Against Faustus the Manichaean 32.2–32.17

Or, if the Father’s testament contains some things in which it ought scarcely to be heeded—for you will have the Jewish law to be the Father’s, and we know how many things in it fill you with horror, how many with shame, so that in your own mind you yourselves have long since judged it not to be genuine, although, as you believe, partly the Father himself wrote it for you with his own finger, and partly Moses, faithful and upright—do you think that the testament of the Son alone could not have been corrupted, that it alone contains nothing that ought to be disapproved in it? Especially since it is established that it was written neither by him nor by his apostles, but a long time afterwards by certain men of uncertain name, who, lest they should not be believed when writing what they did not know, put on the front of their writings partly the names of apostles, partly of those who seemed to have followed the apostles, asserting that what they wrote they had written according to them. By this they seem to me to have done the disciples of Christ the greater wrong, because they ascribed to them things that they wrote dissonant and contradictory among themselves, and professed to write according to them these gospels, which are full of so many errors, so many contradictions both in narratives and in sayings, that they agree neither with themselves at all nor with one another. What else is this but to slander good men and to summon the harmonious company of Christ’s disciples on a charge of discord? Since we notice these things in reading with the soundest gaze of the heart, we judged it most fair to accept what is useful in them—that is, what builds up our faith and spreads the glory of Christ the Lord and of his Father, almighty God—and to reject the rest, which befits neither their majesty nor our faith.

In the same way, as I had begun to say, you do not believe that circumcision from the Old Testament is to be received carnally, though it is so written; nor that the sabbath is to be kept by rest and idleness, though so it is read; nor that God is to be appeased by sacrifices and immolations, as Moses thought. These you have despised as utterly foreign, far removed from the Christian rite, and in no part acceptable. Some of these things, again, you have divided in two, embracing part and rejecting part, as with the Passover, which is itself an annual rite of the Old Testament. Although it is written for you that in its celebration you should not only kill a lamb to be eaten by night, but also for seven days abstain from leaven and be content with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, you take up the Passover but pass over that rite and custom by which it was provided that it should be kept. Likewise the weeks of seven days, that is, Pentecost, which Moses ordered to be marked with a fixed kind and number of sacrifices, you also keep, but with part of it condemned, namely the offerings and sacrifices themselves, because they do not fit with the Christian faith. As for the command to abstain from common foods, you thought, and firmly believed, that carrion and things sacrificed are indeed unclean; but you would not believe the same of pork, or of the hare or hedgehog, or of mullets and squid and the other kinds of fish you have found tasty, though Moses testifies that all these are unclean.

And I believe you do not want even to hear, let alone admit, those other things from the Old Testament: that fathers-in-law sleep with their daughters-in-law, like Judah; fathers with their daughters, like Lot; prophets with harlots, like Hosea; husbands sell their wives’ nights to lovers, like Abraham; one husband is joined to two full sisters, like Jacob; rulers of the people, whom you would especially think inspired, wallow with harlots by the thousand and the hundred, like David and Solomon; or again that which is provided by the wife’s law in Deuteronomy: that the wife of a deceased brother, if he died without sons, must marry the surviving brother, and he must raise up offspring from her in his brother’s place; and if the man will not do this, the woman must lay a complaint before the elders about this impiety of her kinsman, so that they may summon him and restrain him with the severity of censors; and if he refuses, he shall not go unpunished even before them, but, the shoe of his right foot having been taken off, he is to be struck in the face by that woman, and go away spat upon and cursed, to bear this reproach for ever upon his offspring. These, then, and others of this kind are the examples and laws of the Old Testament. If they are good, why do you not imitate them? If bad, why do you not condemn their author, that is, the Old Testament itself? Or if you too think that these falsehoods were inserted into it, as we believe of the New, then we are equal. So stop demanding of us in the New Testament what you do not keep in the Old.

For my part, as far as I can judge, since you have chosen to be persuaded that the Old Testament too is from God, it is more suitable and more excusable for you, who do not keep its commands, to confess that it has been corrupted by unfitting additions than to spurn it while it is inviolate and uncorrupted. So this is the opinion I have always had of you and still have, whenever it is asked why you transgress the commands of the Old Testament: that either as wise men you despise falsehoods, or as stubborn and irreverent men you neglect truths. Meanwhile, since you compel me to believe everything inserted in the records of the New Testament if I accept it, you should know that you too, in your own mind, do not believe many things that are in the Old Testament, though you profess to accept it. For you do not hold, among the things you confess and believe from it, that “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” since this would certainly concern Jesus too; or that he too is held accursed who has not raised up seed in Israel, since this would include all the virgins and the young men of God as well; or that he shall utterly perish from his people who has not been circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, since this too would concern every Christian; or that he must be put to death with stones who has broken the sabbath; or that there is no mercy for anyone who has violated any single command of the Old Testament. If you believed all these and held them firm as commanded by God, believe me, you would have laid hands on Christ first, and you would not now be angry with the Jews, who, by persecuting him with heart and strength, fulfilled the commands of their God.

