Against the Doctrines of Mani

The philosophy of the Christians is called simple. It gives the greatest care to the forming of character, and speaks only in hints about the more exact doctrines concerning God; the chief point of its concern with these matters everyone would reasonably accept, for there they set the efficient cause as the most honoured and most ancient, and the cause of all things that exist. In ethics, too, they pass over the more laborious questions, such as what ethical and logical virtue is and all that is said about dispositions and passions, and they spend their time on the part that gives precepts. They do not give the elements for acquiring each virtue, but heap up rather plain precepts as they come; and the great mass of the people, hearing these, makes great progress in decency (as one can learn from experience), and the stamp of piety settles into their characters, rekindling the disposition formed by such habit and leading them little by little to the desire of the good. But when this philosophy was divided into very many parts by those who came after, many questions arose, as among the eristic schools. From these it came about that some became more adroit than others and more given to inquiry, as one might say, and some even made themselves heads of sects. Through these the formation of character, now obscured, withered away, since those who claimed to lead the sects did not attain precision in argument, and the great multitude was set at strife against itself, with no rule or laws underlying it from which to find a solution to the questions. And just as in other matters ambition, once it falls into excess, spoils everything,

so also in these matters each, eager to outdo his predecessor in the novelty of his opinions, has thrown this simple philosophy into an endless business. So did the one called Manichaeus, a Persian by race, who in my judgment surpassed everyone in telling marvels. His innovation did not spread long ago: the first expounder of the man's doctrine to come to us was one named Papos, after him Thomas, and some others after them. He himself is said to have lived under Valerian, to have campaigned with Shapur the Persian, and, having offended him in some way, to have perished. Some such report of his doctrine reached us from the man's acquaintances. He posited as principles God and matter: God is good, matter evil; but God exceeds in good more than matter in evil. By matter he does not mean what Plato means, that which becomes all things when it takes on quality and shape (which is why he calls it the all-receiving, the mother and the nurse), nor what Aristotle means, the element with which form and privation are concerned, but something different from these: the disorderly motion in each of the things that exist, that he calls matter. Other powers are ranged with God, like handmaids, all good, and others likewise with matter, all evil. The bright, the light and the above are all with God; the dim, the darkness and the below are with matter. God also has desires, but these too are good; and matter likewise, but all evil.

Matter, then, once came to desire to reach the upper region; and having arrived, it marvelled at the brightness and the light that was with God, and wished to seize this rule for itself, thrusting God aside. God wished to punish it, but was at a loss for an evil with which to punish it, for there is no evil in the house of God. So he sent a power, the one we call soul, into matter, to be mingled with it throughout; for the later separation of this power will one day be the death of matter. Thus by God's providence the soul was mingled with matter, an unlike thing with an unlike. But in the mixture the soul suffered along with matter: as what is held in a poor vessel often changes with it, so in matter the soul too suffered something of the kind, and was lessened from its own nature into a share of evil. God pitied this, and sent another power, which we call the Demiurge. When it arrived and set about making the world, that part of the power which had suffered nothing amiss from the mixture was separated from matter, and the sun and the moon came into being first; what had fallen into a moderate evil became the stars and the whole heaven. The part of matter from which the sun and the moon had been separated was driven out of the world, and that is fire, burning but dark and without light, like night. In the other elements, and in the plants and animals in them, the divine power is carried about, mingled unevenly. That is why the world came into being, and in it the sun and the moon, which by births and deaths continually separate the divine power from matter and send it on to God.

For after the Demiurge another power came down upon the light-like substance of the sun and has managed these things; and the matter is plain and, as one might say, clear even to a blind man. In its waxings the moon receives the power that is being separated from matter and is filled with it for that time; and when it is full, in its wanings it sends it up to the sun; the sun lets it go to God; and having done this it awaits again the migration of soul to it from the next full moon, receives it likewise, lets it pass of itself to God, and labours at this continually. An image is seen in the sun such as is the form of man; and matter, vying with it, made man out of itself through the mixture of the power with all of it, so that he too has something of the soul. Yet the form contributed much to man's sharing in the divine power more than the other mortal animals, for he is an image of the divine power. Christ is Mind: having come at some time from the upper region, he freed very much of this power and sent it to God; and at the last, being crucified, he gave knowledge in this way, that the divine power too has been fitted into matter, crucified in it. Since, then, it is God's decree that matter be destroyed, they abstain from all living things and feed on vegetables and on everything without sensation; they abstain from marriage, sexual intercourse and the begetting of children, so that the power may not dwell longer in matter through the succession of the race. But they do not take their own lives in contriving the cleansing of the harm the mixture with matter has done to the power.

