Against Faustus the Manichaean 21.10–22.8

So let the Manichaeans say whether the animals which, according to their ravings, Hyle had fashioned in the race of darkness before God mixed his light with them, did not have this harmony of members which the apostle so praises; whether there the head said to the feet, or the eye to the hand, “I have no need of you.” They have never said this, nor could they say it; for they attribute to them such acts and works as these: they crept, walked, swam, flew, each according to its kind; they also saw and heard and perceived with the other senses; they nourished and cherished their bodies with suitable foods and climates. From this too came abundant fruitfulness of offspring; for they even attribute marriages to them. Certainly all these things, which Mani finds fault with as works of Hyle, cannot happen without the harmony of members which the apostle praises and assigns to God. Do you still doubt whom to follow and whom to anathematize? What of this, that there were some there who even spoke, so that when they harangued, all creeping things, four-footed things, flying things, swimming things heard, understood, and agreed? Marvelous this, and altogether divine eloquence! And they had heard no grammarian or rhetorician, nor learned these things amid the tears of canes and rods. Surely this Faustus, in order to chatter these vanities eloquently, came even late to the training of making speeches, and although he was sharp of wit, yet he burst his stomach with reading, only for so few to agree with him when he spoke. O wretched man, born in this light and not in that darkness! For there, when he harangued against the light, every two-footed and every many-footed creature, every serpent too, from the dragon down to the snail, would have heard him gladly and obeyed him eagerly; but here, when he disputed against the darkness, many called him eloquent rather than learned, and many a most perverse seducer; and among the few Manichaeans applauding him as a great master, no beast came to him, nor did even his horse know anything of that doctrine; as if the divine part had been mixed into all animals precisely so that they should become stupid. What is this, I ask? Wake up at last, wretched people, and compare, in your fable, the former time of all living things and the present, then in their own land, now in this world: then their bodies were strong, now they are weak; then the sight of their eyes was keen enough to live with the delight of invading the region of God, now it is so dull that it is turned away by the rays of the sun; then the minds of animals were sharp enough to understand the speech of one haranguing, now they are dull and wholly foreign to such capacity; then there was so great and so powerful a natural eloquence, now with so much study and toil hardly a small and meager one. O what great goods the race of darkness lost by the admixture of good!

This very Faustus, in this very discourse to which I am now replying, seemed to set many opposites against each other elegantly: health and sickness, plenty and want, white and black, hot and cold, sweet and bitter. Among these I forbear to say anything about white and black, or whether there is any weight of good and evil in colors, so that they should say white belongs to God and black to Hyle. Since they assert that Hyle created all kinds of birds, if God sprinkled the white color on their feathers, where were the ravens hiding when the swans were bathed in whiteness? Likewise there is no need to deliberate about hot and cold; for both, applied in moderation, are healthful, but immoderately, harmful. Let us look at the rest. Good and evil, which perhaps he ought to have put first among these opposites, he seems to have placed as though he wanted them to be understood as general, namely so that health, plenty, white, hot, and sweet belong to good, and sickness, want, black, cold, and bitter to evil; how ignorantly and inconsiderately, let whoever can see. But I, so as not to be thought to slander the man, raise no objection about white and black, hot and cold, sweet and bitter, and will set aside health and sickness. For if white and sweet are two goods, and black and bitter two evils, how is it that very many grapes and every olive grow sweet as they grow black, that is, become better by having more evil? Likewise, if heat and health are two goods, and cold and sickness two evils, why do bodies grow sick by growing hot? Or do the healthy perhaps have fevers? So I do not raise these objections, since perhaps he mentioned them incautiously, or as any opposites whatever rather than as goods and evils; especially since they have said that the fire of the race of darkness was never cold, but that its heat was certainly evil.

But to pass over these, let us look at those things which he mentioned as goods among these opposites in such a way that he does not want them doubted: health, plenty, sweetness. Was there, then, no health of bodies in that race, in which those animals could be born and grow and beget, and last so well that, when some of them were captured while pregnant, as they foolishly say, and bound in the sky, their offspring, not even at full term but miscarried, falling from on high to the earth, could both live and grow and propagate these kinds of flesh which are now countless? Or was there no plenty there, where trees could not only be born in waters and winds, but also in fire and smoke, and be enriched with such fruitfulness that from their fruits the animals of each kind were begotten, and, nourished and fed by the fertility of those trees, were preserved, the gladness of their fattening being attested also by the fruitfulness of their offspring; especially where there was no toil of agriculture nor harshness of summer and winter? For the sun did not circle there, so that the seasons of the year should pass by in alternation. So there was perpetual fertility of the trees, to which the element and nourishment of their kind, just as it had been present for their birth, was perpetually at hand for their bearing, and made fruit never fail; just as we see citron trees bear flowers and fruit the whole year if they are watered continually. Great, therefore, was the plenty there, and great the security of having it; for not even hail was feared, where there were none of the light-collectors whom you fable to stir up the thunder.

