Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.2–6.8

Augustine replied: How and why the Old Testament is accepted by the heirs of the New Testament we have already said above. But since a little earlier Faustus dealt with its promises, and now has chosen to deal with its precepts, I answer that these people do not know at all the difference between precepts for the conduct of life and precepts for signifying life. For example, “You shall not covet” is a precept for the conduct of life; “You shall circumcise every male on the eighth day” is a precept for signifying life. Out of this ignorance the Manichaeans, and all who dislike the writings of the Old Testament, not understanding whatever God commanded the former people in order to celebrate the shadow of things to come, and noticing that these things are not observed now, find fault with them by the custom of the present time, though they certainly suited that time, in which the things now made manifest were signified as coming. But what will they say against the apostle, who says: “All these things happened to them in figure; but they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come”? See, he himself has disclosed why those writings are accepted by us, and why it is no longer necessary for those signs of things to be observed by us. For when he says, “they were written for our sake,” he shows beyond doubt with what care they are to be read and understood by us, and with what authority they are to be held, since they were certainly written for our sake. But when he says, “they were figures of us,” and, “they happened to them in figure,” he shows that there is no longer any need, now that we carry out the realities themselves made manifest, to serve the celebration of figures that foretold them. Hence he says in another place: “Let no one judge you, then, in food or in drink or in regard to a festival day or a new moon or sabbaths, which is a shadow of things to come.” Here too, when he says, “Let no one judge you” in these things, he declares how unnecessary it now is for them to be observed; but when he says, “which is a shadow of things to come,” he shows how fitting it was that they be observed at that time when the things that now shine forth made manifest to us were foretold as future through such shadows of figures.

Accordingly, if the Manichaeans were justified by the resurrection of the Lord, whose day was the third from the day of his passion, but came after the sabbath day, that is, it was the eighth after the seventh, they would surely be stripped of the carnal veil of mortal desires, and, rejoicing in the circumcision of the heart, they would not mock it as foreshadowed and figured in the flesh in the time of the Old Testament, even though in the time of the New Testament they would not compel it to be done and observed. For in what member is the stripping away of carnal and mortal concupiscence more fittingly figured than in that from which carnal and mortal offspring arises? But, as the apostle says, “To the pure all things are pure; but to the impure and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and conscience are defiled.” So these men, who seem to themselves exceedingly pure because they turn away from those members as unclean, or pretend to turn away from them, have fallen into such impurities of unbelief and error that, while they detest the circumcision of the flesh, which the apostle called the seal of the righteousness of faith, they nevertheless believe that the divine members of their God are held bound and defiled in those very fleshly members; so that, when they call the flesh unclean, they are forced to say that God too has become unclean there, in the part in which he is held there, since they assert that he needs to be cleansed; and until this happens, as far as it can, he meanwhile, they say, suffers everything the flesh suffers, not only in the toil and pain of afflictions but also in the pleasure of corruptions. For they say they spare him by not lying with women, lest he be entangled more tightly in fleshly knots and defiled more foully. Since, then, the apostle says, “To the pure all things are pure,” speaking of human beings, who can be changed for the worse by perversity of will, how much more are all things pure to God, who remains forever unchangeable and incapable of defilement? Of his Wisdom it is divinely said, in those books by finding fault with which you defile yourselves the more grievously, that nothing defiled enters into her, and that she reaches everywhere because of her purity. Therefore, O most impure vanity, does it displease you that God, to whom all things are pure, commanded that the sign of human regeneration be placed in the human member from which human generation is propagated; and does it please you that even in the shameful acts committed with that member by unchaste men your God himself, to whom nothing is pure, is stained and corrupted in part of his nature? For what does he not suffer in various shameful corruptions, whom you believe to be defiled even by conjugal intercourse? Now dare to say, as you usually do: “Was there then no place for God to prefigure the seal of the righteousness of faith except in that member?” The answer is: Why not there too? First, because to the pure all things are pure, how much more to God. Second, because the apostle said that this seal of the righteousness of faith was given to Abraham in such a circumcision. But you, do not blush, if you can, when it is said to you: “Had your God then nothing else to do than to entangle part of his own nature in those members which you so spurn?” These members are called shameful in human beings because of the corruptible and penal propagation of our mortality which comes from them: to them the chaste bring modesty, the unchaste wantonness, and God justice.

