Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.35–22.51

Or are we so foolish as to follow Faustus here, who says that Abraham falsely called her his sister, as though he had learned Sarah's descent from somewhere, when holy Scripture had not disclosed it? I think it is right that, in a matter which Abraham knew and we do not, we should believe the patriarch speaking of what he knows rather than the Manichaean accusing him of what he does not know. Since, then, Abraham lived among men at a time when it was indeed no longer lawful for a brother and sister born of both parents, or of one, to be joined in marriage, while custom, forbidden by no law and no authority, joined the children of brothers and other blood-relations of a more distant degree, what wonder if he had as wife his sister, that is, one born of his father's blood? For he himself said this to the king when he returned her to him: that she was his sister by his father, not by his mother; where certainly he was no longer forced by any fear to lie that she was his sister, since the king had learned she was his wife and, frightened by God, was returning her with honour. And Scripture testifies that among the ancients blood-relations, male or female, were commonly called by the general name of brothers or sisters. For Tobias too says to God when he prayed, before he came together with his wife: “And now, Lord, you know that not for the sake of lust do I take my sister,” though she was born neither of the same father's intercourse nor of the same mother's womb, but of the same stock of kinship. And Lot is called Abraham's brother, though Abraham was his uncle. By this usage of the word also the brothers of the Lord are so called in the gospel—not, certainly, ones whom the Virgin Mary had borne, but all near relations of her kin.

Someone will say: “Why did not Abraham rather so presume on his God as not to fear to confess her his wife? For God was surely able to ward off from him the death he feared, and to protect him and his wife from all harm in that foreign land, so that neither would his wife, though very beautiful, be desired by anyone, nor would he be killed on her account.” God could certainly do this; who would be so mad as to deny it? But if Abraham, when asked, had declared that woman his wife, he would have committed two things to God's protection: his own life and his wife's chastity. And it belongs to sound doctrine that, when a man has something he can do, he should not tempt the Lord his God. For the Saviour himself too was certainly able to protect his disciples, to whom nevertheless he said: “If they persecute you in one city, flee to another.” Of this he himself gave the first example. For though he had power to lay down his life, and would not lay it down except when he willed, yet as an infant he fled into Egypt, carried by his parents; and he went up to the feast not openly but secretly, though at other times he spoke openly to the Jews, who were angry and heard him with the most hostile mind and yet could not lay hands on him, because his hour had not yet come—not an hour by whose necessity he would be compelled to die, but an hour at whose fitting time he would deign to be killed. He, then, who by teaching and rebuking openly, and yet not allowing the rage of his enemies to have any power against him, displayed the power of God, by fleeing and hiding instructed the weakness of man, that he should not dare to tempt God when he has something he can do to escape what he ought to beware of. Nor had the apostle Paul despaired of divine help and protection and lost his faith when he was let down through the wall in a basket to escape the hands of his enemies. He did not flee so because he did not believe in God; but he would have been tempting God had he been unwilling to flee so when he could. Accordingly, since among strangers, because of Sarah's surpassing beauty, both her chastity and her husband's life were in danger, and Abraham could not protect both, but could protect one of them, namely his life, he did what he could, so as not to tempt his God; and what he could not do, he committed to him. He, then, who could not hide himself as a man hid himself as a husband, so as not to be killed; he entrusted his wife to God, so that she might not be defiled.

And yet it could be argued more scrupulously whether that woman's chastity would have been violated even if someone had joined himself to her flesh, since she would have allowed this to be done to her for her husband's life, not without his knowledge but at his bidding, in no way deserting conjugal fidelity and not refusing her husband's authority—just as he was no adulterer when, obeying his wife's authority, he consented to beget offspring from her maidservant. But because of the force of first principles—since a woman is not subject to two living men for intercourse in the way that two women are to one man—we take it much more truly and honourably that father Abraham did not tempt God when, as far as a man could, he provided for his life, and that he hoped in God, to whom he commended his wife's chastity.

