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

In other books, I think, we have done enough to show how we can meet the attacks of the Manichaeans, which they launch ignorantly and impiously against the Law, that is, the so-called Old Testament, while they parade themselves with empty boasting amid the applause of the ignorant; and I can briefly recall it here too. For who of even moderately sound mind would not readily understand that the explanation of the Scriptures must be sought from those who profess to be their teachers; and that it can happen, indeed always does happen, that many things seem absurd to the untaught which, when explained by the more learned, seem all the more praiseworthy, and are received with all the more delight once opened, the harder they were to open while closed? This is generally what happens with the holy books of the Old Testament, provided that one who takes offense at them seeks a devout teacher of them rather than an impious mangler, and is filled with the eagerness of one who inquires before the rashness of one who finds fault. Nor, if in his desire to learn these things he happens to meet some bishops or presbyters, or prelates and ministers of the catholic Church of any kind, who either take care not to lay bare the mysteries indiscriminately, or, content with simple faith, have not troubled to learn deeper things, should he despair of finding the knowledge of the truth there, where neither can all who are asked teach, nor are all who ask worthy to learn. So both diligence and devotion must be applied: by the one we shall find people who know; by the other we shall deserve to know.

But the Manichaeans have two chief lures by which the unwary are deceived into wanting them as teachers: one, when they find fault with the Scriptures, which they either misunderstand or want to be misunderstood; the other, when they display the appearance of a chaste life and remarkable self-control. This book, therefore, will contain our view of life and morals, in keeping with catholic teaching; and in it, perhaps, it will be understood how easy it is to feign virtue and how hard to have it. I will certainly keep this measure, if I can: not to attack their diseases, which are very well known to me, as fiercely as they attack what they do not know; for I want them healed, if it can be done, rather than fought. And I will take from the Scriptures testimonies which they must believe, namely from the New Testament; yet from it I will bring forward nothing of what they are accustomed to say was interpolated when they are hard pressed, but I will cite what they are compelled both to approve and to praise. Nor will I leave any statement of the apostolic teaching that I bring forward as a witness without setting beside it a similar one from the Old Testament; so that, if they can at last wake up, lay aside the obstinacy of their dreams, and aspire to the light of Christian faith, they may notice both how far from Christian is the life they parade, and how truly the Scripture they mangle is Christ's.

Where then shall I begin? With authority, or with reason? The order of nature is such that when we learn anything, authority comes before reason. For a reason may seem weak which, after it has been given, takes on authority afterwards to confirm it. But because the minds of men, darkened by long familiarity with the shadows in which they are veiled in the night of sins and vices, cannot fix a fitting gaze on the clearness and purity of reason, it has been arranged most wholesomely that authority, shaded as it were by the boughs of humanity, should lead the faltering eye into the light of truth. But since we are dealing with people who think, speak, and act against order in everything, and who say nothing more insistently than that reason must be given first, I will humor them and take up a method which I admit is faulty in argument. For I delight in imitating, as far as I can, the gentleness of my Lord Jesus Christ, who clothed himself even with the evil of death itself, of which he wished to strip us.

Let us then inquire by reason how a human being ought to live. We certainly all want to live happily; and there is no one in the human race who does not assent to this statement even before it is fully uttered. But in my judgment no one can be called happy who does not have what he loves, whatever it may be; nor one who has what he loves if it is harmful; nor one who does not love what he has, even if it is the best. For one who desires what he cannot obtain is tormented; one who has obtained what ought not to be desired is deceived; and one who does not desire what ought to be obtained is sick. None of these things happens to the mind without misery; and misery and happiness do not usually dwell together in one person: so none of these is happy. A fourth case remains, as I see it, where the happy life can be found: when that which is best for a human being is both loved and possessed. For what else is it that we call enjoying, but having at hand what you love? And no one is happy who does not enjoy what is best for a human being; nor is anyone who enjoys it not happy. Our best, then, must be at hand for us if we intend to live happily.

It follows that we should ask what is best for a human being; and that certainly cannot be inferior to the human being himself. For whoever follows what is inferior to himself becomes inferior himself. But every human being ought to follow what is best. Therefore what is best for a human being is not inferior to a human being. Will it perhaps be something such as the human being himself is? Let it be so indeed, if there is nothing better than a human being which he can enjoy. But if we find something that is both more excellent than a human being and can be at hand for the person who loves it, who would doubt that, to be happy, a human being must strive toward that which is plainly superior to the very one who strives? For if being happy is having attained a good beyond which there is nothing greater, which is what we call the best, how can anyone who has not yet attained his highest good be included in that definition? Or how is it highest, if there is something better that we can attain? If this is so, then, it must be such that one does not lose it against one's will. For no one can be confident about a good which he senses can be snatched from him, even if he wishes to keep and embrace it. And whoever is not confident about the good he enjoys, how can he be happy in such fear of losing it?

Let us ask, then, what is better than a human being. This is certainly hard to find unless we first consider and examine what a human being himself is. I do not think I must now be asked for a definition of man. What seems to me rather to need asking here, since almost everyone agrees, or at least, which is enough, it is agreed between me and those with whom I am now dealing, that we are composed of soul and body, is this: what is the human being himself? Is he both of the things I have named, or only the body, or only the soul? For although there are two things, soul and body, and neither would be called a human being if the other did not exist (for the body would not be a human being if there were no soul, nor again would the soul be a human being if a body were not animated by it), yet it may be that one of them is both regarded as and called a human being. What then do we call a human being? Soul and body, like a pair of horses or a centaur? Or the body only, as being at the service of the soul that rules it, as we call a lamp not the flame and the vessel together but the vessel alone, though on account of the flame? Or do we call nothing else a human being than the soul, but on account of the body it rules, as we call a horseman not the horse and the man together but the man alone, yet because he is fitted to ruling the horse? It is hard to settle this controversy; or, if it is easy by reason, it is long to explain in words; and there is no need to undertake and endure that labor and delay. For whether both, or the soul alone, bears the name of man, what is best for the body is not what is best for the human being; but what is best either for body and soul together or for the soul alone, that is the best for the human being.

If we ask what is best for the body, sound reason compels us to admit that it is that through which the body is in the best condition. But of all the things that give vigor to the body, nothing is better or more excellent than the soul. So the highest good of the body is not its pleasure, not freedom from pain, not strength, not beauty, not swiftness, nor anything else usually counted among the goods of the body, but simply the soul. For by its presence the soul supplies the body with all the things just mentioned, and with what surpasses them all, life. Hence the soul does not seem to me to be the highest good of a human being, whether we call the human being soul and body together or the soul alone. For just as reason found the highest good of the body to be what is better than the body and supplies it with vigor and life, so, whether a human being is body and soul or the soul by itself, we must find whether there is anything that is above the soul itself which, when the soul follows it, makes the soul as good as it can be in its kind. If we can find it, that will certainly be what, setting aside all evasions, is rightly and deservedly to be called the highest good of a human being. Or if the human being is the body, I cannot deny that the best for a human being is the soul itself. But certainly when we are dealing with morals, when we ask what manner of life must be held to so that we can obtain happiness, it is not to the body that precepts are given, and it is not the body's training that must be investigated. In short, good conduct will be the work of that part of us which inquires and learns; and these belong to the soul: so when we strive to obtain virtue, the question is not about the body. And if it follows, as it does, that the body itself, when it is ruled by a soul possessed of virtue, is ruled much better and more honorably, and is in the best condition when the soul that rules itself by a just law is at its best, then what makes the soul best will be the best for the human being, even if we call the body the human being. If my charioteer, obeying me, feeds and manages most suitably the horses in his charge, and himself enjoys my generosity the more obedient he is to me, can anyone deny that not only the charioteer's good condition but also the horses' is owed to me? So whether the human being is only body, or only soul, or both, the chief thing to be sought, it seems to me, is what makes the soul best: for once that is grasped, a human being cannot fail to be either in the best condition, or at least in a much better condition than if this one thing were lacking.

No one will doubt that virtue makes the soul best. But it may very properly be asked whether this virtue can exist even by itself, or only in a soul. Here again arises a very deep question needing a very long discussion; but perhaps I can make good use of a shortcut, and I hope God will be with us, so that, as far as our weakness allows, we may teach about such great matters not only clearly but also briefly. For whichever it is, whether virtue can exist by itself without a soul or can exist only in a soul, beyond doubt the soul follows something in order to attain virtue; this will be either the soul itself, or virtue, or some third thing. But if the soul follows itself in order to acquire virtue, it follows something foolish; for it is foolish before it has acquired virtue. Now the highest wish of those who follow is to reach what each follows. So either the soul will wish not to reach what it follows, than which nothing more absurd or perverse can be said; or, when in its folly it follows itself, it reaches the very folly it shuns. But if it follows virtue, desiring to reach it, how does it follow what does not exist? Or how does it desire to reach what it has? So either virtue exists apart from the soul; or, if one prefers not to call anything virtue except the habit itself and, as it were, the quality of the wise soul, which can exist only in a soul, the soul must follow something else so that virtue may be born in it; for neither by following nothing nor by following folly can it, as far as my reason shows, attain wisdom. This other thing, then, by following which the soul becomes possessed of virtue and wisdom, is either a wise man or God. But it was said above that it must be something we cannot lose against our will. Who would hesitate to think that a wise man, if we were content to follow him, can be taken from us not only when we are unwilling but even when we resist? It remains, then, that it is God: if we follow him, we live well; if we reach him, we live not only well but happily. As for those who deny that he exists, why should I consider with what argument they are to be persuaded, when I do not know whether one should talk with them at all? Even if it seems right, however, a quite different beginning, method, and approach must be taken from the one we have undertaken now. Now my business is with those who do not deny that God exists, and who moreover admit that human affairs are not neglected by him. For I think no one holds to any form of religion who does not believe at least that our souls are cared for by divine providence.

But how do we follow one whom we do not see? Or how do we see, we who are not only human beings but foolish human beings? For although he is perceived not with the eyes but with the mind, what mind can be found fit, while it is covered by the cloud of folly, to drink in that light, or even to try? We must take refuge, then, in the precepts of those who were probably wise. This far reason could be brought. For it moved among human things, not more certain of the truth, but more secure through familiarity. But when it came to divine things, it turned away: it cannot gaze, it trembles, it is in turmoil, it gapes with love, it is beaten back by the light of truth, and turns back to the familiarity of its own darkness, not by choice but by exhaustion. How much is it to be feared here, how much dreaded, that the soul may contract greater weakness there where, worn out, it seeks rest! So, when we long to flee back into the darkness, let that shade of authority meet us, through the dispensation of the ineffable Wisdom, and let it soothe us with wonderful deeds and the words of books, as with gentler signs and shadows of the truth. What more could have been done for our salvation? What more beneficent, what more generous, can be said of divine providence, which did not wholly abandon man when he fell from its laws and, through desire for mortal things, justly and deservedly propagated a mortal offspring? For that most just power has, in wonderful and incomprehensible ways, through certain most secret successions of the things it created and which serve it, both the severity to punish and the mercy to set free. How beautiful this is, how great, how worthy of God, and finally how true, which is what we are seeking, we shall never be able to understand unless, beginning from human and near things, keeping the faith and precepts of the true religion, we do not abandon the way which God has fortified for us by the setting apart of the patriarchs, the bond of the Law, the foretelling of the prophets, the mystery of the Man assumed, the testimony of the apostles, the blood of the martyrs, and the winning of the nations. Therefore from now on let no one ask me for my own opinion, but let us rather listen to the oracles, and submit our petty reasonings to the divine utterances.

Let us see how the Lord himself in the Gospel has taught us to live, and how the apostle Paul has too; for they do not dare to condemn these Scriptures. Let us hear, then, O Christ, what end of goods you prescribe for us; and there is no doubt that the end will be that toward which you bid us strive with the highest love. “You shall love,” he says, “the Lord your God.” Tell me also, I beg you, what is the measure of loving; for I fear to be inflamed with desire and love for my Lord more or less than I ought. “With all your heart,” he says. That is not enough. “With all your soul.” Not even that is enough. “With all your mind.” What more do you want? I might perhaps want more, if I saw what more there could be. What does Paul say to this? “We know,” he says, “that for those who love God all things work together for good.” Let him also state the measure of love. “Who then,” he says, “shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? Or distress? Or persecution? Or famine? Or nakedness? Or danger? Or the sword?” We have heard what we ought to love and how much we ought to love it: toward this we must strive with all our might, and to this all our plans must be referred. The end of goods for us is God. God is for us the highest good. We must neither stay below it nor seek beyond it: the one is dangerous, the other is nothing.