As for the resting on sabbaths, we do now consider it superfluous to observe, since the hope of our eternal rest has been revealed; but not superfluous to read and understand. For in prophetic times, when the things revealed to us at this time had to be prefigured and foretold not only by words but also by actions, the reality we hold was foreshown by that sign we read of. But I want you to tell me why you will not fulfil your own resting. For the Jews, on their sabbath, which they still understand carnally, not only pluck no fruit in the field but do not even cut or cook at home. But you, resting, wait for one of your hearers, armed with a knife or a little sickle, to dash into the garden to feed you, a murderer of gourds, and bring you, wonderful to say, their living corpses. For if he does not kill them, what did you fear in such an act? But if they are killed when they are plucked, how is there life in them, which you claim to help, to purify and restore, by eating and belching? So you receive living gourds, which you ought to swallow whole if you could, so that after that one wound, by which your hearer, when he plucked them, became guilty, to be set free by your indulgence, they might at least from then on reach unharmed and whole the workshop of your paunch, where you can restore your God, broken in that battle. But as it is, before your teeth set about grinding them, you cut them into little pieces, if that pleases your palate; how are you not guilty of so many wounds to them? See how much it would be to your advantage to do every day what the Jews do one day in seven, and to rest even from such household work. And what do they suffer in the fire, where certainly the life that is in them is not restored? For a boiling pot cannot be compared to a holy belly; and yet you mock the sabbath rest as superfluous. How much more sensible it would be not only not to find fault with it in the fathers, when it was not superfluous, but even now, when it is superfluous, to keep it rather than this rest of yours, which is not acceptable for what it signifies but damnable for its error; and by not fulfilling it you are guilty according to the opinion of your vanity, and vain according to the judgment of truth. For you say that fruit feels pain when it is picked from the tree, feels it when it is cut, when it is ground, when it is cooked, when it is eaten. You ought therefore to eat only what can be swallowed raw and unharmed, so that they might suffer at least only one pain, when they are picked, and that not from you but from your hearers. But you say: “How do we help so much life, if we consume only what can be swallowed uncooked and soft?” If, then, by this compensation you inflict so many pains with your food, why do you abstain from that one act to which this necessity most compels you? For fruit can be eaten raw, as some of you have trained themselves to do, not only with fruit but with all vegetables. But if it is not pulled up or cut off or in some way taken from the earth or the tree, it can in no way come to be food. So this, without which you could not help it, ought easily to have been pardonable, rather than those many tortures which you do not hesitate to inflict on the members of your God in preparing your food. “But the tree weeps when the fruit is picked”—for you are not ashamed to say this. Surely the life that is there knows all things and foresees who is coming to it. So when the elect come and pick the fruit, it ought to rejoice, not weep, compensating that passing pain with such happiness, and escaping such misery as it would have met had it fallen to others. Why then do you not pick fruit, when, once it is picked, you inflict so many blows and pains on it? Answer if you can. Nor are fasts proper for you; for the furnace ought not to be idle in which the spiritual gold is purified from its mixture with dung and the divine members are loosed from pitiable bonds. Therefore the more merciful among you is the one who can train himself so that it does no harm to his health often to take raw foods and to consume much. But you both eat cruelly, inflicting such punishments on your food, and fast cruelly, by ceasing from the purification of the divine members.