Now who would not delight, in this event set down in the divine books and faithfully narrated, to search out also the prophetic deed and to knock at the door of the sacrament with godly faith and zeal, that the Lord may open and show who was then figured in that man, and whose wife it is that is not allowed to be defiled and stained in this pilgrimage and among foreigners, so that she may be for her husband without spot or wrinkle? For the church lives rightly in the glory of Christ, so that her beauty is an honour to her husband, as Abraham was honoured among foreigners because of Sarah's beauty; and to her, to whom it is said in the Song of Songs, “O fairest among women,” kings offer gifts for the merit of her beauty, as King Abimelech offered gifts to Sarah, admiring in her the more the grace of her form, which he could love but could not violate. For the holy church too is the wife of the Lord Jesus Christ in secret. For secretly and inwardly, in hidden spiritual privacy, the human soul cleaves to the Word of God, so that they are two in one flesh: this great sacrament of marriage in Christ and in the church the apostle commends. Accordingly, the earthly kingdom of this world, which those kings bore the figure of who were not permitted to defile Sarah, did not experience or find the church to be Christ's wife, that is, one who faithfully clung to him as her husband and head, subject to him, except when it tried to violate her, and yielded to the divine testimony through the faith of the martyrs, and, corrected, honoured with gifts in later kings the one whom in earlier kings it had not been able to subject to its own correction. For what was then figured in the same king first and afterwards has been fulfilled in this kingdom in its earlier and later kings.

And when the church is said to be Christ's sister by the father, not by the mother, what is commended is a kinship not of earthly generation, which will be done away, but of heavenly grace, which will remain for ever. According to this grace we shall not be a mortal race, having received power to be called and to be children of God. For we did not receive this grace from the synagogue, the mother of Christ according to the flesh, but from God the Father. But this earthly kinship, which begets for death in time, Christ, calling us to another life where no one dies, taught us to deny, not to confess, when he said to the disciples: “Do not call anyone your father on earth; for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” Of this he gave an example when he himself said: “Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?” and, stretching out his hand over the disciples, said: “These are my brothers.” And lest anyone should think of earthly kinship in this word, he added: “And whoever does the will of my Father, he is my brother and mother and sister”; as though he said: this kinship I call from God the Father, not from the synagogue the mother. For I now call you to eternal life, where I was born immortally, not to temporal life, from which, in order to call you, I was made mortal.

As to why it is hidden from foreigners whose wife the church is, while it is not kept silent whose sister she is, this reason readily occurs for the present: that it is hidden and hard to understand how the human soul is united or mingled with the Word of God—or whatever better and more fitting word can be used—since he is God and it is a creature. For in this respect Christ and the church are called bridegroom and bride, or husband and wife. But by what kinship Christ and all the saints are brothers, by divine grace, not by earthly blood-relationship, that is, by the father, not by the mother, is both more easily said and more readily grasped by hearing. For all the saints are brothers among themselves by the same grace, but none of them is bridegroom to the fellowship of the others. Accordingly, foreigners much more easily and readily believed Christ to be a man, though of most excellent righteousness and wisdom—not falsely, indeed, since he was a man—but how he was also God they did not know. Hence Jeremiah too says: “He is a man, and who knows him?” He is a man, because it is made known that he is a brother. “And who knows him?” because it is hidden that he is the bridegroom. These things have been said sufficiently about father Abraham against the most impudent, most ignorant, and most slanderous voice of Faustus.

Lot, his brother, righteous and hospitable in Sodom, and pure and untouched by all the defilement of the Sodomites, deserved to escape safe from that burning, which was a likeness of the future judgment, bearing the type of the body of Christ, which in all the saints groans even now among the wicked and ungodly, to whose deeds it does not consent, and from whose company it will be set free at the end of the world, when they are condemned to the punishment of eternal fire. And just as another kind of people was figured in his wife—namely, those who, called by the grace of God, look back, not like Paul, who forgets what lies behind and stretches out to what lies ahead; whence the Lord himself says: “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven”—nor did he pass over that example in silence, with which to season us as with salt, so that we might not be foolish and careless, but prudent and beware of this evil; which is why she, to give this warning, was turned into a pillar of salt. For when he was commanding each one to snatch himself from what lies behind by the most persevering effort towards what lies ahead, he said: “Remember Lot's wife”—so also in Lot himself, when his daughters lay with him, something other was figured than when he was rescued from Sodom. For then Lot himself seems to have borne the person of the future law, which some who were born from it and placed under the law, by understanding it badly, in a way make drunk, and by not using it lawfully bring forth the works of unbelief. “For the law is good,” says the apostle, “if one uses it lawfully.”

Yet we do not therefore justify this deed, either of Lot himself or of his daughters, because it signified something that foretold the future perversity of certain people. For they intended one thing in doing it, and God, who permitted it to be done, another, so that even from it he might show something, his just judgment on the sin of the people then present remaining, and his providence watching over the signifying of things to come. Accordingly, that deed, when it is narrated in holy Scripture, is prophecy; but when it is considered in the life of those who committed it, it is a crime.

