Against the Doctrines of Mani 15–27

Where, then, do pleasure and desire come from? These, they say, are the greatest evils, and it is for these more than for anything else that they have come to hate matter. Now it is clear that these belong only to the animals that have sensation, and that nothing perceives desire and pleasure except what has sensation. For what sensation of pleasure and pain has a plant, or earth, water or air? And the demons, if they are living beings with sensation, perhaps for this reason take pleasure in the customary sacrifices and are vexed when they are left off, whereas nothing of the kind can be thought of God. Those who say, 'Why do animals feel pleasure and desire?' should first blame the fact that they have sensation, or that they need food. For those that are immortal living beings and free from decay and growth, such as the sun, the moon and the stars, although they have sensation, are outside this charge; but man, able both to perceive and to judge, and wise in potency (for he has the power to become such), once he has received his own proper faculty, tramples these things underfoot.

For in general it is worth asking these men whether no human being can become good, or whether someone at least can. If no one is wise, why does Manichaeus himself (I leave the others aside) not only say that he is good, but also claim to be able to make others such? If there is anyone at all, what prevents all from becoming good? For what is possible for one is possible for all, and by the means through which one becomes virtuous all could become so; unless they say that most of the power is caught up in such people. Then again, first, what need is there for the labour of education? We should become good while asleep. Or why do such men above all lead their hearers to hope for the good? For even wallowing with courtesans they would have their own proper good. But if education and conversion are better, and zeal for taking up virtue has made a man such, let all become such, and the disorderly motion of matter they keep chattering about is done away with. It would have been far better to say that wisdom was given by God to men as a weapon, so that whatever befalls them from desire and pleasure, because they have sensation, it might turn little by little toward the good and remove the absurd consequences of them. In that way they themselves, professing to teach virtue, would have been admired for their purpose and their life, and there would be great hope that evils would one day cease, when all had become wise. This, it seems to me, is what Jesus understood: so that farmers, carpenters, builders and others in the crafts might not be shut out from the good, he set up a common assembly of them all together, and by simple and easy discourses both brought them to the knowledge of God and made them come to desire the good.

But how can it be said that 'God sent the divine power down upon matter'? If the power always existed, and neither God nor matter is conceived as prior to it, then again there are three principles according to Manichaeus, and perhaps very many will appear a little later. If it came into being afterwards, how is it without a share in matter? If it is a part of God, first they thereby make God composite and bodily, and this is absurd and impossible. If God made it and it has no share in matter, I am amazed that neither he nor his followers considered this: if God, by willing, made this power (as the true doctrine says that the things after God are hypostases while God abides), how did he not also become the cause of all the other things that came into being, without needing any pre-existing matter? These are the absurdities that appear from this; the consequences follow. Was it the nature of the power to go to matter, or was this contrary to its nature? Then how was it mingled? If it was according to its nature, it was surely always with matter; and if so, how do they call matter evil, when it has been a mixture with the divine power from the beginning? And how will it perish when the divine power mingled with it departs from it one day? For good things preserve; and it is reasonable that they become causes of some further good to whatever they are present with, rather than bring destruction or some other evil upon them.

The clever thing they say is this: just as we see that when the soul is separated from the body the body itself perishes, so when the power leaves matter, what is left, which is matter, will be dissolved and pass away. First, they do not see that none of the things that exist can perish into non-being, for non-being is not; but when bodies are scattered and undergo some change, dissolution takes place, so that one part goes into earth, another into air, another into something else. Next, they do not remember that they suppose matter to be disorderly motion. How is it reasonable that what moves by itself, whose essence is motion, not belonging to it by accident, should cease, when the power departs, from being what it was before the power came down into it? They do not see the difference: every body without a share of soul is motionless (for even plants have the vegetative soul), but the very essence of matter … It would have been better to say that, just as when harmony comes to a lyre playing out of tune it makes the whole attuned, so the divine power, mingled with the disorderly motion (which is matter on their account), has imposed a certain order on it in place of the disorder within it, and always imposes it, in a way worthy of the divine chorus. Otherwise, how did Manichaeus himself become able to discourse about these things, and by what did he expound them? For they grant that he too was a mixture of matter and of the power shut up in it. If, then, he said these things by the disorderly motion he had, how is the opinion not base? If by the divine power, the doctrine is at once doubtful: insofar as it comes from the divine power, it shares in truth; insofar as it shares in the other part, it shifts into falsehood.

