On the Catholic Way of Life and On the Manichaean Way of Life 2.17–2.19

But now let us come to consider and discuss the seal of the hands. And first, your abstaining from killing animals and from tearing plants Christ shows to be most superstitious: for he judged that we have no fellowship of law with beasts and trees, and both sent demons into a herd of pigs and made the tree on which he had found no fruit wither by his curse. Certainly the pigs had done no wrong, nor had that tree. For we are not so mad as to think that a tree is fruitful or barren by its own will. Nor may you say here that by these deeds our Lord meant to signify something else: for who does not know that? But surely the Son of God ought not to have given a sign by homicide, if killing a tree, as you say, is homicide, or killing animals. For he also gave certain signs concerning human beings, with whom we are certainly joined by a fellowship of law; but by healing them, not by killing them. And he would have done the same with beasts and trees, if he judged that we are joined to them by the same fellowship you suppose. I thought authority should be brought in at this point, because one cannot argue subtly with you about the soul of beasts and about the kind of life by which trees are said to live.

But since you protect yourselves by a kind of privilege, so that you cannot be pressed by the Scriptures, by saying that they are falsified (although you have never said that what I mentioned about the tree and the herd of pigs was inserted by corrupters), still, lest, seeing how much these passages are against you, you should one day want to say the same of them too, I will keep to my purpose, and ask you, great promisers of reason and truth, first, what harm is done to a tree, I do not say if you pluck an apple or a leaf from it (which among you, if anyone does it knowingly and not inadvertently, will without any doubt be condemned as a violator of the seal), but if you pull it up by the roots altogether. For that soul which you think is in trees, and rational at that, is released from its bond when the tree is cut down (you say this yourselves), and from a bond indeed in which it was held in great misery and with no benefit. For it is known that you, that is, your founder himself, usually threaten the transmigration of a human being into a tree as a great punishment, though not the greatest: and can a soul become wiser in a tree, as it can in a human being? For there is a very sure reason for not killing a human being: lest you kill one whose wisdom and virtue are of great benefit to others, or one who might perhaps have attained wisdom, whether admonished by someone from outside or divinely enlightened by inner thoughts. But truth teaches, both by most subtle reason and by authority spread far and wide, that the wiser the soul of a human being is when it leaves the body, the more profitably it leaves it. Therefore whoever fells a tree frees from that body a soul that was making no progress in wisdom. So you, holy men, you, I say, above all ought to cut down trees, and lead their souls, freed from that bond, to better things by your prayers and psalms. Or can this be done only for those souls which you have received into your belly, not those you have helped with your mind?

Although you are forced, I think, into very great straits to admit that the souls of trees make no progress in wisdom as long as they are in trees, when you are asked why an apostle is not sent as teacher to trees too, or why he who labors for human beings does not preach the truth to trees too. Here you are forced to answer that those souls cannot receive divine precepts in such bodies. But you are pressed harder from another side, since you declare that they both hear our voices, and understand our words, and see bodies and the movements of bodies, and even perceive our very thoughts. If this is true, why can they learn nothing from the apostle of light? Or why can they not learn much more easily than we, since they see even the inner workings of the mind? For so that teacher, who, as you say, can hardly teach you by speaking, could instruct them by thinking, since they would see his meaning in his mind before he spoke. But if these things are false, see at last in what error you lie.

And as for your not plucking fruits yourselves and not pulling up plants, but nevertheless ordering your Hearers to pluck and pull them up and bring them to you, so that you may benefit not only those who bring them but also the things that are brought, who that considers it well could tolerate it at all? First, because it makes no difference whether you commit a crime yourself or want it committed by another for your sake. You say you do not want it. How then is help given to that divine part that lies in lettuces and leeks, if no one pulls them up and brings them to the saints to be purified? Then, if you yourself are passing through a field in which, by right of friendship, you are given leave to pluck what you like, and you see a crow about to swoop on a fig, what will you do? Does not the fig itself, according to your opinion, seem to speak to you and pitifully beg you to pluck it yourself and bury it in your wounded belly to be purified and revived, rather than that the crow should devour it and mix it with its deadly body and send it on into other forms to be bound and tortured? What is crueler than you, if this is true? What more inept, if it is false? What more contrary to your discipline, if you break the seal? What more hostile to the member of God, if you keep it? But this is from your false and trifling opinion: for a certain and manifest cruelty is proved to be in you, flowing from the same error. For suppose someone, his body broken by disease, worn out by travel, lies half dead with sickness on the road, able to do no more than speak a few words, and a pear would help to bind his bowels; and he begs you as you pass by to help him, and implores you to bring a fruit from the nearest tree, from which no human law and indeed no true law forbids you, to a man who will die soon if you do not: you, a Christian and holy man, will rather pass by and abandon a man so afflicted and so pleading, lest the tree weep when its fruit is taken, and you be destined for Manichaean punishments as a breaker of the seal. O morals and singular innocence!

