Against Faustus the Manichaean 20.11–20.21

And what am I to say to this, that he says, “from the powers of the Holy Spirit and his spiritual outpouring the earth too conceives and brings forth the suffering Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men, hanging from every tree”? O madman! Not to discuss for the moment your empty talk on this matter, can the earth conceive the suffering Jesus from the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin Mary could not? Compare, if you dare, the virginal womb, sanctified by such chastity, with all the places of the earth where trees and plants are produced. Do you shudder, or pretend to shudder, at the womb dedicated to purity in that woman, and not shudder that Jesus is produced in all the gardens around every city from sewer water? For what moisture, however muddy, does not produce and nourish countless shoots? So you preach that the suffering Jesus is born in this way, whom you cry out it is unworthy to believe was born of a virgin. If you think flesh unclean, why does it not seem to you more unclean, what the very nature of the flesh purges out from the balance of its own health? Or is flesh unclean, and the dung that is passed out of the flesh clean? Do you not notice, do you not see, that fields are gladdened by manure, so that they may be made more fertile? Your madness, surely, comes to this: that the earth conceives from the Holy Spirit, who, you say, disdained the flesh of Mary, the more abundantly and gladly the more carefully it has been fattened with the filth and squalor of the flesh. Or, to defend this, will you say that the Holy Spirit is strong everywhere with a presence that cannot be defiled? The answer to you is: why not, then, in the virginal womb too? But to say no more of the conception, look next at the birth itself. You say that the earth, conceiving from the Holy Spirit, brings forth the suffering Jesus, whom, however, you declare hangs from every tree in fruits and apples so defiled that he is defiled still more by countless animals that feed on the flesh of animals, to be cleansed only from the part that your hunger comes to help. So we believe with the heart and confess with the mouth that Christ the Son of God, the Word of God, was clothed with flesh without defilement, because that substance cannot be defiled even by flesh, which cannot be defiled by anything. But you, according to your fable, say that Jesus, still hanging on the tree, is already defiled before he enters the flesh of anyone who eats. Or if he is not defiled, how do you cleanse him by eating? Then, since you say that all trees are his cross (hence Faustus preaches him “hanging from every tree”), why, just as Joseph of Arimathea, doing a good work, took down the true Jesus from the cross to bury him, do you not likewise pick the fruit in order to bury in your belly Jesus taken down from hanging on the tree? Or how is it pious to lay Christ in the tomb, but impious to take him down from the tree? Or is it so that what the apostle quotes from the prophet may fit you too, “Their throat is an open tomb,” that you wait with open mouth for someone to bring Christ to your jaws as to the best of burials? Finally, tell us how many Christs you say there are. Is the one whom the earth, conceiving from the Holy Spirit, brings forth as the suffering one, not only hanging from every tree but also lying in the grass, one Christ, and the one whom the Jews crucified under Pontius Pilate another, and the one stretched out through the sun and moon a third? Or is he one and the same, bound in part in the trees, but in part free and helping that same bound and captive part? If so, the one whom you grant suffered under Pontius Pilate, since you relate that he was without flesh (I do not yet ask how he could suffer such a death without flesh), I ask to whom he left those ships, so that, descending from there, he might suffer such things as could not happen without some body or other. For in his spiritual presence he could in no way suffer those things; while in a bodily presence he could not be at once in the sun and in the moon and on the cross. So if he did not have a body, he was not crucified; but if he did have one, I ask where he got it, since you say all bodies are from the race of darkness, although you have never been able to conceive of the divine substance as anything but bodily. Hence you are forced either to say he was crucified without a body (than which nothing more absurd and mad can be said), or that he was seen to be crucified in phantasm rather than in truth (and what is worse than this impiety?), or that not all bodies are from the race of darkness, but that there is also a body of the divine substance, which is yet not immortal but can be fixed to wood and killed (which is no less full of madness), or that Christ had a mortal body from the race of darkness; and so you who fear to believe that the Virgin Mary was the mother of his body do not fear that the race of demons was. Finally, since according to the statement of Faustus, which he plucked from that very long fable of yours and condensed as briefly as he could, the earth, conceiving from the Holy Spirit, brings forth the suffering Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men, hanging from every tree, why does that Savior suit the hanging one by hanging, and not suit the one who is born by being born? But if you say that Jesus is in the trees, and Jesus crucified under Pontius Pilate, and Jesus stretched out through the sun and moon, because all this is of one and the same substance, why do you not include the other thousands of your deities under this name as well? For why should Splenditenens not be Jesus, and Atlas, and the King of Honor, and the Mighty Spirit, and the First Man, and all the countless others you preach under different names and different offices?