And if they did not have sweet and pleasant foods, they would never have sought them, never have invigorated their bodies with them. For the case is this: according to the fitness of each body, a food either delights or offends. If it delights, it is called sweet or pleasant; if it offends, bitter or harsh or to be spat out for some unpleasantness. Are not we men ourselves so made that one often seeks a food which another abhors, whether because of the temperament of nature, or the habit of custom, or the condition of health? How much more can the bodies of beasts of a far different kind find pleasant what is bitter to us! Otherwise would goats rear up to gnaw the wild olive? For just as honey is bitter to some sickness of men, so the wild olive is sweet to the nature of that animal. Thus it is impressed on wise examiners of things what force order has, namely when to each are applied and rendered its own things, and how great a good this is from the lowest to the highest, from bodily to spiritual things. So, in the race of darkness, when an animal of some element fed on the food that grew in its own element, without doubt the very fitness produced sweetness; but if it had fallen on the food of another element, the very unfitness would have produced offense to the sense of the one tasting. This offense is called bitterness, or harshness, or unpleasantness, or whatever else; or, if it is so excessive that by its foreign force it breaks the framework and harmony of the body and so kills it or takes away its strength, it is even called poison, only through unfitness, though through fitness it is food to another kind: as a hawk dies if it takes bread, which is our daily food, and we die if we take hellebore, on which many cattle feed; yet a certain measure of applying that herb is even a medicine. If Faustus knew or considered this, he would certainly not have put poison and antidote as an example of the two natures of evil and good, as though God were the antidote and Hyle the poison, since one and the same thing and the same nature, taken or applied now fittingly and now unfittingly, either helps or harms. So, according to their fable, their God can be said to have been poison to the race of darkness, whose bodies, so strong, he so corrupted as to make them very weak; but because the light itself too was captured, oppressed, and corrupted, they were poison to each other.

Why then do you not call these either two goods or two evils, or rather both two goods and two evils: two goods in themselves, two evils to each other? Later, if need be, we shall ask which of them is better or worse. Meanwhile, since they were two goods in themselves, consider it thus. God reigned in his land, Hyle reigned in hers; health of the rulers both there and here; plenty of fruits both there and here; fruitfulness of offspring in both; pleasantness of their own pleasures in both. “But that race,” they say, “apart from being evil to the neighboring light, was also evil in itself.” Meanwhile I have already stated its many goods; if you too can show its evils, there will be two good kingdoms, but that one better where there was no evil. What then do you say were the evils of this one? “They ravaged themselves,” he says; “they harmed, killed, and consumed one another.” If that alone was what they spent their time on there, how were such hosts begotten, nourished, and brought to maturity there? So there was rest and peace there too. Nevertheless, let us admit that that kingdom was better where there was no discord; yet I would call these two goods much more fittingly than one good and the other evil, so that that is better where individuals harmed neither themselves nor one another, and this a lower good where, although they opposed one another, each animal nonetheless protected its own safety, soundness, and nature. Yet at least that prince of darkness can be compared with your God at no great distance: no one resisted him, all things served him as he reigned, all things followed him as he harangued; which could not happen without great peace and concord. For those kingdoms are happy where kings are obeyed with the full consent of all. Add to this that to that prince were subject not only those of his own kind, that is, the two-footed, whom you call the parents of men, but also all the kinds of the other animals, and they turned at his nod, doing what he had commanded, believing what he had urged. Saying these things, do you think men’s hearts so deaf that they wait for you to name another god, whom they see plainly and openly described? For if the strength of this prince could do this, great was his power; if his honor, great his renown; if love, great the concord; if fear, great the discipline. If among all these goods there were some evils, is it therefore now to be called a nature of evil, except by those who do not know what they are saying? Further, if you think it a nature of evil because it was not only evil toward the other nature but also had evil in itself, do you think it no evil, that hard necessity which your God suffered before the admixture of the contrary nature, that he was compelled to make war with it and to send his own members into its jaws to be so overwhelmed that they could not be wholly cleansed? See, there was great evil in him too, before he was mixed with what alone you call evil. For either he could not be harmed and corrupted by the race of darkness, and suffered that necessity through his own folly; or, if his substance could be corrupted, you do not worship the incorruptible God whom the apostle preaches. What then? Does not that very corruptibility, by which that nature was not yet corrupted but could be corrupted by another, seem to you an evil in your God?