But now about the killing of animals I will ask what moves you; and indeed many things of this kind can also be said in this case. For what harm will he do to a wolf's soul who kills a wolf, since that wolf, as long as it lives, will remain a wolf and will obey no preacher so as to refrain a little from the blood of sheep; and since, when the beast is killed, the soul, rational according to you, is freed from that bond of the body? And from this killing you forbid even your Hearers: for it seems greater than in the case of trees. Here I do not much blame your senses, the bodily ones I mean. For we see, and perceive by their cries, that animals die in pain, which a human being disregards in a beast, with which, since it does not have a rational soul, he is joined by no fellowship of law. But I look for those same senses of yours in regard to trees, and I find you quite blind. For, to say nothing of the fact that no sense of pain appears in wood by any movements, what is more plain than that a tree is in its best condition when it is flourishing, when it is in leaf, when it is glad with flowers and rich with fruits? And this is mostly and chiefly given it by pruning. But if it felt the iron as you claim, it would rather waste away, struck by so many and such great wounds, than sprout again from those very places and grow green again with such sure rejoicing.

But why do you think it a greater wickedness to kill animals than to cut plants, when plants seem to you to have a purer soul than flesh? “A kind of compensation is made,” he says, “when some part of what is taken from the fields is given to the Elect and holy to be purified.” This was already refuted above, and it was shown sufficiently, I think, that it can on no grounds be said that there is more of that good part in fruits than in meat. But if someone supports himself by selling meat, and spends all the profit of such business on buying food for your Elect, and brings these saints more food than the farmer and peasant, will he not cry out that by the same compensation he may kill animals? “There is,” he says, “another most secret reason.” For a clever man does not lack a refuge against the unlearned in the obscurity of nature. “For the heavenly princes,” he says, “who were captured and bound from the race of darkness and set in those places by the maker of the world, each possess their own animals on earth, coming from their own kind and stock; and they hold those who kill them guilty, and do not allow them to leave this world, and wear them down with what punishments and tortures they can.” Who of the unlearned would not dread this, and who, seeing nothing in such obscurity, would not think it to be as it is said? But I will not abandon my purpose, in which God will help me, so that obscure lies may be refuted by the plainest truth.

For I ask, if the animals that are on land and in the waters come from that race of princes by succession of offspring and the work of mating, since the origin of those born is traced back to those aborted offspring; I ask, I say, if this is so, whether it is not wicked to kill bees, frogs, and many other things which are born without mating? You say it is wicked. So it is not because of kinship with some princes or other that you forbid your Hearers to kill animals. Or if you say that all bodies share a general kinship, trees too will without doubt belong to the same offense against the princes, and the Hearers have not been commanded to spare them. So we come back to that feeble argument, that the harm the Hearers do to plants is expiated through the fruits they bring to your church. For in this way it may be said that those who slaughter animals in the meat market and sell the meat, if they are your Hearers and bring you their profits after buying fruits, may disregard that daily slaughter, and whatever sin is in it is wiped out by your feasts. And if you say that, as with fruits and vegetables, something had to be brought so that that killing might deserve pardon, and since this cannot be done (for the Elect do not eat meat), the Hearers must refrain from killing animals: what will you answer about thorns and useless weeds, which farmers kill by pulling them up when they clear the fields, and which can provide no food for you? How will such devastation come to pardon, from which there is no food for the saints? Or perhaps whatever sin is committed so that fruits and produce may flourish, you dissolve by eating some of those very fruits and produce? What then if locusts, or mice and shrews, lay waste the fields, as plainly often happens? Will they be killed with impunity by a farmer who is your Hearer, because he sins so that the crops may flourish? Here you are surely hemmed in. For either you grant your Hearers the killing of animals, which your founder would not grant, or you will forbid them even agriculture, which he granted. Although you often even dare to say that a moneylender is more innocent than a peasant; so much friendlier are you to melons than to human beings. For you judge it better that a human being be butchered by usury, so long as they are not harmed. Is this a justice to be sought and proclaimed, or rather a deceit to be cursed and condemned? Is this a memorable mercy, or rather a savagery to be cursed?

