Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental 14–26

Next, because, if faith is to be demanded of me, I am more awed by that Scripture where I read that the Holy Spirit came and inspired the apostles, to whom the Lord had promised that he would send him. Therefore either prove to me that what he says is true, so as to show me what I cannot believe, or prove to me that he who says it is the Holy Spirit, so that I may believe what you cannot show. For I profess the Catholic faith, and through it I trust that I shall attain certain knowledge; but you, who are trying to shake my faith, impart certain knowledge, if you can, so as to convict me of having believed rashly what I believed. There are two things you put before me: one, when you say that he who speaks is the Holy Spirit; the other, when you say that what he speaks is plain. I ought to have known both from you without any doubt; but I am not greedy: teach me one of them. Show that this man is the Holy Spirit, and I will believe that what he says is true, even if I do not know it; or show that what he says is true, and I will believe that he is the Holy Spirit, even if I do not know it. Can anyone deal with you more fairly or more kindly? But you can show neither the one nor the other. You have chosen nothing else but to praise what you believe and to mock what I believe. When, then, I in turn praise what I believe and mock what you believe, what do you think we should decide or do, except to abandon those who invite us to know certain things and afterwards command us to believe uncertain things, and to follow those who invite us first to believe what we are not yet able to see, so that, made stronger by faith itself, we may be found worthy to understand what we believe, no longer through men, but through God himself enlightening and strengthening our mind inwardly? And since I have asked whence he proves it to me, I now ask whence he himself knew it. If he says that it was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit and that his mind was divinely illumined so that he might know what he says as certain and plain, he himself indicates the difference between knowing and believing. For the one to whom these things are shown most plainly knows them; but to those to whom he narrates them he does not impart knowledge but urges belief. Whoever rashly consents to this becomes a Manichaean, not by knowing certain things but by believing uncertain ones, as he once deceived us when we were inexperienced youths. He ought, then, not to have promised us knowledge, nor plain cognition, nor arrival without any ambiguity at what is sought, but rather to have said that these things had been shown to him, and that those to whom they are narrated ought to believe him about things they do not know. But if he said this, who would not answer him: “If, then, I am to believe unknown things, why should I not rather believe those that are already celebrated by the agreement of learned and unlearned and have been confirmed among all peoples by the weightiest authority?” Fearing that this would be said to him, he pours mist over the unlearned, first promising knowledge of certain things, then demanding faith in uncertain ones. Yet if he is asked at least to show that these things were shown to him, he likewise fails, and bids us believe this too. Who could bear such deceit and such pride?

What if, with the help of our God and Lord, I show that what he says is not only uncertain but even false? What can be found more unhappy than this superstition, which not only does not display the knowledge and truth that it promises, but says things that are vehemently contrary to knowledge and truth? This will appear more plainly in what follows. For he says: “Now beside one part and side of that illustrious and holy land was the land of darkness, deep and of immense size, in which dwelt fiery bodies, that is, pestilential kinds. Here were infinite darknesses, flowing from the same nature, beyond reckoning, with their own offspring; beyond these were muddy and turbid waters with their inhabitants; and further within them, horrible and violent winds with their prince and begetters; again a fiery and corruptible region with its leaders and nations; and in the same way, further within, a race full of gloom and smoke, in which dwelt the monstrous prince and leader of all, having around him innumerable princes, of all of whom he was the mind and origin. And these were the five natures of the pestilential land.” If he said that the nature of God was an airy or even an ethereal body, he would surely be mocked by all who are able, with whatever keenness of a mind now more serene, to behold the nature of wisdom and truth: not stretched out or spread through any spaces of place, great and magnificent without any bulk, not less in one part and greater in another, but in all things equal to the supreme Father, not having one thing here and another elsewhere, but everywhere whole, everywhere present.

