Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental

Contents

Reading pages: 1–13 · 14–26 · 27–36 · 37–43

1. 1Augustine prays to refute the Manichaeans in a spirit that seeks their correction, not their destruction, by gentle persuasion rather than persecution.
2. 2Only those who do not know how hard it is to find the truth and escape error should be harsh with the Manichaeans.
3. 3Augustine, once a Manichaean himself, cannot be harsh with them and asks that both sides lay aside arrogance and seek the truth together.
4. 4Augustine lists what holds him in the Catholic Church (the consent of nations, its authority, the succession of bishops from Peter’s see, and its very name) unless the Manichaeans can show the truth plainly.
5. 5Augustine refuses to accept Mani’s claim to be an apostle: he believed the Gospel on the authority of the Catholic Church, which forbids him to believe Mani, and the Gospel and Acts name no such apostle.
6. 6Mani calls himself apostle of Jesus Christ rather than of the Paraclete because he wanted to be taken for the Paraclete himself, as the man Christ was taken up by the Son of God.
7. 7If the Holy Spirit was not defiled by taking up Mani, born of human intercourse, the Wisdom of God could not be defiled by birth from a virgin.
8. 8By leaving the Holy Spirit unnamed Mani implies that he is the Spirit, and the Manichaeans honor the Bema, the day of Mani’s death, far above the Pasch of Christ.
9. 9The Acts of the Apostles, which carries the same authority as the Gospel, plainly records the coming of the promised Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
10. 10The Spirit was given twice, after the resurrection and after the ascension, as Scripture says; Augustine will now examine whether Mani’s letter shows the truth or merely demands belief.
11. 11The opening words of Mani’s letter only promise salvation; such words could cover any error, and Augustine passes over the greeting to the letter’s real claims.
12. 12Mani’s letter promises certain knowledge about the origin of Adam and Eve but begins with an incredible story of a battle before the world was made.
13. 13Mani describes the kingdom of light ruled by God the Father, and Augustine asks how Mani could prove or know any of it.
14. 14Mani promises knowledge but demands belief; if belief is required, Augustine would rather believe what the Church, confirmed among all peoples, teaches, and then come to understanding through faith.
15. 15Mani’s account of the land of darkness bordering the land of light treats God’s nature as a body in space, which is false.
16. 16Even the soul, though changeable, has no bulk in space: it is present whole in every part of the body at once.
17. 17The mind holds images of vast regions without being cramped, which shows that it is not spread out in space.
18. 18The power of understanding, which tells real things from imagined ones such as Mani’s land of light, has no spatial extension at all.
19. 19If even the changeable soul is not spread out in space, much less is the unchangeable God, whom the Manichaeans picture as measurable in parts.
20. 20Mani’s phrase “beside one part and side” implies other sides and limits to the land of light, which the Manichaeans deny.
21. 21Two lands joined at their sides must both be bodies, and Augustine describes the Manichaean picture of the land of darkness wedged into the land of light.
22. 22On the Manichaeans’ own picture the land of light is split and penetrated by the land of darkness, a shape worse than that of darkness itself.
23. 23Simple Catholics who picture God in human form think better of him than the Manichaeans, and can grow in the Church to understand Scripture’s bodily language spiritually; the Manichaeans claim Mani spoke without figures and so cannot reinterpret his picture.
24. 24Whether the land of light is of God’s nature, begotten, alien, or made from another substance, the Manichaean account leads to absurdity unless God made it from nothing.
25. 25If God can make good things from nothing, the Manichaeans should learn in the Catholic Church that all natures are good in their degrees; whatever shape they give the two lands, Mani’s own words remain.
26. 26Whether the two lands met along a crooked, curved, or straight line, the result is either ugly or, if straight, a harmony that contradicts their supposed enmity.
27. 27Making a straight side crooked removes beauty but no substance, which shows that evil is not a substance but a loss of good; even the straightness of the dark land’s side is a good from God.
28. 28Mani divides the land of darkness into five natures (darkness, waters, winds, fire, smoke), each with its own kind of inhabitant.
29. 29The order, number, forms, and life that Mani gives to the land of darkness are goods that can come only from God.
30. 30In each of Mani’s five dark natures Augustine praises the goods (health, fruitfulness, form, harmony, life) that Mani’s own description implies.
31. 31Even the prince of smoke has the goods of an ordered soul and body; Mani’s dark natures are the lowest goods, and evil is the absence of good.
32. 32Mani borrowed his five dark natures and their creatures from things seen in this world, but arranged them absurdly, as the examples of serpents, geese, sparrows, fire, and smoke show.
33. 33Every nature, insofar as it is a nature, is good: remove the evils and the nature remains better, remove the goods and nothing remains.
34. 34The goods in natures can be thought of without their evils but not the reverse; Mani, like a man frightened by a lion, saw only what displeased him and missed the goods that come from God.
35. 35All evil is corruption, which is not a nature but against nature; whatever is corrupted loses some good, so Mani’s dark natures cannot be the supreme evil.
36. 36Mani asked where evil comes from before asking what it is; corruption arises because creatures were made by God from nothing, not begotten of him.
37. 37Only the Son, begotten of the Father, is supremely good; creatures made from nothing are lesser goods, and the rational soul should accept its place below God, while earthly things that now trouble it are a just punishment and a call to return.
38. 38Natures are from God, their corruptibility from the nothing from which they were made; God orders corruption to punish sinners and train those returning to him.
39. 39Both Testaments speak of God punishing (Isaiah, the Lord’s warning about Gehenna, Paul on the temple), and the Manichaeans, who explain Paul charitably, should read the Old Testament in the same spirit.
40. 40Growth in form moves a thing toward being and corruption toward not being; so form is from God, who supremely is, and corruption from nothing, and no nature is contrary to God.
41. 41Corruption takes away only what God permits; the passing of temporal things, like words in speech, makes up a lowest kind of beauty, and our loss of them is a penalty and a call to love eternal things.
42. 42We should praise God for the beauty of lower things without clinging to them, and purify the heart by faith in Christ to see the unchanging good.
43. 43Augustine closes by rejecting the Manichaean heresy, which spreads God through space and gives evil a place, and promises to refute its other errors in further books.