Against Faustus the Manichaean 15.9–16.12

This bride of Christ, rejoicing in the hope of her full salvation, wishes you too a good conversion from fables to the truth, so that you may not, dreading Adonai as if he were an adulterer, remain with the most cunning adulterer, the serpent. For Adonai is a Hebrew word and means “Lord” in the sense in which God alone is called Lord; just as latria, a Greek word, means service, not any service whatever, but that by which God alone is served; just as Amen means “true,” not anywhere and in any way, but in a mystical religious sense. And if you were asked where you too have it from, you will find no source except the Hebrew writings, or what derives from the Hebrew. So the church of Christ does not fear objections about these names; she understands and loves them, and pays no attention to the ignorant mocker; and what she does not yet understand, she believes to be of the same kind as many things she has experienced, which were like this when not yet understood. Let anyone object to her that she has loved Emmanuel: she laughs at that man's ignorance and embraces the truth of this name. Let him object that she has loved the Messiah: she repels the slain adversary and holds to the anointed teacher. So she wishes you too to be healed of vain errors and to be built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. You talk of a hippocentaur without knowing what you are saying, and you do not notice what your own fable has made for you, when it fashions in your heart a false world partly from your god and partly from the land of darkness. Is that not a hippocentaur, half beast and half god? Truly not, for it should not even be called a hippocentaur. But consider what it is, and blush, and grow gentle, so that you may shudder at your corruption by the adulterous serpent. If you did not think his cunning credible in Moses, you ought to have been on your guard against it in Paul, who, wishing to present the true church as a chaste virgin to Christ, says: “I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity and chastity that is in Christ.” Though you heard this, you were still so foolish and so maddened by his poisonous incantations that, while the same serpent has persuaded many other heresies of one thing and another, he has persuaded you that he himself is Christ. Further, if many go astray, entangled by his various and many-shaped deceits, who yet confess this warning of the apostle to be true, how greatly are you adulterated, how far off prostituted, who take for Christ the very one by whom the apostle of Christ cries out that Eve was seduced and corrupted, so as to guard the virgin bride of Christ from him by such a warning? He has darkened your heart, who wallows with you in the phantoms of shining groves. What, where, whence are his faithful promises? O you drunk, but not with wine!

Indeed, with sacrilegious shamelessness you have abused the God of the prophets, saying that he did not provide for the Jews themselves, who served him, what he promised. Yet you did not say what he promised and did not provide, lest you be convicted there of its being either already provided, which you do not understand, or still to come, which you do not believe. What has been promised and presented to you, from which you could have assurance that you will receive the triumphs of new ages over the land of darkness? If you bring forward some prophets in whom we may read the Manichaeans foretold with praise as to come, so that you may think something already provided for you by the very fact that we see you exist, you will first have to prove that Mani himself did not invent the prophets for you, he who wanted you to believe him. For he does not think a lie shameful, nor indeed can he hesitate to show false prophets in sheep's clothing, who, while praising Christ, asserts that he showed false scars on his members. But I read that you were plainly foretold, not only by the prophets, sometimes more obscurely, but also by the apostle more expressly. But see how. “The Spirit,” he says, “says plainly that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars who have their conscience seared, forbidding marriage, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth; because every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.” How this has been fulfilled in you is clearer than light to the eyes of all who know you, and we showed it above as occasion allowed.