Finally, why is the Holy Spirit himself placed as the third person, when he is among countless ones? Or why should he not also be Jesus himself? And what is meant now, in the writings of Faustus, by that deceitful texture of words, where, trying as it were to agree with true Christians, from whom he is far, far removed, he says: “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”? For why under a threefold, and not rather under a manifold, not name only but also reality, if there are as many persons as names? For you cannot say, as among weapons one thing goes by the threefold name of “ensis,” “mucro,” “gladius” (sword, blade, brand), and as you say that the moon, the lesser ship, and the night-time light-bearer are one thing, along with any other word you give the same thing, that the First Man is the same as the one you call the Mighty Spirit, and Splenditenens, and the great Atlas; but that one is one, and this another, and that yet another; and none of them do you usually call Christ. Or how is it one deity, if the works are different? Or why is the whole together not one Christ, if, because of the one substance, Christ is in the trees, and Christ in the persecution of the Jews, and Christ in the sun and moon? Surely your phantasms have lost all their ways. Surely they are nothing but the visions of madmen.

But why Faustus should think that we have an equal reverence concerning the bread and the cup, I do not know, since for the Manichaeans to taste wine is not religion but sacrilege. For they acknowledge their God in the grape, but will not in the cask, as if something trodden and shut up had offended them. Our bread and cup, however, is not just any bread and cup, as if because Christ were bound in ears of grain and in vine shoots, as they foolishly think; but it becomes mystical for us by a definite consecration; it is not born so. So what is not made so, although it is bread and a cup, is nourishment for refreshment, not a sacrament of religion, except that we bless and give thanks to the Lord in every gift of his, not only spiritual but also bodily. But to you, according to your fable, Christ is served up bound in all foods, still to be bound in your bowels and loosed by your belches. For when you eat, you refresh yourselves by the failing of your God, and when you digest, you fail by his refreshment. For when he fills you, your restoration presses him down. This indeed might be counted as mercy, when he suffers something for you in you, except that he leaves you empty again in order to escape, set free from you. How then do you compare our bread and cup and call an error far removed from the truth an equal reverence, being more foolish than some who think that because of the bread and cup we worship Ceres and Liber? I thought this worth mentioning so that you may notice from what emptiness comes also that notion of yours, that because of the sabbath you think our fathers were dedicated to Saturn. For just as we are far from Ceres and Liber, gods of the pagans, although we embrace, with our own rite, the sacrament of the bread and the cup, which you praised so much as to want to be equal to us in it, so our fathers were far from the chains of Saturn, although, for the time of prophecy, they observed the rest of the sabbath.

But why did you not say that you have an equal religion with the pagans because of Hyle as well, which occurs frequently in some books of the pagans? Indeed, you wanted to be understood as unequal and far unlike on this very account, because your theologian calls the principle and nature of evil by this name. In this your great ignorance is caught out, because you do not know what hyle is, and you affect to puff yourselves up as learned with the word for a thing of which you are entirely ignorant. For the Greeks, when they discourse on nature, define hyle as a kind of matter of things, in no way at all formed, but capable of all bodily forms; it is recognized somehow in the changeableness of bodies, for in itself it can be neither perceived nor understood. But some of the Gentiles err in this, that they join it to God as coeternal, so that it is not from him, although it is formed by him; that this is foreign to the truth, the truth itself teaches. See, then, to which pagans you are found very like about this very Hyle: you too declare that it has its own principle and is not from God; and in this you said you were unlike them, not knowing what you were saying. But in this, that this hyle has no form of its own and can be formed only by God, they agree with our truth and disagree with your falsehood. For not knowing what hyle is, that is, what the matter of things is, you say it is the race of darkness, where you set up not only countless forms of bodies, distinguished into five kinds, but also a mind that forms these bodies; and, what is more ignorant, or rather more insane, you call the mind itself hyle, which you assert does not get formed but forms. For if there were there some forming mind and bodily elements to be formed, those elements should be called hyle, that is, matter, which that mind would form, the mind which you want to be the principle of evil. If you said this, you would not err much about what hyle is, except that the elements themselves, though to be formed into other forms, yet, because they would already be elements and distinguished by their own kinds, would not be hyle, since hyle is altogether formless. Still your ignorance would be tolerable, because you would be calling hyle what is formed, not what forms. But even so you would be held empty and sacrilegious, because, not knowing that every measure of natures, number of forms, and order of weights can come only from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you would be attributing so great a good to the principle of evil. As it is, since you know neither what hyle is nor what evil is, oh, if only I could persuade you to keep yourselves from seducing the less instructed!

