Against Faustus the Manichaean 19.30–20.10

Therefore, since all those excellent precepts of the Lord which Faustus wished to show were contrary to the old books of the Hebrews are found in those same books, from what did the Lord come not to abolish the law but to fulfil it, except that, apart from the figures of the promises, which were fulfilled and removed when the truth was rendered, the very precepts too, through which that law is holy and just and good, might be fulfilled in us, not through the oldness of the letter, which commands and increases offenses by adding the guilt of transgression to the proud, but through the newness of the Spirit, who helps, and of grace, which sets free for salvation the humble who confess? For in truth, just as all these sublime precepts are not lacking in those old books, so the end to which they are to be referred is hidden there, although the saints lived according to it, who saw its future revelation and, according to the character of their times, either veiled it prophetically or wisely understood what was prophetically veiled. 31. Finally (and I would not say it rashly), I do not know whether anyone has found in those books the name “kingdom of heaven,” which the Lord names so often. It is indeed said there: “Love wisdom, that you may reign for ever.” And if eternal life itself were not openly proclaimed there, the Lord would not say even to the wicked Jews: “Search the scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life; they bear witness to me.” For to what else does it refer that is written there: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord”; and, “Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death”; and, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and torment shall not touch them”; and a little later: “But they are in peace; and though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and having been troubled a little, they will be greatly rewarded”; and in another place: “But the righteous will live for ever, and their reward is with the Lord, and their care with the Most High; therefore they will receive the kingdom of glory and the crown of beauty from the hand of the Lord”? These and many other testimonies of eternal life, some very plain, some somewhat obscure, are found there. And the prophets were not silent about the resurrection of bodies itself. Hence the Pharisees fought very fiercely against the Sadducees, who did not believe in it; this appears plainly not only in the canonical Acts of the Apostles, which these people do not accept, lest they be refuted about the coming of the true Paraclete whom the Lord promised, but also in the gospel, where the Sadducees put to him the question about the woman who had married seven brothers one after another, as each succeeded the other in marriage to her when he died: whose wife would she be in the resurrection? So that scripture abounds in testimonies of eternal life and of the resurrection of the dead; but this name, that is, “kingdom of heaven,” does not occur to me from any place there. For this belongs properly to the revelation of the New Testament, because those bodies which had been earthly will, by that change which Paul mentions more openly, become spiritual in the resurrection, and therefore heavenly, in which we may possess the kingdom of heaven. This was kept to be named even by the mouth of him whom that whole apparatus of the old instrument, in generations, deeds, sayings, sacrifices, observances, festivals, and all the proclamations of its oracles, its events, and the figures of things, was in labor to bring forth as the one to come, as king to rule and priest to sanctify his faithful: he who, full of grace and truth, both helping to do the precepts by grace and taking care to fulfil the promises by truth, came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it.

Faustus said: “Why do you worship the sun, unless because you are pagans and a schism of the Gentiles, not a sect?” It will not be out of place to examine this point too, so that we may see more clearly which of us ought to be called by this name. And indeed, if I were now to set out my faith to you simply, as among friends, I might perhaps seem to be inventing it by way of excuse, or to be ashamed, God forbid, of the worship of the divine lights. But take it as you please; I shall not regret having said it, at least for the sake of some who will thus come to know that our religion has nothing in common with the Gentiles.

We, then, worship one and the same deity under a threefold name, of God the almighty Father, and of Christ his Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But we believe that the Father himself dwells in the highest and principal light, which Paul elsewhere calls “unapproachable,” and that the Son abides in this second and visible light. And since he too is twofold, as the apostle knows him when he says that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God,” we believe that his power dwells in the sun and his wisdom in the moon. We also confess that this whole compass of the air is the seat and lodging of the Holy Spirit, who is the third majesty; and that from his powers and spiritual outpouring the earth too conceives and brings forth the suffering Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men, hanging from every tree. Therefore we have toward all things, and you likewise toward the bread and the cup, an equal reverence, although you hate their authors most bitterly. This is our faith; if you think it should be inquired into elsewhere, you will hear of it; although for the present this argument too is no less firm: that you, or anyone else, if asked where he believes his God dwells, will not hesitate to answer, “In light.” From this my worship is confirmed by the testimony of almost everyone.

