Against Faustus the Manichaean 15.2–15.8

Augustine replied: Listen to this, you whose hearts Christ possesses, and see whether you can bear it, except that he himself is your patience. Faustus, full of new honey, spits out the old vinegar; and Paul, full of old vinegar, poured out half of it to take in the new honey poured in, not to keep it but to spoil it. For you see that when the apostle says, “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,” that comes from the new honey; but what follows, “which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures concerning his Son, who was made for him from the seed of David according to the flesh,” comes from the old vinegar. Who could bear to hear this, unless the same apostle consoled us, saying: “There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you”? But what need is there to repeat what was already said sufficiently above? For that the new patch and the old garment, the new wine and the old wineskins, signify not the two testaments but two lives and two hopes, and that the likeness given by the Lord for understanding the two testaments is rather: “Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of God is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old,” let anyone who can recall it from what we said earlier, or at least let anyone who wishes look it up again. For if someone thinks he should have two hopes, so as to serve God both for earthly happiness and for the kingdom of heaven, the one cannot hold the other; and when this one is disturbed by some tribulation, the man will fail and lose that one too. Hence also the saying, “No one can serve two masters,” which he explained by saying, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” But the Old Testament, for those who understand it rightly, is a prophecy of the New Testament. And so in that first people too, the holy patriarchs and prophets, who understood what they were doing or what was being done through them, had in the New Testament this hope of eternal salvation; for they belonged to what they understood and loved, since, though it was not yet revealed, it was already prefigured. But those belonged to the Old who desired nothing more there than the temporal promises they thought of, and did not understand the eternal things prefigured and prophesied in them. But this has already been said more than enough in our earlier replies.

But it is a marvellous shamelessness when the sacrilegious and unclean society of the Manichaeans does not hesitate even to boast that it is the chaste bride of Christ. What does it gain by this against the truly chaste members of the holy church, except that there comes to mind against such people that apostolic warning: “I have betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, so your minds too may be corrupted from the chastity that is in Christ”? For what are these men doing, preaching to us a gospel other than what we received, but trying to corrupt us from the chastity we keep for Christ, when they blame the law of God under the name of oldness and praise their own error under the name of newness? As if all oldness were to be shunned and all newness sought, when the apostle John sets the old commandment in a place of praise and the apostle Paul commands us to avoid profane novelties of words. To you, then, true bride of the true Christ, Catholic Church, I too will speak according to my small measure, such son and servant of yours as I am, placed in you to dispense food to my fellow servants: beware always, as you do beware, of the impious vanity of the Manichaeans, already tested by the danger of your own and proved by their deliverance. That error once shook me out of your bosom; having tried it, I fled from what I ought not to have tried. But let even my dangers profit you, whom my deliverance now serves; for had not your true and truthful bridegroom, from whose side you were made, set the remission of sins in his true blood for me, the whirlpool of deceit would have swallowed me, and the serpent would have devoured me past repair, made earth as I was. Do not be deceived by the name of truth; you alone have it, both in your milk and in your bread; in that society there is only its name, not the thing itself. You are secure indeed in your grown ones; but I appeal to the little ones in you, my brothers, sons, lords, whom you cherish like eggs under anxious wings or nourish like infants with milk, a virgin mother fruitful without corruption. I appeal to these tender offspring of yours, that they may not be led away from you by chattering curiosity, but rather pronounce anathema on anyone who preaches to them a gospel other than what they received in you, and not abandon the true and truthful Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and the great abundance of his sweetness, which he has hidden for those who fear him and perfected for those who hope in him. How can the words of a truthful man be there, in the preacher of a deceitful Christ? Despise their insults, for you are well aware that in the gifts of your bridegroom you have loved the promise of eternal life, that is, your bridegroom himself, since he himself is eternal life.