I am well aware that you do not dare to call these things false, but say that they were commanded to the Jews for the time then, that is, until the coming of Jesus; and since he has come, foretold, as you will have it, by that same Old Testament, he himself now teaches what we should accept from it and what we should leave aside. Whether the prophets foretold Jesus we shall see later. Meanwhile I must now answer this: if Jesus, announced by the Old Testament, now sifts it and combs it and teaches that a few things in it are to be accepted but very many rejected, then the Paraclete promised to us from the New Testament likewise teaches what we ought to accept from it and what to reject. Of him Jesus himself, when he promised him, says in the gospel of his own accord: “He will lead you into all truth, and he will announce all things to you and will remind you.” Therefore let us be allowed as much in the New Testament through the Paraclete as you show you are allowed in the Old through Jesus—unless perhaps the testament of the Son seems to you of more value than that of the Father, if indeed it is the Father’s, so that, while so much is rejected from the one, nothing of the other alone may fail to be approved; especially since it is established, as we have said, that it was written neither by Christ nor by his apostles.

Therefore, just as you admit from the Old Testament only the prophecies and those civil precepts, mentioned above, which belong to the discipline of common life, but have set aside circumcision and sacrifices and the sabbath and its observance and unleavened bread, what is amiss if we too, accepting from the New Testament only those things we find said in honour and praise of the Son of Majesty either by himself or by his apostles—but only when they were already perfect and faithful—have passed over the rest, which were either said at that time simply and ignorantly by the untaught, or thrown in obliquely and maliciously by enemies, or affirmed imprudently by the writers and handed down to posterity? I mean these very things: that he was born shamefully of a woman, circumcised in Jewish fashion, offered sacrifice in gentile fashion, was baptized humbly, was led about by the devil through the deserts and most wretchedly tempted by him. These, then, excepted, and anything that has been thrown in about him by the writers from the Old Testament under false testimony, we believe the rest: above all the mystic fixing of his cross, by which the wounds of our soul’s passion are shown; then his saving precepts, his parables, and all his divine discourse, which, especially as it sets forth the distinction of the two natures, is beyond doubt his own. There is no reason, then, for you to think that I must believe everything the gospels contain, when you, as has been shown above, barely touch the uppermost liquid of the Old Testament with the tips of your lips, as they say.

Augustine replied: We praise all the Scriptures of the Old Testament, as is fitting, as true and divine; you attack the Scriptures of the New Testament as falsified and corrupted. As for those things in the books of the Old Testament that we do not now observe, we not only say but also show and teach from the apostolic writings that they were fittingly commanded for that time and that people, and that in those very things we do not observe, things are signified for us which we are to understand and hold spiritually. You, however, find fault altogether with everything in the books of the New Testament that you do not accept, and assert that it was neither said nor written by Christ or his apostles. You see, then, how far apart we and you are on this matter. So when you are asked why you do not accept everything in the books of the New Testament, but even in those books in which you approve some things you reject, censure, and accuse many, and contend that they were inserted by corrupters, do not take as your example the distinction in our faith or observance, but give an account of your own presumption.

For if we are asked why we do not worship God with the rite with which the Hebrew fathers worshipped him in the time of the Old Testament, we answer that God has commanded us otherwise through the fathers of the New Testament, and that this is not against the Old Testament, since in it too this was foretold. For this very thing was proclaimed beforehand through the prophet: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, and I will accomplish upon the house of Israel and upon the house of Judah a new testament, not according to the testament that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.” See, this too was prophesied: that that testament would not continue, but that there would be a new one. If here it is objected that we do not belong to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, we defend ourselves from the apostolic teaching; for the apostle teaches that the seed of Abraham is Christ, and says to us who belong to his body, “Therefore you are Abraham’s seed.” Further, if we are asked why we hold the authority of that testament whose rite we do not observe, to this too we answer from the apostolic writings. For the apostle says: “Let no one, then, judge you in food and drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come.” In this way he shows both why these things ought to be read and received—that is, so that we may not quench prophecy, since they were made in the shadow of things to come—and that we ought not to care about those who would judge us on this account, because we no longer observe them bodily; just as elsewhere he said something similar: “These things happened to them in figure; and they were written for our correction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” So when something is read in the record of the Old Testament which is either not commanded us to observe in the New Testament or even forbidden, we must ask what it signifies, not find fault with it; for by the very fact that it is no longer observed it is shown to be not condemned but fulfilled. On this we have already said much, and often.