But now to the point that you called us not a sect but a schism of the Gentiles. A schism, unless I am mistaken, is when someone who holds the same opinions and worships with the same rite as the rest takes pleasure only in separating the congregation; a sect, on the other hand, is when someone who holds opinions far different from the rest has also instituted for himself the worship of the deity with another and far dissimilar rite. If this is so, my opinion and worship, for now, are far different from those of the pagans; we shall see about yours later. The pagans teach that good and evil, foul and splendid, everlasting and perishing, changeable and fixed, bodily and divine, have one principle. I hold the very opposite to them, for I confess God as the principle of all good things, and Hyle of their contraries; for so our theologian names the principle and nature of evil. Again, the pagans think that God is to be worshipped with altars, shrines, images, victims, and incense. In this too I go far apart from them: I consider myself, if only I am worthy, the rational temple of God; I take Christ his Son as the living image of the living majesty; as altar, a mind imbued with good arts and disciplines. Divine honors and sacrifices too I place in prayers alone, and those pure and simple. How then am I a schism of the pagans?

On that reckoning you could also have called me a schism of the Jews, because I too worship the almighty God, which every Jew boldly claims for himself as well, if you did not consider the difference of rites with which the Almighty is worshipped by me and by the Jews, if indeed the Jews worship the Almighty. But for the present we are dealing with opinion, which misled the pagans about the worship of the sun just as it misled the Jews about the worship of the Almighty. But neither is it true if you call me a schism of yours, although I venerate and worship Christ, because I worship him with another rite and another faith than yours. A schism, however, ought to change either nothing from that from which it arose, or not much. You, for example, breaking away from the Gentiles, first tore off with you their opinion of a single principle, that is, that you believe all things come from God; and you turned their sacrifices into love feasts, their idols into martyrs, whom you worship with similar vows; you appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts; you celebrate the solemn days of the Gentiles with them, such as the Kalends and the solstices; certainly you have changed nothing in your way of life. You are plainly a schism, differing from its mother in nothing but your assembly. Your predecessors the Jews too, when they separated themselves from the Gentiles, gave up only carved images; but temples, sacrifices, altars, priesthoods, and the whole ministry of sacred rites they practised with the same rite, and far more superstitiously than the Gentiles. And in the opinion of a single principle they too differ in nothing from the pagans. Therefore it is clear that you and the Jews are schisms of paganism, holding its faith and its rites, though somewhat changed, and you think you are sects merely because your assemblies are separate. Moreover, if you look for sects, there will be no more than two, that is, that of the Gentiles and ours, who hold views far different from them, so opposed to each other as truth and falsehood, as day and night, as poverty and plenty, as sickness and health. But you are neither a sect of error nor of truth, but only a schism; and that not even of the truth, but of error.

Augustine replied: O ignorant plague and shifty vanity! Why do you raise against yourself an objection which, if anyone raises it against you, he does not know whom he is dealing with? For we do not call you pagans or a schism of the pagans, but say that you have a certain likeness to them in that you worship many gods; and indeed that you are far worse than they, because they worship things that exist, but should not be worshipped as gods. For idols too exist, but they are nothing for salvation. And whoever worships (colit) a tree, not by cultivating it but by adoring it, does not worship what exists nowhere, but what should not be worshipped in that way. The demons themselves also, of which the apostle says, “What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God,” certainly exist, since he says they sacrifice to them and does not want us to be their partners. Again, heaven and earth, sea and air, sun and moon and the other stars, all these appear plainly to the eyes and are present to the senses themselves. When the pagans worship these as gods, or as parts of one great god (for some of them think the whole universe is the greatest god), they worship things that exist. When we deal with them so that they may not worship these things, we do not tell them that they are nothing, but that they are not to be worshipped; and we persuade them that the invisible God, the maker of all these, is to be worshipped, by participation in whom alone a man can become happy, which no one doubts all men want. But since some of them worship an invisible and incorporeal creature (as the human soul and mind is), yet, because a man does not become happy by participation even in a creature of this kind, the God who is not only invisible but also unchangeable, that is, the true God, must be worshipped; for he alone is to be worshipped by enjoying whom alone his worshipper becomes happy, and without enjoying whom alone every mind is miserable, whatever else it may enjoy. But since you worship things that do not exist at all, but are invented by the emptiness of your deceitful fables, you would be nearer to true piety and religion if you were at least pagans, or of the kind that worship bodies, which are not to be worshipped, yet are real. Hence I would more truly say that you do not even worship this sun, toward whose circuit your prayer turns round.