Come now, let us investigate, or rather let us notice, for it is at hand and very easily seen, whether the authority of the Old Testament also agrees with these statements brought from the Gospel and the Apostle. What shall I say of the first statement, when it is plain to all that it was drawn from the law given through Moses? For there 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 as for what the Apostle said, so that I need not search longer for something from the Old Testament to compare with it, he added it himself. For when he had said that no tribulation, no distress, no persecution, no want of bodily needs, no danger, no sword separates us from the love of Christ, he at once went on: “As it is written, ‘For your sake we are afflicted all the day long; we are reckoned as sheep for the slaughter.’” They are accustomed to say that this was inserted by corrupters of the Scriptures; so completely have they nothing to say against it that we are forced, poor men, to answer such things. But who does not understand that men who have been refuted could have no other last word? I ask them, however, whether they deny that this statement is in the Old Testament, or affirm that it does not agree with the apostle's statement. The first I will show from the books; in the second, as they twist about and flee over precipices, I will either call them back to peace, if they are willing to look back a little and consider what was said, or I will pursue them with the understanding of others who judge without partisanship. For what can be more harmonious than the agreement of these statements? Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, all grievously afflict a person set in this life. All these words, then, are summed up in that one testimony of the old Law, in which it is said, “For your sake we are afflicted.” The sword remained, which does not bring a life of hardship but takes away the life it finds. To this, then, corresponds, “We are reckoned as sheep for the slaughter.” And love itself could not be signified more expressly than by the words, “For your sake.” Suppose, then, that this testimony had not been found in the apostle Paul but brought forward by me. What would you have to show, heretic, except either that it is not written in the old Law or that it does not suit the Apostle? And if you dare say neither (for you are pressed, since the book is read in which it is plain that it is written, and people understand that nothing could suit what the Apostle said better), why then do you think there is any force in your daring to accuse the Scriptures of being corrupted? Finally, what will you answer someone who says to you: “This is how I understand it, this is how I take it, this is what I believe; and I read those books for no other reason than that I see everything in them in harmony with the Christian faith”? Say rather, if you dare and intend to speak against me, that one must not believe what is said of the apostles and martyrs, that they suffered grievous hardships for Christ's sake, that they were reckoned by their persecutors as sheep for the slaughter. If you cannot say this, why do you quibble about the book in which I find what you admit I ought to believe?

Or do you say that you grant indeed that God is to be loved, but not that God whom those worship who accept the authority of the Old Testament? Then you say that the God who made heaven and earth is not to be worshiped. For he is proclaimed throughout every part of those volumes; and you admit that this whole world, which is signified by the name of heaven and earth, has God as its author and maker, and a good God. For we must speak with you with a qualification whenever God is named, since you hold that there are two gods, one good and the other evil. But if you say that you worship and think worthy of worship the God by whom the world was made, but that he is not the one whom the authority of the Old Testament commends, you act shamelessly, trying in vain to misinterpret another's mind and meaning, which we have received rightly and profitably. For your foolish and impious disputations can in no way be compared with the discourses of devout and most learned men, through whom in the catholic Church those Scriptures are opened to those who are willing and worthy. The Law and the Prophets are understood by us quite otherwise than you think. Stop erring: we do not worship a God who repents, nor an envious one, nor a needy one, nor a cruel one, nor one who seeks pleasure from the blood of men or cattle, nor one who is pleased by shameful deeds and crimes, nor one who limits his possession to some little patch of earth. For against these and similar trifles you are accustomed to declaim weightily and at length. So your invective does not touch us; but you tear at certain old wives' or even children's opinions, with speech that is the more inept the more vehement it is. Whoever is moved by it and goes over to you does not condemn the teaching of our Church but shows that he does not know it.

Therefore, if you have anything humane in your hearts, if you care at all for yourselves, inquire rather diligently and devoutly how these things are said. Inquire, wretched men: for a faith by which anything unfitting to God is believed we condemn more vehemently and more fully than you; and in those things which have been said, when they are understood as the letter sounds, we both correct simplicity and laugh at obstinacy. And many other things which you cannot understand the catholic teaching forbids those to believe who, going beyond a certain childhood of mind, not in years but in study and understanding, are advanced to the white hairs of wisdom. For it teaches how foolish it is to believe that God is contained in some place, however infinite, by any extents of quantity; and it holds it wicked to think that he himself or any part of him moves and passes from place to place. And if anyone should think that anything of his substance and nature can suffer change or alteration in any way, he will be condemned for extraordinary madness and impiety. So it happens that among us there are found some children who think of God in human form and suppose he is so, than which opinion nothing is lower; but there are also found many old men who see with the mind itself that his majesty abides inviolable and unchangeable, not only above the human body but even above the mind itself. These ages, as has already been said, are to be distinguished not by time but by virtue and prudence. Among you, on the other hand, no one indeed is found who describes the substance of God by the shape of a human body; but again, no one who separates it from the stain of human error. So those whom, as it were still crying infants, the breasts of the catholic Church sustain, if they are not carried off by heretics, are nourished each according to his capacity and strength, and are led on, one in this way and another in that, first to the perfect man, and then they come to the maturity and white hairs of wisdom, so that they may live as they wish, and live most happily.

Following God, then, is the desire for happiness; reaching him is happiness itself. We follow him by loving; and we reach him not when we become entirely what he is, but when we come near him and touch him in a wonderful and intelligible way, and are thoroughly lit up and embraced by his truth and holiness. For he is light itself; and it is granted to us to be lit up by him. The greatest thing, then, that leads to the happy life, and the first commandment, is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind.” For “for those who love God all things work together for good.” Hence the same Paul says a little later: “I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor power, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” If, then, for those who love God all things work together for good, and no one doubts that the highest good, which is also called the best, is not only to be loved but to be loved so that we ought to love nothing more, and this is what is signified and expressed by the words, “with all your soul, and with all your heart, and with all your mind,” who, I ask, would doubt, once all this is established and most firmly believed, that nothing else is best for us, to obtain which we must hasten, putting all else after it, but God? Again, if nothing separates us from his love, what can be not only better but also more certain than this good?

But let us look briefly at each item. No one separates us from it by threatening death. For that by which we love God cannot die except while it does not love God, since death itself is not to love God, which is nothing other than to prefer anything to him in loving and following. No one separates us from it by promising life: for no one separates us from the spring itself by promising water. An angel does not separate us: for no angel is more powerful than our mind when we cleave to God. Power does not separate us: for if the power named here is one that has some authority in this world, the mind that cleaves to God is far higher than the whole world. But if the power meant is the most right disposition of our own mind, then if it is in another, it helps us to be joined to God; if it is in us, it joins us itself. Present troubles do not separate us: for we feel them the lighter, the more closely we cleave to him from whom they strive to separate us. The promise of things to come does not separate us: for God promises more surely whatever good is to come, and nothing is better than God himself, who is surely present already to those who cleave to him rightly. Height and depth do not separate us: for if these words perhaps mean the height or depth of knowledge, I will not be curious, lest I be cut off from God; nor does anyone's teaching separate me from him by dispelling error, as it were, since no one would err at all unless he were separated from him. But if the heights and depths of this world are meant, who could promise me heaven so that I would be cut off from the maker of heaven? Or what hell could terrify me into deserting God, when, had I never deserted him, I would know nothing of hell? Finally, what place will tear me from his love, when he would not be wholly everywhere if he were contained in any place?

“Nor,” he says, “will any other creature separate us.” O man of the deepest mysteries! He was not content to say “creature,” but said “any other creature,” reminding us that the very thing by which we love God and cleave to God, that is, the soul and mind, is itself a creature. The other creature, then, is the body; and if the mind is an intelligible thing, that is, one known only by understanding, the other creature is everything sensible, that is, everything that offers some knowledge of itself through the eyes, or ears, or smell, or taste, or touch; and this must be inferior to what is grasped by understanding alone. Since, then, God too can be known to worthy minds only through understanding, though he is more excellent than the very mind by which he is understood, being its creator and author, there was a danger that the human mind, because it is counted among invisible and intelligible things, might think itself to be of the same nature as he who created it, and so fall away through pride from him to whom it ought to be joined by love. For it becomes like God, as far as is granted it, when it submits itself to him to be enlightened and illumined by him. And if it draws nearest to him by this submission by which it becomes like him, it must become far from him by the presumption by which it wants to be more like him. It is this that refuses to obey the laws of God, when it desires to be its own master as God is. So the further it departs from God, not in place but in affection and desire for things lower than itself, the more it is filled with folly and misery. By love, then, it returns to God, a love by which it seeks not to set itself alongside him but to place itself beneath him. The more earnestly and zealously it does this, the happier and the more exalted it will be, and with him alone as master, most free. Therefore it must know that it is a creature. It must believe that its creator remains always, as he is, in the inviolable and unchangeable nature of truth and wisdom, and must confess that folly and falsehood can befall itself, if only because of the errors from which it longs to be freed. But again it must beware lest it be separated from the love of God himself, by which it is sanctified so as to remain most happy, by love of the other creature, that is, of this sensible world. No other creature, then, since we ourselves too are a creature, separates us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let the same Paul tell us who this Christ Jesus our Lord is. “To those who are called,” he says, “we preach Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God.” And does not Christ himself say, “I am the Truth”? If, then, we ask what it is to live well, that is, to strive toward happiness by living well, it will surely be to love Power, to love Wisdom, to love Truth, and to love them with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the mind: Power that is inviolable and unconquered, Wisdom that no folly replaces, Truth that knows no change and no being otherwise than as it always is. Through this the Father himself is seen; for it was said, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” To this we cleave by sanctification. For when we are sanctified we burn with a full and complete love, which alone makes us not turn away from God and be conformed to him rather than to this world: for, as the same Apostle says, “He predestined us to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Through love, then, we are conformed to God, and being conformed and shaped by him, and cut off from this world, we are not confused with the things that ought to be subject to us. And this is done by the Holy Spirit. For “hope,” he says, “does not put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” But we could in no way be restored to wholeness by the Holy Spirit unless he himself remained always whole and unchangeable. This he certainly could not do unless he were of the nature and very substance of God, to whom alone belongs unchangeableness and, so to speak, unalterability always. For the creature, not I but the same Paul cries out, “was subjected to futility.” And what is subject to futility cannot separate us from futility and join us to truth. But the Holy Spirit does this for us: therefore he is not a creature. For everything that exists is either God or a creature.

We ought therefore to love God, a certain threefold unity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, which I will call nothing other than Being itself. For he is truly and supremely God, “from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things”: these are Paul's words. What does he add next? “To him be glory.” Most precisely put. For he does not say “to them”: for God is one. And what is “to him be glory,” but the best, highest, and most widespread renown to him? For the better and more widely he is made known, the more ardently he is loved and cherished. And when this happens, the human race advances with sure and steady step to the best and happiest life. I do not think that, when the question is about morals and life, we need inquire further what the highest good of a human being is, to which everything must be referred. For it has been made plain, both by reason as far as we were able, and by the divine authority which surpasses our reason, that it is nothing other than God himself. For what will be the best for a human being but that to cleave to which is happiest? And that is God alone, to whom we certainly cannot cleave except by love, affection, and charity.

And if virtue leads us to the happy life, I would affirm that virtue is nothing at all but the highest love of God. For what is called the fourfold division of virtue is so called, as far as I understand, from different dispositions of this same love. So I would not hesitate to define those four virtues (would that their force were in all minds as their names are in all mouths!) as follows: temperance is love giving itself wholly to what is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of what is loved; justice is love serving only what is loved, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love wisely choosing between what helps it and what hinders it. But this love, we have said, is not of just anything, but of God, that is, of the highest good, the highest wisdom, and the highest harmony. So we may also define them thus: temperance is love keeping itself whole and incorrupt for God; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for God's sake; justice is love serving God alone, and therefore ruling well all else that is subject to a human being; prudence is love discerning well what helps it toward God from what can hinder it.

What manner of life follows from each of these virtues I will explain in a few words, once I have first set beside the testimonies of the New Testament, which I have been using for some time, matching ones from the Old as well, as I promised. Is it only Paul who says that we must be joined to God so that there is nothing between to separate us? Does not the prophet too express this most aptly and briefly when he says, “But for me it is good to cleave to God”? Is not what is said there at great length about love contained here in the one word “cleave”? And again, does not his addition, “it is good,” look back to what is set down there, “For those who love God all things work together for good”? So in one short sentence and two words the prophet shows both the force and the fruit of love. And since it is said there that the Son of God is the Power and Wisdom of God, and power is understood to belong to action, wisdom to teaching (which is why both are marked in the Gospel when it says, “All things were made through him,” for this belongs to action and power, and then, as concerns teaching and the knowledge of the truth, “And the life,” it says, “was the light of men”), could anything agree more with these testimonies of the New Testament than what is said of wisdom in the Old: “She reaches mightily from end to end, and orders all things sweetly”? For “reaching mightily” signifies rather power, while “ordering sweetly” signifies, as it were, skill itself and reason. But if this seems obscure, see what follows: “And the Lord of all,” it says, “loved her: for she is the teacher of the knowledge of God, and the chooser of his works.” Here nothing seems to be said of action; for choosing works is not the same as working: so these words belong to teaching; work is owed to power, so that the statement we wish to prove may be complete. Read, then, what is joined next. “And if,” it says, “a possession desired in life is honorable, what is more honorable than wisdom, which works all things?” Could anything more splendid, or plainer, or indeed richer be brought forward? Hear another text, if you think this too little, which says the same: “For wisdom teaches sobriety,” it says, “and justice and power.” Sobriety seems to me to belong to the knowledge of the truth itself, that is, to teaching; justice and power to action and working. And with these two, that is, effectiveness in acting and sobriety in contemplating, which the Power of God and the Wisdom of God, that is, the Son of God, gives to those who love him, I do not know what can be compared, since the same prophet at once says how highly they are to be valued; for it is set down thus: “For wisdom teaches sobriety and justice and power, than which nothing in life is more useful for human beings.”