These are the chief points of what they say. They honour above all the sun and the moon, not as gods but as the way by which one can reach God. When the divine power has been completely separated, the outer fire, they say, will fall in and burn up both itself and all the rest, whatever is left of matter. The more refined among them, who are not unacquainted with Greek learning, remind us of things from our own tradition: from the mysteries, Dionysus cut to pieces by the Titans, which they apply to their doctrine that the divine power is divided into matter; from the poems, the battle of the giants, to show that the poets too were not ignorant of the revolt of matter against God. I would not say that these things are unable to beguile those who accept the teaching without examination, since such deceit of argument has even won over to itself some of those who studied philosophy with me. But when I set myself to examine how the matter stands, I am at a loss how to proceed. For their hypotheses do not rest on any recognized arguments by which we could conduct the inquiry, nor are there any principles of demonstration, so that we might see what follows from them. It is truly a windfall with those who are said to philosophize simply: they lay down the writings they have, old and new, taking them to be divinely inspired, and draw their own opinions from them, and they think themselves refuted only if something said or done by them is found not to agree with these; and what for those who philosophize in the Greek manner are the principles of demonstration, the immediate premises, with them is the voice of the prophets. Here, however, all these are thrown out, and the things I mentioned before are asserted without any proof. Since it is necessary to make the answer with reasons, and not to set out other things more plausible and better able to beguile, the approach is harder and harder still, because the arguments must be varied. For if they are more exact, they will pass unnoticed by those whom these men have already captured without any proof; if they are made to beguile, they will fall into the same hold, for they will seem to have come from the like. Much and great care is therefore needed, and God in truth, who will lead the discussion.

He posits two principles, God and matter. If he does this to separate what comes into being from what is, the hypothesis is not so bad, provided that matter neither makes itself and admits the account given of contraries, nor, as making, is regarded as an efficient cause, things perhaps not even right to say (though God has no need of matter for his works, since all things can come into existence in relation to that Mind). But if, as he seems rather to say, matter is the disorderly motion of the things that exist, then first he fails to notice that he is positing another efficient cause, an evil-working one; and he does not see the consequence either, that if one must posit both God and matter, another matter will be posited for God, so that each of the efficient causes has its underlying matter. Instead of two, then, he will be shown to make four principles for us. Strange too is the opposition he sets up. If God for him is what the good is, and he wishes to set an opposite to him, why does he not oppose evil to him, as some of the Pythagoreans do? It is more tolerable as they put it, that there are two principles, the good and the evil, continually at strife, but that the good prevails; for if the evil were to prevail, all things would perish. For in general matter by itself is neither body nor strictly something incorporeal nor simply a particular thing, but something indefinite which, taking on form, becomes defined: the pyramid becomes fire, the octahedron air, the icosahedron water, the cube earth. How then is matter the disorderly motion of the elements? By itself it does not subsist, for motion is in what is moved; but matter does not seem to be such a thing, but rather the first substrate, without shape, from which all else comes. Since, then, matter is the disorderly motion, was it always with what is moved, or was it ever separated from it? If it was ever by itself, then it would not exist, since there is no motion without something moved; but if it was always in what is moved, again two principles will be posited, the mover and the moved. For which of them does he cast his vote, that we may posit it as first along with God?

Moreover, the word 'disorderly' is dragged along with their account and should be banished altogether; for it could only fairly be said when there is no motion. And which of the motions is matter? Motion in a straight line, circular motion, motion by alteration, or motion by coming to be and passing away? But circular motion is so orderly that it is assigned to the order of the universe; and on their own account it is not to be blamed, since the sun and the moon, which alone of the gods they say they revere, move in it. Is it then straight-line motion? But this too has a limit, the reaching of its own place. For everything earthy stops moving whenever it reaches the earth, and every animal and plant stops growing whenever it reaches its own limit, so that the coming to rest of these would more reasonably be the death of matter than the endless end they weave for it. Motion by coming to be and passing away cannot even be conceived as suiting this hypothesis, for in their view matter is ungenerated. If they ascribe to it motion by alteration (and they seem to say this above all, since they say that through matter come changes of character and vices in the soul), it is worth considering how they say even this. Altering itself, it will always begin from a beginning, take hold of the middle as it goes on, and so reach the end; but on reaching the end it will not stop, if alteration is its essence, but will turn back through the same stages to the beginning, and likewise from there again to the end, and will never cease doing this. For example, if the line ΑΓ is being altered, with Β as its middle, the change will go from Α to Β and from there to Γ; then, turning back again from the extreme Γ to Β, it will at length reach Α, and this will go on for ever. So it is with change from black: the middle is grey and the extreme white; and back again from this to grey and likewise to black; and again from white begins the alteration, the same course. If, then,