But she whom the apostolic teaching, presenting her as a chaste virgin to the one husband, Christ, warns to beware of the serpent's deceit by which you have been corrupted, acknowledges the God of the prophets, the true God, her God. She securely believes his last promise, since she already holds so many of his promises fulfilled; and no one says that the prophets she cites from the manuscripts of the Jews were invented for her for the present time. For what was promised more incredible than what was said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations shall be blessed”? And what do we now hold more certainly provided? That indeed is his last promise, which the prophet briefly records thus: “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you for ever and ever.” For when all need is ended and death, the last enemy, destroyed, the everlasting praise of God will be the occupation of those at rest: to which no one will come any more, from which no one will depart any more. This the prophet records elsewhere thus: “Praise the Lord, Jerusalem; praise your God, Zion; for he has strengthened the bars of your gates; he has blessed your sons within you.” With the gates shut, no one will enter, no one will go out. This the bridegroom himself says in the gospel, that he will not open to the foolish virgins even when they knock. This Jerusalem, the holy church, the bride of Christ, is described more fully and richly in the Apocalypse of John. Let the chaste virgin not believe this prophetic promise, if she does not already hold what was promised her through the same prophecy for this present time: “Hear, daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father's house, for the king has desired your beauty, for he is your God; and the daughters of Tyre shall worship him with gifts; the rich of the people shall entreat your face. All the glory of the king's daughter is within, clothed in golden fringes with varied colours; virgins shall be brought to the king after her, her companions shall be brought to you; in joy and gladness they shall be led into the king's temple. In place of your fathers sons are born to you; you shall make them princes over all the earth; they shall remember your name in every generation and offspring; therefore the peoples shall confess you for ever and for ages of ages.” But you, unhappy one corrupted by the serpent, when do you even try to think what is the beauty of the king's daughter within? For it is chastity of mind, where you were spoiled, so that your eyes were opened to love and worship the sun and moon, as if by the just judgment of God you were estranged from the tree of life, which is eternal and inward wisdom, and called and thought nothing else truth and wisdom but this light, which, drawn in through wrongly opened eyes and swollen to immensity and varied in many ways, you rolled about with an unchaste mind in imaginary pictures. These are your exceedingly abominable fornications. And yet think on them patiently, and “Return to me,” says the Truth. Return to me, and you will be cleansed, restored, if you are confounded in yourself and poured back into me. Hear this; this is what the true Truth says, which neither fought with the race of darkness in deceitful forms nor redeemed you with deceitful blood.

Tenth. Faustus said: “Why do you not accept Moses, when Christ says: ‘Moses wrote about me,’ and: ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me too’?” For my part, I should like not only Moses to have written about Christ, but all the prophets of the Jews and of the Gentiles as well. For how would this harm our faith, or rather how would it not help it, if we gathered fitting and suitable testimonies to our God from every side? Indeed, even then we should be free, while keeping our hatred and execration of their superstition, to pick out from them only the prophecies about Christ. So it cannot be contrary to me if Moses too, although he is a stranger to Christ, should seem to have written something about Christ. Would anyone not wish to gather a flower from every thorn, grain from every plant, honey from every fly, although we do not use flies or grass for food or thorns for the ornament of a garland? Would anyone not want a pearl to grow in every deep, gems in every land, fruit in every wood? And if eating fish from the sea does no harm, while drinking its water does, and men know how to take what is useful and spit out what is hostile, should we not be free, having condemned the rite of any religion that is useless to us, to accept from it only the prophecies about Christ? Nor would this help the errors in capturing us and reducing us to their own service, since it did not help the unclean spirits, when they openly and without disguise confessed Jesus to be the Son of God, to make them in the least less hateful to us. So if Moses too wrote something about Christ, according to this testimony, I will accept it, yet in such a way that it does not help him at all in taking me captive to his own law, which I see differs in nothing from paganism. Therefore you have no reason whatever to think that, if this were proved, I should not be glad that every spirit has prophesied about Christ.

I shall indeed be unable to thank you enough if, just as you show that Christ testified that Moses wrote about him, you also teach me what the things are that he wrote. For I searched his scriptures, as I was told to do, and found no prophecies about Christ there, whether because there are none or because I myself could not understand them. So, placed in great perplexity, I was driven by reason to one of two conclusions: either to declare this passage false, or Jesus a liar. But it was foreign to devotion to think that God lied. It seemed more right, then, to ascribe falsehood to the writers than a lie to the author of truth. Especially since I heard him also saying that all who came before him were thieves and robbers: a sentence by which I see Moses struck first of all. Besides this, when he was speaking of his majesty and called himself the light of the world, and the Jews protested indignantly, “Because you testify about yourself, your testimony is not true,” I do not see that he went on to say, where the occasion most required it, that Moses had prophesied about him; but, as one really a stranger, having no testimony from their fathers, he answered: “Indeed in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me,” reminding them of what all had heard said from heaven: “This is my most beloved Son; believe him.” Moreover, it does not seem likely to me that the Jews could have kept silent, when Christ said that Moses had written about him, without at once, malicious and cunning as they were, asking what it was that he thought Moses had written about him. But their silence on every side signifies no less that Jesus said nothing of the kind.

