Against Faustus the Manichaean

There was a certain Faustus, an African by birth, a citizen of Milevis, pleasant in speech, clever in mind, a Manichaean by sect and therefore perverted by an abominable error. I knew the man myself, as I mentioned in the books of my Confessions. He published a certain volume against the right Christian faith and the catholic truth. When it came into our hands and had been read by the brothers, they wished, and by the right of the love through which we serve them they demanded, that we should answer him. This I will now undertake in the name and with the help of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, so that all who read this may understand how worthless a sharp mind and a polished tongue are, unless a man’s steps are directed by the Lord. This has been granted to many who are even slower and weaker, by the hidden justice of divine mercy, while many very sharp and very eloquent men, deserted by the help of God, have run swiftly and stubbornly to stray farther from the way of truth. I think it convenient to set down his words under his name and my reply under mine.

Faustus said: Since the errors and the deceit both of the Jewish superstition and of the semi-Christians have already been brought to light more than enough and fully exposed by the most learned Adimantus, the only one, I mean, whom we should study after our blessed father Mani, it seemed not out of place, dearest brothers, to write for you also these brief and neat answers, on account of the cunning and crafty propositions of those who debate with us, so that when they, after the manner of their parent the serpent, try to entrap you with captious little questions, you too may be watchfully prepared to answer them. For so it will come about that, tied to the very points they have put forward, they cannot wander further this way and that. And so that the minds of readers might not be flooded by a profuse or confused discourse, I have set their words and ours against each other, as briefly as distinctly.

Augustine replied: You think that semi-Christians are to be guarded against, and you say that we are such; but we guard against pseudo-Christians, and we show that you are such. For what is half is incomplete in some part, but false in none. What then? If something is lacking in the faith of those whom you try to entrap, must what they have therefore be destroyed, and not rather what is lacking be built up? As the apostle says, speaking to some who were imperfect: “rejoicing and seeing your way of life, and what is lacking in your faith in Christ.” He surely saw a kind of spiritual building, as he says elsewhere, “You are God’s building,” and in it he saw both a reason to rejoice and a reason to be anxious. He rejoiced at what he saw already built; he was anxious because he perceived that it still had to be built up to the summit of perfection. So it is those of us who are truly catholics, though not yet perfect, and in a sense, as you said, semi-Christians, that you hunt out, to deceive and seduce them by your perversity. But if any are still such, once they understand that you are pseudo-Christians, even if they cannot answer the captious propositions of your questions because of what is lacking in their faith, they nevertheless know that you are not to be followed but avoided. So, just as your aim is to seek out semi-Christians to deceive, our aim is to show that you are pseudo-Christians, so that not only may more skilled Christians expose you by refuting you, but the less skilled may also profit by avoiding you. But why did you call the serpent our father? Has it slipped your mind how you are accustomed to find fault with God, who gave the man a commandment in paradise, and to praise the serpent, because by its counsel it opened his eyes? I think it is just that you should rather acknowledge as your parent that serpent, the devil, whom you praise; for he acknowledges you as his son even now, when you blame him.

Faustus said: Do you accept the gospel? Most certainly. Then do you also accept that Christ was born? That is not so. For it does not follow that, if I accept the gospel, I must therefore also accept that Christ was born. Why? Because the gospel both began to exist and began to be so named from the preaching of Christ, and in it he himself nowhere says that he was born of human beings. But the genealogy is so far from being the gospel that not even its writer dared to call it the gospel. For what did he write? “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David.” So not “the book of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” but “the book of the generation”; and there a star is also brought in, which confirms the nativity, so that it could rightly be called a “genesidium” rather than a gospel. And finally Mark, who did not care to write about the generation but only about the preaching of the Son of God, which is the gospel, see how fittingly he began: “The gospel,” he says, “of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” so that from this it is abundantly clear that the genealogy is not the gospel. For in Matthew himself too, after John had been shut up in prison, we read that only then did Jesus begin to preach the gospel of the kingdom. So whatever is narrated before this is evidently genealogy, not gospel. Otherwise, what prevented Matthew too from writing “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” except that he thought it improper to call a genealogy the gospel? Therefore, if it is now clear enough to you, as you did not know until now, that the gospel is one thing and the genealogy quite another, know that I accept the gospel, as I said, that is, the preaching of Christ. Whatever you wish to ask about it, ask, leaving the generations aside. Or if you have a mind to debate about those too, I do not refuse, since I have plenty to answer about them as well; but learn to ask first what comes first. For you seem to me now to want to know, not whether I accept the gospel, but whether I accept the generations.

Augustine replied: Certainly you questioned yourself, as if speaking for us, whether you accept the gospel, and you answered, “Most certainly.” And again you asked yourself whether you accept that Christ was born, and answered, “That is not so,” giving as your reason that the generation of Christ does not belong to the gospel. What then will you answer the apostle when he says: “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel”? You surely see how you do not know, or pretend not to know, what the gospel is, and that you name the gospel not from apostolic teaching but from your own error. But if you call gospel what the apostles called gospel, you stray from the gospel, since you do not believe that Christ is of the seed of David, which the apostle testified was preached according to his gospel. And what was the gospel of the apostle Paul was also that of the other apostles and of all faithful stewards of so great a mystery. For he says elsewhere: “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” Not all of them wrote a gospel, yet all preached the gospel. Those who narrate the origin, deeds, sayings, and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ are properly called evangelists. For if we ask what the word itself means in Latin, evangelium means good news or a good announcement. This can indeed be said whenever anything good is announced; but properly the word has come to belong to that announcement of the Savior of which I spoke. If you announce something else, it is clear that you are outside the gospel. Surely the little ones whom you call semi-Christians stand against you, if they hear the voice of their mother, love, sounding to them from the apostle’s mouth: “If anyone announces to you anything other than what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.” Since Paul himself, according to his gospel, announced Christ of the seed of David, you who deny this and announce something else are anathema. And who does not see with what blindness it is said that Christ nowhere says that he was born of human beings, when he almost never stops calling himself the Son of Man?

But of course, most learned men, you bring out for us from your bookcase some First Man or other, who came down from the nation of light to subdue the nation of darkness, armed with his waters against the enemy’s waters, with his fire against the enemy’s fire, and with his winds against the enemy’s winds. Why then was he not also armed with his smoke against the enemy’s smoke and with his darkness against the enemy’s darkness, but, as you say, with air against smoke and with light against darkness? Is it because smoke and darkness are evil that his goodness could not have them? Then those three, water, wind, and fire, are good. Why then could the malice of the hostile nation have them? Here you answer: “But that water of the nation of darkness was evil, while the water the First Man brought was good; and its wind was evil, but his was good; so too his good fire fought against its evil fire.” Why then could he not also bring good smoke against evil smoke? Or do your lies vanish and fail at smoke, like smoke itself? Certainly your First Man waged war against a contrary nature. Why then, against those five elements which you invent in the contrary nation, was only one contrary brought from the divine realms, light against darkness? For the other four are not contraries. Air is not contrary to smoke, much less water to water, wind to wind, and fire to fire.

And now, who can listen to those sacrilegious ravings, when you say that your First Man, in order to catch the enemy, changed and transformed the elements he carried to suit the will of the enemy, so that the kingdom which you call the kingdom of falsehood, remaining in its own nature, fought without deceit, while the substance of truth appeared changeable in order to deceive? You want the Lord Jesus Christ to be believed to be the son of this First Man. You call truth the daughter of this invented fable. This First Man, whom you praise because he fought the hostile nation with changeable and lying forms: if you speak the truth, you do not imitate him; but if you imitate him, you too are lying. Therefore our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, true and truthful Son of God, true and truthful Son of Man, both of which he testifies of himself, derived the eternity of divinity from the true God and the origin of flesh from a true human being. Apostolic teaching does not know your First Man. Hear the apostle Paul: “The first man,” he says, “was from the earth, earthly; the second man from heaven, heavenly. As was the earthly, so also are the earthly; as is the heavenly, so also are the heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us also bear the image of him who is from heaven.” So the first man, from the earth, earthly, is Adam, formed from clay; but the second man, from heaven, heavenly, is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the Son of God, came to the flesh, so that by taking it he might both become man outwardly and remain God inwardly, and so be both the true Son of God, through whom we were made, and become the true Son of Man, through whom we were remade. Why then do you bring forward from who knows where your invented First Man, and refuse to acknowledge the first man whom apostolic teaching teaches? Is it so that what the apostle himself says may be fulfilled in you: “They will turn their hearing away from the truth and turn aside to fables”? Paul proclaims a first man from the earth, earthly; Mani proclaims a first man not earthly, clothed with who knows what five deceitful elements. And Paul says: “If anyone announces to you anything other than what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.” So, lest Paul be a liar, let Mani be anathema.

And as for your slandering the star by which the magi were led to worship the infant Christ, are you not ashamed, when you do not place your invented Christ, the son of your invented First Man, under a star’s testimony, but say that he is bound up in all the stars? For you believe that he was mixed with the princes of darkness in that battle in which your First Man fought against the nation of darkness, so that the world was made out of those captured princes of darkness with whom he was mixed. Hence these sacrilegious ravings force you to say that Christ is fixed, bound, and compacted not only in the sky and in all the stars, but also in the earth and in everything that grows from it; no longer your Savior, but one to be saved by you, when you eat those things and belch them. For, seduced by this impious vanity, you seduce your hearers into bringing you food, so that Christ, bound in it, may be helped by your teeth and stomachs. For you preach that he is loosed and freed by such help; and not even wholly, but you maintain that remnants of him, small and filthy though they be, still remain in excrement, so that they are held again and again, entangled and enmeshed, in one bodily form after another, and, if they cannot be loosed and purified while the world stands, they will be loosed and purified by that last fire in which the world itself will burn. Yet even then, you say, the whole Christ cannot be freed, but the last, leftover particles of his good and divine nature, so defiled that they can in no way be washed clean, are condemned forever, fixed to the dreadful globe of darkness. See: men who pretend to be indignant that the Son of God is wronged because a star is said to have shown his birth, as if his nativity were placed under a fatal constellation, themselves place him not only under the conjunction of the stars, but in the bonds of all earthly things, in the juices of all plants, in the putrefaction of all flesh and the corruption of all foods, so bound and polluted that in great part, though not wholly, he cannot be loosed and purified unless he is belched up by human beings, namely by the elect of the Manichaeans, even in leeks and radishes. We, for our part, place no human being’s nativity under the fate of the stars, so that, for the sake of God’s just judgment, we may defend from every bond of necessity the free choice of the will, by which one lives well or badly. How much less do we believe that the temporal birth of him who is the eternal Creator and Lord of all things took place under the condition of the stars! So that star which the magi saw did not rule over Christ, born according to the flesh, by decree, but served him as a witness; it did not subject him to its command, but pointed him out in obedience. Therefore it was not one of those stars which from the beginning of creation keep the order of their courses under the Creator’s law, but at the new birth from a virgin a new star appeared, which performed the service of its office for the magi themselves as they sought Christ, going before their face until, going ahead, it led them to the very place where the Word of God was an infant. What astrologers ever placed the fates of people at birth under the stars in such a way as to assert that, when some person was born, one of the stars left the order of its course and went to the one who was born? For they think that the lot of one being born is bound to the order of the stars, not that the order of the stars can be changed for the day of a man’s birth. Therefore, if that star was one of those that run their courses in the sky, how could it decree what Christ would do once born, when at Christ’s birth it was ordered to abandon what it was doing? But if, as is more probably believed, it arose, not having existed before, to point out Christ, Christ was not born because it appeared, but it appeared because Christ was born. Hence, if it had to be said, we would say not that the star was Christ’s fate, but that Christ was the star’s fate. For he gave it the cause of its birth, not it to him. If, then, there are fates (fata), which are named from fari, that is, from speaking, since Christ is the Word of God, in whom all things were spoken before they existed, the conjunction of the stars is not the fate of Christ, but Christ is the fate even of the stars; he took on flesh itself, created under heaven, by the same will by which he also created heaven, and he laid it down and took it up again by the same power by which he also commanded the stars.

Why then should what is narrated about this birth not be gospel, when such good news is announced to us in it that by it our weakness is healed? Is it because Matthew did not begin by saying, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” as Mark says, but, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ”? In that way John too would not be said to have written a gospel, since he also does not say “the beginning of the gospel” or “the book of the gospel,” but “In the beginning was the Word.” Unless perhaps Faustus was so elegant a coiner of words that he would also have named this opening of John a “verbidium” because of the Word (verbum), as he dared to call the other a “genesidium” because of the genesis. But why do you not rather consider with what shamelessness you call those long and impious fables of yours a gospel? For what good is announced there, where it is said that God could not otherwise provide for and protect his kingdom against some rebellious, contrary, and alien nature or other than by sending part of his own nature into its greedy jaws to be devoured, and to be so polluted that after such labors and torments it could not even be wholly purified? Is such bad news a gospel? Certainly all who know even a little Greek translate evangelium as good news or a good announcement. But how is this good news, since you are told that God himself mourns behind a veil set before him until his members are restored and purified from that devastation and contamination? If he ever ends his mourning, he will be cruel. For what wrong has that part of him done him which will be bound in the globe? It surely must be mourned forever, since it will be condemned forever. But we have escaped: whoever pays careful attention to this news is not forced to mourn because it is bad, but to laugh because it is false.

Faustus said: Do you accept the generation, then? For a long time I did try to persuade myself of this very thing, whatever it is, that God was born; but, offended above all by the disagreement of the two evangelists who write his genealogy, Luke and Matthew, I stuck, uncertain which of them I should follow. For I thought it possible that, since I have no foreknowledge, the one I judged to be lying might be telling the truth, and the one I judged to be speaking the truth might perhaps be lying. So, leaving their endless and interminable dispute, I betook myself to John and Mark, not an unequal exchange, from two to two, and from evangelists to professors of the same name. Their beginnings, for the present, pleased me, and not without reason, because they bring in neither David nor Mary nor Joseph; but John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, meaning Christ; while Mark says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” as if reproving Matthew, who put “the son of David”—unless perhaps the one proclaims one Jesus and the other another. This, then, is the reason why I do not accept that Christ was born. But if you are great enough to remove this stumbling block from me, make them agree with each other, and I will give way somehow; although even so it will not be fitting to believe that God, and the God of Christians, was born from a womb.

Augustine replied: O, if you had read the gospel with devout zeal, and had preferred to inquire carefully rather than to condemn rashly the things in the evangelists that troubled you as contradictions, then at least, because of the very obvious contradiction that meets one, so to speak, at first sight, you would have reflected that, unless something great lay hidden there, it could hardly have happened that such authority would be granted to them throughout the world as to bring under it the minds of so many very learned men. For what great thing is it to see what you saw: that Luke records some ancestors of Christ according to the flesh and Matthew others, though both make Joseph the point, Matthew the one with whom he ends, Luke the one with whom he begins? Because of a certain holy and virginal marriage with Christ’s mother, Joseph also deserved to be called a parent of Christ, so that, because of the dignity of the male, the generations were traced from him or down to him. What great thing is it, then, that you saw: that Joseph has one father according to Matthew and another according to Luke, one grandfather according to this one and another according to that one, and so on upward to David, through so many generations, different ancestors are listed by the one and by the other? Did so many sharp and learned men, most careful students of the divine Scriptures, not see so open and obvious a difference? In the Latin language they are very few, but who could count them in Greek? They plainly saw it. For what is easier? Or who, looking even a little, does not see it? But reflecting devoutly on the eminence of so great an authority, they believed that something lay hidden there that would be given to those who ask and denied to those who bark at it, found by those who seek and withdrawn from those who find fault, opened to those who knock and shut to those who attack. They asked, they sought, they knocked; they received, they found, they entered.

The whole question, surely, is how Joseph could have had two fathers. For if it is shown that this could happen, there is no reason at all why either of these evangelists should be believed to have said something false in listing different generations. For with two fathers it will no longer be strange or contradictory that there could also be two grandfathers, two great-grandfathers, and two great-great-grandfathers, and so on up to David, whose sons both were: Solomon, who belongs to the line that Matthew followed, and Nathan, who is in the series that Luke set out. Some people consider these things and see that a human being cannot be begotten by two men through carnal union, and so they think this question cannot be solved. And they do not notice what is very common and very easy: that a person’s father is called not only the one by whom he was begotten, but also the one by whom he was adopted. For the bond of adoption was not foreign to the customs of the ancients, since we find even women adopting as their sons children not born of their own womb, as Sarah did from Hagar, and Leah from her maidservant, and Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses. And Jacob himself adopted his grandsons, the sons of Joseph. Apostolic teaching testifies that the very name of adoption has great weight in the mystery of our faith. So the apostle Paul, speaking of the privileges of the Jews, says: “To whom belong the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law; whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”; and again he says: “And we ourselves groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body”; and again in another place: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption of sons.” How great a mystery this adoption is appears clearly enough from these and similar testimonies. For God has one only Son, whom he begot from his own substance, of whom it is said: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” But us he did not beget from his substance; for we are a creature, which he did not beget but made; and therefore, to make us brothers of Christ in our own manner, he adopted us. So this way, by which God, when we had not been born of him but created and established by him, begot us by his Word and his grace so that we might be his sons, is called adoption. Hence John says: “He gave them power to become sons of God.” Since, then, the right of adopting sons was customary among our fathers and in the holy Scriptures, what madness of impiety drives you to accuse the evangelists of falsehood first, because they recorded different generations, as if both could not be true, rather than to consider, attend, and see what is very easy: how, by a frequent custom of the human race, one man could have two fathers, one by whose flesh he was begotten as a human being, the other by whose will, when he was already a human being, he was adopted as a son? If the latter is not rightly called father, neither do we rightly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” to him from whose substance we were not born, but by whose grace and most merciful will we have been adopted, according to apostolic teaching and most faithful truth. For we have him as God and Lord and Father: God, because we were created by him, though through human parents; Lord, because we are subject to him; Father, because we have been reborn by his adoption. It was easy, then, for devout searchers of the divine writings to reflect a little and to see, in the different generations of Christ recorded by the two evangelists, how Joseph could have two fathers, whose different ancestors are listed. You too could easily see this, if the zeal for contention did not blind you. But those men also sought and found other things, as they examined every part of these narratives; but those are very far removed from your understanding. So even while you remain in Mani’s error, you could see by reflection, if you did not read with a hostile mind, what commonly happens in human affairs: that one man begets a son in the flesh and another adopts him by will, and so one man has two fathers.

But why Matthew began from Abraham and came down to Joseph, while Luke began from Joseph and went up not to Abraham but to God, who made man and, having given him a commandment, gave him power to become a son of God by believing; and why the one listed the generations themselves at the head of his book, but the other when the Lord and Savior had been baptized by John; and what is meant by the number of the generations in Matthew, that they are arranged as three times fourteen, though when they are added up one seems to be missing, while the number of the generations in Luke, recorded at the Lord’s baptism, comes to seventy-seven, the number the Lord himself commends in the forgiveness of sins when he says, “not only seven times, but seventy times seven”: these things you could in no way track down, unless either you heard them from some catholic, not just anyone but one devoted to the study of the divine Scriptures and as skilled as he could be, or you yourselves, corrected from your error, with catholic devotion asked so as to receive, sought so as to find, and knocked so as to enter.

Therefore, since what disturbed Faustus about the difference of the generations, because the knot lay in understanding two fathers, has been untied by understanding nature and adoption, he wanted in vain to betake himself to two evangelists and to take himself away from the other two, likely to offend those to whom he went more than those from whom he withdrew. For the saints do not love those who choose them if they find them to be deserters of their companions. For they rejoice in unity and are one in Christ; and if one says one thing and another another, or one in one way and another in another, yet all speak the truth and in no way contradict one another, if a devout reader approaches them, if he reads meekly, if he looks not with a heretical mind for something to quarrel about, but with a faithful heart for something to be built up by. Now, therefore, since we have believed that each evangelist undertook to narrate the generations of one of the fathers, and since it is not foreign to the human race that one man should have two, our faith is not foreign to the truth. So, now that the evangelists agree with each other, give way somehow, as Faustus promised.

Or does what he added still trouble you: “Although even so,” he says, “it will not be fitting to believe that God, and the God of Christians, was born from a womb”? As if we believed that the divine nature itself came into existence from a woman’s womb! Did I not just now recall the apostle’s testimony, where he says of the Jews: “whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”? So Christ our Lord and Savior, true Son of God according to divinity and true Son of Man according to the flesh, was born of a woman not in that he is God over all, blessed forever, but in that weakness which he took from us, so that in it he might die for us and heal it in us. He was born of a woman not from the form of God, in which, though he was, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but from the form of a servant, by taking which he emptied himself. For he is said to have emptied himself for no other reason than by taking the form of a servant, not by losing the form of God. For while that nature by which, in the form of God, he is equal to the Father remained unchangeable, he took our changeable nature, through which he might be born of a virgin. But you, while you shudder at entrusting the flesh of Christ to a virgin’s womb, have entrusted the very divinity of God to the wombs not only of human beings but also of dogs and pigs. You refuse to believe that the flesh of Christ was conceived once in the womb of a virgin, in which God was not only not bound, but not even changed; and you preach that the very part of God, the divine nature, is bound, oppressed, and defiled in the male seeds and female wombs of all human beings and beasts, in all conceptions, through all lands, all waters, and all airs, and cannot even be wholly freed afterward!

Faustus said: Do you accept the Old Testament? If there is an inheritance for me in it, I accept it; if not, I do not. For it is surely excessive impudence to lay claim to a will that testifies one has been disinherited. Or do you not know that the Old Testament promises the land of the Canaanites, but promises it to the Jews, that is, to the circumcised, to those who sacrifice, who abstain from pork and the other meats that Moses calls unclean, who keep sabbaths and the feast of unleavened bread and the rest of such things, which its testator himself commanded them to observe? Since none of these has pleased any Christian, for none of us keeps them, it is right that, having refused the inheritance, we also give back the will. This, then, is the reason why I think the Old Testament should be rejected, unless you teach me something wiser. The second reason is that its inheritance is so poor and bodily and so far from the benefits of the soul that, after that blessed promise of the New Testament, which promises me the kingdom of heaven and eternal life, I would disdain it even if its testator thrust it upon me for nothing.

Augustine replied: None of us doubts that the Old Testament contains promises of temporal things and is therefore called old, and that the promise of eternal life and of the kingdom of heaven belongs to the New Testament. But that in those temporal things there were figures of future things that would be fulfilled in us, upon whom the end of the ages has come, is not my conjecture but the apostle’s understanding, for Paul says, speaking of such things: “All these things were figures of us,” and again: “All these things happened to them in figure; but they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” So we accept the Old Testament not in order to obtain those promises, but in order to understand in them the foretellings of the New Testament; for the testimony of the Old wins faith for the New. Hence the Lord, after he rose from the dead and offered himself not only to be seen by the disciples’ eyes but also to be handled by their hands, lest they should still think that something deceptive was being done with their mortal and carnal senses, strengthened them rather by the testimony of the old books, saying: “Everything had to be fulfilled that is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me.” So our hope is not fixed on a promise of temporal things, since we do not believe that even the holy and spiritual men of that time, the patriarchs and prophets, were devoted to these earthly things. For they understood, the Spirit of God revealing it to them, what suited that time, and in what ways God decreed that future things should be figured and foretold through all those things done and said; and their desire was rather for the New Testament; but a present bodily service was rendered by means of the old promises in order to signify the new things to come. Thus not only the tongue of those men but also their life was prophetic. The carnal people, however, clung to the promises of the present life; yet through that people too future things were nonetheless signified. But you do not understand these things, because, as the prophet said, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” For you are not instructed in the kingdom of heaven, that is, in the true catholic church of Christ; if you were, you would bring out from the riches of the holy Scriptures not only new things but also old. For the Lord himself says: “Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure new things and old.” And so, while you think you hold only God’s new promises, you have remained in the oldness of the flesh and have brought in the novelty of error. Of this novelty the apostle says: “But avoid profane novelties of words; for they advance much toward impiety, and their talk creeps like a cancer. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have strayed from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already taken place, and have overturned the faith of some.” Recognize that you flow from this vein of falsehood, you who say that there is now a resurrection of souls only, through the preaching of the truth, but deny the future resurrection of bodies which the apostles preached. And what can you think spiritually, according to the inner man, who is renewed in the knowledge of God, when, through the oldness of the flesh and through the images of carnal things in which your whole error is wrapped, you do not hold bodily things in possession but savor them in fantasy? For you boast that you despise and disdain the land of the Canaanites, which was visible and was visibly given to that people, as if you did not describe the land of light as split on one side by the land of the nation of darkness, as if by a wedge driven into it, so that it is not found in the reality of things and yet is believed in the falsehood of your thoughts; and so it does not sustain your life by being given, and yet it corrupts your mind by being desired.

Faustus said: Do you accept the gospel? You ask me whether I accept it, when my accepting it is evident from the very fact that I observe what it commands? Or should I ask you whether you accept it, when there seem to be in you no signs of one who accepts the gospel? I have left father and mother, wife, children, and the rest, as the gospel commands, and you ask whether I accept the gospel? Unless you still do not know what it is that is called the gospel. For it is nothing other than the preaching and command of Christ. I have thrown away gold and silver and have ceased to carry copper in my belt, content with daily food, not caring for tomorrow, nor anxious about how my belly is to be filled or my body clothed; and you ask me whether I accept the gospel? You see in me those beatitudes of Christ which make up the gospel, and you ask whether I accept it? You see me poor, you see me meek, you see me a peacemaker, pure in heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, enduring persecutions and hatred for righteousness’ sake, and you doubt whether I accept the gospel? It is no wonder, then, that John the Baptist, though he had seen Jesus and had also heard of his works, still asked whether he was the Christ; to whom Jesus, fittingly and deservedly, did not even deign to reply that he was, but sent back to him again the same works he had long since heard about: “The blind see, the deaf hear, the dead rise,” and the rest. I too might not undeservedly do the same with you, if, when you ask whether I accept the gospel, I say: I have left all that was mine, father, mother, wife, children, gold, silver, eating, drinking, luxuries, pleasures. Consider this a sufficient answer to your questions, and know that you will be blessed if you are not scandalized in me.

But, he says, accepting the gospel is not only doing what it commands, but also believing all that is written in it, the first of which is that Jesus was born. But neither, likewise, is accepting the gospel only believing that Jesus was born, but also doing what he commanded. So if you think that I do not accept the gospel because I pass over the generation, then you do not accept it either, and much more do you not accept it, because you despise the commands. And so for the present we are equal, until we also weigh the parts. Or if this contempt of the commands does not prejudice you against professing that you accept the gospel, why should a rejected genealogy prejudice me? But if accepting the gospel consists in these two things, as you say, believing the genealogies and keeping the commandments, why do you, imperfect, judge one who is imperfect? Each of us needs the other. But if, as is more certain, accepting the gospel consists solely in the observance of the heavenly commandments, you are doubly shameless, a deserter, as the saying goes, accusing a soldier. And yet, come, let us suppose, since you wish it, that these two are parts of perfect faith, of which one consists in word, that is, confessing that Christ was born, the other in deed, which is the observance of the commandments. You see, then, how arduous and difficult a part I have chosen for myself; and see how very light and easy a part you have chosen. It is no wonder that the common people flee to you and flee from me, not knowing that the kingdom of God is not in word but in power. Why then do you provoke me, if, having undertaken the harder part of faith, I have left you, as one who is weak, the easier? “But I,” he says, “think that the part of faith which you have left, namely confessing that Christ was born, is more effective and better suited to giving salvation to souls.”

Come then, let us ask Christ himself, and learn from his own mouth where the occasion of salvation chiefly arises for us. Who among human beings will enter your kingdom, O Christ? “Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven,” he says. He did not say: whoever professes that I was born. And elsewhere to the disciples: “Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you.” He did not say: teaching them that I was born, but that they should keep the commandments. Again elsewhere: “You will be my friends if you do what I command you.” He did not say: if you believe that I was born. Again: “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,” and many other things. And when he taught on the mountain, saying, “Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger, blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake,” he nowhere said: blessed are those who confess that I was born. And when he separates the lambs from the goats at the judgment, he says that he will say to those on his right: “I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink,” and so on; “therefore receive the kingdom.” He did not say: because you believed that I was born, receive the kingdom. And to the rich man who asked about eternal life he said: “Go, sell all that you have, and follow me.” He did not say: believe that I was born, so that you may live forever. See, then: to my portion, which I chose for myself out of the twofold faith, as you would have it, the kingdom, life, and blessedness are promised everywhere, but to yours nowhere. Or show where it is written that whoever has confessed that he was born of a woman is blessed, or will receive the kingdom, or will have eternal life. Meanwhile, even if this too is a part of faith, it has no beatitude. But when we prove that it is not even a part of faith, what will happen? Then you will be left empty, as will certainly be shown. But for the present it is enough for our purpose that this portion of ours is crowned with beatitudes. And to it is added that other beatitude as well, from the confession of speech, because we confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, as Jesus himself equally testifies with his own mouth, saying to Peter: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Therefore we hold not one part of faith, as you thought, but two, and both of them valid, and in both alike we are called blessed by Christ, since we practise the one by works and preach the other without blasphemy.

Augustine replied: I have already mentioned above how often the Lord Jesus Christ calls himself the Son of Man, and with what vanity the Manichaeans bring in the fable of their abominable error about some invented First Man, whom they preach as not earthly but clothed with deceitful elements, against the apostle, who says, “The first man was from the earth, earthly”; and with what care the same apostle warned us, saying, “If anyone announces to you anything other than what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.” So it remains for us to believe that Christ is the Son of Man in the way he is preached by apostolic truth, not in the way he is invented by Manichaean falsehood. Since, then, the evangelists announce that he was born of a woman of the house of David, that is, of the family of David, and Paul writes to Timothy, saying, “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel,” it is clear enough how we ought to believe that Christ is the Son of Man: he who is the Son of God, through whom we were made, also became the Son of Man by taking flesh, so that he might die for our offenses and rise again for our justification. And therefore he calls himself both, the Son of God and the Son of Man. Hence, not to go through very many passages, in one place in the Gospel according to John it is written: “Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has also given the Son to have life in himself; and he has given him power to execute judgment as well, because he is the Son of Man.” He said, “They will hear the voice of the Son of God,” and he said, “because he is the Son of Man.” For it is in that he is the Son of Man that he received the power of executing judgment, because he will come to judgment in that very form, so that he may be seen by both the good and the wicked. In that form he also ascended into heaven, and that voice sounded to the disciples: “He will come in the same way as you saw him going into heaven.” For in that he is the Son of God, God equal to the Father and one with the Father, he will not be seen by the wicked; for “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Since, then, he promises eternal life to those who believe in him, and believing in him is nothing other than believing in the true Christ, such as he preaches himself and as he is preached by the apostles, that is, both true Son of God and true Son of Man, you Manichaeans, who believe in a false and deceitful son of a false and deceitful man, while you also teach that God himself, terrified by the uproar of the hostile nation, sent his members to be tortured and not afterward to be wholly purified, see how far you are from the eternal life which Christ promises to those who believe in him. But, you say, he said to Peter when he confessed him as the Son of God, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona.” Did he therefore promise nothing to those who would believe in him as the Son of Man, since he himself is both Son of God and Son of Man? You have eternal life openly promised also to those who believe in the Son of Man: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” he says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” What more do you want? Believe, then, in the Son of Man, so that you may have eternal life, because he is also the Son of God, who can give eternal life, because he is the true God and eternal life, as the same John says in his epistle, where he also says that he is antichrist who denies that Christ has come in the flesh.

Why then do you boast as if of the perfection of his commandments, saying that you carry out what is commanded in the gospel? For what would those things profit where there is no true faith, even if you really fulfilled them? Have you not heard the apostle say: “If I distribute all my goods to the poor and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing”? Why then do you boast as if of Christian poverty, when you lack Christian love? Even robbers have among themselves what they call love, since they owe one another a criminal and shameful complicity; but it is not the love the apostle commends. And to distinguish it from all the others that are to be disapproved and rejected, he says in another place: “But the end of the commandment is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned.” How then can you have true love, arising from a feigned faith? Or when will it shame you that your faith fights with lies, since you preach both that your First Man fought by changeable deceit against his enemies, who remained in the truth of their own nature, and you would persuade us that this Christ, who says, “I am the truth,” feigned the appearance of flesh, the death of the cross, the wounds of the passion, and the scars of the resurrection? Then you want to be put above your Christ, if you announce the truth while he lies. But if you want to follow your Christ, who would not be on guard against falsehood in you, suspecting that even in these commandments which you say you fulfil there is nothing but deceit? For Faustus dared to say that you do not carry copper in your belts—unless perhaps he spoke the truth because you keep not copper in your belts, but gold in your little chests and purses. Nor would these things be blamed in you, except that you profess one thing and live otherwise. That Constantius is still among the living, now our brother, a catholic Christian, who had gathered many of you into his house at Rome in order to fulfil the precepts of Mani, foolish and silly enough indeed, but which you think great; and when your weakness gave way before them, you scattered, each to his own way. Hence those who wished to persevere in them made a schism from your society, and because they sleep on mats they are called Mattarii. Very unlike their bedding were the feathers and goat-hair coverlets of Faustus, whose abundance of luxuries made him disdain not only the Mattarii but also the house of his father, a poor man of Milevis. Take away, then, this lost pretense, if not from your conduct, at least from your writings, so that your tongue may not seem to fight with your life, as that First Man fought with the nation of darkness, with lying, not elements, but words.

But lest anyone blame me for saying these things against men who do not fulfil what is commanded them, rather than against the sect of that most vain error itself, I say this: the precepts of Mani are themselves such that, if you do not keep them, you are deceivers, and if you keep them, you are deceived. For Christ did not command you not to pull up a plant lest you commit murder; he did not forbid his disciples, when they were passing through a grainfield and were hungry, to pluck ears of grain on the sabbath, so that he might refute both the Jews then present and the Manichaeans to come: the former because it was done on the sabbath, the latter because it was done at all. But Mani plainly commanded you to live, with idle hands, off other people’s murders. And those murders are false, but yours are real, when you slaughter wretched souls with such a doctrine of demons.

Yet there is in him that heretical arrogance and intolerable pride: “You see in me,” he says, “those beatitudes of Christ which make up the gospel, and you ask whether I accept it? You see me poor, you see me meek, you see me a peacemaker, pure in heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, enduring persecutions and hatred for righteousness’ sake, and you doubt whether I accept the gospel?” If being righteous were justifying oneself, this man would have flown to heaven on his own words when he said this. But I do not inveigh against the luxuries of Faustus, known to all the hearers of the Manichaeans and especially to those at Rome; I put forward the kind of Manichaean that Constantius was looking for when he demanded that those precepts be fulfilled, not the kind he did not want to see. And yet how do I see such a man as poor in spirit, when he is so proud that he believes his own soul to be God and is not ashamed of it being a captive? How meek, when he prefers to insult so great an evangelical authority rather than to believe it? How a peacemaker, when he thinks that the divine nature itself, by which God is whatever he is, who alone truly is, could not have had perpetual peace? How pure in heart, when so many and such sacrilegious fictions riot in it? How mourning, unless for God captured and bound until he is loosed and escapes, though cut short of a certain part, which will be bound by the Father in the globe of darkness and will not be mourned? How hungering and thirsting for righteousness, which Faustus did not add in his writings, I suppose, so as not to seem to lack it, if he admitted that he still hungered and thirsted for it? But what righteousness do these men hunger and thirst for, for whom perfect righteousness will be to triumph, besides, over their brothers condemned in the globe, who sinned through no fault of their own but were inexpiably infected by the hostile corruption into which the Father sent them?

How do you endure persecutions and hatred for righteousness’ sake, you for whom righteousness is preaching and urging these sacrileges? Why do you not consider how little, almost nothing, you suffer for this impious perversity, because of the gentleness of Christian times? But, as if speaking to the blind and foolish, you want it taken as a great sign of your righteousness that you endure reproaches and suffer persecution. Further, if each person is more righteous the more grievously he suffers—I pass over saying what is very easy to see, how much more grievous things than you are suffered by men defiled with one crime or vice after another—I say this: if whoever suffers persecution for the name of Christ, however that name is claimed and taken up, must at once be said to hold the true faith and righteousness, then grant that he is of a truer faith and a greater righteousness whom we can show to have suffered far more grievous things than you; and thousands of our martyrs meet you, and above all Cyprian himself, whose writings also teach that he believed in Christ born of the Virgin Mary. For this faith, which you detest, he went as far as the sword and death, along with flocks of Christians who then believed as he did and died as he did, or more grievously. But Faustus, convicted or having confessed that he was a Manichaean, was brought with some others before the proconsul’s court, and, at the intercession of the very Christians by whom they had been brought there, he was banished to an island, a very light penalty, if indeed it should be called a penalty: it is what servants of God do daily of their own accord, wishing to withdraw from the turbulent noise of the crowds, and it is a penalty from which the public vows of earthly rulers commonly release the condemned by an act of indulgence. In fact, not long afterward all of them were released from there by that same customary dispensation. So either admit that those held a truer faith and a more righteous life who were found worthy to endure far more terrible things for it than you, or stop boasting that you are detestable to many. But distinguish what it is to suffer persecution for blasphemy and to suffer persecution for righteousness; and for which of these you suffer, consider carefully again and again in your own books.

But how many in our communion truly carry out those more sublime precepts of the gospel, with the appearance of which you deceive the unskilled! How many people of both sexes are pure and untouched by any intercourse; how many, having experienced it, are afterward continent; how many distribute and leave behind their possessions; how many bring the body into servitude by fasts, frequent or daily or even incredibly prolonged! How many brotherly communities have nothing of their own but all things in common, and those only what is necessary for food and clothing, fusing one soul and one heart toward God in the fire of love! And in all these professions how many are found out to be deceitful and lost, how many also lie hidden, how many, walking rightly at first, soon fail through a perverse will! How many are found in temptations to have taken up such a life with another intention, under a shadowy appearance; and how many, keeping their holy purpose humbly and faithfully, persevere to the end and are saved! In their company, though they appear unequal, yet bound by the same love, are those who for some necessity, according to the apostle’s exhortation, have wives as though not having them, and buy as though not holding, and use this world as though not using it. To these are joined, according to the abundant riches of God’s mercy, those also to whom it is said: “Do not defraud one another, except by consent for a time, that you may be free for prayer, and come together again, lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control; but I say this by way of concession, not of command.” To such the same apostle also says: “It is already altogether a fault that you have lawsuits among you.” And bearing with their weakness, he says a little later: “If then you have worldly lawsuits, appoint those who are despised in the church.” For it is not only those who, to be perfect, sell or leave all their possessions and follow the Lord who belong to the kingdom of heaven; but to this Christian army there is also joined, through a kind of exchange of love, a sort of tributary multitude, to whom it will be said at the end, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat,” and the rest. Otherwise those would have to be condemned whose households the apostle orders with such diligent and careful concern, admonishing wives to be subject to their husbands, husbands to love their wives; children to obey their parents, parents to bring up their children in the discipline and correction of the Lord; slaves to obey their masters according to the flesh with fear, masters to render to their slaves what is just and fair. But far be it from him to judge these strangers to the gospel commandments and to be separated from eternal life; for where the Lord says, “If anyone does not take up his cross and follow me, he cannot be my disciple,” exhorting the stronger to perfection, there he at once consoled these also, saying: “Whoever receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward; and whoever receives a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” Hence not only whoever gave a little wine to Timothy for his stomach and frequent illnesses, but also whoever offers a cup of cold water to a healthier and stronger man only in the name of a disciple, as follows there, will not lose his reward.

And why do you deceive your hearers, who serve you with their wives and children and households and houses and fields, if whoever has not left all these things will not accept the gospel? But since you promise them not resurrection but a return to this mortality, so that they may be born again and live the life of your elect, a life as vain and silly and sacrilegious as the one you live when you are most praised; or, if they are of better merit, that they may pass into melons and cucumbers or other foods that you are going to eat, so that they may be quickly purified by your belching: you rightly estrange them from the gospel commandments; but you ought most of all to separate yourselves from them, since you hold and urge such views. For if this vanity belonged to the gospel faith, the Lord ought not to have said, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat,” but, “You were hungry and you ate me,” or, “I was hungry and I ate you.” For according to your ravings no one will be received into the kingdom of God for the merit of that service, because he gave food to the saints, but because either he ate those whom he would breathe out, or he was eaten by those who would breathe him out into heaven. Nor would they say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat?” but they would say, “When did we see you hungry, and you ate us?” And he would not answer them, “When you gave to one of the least of mine, you gave to me,” but, “When one of the least of mine ate you, I ate you.”

Holding and teaching these monstrosities, and living by them, you dare both to say that you keep the gospel precepts and to disparage the catholic church, in which there are so many little ones with the great, both of whom the Lord blesses, as they keep the gospel commandments according to their ranks and hope for the gospel promises. But a malicious error leads your eye only to the chaff of our crop; for you would quickly see the wheat there too, if you were willing for it to be there. Among you, however, both those who are feigned Manichaeans are bad and those who are not feigned are vain. For where the faith itself is feigned, he who uses it in pretense deceives, and he who thinks it true is deceived; nor can a good life arise from it, because each lives well or badly from his love. But if you burned with love for spiritual and intelligible good, and not with desire for bodily phantasms, then, to say quickly what is very well known about you, you would not worship this bodily sun as the divine substance and the light of wisdom.

Faustus said: Do you accept the Old Testament? How can I, when I do not keep its precepts? I think, indeed, that neither do you. For I have spurned circumcision as shameful, and, if I am not mistaken, so have you; the resting on sabbaths as superfluous, and I believe so have you; sacrifices as idolatry, and I do not doubt that so have you. As for pork, I certainly do not abstain from it alone, and you likewise do not eat it alone: I because I consider all flesh unclean, you because you consider nothing unclean; and by each of these the Old Testament is destroyed by each of us. The weeks of eating unleavened bread and the feast of tabernacles we have both despised as useless and vain. Not weaving purple into linen garments; counting a garment of linen and wool as adultery; counting it sacrilege to yoke an ox and an ass together, even if it is necessary; not appointing as priest a man who is bald or shaggy-haired or has some similar mark, because such men are unclean before God: all this we have both despised and laughed at, and have held it of no account, neither in the second rank nor in the first. Yet all these are precepts and ordinances of the Old Testament. So what you object against me you share with me, whether it is to be thought a crime or a right act; for each of us rejects the Old Testament. So if you ask what difference there is between my faith and yours, it is this: you like to lie and to act basely, praising in word what you hate in your mind; I have not learned to deceive. What I think, I say: I admit that I hate the teachers of such shameful things as much as the precepts themselves.

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.

Our fathers who pleased God kept their order in that very obedience, so as to observe whatever God, by commanding, assigned to suitable times, just as he assigned it. So it was not only that, at the time when it was commanded that certain meats not be eaten, they did not eat them, meats which, though all meats given for food were clean by nature, were unclean by some signification, so that the future manifestation of realities might be prefigured by such significations; but also as to unleavened bread and other such things, in which the apostle says there was a shadow of things to come, the people of that time and that nation would have been as guilty if they had scorned to observe them, when those things had to be done in that way and the things now revealed had to be foretold in that way, as we would be foolish if now, when the New Testament is manifest, we thought that those foretelling observances were of any profit to us; just as we would be sacrilegious and impious if we thought that those same books should be rejected, which were written for our sake, so that, recognizing that what has now been revealed to us and announced in manifestation was foretold so long before by those figures, we might hold it faithfully and firmly; rejected because the Lord commands us no longer to observe bodily what is written there, but to understand and do it spiritually. For they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come, as the same apostle also says: “For whatever was written before was written for our instruction.” Therefore, not eating unleavened bread for the appointed seven days was a sin in the time of the Old Testament, but in the time of the New Testament it is not a sin. But in the hope of the world to come, which we have in Christ, who renews us wholly, clothing our soul with righteousness and our body with immortality, to believe that we shall suffer or do anything from the necessity and want of the old corruption is always a sin, as long as these seven days roll on, by which time runs its course. In the times of the Old Testament this, hidden in figure, was understood by certain saints; in the time of the New Testament it is revealed in manifestation and preached to the peoples. Hence the same Scripture was then a precept, and is now a testimony. Not to celebrate the feast of tabernacles was once a sin; now it is not a sin. But not to be built into the tabernacle of God, which is the church, is always a sin. Then, however, the figure was enacted under precept; now the revelation is read as testimony. For what was made then would not be called the tabernacle of testimony unless, by a certain fitness of signification, it testified to some truth that was to be declared in its own time. To mix purple with linen garments and to be clothed in a garment of linen and wool was once a sin; now it is not a sin. But to live in a disorderly way and to want to mix professions of different kinds, so that a consecrated virgin wears the ornaments of married women, or a woman who married because she was not continent bears the appearance of a virgin, is a sin in every way; and so is anything unfittingly woven together from different kinds into anyone’s life. But what was then figured in garments is now declared in conduct; for that was the time of signifying, this of manifesting. So the same Scripture which then exacted works that signified is now a witness to the things signified; and what was then observed for foretelling is now recited for confirming. To yoke an ox and an ass together for work was not then permitted; now it is permitted. For this was made clear through the apostle when, recalling the Scripture that says the threshing ox is not to be muzzled, he said: “Is it for oxen that God cares?” Why then is it read now, when what it forbade is permitted? Because the same apostle goes on there to say: “For our sake Scripture says it.” And surely it is impious for us not to read what was written for our sake; for it was written for our sake, to whom it is made manifest, rather than for theirs, in whom it was figured. For anyone yokes an ox and an ass, if necessary, without harm to the work; but no one makes a wise man and a fool companions, not so that one may command and the other obey, but equally and with equal authority, to proclaim the word of God, without causing scandal. So we hold the same Scripture, which then by its power commanded that what would now be opened should be covered with shadows, and now by its authority testifies to what is opened in the light, which was then covered. As for the bald man and the shaggy-haired man, whom he says the law called unclean, Faustus had paid too little attention, or had come upon a faulty manuscript. But would that he had been willing to have a bare forehead and had not been ashamed to fix the cross of Christ on it! He would surely have believed that Christ, who cries, “I am the truth,” neither died with false wounds nor rose with false scars. Indeed he even says, “I have not learned to deceive; what I think, I say.” So he is not a disciple of his own Christ, who, he madly supposes, showed false scars to his doubting disciples; and he wants to be believed, as one who does not deceive, not only about his other vanities but even about the very deceit of Christ: either he is better than Christ, since Christ deceives and he does not; or by that very fact he is the disciple not of the truthful Christ but of the deceitful Mani, since he deceives even in that in which he boasts that he has not learned to deceive.

Faustus said: Why do you not believe in the genealogy of Jesus? There are many reasons, but the chief one is that he himself nowhere confesses with his own mouth that he has a father or a lineage on earth, but on the contrary that he is not of this world, that he came forth from God the Father, that he came down from heaven, that he has no mother and brothers except those who do the will of his Father who is in heaven. And besides, those very men who ascribe these genealogies to him do not seem to have known him before his birth, nor even immediately after he was born, so that they might be believed to have written what they saw done concerning him with their own eyes; but they joined him when he was already a young man and mature, that is, about thirty years old—if indeed age can be ascribed to divine beings without blasphemy. Therefore, since in all testimony to the truth it is always customary to ask whether one heard or saw, and these men neither claim to have heard from him this order of the generation, or even that he was born at all, nor to have seen it with their eyes, since they came to know him long afterward, that is, after his baptism, it seems to me, and to everyone who judges rightly, as foolish to believe this as if someone were to call a blind and deaf witness into court.

Augustine replied: As to what he calls the chief reason why he does not accept the genealogy of Jesus Christ, there he is shown to be most plainly defeated, to those who read what we said above about the Son of Man, as Christ so often testifies that he is, and about the Son of God, how he himself is also the Son of Man; how according to his divinity he has no lineage on earth, but according to the flesh is of the seed of David, as apostolic teaching testifies. Hence he must be believed and understood both to have come forth from the Father and to have come from heaven, and yet here, the Word made flesh, to have dwelt among human beings. But if they think that he had no mother or lineage on earth because he said, “Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?”, it remains for them to assert that his disciples too had no fathers, the disciples to whom he gave in himself this example, that they should despise the ties of earthly kinship for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, because he said to them, “Call no one your father on earth; for you have one Father, God.” So what he taught them about fathers he himself first did with regard to his mother and brothers, as with many other things in which he deigned to offer himself to us for imitation and to go before us so that we might follow. Therefore, since this man is so defeated in what he thinks his chief point, we must notice how he lies prostrate and entangled in the rest. For he says that the apostles should not be believed, who proclaimed not only his divine but also his human birth, because they joined him later as a young man, and neither saw him born nor said they had heard it from him. Why then do they believe John when he says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made,” and the rest, which please them, though they do not understand it? Let them say where John saw this, or where he said he heard it from the Lord himself. For whatever they say about how John could know this, from that same source we believe that all who proclaimed Christ’s birth could know what they proclaimed. Next, I ask on what ground they believe the Lord said, “Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?” If it is because the evangelist narrated it, why do they not believe him also when he says that his mother and brothers were looking for him? But if he lied in what they will not believe, how do they believe him that Christ said what they will not understand? Next, if Matthew could not know that Christ was born, because he joined him when he was already a young man, how could Mani, born so many years later, know that Christ was not born? They will say: “The Holy Spirit, who was in Mani, knew this.” If he were indeed the Holy Spirit, he would have spoken the truth. But why should we not rather believe about Christ his disciples, who also clung to him bodily, who could know whatever was hidden in human affairs not only through the Holy Spirit imparted by him, but also, with memory so recent and present, could gather even by mere human sense the lineage of Christ according to the flesh and his whole origin? And yet the apostles are called blind and deaf witnesses. Would that you had been not only blind and deaf, so as not to learn such vain and sacrilegious things, but also mute, so as not to say them!

Faustus said: Why do you not accept the Old Testament? Because I have already been taken up by the New; and the old and the new do not go together, as Scripture testifies. For “No one,” it says, “sews a new patch on an old garment; otherwise a greater tear will be made.” So, because I take care not to make a greater tear, as you do, I do not mix Christian newness with Hebrew oldness. For who would not judge it even mean, having put on new clothes, not to give the old ones to inferiors? Therefore, even if I had been born a Jew, as the apostles were, it would still have been right for me, having received the New Testament, to repudiate the Old, as they did. But as it is, since by the kindness of nature I was not born under the yoke of slavery, and Christ met me at once with the full gift of freedom, how wretched and foolish, and ungrateful besides, I shall be if I hand myself over to slavery of my own accord! Indeed Paul reproves the Galatians because, sliding back into circumcision, they were returning to the weak and beggarly elements, which they wished to serve again. How then shall I admit what I see another rebuked for? It is shameful to return to slavery, but more shameful to go into it.

Augustine replied: We have already shown sufficiently above why and how we hold the authority of the Old Testament, not to imitate Jewish servitude but to testify to Christian freedom. For it is not my voice but the apostle’s: “All these things happened to them in figure; but they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” Therefore we do not do in servitude what was commanded in order to foretell us, but we read in freedom what was written in order to confirm us. Who then does not now understand from what the apostle calls the Galatians back: not from reading devoutly the Scripture about circumcision, but from wanting, in superstition, to be circumcised? So we do not sew a new patch on an old garment, but are instructed in the kingdom of heaven after the likeness of that householder whom the Lord mentions, who brings out of his treasure new things and old. He sews a new patch on an old garment who wants to have spiritual continence but has not yet laid aside carnal hope. For read carefully and see that the Lord, when he was asked about fasting, answered, “No one sews a new patch on an old garment.” For the disciples still loved the Lord carnally, since they even feared losing him if he were killed. Hence, when Peter tried to call him back from his passion, he calls him Satan, because he did not savor the things of God but the things of men. So pay attention to how carnal a hope you bear in that fantasy of yours about the kingdom of God, the reason you love and worship this light of the sun, visible to the flesh, as if it were set before you as a model; and you will find how your fasts are sewn onto the wisdom of the flesh as onto an old garment. Yet since a new patch does not suit an old garment, how could the members of your God cleave to the princes of darkness, not joined and sewn on, but, what is more violent, mixed and compacted with them? Or are both old, because both are false and both come from the wisdom of the flesh? Unless perhaps you want to prove from this that one was new and the other old, because a greater tear was made, so that a wretched patch was cut off from the kingdom of light and fixed to the globe of darkness in eternal punishment. And yet this filthy tailor of such fables, or beggarly patcher, thinks himself clever in pricking, as it were with the needle of his tongue, the firm foundations of the divine Scriptures.

Faustus said: Why do you not accept the Old Testament? If the apostles, who were born under it, were allowed to depart from it, why should I not be allowed not to lay claim to that under which I was not born? For we are all born Gentiles, not Jews, and certainly not Christians. But out of that same Gentile state the Old Testament draws some to itself and makes them Jews, and the New draws others and initiates them as Christians; as if two trees, a sweet one and a bitter one, by their roots drew into themselves the strength of the one soil, to be changed into their own qualities. So, since the apostles pass from the bitter to the sweet, how mad shall I be if I turn from the sweet to the bitter!

Augustine replied: Why then does the apostle, who you say left Judaism and passed from bitterness to sweetness, say rather that those of that people who would not believe in Christ were branches broken off from there, and that the Gentiles were grafted, like a wild olive, into the very root of the olive, that is, into the origin of the holy Hebrews, so that they might become sharers in the richness of the olive? For when he was warning the Gentiles about the fall of the Jews, so that they would not be proud, he spoke thus: “For I say to you Gentiles,” he says, “inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I will glorify my ministry, if somehow I may provoke my flesh to emulation and save some of them. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the firstfruits are holy, so is the lump; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, though you were a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became a sharer in the root and richness of the olive, do not boast against the branches. If you do boast, it is not you who bear the root, but the root you. You will say, then, Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in. Well: they were broken off through unbelief, but you stand by faith. Do not be high-minded, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. See, then, the kindness and severity of God: severity toward those who fell, but kindness toward you, if you remain in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off. And they too, if they do not remain in unbelief, will be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive and grafted, contrary to nature, into a good olive, how much more will those who are natural branches be grafted into their own olive? For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of this mystery, so that you may not be wise in your own eyes: that blindness has come upon Israel in part, until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in, and so all Israel should be saved.” You see, then, that you who will not be grafted into this root are not indeed like the broken branches, as the carnal and impious people of the Jews is, but have remained in the bitterness of the wild olive. For what savors of the wild olive of the Gentiles more than worshipping the sun and moon? Unless perhaps you think you are no longer in the wild olive of the Gentiles because you have added thorns of a new kind, and a false Christ, whom, along with the sun and moon, you worship, fashioned not by a craftsman’s hand but by a perverse heart? Be grafted, then, into the root of the olive, to which the apostle rejoices that he was restored, who had been among the branches broken off through unbelief. For he says that he was freed from that state when he rejoices that he passed from Judaism to Christ, because Christ was always preached in that root and in that tree; and when he came, those who did not believe in him were broken off from it, and those who believed were grafted in there. To these, lest they be proud, it is said: “Do not be high-minded, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.” But lest the broken branches themselves despair, he says a little later: “And they too, if they do not remain in unbelief, will be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive and grafted, contrary to nature, into a good olive, how much more will those who are natural branches be grafted into their own olive?” See, this is why he himself glories, freed from the breaking off and restored to the richness of the root. So let those among you whom impiety has broken off from there return and be grafted in again; and let those who were never there come, cut away from their natural barrenness, to become sharers in its fruitfulness.

Faustus said: Why do you not accept the Old Testament? Because both from it and from the New we have learned not to covet what belongs to others. “But what,” you say, “does the Old Testament contain that belongs to others?” Rather, what does it contain that does not? It promises riches and a full belly and sons and grandsons and long life, and, along with these, the kingdom of Canaan; but all these to those who are circumcised, who keep sabbaths, who sacrifice to him, and who abstain from pork and other such things. Since I, and every Christian, neglect these things, as silly, of course, and not at all pertaining to the salvation of the soul, I recognize that what it promises is therefore no longer to be expected by me; and, mindful that the commandment is, “You shall not covet what belongs to others,” I have gladly and willingly allowed the Jews to keep their own goods, content, of course, with the gospel alone and the splendid inheritance of the kingdom of heaven. For just as, if a Jew claimed the gospel for himself, I would rightly rebuke him, saying, “Shameless man, what have you to do with that whose precepts you do not keep?”, so I fear that a Jew may rebuke me in the same way for holding the Old Testament, whose commandments I despise.

Augustine replied: He is not ashamed to repeat the same vain things often, but I am weary of often giving the same answers, true though they are. So whoever seeks an answer to these points too, let him read what we have said above. But to a Jew who says to me, “Why do you hold the Old Testament, whose precepts you do not keep?”, I answer that Christians do keep, even from those very books, the precepts for the conduct of life; while the precepts for signifying life were rightly observed then, when the things now revealed were being foretold. Therefore I do not observe even these as a matter of religion, yet in such a way that I hold them as testimony; just as with the carnal promises it contains, from which it is properly called the Old Testament: though eternal things to be hoped for have been revealed to me, I nevertheless read those too as bearing witness. These things happened to them in figure; but they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come. So, if you have heard what we answer the Jews, hear also what I object to the Manichaeans.

Faustus certainly said that we could be troubled if the Jews said to us, “Why do you hold the Old Testament, whose precepts you do not observe?” We answer them while venerating and preserving the authority of that Scripture. What do you answer when it is said to you: “Why do you hold the gospel books, whose followers you pretend to be in order to deceive the unskilled, while what is written there you not only do not believe but even attack with all the strength you can?” Surely you see that it is rather you who cannot answer objections about the New Testament, than we about the Old. For everything written in the Old we say is true, divinely commanded, and assigned to suitable times. But you, when things written in the books of the New Testament which you do not accept are brought against you, failing to answer, with your throats squeezed by manifest truth, say with wounded breath that they have been falsified. What else could the choked mouths of deceivers breathe out? Or rather, what else but stench could the pierced corpses of the dead give off? And yet Faustus confessed that he had learned not to covet what belongs to others not only from the New Testament but also from the Old; which he certainly could not have learned from his own God. For if he did not covet what belonged to others, why did he build new worlds upon the land of darkness, where they had never been? Or will he say: “First the nation of darkness itself coveted my kingdom, which did not belong to it”? Then did he imitate the nation of darkness, so that he too coveted what belonged to others? Or was the kingdom of light cramped before? Then war was to be wished for, so that breadth of rule might be acquired by victory. If that is good, it could have been coveted before as well; but he was waiting for the hostile nation to break out into war first, so that it might be attacked, as it were, more justly. But if it is not good, why, once the enemy was conquered, did he want his kingdom to grow over another’s land, when before, content with his own borders, he had lived in full happiness? But would that these men truly wished to learn from those writings these very precepts for the conduct of life, one of which is that we should not covet what belongs to others! They would surely grow gentle and, being meek, would understand also those precepts for signifying life, at which their offense barks: that they suited that time for observing and suit this time for understanding. And how do we covet the Old Testament as belonging to others, when we read the things which happened to them in figure, but were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come? I think that one who reads what was written for his own sake does not covet what belongs to others.

Faustus said: Do you accept the apostle? Most certainly. Why then do you not believe that the Son of God was born of the seed of David according to the flesh? I would certainly not believe that the apostle of God could write things contrary to himself, and hold now this view, now that, about our Lord. But since it so pleases you, who never hear without irritation that something in the apostle has been adulterated, know that not even this is against us, if indeed this appears to be Paul’s old and earlier opinion of Jesus, when he too, like the rest, thought him the son of David. But when he learned that this was false, he revises and weakens it, and, writing to the Corinthians, he says: “We know no one according to the flesh; and even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him.” So you must consider how great a difference there is between these two passages, of which one affirms that Jesus is the son of David according to the flesh, while the other says that he now knows no one according to the flesh. If both are Paul’s, either it will be for the reason I have given, or one of them will not be Paul’s. Then he goes on: “So if there is any new creature in Christ, the old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” You see, then, that he calls that former faith old and transitory, that is, having believed that Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh, and this second one new and permanent, that he now knows no one according to the flesh. Hence elsewhere too he says: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.” If this is so, what wrong do we do if, holding Paul’s new and better confession, we throw away that old and worse one? Or if you are determined to believe according to what he writes to the Romans, why should we not be permitted to hold doctrine according to what he writes to the Corinthians? Though I have answered thus to suit your obstinacy; otherwise, far be it from the apostle of God ever to destroy what he built, lest he make himself a transgressor, as he testified. Still, if that former statement is his, it has now been corrected; but if it is not right to say that Paul ever said anything that needed correcting, it is not his.

Augustine replied: This is what I said a little before: when these men are so choked by manifest truth that, hemmed in by the clear words of the holy Scriptures, they can find no way out for their deceit in them, they answer that the testimony brought forward is false. O voice fleeing from the truth, stubborn in madness! So invincible are the things brought against you from the divine books that you have nothing to say but that they have been falsified. What authority of writings can be opened, what sacred book unrolled, what document of any writing brought forth to refute errors, if this answer is admitted, if it is thought of any weight? It is one thing not to accept the books themselves and not to be held by any bond of theirs, as the pagans do with all our books, as the Jews do with the New Testament, and as we ourselves do with yours and those of other heretics, if they have any of their own, or with those which are called apocryphal—not because they are to be held in some secret authority, but because, made clear by no light of testimony, they have been brought forth from who knows what secret place by the presumption of who knows whom. It is one thing, then, not to be held by the authority of certain books or persons, and another to say: “This holy man wrote all things truly, and this letter is his, but in it this is his and that is not his.” Then, when you hear from the other side, “Prove it,” you do not take refuge in more correct copies, or in more numerous or older manuscripts, or in the original language from which this was translated into another language, but you say: “I prove that this is his and that is not his from this: this speaks for me, that against me.” Are you, then, the rule of truth? Is whatever is against you not true? What if another, with a similar madness, but one by which your obstinacy would be broken, stood up and said: “On the contrary, what speaks for you is false, and what is against you is true”? What will you do? Unless perhaps you will bring forward another book, in which whatever you read can be understood according to your view. If you do this, you will hear someone contradicting not some part of it but the whole, and crying, “It is false.” What will you do? Where will you turn? What origin of the book you produce, what antiquity, what series of succession will you cite as witness? For if you try to do this, you will both achieve nothing and see in this matter what the authority of the catholic church is worth, which is established from the most firmly founded seats of the apostles to this present day by the series of bishops succeeding one another and by the agreement of so many peoples. So if a question arose about the reliability of copies, as in some differences of reading, which are few and very well known to students of the sacred writings, our doubt would be settled from the manuscripts of other regions from which the teaching itself came; or, if the manuscripts varied there too, the more numerous would be preferred to the fewer, or the older to the more recent; and if the variation were still uncertain, the original language from which it was translated would be consulted. This is how those inquire who, about what troubles them in the holy Scriptures established by such authority, want to find something to be instructed by, not something to quarrel about.

But this passage brought forward against your impiety from the letter of the apostle Paul, that the Son of God is of the seed of David according to the flesh, all manuscripts, new and old, contain; all churches read it; all languages agree. Take off, then, the cloak of deceit in which Faustus was clothed when, having set before himself someone questioning him and saying, “Do you accept the apostle Paul?”, he answered, “Most certainly.” Why did he not rather answer, “Not at all,” unless because, being a deceiver, he could answer nothing but what was false? For what of the apostle Paul did he accept? Not the first man, whom Paul calls from the earth, earthly, of whom he also says, “The first man Adam was made a living soul”; Faustus proclaims some first man or other, neither from the earth, earthly, nor made a living soul, but existing from the substance of God, the very thing that God is, who sank his members or his garments or his weapons, that is, the five elements, though they too were nothing other than the substance of God, in the nation of darkness, so that they were captured and defiled. Not the second man, whom Paul calls from heaven, whom he also calls the last Adam, made a life-giving spirit, whom he says was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law; of whom he says to Timothy, “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel”; and by whose example he also preaches our resurrection, saying: “For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day according to the Scriptures.” And a little later he adds why he said this: “But if Christ is preached as risen from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” But this man, who, when asked whether he accepts the apostle Paul, answers, “Most certainly,” denies all this. He will not accept Jesus as of the seed of David, nor as made of a woman—whom Paul calls a woman not because she was corrupted by intercourse or by childbirth, but because he speaks in the manner of the Scriptures, which are accustomed to call the sex itself so; as it is written in Genesis of Eve, “He formed her into a woman,” when she had not been united to a man. Nor does he accept the very death of Christ and his burial and resurrection, since he says that Christ neither had a mortal body, in which that death would be real, nor were those scars real which he showed to the disciples after the resurrection, when, as Paul also mentions, he appeared to them alive; nor that our flesh itself will rise, changed into a spiritual body, as the same apostle most plainly says: “It is sown an animal body, it rises a spiritual body.” Then, distinguishing between the animal and the spiritual body, he connects what I have already mentioned about the first Adam and the last Adam, and then adds: “This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God.” And lest anyone should believe that the very form and substance of flesh cannot rise, wishing to express what he here called flesh and blood, since he wanted corruption itself to be understood, which will not exist then in the resurrection of the righteous, he immediately connected: “nor will corruption possess incorruption.” And lest anyone should still think that what was buried will not rise, but that, as it were, one tunic is laid aside and another, better one taken up, wishing to declare most plainly that this very thing will be changed for the better—just as the garments of Christ on the mountain were not laid aside and others taken up, but those very ones he had were glorified for the better—he goes on and connects, saying: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed.” And lest it still be uncertain who they are who will be changed: “In an atom,” he says, “in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorrupt, and we shall be changed.” Perhaps they will still say that in the resurrection we are changed not as to this mortal and corruptible body, but as to the soul, though the apostle did not propose that as his subject, but spoke about the body from the very beginning of the question, as his own proposition shows: “But someone will say,” he says, “How do the dead rise? And with what body do they come?” Here, however, he then points out as with a finger what he was speaking about, and adds: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” Since, then, this man denies these things, and since he preaches that God himself, of whom Paul says, “To the immortal, incorruptible, only God be honor and glory, amen,” is corruptible—for their detestable and abominable fable dreams that his substance and nature feared as a whole lest it be corrupted by the nation of darkness, and that, to protect the rest, it was corrupted in part—why does he try even in this to deceive the unskilled and those less learned in the divine Scriptures, so that, asked whether he accepts the apostle Paul, he answers, “Most certainly,” and is found to mean “Not at all”?

“But there is a sure argument,” he says, “by which I will show that the apostle Paul either changed his view as he advanced and, writing to the Corinthians, corrected what he had written to the Romans, or did not write at all what is brought forward as his, that the Son of God is of the seed of David according to the flesh.” By what argument, then, does he show this? “Because,” he says, “both cannot be true: what is in the letter to the Romans, ‘concerning his Son, who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh,’ and what he says to the Corinthians, ‘So from now on we know no one according to the flesh; and even if we had known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him.’” It remains, then, for us to show how both can be true and how these two are not contrary to each other. For we can in no way say that one of them is not Paul’s, since no manuscript authority varies on it. For although in some Latin copies we read not “made” but “born of the seed of David,” while the Greek copies have “made,” so that the Latin translator, by saying “born,” chose to translate not word for word but by sense, still the authority of all books and languages agrees that Christ is of the seed of David according to the flesh. But far be it from us to say that Paul once erred in this and changed his view as he advanced. Faustus himself felt how shamelessly and impiously this would be said, and preferred to say that Paul’s letter had been corrupted by the falsification of others rather than flawed by his own error.

For it can be said of those books which are written by us, not with the authority of commanding but as an exercise in making progress, that they contain something perhaps not in harmony with a truth that is more hidden and harder to discern, something that has either remained so or been corrected in later books. For we are among those to whom the same apostle says, “And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” This kind of writing is to be read not with the obligation of believing but with the freedom of judging. Yet so that room should not be shut off for it, and the most wholesome labor of tongue and pen in treating and turning over difficult questions not be taken from posterity, the excellence of the canonical authority of the Old and New Testaments has been distinguished from the books of later writers. Confirmed in the times of the apostles, through the successions of bishops and the spread of churches, it has been set on high, as in a kind of seat, and every faithful and devout understanding is to be subject to it. There, if anything troubles you as absurd, it is not permitted to say, “The author of this book did not hold the truth,” but: “Either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator erred, or you do not understand.” But in the works of later writers, which are contained in innumerable books but in no way equal that most sacred excellence of the canonical Scriptures, even in whichever of them the same truth is found, the authority is nevertheless far unequal. So in them, if some things are perhaps thought to be out of harmony with the truth because they are not understood as they were meant, the reader or hearer still has free judgment there, to approve what pleases him or disapprove what offends him. And therefore all things of this kind, unless they are defended either by sure reasoning or from that canonical authority, so that it is shown that what is argued or narrated there either is wholly so or could have happened, are not blamed if someone dislikes them or refuses to believe them. But in that canonical eminence of the sacred writings, even if only one prophet or apostle or evangelist is declared, by the very confirmation of the canon, to have put something in his writings, it is not permitted to doubt that it is true; otherwise there will be no page by which the weakness of human ignorance may be guided, if the most wholesome authority of these books is either despised and wholly abolished or left undefined and confused.

Therefore, whoever you are who have been troubled by these apparent contradictions, that it is written in one place, “the Son of God of the seed of David,” and elsewhere, “even if we had known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him”: even if both were not brought forward from the writings of one apostle, but Paul had said one of them and Peter or Isaiah or some other of the apostles or prophets the other, it would not be permitted to doubt either, because in the canonical authority all things so agree with one another that, with most just and prudent piety, they are believed as if spoken by one mouth, are found to be so by most serene understanding, and are shown to be so by most skilful diligence. Since, then, both are brought forward from the canonical, that is, the truly Pauline, letters of the apostle Paul, and we cannot say either that the manuscript is faulty—for all the corrected Latin copies have it so—or that the translator erred—for all the corrected Greek copies have it so—it remains that you do not understand, and that I am asked for an account of how neither is out of harmony with the other, but both agree in the same rule of sound faith. For if you too inquired devoutly, you could find how these things become clear when examined.

For that the Son of God was made man of the seed of David the same apostle says in more than one place, and other holy Scriptures proclaim it most plainly. But as for his saying, “Even if we had known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him,” the very context of that passage of Scripture shows clearly enough what the apostle is speaking of. For in his manner he contemplates our future life, which has already been fulfilled in the man himself, the mediator Christ Jesus, our head, who has risen, with sure hope, as if it were already here and held as present. That life will certainly not be according to the flesh, just as the life of Christ is now not according to the flesh. For by “flesh” in this passage he wants us to understand not the very substance of our body—which the Lord calls flesh even after his resurrection, saying, “Handle and see, for a spirit does not have bones and flesh, as you see that I have”—but the corruption and mortality of the flesh, which will not then be in us, just as it is now not in Christ. For this is what he properly called flesh even when he was speaking quite plainly about the resurrection itself and said what I have already mentioned above: “Flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God, nor will corruption possess incorruption.” When, then, what he says next there has come about—“Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed, in an atom”—that is, in a moment—“in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorrupt, and we shall be changed; for this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality”—then, in the sense in which he calls flesh not the very substance of the body but the very corruption of mortality, it will certainly not be flesh, because, being changed, it will not have the corruption of mortality. But according to the origin of its substance and of the body it will be the same flesh, because it will itself rise and itself be changed; for both are true: what the Lord said after he had risen, “Handle and see, for a spirit does not have bones and flesh, as you see that I have,” and what the apostle says, “Flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God.” The former was said according to the substance itself, which will exist then too, because it is this that will be changed; the latter was said according to the carnal quality of corruption, which will no longer exist then, because the changed flesh will not be corrupted. So we had known Christ according to the flesh, that is, according to the mortality of the flesh, before he rose; but now we no longer know him so, because, as the same apostle says, Christ, rising from the dead, dies no more, and death will no longer have dominion over him. For if you hold to the strict meaning of words, he lied when he said, “We had known Christ according to the flesh,” if Christ was never according to the flesh; for no one had known what did not exist. And he did not say, “We thought Christ was according to the flesh,” but, “We had known.” However, not to press the word, lest anyone assert that the apostle spoke loosely, saying “we had known” for “we thought,” I am surprised that blind men do not notice—or rather I am not surprised that the blind do not see—that, if Christ had no flesh because the apostle said that he no longer knew Christ according to the flesh, neither did those have flesh of whom he says in the same passage, “So from now on we know no one according to the flesh.” For he could not say, “we know no one according to the flesh,” wishing it to be understood of Christ alone; but because he was contemplating as present the future life of those with him who, rising, will be changed, he says, “From now on we know no one according to the flesh,” that is: we hold so sure a hope of our future incorruption and immortality that from now on we already rejoice in the very knowledge of it. Hence he says in another place: “If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; savor the things that are above, not those on earth.” We have certainly not yet risen as Christ has, yet according to the hope we have in him he testified that we have already risen with him. Hence he also says, “According to his mercy he saved us through the washing of regeneration.” And who does not understand that in the washing of regeneration we were given the hope of future salvation, not yet the salvation itself that is promised? And yet, because the hope is sure, he says, “he saved us,” as if that salvation had already been given. For in another place he says most clearly: “We groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved; but hope that is seen is not hope; for what a man sees, why does he hope for? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” So, just as here he did not say, “we shall be saved,” but that we have already been saved, yet not yet in reality but in hope—“for in hope,” he says, “we have been saved”—so too what is said there, “From now on we know no one according to the flesh,” will be understood as not yet in reality but in hope, because our hope is in Christ, because in him what we hope for as promised to us has already been fulfilled. For he has already risen, and death will no longer have dominion over him. Even if we had known him according to the flesh, when he was still to die—for there was in his body that mortality which the apostle properly calls flesh—yet now we no longer know him so; for that mortal part of him has already put on immortality, so that according to its former mortality it can no longer be called flesh.

