To Justinus the Manichaean, against the Two Principles of the Manichaeans and on the True Flesh of Christ 1–15

To speak to one who long ago, by much reading and the unwearied vigils of continual labour, came to hold what he ought to confess for the faith of the law, is the act of one who errs, Justin, but who loves. So I preferred to show how highly I esteem you, and I gladly accepted that I had laboured with you, so that you might understand beforehand that you still need to examine what Manichaeus teaches, both as Andrew speaks of it in his Acts and as he revealed it in the Treasure. Approached by you about this, I inquire carefully whether what you said was true or not: that things diverse and contrary to us come from one principle; and since you wished me to discuss it, I did not refuse to answer. I want, brother, this labour to be worth the effort. Read the little book sent to you often, and by turning over what is said, penetrate and investigate it yourself in the secret of deeper inquiry. For inner sight conquers words; and the hiddenness of the immense wearies and blinds even the surmises of the mind; yet when it is sought piously and reverently, it is understood to delight rather than to terrify. For each part of the man who is to live, when the intention of a holy mind inquires that there is one principle, and this our flesh, which together with the herbs and grasses that you love, venerates one and the same author, its own and the whole world's, as is its way to act. I myself, wondering and astonished at your stubborn opinion, that you hate the flesh and venerate grasses, do not yet know whether you confess that these come from one author or from different ones. If you say from one, you see what you fall into; if from another, it is careless to praise the maker of the one for some things, while one reproves and rebukes one's own maker for the things that are in oneself. But lest in saying this I rebuke rather than answer, these points will be taken up later, if they move you; now receive what you asked.

To think that we are able and permitted to inquire into things beyond ourselves and the world, when we are almost unknown to ourselves, is mad and insane; and it is a real danger to doubt from where and how and from whom you are, when you do not dare to doubt that you are and that you are bound up with flesh, and you see clearly that you live in the world and are set free by the help of your Creator, when you obey him; and you hold it confessed that the Saviour is one, yet you are afraid to confess that you are from one Maker, dividing one maker of the flesh from another creator of the soul. Imagining these things, we say that both rule the world and guard what they have made in man, each insisting equally that what he perfected from his own kingdom should not perish. The bright sun rejects this, and the chaste Virginity, and the glorious choir of the stars; and the whole fabric of the world refutes and casts off the notion that its origin comes from two diverse and two unbegotten principles. For the mind is defiled with profane clouds if so great a splendour of immense brightness is thought to consist of an older darkness and a part of it. For so it would follow that the sun is from the darkness, if the whole world received its being from two principles. Plainly, since it is not for us to hold our understanding on these things and to remain in this wandering of the senses, we flee and shudder to confess that he over whom even we are victors is from himself. Finally I want you to grasp what it means to say that the flesh is apart from him from whom all things took their beginning, and that it dwells in the higher kingdoms where that celebrated Virginity, glory and proclaimed light are; for since it descended from there into Christ, it cannot be thought not to be there. For it is from there that Christ has his flesh, since your veneration does not allow you to say that it was from Mary. Shall we say, then, that what God took was from another? What was he who was to take it to do, if the one who is creator did not fashion it? And if he made it, is it unworthy to be assumed?

Here, as I see, the inventor and creator is praised, if eternity deigned to dwell in it. But if the flesh that is in Christ is another flesh, and yet not older, then God the maker too is found to be later. If it is older, why is it not itself in the world, and why is it in heaven, where there is nothing fleshly? And if the flesh that is in Christ is not in the world, from where in foreign kingdoms and outside regions did the creature come? Or how is it joined here to souls? Or why can it so often take souls captive, so that it seems almost more powerful in foreign kingdoms? And why does the author of the inner man labour to free this inner man from the flesh? Or why did he let him be shut up in that from which he was to be set free? Certainly all here that is the world is the kingdom of truth and of God, and he who is its maker rules it. If in this whole kingdom, his own, there is one thing belonging to another, called flesh, and if this alone can do so much that the soul, driven by it, is tossed and wavers and grows faint with weariness, we can see how great in his own kingdoms the maker of the flesh might be. For if we take this kingdom, the whole world, to belong to him from whom we believe the flesh came as his minister, we shall be saying that the sun, the choir of stars and the singular Virgin shone forth from a fountain of darkness. But I gladly embrace, and with uplifted joy rejoice to profess, one creator of all these, and to venerate him, known in the secret of pious inquiry by the working of searching care, whom it is right to hold as light and truth and the whole. To hold this, the remembrance of the exulting soul lifts up the senses, and the better origin consoles all the cares of the wavering spirit with the festive reasons of things. Whatever are called ages, or counted as kingdoms, or held to be worlds, whatever came before all antiquity, is one, exists as singular; and it is gathered to be immense in this, that it is the whole, though it is called one.

