On the Catholic Way of Life and On the Manichaean Way of Life

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.11 · 1.12–1.22 · 1.23–1.30 · 1.31–2.3 · 2.4–2.12 · 2.13–2.15 · 2.16 · 2.17–2.19 · 2.20

1. 1.1Augustine explains that this book answers the two Manichaean lures, their attacks on the Scriptures and their show of chastity, by setting out the catholic teaching on life and morals from both Testaments.
2. 1.2Augustine notes that authority naturally precedes reason, but to meet the Manichaeans on their own terms he will begin with reason.
3. 1.3Everyone wants to be happy, and happiness means loving and possessing what is best for a human being, which must be better than a human being and impossible to lose against one's will.
4. 1.4Without deciding whether a human being is soul and body or soul alone, Augustine argues that a human being's highest good is not the body's highest good.
5. 1.5Since the soul is the body's highest good, a human being's highest good must be whatever makes the soul best, and morals concern the soul.
6. 1.6The soul gains virtue by following something above it, which cannot be a wise man, who can be lost, but only God; following God is living well, and reaching him is living happily.
7. 1.7Reason cannot gaze on God unaided, so God in his providence provides the authority of Scripture and the history of salvation, to which Augustine now submits his own reasoning.
8. 1.8From Christ's command to love God with all one's heart, soul, and mind, and from Paul's words in Romans 8, Augustine concludes that God is the highest good.
9. 1.9Augustine shows that the command to love God and Paul's text on being reckoned as sheep for slaughter both come from the Old Testament, and rebukes the Manichaean claim that such passages are interpolations.
10. 1.10Augustine replies that the catholic Church does not read the Old Testament as describing a repenting, envious, cruel, or bodily God, and that it leads believers from childish to mature understanding of God.
11. 1.11Following God by love is the desire for happiness and reaching him is happiness itself; Augustine explains phrase by phrase why nothing in Rom 8:38–39 can separate us from God's love.
12. 1.12Paul's phrase “any other creature” shows that the mind too is a creature; it becomes like God by humble submission in love, not by proud claims to equality, and must not be drawn from him by love of the sensible world.
13. 1.13Christ is the Power, Wisdom, and Truth of God, to whom we are conformed by love poured out by the Holy Spirit, who, since he restores us to wholeness and is unchangeable, is God and not a creature.
14. 1.14God, the threefold unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the highest good of human beings, and we cleave to him only by love.
15. 1.15Augustine defines the four cardinal virtues, temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence, as forms of the love of God.
16. 1.16Augustine sets Old Testament texts, chiefly from Psalms and the Wisdom of Solomon, beside each New Testament text he has used on love, Christ as Power and Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and the one God.
17. 1.17The God of both Testaments is one; the Manichaeans misuse Scripture's humble and figurative language, while true understanding comes through love, as Christ's “ask, seek, knock” and the Wisdom of Solomon both teach.
18. 1.18Augustine, once a Manichaean hearer himself, urges them to see the harmony of both Testaments in stirring up the love of God, and to listen to catholic teachers as he once listened to them for nine years.
19. 1.19Temperance restrains the desires that turn us from God; it means stripping off the old man, Adam, and putting on the new, as both Paul and the Psalms teach.
20. 1.20Temperance turns love away from visible things, so the Manichaean worship of the sun and moon is not Christian; God alone is to be loved, and the world only used for life's needs.
21. 1.21Temperance also despises popular glory and curious, prideful study of the physical world; the New Testament forbids love of the world, and Ecclesiastes declares all such things vanity, to be used, not loved.
22. 1.22Fortitude is love bearing the loss of all things, including pain and death, which the soul fears because of its attachment to the body; if lovers of gold and pleasure endure so much, lovers of God should endure more.
23. 1.23As examples of patience from the Old Testament, Augustine points to Job, who held his riches lightly, and above all to the mother of the seven martyred sons in 2 Maccabees, strengthened by Scripture's precepts of fortitude.
24. 1.24Justice serves God alone and rules other things rightly; prudence keeps watch against evil creeping in little by little; both Testaments teach both.
25. 1.25Living well is loving God wholly, which the four virtues express; eternal life, the knowledge of God, is the reward of that love, so love and authority must come before knowledge and reason.
26. 1.26Whoever loves God rightly loves himself, and the second commandment, to love one's neighbor as oneself, means bringing one's neighbor to God and doing him no harm, which is the first step toward the love of God.
27. 1.27Love of neighbor cares for the body by works of mercy, which even the untroubled wise man performs and should be called merciful for; God too is called merciful.
28. 1.28Discipline heals the mind by fear and love, the Old Testament stressing fear and the New love; the two great commandments the Manichaeans praise come from the Old Testament, which they therefore cannot consistently reject.
29. 1.29Since Christ says the whole Law and the Prophets hang on the two commandments of love, the Manichaeans cannot dismiss the passage as an interpolation without producing an uncorrupted manuscript, which they never do.
30. 1.30Augustine praises the catholic Church as mother of Christians, who teaches worship of God alone and love of neighbor in every human relationship, wives and husbands, parents and children, slaves and masters, rulers and peoples, and so kindles the fire of divine love.
