On the Catholic Way of Life and On the Manichaean Way of Life 1.23–1.30

Why, then, should I collect here the authorities of the New Testament, where it is said, “Tribulation works patience, patience approval, approval hope,” and not only said but proved and confirmed by the examples of those who said it? I will rather call up an example of patience from the Old Testament, against which they rage so furiously. I will not mention that man by whom, amid great tortures of the body and a horrible wasting of the limbs, human things were not only borne but divine things even discussed. In each of his words it shines out clearly enough, if one attends with a fair mind, how little those things are to be valued which, when men wish to hold them by mastery, rather hold them by desire, so that they become slaves of mortal things while they ignorantly desire to be their masters. For he lost all his riches, and, suddenly made the poorest of men, kept his mind so unshaken and fixed on God as to show clearly that they had not been great to him, but he to them, and God great to him. If the people of our time could be of this mind, we would not be so strongly forbidden in the New Testament to possess these things in order to be perfect. For it is much more wonderful not to cling to them though you possess them than not to possess them at all. But since we are now dealing with bearing pain and the tortures of the body, I leave this man, great though he was, unconquered though he was, yet a man. For those Scriptures present to me a woman of astonishing fortitude, and compel me to pass to her now. She, with her seven children, gave up all her inward parts to the tyrant and executioner sooner than one sacrilegious word; by her exhortation her sons were strengthened, in whose limbs she herself was tortured, though she was to bear in her own person too what she had urged them to bear. What, I ask, can be added to such patience? Yet what wonder is it if the love of God, conceived in her very marrow, resisted the tyrant, the executioner, pain, the body, her sex, and her affection? Had she not heard, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints”? Had she not heard, “A patient man is better than the strongest”? Had she not heard, “Whatever is brought upon you, accept it; and in pain endure, and in your humiliation be patient: for gold and silver are tried in the fire”? Had she not heard, “The furnace tries the potter's vessels, and the trial of tribulation tries just men”? Indeed she had taken in both these and many others, the divine precepts of fortitude written by the one Holy Spirit of God in those books, which alone existed then, as in these of the New Testament.

What of the justice that concerns God? When the Lord says, “You cannot serve two masters,” and the Apostle rebukes those who serve the creature rather than the Creator, was it not said earlier in the Old Testament, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve”? But what need is there to say more on this, when everything there is full of such statements? Justice, then, will give this rule of life to the lover we are speaking of: that he serve most willingly God whom he loves, that is, the highest good, the highest wisdom, the highest peace; and that, as for all other things, he rule some as subject to him and take charge of others as to be subjected. This rule of living, as we have shown, is confirmed by the authority of both Testaments.

Nor need we discuss prudence at length, to which belongs discerning what is to be sought and what avoided. If it is lacking, none of the things already spoken of can be achieved. Its part is to keep watch with most careful vigilance, lest we be deceived by evil persuasion creeping in little by little. That is why the Lord often cries, “Watch,” and says, “Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” And again it is said, “Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the whole lump?” And what can be brought from the Old Testament more plainly against this drowsiness of the mind, through which we do not perceive destruction creeping on as it were bit by bit, than what was said by the prophet: “He who despises small things will fall little by little”? On this statement, if it suited us in our haste, I would discourse at great length; and if the task we have now undertaken demanded it, we might perhaps show how deep are the mysteries which most ignorant and sacrilegious men mock, and so are no longer falling little by little but going headlong in a great fall.

What more should I say about morals? For if God is the highest good of a human being, which you cannot deny, it surely follows, since to seek the highest good is to live well, that to live well is nothing other than to love God with all the heart, all the soul, all the mind; from which it comes about that love is kept incorrupt and whole for him, which belongs to temperance; that it is broken by no hardships, which belongs to fortitude; that it serves no other, which belongs to justice; that it keeps watch in discerning things lest deceit or guile creep in little by little, which belongs to prudence. This is the one perfection of a human being, by which alone he succeeds in enjoying the purity of truth: this both Testaments sing to us in harmony, this is urged on us from both sides. Why do you still slander the Scriptures, of which you know nothing? Do you not know with what ignorance you attack books which only those find fault with who do not understand them, and only those cannot understand who find fault with them? For no enemy is allowed to know them, and no one can be anything but a friend to them once they are known. Let us, then, love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind, all of us who have resolved to come to eternal life. For eternal life is the whole reward, in whose promise we rejoice; and the reward cannot come before the merits and be given to a person before he is worthy. For what would be more unjust than this, and what is more just than God? We ought not, then, to demand the reward before we deserve to receive it. Here perhaps it may not unfittingly be asked what eternal life itself is. But let us rather hear its giver: “This is eternal life,” he says, “that they know you, the true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.” Eternal life, then, is the very knowledge of truth. See, then, how perverse and preposterous are those who think they hand on the knowledge of God to make us perfect, when it is itself the reward of the perfect. What then must be done, what, I ask, but that we first love with full charity him whom we want to know? Hence arises what we have been urging from the beginning, that nothing is more wholesome in the catholic Church than that authority should precede reason.