matter is an evil-working cause by way of alteration, it is shown in this way to be no more evil-working than good-working. Let the alteration begin from evil: then it passes from this through the indifferent things to the good; or let it begin from the good: then again its beginning passes through the indifferent things; whether the motion goes toward this extreme or the other, the argument is the same. And this is said beyond what is needed; for all motion has to do with quantity, while quality governs vice and virtue, and we know that these are distinguished even in genus. Are God and matter the only principles, or is something else left lying between them? If there is nothing, they remain unmixed with each other (for it is well said that for extremes to be mixed there must be something in the middle to bind them together); but if there is something else, it must in turn be either incorporeal or body, so that a third principle has been brought in. Again, are God and matter both wholly incorporeal, or is one body and the other incorporeal, or are both bodies? If both are incorporeal, neither is in the other, unless as grammar is in a soul (but it is absurd to think this of God and matter); or as in a void, as some say the void is poured round the universe, but then the other again has no existence, for the essence of the void is nothing; or as accidents, but first this is impossible, for having no share in substance they can be nowhere, since substance is, as it were, the vehicle placed under accidents. If both are bodies, both must be heavy, or both light, or intermediate, or one heavy and the other light or intermediate. If both are heavy, they must in that case be wholly together, and the same holds for the light and the intermediate; if they differ, the one will be wholly separated from the other. For the heavy has one place, the intermediate and the light another: the one has the above, the other the below, the other the middle. But of every sphere the below is the middle, for from it the distance to everything aloft, up to the upper surface, is equal on every side, and all heavy things in turn are borne toward it from every side. That is why I could not help laughing when I heard that matter, moving in disorder (for this is natural to it), came into the region of God, which is light and brightness and all such things. If one is body and the other incorporeal, first, only what is body can be moved; then, if they are unmixed, each is apart according to its own nature; but if the one is mixed with the other, it would be either soul, or mind, or an accident, for only in these ways can incorporeal things be mixed with bodies.

But how was it carried into the region of God, or for what cause? For by nature the below and the darkness belong to it, as they say, while the above and the light are contrary to its nature; so its motion at that time was contrary to nature, and it suffered something like what happens if one throws a stone or a clod of earth upward. That is why such things, lifted for a little by the force of the one who threw them, after being in the air are carried down to the same place. Who, then, lifted matter into the upper region? Of itself and from itself it could not move with this motion, since it is contrary to its nature; it must undergo force to be raised into the upper region, like the stone and the clod. But they leave nothing else with it except God. The consequence of the argument is plain: on their account God, by force and compulsion, raised it up toward himself. Moreover, if matter is evil, its desires too must surely be such; and the desire of evil is base, the desire of the good most excellent. If matter desired the brightness and the light, the desire is not base, just as it is not if someone living in vice should later come to desire virtue. The opposite is what deserves blame, that someone excellent should come to desire the base; as if they were to say that God longs for the evils that belong to matter. For the goods of God are not to be thought of as things like wealth, much land and much gold, of which the owner has less when they pass from him to another. If we must think of any image of them at all, one might fairly compare wisdom and the sciences. As, then, neither wisdom nor knowledge is lessened, nor those who possess them, when another partakes of them, so it is not reasonable that God should have begrudged matter its desire for the good, if indeed on their account it desired it.