What he himself is, Justin, is one thing; what is from him is another. What he is is one, and whatever he is is whole; but what is from him is innumerable. And these are the things with which all that is enclosed and encompassed by the one whole is filled. But since the things that are from him who is from himself and one are various, it is fitting that he should rule various things; and so that he may appear almighty, he had to be found the origin even of contraries. And this plainly belongs to that matter which has divided all its wood into species, unequal and unlike in the kinds of trees; and yet the whole forest, a distinct confusion, in its innumerable thousands of thousands, is seen and appears to be wood, and yet is not marked as different by nature. That these things are among the likenesses which have been decreed, and which have happened to come forth from another so as to be, you yourself recall, looking with me. But no one will doubt that those immense and self-existent things lack likeness, are bereft of comparison and fail of any example. By this our effort is compelled to confess, and is urged and constrained, to approach, touch or attempt, as far as nature can and as far as speech suffices to tell, those hidden things of the height that pass beyond all bounds, and to penetrate to the more secret of the secrets of the venerable things. And therefore I ask now what will be like the immense.

Tell me, if you can, you who, trusting in comparisons, believe that you have reached the truth through the shadows of images. But as I see, Justin, it is not you who fail the things, but the things that fail you. And if, as you are accustomed to say and say now, there is another kingdom, is this some other kingdom that is also immense? But I do not see how it can be called immense if being is not denied to the other: for where being begins for the other, there the boundary of the first is reached, and neither is infinite. And if it is so, that it is finite, I reject that it is from either of them. Yet since we are from another, and the world is not from itself, and however great it is, it is still finite, if not to others, certainly to its maker, it is sacred to confess that its maker is infinite. All things in the world, then, and each of the things that the world itself is, I see and recognize to be from that principle which is one and alone, from itself, in itself and to itself, and which, immense and whole, extends infinitely, and reaches so far that it nowhere fails or comes to an end where being or existing belongs to another. Nor could anything else be held to be that is external or divided, and becomes a rival or stands as an enemy, which, placed in its own domain and remaining there, could admit of being conquered, then taken captive, drawn into the victor's kingdom, and, transferred there, cease to be, ceasing where it had its being before the war. Certainly, if it is still there, it has not yet been overcome; and if it still is, perhaps it may be restored. After how many years will this happen? For how many ages will this battle last? When will it end? If it is extinguished, or already conquered, it is not in its own domain: is it anywhere? Nay rather, being now fails it and ceases. So too all things that were its own have perished with their fountain and have been taken away. If they have perished, none of them is ever its own; and the flesh that exists is not its own, but rather belongs to him who conquered.

Perhaps you prefer to say that the victor carried off to his own kingdom, as a trophy, some of the things that the conquered one possessed. Granted that they exist, yet the spoils that the victor carried off are not hostile. But you confess the flesh as hostile to God even today. O the sloth of the triumpher! O the ease of the beaten! O the torpor of the injured! O the sluggish strength of the one provoked! O the authority of a lord at rest! You are wearied by your captives in your own kingdom; and you who could conquer by war grow used to being overcome by sparing. Let the first things be held in such an order, and this suspicion gathers errors from long before the world existed. Certainly you say that both are from themselves, the two whom you report as having met in war: their power is equal, if they both have their origin from themselves and one eternity. If I dare here to call one better, and to suspect that there is more in one, do I not fall and run into guilt, and am I not condemned before the eternal itself, which is always one? Should I not be afraid to profess that what is eternal is overcome, and that what is from itself is not one; and, while we confess God almighty, shall I assert that at some time he lacked dominion over something? A blind thing, and darker than all darkness, is laid open in this sacrilegious error: to say, with mad care, that what is from itself was conquered, so that the victor, who is from himself, is harassed by fear of the captive, and what is unbegotten is subjected. From the oppressed kingdoms, then, the almighty victor increased himself, and what you ask to be unbegotten, you present as being abolished or taken away. Nay, the one who is from himself will be one whose not-being follows, since, succumbing to the victor's power, he will either perish or be led captive.