What of the fact that you yourselves do not refrain from killing lice, fleas, and bugs? And you think it a great defense of this to say that they are the filth of our bodies. That, first, is plainly false of the flea and the bug. For to whom is it not plain that these animals do not arise from our body? Then, if you abhor mating as violently as you wish to seem to, why do the animals born from our flesh without mating not seem cleaner to you? For although they afterwards breed by mating, they are not first born from our body by our mating. And if whatever is born from living bodies is to be thought most filthy, much more whatever is born from dead ones. So a shrew, or a snake, or a scorpion is killed with more impunity, which we usually hear from you above all are born from human corpses. But I pass over obscure and uncertain things. Of bees, certainly, the report is more widespread that they arise from the carcasses of oxen. So they are killed with impunity. And if this too is doubtful, hardly anyone doubts that beetles arise from dung rolled into a ball and buried by them. You ought, then, to think these animals, and others which it would be long to go through, filthier than your lice; and yet killing them seems wicked to you, and sparing these foolish: unless perhaps you despise them because they are small. Indeed, if it is so, that an animal ought to be the more despised the smaller it is, you must prefer a camel to a human being. Add that gradation which often troubled us when I was listening to you. For there is no reason why a flea should be killed because of the small size of its body, and not also the fly that is born in a bean. And if this one, why not also that somewhat larger one, whose young is certainly smaller than the other. It follows also that a bee may be killed without guilt, whose grub is equal to this fly. From there to the young of the locust and the locust, from there to the young of the mouse and the mouse. And not to be long, do you not see that by these steps one reaches the elephant, so that anyone who does not think the killing of a flea a sin because of its tiny body cannot refuse to admit that he may kill that huge beast without guilt? But I think enough has now been said about trifles of this kind.

There remains the seal of the breast, in which your chastity is very uncertain. For you forbid, not intercourse, but, as the Apostle said long ago, marriage, which is the one honorable defense of such an act. Here I do not doubt that you will cry out and stir up ill will, saying that you strongly commend and praise perfect chastity but do not forbid marriage, since your Hearers, who hold the second rank among you, are not forbidden to marry and have wives. When you have said this loudly and with great indignation, I will question you more gently in this way: are you not the ones who think it a more grievous sin to beget children, because souls are bound in flesh, than intercourse itself? Are you not the ones who used to advise us to observe, as far as possible, the time when a woman, after the purification of her womb, is fit for conception, and to refrain from intercourse at that time, lest a soul be entangled in flesh? From this it follows that you hold one should have a wife not for begetting children but for satisfying lust. But marriage, as the marriage contracts themselves proclaim, joins male and female for the begetting of children: whoever, then, says that begetting children is a more grievous sin than intercourse certainly forbids marriage; and makes the woman no longer a wife but a harlot, who, for certain things given her, is joined to a man to satisfy his lust. For if she is a wife, there is a marriage (matrimonium). But there is no marriage where effort is made that she not be a mother (mater): so she is not a wife. Therefore you forbid marriage, and you cannot defend yourselves by any argument from this charge, which was foretold of you long ago by the Holy Spirit.

Further, since you strive so hard that a soul may not be bound in flesh through intercourse, and assert so strongly that a soul is freed from seeds through the food of the saints, do you not confirm, wretched men, what people suspect of you? For why should it be believed that you wish to free the soul from wheat, beans, lentils, and other seeds when you eat them, and not believed of the seeds of animals? For you cannot say of an animal's seed, as you say of the flesh of a dead animal, that it is unclean because it has no soul: for you hold that in it the soul is bound which will appear in the offspring, and you confess that the soul of Mani himself was entangled in it. And because such seeds cannot be brought to you by your Hearers to be purified, who would not suspect that such a purification takes place secretly among yourselves, and is therefore hidden from them, lest they desert you? If you do not do these things, and I wish it were so, you see nevertheless how open your superstition is to such great suspicion, and how people are not to be blamed for thinking what follows from your profession, when you preach that you free souls from bodies and senses through food and drink. I do not wish to dwell on this longer; and you see how large a field for invective it is. But since the matter is such that speech shrinks from it rather than pursues it, and my purpose can be seen throughout the whole discourse, in which I resolved to exaggerate nothing but to deal, as it were, with bare facts and arguments, let us pass to something else.

It is now clear enough what your three seals are like. These are your morals, this is the end of your admirable precepts, in which nothing is certain, nothing consistent, nothing reasonable, nothing blameless; but everything doubtful, or rather beyond doubt most false, everything contradictory, abominable, absurd. In short, so many and such grave sins are found in these morals that, if anyone of some ability wanted to accuse them all, he could fill a volume with each one at least. If, then, you kept these precepts and fulfilled your profession, nothing would be more inept, more foolish, more ignorant than you; but since you praise and teach these things and do not do them, what more deceitful, more insidious, more malicious than you can be named or found?