Someone may perhaps think these things were not said of the Son of God. What else, then, is shown by the words, “She glorifies her noble birth, having fellowship with God”? Does noble birth usually mean anything other than parents? And does not fellowship proclaim and assert equality with the Father himself? Then, since Paul says that the Son of God is the Wisdom of God, and the Lord himself says, “No one knows the Father except the only-begotten Son,” what could the prophet have said more fittingly than what is said: “And with you is Wisdom, who knows your works, who was present when you made the world, and knew what would be pleasing in your eyes”? And as for Christ's being the truth, which is shown also when he is called the brightness of the Father (for there is nothing around the sun but the very brightness it begets), what could agree with this statement more openly and clearly from the Old Testament than the words, “Your truth is round about you”? Finally, Wisdom itself says in the Gospel, “No one comes to the Father except through me”; the prophet says, “Who then knows your mind, unless you give wisdom?” and a little later, “And men learned what pleases you, and were healed through wisdom.” Paul says, “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”; the prophet says, “For the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee deceit.” For where there is deceit there is no love. Paul says that we are “to be conformed to the image of the Son of God”; the prophet says, “The light of your countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord.” Paul shows that the Holy Spirit is God and therefore not a creature; the prophet says, “And you sent your Holy Spirit from the heights.” For God alone is the highest, than whom nothing is higher. Paul shows that this Trinity is one God when he says, “To him be glory”; it is said in the Old Testament, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God.”

What more do you want? Why do you rage so ignorantly and impiously? Why do you pervert untaught souls by harmful persuasion? The God of both Testaments is one. For as these passages which we have set down from each agree with one another, so do the rest, if you are willing to consider them carefully and with fair judgment. But because many things are said in a humbler way, more suited to minds that creep on the ground, so that they may rise through human things to divine, and many things are said figuratively, so that the eager mind may be exercised more profitably by searching and rejoice more richly in finding, you abuse this wonderful arrangement of the Holy Spirit to deceive and ensnare your hearers. Why divine providence allows you to do this, and how very truly the Apostle said, “There must be many heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you,” would take long to discuss, and, I must tell you, it is not for you to understand these things. I know you well enough. You bring minds altogether gross, and sick from the poisonous diet of bodily images, to judge divine things, which are far higher than you think. So with you the way to proceed now is not that you should already understand them, which cannot be, but that you should someday desire to understand. For this is done by the simple and pure love of God, which is seen most of all in conduct, of which we have already said much: a love which, breathed in by the Holy Spirit, leads to the Son, that is, to the Wisdom of God, through whom the Father himself is known. For if wisdom and truth are not desired with all the strength of the mind, they cannot be found at all. But if they are sought as they deserve, they cannot withdraw and hide themselves from those who love them. Hence that saying which you too are accustomed to have on your lips: “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed.” By love one asks, by love one seeks, by love one knocks, by love it is revealed, and by love, finally, one abides in what has been revealed. From this love of wisdom and diligence in seeking we are not deterred by the Old Testament, as you always most falsely say, but are most vehemently spurred on to them. So listen at last, and consider, I beg you, without obstinacy what is said by the prophet: “Wisdom is radiant,” he says, “and never fades, and is easily seen by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her: she goes before those who desire her, to show herself to them. Whoever keeps watch for her will not toil, for he will find her sitting at his doors. For to think of her is perfect understanding, and whoever keeps watch for her sake will soon be free from care: for she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and shows herself to them cheerfully in the ways, and meets them with all providence. For her truest beginning is the desire for discipline. The care of discipline, then, is love; and love is the keeping of her laws; and the keeping of the laws is the confirmation of incorruption; and incorruption makes one near to God. So the desire for wisdom leads to the kingdom.” Will you still bark against these things? Do they not, set down thus and not yet understood, show anyone that they contain something deep and ineffable? Oh, if only you could understand what has been said! At once you would throw away all the nonsense of your fables and the empty imaginings of bodies, and with great eagerness, sincere love, and firmest faith you would hide yourselves safe in the most holy bosom of the catholic Church.

I could, according to my modest ability, discuss each point, and draw out and show what I have received, things whose excellence and depth words for the most part fail to reach; but as long as you bark, it must not be done. For it was not said in vain, “Do not give what is holy to dogs.” Do not be angry. I too barked and was a dog, when I was rightly dealt with not with the food of teaching but with the cudgels of refutation. But if there were in you the love that we are now discussing, or even if it is there someday, as much as the greatness of knowing the truth requires, God will be present to show you that the Christian faith, which leads to the highest summit of wisdom and truth, to enjoy which is nothing else than to live happily, is neither among the Manichaeans nor anywhere except in the catholic teaching. For what else does the apostle Paul seem to wish, when he says: “For this reason I bend my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you according to the riches of his glory strength, to be strengthened through the Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell through faith in your hearts; that, being rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the height and length and breadth and depth, to know also the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God”? Can anything be said more plainly? I beg you, wake up a little, see the harmony of both Testaments, which shows and teaches clearly enough what the manner of life in conduct is, and to what all things are to be referred. The Gospels stir up the love of God when it is said, “Ask, seek, knock”; Paul stirs it up by saying, “That, being rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend”; the prophet stirs it up too when he says that wisdom can easily be known by those who love her, seek her, desire her, keep watch for her, think of her, care for her. The health of the soul and the way of happiness are shown by the concord of both Scriptures; and you prefer to bark against these things rather than to obey them. I will say briefly what I think: listen to the learned men of the catholic Church with as much peace of mind and with the same wish with which I listened to you; there will be no need of the nine years in which you made a fool of me. In far, far shorter time you will see the difference between truth and emptiness.

But it is time to return to those four virtues, and to draw out and derive from each of them the manner of living. So let us first look at temperance, which promises us a certain wholeness and incorruption of that love by which we are bound to God. Its office is to restrain and calm the desires by which we gape after the things that turn us away from the laws of God and from the fruit of his goodness, which is, to put it briefly, the happy life. For there is the seat of truth; enjoying the contemplation of it and cleaving to it closely, we are beyond doubt happy; but those who fall away from it are entangled in great errors and sorrows. For, as the Apostle says, “the root of all evils is greed, which some have followed and made shipwreck of the faith, and have pierced themselves with many sorrows.” And this sin of the soul is quite plainly signified in the Old Testament, for those who understand rightly, by the transgression of the very man who was in paradise. “For in Adam we all die,” as the same Apostle says, “and in Christ we shall all rise again.” O deep mysteries! But I will restrain myself: for I have undertaken not to teach you what is right now, but to unteach you what is wrong, if I can, that is, if God favors my purpose toward you. Paul, then, says that the root of all evils is greed, through which the old Law also shows that the first man fell. Paul exhorts us to strip off the old man and put on the new. By the old man he wants us to understand Adam who sinned; by the new, the one whom the Son of God took on in the mystery for our deliverance. For he says in another place, “The first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man from heaven, heavenly. As was the earthly, so are those who are earthly; and as is the heavenly, so are those who are heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us also bear the image of the heavenly”; that is, strip off the old and put on the new. The whole office of temperance, then, is to strip off the old man and be renewed in God; that is, to despise all bodily allurements and popular praise, and to turn all our love to invisible and divine things. Hence follows that wonderful saying, “Though our outer man is wasting away, yet the inner is being renewed day by day.” Hear also the prophet singing, “Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” What can be said against this agreement except by blind barkers?

The allurements of the body lie in all those things that the bodily sense touches, which some also call sensible things; among them this common light is most prominent, because among our senses, too, which the soul uses through the body, nothing is to be preferred to the eyes; and therefore in the holy Scriptures all sensible things are signified by the name of visible things. So in the New Testament we are forbidden to love them in this way: “Not looking,” he says, “at the things that are seen, but at those that are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporal, but those that are not seen are eternal.” From this it can be understood how far from Christian are those who think that the sun and moon are not only to be loved but even worshiped. For what do we see, if we do not see the sun and moon? But we are forbidden to turn to the things that are seen. So these too must not be loved by one who intends to offer that incorrupt love to God. But I will have another place to inquire into these things more carefully. For I have set out to speak now not of faith but of life, through which we deserve to know what we believe. God alone, then, is to be loved; and this whole world, that is, all sensible things, is to be despised, though they are to be used for the needs of this life.

Popular glory is thus rejected and despised in the New Testament: “If I wished to please men,” he says, “I would not be a servant of Christ.” There is also something else which the soul conceives about bodies through certain images, and calls the knowledge of things. Hence we are rightly forbidden also to be curious, and that is a great office of temperance. Hence the saying: “Beware lest anyone lead you astray through philosophy.” And because the very name of philosophy, if one considers it, signifies a great thing and one to be sought with the whole mind, since philosophy is the love and pursuit of wisdom, the Apostle very carefully, so as not to seem to deter us from the love of wisdom, added, “and the elements of this world.” For there are some who, abandoning the virtues, and not knowing what God is, and how great is the majesty of the nature that remains always the same, think they are doing something great if they investigate with the greatest curiosity and intensity this whole bodily mass which we call the world. From this, too, such pride is born that they seem to themselves to dwell in the very heaven about which they often dispute. Let the soul, then, restrain itself from the desire for this kind of empty knowledge, if it has resolved to keep itself chaste for God. For by such a love it is generally deceived, so that it either thinks nothing exists but body, or, even if moved by authority it admits that something incorporeal exists, it still cannot think of it except through bodily images, and believes it to be such as the deceptive sense of the body imposes. To this also applies the command to beware of idols.

To this authority of the New Testament, then, by which we are commanded to love nothing of this world, especially in the statement where it is said, “Do not be conformed to this world” (for at the same time it is to be shown that each person is conformed to the thing he loves), to this authority, then, if I ask what I may compare from the Old Testament, I find many things indeed; but one book of Solomon, called Ecclesiastes, brings all these things into utter contempt at very great length. For it begins thus: “Vanity of the vain, said the Preacher, vanity of the vain, and all is vanity. What gain has a man in all his labor which he labors under the sun?” If all these words are attended to, weighed, and examined, many things are found very necessary for those who desire to flee this world and take refuge in God; but it is a long task, and my discourse hastens elsewhere. Yet with this beginning laid down, he goes through everything to show that those who are deceived by such things are the vain, calling the very thing by which they are deceived vanity; not that God did not create these things, but because by their sins human beings choose to subject themselves to things which by the divine law are subject to them when they act rightly. For what else is it to be mocked and deceived by false goods than to think things inferior to yourself worth admiring and desiring? The temperate man, then, has in such mortal and fleeting things a rule of life confirmed by both Testaments: to love none of them, to think none of them desirable for its own sake, but to take of them as much as suffices for the needs of this life and its duties, with the moderation of one who uses, not the affection of one who loves. Let this be said of temperance, briefly for the greatness of the subject, but perhaps at more length than was fitting for the work undertaken.

Not much needs to be said about fortitude. For that love of which we speak, which must be set on fire toward God with all holiness, is called temperance in not desiring these things, fortitude in losing them. But among all the things possessed in this life, the body is the heaviest bond for a human being, by the most just laws of God, on account of the ancient sin, than which nothing is better known for preaching and nothing more hidden for understanding. This bond, lest it be shaken and harassed, disturbs the soul with the fear of toil and pain; lest it be taken away and destroyed, with the fear of death. For the soul loves it by force of habit, not understanding that, if it uses it well and wisely, its resurrection and renewal will, by divine power and law, be subject to its rule without any trouble. But when the soul turns wholly to God with this love, knowing these things, it will not only despise death but even desire it. Yet a great struggle with pain remains. But nothing is so hard and iron that it is not conquered by the fire of love. When the soul is carried away by it to God, it will fly free above every torture, on wondrous wings, most beautiful and unimpaired, on which chaste love rises to the embrace of God. Unless indeed God will allow lovers of gold, lovers of praise, lovers of women, to be braver than those who love him, though that is not love but would more fittingly be called desire or lust. Yet in it one sees how great is the drive of the mind, pressing with untiring course through every enormity toward the things it loves; and it is a proof to us how much must be borne so as not to desert God, if such men bear so much to desert him.

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.

What is it, I ask, that those see who cannot help loving a human being and yet can do without seeing a human being? Surely that, whatever it is, is more excellent than human things, by the contemplation of which a human being can live without human beings. Now hear, Manichaeans, the morals and singular self-control of perfect Christians, to whom the highest chastity has seemed not only praiseworthy but something to be taken up; so that, if you have any shame, you may not dare to boast shamelessly before the minds of the ignorant, as if of a most difficult abstinence. And I will not speak of things you do not know, but of things you hide from us. For who does not know that a multitude of Christians of the highest self-control is spreading more and more every day through the whole world, and most of all in the East and in Egypt, which cannot be hidden from you at all?

I will say nothing of those I mentioned a little before, who, withdrawn utterly from all human sight, live in the most deserted lands, content with bread alone, brought to them at fixed intervals, and water; enjoying converse with God, to whom they have cleaved with pure minds, and most happy in the contemplation of his beauty, which cannot be perceived except by the understanding of the saints. I will say nothing of these, I repeat: for they seem to some to have abandoned human affairs more than they should, since these do not understand how much their minds help us in their prayers, and their lives as an example, though we are not allowed to see their bodies. But to argue this would be long and superfluous, I think: for how can our speech make anyone see this so lofty summit of holiness who does not by himself think it worthy of wonder and honor? These boasters need only be reminded that the temperance and self-control of the holiest Christians of the catholic faith has advanced so far that to some it seems as if it should be restrained and called back, as it were, within human limits; so far, even those who dislike it judge, have their minds risen above human beings.