Now, who would not laugh at your wanting to be better than the pagans on this account too, that they think God is to be worshipped with altars, shrines, images, victims, and incense, while you do none of these things? As if it were not better even to set up an altar and offer a victim to a stone, which at any rate exists, than to adore in the raving of a phantasm what does not exist at all! But you, who said that you are the rational temple of God, how will you explain this? Does it please you that God should have a temple of which the devil built some part? Are you not the ones who say that all your members and your whole body were built by the malignant mind which you call Hyle, and that part of that very builder dwells there together with a part of your God? Since this part is held there, as you assert, chained and shut up, ought you to have called yourself the temple of God, or the prison of God? Unless perhaps you call your soul the temple of God, which you have from the land of light. But you usually call that a part of God, or a member of God, not a temple of God. It remains, then, that you called yourself the temple of God only in respect of the body, which according to you the devil built. See how you blaspheme the temple of God, saying not only that it is not holy, but that it is the devil’s contrivance and God’s workhouse prison. But the apostle says, “For the temple of God is holy, which you are”; and so that you may not think what was said applies only to the soul, hear it more expressly: “Do you not know,” he says, “that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” But you call the devils’ construction the temple of God, and there you place, as Faustus says, “Christ the Son of God, the living image of the living majesty.” Plainly, let your phantasmal Christ dwell in such a temple of sacrilegious vanity. For he can be called an image (simulacrum) not from likeness but from simulation.

So you have also made your mind an altar; but see whose. For it is clear from the very arts and disciplines with which you said it was imbued. Those arts and disciplines forbid you to hold out bread to a begging man, so that you burn on your altar with a sacrifice of cruelty; an altar which the Lord destroys, who reminds us from the law what odor God delights in, saying, “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice.” And notice where the Lord recalled this: when he was passing through a grainfield and his hungry disciples were plucking ears of grain, which you call murder, by the discipline with which you have imbued your mind; an altar indeed not of God but of lying demons, from whose doctrines a malignant conscience is branded and seared, calling murder what the truth calls innocence. For so he says to the Jews, where he struck and destroyed you too, who were to come: “If you knew what ‘I desire mercy rather than sacrifice’ means, you would never have condemned the innocent.”

And what simple and pure prayers will you be able to have as divine honors and sacrifices, when you think so many unworthy and shameful things about the divine nature and substance itself that not only is the true God not propitiated by your sacrifices, but your God is sacrificed in the sacrifices of the pagans? For you hold that he is bound not only in wood and plants and human members, but also in the flesh of cattle, by bonds that defile and pollute him. And to what God does your soul itself sing praise, when, crying out that it is itself a particle of him held captive in the race of darkness, what else does it do but find fault with God, testifying that he could not have provided for himself against his enemies in any other way than by so great a corruption of his parts and so shameful a captivity? Hence your prayers to your God cannot be religious, but reproachful. For what evil had you committed before him, that in this punishment you now groan to him, whom you did not desert by sinning of your own will, but by whom you were handed over to his enemies so that peace might be secured for his kingdom? And not even as hostages are usually handed over, to be kept with honor; nor as a shepherd sets a snare to catch a beast, for he usually places one of his flock in that trap, not a member of himself, and generally so that the beast is caught before the sheep is hurt. But you, members of God, were handed over to the enemies, unable to restrain their savagery from your God except by being defiled with their foulness, having no sin of your own, but wasted away by the enemy’s poison. Hence you cannot say in your prayers, “For the glory of your name, Lord, deliver us; and be merciful to our sins for your name’s sake”; but you say, “Deliver us by your skill, because, so that you may now mourn securely in your kingdom, we are here oppressed, torn apart, defiled.” This is the voice of accusation, not of supplication. Nor can you say what the Master of truth taught: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” For who are your debtors, who have sinned against you? If the race of darkness, do you forgive its debts, when you shut it up, uprooted at the end, in an eternal prison? And what debts can he forgive you, when he has rather sinned against you, by sending you to these things, than you against him, who obeyed the one who sent you? Or if he did not sin because he did this from necessity, your necessity too is greater, since you now lie prostrate in the battle, than his was before you fought. For you now suffer the mingled evil; he suffered nothing of the kind, although he suffered the necessity of sending you. So either he owes you something rather, for you to forgive him, or, if he does not owe you, much less do you owe him. Where then are your sacrifices, your simple and pure prayers, when they are deceitful and impure blasphemies?