So, for instance, with what Faustus, not understanding it, just now threw up as a crime against the commands of the Old Testament: that a brother was ordered to marry his brother’s wife in order to raise up offspring not for himself but for his brother, and to call by his brother’s name what was born from her. What does this foreshow in figure, except that every preacher of the gospel ought so to labour in the Church that he raises up seed for his deceased brother, that is, Christ, who died for us, and that what is raised up should receive his name? In fact the apostle, fulfilling this no longer carnally in the signification sent before, but spiritually in the completed truth, is angry with those whom he mentions he had begotten in Christ Jesus through the gospel, and rebukes and corrects them when they wanted to be Paul’s: “Was Paul crucified for you?” he says, “or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”—as if he said: “I begot you for my deceased brother; you are called Christians, not Paulians.” But he who, chosen by the Church, refuses the ministry of preaching the gospel is rightly and deservedly despised by the Church itself. For this is what is meant by the command to spit in his face—not indeed without the sign of this reproach, that he is stripped of the shoe of one foot, so that he may not be in the lot of those to whom the apostle himself says, “and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace,” and of whom the prophet speaks: “How beautiful are the feet of those who proclaim peace, who proclaim good things!” For he who so holds the gospel faith that it profits himself and he does not refuse to profit the Church is well understood to be shod on both feet. But he who thinks it enough that he has looked after himself by believing, but shuns the care of winning others, will bear not a figurative signification of the man unshod, but the reproach fulfilled in himself.

What of the fact that he also objects that we celebrate the Passover, and taunts us that we do not celebrate it as the Jews do? Since we have the sheep rather in the reality of the present gospel, not in the shadow of the future, and we do not foreshadow its slaying as something to come but commemorate it as done—every day, and most of all in the annual solemnity—for that reason the day of our paschal solemnity does not coincide with the day of the Jews’ shadowy celebration, so that we may also include the Lord’s day, on which Christ rose. As for unleavened bread, Christians of right faith keep it not in the leaven of the old life, that is, of malice, but in the truth and sincerity of faith itself—not for seven days, but every day; which is signified by the number of seven days, through which every day revolves. Though this is somewhat laborious in this world, since the way that leads to life is narrow and strait, yet a sure reward is kept. For this very labour is signified by those bitter herbs, because they are somewhat bitter.

So too Pentecost, that is, the fiftieth day from the Lord’s passion and resurrection, on which he sent us the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, whom he had promised. That this was to come was signified also through the Passover of the Jews, when on the fiftieth day after the celebration of the slain sheep Moses received on the mountain the law written by the finger of God. Read the gospel and notice that the Holy Spirit is there called the finger of God. For those things are celebrated annually in the Church which, being of outstanding excellence, were done on fixed days, so that the festival celebrated together may keep their necessary and wholesome memory. If you want to know, then, why we celebrate the Passover: because then Christ was sacrificed for us. If you want to know why we do not celebrate it with the Jewish rite: because that was a prefiguration of the true thing to come, this is a commemoration of the thing completed. Even in our very words, future and past are not expressed in the same way. On this we have already said enough in this work.