So let us consider the context of the passage itself where this statement stands, about which these men raise their false charges, so that what I say may shine out more clearly. “The love of Christ,” he says, “compels us, judging this: that if one died for all, then all died; and he died for all, so that those who live may no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again. So from now on we know no one according to the flesh; even if we had known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him.” Surely it is now apparent to anyone that the apostle said this because of the resurrection of Christ, since these words were preceded by this: “so that those who live may no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.” For what is “that they live not for themselves but for him,” except that they should not live according to the flesh, in the hope of earthly and corruptible goods, but according to the spirit, in the hope of the resurrection, which has already taken place in Christ, one of their own? So of those for whom Christ died and rose, and who live no longer for themselves but for him, the apostle knew no one according to the flesh, because of the hope of future immortality in expectation of which they lived; which in Christ was no longer hope but reality. Though he had known him according to the flesh, when he was still to die, yet now he no longer knew him so, because he knew that he had risen and that death would no longer have dominion over him. And because we all are this in him, though not yet in reality, yet already in hope, he goes on and says: “So if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new; and all things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.” So every new creature—that is, the people renewed through faith, so as to have meanwhile in hope what will afterward be perfected in reality—already has in Christ what it hopes for in itself. So now the old things have passed away according to hope, because it is now no longer the time of the Old Testament, when a temporal and carnal kingdom was expected from God; and all things have become new according to the same hope, so that we hold as promised the kingdom of heaven, where there will be no death or corruption. But in the resurrection of the dead, no longer according to hope but according to reality, the old things will pass away, when the last enemy, death, is destroyed; and all things will become new, when this corruptible has put on incorruption and this mortal has put on immortality, which has already been done in Christ, whom Paul in reality no longer knew according to the flesh. But of those for whom he died and rose, he knew no one according to the flesh not yet in reality but in hope, because it is by his grace, as the same apostle says to the Ephesians, that we have been saved. For that passage too bears witness to this statement: “But God,” he says, “who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, made us alive together with Christ, by whose grace we have been saved.” What he said here, “made us alive together with Christ,” he said to the Corinthians as “so that those who live may no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.” And when he says here, “by whose grace we have been saved,” he speaks as though what he holds in hope were already accomplished; for, as I mentioned a little before, he says most plainly elsewhere, “For in hope we have been saved.” And so here too he goes on and lists as accomplished what is future: “And he raised us up together,” he says, “and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” For certainly Christ already sits in the heavenly places, but we do not yet; but because by sure hope we already hold what is to come, he said that we sit together in the heavenly places, not yet in ourselves but already in him. For lest you think that what is said in hope as if accomplished is already accomplished now, and so that you understand that it is still to come, he goes on and says: “so that he might show in the ages to come the overflowing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” From this comes that saying too: “For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which are through the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.” For he said, “when we were in the flesh,” as if they were no longer in the flesh. This is understood thus: when we were in the hope of carnal things, when the law, which cannot be fulfilled except through spiritual love, was over them for this purpose, that through transgression sin might abound, so that afterward, when the New Testament was revealed, grace might superabound through forgiveness. Similarly he says elsewhere, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” And lest anyone think that this was said of those who have not yet died, he immediately added, “But you are not in the flesh but in the spirit”; that is: those who are in the hope of carnal goods cannot please God; but you are not in the hope of carnal things but in the hope of spiritual things, that is, of the kingdom of heaven, where even the body itself, which is now animal, will by that change be spiritual in its own kind. “For it is sown an animal body,” as the same apostle says to the Corinthians, “it will rise a spiritual body.” If, then, the apostle already knew according to the flesh none of those who were said not to be in the flesh because they were not in the hope of carnal things, though they still bore corruptible and mortal flesh, how much more expressly would he say of Christ that he no longer knew him according to the flesh, in whose body what they held as promised in hope had already been accomplished in reality! How much better, then, how much more devout it is to treat the divine Scriptures in such a way that, when everything has been examined, they are found to agree, than, when a man fails at a question he cannot solve, to accept them as true in part and condemn them as false in part! For even when the apostle was a child and savored the things of a child—though he said this by way of likeness—he was not yet spiritual as he already was when he wrote the things that would not be handled by students as an exercise in progress, but would be read in the church’s canon with the authority of commanding.

Faustus said: Why do you not accept the prophets? Rather, you tell me, if you have anything to say, why we ought to accept the prophets. “Because of the testimonies,” he says, “which they spoke beforehand about Christ.” I, for my part, have found none, though I have read them quite attentively and most carefully. And yet it is also the confession of a feeble faith not to believe in Christ without witness and proof. Indeed you yourselves usually teach that nothing should be inquired into too curiously, because Christian belief is simple and absolute. How then do you now destroy the simplicity of faith by propping it up with evidence and witnesses, and Jewish ones at that? Or if your first view displeases you and so you have gone over to the other, what witness ought to be more trustworthy to you than God himself concerning his Son, who, not through a seer nor through an interpreter, but by a voice breaking forth of its own accord from heaven, when he sent him to earth, said: “This is my most beloved Son; believe him”? And he himself also said about himself: “I came forth from my Father and came into this world,” and many other such things. At which the Jews, snarling, said: “You testify about yourself; your testimony is not true.” To whom he said: “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true, because I am not alone. For in your law too it is written: The testimony of two men is true. I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me.” He did not say: the prophets. Besides this, he calls his own works to testify for him, saying, “If you do not believe me, believe the works”; he did not say: if you do not believe me, believe the prophets. Therefore we need no testimonies about our Savior; in prophets we look only for examples of an honorable life, and for prudence and virtue; none of which, as I perceive you are well aware, was found in the seers of the Jews, since, when I asked you why you thought they should be accepted, you, not without foresight nor without wit, passed over their deeds in silence and leapt to their predictions alone, forgetting, of course, that it is written that “grapes are never gathered from thorns, nor figs from thistles.” So let this be my brief and restrained answer for now to your question, since you ask why we do not accept the prophets; for the rest, that they prophesied nothing about Christ has already been abundantly shown in the books of our fathers. But I will add this: if the Hebrew seers knew and preached Christ and yet lived so shamefully, what Paul testifies of the wise men of the Gentiles could rightly be said of them too: that “although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened.” You see, then, that it is no great thing to have known great things unless you live in accordance with their dignity.

Augustine replied: With all these words Faustus aims to make us believe that the Hebrew prophets foretold nothing about Christ; that, if they did foretell anything, their testimonies are of no use to us; and that they themselves did not live in a manner worthy of those testimonies. We, then, will show both their predictions of Christ and how much help we have received through them toward the truth and firmness of faith, and that they lived in a manner fitting and suited to their prophecy. In this threefold discussion, to prove the first point by bringing testimonies from all those books to show that Christ was foretold would be long; but I will crush this man’s levity with the heaviest weight of authority. For he does not accept the Hebrew prophets, yet he professes to accept the apostles. Let us hear, then, what the apostle Paul says of their prophecy—the apostle about whom, when he questioned himself, as if in an opponent’s voice, whether he accepted him, he answered, “Most certainly.” “Paul,” he says, “a servant of Christ, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures concerning his Son, who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh.” What more does he want? Unless perhaps they want this to be understood as said of some other prophets, not of our Hebrew ones. But by whomever it was said, still the gospel was promised concerning that Son of God who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh, the gospel for which the apostle says he was set apart; and though this is already contrary to their faithlessness, since according to this gospel we believe that the Son of God was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, let them nevertheless learn clearer passages, in which most evident testimony is borne to the Hebrew prophets by that apostle by whose authority the necks of these proud men may be broken.

“I speak the truth in Christ,” he says; “I do not lie, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belong the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the worship and the promises; whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.” What could be said more abundantly, declared more expressly, commended more holily? For what is the adoption of the Israelites except through the Son of God? Hence he says to the Galatians: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption of sons.” And what is their glory, if not chiefly that of which the same Paul speaks to the same Romans: “What advantage, then, has the Jew? Or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way. First, because the oracles of God were entrusted to them.” Let these men inquire what the oracles of God were that were entrusted to the Jews, and show us any others than those of the Hebrew prophets. And why did he say that the covenants belong especially to the Israelites, if not because the Old Testament was given to them, and the New was figured in the Old? As for the giving of the law, which was given to the Israelites, these men, not understanding its dispensation, because God no longer wants us to be under the law but under grace, are accustomed to find fault with it in furious ignorance. Let them, then, yield to apostolic authority, which, in praising and commending the excellence of the Israelites, listed this too, that the giving of the law belongs to them. If it were evil, it would certainly not be placed among their praises; and if it did not preach Christ, the Lord himself would not say, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me also; for he wrote of me”; nor would he testify to it after the resurrection, saying, “Everything had to be fulfilled that is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me.”

But since the Manichaeans preach another Christ, not the one whom the apostles preached, but their own, a deceiver, and preach him deceitfully—and the followers of that falsehood fittingly lie themselves as well, except that they shamelessly want to be believed, though they profess to be disciples of a liar—there has happened to them what the apostle says of the unbelieving Jews: “When Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart.” For this veil, through which they do not understand Moses, will not be taken away unless they pass over to Christ, not such a Christ as they have invented, but such as the Hebrew fathers prophesied. For so the same apostle says: “But when you pass over to the Lord, the veil will be taken away.” Nor is it strange that these men refuse to believe Christ when he rose and said, “Everything had to be fulfilled that is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me,” since Christ himself told what Abraham said to a certain unmerciful rich man, when he was tormented in the underworld and asked that someone be sent from there to his brothers to teach them, so that they too might not come to that place of torment. For this was said to him: “They have Moses and the prophets there.” And when he said that they would not believe unless someone rose from the dead, the most true answer was given: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if someone rises from the dead.” Therefore these men, not hearing Moses and the prophets, not only do not believe Christ risen from the dead, but do not believe at all that Christ rose from the dead. For how do they believe that he rose, whom they do not believe to have died? And how do they believe that he died, whom they do not believe to have had a mortal body?

But we do not believe them, as deceitful preachers not of a Christ who was a deceiver but of one who did not exist at all. For we have the true and truthful Christ, foretold by the prophets, foretold by the apostles, who presented testimonies to their preaching from the law and the prophets, as they show in countless places. Paul summed this up most briefly and most truly when he said: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been manifested, attested by the law and the prophets.” What prophets but those of the Israelites, to whom he said most plainly belong the covenants and the giving of the law and the promises? Promises about whom but Christ? This he briefly defines in another place, speaking of Christ: “For all the promises of God, in him they are Yes.” Paul tells me that the giving of the law belongs to the Israelites; he also says, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes”; he also says, speaking of Christ, “For all the promises of God, in him they are Yes”; and you tell me that the prophets of the Israelites foretold nothing about Christ? What then remains but for me to choose whether to believe Mani, telling a vain and long fable against Paul, or Paul, who warns beforehand: “If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what we have preached to you, let him be anathema”?

Here perhaps they will say: “Show us where Christ was foretold by the Israelite prophets.” As if that authority were small by which the apostles say that what we read in the writings of the Hebrew prophets was fulfilled in Christ, or by which the Lord himself says that those things were written about him! So whoever cannot show this is the one who does not understand; it is not the apostles or Christ or the holy books that lie. However, not to collect many things, let me mention this one, which the apostle says next in the same passage: “But it is not possible that the word of God has failed. For not all who are from Israel are Israelites, nor are all who are the seed of Abraham children; but in Isaac shall your seed be called: that is, it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as seed.” What will they answer to this, since it is plainly said to Abraham about this seed in another place: “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed”? For if we were debating this at the time when the apostle was expounding it, saying, “The promises were made to Abraham and to his seed—he does not say ‘and to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘and to your seed,’ which is Christ”—perhaps someone might refuse to believe it not so shamelessly, before he saw all nations believe in Christ, who is preached as of the seed of Abraham. But now, when we see this fulfilled which we read was foretold so long before, when all nations are already blessed in the seed of Abraham, to whom it was said thousands of years ago, “In your seed all nations shall be blessed,” who would be so stubbornly mad as either to try to bring in another Christ who is not of the seed of Abraham, or to think that the Hebrew prophecies, belonging to the nation whose father is Abraham, foretold nothing about this true Christ?

But who could recount, I do not say in one short reply, such as we are constrained to keep to in this work, but in any huge volume, all the proclamations of the Hebrew prophets about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? For all things contained in those books were either said about him or said for his sake. But to rouse the seeker and to delight the finder, much more there is suggested through allegories and enigmas, partly in words alone, partly also in deeds that are narrated. Yet unless some things there were plain, the sense by which even obscure things become clear would not be grasped. And even of those things that are wrapped in figures, if some are set out together, as if woven into one view, they join their voices in testifying to Christ in such a way that the deafness of anyone, however dull, would blush.

In six days, in Genesis, God completed all his works, and on the seventh he rested: in six ages the works of God mark the human race in this world, through the succession of times. The first of these is from Adam to Noah, the second from Noah to Abraham, the third from Abraham to David, the fourth from David to the deportation to Babylon, the fifth from then to the humble coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, the sixth, which is now passing, until he comes on high to judgment. The seventh is understood as the rest of the saints, not in this life but in the other, where that rich man, tormented in the underworld, saw the poor man at rest; where there is no evening, because there is no failing of things there. On the sixth day in Genesis man is formed in the image of God: in the sixth age of the world our re-formation is manifested in newness of mind, according to the image of him who created us, as the apostle says. A wife is made from the side of the sleeping man: the church is made for the dying Christ from the sacrament of the blood that flowed from the side of the dead one. Eve, who was made from her husband’s side, is called life and the mother of the living: and the Lord says in the gospel, “Whoever does not eat my flesh and drink my blood will not have life in him.” And everything understood there, if treated thoroughly and in detail, speaks beforehand of Christ and the church, whether in good Christians or in bad. For not in vain did the apostle say, “Adam, who is a type of the one to come,” and: “A man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh. This is a great mystery,” he says; “but I speak of it in Christ and in the church.” For who would not recognize that Christ left his Father in this way, he who, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant; that he left his mother too, the synagogue of the Jews clinging carnally to the Old Testament, and cleaved to his wife, the holy church, so that in the peace of the New Testament the two might be in one flesh; because, though he is God with the Father, through whom we were made, he became through the flesh a sharer with us, so that we might be the body of that head?

As Cain’s sacrifice from the fruits of the earth is rejected, while Abel’s sacrifice from the sheep and their fat is accepted, so the faith of the New Testament, praising God from the innocence of grace, is preferred to the earthly works of the Old Testament; because, although the Jews did those things rightly before, they are nevertheless guilty of unbelief in this, that, when Christ came, they did not distinguish the time of the New Testament from the time of the Old. For God said to Cain: “If you offer rightly but do not divide rightly, you have sinned.” If he had obeyed God when he said, “Be still; for its turning is toward you, and you shall rule over it,” he would have turned his sin toward himself, attributing it to himself and confessing it to God, and so, helped by the grace of forgiveness, he would himself have ruled over his sin, and would not, with sin ruling over him, have killed his innocent brother as a slave of sin. So too the Jews, in whom these things were being figured, if they had been still from their agitation, and, recognizing the time of salvation through grace in the forgiveness of sins, had heard Christ saying, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance,” and, “Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin,” and, “If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free,” they would have turned their sin toward themselves in confession, as is written in the psalm, saying to the physician, “I said, Lord, have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against you”; and, free through the hope of grace, they would have ruled over that sin as long as it was still in their mortal body. But as it is, ignorant of God’s righteousness and wishing to establish their own, puffed up by the works of the law and not humbled about their sins, they were not still; and, with sin reigning in their mortal body so that they obeyed its desires, they stumbled on the stone of stumbling and blazed with hatred against him whose works they grieved to see were accepted by God, when the man born blind, who now saw, said to them, “We know that God does not hear sinners, but if anyone worships him and does his will, him he hears”; as if he were saying to them: He does not look on the sacrifice of Cain, but he looks on the sacrifice of Abel. So Abel, the younger, is killed by his elder brother: Christ, the head of the younger people, is killed by the elder people of the Jews; the one in a field, the other in the place of Calvary.

God asks Cain where his brother is, not as one ignorant who wants to learn from him, but as a judge asks the accused whom he will punish. He answered that he did not know, and that he was not his brother’s keeper. What do the Jews answer us to this day, when we question them about Christ with the voice of God, that is, with the voice of the holy Scriptures, except that they do not know the Christ of whom we speak? The deceitful ignorance of Cain is the false denial of the Jews. But they would in a sense be keepers of Christ if they had been willing to accept and keep the Christian faith. For whoever keeps Christ in his heart does not say what Cain said: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God says to Cain: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the earth.” So the divine voice in the holy Scriptures convicts the Jews. For the blood of Christ has a loud voice on earth, when, after it has been received, all nations respond: Amen. This is the clear voice of the blood, which the blood itself draws from the mouth of the faithful, redeemed by that same blood.

God says to Cain: “And now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand; for you will work the earth, and it will not continue to give you its strength; groaning and trembling you will be on the earth.” He did not say, “Cursed is the earth,” but, “Cursed are you from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” For the unbelieving Jewish people is cursed from the earth, that is, by the church, which opened its mouth in the confession of sins to receive the blood of Christ, shed for the remission of sins by the hand of the persecutor who would not be under grace but under the law; so that he was cursed by the church, that is, so that the church understood and showed him to be cursed, as the apostle says: “For whoever are of the works of the law are under the curse of the law.” Then, having said, “Cursed are you from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand,” he did not say, “for you will work it,” but said, “for you will work the earth, and it will not continue to give you its strength.” Hence it is not necessary to understand that Cain works the same earth that opened its mouth to receive his brother’s blood from his hand; but he is understood to be cursed from this earth because he works the earth which will not continue to give him its strength; that is, the church recognizes and shows the people of the Jews to be cursed because, after Christ was killed, it still works the earthly circumcision, the earthly sabbath, the earthly unleavened bread, the earthly passover. All this earthly working has a hidden strength, the understanding of the grace of Christ, which is not given to the Jews who persevere in impiety and unbelief, because it has been revealed in the New Testament; and since they do not pass over to the Lord, the veil is not taken away from them, which remains in the reading of the Old Testament, because it is done away only in Christ—not the reading of the Old Testament itself, which has a hidden strength, but the veil by which that strength is hidden. Hence, when Christ suffered on the cross, the veil of the temple was torn, so that through the passion of Christ the secrets of the sacraments might be revealed to the faithful who pass over, to drink his blood with mouth opened in confession. Therefore that people, like Cain, still works the earth, still carries on the working of the law carnally, which does not give it its strength, because it does not understand in it the grace of Christ. Therefore also in that very earth which Christ bore, that is, in his flesh, they themselves worked our salvation by crucifying Christ, who died for our offenses. And that same earth did not give them its strength, because they were not justified by the power of his resurrection, who rose for our justification; because, though he was crucified out of weakness, yet he lives by the power of God, as the apostle says. This, then, is the strength of that earth, which it did not show to the impious and unbelieving. Hence, when he rose, he did not appear to those by whom he had been crucified, as to Cain working the earth so that that grain might be sown, the same earth not showing them the fruit of its strength: “for you will work the earth,” he says, “and it will not continue to give you its strength.”

“Groaning and trembling you will be on the earth.” Now see: who does not see, who does not recognize, throughout the whole earth, wherever that people has been scattered, how it groans in grief for its lost kingdom and trembles in fear under innumerable Christian peoples? And so Cain answered and said: “My case is too great; if you cast me out today from the face of the earth, I shall also be hidden from your face, and I shall be groaning and trembling on the earth, and everyone who finds me will kill me.” Truly he groans and trembles for this, lest, having lost even his earthly kingdom, he be killed by this visible death. This he calls a greater case than that the earth does not give him its strength, lest he die spiritually. For he savors carnally, and does not think it grievous to be hidden from the face of God, that is, to have God angry, but only fears being found and killed. He savors carnally, as one working the earth whose strength he does not receive. But to savor according to the flesh is death; not understanding this, he groans for his lost kingdom and trembles at bodily death. But what does God answer him? “Not so,” he says; “whoever kills Cain will loose seven vengeances”; that is, not as you say: the impious race of carnal Jews will not perish by bodily death. For whoever destroys them in that way will loose seven vengeances; that is, he will take away from them the seven vengeances with which they are bound because of the guilt of killing Christ; so that through this whole time, which rolls on in the sevenfold number of days, it may be made sufficiently plain to faithful Christians, the more so because the Jewish nation does not perish, what subjection those have deserved who, in proud rule, killed the Lord.

“And the Lord God set a mark on Cain, so that no one who found him would kill him.” This is truly very wonderful: how all the nations subjugated by the Romans passed over into the rite of Roman worship and took up those sacrileges to observe and celebrate, while the Jewish nation, whether under pagan kings or under Christian ones, has not lost the mark of its law, by which it is distinguished from other nations and peoples; and every emperor or king who finds them in his kingdom finds them with that mark and does not kill them, that is, does not bring it about that they are not Jews, set apart from the fellowship of other nations by a certain sure and proper mark of their observance—except whoever of them passes over to Christ, so that he is no longer found as Cain, nor goes out from the face of God, nor dwells in the land of Nod, which is said to mean “commotion.” Against this evil God is entreated in the psalm: “Do not give my feet to be moved,” and, “Let not the hands of sinners move me,” and, “Those who trouble me will exult if I am moved,” and, “The Lord is at my right hand, that I may not be moved,” and countless such things: this is what all suffer who go out from the face of God, that is, from the mercy of his love. Hence it is said in a certain psalm, “I said in my abundance, I shall never be moved.” But see what follows: “Lord, by your will you gave strength to my beauty; but you turned away your face, and I was troubled.” From this it is understood that every soul is beautiful and comely and strong in virtue by participation in the light of God, not by itself. If these Manichaeans considered and understood this, they would not fall into such blasphemy as to think themselves the nature and substance of God. But they cannot, because they are not still; for they do not understand the sabbath of the heart. For if they were still, as was said to Cain, they would turn their sin toward themselves, that is, attribute it to themselves and not to some nation of darkness or other, and so through the grace of God they would rule over that sin. But as it is, both they and all who, by stubbornly resisting the truth in various errors, go out from the face of God, like Cain, like the lost Jews, dwell in the land of commotion, that is, in carnal agitation against the delight of God, that is, against Eden, which is interpreted “feasting,” where paradise was planted. Now I will touch briefly on a few other things out of many, so as not to obstruct the purpose of this work and of my reply by excessive length.

For whom would it not move to seek and understand Christ in those books—to omit those things which, though they are contemplated the more sweetly the more hidden the places from which they are drawn out, still demand a long discussion, because they need more supporting testimonies; to omit such things, then—whom would it not move toward saving faith that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, pleased God and was translated, and that a seventh rest is preached, to which everyone is translated who is formed, as on the sixth day, in the sixth age of the world, by the coming of Christ? That Noah with his family is delivered through water and wood, as the household of Christ is delivered through baptism signed with the passion of the cross? That the ark is built of squared timbers, as the church is constructed of saints always ready for every good work? For a squared thing stands firm whichever way you turn it. That its length is six times its breadth and ten times its height, showing the likeness of the human body, because Christ appeared in a human body? That its breadth extends to fifty cubits, as the apostle says, “Our heart is enlarged”? How, if not by spiritual love? Therefore he also says: “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” For on the fiftieth day after his resurrection Christ sent the Holy Spirit, by whom he enlarged the hearts of believers. That it is three hundred cubits long, to make six times fifty, as the whole time of this world extends through six ages, in all of which Christ has never ceased to be preached: foretold in five through prophecy, spread abroad in the sixth through the gospel? That its height rises to thirty cubits, a number which the length of three hundred cubits contains ten times: because Christ is our height, who, at the age of thirty years, consecrated the gospel teaching, testifying that he had come not to abolish the law but to fulfil it. And the heart of the law is recognized in the ten commandments; hence the length of the ark is completed by ten times thirty; hence too Noah himself is counted the tenth from Adam. That the timbers of the ark are glued with bitumen inside and out, so that in the structure of unity the forbearance of love might be signified, lest, when scandals tempt the church, whether from those within or from those without, the brotherly joining give way and the bond of peace be loosed. For bitumen is a very hot and very strong glue, signifying the ardor of love, which with great force of strength bears all things to hold together the spiritual fellowship.

That all kinds of animals are shut in the ark: as the church contains all nations, which that dish shown to Peter also signifies. That both clean and unclean animals are there: as both good and bad take part in the sacraments of the church. That the clean are by sevens and the unclean by twos: not because the bad are fewer than the good, but because the good keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And divine Scripture commends the Holy Spirit in a sevenfold working: of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and strength, of knowledge and piety and the fear of God. Hence also that number of fifty days, belonging to the coming of the Holy Spirit, is completed in seven times seven, which makes forty-nine, with one added: for which reason it is said, “eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” But the bad are shown in the number two as prone to schisms and in a way divisible. That Noah himself with his family is counted as the eighth: because in Christ the hope of our resurrection appeared, who rose from the dead on the eighth day, that is, the first after the seventh, the sabbath; which day is the third from the passion, but in the number of days that roll on through all time it is the eighth and the first.

That the ark is finished above, gathered to one cubit: as the church, the body of Christ, gathered into unity, raises up and perfects. Hence he says in the gospel: “Whoever does not gather with me scatters.” That its entrance is made in the side: for no one enters the church except through the sacrament of the remission of sins; and this flowed from the opened side of Christ. That the lower parts of the ark are built with two and three stories: as the church gathers from all nations a multitude either twofold, because of circumcision and uncircumcision, or threefold, because of the three sons of Noah, by whose offspring the world was filled. And therefore these are called the lower parts of the ark, because in this earthly life there is diversity of nations, but at the top we are all completed in one; and there is no such variety there, because Christ is all and in all, completing us above, as with one cubit, in heavenly unity.

That the flood came seven days after Noah had entered the ark: because we are baptized in the hope of future rest, which was signified by the seventh day. That outside the ark all flesh which the earth sustained was destroyed by the flood: because outside the fellowship of the church the water of baptism, though it is the same, not only does not avail for salvation but rather avails for destruction. That it rained forty days and forty nights: because all the guilt of sins committed against the ten commandments of the law throughout the whole world, which is contained in four parts—for ten taken four times make forty—whether that guilt was contracted from prosperity, which belongs to the days, or from adversity, which belongs to the nights, is washed away by the sacrament of heavenly baptism.

That Noah was five hundred years old when the Lord told him to make an ark for himself, and was in his six hundredth year when he entered it—from which it is understood that the ark was built over a hundred years—what else do the hundred years seem to signify here but the individual ages of the world? Hence this sixth age, which is signified from the completion of five hundred years to six hundred, builds the church in the manifestation of the gospel; and therefore whoever takes thought for his life, let him be like a squared timber, ready for every good work, and enter into the holy building; for the second month of the six hundredth year, in which Noah enters the ark, also signifies this same sixth age. For two months are comprised in the number sixty; and from the number six are named sixty, six hundred, six thousand, sixty thousand, six hundred thousand, and six hundred times, and whatever further number rises to infinite increase in larger sums by the same step.

And the mention of the twenty-seventh day of the month belongs to the meaning of the same squareness that has already been explained in the squared timbers. But here it is more evident, because the Trinity perfects us, ready for every good work, that is, in a sense squared: in memory, by which we remember God, in understanding, by which we know him, in will, by which we love him; for three times three, and this three times, makes twenty-seven, which is the “square” of the number three. That in the seventh month the ark settled, that is, rested: the meaning returns to that seventh rest; and because the perfect rest, the number of that squareness is repeated there as well. For this sacrament was commended on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, and again, on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month, the same commendation was confirmed, when the ark rested. For what is promised in hope is shown in reality. Further, since the seventh rest is joined to the eighth, the resurrection—for the rest which receives the saints after this life is not ended when the body is restored, but rather takes up into the gift of eternal life the whole man, renewed no longer in hope but in reality itself, perfected in every part, spirit and body, with immortal salvation—since, then, the seventh rest is joined to the eighth, the resurrection, this too is a high and deep mystery in the sacrament of our regeneration, that is, in baptism: the water rose fifteen cubits above the height of the mountains, that is, this sacrament transcends all the wisdom of the proud. For seven and eight joined make fifteen. And because seventy is named from seven and eighty from eight, with both numbers joined the water was exalted for a hundred and fifty days, commending and confirming to us the same height of baptism in consecrating the new man to hold the faith of rest and resurrection.

That the raven sent out after forty days did not return, either cut off by the waters or lured by some floating corpse, signifies that men most foul with the uncleanness of desire, and therefore too intent on things outside in this world, are either rebaptized or seduced and held by those whom baptism kills outside the ark, that is, outside the church. That the dove sent out, finding no rest, returned, shows that through the New Testament rest is not promised to the saints in this world. For it was sent out after forty days, a number which signifies the life led in this world. Then, sent out after seven days, because of that sevenfold spiritual working, it brought back a fruitful olive shoot, by which it signified that some baptized even outside the church, if they do not lack the richness of love, can at a later time, as in the evening, be brought in the dove’s mouth, as with the kiss of peace, to the fellowship of unity. That, sent out after another seven days, it did not return signifies the end of the world, when the rest of the saints will be no longer in the sacrament of hope, by which the church is joined together in this time as long as what flowed from Christ’s side is drunk, but in the very perfection of eternal salvation, when the kingdom will be handed over to God the Father, so that in that clear contemplation of unchangeable truth we may need no bodily mysteries.

It would be too long to touch on everything, even as briefly as I have run through these things: why, in the six hundred and first year of Noah’s life, that is, when six hundred years were completed, the roof of the ark is opened, and the sacrament that was hidden is, as it were, revealed? Why the earth is said to have dried on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, as if the need for baptizing were now ended, in the number of the fifty-seventh day? For that is what the twenty-seventh day of the second month is, a number which, from that union of spirit and body, has seven times eight, with one added for the bond of unity. Why those who had entered separately go out of the ark together? For so it had been said: that Noah entered the ark, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives: the men are mentioned separately and the women separately. For in this time of this sacrament the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. But Noah goes out, and his wife and his sons and his sons’ wives, males and females now mentioned together, because at the end of the world and in the resurrection of the righteous the body will cleave to the spirit in complete and perfect peace, with no need or desire of mortality resisting. Why, though both clean and unclean animals were in the ark, after the exit from the ark only the clean are offered to God in sacrifice?

Next, what is meant when God speaks to Noah and, as if from the beginning again—because the same things had to be signified in many ways—commends the figure of the church: that his offspring is blessed to fill the earth; that all animals are given them for food, as is said to Peter in that dish, “Kill and eat”? That they are commanded to eat with the blood poured out: so that the former life may not be kept as if stifled in the conscience, but may have, as it were, an outpouring through confession? That God set as a covenant between himself and men and every living soul, that he would not destroy it by a flood, the bow which appears in the clouds, which never shines except from the sun: for those do not perish by the flood, separated from the church, who recognize the glory of Christ in the prophets and in all the divine Scriptures, as in the clouds of God, and do not seek their own glory. But lest the worshippers of this sun swell up the more, let them know that Christ is sometimes signified by the sun in the same way as by a lion, by a lamb, by a stone, because of some likeness, not as the property of his substance.

Now then, as for Noah’s becoming drunk from the vineyard he planted and being uncovered in his house, to whom is it not apparent that this is Christ suffering among his own nation? For then the mortality of his flesh was uncovered, to the Jews a scandal, to the Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, as Shem and Japheth, the power of God and the wisdom of God; because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Accordingly, in the two sons, the eldest and the youngest, two peoples are figured, carrying one garment behind their backs—namely the sacrament of the Lord’s passion, now past and accomplished—and they do not look on their father’s nakedness, because they do not consent to the killing of Christ; and yet they honor it with a covering, as knowing from what they were born. But the middle son, that is, the people of the Jews—middle because it neither held the primacy of the apostles nor believed last among the Gentiles—saw his father’s nakedness, because it consented to the killing of Christ, and told it to his brothers outside. For through it what was secret in prophecy was made manifest and in a way published; and therefore it becomes the servant of its brothers. For what else is that nation today but a kind of librarian for the Christians, carrying the law and the prophets as testimony to the church’s claims, so that we honor by the sacrament what it announces by the letter?

But whom would it not stir, whom would it not either instruct or confirm in the faith, that those two who honored their father’s nakedness, though with faces turned away, as men displeased by the deed of the wicked vineyard, are blessed in this way? “Blessed be the Lord God of Shem,” he says. For although he is the God of all nations, yet in a certain way, by a proper name, he is called the God of Israel even among the nations themselves. And how did this come about, if not from the blessing of Japheth? For in the people of the Gentiles the church has occupied the whole world. This, precisely this, was foretold when it was said: “May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the houses of Shem.” Look, Manichaeans, look: see, the whole world is before your eyes. This is what you are astonished at, this is what you grieve over in our peoples, that God enlarges Japheth. See whether he does not dwell in the houses of Shem, that is, in the churches which the apostles, sons of the prophets, built. Hear what Paul says to the Gentiles who already believed: “You who were at that time,” he says, “without Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants, having no hope of the promise and without God in this world.” These words show that Japheth did not yet dwell in the houses of Shem. But notice how he concludes a little later: “So now,” he says, “you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone.” See how Japheth is enlarged and dwells in the houses of Shem. And yet you hold, read, and preach the letters of the apostles in which all this is attested. Where should I count you, if not in that cursed middle, which does not have Christ as its cornerstone? For we do not recognize you in that wall which believed in Christ from the circumcision, from which the apostles also came, nor in this one which is from the uncircumcision, from which come all from the other nations, running together into the same unity of faith as into the peace of the corner. But also all who accept and read any books of our canon, in which Christ is shown to have been born and to have suffered as a mortal, and yet do not honorably cover that same mortality, laid bare in the passion, by joining in the sacrament of unity, but, without the knowledge of piety and love, publish that from which we were all born—although they disagree among themselves, the Jews with the heretics and the heretics themselves one with another—are nevertheless, in one condition of servitude, useful to the church, either for some attestation or for some testing. For of heretics too it is said: “There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you.” Go now and cast slanders on the ancient sacred writings; do this, servants of Ham; go, you to whom the uncovered flesh from which you were born is worthless. For there would be nothing from which you could call yourselves Christians in any way, unless Christ, as he was foretold by the prophets, had come into the world, had drunk from his vineyard that cup which could not pass, had slept in his passion as in the drunkenness of folly, which is wiser than men; and so the weakness of mortal flesh, stronger than men through the hidden counsel of God, was laid bare; and unless the Word of God had taken it up, the Christian name, in which you too boast, would not exist on earth at all. But do this, as I said: publish with mockery what we reverently honor; let the church use you as its subjects, so that those who are approved may be made manifest in it. So far did those prophets leave unsaid nothing that the church was to have or to suffer, that we find you too there in your places, in a vanity that is ruinous for catching the reprobate but useful for making the approved manifest.

You say that Christ was not foretold by the Israelite prophets, though all those pages keep watch to foretell him, if you would rather examine them with devotion than harass them with levity. Who else, in Abraham, goes out from his land and his kindred to be enriched and made wealthy among strangers, but he who, leaving the land and kindred of the Jews, from whom he was born according to the flesh, is so powerful and prevails among the Gentiles, as we see? Who else, in Isaac, carried the wood for his own sacrifice, but he who himself carried his cross to his passion? Who else was the ram to be sacrificed, caught by its horns in the thicket, but he who was fastened to the gibbet of the cross to be offered for us?

Who else, in the angel who wrestled with Jacob, when, as the weaker and the conquered, he partly blesses the one who prevailed over him, as the stronger and the conqueror, and partly makes the breadth of his thigh lame, but he who, having allowed the people of Israel to prevail against him, blessed some in them, those who believed? But the breadth of Jacob’s thigh limped in the multitude of the carnal people. Who else is the stone placed at Jacob’s head, which was even anointed, so that he might in a way be expressed by name, but Christ, the head of man? For who does not know that Christ is named from anointing? He himself also recalled this very thing in the gospel and testified most plainly that it was figured of himself: when he had said that a certain Nathanael was truly an Israelite in whom there was no guile, and when Nathanael, as if he had that stone at his head, confessed him to be the Son of God and King of Israel—by this confession in a way anointing the stone, that is, confessing that he was the Christ—there the Lord fittingly recalled also what Jacob had then seen, who by the blessing was called Israel: “Amen I say to you,” he says, “you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” For Israel had seen this when he had that stone at his head: a ladder from earth to heaven, by which the angels of God ascended and descended; and by them are signified the evangelists, the preachers of Christ: ascending, certainly, when, to understand his most supereminent divinity, they go beyond all creation, to find him in the beginning, God with God, through whom all things were made; descending, to find him made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law. For in him is the ladder from earth to heaven, from flesh to spirit, because in him the carnal, advancing as if ascending, become spiritual; and to nourish them with milk, the spiritual themselves in a way descend, when they cannot speak to them as to spiritual but as to carnal people. So there is both ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. For the Son of Man is above, in our head, who is the Savior himself; and the Son of Man is below, in his body, which is the church. We understand him also as the ladder, because he himself said, “I am the way.” So one ascends to him, that he may be understood in the heights, and one descends to him, that the little ones may be nourished in his members; and one ascends and descends through him. For his preachers, following his example, not only raise themselves to look for him on high but also humble themselves to proclaim him with moderation. See the apostle ascending: “If we are beside ourselves,” he says, “it is for God”; see him also descending: “if we are sober,” he says, “it is for you.” Let him also say through whom he ascended and descended: “For the love of Christ,” he says, “compels us, judging this: that one died for all; therefore all died; and he died for all, so that those who live may no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.”

Whom do these holy spectacles in the holy Scriptures not delight? He who does not endure sound doctrine turns to fables. And those fables indeed entice, with a varied kind of delight, souls that are childish at whatever age of the body. But let us, now the body of Christ, recognize our voice in the psalm and say to him: “The unjust have told me of delights, but not as your law, O Lord.” Christ meets me and refreshes me everywhere in those books, everywhere in those Scriptures, as I traverse them and pant in that sweat of human condemnation, whether openly or in hidden ways. He himself, even by some difficulty in finding him, inflames my desire, so that I may eagerly drink in what I have found and keep it, stored in my marrow, for my health.

He beckons to me in Joseph, who, persecuted and sold by his brothers, is honored in Egypt after his labors. For we have learned of the labors of Christ in the world of the Gentiles, which Egypt signified, through the various sufferings of the martyrs; and now we see the honor of Christ in the same world, as he subjects all things to himself by the distribution of his grain. He beckons to me in the rod of Moses, which, turned into a serpent on the ground, figured his death, which came from the serpent; but—which is signified by its being seized by the tail—afterward, when all things have been done, at the end of the action, it returns by rising again to what it had been, where, death being consumed by the restoration of life, nothing of the serpent appears. We too, his body, roll along in the same mortality through the slippery courses of time; but at the very end, as at the tail of the world, seized by the hand, that is, by the power of judgment, so that it may slip away no further, we shall be restored, and, the last enemy, death, being destroyed, we shall rise and be the rod of the kingdom in the right hand of God.

Now about the exodus of Israel from Egypt, let not me speak but the apostle: “I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” By explaining one thing, he brought understanding into the rest. For if the rock is Christ because of its firmness, why is the manna not also Christ, as the living bread that came down from heaven? Those who truly feed on it live spiritually; for those who received the old figure carnally died. But when the apostle says, “they ate the same spiritual food,” he shows that this too is to be understood spiritually in Christ, just as he disclosed why he had called the drink spiritual when he added, “and the rock was Christ”; and once this was disclosed, everything shone. Why then is not the cloud also Christ, and the pillar, because it is upright and firm and supports our weakness, shining by night and not shining by day, so that those who do not see may see and those who see may become blind? The Red Sea too is red: baptism, surely, consecrated by the blood of Christ. The enemies pursuing from behind die: our past sins.

The people is led through the desert: all the baptized, not yet enjoying the promised homeland, but hoping for what they do not see and waiting for it with patience, are as it were in the desert; and there are toilsome and dangerous temptations there, lest they return in heart to Egypt. Yet even there Christ does not desert them; for that pillar too does not withdraw. And the bitter waters become sweet by wood, because hostile peoples grow gentle when the sign of Christ’s cross is honored. And the twelve springs watering seventy palm trees prefigure apostolic grace watering the peoples in the number seven multiplied by ten, so that through the sevenfold gift of the Spirit the decalogue of the law may be fulfilled. And the enemy, trying to block the way, is overcome by the sign of the Lord’s cross in the outstretched hands of Moses. And the deadly bites of the serpents are healed when the bronze serpent is lifted up and looked upon. This is declared by the words of the Lord himself: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” he says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Do not even these things cry out? Is there such deafness in hard hearts? The passover is made by killing a sheep: Christ is killed, of whom it is said in the gospel, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world.” Those who keep the passover are forbidden to break the bones: the bones of the Lord are not broken on the cross, and the evangelist testifies that this is why it was said, “You shall not break his bone.” The doorposts are smeared with blood so that destruction may be driven away: the people are marked on their foreheads with the sign of the Lord’s passion for the protection of salvation. The law is given there on the fiftieth day after the passover was kept: the Holy Spirit came on the fiftieth day after the Lord’s passion. The law is said there to have been written by the finger of God: the Lord says of the Holy Spirit, “By the finger of God I cast out demons.” And Faustus, with his eyes shut, cries that he has found nothing in those writings that pertains to the foretelling of Christ! But what wonder if he has eyes to read and no heart to understand, who, standing before the closed door of the divine secret, does not knock with the faith of piety but insults it with the arrogance of impiety? Let it be so indeed, let it be done; for it is just. Let the door of salvation be shut to the proud; let the meek come, whom the Lord teaches his ways; let him see these things in those books, and the rest, whether all or some, such that he may believe the like to be in all.

Let him see Jesus leading the people into the land of promise. For he was not called so at random from the beginning, but by this very dispensation his name was changed and he was called Jesus. Let him see the cluster of grapes from the land of promise hanging on wood. Let him see in Jericho, as in this mortal world, the harlot—of such women the Lord says that they go before the proud into the kingdom of heaven—letting down through the window of her house, as through the mouth of her body, the scarlet cord, which is surely a sign of blood, to confess for salvation on account of the remission of sins. Let him see the walls of that city, as the fortifications of the mortal world, fall when the ark of the covenant was carried around seven times; as now, through the times which slip by in the succession of seven days, the covenant of God goes around the whole world, so that at the end of time death, the last enemy, may be destroyed, and from the destruction of the ungodly a single house, as the one church, may be set free, cleansed from the foulness of sexual immorality through the window of confession, in the blood of remission.

Let him see first the times of the judges and afterward those of the kings, as there will be first judgment and then the kingdom; and, in those very times of judges and kings, Christ and the church figured again and again in many and various ways. Who was it in Samson, killing the lion that met him when he was going to the foreigners to seek a wife, but he who, about to call the church from the Gentiles, said, “Rejoice, for I have overcome the world”? What is meant by the honeycomb built in the mouth of the slain lion, but that, see, we behold the very laws of the earthly kingdom, which before had raged against Christ, now, their fierceness slain, even providing defenses for the preaching of the gospel’s sweetness? What is that woman full of confidence, piercing the enemy’s temples with wood, but the faith of the church destroying the kingdoms of the devil by the cross of Christ? What is the fleece soaked with rain while the threshing floor was dry, and afterward the floor soaked while the fleece was dry, but that at first the one nation of the Hebrews had, hidden in its holy rites, the mystery of God, which is Christ, while the whole world was empty of that mystery; but now the whole world has it in manifestation, and that nation has been emptied?

And what of the times of the kings, to mention a few things from there too? Does not the priesthood, changed at the very beginning to Samuel when Eli was rejected, and the kingdom, changed to David when Saul was rejected, cry out that a new priesthood and a new kingdom were foretold, the old being rejected, which was a shadow of the future, to come in our Lord Jesus Christ? Did not David himself, when he ate the bread of the presence, which it was not lawful for any but the priests to eat, figure both as future in one person, that is, kingship and priesthood in the one Jesus Christ? When ten tribes were separated from the temple and two were left, does this not sufficiently indicate what the apostle says of that whole nation: “A remnant has been saved by the election of grace”?

Elijah is fed in the time of famine by ravens bringing bread in the morning and meat in the evening: and the Manichaeans do not understand Christ in those books, Christ who in a way hungers for our salvation, and to whom sinners, by confessing, bring a faith which now has the firstfruits of the Spirit, but at the end, as in the evening of the world, also the resurrection of the flesh. Elijah is sent to be fed by a foreign widow, who wanted to gather two sticks before she died: here the sign of the cross is expressed not only by the word “wood” but also by the number of the sticks. Her flour and her oil are blessed: the fruit and the cheerfulness of love, which does not fail when it is spent; for God loves a cheerful giver.

The beasts devour the boys who mocked Elisha and cried, “Baldhead, baldhead!”: those who with childish folly deride Christ crucified in the place of Calvary perish, seized by demons. Elisha sends his staff by his servant upon the dead boy, and he does not revive; he comes himself, joins and fits himself to the dead body, and the boy revives: the Word of God sent the law through his servant, and it did not profit the human race, dead in sins; yet it was not sent without reason, for he sent it who knew that it must be sent first. He came himself, conformed himself to us, being made a sharer of our death, and we were made alive. When trees were being cut down with axes, the iron, flying off the wood, sank into the depth of the river, and returned to the wood that Elisha threw in from above: so, when the presence of Christ, working through the body, was cutting down the ungodly Jews as unfruitful trees—for John had said of him, “See, the axe is laid to the root of the tree”—through the passion they inflicted he left the body itself, descending into the depths of the underworld; and when the body had been laid in the tomb above, the spirit returned to it as to its handle, and he rose. How many things I pass over, constrained by the need for brevity, those who read know.

Now the deportation to Babylon itself, where the Spirit of God, through the prophet Jeremiah, commands them to go and to pray for those very people in whose kingdom they are sojourning, since in their peace would be the peace of these as well, and to build houses and plant new vineyards and plant gardens: who does not recognize what it prefigured, if he considers that the true Israelites, in whom there is no guile, passed over through the apostolic dispensation, with the sacrament of the gospel, into the kingdom of the Gentiles? Hence the apostle, as if repeating Jeremiah, says to us: “I desire, then, first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and for those who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all piety and love. For this is good and acceptable before God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” From this, indeed, when they too believed, dwellings of peace were built, the basilicas of Christian congregations; and new vineyards were planted, the peoples of the faithful; and gardens were planted, where among all the herbs that grain of mustard seed reigns, under whose shade, spread far and wide, even the high-flying pride of the Gentiles finds refuge and rest, like the birds of the sky. And as for the return from captivity after seventy years, according to the prophecy of the same Jeremiah, and the renewal of the temple, what believer in Christ does not understand that, after the times have rolled by which run their course by the repetition of the sevenfold number of days, we too, that is, the church of God, must return from the pilgrimage of this world to that heavenly Jerusalem? Through whom, but through Jesus Christ, the true high priest, whose figure was borne by that Jesus who was the high priest of that time when the temple was built after the captivity? The prophet Zechariah saw him in filthy clothing, and, when the devil who stood to accuse him had been defeated, the filthy garment was taken from him and a garment of honor and glory was given him: as the body of Jesus Christ, which is the church, when the adversary has been overcome by judgment at the end of time, is taken up from the mourning of pilgrimage into the glory of everlasting salvation. This is also sung most plainly in the psalm of the dedication of the house: “You have turned my mourning into joy for me; you have torn off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness, so that my glory may sing to you and I may not be pierced.”

Who could touch, however briefly, in the course of another work, on everything in those old books of the law and the prophets that announces Christ figuratively? Unless perhaps someone thinks it is done by ingenuity, that things which ran their course in the order of events in their own times are turned by interpretation to signify Christ. Jews or pagans might perhaps say this; but on those who want to be thought Christians apostolic authority presses its yoke, saying, “All these things happened to them in figure,” and, “All these things were figures of us.” For if Ishmael and Isaac, two men who were born, signify the two covenants, what is to be believed of so many deeds that were done from no natural custom and no necessity of business? Do they signify nothing? If any of us who do not know Hebrew letters, that is, the very characters of the sounds, saw them written on a wall in some honored place, who would be so senseless as to think the wall was painted that way, and not rather understand that it was writing, so that, even if he could not read it, he would not doubt that those marks signified something? So, first of all, everything in the old instrument of the holy Scriptures ought so to move anyone who reads it without a perverse mind that he does not doubt that it signifies something.

For example: if a woman had to be made as a helper for the man, did any necessity force, or any utility suggest, that she be made from the side of a sleeping man? If an ark had to be built to escape the flood, what need was there for its measurements to be precisely these, or even to be recorded in writings to be handed down to posterity for religion? If animals had to be shut in to restore their kinds, what need was there for that particular number, seven of the clean and two of the unclean? Necessity surely required that an entrance to the ark be made; but what required that it be made in the side, or even that this be committed to memory in writing? Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son: let him have been commanded this so that his obedience, proved by such a test, might become known to posterity; let the son more fittingly have carried the wood, so that his old father should not carry it; let him afterward not have been permitted to strike his son, so as not to strike himself with the heaviest bereavement: would Abraham have been less proved if they had returned without any blood shed? Or if the sacrifice now had to be completed, did it add anything to the victim that the ram should appear caught by its horns in the thicket? So all these things, when they are considered and found to be woven, as if superfluous, together with what was necessary, admonish the human mind, that is, the rational mind, first that they signify something, and then to seek what they signify.

So even the Jews themselves, who deride the Christ whose passion we have recognized there, though they refuse to see that he was foretold by such figures, not only of things said but also of things done, are forced to tell us what these things signify; for unless they admit that they signify something, they do not defend books of such divine authority from the disgrace of silly fables. A certain Philo saw this, a man of very liberal learning, one of them, whose eloquence the Greeks do not hesitate to rank equal with Plato’s; and he tried to interpret some things, not in order to understand Christ, in whom he had not believed, but, as it turned out, so that it might appear the more clearly how great a difference it makes whether you refer everything to Christ, for whose sake it was truly said so, or pursue any conjectures you please apart from him with whatever sharpness of mind, and how much force there is in what the apostle says: “When you pass over to the Lord, the veil will be taken away.” For, to mention one thing of this same Philo: wishing the ark of the flood to be understood as built according to the proportions of the human body, he treated everything member by member. And as he consulted most subtly even the rules of numbers, everything fitted, in a way that did not at all hinder understanding Christ, since the Savior of the human race also appeared in a human body, and yet did not compel it, since the human body is certainly that of other men too. But when he came to the door made in the side of the ark, every conjecture of human ingenuity failed. Still, in order to say something, he dared to believe, dared to say, dared to write that the lower parts of the body, where urine and dung are expelled, were signified by that door. No wonder that, not having found the door, he went so astray. But if he had passed over to Christ, the veil being taken away, he would have found the sacraments of the church flowing from the side of that man. For because it was foretold, “The two shall be in one flesh,” therefore in the ark too some things are referred to Christ and some to the church, which is the whole Christ. So also in the other interpretations of figures throughout the whole text of divine Scripture one may consider and compare the meanings of those who understand Christ there and of those who try to twist these things to anything else apart from Christ.

Nor do the pagans clamor against us in this; for they do not dare to object to our interpreting these things, not only said but also done, as taken figuratively for the understanding of Christ, especially since we also show fulfilled what we understand to have been foretold; while they, in order to commend their own fables in some way, try to refer them by interpretation to some physiologies or theologies, that is, natural or divine accounts—in part showing clearly enough what sort of things those fables are, in part concealing it, while they laugh in the theaters at what they venerate in the temples, too free in shamefulness, too slavish in superstition.

But whoever says to us that these things were not done or written in order that Christ might be understood in them will be struck—apart from that great harmony of things prefigured and now fulfilled—by other open and manifest prophetic predictions, such as this: “In your seed all nations shall be blessed.” This was said to Abraham, this to Isaac, this to Jacob. Hence not without reason he says, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” intending, of course, to fulfil in the blessing of all nations what he promised from their seed. Nor without reason did Abraham himself, when his servant swore to him, order him to place his hand under his thigh, knowing that from there would come the flesh of Christ, in whom we do not now foretell that all nations are blessed, but see now what was then foretold.

I should like to know—or rather, I had better not know—with what blindness of mind Faustus read the passage where Jacob called his sons and said: “Gather together, that I may tell you what will befall you in the last days; gather together and hear, sons of Jacob; hear Israel your father.” Here surely no one doubts that the person of one prophesying is made plain. Let us hear, then, what he says to his son Judah, from whose tribe Christ came, of the seed of David according to the flesh, as apostolic teaching testifies. “Judah,” he says, “your brothers shall praise you; your hands shall be on the backs of your enemies; the sons of your father shall worship you. Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the shoot, my son, you have gone up; lying down, you slept like a lion and like a lion’s whelp; who will raise him up? A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until the things laid up for him come; and he is the expectation of the nations, binding his colt to the vine and the foal of the ass with sackcloth; he will wash his robe in wine and his garment in the blood of the grape; his eyes gleam from wine, and his teeth are whiter than milk.” Let these things be false, let them be obscure, if they have not shone forth in Christ with most evident light: if his brothers the apostles and all his co-heirs do not praise him, seeking not their own glory but his; if his hands are not on the backs of his enemies; if whoever still oppose him are not pressed down and bowed to the ground as the Christian peoples grow; if the sons of Jacob have not worshipped him in the remnant that was saved by the election of grace; if he himself is not a lion’s whelp, since by being born he became a little child—this is why it was added, “from the shoot, my son.” For the reason is given why he is a whelp, in whose praise it is written elsewhere, “A lion’s whelp stronger than beasts of burden,” that is, though little, stronger than the greater; if he did not go up on the cross lying down, when with bowed head he gave up his spirit; if he did not sleep like a lion, because even in death itself he was not conquered but conquered, and like a lion’s whelp—for he died by the same nature by which he was born; if he did not raise him from the dead whom no man has seen or can see—for by saying, “Who will raise him up?” a reference to one unknown is sufficiently expressed; if a ruler was lacking from Judah and a leader from his thighs before the things promised, as if laid up, came at the opportune time. For there are most certain historical writings of the Jews themselves, by which it is shown that Herod, a foreigner, was the first king in the nation of the Jews, at the time when Christ was born. So a king from the seed of Judah was not lacking until the things laid up for him came. But because what was promised did not profit the believing Jews alone, see what follows: “and he is the expectation of the nations.” He bound his colt to the vine, that is, his own people, preaching in sackcloth and crying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” And we recognize the people of the Gentiles, made subject to him, as compared to the foal of the ass, on which he also sat, leading it into Jerusalem, that is, into the vision of peace, teaching the meek his ways. If he does not wash his robe in wine: for that robe is the glorious church, which he presents to himself without spot or wrinkle; to which it is also said through Isaiah, “If your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow.” From what, but from forgiven sins? In what wine, then, but that of which it is said that it will be poured out for many for the remission of sins? For he is that cluster which hung on the wood. Therefore see here too what he adds: “and his garment in the blood of the grape.” And as for his eyes gleaming from wine, those members in his body recognize it to whom it is given, by a certain holy intoxication of a mind withdrawn from the temporal things that glide past below, to behold the eternal light of wisdom. Hence we mentioned a little earlier the words of Paul: “For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God.” These are the eyes gleaming from wine. But because there follows, “if we are sober, it is for you,” the little ones who still need to be nourished with milk are not left behind either, because here too there follows: “and his teeth whiter than milk.”

What do you answer to this, madmen? Surely these things are plain; surely they drive away not only the slanders of contradiction but even the fogs of doubt. Look first for such things in those books; believe such things first. I can mention them now neither all, since that is too much, nor many, since that takes long; nor would I want to mention only a few, lest those who do not read the books think they are the only ones, and lest a faithful and careful reader, when he has found many more evident ones, blame me for setting down these in particular, which happened to occur to me at present. For you will find many things which do not even need such a pointer as I used with the words of Jacob. For who now looks for an interpreter when he reads, “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,” and everything that is said there in many ways and plainly: that by his bruise we are healed, that he bore our sins? Who would not think the gospel is being sung: “They dug my hands and feet; they numbered all my bones; they looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots”? Who, unless excessively blind, does not now see fulfilled: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him”? What of that in the gospel, “My soul is sorrowful even to death,” and, “Now my soul is troubled”? Did it not first sound in the psalm: “I slept troubled”? And how did it come about that he slept? By whose voices was it shouted, “Crucify, crucify”? Does not the psalm too go on to foretell: “The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword”? But what did they do, what harm did they do to him who was to rise and ascend above the heavens and possess the whole world with the glory of his name? See whether the psalm kept silent about this beforehand; for there follows: “Be exalted above the heavens, O God, and your glory over all the earth.” Who has ever doubted that this was said of Christ: “The Lord said to me, You are my son; today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession”? Who has been permitted to understand anyone else where Jeremiah says, of wisdom no doubt: “He gave her to Jacob his servant and to Israel his chosen one; after this he was seen on earth and lived among men”?

Who would not recognize the same Savior in Daniel, when the Son of Man is presented to the Ancient of Days and receives a kingdom without end, so that all nations may serve him? And indeed, if that passage which the Lord mentioned from the prophecy of the same Daniel—“When you see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel, standing in the holy place; let the reader understand”—if, with the times of the weeks also computed, that number is examined, not only Christ but also the time when he had to come to suffer is found. And yet even without computing times we usually press the Jews with the manifest outcome of events, since our dispute with them is not whether our salvation is in Christ, but whether he has already come and suffered. And they are refuted by the most evident facts themselves: not only by the faith of all nations, which the same Scripture to which they are forced to yield foretold would serve him, and which so shines throughout the whole world that it strikes the eyes of all who evade it, but also by what has already happened in the Jewish nation itself: that the sanctuary was overthrown, that the sacrifice and the priest and the former anointing ceased—all of which Daniel then foretold would happen, when he clearly prophesied that the holy of holies would be anointed. Since, then, all these things have already happened, the anointed holy of holies is also demanded of them, and they find nothing to answer. And how would they dispute with us not about the Christ but only about his coming, unless they knew well that he was prophesied in their books? Why do they ask John whether he is the Christ? Why do they say to the Lord himself, “How long will you take away our soul? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly”? Why do Peter and Andrew and Philip say to Nathanael, “We have found the Messiah, which is interpreted Christ,” unless because this name was both known and expected in that nation through those writings? For no other nation had kings and priests as its christs and called them so, and their significative anointing could not rightly cease until he came who was foretold in them. For the Jews so knew those christs of theirs that they nevertheless hoped for one through whom at last they would be freed; but, blinded by the hidden justice of God, while they think only of his power, they did not understand the weakness in which he died for us. Hence we recognize as foretold of them those words in the book of Wisdom: “Let us condemn him to a most shameful death; for there will be regard to his words. If he is truly the son of God, he will take him up and free him from the hands of his adversaries. These things they thought, and they erred; for their malice blinded them.” This can also be said most truly of these men, who, in so great a multitude of testimonies, so great an arrangement of things foretold, so great a manifestation of things fulfilled, still say that Christ was not prophesied in those Scriptures. If they say it again and again, we can bring proofs again and again, with the help of him who has supplied so great an abundance against the slanders of human error that we need not repeat what we have already mentioned.

Now as for another evasion of Faustus, which, I believe, when he too was struck by the most brilliant light of prophecy, he thought he had found to be very clever: I am reluctant even to refute it, lest he be thought to have said something because it was thought worth answering. For who but a complete madman would say that it is a sign of feeble faith not to believe in Christ without a witness? I should like these men to answer me: whom did they themselves believe about Christ? Or did they hear that voice from heaven, “This is my Son”? For Faustus, who will not have us believe human witnesses about Christ, bids us rather believe that voice; as if knowledge of that very voice had reached us without a human witness, when it is plain that it reached us in just that way, and the apostle says: “But how will they call on him in whom they have not believed? Or how will they believe him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? Or how will they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who announce peace, who announce good things!” You surely see how prophetic testimony accompanies the preaching of apostolic teaching. For so that what the apostles announced might not be despised or taken as fabulous, it was shown that these things had been foretold by the prophets; because, even though miracles attested them, there would not have been lacking—as some still mutter even now—those who would attribute all those things to magical power, unless such a thought were overcome by prophetic testimony. For no one, surely, would say that by magic arts they had appointed prophets for themselves, long before they were born, by whom they would be foretold. But, of course, Faustus forbids us to believe in the true Christ on the testimony of the Hebrew prophets, he who believed in a false Christ on the errors of the Persians.

But catholic teaching holds that the Christian mind must first be nourished by simple faith precisely in order to make it capable of understanding things above and eternal. For so the prophet also says: “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” And this is the very simple faith by which we believe, before we know the surpassing knowledge of the love of Christ, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God, that the dispensation of his humility, in which he was born and suffered as a man, was foretold so long before by the prophets, through a prophetic nation, a prophetic people, a prophetic kingdom, not without reason, but because in that foolishness which is wiser than men and in that weakness which is stronger than men something great lies hidden for our justification and glorification. And there all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, which are opened to no one who despises the food passed to him through a mother’s flesh, that is, the nourishment of milk through the apostolic and prophetic breasts, and who, disdaining it as infant fare, as if he were of great age, rushes into the poisons of heretics before the food of wisdom, for which he rashly thinks himself fit. So our saying that simple faith is necessary is not contrary to our saying that the prophets are to be believed; rather, it belongs to this very thing, that the prophets be believed before he who spoke through the prophets can be understood by a purified and strengthened mind.

“But if they prophesied Christ, they did not live in a way worthy of, or in keeping with, their prophesying.” How do you know this? Or can you judge what it is to live well or badly, you whose righteousness is that a melon which feels nothing should rather be helped, so that you may eat it, than that a hungry beggar should be given something to eat? But for the catholic little ones, before they know what the perfect righteousness of the human soul is, and how great a difference there is between that righteousness for which we sigh and this by which we live here, it is enough to think of those men what the soundness of apostolic teaching commends: that the righteous lives by faith. “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. For Scripture, foreseeing that God justifies the Gentiles by faith, announced beforehand to Abraham, saying, In your seed all nations shall be blessed.” These are the apostle’s words. If at his voice, so clear and so well known to all, you would wake up from your most deceitful dreams, you would follow the footsteps of our father Abraham and be blessed in his seed with all nations. For he received, as the apostle says, the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith that he had in uncircumcision, so that he might be the father of all who believe in uncircumcision, that it might be reckoned to them also as righteousness; and the father of circumcision to those who are not only of the circumcision but who also follow the footsteps of the faith of our father Abraham, which he had in uncircumcision. Since, then, the righteousness of his faith is set before us as an example to imitate, so that we too, justified by faith, may have peace with God, we ought to understand how he lived, not find fault with it, lest we slip out of the womb of mother church by miscarriage before we are formed by a stable conception and born perfect.

This is my brief answer to Faustus on behalf of the conduct of the patriarchs and prophets, in the voice of our little ones, among whom I would count myself as well, so long as I do not find fault with the life of the ancient saints, even if I do not understand how mystically they lived; whose life the apostles praised and preached to us in their gospel, as they in their prophecy foretold the apostles to come, so that the two Testaments might cry to one another, like the two seraphim: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts.” But when Faustus begins to accuse the patriarchs and prophets, not with a general and indefinite censure, as he has done here, but by recounting their particular deeds, the Lord their God, who is also ours, will help me to answer each point fittingly and aptly. For now, Faustus the Manichaean blames those men, but the apostle Paul praises them; let each choose whom to believe.

Tenth. Faustus said: “How do you worship Christ when you reject the prophets, from whose predictions it is gathered that he was to come?” I do not know whether anyone could prove, once the matter came to be examined, that any prophets of the Hebrews announced our Christ, that is, the Son of God. Yet even if this were so, what is it to us? This reproach falls on those who, having perhaps been converted from Judaism to Christianity under the testimonies of the prophets, as you claim, afterwards neglected them, as men ungrateful for benefits. But we are Gentiles by nature, that is, what Paul calls the uncircumcision, born under another law and other foretellers, whom the Gentile world calls seers. And from these we were afterwards converted to Christianity, without first becoming Jews, so that we should rightly follow the faith of the Hebrew prophets in coming to Christianity; we were roused solely by the fame and the reputation for mighty works and the wisdom of our liberator Jesus. So if, while I was still lingering in my ancestral religion, a preacher had come and tried to commend Christ to me from the prophets, I should at once have thought him mad, for trying to support doubtful things by things more doubtful to me, a Gentile and a man of a very different religion. What then would he have had to do, but first persuade me that I must believe the prophets, and then believe Christ through the prophets? And for that very thing to happen, other prophets would likewise have been needed, to vouch for these. Therefore, if you think Christ is to be accepted through the prophets, through whom will you accept the prophets? Or will you say, “Through Christ in turn,” so that each commends the other, Christ the prophets and the prophets Christ? But a pagan, free from the claims of both, would neither believe the prophets speaking about Christ nor Christ speaking about the prophets. So whoever becomes a Christian from among the Gentiles owes the whole to nothing but his own faith. And to make what we say clearer by an example, let us suppose that we are now instructing some Gentile as a catechumen. Sitting with him, we say: “Believe in Christ, because he is God.” He says: “How do you prove this to me?” And we answer: “From the prophets.” When he asks again, “Which prophets?”, we answer, “The Hebrew ones.” And he says with a smile: “But I do not believe them at all.” And we answer: “What? Christ confirms them.” And he, laughing much more, says: “What? I do not believe him either.” What will happen when things have gone this way? Shall we not be stuck, and will he not laugh at us as foolish and go back to his own? So, as I said, the testimonies of the Hebrews contribute nothing to the Christian church, which consists more of Gentiles than of Jews. Certainly, if there are, as report has it, any predictions about Christ by the Sibyl, or by Hermes whom they call Trismegistus, or by Orpheus and other seers among the Gentiles, these could help us somewhat toward faith, who become Christians from among the Gentiles; but the testimonies of the Hebrews, even if true, are useless to us before faith and superfluous after faith, because before it we could not believe them, and now we believe them needlessly.

Augustine replied: Here the very long reply given earlier may help us to answer briefly. For I think that anyone who has read it already laughs at this man raving such things and still saying that the Hebrew prophets did not foretell Christ the Son of God, when it was in that nation alone that the very name “Christ” was most sacred, in king and in priest, and was not taken away from there before he himself came who was prefigured in them. Let them answer, moreover, where they learned the name of Christ. If from Mani, I ask how they themselves believed Mani, Africans believing a Persian, not to mention others; while Faustus blames Romans and Greeks or other nations if they believed the Hebrew prophets about Christ as foreigners, and says that the oracles of the Sibyl and of Orpheus, or of any other Gentile seers there may be, are better suited to them for believing in Christ. Nor does he notice that those are recited in no churches, while the Hebrew prophets are renowned among all nations and bring such swarms of believers to Christian salvation. To say that Hebrew prophecy is not fit for the Gentiles to believe in Christ, when he sees all nations believing in Christ through Hebrew prophecy, is laughable madness.

A Christ such as was foretold by the Hebrews displeases you; and yet all the peoples of the Gentiles, among whom you think Hebrew prophecy has no weight of authority, believe in such a Christ as was foretold by the Hebrews, receiving, that is, the gospel which God had promised beforehand, as the apostle records, through his prophets in the holy scriptures concerning his Son, who was made for him from the seed of David according to the flesh. Hence the prophet Isaiah says: “There shall be the root of Jesse, who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope,” and: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which is interpreted, “God with us.” Let these men not think that Christ was foretold by the Hebrew prophets only as a man; for Faustus seems to have touched on this when he says, “our Christ, the Son of God,” as if the Hebrews did not call their Christ the Son of God. See, we show from Hebrew prophecy that Christ, the son of the virgin, is God. For indeed, so that the carnal Jews too should not think that Christ was only this, that for our sake he was made man from the seed of David, the Lord himself admonishes them from the prophecy of that same David, asking them what they thought of the Christ, whose son they said he was. When they answered, “David's,” then, so that this alone should not be thought, as I said, and they should not fail to look to Emmanuel, which is interpreted “God with us,” he said: “How then does David himself in the Spirit call him Lord: ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet’?” See, I say, we show from Hebrew prophecy that Christ is God; you show some prophecy of yours from which you learned the name of Christ.

For your Mani was not a prophet of a Christ to come: he calls himself his apostle, with a most shameless falsehood indeed; for it is established that this heresy arose not only after Tertullian but even after Cyprian. Yet all his letters begin thus: “Mani, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” Why did you believe him about Christ? What witness of his apostleship did he bring you? And the very name of Christ, which we know only as instituted in the kingdom of the Jews, in priests and kings, so that not only this or that man but the whole nation itself and the entire kingdom became a prophecy of Christ and of the Christian kingdom: why did this man seize it, why did he usurp it, he who forbids you to believe the Hebrew prophets, so that a false and deceitful apostle might make you deceitful disciples of a false Christ? Finally, so that no one should say to him, “You lie,” suppose he had produced for you some prophets who, by his account, foretold Christ: what will you do with someone like the man Faustus proposed as an example for instruction, who would believe neither them nor him? Or will he call our apostles as witnesses for himself? He will not, I think, produce men, but he will open books; and he will find them opened not for him but against him. For there we read and teach that Christ was born of the virgin Mary, there that the Son of God was made from the seed of David according to the flesh. If he says these books have been falsified, he will be attacking the credibility of his own witnesses; but if he produces other manuscripts which he claims are our apostles', how will he himself give them an authority which he did not receive through the churches of Christ founded by the apostles themselves, so that it might pass on from there to later generations with a firm commendation? How does a man whom I do not believe bring me scriptures through which I am to believe about him, and himself try to give them authority, when I do not believe him?