They have far outdone the myth-makers, who cut off the genitals of Uranus, or compose the plots of his son against Cronus so that he might seize the rule, or again make Cronus swallow his sons and then be cheated by the stone image. For how are their own sayings not of this kind, when they describe outright a war of matter against God, and do not even say these things with a hidden meaning, as Homer in the Iliad makes Zeus rejoice at the war of the gods with one another, hinting that the world is made up of unlike things fitted to one another, conquering and conquered? I have said this because I know such people: when they lack demonstrations, they gather things from the poems from every side and make of them a defence of their own opinions. They would not have fallen into this if they had ever read them with any care. Moreover, all evils have been driven away from the divine chorus, and jealousy and envy above all; but these men leave them with God, when they say that he organized the plot against matter because it desired the good. And with which of the things he had did God wish to punish matter? To say that God is simple is, I think, more exact than their account, and setting out the conception of him is not easy as it is with other things; for it cannot be shown simply by a word, but only through much training and labour. But this at least we all know, that anger and the desire to punish matter are passions arising in one who is so disposed; and these passions would not arise even in a good man, much less in the Good itself.

The argument, carried round, comes again to other points. Since they say that God sent a power down into matter, it is worth considering whether this power was less good than God or equally good. If it was less, what is the cause? For none of the things with God had any share in matter, and he presents only God as good and only matter as evil. If it was equal, why did the one give orders like a king while the other endured this unwilling labour? With matter, too, it will be asked whether its powers are equal to it in evil or less. If they are less, they are surely less in vice; then they would be so by a share in the good, for when there are two evils, the lesser is such surely by partaking of the good. But they leave nothing good in matter. So again there is another difficulty: if some other power exceeds the ruling matter in evil, that one is the more fit to rule, for the more evil would lead the rule in their scheme.

That God sent down a power upon matter is asserted without any proof, and it is not plausible in any way; yet it too must be given the arguments proper to it. They say the cause of it is this: 'So that nothing should be evil and all things good, the power had to be mingled with matter, like wrestlers who overcome their opponents by grappling with them, so that, having mastered evil, it might make it cease to be.' But it would be far more venerable, I think, and worthy of God's supremacy, to have done away with matter at a single thought from among the things that are. I suppose they did not accept this because some evil still exists now, which they say is matter. But things are no more able to cease being what they are, even if one grants that some of them do not change for the worse; there ought to have been some perception of this, that they have been lessened in some measure, so that we might also have better hopes for the future. Well was it said against the argument of Zeno of Citium, who said 'the whole will be burned up', arguing: 'everything burning that has fuel will burn it all up; the sun is fire, and will it not burn up what it has?', from which he concluded, as he thought, that the whole would be burned up. To him one of the wittier men is said to have replied: 'But I saw yesterday, and a year ago, and before that, and I see likewise now, that nothing has suffered from the fire of the sun; it ought to have happened little by little over time, so that we might believe that the whole will one day be burned up.' And to the argument of Manichaeus, asserted without any proof, the same answer applies, I think: 'These things have not been lessened at all; they were there before, at the first man who came into being, when brother killed brother, and they are still here now; the wars are the same and the desires more varied. They ought, if not to have ceased, at least to have lessened, so that we might take courage that they will one day cease in the course of time. But since they are the same from then until now, what ground is there for confidence about the future?'

What, then, does he say the evils are? He leaves none about the sun and the moon. Whether he says there is anything of the kind about the heaven and the stars, and what it is, it is reasonable to ask next. For them disorder is evil, and disorderly motion; but these heavenly bodies always keep the same course in the same way. He will not accuse any of the planets of choosing to stay in a sign of the zodiac beyond the appointed time, nor any of the fixed stars of not keeping to the same seat and not going round with the revolution of the whole, moving one degree toward the following signs in a hundred years. On earth, if he blames the wildness of some regions, or if steersmen find fault with storms at sea, then first, on their own account, such things belong to the portion of the good. For if nothing grew on the earth, all living things would perish very quickly; and this could send on to God much of the power shut up in matter, and many moons would be needed to hold so many souls arriving all at once. The same holds for the sea: to perish there is a windfall, so that those who perish may set out at once on the road to God. Wars on earth, famines and everything destructive are, on their account, held in highest honour; for whatever causes good is to be honoured, and these cause good, since from the destruction that results they send on to God the power that is being separated from those who perish.