So although these points too do not seem small for confirming the suspicion of falsehood about this passage, I am held more by this: that, as I said, I searched all of Moses' writing and found no prophecies about Christ there. Now, however, having found in you a reader of better understanding, I believe I shall gain something, and I confess I shall be grateful, if you do not, out of any ill will, disappoint the hope of progress and instruction which the confidence of your rebuke promises me, but teach me whether there is anything mentioned in the writing of Moses about our God and Lord which perhaps escaped me in reading. And do not, I beg you, say, as the unlearned usually do, that this itself ought to be enough for faith, that Christ said that Moses wrote about him. For I do not want you now to look at me, whom my profession has bound to believe, so that I cannot but believe him whom I follow; but suppose we are dealing with a Jew, suppose with a Gentile. When we tell them, “Moses wrote about Christ,” they will ask for proofs. What shall we offer? Shall we be able to say, “Christ said so,” when they do not yet believe him at all? Surely we shall need to show them what he wrote.

What, then, shall we show? That passage, as you usually do, where his God speaks to Moses, saying: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you”? But neither does the Jew fail to see that this does not concern Christ at all, nor is it to our advantage to believe so, since Christ is not a prophet, nor a prophet like Moses: for the one was a man, the other God; the one a sinner, the other holy; the one born of intercourse, the other, according to you, of a virgin, but according to me not even of a virgin; the one is killed on the mountain, his God being offended, the other suffers of his own will, being most pleasing to the Father. How then will he be a prophet like Moses? Surely the Jew will at once either laugh at us as unlearned or refute us as liars.

Or shall we offer him the passage which you likewise usually bring in: “They shall see their life hanging, and shall not believe”? To which you add “on a tree,” for it does not have that. But it is equally ready to hand to prove that this too has nothing to do with Christ. For among the cruel curses which he brought out against his people, if they fell away from his law, he added this too, saying that they would be in the captivity of their enemies and would think on their end day and night, so that they would have no confidence even in their own life, which the victors had spared them, because it would hang in uncertainty, fearful and always anxious under the threat of swords. So not even this concerns Christ; other passages must be looked for. For I would hardly believe that you think it was said of Christ that everyone is cursed who hangs on a tree, or that other saying, that a prophet or ruler of the people was to be killed who wished to turn them away from their God or to break any of the commandments. That Christ did this I certainly cannot deny. But you, on the other hand, cannot plainly admit that these things were written about him, lest, if so, we begin to ask again in what spirit Moses prophesied, so as either to curse Christ or to order him to be killed. For if he had the Spirit of God, he did not say these things about Christ; if he said these things about Christ, he did not have the Spirit of God. For the divine Spirit would neither curse Christ nor order him to be killed. So, to clear Moses of this charge, you must admit that he did not write even these things about Christ. And if he wrote these things not at all about Christ, either you will give others or there will be none. If there are none, neither could Christ assert what exists nowhere. So, if Christ did not assert it, that passage will be established as false.

But neither is what follows likely: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too”; for the tradition of Moses and that of Christ are very unlike and far apart, so that if the Jews believed one of them they would necessarily resist the other. For Moses teaches above all that one must abstain from all work on the Sabbath, and gives as the reason for this observance that God, when he was making the world and all things in it, gave himself to work for six days and rested on the seventh, which is the Sabbath, and therefore blessed it, that is, sanctified it, as the haven of his rest; and moreover he gave a law that whoever broke it should be killed. This, then, the Jews firmly believed on Moses' teaching, and therefore they thought they should not even lend an ear to Christ, who asserted that God is always working and has set himself no day of rest, because his power is continual and tireless; and that he himself therefore ought never to cease, not even on Sabbaths: “For my Father,” he says, “is always working, and I must work.” Again, Moses counts circumcision of the flesh among sacred things beloved by God, and commands every male to be circumcised in the flesh of their foreskin, and teaches that this is the necessary sign of that covenant which his God made with Abraham; and he asserts that any male who does not bear it shall be cut off from his tribe and shall not come into the share of the inheritance promised to Abraham and his seed. This too, then, the Jews had firmly believed on Moses' assertion, and therefore they could not have faith in Christ, who weakened these things and asserted besides that whoever was circumcised became doubly a son of hell. Again, Moses makes an anxious distinction of fleshly foods, and sits as judge, like a glutton, among fish and birds and four-footed beasts, and orders some to be licked up as clean and others as unclean not even to be touched; among which he condemns the pig and the hare, and any fish that lacks scales, or any four-footed beast that does not have a split hoof and does not chew the cud. These things, then, the Jews firmly believed as written by Moses, and therefore they could no longer believe Christ, who taught the indifference of foods, and removed all of them entirely from his own disciples, but generally allowed to worldly people everything that could be eaten, asserting that nothing entering the mouth polluted them, because what comes out of the mouth thoughtlessly is all that pollutes a man. That Jesus taught these and many other things contrary to Moses, there is no one who does not know.