And yet I want you to tell me why you call all these things which you praise in yourselves by these names, so as to say temple, altar, sacrifice. For if these true things are not owed to the true God, why are they preached with praise in true religion? But if a true sacrifice is rightly owed to the true God, from which also divine honors are rightly so called, the other things called sacrifices are made in the likeness of a certain true sacrifice. These are partly imitations belonging to false and deceitful gods, that is, demons, who proudly demand divine honors for themselves from those whom they have deceived (such as all the things that are, or were, in the temples and idols of the Gentiles); partly foretellings of the one truest sacrifice to come, which was to be offered for the sins of all believers, such as were commanded by God to our ancient fathers, among which was also that mystical anointing by which Christ was prefigured, from which his very name is derived from chrism. So the true sacrifice, owed to the one true God, with which Christ alone filled his altar, the demons imitated in sacrifices of cattle and arrogantly demand for themselves. Hence the apostle says, “What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God,” not blaming what was offered, but that it was offered to them. But the Hebrews, in the sacrifices of cattle which they offered to God in many and various ways, as befitted so great a matter, celebrated a prophecy of the future victim which Christ offered. Hence Christians now celebrate the memory of that same sacrifice, accomplished, by the most holy offering and participation of the body and blood of Christ. But the Manichaeans, not knowing what is to be condemned in the sacrifices of the Gentiles, what is to be understood in the sacrifices of the Hebrews, and what is to be held or observed in the sacrifice of Christians, offer their own vanity as a sacrifice to the devil, who deceived them as they departed from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars.

So let Faustus learn, or rather those who delight in his writings, that we do not have the belief in one principle from the Gentiles, but that the Gentiles did not fall away to false gods so far as to lose the belief in the one true God, from whom is every nature of whatever kind. For their wise men, since, as the apostle says, “the invisible things of God are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity, so that they are without excuse,” “knowing God, did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; for, claiming to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents.” For these are the images of the Gentiles, in interpreting which they have no outlet except to the creature that God made; so that even in that interpretation of images, about which the more learned of them are accustomed to boast and puff themselves up, there happens in them what the same apostle says a little later: “They worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed for ever.” But you are both empty in that in which you are unlike them, and worse in that in which you are like them. For you do not believe in one principle with them, which they believe truly, to the end that you may believe that the substance of the one God himself can be overcome and corrupted, which is impious vanity; while in the worship of many gods, the doctrine of lying demons has persuaded them of many idols, and you of many phantasms.

Nor have we turned their sacrifices into love feasts; but we have understood that sacrifice which I mentioned a little earlier, as the Lord says, “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice.” For our love feasts feed the poor, whether with produce or with meat. For a creature of God is fed with a creature of God that is fit for human food. But because lying demons have persuaded you to abstain, not in order to govern the flesh but in order to practise blasphemy, from foods “which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth, since every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving,” you, ungrateful to the creator and repaying his generous benefits with sacrilegious insults, since meat too is often given out to the poor at the love feasts, say that the mercy of Christians is like the sacrifices of the pagans; whereas you are like some of the pagans in this very point. For you hold it wicked for cattle to be killed because you think human souls are turned back into them, which is found in the books of certain Gentile philosophers, although it is said to have been understood otherwise by later ones. But in this too you err far worse; for they feared to slaughter their neighbor in the animal, but you fear to slaughter your God, whose members you think the souls of animals also are.