If it had been said that the divine power set matter in order and keeps it in order, it would have been far wiser and would have contributed more to the credibility of the teaching of Manichaeus. But 'God sent down another power.' What has been said about the first power applies to this one too, and whatever absurdities follow from their account of the first power may be said now as well. But who could bear the rest? Why did God not send down one power able to do everything? Is a man's mind so versatile that the same man is a geometer, an astronomer, a builder and anything else of the kind, while God, it seems, was at a loss to find a power that would be sufficient for him for everything, so as not to need a first and a second? And why is the one power creative and the other rather passive, so as to be well suited to be mixed with matter? Here again I do not see the cause of the ranking within the good, or of its superiority, if there was no evil in the house of God. For if God alone is good and matter alone evil, all else must be called intermediate and in between. Yet some maker is found who differs regarding the intermediates, when they say that the one is the creative cause and the other the one mixed with matter. Perhaps this is the 'preferred' and the 'dispreferred' that the more recent philosophers speak of in their account of things indifferent. They say that when the creative power set about making the world, that part of matter which had kept its own virtue even in the mixture was separated off, and the sun and the moon came into being; what had taken a share of moderate evil became the heaven and the stars; and the rest within these, of the power and of matter.

Beyond all this I am amazed that they do not perceive that they are making the divine power bodily and cutting it up like parts. Why is the divine power not matter too, if it is passive and divisible throughout, and one part of it becomes the sun and another the moon? For they say these are purely of the divine power. But this is what we said was proper to matter: to be nothing in itself, but to receive shapes and qualities and become all the defined things. If, then, from the divine power alone, as from one substrate, came the sun and the moon, and these are different from each other, why should not something else come to be as well? And if everything will come to be from it, the consequence is plain: the divine power is itself matter, being made into the shapes. But if nothing other than the sun and the moon is what comes from the divine power, then what is shut up in all existing things is the sun and the moon, and each of the stars is the sun and the moon, or one of them, and so is each of the land animals, the birds and the amphibians. That not even conjurors would accept this is, I think, plain to everyone.

When they examine what comes next, the road is not straight but steeper than the one before. They say the sun and the moon suffered nothing amiss in the mixture with matter; but then they cannot say how the rest were lessened from their own nature. If, even when the divine power was by itself, it was such that part of it was good and part better (like the myth of the Hippocentaurs, who were men down to the chest and horses for the rest; both creatures are good, but the man is better), so that one could conceive part of the divine power excelling in beauty and part falling short of it, and likewise one part of matter having a certain excess of evil … (different things being different …), it would be another argument. For one could then suppose that the sun and the moon, being wiser from the beginning, chose the less wicked parts of matter for the mixture, so as to remain in their own virtue, since such wickedness was too weak to force out so great a superiority in good; while the other parts of the power, having fallen, not without forethought but not with equal forethought, received a greater share of the evil in matter, each according to its measure. But since they say nothing different about this power, and it is regarded as alike throughout, the account is unconvincing that in the mixture one part stayed pure and another took a share of some evil.