Nor again does the matter deserve so great a reproach and accusation as Faustus, a blind enemy, has vomited out against it. For that eternal law, commanding that the natural order be preserved and forbidding that it be disturbed, is consulted, and it does not judge this deed as though Lot burned with wicked lust for his daughters, to enjoy their bodies in incest or to have them as wives, nor of those women as though they burned with an accursed love for their father's flesh. For the reckoning of justice looks not only at what was done, but also at why it was done, so that it may weigh deeds, which depend on their causes, in the balance of equity. Since, then, those women sought offspring for the preservation of the race—which in them was certainly a human and natural feeling—and did not believe they could find other men, as though the whole world had been burned up in that conflagration (for they could not tell how far that fire had raged), they wished to join themselves to their father. They ought indeed rather never to be mothers than to use their father so; yet it makes a great difference that they did so for that reason, compared with doing so out of desire for so deadly a pleasure.

They felt that their father so shrank from that act that they did not believe they could accomplish it unless they procured his ignorance. For, as it is written, they made him drunk and lay with him without his knowing. He is therefore to be blamed, not as much as that incest deserves, but as much as that drunkenness deserves. For the eternal law condemns this too, because, for the sake of the natural order, it allows food and drink only for preserving health. Although, then, there is a great difference between a drunkard and one who is drunk—for a drunkard is not always drunk, nor is everyone who is at some time drunk thereby a drunkard—still, in a righteous man the cause of this, if not of drunkenness as a habit, then certainly of being drunk, must be sought. For what, after all, compelled him to consent to, or trust, his daughters as they mixed him many cups of wine, or perhaps offered them often unmixed? Did he wish to console his daughters, who feigned excessive sadness, in such a way that the pain of their desolation and their grief for their mother might be driven from the thoughts of a drunken mind, thinking that they too were drinking as much, while by some trick they were not drinking? But how it befitted a righteous man to apply such consolation even to his grieving ones, we do not see. Or could they, by some most wicked art of the Sodomites, make their father so drunk even with a few cups that they committed that sin with him unawares, or rather upon him unawares? But it would be strange if divine Scripture had kept silent about this, or if God had let his servant suffer it without some fault of his will.

We, however, defend the holy Scriptures, not the sins of men. And are we taking such pains to clear this deed as though our God had either commanded it to be done or approved it when done, or as though men in those books were called righteous in such a way that they could not sin if they wished? Since, then, in the writings these men find fault with, God bore no testimony of righteousness to this deed, by what madness of rashness do they strive to accuse those writings on this ground, when in other places of them these things are most plainly found forbidden by divine precepts? Hence in that event the deed of Lot's daughters is narrated, not praised. Some things had to be narrated with God's judgment declared, some with it unspoken, so that when what God judged of them is brought out, our ignorance may be instructed, and when it is kept silent, either our knowledge may be exercised, so that we recall what we have learned elsewhere, or our sloth may be shaken off, so that we seek what we do not yet know. God, then, who knows how to make good works even out of men's evil work, propagated from that seed the nations he willed, and did not condemn his Scriptures because of men's sins. For he made these things known, he did not do them; and he warned that they are to be avoided, he did not set them forth to be imitated.

With remarkable impudence Faustus also accused Isaac, the son of Abraham, of pretending that Rebecca, who was his wife, was his sister. For Rebecca's descent is not passed over in silence, and it is clear that she was his sister through a very well known kinship. And as for his keeping silent that she was his wife, what is strange or wrong in it if he imitated his father, since he is defended by the same justice by which his father was found blameless of a similar charge? What we have said for Abraham against Faustus's accusation on this matter holds good also for Isaac his son. It is not difficult to go over it again—unless perhaps some studious person asks in the sacrament of what figure we should take the fact that the foreign king learned that Rebecca was her husband's wife when he saw him playing with her; which he would not have learned unless Isaac played with his wife in a way that it would not be fitting to play with one who was not his wife. When holy married people do this, they do not do it idly but wisely; for they descend in a way to the weakness of the female sex, so as to say or do something with tender cheerfulness, not enervating but tempering their manly vigour; yet whoever says or does this to one who is not his wife is shameful. But I would say this, which belongs to the manners of human kindness, so that no harsh and unfeeling person may object as a crime against a holy man that he played with his own wife. For if such inhuman people see some grave man prattling something playful even with little children, to soothe their milk-fed understanding with affable and nurturing ease, they find fault with him as if he were out of his mind, forgetting how they grew, or ungrateful that they grew. But what is meant in the sacrament of Christ and the church by so great a patriarch playing with his wife, and that marriage being recognized from it, he certainly sees who, so as not to sin against the church by some error, carefully examines in the holy Scriptures the secret of her husband, and finds that he for a while hid his majesty, in which, in the form of God, he is equal to the Father, in the form of a servant, so that human weakness might be capable of him, and in this way fitted himself suitably to his wife. For what is absurd—indeed, what is not fittingly suited to the foretelling of things to come—if the prophet of God played in some fleshly way, so as to win his wife's affection, when the very Word of God was made flesh to dwell among us?