As for Faustus slandering us on this score too, that we honor the shrines of the martyrs, saying that in this we have turned idols into martyrs, it does not move me so much to answer this slander as to show that Faustus himself, in his eagerness to slander, was willing to swerve even from the fancies of Mani himself, and fell unawares, somehow, into the common and poetic opinion of the pagans, from whom he wants to appear utterly removed. For when he had said that we turned idols into martyrs, “whom,” he says, “you worship with similar vows; you appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts”: are there, then, shades of the dead? We have never heard this in your discourses, never read it in your writings; on the contrary, you usually contradict such opinions, asserting that the souls of the dead that are evil, or less purified, either go into revolutions or into some heavier punishments, while the good are put on board the ships and, sailing in the sky, pass from here into that phantasm of the land of light, for which they had perished in fighting; and so that no souls are kept around the tombs of their bodies. Where then do the shades of the dead come from? What is their substance? What is their place? But in his eagerness to revile, Faustus forgot what he professed; or perhaps, dozing, he dictated shades while dreaming, and did not wake up when he read his own words. The Christian people celebrate the shrines of the martyrs with religious solemnity, both to stir up imitation and to be joined with their merits and helped by their prayers; yet in such a way that we set up altars not to any of the martyrs, but to the God of the martyrs himself, although at the shrines of the martyrs. For which of the bishops, standing at the altar in the places of the holy bodies, has ever said, “We offer to you, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian”? But what is offered is offered to God, who crowned the martyrs, at the shrines of those whom he crowned, so that from the reminder of the places themselves a greater feeling may arise to sharpen love both toward those whom we can imitate and toward him by whose help we can do so. So we honor the martyrs with that honor of love and fellowship with which holy men of God are honored in this life too, whose heart we perceive to be ready for such suffering for the truth of the gospel; but them the more devoutly, the more securely, now that all their contests have been overcome, and the more confidently we praise them as victors already in a happier life than those still fighting in this one. But with that worship which in Greek is called latreia, and which cannot be expressed in Latin by one word, since it is a certain service properly owed to the deity, we neither worship nor teach that anyone is to be worshipped except the one God. And since the offering of sacrifice belongs to this worship (hence the name idolatry for those who offer it to idols too), we in no way offer anything of the kind, or command it to be offered, either to any martyr or to any holy soul or to any angel; and whoever slips into this error is rebuked by sound doctrine, either so that he may be corrected or so that others may beware. For the saints themselves, whether men or angels, do not want to be given what they know is owed to the one God. This appeared in Paul and Barnabas, when the Lycaonians, moved by the miracles done through them, wanted to sacrifice to them as gods; tearing their garments, confessing and persuading them that they were not gods, they forbade these things to be done to them. It appeared also in the angels, as we read in the Apocalypse that an angel forbade himself to be adored and said to the one adoring him: “I am your fellow servant and of your brothers.” Plainly it is the proud spirits, the devil and his angels, who demand these things for themselves, as throughout all the temples and rites of the Gentiles. Their likeness is expressed also in certain proud men, as we have on record about certain kings of Babylon. Hence holy Daniel endured accusers and persecutors because, when the king’s edict had been published that nothing should be asked of any god but of the king alone, he was caught adoring and praying to his God, that is, the one and true God. As for those who get drunk at the shrines of the martyrs, how can they be approved by us, when sound doctrine condemns them even if they do it in their own houses? But what we teach is one thing, what we put up with is another; what we are commanded to prescribe is one thing, what we are commanded to amend is another, and until we amend it we are compelled to tolerate it. The discipline of Christians is one thing, the self-indulgence of drunkards or the error of the weak is another. And yet in this very point the faults of drunkards and of the sacrilegious are very far apart. For it is a far lesser sin to come back drunk from the martyrs than even to sacrifice fasting to the martyrs. I said “to sacrifice to the martyrs”; I did not say “to sacrifice to God at the shrines of the martyrs,” which we do very often, though only by that rite by which he commanded, in the manifestation of the New Testament, that sacrifice be offered to him; which belongs to that worship which is called latria and is owed to the one God. But what am I to do, and when shall I show to the great blindness of these heretics what force there is in what is sung in the psalms: “The sacrifice of praise will glorify me, and there is the way where I will show him my salvation”? The flesh and blood of this sacrifice were promised before the coming of Christ through victims of likenesses; in the passion of Christ they were rendered in the truth itself; after the ascension of Christ they are celebrated through the sacrament of remembrance. And so there is as much difference between the sacrifices of the pagans and those of the Hebrews as between an erring imitation and a foretelling prefiguration. And just as the virginity of consecrated women is not to be despised or detested because there were also Vestal virgins, so the sacrifices of the fathers are not to be blamed because there are also sacrifices of the Gentiles. For just as there is a great difference between those virginities, although they differ in nothing except to whom they are vowed and rendered, so there is a great difference between the sacrifices of the pagans and of the Hebrews in this very point, that they differ only in this, to whom they were sacrificed and offered: the former to the proud impiety of demons, who claim this very thing for themselves so that they may be held gods, because sacrifice is a divine honor; the latter to the one God, so that a likeness promising the truth of sacrifice might be offered to him to whom the truth itself was to be offered, rendered in the passion of the body and blood of Christ.