Next, which shall we say was not content with its own, so that the battle you speak of arose: light or darkness? If light, it needed darkness and took delight in what is foul. Where, then, is the one held to be almighty, understood to be the whole, if there was something not in him, which was outside and held in other kingdoms, and was truth to itself, which the dominion of the almighty did not yet have? But now let us suppose that darkness started the war, and let us posit that the shadow of the unbegotten brightness, existing, conspired with its own solid things. If that light is fire, the darkness would have come together for burning, so that its solid part, coming to the conflict, would be burned from outside. But if the darkness is empty, and so does not burn, where, I ask, is there any meeting of the solid with the empty? To think these things, and to have come to things so inward by a wandering of the senses, is plainly bold and mad. To imagine a conflict of the empty with the solid, the deep with the high, the finite with the infinite, darkness with light, the false with the true, the tiny with the whole! I do not allow, brother, that these discordant things should be said to have arisen in the same way, and be spoken of as eternal, and so placed that being belongs to both; but I attribute being to the one who is from himself, and would assert that the other is not. If you reject this, teach me what the substance of the empty is, what is outside the infinite, what is older than the eternal, what is as great as the whole; so that I may grasp that it is and exists in reality, and then I will not deny two origins of things. If some jest says these things, or a Persian recounts them, let him teach them to his own nation and grow old at his own hinge. For there they think otherwise of divine things, since they live by another law. Although they are men by nature, yet as they are divided by speech, so they are distinguished in reason too; nor are such peoples regarded otherwise, whose bodies are nourished otherwise, whose dress is fitted otherwise, whose appearance is shaped otherwise by their customs of eating and kept otherwise; most are even born with another form; and, as I say, the nations are innumerable. Have you not seen, then, how many the Manis, Zoroasters and Buddhas have deceived by teaching these things? Let us be called back to what is to be inquired into.

What we are, Justin, we are from him who is almighty and who is seen to have existed from himself, for whom there is no being in what he is not. So there was no one else who came to be and stirred up a battle. But that there are held to be two kinds, and these contrary or diverse, good and evil, solid and empty, high and deep, true and false, light and darkness, eternal and temporal, life and death, and the contraries of all things, the order of things teaches and reveals that they are not from two principles. For if one were to look upon two eternals and feel that they came as enemies, to hold this is to be at the mercy of chance. To have set up such principles, and to have handed over the unbegotten to the anxious fear of trembling dread, while sad care troubled kingdoms about to fight, may perhaps have been permitted to the Parthians, who told tales of the outcomes of wars: what conditions and pacts were agreed, what end checked the war, which of the two a safer fortune appointed lord. But whichever way it is treated, as I see, the danger falls on the unbegotten and on the victor; so, brothers, what is from itself is conquered, and what is without beginning will be ended and will not be, or is already ended. I have escaped; I breathe again: there is no other who is said to be my maker; or, if he still remains, he dwells in his own kingdom, and he will not be my maker in this world. My creator is he who is also the craftsman of the world, by whom the chaste Virginity, the glorious choir of the stars and the bright sun were established in heaven, or set in the heavenly ships, as you used to say. So let us exult and rejoice; give thanks, flesh, now no longer to perish. For you are from your Christ the Saviour, whether when you are in Adam and Mary, or when, taken up into the higher vessels, you have been found worthy to be eternal. No longer desolate of the hope of the promise, thrust down into the depths, wasting away in decay, but now restored by the price of the cross, you will be clothed with the glory of immortality.

And this is worthy of the things you have begun to enter upon, which pass beyond all that eternity and the immense are. For here the magi of Babylon and the chanters of Ctesiphon delight to mark things with the mysteries of their secrets; their power is by song now to raise spirits, now to summon them. But better, and plainly divine, is that our Saviour raised flesh buried in tombs. For no one doubts that what could be buried was dead; and if death clung to the wounded flesh that came from above, then in Christ our flesh rose again. Yet what reason was there to take flesh, if it was not itself to be raised? But if it is another flesh, it is certainly mortal, since it admits of being killed. This is immense and beyond reckoning: to have dwelt in the members of a man. Unless he were from eternity, he would not be almighty; recognize that in this same eternal one are the things called contraries. It belonged to the same one to die to whom belong an unbegotten Father, and age and eternity; and so that he may truly be known as almighty, it is not denied that he was born of a virgin. What it is that is almighty, eternal, infinite and whole, what is immense and higher than every summit and height, from whom all that is in things remains and comes, I learn, reminded by the Saviour of all, who, teaching that he is the Son, deigned to show that he has a Father; revealing him as God, Jesus, in wonder, also revealed that he is all things, as far as the measure of the world deserved. For this reason God is the one and only principle, and God alone is truth; and truth itself is light, and light always eternal; and all that is true is solid, and always is, and remains clear and abides. What is true from itself is never conquered; what is solid has nothing empty in it; what is light does not admit darkness and does not know it; and if it admits darkness and darkness comes into it, darkness ceases to be for itself. Rather, things that have ceased to be for themselves are not for others either. But if the darkness is still in its own realm, it is outside this world, and the conflict with it still goes on, and it is uncertain whether it will be overcome or will truly perish at some time. And if this is still in doubt, then the world too, or the flesh, did not receive its being in that realm as from another, but came to it from him by whom the bright sun too was appointed minister to the world. For if you imagine darkness to be what is called evil, you will grasp and understand it: not taking it that being is given to darkness as it is to light and brightness, but that it comes about or appears from the act of another which truly is. For both in the things above and in the air, and among our own things, there is what has found its being from the act of another: as heat from the sun's ray, cold from the blast of the wind, which binds the rivers, while heat splits the earth. The earth, then, is opened by the sun's heat, and the streams of the rivers are bound by frost.