But if this goes beyond what we can bear, who would not admire and proclaim those who, having despised and abandoned the allurements of this world, are gathered into a common life most chaste and most holy, and spend their lives together, living in prayers, in readings, in discussions; puffed up by no pride, disturbed by no obstinacy, livid with no envy; but modest, reverent, peaceful, offering to him from whom they have deserved the power to do these things a most harmonious life, wholly intent on God, as a most pleasing gift? No one possesses anything of his own, no one is a burden to anyone. They work with their hands at things by which the body can be fed and the mind not hindered from God. They hand over their work to those they call deans, because they are set over ten, so that no care for his body touches any of them, neither in food, nor in clothing, nor in anything else needed for daily necessity or for illness, which often comes. Those deans, arranging everything with great care, and providing at once whatever that life requires because of the weakness of the body, themselves also give account to one, whom they call father. These fathers, not only most holy in conduct but also most excellent in divine teaching, lofty in every way, take counsel without any pride for those they call sons, with great authority on their part in commanding and great willingness on the others' part in obeying. At the end of the day they gather, each from his own dwelling, while still fasting, to hear that father; and at least three thousand men gather to each father, for even many more live under one. They listen with incredible eagerness, in deepest silence, showing the feelings of their minds, as the speaker's words have moved them, by groans, or tears, or a modest joy free of all clamor. Then the body is refreshed, as much as suffices for health and soundness, each one restraining desire, lest it pour itself out even on the scanty and very cheap things provided. So they abstain not only from meat and wine, as far as suffices to tame the passions, but also from those things which provoke the appetite of belly and throat the more as they seem to some to be cleaner, as it were; under which name a shameful desire for exquisite foods, foreign to meat, is usually defended ridiculously and shamefully. Whatever is left over beyond necessary food (and much is left over from the work of their hands and the restraint of their meals) is distributed to the needy with greater care than it was acquired by those who distribute it. For they take no trouble at all to have abundance for themselves, but do everything so that what is left over does not stay with them, so much so that they even send ships loaded with it to places inhabited by the poor. There is no need to say more about a thing so well known.

This is also the life of women who serve God anxiously and chastely, who, separated and removed in their dwellings as far as is fitting from the men, are joined to them only by devout love and imitation of virtue. No young men have access to them, nor even the oldest men, however grave and well proved, except as far as the entrance, to supply the things they need. For they exercise and support the body by working wool, and hand over the clothes themselves to the brothers, receiving from them in return what they need for food. If I wished to praise these morals, this life, this order, this way of living, I could not do it worthily, and I fear I might seem to judge that, set out simply by itself, it could not please, if I thought the tragic buskin of the eulogist should be added to the plainness of the narrator. Find fault with these things, Manichaeans, if you can. Do not parade our tares before blind people who cannot discern.

Yet the excellent morals of the catholic Church are not so narrowly confined that I think the life of those alone whom I have mentioned is to be praised. For how many bishops have I known, most excellent and most holy men, how many presbyters, how many deacons, and ministers of the divine sacraments of every kind, whose virtue seems to me the more wonderful and the more worthy of praise, the harder it is to preserve it amid the manifold kinds of people and in this more turbulent life! For they preside over people not so much healed as needing healing. The vices of the multitude must be endured in order to be cured, and the plague must be borne before it can be stilled. It is very hard here to keep the best manner of life and a peaceful and tranquil mind. For, to explain briefly, the monks live where one learns to live, the clergy where one lives.

Nor would I on that account despise a praiseworthy kind of Christians, namely those who live in cities, far removed from ordinary life. I myself saw at Milan a lodging of holy men, not a few, over whom one presbyter presided, an excellent and most learned man. At Rome too I knew of several, in each of which one man, outstanding in gravity, prudence, and divine knowledge, presides over the others living with him, who live in Christian love, holiness, and freedom: they too are a burden to no one, but, after the custom of the East and on the authority of the apostle Paul, support themselves with their own hands. I learned that many practice fasts that are quite incredible, not refreshing the body once a day toward night, which is everywhere most common, but very often going three days in a row or more without food and drink. And this not only among men but also among women; many widows and virgins also live together and seek their living by wool and weaving, and over each house presides one woman, most grave and well proved, skilled and ready not only in forming and ordering morals but also in instructing minds.

And amid all this no one is pressed into hardships he cannot bear, nothing is imposed on anyone that he refuses, nor is he condemned by the rest because he confesses himself too weak to imitate them: for they remember how much love is commended in all the Scriptures; they remember, “To the pure all things are pure,” and, “Not what goes into your mouth defiles you, but what comes out.” So all their effort is spent, not on rejecting kinds of food as polluted, but on subduing desire and keeping love among the brothers. They remember: “Food is for the belly and the belly for food; but God will destroy both the one and the other”; and elsewhere, “Neither if we eat shall we have more, nor if we do not eat shall we have less”; and above all that saying, “It is good, brothers, not to eat meat nor to drink wine, nor anything by which your brother is offended.” For here he shows how all these things must be directed to the end of love. “For one believes he may eat all things; but let him who is weak,” he says, “eat vegetables. Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat; and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats; for God has received him. Who are you to judge another's servant? To his own Lord he stands or falls; and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand.” And a little later: “He who eats, eats to the Lord, and gives thanks to God; and he who does not eat, to the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God.” And again in what follows: “So each of us will give account for himself. Let us therefore no longer judge one another; but judge this rather, not to put a stumbling block or occasion of offense before a brother. I know and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean through him; but to him who thinks anything unclean, to him it is unclean.” Could he have shown more plainly that it is not in the things we eat but in the mind that there is a power able to defile it; and that therefore even those who are fit to despise these things, and know for certain that they are not polluted if they take any food with loftiness of mind and without shameful desire, must still look to love? See what follows: “For if your brother is grieved because of food, you are no longer walking according to love.” Read the rest, for it is long to insert it all; and you will find the precept that those who can despise these things, that is, the stronger and more secure, must nevertheless abstain, lest those be offended who because of their weakness still need such abstinence.

These things the people I was speaking of know and hold: for they are Christians, not heretics; they understand the Scriptures according to the apostolic teaching, not according to the proud and invented name of an apostle. No one despises him who does not eat, no one judges him who eats; he who is weak eats vegetables. Yet many who are strong do the same for the sake of the weak; for many the reason for doing so is not this, but that they like to live on cheaper food and to lead a very tranquil life with the least costly support for the body. “For all things are lawful for me,” he says, “but I will not be brought under the power of anything.” So many do not eat meat, yet do not superstitiously think it unclean. Accordingly, the very same people who abstain when healthy take it without any fear when sick, if their health requires. Many do not drink wine, yet do not think they are defiled by it: for they have it given most kindly and modestly to some who are weaker, and to all who cannot keep their bodily health without it. And they admonish as brothers some who foolishly refuse it, lest by vain superstition they become weaker sooner than holier. They read to them the Apostle commanding his disciple to take a little wine for his frequent ailments. So they practice godliness diligently; but bodily exercise, as the same Apostle says, they know is of little value. Those who can, then, and they are countless, abstain from meat and wine for two reasons: either for the weakness of the brothers or for their own freedom. Love above all is kept; to love their food, to love their speech, to love their dress, to love their looks are fitted; they come together and conspire into one love; to violate it is held as wicked as to violate God; whatever resists it is fought down and cast out; whatever offends it is not allowed to last a single day. They know that it has been so commended by Christ and the apostles that, if it alone is lacking, all things are empty; if it is present, all things are full.

Resist these, Manichaeans, if you can; look at these, name these, if you dare, without lying, and with insult if you like: compare your fasts with their fasts, your chastity with their chastity, your dress with their dress, your meals with their meals, your modesty with their modesty, your love with their love, and, what the matter chiefly demands, your precepts with their precepts. Then you will see the difference between show and sincerity, between the right way and error, between faith and deceit, between strength and swelling, between happiness and misery, between unity and division, and finally between the sirens of superstition and the harbor of religion. Do not gather for me those who profess the Christian name but neither know nor show the force of their profession. Do not hunt out the crowds of the ignorant, who either are superstitious even in the true religion itself, or are so given to their lusts that they have forgotten what they promised God. I know there are many worshipers of tombs and pictures; I know there are many who drink most luxuriously over the dead, and, offering feasts to corpses, bury themselves over the buried and count their gluttony and drunkenness as religion. I know there are many who have renounced this world in words, yet wish to be weighed down by all the burdens of this world and rejoice to be so weighed down. Nor is it surprising that in so great a multitude of peoples you do not lack people whose blameworthy lives you can use to deceive the unwary and turn them away from catholic salvation; while in your own small numbers you are in great straits when you are asked for even one of those you call the Elect who keeps those very precepts you defend with irrational superstition. But how vain those precepts are, how harmful, how sacrilegious, and how they are not observed by a great part of you, indeed by almost all of you, I have undertaken to show in another volume.

Now I admonish you to cease at last to slander the catholic Church by finding fault with the morals of people whom she herself condemns, and whom she daily strives to correct as bad children. Whoever of them are corrected by good will and the help of God recover by repentance what they had lost by sinning. But those who by bad will persist in their former vices, or even add worse ones to the earlier, are indeed allowed to be in the Lord's field and to grow with the good seed; but the time will come when the tares will be separated. Or if, because of the very name of Christian, they are to be thought of as chaff rather than thorns, there will also come one who will clean the threshing floor, separate the chaff from the wheat, and give to each part what is due according to its merit with the highest fairness.

Meanwhile, why do you rage, why are you blinded by partisanship? Why do you entangle yourselves in the long defense of so great an error? Look for the crops in the field, the wheat on the threshing floor: they will appear easily and offer themselves to those who seek them. Why fix your eyes so much on the refuse? Why frighten ignorant people away from the richness of a fertile garden by the roughness of the hedges? There is a sure entrance, though known to fewer, by which one can go in, which you either do not believe exists or do not want to find. There are in the catholic Church countless believers who do not use this world; there are those who use it as though not using it, as the Apostle says; and this was proved in those times when Christians were forced to worship idols. For how many wealthy people then, how many country householders, how many merchants, how many soldiers, how many leading men of their cities, how many senators even, of both sexes, leaving all these vain and temporal things, which they used indeed but by which they were not held back, underwent death for the saving faith and religion, and showed unbelievers that they possessed all those things rather than being possessed by them!

Why do you slander us by saying that believers already renewed by baptism ought not to beget children, or possess fields and houses or any money? Paul allowed it. For, as cannot be denied, he wrote to believers, after listing many vicious people who will not possess the kingdom of God: “And such you were,” he says, “but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” No one will dare to understand “washed” and “sanctified” as anyone but believers and those who have renounced this world. But since he has shown to whom he wrote, let us see whether he permits these things to them. For it goes on: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful; all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of anything. Food is for the belly and the belly for food; but God will destroy both the one and the other. The body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord, and will raise us also by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Far from it. Do you not know that he who cleaves to a prostitute becomes one body? For the two, he says, shall be in one flesh. But he who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Do you not know that your members are a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought with a great price: glorify and carry God in your body.” “Now concerning the things you wrote to me: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of incontinence let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to the wife what is due, and likewise the wife to the husband. The wife does not have power over her own body, but the husband; and likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the wife. Do not defraud one another, except perhaps by agreement for a time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; and come together again, lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence. But I say this by way of concession, not of command. For I would that all men were as I myself am; but each has his own gift from God, one in this way and another in that.”

Does the Apostle seem to you to have shown the strong what is highest and to have permitted the weaker what is next to it? For he shows that not touching a woman is highest when he says, “I would that all men were as I myself am.” Next to this highest is conjugal chastity, so that a person may not be laid waste by sexual immorality. Did he say on that account that these were not yet believers, because they live with their spouses? Indeed, by this chastity of marriage he said that both the spouses themselves are sanctified by one another, if one of them is an unbeliever, and the offspring born of them: “For the unbelieving husband,” he says, “is sanctified in the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through the believing husband; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.” Why do you obstinately clamor against so great a truth? Why do you try to cloud the light of the Scriptures with empty shadows? Do not say any longer that catechumens may live with their wives but believers may not, that catechumens may have money but believers may not. For there are many who use as though not using. And in that most holy washing the renewal of the new man is begun, so that by progress it may be perfected, in some more quickly, in others more slowly; yet many advance into the new life, if one looks into it not with hostility but with care. For, as the Apostle says, “though our outer man is wasting away, yet the inner is being renewed day by day.” The Apostle says that the inner man is renewed day by day so that it may be perfected; and you want it to begin from perfection. Would that you wanted it! But you seek rather not how to raise up the weak but how to deceive the unwary. For you ought not to say this so boldly, not even if it were established that you are perfect in those trifling commands of yours. But since your own conscience knows that those whom you bring into your sect will, once they begin to be more closely joined with you, find many things in you which no one suspected while you were accusing others, what great shamelessness is it to demand perfection of weaker catholics, so as to turn the ignorant away from them, and not to show it in any way among yourselves to those you have turned away? But so as not to seem to pour out anything rashly against you now, let this be the limit of this volume, so that we may at last come to set out the precepts of your life and your memorable morals.

