Against Faustus the Manichaean 14.1–15.1

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept Moses?” Because of the love and devotion with which we worship Christ. For who is so irreligious as to look gladly on one who has cursed his father? So we too, although Moses never spared anything human or divine in his blasphemy, execrate him all the more for this: that he assailed Christ the Son of God, who for our salvation hung on the tree, with the dreadful abuse of a curse; whether willingly or by chance, you must decide. For by neither will he be so excused as to deserve to be accepted as commended. For he says that everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed. Do you want me, then, to accept this man, to believe this man, when, if he was inspired, it is plain that he cursed Christ knowingly and willingly, and if he cursed him unwillingly and unknowingly, it is plain that he was not inspired? Choose, then, which you will: either that Moses was not a prophet and sinned through lack of foresight, so that while cursing others, as was his habit, he unknowingly blasphemed God too; or that he was indeed inspired and not ignorant of these things to come, but, grudging our salvation, which was to come from the tree, poured out the venom of his cursing mouth on its author. And who then would believe that this man saw or knew the Father, who so tore the Son? That he could foretell the coming of the Son, who did not know the outcome of his ascension? To this is added what I also consider, how widely this abuse is spread and how much it takes in and violates, so that it touches all the righteous and the martyrs too, as many as have ended their lives by a similar death, such as Peter and Andrew and the rest of the same lot. Unless Moses had either not known them, as being no prophet, or hated them, as being malicious if he was a prophet, he would not have torn them with the insult of so cruel a curse. For he does not even say that they are cursed in the common opinion, that is, merely among men, but cursed by God. And if so, what hope of blessing will be left either to Christ or to the apostles or to us ourselves, should it befall us to be crucified for his name's sake? Finally, how lacking in foresight he was, and empty of divine inspiration, that he could not consider that men are hanged on a tree for different reasons: some for a wicked crime, but some for righteousness' sake and for God. And for that reason he threw all together, without any distinction, under the same curse, when he should have said, if he had had any foresight, not to say divination, and if the cross had so offended him that it alone of every kind of punishment was singled out and rejected: “Cursed is every criminal and impious man who has hung on a tree,” so that there might be some distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous. Although even so he would not have spoken the truth, since Christ brought a robber from the tree with him into the paradise of his Father. Where, then, is “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”? Or was Barabbas, that notable robber, who not only was not hanged on a tree but was even released from prison at the request of the Jews, more blessed than the one who ascended with Christ from the cross into heaven? What more? He also calls him cursed who worships the sun or the moon. If, then, placed under a Gentile king, I am compelled to worship the sun, and, when I resist for fear of this curse, am ordered to be crucified, I shall run into his other curse, which he brought out against the one who hangs on a tree. Or is he in the habit of cursing all good people? We, for our part, ought to value his curses as much as those of angry old women. For in the same way he pursues all God's boys and virgins with an equal curse, saying: “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel.” This abuse likewise touches Jesus first of all, who, though himself born, as you say, of the Jews, yet raised up no offspring among them to preserve a posterity; and then his disciples, some of whom he separated from their wives, finding them married, and some of whom he forbade to marry, finding them untouched. For this reason you will understand that we rightly execrate this unpunished tongue of Moses, aiming darts of curses at Christ, the light, holiness, everything divine. Or if perhaps you think there is a great difference between one hanged and one crucified (for you are accustomed to take this up too as a safeguard for your defence), hear Paul ruling out these inventions of yours: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, because it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

Augustine replied: Faustus, devout man, grieves that Christ is cursed by Moses, and hates Moses for this because he loves Christ. Meanwhile, before I disclose how great a sacrament lies in the words, and how devoutly it was said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” I ask these devout men why they are angry with Moses, since his curse did not reach their Christ. For if Christ hung on a tree, he was certainly fixed with nails; which is why after the resurrection he showed the very scars to a disciple slow to believe. And if so, he certainly had a body capable of wounds and mortal, which these men will not admit. If, then, those wounds and those scars were false, it is false too that he hung on a tree. So that curse could not reach him; there is no reason for them to be angry with the one from whose mouth it came. So if they pretend to be angry with one who has cursed a false death of Christ, speaking on their own premises, how much more are they to be shunned, who do not curse Christ but, what is more execrable, accuse him? For if one who brings a curse on mortality is to be rejected, how much more is one to be detested who charges the truth with deceit? But now let us see, taking the occasion from the slanders of the heretics, how that sacrament is to be explained to the faithful.