But what shall I say of truth and wisdom, which surpasses all the powers of the soul, when the nature of the soul itself, which is found to be changeable, in no way occupies spaces of place with any bulk of its own? For whatever has any thickness at all cannot but be diminished in its parts, having one thing here and another elsewhere. For a finger is less than the whole hand, and one finger is less than two; and this finger is in one place, that finger in another, the rest of the hand in another. And we see this not only in the jointed bulks of bodies; but also this part of the earth is not where that part is, because each holds its own place; and a smaller part of a liquid is in a smaller place and a larger in a larger, and one part is near the bottom of a cup, another near the rim. Likewise the parts of the air each fill their own places, and it cannot be that the air with which this house is filled can have together with itself in the same house the air that the neighbors have as well. And of light itself one part pours in through this window, another through that, a greater through a greater, a lesser through a lesser. Nor can there be any body at all, whether heavenly or earthly or airy or watery, that is not less in a part than in the whole, or that can in any way have another part at once in the place of this part; but, having one thing here and another elsewhere, it is extended through any spaces of place in a bulk that is separated and divided, or rather, so to speak, divisible. But the nature of the soul, even if we consider not that power of it by which it understands truth, but the lower one by which it holds the body together and perceives in the body, is in no way found to be extended through spaces of place in any bulk. For it is present whole to each of the small parts of its body, since it perceives whole in each; nor is a smaller part of it in the finger and a greater in the arm, as the finger itself is smaller than the arm, but it is everywhere as great, because it is everywhere whole. For when a finger is touched, the soul does not perceive throughout the whole body, and yet the whole soul perceives; for that touch does not escape the whole soul, which would not happen unless it were present whole. Nor, when a finger is touched and it perceives in the finger, is it present whole in such a way as to abandon the rest of the body and gather itself into that one place where it perceives; but while the whole soul perceives in a finger of the hand, if another place in the foot is touched, it does not cease to perceive whole there too. And so it is present whole at once in separate places, not abandoning one in order to be whole in the other, nor holding both in such a way as to have one part here and another part elsewhere, but able to present itself whole to each place at once; since it perceives whole in each, it shows clearly enough that it is not contained by spaces of place.

What if we think of its memory, not of intelligible things but of these bodily ones, which even beasts are observed to have? For beasts of burden go without straying through familiar places, and wild animals return to their lairs, and dogs recognize the bodies of their masters, and when asleep they often growl and sometimes break out into barking, which they could in no way do unless images of things seen, or in some way perceived through the body, were moving about in their memory. Who can worthily consider where these images are received, where they are carried, or where they are formed? For if they could not be larger than the size of our body, someone might say that the soul forms and keeps these images within the very spaces of its body, by which it too is enclosed. But as it is, though the body occupies a very small part of the earth, the mind turns over images of immense regions and of heaven and earth; and as they come and go in crowds it is not cramped. And so it shows that it is not spread out through places, since it is not, as it were, contained by the images of the greatest places, but rather contains them, not in some fold but by an ineffable force and power, by which it can add anything to them and take anything away, contract them into a narrow space and spread them out through immensity, arrange them as it wishes and throw them into disorder, multiply them and reduce them to a few or to one.

What shall I now say of that power by which truth is understood, by which these very images, formed from what is drawn in through the bodily sense, are resisted with great vigor when they set themselves up in place of the truth? By it one sees that, for example, the true Carthage is one thing, and another is the one that the mind forms in thinking and changes at will with all ease; that from the same ease come innumerable worlds, among which the thought of Epicurus wandered innumerably; and, not to pursue many examples, that from the same ease come this land of light spread through infinite spaces and the five caves of the race of darkness with their inhabitants, in which the phantasms of Mani have dared to usurp for themselves the name of truth. What, then, is this power that distinguishes these things? Surely, however great it is, it is greater than all these, and it is conceived without any such imagining of things. Find spaces for it, if you can; spread it out through places; stretch it with the swelling of infinite bulk. Surely, if you think well, you cannot. For whatever of that kind occurs to you, you judge in that very thought that it can be cut into parts, and you make one part smaller there and another larger, as much as you please; but that very thing by which you judge these things you see to be above them, not by height of place but by dignity of power.

Therefore, if you perceive that the soul, so often changeable (whether by a throng of various wills, or by affections that bend it according to the abundance or lack of things, or by the countless plays of phantasms themselves, or by forgetfulness and memory, or by learning and ignorance), if, then, you perceive that the soul, so often changeable, as I have said, by these and similar movements, is not spread out and extended through places but surpasses all such spaces by the vigor of its power, what is to be thought or supposed about God himself, who, remaining unshaken and unchangeable above all rational minds, gives to each what is to be given? Of him the soul dares to speak more easily than to see him, and it speaks of him the less, the more purely it has been able to see him. Yet if, as the phantasms of the Manichaeans clamor, he were stretched out through space, bounded on one side and immense on the others, then particles of whatever size, and countless pieces, some larger and some smaller, could be measured off in him at the thinker’s will, so that, for example, a two-foot part of him would be smaller by eight parts than a ten-foot part. For this must happen to all natures that are spread out through such spaces and cannot be whole everywhere; it is not found even in the soul, and yet those who are unable to consider these things believe it of the soul in an unseemly and shameful way.