Who too does not see that either there was no foreknowledge there (where it is for you to consider whether it is no fault in God to lack foreknowledge and to be wholly ignorant of what threatens), or, if there was foreknowledge there, there could be no security there, but everlasting fear; and you certainly recognize how great an evil this is. Or was he not afraid that the time might come at any moment when his members would be so ravaged and defiled in that battle that they would be freed and cleansed only with such great toil, and even then not wholly? But if this did not concern him himself (and you see how harshly that is said), certainly his very members, which were to suffer such great evils here, surely feared. Or did they themselves not know that this would happen? Then some part or other of the substance of your God certainly lacked foreknowledge. Count the evils in your supreme good! Or did they not fear because they foresaw equally that their liberation and triumph would follow? Certainly they feared at least for their companions, whom they knew were to be estranged from their kingdom by eternal bonds in that globe.

Or was there no love there, so that there was no brotherly compassion for those over whom, with no sin of theirs going before, eternal punishments hung? What? Were not those very souls that were to be bound in the globe also members of your God? Is it not one kind and one substance? They at least, foreknowing their future everlasting bondage, surely feared, surely grieved. Or if they did not know that this would happen, part of your God was provident, part improvident. How then is it one and the same substance? Since, then, there were such great evils there too before there was any admixture of the other’s evil, why do you boast of it as a pure, simple, and supreme good? So you are forced to admit that these two natures, even in themselves, are either two goods or two evils. We grant you, if you say two evils, to call whichever of them you like the worse; if two goods, call whichever you like the better; there will be a more careful consideration later, provided that error of yours is removed by which you speak of two principles of two natures, good and evil, and plainly of two gods, one good and the other evil. Again, if something is evil because it harms another, these harmed each other; let one part have been the more wicked because it first coveted what belonged to another. One, then, wished to inflict evil, the other repaid evil for evil, and not by the law of retaliation, as an eye for an eye, which you are accustomed imprudently and impudently to criticize, but much more heavily. Choose, then, which you will call the worse: the one which first wished to harm, or the one which both wished and was able to harm more. For the one desired to enjoy the light in its own way, the other uprooted it utterly. The one, if it had achieved what it sought, would certainly have harmed itself in nothing; the other, in order to overthrow the hostile adversary completely, gravely harmed even its own part: like that most notorious mad saying committed to memory in certain writings: “Let friends perish, so long as enemies fall with them.” For a part of God was sent to inexpiable contamination, to provide the covering of the globe in which the enemy is to be buried alive for ever; for even conquered he will be so feared, even shut in he will so terrify, that the everlasting misery of a part of God will give the rest of God some sort of security. O great innocence of goodness! See, your God too will do the very thing for which you horribly accuse the race of darkness, harming both his own and others. That last globe convicts your God of exactly this, in which both the enemy is shut in and the citizen afflicted; indeed, that part which you call God surpasses it in harming both others and its own more. For Hyle did not wish to uproot the other’s kingdom, but to hold it; and as for its own, although it killed some by others of its own consuming them, it nevertheless changed them anew into other forms, so that by dying and being reborn they might at least enjoy the gladness of their life at intervals of time. But God, whom you describe as almighty and best, for ever both uproots others and condemns his own; and, what is believed with still more wonderful madness, Hyle harms its animals in its fight, God punishes his members in his victory. What is this, empty men? Surely you remember Faustus’s words about God as antidote and Hyle as poison: see, your antidote harms more than the poison. Would Hyle have shut up either God, or fixed its own vitals, in so horrible a globe for ever? And, what is more wicked, he slanders those same remains, so that he may not seem to have failed because he could not cleanse them. For Mani says in the Letter of the Foundation that those souls become deserving of such punishment because they allowed themselves to stray from their former shining nature and became enemies of the holy light; although he himself sent them into that error, by which they were so darkened that light became the enemy of light: if unwilling, he was unjust to compel them; if willing, ungrateful to condemn them. If they could foreknow that they would become enemies of their origin, they were tormented by fear before the war, stained inexpiably in the war, condemned for ever after the war, never happy; but if they could not foreknow it, they were improvident before the war, powerless in the war, wretched after the war, never divine. And certainly what they are, God is, according to the unity of substance. Do you see how monstrously you blaspheme? And yet sometimes, wishing as it were to defend the goodness of God, you even say that he grants Hyle something good, that, shut up in itself, it may not rage. Will it, then, have something good, when no good will be mixed with it? Or perhaps, just as God before the war had, without admixture of evil, the evil of necessity, so Hyle after the war will have, without admixture of good, the good of the mixture? Say, then, two evils, but one worse than the other; or two goods, not supreme, but one better than the other, provided that you call the better one the more wretched; for if the outcome of that great war is to be this, that, with Hyle separated from its own ravaging and the members of God fixed in the globe, some good is granted to the enemies and so much evil inflicted on the citizens, consider who has won. But, of course, Hyle is poison, which was able to form, strengthen, nourish, and invigorate its animals; and God is antidote, who could condemn his members because he could not heal them. Madmen! That is not Hyle, nor is that God. So let them rave who, not enduring sound doctrine, turn aside to fables.