But you have not been led astray, as those men foolishly say, to a strange god promising a full belly and the land of the Canaanites. For you understand that in those very promises you yourself were already then prefigured and prophesied, and that the foreknowledge of the saints was in labour with you. Nor should you be moved by the stone tablets, blamed with pitiful wit, for you do not have a heart of stone, which those tablets signified in the former people. For you are a letter of the apostles, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart. At these words those empty men rejoice, thinking that the apostle blamed the dispensation of the Old Testament fitted to that time, not understanding that he said this from the prophet. For these words, which they embrace ignorantly, were foretold long before they were spoken and fulfilled through the apostles by the prophets, whom they reject. For the prophet had said: “I will take away from them the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” Let them see whether this is not “not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart.” For neither the “heart of flesh” there nor the “fleshly tablets” here mean that we should think in a fleshly way; but because, compared with stone, which has no sense, flesh has feeling, the lack of feeling in stone signifies a heart without understanding, and the feeling of flesh signifies an understanding heart. You should rather laugh at these men, who say that earth and trees and stones have sense and live a more intelligent life, but flesh a duller and blunter one. Hence they are compelled, not by the truth but by their own vanity, to admit that the law written on stone tablets is cleaner than their treasure on the skins of dead animals. Or perhaps, because in their little fable they say that stones are the bones of the princes, they do not hesitate to prefer lambskins to them? Then surely that ark of the covenant covered the stone tablets more cleanly than the goatskin covers these men's books. Laugh at these things mercifully, so as to commend them to them as things to be laughed at and fled from. For in those stone tablets, do you not now understand, with no heart of stone, what suited that hard people? And yet in them you recognize the rock, your bridegroom himself, him of whom Peter speaks: the living stone rejected by men, but chosen and honoured by God. To them, then, he was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence; but to you, the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. Peter the apostle explains all this and recalls that all of it was foretold by the prophets, from whom these condemned men are estranged. Read those tablets too, by all means; do not fear: they are plainly your bridegroom's. To others that stone signified hard dullness, but to you firm stability. Those tablets were written by the finger of God; by the finger of God your bridegroom cast out demons; by the finger of God do you drive out the doctrines of lying demons who sear the conscience. From these tablets you repel the adulterer who calls himself the Paraclete, to seduce you with a holy name. For those tablets were given on the fiftieth day after the Passover; and on the fiftieth day after the passion of your bridegroom, which that Passover prefigured, the finger of God was given, the Holy Spirit, the promised Paraclete. Do not dread, then, the tablets by which things were sent to you long ago in writing which you would now recognize; only do not be under the law, so as not to fulfil it out of fear, but under grace, so that love may be in you the fulfilment of the law. For the friend of your bridegroom was reviewing no other tablets when he said: “For you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not covet; and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this word: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Love of neighbour works no evil; and love is the fulfilment of the law.” For there are the two commandments, of love of God and love of neighbour, set out one on each tablet. So he who at his coming commended to you these two commandments, on which the whole law hangs and the prophets, sent those tablets ahead. In the first commandment is the chastity of your marriage, in the second the unity of your members: by the one you embrace the Godhead, by the other you gather fellowship. These two commandments are themselves the ten: three belong to God and seven to the neighbour. O chaste tablets, in which, in an old figure, your lover and beloved foretold to you the new song, on the ten-stringed psaltery, as though he would stretch out his own sinews for you on the tree, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh and the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in you! O marriage tablets, which not without cause the adulteress hates!

Now my words are addressed to you, deceitful Manichaean congregation, wrapped in deceits. Do you, married to so many elements, or rather a harlot prostituted to demons and made pregnant with sacrilegious vanities, dare to tear the Catholic marriage of your Lord with a charge of unchastity? Show us your adulterers, the Splenditenens who holds the balance and Atlas the porter. For you say that the one holds the heads of the elements and suspends the world, and that the other, with knee bent and strong shoulders, carries such a mass from beneath, no doubt so that the first does not give way. Where are they? If they really existed, when would they come to you, busy with such a task? When would they come in to you, so that you, made dainty by your idle bread, might rub with your caressing hand the fingers of the one and the shoulders of the other after so much labour? But evil demons deceive you, who commit fornication with you, so that you conceive lies and give birth to phantoms. Why then would you not spit out the tablets of the true God, enemy to your parchments, by which you have come to love so many false gods with a mind wandering through the fictions of your thoughts? Compared with these, all the lies of the poets will be found more serious and more decent; at least in this, that among the poets the very profession of falsehood deceives no one, while in your books so great a crowd of deceits corrupts with wretched errors souls childish even in old men, enticed by the name of truth, when, with itching ears, as the apostle says, and turning their hearing away from the truth, they turn aside to fables. How then could you bear the sound doctrine of those tablets, where the first commandment is: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one God,” when you wallow wholly in the fornication of a most shameful heart, delighted with the names of gods? Do you not remember your love song, where you describe the supreme reigning king, the everlasting sceptre-bearer, wreathed with crowns of flowers and with a ruddy face? If you loved him alone, such as he is, you ought to blush; for even one husband wreathed with crowns of flowers would displease a chaste wife. Nor can you say that this was said or shown thus with some mystical meaning, since Mani is usually praised by you above all for no other reason than that he removed the coverings of figures and spoke the truth to you naked and literal. Literally, then, you sing of God as a sceptre-bearing king crowned with flowers. Let him at least put down the sceptre when he is wreathed with crowns of flowers; that soft luxury does not befit the severity of the royal rod. Besides, he is not the only one you love; for you go on in your song and add twelve aeons clothed with flowers, full of songs and throwing their flowers in the Father's face. There you also profess these twelve to be certain great gods, three in each of the four regions by which that one is surrounded. How you make him immeasurable, when you say he is so surrounded, you have never been able to find out. You add also countless dwellers in the kingdom and troops of gods and cohorts of angels, all of whom you say God did not create but begot from his own substance.