Yet perhaps carnal minds should not be dealt with in this way; rather we should come down to the thoughts of those who either do not dare or are not yet able to pursue an incorporeal and spiritual nature in thought, so that they do not even consider their own thought by that same thought and find that it judges of spaces of place while occupying no space of place itself. Let us come down, then, to their senses and ask them beside which part or beside which side, as Mani says, of that illustrious and holy land the land of darkness was. For he says “beside one part and side,” and he does not say which part or which side, right or left. But whichever they choose, this at least is clear: one side is not spoken of except where there is another side. And where there are three or more sides, either the outline of a figure bounded on all sides is understood, or, if it lies open into immensity in some direction, it must nevertheless be bounded on those that are called sides. Let them say, then, what bordered the land of light on the other side or sides, if on one side was the race of darkness. They do not say; but when they are pressed to say, they say that the other sides of that land which they call the land of light are infinite, that is, stretched through infinite spaces and confined by no limit. Nor do they understand that then they are no longer sides, which is perfectly obvious even to the slowest minds; for they would be sides only if they were bounded by their limits. “What is it to me,” he says, “if they are not sides?” But when you said “beside one part and side,” you compelled us to understand another part or parts and another side or sides. For if there was only one side, you should have said only “beside the side,” not “beside one side,” just as in our body we rightly say that something is beside one eye, because there is another eye, or beside one breast, because there is another. But if we said “beside one nose” or “beside one navel,” when there is no other, we would be laughed at by learned and unlearned alike. But I do not press you on words; for perhaps you meant “one” in the sense of “only.”

What, then, was beside that side of the land you call illustrious and holy? “The land,” he says, “of darkness.” What? Concerning this land at least, do you grant that it was corporeal? You must say so, since you assert that all bodies take their origin from it. What then? I ask: however slow, however carnal you may be, have you never even noticed this, that the two lands could not be joined to each other at their sides unless both were corporeal? Why, then, were we told, perverted by I know not what blindness, that only the land of darkness was or is corporeal, while that which was called the land of light must be believed incorporeal and spiritual? Let us wake up at last, good men, and, now that we are reminded, at least notice what is very easy: that two lands cannot be joined to each other at their sides unless both are bodies. Or if we are dense and slow even about this, I ask whether the land of darkness too had one side, and the rest infinite, like the land of light. They do not believe so; for they fear that it would seem equal to God. They say, then, that it is immense in depth and in length; but above it they affirm spaces of infinite emptiness. And so that it may not seem to hold a single share and the land of light a double one, they narrow it on two sides as well, as if one loaf (for so what is said can more easily be seen) were shaped crosswise into four quarters, of which three are white and one black. Now take away the division between the three white ones and make them infinite upward and downward and behind on all sides: so they believe the land of light to be. But make that black quarter infinite downward and behind, with an immense emptiness above it: so they think the land of darkness to be. But these things they show, as if they were secrets, to those who are very attentive and eager in inquiry.

Yet if this is so, it is clear that the land of darkness is touched by the land of light on two sides; and surely if it is touched on two, it also touches on two. So much, then, for “the land of darkness was beside one side.” Next, how ugly the shape of the land of light appears: like a cloven hoof with a black wedge driven in beneath it, bounded only where it is split, and gaping open above as well, with empty space between, as much as is immense above the surface of the land of darkness. And then how much better appears the shape of the land of darkness itself, since it splits and the other is split; it is inserted, the other gapes open; it gives place to no emptiness within itself, while the other is closed only on its lower part, where it is filled up below by the hostile wedge. So these ignorant and greedy men, giving greater honor to a multitude of parts than to unity, in order to give six parts to the land of light, three downward and three upward, preferred that the land of light be penetrated rather than penetrate. For with such a shape, even if they deny that it is mixed, they cannot deny that it is penetrated.

