Newman, Augustine and the Truth

John Henry Cardinal Newman died in 1890 but remains revered in Roman Catholic circles as a great educator and seeker of the "truth."

On February 21, during a mass celebrating the 40th anniversary of Newman University College in Birmingham, England, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, said that "Two of the great figures of Catholic education, Augustine of Hippo and Cardinal John Henry Newman, both engaged in a great quest for truth and for freedom."

I don't know from John Henry Newman. But according to the reverend Nichols, "He foresaw the challenge that we face: of living in an age which proclaims that really there is no such thing as truth."

Newman complained that the people of his day were saying that "there is no positive truth in religion; one creed is as good as another; all are to be tolerated for all are matters of opinion."

From that Archbishop Nichols went on to expound thusly: "So our search for truth, and our commitment to that search, is crucial ... for the quality of education we offer ...for the health of our society. Only an understanding of the fundamental unchanging truth about what it is to be a human person can be the foundation of our true freedom."

That doesn't sound too bad until you realize that the "truth" spoken of by Archbishop Nichols and his predecessor, John Henry Newman, is "truth" as defined by the Roman Catholic Church. And if you know anything about the history of the western world for the past 2,000 years, you know that the Roman Catholic Church, for the most part, never came close to the "truth," and, in fact, usually fought the "truth" whenever the "truth" broke through to the light of day.

Now consider that other "great figure" of "Catholic education" the Rev. Nichols referred to: Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine's story is well-known - how he grew up as a licentious, sexual libertine; how he dabbled in various philosophies and theologies; how he abandoned the loves of his life -- his mistress and his son, in order to avoid social and political trouble.

It was in Milan, where he served as professor of rhetoric, that he stumbled across a portion of one of St. Paul's epistles and was suddenly converted to his mother's religion, Christianity.

Augustine left Milan and retreated to the country where he began to write and think. In 391, he traveled to Hippo in North Africa where he was ordained a priest and five years later became the bishop of Hippo.

For the rest of his life, Augustine ferociously fought various heresies he perceived to be threatening his beloved church, including Manichaeism and Donatism. When the barbarians sacked the city of Rome he began his opus, The City of God, which covered 22 volumes and took 12 years to write.

In this work, he outlined his notion of "original sin," which infested human life. He said that "Mankind is divided into two sorts, such as live according to man, and such as live according to God. These we call the two cities... The Heavenly City outshines Rome. There, instead of victory, is truth."

The theology is a mishmash comprised of the litter of ancient debates, little of which is relevant to human beings living in the 21st century. But this mishmash theology, as outlined in The City of God, "became one of the main pillars on which the church of the next 1,000 years was built."

Unfortunately, some of the material that went into the construction of that pillar was hatred of the Jewish people. Hear what St. Augustine has to say about the Jews of his day:

"The true image of the Hebrew is Judas Iscariot, who sells the Lord for silver. The Jew can never understand the Scriptures and forever will bear the guilt for the death of Jesus."

"...the Church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed, because after killing Christ they continue to till the ground of an earthly circumcision, an earthly Sabbath, an earthly passover, while the hidden strength or virtue of making known Christ, which this tilling contains, is not yielded to the Jews while they continue in impiety and unbelief, for it is revealed in the New Testament. While they will not turn to God, the veil which is on their minds in reading the Old Testament is not taken away... the Jewish people, like Cain, continue tilling the ground, in the carnal observance of the law, which does not yield to them its strength, because they do not perceive in it the grace of Christ"

And this, from his Confessions, 12.14: "How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them [the Jews] with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word! Gladly would I have them die to themselves and live to you!"

Augustine may be considered a "father" of the Church. He may be considered a great theologian. He may even be considered a source of the "truth." But...

The "truth" is that Augustine of Hippo was a vicious anti-Semite whose attitudes toward the Jews as expressed in his writings carried a virulent and pestilent anti-Semitic wind that spread across the face of the world to bring horrible suffering and death to millions of Jews from his day to our day.

And why, when he was so wrong with regard to the Jews, would anyone accept anything else he has to say as "truth?"