So you are convicted of worshipping countless gods, since you cannot bear the sound doctrine by which it is taught that there is one Son born of the one God, and the Holy Spirit of both; and yet it is not right to call them not only countless gods but even three gods, for they have not only one and the same substance but also one and the same working through that one and the same proper substance, while through the bodily creation there is also a showing of each. You do not understand this, you do not grasp it; I know, you are full, you are drunk, you are gorged with fabulous sacrilege. Digest at last what you belch out, and stop overwhelming yourself with such things; meanwhile, sing what you sing, and look, if you can, at the disgrace of your fornication. For the doctrine of lying demons has invited you to the fictitious houses of the angels, where a healthful breeze blows, and to fields where spices abound, whose trees and mountains, seas and rivers flow with sweet nectar through all ages. And you have believed and fashioned these things in your heart, where you are tossed about, wanton and dissolute, with empty recollections. For when some such things are said of the ineffable abundance of spiritual delights, they are certainly said in an enigma, so that the mind exercised by them may know that there is something else to be sought and understood there: whether something of this kind is shown to the bodily senses in bodily reality, such as the fire in the bush, the serpent from the rod and the rod from the serpent, the Lord's tunic not divided by his persecutors, the anointing of his feet or his head by a woman's devotion, and the branches of the crowd going before and following his donkey; or whether things are shown figuratively in the spirit through images of bodies, either in a dream or in ecstasy, such as Jacob's ladder, the stone cut out without hands and grown into a mountain shown to Daniel, the sheet shown to Peter, and so many things to John; or whether they are figured in the same way by speech alone, such as the Song of Songs, and the householder in the gospel who made a wedding for his son, and “A certain man had two sons,” the thrifty one and the prodigal, and “A certain man planted a vineyard and let it out to farmers.” But you praise Mani especially for this, that he came last, not to say such things but rather to unravel them, so that, with the figures of the ancients opened and his own narratives and arguments set out in clear light, he hid himself in no enigma. And you add this as the reason for this presumption: that the ancients, when they saw or did or said figures of this kind, knew that he would come afterwards, through whom all things would be made plain, whereas he, knowing that no one would come after him, wove his statements with no allegorical windings. What then is your affection, soiled with fleshly desires, doing in fields and wooded mountains and crowns of flowers and abounding spices? If they are not enigmas of reason, they are phantoms of thought or the madness of frenzy; but if they are said to be enigmas, why do you not flee the adulterer who promises open truth to entice you, and mocks with fabulous deceit those he has enticed? Do not his ministers, wretched men poisoned by such vanities themselves, usually put on their hook this bait from Paul the apostle, where he says: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when what is perfect has come, what is in part will be taken away,” and: “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face”? As if, that is, the apostle Paul knew in part and prophesied in part, seeing through a mirror and in an enigma, all of which was to be taken away when Mani came and brought what is perfect, where the truth is seen face to face. O wanton, unclean, shameless one, do you still chatter this, still feed the winds, still embrace the idols of your heart? So you have seen face to face the reigning sceptre-bearing king wreathed with crowns of flowers, and the troops of gods, and the great Splenditenens bearing six faces and mouths and flashing with light, and the other king of honour surrounded by armies of angels, and the other, the adamant warrior hero holding a spear in his right hand and a shield in his left, and the other glorious king driving three wheels, of fire, water and wind, and the mighty Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders and propping it with his arms on either side, his knee bent? Have you seen these and a thousand other monsters face to face, or does the doctrine of lying demons sing them to you through the mouths of the deceived without your knowing it? Woe to you, unhappy one! See by what phantoms you are debauched, see what vanities you lick up in place of truth; and, drunk with the serpent's cups, you dare to insult with the stone tablets the matronly modesty of the wife of the only Son of God, because she, no longer under the tutelage of the law but under the teaching of grace, neither proud of works nor broken by terrors, lives by faith and hope and love, made an Israel in whom there is no guile, hearing what is written there: “The Lord your God is one God”; which you did not hear, and so spread your fornication among so many fictitious gods.