We were ignorant, it seems, that the Egyptians rightly honour the crocodile, the lion and the wolf, since these, being the strongest of all animals, consume the others, feeding on them and destroying them in every way; and the eagle and the hawk, since these too destroy the weaker creatures in the air and on the earth. Perhaps on their account man is held in the highest honour for this reason, that more than all others he subdues most of the animals by his devices and his arts; and, so that he himself may not miss out on this good, he becomes food for others. Again, births are absurd on their account, producing something enormous from a small and chance seed; and in their view it would have been much better for God to have abolished them, so that the divine power might have been released quickly from its sojourn here. But what will Manichaeus say, one might ask, about licentiousness, injustice and everything of that kind? Have not education and the law been given as helpers against these? Education takes care that nothing of the kind should happen among men, and the law punishes the one caught in some wrongdoing. Next, what is the charge against the earth (if a farmer neglects to tame it), that the rule of God, which is according to justice, has been diminished, when some places are fruitful and others not, or when winds blowing for some other cause benefit some people while others suffer things they would not wish? They ought not to have been ignorant of the nature of the contingent and of the necessary; for then they would not have told such marvels.

Where, then, do pleasure and desire come from? These, they say, are the greatest evils, and it is for these more than for anything else that they have come to hate matter. Now it is clear that these belong only to the animals that have sensation, and that nothing perceives desire and pleasure except what has sensation. For what sensation of pleasure and pain has a plant, or earth, water or air? And the demons, if they are living beings with sensation, perhaps for this reason take pleasure in the customary sacrifices and are vexed when they are left off, whereas nothing of the kind can be thought of God. Those who say, 'Why do animals feel pleasure and desire?' should first blame the fact that they have sensation, or that they need food. For those that are immortal living beings and free from decay and growth, such as the sun, the moon and the stars, although they have sensation, are outside this charge; but man, able both to perceive and to judge, and wise in potency (for he has the power to become such), once he has received his own proper faculty, tramples these things underfoot.

For in general it is worth asking these men whether no human being can become good, or whether someone at least can. If no one is wise, why does Manichaeus himself (I leave the others aside) not only say that he is good, but also claim to be able to make others such? If there is anyone at all, what prevents all from becoming good? For what is possible for one is possible for all, and by the means through which one becomes virtuous all could become so; unless they say that most of the power is caught up in such people. Then again, first, what need is there for the labour of education? We should become good while asleep. Or why do such men above all lead their hearers to hope for the good? For even wallowing with courtesans they would have their own proper good. But if education and conversion are better, and zeal for taking up virtue has made a man such, let all become such, and the disorderly motion of matter they keep chattering about is done away with. It would have been far better to say that wisdom was given by God to men as a weapon, so that whatever befalls them from desire and pleasure, because they have sensation, it might turn little by little toward the good and remove the absurd consequences of them. In that way they themselves, professing to teach virtue, would have been admired for their purpose and their life, and there would be great hope that evils would one day cease, when all had become wise. This, it seems to me, is what Jesus understood: so that farmers, carpenters, builders and others in the crafts might not be shut out from the good, he set up a common assembly of them all together, and by simple and easy discourses both brought them to the knowledge of God and made them come to desire the good.

But how can it be said that 'God sent the divine power down upon matter'? If the power always existed, and neither God nor matter is conceived as prior to it, then again there are three principles according to Manichaeus, and perhaps very many will appear a little later. If it came into being afterwards, how is it without a share in matter? If it is a part of God, first they thereby make God composite and bodily, and this is absurd and impossible. If God made it and it has no share in matter, I am amazed that neither he nor his followers considered this: if God, by willing, made this power (as the true doctrine says that the things after God are hypostases while God abides), how did he not also become the cause of all the other things that came into being, without needing any pre-existing matter? These are the absurdities that appear from this; the consequences follow. Was it the nature of the power to go to matter, or was this contrary to its nature? Then how was it mingled? If it was according to its nature, it was surely always with matter; and if so, how do they call matter evil, when it has been a mixture with the divine power from the beginning? And how will it perish when the divine power mingled with it departs from it one day? For good things preserve; and it is reasonable that they become causes of some further good to whatever they are present with, rather than bring destruction or some other evil upon them.