But let us look at the rest; for nothing seems to have been said about the human being himself, that is, about the lover himself; but whoever thinks this understands too dimly. For it cannot be that one who loves God does not love himself; indeed, only one who loves God knows how to love himself. For he loves himself enough who works diligently to enjoy the highest and true good; and if this is nothing other than God, as what has been said has taught, who can hesitate to say that one who is a lover of God loves himself? Then is there to be no bond of love among human beings themselves? On the contrary, so much so that no surer step toward the love of God can be believed possible than the love of one human being for another. Let the Lord himself, then, bring out for us the second commandment, when he was asked about the commandments of life; for he was not content with one, since he knew that God is one thing and man another, and that the difference between them is as great as between him who created and what was created in the likeness of the Creator. He says, then, that the second commandment is: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And you love yourself healthily if you love God more than yourself. What you do for yourself, then, must be done for your neighbor: that is, that he too may love God with perfect love. For you do not love him as yourself if you do not strive to bring him to the good toward which you yourself are striving. For that is the one good which does not become too narrow for all who strive toward it with you. From this commandment arise the duties of human society, in which it is hard not to go wrong. But first of all we must be benevolent, that is, use no malice and no deceit against any human being. For what is closer to a human being than a human being? Hear also what Paul says: “Love of neighbor,” he says, “works no evil.” I use very short testimonies, but, unless I am mistaken, suitable ones, which suffice for the matter undertaken; for who does not know how many words, and of what weight, are spread everywhere through those books about love of neighbor? But since one sins against a human being in two ways, one if he is harmed, the other if he is not helped when one can help, and these are the very things for which people are called wicked, and the one who loves does neither, this statement, I think, shows well enough what we want: “Love of neighbor works no evil.” And if we cannot come to good things unless we cease to work evil, this is as it were the cradle of the love of God, the love by which we love our neighbor; so that, since love of neighbor works no evil, we may climb from there to what was said: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good.” But somehow these either rise together to fullness and perfection, or the love of God begins first, and the love of neighbor is perfected first. For perhaps the divine love seizes us more quickly at the beginning, but we perfect lesser things more easily. However that may be, this above all must be held: let no one think that, despising his neighbor, he will come to happiness and to the God he loves. And would that, as it is easy for one well formed and kindly to love his neighbor, it were as easy either to help him or to do him no harm! For good will is not enough for these things, but there is need of great reason and prudence, which no one can use unless God, the fount of all goods, grants it. On this matter, which I think very difficult, we shall try to say a few things in keeping with the work undertaken, placing all our hope in him whose gifts alone these are.

A human being, then, as he appears to a human being, is a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body. One who loves his neighbor, therefore, does good partly to the body and partly to the soul of a human being. What concerns the body is called medicine; what concerns the soul, discipline. By medicine I now mean whatever in any way preserves or restores the health of the body. To it belong, then, not only what is supplied by the art of those properly called physicians, but also food and drink, clothing and shelter, and in short every defense and protection by which our body is kept safe even against blows and accidents from outside: for hunger, thirst, cold, heat, and whatever is grievously inflicted from outside do not allow the health we are now speaking of to remain. Therefore those who dutifully and humanely supply all the things by which such evils and hardships are resisted are called merciful, even if they are so wise that they are no longer disturbed by any pain of mind. For who does not know that mercy (misericordia) is so called because it makes the heart (cor) wretched (miserum) as it grieves at another's evil? And who would not grant that the wise man must be free from all wretchedness when he helps the needy, when he gives food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, when he clothes the naked, when he takes the stranger under his roof, when he frees the oppressed, when finally he extends his kindness even to the burial of the dead? Even if he does this with a tranquil mind, not stirred by any stings of pain but led by the duty of goodness, he is still to be called merciful. The name does him no harm, since the wretchedness is absent. But fools, when they avoid mercy as a vice, because they cannot be moved enough by duty unless they are also stirred by disturbance, are rather frozen stiff with inhumanity than made serene by the tranquility of reason. So, much more wisely, God himself too is called merciful; how this is said remains to be understood by those who have shown themselves fit by devotion and study; lest, by using the words of the learned ineptly, we make the souls of the unlearned harden by avoiding mercy rather than soften by seeking kindness. And just as mercy commands us to drive these hardships away from a human being, so innocence forbids us to inflict them.