Man's death comes from the punishment of sin; hence it is also itself called sin, not because a man sins when he dies, but because it came about from sin that he dies. In the same way “tongue” is said properly in one sense of the flesh that moves within the teeth under the palate, and in another sense of what is done by the tongue; in this sense one speaks of one tongue being Greek, another Latin. And “hand” is said in one sense properly of the very member of the body which we move to work, and in another sense of the writing that is done by the hand. For we say, “His hand has been produced,” “His hand has been read against him,” “I have your hand,” “Take back your hand.” Properly, of course, the hand is a member of a man; but I do not suppose that writing is a member of a man; and yet it is called a hand, because it is made by the hand. So too not only the evil act itself, which deserves punishment, is called sin, but also death itself, which came about through sin. That sin, then, by which he would be liable to death, Christ did not commit; but that other, that is death, which was inflicted on human nature through sin, he took on for us. This hung on the tree; this was cursed through Moses; there death was condemned, so that it might not reign, and cursed, so that it might perish. Therefore through such a sin of Christ our sin too was condemned, so that we might be set free and not remain condemned with sin reigning.

Why then does Faustus marvel that sin is cursed, that death is cursed, that the mortality of the flesh is cursed, which was in Christ without sin, yet came about from man's sin even in Christ? For he took his body from Adam, since the virgin Mary, who bore Christ, was from Adam. And God had said in paradise: “On the day you touch it, you shall die by death.” This is the curse that hung on the tree. Let him deny that Christ was cursed who denies also that he died; but let him who confesses that he died, and cannot deny that death comes from sin and for this reason is itself also called sin, hear the apostle saying: “For our old man was crucified together with him,” and let him understand whom Moses called cursed. And so the apostle says without fear of Christ, “He was made a curse for us,” just as he was not afraid to say, “He died for all.” For “he died” is the same as “he was cursed,” since death itself comes from the curse, and every sin is cursed, whether the sin itself that is done so that punishment follows, or the punishment itself, which in another sense is called sin because it comes from sin. Christ, however, took on our punishment without guilt, so that by it he might dissolve our guilt and also end our punishment.

I might be saying this from my own ingenuity, were it not that the apostle presses it home so often, both to wake the sleeping and to choke the slanderers. “God sent his Son,” he says, “in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” That flesh, then, was not sinful flesh, because it had not come into Mary through a male by inheritance of mortality; but yet, because death is from sin, and that flesh, though from a virgin, was mortal, by the very fact that it was mortal it had the likeness of sinful flesh. This he even calls sin, saying in what follows: “so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” Again, in another place he says: “Him who knew no sin he made sin for us, so that we might be the righteousness of God in him.” Why then should Moses be afraid to say “curse” of what Paul was not afraid to call “sin”? Plainly the prophet must both have foreseen and foretold this, prepared to be blamed by heretics along with the apostle. For whoever blames the prophet for saying “curse” is compelled to blame the apostle for saying “sin”; for certainly a curse is the companion of sin.

Nor is the offence greater because he added “by God,” so as to say: “Cursed by God is everyone who has hung on a tree.” For if God did not hate sin and our death, he would not send his Son to take it on and destroy it. What wonder, then, if what God hates is cursed by God? For he gives us immortality, which is to come when Christ comes, all the more gladly as he more mercifully hates our death, which hung on the tree when Christ died. And as for the addition of “everyone,” so that it was said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” Moses certainly did not fail to foresee that righteous men too would be on the cross; rather he foresaw well that heretics would deny the Lord's true death, and therefore would wish to separate Christ from this curse so as to separate him also from the truth of death. For if that death was not true, no curse hung on the tree with Christ crucified, since he was not truly crucified either. But against heretics far in the future, see how from far off Moses cries out to you who are displeased by the truth of Christ's death: “You are evading in vain. Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”; not this one or that, but absolutely everyone! Even the Son of God? Yes, absolutely. For this is what you do not want; this is why you busy yourselves, this is why you lead astray. For he displeases you as cursed for us, because he displeases you as dead for us; for he would be outside the curse of that Adam, if he were outside his death. But since he took on death from man and for man, he did not disdain to take on from him and for him the curse too that accompanies death; even he, yes, even he the Son of God, ever living in his own righteousness, but dead for our offences in the flesh taken on from our punishment. So also he is ever blessed in his own righteousness, but cursed for our offences in the death taken on from our punishment. And for this reason “everyone” was added, so that it should not be said that Christ had no part in true death, if he were separated by foolish reverence from the curse that is joined to death.