No one, I think, doubts that when we inquire about good and evil, this kind of question belongs to moral teaching, with which we are concerned in this discourse. So I could wish that people brought to the investigation of these things a gaze of mind so clear that they could see that highest good, than which nothing is better or higher, to which the rational soul, pure and perfect, is subjected. For once this was understood and perfected, they would see at the same time that it is what is most rightly said to exist supremely and primarily. For that is most of all to be said to exist which is always the same, which is in every way like itself, which can in no part be corrupted or changed, which is not subject to time, which cannot be otherwise now than it was before. For that is what is said to exist most truly. Beneath this word lies the meaning of a nature that abides in itself and remains unchangeably. This we can call nothing else but God; and if you rightly look for what is contrary to him, there is nothing at all. For being has no contrary except not being. So there is no nature contrary to God. But since we bring to the contemplation of these things a gaze of mind wounded and dulled by trifling opinions and by perversity of will, let us try, as far as we can, to reach some kind of knowledge of so great a matter step by step and carefully, not as those who see, but as those who grope usually search.

Often, indeed almost always, Manichaeans, you ask those whom you are trying to persuade of your heresy where evil comes from. Suppose I am now meeting you for the first time. Let me obtain something from you, if you please: that you too lay aside for a little the opinion by which you think you know these things, and try a matter so great with me as if you were beginners. You ask me where evil comes from; I in turn ask you what evil is. Whose inquiry is the more just? Theirs who ask where a thing comes from while they do not know what it is, or his who thinks one must first ask what it is, so that the origin of an unknown thing, which is most absurd, may not be sought? [You answer that evil is what is against nature.] You speak most truly. For who is so blind in mind as not to see that what is evil for each kind is what is against its nature? But once this is established, your heresy is overturned: for no nature is evil, if what is against nature is evil. But you assert that a certain nature and substance is evil. Add to this that whatever is against nature certainly opposes nature and strives to destroy it. It tends, then, to make what is cease to be. For nature itself is nothing other than that which is understood to be something in its own kind. So just as we now, by a new word derived from “to be,” call it essence, which we often also call substance, so the ancients, who did not have these words, said nature instead of essence and substance. This very thing, then, is evil, if you will attend without obstinacy: to fall away from essence and to tend toward not being.

Therefore, when it is said in the catholic Church that God is the author of all natures and substances, it is understood at the same time, by those who can understand it, that God is not the author of evil. For how can he who is the cause of all things that are, that they may be, be in turn the cause that they may not be, that is, that they fall away from essence and tend toward not being? And this, the truest reason proclaims, is evil in general. But that race of evil of yours, which you want to be the highest evil, how will it be against nature, that is, against substance, when you say it is a nature and substance? For if it acts against itself, it takes away its own being; and if it accomplishes that, then at last it will reach the highest evil. But it will not accomplish it, because you want it not only to be but to be everlasting. What is declared to be a substance, then, cannot be the highest evil.

But what am I to do? I know there are many among you who cannot understand these things at all. I know again that there are some who, though with good talent they see these things somehow, yet with bad will, by which they will lose even their talent, act obstinately and look rather for what to say against them that may easily persuade the slow and weak, than agree that they are true. Yet I shall not regret having written, either because one of you may at last consider these things with a fair judgment and abandon your error, or because men of talent who are subject to God and still untouched by your party may read them and not be deceived by your discourses.

Let us examine these things, then, more carefully and, as far as possible, more plainly. I ask you again: what is evil? If you say, “That which harms,” you will not be lying here either. But, I beg you, pay attention; I beg you, be watchful; I beg you, lay aside partisanship, and seek the truth for the sake not of winning but of finding. For whatever harms deprives the thing it harms of some good: for if it takes away no good, it does no harm at all. What, I beseech you, is clearer than this? What plainer? What so open to anyone of moderate understanding, provided he is not obstinate? Once this is laid down, it is already seen, I think, what follows. In that race which you suppose to be the highest evil, nothing can be harmed, since there is nothing good there. And if there are two natures, as you affirm, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness, then since you confess that the kingdom of light is God, to whom you grant a kind of simple nature, so that in it nothing is inferior to anything else, you must confess, though it tells strongly against you, you must nevertheless confess, that this nature, which you not only do not deny to be the highest good but strenuously try to persuade people that it is, is unchangeable, impenetrable, incorruptible, and inviolable; otherwise it will not be the highest good, for that is what nothing is better than; and such a nature can in no way be harmed. But if to harm is to deprive of good, as I have shown, the kingdom of darkness cannot be harmed, because there is nothing good there; the kingdom of light cannot be harmed, because it is inviolable: whom, then, will what you call evil harm?

So, since you cannot extricate yourselves, see how clear is the view of the catholic teaching, which says that one good is good supremely and through itself, not by participation in some good but by its own nature and essence; another good is good by participating and by having; it has from that highest good that it is good, while that good remains in itself and loses nothing. This good that we mentioned second it calls the creature, which can be harmed through falling short; and of this falling short God is not the author, because he is the author of existing and, so to speak, of being. So it is also shown how evil is spoken of: for it is most truly spoken of not according to essence but according to privation; and it is clear what nature can be harmed. For the nature that is deprived of good when it is harmed is not the highest evil; nor is it the highest good, since it can fall away from good for this reason, that it is called good not by being good but by having good. Nor is a thing good by nature when, since it is said to have been made, it certainly received being good. So God is the highest good, and the things he has made are all good, though they are not as good as he who made them. For who is so mad as to demand that the works be equal to the craftsman and the things founded to their founder? What more do you want? Or do you want something plainer still?

I will ask a third time, then, what evil is. You will perhaps answer, “Corruption.” Who would deny that this too is evil in general? For this is against nature, this is what harms. But corruption is not in itself, but in some substance which it corrupts: for corruption itself is not a substance. So the thing which it corrupts is not corruption, is not evil. For what is corrupted is deprived of integrity and purity. So what has no purity of which it may be deprived cannot be corrupted; and what has it is certainly good by participation in purity. Again, what is corrupted is certainly perverted; and what is perverted is deprived of order; and order is good. So what is corrupted is not without good: for it can be robbed, while it is being corrupted, of the very thing it is not without. That race of darkness, then, if it lacked all good, as you say, could not be corrupted: for it had nothing that corruption could take from it; and if corruption takes nothing away, it does not corrupt. Dare now to say, if you can, that God and the kingdom of God could be corrupted, when you cannot find how the kingdom of the devil, such as you describe it, could be corrupted.

What then does the catholic light say on this? What do you suppose, but what the truth holds: that a made substance can be corrupted, for the unmade one, which is the highest good, is incorruptible, and corruption itself, which is the highest evil, cannot be corrupted, but is not a substance? And if you ask what it is, see where it tries to lead the things it corrupts; for it affects the things corrupted from its own character. Now all things through corruption fall away from what they were, and are forced not to remain, forced not to be. For being has to do with remaining. So what is said to be supremely and most of all is said to be by remaining in itself. For what is changed for the better is changed not because it was remaining but because it was being perverted for the worse, that is, was falling away from essence; and of this falling away the author of essence is not the author. Some things, then, are changed for the better, and therefore tend toward being; and they are said by this change not to be perverted but to be reverted and converted. For perversion is contrary to ordering. And these things that tend toward being tend toward order; and when they have attained it, they attain being itself, as far as a creature can attain it. For order brings what it orders into a certain agreement. And to be is nothing other than to be one. So in so far as each thing attains unity, in so far it is. For agreement and harmony are the work of unity, and by them composite things are in so far as they are: for simple things are through themselves, because they are one; but things that are not simple imitate unity by the harmony of their parts, and are in so far as they attain it. Therefore ordering compels being, and disorder not being; and disorder is also called perversion and corruption. Whatever is corrupted, then, tends toward not being. It is now for you to consider where corruption drives things, so that you can find the highest evil: for that is where corruption strives to lead.

But the goodness of God does not allow a thing to be brought to that point, and so orders all things that fall short that they are where they can most fittingly be, until by ordered movements they return to that from which they fell away. So even rational souls, in whom free choice is most powerful, when they fall away from him, he orders in the lower ranks of creation, where it is fitting for such to be. They become wretched, then, by divine judgment, while they are ordered fittingly according to their deserts. Hence that saying, which you usually attack most of all, is very well said: “I make good things and create evil things.” For to create means to found and to order. So in many copies it is written, “I make good things and found evil things.” For to make is to make what did not exist at all; but to found is to order what already existed in some way, so that it may be better and more. For God founds, that is, orders, when he says, “I found evil things,” the things that are falling short, that is, tending not to be; not things that have reached that toward which they tend. For it has been said: nothing is permitted by divine providence to reach the point of not being. These things are treated more widely and more fully elsewhere; but in dealing with you this is enough. For the door had to be shown you which you despair of, and make the ignorant despair of. For no one brings you in but good will, which the divine mercy makes peaceful, as is sung in the Gospel: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.” It is enough, I say, that you see that there is no outcome of a religious discussion of good and evil unless whatever is, in so far as it is, is from God; but in so far as it falls away from essence, it is not from God, and yet it is always ordered by divine providence as befits the whole. If you do not yet see this, I do not know what more I can do now except to treat even more minutely the things that have been said. For nothing but devotion and purity leads the mind to greater things.

For what else will you answer, when I ask what evil is, except either that it is what is against nature, or what harms, or corruption, or something of this kind? But I have shown your shipwreck in these, unless perhaps, as you usually do in dealing childishly with children, you answer that evil is fire, poison, a wild beast, and the like. For indeed, about someone who said that no substance is evil, one of the leaders of this heresy, whom we used to hear quite familiarly and often, would say: “I would like to put a scorpion in the man's hand and see whether he would not pull his hand away; and if he did, he would be convinced not by words but by the thing itself that some substance is evil, since he would not deny that that animal is a substance.” And he said this not in that man's presence, but when we, troubled, reported to him what the man had said: so he answered, as I said, childishly to children. For who with even a little training and learning does not see that these things harm through an unsuitable mixture with the body's temper, and again through a suitable one do not harm, and often even confer no small benefits? For if that poison were evil in itself, it would kill the scorpion itself sooner and more. But on the contrary, if it were somehow wholly taken from it, it would die without doubt. So for its body it is evil to lose what it is evil for ours to receive; and likewise it is good for it to have what it is good for us to lack. Will the same thing, then, be both good and evil? By no means; but evil is what is against nature: for this is evil both to that beast and to us, that is, the unsuitability itself, which beyond doubt is not a substance, but rather hostile to substance. Where then does it come from? Notice where it drives, and you will learn, if any inner light still lives in you. For it drives everything it destroys toward not being. But God is the author of essence; and nothing can be thought to be an essence which forces whatever it is in not to be. So it is said where unsuitability does not come from; for where it comes from nothing can be said.

A certain criminal woman of Athens, as history relates, by drinking little by little brought it about that she could drink, without even slight harm to her health, the poison which the condemned drank in a fixed measure in order to die. So when she was once condemned, she received that lawful quantity of poison, which she had overcome by habit, like the rest, and was not killed like the rest. Since this was a great marvel, she was sent into exile. What are we to think, if poison is evil: that she made it not evil for herself? What is more absurd than this? But because unsuitability is evil, she rather brought it about by moderate habituation that that substance became suitable to her body. For by what cunning could she ever have brought it about that unsuitability should not harm her? Why so? Because what is truly and generally evil harms always and everyone. Oil is good for our bodies, but very harmful to many animals that have six feet. Is not hellebore in one way food, in another medicine, in another poison? Who would not cry out that salt taken immoderately is poison? Yet who can count how many and how great are the benefits it gives the body? Sea water, when drunk by land animals, is harmful; but for the bodies of many, when they are bathed in it, it is most suitable and useful; and to fish it is both health and pleasure in both ways. Bread nourishes a man and kills a hawk. Does not mud itself, which offends and harms grievously when swallowed or smelled, both cool when touched in summer and serve as a remedy for burns? What is more despicable than dung? What more worthless than ash? Yet these bring such benefits to the fields that the Romans thought divine honors should be given to their inventor, Stercutius, from whom dung (stercus) also got its name. But why gather small things, which are countless? Who doubts that the four elements themselves, which are at hand, are beneficial through suitability, but when applied unsuitably are violently opposed to nature? We who live in air are killed when buried in earth or water; yet countless creatures creep about alive in sand and loose earth, and fish die in this air of ours. Fire destroys our bodies, but applied suitably it both restores from cold and drives away countless diseases. This sun, to which you bend the knee, than which truly nothing more beautiful is found among visible things, strengthens the eyes of eagles, while it wounds and darkens ours when looked at; yet by habit it comes about that we too can fix our gaze on it without harm. Will you then allow us to compare it with that poison which habit made harmless to the Athenian woman? Look back at last and consider that, if any substance is evil because it harms someone, the light which you worship cannot be defended from this charge. Consider rather that this unsuitability is universal evil, through which a ray of the sun makes the eyes go dark, though nothing is more pleasant to them than light.