Now as for his son Jacob, against whom his four wives are objected as a huge crime, he is cleared by a general preliminary statement. For when it was the custom, it was not a crime; and now it is a crime because it is not the custom. For some sins are against nature, some against custom, some against precepts. This being so, what crime, after all, is there in what is objected against the holy man Jacob concerning his having several wives at once? If you consult nature, he used those women not for lewdness but for begetting; if custom, this was commonly done at that time and in those lands; if precept, it was forbidden by no law. But now why is it a crime if anyone does this, except that both custom and law do not permit it? Whoever despises these two, even if he could use several women solely for the sake of begetting, still sins, and violates human society itself, for which the propagation of children is necessary. But because, now that customs and laws are otherwise, men cannot take delight in a multitude of wives except through the greatness of their lust, they go astray and think that many wives could not have been had at all except through the heat of fleshly desire and sordid pleasure. For, comparing not others, whose virtue of mind they cannot know at all, but, as the apostle says, measuring themselves by themselves, they do not understand. And because they themselves, even if they have one wife, not only approach her manfully, led by the duty of begetting, but are often dragged unmanfully, overcome by the goad of intercourse, they seem to themselves to conjecture truly how much more others are taken captive by this kind of disease through many wives, when they see that they cannot keep temperance with one.

But we ought not to entrust judgment on the conduct of holy men to those who do not have this virtue, just as we do not allow the feverish to judge the sweetness and wholesomeness of foods, and rather prepare their food by the sense of the healthy and the physician's prescription than by the inclination of their sickness. Accordingly, if these men wish to gain the health not of false and shadowy but of true and solid chastity, let them believe the divine Scriptures, as medical books, that so great an honour of holiness was not given in vain to certain men even though they had several wives, but because it is possible for the mind, the commander of the flesh, to be so strong in the power of temperance that it does not allow the movement of sexual delight, implanted in the nature of mortals, to go beyond the laws imposed by providence for begetting. Otherwise these men, slanderers rather than truthful judges, can accuse even the holy apostles of preaching the gospel to so many peoples not out of love for begetting children of eternal life but out of desire for human praise. For those fathers of the gospel did not lack a glorious fame won through all the churches of Christ, with so many tongues praising them; indeed, it was so great that no greater honour and glory ought to be paid to men by men. This glory in the church the lost Simon coveted with perverse will, when in his blindness he wished to buy with money from them what they had received by divine grace, and that grace freely given. Greedy for this glory, it is understood, was the man who wished to follow the Lord, and whom the Lord in the gospel turns back, saying: “Foxes have holes and the birds of the sky lodgings, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” For he saw that, darkened by deceitful pretence and puffed up by windy pride, he had no place of faith where the teacher of humility, bending down, might be received, because in the discipleship of Christ he sought not Christ's grace but his own glory. Corrupted by this love of glory were those whom the apostle Paul marks out as proclaiming Christ out of envy and rivalry, not sincerely; and yet the apostle rejoices at their preaching, knowing that it could happen that, while they pursued the desire for human glory, believers would still be born from hearing them—not from their envious desire, by which they wished to be either equal or preferred to the glory of the apostles, but through the gospel, which they proclaimed, even if not sincerely; so that God would work good out of their evil. Just as it can happen that a man goes in to intercourse not with the will to beget but carried away by the lust of luxury, and yet a human being is born, a good work of God from the fruitfulness of seeds, not from the foulness of vices. Just as, then, the holy apostles took delight in hearers who admired their teaching, not from greed for gaining praise but from love of sowing truth, so the holy patriarchs united with wives who received their seed, not from desire to gain pleasure but from forethought to propagate a succession; and so neither did the multitude of peoples make the former ambitious, nor the multitude of wives make the latter lustful. But why speak of the men, to whom a most excellent testimony is borne by the divine voice, when it shines out clearly enough that the women themselves sought nothing else in intercourse than children? For when they saw that they were not bearing at all, they gave their maidservants to their husband, so that the maidservants might be mothers in the flesh and they themselves by will.