As for discipline, by which health is restored to the mind itself (and without it the health of the body is of no avail for driving away miseries), it is a very difficult matter indeed. And just as we said that in the body it is one thing to cure diseases and wounds, which few people can do well, and another to relieve hunger and thirst and the other things in which anyone is commonly allowed to help another, so in the mind there are some things in which that excellent and rare mastery is not much needed, as when we exhort and admonish that the very things we said must be supplied to the body be given to the needy. For when we do these things, we help the body by our aid; when we teach that they be done, we help the mind by discipline. But there are other things by which the many and varied diseases of minds are healed by a great and altogether ineffable method; and unless this medicine were sent to the peoples from God, there would be no hope of salvation, since they sin with such unrestrained progress; although even bodily medicine, if you trace things back to their origin, cannot be found to have come to human beings from any source but God, to whom the stability and health of all things must be ascribed. This discipline, however, which we are now discussing, which is the medicine of the mind, is divided, as far as can be gathered from the divine Scriptures themselves, into two parts: restraint and instruction. Restraint is accomplished by fear, instruction by love; I mean of the one who is helped by discipline, for the one who helps has nothing of these two but love. In these two, God himself, by whose goodness and mercy it comes about that we exist at all, has given us the rule of discipline in two Testaments, the Old and the New. For although both are in both, fear predominates in the Old and love in the New; what is there called servitude is here proclaimed by the apostles as freedom. Of the wonderful order and divine harmony of these Testaments it would take very long to speak, and many devout and learned men have spoken of it. The matter demands many books, so that it may be explained and proclaimed as it deserves, as far as a human being can. One who loves his neighbor, then, works as far as he can that he may be sound in body and sound in mind; but care for the body is to be referred to the health of the mind. So, as concerns the mind, he works by these steps: that his neighbor may first fear God, then love him. These are the best morals, through which there comes to us also the very knowledge of the truth to which we are carried with all eagerness.

And in these two things I agree with the Manichaeans, that is, that we should love God and our neighbor; but they deny that this is contained in the Old Testament. How much they err in this is sufficiently clear, I think, from the statements of both that we brought forward above. Yet, to say something brief, but such that to resist it is sheer madness: do they not notice how very perversely they deny that these very two things, which they are compelled to praise, were brought forward by the Lord in the Gospel from the Old Testament, where it is written, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and that other, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? Or, if they do not dare to deny this, for they are pressed by the light of truth, let them dare to deny that these precepts are wholesome; let them deny, if they can, that the best morals are contained in them, and let them say that God ought not to be loved, that one's neighbor ought not to be loved, that all things do not work together for good for those who love God, and that love of neighbor does not refrain from working evil; though by these two human life is most wholesomely and excellently ordered. If they say these things, then they have nothing in common not only with Christians but even with human beings. But if they dare not say them, and are compelled to confess that they are divine, why do they not cease to attack and condemn with wicked impiety the books from which they were brought forward? Or will they say that it does not follow that everything is good there where we could find these things? For this is what they usually say. What I should answer to this evasion, and how I should meet it, I do not easily see. Shall I examine every single word of the Old Testament, to show the obstinate and unlearned that in them there is perfect harmony with the Gospel? But when will that be? When shall I be equal to it, or when will they bear it? What then shall I do? Shall I abandon the case and let them hide in an opinion that is wicked and false, yet hard to refute? I will not: God himself, whose precepts these are, will be at hand to help me, and will not let me be helpless and abandoned in such straits.