31. 1.31Against Manichaean boasts of abstinence, Augustine describes catholic hermits and especially the communities of monks and nuns in the East and Egypt, with their common property, manual work, deans and fathers, fasting, and generous almsgiving.
32. 1.32Augustine also praises the many holy bishops, presbyters, and deacons he has known, whose virtue is harder to keep amid the people they must heal.
33. 1.33Augustine describes communities of Christian men and women at Milan and Rome who live by manual work and practice severe fasts, yet, following Paul, never treat food or wine as unclean and make love their rule.
34. 1.34Augustine challenges the Manichaeans to compare their life with that of true catholics, not with nominal Christians, such as those who venerate tombs and pictures or feast over the dead, whom the Church condemns and tries to correct until the final separation.
35. 1.35Augustine answers the Manichaean charge that baptized Christians should not marry, beget children, or own property, citing Paul's words on the body, marriage, and continence in 1 Corinthians 6–7, and closes the first book.
36. 2.1The highest good is God, who exists supremely and unchangeably, so that nothing is contrary to him except not being; Augustine proposes to approach the question step by step.
37. 2.2Asking first what evil is, Augustine argues that evil is what is against nature, a falling away from being toward non-being, so that no nature or substance is evil and God, the author of all natures, is not the author of evil.
38. 2.3If evil is what harms, and harm is loss of good, then in the Manichaean system evil can harm neither the kingdom of darkness, which has no good, nor the kingdom of light, which is inviolable.
39. 2.4Catholic teaching distinguishes God, good by his own nature, from creatures, good by participation and able to fall short; evil is a privation, not an essence, and God is not its author.
40. 2.5If evil is corruption, it exists only in a good substance that it corrupts, so the Manichaean race of darkness, lacking all good, could not be corrupted.
41. 2.6Corruption is not a substance but a falling away from being toward non-being; being means order and unity, and the highest evil would be the non-being toward which corruption tends.
42. 2.7God's goodness orders all failing things, including souls that fall by free choice, so that nothing reaches non-being; Isaiah's “I create evil” means God orders, not makes, what is failing.
43. 2.8Evil is not a substance such as a scorpion's poison but the unsuitability between things, as shown by poison, food, salt, the elements, and even the sun the Manichaeans worship, all helpful in one relation and harmful in another.
44. 2.9Augustine shows that the Manichaean kingdom of darkness, with its five caverns and their animals, as they describe it, is full of goods such as strength, sight, speech, fruitfulness, order, and life, and so cannot be the highest evil.
45. 2.10Augustine examines the Manichaean “three seals” of mouth, hands, and breast, and shows that the division cannot consistently cover all sins.
46. 2.11The Manichaean seal of the mouth forbids blasphemy, yet by calling the soul a part of God they make God corrupted, changed, needy, weak, wretched, and enslaved, worse than any blasphemy; even the laws of number are more inviolable than their God.
47. 2.12Augustine recalls the unanswered question that troubled him as a Manichaean, why God fought the race of darkness if it could not harm him, and refutes two evasions, one of them heard recently at Carthage.
48. 2.13The worth of abstinence depends on its end; Augustine contrasts a frugal man who takes a little lard and wine with a Manichaean Elect who feasts on costly vegetarian delicacies, showing the absurdity of judging holiness by meat and wine alone.
49. 2.14Augustine sets out the whole of Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 to show that Paul's counsel to abstain from meat and wine was for self-restraint, to avoid idol food, and out of love for the weak, not because meat is unclean.
50. 2.15Augustine sets out the Manichaean reason for abstaining from meat: particles of the divine substance, trapped in plants, are freed by the Elect's eating, while meat is the filthy residue left when the divine has escaped.
51. 2.16Augustine ridicules the Manichaean claim that the divine part in plants is detected by color, smell, and taste, shows that time, cooking, and handling often improve food, and exposes the cruelty and absurdity of their food rules, their refusal of bread to beggars, and their forcing of children to eat leftovers.
52. 2.17On the Manichaean seal of the hands, Augustine argues from Christ's cursing of the fig tree and the herd of swine that we share no bond of law with plants and animals, and exposes the cruelty and inconsistency of rules that forbid plucking fruit for a dying man yet let Hearers do the plucking and allow the killing of vermin.
53. 2.18Augustine argues that by treating procreation as worse than intercourse and urging the avoidance of conception, the Manichaeans in effect forbid marriage, as 1 Tim 4:3 foretold, and their doctrine of freeing souls from seeds through eating invites grave suspicion.
54. 2.19Augustine recounts what he saw and heard in his nine years as a Manichaean Hearer at Carthage: Elect breaking their rules, harassing women in the street, an assault at a vigil, mutual accusations of adultery, theater-going, and a teacher who seduced a consecrated virgin and excused himself by Mani's teaching on Adam.
55. 2.20Augustine tells how a wealthy Manichaean Hearer at Rome gathered the Elect into his house under a bishop to live by Mani's rule, until quarrels exposed their crimes and the bishop fled; he concludes that the Manichaeans cannot fairly judge the catholic Church by its worst members.