Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific authors of all time. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic, worked on Latin documents, and made himself very well-informed about Christianity, but turned against it. But he was extremely naive about Jews; bear this in mind.

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Augustine of Hippo (354-430).

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the ablest of the Latin Fathers of the Church. Since he became the supreme oracle of the Middle Ages and occupies so prominent a position in Catholic literature to-day, it is useful to remember a few points in connection with him which are commonly suppressed. He did not merely reject but scorned the Papal claim of supremacy [see Popes]; he denounced the general corruption of the monks, who first appeared in Europe in his time; and he resented the cult of Mary and of the martyrs which was then introduced. In his later years he shows in his writings a marked intellectual degeneration, and quotations from his earlier works do not represent his mature opinions and are of little value. Thus the allegorical interpretation of Genesis which is now often quoted by liberal Church writers, and sometimes in lay works on the history of evolution, was sourly revoked by him in his Retractations and his De Genesi ad literam. He positively defends slavery [see] as a divine ordination, and his greatest work, Of the City of God, is a dreary and rambling argument, in poor Latin, that the ruin of Rome does not matter because earthly affairs (social welfare and prosperity) are of no moment. He endorsed the crassest superstitions of his age (in one place he represents the fossil bones of prehistoric monsters as remains of the giants of Genesis); he painfully libelled the Manichaeans, to whose sect he once belonged; he supported the Papal policy of persecuting all non-Christians and schismatics; he developed a very contemptuous attitude toward woman, who, he said, was created only for the purpose of bearing children; and though his study of Plato is now much applauded, he in later years spoke of Plato as "that old fool" and described him as "impious." See McCabe's St. Augustine and his Age (1902). Rebecca West's St. Augustine (1930) is uncritical and unreliable.

 

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