And yet you dare to curse the sacrifices of the Old Testament as well, and to call them idolatry, and to associate us too in such sacrilege. On our part we answer first that they are no longer among our practices, yet in such a way that we still embrace them in the mysteries of the divine Scriptures, to understand what was foretold by them; for they too were figures of us, and all such things in many and various ways signified the one sacrifice whose memorial we now celebrate. Hence, once this was revealed and offered in its own time, those were removed from the celebration of practice, but remained in the authority of signifying; for they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come. But in them, of course, it is the killing of animals that troubles you, though this whole creation serves the uses of human beings in a certain conditional way. But you, who will not hold out bread to a hungry beggar, are merciful to cattle, in which you believe human souls are present. The Lord Jesus, then, was cruel in this respect, when he allowed the demons to go into the herd of swine, as they asked him. He too, when the sacrifice of his own body had not yet been shown through his passion, said to a leper whom he had cleansed: “Go and show yourself to the priest, and offer for yourself what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” Rather, since God often testifies through the prophets as well that he needs no such gift, and it is easy to see by reason that he who needs nothing does not need this, the human mind is driven to inquire what he wished to teach us through these things; for surely he would not command things he did not need to be offered to him to no purpose, unless he were showing something in them which it would profit us to know and which ought to be prefigured by such signs. But how much better and more honorable it would be for you to submit to these sacrifices, which, though no longer necessary in our time, still signify and teach something, than to command and believe that living victims of food are offered to you by your hearers! For when the apostle Paul said most fittingly of some who preached the gospel for the sake of meals, “whose god is their belly,” with how much more arrogant impiety do you boast, who are not afraid to call your belly not a god but, what is of more wicked audacity, the cleanser of God! And what madness it is for men to want to seem pious because they refrain from killing animals, when they say that all their foods have the same souls, on which, while they live, as they think, they inflict so many wounds with hands and teeth!

But if you will not eat meat, why do you not slaughter the animals themselves as offerings to your God, so that those souls, which you think not only human but so divine that you believe them to be the very members of God, may be released from the prison of the flesh and, by being commended through your prayers, may not return again? Or do you help them more with your belly than with your mind, and is that nature of God rather saved which has been found worthy to be breathed out by your bowels than that which is commended by your prayers? So the reason you do not sacrifice cattle to your belly is that you cannot consume them alive, so as to free their souls by the intercession of your stomach. O blessed vegetables, which, though pulled up by hand, cut with iron, tortured by fire, and ground by teeth, are still granted to reach the altars of your intestines alive; and wretched cattle, which, because they leave their bodies sooner, cannot enter your bodies! Raving in this way, you still think that we are enemies of the Old Testament because we call no flesh unclean, holding to the apostle’s statement, “To the pure all things are pure,” and to the Lord’s saying, “Not what enters your mouth defiles you, but what comes out.” The Lord did not say this to the crowds only, as your Adimantus, whom Faustus praises above all others after Mani, wished it to be understood when he slandered the Old Testament; but, away from the crowds, he also said the same thing to his disciples more clearly and expressly. For when Adimantus had set this saying of the Lord against the Old Testament, because certain meats are written there as unclean, from which that people was commanded to abstain, he feared it might be said to him: “Why then do you consider not some but all meats unclean, and refrain from eating any, when you yourself bring forward the gospel testimony that a man is not defiled by the things that go into the mouth, pass into the belly, and are cast out into the latrine?” So, trying to escape from these tight straits, which choke his deceit with most manifest truth, he says that the Lord said this to the crowds, as if he told the truth to a few in secret but threw out falsehoods to the crowds; though it is sacrilege to believe this of the Lord, and all who read know that he said it even more plainly to the disciples when the crowds had been sent away. Therefore, since at the beginning of his writing Faustus so admires Adimantus as to prefer only Mani to him, I ask in brief whether this saying of the Lord, in which he said that a man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, is true or false. If they say it is false, why did their great teacher Adimantus cite it as uttered by Christ in order to assail the Old Testament? But if it is true, why, against it, do they believe that they are defiled if they eat any meat? Unless perhaps they would answer truly and say that the apostle did not say, “To heretics all things are pure,” but, “To the pure all things are pure.” For why these things are not pure to such men, the same apostle goes on to say: “But to the impure and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and conscience are defiled.” Hence, in truth, to the Manichaeans nothing at all is pure, since they maintain that even the very substance or nature of God not only could be defiled but has in part been defiled; and not only defiled, but cannot be recovered and cleansed in every part. So it is strange that they say they consider all meats unclean and therefore abstain from them, as if they considered anything pure, not only among foods but among all creatures. For they hold that the vegetables themselves and fruits and all crops and the whole earth and sky are defiled by mixture with the nation of darkness. Would that they were consistent with their error in other foods too, and by abstaining from all that they call unclean would rather die of hunger than stubbornly speak such blasphemies! For who does not understand that this would be more useful for those who refuse to correct and amend themselves?