Compare now, not the spiritual men of the Catholic faith, in whom the mind, as far as it can in this life, perceives that the divine substance and nature is not extended through any spaces of place nor shaped by any dimensions of outline, but compare our carnal and little ones, who, when they hear certain members of our body spoken of allegorically (as when the eyes of God and the ears of God are mentioned), are accustomed, with the freedom of fantasy, to picture God to themselves in the form of a human body: compare these now with those Manichaeans, who are accustomed to describe these trifles to eager and curious men as if they were great secrets, and consider which of them think more tolerably and more honorably of God: those who think of him in a human form endowed with the highest dignity of its kind, or those who think of him as spread out in infinite bulk, yet not on all sides, but infinite and solid in three quarters, while in one he is split, open, gaping, loose above with emptiness, wedged below by the land of darkness, or, if it is better to say so, open above in his own nature and entered below by an alien one. See, I join you in laughing at carnal men who, not yet able to think of spiritual things, suppose that God has human form; you too laugh with me, if you can, at those who in a most wretched way imagine so ugly and shameful a fissure or split in God, so emptily gaping above, so dishonorably stopped up below. There is this difference too: these carnal people who think of God in human form, if they are content in the bosom of the Catholic Church to be nourished with milk, and do not throw themselves headlong into rash opinions, but there nourish a godly zeal for seeking, there ask that they may receive, there knock that it may be opened to them, begin to understand the allegories and parables of the Scriptures spiritually, and gradually to grasp that the divine powers are fittingly expressed in one place by the name of ears, in another of eyes, in another of hands or feet or even of wings and feathers, of shield too and sword and helmet and countless other such things. And the more they advance in this understanding, the more firmly they become Catholics. But the Manichaeans, once they abandon the imagining of that figure, cannot be Manichaeans. For they ascribe this, as something peculiar and pre-eminent, to the praises of their founder: they say that the divine mysteries set down figuratively in books by the ancients were reserved for him, who was to come last, to be solved and demonstrated, and that therefore after him no teacher will come from God any more, because he said nothing through figures and allegories, since he both opened the ancients’ sayings of that kind and set forth his own plainly and clearly. These men, therefore, have no interpretations to fall back on when they hear read from their founder: “Now beside one part and side of that illustrious and holy land was the land of darkness.” Wherever they turn, they must, hemmed in by the misery of their phantasms, fall into splits or abrupt cuttings-off and junctures or most shameful props, which it is most wretched to believe, I will not say of the unchangeable nature of God, but of any incorporeal nature, even a changeable one such as the soul. And yet, if I were unable to stretch myself toward higher things, or to unroll my thoughts from the false imaginings that I carry fixed in memory through the bodily senses into the freedom and purity of spiritual nature, how much better would I think of God in the form of a human body than fix that black wedge into his lower split and, finding nothing with which to stop up his vast openness above, leave him thus open and gaping with immense emptiness! What can be said or imagined more foul than this opinion, more dark than this error?

Next I want to be told, since I read of God the Father and of his kingdoms founded upon the bright and blessed land, whether the Father and his kingdoms and the land are of one and the same substance and nature. If this is so, then that wedge of the race of darkness splits and penetrates not some other nature, as though it were God’s body (which would itself be most shameful in its unspeakable ugliness), but the very nature of God itself. I beg you, think of these things, you are men; I beg you, think of these things and flee, and, even if you must tear open your hearts, root out the sacrileges of such phantasms and drive them from your faith. Or will you say that those three are not of one and the same nature, but the Father of one, the kingdoms of another, the land of another, so that each has its own different nature and substance, arranged in degrees of excellence? If this is true, Mani should have proclaimed not two natures but four. But if the Father and the kingdoms have one nature and the land alone a different one, three natures should have been proclaimed. Or if he preferred to speak of two because the land of darkness does not belong to God, I ask how the land of light belongs to God. For if it both has a different nature and he neither begot nor made it, it does not belong to him, and his kingdoms are placed on another’s ground. Or if it belongs to him because it is neighboring, let the land of darkness belong to him too, which not only touches the land of light as a neighbor but even furrows through it by penetration. But if he begot it, it must not be believed to have a different nature. For what God begot must be believed to be what God is, as is believed in the Catholic Church concerning the only-begotten Son. So necessity brings you back to that shameful thing you must flee and detest: that the black wedge splits not a land as though other and different, but the very nature of God. But if God did not beget it but made it, I ask from what he made it. If from himself, what else is that but to have begotten it? If from some alien nature, I ask whether good or evil. If good, then there was some good nature that did not belong to God, which you will in no way dare to say. If evil, then the race of darkness was not the only evil nature. Or had God perhaps already taken some part from there to turn into the land of light and establish his kingdoms upon it? Then he would have done this with the whole of it, so that long ago there would have been no evil nature at all. But if he did not make the land of light from an alien substance, it remains that he made it from nothing.

