Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.22–22.34

But suppose someone so utterly fleshly and foolish that he worships God not as we worship him, who is one and true, but as you say we worship him, a god fashioned by your slanders or suspicions: does not even such a man worship a better god than you do? I beg you, pay attention and open your eyes, such as they are; for no great sharpness of mind is needed to see what I am about to say. I appeal to all, wise and unwise: hear, attend, judge. How much better would it have been for your god to have dwelt in darkness from eternity than to have plunged into darkness the light co-eternal and akin to himself! How much better to praise with wonder a new light that arose for him to put darkness to flight than to be unable to escape the old darkness rushing upon him except by darkening his own light! Unhappy, if he did it in distress; cruel, if he did it untroubled. Certainly it would have been better for him to see as good a light made by himself than to make evil a light begotten of himself—a light that repelled the hostile darkness from him in such a way that it became hostile to him. For this will be imputed as guilt to those remnants condemned in the globe: that they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light. Before this happened to them, they suffered from eternity, if they did not know that this was to happen to them, the eternal darkness of ignorance; but if they knew, the eternal darkness of fear. See, truly a part and substance of your god dwelt from eternity in its own darkness, and did not afterwards marvel at a new light, but ran into another, alien darkness which it always feared. Moreover, God himself, of whom that was a part, if he feared that so great an evil would come upon that part of himself, the darkness of fear had seized him too; but if he did not know that it would come, he was blinded by the darkness of ignorance; and if he knew it would come upon his part and did not fear, worse is the darkness of such cruelty than that either of ignorance or of fear. For your god did not have what the apostle praises even in the flesh—which you most insanely believe was made not by God but by hyle: “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.” But we do not accuse him of that: he foreknew, he feared, he grieved, but he had no way to act. In this darkness of his misery, then, he dwelt from eternity, and did not afterwards marvel at a new light which drove darkness from him, but, to the great harm of his light, experienced another darkness which he had always feared. How much better would it have been, I will not say to give a precept as God does, but to receive a precept as a man does, to be kept to his good or despised to his harm, yet using free will in either movement of the mind, rather than to be pressed against his will by unavoidable necessity to darken his own light! For it would certainly have been much better to give a precept to human nature without knowing that it would sin than, pressed by necessity, to compel his own divine nature to sin. Wake up and tell us how he conquers darkness whom necessity conquers. Necessity was already a greater enemy at home with him, conquered and commanded by which he fought with the lesser. How much better not to know where Adam had fled from his face than himself to have nowhere to flee, first from the face of hard and dire necessity, and then from the face of the opposite and hostile race! How much better to envy human nature a blessed life than to give over the divine nature to misery; to desire the blood and fat of sacrifices rather than himself to be slaughtered so often even to idols, mixed with the fat and blood of all victims; to be troubled with jealousy if those sacrifices were offered to other gods also, rather than himself, bound not only in all crops but also in all flesh, to be offered on every altar to every demon! How much better, moved and troubled even by human indignation, to be angry with sinners both his own and strangers, than himself to be troubled not only in all who are angry but also in all who fear, to be defiled in all sinners, to be punished in all the condemned, bound everywhere in that part of himself which, innocent, he himself condemned to such disgrace, so that through it he might conquer what he feared—himself also condemned under so ruinous a necessity, that his condemned part might forgive him, if, now that he is wretched, he were at least humble! But as it is, who can bear your finding fault with God for being angry with sinners, his own and strangers, when the god you invent will afterwards condemn in the globe his own members, whom, compelled himself, he compelled to go into the jaws of sin? When he does this, as you say, he will have no anger. But I wonder whether he will have the face to inflict a kind of punishment on those from whom he ought to beg pardon and say: “I beseech you, forgive me; you are my members. When could I do this to you, except conquered by necessity? You know too that at the time when I sent you here, a dreadful enemy had broken out; and now I bind you here because I fear he may break out again.” Surely you now confess this too, that it is much better to kill thousands of men by temporal death for no fault or a slight one than to hand over his own members—that is, the members of God, the substance of God, and plainly God—into the whirlpool of sin, and to condemn them to be bound in everlasting punishment. For if those members had free choice of sinning or not sinning—although how this could be said of the substance of God, which truly is the substance of God and therefore wholly unchangeable, is not to be found; for God cannot sin at all, just as he cannot deny himself; but man can sin and deny God, though if he does not will it, he does not do it—if, then, those members of your god had, as I said, like a human and rational soul, free choice of will to sin or not to sin, perhaps they would rightly be struck with the punishment of that globe for grave crimes. But as it is, you cannot say that those