The clever thing they say is this: just as we see that when the soul is separated from the body the body itself perishes, so when the power leaves matter, what is left, which is matter, will be dissolved and pass away. First, they do not see that none of the things that exist can perish into non-being, for non-being is not; but when bodies are scattered and undergo some change, dissolution takes place, so that one part goes into earth, another into air, another into something else. Next, they do not remember that they suppose matter to be disorderly motion. How is it reasonable that what moves by itself, whose essence is motion, not belonging to it by accident, should cease, when the power departs, from being what it was before the power came down into it? They do not see the difference: every body without a share of soul is motionless (for even plants have the vegetative soul), but the very essence of matter … It would have been better to say that, just as when harmony comes to a lyre playing out of tune it makes the whole attuned, so the divine power, mingled with the disorderly motion (which is matter on their account), has imposed a certain order on it in place of the disorder within it, and always imposes it, in a way worthy of the divine chorus. Otherwise, how did Manichaeus himself become able to discourse about these things, and by what did he expound them? For they grant that he too was a mixture of matter and of the power shut up in it. If, then, he said these things by the disorderly motion he had, how is the opinion not base? If by the divine power, the doctrine is at once doubtful: insofar as it comes from the divine power, it shares in truth; insofar as it shares in the other part, it shifts into falsehood.

If it had been said that the divine power set matter in order and keeps it in order, it would have been far wiser and would have contributed more to the credibility of the teaching of Manichaeus. But 'God sent down another power.' What has been said about the first power applies to this one too, and whatever absurdities follow from their account of the first power may be said now as well. But who could bear the rest? Why did God not send down one power able to do everything? Is a man's mind so versatile that the same man is a geometer, an astronomer, a builder and anything else of the kind, while God, it seems, was at a loss to find a power that would be sufficient for him for everything, so as not to need a first and a second? And why is the one power creative and the other rather passive, so as to be well suited to be mixed with matter? Here again I do not see the cause of the ranking within the good, or of its superiority, if there was no evil in the house of God. For if God alone is good and matter alone evil, all else must be called intermediate and in between. Yet some maker is found who differs regarding the intermediates, when they say that the one is the creative cause and the other the one mixed with matter. Perhaps this is the 'preferred' and the 'dispreferred' that the more recent philosophers speak of in their account of things indifferent. They say that when the creative power set about making the world, that part of matter which had kept its own virtue even in the mixture was separated off, and the sun and the moon came into being; what had taken a share of moderate evil became the heaven and the stars; and the rest within these, of the power and of matter.

Beyond all this I am amazed that they do not perceive that they are making the divine power bodily and cutting it up like parts. Why is the divine power not matter too, if it is passive and divisible throughout, and one part of it becomes the sun and another the moon? For they say these are purely of the divine power. But this is what we said was proper to matter: to be nothing in itself, but to receive shapes and qualities and become all the defined things. If, then, from the divine power alone, as from one substrate, came the sun and the moon, and these are different from each other, why should not something else come to be as well? And if everything will come to be from it, the consequence is plain: the divine power is itself matter, being made into the shapes. But if nothing other than the sun and the moon is what comes from the divine power, then what is shut up in all existing things is the sun and the moon, and each of the stars is the sun and the moon, or one of them, and so is each of the land animals, the birds and the amphibians. That not even conjurors would accept this is, I think, plain to everyone.

When they examine what comes next, the road is not straight but steeper than the one before. They say the sun and the moon suffered nothing amiss in the mixture with matter; but then they cannot say how the rest were lessened from their own nature. If, even when the divine power was by itself, it was such that part of it was good and part better (like the myth of the Hippocentaurs, who were men down to the chest and horses for the rest; both creatures are good, but the man is better), so that one could conceive part of the divine power excelling in beauty and part falling short of it, and likewise one part of matter having a certain excess of evil … (different things being different …), it would be another argument. For one could then suppose that the sun and the moon, being wiser from the beginning, chose the less wicked parts of matter for the mixture, so as to remain in their own virtue, since such wickedness was too weak to force out so great a superiority in good; while the other parts of the power, having fallen, not without forethought but not with equal forethought, received a greater share of the evil in matter, each according to its measure. But since they say nothing different about this power, and it is regarded as alike throughout, the account is unconvincing that in the mixture one part stayed pure and another took a share of some evil.