But if you believed report about Christ (for Faustus, hemmed in by great difficulties, touched on this too in passing, so as not to be forced either to produce those books which have no authority, or to be bound to those whose authority is against him), if, then, you believed report about Christ, see whether it is a fit witness; consider carefully where you are throwing yourselves. For report spreads many evil things about you, which you do not want believed. What reason is there, then, to want report to be truthful about Christ, when you want it to be lying about you? What of the fact that you even contradict the report of Christ? For the report that is clearer and more powerful, that holds the ears and minds and tongues of all nations, is the one which, as Christ from the seed of David is spread abroad according to the Hebrew scriptures, fulfils what is written there as promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob: “In your seed all nations shall be blessed.” What then do you answer: whom did you believe about Christ, you who do not like foreign witnesses? Moreover, the authority of our books, strengthened by the agreement of so many nations through the successions of apostles, bishops and councils, is against you; while yours has none, since it is put forward by so few, and by those who worship a lying God and Christ. Hence it tells against their own lying doctrine, unless they too are held to be liars as imitators of their God and Christ. And report itself, if consulted, both proclaims you to be very bad men and does not cease to preach against you a Christ from the seed of David. You did not hear the voice of the Father from heaven; you did not see the works of Christ, by which he testified about himself; the manuscripts in which these things are written you pretend to accept, so as to deceive under a Christian appearance; yet so that they may not be read against you, you say they are falsified. You quote from them Christ saying, “If you do not believe me, believe the works,” and, “I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me,” and you do not want quoted against you from them: “Search the scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life; they bear witness about me,” and, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too; for he wrote about me,” and, “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them,” and, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if someone rises from the dead.” Where did you come out from? On what do you rely? You reject scriptures confirmed and commended by such great authority; you do no miracles. And if you did them, we should beware of them too in you, since the Lord forewarned us, saying: “Many false christs and false prophets will arise and will do many signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect; see, I have told you beforehand.” So far did he wish nothing to be believed against the confirmed authority of the scriptures, which proves its credibility by the facts themselves, which shows these things fulfilled and accomplished through the succession of times, which foretold them so long before they happened.

It remains for you to say that you offer a reason so certain and unanswerable that, the truth being made plain by itself, it needs no authority of a witness, no truth of a miracle. What do you say? What do you bring forward? What reason, what truth? That fable is long and empty, a childish game, a woman's pastime, an old wife's raving, with a maimed beginning, a rotten middle and a ruinous end. For when you are asked, from its beginning: “What was the race of darkness going to do to the immortal, invisible, incorruptible God, if he had not chosen to fight with it?” and from its middle: “How is God incorruptible and undefilable, whose members you crush in fruits and vegetables by eating and digesting them, in order to purify them?” and from its end: “What did the wretched soul do, that it should be punished in the globe of darkness with a perpetual bond, when, stained by another's fault and not its own, it could not be cleansed because its God failed it, by whose sending it was defiled?”, then, while you hesitate and find nothing to answer, your so many and so large and so costly manuscripts are looked upon, and one grieves much for the labours of the copyists, the purses of the wretched and the bread of the deceived. If, then, neither the antiquity of the scriptures' authority, nor the power of miracles, nor soundness of morals, nor the truth of reason supports you, go away confounded, and come back confessing that he is the Christ, the Saviour of all who believe in him, whose name and whose church the present times display just as past times announced them; not through any man coming out of cavernous hiding places, but through a certain nation and a certain kingdom extended and established for this purpose: that there all things concerning him should be foreshadowed in figures, which are now recognized as expressed in fact, and that there should be written, foretold by the prophets, what is now made good as preached by the apostles.

So then, set before us some Gentile to be instructed, in whose case Faustus laughed at us as failing, where it is he himself who has failed, to be lamented rather than laughed at. For if we say to a Gentile, “Believe in Christ, because he is God,” and he answers, “On what ground do I believe?”, and, when the authority of the prophets is brought forward, says that he does not believe them, because they are Hebrews and he is a pagan, we show the credibility of the prophets from the things which they sang of as to come and which are seen to have come. For I believe it would not escape him what great persecutions the Christian religion first endured from the kings of this world; or if it did escape him, it would easily be proved to him from the history of the nations itself and from the imperial laws committed to writing and to memory. When he learned that this had been foretold so long before by the prophet who says: “Why did the nations rage, and the peoples meditate vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ” (and that this was not said of David himself is easily seen in that same psalm, for there is also said what confounds men however stubborn by the plain evidence of the facts: “The Lord said to me: You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession”; which no one doubts was not granted to the nation of the Jews, in which David reigned, but has been fulfilled with the name of Christ occupying all nations far and wide), then, I believe, he would be moved, when he heard from here many other things too from the prophets which it would take long to go through now. He would see also the very kings of the earth now salutarily subjected to Christ's rule and all nations serving him, and there would be read to him from the psalm what was foretold so long before: “All the kings of the earth shall worship him; all nations shall serve him.” And if he chose to read that whole psalm, which is spoken figuratively as of Solomon, he would find Christ truly the peaceful king (for this is what the name Solomon means), in whom he would recognize fulfilled all that is said there, things far removed from that man Solomon, king of Israel. Likewise that psalm where God is said to be anointed by God, and Christ is certainly declared by that very anointing, and the same Christ is most plainly shown to be God, when God anointed is spoken of: if he chose to consider what is said there of Christ and what of the church itself, which he would read foretold there and see fulfilled throughout the world; he would see also the very idols of the Gentiles perishing so from the world through the name of Christ, and would learn that this very thing was foretold by the prophets; he would hear Jeremiah saying: “Thus shall you say to them: Let the gods who did not make heaven and earth perish from the earth and from under heaven.” Again, when he heard the same prophet in another place saying: “Lord, my strength and my help and my refuge in the day of evils, to you the nations shall come from the end of the earth and shall say: How false were the idols our fathers possessed, and there is no profit in them! Shall a man so make gods, and they are not gods? Therefore, behold, I will show them in that time; I will show them my hand, and they shall know my power, for I am the Lord”: hearing these things from prophetic scripture and seeing what I describe over the whole earth, how he would be moved to faith, when we prove this too by the facts themselves, since we know that the hearts of the faithful are strengthened in this way by prophecy written before the times and fulfilled in these times!

And so that he should not think Christ a man, as some great men have been, the same prophet would shake this out of his thinking. For there it follows, and he says: “Cursed is the man who has his hope in man, and makes flesh his arm's strength, and whose heart departs from the Lord; and he shall be like the tamarisk that is in the desert; he shall not see when good things come, and he shall dwell among the wicked in a desert land, in a salt land which shall not be inhabited”; and: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and the Lord shall be his hope; and he shall be like a fruitful tree beside the water, and he shall send out his roots into the moisture; he shall not fear when the heat comes, and there shall be leafy shoots on him; in the year of drought he shall not fear and shall not fail in bearing fruit.” Here, certainly, since he called cursed the one who puts his hope in man, and unfolded that curse in prophetic likenesses, and called blessed the one who trusts in the Lord, and wove that blessing likewise in fitting likenesses, our man might perhaps be troubled at how, so that he should not put his hope in man, we announce Christ to him as God, and on the other hand call him man, not from his own nature but from our mortality which he took up. For so some erred by believing Christ God and denying him man; and again some, by thinking him man and denying him God, either despised him or, putting their hope in a man, fell into that curse. If then this Gentile were troubled, and said that this prophet had spoken against our faith, because we, following the apostolic teaching, call Christ not only God, so that hope may be placed in him most securely, but also the mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, whereas the prophet spoke only of God and made no mention of human nature: in the same place he would hear the voice of the same prophet admonishing and correcting him: “The heart is heavy in all things, and he is man, and who shall know him?” He is man precisely so that those heavy of heart might be healed by faith through the form of a servant, and might know him as God who for their sake was made man, so that their hope might not be in a man but in the man who is God. And yet, “the heart is heavy in all things, and he is man,” taking the form of a servant; “and who knows him?” who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal to God. “And he is man,” because the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; “and who knows him?” because in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And truly the heart is heavy in all things; for even in his disciples that heart was heavy, when he said to them: “Have I been with you so long, and you have not known me?” For what does “I have been with you so long” mean, but what is said here: “and he is man”? And what else does “and you have not known me” mean, but what is said here: “and who knows him”? Whom, but him who says: “He who has seen me has seen the Father too”? So that our hope may not be in man, because of that curse proclaimed through the prophet, but in the man who is God, that is, in the Son of God, the Saviour Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and men; both he than whom the Father is greater because of the form of a servant, and he who is equal to the Father because of the form of God.

Isaiah also says: “The insolence of men shall be humbled and shall fall, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day; and they shall hide all things made by hands in caves and in clefts of the rocks and in caverns of the earth, from the face of the fear of the Lord and from the majesty of his power, when he rises to shatter the earth. For in that day man shall cast away the abominations of gold and silver which they made, to worship vain and harmful things.” And perhaps this Gentile whom we are instructing, whom Faustus said would declare with a laugh, “I do not believe the Hebrew prophets,” has himself hidden some idols made by hand in a cave or in a cleft of a rock or in a cavern of the earth, or knows that some friend of his has done so, or knows that it has been done in his city or on his estate, from the face of the fear of the Lord, who, through the kings of the earth who, according to the same prophecy, now serve and worship him, shatters the earth with very severe laws, that is, breaks the boldness of the earthly heart. How then can he say, “I do not believe the Hebrew prophets,” when he perhaps recognizes fulfilled in himself what was foretold long ago by the Hebrew prophets?

There was more reason to fear that, surrounded by such evidence of the facts, he might perhaps say that the Christians composed these writings after these things began to happen throughout the world, so that they might be thought to have been foretold beforehand by God and not be despised as done rashly by human means. This would be something to fear, were it not that the people of the Jews is widely scattered and widely known: that Cain who received a mark so that no one should kill him, and that Ham, the servant of his brothers, loaded with carrying the books by which they are taught. For by their manuscripts we prove that these things were not written by us as men prompted by the outcome of events, but were foretold long ago in that kingdom and preserved, and are now made plain and fulfilled. In them, too, the things that are less clear there, because they happened to those people in figure, but were written for our sake, on whom the end of the ages has come, are now illuminated and resolved; and what was darkened by the shadows of things still to come is now made plain by the light of things accomplished.

Perhaps he might also say that he was disturbed by this: that those very people in whose books these things are found foretold, which are now seen fulfilled, do not share the fellowship of the same gospel with us. But when he was taught that this too was foretold by the same prophets, who is so mad as not to see how much he would be moved toward faith? Who so shameless as to pretend not to see it? For who would doubt that this was prophesied of the Jews, when Isaiah says: “The ox knew its owner and the ass its master's manger; but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me”; or what the apostle recalls: “All day long I stretched out my hands to a people that does not believe and contradicts”; and above all: “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear and not understand,” and many things of this kind? And if he said, “What then did the Jews sin, if God blinded them so that they should not know Christ?”, we would show him, as far as we could in instructing an untaught man, that the just punishment of this blindness comes from other hidden sins known to God. We would demonstrate not only that the apostle said of certain people, “For this reason God handed them over to the desire of their hearts,” or “to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting,” wishing to show that certain open sins come as the punishment of certain hidden ones, but also that the prophets themselves did not pass this over in silence. For, not to go further, the same Jeremiah, in that very place where he says, “and he is man, and who knows him?”, so that the Jews should not be excused by this very fact that they did not know him (for if they had known, as the apostle says, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory), goes on to show that it was due to their hidden desert that they did not know him. For he says: “I am the Lord, who search the hearts and test the reins, to give to each according to his way and according to the fruit of his pursuits.”

Again, if that Gentile were disturbed by this, that even those who are called Christians break away into many and various heresies, we would teach him that this too was not passed over by the Hebrew prophets. For as though it followed that, once the Jews had been shown in their blindness, it would come into his mind that many under the Christian name also stray from the Christian fellowship itself, Jeremiah himself, as if showing us the order of instruction, immediately added: “The partridge cried out; it gathered what it did not hatch, making its riches not with judgment.” For it is well known how the partridge, an exceedingly quarrelsome creature, runs into the snare out of sheer eagerness for the quarrel. For heretics do not love to debate, but to win in any way at all by the most shameless obstinacy, so as to gather, as he said here, what they did not hatch. For the Christians whom they chiefly lead astray by the name of Christ they find already born through the gospel of Christ himself, and they make them their riches, not indeed with judgment, but with thoughtless rashness. For they do not understand that the true and saving and, in a sense, genuine and rooted Christian fellowship is there from which they separated those whom they gathered to their riches. And since the apostle says of such men: “For as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupt in mind, reprobate concerning the faith; but they will not go further, for their madness will be plain to all, as theirs also was,” this prophet too goes on and says of the partridge which gathered what it did not hatch: “In the middle of its days they will forsake it, and at its end it will be a fool.” That is, he who at first led astray as if by the promise and display of excellent wisdom will be a fool, that is, will appear a fool. For to those for whom he was at first wise, he will then be a fool, when he appears so, because his madness will be known to all.

And as though the man we are instructing were to ask and say: “By what plain sign, then, while I am still a little one and not yet able to discern the clear truth among so many errors, by what plain mark shall I hold to the church of Christ, in whom I am now compelled to believe by so plain a fulfilment of things foretold?”, the same prophet goes on and, as if taking up the movements of his mind in perfect order, teaches him that the church of Christ which was foretold is the very one which stands out and is visible to all. For it is the seat of glory, of which the apostle says: “The temple of God is holy, which you are.” Hence the prophet says: “But the seat of glory is exalted, our sanctification.” For because of these movements of little ones, who can be led astray by men, the Lord too, foreseeing the manifestation of the church's brightness, says: “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden,” since indeed the seat of glory is exalted, our sanctification, so that those may not be listened to who draw people into religious schisms, saying, “See, here is the Christ; see, there.” For they point to parts, saying, “See here, see there,” whereas that city is on a mountain. What mountain, but the one which, according to the prophecy of Daniel, grew from a little stone and became a great mountain, so that it filled the whole earth? Nor let those be listened to who, in the name of a supposedly secret and hidden truth of a few men, say, “See, in the inner rooms; see, in the desert,” because a city set on a mountain cannot be hidden, because the seat of glory is exalted, our sanctification.

When, therefore, this Gentile saw, by these and other such testimonies of the prophets, things foretold and now fulfilled concerning the persecution by kings and peoples, the faith of kings and peoples, the abolition of idols, the blindness of the Jews, the evidence of the manuscripts kept by them, the madness of the heretics, the excellence of the holy church of true and genuine Christians, what would he find more worthy of belief than those prophets, so as to choose to believe them about the divinity of Christ? For if, before these things happened, I were to press the Hebrew prophets on a Gentile, so that he should believe from them that things would come which he did not yet see accomplished, he might perhaps rightly say: “What have I to do with these prophets, when I am not shown how I am to prove them truthful?” But when so many great things which they foretold have already been brought to effect and made manifest, plainly, if he did not wish to be perverse, he would in no way despise either these things, which deserved to be commended as foreseen and foretold so long before and with such great preparation, or those by whom they could be foreseen and foretold. For there are none whom we more wisely believe, whether about past things that happened long ago or about future things that have not yet happened, than those who have proved to us the truth of their words by so many and such great things foretold by them which have now come to pass.

As for the Sibyl, or the Sibyls, and Orpheus, and some Hermes or other, and any other seers or theologians or sages or philosophers of the Gentiles who are said to have foretold or told true things about the Son of God or about God the Father, this has some value for refuting the vanity of the pagans, but not for embracing their authority; since we show that we worship that God about whom even those could not keep silent who partly dared to teach their fellow Gentile peoples to worship idols and demons, and partly did not dare to forbid it. But those holy authors of ours, with God commanding and helping, extended and governed that people, that commonwealth, such a kingdom, in which what was religion to these men would have been sacrilege. So if any there slipped into the worship of images and demons, they were either struck by punishment under the very laws of their commonwealth or restrained by the free thunder of prophetic voices. For one God was worshipped by them, who made heaven and earth, with a prophetic rite indeed, that is, one signifying things to come, a rite to be abolished when those things had come which it signified were to come; since that kingdom itself was one great prophet, in which king and priest were anointed with a mystical meaning. And this was not taken away, even from the Jews themselves, who did not understand and were therefore unwilling, until there came he who was anointed with spiritual grace, God above his fellows, that holy of holies, who is both the true king by caring for us and the true priest by offering himself for us. Therefore, as great as is the difference, concerning Christ's coming, between the preaching of the angels and the confession of the demons, so great is the difference between the authority of the prophets and the curiosity of the sacrilegious.

By these and similar arguments, which we now touch on briefly but which might then perhaps be argued at somewhat greater length, as needed to dispel a long-standing error, and supported with the strength of fuller proof, that Gentile whom Faustus set before us to be instructed would surely be moved to faith, if he put his salvation before his sins. Once instructed in it and placed in the bosom of the Catholic Church to be nurtured, he would accordingly also be taught what morals he ought to keep; and he would not be disturbed by the multitude of those in whom he did not find what he was commanded to observe, even though they gathered with him bodily in the church and received the same sacraments. He would know that the inheritance of God is to be shared with few, but its seals with many; that he shares with few the holiness of life and the gift of the love poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us, to which inner fountain no stranger comes; but with many the holiness of the sacrament, of which he who eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, while he who scorns to eat will not have life in himself, and therefore will not reach eternal life. And he would know that these same few are called few in comparison with the multitude of the wicked, but that, considered by themselves, they are a great number, spread over the whole world, growing among the tares and with the chaff until the day of harvest and of winnowing. This was said in the gospel; this was foretold by the prophets. For it was foretold: “As a lily among thorns, so is my beloved among the daughters”; it was foretold: “I dwelt with the tents of Kedar; with those who hated peace I was peaceable”; it was foretold: “Mark on their foreheads those who sigh and mourn over the iniquities of my people that are done in their midst.” And so this Gentile, whom we would strengthen with such an address, having now become a fellow citizen of the saints and a member of God's household, no longer a stranger to Israel but a true Israelite in whom there is no guile, would learn also to say from a simple heart these words which the same Jeremiah goes on to add: “The patience of Israel, Lord; let all who have forsaken you be terrified.” For when he had spoken of the partridge which cries out and gathers what it did not hatch, he commended the excellence of the city set on a mountain which cannot be hidden, so that the heretic should not separate a man from the Catholic Church, saying: “But the seat of glory is exalted, our sanctification.” Then, as though it came into his mind, “What then shall we do about so many wicked people, who are mixed in everywhere all the more as the glory of Christ is more eminent in the unity of all nations?”, he at once added: “The patience of Israel, Lord.” For what he said must be borne patiently: “Let both grow until the harvest,” and the good must not be forsaken through impatience in tolerating the wicked; for the good are properly the body of Christ, and therefore when they are forsaken, he is forsaken. Hence he went on and added: “Let all who forsake you be terrified; let those who have withdrawn be confounded on the earth.” For “earth” is a man who presumes on himself and induces others to presume on him; and therefore there follows: “They shall be overthrown, because they have forsaken the fountain of life, the Lord.” For what else does the partridge cry, but that the fountain of life is with it and given by it, gathered to which they withdraw from Christ, deceived by the promise of Christ, in whose name they were already instructed? For it does not gather those whom it hatched, but, to gather those whom it did not hatch, it says: “The salvation which Christ promised is with me; I will give it.” But see what the prophet says: “Heal me, Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved.” Hence the apostle says, “Let no one glory in man,” and the prophet adds: “For you are my glory.” In these ways we instruct a man from apostolic and prophetic teaching, so that he may be built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

But how would Faustus persuade a Gentile of the divinity of Christ, when he has him say, “I believe neither the prophets about Christ nor Christ about the prophets”? Would he believe Christ speaking about himself, when he would not believe him testifying about others? It is truly ridiculous to think so. For one whom he did not once judge worthy of belief, he would either believe in nothing at all, or would rather believe him testifying for others than for himself. Here perhaps Faustus, laughed at, would read the man the Sibyls and Orpheus and the rest of that kind, if he found any other Gentiles who had foretold anything about Christ? But he would not do so; for he has confessed that they are unknown to him, saying: “Certainly, if there are, as report has it, any predictions about Christ by the Sibyl, or by Hermes whom they call Trismegistus, or by Orpheus and other seers among the Gentiles.” Not knowing their writings, then, since he thinks there are some such only by report, he would certainly not read them to the man who says, “I believe neither the prophets nor Christ.” What then would he do? Would he bring forward Mani and commend Christ from him? They have never done this; rather they have always tried to commend Mani from Christ, whose name is now sweetly renowned everywhere, so as to smear the lips of their poisoned cup with this honey, of course. For since Christ promised his own that he would send the Paraclete, that is, the Comforter or Advocate, the Spirit of truth, they take the occasion of this promise and, saying that this Paraclete is Mani, or is in Mani, they creep into the minds of men who do not know when the one promised by Christ was sent. But those who have read the canonical book entitled the Acts of the Apostles see that promise of Christ recalled there again and there most plainly fulfilled. But we are now asking how he would make the Gentile believe about Christ. For I think no one is so blind as to want to say, “I believe Mani,” while he says, “I do not believe Christ.” And then, if not laughing, at least angry, he would say: “So you bid me believe Persian books, after telling me not to believe Hebrew ones?” How then, heretic, will you catch this man, unless you find him already in some way subject to the name of Christ, so that, since he no longer doubts that Christ is to be believed, he may be deceived and agree with Mani as a better preacher of Christ? See, there is that partridge gathering what it did not hatch. Do you, whom it gathers, not yet forsake it, and does he not yet appear to you a fool, who says that the testimonies of the Hebrews, even if true, are useless to us before faith and superfluous after faith?

Let those who have believed, then, throw away all the books through which it came about that they believed. For if this is true, I do not see why even the gospel of Christ itself should be read by the faithful. For before faith it is useless, since that Gentile whom Faustus brings in laughing, Faustus himself to be laughed at or rather wept over, does not believe Christ; and after faith it is superfluous, if even true proclamations about Christ are believed needlessly once one has believed in him. Here perhaps you will say: “But one who already believes ought to read the gospel, so as not to forget what he believed.” In the same way then, madmen, he ought to read the true testimonies of the prophets too, so as not to forget why he believed; for if he forgets that, what he believed cannot be firm in him. Or else throw away now the books of Mani, on whose testimony you believed that the light fought with the darkness, which light was God himself, and that, so that the light might bind the darkness, the light was first devoured and bound and defiled and torn by the darkness; which light you, by eating, restore and release and purify and heal, so that your reward may be paid you, that you may not be condemned in the eternal globe along with that part which could not be freed. This little fable you sing daily in your morals and your words. Why do you still look for the testimony of books in its favour, so that another's substance, and that of your bound god, is spent and held fast in superfluous things and in the making of your manuscripts? Burn all those parchments and the elegant bindings made of fine leathers, so that no superfluous thing may burden you, and your god, who is held bound even in a book as if in a servile punishment, may be released from them. For if you could eat your books, even boiled, what a benefit you would bestow on the members of your god! Or, if it could be done, would the uncleanness of flesh forbid the pages from your meals? Then let the cleanness of the ink blame itself, for sticking to the lambskin. But you did this too, who, as in your first war, fixed what was clean in the pen to the uncleanness of the parchments by writing; except that the colours accuse you with the contrary evidence: for it is rather you who came with the darkness of the ink to the light of white pages. Ought you to be angry with us for saying such things, or with yourselves for believing such things, so that, whether you will or not, these consequences follow? We, however, read the prophetic and apostolic books, which sing in harmony with each other's voices, to remind us of our faith, to comfort our hope, and to encourage our love; and by that harmony, as by a heavenly trumpet, they rouse us from the torpor of mortal life and stretch us toward the prize of the upward call. For when the apostle had recalled something from the prophetic books, as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me,” he at once added the usefulness of divine reading: “For whatever was written before,” he says, “was written for our instruction, so that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures we might have hope in God.” But Faustus contradicts this. Then let what Paul says happen to him: “If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what you received, let him be anathema.”

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept Moses?” Because of the love and devotion with which we worship Christ. For who is so irreligious as to look gladly on one who has cursed his father? So we too, although Moses never spared anything human or divine in his blasphemy, execrate him all the more for this: that he assailed Christ the Son of God, who for our salvation hung on the tree, with the dreadful abuse of a curse; whether willingly or by chance, you must decide. For by neither will he be so excused as to deserve to be accepted as commended. For he says that everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed. Do you want me, then, to accept this man, to believe this man, when, if he was inspired, it is plain that he cursed Christ knowingly and willingly, and if he cursed him unwillingly and unknowingly, it is plain that he was not inspired? Choose, then, which you will: either that Moses was not a prophet and sinned through lack of foresight, so that while cursing others, as was his habit, he unknowingly blasphemed God too; or that he was indeed inspired and not ignorant of these things to come, but, grudging our salvation, which was to come from the tree, poured out the venom of his cursing mouth on its author. And who then would believe that this man saw or knew the Father, who so tore the Son? That he could foretell the coming of the Son, who did not know the outcome of his ascension? To this is added what I also consider, how widely this abuse is spread and how much it takes in and violates, so that it touches all the righteous and the martyrs too, as many as have ended their lives by a similar death, such as Peter and Andrew and the rest of the same lot. Unless Moses had either not known them, as being no prophet, or hated them, as being malicious if he was a prophet, he would not have torn them with the insult of so cruel a curse. For he does not even say that they are cursed in the common opinion, that is, merely among men, but cursed by God. And if so, what hope of blessing will be left either to Christ or to the apostles or to us ourselves, should it befall us to be crucified for his name's sake? Finally, how lacking in foresight he was, and empty of divine inspiration, that he could not consider that men are hanged on a tree for different reasons: some for a wicked crime, but some for righteousness' sake and for God. And for that reason he threw all together, without any distinction, under the same curse, when he should have said, if he had had any foresight, not to say divination, and if the cross had so offended him that it alone of every kind of punishment was singled out and rejected: “Cursed is every criminal and impious man who has hung on a tree,” so that there might be some distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous. Although even so he would not have spoken the truth, since Christ brought a robber from the tree with him into the paradise of his Father. Where, then, is “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”? Or was Barabbas, that notable robber, who not only was not hanged on a tree but was even released from prison at the request of the Jews, more blessed than the one who ascended with Christ from the cross into heaven? What more? He also calls him cursed who worships the sun or the moon. If, then, placed under a Gentile king, I am compelled to worship the sun, and, when I resist for fear of this curse, am ordered to be crucified, I shall run into his other curse, which he brought out against the one who hangs on a tree. Or is he in the habit of cursing all good people? We, for our part, ought to value his curses as much as those of angry old women. For in the same way he pursues all God's boys and virgins with an equal curse, saying: “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel.” This abuse likewise touches Jesus first of all, who, though himself born, as you say, of the Jews, yet raised up no offspring among them to preserve a posterity; and then his disciples, some of whom he separated from their wives, finding them married, and some of whom he forbade to marry, finding them untouched. For this reason you will understand that we rightly execrate this unpunished tongue of Moses, aiming darts of curses at Christ, the light, holiness, everything divine. Or if perhaps you think there is a great difference between one hanged and one crucified (for you are accustomed to take this up too as a safeguard for your defence), hear Paul ruling out these inventions of yours: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, because it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

Augustine replied: Faustus, devout man, grieves that Christ is cursed by Moses, and hates Moses for this because he loves Christ. Meanwhile, before I disclose how great a sacrament lies in the words, and how devoutly it was said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” I ask these devout men why they are angry with Moses, since his curse did not reach their Christ. For if Christ hung on a tree, he was certainly fixed with nails; which is why after the resurrection he showed the very scars to a disciple slow to believe. And if so, he certainly had a body capable of wounds and mortal, which these men will not admit. If, then, those wounds and those scars were false, it is false too that he hung on a tree. So that curse could not reach him; there is no reason for them to be angry with the one from whose mouth it came. So if they pretend to be angry with one who has cursed a false death of Christ, speaking on their own premises, how much more are they to be shunned, who do not curse Christ but, what is more execrable, accuse him? For if one who brings a curse on mortality is to be rejected, how much more is one to be detested who charges the truth with deceit? But now let us see, taking the occasion from the slanders of the heretics, how that sacrament is to be explained to the faithful.

Man's death comes from the punishment of sin; hence it is also itself called sin, not because a man sins when he dies, but because it came about from sin that he dies. In the same way “tongue” is said properly in one sense of the flesh that moves within the teeth under the palate, and in another sense of what is done by the tongue; in this sense one speaks of one tongue being Greek, another Latin. And “hand” is said in one sense properly of the very member of the body which we move to work, and in another sense of the writing that is done by the hand. For we say, “His hand has been produced,” “His hand has been read against him,” “I have your hand,” “Take back your hand.” Properly, of course, the hand is a member of a man; but I do not suppose that writing is a member of a man; and yet it is called a hand, because it is made by the hand. So too not only the evil act itself, which deserves punishment, is called sin, but also death itself, which came about through sin. That sin, then, by which he would be liable to death, Christ did not commit; but that other, that is death, which was inflicted on human nature through sin, he took on for us. This hung on the tree; this was cursed through Moses; there death was condemned, so that it might not reign, and cursed, so that it might perish. Therefore through such a sin of Christ our sin too was condemned, so that we might be set free and not remain condemned with sin reigning.

Why then does Faustus marvel that sin is cursed, that death is cursed, that the mortality of the flesh is cursed, which was in Christ without sin, yet came about from man's sin even in Christ? For he took his body from Adam, since the virgin Mary, who bore Christ, was from Adam. And God had said in paradise: “On the day you touch it, you shall die by death.” This is the curse that hung on the tree. Let him deny that Christ was cursed who denies also that he died; but let him who confesses that he died, and cannot deny that death comes from sin and for this reason is itself also called sin, hear the apostle saying: “For our old man was crucified together with him,” and let him understand whom Moses called cursed. And so the apostle says without fear of Christ, “He was made a curse for us,” just as he was not afraid to say, “He died for all.” For “he died” is the same as “he was cursed,” since death itself comes from the curse, and every sin is cursed, whether the sin itself that is done so that punishment follows, or the punishment itself, which in another sense is called sin because it comes from sin. Christ, however, took on our punishment without guilt, so that by it he might dissolve our guilt and also end our punishment.

I might be saying this from my own ingenuity, were it not that the apostle presses it home so often, both to wake the sleeping and to choke the slanderers. “God sent his Son,” he says, “in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” That flesh, then, was not sinful flesh, because it had not come into Mary through a male by inheritance of mortality; but yet, because death is from sin, and that flesh, though from a virgin, was mortal, by the very fact that it was mortal it had the likeness of sinful flesh. This he even calls sin, saying in what follows: “so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” Again, in another place he says: “Him who knew no sin he made sin for us, so that we might be the righteousness of God in him.” Why then should Moses be afraid to say “curse” of what Paul was not afraid to call “sin”? Plainly the prophet must both have foreseen and foretold this, prepared to be blamed by heretics along with the apostle. For whoever blames the prophet for saying “curse” is compelled to blame the apostle for saying “sin”; for certainly a curse is the companion of sin.

Nor is the offence greater because he added “by God,” so as to say: “Cursed by God is everyone who has hung on a tree.” For if God did not hate sin and our death, he would not send his Son to take it on and destroy it. What wonder, then, if what God hates is cursed by God? For he gives us immortality, which is to come when Christ comes, all the more gladly as he more mercifully hates our death, which hung on the tree when Christ died. And as for the addition of “everyone,” so that it was said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” Moses certainly did not fail to foresee that righteous men too would be on the cross; rather he foresaw well that heretics would deny the Lord's true death, and therefore would wish to separate Christ from this curse so as to separate him also from the truth of death. For if that death was not true, no curse hung on the tree with Christ crucified, since he was not truly crucified either. But against heretics far in the future, see how from far off Moses cries out to you who are displeased by the truth of Christ's death: “You are evading in vain. Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”; not this one or that, but absolutely everyone! Even the Son of God? Yes, absolutely. For this is what you do not want; this is why you busy yourselves, this is why you lead astray. For he displeases you as cursed for us, because he displeases you as dead for us; for he would be outside the curse of that Adam, if he were outside his death. But since he took on death from man and for man, he did not disdain to take on from him and for him the curse too that accompanies death; even he, yes, even he the Son of God, ever living in his own righteousness, but dead for our offences in the flesh taken on from our punishment. So also he is ever blessed in his own righteousness, but cursed for our offences in the death taken on from our punishment. And for this reason “everyone” was added, so that it should not be said that Christ had no part in true death, if he were separated by foolish reverence from the curse that is joined to death.

But whoever believes from the truth of the gospel understands that it is no more an insult to Christ from the mouth of Moses, when he called him cursed, not from the divinity of his majesty but from the condition of our punishment, in which he was hanged on the tree, than it is praise of Christ from the mouth of the Manichaeans, when they deny that he had mortal flesh in which to suffer a true death. For in that prophetic curse one understands praise of humility, while in this heretical so-called honour he is charged with the crime of falsehood. If, then, you deny that he was cursed, deny that he died; if you deny that he died, you are fighting no longer against Moses but against the apostles. But if you confess that he died, confess that he took on the punishment of our sin without our sin. Now when you hear “the punishment of sin,” believe that it comes either from blessing or from curse. If the punishment of sin comes from blessing, wish to be always in the punishment of sin; but if you wish to be freed from it, believe that it came from the curse, by the justice of the divine sentence. Confess, then, that he took on the curse for us whom you confess to have died for us; and that Moses meant nothing else when he said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” but “Mortal is everyone and dying is everyone who has hung on a tree.” For he could have said, “Cursed is everyone who is mortal,” or “Cursed is everyone dying”; but this is what the prophet asserts, because he knew that Christ's death would hang on the cross, and that there would be heretics who would say: “He hung on the tree indeed, but in a kind of appearance, not so as truly to die.” By crying out “cursed,” then, he cried out nothing else than that he truly died, knowing that the death of sinful man, which he himself took on without sin, comes from that curse in which it was said: “If you touch it, you shall die by death.” To this also belongs that serpent hanged on a tree, by which it was signified that Christ did not feign a false death, but hung on the tree of his passion that true death into which the serpent cast man by evil persuasion. This true death these men will not look at, and therefore they are not healed of the serpent's venom, as in the desert all who looked at that serpent were healed.

And so we admit that the unlearned say that being fixed to a tree is one thing and hanging on a tree another. For some think that this question should be solved by saying that Moses cursed Judas, who hanged himself with a noose; as if they first knew whether he hanged himself from a tree or from a stone. But it is true, as Faustus also mentioned, that the apostle does not allow it to be understood as foretold of anyone but Christ. But such lack of learning in some Catholics is the Manichaeans' hunting ground; for such people they usually pursue, such they entangle in their deceits. As such we had fallen among them, as such we had stuck fast, as such we were rescued, not by our own strength but by the mercy of God.

But what divine things did Moses assail, as Faustus charges when he says that he never spared anything human or divine? For he said it and went off: he took no trouble to prove it, he did not care to show it. But we know that Moses devoutly praised all things truly divine and justly governed human things as suited his time and his stewardship. Let them demand that I teach this, when they too have tried to teach what Faustus alleges; he did it cautiously, sharp as he was, but incautiously in this, that he was killing himself with his own sharpness. For a heart sharp for the truth is happy, sharp against the truth unhappy. He did not say, “He never spared any man or any god,” but “anything human,” he says, “or divine.” For if he had said that he did not spare God, he would easily have been convicted of a false charge, since Moses is found everywhere honouring and proclaiming the true God who made heaven and earth. And if he had said that he spared none of the gods, he would have betrayed to Christians that he worships those gods from whose worship Moses forbids; and so he would not gather what he did not hatch, the chicks fleeing under the wings of their Catholic mother. So to lay snares for little ones he said that Moses spared nothing divine, so that Christians would not flee from these men's impiety by an open worship of gods, too abhorrent from the Christian religion, and so that pagans, who knew that Moses had said many true and fitting things against idols and against the gods of the Gentiles, which are demons, would favour them against us.

And if this displeases them, let them openly confess that they are worshippers of idols or demons; which indeed they would be unknowingly, by the very fact alone that they were heretics. For of such the apostle said: “In the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, to doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars.” For who but demons, to whom deceit is dear, would persuade these men that Christ suffered deceitfully, died deceitfully, showed his scars deceitfully, that is, did not truly suffer nor truly die, nor were those true scars from true wounds? What doctrines of lying demons are more evident than these, by which men are persuaded that the Son of God, that is, truth itself, is a liar? But these men have in their doctrine an open worship, not indeed of demons, but still of the creature, which the apostle condemns, saying: “And they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”

So these men unknowingly worship idols and demons in the phantoms of their fables; but in the sun and moon they know that they serve the creature. And in thinking that they also serve the Creator, they are much deceived; for they serve their own phantom, and in no way serve the Creator, since they deny that God created what the apostle plainly shows to belong to God's creation, when he says, speaking of foods and meats: “For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.” See what sound doctrine is, which you could not bear and so turned to fables. Just as the apostle both praises God's creation and yet forbids that religious worship be shown to it, so too Moses, who seems to you to have spared nothing divine (for no other reason, I suspect, than that he forbade the worship of the sun and moon, toward whose course you turn into every corner to worship them), praised the sun and moon with true praise, when he told, as it is, that they were made by God and set in the heavenly order to perform their works: the sun to rule the day, the moon to rule the night. But the sun and moon do not rejoice in your false praises. The devil, the transgressing creature, knows how to rejoice in false praise. But the powers of heaven which did not fall through sin want their Maker to be praised in them; and that is their true praise, by which no wrong is done to their Creator. But wrong is done when it is said that they are his parts, or his members, or something of his substance. For he, perfect and in need of nothing, never flowing away, neither divided nor stretched out through places, whole in himself, unchangeable and sufficient for himself, blessed in himself, because of the abundance of his goodness spoke through his Word and they were made; he commanded, and they were created. So if earthly bodies, of which the apostle was speaking when he said that no food is unclean, are good because every creature of God is good, how much more the heavenly ones, in which the sun and moon excel, since the same apostle says: “Heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; but the glory of the heavenly is one, and that of the earthly another.”

So Moses does not abuse the sun and moon when he forbids them to be worshipped; rather he praises them as heavenly creatures, but praises God as the Creator of heavenly and earthly things, and does not want God to be offended when those are worshipped in place of him who are praised because of him and as coming from him. But how cleverly Faustus thought he was finding fault, because Moses also calls cursed whoever worships the sun and moon! “If, then,” he says, “placed under a Gentile king, I am compelled to worship the sun, and, when I resist for fear of this curse, am ordered to be crucified, I shall run into his other curse, which he brought out against the one who hangs on a tree.” No Gentile king compels you to worship the sun. Nor would the sun itself compel it, if it reigned on earth, since even now it does not want this done by you; but just as the Creator himself bears with his impious blasphemers until the judgment, so the heavenly bodies too tolerate their foolish worshippers until the judgment of their Creator. Yet remember that a Christian king cannot compel the sun to be worshipped. For Faustus gave the example of a Gentile king, knowing surely that what you do when you worship the sun belongs to the Gentiles. This, then, is not Christian; but everywhere now the partridge puts forward the name of Christ, so as to gather what it did not hatch. Yet see how easily the truth answers, and how easily sound doctrine breaks this snare of your question, which seems inescapable and two-headed. See, let us suppose that someone armed with royal power threatens a Christian man that, if he will not worship the sun, he shall be hanged on a tree. “If I avoid,” you say, “the curse which the law brought out against the worshipper of the sun, I shall fall into the one which the same law brought out against him who has hung on a tree.” So indeed you would be troubled; but you, no, not even you, since you worship the sun with no one compelling you. But the Christian, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, attends to each cause and each curse, and sees that one belongs to the mortal body, which is hanged on a tree, the other to the mind, by which the sun is worshipped. For even if the body bows in worshipping, the mind either reveres what it worships or pretends to; and both are ruinous. Therefore, since death earned the curse in both, as hanging on a tree is the death of the body, so worshipping the sun is the death of the mind. The curse in the death of the body is therefore to be chosen, from which curse the body itself will be freed in the resurrection; but the curse in the death of the soul is to be avoided, so that it may not be condemned with its body in eternal fire. For the Lord solved this question for us when he said: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; but fear him who has power to kill both soul and body in the gehenna of fire”; as if he said: Do not fear the curse of bodily death, which is undone in time, but fear the curse of spiritual death, through which the soul is tormented for ever with its body. See, it is not an old woman's cursing but a prophetic prediction: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” For thus Christ will take away curse by curse, as death by death, sin by sin. So Moses did not blaspheme by saying, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” any more than the apostles blasphemed by teaching: “He died,” and: “Our old man was crucified with him,” and: “From sin he condemned sin,” and: “Him who knew no sin he made sin for us,” and many things of this kind. But you, when you shudder at Christ cursed, admit that you shudder at Christ's death. In this appears not an old woman's cursing on your part but a devilish pretence, since by the death of your soul you do not believe the death of Christ's body; yet you urge that this death of Christ was not true but feigned, as if you did not dare to deceive men through the Christian name unless you made Christ himself a teacher of deceit.

As for Moses seeming to Faustus to be hostile to continence and virginity because he said, “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel,” let them read Isaiah crying: “Thus says the Lord to all the eunuchs: Those who keep my commandments and choose what I will, and hold fast my covenant, I will give them in my house and within my wall a named place, better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name, and it shall not fail them.” Or if they think Isaiah contrary to Moses, let him please them here, if the other displeases; that is no small thing against these men. For us it is enough to know that the one God spoke both through Moses and through Isaiah; and that everyone is cursed who has not raised up seed in Israel, whether then, when, for the propagation of a people according to the flesh, the work even of fleshly offspring in conjugal chastity belonged to a citizen's duty, or now, so that no one born spiritually should think that it ought to suffice for himself, and should not press on with the Lord's gains, by which each, according to his small measure, ought to beget Christians by preaching Christ. So that divine sentence takes in the times of both testaments with marvellous brevity: “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel.”

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept the Old Testament?” Because every full vessel does not take in what is poured on top but pours it out, and a full stomach throws back what is forced into it. So the Jews too, filled with the Old Testament because Moses had got there first, spat out the New; and we, filled with the New because Christ had come first, spit out the Old. You accept both because you are full in neither, but half full; and in you the one is not so much filled up by the other as spoiled, because half-filled vessels are never filled with a different substance, but with the same and like itself: wine with wine, honey with honey, vinegar with vinegar. If you pour on top things unlike them and not of their kind, such as gall on honey, water on wine, fish sauce on vinegar, this will not be called filling up, but adulteration. This, then, is the reason why we do not much accept the Old Testament. And because our church, the bride of Christ, poorer indeed but married to a rich husband, is content with her husband's goods, she scorns the wealth of lowly lovers; the gifts of the Old Testament and its author are mean in her eyes, and, a most careful guardian of her good name, she accepts no letters but her bridegroom's. Let your church, by all means, lay claim to the Old Testament; like a wanton girl forgetful of modesty, she delights in another man's gifts and letters. That lover of yours, in fact, the corrupter of your modesty, the God of the Hebrews, promises you in his stone tablets gold and silver, a full belly, and the land of the Canaanites. Such sordid gains have delighted you so much that you are pleased to sin after Christ, and to be ungrateful for his immense dowry. These things entice you, so that you are dying of love for the God of the Hebrews after your marriage to Christ. Learn now, then, that you too are deceived and cheated by his false promises. He is poor, he is needy; he cannot even provide what he promises. For if he provides none of the things he pledges to his own wife (I mean the synagogue), though she humours him in everything and serves him more submissively than a maidservant, what will he be able to provide for you, who are strangers to him and refuse the yoke of his commandments with a proud neck? But go on as you have begun: sew raw cloth onto an old garment, entrust new wine to worn-out wineskins, serve two husbands and please neither, and in a word make the Christian faith a hippocentaur, neither a complete horse nor a man. Allow us to serve Christ alone, content with his immortal dowry alone and imitating the apostle, who says: “Our sufficiency is from God, who has proved us fit ministers of the New Testament.” The God of the Hebrews and we are in quite different positions, since he cannot fulfil what he promises and we disdain to accept it. The liberality of Christ has made us proud against his blandishments. And lest you think I have made this comparison unfittingly, Paul first applied this likeness of marriage discipline to us, saying: “The woman who is under a husband is bound by the law of the husband while he lives; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of the husband. So while her husband lives,” he says, “she will be called an adulteress if she is joined to another man; but if her husband dies, she will not be an adulteress if joined to another.” By this he shows that those commit adultery in spirit who join themselves to Christ without first divorcing the author of the law and in some way counting him among the dead. This saying looks chiefly to those who believed from among the Jews, namely that they should forget their former superstition. But what need have we even of this precept, we who, converted to Christ from paganism, must regard the God of the Hebrews not as dead but as never even born? Certainly, to a Jew who believes, Adonai must seem dead; to a Gentile, his idol; and to each, whatever he worshipped before he knew Christ. For if, after divorcing idolatry, someone worships the God of the Hebrews and Christ alike, he differs in no way in worn-out modesty from a woman who after the death of one husband has married two.

Augustine replied: Listen to this, you whose hearts Christ possesses, and see whether you can bear it, except that he himself is your patience. Faustus, full of new honey, spits out the old vinegar; and Paul, full of old vinegar, poured out half of it to take in the new honey poured in, not to keep it but to spoil it. For you see that when the apostle says, “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,” that comes from the new honey; but what follows, “which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures concerning his Son, who was made for him from the seed of David according to the flesh,” comes from the old vinegar. Who could bear to hear this, unless the same apostle consoled us, saying: “There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you”? But what need is there to repeat what was already said sufficiently above? For that the new patch and the old garment, the new wine and the old wineskins, signify not the two testaments but two lives and two hopes, and that the likeness given by the Lord for understanding the two testaments is rather: “Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of God is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old,” let anyone who can recall it from what we said earlier, or at least let anyone who wishes look it up again. For if someone thinks he should have two hopes, so as to serve God both for earthly happiness and for the kingdom of heaven, the one cannot hold the other; and when this one is disturbed by some tribulation, the man will fail and lose that one too. Hence also the saying, “No one can serve two masters,” which he explained by saying, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” But the Old Testament, for those who understand it rightly, is a prophecy of the New Testament. And so in that first people too, the holy patriarchs and prophets, who understood what they were doing or what was being done through them, had in the New Testament this hope of eternal salvation; for they belonged to what they understood and loved, since, though it was not yet revealed, it was already prefigured. But those belonged to the Old who desired nothing more there than the temporal promises they thought of, and did not understand the eternal things prefigured and prophesied in them. But this has already been said more than enough in our earlier replies.

But it is a marvellous shamelessness when the sacrilegious and unclean society of the Manichaeans does not hesitate even to boast that it is the chaste bride of Christ. What does it gain by this against the truly chaste members of the holy church, except that there comes to mind against such people that apostolic warning: “I have betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, so your minds too may be corrupted from the chastity that is in Christ”? For what are these men doing, preaching to us a gospel other than what we received, but trying to corrupt us from the chastity we keep for Christ, when they blame the law of God under the name of oldness and praise their own error under the name of newness? As if all oldness were to be shunned and all newness sought, when the apostle John sets the old commandment in a place of praise and the apostle Paul commands us to avoid profane novelties of words. To you, then, true bride of the true Christ, Catholic Church, I too will speak according to my small measure, such son and servant of yours as I am, placed in you to dispense food to my fellow servants: beware always, as you do beware, of the impious vanity of the Manichaeans, already tested by the danger of your own and proved by their deliverance. That error once shook me out of your bosom; having tried it, I fled from what I ought not to have tried. But let even my dangers profit you, whom my deliverance now serves; for had not your true and truthful bridegroom, from whose side you were made, set the remission of sins in his true blood for me, the whirlpool of deceit would have swallowed me, and the serpent would have devoured me past repair, made earth as I was. Do not be deceived by the name of truth; you alone have it, both in your milk and in your bread; in that society there is only its name, not the thing itself. You are secure indeed in your grown ones; but I appeal to the little ones in you, my brothers, sons, lords, whom you cherish like eggs under anxious wings or nourish like infants with milk, a virgin mother fruitful without corruption. I appeal to these tender offspring of yours, that they may not be led away from you by chattering curiosity, but rather pronounce anathema on anyone who preaches to them a gospel other than what they received in you, and not abandon the true and truthful Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and the great abundance of his sweetness, which he has hidden for those who fear him and perfected for those who hope in him. How can the words of a truthful man be there, in the preacher of a deceitful Christ? Despise their insults, for you are well aware that in the gifts of your bridegroom you have loved the promise of eternal life, that is, your bridegroom himself, since he himself is eternal life.

But you have not been led astray, as those men foolishly say, to a strange god promising a full belly and the land of the Canaanites. For you understand that in those very promises you yourself were already then prefigured and prophesied, and that the foreknowledge of the saints was in labour with you. Nor should you be moved by the stone tablets, blamed with pitiful wit, for you do not have a heart of stone, which those tablets signified in the former people. For you are a letter of the apostles, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart. At these words those empty men rejoice, thinking that the apostle blamed the dispensation of the Old Testament fitted to that time, not understanding that he said this from the prophet. For these words, which they embrace ignorantly, were foretold long before they were spoken and fulfilled through the apostles by the prophets, whom they reject. For the prophet had said: “I will take away from them the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” Let them see whether this is not “not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart.” For neither the “heart of flesh” there nor the “fleshly tablets” here mean that we should think in a fleshly way; but because, compared with stone, which has no sense, flesh has feeling, the lack of feeling in stone signifies a heart without understanding, and the feeling of flesh signifies an understanding heart. You should rather laugh at these men, who say that earth and trees and stones have sense and live a more intelligent life, but flesh a duller and blunter one. Hence they are compelled, not by the truth but by their own vanity, to admit that the law written on stone tablets is cleaner than their treasure on the skins of dead animals. Or perhaps, because in their little fable they say that stones are the bones of the princes, they do not hesitate to prefer lambskins to them? Then surely that ark of the covenant covered the stone tablets more cleanly than the goatskin covers these men's books. Laugh at these things mercifully, so as to commend them to them as things to be laughed at and fled from. For in those stone tablets, do you not now understand, with no heart of stone, what suited that hard people? And yet in them you recognize the rock, your bridegroom himself, him of whom Peter speaks: the living stone rejected by men, but chosen and honoured by God. To them, then, he was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence; but to you, the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. Peter the apostle explains all this and recalls that all of it was foretold by the prophets, from whom these condemned men are estranged. Read those tablets too, by all means; do not fear: they are plainly your bridegroom's. To others that stone signified hard dullness, but to you firm stability. Those tablets were written by the finger of God; by the finger of God your bridegroom cast out demons; by the finger of God do you drive out the doctrines of lying demons who sear the conscience. From these tablets you repel the adulterer who calls himself the Paraclete, to seduce you with a holy name. For those tablets were given on the fiftieth day after the Passover; and on the fiftieth day after the passion of your bridegroom, which that Passover prefigured, the finger of God was given, the Holy Spirit, the promised Paraclete. Do not dread, then, the tablets by which things were sent to you long ago in writing which you would now recognize; only do not be under the law, so as not to fulfil it out of fear, but under grace, so that love may be in you the fulfilment of the law. For the friend of your bridegroom was reviewing no other tablets when he said: “For you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not covet; and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this word: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Love of neighbour works no evil; and love is the fulfilment of the law.” For there are the two commandments, of love of God and love of neighbour, set out one on each tablet. So he who at his coming commended to you these two commandments, on which the whole law hangs and the prophets, sent those tablets ahead. In the first commandment is the chastity of your marriage, in the second the unity of your members: by the one you embrace the Godhead, by the other you gather fellowship. These two commandments are themselves the ten: three belong to God and seven to the neighbour. O chaste tablets, in which, in an old figure, your lover and beloved foretold to you the new song, on the ten-stringed psaltery, as though he would stretch out his own sinews for you on the tree, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh and the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in you! O marriage tablets, which not without cause the adulteress hates!

Now my words are addressed to you, deceitful Manichaean congregation, wrapped in deceits. Do you, married to so many elements, or rather a harlot prostituted to demons and made pregnant with sacrilegious vanities, dare to tear the Catholic marriage of your Lord with a charge of unchastity? Show us your adulterers, the Splenditenens who holds the balance and Atlas the porter. For you say that the one holds the heads of the elements and suspends the world, and that the other, with knee bent and strong shoulders, carries such a mass from beneath, no doubt so that the first does not give way. Where are they? If they really existed, when would they come to you, busy with such a task? When would they come in to you, so that you, made dainty by your idle bread, might rub with your caressing hand the fingers of the one and the shoulders of the other after so much labour? But evil demons deceive you, who commit fornication with you, so that you conceive lies and give birth to phantoms. Why then would you not spit out the tablets of the true God, enemy to your parchments, by which you have come to love so many false gods with a mind wandering through the fictions of your thoughts? Compared with these, all the lies of the poets will be found more serious and more decent; at least in this, that among the poets the very profession of falsehood deceives no one, while in your books so great a crowd of deceits corrupts with wretched errors souls childish even in old men, enticed by the name of truth, when, with itching ears, as the apostle says, and turning their hearing away from the truth, they turn aside to fables. How then could you bear the sound doctrine of those tablets, where the first commandment is: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one God,” when you wallow wholly in the fornication of a most shameful heart, delighted with the names of gods? Do you not remember your love song, where you describe the supreme reigning king, the everlasting sceptre-bearer, wreathed with crowns of flowers and with a ruddy face? If you loved him alone, such as he is, you ought to blush; for even one husband wreathed with crowns of flowers would displease a chaste wife. Nor can you say that this was said or shown thus with some mystical meaning, since Mani is usually praised by you above all for no other reason than that he removed the coverings of figures and spoke the truth to you naked and literal. Literally, then, you sing of God as a sceptre-bearing king crowned with flowers. Let him at least put down the sceptre when he is wreathed with crowns of flowers; that soft luxury does not befit the severity of the royal rod. Besides, he is not the only one you love; for you go on in your song and add twelve aeons clothed with flowers, full of songs and throwing their flowers in the Father's face. There you also profess these twelve to be certain great gods, three in each of the four regions by which that one is surrounded. How you make him immeasurable, when you say he is so surrounded, you have never been able to find out. You add also countless dwellers in the kingdom and troops of gods and cohorts of angels, all of whom you say God did not create but begot from his own substance.

So you are convicted of worshipping countless gods, since you cannot bear the sound doctrine by which it is taught that there is one Son born of the one God, and the Holy Spirit of both; and yet it is not right to call them not only countless gods but even three gods, for they have not only one and the same substance but also one and the same working through that one and the same proper substance, while through the bodily creation there is also a showing of each. You do not understand this, you do not grasp it; I know, you are full, you are drunk, you are gorged with fabulous sacrilege. Digest at last what you belch out, and stop overwhelming yourself with such things; meanwhile, sing what you sing, and look, if you can, at the disgrace of your fornication. For the doctrine of lying demons has invited you to the fictitious houses of the angels, where a healthful breeze blows, and to fields where spices abound, whose trees and mountains, seas and rivers flow with sweet nectar through all ages. And you have believed and fashioned these things in your heart, where you are tossed about, wanton and dissolute, with empty recollections. For when some such things are said of the ineffable abundance of spiritual delights, they are certainly said in an enigma, so that the mind exercised by them may know that there is something else to be sought and understood there: whether something of this kind is shown to the bodily senses in bodily reality, such as the fire in the bush, the serpent from the rod and the rod from the serpent, the Lord's tunic not divided by his persecutors, the anointing of his feet or his head by a woman's devotion, and the branches of the crowd going before and following his donkey; or whether things are shown figuratively in the spirit through images of bodies, either in a dream or in ecstasy, such as Jacob's ladder, the stone cut out without hands and grown into a mountain shown to Daniel, the sheet shown to Peter, and so many things to John; or whether they are figured in the same way by speech alone, such as the Song of Songs, and the householder in the gospel who made a wedding for his son, and “A certain man had two sons,” the thrifty one and the prodigal, and “A certain man planted a vineyard and let it out to farmers.” But you praise Mani especially for this, that he came last, not to say such things but rather to unravel them, so that, with the figures of the ancients opened and his own narratives and arguments set out in clear light, he hid himself in no enigma. And you add this as the reason for this presumption: that the ancients, when they saw or did or said figures of this kind, knew that he would come afterwards, through whom all things would be made plain, whereas he, knowing that no one would come after him, wove his statements with no allegorical windings. What then is your affection, soiled with fleshly desires, doing in fields and wooded mountains and crowns of flowers and abounding spices? If they are not enigmas of reason, they are phantoms of thought or the madness of frenzy; but if they are said to be enigmas, why do you not flee the adulterer who promises open truth to entice you, and mocks with fabulous deceit those he has enticed? Do not his ministers, wretched men poisoned by such vanities themselves, usually put on their hook this bait from Paul the apostle, where he says: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when what is perfect has come, what is in part will be taken away,” and: “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face”? As if, that is, the apostle Paul knew in part and prophesied in part, seeing through a mirror and in an enigma, all of which was to be taken away when Mani came and brought what is perfect, where the truth is seen face to face. O wanton, unclean, shameless one, do you still chatter this, still feed the winds, still embrace the idols of your heart? So you have seen face to face the reigning sceptre-bearing king wreathed with crowns of flowers, and the troops of gods, and the great Splenditenens bearing six faces and mouths and flashing with light, and the other king of honour surrounded by armies of angels, and the other, the adamant warrior hero holding a spear in his right hand and a shield in his left, and the other glorious king driving three wheels, of fire, water and wind, and the mighty Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders and propping it with his arms on either side, his knee bent? Have you seen these and a thousand other monsters face to face, or does the doctrine of lying demons sing them to you through the mouths of the deceived without your knowing it? Woe to you, unhappy one! See by what phantoms you are debauched, see what vanities you lick up in place of truth; and, drunk with the serpent's cups, you dare to insult with the stone tablets the matronly modesty of the wife of the only Son of God, because she, no longer under the tutelage of the law but under the teaching of grace, neither proud of works nor broken by terrors, lives by faith and hope and love, made an Israel in whom there is no guile, hearing what is written there: “The Lord your God is one God”; which you did not hear, and so spread your fornication among so many fictitious gods.

How could those tablets not be hostile to you, in which the second commandment is: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” since you have placed in the vanity of deceit even Christ himself, who, for the sake of carnal men who were to be cleansed of carnal vanity, came forth truly, even to fleshly eyes, in the truth of the flesh? How could the third commandment, about the rest of the Sabbath, not be against you, a restless soul tossed by the illusions of so many fictions? When will you grasp, when will you understand, when will you love how these three commandments belong to the love of God? You are immoderate and foul and quarrelsome; you have swollen, you have grown vain, you have become cheap; you have exceeded your measure, disfigured your beauty, disturbed your order. I was such a one among you; I know you. How then can I now teach you that these three commandments belong to the love of God, from whom and through whom and in whom are all things? How can you understand this, when the detestable perversity of your error does not allow you to know and observe even those seven which belong to the love of neighbour, by which the fellowship of human life is held together? Among them the first commandment is: “Honour your father and your mother,” which Paul also mentions as the first commandment with a promise, and himself likewise enjoins. But you have learned from demonic doctrine to regard your parents as enemies, because by intercourse they bound you in the flesh and so, of course, laid unclean fetters on your god. Hence too you so violate the next commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” that you detest in marriage above all the fact that children are begotten; and so you make your hearers, while they take care that the women with whom they have intercourse do not conceive, adulterers even of their wives. For they take them in marriage according to the law of matrimony, with the marriage tablets proclaiming that it is for the begetting of children; and, fearing by your law to defile a particle of their god with the filth of flesh, they have intercourse with the women in an unchaste union only to satisfy lust; and they accept children unwillingly, though for that alone marriages are to be joined. How then do you not forbid marriage, as the apostle foretold of you so long before, when you try to take away from marriage that from which marriage exists? Take it away, and husbands will be shameful lovers, wives harlots, bridal chambers brothels, fathers-in-law pimps. And for this reason you do not keep the commandment “You shall not kill” either, through the perversity of the same error. For while you fear that a member of your god will be bound in flesh, you do not give bread to the hungry; dreading a false homicide here, you commit a true one there. So if you come upon a starving man who may die unless you help him by offering food, you will already be held a murderer either by the law of God, if you do not give, or by the law of Mani, if you do. What then? How will you keep the other commandments of the Decalogue? Will you abstain from theft, so that some man or other devours bread or any food, to be slaughtered in his entrails, rather than that you should, if you can, steal it from him and run to the workshop of your elect's bellies, so that by your theft your god may not fall into a heavier bond, and may be rescued from the one he had fallen into? And then if you are caught in that theft, will you not swear by that very god of yours that you did not take it? For what will such a god do to you, to whom you say: “I swore falsely by you, but for you; unless you wanted me to bring ruin on you while I brought you honour”? So you also despise the commandment of the law, “You shall not bear false witness,” for the sake of your god's members, so as to free them from their fetters not only by false testimony but by a false oath. Now as for what follows, “You shall not covet your neighbour's wife,” this ought to be fulfilled by you, and this one I see that no necessity of your error compels you to violate. But if it is wicked to covet another's wife, consider what it is to offer oneself to others to be coveted, and remember your beautiful gods and beautiful goddesses presenting themselves to be ardently coveted, the gods by the female princes of darkness and the goddesses by the males: so that, when these are aroused to enjoy lust and are burning greedily for their embraces, they may rescue from them that god of yours, fettered everywhere and in need of such shamefulness on the part of his own to be set free. And as for not coveting your neighbour's property, which is the last commandment of the Decalogue, how can you, wretched one? Does not your god himself lyingly tell you that he is fashioning new ages for himself in a foreign land, where after a false victory you may swell with a false triumph? Since you now desire this in mad vanity, and believe that this same land of the race of darkness is joined to your substance by the closest neighbourhood, you certainly covet your neighbour's property. With good reason are the tablets hostile to you, containing such good commandments, so contrary to your error. For those three which belong to the love of God you altogether do not know, altogether do not keep; and these seven, by which human fellowship is not harmed, if you ever keep them, either you are restrained by shame, so as not to be disgraced among men, or broken by fear, so as not to be punished by the public laws, or you shrink from an evil deed out of some good habit, or by the natural law itself you notice how unjustly you would do to another what you do not want done to you by another; yet you feel how your error drives you in the opposite direction, both when you follow it and when you do not, when you either do what you do not want to suffer, or refrain from doing it only because you do not want to suffer it.

But this true bride of Christ, whom you insult with most shameless brow about the stone tablets, understands the difference between the letter and the spirit, which are called in another way law and grace; and serving God no longer in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the spirit, she is no longer under the law but under grace. For she is not blinded by quarrelsomeness, but meekly attends to the apostle's words, so as to understand what he calls the law under which he no longer wants us to be: because it was set down for the sake of transgression until the seed should come to whom the promise was made, and because it came in so that the offence might abound; but where the offence abounded, grace abounded still more. Yet he does not for that reason call the law itself sin because it does not give life without grace; for rather it increases guilt by adding transgression: for where there is no law, there is no transgression either. And so by itself, when it is only the letter without the spirit, that is, law without grace, it only makes men guilty; but he puts to himself what those of less understanding might think, and makes plain what he means when he says: “What then shall we say? Is the law sin? Far from it. But I did not know sin except through the law. For I would not have known desire, had the law not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ So sin, taking occasion through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, become death to me? Far from it. But sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good.” She whom you insult understands this, because she asks with groaning, seeks humbly, knocks meekly; and so she sees that the law is not blamed when it is said, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” just as knowledge is not blamed when it is said, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” For he himself had said, “We know that we all have knowledge,” and then he adds, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Why then did he himself have that by which he might be puffed up, unless because with love knowledge not only does not puff up but even strengthens? So the letter with the spirit and the law with grace are no longer called letter and law in the same way as when, by itself, it kills as the offence abounds. For so the law was also called the power of sin, when it increases sin's harmful pleasure by severe prohibition. Yet even so it is not evil; but sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death through what is good. So many things are harmful to some, although they are not evil. For you too, when your eyes are sore, close your windows even against your god the sun. This bride of Christ, then, is now dead to the law, that is, to sin, which becomes more abundant through the law's prohibition when the law without grace commands but does not help. Dead, then, to such a law, so that she may belong to another, who rose from the dead, she distinguishes these things without wrong to the law, so as not to commit sacrilege against its author. This you do against him whom you do not understand to be the author of good, although you hear the apostle saying: “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.” See, he who seems to you one of the princes of darkness is the author of good. Attend to the truth; it strikes your eyes. See, Paul the apostle says: “The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.” See whose author he is who sent ahead, in the dispensation of a great sacrament, those tablets which you foolishly laugh at. For the same law which was given through Moses became grace and truth through Jesus Christ, when the spirit was joined to the letter, so that the righteousness of the law began to be fulfilled, which when not fulfilled made men guilty even of transgression. For it is not one law that is holy and just and good, and another through which sin works death, to which we must die so as to belong to another, who rose from the dead; it is the very same. See, follow, read: “But sin,” he says, “that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good, so that sin might become beyond measure sinful through the commandment.” Deaf one, blind one, hear, see: “through what is good,” he says, “it worked death in me.” So the law is always good, whether it harms those empty of grace or profits those full of grace; it is always good, as the sun is always good, because every creature of God is good, whether it hurts sore eyes or soothes healthy ones. So what health is to the eyes for seeing the sun, grace is to minds for fulfilling the law. And as healthy eyes do not die to the delight of the sun, but to those harsh strokes of its rays by which, dazzled, they were driven into thicker darkness, so the soul that has been made whole by the love of the Spirit is said to be dead, not to the righteousness of the law, but to that guilt and transgression which the law produced through the letter when grace was lacking. So both things are said of it: “The law is good, if one uses it lawfully,” and what follows: “knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the just man,” because one who delights in righteousness itself has no need of the terrifying letter.

This bride of Christ, rejoicing in the hope of her full salvation, wishes you too a good conversion from fables to the truth, so that you may not, dreading Adonai as if he were an adulterer, remain with the most cunning adulterer, the serpent. For Adonai is a Hebrew word and means “Lord” in the sense in which God alone is called Lord; just as latria, a Greek word, means service, not any service whatever, but that by which God alone is served; just as Amen means “true,” not anywhere and in any way, but in a mystical religious sense. And if you were asked where you too have it from, you will find no source except the Hebrew writings, or what derives from the Hebrew. So the church of Christ does not fear objections about these names; she understands and loves them, and pays no attention to the ignorant mocker; and what she does not yet understand, she believes to be of the same kind as many things she has experienced, which were like this when not yet understood. Let anyone object to her that she has loved Emmanuel: she laughs at that man's ignorance and embraces the truth of this name. Let him object that she has loved the Messiah: she repels the slain adversary and holds to the anointed teacher. So she wishes you too to be healed of vain errors and to be built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. You talk of a hippocentaur without knowing what you are saying, and you do not notice what your own fable has made for you, when it fashions in your heart a false world partly from your god and partly from the land of darkness. Is that not a hippocentaur, half beast and half god? Truly not, for it should not even be called a hippocentaur. But consider what it is, and blush, and grow gentle, so that you may shudder at your corruption by the adulterous serpent. If you did not think his cunning credible in Moses, you ought to have been on your guard against it in Paul, who, wishing to present the true church as a chaste virgin to Christ, says: “I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity and chastity that is in Christ.” Though you heard this, you were still so foolish and so maddened by his poisonous incantations that, while the same serpent has persuaded many other heresies of one thing and another, he has persuaded you that he himself is Christ. Further, if many go astray, entangled by his various and many-shaped deceits, who yet confess this warning of the apostle to be true, how greatly are you adulterated, how far off prostituted, who take for Christ the very one by whom the apostle of Christ cries out that Eve was seduced and corrupted, so as to guard the virgin bride of Christ from him by such a warning? He has darkened your heart, who wallows with you in the phantoms of shining groves. What, where, whence are his faithful promises? O you drunk, but not with wine!

Indeed, with sacrilegious shamelessness you have abused the God of the prophets, saying that he did not provide for the Jews themselves, who served him, what he promised. Yet you did not say what he promised and did not provide, lest you be convicted there of its being either already provided, which you do not understand, or still to come, which you do not believe. What has been promised and presented to you, from which you could have assurance that you will receive the triumphs of new ages over the land of darkness? If you bring forward some prophets in whom we may read the Manichaeans foretold with praise as to come, so that you may think something already provided for you by the very fact that we see you exist, you will first have to prove that Mani himself did not invent the prophets for you, he who wanted you to believe him. For he does not think a lie shameful, nor indeed can he hesitate to show false prophets in sheep's clothing, who, while praising Christ, asserts that he showed false scars on his members. But I read that you were plainly foretold, not only by the prophets, sometimes more obscurely, but also by the apostle more expressly. But see how. “The Spirit,” he says, “says plainly that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars who have their conscience seared, forbidding marriage, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth; because every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.” How this has been fulfilled in you is clearer than light to the eyes of all who know you, and we showed it above as occasion allowed.

But she whom the apostolic teaching, presenting her as a chaste virgin to the one husband, Christ, warns to beware of the serpent's deceit by which you have been corrupted, acknowledges the God of the prophets, the true God, her God. She securely believes his last promise, since she already holds so many of his promises fulfilled; and no one says that the prophets she cites from the manuscripts of the Jews were invented for her for the present time. For what was promised more incredible than what was said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations shall be blessed”? And what do we now hold more certainly provided? That indeed is his last promise, which the prophet briefly records thus: “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you for ever and ever.” For when all need is ended and death, the last enemy, destroyed, the everlasting praise of God will be the occupation of those at rest: to which no one will come any more, from which no one will depart any more. This the prophet records elsewhere thus: “Praise the Lord, Jerusalem; praise your God, Zion; for he has strengthened the bars of your gates; he has blessed your sons within you.” With the gates shut, no one will enter, no one will go out. This the bridegroom himself says in the gospel, that he will not open to the foolish virgins even when they knock. This Jerusalem, the holy church, the bride of Christ, is described more fully and richly in the Apocalypse of John. Let the chaste virgin not believe this prophetic promise, if she does not already hold what was promised her through the same prophecy for this present time: “Hear, daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father's house, for the king has desired your beauty, for he is your God; and the daughters of Tyre shall worship him with gifts; the rich of the people shall entreat your face. All the glory of the king's daughter is within, clothed in golden fringes with varied colours; virgins shall be brought to the king after her, her companions shall be brought to you; in joy and gladness they shall be led into the king's temple. In place of your fathers sons are born to you; you shall make them princes over all the earth; they shall remember your name in every generation and offspring; therefore the peoples shall confess you for ever and for ages of ages.” But you, unhappy one corrupted by the serpent, when do you even try to think what is the beauty of the king's daughter within? For it is chastity of mind, where you were spoiled, so that your eyes were opened to love and worship the sun and moon, as if by the just judgment of God you were estranged from the tree of life, which is eternal and inward wisdom, and called and thought nothing else truth and wisdom but this light, which, drawn in through wrongly opened eyes and swollen to immensity and varied in many ways, you rolled about with an unchaste mind in imaginary pictures. These are your exceedingly abominable fornications. And yet think on them patiently, and “Return to me,” says the Truth. Return to me, and you will be cleansed, restored, if you are confounded in yourself and poured back into me. Hear this; this is what the true Truth says, which neither fought with the race of darkness in deceitful forms nor redeemed you with deceitful blood.

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept Moses, when Christ says: ‘Moses wrote about me,’ and: ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me too’?” For my part, I should like not only Moses to have written about Christ, but all the prophets of the Jews and of the Gentiles as well. For how would this harm our faith, or rather how would it not help it, if we gathered fitting and suitable testimonies to our God from every side? Indeed, even then we should be free, while keeping our hatred and execration of their superstition, to pick out from them only the prophecies about Christ. So it cannot be contrary to me if Moses too, although he is a stranger to Christ, should seem to have written something about Christ. Would anyone not wish to gather a flower from every thorn, grain from every plant, honey from every fly, although we do not use flies or grass for food or thorns for the ornament of a garland? Would anyone not want a pearl to grow in every deep, gems in every land, fruit in every wood? And if eating fish from the sea does no harm, while drinking its water does, and men know how to take what is useful and spit out what is hostile, should we not be free, having condemned the rite of any religion that is useless to us, to accept from it only the prophecies about Christ? Nor would this help the errors in capturing us and reducing us to their own service, since it did not help the unclean spirits, when they openly and without disguise confessed Jesus to be the Son of God, to make them in the least less hateful to us. So if Moses too wrote something about Christ, according to this testimony, I will accept it, yet in such a way that it does not help him at all in taking me captive to his own law, which I see differs in nothing from paganism. Therefore you have no reason whatever to think that, if this were proved, I should not be glad that every spirit has prophesied about Christ.