I have said these things so that, if possible, you may at last stop saying that evil is a land immensely deep and long; that evil is a mind wandering through the land; that evil is the five caverns of the elements, one full of darkness, another of waters, another of winds, another of fire, another of smoke; that evil is the animals born in each of those elements, creeping things in the darkness, swimming things in the waters, flying things in the winds, four-footed things in the fire, two-footed things in the smoke. For these things, as you describe them, can in no way be so; since whatever is such, in so far as it is, must be from the highest God, since in so far as it is, it is certainly good. For if pain and weakness are evil, the animals there had such strength of body that you say their aborted offspring, after the world was made from them according to your sect, fell from heaven to earth and could not die. If blindness is evil, they saw; if deafness, they heard. If to be silent or dumb is evil, their voices there were so clear and distinct that, as you assert, they decided in an assembly, persuaded by one speaker, to wage war against God. If barrenness is evil, there was great fruitfulness there in begetting children. If exile is evil, they were in their own land and inhabited their own regions. If slavery is evil, there were also some there who ruled. If death is evil, they lived, and lived in such a way that, as you proclaim, the mind itself could never die in any way, not even after God's victory.

Why, I ask, do I find in the highest evil so many goods contrary to those evils I have listed? Or if these are not evils, will any substance at all, in so far as it is a substance, be evil? If weakness is not evil, will a weak body be evil? If blindness is not evil, will darkness be evil? If deafness is not evil, will a deaf person be evil? If being dumb is not evil, will a fish be evil? If barrenness is not evil, how is a barren animal evil? If exile is not evil, how is an animal in exile evil, or an animal sending someone into exile? If slavery is not evil, how is an animal that serves evil, or one that forces someone to serve? If death is not evil, how is an animal that is mortal evil, or one that inflicts death? But if these are evils, how will strength of body, sight, hearing, persuasive speech, fruitfulness, a native land, freedom, and life not be goods, all of which you declare to have existed in that kingdom of evil, while you dare to assert that it is the highest evil?

Finally, if (as no one has ever denied) unsuitability is evil, what is more suitable than those elements to their respective animals: darkness to creeping things, waters to swimming things, winds to flying things, fire to the more voracious, smoke to the more lofty? Such harmony you describe in the race of discord, such order in the seat of perversity. If what harms is evil, I pass over that very strong point made above, that no harm could be done where there was no good; but if that is obscure, this at least stands out and is plain to all, since, as I said and as all agree, what harms is evil: in that race the smoke did not harm the two-footed animals; it begot them, and nourished and sustained them, as they were born, grew, and ruled without harm. But now, after good has been mixed with evil, the smoke has become more harmful, so that it cannot be endured by us, who are certainly two-footed: it blinds, chokes, kills. Did such savagery come upon evil elements by the mixture of good? Such perversity under God's rule? Why, surely, do we see in the other cases that suitability which deceived your founder and enticed him to compose his lies? Why, I say, do darkness suit creeping things, waters swimming things, winds flying things, while fire burns the four-footed and smoke chokes us? What of the fact that serpents too see very sharply, rejoice in the presence of the sun, and are more abundant where the clearer air gathers cloud less readily and less often? What is more absurd than that the inhabitants and lovers of darkness should be more at home and more fitted where the clearness of light is enjoyed? And if you say that they delight rather in heat than in light, you would say with much more consistency that the lively serpents were born in fire than the slow ass; and yet who would deny that the asp is a friend to this light, since its eyes are compared to the eyes of an eagle? But I will leave the beasts. Let us consider ourselves, I beg you, without obstinacy, and at last strip our minds of empty and ruinous fables. For who could bear such perversity as to say that in the race of darkness, with which no light was mixed, two-footed animals had such firm, such vigorous, such incredible power of eyesight that even in their darkness they saw the most pure light of God's kingdoms, which you extol (since you want it to have been visible even to such beings), and looked at it, and considered it, and delighted in it, and desired it; but that our eyes, by the mixture of light, the mixture of the highest good, indeed the mixture of God, have been made so feeble and so weak that we neither see anything in darkness nor can bear the sight of the sun at all, and, turning away from it, even look for the things we were seeing?

These things can be said also if corruption is evil, which likewise no one doubts: for the smoke did not then corrupt the kinds of animals which it now corrupts. And not to go through every point, which is long and unnecessary, the animals you invent as having been there were so much less liable to corruption that their aborted offspring, not yet fit to be born, cast down from heaven to earth, could live, beget, and conspire again, having of course their original strength, because they were already conceived before the mixture of good and evil: for after that mingling, the things born of them you say are those animals which we now see very weak and easily yielding to corruption. Who could endure this error any longer, except one who either does not see these things or has become hardened against all the weight of reason by some incredible habit and familiarity with you?

But since I have shown, I think, in what great darkness and falsehood you move concerning goods and evils in general, let us now look at those three seals which you boast of in your morals with great praise and proclamation. What, then, are these seals? Those of the mouth, of course, of the hands, and of the breast. What does this mean? That a person, he says, should be chaste and innocent in mouth, hands, and breast. What if he sins with the eyes, ears, or nostrils? What if he strikes a man with his heels, or even kills him? How shall we hold this man guilty, who has sinned neither with mouth, nor hands, nor breast? “But when I name the mouth,” he says, “I want all the senses in the head to be understood; when the hand, all action; when the breast, all sexual lust.” To which, then, do you want blasphemies to belong? To the mouth or to the hand? For this is an action performed by the tongue. So if you include all action under one heading, why do you join the action of the feet to the hands and separate that of the tongue? Or, because the tongue signifies something by words, do you want to separate it from the action that is not done for the sake of signifying, so that the seal of the hands is defined as abstaining from evil action not done for the sake of signifying? But what will you do if someone sins by signifying something with the hands, as happens when we write, or show something by a gesture to be understood? For you cannot assign this to the mouth and tongue, because it is done with the hands. For what is more absurd than that, when three seals are named, of the mouth, the hands, and the breast, some sins detected in the hands should be assigned to the mouth? But if action in general is given to the hands, what reason is there to add the action of the feet to it and not that of the tongue? Do you see how the desire for novelty, with error as its companion, is led into great straits? For you cannot find how to include the cleansing of all sins in those three seals, which you proclaim by a new kind of division.

But divide as you wish, pass over whatever you wish: let us examine what you usually commend most. You say that it belongs to the seal of the mouth to abstain from all blasphemy. Now blasphemy is when evil things are said of good things. So now in common usage blasphemy means only speaking evil words about God: for about human beings there can be doubt, but God is beyond dispute good. If, then, reason proves that no one says worse things of God than you, where will your memorable seal of the mouth be? For reason teaches, and not a hidden reason, but one lying open and set out for everyone's understanding, yet invincible, and the more invincible because no one is allowed not to know it, that God is incorruptible, unchangeable, inviolable, that no want, no weakness, no misery can befall him. And every rational soul feels this in common so much that even you nod assent when it is said.

But when you begin to tell your fables, you, possessed by a strange blindness, try to persuade people that God is corruptible, changeable, violable, liable to want, admitting weakness, and not safe from misery; and you persuade those possessed by a strange blindness. And this is not enough: for you say not only that God is corruptible, but corrupted; not only changeable, but changed; not only violable, but violated; not one who could suffer want, but in want; not one on whom weakness might fall, but on whom it has fallen; not one who could be wretched, but wretched. For you say that the soul is God or a part of God. And I do not see how what is called a part of God is not God: for a part of gold is gold, of silver silver, of stone stone; and, to come to greater things, a part of earth is earth, a part of water water, of air air; and if you take something from fire you will not deny that it is fire; and any part of light can be nothing but light. Why then will a part of God not be God? Or does God have a jointed form, like a man and the other animals? For a part of a man is not a man.

But I come down to each of these opinions and consider them one at a time. If you want God to be like light, you cannot refuse to admit that any part of God is God. So when you say that the soul is a part of God, which you do not deny is both corrupted, since it is foolish; and changed, since it was wise; and violated, since it lacks its proper perfection; and in want, since it asks for help; and weak, since it needs medicine; and wretched, since it desires to be happy: you ascribe all these things to God by a sacrilegious opinion. Or if you do not grant these things of the soul, then neither is the Spirit needed to lead the soul into truth, since it is not foolish; nor is the soul renewed by the true religion, since it has not grown old; nor is it perfected by your seals, since it is perfect; nor does God bring it help, since it is not in want; nor is Christ its physician, since it is healthy; nor is a happy life rightly promised it. What of the fact that Jesus is called a deliverer, as he himself cries out in the Gospel: “If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free”? And the apostle Paul says: “You were called to freedom.” The soul, then, that has not yet attained this freedom is a slave. So, on your authority, since a part of God is God, God is both corrupted by folly, and changed by falling, and violated by the loss of perfection, and in need of help, and enfeebled by disease, and crushed by misery, and disfigured by slavery. And if a part of God is not God, still he cannot be incorrupt in whose part there is corruption; nor unchanged, who is changed in some part; nor inviolate, who is not perfect in every part; nor free from want, who works diligently to restore his part to himself; nor wholly healthy, who is weak in some part; nor most happy, who has some part subject to misery; nor wholly free, some part of whom is held down by slavery. You are forced to say all these things when you declare that the soul, which you see overwhelmed by such calamities, is a part of God. If you can take these and many such things out of your sect, then at last say that your mouth is free of blasphemies. Rather, abandon that sect: for if you cease to believe and say what he wrote, you will certainly not be Manichaeans.

God must be understood or believed to be the highest good altogether, than which nothing better can be or be thought, if we intend to be free of blasphemies. A law of numbers can in no way be violated or changed, nor could any nature by any violence bring it about that the number that follows one is not in the ratio of double to it. This can in no way be changed, and God is called changeable by you! This law keeps its inviolable integrity, and you will not have God even equal to it! Let any race of darkness bring it about that the intelligible number three, in which one is so truly one that it has no parts, let that race of darkness, then, bring it about that this number three is divided into two equal parts. Your mind surely sees that no one's malice can make this happen. So that which could not violate the law of number could violate God! But if it could not, what necessity was there, I beg you, that a part of him should be mixed with evil and thrust into such great miseries?

For now there arose that question which, even when we were listening to you eagerly, pressed us hard; and we found no way out when we asked what the race of darkness would have done to God if he had refused to fight with it at the cost of such calamity to a part of himself. For if it would not have harmed him had he stayed at rest, we complained that we had been treated cruelly in being sent into these hardships; but if it would have harmed him, then his nature was not incorruptible, as the nature of God ought to be. On this question there was someone who said that God did not wish to be rid of evil or take care that he not be harmed, but by his natural goodness wished to benefit a restless and perverse nature, so that it might be ordered. That is not what the books of the Manichaeans say: there it is very often indicated, very often said, that God took care not to be invaded by his enemies. But let us grant that Mani thought this, as that man said who could find nothing else to say; is God defended from cruelty or weakness by this argument? For this goodness of his toward the hostile race proved a great ruin to his own. Add to this that if his nature could not be corrupted and changed, no plague would change and corrupt us either; and the order that was to be given to the alien nature could have been given without our perversion. And what I heard lately at Carthage had not yet been said. For when someone, whom I very much wish to be freed from that error, was driven by this question into the same straits, he dared to say that the kingdom of God had certain borders of its own which could be invaded by the contrary race, but that God himself could in no way have been violated. But he said what not even that founder of yours would be forced in any way to say: for he would perhaps see that the ruin of his sect follows much more easily from this view than from the other. And indeed it is so, that if anyone of moderate intelligence hears that in that nature one part was violable and another inviolable, he readily understands that there are no longer two natures but three: one inviolable, another violable, a third that violates.

Since these blasphemies, coming from the heart, dwell daily in your mouth, cease at last to proclaim the seal of your mouth as something great, to allure the ignorant. Unless perhaps you think the seal of the mouth wonderful and praiseworthy because you do not eat meat and do not drink wine. I ask you for what end you do this. For if the end to which the things we do are referred, that is, the end for the sake of which we do whatever we do, is not only blameless but also praiseworthy, then and only then are our deeds also worthy of some praise; but if the end we look to and keep in view when engaged in some duty is justly and deservedly blamed, no one will doubt that that duty too must be disapproved and blamed.

It is recorded of Catiline that he could bear cold, thirst, and hunger. These things that foul and sacrilegious man had in common even with our apostles. How then is that parricide distinguished from our apostles, except by the end he pursued, which was utterly different? For he endured these things in order to satisfy most unbridled and monstrous desires; they on the contrary in order to suppress them and force them to serve reason as master. You too, when the multitude of catholic virgins is proclaimed to you, are accustomed to say, “A mule is a virgin too.” Rashly indeed, through ignorance of catholic teaching; but still you mean that such continence is empty unless it is referred by sure reasoning to some most right end. Catholic Christians too could compare your abstinence from wine and meat to beasts of burden and many sparrows, and finally to countless kinds of worms. But so as not to fall into your rashness, I will not do this hastily, but will first examine for what end you do these things. For it is agreed between us, I think, that in morals of this kind nothing else is to be sought. If, then, you do it for the sake of frugality and of restraining the lust by which we are delighted and captured by such foods and drink, I hear and approve: but it is not so.