They say that the sun and the moon separate the divine power from matter little by little and send it off to God: the moon receives it into itself from the new moon until the full moon and then hands it over to the sun, and the sun sends it on to God. If they had gone even a little to the doors of the astronomers, they would not have fallen into this, nor would they have been ignorant that the moon (having, as some say, no light of its own) is lit up by the sun, and that its phases follow its distances from the sun: it is full when it is a hundred and eighty degrees from the sun, and in conjunction when it moves in the same degree as the sun. Then, is it not amazing that the souls, many as they are and from different sources (from the world itself, from animals, plants, nymphs and demons, and among these from birds, land animals and amphibians), are not distinguished by sight, but one body, always alike, is seen by us in the moon throughout? And what of the continuity of this body: when the moon is halved it appears as a semicircle, and when it is gibbous, of that shape …? Again, how are the souls taken up to the moon, or using what vehicle? If it is light, like fire, it would probably not go only as far as the moon but always further upward; if it is heavy, it could not reach the moon at all. What reason is there that what first reaches the moon is not sent straight up to the sun, but waits for the full moon and the arrival of the other souls? When the moon wanes from the full, where does the power that is being separated stay during that time, until the moon, emptied of the earlier souls like a deserted city, receives a second colony? A treasury ought to have been marked off in some part of the earth or of the clouds or of some other place, where the souls gather and stand ready for the journey to the moon. But there is yet another difficulty. Why is the moon not filled at once, or why does it wait fifteen days? No less amazing than what has been said is this: never, since men have kept memory, has the moon been filled in less than fifteen days, not even at the flood in the time of Deucalion, and still less in the time of Phoroneus, when practically everything on earth was destroyed and much of the power must have been separated from matter. Besides this, they ought to have considered good harvests and bad and deaths likewise; since these do not happen in order, the order of the full moons and wanings should not be kept in this way either.

Nor should this be brought in as a side issue: if the divine power shut up in matter is infinite, what the sun and the moon accomplish can do nothing to lessen it, for what remains is again infinite when a finite amount is taken; but if it is finite, there ought to have been some perception, in so long a time, of how much of this power has been lessened from the world; yet everything remains the same. And what myths have they not surpassed in implausibility with this too, when they say that man is a work of matter made after the image seen in the sun? For images are likenesses of archetypes. If they leave the image in the sun, where is the pattern after which the image was formed for them? They will not say it is man himself, the true man; nor the divine power, for this they mix with matter, whereas they say the image was seen in the sun, which on their account came into being from the later separation from matter; nor the creative cause, for they say this was sent down to save the divine power, and on their account it must surely be ranked before the sun, since it was upon its arrival that the sun and the moon were separated from matter; yet they say the image was seen in the sun. 'Matter,' they say, 'made man.' In what way, or how? It could not even mould him. Besides the fact that on their account man would be an image of an image and have no subsistence, it cannot even be conceived how man is a work of matter; for reasoning and perceiving do not belong even to matter as they conceive it. And what is man on their account? The mixture of soul and body, or one of the two, or mind, higher than the whole soul? If it is mind, how could the better be the work of the worse? If it is soul (and they say this is the divine power), how can they take the divine power away from God and place it under the craftsmanship of matter? If they leave only the body, let them remember again that this is motionless in itself, while they say that the essence of matter is motion. And since they think that nothing by itself is drawn to matter, neither is it reasonable to suppose that what is composed of these is its work. Moreover, it seems beyond dispute that what is made by something is altogether inferior to it: so the world is inferior to its maker, and the works of craftsmen to the craftsmen. If, then, man is the work of matter, he is surely inferior to it. But these men leave nothing worse than matter. And it is not the same for the divine power to be mixed with matter as with something worse than matter. What they say by way of explaining the arrangement cannot even be conceived. Why do they think matter needed the better image for the existence of man? Or why was the image not sufficient by itself, as with mirrors, for man to appear, or as the sun itself is sufficient for the coming to be and passing away of all things that come to be? 'Matter imitated the image in making its own work.' With which of the things it had? With the divine power mixed with it? Then in this way the divine power stands to matter as an instrument. With the disorderly motion? Then they are giving form to matter. But all likenesses reach their completion through imitation with order and exactness; neither a house nor a ship nor any other work of art can be completed by disorder, nor a statue, which art devised to imitate a man.