I shall indeed be unable to thank you enough if, just as you show that Christ testified that Moses wrote about him, you also teach me what the things are that he wrote. For I searched his scriptures, as I was told to do, and found no prophecies about Christ there, whether because there are none or because I myself could not understand them. So, placed in great perplexity, I was driven by reason to one of two conclusions: either to declare this passage false, or Jesus a liar. But it was foreign to devotion to think that God lied. It seemed more right, then, to ascribe falsehood to the writers than a lie to the author of truth. Especially since I heard him also saying that all who came before him were thieves and robbers: a sentence by which I see Moses struck first of all. Besides this, when he was speaking of his majesty and called himself the light of the world, and the Jews protested indignantly, “Because you testify about yourself, your testimony is not true,” I do not see that he went on to say, where the occasion most required it, that Moses had prophesied about him; but, as one really a stranger, having no testimony from their fathers, he answered: “Indeed in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me,” reminding them of what all had heard said from heaven: “This is my most beloved Son; believe him.” Moreover, it does not seem likely to me that the Jews could have kept silent, when Christ said that Moses had written about him, without at once, malicious and cunning as they were, asking what it was that he thought Moses had written about him. But their silence on every side signifies no less that Jesus said nothing of the kind.

So although these points too do not seem small for confirming the suspicion of falsehood about this passage, I am held more by this: that, as I said, I searched all of Moses' writing and found no prophecies about Christ there. Now, however, having found in you a reader of better understanding, I believe I shall gain something, and I confess I shall be grateful, if you do not, out of any ill will, disappoint the hope of progress and instruction which the confidence of your rebuke promises me, but teach me whether there is anything mentioned in the writing of Moses about our God and Lord which perhaps escaped me in reading. And do not, I beg you, say, as the unlearned usually do, that this itself ought to be enough for faith, that Christ said that Moses wrote about him. For I do not want you now to look at me, whom my profession has bound to believe, so that I cannot but believe him whom I follow; but suppose we are dealing with a Jew, suppose with a Gentile. When we tell them, “Moses wrote about Christ,” they will ask for proofs. What shall we offer? Shall we be able to say, “Christ said so,” when they do not yet believe him at all? Surely we shall need to show them what he wrote.

What, then, shall we show? That passage, as you usually do, where his God speaks to Moses, saying: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you”? But neither does the Jew fail to see that this does not concern Christ at all, nor is it to our advantage to believe so, since Christ is not a prophet, nor a prophet like Moses: for the one was a man, the other God; the one a sinner, the other holy; the one born of intercourse, the other, according to you, of a virgin, but according to me not even of a virgin; the one is killed on the mountain, his God being offended, the other suffers of his own will, being most pleasing to the Father. How then will he be a prophet like Moses? Surely the Jew will at once either laugh at us as unlearned or refute us as liars.

Or shall we offer him the passage which you likewise usually bring in: “They shall see their life hanging, and shall not believe”? To which you add “on a tree,” for it does not have that. But it is equally ready to hand to prove that this too has nothing to do with Christ. For among the cruel curses which he brought out against his people, if they fell away from his law, he added this too, saying that they would be in the captivity of their enemies and would think on their end day and night, so that they would have no confidence even in their own life, which the victors had spared them, because it would hang in uncertainty, fearful and always anxious under the threat of swords. So not even this concerns Christ; other passages must be looked for. For I would hardly believe that you think it was said of Christ that everyone is cursed who hangs on a tree, or that other saying, that a prophet or ruler of the people was to be killed who wished to turn them away from their God or to break any of the commandments. That Christ did this I certainly cannot deny. But you, on the other hand, cannot plainly admit that these things were written about him, lest, if so, we begin to ask again in what spirit Moses prophesied, so as either to curse Christ or to order him to be killed. For if he had the Spirit of God, he did not say these things about Christ; if he said these things about Christ, he did not have the Spirit of God. For the divine Spirit would neither curse Christ nor order him to be killed. So, to clear Moses of this charge, you must admit that he did not write even these things about Christ. And if he wrote these things not at all about Christ, either you will give others or there will be none. If there are none, neither could Christ assert what exists nowhere. So, if Christ did not assert it, that passage will be established as false.

But neither is what follows likely: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too”; for the tradition of Moses and that of Christ are very unlike and far apart, so that if the Jews believed one of them they would necessarily resist the other. For Moses teaches above all that one must abstain from all work on the Sabbath, and gives as the reason for this observance that God, when he was making the world and all things in it, gave himself to work for six days and rested on the seventh, which is the Sabbath, and therefore blessed it, that is, sanctified it, as the haven of his rest; and moreover he gave a law that whoever broke it should be killed. This, then, the Jews firmly believed on Moses' teaching, and therefore they thought they should not even lend an ear to Christ, who asserted that God is always working and has set himself no day of rest, because his power is continual and tireless; and that he himself therefore ought never to cease, not even on Sabbaths: “For my Father,” he says, “is always working, and I must work.” Again, Moses counts circumcision of the flesh among sacred things beloved by God, and commands every male to be circumcised in the flesh of their foreskin, and teaches that this is the necessary sign of that covenant which his God made with Abraham; and he asserts that any male who does not bear it shall be cut off from his tribe and shall not come into the share of the inheritance promised to Abraham and his seed. This too, then, the Jews had firmly believed on Moses' assertion, and therefore they could not have faith in Christ, who weakened these things and asserted besides that whoever was circumcised became doubly a son of hell. Again, Moses makes an anxious distinction of fleshly foods, and sits as judge, like a glutton, among fish and birds and four-footed beasts, and orders some to be licked up as clean and others as unclean not even to be touched; among which he condemns the pig and the hare, and any fish that lacks scales, or any four-footed beast that does not have a split hoof and does not chew the cud. These things, then, the Jews firmly believed as written by Moses, and therefore they could no longer believe Christ, who taught the indifference of foods, and removed all of them entirely from his own disciples, but generally allowed to worldly people everything that could be eaten, asserting that nothing entering the mouth polluted them, because what comes out of the mouth thoughtlessly is all that pollutes a man. That Jesus taught these and many other things contrary to Moses, there is no one who does not know.

Since it would take long to go through these one by one, I will show one in place of many: namely, that the greatest part of the Christian heresies, and, what is plain to see, the Catholics, take no care to keep any of the things Moses writes. If this does not come from some error but from that true tradition of Christ and his disciples, you must altogether admit that Jesus and Moses taught things contrary to each other, and that Christ was not believed by the Jews for the very reason that they wished to keep faith with Moses. How then will it not be false that Jesus said to them, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too,” when it is quite plain that they did not believe Jesus all the more because they believed Moses, but could have had faith in Christ if they had stopped believing Moses? But, as I said, I beg you to teach us where Moses wrote anything about Christ.

“Otherwise,” he says, “if you are a Christian, believe Christ when he says that Moses wrote about him; and if you do not believe it, you are not a Christian.” This is always the inept and feeble reply of those who have nothing to show. How much better would you have done, then, to confess this simply? And yet you could say this to me, since you know that I am bound to believe for the sake of the religion by which I serve Christ; although the question still remains whether this too is Christ's testimony, so that it must be believed absolutely, or the writer's, so that it must be examined carefully. And if we do not believe falsehoods, we do not offend Christ by it, but the falsifiers. Still, this could be borne somehow when put to Christians. But what shall we do about those I mentioned, the Jew, that is, and the Gentile, to whom we cannot say: “If you are a Christian, believe; if you do not believe, you are not a Christian”? Even of a Christian you would not say this quite rightly, since Christ did not spurn the apostle Thomas when he doubted about him; but, to heal the wounds of his mind, he showed the scars of his body, and did not say: “If you are a disciple, believe; if you do not believe, you are not a disciple.” You say this to me, who am doubting not about Christ but about a saying, whether it is his or was slipped in. “But,” you say, “he calls those more blessed who have not seen and have believed.” If you think this was said so that we should believe anything without reason and judgment, be more blessed, you, without sense; I shall be content to have heard myself blessed with reason.

Augustine replied: You say cunningly that you are ready, if you find any prophecies about Christ in the books of Moses, to take them as you would a fish from the sea while spitting out the very water from which the fish is caught. But since everything Moses wrote is about Christ, that is, wholly concerns Christ, whether it foretells him by figures of things done or said, or commends his grace and glory, you, who have believed a fictitious and deceitful Christ from Mani's writings, will not believe these things of Moses, just as you will not eat fish. But there is this difference: that you pursue Moses with hostility, while you praise fish deceitfully. For if eating fish from the sea does no harm, as you yourself said, why do you proclaim it so harmful that, if no other food is at hand, you would rather waste away with hunger than eat fish? What then? If all flesh is unclean, as you say, and that wretched life of your god, which is purified through your food, is held fast in all water and every plant, your detestable superstition compels you both to throw away the fish which you praised, and to drink sea water and eat thorns, which you found fault with. And as for your comparing the servant of God with the demons, so that he should be regarded as they were when they confessed Christ, if anything could be found in his books that preaches Christ, he does not disdain his Lord's reproach. For if the householder was called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household! But consider from whom you have learned these things, surely men more wicked than those who so reviled the Lord. For they did not believe that he was the Christ, and therefore thought him a deceiver; but you do not think a doctrine truthful unless it dares to proclaim Christ a deceiver.

But why does the law of Moses seem to you to differ in nothing from paganism? Because it commends a temple, a sacrifice, an altar and a priest? But all these names are found in the New Testament too: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” and: “When you offer your gift at the altar,” and: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for yourself the sacrifice that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” And of what things these were figures, the Lord himself partly shows, when he compares the temple of his body to that temple, and partly we learn from the apostolic teaching; for “the temple of God is holy,” says the apostle, “which you are,” and: “I beseech you, therefore, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God,” and other things of this kind. So all those things were figures of us, as the same apostle says, and as must often be recalled, because they were offered not to demons but to the one true God who made heaven and earth; not as to one who needed such things, but as to one who distinguishes the times and commands present things through which to signify future ones. But you, who, to lead astray and deceive simple and imperfect Christians, pretend to detest paganism, produce for us the authority of Christian books in which you are commanded to revere and worship the sun and moon. It is your error, then, that is rather like paganism, since you do not even worship Christ, but under Christ's name something or other which you have invented for yourselves by lying, and you worship gods, either those visible in this sky we see or countless other fictitious ones. For these phantoms, as for empty and hollow images, you have not built shrines, but have made your hearts their temples.

You demand that I show what Moses wrote about Christ. Much has already been shown above; but who could show it all? Especially since, if I mention some things, this perverse man seems ready either to try to twist them into another sense or, if he is overwhelmed by the evidence of a clearer truth, to say that he takes them like a sweet fish from the salt sea and so ought not to be compelled to accept the whole writing of Moses, as if to drink the sea water. So I think it enough for this work to show that the very things he has picked out for blame from the writing of the law of the Hebrews concern the preaching of Christ, if rightly understood. From this it will be plain enough that the rest, whether immediately declared or carefully and truthfully examined, agree much more with the Christian faith, if the enemy is shown to be condemned by Christian truth from the very things he puts forward to be mocked and condemned. Therefore, you who are full of every deceit, since the Lord said in the gospel, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too, for he wrote about me,” there is no reason for you to pretend that you were placed in great perplexity and seem driven to one of two conclusions, either to declare this passage false or Jesus a liar. For as this passage is true, so too Jesus is truthful. “It seemed more right,” he says, “to ascribe falsehood to the writers than a lie to the author of truth.” Do you really believe Christ to be the author of truth, whom you proclaim a feigner of flesh and death and wounds and scars? I want you to show me where you learned that Christ is the author of truth, if you dare to ascribe falsehood to those who wrote about him, whose authority, commended and confirmed by recent memory, has flowed down to later generations. For you have not seen Christ, nor has he spoken with you as with the apostles, nor called you from heaven as he did Saul. What can we think, what can we believe about him, except what scripture testifies? Further, if the gospel is lying, which has been spread and made known to all nations, and from the beginning of the preaching of Christ's name has been set in so high a place of holiness in all the churches, what writing can be produced in which faith is to be had about Christ? What writing could you bring forward which a man who did not want to believe it would not say was forged, if such widespread knowledge of the gospel comes into doubt?

Next you add that you heard him saying that all who came before him were thieves and robbers. Where did you hear him say this, if not from the gospel? But if someone else were to contend that this, which you believe from the gospel so firmly that you say you heard it as from the Lord's mouth, is false, and were to deny that Christ said it, where will you go? What will you do? Will you not proclaim the authority of the gospel with all the strength you can? Wretched man, what you do not want to believe is written in the same place where you learned what you believe so firmly that you say you heard it from Christ himself. See, we believe both, because we believe the holy gospel, where both are written: both that Moses wrote about Christ, and that all who came before Christ were thieves and robbers. For he wants “came” to be understood as meaning that they were not sent; for those who were sent, like Moses and the holy prophets, did not come before him but with him, since they did not wish to go before him in pride, but humbly carried him speaking through them. But you, who understand these words of the Lord in this way, sufficiently admit, on your understanding, that you have no prophets who prophesied that Christ would come, and therefore you have invented him for yourselves as you wished. For if you have any, who are not to be believed in any case, because they are produced only by you, yet if there are any whom you dare to say prophesied that Christ would come in false flesh, suffer a false death, and offer false scars to doubting disciples (I do not say how detestable and to be shunned they are by this very fact, and how they cannot be truthful, who are pleased with Christ for his lying), not to say this, certainly, as I had begun to say, on this understanding of yours they were thieves and robbers, since they came before Christ, whoever preached in any way that he would come. Further, if the true understanding is that those are said to have come before Christ who would not come with Christ, that is, with the Word of God, but, though God did not send them, brought their own lies to men, then you yourselves too, although you were born into this world after Christ's passion and resurrection, are thieves and robbers, because before he enlightened you to preach his truth, you wished to come before him in order to boast of your own deceit.

But in that place where the Jews said to him, “You testify about yourself; your testimony is not true,” it is no wonder that you do not see that he went on to say that Moses prophesied about him; for you do not have the devout eye with which you could see it. For look, the very answer he gave them, namely, “In your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me”: what else does it say to those who understand rightly, but that that number of witnesses was consecrated and commended in the law by the prophetic Spirit, so that in this way too the future revelation of the Father and the Son should be foretold, whose Spirit, in that inseparable Trinity, is the Holy Spirit? This is why it is written: “On the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall stand.” Otherwise one witness often tells the truth and several often lie; and at the beginning of the faith of the Gentiles one apostle preaching the gospel was believed rather than the erring peoples by whom he suffered persecution. So it is not for nothing that this number of witnesses was in some way consecrated; and when the Lord gave this answer, he wished it to be understood by this very fact too that Moses had prophesied about him. Or do you perhaps cavil because he did not say “in the law of God,” but “in your law it is written”? Who does not recognize here a usual idiom of the scriptures? For he said “in your law,” meaning given to you, just as the apostle speaks of “his gospel,” which yet he testifies he received not from man but through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Or do you say that Christ also denied that he had God as his Father wherever he did not say “our Father” but “your Father”? And now as for that voice which you mentioned as brought down from heaven, “This is my most beloved Son; believe him”: since you did not hear it, do not believe it. But if you believe it because you found it in the holy scriptures, there too is this one, in which you will not believe that Moses wrote about Christ; there are many others too, which you likewise discredit; and you do not fear, wretched men, that some profane person might in the same way say that this voice never sounded from heaven at all. And just as you argue against the salvation of the human race, which is conferred on all nations by the authority of the gospel, to your own ruin too, when you say that one should not believe that Christ said Moses wrote about him, because, if he had said it, the Jews could not have kept silent without at once, malicious and cunning as they were, asking what it was that he thought Moses had written about him: so that empty and lost man might say: “If that voice had sounded from heaven, all the Jews who heard it would have believed.” Why then, madmen, do you not consider that, just as it could happen that the hard unbelief of the Jews remained even after that heavenly voice, so it could happen that, when Christ said that Moses wrote about him, they, with malicious cunning, fearing all the more that they might be refuted, did not ask at all to hear what Moses had written about him?

But Faustus feels that this argument is not only sacrilegious against the holiness of the gospel but also weak and feeble, and he directs his effort rather to this, and says he is held more by the fact that, having searched the whole writing of Moses, he found no prophecies about Christ there. To him I answer quickly: because he does not understand. And if anyone asks why he does not understand, I shall answer: “Because he reads with a hostile, an adverse mind; because he does not search in order to know, but thinks he knows what he does not know.” This presumption of swollen arrogance either closes the eye of the heart, so that it does not see at all, or distorts it, so that it sees perversely and approves or disapproves one thing for another. “Teach me,” he says, “what there is mentioned in the writing of Moses about our God and Lord which perhaps escaped me in reading.” Here too I may answer quickly: the whole of it escaped you, because he wrote the whole of it about Christ. But since we cannot discuss and treat the whole, I shall keep for you in this work, if I can, with the Lord's help, what I said above: I shall show that the very things you choose for blame were written about Christ. You also ask me not to say, as the unlearned usually do, that this itself ought to be enough for faith, that Christ said Moses wrote about him. If I do say this, I say it not as an unlearned man but as a believer. And I too admit that it has no force for convincing a Gentile or a Jew; but that against you, who glory in the Christian name in whatever way, it is fitting and powerful enough, you too, though you long evaded it, were compelled at last to confess, saying: “For I do not want you now to look at me, whom my profession has bound to believe, so that I cannot but believe him whom I follow; but suppose we are dealing with a Jew, suppose with a Gentile.” By these words you showed that you yourself, with whom I am now concerned, since your profession has bound you to believe, are sufficiently convicted that Moses wrote about Christ, because it is written in the gospel that Christ himself said so; and you do not dare to undermine its so illustrious and holy authority. For even when you dare to do so obliquely, pressed by the straits of your difficulty and seeing what ruin overwhelms you when you are told that there is no writing in which you may demand belief about the deeds and words of Christ if you think the gospel, so holy and so widely known, is not to be believed, and fearing that, once the cloak of the Christian name is lost, your naked vanity will remain to be spat on and detested by all, you try to gather yourself up again, wounded, and say that your profession has now bound you to believe these words of the gospel. So I hold you meanwhile, with whom I am now dealing; I strike, I slay you, that is, your error and deceit; and I compel you to confess that Moses wrote about Christ, because it is read in the gospel that Christ said so, and your profession has bound you to believe it. But if I must debate with a Jew or a Gentile, I have already shown above how I think I should proceed, according to my small strength.

Nor do I deny that what you chose as easy to refute was foretold of Christ, where God speaks to Moses, saying: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you.” Nor do your elegant and witty antitheses, with which you tried to colour and paint your muddy speech, deter me in any way from this truth of the faith. For, comparing Christ and Moses and wishing to show that he is unlike, so that what is written, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you,” should not seem to be understood of Christ, you set many contraries against one another: that the one was a man, the other God; the one a sinner, the other holy; the one born of intercourse, the other, according to us, of a virgin, but according to you not even of a virgin; the one killed on the mountain, his God being offended, the other suffering of his own will, being most pleasing to the Father. As if, when something is said to be like, it is understood to be like in every part and in every way. For not only things of one and the same nature are said to be like each other, as twins, or children to parents, or all men to all men in so far as they are men (which is very easy to see in other animals too, or in trees, as an olive is said to be like an olive, a laurel like a laurel); but also many things of unequal nature are both like and called like, as the wild olive to the olive, and spelt to wheat. I speak of things still near and close to each other; for what is so far removed from the Son of God, through whom all things were made, as a sheep and a stone? And yet we read in the gospel: “Behold the Lamb of God,” and in the apostle: “And the rock was Christ”; which no one would rightly say in any way, if he took on no likeness to them in any way. What wonder, then, if Christ did not disdain to become like Moses himself, he who became like the sheep which, in foretelling him through Moses himself, God commanded his people to eat, and its blood to be used for the protection of their safety, and to be called the Passover, which no one is now allowed to pretend has not been fulfilled in Christ? So from the scriptures I recognize him as unlike; from the scriptures recognize with me that he is also like: not unlike in the same respect in which he is like, but for one reason the one and for another the other, provided I demonstrate both. Christ is unlike man, because he is God, for it is written of him: “who is God over all, blessed for ever”; and Christ is like man, because he is man, for it is likewise written of him: “the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Christ is unlike a sinner, because he is ever holy; and Christ is like a sinner, because “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” Christ is unlike a man born of intercourse, in so far as he was born of a virgin; but Christ is like a man who is born, in so far as he too was born of a woman, to whom it was said: “The holy one to be born of you shall be called the Son of God.” Christ is unlike a man who died because of his sin, in so far as he died without sin and by his own power; but again Christ is like a man who died, in so far as he too died by a true death of the body.

Nor should you disparage Moses, the servant of God, for having been, as you said, a sinner, and killed on the mountain because his God was offended. For he too knew how to glory in the Lord, so as to be saved by him, by whom he also was saved who says: “Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.” For Moses is rebuked by the divine voice because his faith wavered somewhat over bringing water out of the rock; and this he may have in common with the sin of Peter, who in the midst of the waves doubted with a similar failure of faith. But far be it from us to believe that he was for this reason estranged from the eternal fellowship of the saints, he who, as the gospel says, was found worthy to stand with holy Elijah beside the Lord when he was glorified on the mountain. For, as we read in the old books, even after that sin it is evident how great his merit was with God. But as for the reason why God spoke of punishing his sin with such a death: since I have promised to show that the very things you chose for blame concern the foretelling of Christ, I will do my best, with the Lord's help, to teach that this too, which you blamed in Moses' death, was, for those who understand rightly, a prophecy of Christ.

For as is the way of the divine mysteries in the holy scriptures, that the same man at different times bears one character and then another to signify something, at that time Moses bore the character of the people of the Jews placed under the law, and prefigured it in prophetic foretelling. So, as Moses, striking the rock with the rod, doubted the power of God, so that people, held under the law given through Moses, fixing Christ to the wood of the cross, did not believe that he was the power of God. But as the rock, when struck, poured out water for the thirsty, so the wound of the Lord's passion has become life for those who believe. For on this matter we have a most illustrious and faithful word of the apostle, when he says, speaking of it: “And the rock was Christ.” This fleshly despair about the divinity of Christ, then, God commands to die on the height of Christ himself, when he orders the death of Moses' flesh to take place on the mountain. For as Christ is the rock, so too Christ is the mountain: the rock lowly strength, the mountain eminent greatness; for as the apostle says, “The rock was Christ,” so the Lord himself says, “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden,” declaring himself the mountain, and his faithful, founded in the glory of his name, the city. The prudence of the flesh lives when Christ's lowliness on the cross, like the struck rock, is despised; for Christ crucified is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. And the prudence of the flesh dies when Christ is acknowledged as exalted, like the eminence of the mountain; for to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. So Moses went up the mountain, so that, his flesh dead, he might be received in the living spirit; where Faustus had not gone up, so that he speaks fleshly slanders with a dead mind. Did not Peter shudder, through the prudence of the flesh, at the rock itself being struck, when he said to the Lord, who foretold his passion: “Far be it, Lord; this shall not happen; be merciful to yourself”? Nor did the Lord spare this sin, when he answered him: “Get behind me, Satan; you are a stumbling block to me; for you do not think the things of God, but the things of men.” Or where did that fleshly distrust die, if not in Christ's glorification, as on the height of a mountain? For it certainly lived when he denied him timidly, and it was certainly dead when he preached him freely. It lived in Saul, when, detesting the stumbling block of the cross, he laid waste the Christian faith; and where but on that mountain had it died, when Paul now said: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”?

What then have you, heretical vanity, by which you think you can prove that “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you” was not foretold of Christ, when you cannot do so even from your showing him unlike? For we show him like for other reasons. Or is it because he was called a prophet, he who deigned to be man and foretold so many things to come? Unless perhaps a prophet is something other than a man who foretells future things beyond human conjecture. Hence he says of himself: “A prophet is not without honour except in his own country.” But I shall see to you, who confessed a little before that you were convicted, when you said that your profession had bound you to believe the gospel. Let the Jew himself come forward, who raises his neck, wrongly free of Christ's yoke, and therefore still thinks it lawful to say: “Your Christ lied; Moses wrote nothing about him.”

Let him tell me what prophet God promised when he said to Moses: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, as you are,” or “like you.” For there were many prophets afterwards, but certainly he meant one particular person to be understood. Here, I believe, that successor of Moses would most readily occur to him, who brought the people freed from Egypt into the land of promise. Thinking of him, he will perhaps still laugh at me for asking of whom it was said, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you,” when I read who succeeded Moses after his death in that same office of ruling and leading the people. And when he has laughed at me as unlearned (for so Faustus too describes me), I shall not stop pressing the man further and calling him back from careless laughter to the care of answering, by asking and demanding why to that same future successor of his, in comparison with whom he was disapproved, so that he himself should not bring the people into the land of promise (lest, namely, the law given through Moses, not to save but to convict the sinner, should be thought to bring into the kingdom of heaven; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ): I will ask the Jew, then, why Moses changed the name of that same future successor of his. For he was called Hoshea, and Moses named him Jesus. And why, finally, did he name him so at that time, when he sent him ahead from the valley of Paran to that same land to which the people were to come under his own leadership? For the true Jesus himself says: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.” I will also ask whether the prophet does not bear witness to this figure, saying: “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from Paran,” as if to say: God, the Holy One, will come of that name which he bore who came from the south, from Paran, that is, Jesus. To this is added that the same Word of God is understood to speak where he promises that same successor of Moses, through whom the people would be sent into the land of promise, calling him by the name of angel (as men who announce something are also usually called in divine scripture), and he says thus: “Behold, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way, to bring you into the land which I swore to you. Take heed to yourself and obey him; do not disbelieve him, for he will withhold nothing from you; for my name is in him.” What is this? Let not the Manichaean now, but the Jew himself search those scriptures, and see whether God said of any angel, “My name is in him,” except of this one whom he promises as the one who would lead them into the land of promise. Then let him ask among men who, as Moses' successor, brought the people in, and he will find Jesus, called so not from the beginning of his life but with his name changed. He, then, who said, “My name is in him,” in that Jesus, is himself the true Jesus, the ruler and leader of the people into the inheritance of eternal life according to the New Testament, of which the Old Testament was a figure. So, as far as prophetic preparation is concerned, nothing more remarkable could be done or said, since the matter was carried as far as the very expression of the name.

It remains that this Jew, if he wishes also to be a Jew inwardly, not in the letter but in the spirit, if he wishes to be counted a true Israelite in whom there is no guile, should remember that Jesus who in figure died, who brought them into the land of the dying, and recognize in truth the living Jesus, under whose leadership he may enter the land of the living. Such a man will no longer bitterly resist so clear a prophecy, but, made gentle by the remembrance of the Jesus who brought them into that land of promise, he will now hear him whose name that one bore, who brings in more truly and says: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth as an inheritance.” Here now also that Gentile, if he did not have too stony a heart, or if he were one of those stones from which God raises up children to Abraham, would he not marvel that in the ancient books of the very nation from which Jesus was said to have been born so evident a prophecy was written about him that even his name was expressed? And would he not notice at the same time that it was no mere man who was foretold as Jesus, but certainly God, since in that man who, appointed to rule the people and bring them into the kingdom, was called Jesus with his name changed, God said his own name was, and named him angel by the very fact that, sent with his name changed, he announced something great and divine? For who that is even slightly acquainted with Greek does not know that a messenger is called “angel” in Greek? Therefore any Gentile, if he did not wish to be perverse and stubborn, would not despise those books because they were Hebrew, the books of a nation by whose law he was not bound; but he would value highly the books of any nation in which he found written so long before things which he recognized as already fulfilled in his own times. And he would not spurn Christ Jesus himself because he saw him foretold in Hebrew writings; rather he would judge that he, who in any writings whatever, before he was born among men, had deserved to be foretold and commended in this way through so many volumes of ages, partly by plainer testimonies, partly by figures and sacraments of deeds and words, should be followed and revered with great wonder and due religion. So for him the prophecy of the books would be proved true from the effects of Christianity already present, and from the prophecy of the books Christ would be recognized as one to be worshipped. Let me be thought to talk emptily, if this has not been done so, if it is not being done so, if men are not running together into this faith throughout the whole world through the reading of these same books.

Hence the folly of these men is marvellously laughable, who ask of us, as if it were impossible, how a Gentile would want to learn the Christian faith through the books of the Jews, when he sees all nations becoming disciples of these books with such devotion and in such numbers; all the more strongly and firmly, surely, because such great testimonies about Christ are brought out from the hands of enemies. In them the nations who believe can think nothing about him to have been invented for the occasion, because they find Christ in those books which, for so many ages, those have served who crucified Christ, and which those hold in so high a place of authority who daily blaspheme Christ. For if the prophecies of Christ were brought forward by those who preach Christ, they would be thought to have been invented by them; but as it is, he who preaches expounds what he who blasphemes reads aloud. For all the blindness of the impious is ordered to some use for the saints by the supreme God, who, by the justice of his governance, makes good use even of the wicked, so that those who live unjustly by their own will are justly disposed by his judgment. So, lest the testimonies of the prophecy of Christ (that he would be born, would do wonders, would suffer indignities, would die, would rise, would ascend, would spread the gospel of eternal life through all nations) should be believed to have been invented by those who announced him to the peoples, something great was done for our use through the unbelief of the Jews: that those very people who did not have these things in their hearts for their own sake should have them in their manuscripts for ours. Nor is the authority of those books diminished because they are not understood by the Jews; rather it is increased; for their very blindness is foretold there. Hence, by not understanding the truth, they bear witness all the more to the truth, because when they do not understand those books by which it was foretold that they would not understand, they show by this too that the books are truthful.

Hence also that passage by whose ambiguity Faustus is deceived: “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life.” Someone may say that these words can also be understood otherwise; but that they cannot be understood of Christ, neither did Faustus dare to say, nor will anyone at all dare, unless he denies either that Christ is the life, or that he was seen hanging by the Jews, or that they did not believe him. But since he himself says, “I am the life,” and it is established that he hung before the eyes of the Jews who did not believe him, I do not see why we should doubt that this too was written about Christ by him of whom Christ says, “For he wrote about me.” So if Faustus tried to show that what is written, “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you,” cannot be understood of Christ, because Christ is not like Moses, and yet he has been refuted on every side, why need we labour over this testimony? Or at any rate, just as he said Christ was not like Moses in order to refute that prophecy, so to refute this one let him say that Christ is not the life, or did not hang in the sight of the Jews who did not believe him. But since he has not said this, nor would any of them dare to say it today, there is no reason why we should delay to embrace this prophecy too of his servant about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. “But,” he says, “this was set among the other curses.” Is it therefore not a prophecy, when the others too, among which it is set, are nothing but prophecies? Or is it not a prophecy of Christ because the things woven into that reading, before or after it, seem to have nothing to do with Christ? As if there were anything worse among the curses which befell the Jews as the desert of their proud impiety than to see their life, that is, the Son of God, hanging, and not believe their life. For when curses are spoken in prophecy, they do not come from the ill wish of one who imprecates, but from the foreknowing spirit of one who announces. For those that come from an ill wish are forbidden, when it is said: “Bless, and do not curse.” But these are often found in the speech of the saints, as the apostle Paul says: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; the Lord will repay him according to his works.” For in this one the apostle seems, as if angry and indignant, even to have wished evil: “I wish those who unsettle you would even cut themselves off!” Yet if you consider the person of the writer, you will understand that by a most elegant ambiguity he rather wished them well. For there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Faustus would have perceived this in these words too, had he brought a devout palate to the Lord's food. For the saying, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life,” perhaps sounded to the Jews in this way: that, seeing their life hang in uncertainty amid the threats or wiles of their enemies, they would not believe that they would live. But the son of the gospel, when he hears, “For he wrote about me,” sees in this very ambiguity of the sentence what the prophets throw to swine and what they hint to men; and at once there comes to his mind Christ, the life of men, hanging, and the Jews not believing him for the very reason that they see him hanging. And someone else might quickly say that, among the other curses in that reading which do not lead to understanding anything about Christ, this alone is about Christ, where it is written, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life”; for it could well happen that among the various curses prophetically foretold to an impious people this too should be set. But I, and those who consider with me somewhat more attentively that saying of the Lord in the gospel, in which he did not say, “For he wrote about me too,” as if he were believed to have written other things not concerning Christ, but said, “For he wrote about me,” so that in searching we should consult the whole intention of that scripture only for understanding the grace of Christ, recognize that the other curses in that reading too were foretold because of Christ; which it would take too long to show now, if I wished to.

So far from it being true that what Faustus mentioned does not concern Christ because it is set among the other curses, that not even the others have a right understanding unless they are referred to the glory of Christ, by which the human race is cared for, as prophesied of it. How much more this one! Even if Moses had been such that he poured out with his mouth something other than what he saw in his heart, I would more readily say that he prophesied without knowing it than deny that it was prophesied of Christ, when I hear it said to the people of the Jews: “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life.” For Caiaphas did not have in mind what was understood from his words, when, persecuting Christ as an enemy, he said it was expedient that one man should die so that the whole nation should not perish; where the evangelist added that he did not say this of himself, but, being high priest, prophesied. But Moses was not Caiaphas. Therefore what he said to the Hebrew people, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life,” he not only said of Christ (and even if he had said it unknowingly, it ought to be understood as said of no one else), but he also said it knowingly. For he was a most faithful steward of the prophetic sacrament, that is, of that priestly anointing from which we recognize the name of Christ; in which sacrament even Caiaphas, though a very bad man, could prophesy unknowingly. For the prophetic anointing brought it about in him that he prophesied; but his impious life, that he prophesied unknowingly. With what mouth, then, is it said that Moses prophesied nothing about Christ, he with whom that anointing began from which the name of Christ became known, and from which even the persecutor of Christ prophesied Christ, though unknowingly?

As for the curse on the one who hangs on a tree, we have already said above as much as seemed enough. But that Moses did not command against Christ when he said that a prophet or ruler of the people was to be killed who wished to turn the children of Israel away from their God or to break any of the commandments, is clear enough from the many things we have already treated, and will become clearer and clearer to one who considers more and more the words and deeds of the Lord Jesus Christ: for Christ did not wish to turn any of them away from their God. For the God whom Moses had commanded them to love and worship is certainly the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, whom the Lord Jesus Christ mentions with the same commendation, and by whose authority he refutes the error of the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, where he says: “But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what God spoke to Moses from the bush: I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live to him.” Fittingly, then, the Manichaeans are now refuted by the same voice by which the Sadducees were refuted then; for they too deny the resurrection itself, in a different way indeed, but still deny it. Again, when, praising the centurion's faith, he said, “Amen I say to you, I have not found such faith in Israel,” he added and said: “And I tell you that many will come from east and west and recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will go into the outer darkness.” If then, as Faustus cannot deny, Moses commended to the people of Israel no God but the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and Christ by these and other testimonies commends him without hesitation, he did not try to turn that people away from their God; rather he threatened that they would go into the outer darkness because he saw them turned away from their God, in whose kingdom he says the nations called from the whole world will recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, for no other reason than that they had held the faith of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Hence the apostle too says: “The scripture, foreseeing that God justifies the Gentiles by faith, announced beforehand to Abraham, saying: In your seed all nations shall be blessed”; namely, that those should be blessed in the seed of Abraham who imitated the faith of Abraham. So Christ did not wish to turn the Israelites away from their God, but rather rebuked them because they were turned away from him. And whoever thinks that the Lord broke any of the commandments given through Moses, it is no wonder if he thinks what the Jews thought; but he errs for the very reason that the Jews too erred in this. Where Faustus mentions the commandment itself which he would have us believe the Lord broke, there we must show how he is deceived, as we have already shown above where it was needed. For now I say this: if the Lord had broken any of those commandments, he would not have rebuked the Jews on this very point. When they cavilled that his disciples ate with unwashed hands and so transgressed, not the commandment of God, but the traditions of the elders, he said to them: “Why do you too transgress the commandment of God in order to establish your traditions?” And he mentions the commandment of God itself, which we know was commanded through Moses. For he went on to say: “For God said, Honour father and mother, and, Whoever curses father or mother shall surely die. But you say: Whoever says to father or mother, May the gift that is from me benefit you, has not honoured his father; and you have made void the word of God for the sake of your tradition.” See in this how much he teaches us: both that he does not turn the Jews away from their God, and that he not only does not break his commandments but also rebukes those by whom they are broken, and that it was none other than God who commanded these things through Moses.

Therefore, since we believe that everything Moses wrote concerns the commending of Christ, and since we cannot demonstrate this in this work, we promised to show it in those things which Faustus picked out from that scripture to refute or find fault with. So it is rightly demanded of us as a debt that we show that this too, Moses' command that a prophet or ruler should be killed who wished to turn them away from their God or to break any of the commandments, concerns the keeping of the faith which is learned in the church of Christ. For by the prophetic Spirit, with God speaking to him, he saw that many heretics would arise, teachers of various errors, against the teaching of Christ, who would not preach the Christ who is the true Christ. For the true one is he who was foretold through the prophecies given out through the same Moses and the other holy men of that nation. So whoever wished to teach another, Moses commanded him to be killed. And what else does the Catholic tongue do now, but that, by the spiritual sword sharpened on both edges with the two testaments, all are slain who wish to turn us away from our God or to break any of the commandments? Among them falls above all Mani himself, when his error is destroyed by the assertion of the truth of the law and the prophets; for he wishes to turn us away from our God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whom Christ commends, and wishes to break the commandments of the law, in whose very figures we know Christ was prophesied.

Now as for that argument, I do not know whether to call it most obtuse or most fraudulent; for Faustus had wit, so I rather think he wished to throw a mist over a less attentive reader than that he did not see what I shall say. For he says: “And if he wrote these things not at all about Christ, either you will give others or there will be none.” This proposition is true; but it was incumbent on him to show both that these things were not written about Christ and that others cannot be given. He did neither of these, for we have shown how these things can be taken of Christ, and above we gave many others which can have no meaning except of Christ. So there is no reason, Faustus, for you to conclude that nothing was written by Moses about Christ. For attend to what you say: “And if he wrote these things not at all about Christ,” you say, “either you will give others or there will be none.” You speak truly. So, since we have taught that these things were written about Christ or because of Christ, and have given many others, it is rather your argument that will be nothing. And these things which you mentioned you at least tried to show were not written about Christ, though you did not succeed; but as for what you added, “either you will give others or there will be none,” you ought first to have demonstrated that we cannot give others, so as to infer safely that there are none. But as it is, as if your little book were going to have hearers so deaf or readers so blind that no one would notice what you passed over, you rushed to say: “If there are none, neither could Christ assert what exists nowhere; so, if Christ did not assert it, that passage will be established as false.” O man who thinks of himself as speaker and does not think of another as contradictor! Where is your sharpness? Or could you not do otherwise in a bad cause? But the bad cause compelled you to talk emptily; yet no one compels you to have a bad cause. For what if we give others? Then certainly there will not be none, since there will be some. And if there are some, Christ could assert what is. So, if Christ could assert this, it is not established that that passage of the gospel is false. Go back, then, to your proposition, in which you said, “either you will give others or there will be none,” and see that you have not shown that we will give no others. See also how many others we have already mentioned above, and notice what follows from this: namely, that it is not false that we read in the gospel that Christ said, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too; for he wrote about me.” And the authority of the gospel is so eminent and its truth so well founded that, even if through the slowness of our understanding we found nothing written by Moses about Christ, we ought to believe not only that there are some things, but that everything he wrote concerns Christ, because he did not say, “and he wrote about me,” but “he wrote about me.” But as it is, even if this passage of the gospel were to be doubted (far be it!), all that doubt would be removed once so many testimonies about Christ have been found in the writing of Moses; and since the passage of the gospel is not to be doubted, even if those testimonies had not been found, it would still be necessary to believe that they exist.

For as to what you add, “that the tradition of Christ and of Moses was unlike, and therefore it was not likely that if they believed Moses they would believe Christ; rather it followed that if the Jews believed one, they would necessarily resist the other,” you would certainly not say this if you raised the eye of consideration a little and looked at the whole world, without the blindness of contention, in learned and unlearned men, Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish, to whom the apostle said he was a debtor, believing Moses and Christ together. If, then, it was not likely that the Jews would believe Moses and Christ alike, it is much less likely that the whole world would believe Moses and Christ alike. But since we see all nations believing both, and holding his prophecy in agreement with this one's gospel with a most firm and widespread faith, one nation was not called to anything impossible when it was told, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too”; rather the hardness of the Jews is to be marvelled at and rebuked more strongly, who did not do what we see the whole world has done.

For whatever you say about the Sabbath, about circumcision of the flesh, and about the distinction of foods, that the tradition of Moses was one thing and what Christians learned through Christ another, we have already shown above that, as the apostle says, all these things were figures of us. So it is not a different teaching, but a different time. For it was one time when these things had to be foretold through figurative prophecies, and it is another when they must now be fulfilled through the truth made plain and rendered. But what wonder if the Jews, understanding the Sabbath in a fleshly way, resisted Christ, who was now conveying it spiritually? Answer the apostle, if you can, who testifies that the rest of that day is a shadow of what was to come. But if they resisted Christ through not understanding the true Sabbath, do not you resist him, and understand true innocence. For in that very place where Jesus is chiefly thought to be a destroyer of the Sabbath, when his disciples, passing through the grainfield and hungry, plucked ears and ate them, he called them innocent, answering the Jews: “If you knew what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would never have condemned the innocent.” For they ought rather to have pitied the hungry, since these did this compelled by hunger. But among you, whoever plucks ears is reckoned a murderer, not by the tradition of Christ, who calls this innocence, but by the tradition of Mani. Or did the apostles perhaps show mercy to those ears, so as to purify the members of God by eating them, as your fable has it? Then you are cruel, who do not do this. But Faustus, it seems, knows how to destroy the Sabbath, because he knows that the power of God works always and tirelessly. Let those say this who understand that God makes all times without a temporal will. That is too much for you, who say that the rest of your god was shaken off by the rebellion of the race of darkness and disturbed by the sudden attack of enemies. Or did he, foreseeing from eternity that this would happen, never have rest, because he was never secure, thinking that he would wage so heavy a war with such ruin and loss to his members?

Moreover, that Sabbath which you ignorantly and impiously deride would not have been so attested by Christ, unless it too had its meaning among the prophecies written about Christ. For since he suffered of his own will, as you yourself put it in his praise, and therefore had the times of his passion and resurrection in his power, he brought it about that his flesh rested in the tomb on the Sabbath from all its works, so that, rising on the third day, which we call the Lord's day, and which is counted as the eighth after the Sabbath, he might declare that circumcision on the eighth day also belonged to prophesying him. For what does circumcision of the flesh signify? What, but the stripping off of the mortality which we bear from fleshly generation? For this reason the apostle says: “Stripping himself of the flesh, he made an example of principalities and powers boldly, triumphing over them in himself.” For when he says that he stripped himself of the flesh, we understand by flesh in that place the mortality of the flesh, according to which this body is properly named flesh. This mortality was properly called flesh because it will not be in that immortality of the resurrection. This is why it is written: “Flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom of God.” With these words you are accustomed to slander our faith, by which we believe in the future resurrection of this body, which has already gone before in God himself; and you pass over what follows, in which the apostle plainly explains what he means. For, wishing to show what he called flesh in that place, he immediately added: “nor shall corruption possess incorruption.” For he says that this body, which because of mortality is properly called flesh, is changed in the resurrection, so that it is no longer corruptible and mortal. And lest this be thought said on our own conjecture, consult his very words that follow. “See,” he says, “I tell you a mystery: we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” So, to be clothed with immortality, it is stripped of mortality. This is the mystery of circumcision, which was commanded to be done on the eighth day, and on the eighth day, that is, the Lord's day after the Sabbath, was fulfilled now in truth by the Lord. Hence it is said: “Stripping himself of the flesh, he made an example of principalities and powers.” For through this mortality the devilish powers, envious of us, had dominion over us; and he is said to have made an example of them because in himself, our head, he gave an example of what will be accomplished in his whole body, that is, the church to be freed from the power of the devil, at the last resurrection. This is our faith. And since, as Paul recalls the prophetic testimony, the just man lives by faith, this is our justification. For even pagans believe that Christ died; but that Christ rose is the faith proper to Christians. “For if you confess with your mouth,” says the apostle, “that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Because, then, we are justified by this faith in the resurrection, this too is said apostolically of Christ: that he died for our offences and rose for our justification. And because this resurrection, which, when believed, justifies us, was prefigured by that circumcision on the eighth day, the apostle says of Abraham himself, to whom it was first given: “And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of faith.” So among other prophetic figures Moses also wrote this circumcision about Christ, of whom Christ himself says: “For he wrote about me.” As for the Lord's saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel sea and land to make one proselyte; and when you have made him, you make him a son of gehenna twice as much as yourselves,” he did not say this because the proselyte is circumcised, but because he imitates their morals, from imitating which he restrains his own, saying: “The scribes and Pharisees sit on the chair of Moses: do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say, and do not do.” In these words of the Lord you ought to notice both things: how great honour was paid to the teaching of Moses, in whose chair even bad men sitting were compelled to teach good things; and how the proselyte became a son of gehenna, namely, not by hearing the words of the law from the Pharisees but by following their deeds. So what Paul says could have been said then to the circumcised proselyte: “Circumcision indeed is of value, if you keep the law.” But because he imitated the Pharisees in not keeping the law, he became a son of gehenna; and for this reason, I think, twice as much as they, because he neglected to fulfil what he had taken on of his own will, not born of Jews but having become a Jew by choice.

But what did you mean when you said, without regard and insultingly, that Moses sits as judge like a glutton, and orders some things to be licked up as clean and others as unclean not even to be touched? When it belongs rather to a glutton to distinguish nothing, or, if he does distinguish, to choose the tastier. Or do you say this so that your continence may seem admirable to the unlearned, as if from early youth, as though you did not know, or had already forgotten, how much more pleasantly pork tastes than mutton? But since Moses wrote these things too about Christ in prophetic figures, signifying by the flesh of animals men either to be incorporated into Christ's body, which is the church, or to be rejected, he has figured you too among the unclean, who do not agree with the Catholic faith for this reason, that you neither chew over the word of wisdom, nor have, as it were, the split hoof, since you do not distinguish the two testaments, the Old and the New, in harmony. And who could bear that you too were not ashamed to follow the deceit of your Adimantus?

For you too say “that Christ taught the indifference of foods in such a way that he removed all meats entirely from his own disciples, but generally allowed to worldly people everything that could be eaten, and asserted that nothing entering the mouth polluted them, because what comes out of the mouth thoughtlessly is all that pollutes a man.” These words of yours are all the more shameless as the lie with which they are produced and expressed is more open. First, because, according to Christ's sentence, if only the evil things that come out of the mouth pollute a man, why did not only these pollute Christ's disciples too, so that it was necessary to forbid them meats as unclean? Or are worldly men not polluted by what enters the mouth, but by what comes out of it? Then they are better protected against uncleanness than the saints, if both what enters and what comes out can defile the saints. I should like these men to tell me: what did Christ eat and drink, who, in comparison with John, who neither ate nor drank, said that he himself ate and drank? For when he rebuked the perversity of men seeking pretexts for slander on both sides, he said: “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He has a demon; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” And we know John's food and drink; for it was not said that he did not drink at all, but that he did not drink wine and strong drink: so he drank water. Nor was his food nothing at all, but locusts and wild honey. Why then was he said to be “neither eating nor drinking,” unless because he did not use the diet which the Jews used? So unless the Lord had used it, he would not have been called “eating and drinking” in comparison with him. Or perhaps because the Lord ate bread and vegetables, which John did not eat? It would be strange if he who ate locusts and honey were called not eating, and he who was content with bread and vegetables were called eating. But suspect what you like about the foods; certainly he would not have been called a drinker and a drunkard if he did not drink wine. Why then do you think this too unclean? For you do not forbid touching these things for the sake of continence and the discipline of taming the body, but because they are unclean; for you say they are the filth and gall of the race of darkness, against the apostle, who says: “All things are clean to the clean.” See, these men dare to say that Christ, the teacher of the indifference of foods, nevertheless forbade his disciples those things which they themselves think unclean. Show where he removed these things from his disciples, deceitful, wicked men; yet so blinded by the providence of God the avenger that you even remind us of the means by which you are refuted. My mind will not let me rest unless I insert the whole passage of the gospel which this man wished to set against Moses, for examination, so that we may see there how false it is, as first Adimantus and now Faustus said, that the Lord Jesus removed meats from his disciples as food and allowed them generally to worldly people. For when he had answered those who cavilled that they ate with unwashed hands, the gospel goes on thus: “And calling the crowds, he said to them: Hear and understand. Not what enters the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth defiles a man. Then the disciples came and said to him: Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” Here certainly, when addressed by the disciples, he ought, as these men would have it, to have taught them specially to abstain from all meats, so that what he said above, “Not what enters the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth,” might seem to have been said to the crowds. Let the evangelist go on, then, and say what the Lord answered, now not to the crowds but to the disciples. “But he answered and said: Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit.” This, of course, because, wishing to establish their own traditions, they did not understand the commandments of God. But the disciples had not yet asked the master how they themselves should take what he had said to the crowds. See, this too happens; for the evangelist continues and says: “And Peter answered and said to him: Explain this parable to us.” From this we understand that Peter thought the Lord had not spoken literally and openly when he said, “Not what enters the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth,” but had wished, as he usually did, to signify something by the obscurity of a parable. Let us see, then, whether now, privately, to the disciples who asked, he says what the Manichaeans would have, that all meats are unclean and they ought not to touch any of them. What then? He rebukes them because they had not yet understood his open speech and thought what was said literally to be a parable. For it goes on thus: “But he said: Are you also still without understanding, and do you not understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the belly and is cast out into the drain? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and that defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies; these are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.”

Surely now the deceit, exposed, goes off refuted; surely it is now clear that the Lord did not teach the crowds one thing on this matter and the disciples another in private; surely it is seen without doubt that it is rather the Manichaeans who are liars and deceivers, not Moses, not Christ, not the teaching of the two testaments, figured there and revealed here, prophesied there and presented here. How then do they think that Catholics keep none of the things Moses wrote, when they observe absolutely all of them, no longer in figures but in the realities which those figures foretold by signifying them? For if the time of writing were one and the time of reading another, we would not rightly say that the reader does not observe that writing because he himself does not form those characters; since those were figures of sounds, while he now gives out the sounds themselves, not busied in forming those figures, but prompted by looking at them. And the Jews did not believe Christ for this reason, that they did not observe even those things which Moses had commanded, not figuratively but openly. Hence he says to them: “You tithe mint and cummin and leave the weightier things of the law, mercy and judgment, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel; these you ought to have done, without omitting those.” Hence too their teaching by their traditions how the commandment of God which had ordered honour to be paid to parents might be weakened; because of which pride and iniquity they deserved to be blinded, so as not to understand the rest, because they impiously despised what they understood.

You see how I do not say to you: “If you are a Christian, believe Christ when he says that Moses wrote about him; and if you do not believe, you are not a Christian.” You yourself must see what you think of yourself, who ask to be taught about Christ as a Gentile or a Jew; yet I have not shirked this either, and I have closed to you, as far as I could, every approach of error. Nor have I let that precipice lie open over which you blind men throw yourselves, saying that there are falsehoods in the gospel wherever your heresy finds no way out, so that nothing remains for you to return to, from which you might believe Christ, where this pestilent saying cannot be set against you. Indeed, you even wish to be taught as the Christian Thomas was, whom Christ did not spurn when he doubted about him, but, to heal the wounds of his mind, showed the scars of his body. These are your words. It is good that you demand to be taught in this way. For how I feared that you would contend that this too in the gospel is false! Believe, then, the scars of Christ; for if those scars were true, those wounds too had been true; and true wounds could only be had by true flesh. This truth overturns your whole error. Further, if Christ showed false scars to a doubting disciple, you call him deceitful in teaching so, and you wish to be deceived in learning so. But since there is no one who wants to be deceived, while many want to deceive, I understand that you would rather teach deceitfully, as if by the example of Christ, than learn deceitfully by the example of Thomas. So if you believe that Christ deceived the doubter with false scars, who would want to believe you when you teach, and not rather beware of you as a deceiver? But if that disciple touched the true scars of Christ, you are compelled to confess the true flesh of Christ too. So you will not remain a Manichaean, if you believe as Thomas did; but you will remain an unbeliever, if you do not believe even as Thomas did.

Seventh. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept the law and the prophets, when Christ said that he had not come to destroy them but to fulfil them?” Who testifies that Jesus said this? Matthew. Where did he say it? On the mountain. Who was present? Peter, Andrew, James and John; these four only, for he had not yet chosen the others, nor Matthew himself. Of these four, one, namely John, wrote a gospel. Does he mention this anywhere? Nowhere. How then is it that what John, who was on the mountain, does not attest, Matthew wrote, who followed him a long interval after Jesus came down from the mountain? And for this reason it is first of all doubtful whether Jesus said any such thing, since the fit witness is silent while the less fit one speaks. Meanwhile, let us allow that we have wronged Matthew, until we prove that he did not write these things either, but someone else, I know not who, under his name; which the indirect narration of that same reading of Matthew also shows. For what does it say? “And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man sitting at the tax office, named Matthew, and called him; and he at once rose and followed him.” And who, writing about himself, would say, “he saw a man and called him and he followed him,” and not rather, “he saw me and called me and I followed him,” unless because it is established that Matthew did not write these things, but someone else, I know not who, under his name? Since, then, even if Matthew wrote this, it would not be true, as he was not present when Jesus spoke these things on the mountain, how much less is it to be believed, since not even Matthew wrote it, but another under the names both of Jesus and of Matthew!

What of this, that from the very saying in which he commanded them not to think that he had come to destroy the law, it is given rather to be understood that he did destroy it? For the Jews could not have suspected this if he had done nothing of the kind. But, “Do not think,” he says, “that I have come to destroy the law.” Come then, suppose the Jews had said to him: “But what are you doing of this kind, from which we could suspect it? Is it that you mock circumcision, violate the Sabbath, reject sacrifices, confuse foods?” Is this, then, “Do not think”? And what more or what more manifest could be done for the destruction of the law and the prophets? Or if this is fulfilling the law, what will destroying it be? What of this, that the law and the prophets do not even welcome fulfilment, so full and complete do they seem to themselves? Their author and father is no less indignant at anything being added to them than at anything being taken away, so that, writing in Deuteronomy, he says: “These commandments which I command you today, Israel, you shall observe; and take care not to turn aside from them either to the left or to the right, and do not add anything to them or take anything away, but persevere in them, so that the Lord your God may bless you.” Therefore, whether Jesus added something to the law and the prophets in order to fulfil them, he seems to have slipped to the right; or whether he took something away in order to destroy them, to the left; either way he certainly offended the author of the law. And so either this saying means something else, or it is false.

Augustine replied: O marvellous madness, to refuse to believe Matthew when he tells something about Christ, and to want to believe Mani! If Matthew was not there when Christ said, “I have not come to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfil,” and for that reason he is not to be believed, was Mani there, or even yet born, when Christ appeared among men? By this law of your faith, then, you ought to have believed nothing he testified about Christ. We, however, do not say that Mani is not to be believed because he was not present at the words and deeds of Christ and was born long after, but because he speaks about Christ against Christ's disciples and against the gospel confirmed by their authority. For we have the voice of the apostle, who saw in the Holy Spirit that such men would come; hence he said to the faithful: “If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what you received, let him be anathema.” For if no one tells the truth about Christ but one who saw and heard him in person, no one today tells the truth about him. Further, if true things are told about him to his faithful today because those who saw and heard spread them by preaching or by writing, why could not Matthew hear true things about Christ from the mouth of John, his fellow disciple, where John was present and he was not, if from John's book we can speak the truth about Christ, not only we who were born so long after, but others too who will be born after us? For on this ground not only Matthew's gospel but also those of Luke and Mark, who followed those same disciples, have been received with no unequal authority. Besides, the Lord himself could have told Matthew what he had done with those he had called earlier, before he called him. “But,” he says, “John himself ought to have put this in his gospel, if he had heard this said by the Lord, being present when it was said.” As if it could not happen that, since he could not write everything he had heard from the Lord, among other things he passed over he passed over this too, being intent on writing other things. Did he not himself conclude his gospel thus: “And there are many other things that Jesus did; if they were written one by one, I do not think the world itself could contain the books that would be written”? Here certainly he shows that he knew he had passed over many things. But if John's authority on the law and the prophets pleases you, believe John testifying to the law and the prophets. He wrote that Isaiah saw Christ's glory. In his gospel you have the passage we treated a little earlier: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too; for he wrote about me.” Your evasion is beaten down on every side. Say openly that you do not believe the gospel of Christ; for those who believe in the gospel what they want, and do not believe what they do not want, believe themselves rather than the gospel.

But what an elegant thing Faustus thought he was saying, when he wanted it not to be believed that Matthew wrote these things because, speaking of his own election, he did not say, “He saw me and said to me, Follow me,” but, “He saw Matthew and said to him, Follow me.” I do not know whether he said this from the error of ignorance or from the habit of deceit. But I would not think him so ignorant as never to have read or heard that writers of history, when they come to their own person, usually present themselves as if telling about another what they tell about themselves. I rather think, then, that he wished, not as an ignorant man but for the ignorant, to spread a mist, hoping to catch more people who did not know these things. Examples of such narration are found even in the history of secular affairs; but there is no need for me to remind our people or refute this man from another kind of literature. He himself, a little earlier, brought forward certain testimonies from the books of Moses in such a way as not to deny that Moses wrote them, but rather to affirm it, while contending that they did not concern Christ. Let them read, then, in those same books, what Moses wrote about himself: whether he wrote, “I said,” or “I did this or that,” and not rather, “Moses said,” and “Moses did”; or, “The Lord called me,” or “The Lord said to me,” and not rather, “The Lord called Moses,” and “The Lord said to Moses,” and all the rest in the same way. So Matthew too wrote of himself as of another; and John did the same. For near the end of his book he too speaks thus: “Peter, turning, saw the disciple whom Jesus loved, who also had reclined at the supper on his breast and had said to the Lord, Who is it that will betray you?” Did he say here, “Peter, turning, saw me”? Or perhaps for this reason they think he too did not write this gospel? But a little after he says: “This is the disciple who testifies about Jesus and who wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true.” Did he say, “I am the disciple who testify about Jesus and who wrote these things,” and, “We know that my testimony is true”? Certainly it is plain that this was the custom of writers when they narrated events. And how many things the Lord himself says of himself in the same manner of speech, who could count? “When the Son of Man comes,” he says, “do you think he will find faith on earth?” He did not say, “When I come, do you think I will find?” And: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking”; he did not say, “I came.” And: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live”; he did not say, “my voice”; and many things of this kind. So I think what has been said is enough both to remind the studious and to refute the slanderous.

Now who does not see how weak is his saying that Christ could not have said, “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets; I have not come to destroy but to fulfil,” unless he had already done something of the kind, so that he could fall under this suspicion? As if we denied that to the Jews, who did not understand, Christ could seem to be a destroyer of the law and the prophets. But this is the very reason why he, truthful and the Truth, could not have said of another law and other prophets that he did not destroy them, but only of those which they suspected him of destroying. This is also confirmed enough by what follows there, where he says: “Amen, amen I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota or one stroke will pass from the law until all things come to pass. Whoever then breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” For he was thinking of the Pharisees when he said this, who broke the law by their deeds and taught it by their words; of whom he says in another place: “What they say, do; but what they do, do not do; for they say, and do not do.” For this reason here too it follows thus: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness abounds more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven”: that is, unless you do and so teach what they do not do and yet so teach, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. So the very law which the Pharisees taught and did not do, Christ says he did not come to destroy but to fulfil, because it belongs to the chair of Moses, in which the Pharisees, sitting and speaking but not doing, are to be heard, not imitated.

Nor does Faustus understand, or perhaps he pretends not to understand, what fulfilling the law is, since he thinks it is to be taken of adding words, because it is written that nothing should be added to God's scripture or taken away; hence he says that what is commended as so perfect that nothing is to be added or subtracted ought not to have been fulfilled. These men do not know, then, how one fulfils the law who lives as the law commanded. For love is the fulfilment of the law, as the apostle says. This love the Lord deigned both to show and to give, by sending the Holy Spirit to his faithful. Hence the same apostle says again: “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” And the Lord himself: “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” So the law is fulfilled either when the things commanded there are done, or when the things prophesied there are displayed. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The law itself, when fulfilled, became grace and truth. Grace belongs to the fullness of love, truth to the fulfilment of the prophecies. And because both came through Christ, therefore he did not come to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfil them: not that things lacking might be added to the law, but that the things written might be done. His very words testify to this. For he did not say, “Not one iota or one stroke will pass from the law until what is lacking is added,” but, “until all things come to pass.”

Faustus said: “I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it.” But you should know that to believe that Christ said this, unless perhaps it means something else, is no less contrary to you than to me. For each of us is a Christian on this view, because we have thought that Christ came for the destruction of the law and the prophets. And if you will not admit this in word for the present, yet you show it by your works. That is why you yourself also despise the precepts of the law and the prophets; that is why we both confess that Jesus established a New Testament: and in this what else do we confess but the destruction of the Old Testament? Since this is so, how shall we believe that Christ said that, unless we first condemn ourselves for a foolish opinion in the past, return to repentance, submit afresh to the law and the prophets, and take care to observe their commandments, whatever they are? When we have done this, then at last we shall truly have believed that Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it. But as it is, it is false, since you do not believe it either, though you accuse me alone of not doing so.

But suppose it was permissible to have erred in the past. What now, then? Do you want to go under the law, if Christ did not so much destroy it as fulfil it? Do you want to be circumcised, that is, to mark shameful parts with a shameful mark, and to believe that God delights in such sacraments? Do you want to take up the idleness of Sabbaths and put your hands into Saturn's chains? Do you want, for the gluttony of the Jews' demon (for not of God), to lay low with knives now bulls, now rams, now even goats, not to say men also, and to practise now more cruelly under the prophets and the law the very thing for which we hate idols? Do you want, finally, to consider some funeral foods clean and to hold some as unclean and contaminated, among which the law and the prophets declare pork more defiled? You will certainly say that none of these things must be done by us, if we wish to persevere in being what we are; since you hear Christ saying that he who is circumcised becomes doubly a son of gehenna, and you see that he neither kept the Sabbath himself nor anywhere commanded it to be kept; likewise about foods you hear him assert that a man is defiled by none of the things that enter the mouth, but rather that the things which come out of the mouth pollute; and likewise about sacrifices his frequent saying is that God desires mercy, not sacrifice. If, then, these things are so, where will be his saying that he did not come to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfil them? If he said it, he either said it meaning something else, or (far be it!) said it lying, or did not say it at all. But that Jesus lied, no one, at least no Christian, would say; and therefore either it was said otherwise, or not said at all.

And yet the Manichaean faith has already made me safe against the necessity of this passage; for from the beginning it persuaded me not to believe indiscriminately everything that is read as written in the Saviour's name, but to test whether it is true, whether sound, whether uncorrupted; for there are very many tares which a sower going about by night has scattered through almost all the scriptures to infect the good seed. And therefore not even here has this saying frightened me, although it bears the inscription of a revered name, because I am still free, on principle, to test whether this too is from the sower by day, the good one, or from that one by night, the worst. But you, who rashly believe everything, who condemn reason, nature's gift, in men, for whom it is a matter of religion not to judge between true and false, and for whom separating good from its contrary is no less a terror than bogeys to infants, what will you do when necessity drives you into the straits of this passage? I mean, when a Jew, or anyone else not ignorant of this saying, challenges you: why do you not keep the precepts of the law and the prophets, when Christ says that he did not come to destroy them but to fulfil them? Surely you will be compelled either to give in to an empty superstition, or to declare the passage false, or to deny that you are Christ's disciple.

Augustine replied: Since you repeat things so often exploded and refuted, we too shall not be reluctant to repeat the arguments by which we refuted them. Christians do not do those things from the law and the prophets by which the things they do were signified. For those were figures of things to come, which had to be taken away once the realities themselves were revealed and presented through Christ, so that by the very fact that they were taken away the law and the prophets might be fulfilled. For there this too is written, that God would give a new covenant, “not like the one,” he says, “which I gave to their fathers.” For that people, because of their heart of stone, had received many precepts more suited to them than good, by which, however, future things were figured and prophesied; but they were celebrated by people who did not understand them. But when the things signified by them came and were made plain, those things are no longer commanded to be done, but are read to be understood. Hence it is said there of this future thing too: “I will take away from them the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh,” that is, not a heart without feeling but a heart with feeling. From this the apostle drew when he said: “not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart.” For what else did he say but “heart of flesh”? Since, then, this too was foretold, the law and the prophets would rather not be fulfilled if those things were not taken away from our celebration, because what they foretold would not happen; but since this too happens, they are understood to be fulfilled in the very thing by which they seem to you not to be fulfilled.

Nor does your taunt frighten us, when you call the rest of the Sabbath Saturn's chains. For it is empty and inept; and it would not have come into your mind to say this, were it not that you worship the sun on the day they call the Sun's day. But just as we call that same day the Lord's day, and on it venerate not this sun but the Lord's resurrection, so the rest of the Sabbath was observed by the fathers without veneration of Saturn, when it had to be observed so; for it was a shadow of things to come, as the apostle testifies. For the Gentiles gave the names of their gods to these days, whose number seven comes round in a cycle; of whom the apostle says that they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. In this you too imitate them, except that you worship with them the two brighter lights, but not the other stars with them. They also gave the names of their gods to the months. For in honour of Romulus, because they believed him the son of Mars, they dedicated the first month to Mars and called it March. Then April, from the name of no god of theirs, but from the thing itself, as if “aperilis,” because then most of the buds open into flower. Then the third month May, because they worship Maia, Mercury's mother, as a goddess. Then the fourth June, from Juno; then the rest up to December they named from numbers. But of these Quintilis and Sextilis were called July and August from the names of men to whom they had decreed divine honours. For the seventh, September, and the others, as I said, up to December, are named by the names of numbers in order. Further, January was named from Janus, February from the februa, the rites of the Luperci. Do you want, then, to be said to worship Mars in the month of March? For in that month you celebrate your Bema with great festivity. But if you think you may consider something else in the month of March, not Mars, why do you try to bring Saturn into the divine scriptures from the seventh day, which was named Sabbath from rest, because the Gentiles called that day Saturn's? Surely now you see with what impiety you rave.

As for the sacrifices of animals, which of us does not know that they were imposed rather as suited to a perverse people than offered to a God who desired them? Yet even in these there were figures of us, because without blood there is no cleansing for us and no propitiation of God; but the truth of those figures is Christ, by whose blood we have been redeemed and cleansed. For in the figures of the divine oracles he is called a bull, because of the power of the cross, with whose horns he tossed the impious; and a ram, because of the pre-eminence of innocence; and a goat, because of the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin. And if you mention any other kind of sacrifice more expressly, I will show you that Christ was prophesied in that too. Therefore, whether circumcision or Sabbath or distinction of foods or the offering of sacrifices, all these things were figures of us and prophecies, which Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil, when he fulfilled what was foretold by them. Consider whom you are contradicting: with the apostle, from the apostle, I say: all these things were figures of us.

For just as Mani taught you an impious perversity, so that from the gospel you accept what does not hinder your heresy and do not accept what does hinder it, so the apostle taught us a devout precaution, that whoever announces to us anything other than what we received, let him be anathema. Hence Catholic Christians count you too among the tares; for the Lord explained that the tares are not some falsehoods put into true scriptures, as you interpret, but men, sons of the evil one, that is, imitators of the devil's falsehood. Nor do they believe everything rashly; and therefore they certainly do not believe Mani and the other heretics. Nor do they condemn reason in men; but what you call reason they prove to be error. Nor do they think it impious to judge between true and false; therefore they judge your sect most false and the Catholic faith most true. Nor do they fear to separate good from its contrary; but they understand that evil is not a nature, because it is against nature; not some race of darkness or other, born from its own principle and rebelling against the divine kingdoms, which truly brought greater terror to your god than bogeys to infants; for you say that he set a veil before himself, so as not to see his members captured and laid waste by its onslaught. So they suffer no straits from this passage, as though they did not keep the precepts of the law and the prophets; because by the grace of Christ they have the lawful love of God and of neighbour, on which two commandments the whole law hangs and the prophets; and whatever was prophesied there figuratively, whether by events or by the celebration of sacraments or by modes of speech, they know to be fulfilled in Christ and the church. Hence we neither give in to an empty superstition, nor say that passage of the gospel is false, nor deny that we are Christ's disciples; because, by that reasoning of truth which I have so often set out as well as I could, it was not another law or other prophets than those which Catholic authority holds that he came not to destroy but to fulfil.

Faustus said: “I did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them.” See, I now agree that it was said. Yet we must ask why Jesus said it. Was it to soothe the fury of the Jews, who, seeing their sacred things trampled by him, were indignant and thought that he, as an impious and unsound man, should not even be listened to, much less followed? Or was it to instruct and train us, who believed in him from among the Gentiles, to take on patiently and obediently the yoke of commandments which the law of the Jews and the prophets would place on our necks? But I do not believe that even you think this, that Jesus uttered this word to bind us over to the law of the Hebrews or to the prophets. And therefore, if this was not the reason for saying it, the reason must be the other one, which I gave. For there is no one who does not know that the Jews constantly lay in wait, fiercely, for the words and works of Christ. Since they gathered from these that their law and prophets were being abolished by him, they were bound to be indignant; and therefore it would not have been out of place for him to have said, in order to check their fury, that they should not think he had come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. Nor did he lie or deceive in saying this: for he named “the law” without distinction and absolutely.

Now there are three kinds of law. One is that of the Hebrews, which Paul calls the law of sin and death; another is that of the Gentiles, which he calls natural. “For the Gentiles,” he says, “do by nature what belongs to the law; and not having a law of this kind, they are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts.” The third kind of law is the truth, which the apostle likewise indicates when he says: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.” Since, then, there are three laws, and Jesus assures us that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, no small care and diligence is needed to understand which of them he meant. Likewise, some prophets are those of the Jews, others those of the Gentiles, others those of the truth. Of the Jews’ prophets no one will ask, for it is well known. But if anyone doubts about those of the Gentiles, let him hear Paul, who, writing to Titus about the Cretans, says: “One of their own, a prophet of theirs, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies.” And therefore there is no doubt that the Gentiles too have their prophets. Moreover, that the truth too has its prophets is shown as much by Paul himself as by Jesus: by Jesus where he says, “Behold, I send you wise men and prophets, and some of them you will kill in various places”; and by Paul when he says, “The Lord himself appointed first apostles, then prophets.”

With the law divided in three and the prophets divided in three, it is not quite clear which of them Jesus meant; yet it may be inferred from what follows. For if he had at once named circumcision and sabbaths and sacrifices and the Hebrew observances, and had put forward something about them by way of fulfilment, there would have been no doubt that he spoke of the law and the prophets of the Jews, saying that he came not to abolish them but to fulfil them. But since he mentions none of these, and lists only the more ancient precepts, that is, “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not swear falsely” (and these existed of old among the nations, as is easy to prove, having been promulgated long ago through Enoch and Seth and other righteous men like them, to whom illustrious angels handed them down to tame the savagery in human beings), who would not think that he spoke of the law of truth and its prophets? Finally, his fulfilment is proved to concern the very things he promised. For what does he say? “You have heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not kill; but I say to you, do not even be angry”: that is fulfilment. “You have heard that it was said: You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you, do not even desire”: that is fulfilment. “It was said: You shall not swear falsely; but I say to you, do not swear at all”: that too is fulfilment. For in these he both strengthens the earlier precepts and adds what was lacking. But where he seems to have named some precepts of the Jews, he did not fulfil them, but even uprooted them entirely by commanding the opposite. For what follows? “You have heard that it was said: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; but I say to you: whoever strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also”: this now is destruction. “It was said,” he says, “You shall love your friend and hate your enemy; but I say to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”: this too is destruction. “It was said: Whoever wishes to put away his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce; but I say: whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, both makes her commit adultery, and he himself will be an adulterer if he afterwards marries another.” These, then, are plainly precepts of Moses, and therefore destroyed; the others belong to the ancient righteous men, and therefore are fulfilled. If you too are pleased to understand it so, it will not be out of place that Jesus also said that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. But if this explanation of ours displeases you, look for another: only do not let yourself be forced to say that Jesus lied, or find it necessary to become a Jew, so that you do not persist even now in abolishing the law which he himself did not abolish.