How could those tablets not be hostile to you, in which the second commandment is: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” since you have placed in the vanity of deceit even Christ himself, who, for the sake of carnal men who were to be cleansed of carnal vanity, came forth truly, even to fleshly eyes, in the truth of the flesh? How could the third commandment, about the rest of the Sabbath, not be against you, a restless soul tossed by the illusions of so many fictions? When will you grasp, when will you understand, when will you love how these three commandments belong to the love of God? You are immoderate and foul and quarrelsome; you have swollen, you have grown vain, you have become cheap; you have exceeded your measure, disfigured your beauty, disturbed your order. I was such a one among you; I know you. How then can I now teach you that these three commandments belong to the love of God, from whom and through whom and in whom are all things? How can you understand this, when the detestable perversity of your error does not allow you to know and observe even those seven which belong to the love of neighbour, by which the fellowship of human life is held together? Among them the first commandment is: “Honour your father and your mother,” which Paul also mentions as the first commandment with a promise, and himself likewise enjoins. But you have learned from demonic doctrine to regard your parents as enemies, because by intercourse they bound you in the flesh and so, of course, laid unclean fetters on your god. Hence too you so violate the next commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” that you detest in marriage above all the fact that children are begotten; and so you make your hearers, while they take care that the women with whom they have intercourse do not conceive, adulterers even of their wives. For they take them in marriage according to the law of matrimony, with the marriage tablets proclaiming that it is for the begetting of children; and, fearing by your law to defile a particle of their god with the filth of flesh, they have intercourse with the women in an unchaste union only to satisfy lust; and they accept children unwillingly, though for that alone marriages are to be joined. How then do you not forbid marriage, as the apostle foretold of you so long before, when you try to take away from marriage that from which marriage exists? Take it away, and husbands will be shameful lovers, wives harlots, bridal chambers brothels, fathers-in-law pimps. And for this reason you do not keep the commandment “You shall not kill” either, through the perversity of the same error. For while you fear that a member of your god will be bound in flesh, you do not give bread to the hungry; dreading a false homicide here, you commit a true one there. So if you come upon a starving man who may die unless you help him by offering food, you will already be held a murderer either by the law of God, if you do not give, or by the law of Mani, if you do. What then? How will you keep the other commandments of the Decalogue? Will you abstain from theft, so that some man or other devours bread or any food, to be slaughtered in his entrails, rather than that you should, if you can, steal it from him and run to the workshop of your elect's bellies, so that by your theft your god may not fall into a heavier bond, and may be rescued from the one he had fallen into? And then if you are caught in that theft, will you not swear by that very god of yours that you did not take it? For what will such a god do to you, to whom you say: “I swore falsely by you, but for you; unless you wanted me to bring ruin on you while I brought you honour”? So you also despise the commandment of the law, “You shall not bear false witness,” for the sake of your god's members, so as to free them from their fetters not only by false testimony but by a false oath. Now as for what follows, “You shall not covet your neighbour's wife,” this ought to be fulfilled by you, and this one I see that no necessity of your error compels you to violate. But if it is wicked to covet another's wife, consider what it is to offer oneself to others to be coveted, and remember your beautiful gods and beautiful goddesses presenting themselves to be ardently coveted, the gods by the female princes of darkness and the goddesses by the males: so that, when these are aroused to enjoy lust and are burning greedily for their embraces, they may rescue from them that god of yours, fettered everywhere and in need of such shamefulness on the part of his own to be set free. And as for not coveting your neighbour's property, which is the last commandment of the Decalogue, how can you, wretched one? Does not your god himself lyingly tell you that he is fashioning new ages for himself in a foreign land, where after a false victory you may swell with a false triumph? Since you now desire this in mad vanity, and believe that this same land of the race of darkness is joined to your substance by the closest neighbourhood, you certainly covet your neighbour's property. With good reason are the tablets hostile to you, containing such good commandments, so contrary to your error. For those three which belong to the love of God you altogether do not know, altogether do not keep; and these seven, by which human fellowship is not harmed, if you ever keep them, either you are restrained by shame, so as not to be disgraced among men, or broken by fear, so as not to be punished by the public laws, or you shrink from an evil deed out of some good habit, or by the natural law itself you notice how unjustly you would do to another what you do not want done to you by another; yet you feel how your error drives you in the opposite direction, both when you follow it and when you do not, when you either do what you do not want to suffer, or refrain from doing it only because you do not want to suffer it.