And as for Faustus's objection, made with a most lying accusation, that there was a contest among them like four harlots as to which would seize him for intercourse, where he read this I do not know—unless perhaps in his own heart, as in a book of wicked falsehoods, where he truly played the harlot himself, but with that serpent concerning whom the apostle feared for the church, which he wished to present as a chaste virgin to one husband, Christ, lest, as he had deceived Eve by his cunning, so he should corrupt their minds by turning them away from the chastity of Christ. For these men are such friends of this serpent that they maintain he did good rather than harm. It was plainly he who persuaded Faustus, pouring seeds of falsehood into his adulterated breast, to bring forth these ill-conceived slanders from a most unclean mouth and to commit them to memory with a most audacious pen. For no maidservant snatched the man Jacob from another, none quarrelled with another over intercourse with him. There was all the more order because there was no lust; and the rights of conjugal authority were kept the more firmly the more chastely the wrong of fleshly desire was avoided. For in the very fact that he was hired by one wife, our assertion is shown to be true; there truth itself cries out for itself against the slanders of the Manichaeans. For what need was there for one to hire him, except that it was the other's turn for her husband to go in to her? For he would never have gone to the other unless she had hired him; but he certainly went, in just turns, to her by whom he had begotten so many sons and whom he had obeyed so as to beget even by her maidservant, and by whom afterwards, without hiring, he begot again. But that night Rachel had in turn, to remain with her husband; at that time she had that authority about which the voice of the New Testament, through the apostle, was certainly not silent, saying: “Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife.” Therefore she had already made an agreement with her sister, to whom, having become her debtor, she transferred her debtor. For the apostle calls it by this name: “Let the husband,” he says, “render to his wife what is due.” She, then, to whom the husband was debtor, had already received from her sister what she had chosen by her will, in order to give her what she had in her authority.

Here indeed this man, whom Faustus, with closed or rather extinguished eyes, accuses as unchaste, if he had been a slave of desire, not of righteousness, would he not have burned all day for the pleasure of that night in which he was to lie with the more beautiful wife, whom he certainly loved more and for whom he had paid twice seven years of unpaid labour? When, then, at the end of the day he was going to her embrace, when would he have been turned from it, if he had been such as the Manichaeans, understanding nothing, suppose? Would he not, despising the women's agreement, have gone in rather to his beautiful one, who owed him that very night not only by the custom of a wife but also by the right of turn? And would he not rather have used his husband's authority, since “the wife too does not have authority over her own body, but the husband,” and the alternation of their service was then in his favour? He would have used his conjugal authority much more irresistibly if he had been overcome by desire for beauty. But then the women would have been found better, if they had striven for conceiving sons, and he for the pleasure of lying with them. So this most temperate man, a true man, since he used women so manfully that he was not subject to fleshly delight but master of it, paid attention to what he owed rather than to what was owed to him; nor did he wish to abuse his authority for his own pleasure, but preferred to be one who rendered that due rather than one who exacted it. Hence it followed that he rendered it to the one to whom she to whom it was owed chose that it be given in her place. On learning this agreement and bargain of theirs, when he was suddenly and unexpectedly called back from his most beautiful wife and called to the less comely one, he did not blaze with anger, nor was he clouded with sadness, nor did he busy himself between the two with unmanly coaxing so that Rachel might give the night back to him; but, as a just husband and provident father, seeing that they were concerned for offspring, and himself seeking nothing else from intercourse, he judged that he should comply with the will of those who each wished sons for herself, nothing being lost to his own, since both were bearing for him; as though he said: give way to each other and settle among yourselves, as you wish, which of you shall become a mother; why should I contend, when whether the child is born of this one or that, he will have no other father? This modesty, surely, this restraint of desire, and this seeking only of human posterity in the union of married bodies, Faustus, sharp as he was, would both understand and praise in those writings, had not his mind, depraved by a detestable sect, sought something to find fault with, and counted as the greatest crime that one honourable feature of the marriage covenant, by which men and women are joined for the procreation of children.

Now that the patriarch's conduct has been defended and the charge which wicked error made against him refuted, let us freely, as far as we can, search out the secrets of the mysteries, and knock with the piety of faith, that it may be opened to us by the Lord what things those four wives of Jacob figured, of whom two were free and two maidservants. For we see that the apostle understands the two Testaments in the free woman and the maidservant whom Abraham had. But there, with one and one, what is meant appears more easily; here there are two and two. Then, there the maidservant's son is disinherited, while here the sons of the maidservants receive the land of promise together with the sons of the free women; hence without doubt something else is signified here.