particles had freedom of will, which God himself, the whole of him, did not have; for if he did not send them into sin, he would, the whole of him, be overrun by the race of darkness and compelled to sin. But if he could not be compelled, he sinned when he sent them where they could be compelled; and so he himself is more deserving of that sack, as it were, of the parricide, he who did this by free command, than they who by obeying went where they lost the free choice of living rightly. But if he himself, invaded and possessed, could have been compelled to sin had he not provided for himself first by the disgrace and then by the punishment of his part, and there was no free will in your god nor in his parts, let him not pretend to be a judge, but acknowledge himself guilty—not because he suffered what he did not want, but because he pretends to render justice in condemning those whom he knows to have suffered evil rather than done it; which he pretends only so that he may not be found conquered, as though it profited any wretch to be called happy or fortunate. Surely even this would have been better: that your god, without any weighing of equity, should spare men neither righteous nor sinners—which Faustus, understanding nothing, put last in his criticism of our God—than that he should so rage against his own members that it is too little that he offered them to the enemies to be poisoned beyond expiation, unless he also accuses them of a false charge of iniquity. For he says that they deservedly pay so monstrous and endless a punishment because they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light. Why, except because, as he himself says, they were so absorbed into the first greed of the princes of darkness that they could not recall their origin and distinguish themselves from the hostile nature? Such souls, then, did no evil themselves, but innocently suffered so great an evil. By whose doing, if not first of all his, who commanded them to go forth from him into so great an evil? They found, then, a father worse than the enemy. For the father sent them into so great an evil, while the enemy desired them as a good, wanting to enjoy them, not to harm them: the one harmed knowingly, the other unknowingly. But a weak and helpless god could not provide for himself otherwise, first against a wicked enemy and afterwards against the enemy shut in. Let him at least not accuse those by whose obedience he is safe, by whose death he is secure. If he was compelled to fight, was he compelled also to slander? For when they allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and became enemies of the holy light, they were certainly compelled to this by the enemy; and if they could not resist him, they are condemned innocent; but if they could and would not, why do you still so fabulously bring in a nature of evil, when the origin of sin is from one's own will? For this they certainly did by their own fault, not by another's force, that when they could resist evil, they would not. For if they did so, they would do well; but if they did not, they would sin gravely and monstrously; if they could and did not, then certainly they would not. If, then, they would not, the crime is of the will, not of necessity. From the will, therefore, is the beginning of sin; and where the beginning of sin is, there is the beginning of evil, whether of doing contrary to a just precept or of suffering according to a just judgment. There is no reason, then, why, in asking where evil comes from, you should rush into the great evil of this error, of calling a nature abounding in so many goods a nature of evil, and placing in the nature of the highest good, before its mixture with the nature of evil, the dreadful evil of necessity. For the cause of this error of yours too is pride, which you will not have if you do not will it. But while you want to defend in any way you can that into which you have rushed, you take the origin of sin away from the choice of the will and place a nature of evil in an empty and false fable. And so it remains for you to say that those souls also, to be condemned in the horrible globe in eternal bondage, became enemies of the holy light not by will but by necessity; and to make your god such a judge that before him you can do nothing to help those whose cause you defend by proving necessity, and such a king that from him you cannot obtain pardon even for your brothers, his sons and members, whose enmity against you and him you claim arose not by will but by necessity. O most monstrous cruelty! Except that you turn to defend him too, excusing him on the ground that he also does this by necessity. If, then, you could find another judge, who, free from the chain of necessity, stood as governor of equity, he would surely not fix this god outside in that globe, but would shut him inside with the terrible enemy himself. For why should he not justly be first in the penalty of condemnation who is first in the crime of necessity? How much better, then, would you do to choose, in comparison with a worse one, a god—not such as we worship, but such as you either invent or suppose that we worship—who, without any weighing of equity, without any distinction between condemnation and discipline, would spare in his servants neither the righteous nor the sinner, rather than one who did not spare his own members, whether innocent, if necessity is not a crime, or made guilty by obeying him, if necessity too is a crime, so that they are condemned for ever by him with whom they ought either to be acquitted together, if freedom revived after the victory, or condemned together, if even after the victory necessity still had so much power that equity could have some power too. And just as you invent a god—not that true and highest God whom we worship, but some other false one whom you either suppose or slanderously claim that we worship—who nevertheless is himself much better than your god (for neither exists, and both are invented by you), so you invent the one you accuse as ours better than the one you adore as yours.