And yet, if one of the Nazarenes, whom others call Symmachians, had raised this objection against me, that Jesus said he had not come to abolish the law, I would for a while have hesitated, unsure what to answer him. And not without reason; for he came covered with the law and the prophets in body and mind alike. For such people as I mean both bear circumcision and keep the sabbath and abstain from pork and from other things of that kind which the law commanded, deceived under the profession of the Christian name, as one is given to understand, by this very chapter, by which you also are deceived, namely that Christ said he had come not to abolish the law but to fulfil it. Therefore with such people I would have had no small struggle, as I said, until I had shaken off the trouble of this chapter. But with you I should by no means be afraid to engage; for you rely on no strength and attack rather with impudence, so that I would more easily think myself being tempted by you than forced to believe that Christ said what I do not see that even you have believed. For you put forward nothing of those things by which the law and the prophets would seem not to be abolished but fulfilled, and yet you rebuke me as idle and a transgressor on the strength of this chapter. Or do you too now glory in that obscene little seal of mutilated groins, like a Jew or a Nazarene? Or do you raise your eyebrow over keeping the sabbath? Or do you rejoice with a clear conscience about abstaining from pork? Or, finally, do you exult that you have glutted the God of the Jews with the blood of victims and the smoke of burnt offerings? But if you have done none of these things, why do you so insist that Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it?

So I give unfailing thanks to my teacher, who held me back when I was likewise slipping, so that I am a Christian today. For I too, when I read this chapter unwarily, had almost resolved, as you have, to become a Jew. And not without reason; for if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, and fulfilling is never said of an empty vessel but of one partly filled, it seemed to me that only an Israelite could become a Christian, who, filled for the most part with the law and the prophets, would come to Christ to be filled up by him with what he still seemed to have room for, provided, that is, that he too did not abolish the earlier things; otherwise this would not be fulfilment in his case but emptying out. But I, coming from the Gentiles, thought I had approached Christ in vain, because I brought nothing of the kind that he could fill up in me with his additions. Seeking, then, what that earlier measure was, I find sabbaths, circumcision, sacrifices, new moons and baptisms, the eating of unleavened bread, distinctions of foods, of drinks, of garments, and other things that would take long to run through. I concluded, then, that this, and nothing else, was what Christ said he had not come to abolish but to fulfil. And not without reason; for what is the law without commandments? What are the prophets without their predictions? Besides this, I find there also a bitter curse laid against those “who do not abide in all the things that are written in the book of that law, to do them.” So, fearing the curse on the one side as coming from God, and on the other hearing Christ, as his Son, saying that he had not come to abolish these things but to fulfil them, see whether anything could any longer have stopped me from becoming a Jew. But from this danger the venerable faith of Mani rescued me.

But I ask with what confidence you raise these objections, or why you think that this is against me alone, when it seems no less against you. If it is not Christ’s part to abolish the law and the prophets, certainly it is not Christians’ part either. Why then do you abolish them? Or are you gradually admitting that you are not Christians? Why do you profane with every kind of work that day of the sabbath, held sacred by the law and all the prophets, on which they testify that God himself, the maker of the world, rested, fearing neither the penalty of death which it laid down against its violators nor the disgrace of the curse? Why do you defend your private parts from that disgraceful little seal of circumcision, honored by the law and all the prophets, and above all by Abraham after his supposed faith, especially since the God of the Jews declares that everyone of his people will perish who has not been marked beforehand with this ignominy? Why do you also scorn the ordinances of sacrifice, which neither Moses and the prophets under the law nor Abraham under his faith held as secondary? Why do you pollute your souls by treating foods as indifferent, if, as you believe, Christ did not come to abolish all these things but to fulfil them? Why do you also violate the yearly rule of unleavened bread and the rite of slaughtering the lamb, which the law and the prophets command to be kept for ever? Why, finally, do you take so little care not to break through new moons and baptisms and the feast of tabernacles and the other carnal sacraments of the law and the prophets of this kind, if Christ did not destroy them? So I would rightly say that if you want your contempt for these things to stand on a reason, you must either deny that you are disciples of Christ or at last admit that he first destroyed all these things. And when you have admitted this, then this too follows: that you must admit either that it is falsely written that he said he had not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, or that he meant something far different from what you think.

Augustine replied: Since you now agree that Christ said, “I did not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfil them” (for it seems hard to you to go against the authority of the gospel), let it also seem hard to you to go against the apostle when he says, “All these things were figures of us”; and again when he says of Christ, “For in him it was not Yes and No, but in him it was Yes: for as many as are the promises of God, in him they are Yes,” that is, in him they were displayed, in him they were fulfilled. Then you will see without any fog both what law he came to fulfil and how he fulfilled it. Nor will you go on stretching yourself over three kinds of law and three kinds of prophets, looking for a way out and not finding it. For it is plain, and the scripture of the New Testament too often testifies to it more clearly than light, what law and what prophets Christ came not to abolish but to fulfil. For the very law that was given through Moses became grace and truth through Jesus Christ; it is, I say, the very law given through Moses, of whom Christ says, “For he wrote of me.” Certainly it is the very law that “came in so that the offense might abound”, words which you, understanding nothing, are accustomed to have in your mouths to find fault with it. Read there, then, and see that it is the very law of which it is said: “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means. But sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good.” For the law did not command the offense so that, when it came in, the offense might abound; but the addition of a holy and just and good commandment had made the proud, who attributed much to themselves, guilty of transgression as well, so that, humbled in this way, they might learn that it belongs to grace through faith that they should no longer be subject to the law through guilt, but joined to the law through righteousness. For the same apostle says that “before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up for the faith that was afterwards revealed. So the law,” he says, “was our tutor in Christ Jesus; but after faith came, we are no longer under a tutor,” because the guilt of the law does not bind us, who are now set free by grace. For before we, humbled, received spiritual grace, the letter, commanding what we could not fulfil, did nothing but put us to death. Hence the same apostle says: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Again, these are the words of the same apostle: “For if a law had been given that could give life, righteousness would indeed be from the law; but scripture shut up all things under sin, so that the promise from the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.” Again, these are his words: “For what was impossible for the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh, in order that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” See, this is what “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it” means. For the law which bound the proud with the guilt of transgression as well, by increasing sin when it commands what they cannot fulfil, has its righteousness fulfilled by the grace of the Spirit in those who learn from Christ to be meek and humble of heart, who came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it. Then, since even for those placed under grace it is difficult in this mortal life to fulfil in every way what is written in the law, “You shall not covet,” he, made a priest through the sacrifice of his flesh, obtains forgiveness for us, fulfilling the law in this way too, so that what we can do less fully through our weakness is restored through the perfection of him whose members, as of our head, we have been made. Hence John says: “Little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin; and if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; he is the propitiation for our sins.”

He fulfilled the prophecies in this way: in him the promise of God became truth. I mentioned this a little earlier from the apostle, who says: “For as many as are the promises of God, in him they are Yes.” Again he says: “For I say that Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the sake of the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers.” So what was promised in the prophets, whether openly or through figures either of speech or of action, was fulfilled in him who came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them. But you do not understand this: that if certain acts and celebrations which were figures foretelling things to come were still performed by Christians, they would signify nothing except that the things foretold at that time by those figures had not yet come. For what is still foretold as to come either has not yet come, or, if it has already come, is foretold needlessly or falsely. Therefore, the very thing from which it seems to you that Christ did not fulfil the prophets, namely that certain things are not done by Christians which were instituted through the prophets to be done by the Hebrews, proves rather that he did fulfil them. For whatever was prophesied through figures of this kind has been fulfilled to such a degree that it is no longer prophesied through them. To this belongs also what the Lord himself says: “The law and the prophets were until John.” For the law, which shut up transgressors under abounding guilt for the faith that was afterwards revealed, became grace through Jesus Christ, through whom grace superabounded; and so it was fulfilled through liberating grace, when it was not fulfilled through the commanding letter. Likewise all the prophecy in the law itself, which promised the coming of the Savior not only in words but also in figures of certain actions, became truth through Jesus Christ. “For the law was given through Moses; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” From his coming, the kingdom of God now began to be proclaimed, because “the law and the prophets were until John”: the law, to make guilty those who would desire salvation; the prophets, to promise the Savior. But who does not know that other prophets appeared in the church after Christ’s ascension? Of them Paul says: “And he appointed some in the church, first apostles, then prophets, third teachers,” and so on. So it was not of them that it was said, “The law and the prophets were until John,” but of those who prophesied the first coming of Christ; and that coming, once fulfilled, could certainly no longer be prophesied.

So when you ask why a Christian is no longer circumcised in the flesh, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, a Christian is no longer circumcised precisely because what was prophesied by that circumcision Christ has now fulfilled. For the stripping away of carnal generation, which was figured in that act, has now been fulfilled in the resurrection of Christ; and what is to take place in our resurrection is commended to us by the sacrament of baptism. For the sacrament of new life ought not to have been taken away entirely, because the future resurrection of the dead still remains for us; and yet it ought to have been changed for the better by baptism taking its place, because something has now happened that had never happened before: in the resurrection of Christ an example of the future eternal life has been given to us. When you ask why a Christian does not keep the rest of the sabbath, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, a Christian does not keep it for this very reason, that what was prophesied by that figure Christ has now fulfilled. For we have our sabbath in him who said: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you; take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

When you ask why a Christian does not observe the distinction of foods commanded in the law, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, a Christian does not observe it for this reason, that what was prophesied by those figures Christ has now fulfilled, by not admitting into his body, the body that he predestined in his saints to eternal life, whatever was signified in human conduct by those animals. When you ask why a Christian does not offer God sacrifices of flesh and blood from slain animals, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, the Christian ought all the more no longer to offer these, because what they prophesied by such figures Christ fulfilled by the sacrifice of his own flesh and blood. When you ask why a Christian does not keep unleavened bread like the Jews, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, the Christian all the more does not keep it, because what was prophesied by that figure Christ fulfilled, purging out the leaven of the old life and showing the new life. When you ask why a Christian does not celebrate the Passover with the flesh of a lamb, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, the Christian no longer celebrates the Passover in that way for this reason, that what was foretold by that figure Christ, the spotless lamb, fulfilled by his passion. When you ask for what reason a Christian does not celebrate the new moons commanded in the law, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer: on the contrary, the Christian no longer celebrates them for this reason, that what they were celebrated to foretell Christ has now fulfilled. For the celebration of the new moon foretold the new creation, of which the apostle says: “So if anyone is a new creation in Christ, the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” When you ask why a Christian does not observe those baptisms for each and every kind of uncleanness that are commanded in the law, if Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, I answer that the Christian does not observe them rather for this reason, that they were figures of things to come which Christ fulfilled. For he came to bury us together with himself through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ rose from the dead, so we too may walk in newness of life. When you ask what reason there is that the feast of tabernacles is not a solemn feast of Christians, if the law was fulfilled by Christ and not abolished, I answer that the tabernacle of God is his faithful, in whom, joined together by love and in a way built into one, he deigns to dwell; and therefore it is all the more not observed by Christians, because Christ has now fulfilled in his church what that figure promised prophetically.

For now, so that these things should not be passed over in silence in the task we have undertaken, we have touched on them as briefly as we could. But discussed limb by limb and joint by joint, they have filled many great books which show nothing else in that scripture but Christ prophesied. So it turns out that all the things in that scripture which you think are not observed by Christians because Christ abolished them are found rather not to be observed by Christians because Christ fulfilled them. For the very observance of such figures was a foretelling of Christ. Hence what is surprising, what is absurd, or rather what is not fitting and consistent, if after his coming there ceased whatever was done in order to foretell his coming? Therefore the figures of things, which were observed so that by their very observance the Christ who was to come might be prophesied, must so little be thought unfulfilled by Christ’s coming because they were not observed when he came, that, if they had not been fulfilled by Christ’s coming, they would still be observed. Now people cannot be gathered together in any name of religion, whether true or false, unless they are bound together by some sharing of visible signs or sacraments; and the power of these sacraments is unspeakably great, and therefore, when they are despised, it makes men sacrilegious. For that is despised impiously without which piety cannot be made complete.

Nevertheless, because the visible sacraments of piety can be present even in the impious, as we read that even Simon the magician had holy baptism, such people become what the apostle describes: “having the form of piety, but denying its power.” And the power of piety is “the end of the commandment, that is, love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned.” Hence the apostle Peter, when he was speaking of the sacrament of the ark in which Noah’s household was delivered from the flood, says: “So baptism, in a like form, saves you also.” And so that they should not think the visible sacrament enough for them, through which they had the form of piety, while by living wickedly with evil morals they denied its power, he at once added: “not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the questioning of a good conscience.”

So the first sacraments, which were observed and celebrated under the law, foretold the Christ who was to come; and when Christ had fulfilled them by his coming, they were taken away, and they were taken away because they were fulfilled; for he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. And others were instituted, greater in power, better in usefulness, easier in practice, fewer in number, since the righteousness of faith has been revealed and the children of God have been called into freedom, and the yoke of slavery, which suited a hard people given to the flesh, has been taken away.

Yet consider the righteous men of old, who understood that those sacraments foretold the coming revelation of faith, by which, though it was still covered and hidden, yet understood by the gift of piety, they themselves lived even then, since in this life no one can be righteous except the one who lives by faith. If, then, the righteous men of old were ready to suffer all hard and dreadful things for those foretelling sacraments and figures of things not yet fulfilled, and many of them did suffer; if we praise the three young men and Daniel because they would not be defiled by the king’s table, which was against the sacrament of that time; if we hold up the Maccabees with great admiration because they would not touch foods which Christians now lawfully use, because then, in that prophetic time, it was not lawful: how much more ready ought a Christian now to be to endure all things for the baptism of Christ, for the eucharist of Christ, for the sign of Christ, since those were promises of things to be completed, and these are tokens of things completed? For what is still promised to the church, that is, to the body of Christ, and is proclaimed for its manifestation, has certainly already been completed in the very head of the body, the Savior, that is, in the very mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. For what is promised except eternal life from the resurrection of the dead? This has already been completed in that flesh in which the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Then, therefore, the faith was hidden; for all the righteous and holy men even of those times believed the same things and hoped for the same things; and all those sacraments and that whole ritual of sacred rites were promises. But now the faith has been revealed, for which the people was shut up when it was kept under the law; and what is promised to the faithful at the judgment has already been completed as an example through him who came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them.

Hence there is indeed a question among those who search the holy scriptures: whether faith in Christ, who was to suffer and to rise again, which the righteous men of old learned either by revelations or understood in the prophets, was as profitable to them as faith in him who has suffered and been raised is profitable now; or whether the very shedding of the blood of the Lamb of God, which took place, as he himself says, for many for the forgiveness of sins, either gave or added some benefit and cleansing even to those who had departed this life believing that it would happen, before it happened; and whether his death visited even the dead to set them free. But to discuss this question now by treating it thoroughly, or to settle it by confirming something found in it, would be long and is not necessary for this work.

Meanwhile, against the slanderous ignorance of Faustus, it will be enough to show how wildly mistaken they are who think that, because the signs and sacraments have been changed, the realities themselves are different, which the prophetic rite foretold as promised and the gospel rite has announced as fulfilled; or who judge that, since the realities are the same, they ought not to have been announced as completed by sacraments other than those by which they were foretold as still to be completed. For if the sounds of the words we speak are changed according to the time, and the same thing is announced in one way as to be done and in another as done (just as these very two words I have used, “to be done” and “done,” did not sound with equal lengths of time nor with the same or the same number of letters or syllables), what wonder is it if the passion and resurrection of Christ were promised as future by some sacramental seals of the mysteries and are announced as already accomplished by others, since the very words “future” and “accomplished,” “about to suffer” and “has suffered,” “about to rise” and “has risen,” could not be drawn out equally nor sound alike? For what are bodily sacraments but a kind of visible words, sacred indeed, yet changeable and temporal? For God is eternal; and yet the water, and all that bodily action which is performed when we baptize, both happens and passes away, and is not eternal; where again even those syllables that sound quickly and pass away when “God” is said, unless they are said, there is no consecration. All these things are done and pass away, sound and pass away; yet the power that works through them abides continually, and the spiritual gift that is conveyed through them is eternal. So whoever says, “If Christ had not abolished the law and the prophets, those sacraments of the law and the prophets would remain in the assemblies and celebrations of Christians,” can say, “If Christ had not abolished the law and the prophets, he would still be promised as one who will be born, will suffer, and will rise again”; whereas he did not abolish these things but rather fulfilled them precisely because he is no longer promised as one who will be born, will suffer, will rise, as those sacraments once proclaimed, but it is announced that he has been born, has suffered, has risen, as these sacraments performed by Christians now proclaim. He, then, who came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them, by that very fulfilment took away the things through which what is now known to be fulfilled was still being promised as to be fulfilled; just as if he took away the words “will be born, will suffer, will rise,” which were rightly said while these things were future, and ordained that “has been born, has suffered, has risen” be said, which are rightly said now that those things are completed and therefore taken away.

Just like these words, then, those sacraments of the former people, because they have now been fulfilled through him who came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them, had for that reason to be taken away and changed. As for the first Christians who had believed from among the Jews, the apostles allowed them to keep their ancestral rite and tradition, until they could gradually be persuaded against so long-standing a custom and led to a perfect understanding, and because they had been born and brought up so; and they advised those for whom it was needed to conform to their slowness and customs. Hence the apostle even circumcised Timothy, born of a Jewish mother and a Greek father, for the sake of the people of that kind to whom he had come with him, and he himself kept such a custom among them, not with deceitful pretence but with prudent counsel; for these things were not harmful to those born and brought up so, although they were no longer necessary for signifying things to come. Indeed it would have been more harmful to forbid them as harmful in the case of those people until whom they had to last; for Christ, who had come to fulfil all those prophecies, had found them already initiated in this way, so that from then on those who were bound by no such tie, but came from the opposite wall, as it were, that is, from the uncircumcision, to that cornerstone who is Christ, should be compelled to nothing of the kind. But if those who had come from the circumcision and were still devoted to such sacraments were willing of their own accord, like Timothy, to show such conformity, they were not forbidden; but if they thought that their hope and salvation lay in works of the law of this kind, they were forbidden, as from certain ruin. Hence the apostle’s words: “Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing”: circumcised, that is, as they themselves wished, as they had been persuaded by certain perverted men, that they could not be saved without these works of the law. For when the Gentiles were coming to the faith of Christ, chiefly through the preaching of the apostle Paul, in the way they ought to come, so as to be burdened with no observances of this kind (both because grown men, dreading these unaccustomed things, especially circumcision, would have been deterred from the faith, and because, not having been born so as to be imbued with such sacraments, if they became proselytes in the old manner, it would be as though Christ were still being promised as one to come through those mysteries), when, then, they were coming to the faith in the way in which it was now right for people to come from the Gentiles, those who had come from the circumcision, not understanding why these things were permitted to themselves and why they were not to be imposed on the Gentiles, had begun to disturb the church with certain carnal factions, because the Gentiles who were joining the people of God did not formally become proselytes by circumcision of the flesh and other observances of the law of this kind. And among them were some who insisted strongly that this be done because they feared the Jews among whom they lived. Against these the apostle Paul wrote much; for he corrected with brotherly rebuke even Peter, who had been drawn into their pretence. But after the apostles had gathered together and decided in their council that the Gentiles were not to be compelled to works of the law of this kind, it displeased some Christians of the circumcision, who were unable to see in their minds that only those were not to be forbidden such observances whom the faith, when it was revealed, had found already imbued with them, so that the prophetic action itself might be brought to its end in those whom it had already held before the fulfilment of the prophecy; lest, if it were removed from them too, it should seem condemned rather than ended, and lest, if it were imposed on the Gentiles too, it should be thought either not to have been instituted for the sake of promising Christ, or still to promise Christ. So the first people of God, before Christ came to fulfil the law and the prophets, was commanded to observe all those things that promised him: free in those who understood to what they referred, but slave in those who did not understand this. The later people, then, coming to the faith by which Christ was now preached as having come, suffered, and risen, was neither compelled nor forbidden to observe these things in the case of those people whom that faith had found already trained in such sacraments; but in the case of those who had believed while free of such things, held by no tie of birth, custom, or conformity, it was even forbidden, so that through them it might now begin to appear that all those things had been instituted for the sake of promising Christ, and that, now that he had come and fulfilled these promises, they must cease. When this tempering and moderation of the Holy Spirit working through the apostles displeased some believers from the circumcision who did not understand these things, they persisted in the perversity of compelling even the Gentiles to judaize. These are the people whom Faustus mentioned under the name of Symmachians or Nazarenes, who have lasted down to our own times, now indeed in small numbers, but still lasting even in their fewness.

What ground, then, have these people for slandering the law and the prophets, saying that Christ came to abolish them rather than to fulfil them because Christians do not observe what is commanded there? For they do not observe only those things through which Christ was promised, and they do not observe them precisely because Christ has now fulfilled those promises, and they are no longer promised because they have been fulfilled; and their promising signs had to come to an end in those whom the faith of Christ, who fulfils them, had found already imbued with them. Do Christians not observe what is in that scripture: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God; you shall not make yourself an idol,” and so on? Do Christians not observe what is said there: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”? Do Christians not observe the sabbath itself, in so far as it serves to understand true rest? Do Christians not pay honor to parents, as is commanded there? Do Christians not refrain from sexual immorality, murders, thefts, false witness, from coveting a neighbor’s wife ⟨or a neighbor’s property⟩? All these things are written in that law. These are precepts of morals; those are sacraments of promises. These are fulfilled through grace that helps; those through truth rendered. Both are fulfilled through Christ, who always gave that grace and now also reveals it, and who then promised this truth and now displays it; for “the law was given through Moses; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Finally, the precepts which are kept in a conscience that lives rightly are fulfilled by “faith working through love”; but those that consisted in promissory signification have passed away now that the realities have been rendered. So these too have not been abolished but fulfilled, because Christ showed them to be neither void nor deceptive when he displayed what was promised by their signification.

So it is not, as Faustus imagines, that the Lord Jesus fulfilled certain precepts which had already been spoken by the righteous men of old before the law of Moses, such as “You shall not kill,” which he did not refute by its opposite but rather strengthened when he called us back even from anger and abuse; and that he abolished certain others which seemed peculiar to the law of the Hebrews, such as “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” which he seems rather to have taken away than confirmed when he says, “But I say to you, do not resist evil; but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also,” and so on. For we say that even these precepts, which these people think Christ abolished by stating the opposite, were both well instituted at that time, for that time, and are now not abolished by Christ but fulfilled.

So I ask them first whether those righteous men of old, Enoch and Seth (for Faustus names these above all), and any others there were, not only before Moses but also before Abraham, were angry with a brother without cause or said to a brother, “Fool.” For if they did not say it, why should they not also have taught such things? And if they did teach such things, I ask how Christ fulfilled their righteousness and teaching by adding, “But I say to you: if anyone is angry with his brother, or if anyone says ‘Raca,’ or if anyone says ‘Fool,’ he will be liable to judgment, or to the council, or to the fire of Gehenna,” since they too lived in the same way and taught that one must live in the same way. Or did those righteous men not know that anger must be curbed and that a brother must not be provoked with insolent abuse; or did they know it, but were unable to keep themselves from these things? Then they were liable to Gehenna; how then were they righteous? Surely you do not dare to say that their righteousness was either so ignorant of what belonged to its duty, or so intemperate, as to make them liable to Gehenna. Why then should Christ fulfil, by adding these things, that law by which the righteous men of old lived, when their righteousness too could not exist without these things? Or will you say that headlong anger and a wicked tongue began to belong to iniquity from the time Christ came, while before it was not wicked to commit these things in heart or mouth, just as in certain matters, among the institutions belonging to particular times, we find that something is not lawful now which was lawful before, or that what was not lawful before is lawful now? You are not so foolish as to say this; but even if you say it, the answer will be that on this understanding Christ did not come to fulfil what was lacking in the ancient law, but to institute a law that did not exist, if, when saying “Fool” to a brother had not been unrighteous among the righteous men of old, Christ willed it now to be so unrighteous that whoever says it is liable to Gehenna. So you have not yet found to what law these things were once lacking, so that by adding them now Christ might fulfil it.

Or perhaps the law against adultery was only half-full among those righteous men of old, until it was filled up by the Lord, who added that no one should look at a woman to desire her? For this is how you quoted that saying: “You have heard that it was said: You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you, do not even desire.” “That is fulfilment,” you say. Set out the gospel words plainly, do not weaken what was said with your own words, and see what you have implied about those most ancient righteous men. “You have heard,” he says, “that it was said: You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you: whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Did those righteous men, then, Seth or Enoch or any like them, commit adultery in their hearts? And was their heart either not the temple of God, or did they commit adultery in the temple of God? But if you do not dare to say this, how did Christ, coming only now, fulfil their law on this matter too, when among them it was already full even then?

As for not swearing, since here too you said that their law was fulfilled by Christ, I cannot affirm that the righteous men of old did not swear; for we find that even the apostle Paul swore. But frequent swearing is never off your lips, since you swear by the light, which you love along with the flies (for you do not know how to think, even in part, of that light of minds, wholly foreign to these eyes, which enlightens every man coming into this world), and by your lord Manichaeus, who in his native language was called Mani. But you, to avoid the name of madness among the Greeks, as it were declined and lengthened the name and added a sort of pouring, where you slip further. For one of you explained to me why he was called Manichaeus: namely, so that in the Greek language he might seem to be, as it were, pouring out manna, because in Greek “pours” is chei. What you have achieved by this I do not know, except to dream up madness for yourselves more expressly. For you did not add one letter in the first part of the name, so that manna might be recognized, but you added two syllables in the latter part, calling him not Mannichaeus but Manichaeus, so that it sounds as though he pours out nothing but madness for you in his long-winded and empty discourses. You very often swear also by the Paraclete, not of course the one whom Christ promised and sent to his disciples, but by that same man, the madness-pourer, to translate his name into Latin. Since, then, you never stop swearing, I should like to know how you understand this part of the law too, which you want to be understood as most ancient, to have been fulfilled for you by the Lord; and all the more because of the apostle’s oaths. For what authority are you, even to yourselves, much less to me or to anyone? From this I think it is now clear how differently we must take what Christ says: “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it”: namely, not by these additions, which belong either to the explanation of the ancient sayings put forward or to the manner of life, not to their fulfilment.

For since they understood homicide to mean only the destruction of a human body by which it is deprived of life, the Lord made plain that every wicked impulse to harm a brother is reckoned as a kind of homicide. Hence John also says: “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer.” And since they thought that only bodily unlawful intercourse with a woman was called adultery, the Master showed that such desire too is nothing else. Again, since swearing falsely is a grave sin, while not swearing, like swearing truly, is no sin at all, but the one who is not accustomed to swear at all is farther removed from swearing falsely than the one who is quick to swear truly, the Lord preferred that we, without swearing, should not depart from the truth rather than that, swearing truly, we should come near to perjury. And so the apostle too never swore in the speeches he is reported to have given, lest by a habit of swearing he should at some time slip into perjury even unawares. But in his writings, where there is greater and more careful consideration, he is found to have sworn in many places, so that no one should think that one sins even by swearing truly, but should rather understand that the hearts of human frailty are more safely kept from perjury by not swearing. Having considered these things, we find that those precepts which Faustus wants to belong properly to Moses have not been destroyed either, as he thinks.

For here too I ask them why they want to be peculiar to the law of Moses what was said to the ancients: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” Did not the apostle Paul also call certain men hateful to God? And certainly in this very admonition the Lord himself urges us to imitate God: “So that you may be children,” he says, “of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” So we must ask how it is to be understood that, after the example of God, to whom Paul said some are hateful, enemies are to be hated, and again, after the example of God, who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust, enemies are to be loved. Thus it will appear that the Lord wished to bring in, for those who misunderstood the saying “You shall hate your enemy,” what they did not know at all, that they should love their enemies. How both are to be kept would take long to discuss. But meanwhile, to these people, who are displeased in general if anyone hates his enemy, we have a word that will put them out of countenance, when we ask them whether their God loves the race of darkness; or, if enemies are to be loved now because they have a share of good, why we ought not also to hate them because they have a share of evil. For by that rule this too is resolved, and it is shown that there is no contradiction between what is said in the ancient scripture, “You shall hate your enemy,” and in the gospel, “Love your enemies”: every wicked man, in so far as he is wicked, is to be hated, but in so far as he is a man, he is to be loved; so that we may reprove what we rightly hate in him, that is, the vice, in order that what we rightly love in him, that is, human nature itself, may be set free when the vice is corrected. This, I say, is the rule by which we may both hate an enemy for what is evil in him, that is, his iniquity, and love an enemy for what is good in him, that is, a social and rational creature; except that we prove that he is evil not by nature, either his own or another’s, but by his own will. They, however, think that a man is evil by the nature of the race of darkness, which, according to them, God feared wholly before he was conquered in part, and in part was so conquered by it that he was not even wholly set free. So, having heard and not understood what was said to the ancients, “You shall hate your enemy,” men were carried into hatred of a man when they ought to have hated nothing but the vice. These the Lord corrects by saying, “Love your enemies,” so that he who had already said, “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it,” and who therefore was not abolishing what is written in the law about hating an enemy, might, by commanding us to love our enemies, compel us to understand how we could both hate one and the same man for his fault and love him for his nature. But for their perverse minds this is a great deal to understand. They need only be pressed to defend, according to the lost reasoning, or rather madness, of their slander, their God, whom they cannot call a lover of the race of darkness; and therefore they have no way of urging, after his example, that each should love his enemy. For they could more easily have attributed love of an enemy to the race of darkness itself than to their God. For that race, as they rave, desired the light near and adjoining it, and wished to enjoy it, and, in order to enjoy it, planned to invade it. Nor is this a fault, when the true and beatifying good is sought. Hence the Lord too says: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and those who do violence will seize it.” See, according to their empty fancy, the race of darkness wished to do violence and to seize the good it had loved, delighted by its brightness and beauty; and God did not love it in return, but, detesting it with hatred, set about uprooting it utterly when it wished to enjoy him. If, then, the evil love the good in order to enjoy it, while the good hate the evil in order not to be polluted, answer, Manichaeans: which of them fulfils what the Lord said, “Love your enemies”? See, if you want these to be separate and conflicting sayings, your God did what is written in the law of Moses, “You shall hate your enemy,” and the race of darkness did what is written in the gospel, “Love your enemies.” And yet even by your fictions you have not been able to find how to settle the question between the flies that seek the light and the cockroaches that flee it; for you maintain that both are offspring of the race of darkness. Why then do the one love a light foreign to them, while the others, shunning it, rather delight in their own origin? Or are flies born more cleanly in stinking sewers than cockroaches in dark bedrooms?

Now, how is the saying to the ancients, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” contrary to what the Lord says, “But I say to you, do not resist evil; but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also,” and so on, since that ancient precept too was given in this way to check the flames of hatred and to rein in the unbridled spirits of the raging? For who is easily content to return only as much vengeance as he has received injury? Do we not see men slightly hurt plotting murder, thirsting for blood, and hardly finding in the sufferings of their enemy enough to satisfy them? Who, when struck with a fist, does not either stir up the courts to condemn the one who struck him, or, if he wants to strike back himself, pound the whole man with fists and heels, if he does not even snatch up some weapon? On this immoderate and therefore unjust revenge the law fixed a just measure and instituted the penalty of retaliation, that is, that each should pay a punishment equal to the injury he inflicted. So “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is not tinder for fury but a boundary to it, set not so that what had died down might be kindled by it, but so that what was burning might not spread further. For there is a certain just vengeance, and it is justly owed to the one who has suffered injury. Hence, when we forgive, we in a way give freely from our own right. Hence too they are called debts, which in the Lord’s Prayer we are taught to forgive in human fashion, so that ours too may be forgiven us in divine fashion. And what is owed, even if it is kindly forgiven, is still not unjustly demanded back. But just as in swearing, even the one who swears truly comes near to perjury, from which the one who does not swear at all is far removed, and although the one who swears truly does not sin, yet the one who does not swear is farther from sin (so that the admonition not to swear is a safeguard against the sin of perjury), so, since the one who wishes to be avenged unjustly, without measure, sins, while the one who wishes to be avenged justly, observing measure, does not sin, the one who does not wish to be avenged at all is farther from the sin of unjust vengeance. For the one who exacts more than is owed sins; the one who exacts what is owed does not sin; but the one who does not exact what is owed at all is far safer from the sin of the unjust exactor, especially so that he himself may not be forced to pay his own debt by him who has no debt. So I too could put these things thus: “It was said to the ancients: You shall not avenge yourself unjustly; but I say, do not even avenge yourselves”: that is fulfilment; just as Faustus says about swearing: “It was said, ‘You shall not swear falsely’; but I say, ‘Do not swear at all’; that too is fulfilment.” I too, then, could have spoken thus, if it seemed to me that by these added words Christ supplied what was lacking in the law, and not rather that what the law wished to bring about, that no one should sin by avenging himself unjustly, is more safely kept if he does not avenge himself at all, just as what it wished to bring about, that no one should sin by swearing falsely, is more safely kept if he does not swear. For if “an eye for an eye” and “whoever strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also” are contrary, why are “Render your oath to the Lord” and “Do not swear at all” not contrary? And yet Faustus thinks the latter is not destruction but fulfilment; and he ought to have thought the same here. For if “swear truly” is fulfilled by saying “do not swear,” why is “avenge justly” not also fulfilled by saying “do not avenge”? So I think that in both there is a safeguard against the sin by which one either swears falsely or avenges unjustly; although this precept about giving up vengeance entirely also avails for this, that by forgiving debts of this kind we may deserve to have ours forgiven too. But a measure first had to be applied to a hard people, by which it might learn not to go beyond what was owed, so that, once the anger that rushes to immoderate vengeance had been tamed, whoever wished might calmly consider what he himself owed, which he would wish the Lord to forgive him, and by this consideration forgive his fellow servant his debt.

For that precept of the Lord too, about not putting away a wife, when it was said to the ancients, “Whoever puts away his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce,” will be seen not to be contrary, if we look carefully. For the Lord explained what the law intended when it commanded the man who put away his wife at will to give her a certificate of divorce. For it does not say, “Whoever wishes, let him put away his wife,” to which not putting away would be contrary; but certainly he did not wish a wife to be put away by her husband, he who put in this delay, so that a mind rushing headlong into separation might be checked by the writing of the certificate and desist, and consider what an evil it was to put away a wife; especially because, as they report, among the Hebrews no one was permitted to write Hebrew letters except the scribes alone, who professed a superior wisdom, and those of them who were endowed with fairness and piety not only professed it but also pursued it. To these, then, who ought to be wise interpreters of the law and just dissuaders from separation, the law wished to send the man whom it commanded to give a certificate of divorce if he put away his wife. For the certificate could be written for him only by them, who, by this opportunity arising from necessity, might in a way guide him back into their own hands by good counsel, and, by dealing peaceably between him and his wife, persuade them to love and concord. But if so great a hatred came between them that it could not be extinguished or amended, then of course the certificate would be written, because he would refrain in vain from putting away a woman whom he so hated that he could not be recalled to the love due in marriage by any persuasion of the wise. For if a wife is not loved, she is to be put away; therefore, since she is not to be put away, she is to be loved. But love can be brought about by admonishing and persuading, not imposed by compelling the unwilling. This the scribe ought to do, being just and wise, as one in that profession ought to be. So that the man would come to him, the discordant husband was commanded to have a certificate written; and a good and wise man would not write it unless the counsel of concord could prevail nothing in a mind too averse and perverse. But I ask you, out of the sacrilegious emptiness of your error, why you are displeased by the putting away of a wife, whom you judge is to be kept not for the faithfulness of marriage but for the crime of lust. For marriage (matrimonium) is so called because a woman ought to marry for no other reason than to become a mother (mater): which to you is hateful. For you think that in this way the part of your God that was conquered and subdued in battle by the race of darkness is bound even with fleshly fetters.

But to explain rather the matter now in hand: if Christ, where he put forward certain ancient sayings and added, “But I say to you,” neither fulfilled the law of the first men by this addition of words, nor destroyed the law given through Moses by setting opposites against it, but rather so commended everything he quoted from the law of the Hebrews that whatever he said further in his own person served either to supply an explanation, if the law had stated something obscurely, or to keep more safely what the law intended: you see how differently we must understand his saying that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. It was not that the law, as if half-full, should be made complete by these words, but that what could not be done while the letter commanded, because of the presumption of the proud, should be fulfilled while grace persuades, because of the confession of the humble, by the performance of deeds, not by the addition of words. For faith, as the apostle says, “works through love.” Hence he also says: “For whoever loves another has fulfilled the law.” Because Christ, when he came, gave openly, through the Holy Spirit whom he promised and sent, this love by which alone the righteousness of the law could be fulfilled, he therefore said, “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it.” This is the New Testament, in which the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven is promised to this love, which was veiled in the figures of the Old Testament according to the distribution of times. Hence he also says: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.”

So all, or nearly all, the things he advised or commanded where he added “But I say to you” are found also in those old books. There, against anger, it is said: “My eye was troubled because of anger,” and, “Better is he who conquers anger than he who takes a city.” There, against a harsh word: “The stroke of a whip makes a bruise; but the stroke of the tongue breaks bones.” There, against adultery of the heart: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.” For it does not say, “Do not commit adultery,” but, “Do not covet.” Hence the apostle quotes this from the law, saying: “For I would not have known covetousness, if the law had not said, You shall not covet.” There, on the patience of not resisting, the man is praised who offers his cheek to the one who strikes him and is filled with insults. There, on loving an enemy, it is said: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink.” For the apostle quoted this from there; and there is that in the psalm: “With those who hated peace I was peaceable,” and much else. And that we should imitate God by refraining from vengeance and by loving even the wicked, you have there an ample passage about God himself doing so; for there it is written: “For to be very strong is always in your power alone, and who will stand against the might of your arm? For the whole world before you is like a grain on the scales, and like a drop of the morning dew that falls on the earth. But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things, and you overlook the sins of men for the sake of repentance. For you love all things that exist, and hate none of the things you have made; for you would not have made anything if you hated it. How then could anything endure if you had not willed it, or how would anything be preserved that had not been called by you? But you spare all things, because they are yours, Lord, who love souls. For your good Spirit is in all things; therefore you correct little by little those who go astray, and you admonish and speak to them about the things in which they sin, so that, leaving their wickedness, they may believe in you, Lord.” To imitate this kindly patience of God, “who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust,” Christ urges us, so that we may disregard avenging our injuries and do good to those who hate us, that we may be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. And that our forgiving others these debts of revenge avails for the forgiveness of the debts of our own sins, and that we must beware lest, if we do not do this, the bond of sin is not forgiven us either when we pray, is written thus in those old books: “He who wishes to be avenged will find vengeance from God, and he will surely confirm his sins. Forgive your neighbor who harms you, and then, when you pray, your sins will be loosed. Does a man keep anger against a man and seek healing of the flesh from the Lord? Does he have no mercy on a man like himself, and pray to the Lord for his own sins? He himself, while he is flesh, keeps anger, and does he ask atonement from the Lord? And who will intercede for his sins?”

Now, about not putting away a wife, what else, or what more fitting, could I quote from those books than the passage from which the Lord himself answered the Jews when they questioned him on this matter? For when they asked whether it was lawful to put away a wife for any cause, he said to them: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said: For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be in one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined, let no man separate.” See, the Jews, who thought that they were acting according to the will of the law of Moses when they put away their wives, are refuted from the books of Moses: a wife is not to be put away. At the same time we learn here, on the testimony of Christ himself, that God made and joined male and female; and by denying this the Manichaeans stand condemned, resisting now not the book of Moses but the gospel of Christ. Moreover, if what they themselves suppose and preach is true, that the devil made and joined male and female, by what devilish cunning does Faustus blame Moses as dissolving marriages through the certificate of divorce, and praise Christ as strengthening that bond by the precept of the gospel, when according to his own foolish and sacrilegious opinion he ought to have praised Moses for separating what the devil had made and joined, and to have reproached Christ for making firm the devil’s fabrication and binding? Again, how does the good Master explain why Moses himself, from whose book was brought forward the conjugal chastity, so holy and not to be violated by any separation, from the first joining of male and female, afterwards permitted a wife to be put away? For when they had replied, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and to put her away?” he said to them, “Because Moses, for the hardness of your heart, permitted you to put away your wives.” This is what we explained a little earlier. For how great was the hardness that could not be loosened and bent, even by the interposition of the certificate, where an opportunity for dissuasion would be given to the just and wise, to receive or recall the love of marriage? So the Lord declared, by the testimony of the same law, what the law both commanded to the good and permitted to the hard, when he both warned that a wife is not to be put away, by recalling from the same scripture the joining of male and female and setting out the divine authority of that joining, and showed that the certificate of divorce was to be given because of hardness of heart, whether a heart to be tamed or an untamed one.

Therefore, since all those excellent precepts of the Lord which Faustus wished to show were contrary to the old books of the Hebrews are found in those same books, from what did the Lord come not to abolish the law but to fulfil it, except that, apart from the figures of the promises, which were fulfilled and removed when the truth was rendered, the very precepts too, through which that law is holy and just and good, might be fulfilled in us, not through the oldness of the letter, which commands and increases offenses by adding the guilt of transgression to the proud, but through the newness of the Spirit, who helps, and of grace, which sets free for salvation the humble who confess? For in truth, just as all these sublime precepts are not lacking in those old books, so the end to which they are to be referred is hidden there, although the saints lived according to it, who saw its future revelation and, according to the character of their times, either veiled it prophetically or wisely understood what was prophetically veiled. 31. Finally (and I would not say it rashly), I do not know whether anyone has found in those books the name “kingdom of heaven,” which the Lord names so often. It is indeed said there: “Love wisdom, that you may reign for ever.” And if eternal life itself were not openly proclaimed there, the Lord would not say even to the wicked Jews: “Search the scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life; they bear witness to me.” For to what else does it refer that is written there: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord”; and, “Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death”; and, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and torment shall not touch them”; and a little later: “But they are in peace; and though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and having been troubled a little, they will be greatly rewarded”; and in another place: “But the righteous will live for ever, and their reward is with the Lord, and their care with the Most High; therefore they will receive the kingdom of glory and the crown of beauty from the hand of the Lord”? These and many other testimonies of eternal life, some very plain, some somewhat obscure, are found there. And the prophets were not silent about the resurrection of bodies itself. Hence the Pharisees fought very fiercely against the Sadducees, who did not believe in it; this appears plainly not only in the canonical Acts of the Apostles, which these people do not accept, lest they be refuted about the coming of the true Paraclete whom the Lord promised, but also in the gospel, where the Sadducees put to him the question about the woman who had married seven brothers one after another, as each succeeded the other in marriage to her when he died: whose wife would she be in the resurrection? So that scripture abounds in testimonies of eternal life and of the resurrection of the dead; but this name, that is, “kingdom of heaven,” does not occur to me from any place there. For this belongs properly to the revelation of the New Testament, because those bodies which had been earthly will, by that change which Paul mentions more openly, become spiritual in the resurrection, and therefore heavenly, in which we may possess the kingdom of heaven. This was kept to be named even by the mouth of him whom that whole apparatus of the old instrument, in generations, deeds, sayings, sacrifices, observances, festivals, and all the proclamations of its oracles, its events, and the figures of things, was in labor to bring forth as the one to come, as king to rule and priest to sanctify his faithful: he who, full of grace and truth, both helping to do the precepts by grace and taking care to fulfil the promises by truth, came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it.

Faustus said: “Why do you worship the sun, unless because you are pagans and a schism of the Gentiles, not a sect?” It will not be out of place to examine this point too, so that we may see more clearly which of us ought to be called by this name. And indeed, if I were now to set out my faith to you simply, as among friends, I might perhaps seem to be inventing it by way of excuse, or to be ashamed, God forbid, of the worship of the divine lights. But take it as you please; I shall not regret having said it, at least for the sake of some who will thus come to know that our religion has nothing in common with the Gentiles.

We, then, worship one and the same deity under a threefold name, of God the almighty Father, and of Christ his Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But we believe that the Father himself dwells in the highest and principal light, which Paul elsewhere calls “unapproachable,” and that the Son abides in this second and visible light. And since he too is twofold, as the apostle knows him when he says that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God,” we believe that his power dwells in the sun and his wisdom in the moon. We also confess that this whole compass of the air is the seat and lodging of the Holy Spirit, who is the third majesty; and that from his powers and spiritual outpouring the earth too conceives and brings forth the suffering Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men, hanging from every tree. Therefore we have toward all things, and you likewise toward the bread and the cup, an equal reverence, although you hate their authors most bitterly. This is our faith; if you think it should be inquired into elsewhere, you will hear of it; although for the present this argument too is no less firm: that you, or anyone else, if asked where he believes his God dwells, will not hesitate to answer, “In light.” From this my worship is confirmed by the testimony of almost everyone.

But now to the point that you called us not a sect but a schism of the Gentiles. A schism, unless I am mistaken, is when someone who holds the same opinions and worships with the same rite as the rest takes pleasure only in separating the congregation; a sect, on the other hand, is when someone who holds opinions far different from the rest has also instituted for himself the worship of the deity with another and far dissimilar rite. If this is so, my opinion and worship, for now, are far different from those of the pagans; we shall see about yours later. The pagans teach that good and evil, foul and splendid, everlasting and perishing, changeable and fixed, bodily and divine, have one principle. I hold the very opposite to them, for I confess God as the principle of all good things, and Hyle of their contraries; for so our theologian names the principle and nature of evil. Again, the pagans think that God is to be worshipped with altars, shrines, images, victims, and incense. In this too I go far apart from them: I consider myself, if only I am worthy, the rational temple of God; I take Christ his Son as the living image of the living majesty; as altar, a mind imbued with good arts and disciplines. Divine honors and sacrifices too I place in prayers alone, and those pure and simple. How then am I a schism of the pagans?

On that reckoning you could also have called me a schism of the Jews, because I too worship the almighty God, which every Jew boldly claims for himself as well, if you did not consider the difference of rites with which the Almighty is worshipped by me and by the Jews, if indeed the Jews worship the Almighty. But for the present we are dealing with opinion, which misled the pagans about the worship of the sun just as it misled the Jews about the worship of the Almighty. But neither is it true if you call me a schism of yours, although I venerate and worship Christ, because I worship him with another rite and another faith than yours. A schism, however, ought to change either nothing from that from which it arose, or not much. You, for example, breaking away from the Gentiles, first tore off with you their opinion of a single principle, that is, that you believe all things come from God; and you turned their sacrifices into love feasts, their idols into martyrs, whom you worship with similar vows; you appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts; you celebrate the solemn days of the Gentiles with them, such as the Kalends and the solstices; certainly you have changed nothing in your way of life. You are plainly a schism, differing from its mother in nothing but your assembly. Your predecessors the Jews too, when they separated themselves from the Gentiles, gave up only carved images; but temples, sacrifices, altars, priesthoods, and the whole ministry of sacred rites they practised with the same rite, and far more superstitiously than the Gentiles. And in the opinion of a single principle they too differ in nothing from the pagans. Therefore it is clear that you and the Jews are schisms of paganism, holding its faith and its rites, though somewhat changed, and you think you are sects merely because your assemblies are separate. Moreover, if you look for sects, there will be no more than two, that is, that of the Gentiles and ours, who hold views far different from them, so opposed to each other as truth and falsehood, as day and night, as poverty and plenty, as sickness and health. But you are neither a sect of error nor of truth, but only a schism; and that not even of the truth, but of error.

Augustine replied: O ignorant plague and shifty vanity! Why do you raise against yourself an objection which, if anyone raises it against you, he does not know whom he is dealing with? For we do not call you pagans or a schism of the pagans, but say that you have a certain likeness to them in that you worship many gods; and indeed that you are far worse than they, because they worship things that exist, but should not be worshipped as gods. For idols too exist, but they are nothing for salvation. And whoever worships (colit) a tree, not by cultivating it but by adoring it, does not worship what exists nowhere, but what should not be worshipped in that way. The demons themselves also, of which the apostle says, “What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God,” certainly exist, since he says they sacrifice to them and does not want us to be their partners. Again, heaven and earth, sea and air, sun and moon and the other stars, all these appear plainly to the eyes and are present to the senses themselves. When the pagans worship these as gods, or as parts of one great god (for some of them think the whole universe is the greatest god), they worship things that exist. When we deal with them so that they may not worship these things, we do not tell them that they are nothing, but that they are not to be worshipped; and we persuade them that the invisible God, the maker of all these, is to be worshipped, by participation in whom alone a man can become happy, which no one doubts all men want. But since some of them worship an invisible and incorporeal creature (as the human soul and mind is), yet, because a man does not become happy by participation even in a creature of this kind, the God who is not only invisible but also unchangeable, that is, the true God, must be worshipped; for he alone is to be worshipped by enjoying whom alone his worshipper becomes happy, and without enjoying whom alone every mind is miserable, whatever else it may enjoy. But since you worship things that do not exist at all, but are invented by the emptiness of your deceitful fables, you would be nearer to true piety and religion if you were at least pagans, or of the kind that worship bodies, which are not to be worshipped, yet are real. Hence I would more truly say that you do not even worship this sun, toward whose circuit your prayer turns round.

For about it too you boast so many falsehoods, and such detestable ones, that if it avenged its injuries, you would already be burning alive in its flames. For first you say that it is a kind of ship; so you not only stray, as the saying goes, by the whole sky, but swim as well. Then, although it shines round before everyone’s eyes, and that shape is perfect for it given the position of its order, you assert that it is triangular, that is, that this light shines on the world and the earth through a kind of triangular window of the sky. So it comes about that you bend your back and neck toward this sun, yet adore not the sun itself, visible in so bright a roundness, but some ship or other flashing and shining through a triangular hole, a ship you have invented in your thoughts. Certainly that shipwright would not have made it if, as the timbers with which the planks of ships are fastened together are bought, so the words with which the fables of heretics are fabricated were bought as well. But these things in you are more bearably either laughed at or wept over; what is intolerably wicked is that you say that from this very ship beautiful girls and boys are displayed, with whose most lovely bodies the princes of darkness are inflamed, the males toward the females and the females toward the males, so that in that very burning lust and gaping desire the members of your God may be released from their members as from foul and filthy fetters. And with these most obscene rags of yours you try to sew on the ineffable Trinity, saying that the Father dwells in a certain secret light, the power of the Son in the sun, his wisdom in the moon, and the Holy Spirit in the air!

In this threefold, or rather now fourfold, fable of yours, what am I to say to you about the Father’s secret light, except that you cannot conceive of light except such as you are used to seeing? For gazing at this light, which is visible and most familiar to all flesh, not only of men but also of beasts and little worms, you are accustomed to enlarge without limit the image conceived from it in your heart, and to call that the light where God the Father dwells with the citizens of his kingdom. For when have you distinguished the light by which we see from the light by which we understand, since you have never thought that understanding the truth is anything other than imagining bodily forms, either bounded or unbounded on some sides, which you do not know to be empty phantasms? There is a great difference between the thought by which I imagine your land of light, which exists nowhere at all, and the thought by which I imagine Alexandria, which I have never seen, yet which exists; and again there is a great difference between this thought, by which I imagine Alexandria unknown to me, and that by which I imagine Carthage, which I know. But from this thought too, by which I imagine certain and known bodies, the thought by which I understand justice, chastity, faith, truth, love, kindness, and whatever is of this kind, is incomparably far removed. Tell me, if you can, what kind of light that thought is, by which all these things, which are not this light, are both distinguished from one another and known with sure clarity, together with how far they are from this light. And yet even this light is not that light which God is; for this is a creature, he is the creator; this was made, he is the one who made it; this, finally, is changeable, as it wills what it did not will, and knows what it did not know, and remembers what it had forgotten, while that light abides in unchangeable will, truth, and eternity. And from it we have the beginning of existing, the reason of knowing, the law of loving; from it all living things, even irrational ones, have the nature by which they live, the vigor by which they perceive, the movement by which they seek; from it too all bodies have measure, so that they may subsist, number, so that they may be adorned, weight, so that they may be ordered. So that light is the inseparable Trinity, one God, whose substance, incorporeal, spiritual, and unchangeable in itself, with no body joined to it, you even divide by places. And you do not even give the Trinity three places, but four: one to the Father, that is, the unapproachable light, which you do not understand at all; two to the Son, namely the sun and the moon; and again one to the Holy Spirit, that is, this whole compass of the air. About the unapproachable light of the Father, then, since for those who hold the true faith the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separated from it, let this be enough for now.

And what made your vanity place the Son’s power in the sun and his wisdom in the moon? For since the Son abides inseparably in the Father himself, how can his wisdom be separated from his power, so that the one is in the sun and the other in the moon, when only bodies can be divided and separated by places of this kind? If you knew this, you would never weave such fables from a foolish and mad phantasm. But even within that very falsehood and deceit, how unfittingly, how perversely you say that the seat of wisdom shines less than the seat of power, when working and accomplishing seem to belong to power, but teaching and showing to wisdom! And so, if heat prevailed in the sun and light in the moon, these inventions would somehow have found a mist of likelihood for deceiving carnal and animal men, who think that nothing exists except what they have imagined as bodily; for the force of heat works to move things, so that it might be attributed to power, while the clear brightness of light serves to show things, so that they might give it to wisdom. But since light far excels in the sun, how is power there, while what shines so much less here is wisdom? O sacrilegious folly! And since the one Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, while the Holy Spirit is not himself Christ, how is Christ separated from himself, when the Holy Spirit is not separated from him? For you assert that the air, which your fable assigns as the seat of the Holy Spirit, fills the whole structure of the world. Hence the sun and the moon, as they travel their circuits, are always with it; but the moon departs from the sun and returns again to the sun. So, on your authority, or rather by your deception, wisdom withdraws from power for half of the circuit and returns to it again for the other half; and when the moon is full, then wisdom is far from power; for then these two lights are separated from each other by so long an interval that when the sun sinks toward the west, the moon rises in the east. From this it follows, since everything that power deserts grows weak, that wisdom is the weaker the fuller the moon is. But if, as the truth holds, both the wisdom of God is always equally strong and the power of God is always equally wise, why do you speak of these two in such a way as to separate them by seats and intervals of place, when you say that the seats themselves are of the same substance, men who with blind and mad minds do not depart from the phantasm of bodies, and are so lacking in power and wisdom that you can neither be wise with any strength nor be strong with any wisdom? Is it really so, detestable and accursed folly, that Christ, stretched out through the sun and moon, dwelling here as power and there as wisdom, neither perfect and full here, nor wise in the sun nor powerful in the moon, in both places procures beautiful boys to be desired by the female princes of darkness and girls by the males? This you read, this you believe, this you teach, by this faith and doctrine you live; and you are surprised that you are so abhorred!

But if you so go astray about these most eminent and best-known lights that you adore in them not what they are but what you most insanely imagine, what am I to say about your other fables? For what Splenditenens suspends the world, and what Atlas holds it up along with him? These and countless other things that you rave about in the same way do not exist at all, and you worship them. That is why we say that you are worse than the pagans, like them only in that you worship many gods, but unlike them for the worse in that they worship as gods things that exist but are not gods, while you worship things that are neither gods nor anything at all, since they do not exist at all. They too have some fabulous inventions; but they know that they are fables, and either say they were invented by poets for the sake of delight, or try to interpret them with reference to the nature of things or the morals of men: as that Vulcan is lame because the motion of earthly fire is of that kind; that Fortune is blind because the things called fortuitous happen uncertainly; that the three Fates with distaff and spindle and fingers twist the thread from the wool because of the three times: the past, which is already spun and wound on the spindle; the present, which passes between the fingers of the spinner; the future in the wool wound on the distaff, which is still to pass through the fingers of the spinner to the spindle, as through the present to the past; that Venus is the wife of Vulcan, because pleasure is naturally drawn from heat, and the adulteress of Mars, because she is unsuited to those at war; that Cupid is a boy flying and shooting arrows, because irrational and unstable love wounds the hearts of the wretched; and very many other things in this manner. So what we laugh at in them is that, having interpreted them so, they adore what, if not understood, they would adore, though damnably, yet more excusably. For by these very interpretations they are convicted of worshipping not the God by participation in whom alone the mind becomes happy, but the creature made by him; and not only the virtues of that creature, like Minerva, whose fable, that she was born from the head of Jupiter, they interpret as prudence in counsel, which is proper to reason, to which Plato too gave the head as its seat, but also vices, as we said about Cupid. Hence one of their tragic poets says: “Base lust, favoring vice, invented love as a god.” For the Romans even consecrated images of bodily ills, such as Pallor and Fever. So, to pass over the fact that the adorers of images have feelings toward the very shapes of the bodies, so that they fear as gods those very forms set up on high in places of honor, to which they see such homage paid, the very interpretations by which these dumb, deaf, blind, and lifeless things are defended accuse them all the more justly. Nevertheless, these things, whatever they are, although, as I have already said, they are nothing for salvation or for any benefit, both exist, and what is interpreted from them is found in reality. But you neither by painting nor by sculpture nor by interpretation show your First Man warring with five elements; and the Mighty Spirit fashioning the world from the captive bodies of the race of darkness, or rather from the conquered and subdued members of your God; and Splenditenens holding in his hand the remains of those same members of your God and lamenting all the rest, captured, oppressed, defiled; and the great Atlas carrying it on his shoulders together with him, so that the other, worn out, may not throw it all down; and so your fable, as on a theatre curtain, may not be able to reach the catastolium of that last globe; and countless other things equally silly and mad: and yet you believe and worship them, although they do not exist at all, and moreover you mock as rashly credulous the Christians who cleanse their pious minds by unfeigned faith. Not to look for many arguments to show that these things do not exist at all (because to treat more subtly and loftily of the structure of the world, even if it were not difficult for me, would certainly take too long), I say this: if these things are true, the substance of God is changeable, corruptible, capable of defilement. But to believe this is full of sacrilegious madness. All those things, therefore, are vain, false, nothing. Hence you are altogether worse than these pagans who are commonly known, who existed of old and now blush at what remains of them, because they worship things that are not gods, while you worship things that do not exist at all.

So if you think that you hold the truth because you are far unlike the error of the pagans, and that we are in error because we are perhaps farther from you than from the pagans, then let a dead man be called healthy because he is no longer even sick, and let the healthy man be blamed because he is nearer to the sick than to the dead. Or, if many pagans are to be reckoned not as sick but as dead, let the shapeless ash in the tomb be praised because it no longer even keeps the shape of a corpse, and let living limbs be faulted because they are more like a corpse than ashes; just as these people think we should be blamed because, they say, we are more like the corpse of the pagans than the cinders of the Manichaeans. Yet things are usually divided for distinction in different ways according to many differences, so that what was on one side is found, by other differences, on another side where it was not before. For example, if someone divides all flesh into flying creatures and those that cannot fly, by this difference four-footed animals are more like men than birds, for both alike cannot fly. Again, if someone divides by another difference, saying that some are rational and others irrational, now four-footed animals are more like birds than men, for both alike lack reason. Not considering this, Faustus says: “Moreover, if you look for sects, there will be no more than two, that is, that of the Gentiles and ours, who hold views far different from them,” because, of course, he had said that the Gentiles differ from the Manichaeans chiefly in that they say all things come from one principle, which the Manichaeans deny, adding the principle of the race of darkness. In this difference, it must be admitted, many pagans agree with us; but he did not see that, again, if someone divides by saying that among those who are held by some religion, some think one God is to be worshipped and others many, by this difference both the pagans are far from us, and these people are counted with the pagans, and we with the Jews. Someone, then, could by this difference also reckon only two sects in this way. Here perhaps you will say that you declare your many gods to be of one substance, as if the pagans did not assert that their many gods are not of one substance, although they attribute to them different offices, works, and powers; just as among you too one fights the race of darkness, another builds the world from what was captured from it, another suspends it from above, another carries it from below, another turns the wheels of fire, winds, and waters at the bottom, another, circling in the sky, gathers with his rays the members of your God even from sewers. And who can count all the fabulous offices of all your gods, shown by no truth, figured by no enigmas? Further, if another divides all men by saying that some believe that God cares for human affairs and others do not believe this at all, on the one side the pagans agree with us, and the Jews, and you, and all heretics who are in any way called Christians; on the other are found the Epicureans and any others who have held this view. Is this a small difference? Why then should it not be said that by this difference too there are only two sects, so that in one of them you are with us? Or will you dare, in this difference, to depart from us who preach that God cares for human affairs, and to be with the Epicureans, who deny it? Here, surely, rejecting them, you run to us. So, by various differences, they are found now here, now there, joined on one side, separated on another; in turn all are with us and we with all, and again none of them with us nor we with any of them. If Faustus had considered this, he would not rave so eloquently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For it is not true, as Faustus said, that our predecessors the Jews, separated from the Gentiles, since they had a temple and sacrifices and altars and priesthoods, gave up only carved images, that is, idols. For they could, as some do even without carved idols, have sacrificed to trees and mountains, and finally even to the sun and moon and the other stars. If they had done this, with that worship which is called latria, serving the creature rather than the creator, and so erring in the no small evil of impious superstition, the demons would nonetheless have presented themselves to delude them and to take what they had offered in this way. For those proud and impious spirits are fed not by the savor and smoke, as some foolish people think, but by the errors of men: not by refreshment of their body, but by malevolent delight, when they deceive in any way whatever, or by the arrogant pride of a counterfeit majesty, when they boast that divine honors are paid to them. So our fathers did not give up only the images of the Gentiles; but, sacrificing nothing to the earth or to any earthly thing, nor to the sea, nor to the sky, nor to the host of heaven, they offered victims to the one God, creator of all, who willed them to be offered to him, promising through their likeness the true victim through whom he has reconciled us to himself by the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus our Lord; and Paul addresses the faithful, made the body of this head, saying: “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God.” But the Manichaeans say that human bodies are the handiwork of the race of darkness and prisons in which God, conquered, is shut up; hence Faustus proclaims one thing, Paul quite another. But since “whoever preaches to you a gospel other than what you have received, let him be accursed,” Christ speaks truly in Paul; let Mani be accursed in Faustus.

He also says that we have changed nothing of the morals of the Gentiles, not knowing what he is saying. For since “the righteous lives by faith,” and “the end of the commandment is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned,” and there remain for forming the life of the faithful these three, “faith, hope, love,” how can anyone have the same morals as someone with whom he does not share these three? For whoever believes something different, hopes for something different, loves something different, must live differently. And if the use of certain things seems to be the same for us as for the Gentiles, such as food and drink, houses, clothes, baths, and, for those of us who lead married life, taking and having wives, begetting, rearing, and leaving inheritances to children, yet the one who refers their use to a different end uses these things very differently, and so does the one who gives thanks for them to God, about whom he believes nothing wrong or false. For just as, in your very error, though you eat the same bread as other men, and live on fruits and springs, and are clothed in wool and linen woven alike, you still do not lead the same life in these things, not by eating or drinking or wearing something different, but by thinking and believing something different and referring all these things to a different end, namely the end of your error and vanity: so we too, both in these and in other things which we take alike, do not live alike with the Gentiles, since we refer the same things not to the same end, but to the end of the lawful and divine commandment, “love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned, from which some, straying, have turned aside to vain talk.” In this, indeed, you hold first place, not observing, not considering how much a different faith avails for a different life in having and doing the same things. So, although your hearers both have wives and take up children, however unwillingly, and amass or keep inheritances for them, eat meat, drink wine, bathe, reap, gather grapes, do business, hold public offices, you nevertheless count them with you and not with the Gentiles, although their deeds seem more like the Gentiles’ than yours. For although the deeds of certain Gentiles come nearer to yours than those of some of your hearers (for some of them, in their sacrilegious rites, abstain from wine and from meat and from intercourse), you count rather your hearers, who use all these things and in that are unlike you, in the flock of Mani, than those who do the same things that you do; and you call a woman who has believed in Mani yours rather, even if she bears children, than the Sibyl, who did not even marry. “But many are called catholic Christians who are adulterers, robbers, misers, drunkards, and whatever else is opposed to sound doctrine.” Well then, among you, in your so small and almost nonexistent number, are not many such, and are some among the pagans not such? Do you therefore say that pagans who are not such are better than you? Yet because of the sacrilegious vanity of your sect, even those among you who are not such are worse than pagans who are such. Hence it is clear that sound doctrine, which alone is catholic, is not discredited because many want to be reckoned under its name but do not want to be healed by it. For that fewness which the Lord especially commends is to be recognized within a huge and countless multitude spread throughout the whole world: a fewness of saints and faithful which, as must often be pointed out, is called few as the grains are few in comparison with the multitude of the chaff, but which in itself makes so great a mass of wheat that it surpasses by an incomparable multitude all your good and bad members alike, whom the truth rejects equally. See, we are not a schism of the Gentiles, from whom we differ very greatly for the better; but neither are you, since you differ from them very greatly for the worse.

Faustus said: “Is there one God, or two?” Plainly one. “How then do you assert two?” Never in our assertions has the name of two gods been heard. But I should like to know from where you suspect this. “Because you teach two principles, of good and of evil.” It is true that we confess two principles, but one of them we call God, the other Hyle, or, to speak in common and usual terms, the demon. But if you think this means two gods, then when a physician discusses sickness and health you will be able to think they are two healths; and when someone names good and evil, you will be able to think they are two goods; and hearing of plenty and want, you will think they are two plenties. What then? If, when I discuss white and black, cold and hot, sweet and bitter, you were to say that I had shown two whites, two hots, and two sweets, would you not seem out of your mind and of a brain far from sound? So too, when I teach two principles, God and Hyle, I ought not on that account to seem to you to be showing two gods. Or, because we assign all harmful power to Hyle and all beneficial power to God, as is fitting, do you think on that account that it makes no difference whether we call both of them God? If so, hearing of poison and antidote, you will be able to think it makes no difference whether both are called antidote, because each has its own power, each does and works something. And hearing of a physician and a poisoner, you will call both physicians; and hearing of a just man and an unjust one, you will be able to call both just, because each of them does something. But if it is absurd to do this, how much more absurd to think God and Hyle two gods because each of them works something? Therefore this argument is silly and quite exhausted of strength: because you cannot answer me about the thing, you stir up ill will from names alone. For I do not deny that we too sometimes call the opposing nature “god,” but not according to our faith; rather, according to the name already applied to it by its worshippers, who imprudently think it a god; as the apostle too says, “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers,” naming him god because he was already so called by his own, but adding that he blinds minds, so that it may be understood from this that he is not the true God.

Augustine replied: We do indeed often hear of two gods in your disputations; and although you denied it at first, a little later you yourself admitted it, as if giving the reason why you say so, because the apostle too says, “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers.” Many of us punctuate this sentence so as to say that the true God has blinded the minds of unbelievers. For when they have read, “in whom God,” they pause in pronouncing it, and then add, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this world.” For even if you do not punctuate it so, but for the sake of explanation change the order of the words thus, “in whom God has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this world,” the same sense shines out as in that punctuation. For even such an operation, by which the minds of unbelievers are blinded, can in a certain way belong to the true God; it is not malice that does it, but justice, as the same Paul says elsewhere: “Is God unjust, who inflicts wrath?” And again elsewhere: “What then shall we say?” he says; “Is there injustice with God? By no means. For he says to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will show compassion to whom I am compassionate.” Since, then, he had first laid down what must be held unshaken, that there is no injustice with God, notice what he says a little later: “But if God, wishing to show his wrath and to make known his power, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, and in order to make known the riches of his glory toward the vessels of mercy, which he prepared for glory,” and so on. Certainly here it can in no way be said that one God shows his wrath and makes known his power in the vessels made for destruction, and another shows his riches in the vessels of mercy. For the apostolic teaching testifies that one and the same God does both. Hence also this: “For this reason God gave them up to the desires of their heart, to uncleanness, so that they dishonor their bodies among themselves”; and a little later: “Therefore God gave them up to shameful passions”; and again a little later: “And since they did not see fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind.” See how the true and just God blinds the minds of unbelievers. For in these words of the apostle which I have quoted, no other God has ever been understood than the one who sent his Son, who says: “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” For here too it is clear enough to the minds of the faithful how God blinds the minds of unbelievers. For something hidden goes before, in hidden places, where God carries out the most just examination of his judgment, so that the minds of some are blinded and those of others enlightened; to whom it is most truly said: “Your judgments are a great deep.” Marveling at the impenetrable height of this depth, the apostle exclaims: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments!” and so on.

But you, unable to distinguish what God does by kindness and what by judgment, because our psalter is far from your heart and from your mouth, where it is said, “Of mercy and judgment I will sing to you, Lord,” remove altogether from the decision and judgment of God whatever has offended you through the weakness of human mortality, having of course another, evil god ready, whom not truth shows you but vanity invents, to whom you attribute not only whatever you do unjustly but also whatever you suffer justly; thus attributing to God the benefits of his gifts and taking from him the judgments of punishment, as though Christ said that eternal fire was prepared for the wicked by another god than him “who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Why do you not understand that such goodness here and such severity there belong to one God, except because you do not know how to sing of mercy and judgment? Does not the same one who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust, nevertheless break off the natural branches and graft in the wild olive contrary to nature? Does not the apostle say there of the one God himself: “See then the goodness and severity of God: severity toward those who were broken off, but goodness toward you, if you remain in goodness”? Surely you have heard, surely you have noticed, how he neither takes from God his judicial severity nor from man his free will. It is hidden, it is deep, it is shut off from human thought in an unapproachable secret, how God both condemns the ungodly and justifies the ungodly; for the truth of the holy scriptures speaks of both concerning him. Does it delight you, then, to chatter against the divine judgments because they are unsearchable? How much more fitting, how much better suited to our measure, it is to be awestruck where Paul was awestruck, and to exclaim: “O the depth of the riches of the knowledge and wisdom of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!” How much better to marvel at what you are not able to search out, than to want to invent another, evil god because you could not comprehend the one good God! For the question is not about the name, but about the work.

For Faustus seems to have defended himself quickly when he says, “We do not speak of two gods, but of God and Hyle.” But when you ask what he means by Hyle, you will hear plainly a description of another god. For if they called hyle the formless matter capable of bodily forms, as it was called by the ancients, none of us would charge them with calling it a god. As it is, how great an error, how great a madness it is either to call the matter of bodies the maker of bodies, or to deny that the maker of bodies is God! Since, then, what the true God does, namely the qualities and forms of bodies, elements, and living things, so that there are bodies, elements, and living things, you say some other being does, whatever name you call him by, you are rightly said by your error to bring in another god. For in this one matter you err twice with a sacrilegious error: once, in that you say that what God made is made by one whom you blush to confess as god (but you will in no way bring it about that he is not god, unless you deny that he makes such things as only God makes); and again, because you suppose that what the good God makes good is both made by an evil one and is evil, shuddering with a childish mind at what does not suit the weakness of penal mortality and loving what does suit it. So you call him evil who made the snake, but you think this sun so great a good that you believe it was not made by God but brought forth or sent out from him. But the true God, in whom I grieve exceedingly that you do not yet believe, made both the snake among other lower things and the sun among other higher ones, and, higher still, not bodily heavenly things but spiritual things far better than this light, which no carnal man perceives, much less you, who, when you detest the flesh, detest nothing other than your own rule by which you measure good and evil! For there can be in you no thought either of evils, except of the kind that offend the carnal sense, or of goods, except of the kind that delight the carnal eye.