They say that the sun and the moon separate the divine power from matter little by little and send it off to God: the moon receives it into itself from the new moon until the full moon and then hands it over to the sun, and the sun sends it on to God. If they had gone even a little to the doors of the astronomers, they would not have fallen into this, nor would they have been ignorant that the moon (having, as some say, no light of its own) is lit up by the sun, and that its phases follow its distances from the sun: it is full when it is a hundred and eighty degrees from the sun, and in conjunction when it moves in the same degree as the sun. Then, is it not amazing that the souls, many as they are and from different sources (from the world itself, from animals, plants, nymphs and demons, and among these from birds, land animals and amphibians), are not distinguished by sight, but one body, always alike, is seen by us in the moon throughout? And what of the continuity of this body: when the moon is halved it appears as a semicircle, and when it is gibbous, of that shape …? Again, how are the souls taken up to the moon, or using what vehicle? If it is light, like fire, it would probably not go only as far as the moon but always further upward; if it is heavy, it could not reach the moon at all. What reason is there that what first reaches the moon is not sent straight up to the sun, but waits for the full moon and the arrival of the other souls? When the moon wanes from the full, where does the power that is being separated stay during that time, until the moon, emptied of the earlier souls like a deserted city, receives a second colony? A treasury ought to have been marked off in some part of the earth or of the clouds or of some other place, where the souls gather and stand ready for the journey to the moon. But there is yet another difficulty. Why is the moon not filled at once, or why does it wait fifteen days? No less amazing than what has been said is this: never, since men have kept memory, has the moon been filled in less than fifteen days, not even at the flood in the time of Deucalion, and still less in the time of Phoroneus, when practically everything on earth was destroyed and much of the power must have been separated from matter. Besides this, they ought to have considered good harvests and bad and deaths likewise; since these do not happen in order, the order of the full moons and wanings should not be kept in this way either.

Nor should this be brought in as a side issue: if the divine power shut up in matter is infinite, what the sun and the moon accomplish can do nothing to lessen it, for what remains is again infinite when a finite amount is taken; but if it is finite, there ought to have been some perception, in so long a time, of how much of this power has been lessened from the world; yet everything remains the same. And what myths have they not surpassed in implausibility with this too, when they say that man is a work of matter made after the image seen in the sun? For images are likenesses of archetypes. If they leave the image in the sun, where is the pattern after which the image was formed for them? They will not say it is man himself, the true man; nor the divine power, for this they mix with matter, whereas they say the image was seen in the sun, which on their account came into being from the later separation from matter; nor the creative cause, for they say this was sent down to save the divine power, and on their account it must surely be ranked before the sun, since it was upon its arrival that the sun and the moon were separated from matter; yet they say the image was seen in the sun. 'Matter,' they say, 'made man.' In what way, or how? It could not even mould him. Besides the fact that on their account man would be an image of an image and have no subsistence, it cannot even be conceived how man is a work of matter; for reasoning and perceiving do not belong even to matter as they conceive it. And what is man on their account? The mixture of soul and body, or one of the two, or mind, higher than the whole soul? If it is mind, how could the better be the work of the worse? If it is soul (and they say this is the divine power), how can they take the divine power away from God and place it under the craftsmanship of matter? If they leave only the body, let them remember again that this is motionless in itself, while they say that the essence of matter is motion. And since they think that nothing by itself is drawn to matter, neither is it reasonable to suppose that what is composed of these is its work. Moreover, it seems beyond dispute that what is made by something is altogether inferior to it: so the world is inferior to its maker, and the works of craftsmen to the craftsmen. If, then, man is the work of matter, he is surely inferior to it. But these men leave nothing worse than matter. And it is not the same for the divine power to be mixed with matter as with something worse than matter. What they say by way of explaining the arrangement cannot even be conceived. Why do they think matter needed the better image for the existence of man? Or why was the image not sufficient by itself, as with mirrors, for man to appear, or as the sun itself is sufficient for the coming to be and passing away of all things that come to be? 'Matter imitated the image in making its own work.' With which of the things it had? With the divine power mixed with it? Then in this way the divine power stands to matter as an instrument. With the disorderly motion? Then they are giving form to matter. But all likenesses reach their completion through imitation with order and exactness; neither a house nor a ship nor any other work of art can be completed by disorder, nor a statue, which art devised to imitate a man.