But whoever believes from the truth of the gospel understands that it is no more an insult to Christ from the mouth of Moses, when he called him cursed, not from the divinity of his majesty but from the condition of our punishment, in which he was hanged on the tree, than it is praise of Christ from the mouth of the Manichaeans, when they deny that he had mortal flesh in which to suffer a true death. For in that prophetic curse one understands praise of humility, while in this heretical so-called honour he is charged with the crime of falsehood. If, then, you deny that he was cursed, deny that he died; if you deny that he died, you are fighting no longer against Moses but against the apostles. But if you confess that he died, confess that he took on the punishment of our sin without our sin. Now when you hear “the punishment of sin,” believe that it comes either from blessing or from curse. If the punishment of sin comes from blessing, wish to be always in the punishment of sin; but if you wish to be freed from it, believe that it came from the curse, by the justice of the divine sentence. Confess, then, that he took on the curse for us whom you confess to have died for us; and that Moses meant nothing else when he said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree,” but “Mortal is everyone and dying is everyone who has hung on a tree.” For he could have said, “Cursed is everyone who is mortal,” or “Cursed is everyone dying”; but this is what the prophet asserts, because he knew that Christ's death would hang on the cross, and that there would be heretics who would say: “He hung on the tree indeed, but in a kind of appearance, not so as truly to die.” By crying out “cursed,” then, he cried out nothing else than that he truly died, knowing that the death of sinful man, which he himself took on without sin, comes from that curse in which it was said: “If you touch it, you shall die by death.” To this also belongs that serpent hanged on a tree, by which it was signified that Christ did not feign a false death, but hung on the tree of his passion that true death into which the serpent cast man by evil persuasion. This true death these men will not look at, and therefore they are not healed of the serpent's venom, as in the desert all who looked at that serpent were healed.

And so we admit that the unlearned say that being fixed to a tree is one thing and hanging on a tree another. For some think that this question should be solved by saying that Moses cursed Judas, who hanged himself with a noose; as if they first knew whether he hanged himself from a tree or from a stone. But it is true, as Faustus also mentioned, that the apostle does not allow it to be understood as foretold of anyone but Christ. But such lack of learning in some Catholics is the Manichaeans' hunting ground; for such people they usually pursue, such they entangle in their deceits. As such we had fallen among them, as such we had stuck fast, as such we were rescued, not by our own strength but by the mercy of God.

But what divine things did Moses assail, as Faustus charges when he says that he never spared anything human or divine? For he said it and went off: he took no trouble to prove it, he did not care to show it. But we know that Moses devoutly praised all things truly divine and justly governed human things as suited his time and his stewardship. Let them demand that I teach this, when they too have tried to teach what Faustus alleges; he did it cautiously, sharp as he was, but incautiously in this, that he was killing himself with his own sharpness. For a heart sharp for the truth is happy, sharp against the truth unhappy. He did not say, “He never spared any man or any god,” but “anything human,” he says, “or divine.” For if he had said that he did not spare God, he would easily have been convicted of a false charge, since Moses is found everywhere honouring and proclaiming the true God who made heaven and earth. And if he had said that he spared none of the gods, he would have betrayed to Christians that he worships those gods from whose worship Moses forbids; and so he would not gather what he did not hatch, the chicks fleeing under the wings of their Catholic mother. So to lay snares for little ones he said that Moses spared nothing divine, so that Christians would not flee from these men's impiety by an open worship of gods, too abhorrent from the Christian religion, and so that pagans, who knew that Moses had said many true and fitting things against idols and against the gods of the Gentiles, which are demons, would favour them against us.

And if this displeases them, let them openly confess that they are worshippers of idols or demons; which indeed they would be unknowingly, by the very fact alone that they were heretics. For of such the apostle said: “In the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, to doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars.” For who but demons, to whom deceit is dear, would persuade these men that Christ suffered deceitfully, died deceitfully, showed his scars deceitfully, that is, did not truly suffer nor truly die, nor were those true scars from true wounds? What doctrines of lying demons are more evident than these, by which men are persuaded that the Son of God, that is, truth itself, is a liar? But these men have in their doctrine an open worship, not indeed of demons, but still of the creature, which the apostle condemns, saying: “And they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”