So when I consider these works of God at the bottom of things, earthly, weak, mortal, yet works of God, such as we can see, I am moved beyond words to praise their creator, who is so great in great works that he is not less in the least. For the divine art by which heavenly and earthly works are made, though these are unlike one another, is itself like itself in all of them, because in perfecting each in its own kind it is everywhere perfect. For it does not make the universe in each single thing, but, making single things for the embrace of the universe, it offers itself whole both to the universe to be made and to single things, making and arranging all things fittingly in their places and orders, and giving what is fitting to all, both individually and universally. See here, at what is as it were the lowest floor of the whole creation, look at the living things that fly and swim and walk and creep. Surely they are mortal; surely their life, as it is written, is “a vapor that appears for a little while.” For they contribute this small measure, received from the best of founders, to the universe as to a common store, to fill it out according to the share of their kind, so that, with these lowest things, all things may be good, among which the higher are better than they. But pay attention, and give me a single animal, however abject, whose soul hates its flesh and does not rather nourish and cherish it, and quicken, rule, and in a way administer with vital motion, according to the smallness of its kind, a sort of universe of its own joined to it for preserving its safety. For when the rational soul chastises its body and brings it into subjection, so that the perception of wisdom may not be hindered by immoderate earthly appetite, even so it certainly loves its flesh, which it lawfully subjects and orders to obey it. Finally, you yourselves, although by a carnal error you detest the flesh, cannot but love your flesh and look after its health and safety, avoiding all the blows, falls, and bad weather by which it is harmed, and seeking the protection and health by which it is preserved; so you show that the law of nature prevails against the opinion of your error.

What of the flesh itself: its vital organs, the harmony of its whole form, its members for working, its vessels for sensing, all distinguished by their places and offices and woven together in harmonious unity with moderation of measures, equality of numbers, and order of weights: do they not point to their maker, the true God, to whom it is truly said, “You have arranged all things in measure and number and weight”? If, then, you had a heart not perverted and corrupted by empty fables, you would clearly see his invisible things, understood even through these things that have been made in this lowest and fleshly creation. For from where do these things I have mentioned come to them, except from him by whose unity every measure is established, by whose wisdom every beauty is formed, by whose law every order is arranged? But if you have no eye to behold these things, let the authority of the apostle guide you.

For when the apostle was giving precepts about holy love, such as that of husbands for their wives ought to be, he took his example from the soul that loves. “He who loves his wife,” he says, “loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church.” See, the whole fleshly substance is before your eyes! See how this common bond of nature points every living thing, joined to itself for its safety, to love its own flesh. For this is not only so in men, who, when they live rightly, not only look after the safety of their flesh but also tame and rein in fleshly impulses to the use of reason; but beasts too flee pain and fear destruction, and whatever can break and sever that framework of members and that bond of flesh and spirit from its harmonious joining, they avoid with all the agility they have, they too nourishing and cherishing their own flesh. “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes,” he says, “and cherishes it, as Christ also does the church.” See from where to where he has ascended; behold, if you can, what force the creature draws from the creator, from the heavenly structures themselves down to flesh and blood, bounded by the fullness of the universe, adorned by the variety of forms, ordered by the grades of things.

Again, when the same apostle was teaching us something plainly great, divine, and hidden about spiritual gifts, diverse yet harmonizing in unity, he gave a likeness drawn from this very flesh of ours; and while saying this he by no means kept silent that God is its maker. Although the passage is long, yet because it is very necessary I shall not be reluctant to insert the whole of it from his letter to the Corinthians into this work. “Concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant. You know that when you were Gentiles, you went up to voiceless images, led as you were. Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking in the Spirit of God says ‘Anathema Jesus,’ and no one can say ‘Lord Jesus’ except in the Holy Spirit. Now there are divisions of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are divisions of ministries, and the same Lord; and there are divisions of workings, but the same God, who works all things in all. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good: to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith in the same Spirit, to another the gift of healings in the one Spirit, to another the workings of powers, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues: but one and the same Spirit works all these, dividing to each his own as he wills. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free; and we were all given to drink of one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,’ is it therefore not of the body? Or if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,’ is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the smelling be? But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body as he willed. If they were all one member, where would the body be? But now there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’; but much more, those members of the body that seem to be weaker are necessary; and those of the body that seem to be less honorable, on these we bestow more abundant honor; and our unseemly parts have more abundant seemliness, while our seemly parts have no need. But God has tempered the body together, giving greater honor to the part that lacked, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another; and if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it.” If there is in you, I do not say any Christian faith, so that you believe the apostle, but any human sense, so that you perceive what is plain, let each one see and consider these things in himself: how true, how certain they are, how great in what is small, how good in what is lowest; since the apostle sets these things in a place of praise, so that through these weak bodily things which are seen, those sublime spiritual things which are not seen may be more easily understood.

So you see whom he contradicts who denies that God is the maker of these members and of our body, which the apostle so commends and praises, proclaiming to us something other than what we have received. What need is there, then, for him to be refuted by me rather than anathematized by all Christians? The apostle says, “God tempered the body,” and this man says, “Hyle, not God.” What is plainer than these enmities, to be anathematized before they are refuted? Did the apostle here too, when he said “God,” add “of this world”? There, even if someone understands that the devil blinds the minds of unbelievers, we do not deny it, by evil persuasions; and those who consent to them lose the light of justice, God repaying what is just. All these things we read in the holy scriptures. For this too was said of seduction coming from outside: “I fear lest, as the serpent seduced Eve by his cunning, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity and chastity that is in Christ.” Like this is: “Evil conversations corrupt good morals.” And this, that each one may be his own seducer: “But whoever thinks he is something, when he is nothing, deceives himself.” And this about God’s punishment, which I mentioned above: “God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting.” So too in the old books, after saying first, “God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living,” a little later it says, “Through the envy of the devil death entered the world.” And again about death itself, lest men should put themselves outside blame: “But the ungodly,” it says, “summoned it by their hands and words, and thinking it a friend they wasted away”; and elsewhere: “Good things and bad, life and death, riches and poverty, are from the Lord God.” Here confused men do not understand that in one and the same evil work, not by another punishment following later, which will be manifest, but by a certain punishment accompanying it at once, one thing comes from the cunning of the persuader, another from the wickedness of the one who wills, another from the justice of the one who punishes: the devil suggests, man consents, God abandons. Therefore in the evil work, that is, the blinding of unbelievers, if the devil too is understood because of the malice of his persuasion, so that it is punctuated thus, “the god of this world,” it does not seem to me absurd. For he is not called god without an addition, since “of this world” is added, that is, of ungodly men who want to flourish only in this world; in which sense the world is also called evil, as it is written: “to rescue us from the present evil world.” For of the same kind is this: “whose god is the belly”; if “whose” were not there, he would in no way say “god is the belly.” Nor could demons be called gods in the psalm unless “of the nations” were added; for so it is written: “For the gods of the nations are demons.” But here it is neither “the god of this world,” nor “whose god is the belly,” nor “the gods of the nations are demons,” but it is stated simply, “God tempered the body”; and this can be understood only of the true God, creator of all. For those things are said with reproach, but this is said with praise. Unless perhaps Faustus understands that God tempered the body not by the arrangement of the members, that is, by fashioning and constructing, but by the admixture of his light: namely, that another, who fashioned it, placed these members so distinguished and located in their seats, while God, by mixing in his goodness, tempered the malice of this structure. For with such fables they dull childish minds; but God, coming to the aid of little ones through the mouths of the saints, has not allowed them to say even this. For you have also a little earlier: “God placed the members, each one of them, in the body as he willed.” Who now would not understand that God is called the tempering maker of the body in this sense, that he fashioned the body from many members which keep the offices of different works within the framework of unity?

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.

For just as he is sufficient to himself for eternal blessedness and out of it abounds for making others blessed, so he is sufficient to himself for eternal light and out of it abounds for making others enlightened, coveting no one's good, since every good will enjoys him, fearing no one's evil, since every evil will is abandoned by him; for neither does the one who is blessed by his gift increase him, nor does the one who is wretched by his judgment frighten him. Such a God, Manichaeans, you do not worship; you have gone far from him while you follow your phantasms, which your vain and wandering heart, drinking in the light of the heavenly bodies through the eyes of the flesh, has expanded and varied for you with manifold fictions. This light, although God made it too, is far beyond comparison even with that light which God made in the minds of the godly, which he makes full of light out of darkness, as he makes them righteous out of ungodliness; how much more with that inaccessible light which makes all these things! Nor is it inaccessible to all; for “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”; and “the ungodly shall not see the light,” as Isaiah says. To such, then, that light-making light is inaccessible, which made not only that spiritual light in the minds of the saints but also this bodily light—not one which it forbids the wicked to approach, but one which it makes rise upon the good and the wicked.

When, then, there was darkness over the abyss, he who was light said: “Let there be light.” What light made the light is clear; for it is clearly stated: “God said.” But what light he made is not so clear: whether that light which is in the minds of the angels, that is, whether God then made the rational spirits themselves, or some bodily light, itself also removed from our sight in the high places of this world—this is discussed in harmony among students of the divine Scriptures. For on the fourth day he made these visible lights of heaven. And whether they were made together with their own light, or were in some way kindled from that which had already been made, is likewise a question. But whatever light was made when, darkness being over the abyss, God said: “Let there be light,” whoever by reading the holy writings with piety becomes worthy to understand does not doubt that created light was made by the creating light.

Nor should God be thought to have dwelt in darkness before he made light because the Spirit of God was borne over the waters, when it had been said before: “Darkness was over the abyss.” For the abyss is the immeasurable depth of the waters. Hence it may occur to fleshly prudence that the Spirit of God, of whom it was said, “He was borne over the waters,” dwelt as it were in this darkness which was over the abyss—to one who does not understand how the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it, unless through the Word of God light is made and it is said to them: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” But if rational minds, made dark through an ungodly will, cannot comprehend the light of the wisdom of God, which is nowhere absent, because they are far from it in affection, not in place, what wonder if the Spirit of God, which was borne over the waters, was borne also over the darkness of the waters, at an incomparable distance indeed, but of substance, not of places?

I know indeed how deaf they are to whom I sing these things; yet I do not despair that the truth of my song will find its own ear, one that the Lord has opened, from whom are the true things that we say. But what kind of judges of the divine Scriptures are we putting up with in these men, who are displeased even that his works pleased God, and who find fault with him as though he marvelled at the light as something unfamiliar, because it is written: “And God saw the light, that it was good”! For he approves his works because what he made pleases him, and this is to see that they are good. For he is not forced to do anything against his will, so as to make what does not please him, nor does he slip unawares into making something, so that what has been made displeases him. But why should it not displease them that our God saw his work, that it was good, since their god, when he plunged his members into darkness, placed a veil before himself? For he did not see what he had made, that it was good; rather he was unwilling to see it, because it was evil.

Faustus indeed said that our God marvelled. This is not written, nor does it at all follow that when someone has seen that a thing is good, he is said also to have marvelled. For we see many good things without marvelling at them, as though they were so beyond expectation; we merely approve that they are as they ought to be. Yet we will show them that God marvelled—not in the Old Testament, which they maliciously slander, but in the New, which they accept in order to deceive the unlearned. For they confess that Christ is God, and they set this in their snare like a very sweet bait, with which to catch those devoted to Christ. God therefore marvelled when Christ marvelled; for so it is written in the gospel, that on hearing the faith of a certain centurion he marvelled and said to his disciples: “Truly I say to you, I have not found such faith in Israel.” See, we have explained as best we could “God saw that it was good,” and better men perhaps explain it better; let these men also explain why Jesus marvelled at what he foreknew before it happened, and certainly knew before he heard it. For although there is a very great difference between someone seeing that a thing is good and also marvelling at it, yet there is some likeness in this, that Jesus too marvelled at the light of faith which he himself had made in the heart of that centurion—he who is the true light that enlightens every man coming into this world.

Some ungodly pagan could certainly slander and find fault with him in the gospel just as Faustus does with God in the Old Testament. For he too would call Christ improvident, not only because he marvelled at the centurion's faith, but also because he chose Judas among the disciples, who was not going to keep his commandments—just as this man finds fault with the giving of a precept in paradise to a man who would not do it. He would also blame Christ because he could not know who touched him when the woman who suffered from a flow of blood touched the fringe of his garment—just as this man blamed God for not knowing where Adam was hiding, I suppose because he said: “Adam, where are you?”, as Christ said: “Who touched me?” He would also call him envious and fearful lest, if five other virgins entered his kingdom, they should live for ever: against whom he shut the door so that he did not open even when they knocked pitiably, as though forgetting what he himself had promised, saying: “Knock, and it will be opened to you”—just as this man charges God with envy and fear because he did not admit the sinner to eternal life. He would also say that he craved the blood not of cattle but of men, because he said: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it in eternal life”—just as this man chose to slander the sacrifices of animals, by which figures the sacrifice of the blood by which we were redeemed was promised. He would also find fault with him as jealous, because when he had driven the buyers and sellers out of the temple with a whip, the evangelist recalled that it was written of him: “Zeal for your house consumes me”—just as this man accused God of being jealous because he forbade sacrifice to others. He would say he was angry with his own and with strangers: with his own, because he said: “The servant who knows the will of his master and does things worthy of stripes will be beaten with many”; with strangers, because he said: “If anyone does not receive you, shake off the dust of your feet against them; truly I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for that city”—just as this man charges God with being angry, now with strangers, now with his own, both of whom the apostle mentions, saying: “For whoever have sinned without the law will also perish without the law; and whoever have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.” He would also say that he slaughtered and shed the blood of many for slight offences or none. For it would seem to a pagan a slight offence or none not to have a wedding garment at the wedding feast, on account of which our King in the gospel ordered a man to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness; or to be unwilling that Christ should reign over oneself, for which sin he says: “But those who did not want me to reign over them, bring here and kill before me”—just as this man accused God in the Old Testament, who seemed to him to slaughter thousands of men for slight offences or none. And as for Faustus's finding fault with God's threatening to come with a sword with which he would spare neither the righteous nor the sinner, how would that pagan find fault with it, hearing the apostle Paul say of our God: “He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all,” and hearing Peter too, when he spoke of the great tribulations and killings of the saints, exhorting them to endure and saying: “The time has come for judgment to begin at the house of the Lord; and if it begins with us, what will be the end of those who do not believe the gospel of the Lord? And if the righteous is scarcely saved, where will the sinner and the ungodly appear?” For who is more righteous than the One whom yet the Father did not spare? And what is clearer than that he spares not even the righteous, correcting them by various tribulations, when it is openly said of this: “And if the righteous is scarcely saved”? For it is written not only in the Old Testament: “For whom God loves he rebukes, and he scourges every son whom he receives,” and: “If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, why should we not endure evil things?”, but also in the New: “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten,” and this: “For if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged by the Lord; but when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, so that we may not be condemned with the world.” And yet if a pagan found fault with such things in the New Testament as these men find fault with in the Old, would not they themselves undertake to defend them? If they could do so, by what madness do they find fault here with the same kind of things they defend there? But if they could not, why do they grant only in one Testament, and not rather in both, that what would seem perverse to the ungodly who do not understand should be believed by the godly who do not understand to be right, though hidden?

Or perhaps they dare to say that the similar things we have brought forward from the New Testament are also false and perverse, by that devilish privilege of theirs, so that whatever is in the gospel or the canonical letters by which they think their heresy can be helped, they hold and urge to have been said by Christ and the apostles, but whatever sounds against them from the same books they do not hesitate to say, with impudent and sacrilegious mouth, was inserted by falsifiers? To this madness of theirs, which tries to extinguish and abolish the authority of all books, I have already replied above at no little length, as far as the plan of the work I undertook seemed to allow.

Now I point out this: since they strive to veil their mad and sacrilegious fables with the cloak of the Christian name, let them nevertheless see that, when they argue thus against the Christian Scriptures, the truth of the divine books of both Testaments is defended by us not only against pagans but also against Manichaeans. And these things which Faustus has just set down in his discourse from our old writings as unworthy of God, I would perhaps defend against a pagan who found fault with such things in the words of the gospel or the apostles by recalling similar things from their own authors, as our Paul did among the Athenians. For I would perhaps find even in their writings God the creator and maker of the world and the establisher of this light, who nevertheless, before he founded it, did not lie in darkness; and who was transported with joy at his completed work—which is certainly more than “he saw that it was good”; and a lawgiver, whose law, if man followed it, he would follow to his own good, but if he despised it, to his own harm; and they would not call him ignorant of the future because he gave a law also to those who would later despise it. Nor would they call even a man improvident because he asks something, those in whose books many things are asked for no other reason than that each may be refuted by his own answers, when the one who asks knows not only what he wants the other to answer but also that he will answer it. And if he wished to say that God envied anyone because he did not allow the wicked to become blessed, he would find the books of his own authors full on this subject, which pertains to divine providence.

Concerning sacrifices, a pagan would object nothing else to me than why we find fault with these among them, when in our old books our God is read to have commanded such things to be offered to himself. Here, discussing true sacrifice perhaps more fully, I would show that it is due only to the one true God, being that which the one true Priest offered to him, the mediator between God and men; that the promising figures of this sacrifice had to be celebrated in the victims of animals for the commending of the flesh and blood to come, through which one victim forgiveness would be made of the sins contracted from flesh and blood, which shall not possess the kingdom of God, because the same substance of the body will be changed into a heavenly quality: which the fire in the sacrifice signified, as swallowing up death in victory. And these things were duly celebrated in that people whose kingdom and priesthood were a prophecy of the King and Priest to come, to rule and consecrate the faithful in all nations and to bring them into the kingdom of heaven and the sanctuary of the angels, to eternal life. Of this true sacrifice, then, as the Hebrews celebrated religious foreshadowings, so the pagans celebrated sacrilegious imitations; for “what the nations sacrifice,” says the apostle, “they sacrifice to demons, and not to God.” For the immolation of blood that foretold it is an ancient thing, testifying from the beginning of the human race to the future passion of the mediator; for Abel is found in the sacred writings to have been the first to offer it. It is no wonder, then, if the transgressing angels, whose two greatest vices are pride and deceit, flitting through this air, demanded for themselves from their worshippers what they knew was due to the one true God, wishing to be thought gods by them, the vanity of the human heart giving them room—especially when images were set up out of longing for the dead, from which the use of idols arose, and by greater flattery divine honours were paid to them as though they had been received into heaven; in place of whom the demons put themselves forward on earth to be worshipped and demanded sacrifice for themselves from the deceived and lost. Sacrifice, then, shows clearly enough to whom it is due, not only when the true God justly commands it, but also when a false god proudly exacts it. If that pagan were harder to persuade, I would persuade him of these things by prophecy itself also, in which things written so long before are now, as I would show, fulfilled. And if he despised this too, I would recognize this also rather than wonder at it, since I would recall that in the truth of that same prophecy it was foretold that not all would believe.

But if he objected to me that Christ, or God, is called jealous in both Testaments, and harped on the word itself, he would only show himself either ignorant or neglectful of all literature. For although their learned men distinguish between will and desire, joy and gladness, caution and fear, clemency and pity, prudence and cunning, confidence and boldness, and many things of this kind, so that in each pair they assign the first words I have given to virtues and the second to vices, yet their books are full of cases where, by a loose use of these names which properly signify vices, virtues too are so called: when desire is put for will, or gladness for joy, or fear for caution, or pity for clemency, or cunning for prudence, or boldness for confidence. And who could recount everything that the custom of speech appropriates with similar licence? Add to this the particular character of each language. For in the writings of the church I do not remember pity ever being used in a bad sense; and the custom of everyday speech agrees with this. The Greeks call two things that are related, yet distinct, by one name, labour and pain; we express them by separate names; just as we call by one name “life,” whether in the sense in which we say “he lives” of what is not lifeless, or in the sense in which we say “he is a man of good life”; but the Greeks signify these two by two words. Hence it may be that, apart from the loose use of words which is widespread in all languages, zeal (jealousy) is also used, by some peculiarity of the Hebrew language, in both senses: either when the mind, troubled by a spouse's adultery, wastes away—which cannot happen to God—or when diligent watch is kept to preserve conjugal chastity; and that God does this, when he addresses his people as a wife whom he does not want to commit fornication with many false gods, it is useful for us to confess not only without hesitation but with thanksgiving. This I would say also of the anger of God; for God is not disturbed when he brings anger, but anger is put for punishment, either by a loose use of the word or by some peculiarity of the original language.

As for the thousands of men killed, he would not wonder at it if he did not deny the judgment of God: which not even pagans deny, who grant that this universe is ruled and administered by the providence of God from the highest things to the lowest. If he denied this too, he would be convinced either more easily by the authority of his own writers or, at somewhat greater length, by argument from sure reasons; or else, as too hard and stupid, he would be left to the divine judgment itself, which he did not believe existed. Further, if he expressly named the slight offences or no offences for which God killed men, we would show that they were neither none nor slight. For example, as to what we gave as an example concerning the wedding garment, we would show how great a wickedness it is to come to the sacred wedding seeking there the glory not of the bridegroom but one's own, or whatever else that garment might be found, on better understanding, to signify. Or as to those who are killed before the eyes of the king because they were unwilling that he should reign over them, it would perhaps appear without long discussion on our part that, although it is no fault in a man if he is unwilling that any man should reign over him, it is no slight fault, nor none, to be unwilling that he should reign over one in whose kingdom alone one lives rightly, blessedly, and for ever.

Now as for that last thing Faustus set down, laying snares for the old books as though they disparaged God—that he threatens a sword by which he will spare no one, neither righteous nor sinner—if it were explained to a pagan how it should be understood, perhaps he would resist neither the New Testament nor the Old, and the gospel likeness would please him, which to these men who want to be considered Christians is either not apparent, since they are blind, or displeasing, since they are perverse. For that supreme husbandman of the vine prepares his knife in one way for the fruitful branches and in another for the unfruitful, yet he spares neither the good nor the bad, pruning the one and cutting off the other. For there is no man endowed with such righteousness that he does not need the trial of tribulation, either to perfect or to strengthen or to prove his virtue—unless perhaps these men do not count even the apostle Paul among the righteous, who, though he humbly and truthfully confesses his past sins, yet gives thanks that he has been justified by the faith of Jesus Christ. Or did he spare him, he whom these empty men do not understand when he says: “I will not spare, neither the righteous nor the sinner”? Let them hear Paul himself: “And lest I should be exalted,” he says, “by the greatness of the revelations, there was given me a goad of the flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me; on account of which I three times asked the Lord to take it away from me, and he said to me: My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.” See, he did not spare even the righteous, in order to perfect his power in weakness—he who had given him the buffeting angel of Satan; unless you say that the devil gave it. Was the devil, then, acting so that Paul might not be exalted by the greatness of the revelations, and so that his power might be made perfect? Who would say this? The righteous man, therefore, had been handed over to be buffeted by the angel of Satan by him who through Paul handed over the unrighteous also to Satan himself, of whom the same apostle says: “whom I have handed over to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.” Do you now understand how he from above spares neither the righteous nor the sinner? Or do you shudder more because a sword is named there? For it is one thing to be buffeted, another to be killed. As though thousands of martyrs had not been laid low by various kinds of death, or the persecutors had really had this in their power, had it not been given them from above by him who said: “I will not spare, neither the righteous nor the sinner”; since the Lord of the martyrs himself, whose own Son the Father did not spare, says most plainly to Pilate: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” These afflictions and persecutions of the righteous, the same Paul says, are an example of the righteous judgment of God. This thought is set out more fully by the apostle Peter, as I mentioned above, where he says that the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of the Lord. “And if it begins with us,” he says, “what will be the end of those who do not believe the gospel of God? And if the righteous is scarcely saved, where will the sinner and the ungodly appear?” From this it is understood how the ungodly are not spared, like branches cut off for burning, when the righteous are not spared for the perfecting of their cleansing. For Peter himself also testifies that these things happen by the will of him who says in the old books: “I will not spare, neither the righteous nor the sinner.” For he too says: “It is better to suffer for doing good, if the Spirit of God so wills, than for doing evil.” When, then, by the will of the Spirit of God those who do good suffer, the righteous are not spared; and when those who do evil suffer, sinners are not spared; yet both happen according to the will of him who says: “I will not spare, neither the righteous nor the sinner,” scourging the one as a son and punishing the other as ungodly.

See, I have shown as best I could that we do not worship a God who dwelt from eternity in darkness, but him who is light, and in whom there is no darkness at all, and who dwells in himself in light inaccessible, the radiance of whose eternal light is his co-eternal wisdom; not one who marvels at an unexpected light, but the creator of the light made, that it might exist, and its approver, that it might remain; not one ignorant of the future, but the giver of a precept and the condemner of a transgression, so that punishment justly pronounced against disobedience might restrain those present and frighten those to come; not one who asks in improvidence out of ignorance, but who judges by questioning; not envious and fearful, but justly barring the transgressor from the eternal life which is given to the justly obedient; not craving blood and fat, but, imposing sacrifices suited to a fleshly people, promising the true sacrifice through certain figures; jealous not with spiteful agitation but with tranquil goodness, lest the soul, which owes chastity to the one God, should be defiled, corrupted, and prostituted through many false gods; not raging turbulently with an anger like a man's, but with another, divine anger severely rendering what is just, which by an established usage of speech is called anger not because of a lust for revenge but because of the vigour of judging; not destroying thousands of men for slight offences or none, but by most equitable weighing imposing on peoples the benefit of fearing him through the temporal deaths of mortals; not punishing righteous and sinners without any discrimination in blind confusion, but dealing out to the righteous wholesome correction for their perfecting, and to sinners due severity for the sake of equity. Hence it appears, Manichaeans, that you are deceived by your suspicions, since by misunderstanding our Scriptures, or by meeting bad interpreters, you believe false things of Catholics; and so, having abandoned sound doctrine, turned to sacrilegious fables, utterly perverted and estranged from the fellowship of the saints, you will not be corrected even from the New Testament, from which we bring forward things like those you attack in the Old. So it comes about that we are compelled to defend both Testaments against you as against pagans.

But suppose someone so utterly fleshly and foolish that he worships God not as we worship him, who is one and true, but as you say we worship him, a god fashioned by your slanders or suspicions: does not even such a man worship a better god than you do? I beg you, pay attention and open your eyes, such as they are; for no great sharpness of mind is needed to see what I am about to say. I appeal to all, wise and unwise: hear, attend, judge. How much better would it have been for your god to have dwelt in darkness from eternity than to have plunged into darkness the light co-eternal and akin to himself! How much better to praise with wonder a new light that arose for him to put darkness to flight than to be unable to escape the old darkness rushing upon him except by darkening his own light! Unhappy, if he did it in distress; cruel, if he did it untroubled. Certainly it would have been better for him to see as good a light made by himself than to make evil a light begotten of himself—a light that repelled the hostile darkness from him in such a way that it became hostile to him. For this will be imputed as guilt to those remnants condemned in the globe: that they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light. Before this happened to them, they suffered from eternity, if they did not know that this was to happen to them, the eternal darkness of ignorance; but if they knew, the eternal darkness of fear. See, truly a part and substance of your god dwelt from eternity in its own darkness, and did not afterwards marvel at a new light, but ran into another, alien darkness which it always feared. Moreover, God himself, of whom that was a part, if he feared that so great an evil would come upon that part of himself, the darkness of fear had seized him too; but if he did not know that it would come, he was blinded by the darkness of ignorance; and if he knew it would come upon his part and did not fear, worse is the darkness of such cruelty than that either of ignorance or of fear. For your god did not have what the apostle praises even in the flesh—which you most insanely believe was made not by God but by hyle: “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.” But we do not accuse him of that: he foreknew, he feared, he grieved, but he had no way to act. In this darkness of his misery, then, he dwelt from eternity, and did not afterwards marvel at a new light which drove darkness from him, but, to the great harm of his light, experienced another darkness which he had always feared. How much better would it have been, I will not say to give a precept as God does, but to receive a precept as a man does, to be kept to his good or despised to his harm, yet using free will in either movement of the mind, rather than to be pressed against his will by unavoidable necessity to darken his own light! For it would certainly have been much better to give a precept to human nature without knowing that it would sin than, pressed by necessity, to compel his own divine nature to sin. Wake up and tell us how he conquers darkness whom necessity conquers. Necessity was already a greater enemy at home with him, conquered and commanded by which he fought with the lesser. How much better not to know where Adam had fled from his face than himself to have nowhere to flee, first from the face of hard and dire necessity, and then from the face of the opposite and hostile race! How much better to envy human nature a blessed life than to give over the divine nature to misery; to desire the blood and fat of sacrifices rather than himself to be slaughtered so often even to idols, mixed with the fat and blood of all victims; to be troubled with jealousy if those sacrifices were offered to other gods also, rather than himself, bound not only in all crops but also in all flesh, to be offered on every altar to every demon! How much better, moved and troubled even by human indignation, to be angry with sinners both his own and strangers, than himself to be troubled not only in all who are angry but also in all who fear, to be defiled in all sinners, to be punished in all the condemned, bound everywhere in that part of himself which, innocent, he himself condemned to such disgrace, so that through it he might conquer what he feared—himself also condemned under so ruinous a necessity, that his condemned part might forgive him, if, now that he is wretched, he were at least humble! But as it is, who can bear your finding fault with God for being angry with sinners, his own and strangers, when the god you invent will afterwards condemn in the globe his own members, whom, compelled himself, he compelled to go into the jaws of sin? When he does this, as you say, he will have no anger. But I wonder whether he will have the face to inflict a kind of punishment on those from whom he ought to beg pardon and say: “I beseech you, forgive me; you are my members. When could I do this to you, except conquered by necessity? You know too that at the time when I sent you here, a dreadful enemy had broken out; and now I bind you here because I fear he may break out again.” Surely you now confess this too, that it is much better to kill thousands of men by temporal death for no fault or a slight one than to hand over his own members—that is, the members of God, the substance of God, and plainly God—into the whirlpool of sin, and to condemn them to be bound in everlasting punishment. For if those members had free choice of sinning or not sinning—although how this could be said of the substance of God, which truly is the substance of God and therefore wholly unchangeable, is not to be found; for God cannot sin at all, just as he cannot deny himself; but man can sin and deny God, though if he does not will it, he does not do it—if, then, those members of your god had, as I said, like a human and rational soul, free choice of will to sin or not to sin, perhaps they would rightly be struck with the punishment of that globe for grave crimes. But as it is, you cannot say that those particles had freedom of will, which God himself, the whole of him, did not have; for if he did not send them into sin, he would, the whole of him, be overrun by the race of darkness and compelled to sin. But if he could not be compelled, he sinned when he sent them where they could be compelled; and so he himself is more deserving of that sack, as it were, of the parricide, he who did this by free command, than they who by obeying went where they lost the free choice of living rightly. But if he himself, invaded and possessed, could have been compelled to sin had he not provided for himself first by the disgrace and then by the punishment of his part, and there was no free will in your god nor in his parts, let him not pretend to be a judge, but acknowledge himself guilty—not because he suffered what he did not want, but because he pretends to render justice in condemning those whom he knows to have suffered evil rather than done it; which he pretends only so that he may not be found conquered, as though it profited any wretch to be called happy or fortunate. Surely even this would have been better: that your god, without any weighing of equity, should spare men neither righteous nor sinners—which Faustus, understanding nothing, put last in his criticism of our God—than that he should so rage against his own members that it is too little that he offered them to the enemies to be poisoned beyond expiation, unless he also accuses them of a false charge of iniquity. For he says that they deservedly pay so monstrous and endless a punishment because they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light. Why, except because, as he himself says, they were so absorbed into the first greed of the princes of darkness that they could not recall their origin and distinguish themselves from the hostile nature? Such souls, then, did no evil themselves, but innocently suffered so great an evil. By whose doing, if not first of all his, who commanded them to go forth from him into so great an evil? They found, then, a father worse than the enemy. For the father sent them into so great an evil, while the enemy desired them as a good, wanting to enjoy them, not to harm them: the one harmed knowingly, the other unknowingly. But a weak and helpless god could not provide for himself otherwise, first against a wicked enemy and afterwards against the enemy shut in. Let him at least not accuse those by whose obedience he is safe, by whose death he is secure. If he was compelled to fight, was he compelled also to slander? For when they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light, they were certainly compelled to this by the enemy; and if they could not resist him, they are condemned innocent; but if they could and would not, why do you still so fabulously bring in a nature of evil, when the origin of sin is from one's own will? For this they certainly did by their own fault, not by another's force, that when they could resist evil, they would not. For if they did so, they would do well; but if they did not, they would sin gravely and monstrously; if they could and did not, then certainly they would not. If, then, they would not, the crime is of the will, not of necessity. From the will, therefore, is the beginning of sin; and where the beginning of sin is, there is the beginning of evil, whether of doing contrary to a just precept or of suffering according to a just judgment. There is no reason, then, why, in asking where evil comes from, you should rush into the great evil of this error, of calling a nature abounding in so many goods a nature of evil, and placing in the nature of the highest good, before its mixture with the nature of evil, the dreadful evil of necessity. For the cause of this error of yours too is pride, which you will not have if you do not will it. But while you want to defend in any way you can that into which you have rushed, you take the origin of sin away from the choice of the will and place a nature of evil in an empty and false fable. And so it remains for you to say that those souls also, to be condemned in the horrible globe in eternal bondage, became enemies of the holy light not by will but by necessity; and to make your god such a judge that before him you can do nothing to help those whose cause you defend by proving necessity, and such a king that from him you cannot obtain pardon even for your brothers, his sons and members, whose enmity against you and him you claim arose not by will but by necessity. O most monstrous cruelty! Except that you turn to defend him too, excusing him on the ground that he also does this by necessity. If, then, you could find another judge, who, free from the chain of necessity, stood as governor of equity, he would surely not fix this god outside in that globe, but would shut him inside with the terrible enemy himself. For why should he not justly be first in the penalty of condemnation who is first in the crime of necessity? How much better, then, would you do to choose, in comparison with a worse one, a god—not such as we worship, but such as you either invent or suppose that we worship—who, without any weighing of equity, without any distinction between condemnation and discipline, would spare in his servants neither the righteous nor the sinner, rather than one who did not spare his own members, whether innocent, if necessity is not a crime, or made guilty by obeying him, if necessity too is a crime, so that they are condemned for ever by him with whom they ought either to be acquitted together, if freedom revived after the victory, or condemned together, if even after the victory necessity still had so much power that equity could have some power too. And just as you invent a god—not that true and highest God whom we worship, but some other false one whom you either suppose or slanderously claim that we worship—who nevertheless is himself much better than your god (for neither exists, and both are invented by you), so you invent the one you accuse as ours better than the one you adore as yours.

So too you find fault with the patriarchs and prophets, not such as they are honoured by us, but such as you have invented with malevolent vanity from our books, which you do not understand. And yet even these, such as you suspect them to have been, it is too little for me to say are better than your elect who keep all the commandments of Mani, unless I also show that they are better than your god himself. This I will not undertake to show until, with the Lord's help, I have first defended our holy fathers, the patriarchs and prophets, from your accusations by clear reasoning against fleshly hearts. And to you indeed, Manichaeans, it would be enough to answer thus: by showing that even what you think were the vices of our fathers are to be preferred to the virtues of yours, adding, to heap up your confusion, that your god too is found to be far worse than men such as you boast our fathers to have been. So it would be enough, as I said, to answer you. But since some, even apart from your empty talk, are moved of their own accord when they compare the life of the prophets in the Old Testament with the life of the apostles in the New, and cannot distinguish the custom of that time, in which the promise was veiled, from the custom of this time, in which the promise is revealed, I am compelled rather to answer those who either dare to prefer their own self-restraint to the prophets or seek in the prophets a defence for their own wickedness.

In this matter I say first that not only the speech but also the life of those men was prophetic, and that that whole kingdom of the Hebrew nation was a great prophet, because it was the prophet of someone great. Therefore, as regards those there who were instructed in heart in the wisdom of God, the prophecy of Christ and the church to come is to be searched out not only in what they said but also in what they did; and as regards the rest, and all the people of that nation together, in what was done divinely in them or concerning them. For all those things, as the apostle says, were figures of us.

These men find fault with certain deeds of the prophets, whose loftiness is far above them, as though they were lust, just as some sacrilegious pagans find fault with Christ as though for folly, or rather madness, because he looked for fruit on a tree at a season of the year when it was not due, or for a childish silliness, because with bowed head he wrote with his finger on the ground and, after answering the men who questioned him, began to do it again. For they have no wisdom, nor do they understand that in great souls certain virtues are very like the vices of small souls in some appearance, but in no comparison of equity. Those who find fault with these things in the great are like untaught boys at school who, having learned as a great thing that a noun in the singular must be given a verb in the singular, find fault with the most learned author of the Latin language because he said: “pars in frusta secant” (“a part cut it into pieces”); he ought, they say, to have said “secat.” And because they know that “religio” is spelled so, they blame him because he wrote “relligione patrum” with a doubled l. Hence it may not absurdly be said, each in its kind, that as far as the figures and metaplasms of the learned differ from the solecisms and barbarisms of the ignorant, so far do the figurative deeds of the prophets differ from the lustful sins of the wicked. And so, just as a boy reproved for a barbarism would be beaten with the rod if he tried to defend himself by Virgil's metaplasm, so whoever, having wallowed with his wife's maidservant, takes as an example in his defence the deed of Abraham in begetting offspring from Hagar—would that he might be corrected, not by the rod merely, but even by the cudgel, so that he may not be punished with the other adulterers in eternal punishment! Those matters are indeed very small, and these great; nor is the likeness drawn from them so that a figure of speech should be put on a level with a sacrament, or a solecism with adultery. Yet, in proportion to each kind, what skill or unskill avails in the case of certain virtues or vices of speech, that wisdom or folly avails in these virtues or vices of conduct, though they are of a far different kind.

Therefore, lest we rush rashly into praising or blaming, accusing or defending, restraining or releasing, condemning or acquitting, seeking or avoiding anything—in all of which sins or right actions are found—we ought first to consider what sin is, and then to examine the deeds of the saints written in the divine books, so that, if we find any sins of theirs too, we may see by careful reasoning, as far as we can, for what usefulness these too were put in writing and committed to memory. And whatever we find that seem to the foolish or malevolent to be sins, which are not, and yet in which no examples of virtue stand out, let us consider these too, why they were included in those writings which we believe were wholesomely composed for the usefulness of ruling the present life and attaining the future one. Further, whatever lessons of righteousness shine out in the deeds of the saints, no one, even of the unlearned, doubts ought to have been written. The question, then, can be about those things which may seem to have been written either uselessly, if they appear neither right actions nor sins, or even harmfully, if they are proved to be sins, lest they avail for imitation—whether they are not reproved in the books themselves, and therefore may be thought not even to be sins, or are reproved there too, but are committed with an easy hope of pardon, because they are found even in the saints.

Sin, then, is anything done or said or desired against the eternal law. And the eternal law is the divine reason or will of God, commanding that the natural order be preserved and forbidding that it be disturbed. What, then, is the natural order in man must be asked. Man consists of soul and body; but so does a beast. No one doubts that the soul is to be set above the body in the natural order. But in the soul of man there is reason, which is not in a beast. Therefore, just as the soul is set above the body, so by the law of nature the reason of the soul itself is set above its other parts, which beasts also have; and within reason itself, which is partly contemplative and partly active, contemplation without doubt excels. For in it is the image of God, by which we are re-formed through faith to sight. Rational action, therefore, ought to obey rational contemplation, whether it works through faith, as it does as long as we are away from the Lord, or through sight, as it will when we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is, made even, in a spiritual body, equal by his grace to his angels, having received the first robe of immortality and incorruption, with which this mortal and corruptible of ours will be clothed, that death may be swallowed up in victory, righteousness being perfected through grace. For the holy and exalted angels too have their contemplation and action; for they command themselves to do what he whom they contemplate commands, whose eternal rule they serve freely, because sweetly. But we, whose body is dead because of sin, until God gives life also to our mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in us, live righteously in the measure of our weakness according to the eternal law, by which the natural order is preserved, if we live by unfeigned faith, which works through love, having in a good conscience the hope laid up in heaven of immortality and incorruption, and of the perfecting of righteousness itself, even to a certain inexpressibly sweet fullness, for which in this pilgrimage we must hunger and thirst, as long as we walk by faith, not by sight.

Therefore human action, serving faith which serves God, reins in all mortal delights and restrains them to their natural measure, preferring by ordered love the better to the lower. For if nothing unlawful gave delight, no one would sin. He sins, then, who slackens rather than reins in delight in what is unlawful. And that is unlawful which that law forbids by which the natural order is preserved. Whether there is any rational creature whom nothing unlawful can delight is a great question. If there is, man was not made of that kind, nor that angelic nature which did not stand in the truth; but these rational beings were made of such a kind that there was in them the power to rein in delight from the unlawful, and by not reining it in they sinned. Great, then, is even the human creature, since it is restored through that power by which, had it willed, it would not have fallen. Great, then, is the Lord and greatly to be praised, who made it. For he made lower creatures, which cannot sin; he made also better ones, which will not sin. For the bestial nature does not sin, because it does nothing against the eternal law, to which it is so subject that it cannot share in it. Again, the exalted angelic nature does not sin, because it so shares in the eternal law that God alone delights it, whose will it obeys without any experience of temptation. But man, whose life on earth because of sin is a temptation, should subject to himself what he has in common with beasts and subject to God what he has in common with angels, until, righteousness and immortality being perfected and received, he is raised above the former and made equal to the latter.

Mortal delights are to be either aroused or relaxed only so far as is needed to restore or to preserve this mortal well-being, whether of each individual or of the human race itself. If they slip beyond this and, against the rule of temperance, lusts carry away a man who does not govern himself, they will certainly be unlawful and shameful and deserve to be corrected by pain. And if they plunge the governor, thrown into disorder, into such a whirlpool of ruinous habit that either, believing they will go unpunished, he neglects the medicine of confession and repentance by which he might be corrected and emerge, or, by a worse death of the heart, he brings to them a blasphemous patronage of defence against that eternal law of providence, and so meets his last day, then that blameless law judges him worthy no longer of correction but of condemnation.

Consulting, then, the eternal law, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, let us see what father Abraham sinned in, that is, what he did against this law, in the things Faustus objected to as great crimes. “Burning,” he says, “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.” But this Faustus, blinded by an insane desire to accuse, both betrayed the wickedness of his heresy and, without knowing it and in error, praised Abraham's intercourse. For just as that eternal law, that is, the will of God the creator of all creatures, providing for the preservation of the natural order, allows the delight of mortal flesh to be relaxed under the rule of reason in intercourse only for the propagation of offspring—not so that lust may be served and satisfied, but so that the welfare of the race may be provided for—so, on the contrary, the perverse law of the Manichaeans commands those who have intercourse to avoid offspring above all, lest their god, whom they lament as bound in all seeds, be bound more tightly in a woman's conception; so that their god may be poured out in a shameful fall rather than bound in a cruel tie. It was not Abraham, then, who burned with an insane desire to have offspring, but Mani who raved with an insane folly of avoiding offspring. Accordingly, the one, keeping the order of nature, sought nothing in human intercourse except that a human being should be born; the other, observing the perversity of his fable, feared nothing in any intercourse except that God should be taken captive.

And where Faustus blames, in Abraham's deed, as it were, his wife's knowledge, there indeed, with an evil mind and the intention of disparaging, yet unknowingly and unwillingly, he praises both. For she did not join her knowledge to a crime of her husband's, so that he might satisfy his lust with shameful and unlawful pleasure; rather she too, wanting children according to the natural order and knowing herself barren, claimed by lawful authority the fruitfulness of her maidservant's womb for the use of her own right, not yielding to a husband who lusted, but commanding one who obeyed. Nor was this disordered pride. For who does not know that a wife ought to serve her husband as her lord? But as regards the members of the body by which the sex itself is distinguished, the apostle says: “Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife”; so that, while in the other acts that concern human peace the woman owes service to the man, in this one thing, by which the two sexes are distinguished by their fleshly lot and joined by fleshly union, the husband has the same authority over the wife as the wife over the husband. The offspring, then, that Sarah could not have from herself she wished to have from her maidservant, yet from the same seed from which she ought to have had it from herself, if she could. A woman would never do this if she were held by fleshly desire for her husband's body; she would rather be jealous of a concubine than make her a mother. As it was, the will to propagate was godly precisely because the will to have intercourse was not lustful.

This certainly could not be defended, if Abraham, as Faustus objected, wished to have offspring by Hagar not believing God, who had already promised him offspring from Sarah. But it is most plainly false: God had not yet promised this. Let those who wish go over the earlier parts of that Scripture; they will find that the land and the abundance of a countless multitude had already been promised to Abraham's seed, but it had not yet been revealed how that seed was to be propagated—whether from Abraham's flesh, if he begot of himself, or by choice, if perhaps he adopted someone; and then, if from his own flesh, whether from Sarah or from another woman altogether, had not yet been made clear. Let those who wish read, I say, and they will find that Faustus either is deceived through imprudence or deceives through impudence. So Abraham, when he saw that sons were not born to him and yet held fast to the promise made to his seed, first thought of adoption. This is shown by his saying, when speaking with God, of his home-born servant: “This one will be my heir”; as though he said: since you have not given me seed from myself, fulfil in this one what you promised to my seed. For if only what was born of someone's flesh were called his seed, the apostle would not call us the seed of Abraham, who certainly do not derive the origin of our flesh from him, but have become his seed by imitating his faith, believing in Christ, whose flesh was propagated from his flesh. Then, therefore, Abraham heard from the Lord: “This one will not be your heir, but he who comes forth from your womb, he will be your heir.” Now that the thought of adoption was removed, since Abraham hoped for seed from himself, it remained uncertain whether it would be from Sarah or from another; which God wished to hide from him until the Old Testament should first be prefigured from the maidservant. What wonder, then, if Abraham, seeing that his barren wife wished offspring to come to her from her maidservant and from her husband, since she could not bear it herself, did not yield to his own fleshly desire but obeyed the authority of the marriage, believing that Sarah had wished this by God's prompting, who had already promised him an heir from himself, but had not foretold from which woman? In vain, then, did Faustus madly leap to make this accusation, faithlessly charging Abraham with faithlessness. The other things he could not understand through the blindness of unbelief; but this he neglected even to read, through the lust of slandering.

And as for his calling a righteous and faithful man a most infamous trafficker in his own marriage, and asserting that for the sake of greed and his belly he sold his wife Sarah for intercourse to two kings, Abimelech and Pharaoh, at different times, falsely calling her his sister because she was very beautiful—he does not, with truthful mouth, separate the honourable from the shameful, but with slandering mouth turns the whole into a crime. This deed of Abraham does seem like procuring, but only to those who cannot, by the light of that eternal law, distinguish right actions from sins: to whom constancy too can seem obstinacy, and the virtue of confidence is thought the vice of boldness, and whatever else of the kind is objected against those who act rightly, as though they did not, by those who do not see rightly. For Abraham did not consent to a crime of his wife's and sell her adultery; but just as she did not hand over her maidservant to her husband's lust, but of her own accord brought her to the duty of begetting, without at all disturbing the natural order, since that lay in her authority, commanding one who obeyed rather than yielding to one who lusted: so he too, of his chaste wife, who clung to him with a chaste heart, of whose mind, where the virtue of modesty dwelt, he had no doubt at all, kept silent that she was his wife and said she was his sister, lest, if he were killed, she should be held captive by foreigners and ungodly men; being sure of his God that he would not let her suffer anything shameful and wicked. Nor did his faith and hope deceive him; for Pharaoh, frightened by portents and afflicted with many evils on her account, when he learned by divine means that she was his wife, restored her unharmed and with honour; and Abimelech, warned and instructed in a dream, did the same.

Some indeed—not slanderous and abusive like Faustus, but paying due honour to the same books which he either finds fault with through not understanding or does not understand through finding fault—when they considered this deed of Abraham, thought that he fell somewhat short of firmness of faith and wavered, and that, from fear of death, he denied his wife as Peter denied the Lord. If it had to be understood so, I would acknowledge the man's sin; nor would I therefore judge all his merits blotted out and erased, any more than those of that apostle—although it is not an equal fault to deny one's wife and to deny the Saviour. But as it is, since I have a way of understanding it that does not require me to understand it so, I am under no compulsion to slip rashly into blaming one whom no one proves to have slipped through fear into lying. For he was not asked whether she was his wife and answered that she was not; but when he was asked what that woman was to him, he declared her his sister; he did not deny her as his wife. He kept silent some truth; he did not say anything false.

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.

For although I think that Jacob's two free wives belong to the New Testament, in which we have been called to freedom, yet they are not two for nothing—unless perhaps because, as can be noticed and found in the Scriptures, two lives are proclaimed to us in the body of Christ: one temporal, in which we labour; the other eternal, in which we shall contemplate the delight of God. The Lord made known the one by his passion, the other by his resurrection. The names of those women also prompt us to understand this. For they say that Leah means “labouring,” and Rachel “the beginning seen,” or “the word from which the beginning is seen.” The action, then, of human and mortal life, in which we live by faith, doing many laborious things, uncertain how they will turn out for the benefit of those we wish to help, is Leah, Jacob's first wife; and so she is recorded also as having weak eyes; for the thoughts of mortals are timid, and our forethought uncertain. But the hope of the eternal contemplation of God, having a sure and delightful understanding of truth, is Rachel; whence she is also said to be of good countenance and beautiful appearance. For every godly and studious person loves her, and for her sake serves the grace of God, by which our sins, though they be as scarlet, are made white as snow. For Laban means “whitening,” and Jacob served him for Rachel. For no one turns to serve righteousness under the grace of the forgiveness of sins except in order to live at rest in the Word, from which is seen the beginning, which is God. So it is for Rachel, not for Leah. For who, after all, has loved in the works of righteousness the labour of actions and sufferings? Who has sought that life for its own sake? Just as Jacob did not seek Leah, but nevertheless, when she was substituted for him in the night, he embraced her for begetting and experienced her fruitfulness. For the Lord, since she could not be loved for her own sake, first made her to be endured, so that Rachel might be reached, and then commended her for her sons. So indeed every useful servant of God, placed under the grace of the whitening of his sins, what else has he meditated on in his conversion, what else carried in his heart, what else loved but the teaching of wisdom? Many think they will gain and receive it at once, as soon as they have exercised themselves in the seven precepts of the law which concern love of neighbour, so that no man is harmed, that is: “Honour your father and mother; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife; you shall not covet your neighbour's property.” When he has kept these as far as he could, after the endurance of labour has cleaved to him through various temptations, as through the nights of this world, in place of the longed-for and hoped-for most beautiful delight of teaching—as though Leah were joined to him unexpectedly in place of Rachel—he bears her too, so as to reach the other, if he loves perseveringly, receiving seven other precepts—as though it were said to him: serve another seven years for Rachel—that he be poor in spirit, meek, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker. For a man would wish, if it were possible, to reach at once the delights of beautiful and perfect wisdom without any endurance of labour, which must be embraced in doing and suffering; but this is not possible in the land of the dying. This is what seems to be signified by what was said to Jacob: “It is not the custom in our place for the younger to marry before the elder”; for she who is first in time is not absurdly called the elder. And in the right education of man the labour of doing what is just comes before the pleasure of understanding what is true.

To this point applies what is written: “You have desired wisdom; keep the commandments, and the Lord will give her to you”—commandments, certainly, that pertain to righteousness; and the righteousness which is from faith, which moves amid the uncertainties of temptations, so that by godly belief in what it does not yet understand it may also gain the merit of understanding. For as much force as there is in what I just mentioned is written, “You have desired wisdom; keep the commandments, and the Lord will give her to you,” so much, I think, there is also in this: “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” so that righteousness is shown to belong to faith, and understanding to wisdom. Accordingly, in those who burn with a great love of clear truth, the zeal is not to be disapproved, but recalled to order, so that it begins from faith and strives by good conduct to reach where it is heading. For in what it is engaged in there is laborious virtue; in what it seeks, luminous wisdom. “What need is there,” someone says, “to believe what is not shown me plainly? Bring forth some word by which I may see the beginning of all things.” For it is this that the rational mind most of all and first burns for, if it is a lover of truth. Let him be answered: what you desire is beautiful indeed and most worthy to be loved, but Leah marries first, and Rachel afterwards. Let this ardour, then, avail for this, that the order be not refused but rather endured, without which one cannot reach what is loved with so great ardour. And when it has been reached, one will have together in this world not only beautiful understanding but also laborious righteousness. For however keenly and purely the unchangeable good is perceived by mortals, still the body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things. We must strain towards the one thing, then, but for its sake many things must be borne.

So Jacob's two wives are free; for both are daughters of the forgiveness of sins, that is, of the whitening, which is Laban. Yet one is loved and the other endured. But the one endured is made fruitful first and more abundantly, so that, if not for her own sake, she may at least be loved for her sons. For the labour of the righteous has its greatest fruit in those whom they beget for the kingdom of God amid many temptations and tribulations by preaching the gospel; and those for whose sake they are in labours more abundantly, in stripes beyond measure, in deaths often, for whose sake they have fightings without and fears within, they call their joy and crown. And these are born to them more easily and copiously from that word of faith by which they preach Christ crucified, and whatever of his humanity is more quickly grasped by human thought and does not trouble even Leah's weak eyes. But Rachel, clear of sight, is beside herself for God, and sees in the beginning the Word, God with God, and wishes to bear and cannot, because “who will declare his generation?” Accordingly, the life devoted to the pursuit of contemplation, in order to behold with the not weak eyes of the mind the things invisible to the flesh, understood through the things that are made, and to perceive inexpressibly the eternal power and divinity of God, wishes to be free of all business, and so is barren. For in seeking the leisure in which the pursuits of contemplation are kindled, it does not adapt itself to the weakness of men who desire to be helped in their various afflictions. But because it too burns with the love of begetting—for it wishes to teach what it knows and not to travel with consuming envy—it sees its sister abounding in sons through the labour of doing and suffering, and grieves that men run to that virtue by which their weaknesses and needs are provided for rather than to that from which something divine and unchangeable is learned. This grief seems to be figured in what is written: “And Rachel envied her sister.” Accordingly, since a clear and pure understanding of that substance which is not body, and therefore does not belong to the sense of the flesh, cannot be expressed in words uttered by the flesh, the teaching of wisdom chooses to suggest divine things, to be thought of in whatever way, through any bodily images and likenesses, rather than to cease from the duty of teaching such things; just as Rachel chose to receive children from her husband and her maidservant rather than remain entirely without sons. For Bilhah, Rachel's maidservant, is said to mean “grown old”; for from the old life given to the fleshly senses bodily images are thought of, even when something is heard of the spiritual and unchangeable substance of the divinity.

Leah too receives sons from her maidservant, fired by love of having more numerous offspring. And we find that Zilpah, her maidservant, means “a mouth going.” Therefore, when we notice in the Scriptures those whose mouth goes into the preaching of the gospel faith but whose heart does not go, this is understood to be Leah's maidservant. For it is written of some: “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” And to such the apostle says: “You who preach that one must not steal, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?” Yet so that through this condition too that free and labouring wife of Jacob may receive sons as heirs of the kingdom, the Lord therefore says: “What they say, do; but what they do, do not do.” Hence the apostolic life, in the labour of chains, says: “Whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice”—as if glad of more numerous offspring even from the maidservant's bearing.

There is also a child of Leah's born through Rachel's kindness, when, having received the mandrake apples from Leah's son, she allowed her husband, who was due to lie with her that night, to lie with her sister. I know that some think of this kind of fruit that, taken as food by barren women, it produces fertility; and for that reason they think Rachel pressed in every way to get it from her sister's son out of desire to bear. I would not think so even if she had conceived then. But as it is, since the Lord gave her offspring only after two more births of Leah's following that night, there is no reason why we should suspect anything of the kind about the mandrake, which we have found in no woman. I will say, then, what I think; more learned men may perhaps say better. When I had seen these apples myself and was glad that this had happened to me because of that very passage of the sacred reading—for it is a rare thing—I examined their nature carefully, as far as I could, not with some knowledge remote from common sense, which teaches the virtues of roots and the powers of herbs, but as far as sight and smell and taste reported to me and to any man. Accordingly, I found it a beautiful and sweet-smelling thing, but insipid in taste; and so I confess I do not know why the woman desired it so much, unless perhaps for the rarity of the fruit and the pleasantness of its smell. But why holy Scripture did not wish to pass over the event itself—which would certainly not take care to suggest to us such desires of women as something great, unless it were prompting us to seek something great in them—I can conjecture nothing more than what that common sense suggests to me, namely that I understand the mandrake apple to figure good reputation: not that which is conferred when a few righteous and wise men praise a man, but that popular fame by which a greater and more widespread renown is won; not to be sought for its own sake, but very necessary for the aim of good men, by which they serve the human race. Hence the apostle says: “He must also have a good testimony from those outside”; who, though they have little wisdom, yet often render to the labour of those through whom they are served both the splendour of praise and the fragrance of a good name. And none of those in the church first reach this popular glory except those who are engaged in the dangers and labour of action. Therefore Leah's son found the mandrake apples going out into the field, that is, walking honourably towards those outside; while that teaching of wisdom, which, far removed from the din of the crowd, is fixed in sweet delight on the contemplation of truth, would not attain this popular glory, however small, except through those who, in the midst of crowds, by acting and persuading, preside over peoples, not in order to preside but in order to profit; because, while these active and busy men, through whom the welfare of the multitude is administered and whose authority is dear to the peoples, bear testimony also to the life of leisure given to the pursuit of seeking and contemplating truth, in a way the mandrake apples come through Leah to Rachel; and to Leah herself through her firstborn son, that is, through the honour of her fruitfulness, in which is all the fruit of laborious action, imperilled amid the uncertainties of temptations—action which many endowed with good ability and burning with zeal, though they could be fit to govern peoples, nevertheless avoid because of its turbulent occupations, and are carried with their whole heart into the leisure of learning, as into the embrace of beautiful Rachel.

But since it is good that this life too, becoming more widely known, should win popular glory, while it is unjust that it should gain it if it keeps its lover in leisure when he is apt and fit for administering the cares of the church, and does not give him to the government of the common welfare, therefore Leah says to her sister: “Is it too little for you that you have taken my husband, that you wish to take my son's mandrakes as well?” By the one husband she signifies all those who, though capable in the virtue of action and worthy to be entrusted with the government of the church for dispensing the sacrament of faith, are fired with zeal for learning and for searching out and contemplating wisdom, and wish to withdraw from all the troubles of action and hide themselves in the leisure of learning and teaching. So it was said: “Is it too little for you that you have taken my husband, that you wish to take my son's mandrakes as well?”—as though it were said: is it too little that the life of study keeps in leisure men necessary for the labour of public affairs, that it seeks popular glory as well?

Therefore, to obtain it justly, Rachel gives her husband to her sister that night: that is, those who by laborious virtue are suited to governing peoples, even if they had chosen to devote themselves to knowledge, should take up the experience of temptations and the burden of cares for the common good, so that the very teaching of wisdom, to which they had resolved to devote themselves, may not be blasphemed, and may gain a good reputation among the less learned peoples, which those apples signify, and which is necessary for the encouragement of learners. But that they take up this care plainly under compulsion is also sufficiently signified, in that when Jacob came from the field, Leah met him, and, holding him back, said: “You shall come in to me, for I have hired you for my son's mandrakes”; as though she said: do you wish a good reputation to be conferred on the teaching you love? Do not flee the dutiful labour. Whoever pays attention sees these things done in the church. We experience in examples what we understand in books. Who does not see this happening throughout the world: that all come from the works of the world and go into the leisure of knowing and contemplating truth, as into the embrace of Rachel, and are intercepted by the necessity of the church and ordained to labour, as though Leah said: “You shall come in to me”? And when they dispense the mystery of God chastely, so as to beget sons of faith in the night of this world, that life too is praised by the peoples, out of love for which they turned and left the hope of the world, and from whose profession they were taken up to the mercy of governing the people. For in all their labours they act so that that profession, to which they had turned, may be glorified more widely and brightly because it has given such rulers to the peoples—as though Jacob did not refuse Leah's night, so that Rachel might obtain the sweet-smelling and brightly shining apples. And she too at length, by the mercy of God, bears through herself, though only with difficulty, since it is very rare that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and whatever is said of this godly and wisely, is grasped without the phantasm of fleshly thought, and soundly, even in part.

Let these things suffice, said against Faustus's slanders, concerning the three fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose God the God whom the Catholic Church worships willed to be called. Of the merits and piety of these three men, and of the loftiness of their prophecy, far removed from the judgment of the fleshly, this is not the place to speak: in this present work of ours they needed only to be defended from these accusations with which a slanderous tongue, hostile to the truth, assailed them, lest those who read the holy and wholesome Scriptures with a perverse and hostile mind should seem to have said something against them, while they attack with insolent abuse those who are proclaimed there with such honour.

But Lot, the brother, that is, the blood-relation, of Abraham, is by no means to be compared with these, of whom God says: “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” nor to be counted among those to whom that Scripture bears witness of righteousness to the end—although, having lived godly and chastely among the Sodomites, and commended also by the merit of hospitality, he was rescued from the burning of that land, and a land of possession was given to his descendants by the gift of God for the sake of Abraham, who was his uncle. These merits are set before us in those books to be praised, not his drunkenness, not the incest; but when we find written both a right action and a sin of the same man, one is suggested for imitation, the other for avoidance. Further, if the sin of Lot, to whom a testimony of righteousness was borne before he sinned, not only does not discolour the divinity of God or the truth of that Scripture, but even commends it as worthy of praise and love—because, like the brightness of a faithful mirror, it shows of the persons brought before it not only what is beautiful and sound but also what is ugly and faulty—how much more does the deed of Judah, in lying with his daughter-in-law, bring nothing at all for which the holy authority should be blamed! That authority, established in those books and standing firm, by divine right despises not only the slanderous subtleties of the very few Manichaeans but also the dreadful enmities of so many and such great peoples of the Gentiles, whom it has now almost wholly brought under the yoke of the worship of the one true God, away from the wicked superstition of idols, through the Christian empire, the world having been subdued not by the violence of warfare but by the power of unconquered truth. For where in those writings is Judah praised? What good has that Scripture testified of him, except that, in the prophecy of Christ, who was foretold to come in the flesh from his tribe, he stood out, commended above the others by his father's blessing?

Moreover, to Faustus's mention that he committed fornication we add something else, that he sold his brother Joseph into Egypt. Do anyone's crooked limbs corrupt the light which shows all things? So neither do anyone's misdeeds make evil the Scripture through whose disclosure they become known to readers. For when that eternal law is consulted, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, it ordains that human intercourse take place only for the sake of propagation, and only in a marriage socially ordered, which does not pervert the bond of peace; and therefore the prostitution of women set out not for raising offspring but for satisfying lust is condemned by the divine and eternal law. For saleable foulness dishonours every buyer; and so, although Judah would have sinned more gravely if he had wished to lie with his daughter-in-law knowingly—for if husband and wife, as the Lord says, are “no longer two but one flesh,” a daughter-in-law is to be counted no otherwise than a daughter—yet there is no doubt that, as far as was in him, he lay shamefully with a harlot. But she who deceived her father-in-law did not sin from desire for his flesh, nor from greed for a harlot's hire; but, seeking offspring from the very blood from which, though married to two brothers already, she could not have it, the third being refused her, she submitted her body by a trick to their father, her father-in-law, to be made fruitful, having received a pledge of the hire, which she kept not for adornment but for evidence. She would indeed have done better to remain without sons than to become a mother without the right of marriage; yet she sinned with a far different intention in providing her father-in-law as father for her sons than if she had desired him for herself as an adulterer. Finally, when by his order she was being led out to death and had brought out the staff, the necklace, and the ring, saying that she had been made pregnant by him whose pledges these were, when he recognized what he had given, he answered that she was more justified than he, because he had been unwilling to join his son to her as husband; deprived by which, she was compelled to seek posterity in that way rather than in no way, and from no other source than the same stock. In this sentence, saying not that she was justified but that she was more justified than he, he did not praise her, but preferred her in comparison with himself—that is, blaming less the desire to have offspring, led by which she had submitted herself to her father-in-law, than the heat of lustful intercourse, by which he, overcome, had gone in as to a harlot; just as it is said to some: “You have justified Sodom,” that is, you have sinned so much that Sodom compared with you seems righteous. And yet even if this woman is understood not as blamed less in comparison with a worse deed, but as plainly praised by her father-in-law—though, when that eternal law of justice is consulted, which forbids the natural order to be disturbed (not only, certainly, of bodies, but most of all and first of souls), she is rightly found blameworthy, because she did not keep the ordered fellowship in procreating children—what wonder if a sinful woman is praised by a sinful man?

Faustus, or rather the Manichaean perversity itself, thinks this tells against us, as though, in venerating that Scripture and praising it worthily, we had to approve the vices of men which it records; on the contrary, the more reverently we receive it, the more confidently must we blame what we have learned, through its truth, more surely to be blamed. For there fornication and every unlawful intercourse is condemned by divine law. And so, when it records such deeds of certain people, about which it keeps its own verdict silent in that place, it leaves them for us to judge; it does not prescribe them for praise. For which of us does not detest, in the gospel itself, the cruelty of Herod, when, troubled about the birth of Christ, he ordered so many infants to be killed? Yet this deed is not condemned there, only narrated. But lest the Manichaeans, with insane impudence, contend that this is false, because they deny even the birth of Christ by which Herod was troubled, let them read of the savagery and blindness of the Jews themselves, how there it is only narrated, not condemned, and yet it is detested by all.

“But,” they say, “this Judah, who lay with his daughter-in-law, is counted among the twelve patriarchs.” What of it? Was not that Judas too, who betrayed the Lord, numbered among the twelve apostles, and sent out with them, one of them, a devil, to preach the gospel? But they answer further and say: that man, after such a crime, perished by his own noose and was removed from the number of the apostles; whereas this one, after this disgrace, was especially blessed among his brothers by that father to whom God bears so great a testimony, and praised above all. On the contrary, from this it appears more expressly that that prophecy refers not to him but to Christ, who was foretold to come in the flesh from his tribe; and for that reason divine Scripture all the more ought not to keep silent about his crime, as it did not keep silent, so that in the words of his father, by which he is so praised after that disgrace, since he himself is not recognized, another may be sought.

Although Faustus may be understood to have wished, with his slandering tooth, to bite at this very thing, that we proclaim Christ to have come from his tribe, especially since in the generations of his fathers recorded by the evangelist Matthew there is found also Zerah, whom Tamar herself bore from that conception. For if he had wished to find fault with the stock of Jacob and not the generation of Christ, he had rather the firstborn Reuben, who violated his father's bed with wicked lust—a fornication such as the apostle says is not heard of even among the Gentiles. This deed his father Jacob himself did not pass over in silence when he blessed them, accusing and detesting it upon his head. Faustus would rather have objected this crime, where no mistake arising from a harlot's dress appears, but a wholly voluntary defiling of the father's bed—unless he hated Tamar herself the more because by that intercourse she desired nothing else than to bear children than if she had burned with the mere lust of fleshly pleasure, and wished, by blaming the forebears of Christ, to undermine faith in his incarnation; not knowing, wretched man, that the most true and truthful Saviour was a teacher not only by speaking but also by being born. For his faithful, who were to come from all nations, had to learn even from the example of his own flesh that the iniquities of their parents could not harm them. Accordingly, that bridegroom, suiting himself to his invited guests, who was going to call good and bad to the wedding, willed also to be born of good and bad, so as to confirm that the prophecy of the Passover, in which the lamb was commanded to be eaten taken from the sheep and the goats, as from the righteous and the unrighteous, had gone before to prefigure him. For, keeping everywhere the proofs of God and of man, he did not scorn parents both good and bad, for the sake of fitness to his humanity, but chose birth from a virgin for the sake of the miracle of his divinity.

In vain, then, does Faustus, raging rather against himself with sacrilegious tooth, accuse the holy Scripture, which the whole world now rightly reveres: which, as I said above, like the brightness of a faithful mirror, has flattered no one's person, but either itself judges men's deeds to be praised and blamed, or sets them before readers to be judged; not only indicating that the men themselves are blameworthy or praiseworthy, but also not keeping silent about some things to be praised in the blameworthy and some to be blamed in the praiseworthy. For not because Saul was a blameworthy man is that deed of his therefore not praiseworthy, in that he so diligently searched out the tasting of what was under the curse and tried so severely to punish it, obeying God, who had forbidden it to be done; or that he removed the pythonesses and ventriloquists from his kingdom. Nor, because David was praiseworthy, are his sins, which God also rebuked through the prophet, therefore to be either approved or imitated. Just as neither is Pontius Pilate to be blamed in that, against the accusations of the Jews, he judged the Lord innocent, nor is Peter to be praised in that he denied the same Lord three times, or in that for which he was called Satan by him, because, not minding the things of God, he wished to call him back from his passion, that is, from our salvation; so he who was called blessed a little before was called Satan a little after. But what prevailed in him, his apostleship and the crown of martyrdom testify.

So too we read the sins of King David, but we read also his right actions. And in what he prevailed, or by what he conquered what, is plain enough—not to the malevolent blindness with which Faustus rushed against the holy books and men, but to the religious prudence by which both the divine authority and human merits can be seen and distinguished. For let these men read and see that God rebuked more things in David than Faustus did; but there too is the sacrifice of repentance, there is that incomparable gentleness even towards a most savage and cruel enemy, who, as often as he was given into David's most mighty hands, so often was let go unharmed from his most godly hands. There is memorable humility under the scourge of God, and the royal neck so subject to the Lord's yoke that, armed and accompanied by armed men, he bore most patiently bitter insults from an enemy's mouth, and most modestly restrained his companion, inflamed with anger because his king heard such things and already about to proceed with avenging right hand against the reviler's head; adding to his royal command the weight of divine fear, and saying that this was rendered to his deserts by the judgment from above, by which that insulter had been sent to hurl such reproaches at him. There is such pastoral love towards the flock entrusted to him that he wished to die himself for them, when, after the people had been numbered, it pleased God to punish the sin of his pride by reducing that same number by the death of many, by whose multitude the king's heart had been tempted to pride; in which hidden judgment God, with whom there is no iniquity, both withdrew from this life those whom he knew unworthy of this life, and in him who had exalted himself because of the abundance of men healed the swelling of the human mind by diminishing that same abundance. There such religious fear of God guarded the sacrament of Christ in the holy anointing that his heart trembled with godly anxiety when he secretly cut off a small piece of Saul's own garment, so as to have something by which to prove to him how unwilling he was to kill him when he could. There is such prudence and such clemency towards his sons that, though he did not mourn the innocent child, for whom, when sick, he had besought the Lord with many tears, casting himself down in the squalor of humility, once he was dead, yet the young son rushing headlong in parricidal fury, who had both stained his father's bed with wicked defilements and was waging a criminal war against his father, he both wished to be preserved and wept for when killed—foreseeing, namely, the everlasting punishments of a soul entangled in such great crimes, to escape which he desired him to live, humbled, so as to be corrected through repentance. These and many other things to be praised and imitated are found in that holy man, if a perverse mind does not search the Scripture that speaks of him; above all if, with a submissive, godly, and plainly faithful mind, we follow the verdict of God, who knew the secrets of his heart, where in the sight of him who cannot be deceived he was so pleasing that he was even set forth by him for his sons to imitate.

