By Joseph McCabe. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1903 (published December, 1902). [Also: London: Duckworth & Co. 1902.]1
Mr. McCabe was formerly known as the Very Reverend Father 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.