Not even knowing Christ, but calling him Chrestos by changing one letter to η, they bring in another meaning in place of what is properly understood of him, and say that he is Mind. If they say that he is the knowable and the knowing and wisdom, they speak in agreement with those of the churches about him, and in arranging things so they will be caught: how then do they throw out the whole of what is called the old history? If they say, as some do, that mind is something that supervenes, one of the things that come in from outside and befall us, let us consider it. Those who champion this opinion say, most plausibly, that it enters at about the seventh year, when the faculty of sensation has been articulated. If, then, Christ is Mind on their account, he will both be and not be at the same time. Before mind enters he does not yet exist, if Christ is mind on their account; and yet mind enters into him while he exists; so on their account he will exist again. Christ is and is not at the same time. And if, by the finest choice of their own, mind on their account is all the things that are (since they suppose matter to be ungenerated and, so to speak, as old as God), then in this way they suppose Christ to be both mind and matter, if indeed on their account Christ is all things, being mind, which is all things, and matter too is one of the things that are, being ungenerated. They say that the divine power was crucified in matter in this way as a demonstration, and that he himself underwent this suffering: as if it were impossible for him to do what Manichaeus himself does, teaching by word about this, that the divine power has been shut up in matter and departs again in the way they make up for themselves. To say, in the church's teaching, that he gave himself for the forgiveness of sins has a certain credibility with the many, both from the histories of the Greeks, when they tell of some who gave themselves for the safety of cities, and from the history of the Jews, which also has an example of the account when it prepares the child of Abraham as a sacrifice to God. But to subject Christ to suffering for the demonstration of a fact is great ignorance, since a word is sufficient for teaching and for the knowledge of things.

They abstain from living creatures. If they do so for some other reason, it is no concern of ours; but if it is because the divine power is more absent from them, or because it is present in them in greater measure, their choice is laughable. If plants are more material, how is it reasonable to use the worse for food and diet? If the divine power is greater in them, what use are such things for food, since the nourishing and growing part of the soul is the more bodily? As for their abstaining from marriage and sexual intercourse, for fear that through the succession of the race the divine power should dwell longer in matter, I wonder how they can approve of themselves. For if God's providence does not suffice to clear the divine power out of matter, both through births and through the things that are always the same and alike, what can the contrivance of Manichaeus devise for this? Surely, with a truly gigantic spirit, he claims to have become God's helper in this, so that by abolishing births he might make the departure of the divine power from matter quicker. What the poems say about the Giants is plainly myth. Those who discuss these things set them forth in allegories, hiding the solemnity of the account under the form of a myth; as when the history of the Jews says that the angels came together with the daughters of men in sexual union: such a manner of speaking signifies that the nourishing powers of the soul … from the things above to the things here. The poets, saying that the Giants sprang up armed from the earth and then, having risen against the gods, perished at once, hint at the swiftness and perishability of bodies, and in this way adorn their poetry with marvels to entertain. But these men, knowing nothing of this, wherever they can lay hold of some fallacy, from whatever source, make it a windfall for themselves, as though their business were to overcome the truth by every art.

Their fire, burning but without light, which is outside the world: where is it placed? If it is upon the world, what is the cause of the world's remaining unharmed until now? If it is to destroy the world once it comes near, it is joined to it now as well. If it is apart, raised up as in a place of its own, what will make it fall upon the world later? How will it leave its own place? By what necessity and force? What subsistence of fire is to be conceived apart from matter, or how moisture is its food, and the other questions of natural philosophy, do not belong to the present argument. But this is surely plain from what has been said: the fire outside the world is precisely what they call matter. Since the sun and the moon, being pure and of the pure divine power, were separated from this fire and left no part of themselves in it, this was matter by itself, wholly unmixed with the divine power. So if the world is emptied of the divine power within it, such a fire will be left once more. How, then, will the fire either destroy anything or be destroyed by something else? Besides the fact that like is unaffected by like (for like is rather a friend to like), I do not see how the destruction will happen. What matter will be when it is separated from the divine power, it was before it was mixed with the divine power. If, then, it will perish when deserted by the divine power, why did it not perish before the divine power … or another creation, so that matter may perish, and he will do this without end? And what is the benefit? What did not happen by the first decision, how will it happen by the second? Or what reason is there to attribute to God things which it would not be right to suspect even of a man? In such matters impossibility attaches to willing, besides the fact that one ought not readily even to speak of willing, even if it is possible; unless they speak of some other God, the one beyond being, just as they bring in a new kind of matter, and not the one understood by men of sense, which reason finds either not to exist at all, or to be the last of all things, hardly reaching even a bastard conception.

But is the lightless fire greater than the matter that is to be deserted by the divine power, or less? If it is less, how will it overcome the greater? If it is greater, it will be able to draw it back to itself, being of the same nature, but it will not destroy it, just as the Nile does not destroy the bays cut off from it.