For what else did the Spirit of God see than the depths of his heart, when, rebuked by the prophet, he said, “I have sinned,” and at once, at this one word, deserved to hear that he had received pardon? For what, but for eternal salvation? For the discipline of the fatherly scourge, according to God's threat, was not omitted in his case, so that, having confessed, he might be freed for ever, and, afflicted, he might be proved in time. And it was no ordinary strength of faith, nor a small sign of a meek and obedient mind, that when he had heard from the prophet that God had forgiven him, and yet the things that had been threatened came to pass in consequence, he did not say that he had been deceived by the prophet's lie, nor murmur against God as though he had pronounced a false pardon of his sins. For the deeply holy man, lifting up his soul not against God but to God, understood how much eternal punishment his sins deserved unless the Lord were merciful to him confessing and repenting; and while he was burned with temporal corrections for them, he saw that both pardon remained for him and medicine was not neglected. But why did Saul, rebuked by Samuel, though he too said “I have sinned,” not deserve to hear what David heard, that the Lord had forgiven him? Is there respect of persons with God? Far from it. But in a like voice, which human sense heard, there was an unlike breast, which the divine eye distinguished. What are we taught by such examples except that the kingdom of heaven is within us, and that we ought to worship God from our inmost being, so that the mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart, not so that a people honours him with their lips while their heart is far from him; and that we should not dare to judge of men, whose inner parts we cannot see, otherwise than God, who can, and cannot be deceived or corrupted? Since so lofty an authority of the divine Scripture contains his most evident verdict on David, is not human rashness that thinks otherwise much to be laughed at, or rather lamented? For we must believe those divine books concerning ancient men which so long ago foretold things that are now seen present.

What else do we learn in the gospel, when the same words are heard from Peter confessing Christ the Son of God as from the demons, who utter like words but with a far unlike heart? So, in a like voice, Peter's faith is praised and the uncleanness of the demons is restrained. By whom, but by him who knew how to look into the inner roots of those voices, not with a human ear but with a divine mind, and to distinguish them without any error? For how many other men too say that Christ is the Son of the living God, and yet are not compared with Peter's merits—not only those who will say on that day, “Lord, Lord,” and will hear, “Depart from me,” but also those who will be set apart on the right, among whom very many never denied Christ even once, nor disapproved his passion for our salvation, nor compelled the Gentiles to live like Jews, and yet will appear unequal to Peter, who did these things, as he sits on the twelve thrones and judges not only the twelve tribes but also the angels? So too many who have desired no one's wife, and pursued to death no husband of a woman desired, yet cannot have David's merit with God, though he did those things. So much does it matter what displeases each one in himself, and how much, so that it is utterly rooted out, and what fruitful and rich growth springs up in its place with great productiveness; for to the farmer too those fields are more pleasing which, even after great thorns have been rooted out, bring forth a hundredfold, than those which never had any thorns and scarcely reach thirtyfold.

So too Moses, the servant of God most faithful in all his house, minister of the holy law and of the commandment holy, just, and good, to whom the apostle bears witness—for these words I have mentioned are his—minister also of the sacraments, not yet bestowing salvation but still promising the Saviour, which the Saviour himself also confirms, saying: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me also; for he wrote of me” (on which, in its place, we have argued as far as seemed sufficient against the impudent slanders of the Manichaeans)—this Moses, then, the servant of the living God, the true God, the highest God, maker of heaven and earth, not out of something alien but out of nothing, not under the pressure of necessity but from overflowing goodness, not through the punishment of his own member but through the power of his Word; this Moses, I say, humble in refusing so great a ministry, submissive in undertaking it, faithful in keeping it, energetic in carrying it out, vigilant in ruling the people, vehement in correcting, ardent in loving, patient in bearing, who for those over whom he was set placed himself before God when he consulted him and set himself against him when he was angry—this man, so great and of such a kind, far be it from us to weigh by the slandering mouth of Faustus; but rather by the mouth of the plainly truthful God, who truly knew the man he had made, since he also both recognizes as judge the sins of men, which he himself does not commit, in those who deny them, and pardons them as father in those who confess them. Wholly from his mouth we both love and admire his servant Moses, and imitate him as far as we can, though we are far inferior to his merits, even though we have killed or plundered no Egyptian and waged no war; of which he did the one by the bent of a future defender, the others by the command laid upon him by God.

To pass over for the present that, when he struck the Egyptian, although God had not commanded him, yet in his prophetic person it was divinely permitted for this purpose, that it should foreshadow something to come (which I am not now treating), but discussing those deeds altogether as if they had signified nothing, and consulting that eternal law, I find that a man ought not to have been killed by one who held no ordained authority, however injurious and wicked he was. Yet souls capable of virtue and fertile often put forth beforehand vices by which they show this very thing, for what virtue they are best suited, if they are cultivated by precepts. For just as farmers, when they see land producing great weeds, though useless, declare it suitable for grain; and where they see fern, though they know it must be rooted out, understand it fit for strong vines; and when they see a mountain wooded with wild olives, do not doubt that with cultivation it will be useful for olives: so that movement of the mind, by which Moses, not observing the order of authority, could not bear that his foreign brother should suffer wrong from a wicked citizen unavenged, was not useless for the fruits of virtues, but, still uncultivated, put forth signs that were indeed faulty, but of great fertility. Finally, he himself, through his angel, called Moses with divine voices on Mount Sinai, that through him the people of Israel might be freed from Egypt, and prepared him by the miracle of the vision in the bush burning and not consumed, and by the Lord's words, for the fruit of obedience; he who also called Saul, as he persecuted the church, from heaven, cast him down, raised him up, filled him—as it were struck, pruned, grafted, made fruitful. For that savagery of Paul, when, in zeal for the traditions of the fathers, he persecuted the church, thinking he was offering service to God, was like a wild growth, a vice, but a sign of great productiveness. From the same source was that act of Peter's, when, drawing his sword and wishing to defend the Lord, he cut off the ear of a persecutor; which deed the Lord checked rather menacingly, saying: “Put back your sword; for whoever uses the sword will fall by the sword.” And he uses the sword who arms himself against someone's blood without any higher and lawful authority either commanding or permitting it. For the Lord had indeed ordered his disciples to carry the steel, but had not ordered them to strike. What then is unfitting if Peter after this sin was made shepherd of the church, as Moses after striking the Egyptian was made ruler of that synagogue? For both exceeded the rule of justice not from detestable savagery but from a correctable spirit; both sinned from hatred of another's wickedness, but the one from love of a brother, the other from love of the Lord, though still fleshly. This vice was to be pruned or rooted out; yet so great a heart was to be cultivated for bearing virtues, as land for crops.

What, then, does Faustus object about the spoiling of the Egyptians, not knowing what he says? In doing this Moses was so far from sinning that he would have sinned by not doing it. For God had commanded it, who certainly knows, not only according to men's deeds but also according to their hearts, what each ought to suffer, or through whom. That people was still fleshly and taken up with desire for earthly things; and the Egyptians were sacrilegious and unjust: for, using that gold, that is, God's creature, badly to the creator's injury, they served their idols with it, and they had unjustly and harshly afflicted foreigners with unpaid labour. Both, then, were deserving: these, that such things should be commanded them; those, that they should suffer such things. And perhaps, according to their own wishes and thoughts, the Hebrews were permitted rather than commanded to do these things; but God wished to make his permission known to them through his servant Moses, when he ordered him to tell them. It may be, however, that there are other most hidden reasons why this was divinely said to that people; but we must yield to divine commands by obeying, not resist them by arguing. The apostle said: “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?” Whether, then, the reason is the one I have given, or some other lies hidden in the secret and hidden ordering of God, why he told that people through Moses to ask from the Egyptians, as a loan, things they were to carry off, this I affirm: that it was said neither in vain nor unjustly, and that it was not lawful for Moses to do otherwise than God had said; so that the counsel of commanding was with the Lord, and the obedience of carrying out with the servant.

“But,” he says, “the true and good God is in no way to be believed to have commanded such things.” On the contrary, no one rightly commands such things except the true and good God, who alone knows what should be commanded to each, and alone allows no one to suffer anything unfitting. Otherwise, let that ignorant and false goodness of the human heart contradict Christ also, lest by the command of the good God the ungodly should suffer some evil, when he is going to say to the angels: “Gather first the weeds and bind them in bundles for burning”—he who nevertheless forbade the servants who wished to do this very thing out of season, saying: “Lest perhaps, when you wish to gather the weeds, you root up the wheat with them.” So only the true and good God knows what, when, to whom, and through whom he commands or permits something to be done. This human—not goodness, but plain vanity—could also contradict the same Lord when he granted the harmful desire of the demons who wished and asked to go into the swine, especially since the Manichaeans believed that not only swine but even small and despised animals have human souls. Rejecting and casting off that vanity, it is nevertheless established that our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, and therefore the true and good God, granted to the desire of the demons the death of other people's cattle, the destruction of animals of whatever kind, and heavy loss to men. And who so mad as to say that he could not have kept them away from men even if he had not wished to grant their harmful will the destruction of the swine? Further, if the cruel and wicked desire of spirits condemned and already destined to eternal fire was let loose to what it had inclined to by the creator and orderer of all natures, by a hidden but everywhere just governance, what is absurd if the Egyptians deserved to be deprived by the Hebrews—men ruling unjustly, by free men, to whom they were even debtors for the wages of such hard and unjust labours—of earthly things, which they were even using in sacrilegious rites to the injury of the creator? Yet if Moses had ordered this of his own accord, or the Hebrews had done it of their own accord, they would certainly have sinned; although they perhaps did sin, not indeed in doing what God had either commanded or permitted, but in desiring such things. But that they were permitted to do this by divine dispensation, they were permitted by the just and good judgment of him who knows how by punishments either to restrain the wicked or to instruct the subject, and to give stronger precepts to the sounder and to appoint certain medicinal stages for the weaker. Moses, however, is to be charged neither with greed for those things desired, nor with contumacy in despising any divine commands.

For that eternal law, which commands the natural order to be preserved and forbids it to be disturbed, has placed certain deeds in a kind of middle position for men, so that in taking them upon oneself boldness is rightly blamed, while in carrying them out at command obedience is rightly praised. So much does it matter in the natural order what is done by whom, and under whom each acts. If Abraham had sacrificed his son of his own accord, what would he have appeared but horrible and insane? But at God's command, what but faithful and devoted? Truth itself cries this out so loudly that Faustus, frightened by its voice, though seeking with tooth and nail what to say against Abraham himself, to the point of coming to slanderous lies, still did not dare to find fault with this—unless perhaps so noble a deed did not occur to his mind, which, even unread and unsought, would come to mind, and which, sung in so many tongues and painted in so many places, would strike ears and eyes even if they pretended not to notice. Therefore, if in killing his son a spontaneous impulse is found accursed, but obedient service at God's command not only blameless but even praiseworthy, why, Faustus, do you blame Moses for spoiling the Egyptians? If the apparent wickedness of the man doing it provokes you, let the divine authority of the One commanding it frighten you. Or are you ready to find fault even with God himself for willing such things to be done? “Get behind me, then, Satan; for you do not mind the things of God, but the things of men.” And would that you had been worthy to hear this, as Peter was, and had afterwards preached what you now blame in God with feeble sense, as he afterwards proclaimed to the Gentiles with glorious preaching what at first, when the Lord willed it to happen, displeased him.

Therefore, if human hardness, and a will depraved and perverse in matters of right, now at last understands that it makes a very great difference whether something is done by human desire or rashness, or in obedience to the command of God, who knows what, when, and to whom he permits or commands, and what it befits each to do and suffer, let it neither wonder at nor shudder at the wars waged by Moses; because in them too he followed divine commands and was not cruel but obedient; nor was God cruel when he commanded these things, but he rendered to the deserving what they deserved and frightened those who deserved it. For what is blamed in war? Is it that those who will die some time die, so that those who will live may be subdued in peace? To find fault with this belongs to the timid, not to the religious. The desire to harm, the cruelty of revenge, an unpeaceful and implacable mind, savagery in rebelling, the lust for domination, and whatever is like these—these are what are rightly blamed in wars; and generally, so that these may also be rightly punished, wars themselves are undertaken by good men against the violence of those who resist, at the command either of God or of some lawful authority, when they find themselves in that order of human affairs in which that very order rightly binds them either to command such a thing or to obey in such things. Otherwise John, when soldiers came to him to be baptized, saying, “And what shall we do?”, would have answered them: “Throw away your arms, leave that military service, strike, wound, cut down no one.” But because he knew that when they did these things in military service they were not murderers but ministers of the law, and not avengers of their own injuries but defenders of public safety, he answered them: “Extort from no one, falsely accuse no one, be content with your wages.” But since the Manichaeans are accustomed openly to blaspheme John, let them hear the Lord Jesus Christ himself commanding that this wage be paid to Caesar which John says ought to suffice the soldier: “Render,” he says, “to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” For taxes are paid for this purpose, that wages may be provided to the soldier who is needed because of wars. Rightly too he praised the faith of that centurion who said, “For I too am a man set under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to one, Go, and he goes, and to another, Come, and he comes, and to my servant, Do this, and he does it,” and did not order him to desert that military service. But to argue now about just and unjust wars would be long and unnecessary.

For it matters for what causes and on whose authority men undertake to wage wars; yet that natural order, suited to the peace of mortals, requires that the authority and decision to undertake war rest with the ruler, while the soldiers owe the service of carrying out military commands to the peace and common safety. And a war undertaken to be waged on God's authority it is not right to doubt is rightly undertaken, whether to frighten or to crush or to subdue the pride of mortals; since not even a war waged by human greed can do any harm, not only to the incorruptible God, but even to his saints; rather it is found even to benefit them, for exercising patience, humbling the soul, and bearing fatherly discipline. For no one has any power over them unless it has been given him from above. For there is no power except from God, whether commanding or permitting. Since, then, a righteous man, if he happens to serve as a soldier under a human king, even a sacrilegious one, can rightly fight at his command, keeping the order of civic peace—when what he is commanded either is certainly not against God's precept or it is not certain whether it is, so that perhaps the iniquity of commanding makes the king guilty, while the order of serving shows the soldier innocent—how much more innocently is he engaged in the conduct of wars who wages war at the command of God, who, as no one who serves him is unaware, cannot command anything evil!

But if they think God could not have commanded war to be waged because afterwards the Lord Jesus Christ said, “But I say to you, do not resist evil; but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the left also,” let them understand that this readiness is not in the body but in the heart; for there is the holy chamber of virtue, which dwelt also in those ancient righteous men, our fathers. But the order of the dispensation of events and the distribution of times required that it should first appear that even earthly goods themselves, to which human kingdoms and victories over enemies are reckoned, and for the sake of which above all the city of the ungodly, spread through the world, is accustomed to supplicate idols and demons, belong only to the power and decision of the one true God. Hence the Old Testament also covered the secret of the kingdom of heaven, to be opened at the fitting time, with earthly promises, and in a way shaded it more darkly. But when the fullness of time came for the New Testament to be revealed, which was veiled by the figures of the Old, it had now to be shown by evident testimony that there is another life for which this life ought to be despised, and another kingdom for which the hostility of all earthly kingdoms ought to be borne most patiently. Accordingly, those through whose confessions, sufferings, and deaths it pleased God to bear witness to this are called martyrs, which in Latin means witnesses. Their number flourished so greatly that, if Christ—who called Saul from heaven and, having made him a sheep out of a wolf, sent him into the midst of wolves—had wished to arm them, gathered together, and help them as they fought, as he helped the Hebrew fathers, what nations would have resisted? What kingdoms would not have yielded? But so that a most glorious testimony might be borne to the truth, by which it now had to be taught that God is to be served not for temporal happiness in this life but for eternal happiness after this life, what is commonly called unhappiness had to be undergone and borne for the sake of that happiness. So in the fullness of time the Son of God, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, made of the seed of David according to the flesh, sends his disciples as sheep into the midst of wolves, and warns them not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; he promises also that the integrity of the body itself will be renewed, even to the restoration of a hair; he calls Peter's sword back into its sheath, restores the enemy's severed ear to its former shape, says that he could have commanded legions of angels to destroy his enemies, were it not that the cup had to be drunk which his Father's will had given; he drinks it first, and passes it to those who follow; he reveals the virtue of patience by his precept and confirms it by his example. Therefore God raised him from the dead and gave him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father. So the patriarchs and prophets reigned here, so that it might be shown that God gives and takes away these kingdoms; the apostles and martyrs did not reign here, so that the kingdom of heaven might rather be set forth as to be desired. The former waged royal wars, so that it might appear that such victories too are granted by God's will; the latter were killed without resisting, so that they might teach that it is a better victory to be killed for the faith of the truth. Although there too the prophets knew how to die for the truth, as the Lord himself says: “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.” And after there began to be fulfilled what was prophesied in the psalm, under the figure of Solomon—which in Latin means “peaceful”—about the Lord Christ (for he is our peace): “And all the kings of the earth shall worship him; all nations shall serve him,” Christian emperors too, placing full confidence of godliness in Christ, won a most glorious victory over sacrilegious enemies, who had put their hope in the rites of idols and demons, when, by most plain and well-known proofs, of which some have already committed a written record to memory, the soothsayings of the demons deceived the one side and the predictions of the saints strengthened the other.

But if it seems strange to these empty men that God then commanded one thing to the ministers of the Old Testament, in which the grace of the New was veiled, and another to the preachers of the New Testament, in which the obscurity of the Old was unveiled, let them attend to the Lord Christ himself changing what he had said and saying something else: “When I sent you,” he says, “without purse and bag and sandals, did you lack anything?” And they said: “Nothing.” He said to them, therefore: “But now let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag; and let him who has none sell his tunic and buy a sword.” Certainly, if these men found these different things in the two separate Testaments, Old and New, they would cry out that this too shows the two Testaments to be contrary to each other. What, then, will they answer now, when the same Lord himself says: “Before, I sent you without purse and bag and sandals, and you lacked nothing; but now let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag, and let him who has a tunic sell it and buy a sword”? Do they now understand how, through no inconstancy in him who commands, but by the reason of him who dispenses, precepts or counsels or permissions are changed according to the difference of times? For if they say that this about taking a purse and bag and buying a sword was spoken for the sake of a certain mystery, why do they not admit that, for the sake of a certain mystery, the same one God then commanded the prophets to wage wars and now forbade the apostles? For in what we have recalled from the gospel there were not only the Lord's words, but the deeds of the obedient disciples followed too. For then they went without purse and bag and lacked nothing, as his question and their answer declared; and now, when he commanded them about buying a sword, they said to him: “Look, here are two swords.” And he answered: “It is enough.” Hence Peter too was found armed when he cut off the persecutor's ear; where his spontaneous boldness is checked, because, though he had been ordered to carry steel, he had not been ordered to strike. The Lord's will was certainly hidden, why he commanded weapons to be carried which he did not wish them to use. Nevertheless, it belonged to him to command with reason, and to them to carry out his commands without question.

It is, then, by slanderous ignorance that Moses is blamed for waging wars; he would have deserved less blame if he had waged them of his own accord than if he had not waged them when God commanded. But to dare to blame God himself for commanding such things, or not to believe that a just and good God could command such things, belongs to a man—to put it mildly—unable to think that, for divine providence, which reaches through all things highest and lowest, what arises is not new nor does what dies perish, but each thing, in its own order whether of natures or of merits, gives way, succeeds, or remains; and that the right will of men is joined to the divine law, while disordered desire is restrained by the order of the divine law, so that neither does the good man will anything other than what is commanded, nor can the bad man do more than is permitted—and in such a way, indeed, that he cannot do with impunity what he has unjustly willed. And so, in all the things that human weakness shudders at or fears, only iniquity is rightly condemned; the rest are either the dues of natures or the deserts of faults. A man becomes unjust when he loves for their own sake things to be taken up for the sake of something else, and seeks for the sake of something else things to be loved for their own sake. For so, as far as in him lies, he disturbs in himself the natural order which the eternal law commands to be preserved. And a man becomes just when he seeks to use things for no other end than that for which they were divinely appointed, and to enjoy God himself for his own sake, and himself and his friend in God himself for the sake of that same God. For he loves his friend for God's sake who loves the love of God in his friend. Neither iniquity nor justice would be in our power unless it were in the will. Further, if it were not in our power, no reward and no punishment would be just: which no one thinks unless he is out of his mind. But ignorance and weakness, so that a man either does not know what he ought to will, or cannot do all that he wills, come from a hidden order of punishments and from those inscrutable judgments of God, with whom there is no iniquity. For the sin of Adam has been made known to us by the faithful word of God; and it is truly written both that in him all die and that through him sin entered this world, and through sin death. And that, from this punishment, the body is corrupted and weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things, is most true and most familiar to us; and it is certain that only merciful grace frees from this just punishment. Hence the apostle groans and cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But what the distribution of God judging and showing mercy is—why one is thus and another thus—happens for hidden causes, yet just ones. Yet we are not therefore ignorant that all these things happen by the judgment or mercy of God, though the measures and numbers and weights are placed in secret by which all things are arranged by God, the creator of all that exists by nature, and not the author, yet the orderer, even of sins; so that those things which would not be sins unless they were against nature are so judged and ordered that they are not allowed to disturb or disfigure the nature of the universe, being assigned to the places and conditions of their deserts. This being so, and since, through this secret of God's judgments and the movements of human wills, some are corrupted by the same prosperity which others use temperately, and some fail in the same adversities in which others advance, and since human and mortal life itself is a temptation on earth, which of men knows whom it profits or harms, in peace, to reign or to serve or to be at leisure or to die, and, in war, to command or to fight or to conquer or to be killed? While yet this is certain: that whom it profits, it profits only by divine kindness, and whom it harms, it harms only by divine judgment.

Why, then, do we leap into rash criticisms—and would that they were of men and not of God? Let the ministers of the Old Testament, who were also the foretellers of the New, have served by killing sinners; let the ministers of the New Testament, who are also the expounders of the Old, have served by dying at the hands of sinners: yet both served the one God, who at different and fitting times teaches both that temporal goods are to be sought from him and to be despised for his sake, and that temporal hardships can be imposed by him and ought to be borne for his sake. What cruelty, then, did Moses either command or do when, zealous with holy zeal for the people entrusted to him and desiring them to be subject to the one true God, after he learned that they had fallen away to making and worshipping an idol and had prostituted their unchaste mind to demons, he took vengeance with the sword on a few of them, whom God himself, whom they had offended, by a deep and secret judgment had willed to be brought to be struck, and so both wholesomely frightened them in the present and established discipline for the future? For who would not recognize that he did what he did with no cruelty but with great love, in the words with which he prayed for their sin, saying: “If you forgive them their sin, forgive; but if not, blot me out of your book”? Whoever, then, godly and prudent, compares that slaughter and this prayer surely sees most clearly—sees how great an evil it is for the soul to commit fornication through the images of demons, when he who loves so rages so. So plainly too the apostle, not cruelly but lovingly, handed a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. He handed over others too, that they might learn not to blaspheme. The Manichaeans read apocryphal writings composed under the apostles' name by some cobblers of fables or other; writings which, in the times of their writers, would have deserved to be received into the authority of the holy church if the holy and learned men who were then in this life and could examine such things had recognized that they spoke the truth. There, nevertheless, they read that the apostle Thomas, when he was at a certain wedding feast as a stranger and quite unknown, and was struck with the palm of the hand by a certain servant, called down on the man an immediate and cruel punishment. For when he had gone out to a spring, to draw water for the guests, a lion rushed upon him and killed him, and his hand, with which he had struck the apostle's head with a light blow, was torn from his body and, according to the word of that same apostle, who wished and prayed for it, a dog brought it in to the tables at which the apostle himself was reclining. What can seem crueller than this? But because, unless I am mistaken, it is also written there that he asked pardon for him in the world to come, compensation was made by a greater benefit: so that both the apostle, through this fear, might be commended to those who did not know him as dear to God, and that man might be provided for eternally after this life, which must end some time. Whether that narrative is true or invented makes no difference to me now. Certainly the Manichaeans, by whom those writings which the church's canon rejects are accepted as true and genuine, are at least compelled by this to confess that that virtue of patience which the Lord teaches, saying, “If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the left also,” can be in the readiness of the heart even if it is not shown by bodily gesture and spoken words; since the apostle, struck with the palm, rather asked God that the injurious man be spared in the world to come, but that that injury be not left unavenged in the present, rather than either offering the striker the other side or inviting him to strike again. He certainly kept within the affection of love and without required an example of correction. Whether this is true or invented, why will they not believe that the servant of God Moses laid low with the sword the makers and worshippers of the idol with such a mind, when it is clear enough from his words that he begged pardon for this kind of sin in such a way that, unless he obtained it, he wished to be blotted out of God's book? And what likeness is there between an unknown man struck with the palm and God, who freed them from slavery in Egypt, led them across the divided sea, covered their pursuing enemies with the waves, and was abandoned and despised when an idol was preferred to him? And if we compare the punishments themselves, what likeness is there between being killed by the sword and being slaughtered and torn by wild beasts? For judges who serve the public laws order those guilty of a greater crime to be thrown to the beasts rather than struck with the sword.

There remains, among the slanderous and sacrilegious criticisms of Faustus, that to which I now reply: that the Lord spoke to the prophet Hosea and said: “Take for yourself a wife of fornication, and have sons by the woman of fornication.” In this scripture their unclean heart is so blinded that they do not understand even the plainest words of the gospel, where the Lord says to the Jews: “The harlots and tax collectors will go before you into the kingdom of heaven.” For what is contrary to the clemency of truth, what hostile to the Christian faith, if a harlot, leaving fornication, is changed into chaste marriage? And what so unfitting and foreign to the faith of a prophet as if he did not believe that all the sins of an unchaste woman changed for the better were forgiven? So, when the prophet made a harlot his wife, both the woman was helped to amend her life and the sacrament of a figure, of which we shall speak shortly, was expressed. But who does not see what in this deed rather offends the error of the Manichaeans? Namely, that harlots are accustomed to take care not to become pregnant. Accordingly, a fornicating woman who remained so pleased them more, so as not to bind their god, than one who, made the wife of one man, should bear children.

And of Solomon what shall I say, except that he is reproved more severely by the testimony of the faithful and holy Scripture itself than by Faustus's petulant and trifling abuse? For it spoke truly and faithfully of him: both what good he had at first and what evil he did in leaving the good in which he had first been. But Faustus, with his eyes closed or rather put out, did not go where he was led by the light that makes things plain, but rushed where he was carried headlong by malevolence. For by this very thing the holy books have the more shown to their religious readers and choosers how chastely the holy men had several wives: that Solomon, who had them not in that way, but rather for lust than for offspring, was disapproved and reproved in these words, so that he was called a lover of women, and thereby, having slipped and sunk into the depth of idolatry, he was exposed by the same truth, which accepts no one's person.

Now, then, having dealt with all the persons by whom Faustus thought the Scriptures of the Old Testament were to be blamed, and having given each his fitting discussion, by which either the men of God were defended against the slanders of heretics and fleshly people, or, though the men were reproved, the Scripture was nonetheless shown to be praiseworthy and venerable, let us see next, in the order in which Faustus named those men in his accusation, what the deeds of the men themselves also signify, what prophecies they carry, what things to come they foretell. This we have already done for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, by whose names God willed to be called as though he were God of them alone, though he is God of the whole creation; certainly not giving them so great an honour for nothing, but because he knew in them, as he alone also could know perfectly and supremely, a sincere and outstanding love; and because in these three fathers he in a way completed the great and wonderful sacrament of his future people: that they begot through free women not only into freedom, as through Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel, but also into slavery, as through the same Rebecca was born Esau, to whom it was said: “You shall be your brother's servant”; and through maidservants not only into slavery, as through Hagar, but also into freedom, as through Bilhah and Zilpah. For so in the people of God, through spiritual free men too, some are born not only into praiseworthy freedom, as those to whom it is said, “Be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ,” but also into damnable slavery, as Simon through Philip; and through fleshly slaves some are born not only into damnable slavery, those who imitate them, but also into praiseworthy freedom, those to whom it is said: “What they say, do; but what they do, do not do.” Whoever wisely recognizes this great sacrament in the people of God keeps the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace to the end, by cleaving to some and bearing with others. We have done this also for Lot, showing what of his Scripture narrated as to be praised, what as to be blamed, and what it signified to be understood from the whole event.

It follows that we consider the deed of Judah in lying with his daughter-in-law, what it signified of things to come. But first something must be said by way of preface, lest anyone of slight consideration be offended that in the holy Scriptures some things to come, not evil but good, are signified by certain evil works of men. For divine providence everywhere keeps the power of its goodness, so that, just as from the intercourse of adulterers a human being is formed and born, a good work of God from an evil work of men (as we have already said in the preceding discussion, from the fruitfulness of seeds, not from the foulness of vices), so in the prophetic Scriptures, which narrate not only the good but also the evil deeds of men, since the narration itself is prophetic, something of future goods is signified even by the evil works of men, through the work not of the sinner but of the writer. For Judah, when overcome by desire he went in to Tamar, did not have this intention in his lust, that something should be signified by it that pertained to the salvation of men; just as neither did that Judas who betrayed the Lord intend that something should be done by it that pertained to that same salvation of men. Further, if from so evil a work of that Judas the Lord made so good a work, that he redeemed us by the blood of that same passion of his, what wonder if his prophet, of whom he himself said, “For he wrote of me,” signified something good from the evil deed of this Judah, so as to teach us by his ministry? For the prophet-narrator, under the disposing and inspiring of the Holy Spirit, gathered those deeds of men whose insertion was not empty of foreshadowing the things he intended to prophesy. And for signifying some good things it makes no difference whether the deeds by which they are signified are good or evil. For what difference does it make to me, when I want to learn something by reading, whether I find black Ethiopians written in red ink and white Gauls in black ink? But if I saw such a thing not in writing but in a painting, I would without doubt find fault with it. So in men's deeds which are set forth for imitation or avoidance it matters more whether they are good or evil; but in those written or spoken for signifying, it makes no difference what praise or blame they deserve in the morals of the doers, provided only they have some necessary fitness for prefiguring the thing in question. For just as Caiaphas in the gospel—as regards his harmful and ruinous mind, and indeed as regards the very words, if you attend in them to the will of the speaker, by which he was working that a just man should be unjustly killed—spoke what was certainly evil, yet without his knowing it signified a great good when he said, “It is expedient that one man die and that the whole nation not perish,” and it was said of him, “This he did not say of himself, but, being high priest, he prophesied that Jesus was to die for the nation”: so the deed of Judah, according to his lust, was evil, but without his knowing it signified a great good; for he did evil of himself, but he did not signify good of himself. And this, which I thought it necessary to say by way of preface, should apply not only to this deed of Judah but also to the others, if any evil works of men occur by which something good was prophesied by the narrator.

In Tamar, then, Judah's daughter-in-law, is understood the people of the kingdom of the Jews, to whom kings from the tribe of Judah were joined as husbands. Rightly her name means “bitterness”; for she gave the Lord a cup of gall. And two kinds of rulers who did not act rightly among the people—one of those who did harm, the other of those who did no good—are signified in the two sons of Judah, of whom one was wicked or cruel before the Lord, the other spilled on the ground so as not to give seed to make Tamar fruitful. Nor are there more than two kinds of men useless to the human race: one of those who harm, the other of those who will not give, and who waste whatever good they have in this earthly life, as if spilling it on the ground. And since in evil the one who harms comes before the one who does no good, therefore the wicked one is called the elder, and the next the one who spilled on the ground. Also the name of the elder, who was called Er, means “of skins,” such tunics as the first humans were clothed in when sent out of paradise in punishment for their condemnation. The name of the next, who was called Onan, means “their grief.” Whose? But theirs to whom he does no good, though he has the means to do good and wastes it on the ground. Further, the evil of life taken away, which skin signifies, is greater than that of life not helped, which “their grief” signifies. Yet God is said to have killed both: in which it is figured that he took the kingdom away from such men. And the third son of Judah, in not being joined to that woman, signifies the time from which kings began not to be made for the Jewish people from the tribe of Judah. So he was indeed a son of Judah, but Tamar did not receive him as husband, because the tribe of Judah was the same, but no one from it now reigned over the people. Hence his name too, that is Shelah, means “his dismissal.” Certainly the holy and righteous men do not belong to this signification, who, though they lived at that time, belong to the New Testament, which they knowingly served by prophesying, such as David was. At that time, indeed, when Judea had begun not to have kings from the tribe of Judah, Herod the Great is not to be counted among its kings as a husband of Tamar; for he was a foreigner, and was not joined to her by that sacrament of the mystic anointing as by a conjugal covenant, but ruled like a stranger: a power he had received from the Romans and from Caesar. So too his sons the tetrarchs, one of whom was called Herod by his father's name, who came to agreement with Pilate at the Lord's passion. These foreigners, then, were so far from being reckoned in that mystic kingdom of the Jews that the Jews themselves publicly cried out, gnashing their teeth against Christ: “We have no king but Caesar.” Nor was this true except by that universal dominion of the Romans; for Caesar too was not properly king of the Jews; but so that they might deny Christ and flatter him, they condemned themselves by such a cry.

At that time, then, when the kingship had already failed from the tribe of Judah, Christ was to come, the true Saviour, our Lord, who would do no harm and much good. For so it had been prophesied: “A ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes for whom it is promised; and he is the expectation of the nations.” By that time all the teaching authority of the Jews also, and the mystic anointing itself—from which they were called christs—had failed, according to the prophecy of Daniel. Then came he for whom it was laid up, the expectation of the nations, and the holy of holies was anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows. For he was born in the time of Herod the Great, and suffered under the tetrarchy of the younger Herod. Of him, then, coming to the sheep that were lost of the house of Israel, Judah himself bore the figure when he went to shear his sheep at Timnah, which means “failing.” For the ruler from Judah had already failed, and all the teaching authority and anointing of the Jews, so that he might come for whom it was laid up. And he came with his shepherd the Adullamite, whose name was Hirah; and Adullamite means “testimony in water.” Plainly with this testimony the Lord came, having indeed a greater testimony than John, yet for the sake of the weak sheep he used this testimony in water. For Hirah too, the name of that shepherd, means “vision of my brother.” John certainly saw his brother—brother according to the seed of Abraham, according to the kinship of Mary his mother and Elizabeth John's mother—and the same his Lord and God, since, as he himself says, he received from his fullness. He certainly saw him, and so among those born of women none greater than he has arisen, because of all who foretold Christ he saw what many righteous men and prophets desired to see and did not see; he greeted him from the womb, he recognized him more perfectly from the dove, and so, like the Adullamite, he truly bore testimony in water. And the Lord came to shear the sheep, that is, to unload them of their laborious burdens, from which the teeth of the church praised in the Song of Songs would be like a flock of shorn ewes.

Now let Tamar change her dress; for Tamar also means “changing.” But let the name of bitterness wholly remain in her—not that bitterness in which she gave the Lord gall, but that in which Peter wept bitterly; for Judah in Latin is “confession.” Let bitterness, then, be mingled with confession, so that true repentance may be foreshadowed. By this repentance the church established in all nations is made fruitful. For Christ had to suffer and rise on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins had to be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. For the harlot's dress itself is the confession of sins. Tamar now bears the type of the church called out of the nations, sitting in this dress at the gate of Enan or Enaim, which means “springs.” For she ran like the hart to the springs of water, to reach the seed of Abraham; there she is made fruitful by one who does not recognize her, because it was foretold of her: “A people whom I did not know served me.” She received in secret the ring, the necklace, and the staff: she is sealed by calling, adorned by justification, exalted by glorification. “For those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.” But these things, as I said, are still in secret, where the conception of holy fruitfulness also takes place. And the promised kid is sent as to a harlot—the kid, the reproach of sin—through the same Adullamite, as though rebuking and saying: “Brood of vipers.” But the reproach of sin did not find her, whom the bitterness of confession had changed. Afterwards, by the public signs of the ring, the necklace, and the staff, she overcame the Jews who judged rashly, whose person Judah himself now bore, who still today say that this is not the people of Christ and that we do not have the seed of Abraham; but when the most certain proofs of our calling, justification, and glorification are brought forward, they will without doubt be confounded and will confess that we are more justified than they. I would search out and expound these things more thoroughly and, so to speak, limb by limb and joint by joint, as far as the Lord helped my effort, did not concern to finish this work, which is already longer than I would wish, keep me from this more laborious diligence.

Now I will touch, as briefly as I can, on what David's sin signified in prophecy. For the names themselves, when interpreted, show sufficiently what this deed too prefigured. David means “strong of hand” or “desirable”; and what is stronger than that Lion of the tribe of Judah, who conquered the world? And what more desirable than him of whom the prophet says: “The one desired by all nations will come”? Bathsheba means “well of fullness” or “seventh well”; and whichever of these interpretations of the name we take, it suits well enough what we intend to say. For in the Song of Songs that bride is the church, who is called a well of living water. And to this well the name of the number seven is joined, signifying the Holy Spirit, by reason of Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit came, sent from heaven. For the scripture of Tobit also testifies that this feast day is made up of weeks. And to forty-nine, which is seven times seven, one is added, by which unity is commended. In this reckoning lives that apostolic saying: “Bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” By the spiritual gift, then, that is, the sevenfold, the church was made a well of fullness, because there was made in her a spring of water welling up to eternal life, which whoever has will never thirst. And who was her husband? What else does he signify, by the interpretation of his name, but the devil? To him were bound in a most evil marriage all whom the grace of God sets free, so that the church without spot or wrinkle may be united to her own Saviour. For Uriah means “my light of God,” and Hittite “cut off,” either because he did not stand in the truth, but was cut off, by the desert of pride, from the light from above which he had from God, or because, having fallen and lost his true strength, he nevertheless transforms himself into an angel of light, still daring to say: “My light is of God.” This David, then, sinned gravely and wickedly; which crime of his God both rebuked through the prophet with reproof and David himself washed away by repentance. Yet that one desired by all nations loved the church washing herself on the roof, that is, cleansing herself from the filth of the world and by spiritual contemplation rising above and treading down the house of clay; and having begun acquaintance with her by a first meeting, he afterwards killed the devil, utterly separated from her, and united her to himself in perpetual marriage. Let us hate the sin, then, but not extinguish the prophecy; let us love that David as much as he is to be loved, who by mercy freed us from the devil; and let us love this David also, who healed so grave a wound of iniquity in himself by the humility of repentance.

Now what shall I say of Solomon? Holy Scripture rebukes and condemns him severely and mentions nothing at all of his repentance or of God's indulgence towards him. Nor does anything occur to me that this lamentable sinking of his signifies of good even in allegory, unless perhaps someone were to say that the foreign women with whose love he burned signify the churches chosen from the Gentiles. This might perhaps be understood not absurdly if those women had forsaken their gods for Solomon's sake and worshipped his God. But since he, for their sake, offended his God and worshipped their gods, there is nothing good we can conjecture from it. Yet I do not think it signifies nothing, but something evil, as we said of Lot's wife and daughters. For in the person of this Solomon there appears both a wonderful excellence and a wonderful overthrow. What, then, existed in him at different times—first good and afterwards evil—is shown in the church in this world still at one and the same time. For I think that by his good the good of the church are signified, and by his evil the bad of the church; as in the unity of one threshing floor, as in that one man, the good in the grain and the bad in the chaff; as in the unity of one field, the good in the wheat and the bad in the weeds. If, by a more careful examination of what is written of him, something else more probable can come to light from this, either to me or to more learned and better men, still for now we have not so let the matter go that it hinders our purpose, hastening on to other things, like an interrupted thread of composition.

Of the prophet Hosea there is no need for me to say what that command or deed signifies, when the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of fornication, and have sons of fornication,” since Scripture itself shows clearly enough why and for what reason it was said. For it continues: “For the land will surely commit fornication, departing from the Lord. And he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; and she conceived and bore him a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while, and I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Judah, and I will make it cease, and I will turn away the kingdom of the house of Israel. And on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. And she conceived again and bore a daughter. And the Lord said to him: Call her name ‘Without mercy,’ for I will no longer have mercy on Israel, but I will utterly forget them; but on the house of Judah I will have mercy, and I will save them in the Lord their God, and I will not save them by bow or by sword or by war or by horses or by horsemen. And she weaned her who was ‘Without mercy,’ and conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name ‘Not my people,’ for you are not my people, and I will not be your God. And the number of the sons of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which is without measure and cannot be numbered; and it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Sons of the living God.’ And the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head, and they shall go up from the land, for great is the day of Jezreel. Say to your brothers, ‘My people,’ and to your sister, ‘She has obtained mercy.’” Since, then, the Lord himself plainly discloses the figure of this command and deed through the same scripture, and since the apostolic writings testify that this prophecy was fulfilled in the preaching of the New Testament, who would dare to say that it was not commanded and done for the reason for which he who commanded it explains in the holy writings that he commanded it and the prophet did it? For the apostle Paul says: “in order to make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles; as Hosea also says: I will call ‘not my people’ ‘my people,’ and ‘not beloved’ ‘beloved,’ and it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they will be called sons of the living God.” Paul, then, shows that this was prophesied of the Gentiles. Hence Peter too, writing to the Gentiles, without naming the prophet inserts his prophecy into his own words, saying: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, that you may proclaim the virtues of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light; you who once were not a people, but now are the people of God; on whom once he had no mercy, but now has mercy.” From this it plainly appears that what was said through the prophet—“And the number of the sons of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which is without measure and cannot be numbered,” and what is added next, “and it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Sons of the living God’”—was not at all said of that Israel which is according to the flesh, but of that of which the apostle says to the Gentiles: “You, then, are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise.” But since many from that Judea also believed and will believe—for from there were the apostles, from there the many thousands who were joined to the apostles in Jerusalem, from there the churches of which he says to the Galatians, “I was unknown by face to the churches of Judea that are in Christ”; whence also he interprets the Lord, called the cornerstone in the psalms, as having joined in himself two walls, namely of the circumcision and of the uncircumcision, “so as to create in himself one new man from the two, making peace, and to reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, killing the enmity in himself; and coming he preached peace to those who were far off and to those who were near,” that is, to the Gentiles far off and to the Jews near; “for he is our peace, who made both one”—rightly this prophet too, putting the sons of Judah for the Jews and the sons of Israel for the Gentiles, says: “And the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head, and they shall go up from the land.” Whoever, then, contradicts this prophecy, so plainly declared by the very outcome of events, most impudently contradicts not only the prophetic but also the apostolic writings, and not only any writings but things fulfilled and flooded with the clearest light. The deed of Judah perhaps required somewhat more careful attention, so that this harlot, who signifies the church gathered from the prostitution of Gentile superstitions, might be recognized in the dress of that woman called Tamar; but here, since Scripture itself discloses its meaning and is illuminated by the harmonious writings of the apostles, why do we linger here any longer, and not now look at what remains concerning the servant of God Moses, what the things Faustus objected also signify?

That in defending his brother he killed the Egyptian readily suggests to anyone that the devil, who does us wrong in this pilgrimage, is killed by the Lord Christ in our defence. And that he buried the dead man in the sand plainly shows that the devil's now dead presence lies hidden in those who have no firm foundation. Hence the Lord builds the church on the rock, and compares those who hear his word and do it to a wise man who builds his house on the rock, so that it may not give way and collapse under temptations; but those who hear and do not do it he compares to a foolish man building on sand, whose house, when tried, falls with a great ruin.

As for his spoiling the Egyptians at the command of the Lord his God, who commands nothing but what is most just, what it prefigured I recall having set down already, as far as it occurred to me then, in certain books which I entitled On Christian Teaching: that by the gold, silver, and clothing of the Egyptians are signified certain branches of learning which are learned with no useless study in the very custom of the Gentiles. But whether it signifies this, or that precious souls from those very Gentiles, like vessels of gold and silver, together with their bodies—which the clothing signifies—join themselves to the people of God, so that they may be freed together from this world as from Egypt: whether this or that or something else was figured by it, it is certain, to those who read these writings with godliness, that those commands, deeds, and writings were not in vain nor without foretelling of things to come.

Now, to go through all the wars that were waged by Moses would be too long. Let it suffice, then, that concerning that war waged against Amalek I have already set out earlier in this same work, in which I am answering Faustus, as far as seemed sufficient for the task undertaken, what it foretold as prophecy and what mystery it contained. Let us now look at that in which either the enemies of these writings or those without any learning are accustomed to charge Moses with the vice of cruelty: which Faustus did not set down expressly when he said that he both commanded and did many cruel things. But because I know what they are accustomed to brandish most of all, and invidiously, I mentioned it myself and defended it above, so that neither the Manichaeans themselves, if they wished to be corrected, nor anyone else among the ignorant or ungodly might think there was any crime in that deed. Now, however, we must ask what prophetic meaning it also had that he ordered many of those who had made themselves an idol in his absence to be killed, without any distinction of kinship. It is easy to understand that the killing of those men signifies the killing of such vices as those by which they slid into that idolatry. For against such vices the psalm bids us rage when it says: “Be angry, and do not sin.” Against such vices the apostle bids us rage when he says: “Put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is the service of idols.”

But what is meant by what he did first, burning the calf itself with fire, grinding it to pieces, scattering it in water, and giving it to the people to drink, calls for greater attention in searching out its meaning. For if he broke the tablets, which he had received written by the finger of God, that is, by the working of the Holy Spirit, because he judged them unworthy to have them read to them; if, finally, in order that that calf might be utterly abolished from among them, he burned it, ground it, scattered it in water, and sank it—why did he also give it to this people to drink? Whom would this deed not rouse to seek and understand its prophetic meaning? Let there occur, then, to attentive minds the devil's body, as it were, in the calf—that is, men in all nations whose head, that is, author, for these sacrileges is the devil; golden for this reason, because the rites of idolatry seem as it were instituted by wise men. Of them the apostle says: “For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; claiming to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents.” From this so-called wisdom comes this golden calf, such figures as even the leading men and, as it were, the learned of the Egyptians were accustomed to worship. By this calf, then, is signified the whole body, that is, the whole society of Gentiles given to idolatry. This sacrilegious society the Lord Christ burns with that fire of which he says in the gospel, “I came to send fire on the earth,” so that, since there is no one who hides himself from its heat, when the Gentiles believe in him the devilish form in them may be dissolved by the fire of his power. Then that whole body is ground down, that is, cut away from that fusion of evil conspiracy, it is humbled by the word of truth, and, ground down, is put into water, so that the Israelites, that is, the preachers of the gospel, may transfer them by baptism into their own members, that is, into the Lord's body. To one of these Israelites, Peter, it was said of these very Gentiles: “Kill and eat.” If “kill and eat,” why not also “grind and drink”? So that calf, by the fire of zeal, the edge of the word, and the water of baptism, was rather swallowed up by those whom it was trying to swallow up.

If, then, these passages of the Scriptures too, on account of which the heretics slander those same Scriptures, when searched out and, as it were, questioned, answer that the more obscure they seem, the more wonderful are the treasures of mysteries hidden in them, how much more ought the blasphemous mouths of the ungodly to fall wholly silent when they are stopped by the plainest truth, against which, with choked breath, they find nothing to mutter, and, wretched men, would rather have their throats blocked by its manifestation than their breasts filled with its sweetness! All these things, then, sound of Christ; that Head, which has now ascended into heaven, and this his Body, which labours on earth until the end, was what the whole intent of those who wrote the truly sacred writings was in travail with; nor is anything narrated in the texture of the prophetic books to be believed not to signify something of things to come, except what was put there so that, as it were, those things might be bound together which foretell that King and his people, whether by proper or by figurative expressions or events. For just as in lyres and musical instruments of that kind not everything that is touched gives out a musical sound, but only the strings, while the other things in the whole body of the lyre were made so that there might be something to which those strings might be fastened, from which and to which they might be stretched, which the craftsman is going to tune and strike for the sweetness of the song: so in these prophetic narratives, which are selected by the prophetic spirit from the deeds of men, either they already sound something by signifying things to come, or, if they signify nothing of the kind, they are inserted so that there may be something by which the signifying ones, like the sounding ones, may be connected.

But if the heretics will not accept these allegorical narratives of events as they are expounded by us, or even contend that they signify nothing but what they literally say, there is no struggling with men who say, “It does not taste to my palate as you say it tastes to yours,” provided that the things divinely commanded are believed or understood either to form morals and godliness, or to signify something figuratively, or rather both than neither; provided also that the very things understood to be said or done figuratively are referred to the same good morals and godliness. And so, even if our understanding or reasoning or opinion about these figures in events displeases the Manichaeans or anyone else, let this suffice: that our fathers, to whom God bears witness of a good life and of obedience to his precepts, are defended by that rule of truth which can displease only depraved and twisted hearts; and that that Scripture to which the perversity of that error is hostile, in whatever deeds of men it has praised or rebuked or only narrated and set before us to judge, itself stands blameless and venerable.

What more useful and wholesome provision could be made for those who read or hear those sacred writings with godliness than that in them there should be set forth not only praiseworthy men for imitation and blameworthy men for avoidance, but also certain turnings aside and slips of the good into evil—whether they are later corrected and return to the way, or remain beyond recall—and again certain changes and advances of the bad into good—whether they will persevere or relapse again into their former state—so that neither the righteous may be lifted up into pride by security, nor the wicked hardened against the medicine by despair? And those deeds of men which pertain neither to imitation nor to avoidance, and yet are found in holy Scripture, either were put there for connection, as occasions by which necessary matters are reached, or by the very fact that they seem superfluous sufficiently warn us that the oracle of some mystical meaning must be sought in them. For we are not speaking of books in which nothing, or few things and not many, has been foretold by the prophetic spirit, most plainly and now also fulfilled in the events themselves, testifying to their divine authority by the most faithful and brilliant light of truth; so that whoever thinks they said anything superfluously or foolishly is utterly out of his mind, when he sees not only everything of men and their talents subject to them, but also reads that this was foretold by them and knows it has been accomplished.

If, then, someone reading the deed of David, of which he repented when the Lord rebuked and threatened him, takes from it fuel for himself to sin, is that Scripture to be blamed? Is he not rather to be condemned the more severely, the more he chose to misuse, for wounding or killing himself, a thing which was written for healing and freeing? For because men who have fallen into sin either neglect the medicine of repentance out of pride or perish utterly through despair of recovering health and gaining pardon, the example of so great a man was set forth, by which the sick may be healed, not by which those who are healthy may be wounded. For it is not the fault of medicine if madmen kill themselves, or malicious men kill others, with medical instruments.

But yet our fathers, the patriarchs and prophets, to whom so illustrious a testimony of holiness and godliness is borne by that Scripture which no one denies to have been divinely dispensed for the salvation of the human race unless he either does not know it or has lost all sense of rational consideration—even if they had been lustful and cruel, as the error, or rather the madness, of the Manichaeans accuses them, would they not even so be shown to be better, I will not say than their elect, but than their god himself? Is it not better for a man to wallow with a concubine, a man with a woman, than to be the purest light and to be defiled by mixing with darkness? See, a man, for greed and his belly, falsely called his wife his sister and sold her for others' intercourse: how much worse and more execrable is he who, by pretence adapting his own nature to the lust of those who desired it, gave it up to them for nothing to be polluted and corrupted! Even one who lay with his daughters knowingly, does he not commit less evil than one who mixes his own members with the lusts of all such and worse foulnesses? For what such thing is committed by the unclean and wicked in which your god, Manichaeans, is not polluted with all the foulnesses? Finally, if Jacob truly, as Faustus says, roamed among four wives with foul desire like a he-goat, taking no care for offspring but only for wanton pleasure, how much less wretched would he be than your god, who not only would suffer in him and in his four wives all that disgrace of luxury, compounded with all their bodies and movements, but in the very he-goat to which that filthy man compared him suffers all that generative movement and heat, and, everywhere mixed under a foul condition, is inflamed in the he-goat, sown in the she-goat, begotten in the kid! And so, even if Judah had been not only a fornicator but also a wicked and knowing violator of his daughter-in-law in incest, your god would have stuck, been defiled, and burned in the lust of that incest too. And David repented of his iniquity, that he loved another's wife and ordered her husband to be killed; but when will your god repent that, loved by the hellish race, male and female, of the princes of darkness, he yielded his members to their lust, and killed not a husband whose wife he had loved, but his own sons in the members of the demons, by which demons he himself had been loved? But even if David had not repented, and had not received the health of righteousness by such medicine, even so he would have been better than this god of the Manichaeans. For let us suppose him guilty of that one deed itself and of as many other such as one man could commit; but that god is convicted of being disgraced and polluted in all such deeds of all men by that mixing of his members. And the prophet Hosea is accused by Faustus: if he, captivated by foul desire, had loved and married a harlot—you certainly proclaim that the souls of both, the wanton lover and the obscene harlot, are parts and members and the nature of your god—that harlot, then (why should I go round in words and not speak plainly?), that harlot would be your god. For you cannot say that, keeping the nature of his holiness preserved and uncorrupted, he came into that harlot's body not bound but only present; rather you confess that these members of your god are most defiled and for that reason need great purification. That harlot, then, for whom you dare to accuse the man of God, would be your god, even if she had not been changed for the better by chaste marriage; or, if you will not have it so, you certainly do not deny that the soul of the harlot is a particle of your god, however small. In this, then, she is already better than your god, since she would be one harlot, while he, by the condition of that mixture of his, is prostituted to the whole race of darkness in all harlots; and in all males and females, finally, who commit fornication widely and variously and corrupt themselves, he is rolled about, loosed, and bound, to be rolled, loosed, and bound again in their offspring, until at last the most unclean part of your god is brought to the final globe like an inexpiable harlot. These evils, these foulnesses, these disgraces your god could not remove from his members, and, compelled by the necessity of a monstrous enemy, he came to them; for he could not kill the injurious and violent one while keeping his citizens or parts safe. How much better, then, is he who, having killed the Egyptian, defended his brother unharmed—whom Faustus accuses with wonderful vanity, while with more wonderful blindness he does not look at his own god! How much better that Moses should take vessels of gold and silver from the race of the Egyptians than that the race of darkness should plunder his god's members! And yet, though their god himself waged so wretched a war, his worshippers object to the servant of our God that he waged wars, in which he always triumphed with all his people as victor over the enemies, who could be led away as male or female captives by the people of Israel, while Moses waged war: which your god too would certainly have done if he could. This, then, is not to accuse the wicked but to envy the more fortunate. And what cruelty was there in Moses in taking vengeance with the sword on the people who had sinned gravely against God? For he begged pardon for that sin for them, offering himself even to divine punishment. Yet if he had done even this not mercifully but cruelly, even so he would have been better than your god. For he would in no way afterwards, if he had conquered, condemn any of his own who were innocent and obedient, if he had been sent to break through the enemy's ranks and been taken captive: which this god is going to do to that part of himself which he will fix in the globe, because it obeyed his command, because, its death set before it, it went forth into the enemy ranks for the safety of his kingdom. “But in this succession of ages,” he says, “now mixed with evils and compounded with them, it did not obey the precepts.” Let us ask why. If by its own will, the fault is real and the punishment just; but then, if the will is guilty, there is no contrary nature compelling to sin, and so the whole deceit of the Manichaeans is convicted and overthrown. But if it was overwhelmed by the enemy to whom it was sent, if overcome by another's evil which it could not resist, the punishment is unjust and the cruelty great. “But God's necessity,” it is said, “is brought forward to excuse it.” Let those worship such a god who do not wish to worship God. Indeed—as must be admitted—even his worshippers themselves, though by worshipping such a god they are most wicked, are yet better than he, because at least they exist; while he is nothing but a fiction of falsehood and a figment of vanity. But now let us look at the rest of Faustus's clever ravings.

Faustus said: Once, when I was debating, someone from the large crowd answered me and said: “Do you accept Jesus born of Mary?” I said to him: “Which Jesus do you mean? For there were several named Jesus among the Hebrews: one the son of Nun, the disciple of Moses; another the son of Jozadak the high priest; again another, who was called the son of David; and another the Son of God. Which of these, then, are you asking me whether I accept as born of Mary?” “The Son of God, of course,” he said. I said to him: “And on whose authority, or on what teacher's instruction, should I accept that?” And he said: “Matthew's.” I said to him again: “What, then, did Matthew write?” And he said: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” and the rest. Then I said: “I had thought you were going to say, ‘The book of the generations of Jesus Christ the Son of God,’ and I had prepared myself to raise an objection; but since you have now faithfully quoted the passage, you need only be reminded to consider what you have recited. For Matthew does not here profess to have undertaken to write the generation of the Son of God, but of the son of David.”

So, to believe him for the moment in what he says, the son of David will be, for me, born of Mary; so far, in this whole text of the genealogy, no mention is made of the Son of God—until the baptism, that is; and in vain do you slander the writer, as though he had shut up the Son of God in a woman's womb. On the contrary, he cries out, it seems, and by his very title clears himself completely of this sacrilege, declaring that it was the son of David, sprung from that stock, that he wrote of, not the Son of God. For as for Jesus who is the Son of God, if you consider this writer's mind and purpose, he wants us to accept him not so much as begotten of the Virgin Mary as made at a certain time through baptism at the streams of the Jordan. For there he says that the one whom at the beginning he designated as David's son, baptized by John, was at a certain time made the Son of God, after about thirty years, according to Luke's account, when also a voice was then heard saying to him: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” You see, then, that what, as it seems to him, was born of Mary thirty years before is not itself the Son of God, but that what was made afterwards by baptism at the Jordan—that is, the new man, as we believe him to be in us when we have turned to God from the error of the Gentiles. Whether this agrees well enough with the faith which you call Catholic, I do not know; but meanwhile this is Matthew's view, if these words are his. For nowhere in Mary's childbearing do we read it said, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” or, “This is my most beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” but at his purification at the Jordan. If you too believe it as it is written, you will now be a Matthaean—for so I must put it—but by no means a Catholic. For we know the Catholic faith, which is as far removed from this profession of Matthew's as it is from the truth, if indeed your creed runs thus: that you believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary. It is yours, then, to accept the Son of God from Mary; Matthew's, from the Jordan; ours, from God. And so Matthew, if these words are certainly his, is as much opposed to you in this profession of his as to us—except that he was found a little more prudent than you, in ascribing birth from the female sex to the son of David rather than to the Son of God. Therefore you must confess one of two things: either that this is not Matthew who seems to assert these things, or that you do not hold the apostolic faith.

But for our part, although no one at all can dislodge us from this conviction that we must receive the Son of God from God, yet, to make a great concession to imprudence, so that we are driven to believe even falsehoods, Jesus will be for us the Son of God made at the Jordan rather than born of a woman's womb. And yet not even the one whom Mary bore, if there was any such, would rightly be called the son of David unless it were established that he was begotten by his father Joseph. Since you deny this, you must also confess that he is not even the son of David, since the genealogy is traced from Abraham to David and from David down to Joseph—through all the fathers of the Hebrews, that is. Since Jesus was not conceived from him, as we read, he will not be the son of David either; and he is quite mad who, when he was going to say that he was born of Mary without intercourse with Joseph, put him at the beginning as the son of David. Since, then, not even the one born of Mary would rightly be called the son of David, because he was not born of Joseph, how much less the Son of God!

Moreover, it is not shown that the virgin's own descent was from this tribe, from which David is known to be—I mean Judah, from which the kings of the Jews came—but from the tribe of Levi, from which came the priests. This itself is plain, because she had as father a certain priest named Joachim, of whom nevertheless no mention at all is made in this genealogy. How then will Mary be said to belong to this line of Davidic kinship, in which you see that she has neither father nor husband? And so neither will anyone born of her be the son of David, unless you connect his mother with Joseph in such a way that she is proved to be either his daughter or his wife.

Augustine replied: The Catholic faith, which is also the apostolic faith, is that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is both the Son of God according to his divinity and the son of David according to the flesh. This we prove from the gospel and apostolic writings in such a way that no one can contradict our proofs except one who contradicts those writings themselves—not as this Faustus imagined for himself that someone or other said a few words and afterwards brought forward no testimonies against the shifty cunning of the same Faustus. When I have done this, nothing will remain for him to answer except that by which he tries expressly to mock and evade the force of the most manifest truth in the holy Scriptures, answering that those things are false and were inserted into the divine books. That madness and furious presumption and audacity I have already refuted earlier in this work, as far as seemed sufficient; nor ought I to repeat the same things, so that I may also consider the measure of my discourse. What need is there, then, to seek and gather testimonies scattered through all the Scriptures, by which to prove against him that in books of the greatest and divine authority the same one is called the only-begotten Son of God, ever God with God, who is also called the son of David because of the form of a servant taken from the Virgin Mary, the wife of Joseph? For now, since he chose to argue about Matthew, and since the whole book of Matthew cannot be inserted by me into this discussion, let whoever wishes read and see how Matthew, by narrating, carries the one whom, when about to enumerate his parents, he calls the son of David, through to the passion and resurrection, and says that no other than he was conceived and born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. To this he adds also testimony from the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which is interpreted, “God with us”; and that the same one, baptized by John, heard from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”—of whom it had already been said, from the virgin's childbirth, “God with us.” Unless perhaps it seemed to Faustus less to be called God than to be called the Son of God. For from this he tried to conjecture that Matthew did not think he was made the Son of God except from his baptism, because there a voice came from heaven, “This is my Son,” when the same evangelist had earlier also brought in the divine testimony from the prophet, where the virgin's offspring itself was called “God with us.”

We ought to look closely at this wretched, raving chatterer and observe that he does not omit, wherever he can, to pour the fog of falsehood over the reader of his empty talk even about the testimonies of the Scriptures. So he said of Abraham that he had not believed God, who promised him a son by Sarah, when he lay with the maidservant, whereas Scripture testifies that Sarah's childbearing had not yet been promised him; or that he lied in calling his wife his sister, when he had nowhere read Sarah's descent in those writings which are to be trusted in this matter; and of his son Isaac, that he too falsely called Rebecca his sister, when her descent is openly written there; and of Jacob, that there was a daily contest among his four wives as to which would first seize him for intercourse as he came from the field—which he is proved to have read nowhere at all there. See what kind of man boasts that he hates the lying writers of the divine books, who dares to lie even about the gospel, at the height of so great an authority known to all, so that he would have it thought that not Matthew—lest he be crushed by the weight of the apostle's name—but someone or other under Matthew's name wrote about Christ what he does not wish to believe and what he tries to refute with slanderous cunning.

So, then, it was said from heaven over the water of the Jordan, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” just as it was said also on the mountain. For not because the voice itself sounded from heaven there also was he not the Son of God before, since from the virgin's womb he received the form of a servant who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. Indeed the apostle Paul himself says most plainly in another place: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,” calling her a woman in the manner of Hebrew speech, meaning a female. He, then, is the Son of God, who is also David's Lord according to his divinity, and the same is David's son, of the seed of David according to the flesh. And if it did not profit us to believe this, the same apostle would not commend it so attentively to Timothy, saying: “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel.” Against which gospel, if anyone proclaims another, let him be anathema, as he warned the faithful with great care.

What, then, should now trouble a follower of the holy gospel in the fact that Christ, born of a virgin without intercourse with Joseph, is nevertheless called the son of David, though the evangelist Matthew carries the series of generations not to Mary but to Joseph? First, because the person of her husband was rather to be honoured because of the male sex; for he was not therefore not her husband because he did not join with her in intercourse, since Matthew himself relates that Mary was called his wife by the angel—the same Matthew who relates that she had conceived not by his intercourse but by the Holy Spirit. And if not the apostle Matthew wrote these things as true, but someone else under his name wrote them as false, as the Manichaeans think, would he so contradict himself even in the plainest matters, set down so close together, that, of one whom he called the son of David, born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse with any man, he should enumerate the parents step by step and without any reason bring them down to the one whom he himself had said was not united with Mary? For if one writer enumerated the forebears of Christ from David to Joseph, calling him the son of David, and another said he was born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse with any man and did not call him the son of David, not even so ought we at once to think that they had said things contrary to each other, so that either both or one of them was convicted of falsehood. For we ought to think that it could be that both spoke the truth: that Joseph was called the husband of Mary, having her as his wife continently, not in intercourse but in affection, not by the mingling of bodies but by the union of souls, which is dearer; and that therefore the husband of the virgin mother of Christ ought not to have been separated from the series of Christ's ancestors; and that Mary herself drew some vein of blood from the stock of David, so that the flesh of Christ, even though procreated from a virgin, could not be without the seed of David. But since one and the same narrator says both and commends both—both Joseph as Mary's husband and the virgin mother of Christ, and Christ of the seed of David and Joseph in the series of Christ's forebears from David—what remains for one who prefers to believe the divine gospel rather than the fables of heretics to believe, except both that Mary was not a stranger to the kinship of David, and that she was not called Joseph's wife in vain, because of the order of the sexes and the covenant of souls, though he was not united with her in the flesh; and that Joseph, rather, because of his male dignity, was not to be separated from the order of those generations, lest by this very fact he should seem separated from that woman to whom the affection of his mind joined him; and lest the faithful of Christ should reckon the fleshly union of spouses so great a thing in marriage as to believe that without it they are not spouses, but should rather say that faithful marriages cleave the more intimately to the members of Christ the more they could imitate the parents of Christ?

We believe, then, that Mary too was of the kinship of David, because we believe those Scriptures which say both: that Christ was of the seed of David according to the flesh, and that his mother Mary was a virgin, not lying with a man. Whoever, therefore, says that Mary did not belong to the blood-relationship of David plainly struggles against the so excellent authority of these Scriptures. Let him, then, prove that she did not belong to the seed of David, and show this not from any writings whatever, but from ecclesiastical, canonical, Catholic ones. For others have among us no weight of authority in these matters; for these are the ones which the church spread through the whole world receives and holds, which church was also prophesied through them and, as it was promised, so was rendered. And so what Faustus set down about Mary's descent—that she had as father a certain priest of the tribe of Levi named Joachim—is not canonical and does not bind me. But even if I believed it, I would rather say that this Joachim himself belonged in some way to the blood of David, and was in some way adopted from the tribe of Judah into the tribe of Levi, either he himself or one of his forebears, or certainly was born in the tribe of Levi in such a way as to derive some blood-relationship from the stock of David. Just as the same Faustus admits it could have been that Mary was of the tribe of Levi, who nevertheless is known to have been given to a husband who was of the stock of David, that is, of the tribe of Judah, and he says that Christ could have been accepted as the son of David in this way if Mary had been the daughter of Joseph. Accordingly, if a daughter of Joseph had married in the tribe of Levi, whoever was born of her, even in the tribe of Levi, would not absurdly be called the son of David as well. So, if the mother of that Joachim whom Faustus names as Mary's father, being of the tribe of Judah and the family of David, married in the tribe of Levi, then not undeservedly both Joachim and Mary and Mary's son are truly declared, even in this way, to be of the seed of David. This, then, or something like it, I would rather believe, if I were held by the authority of that apocryphal writing in which Joachim is read as Mary's father, than that the gospel lies, in which it is written that Jesus Christ the Son of God, our Saviour, was both of the seed of David according to the flesh and procreated through the Virgin Mary. It is enough for us, then, that the Scriptures which say this, and which we believe, can be convicted of no falsehood by their enemies.

Let him not, then, say to me in turn: “Even if I do not show that Mary was not of the kinship of David, show me that she was of it.” For I show this by a proof quite clear and very strong: that Scripture of the most confirmed authority says both that Christ is of the seed of David and that his mother is the Virgin Mary, without intercourse with anyone. And how very modest a detester of some sort of foulness Faustus seemed to himself when he said: “In vain do you slander the writer, as though he had shut up the Son of God in a woman's womb!” The Catholic faith, which believes that Christ the Son of God was born according to the flesh of a virgin, plainly does not in any way so shut up the same Son of God in a woman's womb as though he were not outside it, as though he had abandoned the government of heaven and earth, as though he had withdrawn from the Father. But you, Manichaeans, with that heart with which you can think of nothing but bodily phantasms, do not grasp these things at all: how the Word of God, the power and wisdom of God, both abiding in himself and with the Father and ruling the whole creation, reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly. In the wonderful and inexpressible ease of this ordering he also arranged for himself a mother on earth, and, to free his servants from the slavery of corruption, received in her the form of a servant, that is, a mortal body; having received it he showed it, having shown it and laid it low in death he raised it up by resurrection, and rebuilt it like a temple destroyed. You, however, who dread believing these things as though they were sacrilegious, shut up the members of your god not in the womb of a virgin but in the wombs of all fleshly females, from elephants to flies. Or does the true Christ seem to you the more contemptible because we say that the Word was made flesh in a virgin's womb in such a way that, abiding inviolably in his own nature without any change of himself, he fitted to himself a man as his temple; and is your god dear to you because, bound by so many chains of flesh and defiled in that part with which he is even to be fixed in the globe, he begs for help to no purpose, or, being utterly overwhelmed, is not even allowed to beg?

Faustus said: Why do you deny that man is made by God? We do not deny outright that man is made by God in every sense; but we ask who is made, and when, and in what way, since according to the apostle there are two men, one of whom he sometimes calls the outer man, more often the earthly, and now and then even the old man, while the other he calls the inner, the heavenly, and the new. We ask, then, which of these two is made by God, since there are also two times of our birth: one, that in which nature brought us forth into this light entangled in the bonds of the flesh; the other, when the truth, having turned us from error, regenerated us to itself, initiated into the faith. Signifying this time of the second birth, Jesus says in the gospel: “Unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And when Nicodemus, understanding too little, was perplexed and asked how this could happen—for an old man cannot enter his mother’s womb and be born again—Jesus answered him: “Unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And he goes on: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Therefore, if birth is not only that by which we are begotten in the body, but also that other by which we are reborn by the Spirit, it is no less a matter of concern to ask this very thing too: in which of them God makes us. The manner of being born is also twofold: one, proper to passion and intemperance, by which we were sown by our begetters shamefully and through lust; the other, of decency and holiness, by which in Christ Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, we have been made disciples for the faith under the teaching of good men. That is why every religion, and the Christian above all, calls the untaught to the sacrament as infants. Signifying this too, the apostle says: “My little children, with whom I am again in labour until Christ is formed in you.” So the question is no longer whether God makes man, but when, and whom, and in what way he makes him. For if it is when we are fashioned in the womb—as the gentiles generally hold, and the Jews, and you yourselves—that God forms us after his image, and makes us old, and creates us through passion and lust (and I hardly know whether that befits his divinity); but if it is when we believe and are converted to a better state of life that we are formed by God—as Christ holds, and his apostles, and we—then surely God makes us new, and makes us decently and purely. What could be more consistent with, or more befitting, his holy and venerable majesty? But if you too do not spurn the authority of Paul, we will show you from him whom, and when, and in what way God makes man. He says to the Ephesians: “That you put off, as regards your former way of life, the old man, which is corrupted through the desires of error; but be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which was created according to God in righteousness and holiness of truth.” You see, then, when man is created after the image of God; you see here that another man is shown, and another birth, and another manner of being born. For when he says “put off and put on,” he certainly signifies the time of believing; and when he testifies that the new man is created by God, he indicates that the old man is neither from him nor formed according to him. And when he continues, saying that the new man comes to be in holiness and righteousness and truth, he marks out and shows that other way of birth which I said is far unlike this one that sowed our bodies in the frenzied embraces of our parents; and he shows that this one is not from God, since he declared that the other alone is from God. Likewise he says the same thing again to the Colossians: “Strip off the old man with his deeds, and put on the new, which is renewed in the knowledge of God after the image of him who created him in you.” Here too, then, he shows not only that the new man is the one whom God makes, but he has taught also when and by what means he is formed: namely, “in the knowledge of God,” by which the time of believing is signified. And further: “after the image,” he says, “of him who created him,” so that it may be clear from this that the old man is neither the image of God nor formed by him. For what follows, when he says: “where there is not male and female, Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian,” shows more and more that this birth which made us male and female, Greeks and Jews, Scythians and barbarians, is not the one in which God is at work when he forms man, but that one which strips us of all the variety of nations, sex, and condition and renders us one, after the likeness of him who is one, that is, Christ; as the same apostle says again: “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ; there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, but all are one in Christ.” Therefore man is made by God when he becomes one out of many, not when out of one he is divided into many. Now the first origin, that is, the bodily one, divided us; the second, the intelligible and divine, unites us. And so we have most rightly thought that the former should be ascribed to the nature of the body, the latter to the majesty on high. That is why the same apostle says again to the Corinthians: “In Christ Jesus through the gospel I begot you”; and to the Galatians, of himself: “When it pleased him who set me apart from my mother’s womb to reveal his Son in me, so that I might proclaim him among the gentiles, I did not at once consult flesh and blood.” You see, then, that everywhere he affirms that we are formed by God in this second birth of ours, the spiritual one only, not in that first, obscene and shameful one, which conceived, formed, and brought us forth in the mother’s womb in no way more excellent or cleaner than the other animals. If you are willing to consider this, you will find that on this point we differ from you not so much in profession as in understanding, since you are pleased to grant to this old, outer, and earthly man that he was formed by God, whereas we, on the contrary, give this to the heavenly man and assign it to the inner and new man; and not rashly or presumptuously, but learning it from Christ and his apostles, who are shown to have been the first to teach these things in the world.