Since it would take long to go through these one by one, I will show one in place of many: namely, that the greatest part of the Christian heresies, and, what is plain to see, the Catholics, take no care to keep any of the things Moses writes. If this does not come from some error but from that true tradition of Christ and his disciples, you must altogether admit that Jesus and Moses taught things contrary to each other, and that Christ was not believed by the Jews for the very reason that they wished to keep faith with Moses. How then will it not be false that Jesus said to them, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too,” when it is quite plain that they did not believe Jesus all the more because they believed Moses, but could have had faith in Christ if they had stopped believing Moses? But, as I said, I beg you to teach us where Moses wrote anything about Christ.

“Otherwise,” he says, “if you are a Christian, believe Christ when he says that Moses wrote about him; and if you do not believe it, you are not a Christian.” This is always the inept and feeble reply of those who have nothing to show. How much better would you have done, then, to confess this simply? And yet you could say this to me, since you know that I am bound to believe for the sake of the religion by which I serve Christ; although the question still remains whether this too is Christ's testimony, so that it must be believed absolutely, or the writer's, so that it must be examined carefully. And if we do not believe falsehoods, we do not offend Christ by it, but the falsifiers. Still, this could be borne somehow when put to Christians. But what shall we do about those I mentioned, the Jew, that is, and the Gentile, to whom we cannot say: “If you are a Christian, believe; if you do not believe, you are not a Christian”? Even of a Christian you would not say this quite rightly, since Christ did not spurn the apostle Thomas when he doubted about him; but, to heal the wounds of his mind, he showed the scars of his body, and did not say: “If you are a disciple, believe; if you do not believe, you are not a disciple.” You say this to me, who am doubting not about Christ but about a saying, whether it is his or was slipped in. “But,” you say, “he calls those more blessed who have not seen and have believed.” If you think this was said so that we should believe anything without reason and judgment, be more blessed, you, without sense; I shall be content to have heard myself blessed with reason.

Augustine replied: You say cunningly that you are ready, if you find any prophecies about Christ in the books of Moses, to take them as you would a fish from the sea while spitting out the very water from which the fish is caught. But since everything Moses wrote is about Christ, that is, wholly concerns Christ, whether it foretells him by figures of things done or said, or commends his grace and glory, you, who have believed a fictitious and deceitful Christ from Mani's writings, will not believe these things of Moses, just as you will not eat fish. But there is this difference: that you pursue Moses with hostility, while you praise fish deceitfully. For if eating fish from the sea does no harm, as you yourself said, why do you proclaim it so harmful that, if no other food is at hand, you would rather waste away with hunger than eat fish? What then? If all flesh is unclean, as you say, and that wretched life of your god, which is purified through your food, is held fast in all water and every plant, your detestable superstition compels you both to throw away the fish which you praised, and to drink sea water and eat thorns, which you found fault with. And as for your comparing the servant of God with the demons, so that he should be regarded as they were when they confessed Christ, if anything could be found in his books that preaches Christ, he does not disdain his Lord's reproach. For if the householder was called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household! But consider from whom you have learned these things, surely men more wicked than those who so reviled the Lord. For they did not believe that he was the Christ, and therefore thought him a deceiver; but you do not think a doctrine truthful unless it dares to proclaim Christ a deceiver.