But this true bride of Christ, whom you insult with most shameless brow about the stone tablets, understands the difference between the letter and the spirit, which are called in another way law and grace; and serving God no longer in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the spirit, she is no longer under the law but under grace. For she is not blinded by quarrelsomeness, but meekly attends to the apostle's words, so as to understand what he calls the law under which he no longer wants us to be: because it was set down for the sake of transgression until the seed should come to whom the promise was made, and because it came in so that the offence might abound; but where the offence abounded, grace abounded still more. Yet he does not for that reason call the law itself sin because it does not give life without grace; for rather it increases guilt by adding transgression: for where there is no law, there is no transgression either. And so by itself, when it is only the letter without the spirit, that is, law without grace, it only makes men guilty; but he puts to himself what those of less understanding might think, and makes plain what he means when he says: “What then shall we say? Is the law sin? Far from it. But I did not know sin except through the law. For I would not have known desire, had the law not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ So sin, taking occasion through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, become death to me? Far from it. But sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good.” She whom you insult understands this, because she asks with groaning, seeks humbly, knocks meekly; and so she sees that the law is not blamed when it is said, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” just as knowledge is not blamed when it is said, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” For he himself had said, “We know that we all have knowledge,” and then he adds, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Why then did he himself have that by which he might be puffed up, unless because with love knowledge not only does not puff up but even strengthens? So the letter with the spirit and the law with grace are no longer called letter and law in the same way as when, by itself, it kills as the offence abounds. For so the law was also called the power of sin, when it increases sin's harmful pleasure by severe prohibition. Yet even so it is not evil; but sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death through what is good. So many things are harmful to some, although they are not evil. For you too, when your eyes are sore, close your windows even against your god the sun. This bride of Christ, then, is now dead to the law, that is, to sin, which becomes more abundant through the law's prohibition when the law without grace commands but does not help. Dead, then, to such a law, so that she may belong to another, who rose from the dead, she distinguishes these things without wrong to the law, so as not to commit sacrilege against its author. This you do against him whom you do not understand to be the author of good, although you hear the apostle saying: “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.” See, he who seems to you one of the princes of darkness is the author of good. Attend to the truth; it strikes your eyes. See, Paul the apostle says: “The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.” See whose author he is who sent ahead, in the dispensation of a great sacrament, those tablets which you foolishly laugh at. For the same law which was given through Moses became grace and truth through Jesus Christ, when the spirit was joined to the letter, so that the righteousness of the law began to be fulfilled, which when not fulfilled made men guilty even of transgression. For it is not one law that is holy and just and good, and another through which sin works death, to which we must die so as to belong to another, who rose from the dead; it is the very same. See, follow, read: “But sin,” he says, “that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good, so that sin might become beyond measure sinful through the commandment.” Deaf one, blind one, hear, see: “through what is good,” he says, “it worked death in me.” So the law is always good, whether it harms those empty of grace or profits those full of grace; it is always good, as the sun is always good, because every creature of God is good, whether it hurts sore eyes or soothes healthy ones. So what health is to the eyes for seeing the sun, grace is to minds for fulfilling the law. And as healthy eyes do not die to the delight of the sun, but to those harsh strokes of its rays by which, dazzled, they were driven into thicker darkness, so the soul that has been made whole by the love of the Spirit is said to be dead, not to the righteousness of the law, but to that guilt and transgression which the law produced through the letter when grace was lacking. So both things are said of it: “The law is good, if one uses it lawfully,” and what follows: “knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the just man,” because one who delights in righteousness itself has no need of the terrifying letter.