Augustine replied: The apostle Paul wants the inner man to be understood as referring to the spirit of the mind, and the outer man to the body and this mortal life; yet nowhere in his letters do we read that he called these two together two men, but one man, whom God made whole, that is, both what is inward and what is outward. But he made him after his image only in respect of what is inward, which is not only incorporeal but also rational, something that cattle do not have. So he did not make one man after his image and make another not after his image; but because both of these, inner and outer, are together one man, he made this one man after his image—not in respect of his having a body and bodily life, but in respect of his having a rational mind, by which he may know God and be set above all irrational things by that same excellence of reason. Now Faustus grants that the inner man is made by God, since “he is renewed,” he says, “in the knowledge of God after the image of him who created him.” I fully acknowledge this saying of the apostle; why does he not acknowledge the other: “God arranged the members, each one of them, in the body as he willed”? See, God is proclaimed by the same apostle as the maker of the outer man too. Why does Faustus choose from him what he thinks is in his favour, and keep silent about or reject what cuts away the fables of Mani? Again, when the same Paul was discoursing on the earthly and the heavenly man, distinguishing between mortal and immortal, between what we are in Adam and what we shall be in Christ, he brought, from the very law, from the very book and the very place, the testimony concerning the earthly, that is, the animal body, where it is written that God made the earthly man as well. For when he was treating how the dead will rise and with what body they will come, he gave comparisons from the seeds of grain—that bare grains are sown and God gives them a body as he willed, to each seed its own body. (Here, by the way, he overturns the error of Mani, who says that grains and herbs and all roots and shrubs are created by the race of darkness, not by God, and who believes that God is bound in those forms and kinds of things rather than that he made any of them.) Having said these things, then, against Mani’s sacrilegious folly too, he came to the differences of flesh: “Not all flesh,” he says, “is the same flesh”; then to the differences of heavenly and earthly bodies; then to the change of our body by which it can become spiritual and heavenly: “It is sown,” he says, “in dishonour, it will rise in glory; it is sown in weakness, it will rise in power; it is sown an animal body, it will rise a spiritual body.” And then, wishing to show the origin of the animal body, he says: “If there is an animal body, there is also a spiritual one; so also it is written: The first man Adam became a living soul.” This is written in Genesis, where it is told how God made man and gave life to the body he had formed from the earth. As for the old man, the apostle means nothing else by it than the old life, which is in sin, in which one lives after Adam; of which he says: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed through to all men, in whom all have sinned.” So that whole man, that is, in both his inner and his outer part, grew old because of sin and was handed over to the penalty of mortality. But he is now renewed according to the inner man, where he is re-formed after the image of his creator, putting off unrighteousness, that is, the old man, and putting on righteousness, that is, the new man. And then, when the body that is sown an animal body rises a spiritual body, the outer man too will receive the dignity of a heavenly condition, so that the whole that was created may be re-created, and the whole that was made may be remade, by him re-creating who created, and remaking who made. He explains this briefly where he says: “The body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you.” For who, taught in the catholic truth, does not know that according to the body some human beings are male and others female, but not according to the spirit of the mind, in which we are renewed after the image of God? Yet that God made both, the same apostle again testifies, where he says: “Neither is woman without man nor man without woman in the Lord; for as woman is from man, so also man is through woman; but all things are from God.” What does the foolish deceit of men alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart say to this, except: “In the apostle’s letters, what we want is true, what we do not want is false”? Let the Manichaeans rave like this—and then come to their senses and cease to be Manichaeans. If they are asked—since they confess that the inner man is renewed after the image of God, and even bring forward this testimony of their own accord, and Faustus says that God makes man at the time when the inner man is renewed in the knowledge of God—whether the one who remakes him also made him, whether the one who renews him also founded him, they will answer, “The same.” If to this answer of theirs we add the question when he formed the one whom he now re-forms, they will look for a place to hide, so as not to be forced to lay bare the disgrace of their fable. For they do not say that he was formed or founded or established by God, but that he was a part of God’s substance, sent outright against the enemies; nor that he grew old through sin, but that he was taken captive by necessity and deformed by the enemies, and the rest, which it is tiresome to repeat. For there they also mention a first man—not the one whom the apostle calls earthly, from the earth, but some man of their own, leaping out of a chest of lies. About him Faustus is entirely silent, though he set himself a question about man, fearing that he might somehow become known to those against whom he is arguing.

Faustus said: Does God have limits, or is he infinite? If your prayer does not deceive, which says, “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” God has limits—unless perhaps the one you ask about is one God and the one you pray to is another. Otherwise the boundary of circumcision, which marks off Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from fellowship with all other nations, also bounds the power of God himself with respect to them; and one whose power is limited is not himself without limits. Indeed, in this prayer you do not even mention the men of old who lived before Abraham—I mean Enoch and Noah and Shem and the rest like them—whom you do not deny to have been righteous in uncircumcision; but because they lacked the badge of circumcision, you will not have God to be their God either, but only the God of Abraham and his seed. If, then, God is one and infinite, what is the meaning of this so careful and anxious precaution in your invocation, that, not content with naming God, you add whose God, namely Abraham’s and Isaac’s and Jacob’s—as though your prayer would go astray in some crowd of gods or suffer shipwreck unless it sailed toward the sign of Abraham? For the Jews to pray so, for a definite reason, is not absurd, since they are circumcised; for in this way they show that they invoke the God of circumcision, as against the gods of the foreskin. But why you do the same I hardly understand, since you do not bear the sign that Abraham had, whose God you call him. For truly, as one is given to understand, the Jews and the God of the Jews seem to have set marks of this kind on one another for the sake of mutual recognition, so that they might not stray from each other. He sealed them with the obscene brand of circumcision, so that wherever on earth they might be, among whatever nations, they might still be known as his through circumcision; and they in turn marked their God with the surname of their fathers, so that wherever he too might be, even in a great throng of gods, as soon as he heard “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” he would know that he was being called. This commonly happens among many who share one name, so that none of them answers when called unless he hears his surname. So too shepherds and herdsmen brand marks on their flocks, so that no one may take another’s beast as his own. Since you do the same, saying “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” you show not only that God has limits but also that you are strangers to him, without his sign and sacrament, the mutilation of men’s members, by which he recognizes his own. Therefore, if this is the God you worship, it is perfectly clear from this that he has limits. But if you want God to be infinite, you must first renounce this one and, changing your prayer, show repentance for your past error. This has been said so that we may seem to have defeated you from your own premises. Otherwise, if it is asked whether the supreme and true God is infinite or not, on this the opposition of good and evil can briefly teach us. For if evil does not exist, God is surely infinite; but he has a limit if evil exists; and it is established that evil exists. Therefore God is not infinite; for evils take their beginning there where the good has its limit.

Augustine replied: Far be it that anyone who knows you should put this question to you, or argue with such people at all on this matter. For first you must be cleansed by devout faith and by some small measure of the reasoning of truth from the fabrication of carnal and bodily thoughts, so that you may be able in some way and in some degree to think of spiritual things. As long as you cannot do this—your heresy knows nothing else than to stretch out body and soul and God over spaces of place, whether finite or infinite, though only a body occupies such spaces or is occupied by them—you would act more wisely if you did not involve yourselves in this question, where you can neither teach anything true (as you cannot elsewhere either) nor are fit to learn, as perhaps you could elsewhere if you were not proud and quarrelsome. For when one begins to ask how God is finite, whom no place contains, and how infinite, whom the Son knows wholly—how finite, being immeasurable; how infinite, being perfect; how finite, having no measure; how infinite, being the measure of all things—every carnal thought vanishes; and if it wishes to become what it is not yet, it first blushes at what it is. Therefore this question you put to yourselves about God finite and infinite you would better finish by keeping silent, until you cease to stray so far from the end of the law, which is Christ. As for the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, why he, being the true God of every creature, wished to make himself known to his people by that name, we have already said as much as was enough. On circumcision too we have often replied in earlier parts of this work to ignorant slanders. If these men thought with a Christian, not a heretical, mind about the sense in which it was said, “To the clean all things are clean,” they would by no means mock a sign divinely given in a fitting part of the body, by which the stripping off of the flesh was figured. But because what follows is also true, “To the unclean and unbelieving nothing is clean, but both their mind and conscience are defiled,” we gently remind them, as they laugh and wittily insult, that if by their account circumcision is shameful, they have there nothing to laugh at, but something to weep over: because their God is bound up, defiled, and mixed both with that small part that is cut off and with that blood that drips from it.

Faustus said: If Jesus was not born, how did he die? This is now plainly conjecture, and no one uses conjecture except one whom proofs have failed. Yet we shall answer this too, bringing examples from nowhere else than from the things you are accustomed to believe; if they are true, they will confirm us as well; if false, they will destroy you too. You say, then: How did Jesus die if he was not a man? And I ask you in turn: How did Elijah not die, when he was a man? Or was this mortal allowed, beyond his condition, to seize the right of immortality, and was Christ, the immortal, not allowed to take something of death to himself, if it was necessary? And if Elijah lives for ever against nature, why do you not rather grant that Jesus could die for three days only against nature—especially since you believe this not only of Elijah but also of Moses and Enoch, that they too are immortal and were caught up with their bodies into heaven? Therefore, if by this argument it is rightly inferred that Jesus was a man because he died, it could equally be inferred by the same argument that Elijah was not a man because he did not die. But it is false that Elijah was not a man, though he is believed to be immortal; it will be equally false that Jesus was a man, though he is thought to have died. And if you will believe me when I tell the truth, both of them acquired a false reputation among the Hebrews: Jesus for his death and Elijah for his immortality; for neither did the latter not die, nor did the former die. But you believe what you wish; what you do not wish, you bring back to nature. Therefore, if one asks what is proper to nature, nature wills neither that the immortal should die nor that the mortal should not die. But if we ask about the power in God and in man to do what they wish, I think it more possible that Jesus could die than that Elijah could not die, for the power in Jesus is greater than in Elijah. And if you, forgetting nature and his condition, lift the less powerful into heaven against the licence of nature and consecrate him to perpetuity, why should I not grant that Jesus could die if he willed, even if I were to agree that it was truly death and not the semblance of death? For just as from the beginning, having taken the likeness of a man, he feigned all the affections of the human condition, so it would not have been out of keeping if at the end too, in order to seal the dispensation, he had appeared to die as well.

Besides, this too should be mentioned: if one asks what is permitted to each thing by nature, the question ought to be asked about everything that Jesus did, not only about his death. For nature does not allow one blind from birth to see the light; yet Jesus is seen to have done this mightily for blind men of this kind, so that the Jews themselves exclaimed that never since the beginning of the world had it been seen that anyone opened the eyes of one born blind. To have healed a withered hand, to have restored voice and speech to those deprived of them by nature, to have restored the breath of life to the dead, to bodies already dissolved in decay, by giving back their frame—whom would this not reduce to amazement, and in a sense compel to disbelieve, when he considers what is or is not permitted by nature? Yet all these things we Christians in common believe were done by the same Jesus, no longer with regard to nature, but only to the power and might of God. We read also that once, thrown by the Jews from the brow of a hill, he went away unharmed. Why, then, could he who did not die when cast down from a high mountain, because he did not will it, not also die when he willed? And this has now been answered by us in this way because you like to argue and try others’ weapons, wishing to dispute dialectically; otherwise, for us neither did Jesus die nor is Elijah immortal.

Augustine replied: Whatever holy Scripture, set at the highest summit of authority by sure and great proofs of its trustworthiness, testifies about Enoch, Elijah, and Moses, that we believe—not what Faustus suspects we believe. But what is according to nature and what is against nature, people who err as you do cannot know. We do not deny, however, that in human fashion something is called against nature which is against the course of nature known to mortals. So it is with what the apostle says: “If you were cut from the wild olive, natural to you, and grafted against nature into the good olive”; he called that against nature which is against the custom of nature that human knowledge grasps, namely that a wild olive grafted into an olive bears not the berries of the wild olive but the richness of the olive. But God, the creator and founder of all natures, does nothing against nature; for whatever he has done will be natural to each thing, since from him is all measure, number, and order of nature. Nor does man himself do anything against nature except when he sins; and yet he is brought back to nature by punishment. For it belongs to the natural order of justice that either sins are not committed or they cannot go unpunished. Whichever of these is the case, the natural order is preserved, if not by the soul, then certainly by God. For sins trouble the conscience and harm the mind itself, since by sinning it is deprived of the light of justice, even if there follow no pains, whether those inflicted on the ones to be corrected or the last ones reserved for the uncorrected. But we say, not unfittingly, that God does something against nature when he does something against what we know in nature. For we also call nature the course of nature that is known and usual to us; and when God does something against it, these are called mighty works or wonders. But against that supreme law of nature, which is remote from the knowledge either of the ungodly or of those still weak, God no more acts than he acts against himself. And the spiritual and also rational creature, to which kind the human soul belongs, the more it shares in that unchangeable law and light, the more it sees what can and cannot be done; but the further it is removed from it, the more it wonders at unusual things, the less it discerns what is to come.

And so we do not know what was done with Elijah; yet we believe about him what truthful Scripture testifies. This at least we know: that what was done with him is what the will of God holds, and that what the will of God does not hold cannot be done with anyone at all. Accordingly, if I am told that it can happen that the flesh, say, of this or that man is changed into a heavenly body, I grant that it can happen; but whether it will happen I do not know, and I do not know because what the will of God holds on this matter is hidden from me. Yet this is not hidden from me: that without doubt it will happen, if the will of God holds it. Further, if I hear that something was going to happen, but God acted so that it did not happen, I will answer most confidently: what was rather going to happen was what God did, not that thing on account of which, as though it were going to happen, he did this. For God certainly knew what he was going to do, and so he knew at the same time that that thing was not going to happen which he was going to act to prevent; and without doubt what God knows is truer than what man supposes. Hence future things can no more not happen than past things can not have been done, since it is not in God’s will that anything should be false in the very respect in which it is true. Therefore all things that are truly going to be will without doubt happen; and if they have not happened, they were not going to be. So too all things that are truly past have without doubt passed.

So whoever says, “If God is almighty, let him make what has been done not to have been done,” does not see that he is saying, “If he is almighty, let him make things that are true false in the very respect in which they are true.” For he can make something not be that was; for he makes it not be when he finds something existing to work upon, as when he makes someone who began to be by being born cease to be by dying; for he finds something already made to work upon. But who would say that he makes what already is not to not be? For whatever is past already is not. And if anything can be done with it, there is still something to work upon; and if there is, how is it past? So what we truly say has been, is not; but it is true that it has been because this is true in our statement, not in the thing, which no longer is. For the statement by which we say that something has been is true precisely because the thing of which we speak no longer is. This statement God cannot make false, because he is not contrary to the truth. And if you ask where this true statement is, it is found first in our mind, when we know and say that it is true. But even if it is taken from our mind, when we have forgotten what we knew, it will remain in the truth itself. For it will always be true that what was and is not has been; and it will be true that what was has been, there where it was true, before it came about, that what was not was going to be. To this truth God cannot be opposed, in whom is the supreme and unchangeable truth itself, by which whatever is true in the souls and minds of anyone is illumined so that it may be. Nor do we call God almighty as though we believed that he could also die, so that, because he cannot do this, he should not be called almighty. He alone is plainly and truly called almighty, because he truly is, and from him alone is whatever in any way is, whether spiritual or bodily; because he uses his whole creation as he pleases; and it pleases him, according to the true and unchangeable justice that he himself is to himself, to change all changeable things, while he himself is unchangeable, according to the deserts either of natures or of deeds. Are we then going to say that Elijah, being a creature, could not be changed either for the worse or for the better, or could not be changed in a manner unusual to the human race, according to the will of almighty God? Who would be so foolish as to say this? Why then should we not believe what is set down about him in most truthful Scripture—unless we think that God can do only what we are accustomed to see?

“But if Elijah,” he says, “was a man and could avoid dying, why could Christ, though he was not a man, not die?” That is as if someone were to say: “If the nature of man could be changed into something better, why could the nature of God not be changed into something worse?” Foolish! For the nature of man is changeable, but the nature of God unchangeable. Someone equally insane could say: “If he can grant to man to reign for ever, why can he not also make himself to be damned for ever?” “I do not say this,” he says, “but compare at least a three-day death of God with the eternal life of a man.” Certainly, if you took the three-day death of God in this way, that in him the flesh died which he took from the race of mortals, you would be thinking the truth; for the truth of the gospel proclaims that this three-day death of Christ took place for the eternal life of men. But when you want a three-day death in the divine nature itself, without any mortal creature taken up, to be believed without absurdity because human nature can be given immortality, you are surely as foolish as one who knows neither God nor the gifts of God. Then again, how is it that you do not say, and hold, the very thing I put above: that God has not made for himself that by which he is damned for ever, when that part of your god is to be fastened for ever in the globe? Or will you say this too, that a part of light is light, but a part of God is not God? Finally, so that without any reasoning, and by the plain truth of faith, you may hear from us why we believe that Elijah, born a man, was caught up from the earth by God, and that Christ was both truly born of a virgin and truly died on the cross: we believe these things because holy Scripture testifies both that of Elijah and this of Christ; and no one is godly unless he believes it, no one fails to believe it unless he is ungodly. But you deny that about Elijah, because you feign everything. And about Christ, not even you say that he could not be born and could die; rather, you contend that his birth from a virgin never happened at all, and that his death on the cross was false, that is, that it too was nothing, but feigned to deceive human eyes—for no other purpose than that you too, who lie about everything, may be pardoned by those who have believed these things.

But who would put to you the question that Faustus puts to himself as if from the mouth of a Catholic, “If Jesus was not born, how did he die?”—except one who has given too little thought to Adam himself, who was not born and yet died? If, then, the Son of God had willed to form for himself human and true flesh from the same source from which he formed it for that first man—since all things were made through him—who would dare to affirm that he could not? If, again, he had willed to change a body taken from a heavenly or airy or watery creature into the most real quality of human flesh, in which as a mortal man he could both live and die, who would deny that he could do this, the almighty Son of the Almighty? No one would dare. Finally, if he had willed to take a body from none of the bodily elements created through him, but to create true flesh for himself entirely out of nothing, just as all things that were not were created through him, which of us would contradict it, which of us would contend that it could not have been done? So we do not believe that he was born of the virgin Mary because he could not otherwise exist in true flesh and appear to men, but because it is so written in that Scripture which, unless we believe it, we can be neither Christians nor saved. We believe, then, that Christ was born of the virgin Mary, because it is so written in the gospel; we believe that he was crucified and died, because it is so written in the gospel; and that he was truly born and truly died, because the gospel is truth. Why he willed to suffer all those things in flesh taken from a woman’s womb, the whole counsel rests with him—whether because he judged that both sexes, which he had created, should be commended and honoured in this way too, by taking the form of a man and being born of a woman, or for some other reason. What that reason is, I would not rashly say; but this I will say confidently: that it was done in no other way than the truth of the gospel has taught, and that it ought not to have been done in any other way than the wisdom of God judged. We set the faith of the gospel above all the disputations of heretics; and we praise the counsel of God’s wisdom above all the counsel of any creature whatever.

Yet Faustus urges us to believe him, saying: “And if you will believe me when I tell the truth, both of them acquired a false reputation among the Hebrews: Jesus for his death and Elijah for his immortality”—though a little later he says: “For just as from the beginning, having taken the likeness of a man, he feigned all the affections of the human condition, so it would not have been out of keeping if at the end too, in order to seal the dispensation, he had appeared to die as well.” Most wicked and most deceitful man, how am I to believe you as one telling the truth, when you say that Christ could feign death? Was he lying, then, when he said, “The Son of Man must be killed and rise on the third day,” and are you not lying when you tell us to believe you as one telling the truth? Was Peter more truthful, then, when he said to him, “Far be it, Lord; this shall not happen”—for which he deserved to hear, “Get behind me, Satan”? And he did not hear this without fruit, for afterwards, corrected and made perfect, he preached the truth of Christ’s death until his own death. But if he, merely because he thought that Christ would not die, deserved to hear “Satan,” what do you deserve to hear, who not only deny that he died but even say that he feigned death? “But,” he says, “he must be believed to have feigned death too, because he feigned all the affections of the human condition.” Who is going to grant you, against the gospel, that he feigned all the affections of the human condition? Certainly, if the evangelist said “Jesus slept,” if he said “he hungered,” “he thirsted,” “he was sorrowful,” “he rejoiced,” and anything else of the kind, all these are true; for they were so narrated that they are written as things he did not feign but plainly did or showed—not indeed by the necessity of his condition, but by the will to teach and by divine power as well. For a man is often angry even if he does not wish it; sorrowful even if he does not wish it; sleeps even if he does not wish it; hungers and thirsts even if he does not wish it; but he did all these because he willed. So too men are born and suffer, not because they will it, nor because they will it not; but he did these also because he willed. Yet these things are true, and were faithfully and truthfully written of him, so that whoever believes his gospel may be instructed by truth, not mocked by lies.

Faustus said: If Jesus was not born, neither did he suffer; but if he suffered, then he was also born. Believe me, it does not serve you to look for natural consequence in these matters; otherwise your whole faith will be weakened. For you too believe that Jesus was born of a virgin without intercourse with a man; and if what comes first must be proved from what follows, this will be false. For one could answer you too in this way: “If Jesus was born of a woman, then he was also begotten of a man; but if he was not begotten of a man, then neither was he born of a woman.” Yet, as you believe, he could be born without being begotten; why then could he not also suffer without being born?

Augustine replied: No one puts to you the question you put to yourself, except an unskilled person whom you deceive, not an instructed one by whom you are refuted. For Jesus could both be born without being begotten and suffer without being born; but one of these he willed, the other he did not. He willed to be born without being begotten; he did not will to suffer without being born, for he suffered having been born. You say to me: How do you know? Because I read it in the gospel of truth. But if I say to you: How do you know what you say? You set against me the authority of Mani; you say there is falsehood in the gospel. But I would not believe Mani saying this even if he did not praise Christ to me for lying. That he did not find in Christ; but he betrays what he himself loves.

Faustus said: “But he could not die unless he had been born.” And I answer: Nor could he be born unless he were not God; or if he could both be God and be born, why could he not also both not be born and die? You see, then, that it is not useful enough in these matters to look for consequence or to rely on arguments when the matters in question concern Jesus; rather we must ask what he himself proclaimed about himself, or what his apostles proclaimed about him. And so the genealogy itself must be thoroughly examined, and we must see whether it agrees with itself, rather than seek the truth of his birth by inference from his passion; for he could both suffer without being born, and, having been born, not suffer at all—especially since you yourselves confess that nothing is impossible for God; and that too will be false if it is established that one not born could not die.

Augustine replied: Again and often you put to yourself what you do not hear from those by whom you are refuted. No one says to you, “He could not die unless he had been born,” for Adam died though he had not been born. But this is said to you: He was born, because the holy gospel says so, not some heretic or other; he died, because this is read in the holy gospel, not in the book of some heretic. But you, who forbid argument when the matters in question concern Jesus, and judge that we must ask what he himself proclaimed about himself or what his apostles proclaimed about him—when I begin to recite the gospel of his apostle Matthew, where the whole account of his birth is set out, you will at once say that this account is not Matthew’s, though the whole Church says it is Matthew’s, the Church brought down by sure succession from the apostolic sees to the present bishops. What will you read me against it? Some book of Mani, perhaps, where it is denied that Jesus was born of a virgin. Just as I believe, then, that this book is Mani’s, because it has been preserved and handed down from the very time when Mani lived in the flesh, through his disciples, by a sure succession of your leaders, right to your own time, so you too should believe that this book is Matthew’s, which the Church has brought down to these times, in an unbroken series of times and by a sure succession of connection, from the time when Matthew himself lived in the flesh. And tell me which book we ought rather to believe: that of the apostle who clung to Christ while he was still on earth, or that of some Persian or other who was born so long afterwards? But perhaps you will bring out another book bearing the name of some apostle who is known to have been chosen by Christ, and you will read there that Christ was not born of Mary. Since, then, one of these two books must be lying, which do you judge we ought rather to trust? That which the Church—begun by Christ himself, advanced through the apostles, extended by a sure series of successions to these times and spread over the whole world—acknowledges and approves as handed down and preserved from the beginning? Or that which the same Church rejects as unknown, especially when it is brought forward by men so truthful that they praise Christ for lying?

Here you will say: “Let the genealogy itself in the two books of the gospel be considered, whether it agrees with itself.” We have already said elsewhere in this work what needed to be said on this. For nothing troubles you except how Joseph could have had two fathers. Even if it had not occurred to you as you thought about it that one begot him and another adopted him, you ought not even so to have pronounced so hasty a verdict against so great an authority. But now, if, at least when reminded, you consider how this could have happened, simply believe the gospel, and cease rather from arguing so badly and perversely.

As for Faustus’s view that we must ask what Jesus himself proclaimed about himself, to whom would this not seem just? But can this be known except through the narration of his disciples? If they are not believed when they report that he was born of a virgin, how will they be trusted when they report what he proclaimed about himself? For if some writing were produced that was said to be properly Christ’s own, with no one else reporting it, how could it happen that, if it were truly his, it would not be read, not received, not raised to the very summit of authority in his Church—the Church which, propagated from him through the apostles by bishops succeeding one another, is spreading to these times, with many things in it already fulfilled that were foretold before, and with those that remain until the end without doubt still to come and to arrive? For if such writings were produced, one would certainly have to consider by whom they were produced. If they came from him, they could without doubt have been produced first to those who were then with him, and through them reach others also. And if this had happened, they would shine forth with the most firmly established authority through those successions of leaders and peoples that I have mentioned. Who, then, is so mad as to believe today that a letter which Mani produced is Christ’s, and not to believe the deeds and sayings of Christ that Matthew wrote? Or, if he doubts even about Matthew whether he wrote these things, why does he not rather believe about Matthew himself what he finds in the Church, which is shown by a sure series of successions from the times of Matthew himself to this time, instead of believing some man or other who comes from the side, out of Persia, two hundred or more years later, and urges that he, rather, should be believed about what Christ said and did? For even the apostle Paul himself, called from heaven after the Lord’s ascension—if he had not found apostles in the flesh, by communicating with whom and conferring the gospel with whom he might be shown to belong to the same fellowship, the Church would not have believed him at all. But when it learned that he proclaimed what they also proclaimed, and that he lived in their communion and unity, with signs also coming through him such as they too worked, he so earned authority, the Lord commending him, that his words are heard today in the Church as though Christ were heard speaking in him, as he himself most truly said. And Mani thinks that the Church of Christ ought to believe him when he speaks against Scriptures established by so great and so ordered an authority—Scriptures through which the Church has been especially charged that whoever proclaims to it anything other than what it has received, let him be anathema.

“But I bring forward a reason,” he says, “by which to show that those Scriptures are not to be believed.” Surely you are not arguing? And yet even in the argument itself you are defeated. For all your argument comes down to this: that the soul should at last believe that it is wretched in this world because by its wretchedness it came to the help of its God, lest he be deprived of his kingdom, and that his nature and substance is so changeable, corruptible, violable, and capable of defilement that a certain part of it cannot even be cleansed, and is punished with the eternal penalty of the globe by the very one who, knowing it to be innocent and committing no sin while with him, mixed it from his own inward parts into so great a contamination. This is the end of all your arguments and fables—and would that there were an end of them, but in your heart and your mouth, so that at last you might cease to believe and to say such execrable blasphemies. “But from those writings themselves,” he says, “I prove that they are not to be believed everywhere, since they contradict themselves.” Why then do you not rather say that they are to be believed nowhere, as inconsistent witnesses that impugn one another? “But I choose,” he says, “what I see to be consistent with the truth.” With what truth? With your fable, of course, which has at its head the war of God, in its middle the contamination of God, at its end the damnation of God. “And nowhere,” he says, “are writings that are opposed and contrary to one another believed.” But it seems so to you because you do not understand; for whatever you have brought forward that seemed such has been shown to be something you do not understand, and whatever you bring forward will be shown so. There is therefore no reason why we should not believe those writings endowed with such authority; and this is plainly the greatest reason why we should anathematize those who proclaim anything else.

Faustus said: “Then it was magic that he was seen and suffered, if he was not born.” The same argument is turned back on you in turn: that it was magic too that he was carried in the womb and brought forth, if he was not begotten. It is agreed that it is outside the law of nature for a virgin to give birth, and much more for her to be found a virgin even after giving birth. Why then do you not allow this too to have happened beyond nature: that he could suffer, when he willed, without the lot of birth? Believe me, as far as the matter is concerned, both of us profess on this point things contrary to nature. But there is this difference: we do so honourably, you shamefully; we give some reason for his passion, and a probable one; for his birth you offer either none or a false one. In short, we confess that he suffered in appearance only, and did not truly die; you believe that there was certainly a childbirth and that he was carried in a woman’s womb. Or if it is not so, confess too that this also was done in semblance, so that he seemed to be born, and our whole dispute will be at an end. For what you often like to affirm, that he must necessarily have been born because otherwise he could not have been seen by men or have spoken, is ridiculous, since angels are shown many times—as our people have already proved—both to have been seen by men and to have spoken.

Augustine said: It is not said to you that it is magic for one who was not born to die; for we have already mentioned above that this happened in Adam. But even if it had never happened, and the Lord Christ had willed to come in such a way that, appearing not in flesh taken from a virgin but yet in true flesh, he might redeem us by a true death, who would dare to say that he could not? But what he did was better: that he should also be born of a virgin, and deign to commend by his birth both sexes, for whose deliverance he had died, his male body being begotten of a woman—speaking by this very fact above all against you yourselves and overthrowing you, who proclaim that male and female are the work not of God but of the devil. But this is what you are said to assert that resembles magic: that you say his passion and death took place in appearance only and were deceitfully shadowed forth, so that he who was not dying seemed to die. From this it follows that you call his resurrection too shadowy, imaginary, and deceitful; for there can be no true resurrection of one who did not truly die. So it follows that he showed false scars to his doubting disciples, and that Thomas cried, “My Lord and my God,” not confirmed by truth but deceived by falsehood. And yet you try to persuade us that you speak the truth with your tongue, though you say that Christ lied with his whole body. These are the things objected to you, who have fashioned for yourselves a Christ of whom you could not be true disciples unless you too were liars. Nor can the flesh of a man born of a virgin seem to be magic because the flesh of Christ alone was so born, just as it is not magic that the flesh of Christ alone rose on the third day never to die again. Otherwise all the miracles of God will be magical, because they were done singularly; but they were done truly and showed what was true, and did not mock men’s eyes with deceitful illusions. They are indeed often called contrary to nature, not because they oppose nature, but because they exceed the measure of nature that is familiar to us. May the Lord, then, drive away from the minds of his little ones what Faustus, as if by way of advice, tried to persuade: that we too should profess an imaginary, not a true, birth of Christ, and so all dispute between us would end. Rather let there remain for us a contest against them for the truth than agreement with them in falsehood.

Yet I ask them: if our dispute ends when we say this, why do they not say it themselves? Why do they themselves affirm that Christ’s death was not true but imaginary, yet have chosen to say that his birth was not even of that kind, but nothing at all? If they were abashed by the weight of the gospel’s authority, and therefore did not dare to say that Christ did not suffer even in semblance, the same authority of the gospel also testifies to his birth. For although two evangelists narrated Mary’s childbirth itself, yet none of the evangelists was silent that Jesus had a mother. Or were they reluctant to proclaim this too as feigned because Matthew traces one line of generations and Luke another, so that they seem not to agree? But give a man who does not understand, and he will think that the evangelists also disagree in many things concerning Christ’s passion; give one who understands, and they agree everywhere. Or is it because it is honourable to feign death, but shameful even to feign birth? Why then does he urge us to confess this, so that our dispute may be ended? Why it seems to me that he chose to proclaim Christ’s birth not even as feigned like his death, but as nothing at all, will appear in the following discourse, when we answer the next question.

Far be it that there should be any shamefulness in the members of the saints, even the genital members. They are indeed called unseemly, because they do not have the kind of comeliness that the members placed in view have. But see what the apostle says when, from the very unity and joining of the members of our body, he urges love upon the Church: “Much rather,” he says, “those members of the body that seem to be weaker are necessary; and those that seem to be meaner parts of the body, on these we bestow more abundant honour; and our unseemly parts have more abundant seemliness, whereas our seemly parts have no need. But God has tempered the body, giving greater honour to the part that lacked, so that there might be no divisions in the body.” So it is the unlawful use of those members, not subject to the laws of self-control, that is shameful, not the members themselves; which not only the celibate and virgins keep in excellent integrity, but the holy married fathers and mothers themselves used, looking only to procreation, in such a way that that natural motion was in no way shameful, since it served not lust but reason. How much more, then, in the holy virgin Mary, who conceived the flesh of Christ by faith, had the members nothing shameful, since they served not a human, even lawful, conception, but only a divine childbirth? She was rightly so honoured that she might pass on to us Christ—whom we conceive by believing with undefiled hearts and in a sense bring forth by confessing—with her integrity preserved even in body. For in no way would Christ by being born make his mother worse, so as to take away the glory of virginity from her on whom he had conferred the gift of fruitfulness. These things were done truly, not deceitfully; but they are new, they are unusual, they are against the best-known course of nature—because they are great, because they are wonderful, because they are divine, and all the more true, certain, and firm. “And angels,” he says, “were seen and spoke, though they were not born.” As if we said that Christ, unless he were born of a woman, could neither be seen nor speak! He could, but he did not will it; and what he willed is better. And that he willed it is certain because he did it—he who did nothing out of necessity, as your god does, but everything by will. And that he did it we do not doubt, because we believe not some heretic but his gospel.

Faustus said: “Paul wrote of you long ago that some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, to doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful.” I will never agree with you that these words were spoken by the apostle unless you first confess yourself that Moses and the prophets brought doctrines of demons and were interpreters of a seducing and malignant spirit, since they carefully teach abstinence from pork and the other meats they call unclean. You must therefore first deliberate about these men, and think long and hard how these things ought to be taken: whether they seem to have spoken them in God or in a demon. For to this extent either Moses and the prophets will be condemned with us, or we shall be acquitted with them. For this verdict of yours is not just now: that we, who judge that only the priestly class of men among the people ought to abstain from meats, should seem to you followers of the doctrine of demons, while you think that your prophets, and Moses himself above all—who was the first to forbid, not to the priests only but indiscriminately to every class of men, the flesh of swine, hares, and hedgehogs, and cuttlefish and squid and all the other kinds of fish without scales—spoke this not in a seducing spirit or in the doctrine of demons, but rather in God and in the Holy Spirit. So, even if I grant you meanwhile that Paul said this, I shall not be beaten by you until you have condemned Moses and the prophets; so that what you would perhaps never have done when convinced by reason and truth, you may now be seen to do for your belly’s sake: blaspheme Moses.

There is also another passage among you, about the three young men in Daniel, by which you will be greatly confounded in the same way, if it is established that abstaining from foods is the religion of demons. For they are read to have abstained not only from what the law forbade but also from what it allowed; and you are accustomed to admire them greatly and to count them among the martyrs, though they too followed the doctrine of demons, if it is established that this testimony is the apostle’s. Besides this, Daniel himself relates that he fasted for three weeks of days and ate no meat and drank no wine while he prayed for his people. What then? Does he too glorify himself in the doctrine of demons and seek glory from the invention of a seducing spirit?

And what shall I say of you—that is, of the more Christian among you? Some of them abstain from pork, most from every four-footed beast, and others altogether from every animal; and for this the whole Church holds them in honour and, receiving them with the highest veneration, all but thinks them gods. And you do not see, slow learners, that if this testimony is true and was spoken by the apostle, they too have been deluded by the doctrines of demons. And what shall we say about that which no one would dare to evade or deny, since it is agreed among all and is celebrated equally throughout the world every year with all zeal in the Catholic assembly? I mean Lent. Whoever among you thinks it ought to be properly observed must abstain from all those things which this passage says God created for us to receive, and which it furthermore calls abstinence from them the doctrine of demons. What then of you, dearly beloved? Are you living by the rite of demons when you celebrate these mysteries of Christ’s passion, and are you caught by the deceit of a seducing spirit, and do you speak lies in hypocrisy, and have your conscience seared? But if none of this is true of you, then neither of us. What then does this passage mean, or by whom shall we think it was written, and against whom, since it confirms neither the traditions of the Old Testament nor the decrees of the New—seeing that the New, as appears from yourselves, teaches abstinence from all foods, and the Old from certain ones—yet both teach abstinence—whereas this verdict of yours wants all abstinence from fleshly foods whatever to be doctrines of demons? If you too believe it, I shall say the same thing again and again: condemn Moses, renounce the prophets, and pass the same sentence on yourselves too, since as they always abstained from some foods, so you sometimes abstain from all.

Or if Moses and the prophets, when they distinguish foods, seem to you to be establishing the law of God and not of demons; if Daniel kept his three weeks in the Holy Spirit; if the young men Ananias, Azarias, and Misael chose to live on vegetables and pulse by the prompting of the divine mind; if, finally, all among you who abstain do so not driven by demons; if Lent without wine and meat is kept by you not superstitiously but by divine law—then see, I beg you, see that it is not the height of madness to think that Paul said that all abstinence from foods is a doctrine of demons, and “forbidding to marry”—any more than he said that dedicating virgins to Christ is a doctrine of demons. You read this, like the rest, without reflection, and keep looking round at us, and you do not see that by it your own virgins are marked as caught by the doctrine of demons, and that you are priests of demons, since you always vie with one another to urge them to this profession by your persuasions, so that in all your churches there is now almost a greater number of virgins than of married women. Why then do you not desist from such undertakings yourselves? Why do you lead the wretched daughters of men into fraud, if what is fulfilled in them is not the will of Christ but of demons? Yet I would like you first to answer us this: is it a doctrine of demons to make virgins at all, or only to make them by forbidding marriage? If by forbidding, it has nothing to do with us; for we too judge it as foolish to hold back someone who wishes to marry as it is wicked and impious to compel someone who does not. But if you think that to favour this purpose too, and not to resist one who wishes it, is also a doctrine of demons—I say nothing now of your danger—I fear for the apostle himself, lest he seem to have brought the doctrine of demons to Iconium when by his preaching he set Thecla, already pledged to the bridal chamber, on fire with love of perpetual virginity. And what shall we say of the Master himself and author of all holiness, Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom of this very profession of maidens, who in the gospel, ranking three kinds of eunuchs—one born, another made, the third voluntary—yet gave the palm to those “who,” he says, “have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,” signifying the virgins and young men who, having cut out of their hearts the very desire of marrying, live always in his Church, as in a royal house, in the place of eunuchs? What then? Does this too seem to you a doctrine of demons, and spoken in a seducing spirit? And who else will be speaking in God, if Paul and Christ are proved to have been priests of demons? I pass over the other apostles of the same Lord of ours—Peter and Andrew, Thomas, and among the rest that blessed John who never knew Venus—who in various places sang the possession of this good among virgins and young men with divine proclamation, leaving us, and you yourselves too, a pattern for making virgins. These, as I said, I pass over, because you have excluded them from the canon, and with your sacrilegious mind you can easily attach the doctrines of demons to them. But can you say the same of Christ, or of the apostle Paul, who, it is agreed, everywhere alike always preferred the unmarried to the married in word, and showed it also in deed towards the most holy Thecla? But if this was not the doctrine of demons that Paul proclaimed to Thecla and the other apostles to others, who can now believe that he said that even persuasion to holy chastity is the will and doctrine of demons? So there is no reason for you to think meanwhile that you make virgins by exhortation alone and not by forbidding marriage. For this very principle is ingrained in us too; and anyone must surely be thought not merely foolish but mad who thinks that what is granted by public law can be forbidden by a private one—I mean marriage itself. Therefore we too exhort those who are willing to persevere, but we do not compel the unwilling to come. For we know how strong the will is, and how strong the force of nature itself, even against public law, let alone against a private one, to which one is free to answer, “I will not.” If, then, it is without crime to make virgins in this way, we too are free of blame; but if to make virgins in any way at all is a crime, you too are guilty. So I do not see with what intention or purpose you bring this passage against us.

Augustine replied: Hear, then, what you confess you do not see: with what intention or purpose we bring this passage against you. It is not because you abstain from meats. For our first fathers too abstained from some, as you mention—yet not to condemn them, but to signify something, which you do not understand, and on which I have already spoken, as much as seemed sufficient, in earlier parts of this work. And Christians—not heretics but Catholics—abstain not only from meats but from some fruits of the earth too, to subdue the body for the sake of the soul, to humble it the more in prayer, not because they believe these things unclean; and they do so either always, as a few do, or on certain days and seasons, as almost all do in Lent, each more or less as he has wished or been able. But you deny that the creature itself is good and call it unclean, saying that the devil makes meats out of the dregs of the matter of evil; and for this reason you shudder at them and reject them as the more unclean and savage bonds of your god. To your hearers, however—whom you described as distinguished from the priestly class—you allow these to be eaten by way of pardon; just as the apostle allows to some, by way of pardon, not every conjugal intercourse, even that which takes place solely for the sake of procreation, but that which takes place through incontinence, yet with one’s spouse. For nothing is allowed by way of pardon except a sin. This is what you think of all eating of meat; this you yourselves have learned from your heresy and teach your hearers. But you allow it to them as something to be pardoned, because they supply you with what you need, as I said—not saying that it is not a sin, but granting pardon to those who sin; while you yourselves abstain from every such contagion as evil and unclean. And so what follows those words of the apostle with which you ended your citation of this passage is exactly what makes us bring this testimony against you. I think you knew this too, so that you did not quote those words at first, and at the end said to us, “I do not see with what intention or purpose you bring this passage against us,” since you preferred to keep silent about this very purpose of ours rather than mention it. For when the apostle had said, “abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful,” he went on to say, “and by those who have known the truth, because every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” This is what you deny. It is with this mind, this will, this opinion, that you refrain from foods of this kind: that they are evil and unclean not by signification but by nature. In this you without doubt blaspheme their creator; this is what belongs to the doctrine of demons. Do not be surprised, then, that this was prophesied of you by the Holy Spirit so long before.

Again, if you exhorted to virginity in the way the apostolic teaching exhorts—“He who gives in marriage does well, and he who does not give in marriage does better”—so as to say that marriage is good but virginity better, as the Church does which is truly the Church of Christ, the Holy Spirit would not have foretold you in this way, saying, “forbidding to marry.” For he forbids who says that this is evil, not he who sets something better above this good. In fact, you detest above all that intercourse which alone is honourable and conjugal, and which marriage contracts also declare—for the procreation of children. Hence you truly forbid not so much intercourse as marriage. For intercourse takes place also for the sake of lust, but marriage only for the sake of children. Nor should you say that you do not forbid it because you tolerate, without breaking friendship, many of your hearers who are unwilling or unable to obey you in this. For the one you hold in the doctrine of your error, the other in the necessity of your fellowship. This is what I put off saying a little earlier: why you thought Christ’s death should be preached as false and feigned, and not his birth too. For you preach and praise death as the separation of the soul—that is, of the nature of your god—from the body of his enemies, that is, from the handiwork of the devil. And so you believed it a thing worthy for Christ to commend, even if not by dying, then by feigning death. But since you believe that in birth your god is not set free but rather bound, you were unwilling to believe that Christ even deceptively imagined birth; so much so that Mary would not displease you so much if she had had intercourse and not conceived, as she displeases you because she did not have intercourse and yet gave birth. You see, then, that there is a great difference between those who exhort to virginity by setting a greater good above a lesser good, and those who forbid marriage by attacking more vehemently the intercourse of procreation, which alone is properly nuptial; a great difference between those who abstain from foods for the sake of a sacramental signification or for the chastening of the body, and those who abstain from foods that God created by saying that God did not create them. Accordingly, the former is the doctrine of the prophets and apostles; the latter that of lying demons.

Faustus said: “To the clean all things are clean, but to the unclean and defiled nothing is clean; but both their mind and conscience are defiled.” Whether it serves you to believe that this too was said by Paul must be considered. For thus far it has been established not only that Moses and the prophets were driven by demons, since they made such great laws about the differences of foods, but also that they themselves were unclean and defiled in their mind and conscience, so that what follows may also fitly fall on them: “They profess that they know God, but in their works they deny him.” And to whom does this apply better than to the prophets and Moses, who are proved to have lived far otherwise than befitted those who knew God? Up to now, however, I had thought that apart from adulteries, frauds, and murders there was nothing else from which Moses and the prophets might seem to have had polluted consciences; but now, as this passage shows, we are given to know that they were of defiled mind on this account too, because they thought something defiled. How then can you suppose that such men could have attained the vision of the divine majesty, since it is written that none but the pure in heart can see God? Indeed, even if they had been chaste from unlawful crimes, this superstition alone of abstaining from certain foods, if it contaminates the mind, could have denied them the sight of the divinity. So that boasting of Daniel and the three young men has vanished and is extinguished as well. Until this preaching, which holds that nothing is unclean, they were regarded in Judaism as most chaste young men of good mind, because, mindful of the traditions of their fathers, they kept themselves with all zeal untouched by the dainties of the gentiles, and especially by what was sacrificed. Now at last it has appeared that they too were contaminated in mind and conscience, and most of all when they kept their mouths from blood and from funereal foods.

But perhaps ignorance excuses them; for since this Christian faith, which taught that to the clean all things are clean, had not yet appeared, they too may have thought some things not clean. But what excuse do you use now, if, while Paul cries out that nothing is unclean, and calls abstinence from foods doctrines of demons, and calls those who have thought anything defiled polluted in mind, you not only abstain, as we said, but even seek glory from it, and believe yourselves the more acceptable to Christ the more abstinent you are from foods—that is, according to this saying, the more defiled you are in mind and the more and more polluted in your conscience? What of this, that, though there are three religions in the world which equally place the purification of the mind in chastity and abstinence, though with very different rites—I mean the Jews, the Christians, and the gentiles—it cannot be found from which of these religions this saying comes, which teaches that nothing is not holy? Certainly not at all from Judaism; nor likewise from paganism, since it too distinguishes foods; and there is no difference except that the Hebrew disagrees with the pagan about certain animals. There remains the Christian faith; and if you think it proper to it to consider nothing polluted, you must first confess that there is no Christian among you. For all among you, to say nothing of other things, consider at least carrion and things sacrificed no small defilement; or if you too do this by right of Christianity, then this saying, which removes all abstinence from unclean things whatever, does not belong even to this religion. How then could Paul have said what suits no religion? For the apostle did not so much put off religion as change its rite when from a Jew he became a Christian. But whoever wrote this passage seems to me to have rested on no religion at all.

Therefore, if in future, searching the Scriptures, you find anything to injure our faith, remember to set it against us only when you have made quite sure that it is not contrary to you. So too with what you are accustomed to bring up about Peter: that he once saw a vessel let down from heaven, in which were all kinds of animals and serpents; and as he was astonished and amazed, a voice was heard saying to him, “Peter, whatever you see in the vessel, kill and eat.” And he answered, “Lord, I will not touch anything common and unclean.” And again the voice said to him, “What I have sanctified, do not call unclean.” Although this itself may seem, by allegory, to signify something else and not indifference of foods, yet, since you like to understand it so, you must then feed indiscriminately on all beasts, and on vipers and snakes and all the rest of the serpent kind, according to Peter’s vision. In this way you will prove that you truly obey the voice he is said to have heard. And yet remember this too always: that Moses and the prophets are condemned by it, since they thought many of the things that God has sanctified, according to the sense of this voice, to be polluted.

Augustine replied: When the apostle says, “To the clean all things are clean,” he wanted the natures themselves that God created to be understood, according to what Moses wrote in Genesis, “And God made all things, and behold, they were very good”—not the significations according to which God, through the same Moses, distinguished the clean from the unclean. Since we have already said much on this in many places, it will be enough now to have given a brief reminder. Accordingly, those who, already in the time of the revelation of the New Testament, thought those shadows of things to come were still to be kept in such a way as to contend that without them the gentiles could not receive the salvation that is in Christ—these the apostle calls unclean, because they thought carnally, and unbelieving, because they did not distinguish the time of grace from the time of the law. To them he says that nothing is clean, because they used neither the things they rejected nor the things they took in a holy or just way—as indeed is true of all unbelievers, but of you above all, Manichaeans, to whom nothing at all is clean. For not even the food you take, though you separate it with great care, as it were, from the contagion of flesh, is clean to you, since you say it was created by none but the devil. In it you even claim that by eating you purify your god, bound and polluted. You might at least seem clean to yourselves, since it is in your bellies that he deserves to be purified. But you also contend that your bodies are of the nature and workmanship of the race of darkness, and that your souls are still defiled by those very bodies. What then is clean to you? Not what you take, not where you put what you take, not you yourselves, who purify what you have taken. You see, then, on account of whom the apostle spoke this saying at that time; yet he spoke it in such a way that it would hold all the unbelieving and unclean, but convict you most of all. So to the clean all things are clean according to the nature in which they were created, though not all things were clean according to signification to the first people, the Jews; nor are all things suitable for us, whether for the health of the body or for the custom of human society; but when each thing is given its due and keeps its natural order, to the clean all things are clean, while to the unclean and unbelieving, such as you are above all, nothing is clean. The rest of the apostle’s words, which follow, you would say to yourselves to your own health, if you wished your seared conscience to be healed. For it follows: “But both their mind and conscience are defiled.”

Faustus said: “If you accept the gospel, you must believe everything written in it.” What about you, then? Because you accept the Old Testament, do you therefore believe indiscriminately everything written in it? Surely you pick out from it only the prophecies that signified that a king would come to the Jews, because you think he is Jesus, and a few common precepts of civil conduct, such as “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery”; the rest you pass over, and you think them no less than what Paul thought dung. What is strange, then, or what is surprising, if I too, reading from the New Testament all that is purest and suited to my salvation, pass over those things that were deceitfully brought in by your forefathers and discolour both its majesty and its grace?

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”?

How, then, will you be able to prove what is demanded of you: that he from whom you learned that the gospel writings are not the apostles’ is the Paraclete? For we, on our side, prove that the Paraclete is none other than the Holy Spirit who came soon after Jesus was glorified; for he had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. We prove also that he leads into all truth, because one does not enter into the truth except through love; and “the love of God,” says the apostle, “has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” We teach also that Paul did not say “when what is perfect has come” except of that perfection which is to be in the receiving of eternal life. For while he was saying this, he says: “For we see now through a mirror in a riddle, but then face to face.” Here certainly, unless you want to be openly mad, you will confess that you do not see God face to face. So that which is perfect has not come to you. In this way the apostle explained plainly enough what he thought on this matter. Nor will this come to the saints until there has come to pass what John also says: “We are children of God, and it has not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is”—then the Holy Spirit, whose pledge we have now received, leading us into all truth. And what was said, “The world cannot receive him,” was certainly said of those who are commonly called by the name of the world in the Scriptures: lovers of the world, whether ungodly or carnal; of such the apostle says: “But the animal man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God.” For they are said to be of this world as long as they can understand nothing more than these bodily things which they have perceived in this world; just as you too understand nothing else, who, admiring this light of the sun and moon, have fashioned for yourselves all divine things of that kind, at the prompting of that empty talker whom, deceived and deceiving, you call the Paraclete. Therefore, since you are in no way able to show how he is the Paraclete, you have nothing from which to teach that you have learned by some most firm authority how these gospel writings, of which you will not accept everything, are not by Christ’s apostles. It remains, then, for you to say that you have learned this by this reasoning: that there are things there which discolour the glory of Christ—namely, that he is narrated there to have been born of a virgin, to have been circumcised, that the sacrifice then customary was offered for him, that he was baptized, that he was tempted by the devil.

Apart from these, and the testimonies from the Old Testament, which are uncertain to them in those writings, you confess, according to what Faustus says, that you accept the rest, and above all “the mystic fixing of his cross, by which the wounds of the passion of your soul are shown.” Then, he says, “his saving precepts, and his parables, and all his divine discourse, which, especially as it sets forth the distinction of the two natures, is beyond doubt his own.” You see, then, that what you are doing is to remove all authority from the midst of the Scriptures, so that each man’s own mind is the authority for what he approves and disapproves in each Scripture; that is, so that he is not subjected to the authority of the Scriptures for faith, but subjects the Scriptures to himself—so that something pleases him not because he reads it written with sublime authority, but it seems rightly written because it has pleased him. To what are you committing yourself, wretched soul, weak, wrapped in carnal mists? To what are you committing yourself? Remove authority, then; let us see. Remove authority; give a reason. Does your reasoning lead to this: that unless the nature of God is believed violable and corruptible, that long fable of yours cannot find a theatrical ending? Finally, how do you know that there are eight earths and ten heavens, that Atlas carries the world and Splenditenens holds it suspended, and countless such things? How do you know these things? “Plainly,” you say, “Mani taught me.” But, unhappy soul, you believed; for you did not see. If, then, for thousands of fabulous phantoms with which you have been shamefully made pregnant, you subjected yourself to a most unknown and most frenzied authority, so as to believe all these things because they are written in those books which, by a pitiable error, you judged must be believed, though none of these things is demonstrated to you—why do you not rather subject yourself to the authority of the gospel, so founded, so established, spread abroad with such glory, and commended from the times of the apostles to our times by most certain successions, so that you may believe, so that you may live, so that you may learn that all those things that offend you offend you from a vain and perverse opinion, and that it is truer that the unchangeable nature of God took to itself something of a mortal creature, in which, remaining unchangeable, it might do and suffer, not deceitfully but truly, whatever it befitted that creature to do and suffer for the salvation of the human race from which it was taken—truer, I say, than to believe that God’s nature is violable and corruptible, and cannot be wholly freed and purified once defiled and oppressed, but is damned by God’s supreme necessity with the eternal penalty of the globe?

“But,” you say, “I believed what he did not show me because he showed me plainly two natures, namely of good and of evil, in this very world.” But this is the very thing by which you were deceived, unhappy soul: that, just as in that gospel Scripture, so in this world you could think nothing evil except what offended your carnal sense, such as a serpent, fire, poison, and the like, and nothing good except what soothed that same carnal sense of yours with some pleasure, such as the pleasantness of tastes, the sweetness of odours, the sight of this light, and anything else that may have similarly flattered your ears or eyes or nostrils or palate. But if you had first looked at the whole creation in such a way as to ascribe it to God as its author, as though reading a great book of the nature of things, and so, if anything there offended you, had believed it safer that the cause might be hidden from you, as a human being, than had dared to find fault with anything in the works of God, you would never have fallen into sacrilegious trifles and blasphemous fictions, with which, not understanding whence evil is, you try to fill God with all evils.

Here, if you ask us how we know that these writings are the apostles’, we answer you briefly that we know it in the same way that you know that those writings are Mani’s which you pitiably set above this authority. For if someone were to raise a question with you on this point too, and throw in the doubt of contradiction, saying that the books you bring forward as Mani’s are not Mani’s, what will you do? Will you not rather laugh at the ravings of a man who utters this impudent statement against a thing confirmed by so long a series of connection and succession? Just as it is certain, then, that those books are Mani’s, and that the man is altogether to be laughed at who, coming from the side and born so long afterwards, should press this dispute of contradiction against you, so it is certain that Mani, or the Manichaeans, are to be laughed at, or rather lamented, who dare to say anything of the kind against an authority so founded, kept and handed down by sure successions from the times of the apostles to these times.

Now, then, the authority of Mani must be compared with the authority of the apostles. For it is as certain that these writings are theirs as that those are his. But who compares Mani with the apostles, except one who separates himself from Christ, who sent the apostles? Or who ever discerned in the words of Christ two natures opposed to each other and from their own principles, except one who does not discern the words of Christ? So the apostles, as disciples of the truth, preach the birth of Christ and his true passion; but Mani boasts that he leads into all truth, and wants to lead into a Christ in whom he preaches the falsehood of the passion itself. They preach Christ circumcised in the flesh that he took from the seed of Abraham; he preaches God cut to pieces in his very nature by the race of darkness. They preach a sacrifice offered for the flesh of Christ, in imitation of the sacrifice that was then piously offered; he preaches a member not of flesh but of the divine substance itself, brought in to be sacrificed to all the demons of the hostile nature. They preach Christ baptized in the Jordan to give an example; he preaches God himself sunk by himself in the defilement of darkness, not to emerge wholly, but to be punished with eternal damnation in that part of him that could not be cleansed. They preach the flesh of Christ tempted by the prince of demons; he preaches a part of God possessed by the race of demons. And they preach that it was tempted to teach us to resist the tempter; he preaches that it was possessed so that it cannot be restored either to the Father or to the victor. Finally, Mani, out of the doctrine of demons, proclaims something else, so that he may seem more eminent; but the apostles, out of the doctrine of Christ, charge that whoever proclaims anything else, let him be anathema.

Faustus said: “It is written in the gospel that many will come from the east and the west and will recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. Why then do you not accept the patriarchs?” Far be it from us to begrudge any mortal whom God, perhaps looking on him in his mercy, has at some time brought back from perdition to salvation. But we certainly put this down to the clemency of him who had mercy, not to the merit of one whose life you cannot deny was disreputable. And so the fathers of the Jews too, namely Abraham and Isaac and Jacob—if this testimony of Christ about them that you bring forward is certain—although they themselves were most shameful, as Moses their great-grandson indicates, or whoever else is the author of this history called Genesis, who wrote their lives for us as most deserving of all hatred and disgust—let them too be now in the kingdom of heaven; let them be in a place that they never believed in nor hoped for, as appears plainly enough from their books; provided only that it is agreed, with you too confessing it, that after a long interval they were set free by Christ our Lord from the foul and penal prison of the underworld, where the deserts of their lives held them confined, and that it was through his mystic passion that they could come to that very thing which is written of them, if they did come to it. For just as no one would begrudge it, or could be so inhuman as to be displeased by so great an act of kindness, because our same Lord set a certain robber free from the cross and said that on that same day he would be with him in the paradise of his Father—yet we will not on that account say that the lives and morals of robbers ought to be acceptable to us because Jesus granted pardon to a robber, or because he forgave the errors of tax collectors and harlots and said that they would even go before into the kingdom of heaven those who had behaved proudly. For he himself acquitted a certain woman caught in wrongdoing and in adultery when the Jews accused her, commanding her to sin no more. Therefore, if he did something of this kind with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, thanks be to him; it shows that he works such things for souls who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust. But this one thing troubles me in this opinion of yours: why you think this only of the fathers of the Jews, and not also of the other patriarchs of the gentiles, that they too at some time experienced this grace of our deliverer—especially since the Christian Church is made up more of their sons than of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But you will say, of course, that those worshipped idols, while these worshipped almighty God, and that therefore Jesus cared for them alone. So the worship of almighty God thrusts one down into Tartarus, and one who worshipped the Father needs the help of the Son? But see to it yourself. Let us agree, I say, up to this point: that they were brought back to heaven, not because they deserved it, but because divine clemency overcomes the force of sins.

However, whether even this was said by Christ, the very variety of the writers makes us doubtful and uncertain. For while two evangelists, Matthew and Luke, both tell of a certain centurion whose servant was then sick, and on whose account Jesus is seen to have said this very thing—namely, that he had not found such faith in Israel as in that man, a gentile and indeed a pagan, because he said he was not worthy that Jesus should enter under his roof, but asked only that he should command with a word and his servant would be healed—yet Matthew alone adds that Jesus went on to say: “Amen, I say to you, many will come from the east and the west and will recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into the outer darkness.” By the many who were to come he signified the pagans, on account of the centurion, since he too was a gentile, yet in him such great faith had been found; and by the sons of the kingdom he meant the Jews, in whom no faith had been found. But Luke, though he too thought this a necessary and memorable thing to insert in his gospel among Christ’s wonderful deeds, makes no mention there of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If anyone says that he passed it over because it had already been said sufficiently by Matthew, why then does he relate the deed itself concerning the centurion and his servant, which had equally long since been made known to us sufficiently by Matthew’s diligence? But that is false. For about the very request that Jesus come, Matthew says that the centurion came to him in person to ask for healing; but Luke does not, but says that he sent the elders of the Jews to him, who, lest perhaps he be spurned by him as a gentile—since these men will have Jesus to be plainly a Jew—set about persuading him, saying that he was worthy that he should do this for him, since he loved their nation and had himself built them a synagogue: as if this too concerned the Son of God, if the Jews had obtained the building of their synagogue from a pagan centurion. Nor did Luke keep silent altogether about this saying—thinking, I suppose, that it might perhaps be true—but he changes its place and attaches it to another occasion far different, namely where Jesus says to his disciples: “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many will come seeking to enter and will not be able. And when the master of the house has entered,” he says, “and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and knock, saying, ‘Lord, open to us.’ And he will answer, ‘I do not know you.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets and synagogues.’ And he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity.’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets entering into the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrust out. And they will come from the east and the west and the south and the north and will recline in the kingdom of God.” Now this very point, that many will be shut out of the kingdom of God who bore only the name of Christ but did not do his works, Matthew did not omit to write either; but there he makes no mention at all of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Likewise Luke too wrote about the centurion and his servant; but he too testifies nothing at all there about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, since it cannot be established with certainty where it was said, nothing prevents us from not believing that it was said at all.

And not without reason do we never bring our ears to Scriptures of this kind, so discordant and varied, without judgment and reason; but, considering everything and comparing one thing with another, we weigh whether each of them could have been said by Christ or not. For many words have been inserted into the sayings of our Lord by your forefathers which, though stamped with his name, do not agree with his faith; especially since, as we have often proved already, these things were not written by him or by his apostles, but a long time after their being taken up were gathered from rumours and opinions by some Semi-Jews or other who did not even agree among themselves; and yet these, ascribing everything to the names of the Lord’s apostles, or of those who seemed to have followed the apostles, falsely claimed that they had written their errors and lies according to them. But see to it yourself. Meanwhile, as I say, I would not contend too much with you about this passage, since what I put forward before is enough for my defence, and you yourselves cannot deny it: that before the coming of our Lord all the patriarchs of Israel and the prophets lay in the darkness of Tartarus according to their deserts. If they were ever set free from there by Christ and brought back to the light, what has that to do with hatred of their lives? For we hate and reject, not what they were—that is, men—but what kind of men they were—that is, wicked; nor what they are now—that is, purified—but what they were—that is, once impure. And so, meanwhile, however you wish it to be, this passage is no obstacle to us: if it is true, Christ’s mercy and goodness are commended here; if false, the crime attaches to his writers. Either way we are safe, as always.

Augustine replied: How safe, wretched man? How safe, you who say you hate the patriarchs as impure and still lament your god as impure? Certainly you have granted that those patriarchs, after the Saviour’s coming, received purification and were given blessed rest; but your god, even after the Saviour’s coming, still lies in darkness, is still plunged in all crimes, still wallows in all impurities. So not only was the life of those men better than your god, but even their death was happier. But in what abodes the righteous were who had left this life before Christ came in the flesh, and whether Christ’s passion also brought them to something better—they who not only believed in him as one who would come, suffer, and rise again, but also, as was fitting, foretold this very thing by the prophetic Spirit—must be searched out in the holy Scriptures, if in any way it can be clearly searched out; not from the rash opinions of any men whatever, let alone from the perversities of so execrable a heresy of men straying far from the truth. In vain does Faustus promise himself by this crooked path that something can be granted to anyone after this life which he has not secured for himself in this life. It is good for you, while you live here, to abandon this error and to know and hold the truth of the Catholic faith. Otherwise what the unrighteous man promises himself will be far away, when what God has threatened against the unrighteous begins to come to pass.

On the life of the patriarchs I have already given this slanderer many answers, as many as I thought sufficient. The Lord bore witness to them—not as men corrected at their death or justified after his passion—when he admonished the Jews that, if they were Abraham’s sons, they should do the works of Abraham; and that Abraham longed to see his day, and saw it and was glad; and that the angels carried that poor man, afflicted and despised by the proud rich man, into Abraham’s bosom, that is, into some great and hidden secret place of quiet happiness. What shall I say of the apostle Paul? Does he too perhaps praise Abraham as justified after death, because before he was circumcised he believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness? He values this so highly that he says that we, who are not descended from his flesh, have been made his sons for no other reason than that we follow the footsteps of his faith.

But what am I to do with you, whom iniquity has made so deaf to the testimonies of the Scriptures that whatever is brought against you from them you dare to say was not spoken by the apostle but written under his name by some forger or other? So openly foreign to Christian teaching is the doctrine of demons that you preach that you cannot defend it at all under the name of Christian teaching unless you say that the Scriptures of the apostles are false. Unhappy enemies of your own souls! What writings will ever have any weight of authority if the gospel and apostolic writings do not? Of what book will it be certain whose it is, if it is uncertain whether the writings are the apostles’ which the Church says are the apostles’ and holds as handed down from the apostles themselves and declared with such eminence through all nations? And will it be certain that the apostles wrote what heretics opposed to this Church bring forward, called by the names of their authors, who lived long after the apostles? As if in secular literature too there had not been authors entirely certain, under whose names many things were later brought forward and therefore rejected, because they did not agree with the works established as theirs, or because at the time when those authors wrote they did not become known and were not handed on and commended to posterity by them or by their closest friends. To pass over others, were not certain books brought forward under the name of Hippocrates, the most renowned physician, not received as authoritative by physicians? Nor did some likeness of matter and words help them, when, compared with those established as truly Hippocrates’, they were judged unequal, and because they had not become known from the time when his other writings became known as truly his. But how is it established that these books, by comparison with which those brought in from the side are rejected, are Hippocrates’? If anyone denies this, he is not even refuted but laughed at—why, except that the series of succession has commended them from the very time of Hippocrates to this time and onward in such a way that to doubt it is the mark of a madman? How have men known that the books of Plato, Aristotle, Varro, Cicero, and other such authors are theirs, except by the same continuous testimony of times succeeding one another? Many have written much on ecclesiastical literature, not indeed with canonical authority, but out of some zeal to help or to learn. How is it established which is whose, except that at the times when each wrote them, he made them known and published them to whom he could, and from there, the knowledge continued to one person after another and more widely confirmed, they reached posterity even to our own times, so that, when asked whose each book is, we do not hesitate what we should answer? But why go on into the distant past? Look at these writings that we have in our hands: if, some time after this life of ours, anyone were to deny either that those are Faustus’s or that these are mine, how would he be refuted, except that those who now know these things pass on their knowledge to those who will come long afterwards by continued successions of their descendants? Since this is so, who is blinded by such madness—unless he has been overthrown by consenting to the malice and deceit of lying demons—as to say that the Church of the apostles, so faithful, so numerous a concord of brothers, could not have achieved this: to pass on their writings faithfully to posterity, when it kept their chairs to the present bishops by a most certain succession—when this happens with such ease for the writings of men of any sort, whether outside the Church or in the Church itself?

“But,” he says, “their writings are found to contradict one another.” You read with malice and evil intent; foolish, you do not understand; blind, you do not see. For what great thing would it have been to examine them carefully and find the great and wholesome agreement of these writings, if contentiousness had not perverted you and if piety had helped you? For who, reading two historians writing about one thing, ever thought that both or either of them was deceiving or deceived, if one of them said what the other passed over; or if one summarized something more briefly, keeping only the same sense whole and intact, while the other set out everything, as it were, member by member, so as to convey not only what was done but also how it was done? Just as Faustus wanted to slander the truth of the gospels on this ground: that Matthew said something which Luke, when narrating the same thing, omitted to say—as if Luke denied that Christ said what Matthew wrote that he said. On this there was never any question at all, nor can this be objected except by people altogether imprudent and unwilling or unable to consider anything of these matters. But this is indeed commonly inquired about among the faithful and objected by unbelievers, and also by those who are either poorly educated or too contentious, unless they come to their senses when admonished: that Matthew said, “A centurion came to him, asking him and saying,” while Luke says that he sent elders of the Jews to him, asking this very thing about his servant who was sick, that he would heal him; and as he was approaching the house, he sent others through whom he said that he was not worthy that Jesus should enter his house, nor was he himself worthy to come to Jesus. How then, according to Matthew, “did he come to him, asking and saying, ‘My servant lies at home paralysed and is grievously tormented’”? This is understood thus: Matthew briefly summarized the true and complete sense, saying that the centurion came to Jesus, and not saying whether he came in person or through others; and that he said that to him about his servant, not expressing whether he said it in person or through others. What then? Is not human usage full of such expressions, when we say that someone has come very close to something, though we do not yet say that he has arrived? And do we not very commonly speak of the arrival itself—to which nothing, it seems, can be added—as taking place through others, often saying, “He pleaded his case, he got through to the judge,” or, “He got through to this or that powerful man,” when for the most part he does it through friends, without seeing at all the one he is said to have got through to? Hence such men, whoever by the art of ambition reach the somehow inaccessible minds of the powerful, whether in person or through others, are even popularly called “getters-through.” What then? When we read, do we forget how we are accustomed to speak? Or was the Scripture of God going to speak to us otherwise than in our own way? This, then, is what I would answer the stubborn and turbulent from the common usage of speech.

But let those who inquire into these things not contentiously but peaceably and faithfully come to Christ, not in the flesh but in the heart, not by bodily presence but by the power of faith, as that centurion did; then they will better perceive what Matthew said. For to such it is said in the psalm: “Come to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not blush.” Hence that centurion, whose faith he so praised, had come closer to Christ than those very men through whom he sent his words. Similar to this is what the Lord said, “Someone touched me,” when the woman who suffered from a flow of blood touched the fringe of his garment and was made well. For he seemed to his disciples to say this strangely, “Who touched me?” and “Someone touched me,” when the crowd was pressing on him. In fact they answered him: “The crowds are pressing on you, and do you say, ‘Who touched me?’” So, just as they pressed but she touched, so they were sent to Christ, but the centurion came closer. Thus Matthew both kept the custom of a not very unusual expression and conveyed something mystically; while Luke showed how this was actually done, so that from this we might be compelled to notice in what sense Matthew said it. I would like one of these empty men, who slanderously throw such petty questions at the gospel as if they were great ones, to narrate the same thing twice himself—not falsely or deceitfully, but wishing wholly to convey and set it out—and to have his words taken down with the pen and read back to him, to see whether he would not say something more or less, or in a different order, not only of words but even of things; or whether he would not add something of his own sense, as though another had said it, which he had not heard him say but clearly knew he meant and thought; or whether he would not summarize briefly the truth of some sense whose points he had earlier set out more explicitly, as it were; and anything else that can perhaps be grasped by fixed rules, how it comes about that, either in the single narratives of the same thing by two people or in two narratives of one person about one and the same thing, many different things are found, yet none opposed; many varied, yet none contrary. So all those knots are untied with which these wretched men tie their own necks, so as to keep in the spirit of their error within and admit none of salvation from without.

Therefore, after refuting all the slanders of Faustus—at least those of his chapters to which in this work I have replied sufficiently, I think, and at length, as far as the Lord deigned to help me—I briefly admonish you who are held by that so wicked and execrable error: if you want to follow the authority of the Scriptures, which must be preferred to all things, follow that which has come down from the times of Christ’s own presence, through the ministries of the apostles and the sure successions of bishops from their sees, to these times, kept, commended, and made glorious throughout the whole world. For there you will see both the obscure things of the Old Testament revealed and the things foretold fulfilled. But if you are moved by reason, as you claim, first consider who you are, how little fit to comprehend the nature—I will not say of God, but of your own soul—to comprehend it, that is, as you say you wish or have wished, by most certain reason, not by most empty credulity. Since you can by no means do this—for without doubt, as long as you are such as you are, you will in no way be able to—at least think or believe what is naturally implanted in every human mind, provided it is not disturbed by the depravity of perverse opinion: that the nature and substance of God is utterly unchangeable, utterly incorruptible; and at once you will no longer be Manichaeans, so that at some time you may also be Catholics. Amen.