But why does the law of Moses seem to you to differ in nothing from paganism? Because it commends a temple, a sacrifice, an altar and a priest? But all these names are found in the New Testament too: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” and: “When you offer your gift at the altar,” and: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for yourself the sacrifice that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” And of what things these were figures, the Lord himself partly shows, when he compares the temple of his body to that temple, and partly we learn from the apostolic teaching; for “the temple of God is holy,” says the apostle, “which you are,” and: “I beseech you, therefore, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God,” and other things of this kind. So all those things were figures of us, as the same apostle says, and as must often be recalled, because they were offered not to demons but to the one true God who made heaven and earth; not as to one who needed such things, but as to one who distinguishes the times and commands present things through which to signify future ones. But you, who, to lead astray and deceive simple and imperfect Christians, pretend to detest paganism, produce for us the authority of Christian books in which you are commanded to revere and worship the sun and moon. It is your error, then, that is rather like paganism, since you do not even worship Christ, but under Christ's name something or other which you have invented for yourselves by lying, and you worship gods, either those visible in this sky we see or countless other fictitious ones. For these phantoms, as for empty and hollow images, you have not built shrines, but have made your hearts their temples.

You demand that I show what Moses wrote about Christ. Much has already been shown above; but who could show it all? Especially since, if I mention some things, this perverse man seems ready either to try to twist them into another sense or, if he is overwhelmed by the evidence of a clearer truth, to say that he takes them like a sweet fish from the salt sea and so ought not to be compelled to accept the whole writing of Moses, as if to drink the sea water. So I think it enough for this work to show that the very things he has picked out for blame from the writing of the law of the Hebrews concern the preaching of Christ, if rightly understood. From this it will be plain enough that the rest, whether immediately declared or carefully and truthfully examined, agree much more with the Christian faith, if the enemy is shown to be condemned by Christian truth from the very things he puts forward to be mocked and condemned. Therefore, you who are full of every deceit, since the Lord said in the gospel, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me too, for he wrote about me,” there is no reason for you to pretend that you were placed in great perplexity and seem driven to one of two conclusions, either to declare this passage false or Jesus a liar. For as this passage is true, so too Jesus is truthful. “It seemed more right,” he says, “to ascribe falsehood to the writers than a lie to the author of truth.” Do you really believe Christ to be the author of truth, whom you proclaim a feigner of flesh and death and wounds and scars? I want you to show me where you learned that Christ is the author of truth, if you dare to ascribe falsehood to those who wrote about him, whose authority, commended and confirmed by recent memory, has flowed down to later generations. For you have not seen Christ, nor has he spoken with you as with the apostles, nor called you from heaven as he did Saul. What can we think, what can we believe about him, except what scripture testifies? Further, if the gospel is lying, which has been spread and made known to all nations, and from the beginning of the preaching of Christ's name has been set in so high a place of holiness in all the churches, what writing can be produced in which faith is to be had about Christ? What writing could you bring forward which a man who did not want to believe it would not say was forged, if such widespread knowledge of the gospel comes into doubt?

Next you add that you heard him saying that all who came before him were thieves and robbers. Where did you hear him say this, if not from the gospel? But if someone else were to contend that this, which you believe from the gospel so firmly that you say you heard it as from the Lord's mouth, is false, and were to deny that Christ said it, where will you go? What will you do? Will you not proclaim the authority of the gospel with all the strength you can? Wretched man, what you do not want to believe is written in the same place where you learned what you believe so firmly that you say you heard it from Christ himself. See, we believe both, because we believe the holy gospel, where both are written: both that Moses wrote about Christ, and that all who came before Christ were thieves and robbers. For he wants “came” to be understood as meaning that they were not sent; for those who were sent, like Moses and the holy prophets, did not come before him but with him, since they did not wish to go before him in pride, but humbly carried him speaking through them. But you, who understand these words of the Lord in this way, sufficiently admit, on your understanding, that you have no prophets who prophesied that Christ would come, and therefore you have invented him for yourselves as you wished. For if you have any, who are not to be believed in any case, because they are produced only by you, yet if there are any whom you dare to say prophesied that Christ would come in false flesh, suffer a false death, and offer false scars to doubting disciples (I do not say how detestable and to be shunned they are by this very fact, and how they cannot be truthful, who are pleased with Christ for his lying), not to say this, certainly, as I had begun to say, on this understanding of yours they were thieves and robbers, since they came before Christ, whoever preached in any way that he would come. Further, if the true understanding is that those are said to have come before Christ who would not come with Christ, that is, with the Word of God, but, though God did not send them, brought their own lies to men, then you yourselves too, although you were born into this world after Christ's passion and resurrection, are thieves and robbers, because before he enlightened you to preach his truth, you wished to come before him in order to boast of your own deceit.