So give me your attention, Manichaeans, those of you who are perhaps held by that superstition in such a way that you may someday escape. Give me your attention, I say, without obstinacy, without eagerness to resist: for otherwise your judging will be most ruinous to you. Certainly no one doubts, and you are not so turned away from the truth as not to understand, that if loving God and neighbor is good, which no one can question, then whatever hangs on these two commandments cannot justly be found fault with. And what hangs on them, it is ridiculous if you think you should ask me; hear Christ himself, hear Christ, I say, hear the Wisdom of God: “On these two commandments,” he says, “the whole Law hangs, and all the Prophets.” What can the most shameless obstinacy say here? That Christ did not say this? These words of his are written in the Gospel. That the writing is false? What more impious than this sacrilege can be found? What more shameless than such a claim? What bolder? What more wicked? The worshipers of idols, who hate even the name of Christ, never dared to say this against those Scriptures. For the utter overthrow of all literature and the abolition of all books committed to memory would follow, if what is strengthened by the devotion of so many peoples and confirmed by such agreement of men and ages is brought into such doubt that it cannot have even the credibility and weight of an ordinary history. Finally, what could you bring forward from any writings where I may not use this very claim, if it is brought against my reasoning and purpose? And who could bear it that they forbid us to believe books most widely known and already established in everyone's hands, and command us to believe those which they themselves bring forward? If any writing is to be doubted, which more than one that has not deserved to be spread abroad, or that could falsely claim another's name for the whole of it? If you thrust it on me against my will, and force me into belief by heaping up such authority, shall I doubt, poor wretch, the one I see most widely spread with constancy and fortified by the witness of the churches dispersed through the whole world, and, what is more wretched, doubt it on your authority? Even if you brought forward other copies, I ought not to hold to any but those commended by the agreement of the greater number; but now, when you bring forward nothing to compare except an utterly empty claim full of rashness, will you think the human race so perverse and so deserted by the help of divine providence that it will prefer to those Scriptures, not other Scriptures brought forward by you to refute them, but merely your words? For you must bring forward another manuscript containing the same things, but uncorrupted and truer, in which only those things are missing that you accuse of being inserted into this one. For example, if you contend that Paul's letter written to the Romans is corrupted, bring forward another that is uncorrupted, or rather another manuscript in which the same letter of the same Apostle is written pure and uncorrupted. “I will not,” you say, “lest I be thought to have corrupted it myself”: for this is what you usually say; and you are right: people of even moderate sense will suspect nothing else if you do it. See, then, what you yourself have judged of your own authority; and understand whether people ought to believe your words against those Scriptures, if it is great rashness to believe a manuscript for this reason alone, that it is brought forward by you.

But why say more on this? For who does not see that those who dare to say such things against the Christian Scriptures, even if they are not what people suspect, are certainly not Christians? For to Christians this form of life has been given: that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and then our neighbor as ourselves; for on these two commandments the whole Law hangs, and all the Prophets. Rightly, catholic Church, truest mother of Christians, you not only proclaim that God himself, whose attainment is the happiest life, is to be worshiped most purely and chastely, bringing in no creature for us to adore, which we should be commanded to serve; and excluding from that incorrupt and inviolable eternity, to which alone a human being must be subject and by cleaving to which alone the rational soul is not wretched, everything that has been made, everything liable to change, everything subject to time; neither confusing what eternity, what truth, what peace itself distinguishes, nor again separating what one majesty joins; but you also embrace the love and charity of neighbor in such a way that with you every medicine is powerful for the various diseases with which souls are sick for their sins.

You train and teach children childlike, young men with vigor, old men with calm, as befits the age not only of each one's body but also of his mind. You subject wives to their husbands in chaste and faithful obedience, not to satisfy lust but to bring forth offspring and to share the household. You set husbands over their wives, not to make sport of the weaker sex, but by the laws of sincere love. You bind sons to their parents in a kind of free servitude, and set parents over their sons in a devoted rule. You join brothers to brothers by a bond of religion firmer and closer than that of blood. You bind every relationship of kin and every tie of marriage alliance with mutual love, while keeping the bonds of nature and of choice. You teach slaves to cleave to their masters not so much from the necessity of their condition as from delight in duty. You make masters gentle toward their slaves out of regard for the supreme God, their common Lord, and more inclined to provide for them than to coerce them. You join citizens to citizens, nations to nations, and indeed all human beings, by the remembrance of their first parents, not only in society but in a kind of brotherhood. You teach kings to look after their peoples; you admonish peoples to submit to their kings. You teach carefully to whom honor is due, to whom affection, to whom reverence, to whom fear, to whom consolation, to whom admonition, to whom exhortation, to whom discipline, to whom rebuke, to whom punishment; showing how not all things are owed to all, but love is owed to all, and injury to none.

And when this human love has nourished and strengthened the mind clinging to your breasts, and made it fit to follow God, when his majesty has begun to reveal itself as far as suffices for a human being while he dwells on this earth, such ardor of love is born and such a fire of divine love rises up that, all vices burned away and the human being purified and sanctified, it becomes plain enough how divinely it was said, “I am a consuming fire,” and, “I came to cast fire on the earth.” These two sayings of the one God, marked in the two Testaments, declare with harmonious witness the sanctification of the soul, so that there may someday come to pass what was likewise taken into the New Scripture from the Old: “Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your contention?” If these heretics could understand this one thing, they would surely worship God nowhere but with you and in your bosom, not proud at all and at peace. Rightly with you the divine precepts are kept far and wide. Rightly with you it is well understood how much more grievous it is to sin against a known law than an unknown one. For “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law,” by which the awareness of a despised command strikes and kills more grievously. Rightly with you it has been seen how vain is work under the law, when lust lays waste the mind and is held back by fear of punishment, not overwhelmed by love of virtue. Rightly you have so many who are hospitable, so many who are dutiful, so many who are merciful, so many who are learned, so many who are chaste, so many who are holy, so many burning so with the love of God that in the highest self-control and an incredible contempt for this world even solitude delights them.