If you ask this too: why, of all the foods from which that people was forbidden in the shadow of things to come, we do not eat carrion and things sacrificed to idols—hear this as well, and for once put truth before the slanders of vanity. Why it is not expedient for a Christian to eat what has been sacrificed, the apostle says: “I do not want you,” he says, “to become partners of demons.” For he does not find fault with sacrifice itself, which the fathers offered as a prefiguring of the blood of the sacrifice by which Christ redeemed us. But “what the gentiles sacrifice,” he says, “they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” Then he added what I said: “I do not want you to become partners of demons.” For if the very nature of sacrificed flesh were unclean, it would certainly defile even one who did not know. For it would be no less what it is because it was taken by one who did not know; but the reason is conscience, lest one seem to have communed with demons. As for carrion, I think human custom has not admitted it as food because the flesh of animals that have died, not been killed, is diseased and not suited to the health of the body, for whose sake we take nourishment. For what was commanded in figure to the ancients about pouring out the blood—that is, to Noah himself after the flood (and we have already shown what it signified)—many understand to be read as commanded by the apostles in the Acts of the Apostles also: that the gentiles should abstain only from sexual immorality and from things sacrificed and from blood, that is, that they should eat no flesh whose blood had not been poured out. Others do not understand it so, but take the command to abstain from blood to mean that no one should defile himself with murder. To discuss this now would be long and is not necessary. For even if the apostles then commanded that Christians should abstain from the blood of animals and not eat strangled flesh, they seem to me to have chosen, for the time, something easy and in no way burdensome to those observing it, in which the gentiles too, together with the Israelites, might observe something in common, for the sake of that cornerstone who builds the two in himself; and at the same time they might be reminded that in Noah’s ark itself, when God commanded this, the Church of all nations was figured—a prophecy of a fact that was already beginning to be fulfilled as the gentiles came to the faith. But that time has passed in which those two walls, one coming from the circumcision and the other from the foreskin, though they were in harmony in the cornerstone, still stood out more distinctly by certain properties of their own. And now that the Church of the gentiles has become such that no carnal Israelite appears in it, what Christian now observes this, so as not to touch thrushes or smaller birds unless their blood has been poured out, or not to eat a hare if it was killed by a blow of the hand on the neck, without a bloody wound? And the few, perhaps, who are still afraid to touch these things are laughed at by the rest. So completely has that saying of the truth held the minds of all in this matter: “Not what enters your mouth defiles you, but what comes out”—condemning no nature of food that human society admits, but the sins that iniquity commits.

As for the deeds of the ancients—both those that seem sins to the foolish and uneducated when they are not, and those that truly are sins—we have already shown in sufficient discourse why they were written down and preserved, and how they rather commend the veneration due to Scripture itself. We have also answered already, in its proper place, about the curse on him who hangs on a tree and on him who has not raised up seed in Israel, when we refuted these objections earlier. And in short we defend everything—whether what we have discussed one by one in earlier parts of this work, or similar things that Faustus has put in this discourse to which we are replying—by one most firm principle of truth, which we have received from the authority of the holy Scriptures. Whatever is written in those books of the Old Testament, we praise, accept, and approve as all written most truly and most usefully for eternal life; but those commands in them that we do not observe by bodily performance we understand to have been most rightly commanded then, we have learned to be a shadow of things to come, and we recognize as now fulfilled. And so whoever at that time did not observe even those works that were commanded to be done as signs paid, by a most just judgment, the penalties divinely established—just as now, if anyone dared with sacrilegious rashness to violate the sacraments of the New Testament, distinguished as they are by the reckoning of the time. For just as the righteous men of that time, who did not refuse even death for those sacraments, are rightly praised, so now are the holy martyrs for these. And just as a sick man ought not to find fault with the teaching of medicine if it prescribes one thing for him today and tomorrow forbids even what it had prescribed before—for so the reckoning of healing his body required—so the human race, sick and wounded from Adam to the end of the world, as long as the body that is corrupted weighs down the soul, ought not to find fault with the divine medicine if in some things it has commanded the same thing to be observed, but in others one thing first and another later; especially since it promised that it would command something else.

There is no comparison, then, in what Faustus puts forward: that the Paraclete, who was himself prophesied in the New Testament, has chosen for you from the New Testament what you are to believe and shown what you are to reject, just as Christ did for us from the Old, in which he was likewise prophesied. This might be said with some semblance of reason if there were anything in the books of the Old Testament that we said was not rightly said, not divinely commanded, not truthfully written. We say none of these things, but accept everything: both what we observe, so as to live rightly, and what we do not observe, so that we may see that those things too, commanded and observed then in prophecy, are now fulfilled. Moreover, just as we read that the Paraclete was promised in those books of which you will not accept everything, so we read that he was sent in that book which you are afraid even to name. For in the Acts of the Apostles, as I have often mentioned and did a little earlier, it is read most plainly that the Holy Spirit was sent on the day of Pentecost, and he also showed by his work who he was. For those who first received him spoke in all tongues, so that by this sign too he might promise that the Church would be in all tongues, that is, in all nations, and would most truly preach him, as it preaches the Father and the Son.