Therefore, if you are now persuaded that the almighty God can make something good from nothing, come into the Catholic Church and learn that all the natures which God has made and established are arranged in degrees of excellence from the highest to the lowest, all good, but some better than others, and that they were made from nothing, God the craftsman working powerfully, so to speak, through his wisdom, so that what was not could be, and insofar as it was, it would be good; but insofar as it fell short, it would show that it was not begotten of God but made by him from nothing. For if you consider it, you find nothing to hold you back: you cannot say that the land of light you describe is what God is, lest the ugliness of that quarter be driven into the very nature of God; nor that it was begotten of him, lest it still have to be understood as what God is and so come back to the same ugliness; nor that it is alien to him, lest you be forced to say that he placed his kingdoms on another’s ground and that there are not two but three natures; nor that it was made by him from an alien substance, lest there be either some good besides God or some evil besides the race of darkness. It remains, then, for you to confess that God made the land of light from nothing, and you do not want to believe it. But if God could make from nothing some great good which was yet inferior to himself, he could also, because he is good and begrudges no good, make another good inferior to that first one; he could also make a third, to which the second would be preferred, and so extend the order of made natures down to the lowest good, so that their totality would not flow away uncertain in an indefinite number but stand bounded by a fixed limit. Or if you will not confess that God made this land of light even from nothing, there will be no way out by which you can escape such great shamefulness and such sacrilegious opinions. Or at least see (since carnal thought is free to imagine whatever phantasms it pleases) whether you can perhaps find some other shape for this conjunction of the two lands, so that so detestable and repulsive a picture of things does not come to mind: namely, that the land of God, whether it is of the same nature as God or of a different one on which God’s kingdoms are nevertheless founded, lies with so huge a bulk through immensity that it lies with limbs stretched out and open into infinity, with which it most foully and shamefully receives from below that wedge of the land of darkness, itself of immense size, driven into it. But whatever other shape you find by which these two lands are joined, you certainly cannot blot out Mani’s writings. I do not mean the others, in which he described these things more expressly (for perhaps, because they are known to fewer people, they seem to carry less danger), but these very words of the Letter of the Foundation now under discussion, which is usually very well known to nearly all among you who are called enlightened. For here it is written thus: “Now beside one part and side of that illustrious and holy land was the land of darkness, deep and of immense size.”

What more are we waiting for? We have it, that it was beside a side. Now invent shapes as you please and draw outlines of whatever kind: certainly that immense bulk of the land of darkness was joined to the land of light by a straight side, or a curved one, or a crooked one. But if by a crooked one, then that holy land too has a crooked side; for if it has a straight side and is touched by the crooked side of the other, certain deep hollows gape between, empty to infinity, and the emptiness was no longer only above the land of darkness, as we used to hear. If so, how much better it would have been for the land of light to withdraw somewhat further and for so great an emptiness to lie between that it could not be touched by the land of darkness in any part at all! Indeed, so great a space of empty depth might have lain open that, if any wickedness of that race arose, even if the princes of darkness wished rashly to leap across into it (since bodies cannot fly unless supported by bodily air), they would be hurled headlong through that emptiness and, since it was infinite downward, would never reach any bottom; even if they could live forever, they could never do harm, since they would always be falling downward. But if it was joined by a curved side, the land of light too received it in a curved hollow in an ugly way. Or if the land of darkness was curved inward, like a theater, it embraced a curved part of the land of light received into such a hollow in a no less ugly union. Or if this land had a curved side and that one a straight side, it did not touch it along the whole side; and certainly it would have been better, as I said above, for it to touch at no part and for so great an emptiness to lie between that it would separate the two lands by a fitting interval and allow the rash and wicked to do no harm as they fell headlong into infinity. But if a straight side touched a straight side, I see indeed no receptacles or gaps, but I plainly see so great a peace and so great a harmony of the two lands with each other that there could be no closer union. For what is more beautiful, what more fitting, than for straight to be joined to straight in such a way that no hollow or bend at any point breaks or separates the natural and stable juncture, through infinite space and from infinite eternity? These straight sides of the two lands, even if they were separated by an intervening emptiness, would not only be beautiful in themselves, because so straight, but would also so match each other across the interval that the equal straightnesses on this side and that, even without any juncture, would come together by their very likeness into one beauty. And when that juncture is added, I cannot find what can be said or thought more harmonious and peaceful than these two lands, or indeed more beautiful than this very union of two straight sides.