For about it too you boast so many falsehoods, and such detestable ones, that if it avenged its injuries, you would already be burning alive in its flames. For first you say that it is a kind of ship; so you not only stray, as the saying goes, by the whole sky, but swim as well. Then, although it shines round before everyone’s eyes, and that shape is perfect for it given the position of its order, you assert that it is triangular, that is, that this light shines on the world and the earth through a kind of triangular window of the sky. So it comes about that you bend your back and neck toward this sun, yet adore not the sun itself, visible in so bright a roundness, but some ship or other flashing and shining through a triangular hole, a ship you have invented in your thoughts. Certainly that shipwright would not have made it if, as the timbers with which the planks of ships are fastened together are bought, so the words with which the fables of heretics are fabricated were bought as well. But these things in you are more bearably either laughed at or wept over; what is intolerably wicked is that you say that from this very ship beautiful girls and boys are displayed, with whose most lovely bodies the princes of darkness are inflamed, the males toward the females and the females toward the males, so that in that very burning lust and gaping desire the members of your God may be released from their members as from foul and filthy fetters. And with these most obscene rags of yours you try to sew on the ineffable Trinity, saying that the Father dwells in a certain secret light, the power of the Son in the sun, his wisdom in the moon, and the Holy Spirit in the air!

In this threefold, or rather now fourfold, fable of yours, what am I to say to you about the Father’s secret light, except that you cannot conceive of light except such as you are used to seeing? For gazing at this light, which is visible and most familiar to all flesh, not only of men but also of beasts and little worms, you are accustomed to enlarge without limit the image conceived from it in your heart, and to call that the light where God the Father dwells with the citizens of his kingdom. For when have you distinguished the light by which we see from the light by which we understand, since you have never thought that understanding the truth is anything other than imagining bodily forms, either bounded or unbounded on some sides, which you do not know to be empty phantasms? There is a great difference between the thought by which I imagine your land of light, which exists nowhere at all, and the thought by which I imagine Alexandria, which I have never seen, yet which exists; and again there is a great difference between this thought, by which I imagine Alexandria unknown to me, and that by which I imagine Carthage, which I know. But from this thought too, by which I imagine certain and known bodies, the thought by which I understand justice, chastity, faith, truth, love, kindness, and whatever is of this kind, is incomparably far removed. Tell me, if you can, what kind of light that thought is, by which all these things, which are not this light, are both distinguished from one another and known with sure clarity, together with how far they are from this light. And yet even this light is not that light which God is; for this is a creature, he is the creator; this was made, he is the one who made it; this, finally, is changeable, as it wills what it did not will, and knows what it did not know, and remembers what it had forgotten, while that light abides in unchangeable will, truth, and eternity. And from it we have the beginning of existing, the reason of knowing, the law of loving; from it all living things, even irrational ones, have the nature by which they live, the vigor by which they perceive, the movement by which they seek; from it too all bodies have measure, so that they may subsist, number, so that they may be adorned, weight, so that they may be ordered. So that light is the inseparable Trinity, one God, whose substance, incorporeal, spiritual, and unchangeable in itself, with no body joined to it, you even divide by places. And you do not even give the Trinity three places, but four: one to the Father, that is, the unapproachable light, which you do not understand at all; two to the Son, namely the sun and the moon; and again one to the Holy Spirit, that is, this whole compass of the air. About the unapproachable light of the Father, then, since for those who hold the true faith the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separated from it, let this be enough for now.