These things must be noticed thus: that something else is brought about by the act of another, so that in the things that are, one may see that what is not present in them by quality is found to arise from the act of another. But it is otherwise with what comes about, given to another, from the reality of the eternal which is and which is whole. For darkness is not standing, not solid, not penetrating, but something empty which perishes by light and has no being for itself when light shines. For it befalls darkness not to be, by the act of light, because it is not itself substance: it admits of perishing by the substance of light. If, then, it belongs to darkness to perish by light, it comes to it from the same light to appear, in the way that the deep comes from the high, and nothing from the whole. For since the whole is eternal, there is nevertheless also nothing, which is no substance anywhere. For it is high, but it has its depth; for if it were not high, the deep could not appear. If you do not know the solid, you do not discern the empty. There are, then, things that are substance, and there are things that are without using their own substance. Because those are which are substance, from them it comes to the others, which are not substance, to appear: like hoarfrost, like ice, which appear, but because they do not use their own substance, being comes to them from the act of cold; they melt and, dissolved, perish. Ice, indeed, is from water, but is bound by the rigour of the air. So I see two states of water, liquid and ice. What is substance, then, is the liquid; what comes to it by act is its freezing into ice. But because ice itself is no substance, it perishes and is taken away, while the liquid of the water, remaining substance, persists.

And these things are of the world, coming either from the Creator or from nature. But those higher things, the last, and the first without beginning, which lack likeness and fail of comparison, which are not formed after the example of images, to which nothing is equal and nothing prior, beyond which nothing can be thought, which are grasped only in this, that they are known to be incomprehensible: these do not have their act by such a cause or form as the things just spoken of, which this composite world has. But as power belongs to them, which are unmade, unbegotten, infinite and whole, so see or consider that being belongs to them: that there is one and only one who is almighty, who is held to be the whole of all, who is seen to be infinite; this is and stands, and, standing forth in its own invisible solidity, rules and reigns, using the force of its reason, its admirable substance, by that divine act of its own by which it is either moved or unmoved. And yet that very thing which is gives an origin even to the false, as the whole: for, since the whole is almighty, it comes about through him that nothing too appears. For the almighty would not be the whole if there were nothing at all besides himself. There is, then, what is called nothing, but it has no substance; and there is what is called the whole, and it has substance. But to the one belongs being, to the other non-being. God, then, is truth, who is the whole and stands infinite. Because nothing can be outside the whole, rightly, Justin, what is understood as placeless, held to be outside the bounds, is called false; if indeed any reasoning can admit that you should conceive an end anywhere for him whom you see and trace out to be the whole. For if the whole is filled by the eternal, nothing has anywhere to be; and if the almighty is all things, being for nothing can be understood only in this way: that what is outside the whole is held to be nothing at all. Finally, if you measure the almighty so that there is for you another who is not almighty, then place will be called greater than God, and vaster than both, if diverse unbegotten principles hold their own kingdoms and stand as rivals.