So these men unknowingly worship idols and demons in the phantoms of their fables; but in the sun and moon they know that they serve the creature. And in thinking that they also serve the Creator, they are much deceived; for they serve their own phantom, and in no way serve the Creator, since they deny that God created what the apostle plainly shows to belong to God's creation, when he says, speaking of foods and meats: “For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.” See what sound doctrine is, which you could not bear and so turned to fables. Just as the apostle both praises God's creation and yet forbids that religious worship be shown to it, so too Moses, who seems to you to have spared nothing divine (for no other reason, I suspect, than that he forbade the worship of the sun and moon, toward whose course you turn into every corner to worship them), praised the sun and moon with true praise, when he told, as it is, that they were made by God and set in the heavenly order to perform their works: the sun to rule the day, the moon to rule the night. But the sun and moon do not rejoice in your false praises. The devil, the transgressing creature, knows how to rejoice in false praise. But the powers of heaven which did not fall through sin want their Maker to be praised in them; and that is their true praise, by which no wrong is done to their Creator. But wrong is done when it is said that they are his parts, or his members, or something of his substance. For he, perfect and in need of nothing, never flowing away, neither divided nor stretched out through places, whole in himself, unchangeable and sufficient for himself, blessed in himself, because of the abundance of his goodness spoke through his Word and they were made; he commanded, and they were created. So if earthly bodies, of which the apostle was speaking when he said that no food is unclean, are good because every creature of God is good, how much more the heavenly ones, in which the sun and moon excel, since the same apostle says: “Heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; but the glory of the heavenly is one, and that of the earthly another.”

So Moses does not abuse the sun and moon when he forbids them to be worshipped; rather he praises them as heavenly creatures, but praises God as the Creator of heavenly and earthly things, and does not want God to be offended when those are worshipped in place of him who are praised because of him and as coming from him. But how cleverly Faustus thought he was finding fault, because Moses also calls cursed whoever worships the sun and moon! “If, then,” he says, “placed under a Gentile king, I am compelled to worship the sun, and, when I resist for fear of this curse, am ordered to be crucified, I shall run into his other curse, which he brought out against the one who hangs on a tree.” No Gentile king compels you to worship the sun. Nor would the sun itself compel it, if it reigned on earth, since even now it does not want this done by you; but just as the Creator himself bears with his impious blasphemers until the judgment, so the heavenly bodies too tolerate their foolish worshippers until the judgment of their Creator. Yet remember that a Christian king cannot compel the sun to be worshipped. For Faustus gave the example of a Gentile king, knowing surely that what you do when you worship the sun belongs to the Gentiles. This, then, is not Christian; but everywhere now the partridge puts forward the name of Christ, so as to gather what it did not hatch. Yet see how easily the truth answers, and how easily sound doctrine breaks this snare of your question, which seems inescapable and two-headed. See, let us suppose that someone armed with royal power threatens a Christian man that, if he will not worship the sun, he shall be hanged on a tree. “If I avoid,” you say, “the curse which the law brought out against the worshipper of the sun, I shall fall into the one which the same law brought out against him who has hung on a tree.” So indeed you would be troubled; but you, no, not even you, since you worship the sun with no one compelling you. But the Christian, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, attends to each cause and each curse, and sees that one belongs to the mortal body, which is hanged on a tree, the other to the mind, by which the sun is worshipped. For even if the body bows in worshipping, the mind either reveres what it worships or pretends to; and both are ruinous. Therefore, since death earned the curse in both, as hanging on a tree is the death of the body, so worshipping the sun is the death of the mind. The curse in the death of the body is therefore to be chosen, from which curse the body itself will be freed in the resurrection; but the curse in the death of the soul is to be avoided, so that it may not be condemned with its body in eternal fire. For the Lord solved this question for us when he said: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; but fear him who has power to kill both soul and body in the gehenna of fire”; as if he said: Do not fear the curse of bodily death, which is undone in time, but fear the curse of spiritual death, through which the soul is tormented for ever with its body. See, it is not an old woman's cursing but a prophetic prediction: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” For thus Christ will take away curse by curse, as death by death, sin by sin. So Moses did not blaspheme by saying, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” any more than the apostles blasphemed by teaching: “He died,” and: “Our old man was crucified with him,” and: “From sin he condemned sin,” and: “Him who knew no sin he made sin for us,” and many things of this kind. But you, when you shudder at Christ cursed, admit that you shudder at Christ's death. In this appears not an old woman's cursing on your part but a devilish pretence, since by the death of your soul you do not believe the death of Christ's body; yet you urge that this death of Christ was not true but feigned, as if you did not dare to deceive men through the Christian name unless you made Christ himself a teacher of deceit.