And what made your vanity place the Son’s power in the sun and his wisdom in the moon? For since the Son abides inseparably in the Father himself, how can his wisdom be separated from his power, so that the one is in the sun and the other in the moon, when only bodies can be divided and separated by places of this kind? If you knew this, you would never weave such fables from a foolish and mad phantasm. But even within that very falsehood and deceit, how unfittingly, how perversely you say that the seat of wisdom shines less than the seat of power, when working and accomplishing seem to belong to power, but teaching and showing to wisdom! And so, if heat prevailed in the sun and light in the moon, these inventions would somehow have found a mist of likelihood for deceiving carnal and animal men, who think that nothing exists except what they have imagined as bodily; for the force of heat works to move things, so that it might be attributed to power, while the clear brightness of light serves to show things, so that they might give it to wisdom. But since light far excels in the sun, how is power there, while what shines so much less here is wisdom? O sacrilegious folly! And since the one Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, while the Holy Spirit is not himself Christ, how is Christ separated from himself, when the Holy Spirit is not separated from him? For you assert that the air, which your fable assigns as the seat of the Holy Spirit, fills the whole structure of the world. Hence the sun and the moon, as they travel their circuits, are always with it; but the moon departs from the sun and returns again to the sun. So, on your authority, or rather by your deception, wisdom withdraws from power for half of the circuit and returns to it again for the other half; and when the moon is full, then wisdom is far from power; for then these two lights are separated from each other by so long an interval that when the sun sinks toward the west, the moon rises in the east. From this it follows, since everything that power deserts grows weak, that wisdom is the weaker the fuller the moon is. But if, as the truth holds, both the wisdom of God is always equally strong and the power of God is always equally wise, why do you speak of these two in such a way as to separate them by seats and intervals of place, when you say that the seats themselves are of the same substance, men who with blind and mad minds do not depart from the phantasm of bodies, and are so lacking in power and wisdom that you can neither be wise with any strength nor be strong with any wisdom? Is it really so, detestable and accursed folly, that Christ, stretched out through the sun and moon, dwelling here as power and there as wisdom, neither perfect and full here, nor wise in the sun nor powerful in the moon, in both places procures beautiful boys to be desired by the female princes of darkness and girls by the males? This you read, this you believe, this you teach, by this faith and doctrine you live; and you are surprised that you are so abhorred!

But if you so go astray about these most eminent and best-known lights that you adore in them not what they are but what you most insanely imagine, what am I to say about your other fables? For what Splenditenens suspends the world, and what Atlas holds it up along with him? These and countless other things that you rave about in the same way do not exist at all, and you worship them. That is why we say that you are worse than the pagans, like them only in that you worship many gods, but unlike them for the worse in that they worship as gods things that exist but are not gods, while you worship things that are neither gods nor anything at all, since they do not exist at all. They too have some fabulous inventions; but they know that they are fables, and either say they were invented by poets for the sake of delight, or try to interpret them with reference to the nature of things or the morals of men: as that Vulcan is lame because the motion of earthly fire is of that kind; that Fortune is blind because the things called fortuitous happen uncertainly; that the three Fates with distaff and spindle and fingers twist the thread from the wool because of the three times: the past, which is already spun and wound on the spindle; the present, which passes between the fingers of the spinner; the future in the wool wound on the distaff, which is still to pass through the fingers of the spinner to the spindle, as through the present to the past; that Venus is the wife of Vulcan, because pleasure is naturally drawn from heat, and the adulteress of Mars, because she is unsuited to those at war; that Cupid is a boy flying and shooting arrows, because irrational and unstable love wounds the hearts of the wretched; and very many other things in this manner. So what we laugh at in them is that, having interpreted them so, they adore what, if not understood, they would adore, though damnably, yet more excusably. For by these very interpretations they are convicted of worshipping not the God by participation in whom alone the mind becomes happy, but the creature made by him; and not only the virtues of that creature, like Minerva, whose fable, that she was born from the head of Jupiter, they interpret as prudence in counsel, which is proper to reason, to which Plato too gave the head as its seat, but also vices, as we said about Cupid. Hence one of their tragic poets says: “Base lust, favoring vice, invented love as a god.” For the Romans even consecrated images of bodily ills, such as Pallor and Fever. So, to pass over the fact that the adorers of images have feelings toward the very shapes of the bodies, so that they fear as gods those very forms set up on high in places of honor, to which they see such homage paid, the very interpretations by which these dumb, deaf, blind, and lifeless things are defended accuse them all the more justly. Nevertheless, these things, whatever they are, although, as I have already said, they are nothing for salvation or for any benefit, both exist, and what is interpreted from them is found in reality. But you neither by painting nor by sculpture nor by interpretation show your First Man warring with five elements; and the Mighty Spirit fashioning the world from the captive bodies of the race of darkness, or rather from the conquered and subdued members of your God; and Splenditenens holding in his hand the remains of those same members of your God and lamenting all the rest, captured, oppressed, defiled; and the great Atlas carrying it on his shoulders together with him, so that the other, worn out, may not throw it all down; and so your fable, as on a theatre curtain, may not be able to reach the catastolium of that last globe; and countless other things equally silly and mad: and yet you believe and worship them, although they do not exist at all, and moreover you mock as rashly credulous the Christians who cleanse their pious minds by unfeigned faith. Not to look for many arguments to show that these things do not exist at all (because to treat more subtly and loftily of the structure of the world, even if it were not difficult for me, would certainly take too long), I say this: if these things are true, the substance of God is changeable, corruptible, capable of defilement. But to believe this is full of sacrilegious madness. All those things, therefore, are vain, false, nothing. Hence you are altogether worse than these pagans who are commonly known, who existed of old and now blush at what remains of them, because they worship things that are not gods, while you worship things that do not exist at all.