To understand or hold that anything is greater than the eternal Almighty is the barbarous notion of a careless confusion; and to hold that what wages war is coeternal, and to suppose that one of the eternals is conquered, belongs to one who would say that light itself will not exist in some age. And if you listen to this, you will understand that the sun too will not exist. And since its being is to have begun, if the danger arises that what exists from itself should perish, then the unbegotten makes war, and what is overcome by the unbegotten is itself unbegotten. Do you dare to judge which of the unbegotten began first? Or do you perhaps disguise it by a mere order, and tell the tale that they began together? Can you judge one greater and one lesser among eternal unbegotten things? If you put darkness first, you give it every principle, and it will be greater. If you confess that light is older, you confess that all things come from it. If you see both as equally coeval, either neither will be conquered, or what one has taken will remain to the other. And where here will the almighty or eternal be? Will he be victor in one of them, and in equal existence will an unequal cause arise, and will the outcome govern the war of unbegotten beings, or will chance take it up? Far be it from the mind of the soul to attend to this error; let human hope cast off the confession of so mad an understanding. One unbegotten stands; from one Lord all things have come. And because diverse things belong to the same cause, the almighty is found by all creatures, both before beginnings and before ends.

So from the true, which is, comes also the being of the false, as shadows come from solid things. For if there is no solid thing, there is no shadow either. And this is the true mystery of the true. For from the things that are true appear also the things that are not; so that he is for himself from himself, and grounds the being of others from himself, not by his work, not by labour, not by matter, not by nature, nor by substance. For if it belongs to the almighty to be the whole, what is outside is his. And if anything comes about without him, neither is almighty, and by act and chance the principles grow by what is added, and are certainly diminished when they have made additions. Finally, what matter, what nature is there of a shadow, which does not appear without another, nor is found in darkness? Because it is not its own substance, nor from itself, it vanishes and perishes; and yet the solid thing from which the shadow sometimes comes persists, standing in its own strength. Marvel, Mani of Babylon, at these mysteries and these riches of the Almighty; confess that nothing is which is not his whom you venerate as eternal, whom you confess as Lord, before whom there is nothing. And how can anything fittingly be not his, or not from him, before whom you conceive nothing else? But because you are troubled, wavering, anxious with the care of a wandering error, or rather confused by the labour of vain study and deceived by dull senses, you have wounded the first beginnings of your soul by the madness of a greater inquiry. Call back your untamed cares to the first footsteps, and cease to believe that one eternity has taken up two kingdoms, testing each other, as you say.

Of two eternals, if one is to be conquered, eternity will remain cut off. Light and darkness, then, have equal things, and things diverse within themselves, or rather contrary: one power fits them both, but in the other it will at some time cease. It is no longer the same, if it is hoped for anywhere. If one of them fails first, it will follow, Justin, that you confess that there is one principle, if there is one victor of the two. Certainly I understand that in the highest heights, at the very extremity of all height, nothing dwells that is called evil, which the fearful veneration of human devotion supposes to be beyond the Angels and Archangels. It is sacrilegious to say that evil dwells in such places; or, if its seat is there and it is taken to be a creator, then the devil rules all creation and the sun itself. For if he is coeternal, he is there; or if he is not there, he is in some kingdom of his own, I know not where. I believe that the other has no sun, no heaven, no world, no light, no truth. And if he has a kingdom elsewhere, nothing of his is common with us; or if he is in this world, he is already conquered, he is already under the sun, he no longer has strength. And if you confess this, you understand yourself that what you see captured by the ruler cannot be called a principle. Is it fitting for things to have two highests, two lowests, two infinites? Two infinites cannot be spoken of, because where one begins is the end of the other. The highest is highest if there is nothing beyond it, and likewise the lowest if there is nothing beneath it; and the whole is the whole when nothing else is found. If this is so, God is one and only, highest, infinite, whole, almighty and all-holding; he is the one and only principle.

Do not be disturbed; do not be anxious, terrified, astonished and blinded by wonder at so venerable a truth, on the ground that evil cannot arise from a good author. You rightly ask these questions about creatures: that created things do not send forth from themselves anything other than what they are, as bitter from sweet, water from fire, offspring of the underworld from shadow, man from wood, flesh from what is not flesh, and all the other things that the whole world counts. But these cannot be ascribed to the Almighty. It is a rule of teaching that there is a law for him, what can come from him and what cannot, what is from him and what through him. You rightly gather these things and bind them together, if you do not at all confess him to be almighty. But if his power and eternity are spread through the whole, and it did not come to him from another that he should be, then certainly all things either come about or are created from him, or out of him, or through him. Therefore evil too received from him that it should be. But this evil is what is called a demon; for the other things, if there are any that you call evil, have no substance or nature. A demon, now good, now evil, is an angelic creature, as the usage of the Attic tongue teaches, saying agathos daimōn, “good demon”, and kakos daimōn, “evil demon”. And that the one called kakos is himself good, we shall say later. And all the other things you call evil, if the vices of error cease, will have no origin of birth.