conditio sine qua non that this connection should be brought to a close. It seems to be thoroughly out of place, therefore, to animadvert on Augustine's coldness and insensibility towards the companion of all these years, when he prepared to put her from him and to take a wife as a preliminary to baptism (p. 143). In the first place he was not insensible: he tells us that there was left on her departure "a raw and bloody wound in his heart where she had lain." In the next place, he seems to have had no choice. In accepting Christianity he accepted its code of moral law: and he did not accept Christianity in a cold and calculating spirit but under the stress of a great religious and moral upheaval. That he did not solve the problem by marrying his concubine, as Mr. McCabe suggests might have been the proper course, probably in no way argues that he had "no sense whatever of obligation to the woman who had shared his life for fourteen years" (p. 143). It is explained by Mr. McCabe's own remark immediately following: "Evidently, she belonged to a much lower condition of life than his own." "Let a concubine," says the "Apostolical
Constitutions" (viii. 32), "who is a slave of an unbeliever, and confines herself to her master alone, be received [to baptism]; but if she be incontinent with others, let her be rejected. A believer who has a
concubine,—if she be a slave, let him cease [from her] and take a wife legitimately: if she be free, let him take her as his legitimate wife; and if he does not, let him be rejected." If we may suppose these regulations fairly to represent the usage at Milan at the end of the fourth century—no very violent supposition—they explain Augustine's case as neatly as the recently recovered Laws of Hammurabi fit into all the plications of the episode of Hagar. We need only presume that Augustine's concubine was of servile or equivalent condition to bring his action into exact harmony with the regulations.
Mr. McCabe has indeed said (p. 42): "It does not seem likely that Augustine's mistress was a slave"; though he needs to add that nothing whatever is told us about her social position and, as we have seen, he allows at a later point, that she was "evidently" of a much lower condition of life than Augustine. That Augustine treated her as a slave is evidence enough, in such circumstances, to justify the supposition that she was a slave.
Certainly the parting was not unattended with the deepest emotion on both sides. Augustine tells us that she went away "vowing to God" to keep herself free from future connections. This is surely a fine and pathetic touch. Mr. McCabe treats it with incredible coarseness. Because the "hagiographer"—including in this case M. Boissier!—generally considers that the meaning is that she entered a nunnery, Mr. McCabe, with his customary "anti-hagiographic" fury, actually contends that it probably means that she went away cursing and swearing! "Vovens tibi," he says,
"may very well mean that 'she vowed and swore [every African, including Augustine, swore habitually] she would have nothing more to do with men'; either in anger or in her great love for Augustine" (p. 147, note).
Surely every simple-hearted reader—we use the epithet inviting Mr.
McCabe's scorn—will perceive that a serious vow to God alone can be meant. With such an instance as this before us of the lengths Mr. McCabe
can go in his "anti-hagiographic" rage, it is hardly necessary to seek further illustrations of the lowering effect it has had on the picture he is painting of Augustine under its influence.
The book is very free from minor slips in statements of fact. There is a perfectly blind note on p. 449 on the relations of Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine. There occurs a note on p. 499 in which a curious slip which Dr. Hodgkin made in the first edition of his "Italy and her Invaders," relative to the opponent with whom Augustine deals in the "Opus imperfectum" is mentioned: in his second edition Dr. Hodgkin corrected it duly, as also other slips of the same kind that deformed the first issue. On p.
292 we meet the odd phrase "Christian Presbyterians"—as designating a body including M. de Pressensé "and others": we have not fathomed the designed implication. On p. 41 Paulinus of Pella is quite decisively represented as the grandson of Ausonius: the point is still, perhaps, disputable. On p. 380 it is doubtless the insufficiently overseen printer who has foiled the author's evil counsel by giving us ְב ֵק ָכה for ְנ ֵק ָבה. But a truce to such things. We shall mention only one more for the sake of the curious interest that attaches to it. On p. 416 Mr. McCabe speaks of the attribution of Pelagius' Commentary on Paul's Epistles to Gelasius and "then … to Jerome himself, the most bitter opponent and critic of its real author," as "a unique and precious fact in the history of heresy." Did Mr. McCabe bear in mind that the "Confession of Faith" presented by Pelagius to Innocent was actually admitted into the "Libri Carolini" at the close of the eighth century as Augustine's; and indeed was produced as Augustine's in 1521 a.d. by the Sorbonne against Luther? There is really no limit to which ignorance cannot go in the confusion of doctrines—as the Presbyterian
Church has lately had much occasion to observe!
Let us not close without a word of appreciation of what is praiseworthy in the book. If the portrait which it gives us of Augustine is distorted, it is
yet sharply drawn and brings to notice real traits of his character which may now and again be obscured by the "hagiographer." The book may very profitably be read, therefore, along with the "hagiographers" and may supply a useful supplement to them: though assuredly some of the "hagiographers"—say, Tillemont, Bindermann, Böhringer, or Rauscher— must needs be read along with it as a corrective, if we are not to be altogether misled in our estimate of Augustine. It certainly is a very easy book to read: the style is pleasantly flowing and though deformed by cynical turns, yet attractive and picturesque. There does not seem to lie behind its narrative as careful study of the sources as lay behind the narrative of the "Peter Abelard," but Mr. McCabe, as we have said, makes few slips in matters of fact and writes out of a considerable acquaintance with the ecclesiastical life of the fourth and fifth centuries. A high degree of literary skill is exhibited and much historical feeling. If Mr. McCabe can only bring himself to write in a purely historical spirit, we feel sure he has a great service to render to the Churches.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, i. 1903, pp. 305–312.