So too you find fault with the patriarchs and prophets, not such as they are honoured by us, but such as you have invented with malevolent vanity from our books, which you do not understand. And yet even these, such as you suspect them to have been, it is too little for me to say are better than your elect who keep all the commandments of Mani, unless I also show that they are better than your god himself. This I will not undertake to show until, with the Lord's help, I have first defended our holy fathers, the patriarchs and prophets, from your accusations by clear reasoning against fleshly hearts. And to you indeed, Manichaeans, it would be enough to answer thus: by showing that even what you think were the vices of our fathers are to be preferred to the virtues of yours, adding, to heap up your confusion, that your god too is found to be far worse than men such as you boast our fathers to have been. So it would be enough, as I said, to answer you. But since some, even apart from your empty talk, are moved of their own accord when they compare the life of the prophets in the Old Testament with the life of the apostles in the New, and cannot distinguish the custom of that time, in which the promise was veiled, from the custom of this time, in which the promise is revealed, I am compelled rather to answer those who either dare to prefer their own self-restraint to the prophets or seek in the prophets a defence for their own wickedness.

In this matter I say first that not only the speech but also the life of those men was prophetic, and that that whole kingdom of the Hebrew nation was a great prophet, because it was the prophet of someone great. Therefore, as regards those there who were instructed in heart in the wisdom of God, the prophecy of Christ and the church to come is to be searched out not only in what they said but also in what they did; and as regards the rest, and all the people of that nation together, in what was done divinely in them or concerning them. For all those things, as the apostle says, were figures of us.

These men find fault with certain deeds of the prophets, whose loftiness is far above them, as though they were lust, just as some sacrilegious pagans find fault with Christ as though for folly, or rather madness, because he looked for fruit on a tree at a season of the year when it was not due, or for a childish silliness, because with bowed head he wrote with his finger on the ground and, after answering the men who questioned him, began to do it again. For they have no wisdom, nor do they understand that in great souls certain virtues are very like the vices of small souls in some appearance, but in no comparison of equity. Those who find fault with these things in the great are like untaught boys at school who, having learned as a great thing that a noun in the singular must be given a verb in the singular, find fault with the most learned author of the Latin language because he said: “pars in frusta secant” (“a part cut it into pieces”); he ought, they say, to have said “secat.” And because they know that “religio” is spelled so, they blame him because he wrote “relligione patrum” with a doubled l. Hence it may not absurdly be said, each in its kind, that as far as the figures and metaplasms of the learned differ from the solecisms and barbarisms of the ignorant, so far do the figurative deeds of the prophets differ from the lustful sins of the wicked. And so, just as a boy reproved for a barbarism would be beaten with the rod if he tried to defend himself by Virgil's metaplasm, so whoever, having wallowed with his wife's maidservant, takes as an example in his defence the deed of Abraham in begetting offspring from Hagar—would that he might be corrected, not by the rod merely, but even by the cudgel, so that he may not be punished with the other adulterers in eternal punishment! Those matters are indeed very small, and these great; nor is the likeness drawn from them so that a figure of speech should be put on a level with a sacrament, or a solecism with adultery. Yet, in proportion to each kind, what skill or unskill avails in the case of certain virtues or vices of speech, that wisdom or folly avails in these virtues or vices of conduct, though they are of a far different kind.