Faustus said: Why do you blaspheme the law and the prophets? We are not at all enemies or foes of the law and the prophets, nor indeed of anyone whatever; so much so that, if only you would allow us, we are ready to declare false all those things that are written about them and on account of which we seem to hate them. But you resist, and by agreeing with your writers you perhaps bring innocent prophets into accusation, you defame the patriarchs, you disgrace the law as well; and, what is more foolish, you want your writers not to be liars, and yet those whose crimes and shameful lives they wrote down to be religious and holy. Since both of these cannot hold together, it must be that either the one were wicked, or the others liars and false.

Come then, if you please: let us by common consent condemn the writers and take up the defence of the law and the prophets. By the law I do not now mean circumcision, nor sabbaths and sacrifices and the other things of that kind belonging to the Jews, but that which is truly law, that is: “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not swear falsely,” and the rest. Since this law had long been spread abroad among the nations, that is, from the time the creation of this world has existed, the writers of the Hebrews broke in upon it and mixed into it, like leprosy and scab, these abominable and most shameful precepts of their own which concern circumcision and sacrifices. Come, if you too are certainly a friend of the law, condemn with me those who dared to violate it by this mixture of precepts unsuited to it. For unless you also knew that these precepts were not the law, nor any part of the law, either you would strive to keep them, as people who profess righteousness, or you would openly confess that you are not righteous. But as it is, you take anxious care, as people who wish to live rightly, about those commandments which forbid crimes, while of those which concern the Jews no mention is made. How will this be excused in you, unless it is established that they are not the law? Indeed, if, just as you are inflamed and judge it an intolerable insult when someone calls you neglectful of the precept in which it is said: “You shall not kill,” or “You shall not commit adultery,” so you would also burn with anger if someone called you uncircumcised and neglectful of the sabbath, it would be understood beyond doubt that both were law and the commandment of God. But as it is, you seek praise and glory from those former precepts if you keep them, and from these latter you fear no loss of that same good, because you despise them. Therefore it is clear, as I said, that these are not the law, but rather the stains and scab of the law; and if they are condemned by us, they are condemned as false, not as lawful. Nor does this reproach touch the law or God the author of the law, but those who wrote both him and it into their wicked religious rites. And that sometimes, when we attack the Jewish precepts, we seem to assail the revered name of the law, happens through your fault, since you will have no distinction between the Hebrew institutions and the law. Otherwise, give back to the law its proper dignity: cut away from it the Israelite disgraces like warts, impute the crime of its disfigurement to the writers, and you will see at once that we have been enemies of Judaism, not of the law. It is the name that deceives you, because you do not know to whom it ought rightly to be ascribed.

Besides this, I do not see why you think that we blaspheme your prophets and patriarchs. For if these things which they are read to have committed had been written or composed by us, this accusation of yours against us would not be unreasonable. But when these things were either written by themselves, seeking glory from their vices against the custom of decency, or by their companions and peers, what fault of ours is there in this? For we condemn and detest the wicked deeds which the guilty confessed of themselves of their own accord and without being asked. Or if the malice of the writers, out of envy towards them, invented these things, let the writers be punished, let their books be condemned, let the prophetic name be cleansed of unworthy repute, and let the authority of the patriarchs be restored to its dignity and censure.

And indeed it could have happened that, just as they shamelessly invented so many things about God—now saying that he had dwelt in darkness from eternity and afterwards marvelled when he saw the light; now that he was ignorant of the future, so that he gave Adam that precept which he was not going to keep; now that he was improvident, so that he could not see him hiding in a corner of paradise after he knew his nakedness; now that he was envious and fearful that, if his man tasted of the tree of life, he would live for ever; at other times that he craved blood and fat from every kind of sacrifice, and was jealous if the same were offered to others as to himself; and now angry with strangers, now with his own; now destroying thousands of men for slight offences or none at all; now even threatening that he would come with a sword and spare no one, neither the righteous nor the sinner—it could have happened, I say, that those who lied with such impudence about God himself also lied about the men of God. But agree with us that the writers should bear the crime, if you want the prophets to be freed from it.