For I ask you: suppose there is someone, as there may be, a man so sparing and frugal that, moderating the appetite of belly and throat, he does not feast twice in one day; and at his supper a few vegetables are set before him with a little lard, greased and seasoned with that same lard, as much as suffices to suppress hunger; and he quenches his thirst, for the sake of careful health, with two or three cups of unmixed wine, and this is his daily fare: while another, for his part, tasting no meat and no wine, gladly takes at the ninth hour choice and foreign produce, varied in many courses and sprinkled with plenty of pepper, intending to sup on the same at nightfall too; and drinks mead, boiled-down wine, raisin wine, and the pressed juices of some fruits, which imitate wine closely enough and even surpass it in sweetness; and drinks not as much as he is thirsty but as much as he likes; and sees to it that this is supplied to him daily, and enjoys such fare and delicacies from no necessity but with great pleasure: which of these two, as concerns eating and drinking, do you judge to lead the more abstinent life? I do not think you are so blind as not to prefer the man of the scanty lard and wine to this glutton. So truth compels; but your error sings a very different tune. For your Elect, proclaimed for his three seals, if he lives daily like the man we described second, may be rebuked by one or perhaps two of the stricter among you, but cannot at all be condemned as a breaker of the seal. But if he sups once with the first man, and greases his lips with a scrap of bacon, even rancid, and wets them with flat wine, he will at once be judged a breaker of the seal and destined for Gehenna by the sentence of your founder, to your amazement, but with your agreement. I beg you, abandon error; I beg you, attend to reason; I beg you, resist habit a little. For what is more perverse than this depravity? What more crazy? What more insane can be said or thought than that a man belching with satisfaction from a stomach stretched with mushrooms, rice, truffles, cakes, boiled wine, pepper, and silphium, and seeking such things daily, cannot be found to have fallen from the three seals, that is, from the rule of holiness; while another, seasoning very cheap produce with smoked meat, taking only as much of it as suffices to refresh the body, and sipping three cups of wine to keep up his health, should be destined for sure punishment if he passes from the first fare to the second?

But, you say, the Apostle says, “It is good, brothers, not to eat meat nor to drink wine.” As if any of us denied that it is good! But it is good either for the end I mentioned above, according to which it is said, “And make no provision for the flesh in its desires”; or for those ends which the same Paul shows elsewhere: that is, either to bridle gluttony, which is usually carried away more wildly and immoderately by these things; or so that a brother may not be offended, or so that the weak may not share in an idol. For at the time when the Apostle wrote this, much meat offered in sacrifice was sold in the market. And because wine too was poured out to the gods of the Gentiles, many weaker brothers, who also used these things on sale, preferred to abstain from meat and wine altogether rather than fall even unknowingly into what they thought was communion with idols. And because of them even those who were stronger, and had judged with greater faith that these things should be disregarded, knowing that nothing is unclean except through a bad conscience, and holding to that saying of the Lord, “Not what goes into your mouth defiles you, but what comes out,” were nevertheless bound to abstain from these things because of these weaker ones, so that they might not be offended. And this is not gathered by conjecture, but is found plainly in the Apostle's letters themselves. For you usually say to us only, “It is good, brothers, not to eat meat nor to drink wine,” but do not add what follows, “nor anything by which your brother is offended, or caused to stumble, or made weak.” For from this it is clear for what end the Apostle commanded these things. What comes before and after shows it more plainly; it is long to recount, but for the sake of those who are slow to read and study the divine Scriptures we are compelled to go over the whole passage.

“Receive one who is weak in faith,” he says, “not for disputes over opinions. One believes he may eat all things; but let him who is weak eat vegetables. Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat; and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats; for God has received him. Who are you who judge another's servant? To his own Lord he stands or falls; and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand. For one judges one day above another, another judges every day alike: let each abound in his own mind. He who regards the day regards it for the Lord; and he who eats, eats for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who does not eat, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives for himself, and none dies for himself. For if we live, we live for the Lord; if we die, we die for the Lord. So whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ both lived and died and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the living and of the dead. But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written: ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.’ So each of us will give account of himself to God. Let us therefore no longer judge one another, but judge this rather, not to put a stumbling block or occasion of offense before a brother. I know and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean through him; but to him who thinks anything unclean, to him it is unclean. For if your brother is grieved because of food, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not by your food destroy him for whom Christ died. So let not our good be blasphemed. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who serves Christ in this pleases God and is approved by men. So let us pursue the things that make for peace and the things that build one another up. Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are clean, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense. It is good not to eat meat and not to drink wine, nor anything by which your brother is offended, or caused to stumble, or made weak. You have faith: have it to yourself before God. Blessed is he who does not judge himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because it is not of faith; and whatever is not of faith is sin. We who are stronger ought to bear the weaknesses of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself.”

Is it not clear enough that the Apostle commanded all who were stronger not to eat meat or drink wine, because they offended the weak by not accommodating themselves to them, and made them think that those who judged by faith that all things are clean would not abstain from such food and drink in deference to idols? He means this too when he writes to the Corinthians thus: “As for food offered in sacrifice to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but one. For although there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we in him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him. But not all have this knowledge. Some, by their conscience, even until now eat it as food offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. But food does not commend us to God. For neither if we eat shall we have more, nor if we do not eat shall we lack. But take care lest this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees one who has knowledge reclining at table in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, being weak, be built up to eat food offered to idols? And the weak brother, for whom Christ died, will perish through your knowledge. And so, sinning against the brothers and wounding their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to stumble.” Again in another place: “What then? Do I say that what is sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? But what the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to become partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful; all things are lawful for me, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own, but each the other's. Eat whatever is sold in the market, asking no questions for conscience' sake. But if anyone says, ‘This has been sacrificed to idols,’ do not eat, for the sake of the one who pointed it out, and for conscience' sake: I mean not your own conscience, but the other's. For why should my liberty be judged by another's conscience? If I partake with thanks, why am I blasphemed for that for which I give thanks? So whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I please everyone in everything, not seeking my own advantage, but that of the many, that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

It is clear, then, I think, for what end one should abstain from meat and wine. This end is threefold: to suppress the pleasure that is usually found especially in these foods, and in such drink even to the point of drunkenness; to protect weakness, because of the things that are sacrificed and poured out to idols; and, what is most to be commended, for the sake of love, lest the weakness of the weaker, who abstain from these things, be offended. But you say that dishes of meat are unclean, though the Apostle says that all things are clean, but that it is evil for him who eats with offense. And indeed I believe that you are defiled by these foods precisely because you think them unclean. For he says: “I believe and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean through him; but to him who thinks anything unclean, to him it is unclean.” And who doubts that by “unclean” (commune) he meant impure and defiled? But it is foolish to argue with you from the Scriptures, since you deceive by promising reason, and say that those books, in which there is the great authority of religion, are corrupted by the insertion of false passages. So persuade me by reason how meats defile the one who eats them, if they are taken without any offense, without any weak opinion, and without any lust.

It is worth knowing the whole rationale of this superstitious abstinence, which is given thus. “Because,” he says, “a member of God was mixed with the substance of evil, in order to bridle it and restrain it from its utmost fury” (for so you say), “the world was built from the mixture of both natures, that is, of good and evil. And that divine part is purified daily from every part of the world and taken back into its own kingdoms: but as it is breathed out through the earth and rises toward heaven, it runs into plants, since they are fixed to the earth by their roots, and so it makes all grasses and all shrubs fruitful and vigorous. From these the animals take food, and when they mate they bind that divine member in the flesh, and, turning it from its proper course and hindering it, entangle it in wanderings and hardships. So if foods prepared from produce and fruits come to the saints, that is, to the Manichaeans, then through their chastity, prayers, and psalms whatever in them is bright and divine is purified, that is, perfected in every respect, so that it may be carried back to its own kingdoms without any hindrance from filth.” That is why you forbid giving bread or any produce, or even water, which is cheap to all, to a beggar who is not a Manichaean, lest the member of God that is mixed with these things, defiled by his sins, be hindered from its return. But meat, you say, is already compacted of the filth itself. For some of that divine part, as you claim, escapes when produce and fruits are picked; it escapes when they are afflicted by threshing, grinding, or cooking, or even by biting and chewing. It escapes also in all the movements of animals, when they frisk, when they exercise, when they labor, or when they do anything at all. It escapes also during our rest, while what is called digestion is carried on in the body by the inner heat. And so, with the divine nature escaping on so many occasions, something most filthy remains, from which flesh is formed through mating; yet with a soul of the good kind, since much, though not all, of the good flies off by the movements mentioned. Therefore, when the soul too has left the flesh, an excessive filth remains, and so the soul of those who eat meat is defiled.

O obscurity of nature, how great a cover for falsehood you are! Who, hearing these things, if he has not learned the causes of things and, not yet sprinkled with even a little light of truth, is deceived by bodily images, would not think them true, precisely because they are not at all evident, are thought of through certain images of visible things, and can be eloquently stated? Great crowds and herds of such people are called in, whom religious fear rather than reason keeps safe from these deceptions. So I will try to refute these things, as far as God deigns to help me, in such a way that it may be clear enough how false and absurd they are, not only to the judgment of the prudent, by which they are rejected as soon as they are stated, but even to ordinary understanding.

First, then, I ask how you show that this part of God, whatever it is, is present in grain, beans, vegetables, flowers, and fruits. “It is plain,” they say, “from the very brightness of their color, the pleasantness of their smell, and the sweetness of their taste: and when they are rotten and no longer have these, they show that they have been deserted by that same good.” Are you not ashamed to think that God is found by nose and palate? But I pass over this. For I will speak to you plainly, and, as the saying goes, it is much for you. Rather, you should have understood this, with whatever mind you have: if the presence of the good appears in bodies by color, then the dung of animals, which is the very refuse of flesh, shines with various colors, sometimes white, often golden, and others of the kind which in fruits and flowers you take as witnesses of God present and inhering. What reason is there, then, that you declare redness in a rose to be a sign of abundant good, and condemn the same in blood? Why do you embrace the same color in a violet which you despise in bile, in the disease of the jaundiced, and finally in an infant's excrement? Why do you think the brightness and gleam of oil proclaim a plenty of good mixed in it, and prepare throat and belly to purify it; but fear to touch your lips with the drops of very similar gleam that drip from fat meat? Why do you think a melon is golden from the treasures of God, and do not think so of the rancid fat of bacon or the yolk of an egg? Why does whiteness in lettuce proclaim God to you, but not in milk? I am still speaking of colors, in which (to pass over the rest) you can compare no meadows clothed with flowers to the quills and plumes of a single peacock, which certainly are born of mating and flesh. And if this good is also found by smell, ointments of marvelous fragrance are made from the flesh of some animals. And the very foods usually cooked with better kinds of meat smell much more pleasant than if the meat were missing. Finally, if you judge things that smell sweeter to be cleaner, you should have eaten a certain kind of mud more eagerly than drink cistern water; for dry earth soaked by rain charms the nostrils with a wonderful smell, and such mud smells better than the purer rain would if caught by itself. And if taste must bear witness, so that we may know that something of God dwells in a body, it dwells more in dates and honey than in pork, but more in pork than in beans; more in a fig than in liver fattened on figs, I grant it; but you too grant that it dwells more in such liver than in beet. What of the fact that by this reasoning you are forced to confess that certain plants, all of which you certainly want to be cleaner than flesh, receive God from flesh itself, if God is recognized as mixed in by taste? For vegetables become tastier when cooked with meat; and the grasses on which cattle feed we cannot taste, but when turned into the juice of milk we judge them both finer in color and most agreeable in taste.

Or do you think that where the three goods are found together, good color, smell, and taste, there is a greater part of the good? Then do not admire and praise flowers so much, which you cannot admit to the tribunal of the palate to be judged. At least do not prefer purslane to meat, since cooked meat surpasses it in color, taste, and smell. A roast sucking pig (for you force us to discuss good and evil with you rather in the manner of cooks and confectioners than of writers and copyists), a roast sucking pig, then, is bright in color, pleasing in smell, and delightful in taste: you have a perfect sign of the divine substance dwelling in it; it invites you with a threefold testimony and longs to be purified by your holiness. Attack it; why do you hesitate? What objection are you ready to make? In color alone an infant's dung surpasses lentils; in smell alone a roast morsel surpasses a soft green fig; in taste alone a slaughtered kid surpasses the grass on which it fed alive: a flesh has been found whose cause is helped by all three witnesses together. What more do you want? Or what will you say? Why do morsels of meat make you unclean when you feast, and these monstrous things do not make you so when you argue? Especially since the ray of this sun, which you certainly set above all meats and fruits, neither smells nor tastes but excels among other bodies only by the excellence of its most brilliant color; and it strongly urges you, indeed compels you against your will, to prefer nothing to brightness of color among the proofs of mixed good. So you are brought into such straits that you must confess that a part of God dwells more in blood, and in those things, most foul but brightly colored, which are discharged from the flesh of animals into the streets, than in the pale leaves of the olive.

And if you say, as you do say, that olive leaves, when burned, give off fire, in which the presence of light appears, but meat when burned does not do the same, what will you answer about fat, which lights almost all the lamps of Italy? What about cow dung, which is certainly filthier than the flesh of the ox, which the peasants dry and use on the hearth in such a way that nothing burns more easily or with less smoke? What of the fact that, if brightness and gleam show a greater presence of the divine part, you do not purify it, seal it, set it free? For it is found most in flowers, to say nothing of blood and countless things in flesh or very like what comes from flesh; and you certainly cannot have flowers at your feasts. And even if you ate meat, you would certainly not put fish scales and certain grubs and flies, all of which glitter with their own light even in the dark, in your dishes.

What remains, then, but that you stop saying that you have eyes, nostrils, and palate as competent judges by which to prove the presence of the divine part in bodies? And with these removed, how will you show not only that there is a greater part of God in plants than in flesh, but that there is anything of him in plants at all? Or does beauty move you, not the beauty of pleasant color, but that of the agreement of parts? Would that it did! For when would you dare to compare twisted wood with the bodies of animals, in whose form equal limbs answer to equal limbs? But if you delight in the testimony of the bodily senses, as must be for those who cannot see the force of being with the mind, how do you prove that the substance of the good escapes from bodies through lapse of time and through certain crushings, except because God departs from there, as you assert, and moves from place to place? That is full of madness.