As for Moses seeming to Faustus to be hostile to continence and virginity because he said, “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel,” let them read Isaiah crying: “Thus says the Lord to all the eunuchs: Those who keep my commandments and choose what I will, and hold fast my covenant, I will give them in my house and within my wall a named place, better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name, and it shall not fail them.” Or if they think Isaiah contrary to Moses, let him please them here, if the other displeases; that is no small thing against these men. For us it is enough to know that the one God spoke both through Moses and through Isaiah; and that everyone is cursed who has not raised up seed in Israel, whether then, when, for the propagation of a people according to the flesh, the work even of fleshly offspring in conjugal chastity belonged to a citizen's duty, or now, so that no one born spiritually should think that it ought to suffice for himself, and should not press on with the Lord's gains, by which each, according to his small measure, ought to beget Christians by preaching Christ. So that divine sentence takes in the times of both testaments with marvellous brevity: “Cursed is everyone who has not raised up seed in Israel.”

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept the Old Testament?” Because every full vessel does not take in what is poured on top but pours it out, and a full stomach throws back what is forced into it. So the Jews too, filled with the Old Testament because Moses had got there first, spat out the New; and we, filled with the New because Christ had come first, spit out the Old. You accept both because you are full in neither, but half full; and in you the one is not so much filled up by the other as spoiled, because half-filled vessels are never filled with a different substance, but with the same and like itself: wine with wine, honey with honey, vinegar with vinegar. If you pour on top things unlike them and not of their kind, such as gall on honey, water on wine, fish sauce on vinegar, this will not be called filling up, but adulteration. This, then, is the reason why we do not much accept the Old Testament. And because our church, the bride of Christ, poorer indeed but married to a rich husband, is content with her husband's goods, she scorns the wealth of lowly lovers; the gifts of the Old Testament and its author are mean in her eyes, and, a most careful guardian of her good name, she accepts no letters but her bridegroom's. Let your church, by all means, lay claim to the Old Testament; like a wanton girl forgetful of modesty, she delights in another man's gifts and letters. That lover of yours, in fact, the corrupter of your modesty, the God of the Hebrews, promises you in his stone tablets gold and silver, a full belly, and the land of the Canaanites. Such sordid gains have delighted you so much that you are pleased to sin after Christ, and to be ungrateful for his immense dowry. These things entice you, so that you are dying of love for the God of the Hebrews after your marriage to Christ. Learn now, then, that you too are deceived and cheated by his false promises. He is poor, he is needy; he cannot even provide what he promises. For if he provides none of the things he pledges to his own wife (I mean the synagogue), though she humours him in everything and serves him more submissively than a maidservant, what will he be able to provide for you, who are strangers to him and refuse the yoke of his commandments with a proud neck? But go on as you have begun: sew raw cloth onto an old garment, entrust new wine to worn-out wineskins, serve two husbands and please neither, and in a word make the Christian faith a hippocentaur, neither a complete horse nor a man. Allow us to serve Christ alone, content with his immortal dowry alone and imitating the apostle, who says: “Our sufficiency is from God, who has proved us fit ministers of the New Testament.” The God of the Hebrews and we are in quite different positions, since he cannot fulfil what he promises and we disdain to accept it. The liberality of Christ has made us proud against his blandishments. And lest you think I have made this comparison unfittingly, Paul first applied this likeness of marriage discipline to us, saying: “The woman who is under a husband is bound by the law of the husband while he lives; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of the husband. So while her husband lives,” he says, “she will be called an adulteress if she is joined to another man; but if her husband dies, she will not be an adulteress if joined to another.” By this he shows that those commit adultery in spirit who join themselves to Christ without first divorcing the author of the law and in some way counting him among the dead. This saying looks chiefly to those who believed from among the Jews, namely that they should forget their former superstition. But what need have we even of this precept, we who, converted to Christ from paganism, must regard the God of the Hebrews not as dead but as never even born? Certainly, to a Jew who believes, Adonai must seem dead; to a Gentile, his idol; and to each, whatever he worshipped before he knew Christ. For if, after divorcing idolatry, someone worships the God of the Hebrews and Christ alike, he differs in no way in worn-out modesty from a woman who after the death of one husband has married two.