But why this statement of the apostle, “To the pure all things are pure,” and, “Every creature of God is good,” is not contrary to the Old Testament, where certain meats are prohibited, let them understand if they can: the apostle said this of natures themselves, while those writings, because of certain prefigurations suited to the time, called certain animals unclean not by nature but by signification. So, for example, if one asks about the pig and the lamb, both are clean by nature, because every creature of God is good; but by a certain signification the lamb is clean, the pig unclean. It is as if you said “fool” and “wise”: each of these words is certainly clean by the nature of the sound and of the letters and syllables of which it consists; but by signification one of them, the word “fool,” can be called unclean, not by its own nature but because it signifies something unclean. And perhaps what the pig is among the figures of things, the fool is in the reality of things, and both that animal and these two syllables, stultus, signify one and the same thing. For that animal was set down in the law as unclean because it does not chew the cud; but this is not its fault but its nature. But there are people signified by this animal who are unclean by their own fault, not by nature: they gladly hear the words of wisdom, but afterward do not think about them at all. For what is it to call back something useful that you have heard, by the sweetness of remembering, from the bowels of memory as it were to the mouth of thought, but in a certain spiritual way to chew the cud? Those who do not do this are figured by that kind of animal; hence abstinence from such meats forewarned us to beware of such a fault. For since wisdom itself is a desirable treasure, it is written in another place of this cleanness of chewing the cud and uncleanness of not chewing it: “A desirable treasure rests in the mouth of the wise, but a foolish man swallows it.” Such likenesses of things in figurative expressions and observances move rational minds profitably and pleasantly by the exercise of seeking and comparing. But to the former people many such things were commanded not only to be heard but also to be observed. For it was a time when the things to be revealed in a later time had to be prophesied not only by words but also by deeds. When these were revealed through Christ and in Christ, the burdens of observances were not imposed on the faith of the Gentiles, yet the authority of the prophecy was commended. See, we have said why, although according to the judgment of the Lord and the apostle we hold no animal flesh unclean, we nevertheless do not oppose the Old Testament, where certain kinds are called unclean. Now you tell us why you consider meats unclean.

If, according to your error, because of the mixture of the nation of darkness, it is not meats but your God himself who is unclean in that part which he sent and mixed in to be swallowed and defiled, as if to subdue and capture the enemy, then, because of that same mixture, whatever else you eat is also unclean. But you say: “Meats are much more unclean.” Why meats are more unclean—it would take long to recount their ravings on this matter, but I will touch briefly on what is enough, so that these critics of the Old Testament may be seen to be so worn out by the oldness of folly that, as accusers of the flesh, they are shown to savor nothing but the flesh, without any spiritual truth. For perhaps this somewhat longer reply will so equip the reader against them that not so many words will be required of us in the other replies. For these vain talkers and seducers of the mind say that in that battle, when their First Man ensnared the nation of darkness with deceitful elements, princes of both sexes were captured from there; and when the world was built out of them, many of them were bound in the heavenly structures, among whom were some pregnant females; and when the sky began to rotate, unable to bear its whirling, they miscarried and cast out what they had conceived; and these aborted offspring, male and female, fell from the sky to the earth, lived, grew, mated, and bore young. From this, they say, is the origin of all flesh that moves on the earth, in the water, and in the air. So if the origin of flesh is from the sky, it is utterly absurd to think it more unclean on that account, especially since they say that in the very structure of the world those same princes of darkness were so bound throughout the whole fabric, from the highest to the lowest, that the more mixed good each had, the higher it deserved to be placed; and so meats, whose origin is from the sky, ought to be purer than crops, which arise from the earth. Next, what can be said that is so insane as that conceptions formed before the mixture of life were so much more vigorous that, though aborted and