So now tell us why you do not accept everything from the books of the New Testament: is it because they are not by Christ’s apostles, or because Christ’s apostles taught something wrong? You answer: because they are not by Christ’s apostles. For that other answer belongs to the pagans, who say that Christ’s apostles did not teach rightly. What do you say, then? How do you show that those Scriptures were not supplied by the apostles? You answer: because there are many things in them contrary both to one another and to themselves. That is utterly false; you do not understand. For whatever of this kind Faustus has brought forward that seemed so to you has been shown not to be so; and whatever of this kind you bring forward, we shall show the same. And who would bear that a reader or hearer should dare to blame Scripture of such authority more readily than the fault of his own slowness? Or do you say that the Paraclete taught you that these Scriptures are not the apostles’, but were written by others under their names? Then teach at least this: that he from whom you learned that these are not the apostles’ is the Paraclete himself. Or will you say: Christ promised him and sent him? The answer to you is: Christ neither promised nor sent this one at all; and at the same time it is shown when he sent the one he promised. Prove, then, that Christ sent him. From what do you assert the person of your author, or rather deceiver? You answer that you prove it from the gospel. From what gospel? One that you do not accept whole, which you say has been falsified. Who would first himself say that his witness has been corrupted by falsehood, and then bring him forward to testify? For if we believe him when you wish and do not believe him when you do not wish, we are no longer believing him but you. And if we wanted to believe you, we would not demand a witness from you. Further, the Paraclete was promised in such a way that it was said, “He will lead you into all truth.” How will he lead you into the truth who teaches you that Christ is a deceiver? Add to this: even if you showed that everything read in the gospel about the promise of the Paraclete is such that it could not possibly be understood except of your Mani—as the things said of Christ in the prophets are shown to be such as could not apply to anyone else—yet, since you would be bringing them out of those books that you say are falsified, we would say that this very thing was false there and inserted by the corrupters, your forefathers: namely, that you read there something written about Mani in such a way that we could not understand it of anyone else. What would you do, tell me, except cry out that you could in no way have falsified books that were already in the hands of all Christians, since as soon as you began to do it you would be refuted by the truth of older copies? For the very reason, then, that they could not be corrupted by you, they could not be corrupted by anyone. For whoever had first dared to do this would have been refuted by comparison with many older books, especially since the same Scripture was contained not in one language but in many. For even now some errors in the books are corrected either from older ones or from the language that preceded. So either you are compelled at once to admit those books truthful, and at once they will overthrow your heresy; or if you call them deceitful, you will not be able to assert the Paraclete on their authority, and you have overthrown your heresy yourselves.

Add to this that the things said in the promise of the Paraclete are such as to exclude Mani, coming after so many years, from this claim altogether. For since the Holy Spirit was to come immediately after the Lord’s resurrection and ascension, it is said most plainly by John: “For the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” If, then, the reason he was not given was that Jesus had not yet been glorified, without doubt, once Jesus was glorified, there was a reason for him to be given at once. For the Cataphrygians too said that they had received the promised Paraclete, and on this account strayed from the Catholic faith, trying to forbid what Paul allowed and to condemn second marriages, which he permitted. They lay in wait under these words, because it is written of the Paraclete, “He will lead you into all truth”—as if Paul and the other apostles had not taught all truth and had kept a place for the Paraclete of the Cataphrygians. To this they also dragged what Paul says: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when what is perfect has come, what is in part will be done away”—as if the apostle, knowing and prophesying in part, said, “Let him do what he wishes; there is no sin if she marries,” and therefore the perfection of the Phrygian Paraclete had done away with this. When they are told that they are condemned by the authority of the Church promised so long before and spread through the whole world, they answer that in them is fulfilled also what was said of the Paraclete, that the world cannot receive him. Are these not the very things you too are accustomed to say: that “He will lead you into all truth,” and “When what is perfect has come, what is in part will be done away,” and “The world cannot receive him,” were foretold of your Mani? And what heresy at all could arise under the name of the Paraclete that would not dare to fit all these to itself with a semblance of truth? For is there any heresy that does not call itself the truth, and, the prouder it is, all the more call itself the perfect truth, so that it promises to lead into all truth, and tries to do away with the teaching of the apostles, which is contrary to its error, as though through it what is perfect had come? And since the Church holds what the apostle most vehemently urged, “If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what you have received, let him be anathema,” when such a heresy, proclaiming something else, begins to be anathematized by the whole world, will it not at once say, “This is what is written: the world cannot receive him”?