So if you think that you hold the truth because you are far unlike the error of the pagans, and that we are in error because we are perhaps farther from you than from the pagans, then let a dead man be called healthy because he is no longer even sick, and let the healthy man be blamed because he is nearer to the sick than to the dead. Or, if many pagans are to be reckoned not as sick but as dead, let the shapeless ash in the tomb be praised because it no longer even keeps the shape of a corpse, and let living limbs be faulted because they are more like a corpse than ashes; just as these people think we should be blamed because, they say, we are more like the corpse of the pagans than the cinders of the Manichaeans. Yet things are usually divided for distinction in different ways according to many differences, so that what was on one side is found, by other differences, on another side where it was not before. For example, if someone divides all flesh into flying creatures and those that cannot fly, by this difference four-footed animals are more like men than birds, for both alike cannot fly. Again, if someone divides by another difference, saying that some are rational and others irrational, now four-footed animals are more like birds than men, for both alike lack reason. Not considering this, Faustus says: “Moreover, if you look for sects, there will be no more than two, that is, that of the Gentiles and ours, who hold views far different from them,” because, of course, he had said that the Gentiles differ from the Manichaeans chiefly in that they say all things come from one principle, which the Manichaeans deny, adding the principle of the race of darkness. In this difference, it must be admitted, many pagans agree with us; but he did not see that, again, if someone divides by saying that among those who are held by some religion, some think one God is to be worshipped and others many, by this difference both the pagans are far from us, and these people are counted with the pagans, and we with the Jews. Someone, then, could by this difference also reckon only two sects in this way. Here perhaps you will say that you declare your many gods to be of one substance, as if the pagans did not assert that their many gods are not of one substance, although they attribute to them different offices, works, and powers; just as among you too one fights the race of darkness, another builds the world from what was captured from it, another suspends it from above, another carries it from below, another turns the wheels of fire, winds, and waters at the bottom, another, circling in the sky, gathers with his rays the members of your God even from sewers. And who can count all the fabulous offices of all your gods, shown by no truth, figured by no enigmas? Further, if another divides all men by saying that some believe that God cares for human affairs and others do not believe this at all, on the one side the pagans agree with us, and the Jews, and you, and all heretics who are in any way called Christians; on the other are found the Epicureans and any others who have held this view. Is this a small difference? Why then should it not be said that by this difference too there are only two sects, so that in one of them you are with us? Or will you dare, in this difference, to depart from us who preach that God cares for human affairs, and to be with the Epicureans, who deny it? Here, surely, rejecting them, you run to us. So, by various differences, they are found now here, now there, joined on one side, separated on another; in turn all are with us and we with all, and again none of them with us nor we with any of them. If Faustus had considered this, he would not rave so eloquently.