falling from sky to earth, they lived, while, once life has been mixed in, they cannot live unless born at the proper time, and if they fall from even a slightly higher place, they die at once? Surely, if the kingdom of life made war against the kingdom of death, the mixture of life ought to have made them more vigorous, not more perishable. But if each thing better keeps its incorruption in its own nature, they ought to have preached not two natures, a good and an evil, but two good ones, one of them better. On what ground, then, do they assert that those meats are more unclean which they say derive their race from the sky, at least those known to everyone? For they suppose that the very first bodies of the princes of darkness arose, like little worms, from trees born in that same place, and the trees themselves from those five elements. So if the bodies of animals have their first origin from trees and their second from the sky, what reason is there for considering them more unclean than the fruits of trees? If it is because, when they die, they lose their soul, so that whatever remains when life departs is then unclean, why on the same terms are vegetables and fruits not unclean, which certainly, as was said above, die when they are plucked or pulled up? For they do not want to be guilty of these murders, so long as they pluck nothing from the earth or a tree. Next, since they assert that there are two souls in the one body of a living creature, one good, from the nation of light, the other evil, from the nation of darkness, does the good soul flee when the animal is killed, and the evil one remain? For if that were so, and the killed animal still lived, how did it live in the nation of darkness, when it had only the soul of its own nation, with which it had even rebelled against the divine realms? Since, then, at the death of any animal both souls, the good and the evil, leave the flesh, why is the flesh called unclean, as if it were left by the good soul alone? For even if some remnants of life remain, they remain from both; for they say that not even dung remains without some small remnants of the members of God. So they find no reason to assert that meats are more unclean than crops. But, of course, trying to show off their deceitful chastity, they think flesh more unclean because it comes from intercourse; as if they were not all the more urgently obliged to help that divine member by eating, the more tightly they think it is bound there. Finally, if this is the reason for the greater uncleanness of meats, let them eat the bodies of animals that do not arise from intercourse, such as the countless kinds of worms, some of which, born from trees, are commonly eaten in certain regions of Venetia. Frogs too, which the earth produces suddenly from a single rain, they ought to have taken as food, to free the members of their God mixed in such forms, if they detest the flesh that is propagated by intercourse; and they ought to accuse the human race of error for eating hens and pigeons, procreated by the coupling of males and females, while rejecting the purer frogs, daughters of sky and earth. For according to their fable the first princes of darkness, whose parents were trees, are purer than Mani himself, whom a father and mother begot by intercourse; and even their lice, which are born without intercourse from the sweat of the flesh or the exhalation of the body, are purer than these wretches themselves, who were born of parents who had intercourse. Or if they think that whatever is born from flesh, even without intercourse, is unclean because the flesh itself is from intercourse, then vegetables and crops will be unclean which have sprung up more fertile and abundant from dung. Let those who say that crops are purer than meats see what to do here, or what to answer. For what more unclean is cast out from the flesh than dung, and what is applied to crops with more fruitfulness? Certainly they themselves say that through the grinding and digestion of foods life flees from them, and only some tiny bit remains in the dung. Why then, from the place where only a tiny bit of life remains, do your foods, that is, the fruits of the earth, come forth better, larger, and more plentiful? Flesh is fed not on the refuse of the earth but on its produce; but the earth is fertilized not by the produce of the flesh but by its refuse. Let them choose which is purer; or let them now be corrected and cease to be unclean and unbelieving, to whom nothing is pure, and let them embrace with us the apostle who says: “To the pure all things are pure”; “The earth is the Lord’s, and its fullness”; “Every creature of God is good.” For all things that exist by nature are good in their own order, and no one sins in them except he who, not keeping his own order in obedience to God, disturbs their order too by using them badly.