For nine whole years I listened to you with great care and diligence; not one of the Elect could become known to me who was not, according to these precepts, either caught in sin or at least subject to suspicion. Many were found with wine and meat, many bathing in the baths. But these things we only heard. Some were proved to have seduced other men's wives, so that I cannot really doubt it. But let this too be rumor rather than fact. I myself saw, not alone, but with others, some of whom have now been freed from that superstition, and some of whom I still hope will be freed; we saw, then, at a crossroads in Carthage, in a very busy street, not one but more than three of the Elect together, walking behind some women or other, neighing after them with such wanton gestures that they surpassed the shamelessness and impudence of all the riffraff. It was plain enough that this came from long habit and that they lived this way among themselves, since none of them was restrained by fear of a companion's presence, which showed that all, or nearly all, were held by the same plague. For they were not from one house, but lived quite apart, and had happened to come down together from the place where all had gathered. We were deeply troubled and complained deeply too. But who thought that this should be punished, I will not say by separation from the church, but even by a severe rebuke in proportion to the greatness of the scandal? And the whole excuse for their impunity was that, at a time when their meetings were forbidden by public law, it was feared that someone who was offended might betray them.

Where, then, is their proclaiming that they will suffer perpetual persecution in this world, and their wanting to be thought the more commendable for it, interpreting it to mean that this world hates them; and their affirming that the truth must therefore be sought among them, because in the promise of the Holy Spirit the Paraclete it was said that this world cannot receive him? This is not the place to discuss that. But certainly, if you are to suffer perpetual persecution until the end of the age, this dissoluteness too, and the unpunished contagion of such great foulness, will be perpetual, as long as you are afraid to offend such people.

This was also the answer given us when we had reported to the leaders themselves that a woman had complained to us that, in a room where she was with other women, feeling safe, no doubt, because of their holiness, several of the Elect came in, the lamp was put out by one of them, and in the dark she was seized by the embrace of one of them, she did not know which, and would have been forced into sin had she not escaped by crying out for help. How much habit must we think this outrage, which we too knew well, came from? And this was done on the night when your solemn vigils are celebrated. But in truth, even if there were no fear of betrayal, who could bring before the bishop for condemnation one who had taken such care not to be recognized? As if the same crime did not involve all who had come in together. For when all were joking wantonly, they had all agreed to put out the lamp.

And what great doors to suspicion were opened, when we found them envious, greedy, most eager for exquisite feasts, very frequent in quarrels, and very easily stirred over trifles! We certainly did not think they could refrain from the things they professed to refrain from, once they found hiding places and darkness. There were two men of quite good reputation, of ready talent, and leaders in their disputations, more closely and familiarly attached to us than the rest. One of them, who was bound to us more closely also by liberal studies, is now said to be a presbyter there. These two were bitterly jealous of each other, and one charged the other, not by open accusation but by talk wherever he could and by whispers, with having violently assaulted the wife of a certain Hearer. The other, clearing himself, meanwhile accused to us another of the Elect of the same crime, who was living at that same Hearer's house as a most trusted friend; and since he had come in suddenly and caught him with the woman, he said that that enemy and rival had advised the woman and the adulterer to concoct this slander against himself, so that if he revealed anything he would not be believed. We were distressed and bore it very hard that, even if it was uncertain about the woman's having been assaulted, there was nevertheless a most bitter envy in those two, than whom we found none better there, and it forced us to conjecture other things.

Finally, we very often found in the theaters some of the Elect, grave both in age and, as it seemed, in morals, together with an old presbyter. I pass over the young men, whom we used to catch even quarreling over actors and charioteers; which is no slight proof of how they could restrain themselves in secret, when they could not overcome that desire which exposes them to the eyes of their Hearers and betrays them blushing and running away. Or would that great scandal of that saint too, to whose disputations we used to flock in the street of the fig-sellers, have been exposed, if he had been able to make a consecrated virgin merely a woman and not also pregnant? But the growing womb did not allow that hidden and incredible evil to be concealed. When her mother revealed it to her young brother, he, though grieving most bitterly, was held back from public accusation by the name of religion; but he brought it about that the man was expelled from that church (for no one could bear this); and so that the matter might not go wholly unpunished, he resolved, with some friends he gathered, to beat the man with fists and heels. And as he was being severely beaten, the man cried out that they should spare him on the authority of Mani, saying that Adam, the first hero, had sinned and after his sin been holier.

For this is your opinion about Adam and Eve: it is a long fable, but I will touch on as much of it as suffices for the present. You say that Adam was begotten by his parents, those aborted princes of darkness, in such a way that he had the greatest part of light in his soul and a very small part of the opposing race. And although he lived holily because of the overflowing abundance of good, that opposing part was nevertheless stirred in him, so that he was turned to intercourse: so he fell and sinned, but afterwards lived more holily. Here I do not complain about that worthless man, who by a wicked violation brought another's family to such disgrace and infamy under the garb of an Elect and holy man. I do not charge this against you. Let it be the act of a most abandoned man rather than of your custom. For I accuse not you of so great a crime, but him. But this I do not know how it can be borne and tolerated in all of you: that while you say the soul is a part of God, you assert nevertheless that, when even a little evil is mixed in, its greater abundance and richness is overcome. For who, believing this, would not, when lust beats at him, take refuge in such a defense rather than in bridling and suppressing that lust?