Not even knowing Christ, but calling him Chrestos by changing one letter to η, they bring in another meaning in place of what is properly understood of him, and say that he is Mind. If they say that he is the knowable and the knowing and wisdom, they speak in agreement with those of the churches about him, and in arranging things so they will be caught: how then do they throw out the whole of what is called the old history? If they say, as some do, that mind is something that supervenes, one of the things that come in from outside and befall us, let us consider it. Those who champion this opinion say, most plausibly, that it enters at about the seventh year, when the faculty of sensation has been articulated. If, then, Christ is Mind on their account, he will both be and not be at the same time. Before mind enters he does not yet exist, if Christ is mind on their account; and yet mind enters into him while he exists; so on their account he will exist again. Christ is and is not at the same time. And if, by the finest choice of their own, mind on their account is all the things that are (since they suppose matter to be ungenerated and, so to speak, as old as God), then in this way they suppose Christ to be both mind and matter, if indeed on their account Christ is all things, being mind, which is all things, and matter too is one of the things that are, being ungenerated. They say that the divine power was crucified in matter in this way as a demonstration, and that he himself underwent this suffering: as if it were impossible for him to do what Manichaeus himself does, teaching by word about this, that the divine power has been shut up in matter and departs again in the way they make up for themselves. To say, in the church's teaching, that he gave himself for the forgiveness of sins has a certain credibility with the many, both from the histories of the Greeks, when they tell of some who gave themselves for the safety of cities, and from the history of the Jews, which also has an example of the account when it prepares the child of Abraham as a sacrifice to God. But to subject Christ to suffering for the demonstration of a fact is great ignorance, since a word is sufficient for teaching and for the knowledge of things.

They abstain from living creatures. If they do so for some other reason, it is no concern of ours; but if it is because the divine power is more absent from them, or because it is present in them in greater measure, their choice is laughable. If plants are more material, how is it reasonable to use the worse for food and diet? If the divine power is greater in them, what use are such things for food, since the nourishing and growing part of the soul is the more bodily? As for their abstaining from marriage and sexual intercourse, for fear that through the succession of the race the divine power should dwell longer in matter, I wonder how they can approve of themselves. For if God's providence does not suffice to clear the divine power out of matter, both through births and through the things that are always the same and alike, what can the contrivance of Manichaeus devise for this? Surely, with a truly gigantic spirit, he claims to have become God's helper in this, so that by abolishing births he might make the departure of the divine power from matter quicker. What the poems say about the Giants is plainly myth. Those who discuss these things set them forth in allegories, hiding the solemnity of the account under the form of a myth; as when the history of the Jews says that the angels came together with the daughters of men in sexual union: such a manner of speaking signifies that the nourishing powers of the soul … from the things above to the things here. The poets, saying that the Giants sprang up armed from the earth and then, having risen against the gods, perished at once, hint at the swiftness and perishability of bodies, and in this way adorn their poetry with marvels to entertain. But these men, knowing nothing of this, wherever they can lay hold of some fallacy, from whatever source, make it a windfall for themselves, as though their business were to overcome the truth by every art.

Their fire, burning but without light, which is outside the world: where is it placed? If it is upon the world, what is the cause of the world's remaining unharmed until now? If it is to destroy the world once it comes near, it is joined to it now as well. If it is apart, raised up as in a place of its own, what will make it fall upon the world later? How will it leave its own place? By what necessity and force? What subsistence of fire is to be conceived apart from matter, or how moisture is its food, and the other questions of natural philosophy, do not belong to the present argument. But this is surely plain from what has been said: the fire outside the world is precisely what they call matter. Since the sun and the moon, being pure and of the pure divine power, were separated from this fire and left no part of themselves in it, this was matter by itself, wholly unmixed with the divine power. So if the world is emptied of the divine power within it, such a fire will be left once more. How, then, will the fire either destroy anything or be destroyed by something else? Besides the fact that like is unaffected by like (for like is rather a friend to like), I do not see how the destruction will happen. What matter will be when it is separated from the divine power, it was before it was mixed with the divine power. If, then, it will perish when deserted by the divine power, why did it not perish before the divine power … or another creation, so that matter may perish, and he will do this without end? And what is the benefit? What did not happen by the first decision, how will it happen by the second? Or what reason is there to attribute to God things which it would not be right to suspect even of a man? In such matters impossibility attaches to willing, besides the fact that one ought not readily even to speak of willing, even if it is possible; unless they speak of some other God, the one beyond being, just as they bring in a new kind of matter, and not the one understood by men of sense, which reason finds either not to exist at all, or to be the last of all things, hardly reaching even a bastard conception.

But is the lightless fire greater than the matter that is to be deserted by the divine power, or less? If it is less, how will it overcome the greater? If it is greater, it will be able to draw it back to itself, being of the same nature, but it will not destroy it, just as the Nile does not destroy the bays cut off from it.