Otherwise, it was not we who wrote these things about Abraham: that, burning with an insane desire to have offspring, and not believing God, who had already promised him this from his wife Sarah, he wallowed with a concubine, and—what is more shameful—with his wife's knowledge; nor that he, a most infamous trafficker in his own marriage, for the sake of greed and his belly, at different times sold his wife Sarah to two kings, Abimelech and Pharaoh, for intercourse, falsely calling her his sister because she was very beautiful; nor that Lot, his brother, rescued from Sodom, lay with his two daughters on the mountain—he would have burned more honourably in Sodom by the stroke of lightning than he burned on the mountain with the flame of forbidden lust; nor that Isaac did the same as his father and, pretending in like manner about his wife Rebecca, himself called her his sister, so that he might live shamefully by means of her; nor that Jacob his son, the husband of four wives, Rachel and Leah, two sisters, and each of their maidservants, roamed among them like a he-goat, so that there was a daily contest among four harlots as to which would first seize him for intercourse when he came from the field, and sometimes they even hired him from one another for the night for a price; likewise that Judah his son slept with Tamar his daughter-in-law after her marriages to one son and then another, deceived, as they say, by the dress of a prostitute into which she had changed herself—she who knew well that her father-in-law had always had dealings with women of that kind; nor that David, after so many wives, committed adultery with the little wife of Uriah his soldier and had the man himself killed in war; nor that Solomon his son had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines, and daughters of kings without number; nor that Hosea, the first of the prophets, begot children by a harlot—and to this disgrace, what is worse, the counsel of God is also ascribed; nor even this, that Moses committed murder, that he plundered Egypt, that he waged wars, that he both commanded and did many cruel things, that not even he was content with one marriage: these things, I say, and things like them, which are found in their various books, were none of them written by us, none composed by us. Either these are false fictions of your writers or true crimes of the fathers. Choose which you prefer; for we must detest either the one or the other alike, since we hate the wicked and shameful as much as liars.

Augustine replied: You understand neither the sacraments of the law nor the deeds of the prophets, because you know how to think neither of holiness nor of righteousness. But concerning the precepts and sacraments of the Old Testament we have already said much and often, so that it might be understood that there was in them one thing that was to be fulfilled by being done, given as a gift through the grace of the New Testament, and another that was shown to be fulfilled by being removed, through the truth now revealed. For the precept of the law to be perfected was taken up in the love of God and of neighbour, while the promise of the law was shown to be discharged by the ceasing of circumcision and of the other sacraments of that time. For the precept made people guilty, so that they might long for salvation, while the promise celebrated figures, so that they might wait for the Saviour; so that by the coming of the New Testament grace, once given, might set free the former, and truth, once rendered, might take away the latter. For the very law that was given through Moses became grace and truth through Jesus Christ: grace, namely, so that, forgiveness of sins having been given, what had been commanded might be kept by the gift of God; and truth, so that, the observance of shadows having been taken away, what had been promised might be made present by the faithfulness of God.

Those, then, who find fault with what they do not understand and call the figures of the promising sacraments the leprosy or scab or warts of the law are like people who are displeased with things whose usefulness they do not grasp: as if a deaf man, seeing the lips of speakers move, were to find fault with these movements of the mouth as superfluous and ugly; or as if some blind man, having heard a house praised, wanted to test by feeling what was said, and, running his hand over the smoothness of the walls, came upon the windows and blamed them as out of keeping with that evenness, and thought them ruinous holes.

Now as for the deeds of the prophets, that they too were prophetic and mystical—what shall I do to make them understand, whose minds vanity has so taken hold of that they think we believe that God himself once dwelt in darkness, because it is written: “Darkness was over the abyss”? As though we said that God is the abyss where the darkness was, because there was no light there before God made light by his word! But because they do not distinguish between the light which is God himself and the light which God made, they therefore think it follows that he himself was in darkness before he made light, when darkness was over the abyss, before he said: “Let there be light,” and light was made. For just as in the New Testament both are said of him—for there we read both: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all,” and likewise there we read: “God, who said that light should shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts”—so also in those old books it is said, “She is the radiance of eternal light,” of the wisdom of God, which certainly was not made, since through it all things were made; and of a certain light which can be made only through it, it is said there in this way: “You will light my lamp, O Lord; my God, you will light up my darkness.” So too in the beginning, when darkness was over the abyss, God said: “Let there be light,” and light was made; which he would not have made unless he were the light-making light, which is God.