And yet no signs or evidence, as far as I can judge, have led you to this opinion. For many things plucked from trees or pulled from the earth become better by some lapse of time before they come to our food, such as leeks and endives, lettuce, grapes, apples, figs, and some pears; and many things besides which both take on better color when they are not eaten as soon as they are plucked, and are taken into the body more healthily, and taste more savory in the mouth: and such great benefit and sweetness ought not to be in these things if, according to your opinion, they became the more deserted by the good, the longer they are stored after being separated from the earth as from a mother. The flesh itself of animals killed the day before is certainly more pleasant and more wholesome; but it ought not to be so if, as you assert, it had more good on the day the animal was freshly killed than the day after, when a greater flight of the divine substance had taken place. And who does not know that wine becomes purer and better with age? Not more apt to upset the senses, as you think, but more useful for invigorating the body: only let there be moderation, which ought to rule in everything. For it is with new must that disorder of the senses usually happens more quickly: so much so that if it is sometimes left in the vat and has fermented a little, it strikes the brain of those who look down on it, sends them headlong, and, unless they are helped somehow, kills them. And as for health, who would deny that bodies are swollen by it and harmfully distended? Are such great harms in it because it has more good, and are they absent from old wine because a great part of the divine substance has departed? It is absurd to say so; especially for you, who judge the presence of a part of God by the eyes, nostrils, and palate, when these senses are pleasantly affected.

And what great perversity it is to think wine the gall of the princes of darkness, and not to refrain from eating grapes! Will that gall be in it more when it is in the cask than when it was in the grapes? And if, when the good departs, the evil remains, as it were, more undiluted, and this happens with the lapse of time, then the same grapes, hung up and kept, ought not to become mellower, sweeter, healthier; nor should the wine itself mentioned above become clearer and brighter after losing light, and healthier as the health-giving substance departs. What shall I say of wood and leaves, which dry out with time, yet cannot on that account be said by you to become worse? For they lose what produces smoke, and keep what makes a bright flame rise, and by that brightness, which you love so much, they testify that the good is purer in drier wood than in greener. From this it follows that either you deny that the part of God is greater in pure light than in smoky light, and so throw all your proofs into confusion, or you confess that it can happen that, from plants cut off or pulled up, if they are stored for a longer time, the nature of evil escapes more abundantly than that of good. And once this is granted, we shall hold that from plucked fruits a greater evil may depart, and so a greater good may remain in flesh.

Let this be said about time. For if that divine nature finds an occasion for flight through the stirring, kneading, and rubbing of these things, many similar things refute you, which become better by being stirred. Some people imitate wine with the juice of barley, which becomes best by being stirred. And indeed, what must by no means be passed over, this kind of drink makes people drunk very quickly: yet you have never said that the juice of barley is the gall of the princes. Flour is skillfully worked a little stiffly with a rather small amount of water, so that it becomes better by kneading, and, than which nothing more perverse can be said, whiter as the light flees. The confectioner works honey a long time, so that it reaches that whiteness and a less harmful and milder sweetness: explain how this happens as the good departs. And if you like to prove the presence of God not by sight, smell, and taste, but also by the delight of hearing, flesh supplies strings for lyres and bones for flutes, which become sonorous when dried, rubbed, and twisted. So the sweetness of music, which you claim came from the divine kingdoms, is supplied to us by the refuse of dead flesh, dried by time, thinned by rubbing, stretched by twisting: afflictions by which you preach that the divine substance escapes even from living things; which you say also happens by boiling them. Why then do boiled thistles not harm health at all? Are we to think that God, or a part of God, departs from them while they are cooked like this? Why should I go through the rest, all of which it is neither easy nor necessary to mention? For to whom does it not occur how many things are sweeter and healthier when cooked? Which ought not to be so if, as you think, they are deserted by the good through such stirrings.

I think you find nothing at all by which to prove to these bodily senses that meats are unclean and defile the souls of those who eat them because plucked fruits, after many stirrings, are turned into flesh; especially since you think the age and corruption of vinegar cleaner than wine, and we see that the boiled-down wine you drink is nothing else than cooked wine, which ought to be filthier than wine if the divine members depart from bodily things through movements and cookings. And if that is not so, there is no reason why you should think that fruits, when they are plucked, stored, handled, cooked, and digested, are deserted by the escaping good and therefore supply a very filthy matter for forming bodies.

And if you are not led by color, form, smell, and taste to judge that good is in these things, what else can you bring forward? Or is it a proof to you that a certain firmness and strength seems to be taken from these things when they are separated from the earth and handled? But if this moved you (although it can quickly be seen to be false, because of the increased firmness of some things after they have been taken from the earth, as has already been mentioned of wine, which becomes stronger with age), yet if this firmness moved you, as I said, you would prove that a more abundant part of God is in no food more than in meat. For athletes, to whom that strength and vigor is most necessary, do not live on vegetables and fruit, but on meat. Or because flesh is fed by trees, but trees are not fed by flesh, do you think that their bodies are better than ours? You do not consider a thing so plain, that shrubs become more luxuriant and fruitful, and crops richer, by the nourishment of dung, while in accusing flesh you seem to yourselves to say nothing more grievous than when you say it is a house of dung. So the things which are clean for you are nourished by what you proclaim to be much more unclean than the thing which is unclean for you.

And if you despise flesh because it is born after mating, then let the flesh of worms delight you, which are born so numerous and so large in fruits, in wood, and in the earth itself without any mating. But I do not know what this pretense is. For if flesh displeased you because it is formed by the union of father and mother, you would not say that those princes of darkness were born of the fruits of their trees, whom you certainly despise more than the meats you will not taste. For your opinion that all the souls of animals come from the food of their parents, from which prisons you boast that you set free the divine substance held in your food, tells very strongly against you, and drives you most urgently to eat meat. For why do you not set free, by forestalling them and eating, the souls which those who feast on meat are going to bind to a body? “But,” he says, “some of the good part is bound by them not from the meats but from the fruits they take with the meats.” What answer, then, seems to be given about the souls of lions, whose only food is flesh? “They drink,” he says, “and so that soul is drawn from the water and entangled in flesh.” What can be said of countless birds? What of eagles themselves, which feed only on flesh and need no drink? Here certainly he fails, and no answer can be found. For if the soul comes from food, and there are animals that bear young, which have no drink and whose only food is flesh, there is a soul in flesh which you, in your fashion, ought to help purify by eating flesh. Unless perhaps you think that the pig, because it is fed on fruits and drinks water, has a soul of light; while you maintain that a soul of darkness is in the eagle, to which the sun is most congenial, because it lives on flesh alone. O straits, O incredible absurdities! Into these you would surely not have fallen if, estranged from empty fables, you followed in abstinence from food what truth approves, so as to judge that delicate foods are to be refused for the sake of restraining desire, not of avoiding an uncleanness which does not exist.

For even if someone, little regarding the nature of things and the power of soul and body, were to grant you that the soul is defiled by a dish, still you grant that it becomes much more unclean through desire. What reason, then, or rather what madness, is it to drive from the number of the Elect a man who has perhaps tasted meat for the sake of health without any desire; while if he has desired to eat peppered truffles greedily, you could perhaps rebuke him only for immoderation, but not condemn him as a breaker of the seal? So it comes about that among your Elect there cannot be one who has been found to have eaten some part of a chicken, not out of desire but as a remedy; but there can be one who has himself betrayed that he longed vehemently for rich dishes and other cakes without meat. You keep, then, the one whom desire plunges in filth, and you do not keep the one whom the food itself, as you think, stains; though you confess that a far greater defilement comes from lust than from a dish: embracing the one who hangs gaping over sweetly seasoned produce and does not restrain himself; excluding the one who takes any human food indifferently, for the sake of suppressing hunger, without any desire, ready to take it and ready to lose it. Behold wonderful morals, behold excellent discipline, behold memorable temperance!

And your thinking it wicked if anyone besides the Elect touches for eating the foods which are offered to you, as if to be purified, how full of shamefulness, and sometimes of crime, is that? For often so much is given that it cannot easily be consumed by a few. And since it is thought sacrilege either to give what is left over to others or even to throw it away, you are thrust into great indigestion, wanting to purify, as it were, all that was given. Then, when you are distended and nearly bursting, you compel the boys who are under your discipline by a cruel domination to devour the remains: so much so that someone at Rome was charged with having killed wretched little children by forcing them to eat through such superstition. I would not believe this, did I not know how great a wickedness you think it either to give these things to others who are not Elect or even to have them thrown away. Hence there remains that necessity of eating, which leads almost daily to the most shameful indigestion, and sometimes even to homicide.

And while this is so, you even forbid giving bread to a beggar; yet you think money may be given out of mercy, or rather out of ill will. What shall I convict here first, cruelty or folly? For what if the matter happens in a place where food cannot be found for sale? That needy man will die of hunger, while you, wise and kind man, pity a cucumber more than a human being. This is surely (for what can I say more fittingly and plainly?) false mercy and true cruelty. Now let us look at the folly. What if he buys bread for himself with the coins you have given? Will not that divine part of yours suffer in him, who takes it from the seller, what it would have suffered if he had taken it from you? So that sinful beggar wraps in filth the part of God that longs to fly back, helped to so great a crime by your coins: and yet you, most prudent men, think it makes a difference whether you do not give a man who is about to commit murder a man to kill, but knowingly give him money with which to buy someone to kill. What can be added to this madness? For so it comes about that either the man dies, if he does not find food for sale, or the food itself dies, if he does find it: of which the one is true homicide, the other is your homicide, yet to be attributed to you as if both were true. And as for your not forbidding your Hearers to eat meat, while forbidding them to kill animals, what can be more foolish and more perverse? For if such food does not contaminate, take it yourselves too; if it does contaminate, what madness is it to think it a greater wickedness to free a pig's soul from its body than to stain a human soul with a pig's body?

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?

What more shall I say about your morals? I have told what I found out myself, when I was in the city where these things were done. What was done at Rome in my absence would take long to explain in full. Yet I will tell it briefly. For the matter broke out so far that it could not be hidden even from those who were absent; and when I was later at Rome, I confirmed that everything I had heard was true; though the man who had brought me the report, who had been present, was so close to me and so well proved that I could not doubt it at all. A certain Hearer of yours, who yielded nothing to the Elect in that memorable abstinence, who had a liberal education and wished and knew how to defend your sect copiously, was much distressed that the utterly corrupt morals of the Elect, who lived scattered, in the worst way, and anywhere, were often thrown at him when he argued. So he desired, if it could be done, to gather into his own house all who were ready to live according to those precepts, and to support them at his own expense. For he was both no ordinary despiser of money and a man of no ordinary wealth. He complained that his great efforts were hindered by the laxity of the bishops, with whose help he ought to have carried them out. Meanwhile there was a certain bishop of yours, a man plainly, as I found myself, rustic and uncultured, but who somehow seemed by that very roughness stricter in keeping good morals. This man, long desired and at last present, the Hearer seizes upon and sets out his wish to him: the bishop praises it and agrees, and it is decided that he himself should be the first to begin living in his house. When this was done, all the Elect who could be at Rome gathered there. A rule of life from Mani's letter was set before them: to many it seemed intolerable; they left; yet not a few remained out of shame. They began to live as had been decided, and as so great an authority prescribed; while the Hearer pressed all vigorously to everything, yet pressed no one to anything he did not first undertake himself. Meanwhile very frequent quarrels arose among the Elect; crimes were charged against one another, all of which he heard with groans, and he took care that in quarreling they should betray themselves most incautiously: they betrayed unspeakable and monstrous things. There it became known what sort of men they were, who nevertheless, beyond the rest, thought they ought to submit to the force of those precepts. What, then, was to be suspected of the others, or rather what was to be judged? What more? At length, under pressure, they murmured that those commands could not be borne; and from that into mutiny. The Hearer pleaded his case by a very short dilemma: either all those things must be kept, or the man who had commanded such things on such a condition, things which no one could fulfill, must be thought most foolish. Yet the most unbridled clamor of the many overcame the opinion of one, for it could not be otherwise. Afterwards the bishop himself gave way, and fled with great disgrace; and it was said that foods outside the rule had been secretly taken by him and often found, since he had plenty of money from his own purse, carefully hidden.

If you say these things are false, you resist things all too plain and widely known. But I wish you would say it! For since these things are manifest and very easy to learn for those who want to know, it will be understood how truly those are accustomed to speak who deny that they are true. But you use other defenses, which I do not reject. For either you say that there are some who keep your precepts, and that they ought not to be smeared with the crimes of others; or that one ought not to ask at all what sort of people those are who profess your sect, but what sort the profession itself is. Though I grant you both (although you can neither show those faithful observers of the commands nor clear the heresy itself of so many and such great trifles and crimes), this I will strongly demand of you: why do you pursue with curses the Christians of the catholic name, looking at the ruined life of some, when you either shamelessly refuse to have an inquiry made about your own people, or more shamelessly do not refuse, and want it understood that in your great fewness there are hidden some who keep their precepts, but will not allow it in the great multitude of the Catholic Church?