Therefore, lest we rush rashly into praising or blaming, accusing or defending, restraining or releasing, condemning or acquitting, seeking or avoiding anything—in all of which sins or right actions are found—we ought first to consider what sin is, and then to examine the deeds of the saints written in the divine books, so that, if we find any sins of theirs too, we may see by careful reasoning, as far as we can, for what usefulness these too were put in writing and committed to memory. And whatever we find that seem to the foolish or malevolent to be sins, which are not, and yet in which no examples of virtue stand out, let us consider these too, why they were included in those writings which we believe were wholesomely composed for the usefulness of ruling the present life and attaining the future one. Further, whatever lessons of righteousness shine out in the deeds of the saints, no one, even of the unlearned, doubts ought to have been written. The question, then, can be about those things which may seem to have been written either uselessly, if they appear neither right actions nor sins, or even harmfully, if they are proved to be sins, lest they avail for imitation—whether they are not reproved in the books themselves, and therefore may be thought not even to be sins, or are reproved there too, but are committed with an easy hope of pardon, because they are found even in the saints.

Sin, then, is anything done or said or desired against the eternal law. And the eternal law is the divine reason or will of God, commanding that the natural order be preserved and forbidding that it be disturbed. What, then, is the natural order in man must be asked. Man consists of soul and body; but so does a beast. No one doubts that the soul is to be set above the body in the natural order. But in the soul of man there is reason, which is not in a beast. Therefore, just as the soul is set above the body, so by the law of nature the reason of the soul itself is set above its other parts, which beasts also have; and within reason itself, which is partly contemplative and partly active, contemplation without doubt excels. For in it is the image of God, by which we are re-formed through faith to sight. Rational action, therefore, ought to obey rational contemplation, whether it works through faith, as it does as long as we are away from the Lord, or through sight, as it will when we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is, made even, in a spiritual body, equal by his grace to his angels, having received the first robe of immortality and incorruption, with which this mortal and corruptible of ours will be clothed, that death may be swallowed up in victory, righteousness being perfected through grace. For the holy and exalted angels too have their contemplation and action; for they command themselves to do what he whom they contemplate commands, whose eternal rule they serve freely, because sweetly. But we, whose body is dead because of sin, until God gives life also to our mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in us, live righteously in the measure of our weakness according to the eternal law, by which the natural order is preserved, if we live by unfeigned faith, which works through love, having in a good conscience the hope laid up in heaven of immortality and incorruption, and of the perfecting of righteousness itself, even to a certain inexpressibly sweet fullness, for which in this pilgrimage we must hunger and thirst, as long as we walk by faith, not by sight.

Therefore human action, serving faith which serves God, reins in all mortal delights and restrains them to their natural measure, preferring by ordered love the better to the lower. For if nothing unlawful gave delight, no one would sin. He sins, then, who slackens rather than reins in delight in what is unlawful. And that is unlawful which that law forbids by which the natural order is preserved. Whether there is any rational creature whom nothing unlawful can delight is a great question. If there is, man was not made of that kind, nor that angelic nature which did not stand in the truth; but these rational beings were made of such a kind that there was in them the power to rein in delight from the unlawful, and by not reining it in they sinned. Great, then, is even the human creature, since it is restored through that power by which, had it willed, it would not have fallen. Great, then, is the Lord and greatly to be praised, who made it. For he made lower creatures, which cannot sin; he made also better ones, which will not sin. For the bestial nature does not sin, because it does nothing against the eternal law, to which it is so subject that it cannot share in it. Again, the exalted angelic nature does not sin, because it so shares in the eternal law that God alone delights it, whose will it obeys without any experience of temptation. But man, whose life on earth because of sin is a temptation, should subject to himself what he has in common with beasts and subject to God what he has in common with angels, until, righteousness and immortality being perfected and received, he is raised above the former and made equal to the latter.

Mortal delights are to be either aroused or relaxed only so far as is needed to restore or to preserve this mortal well-being, whether of each individual or of the human race itself. If they slip beyond this and, against the rule of temperance, lusts carry away a man who does not govern himself, they will certainly be unlawful and shameful and deserve to be corrected by pain. And if they plunge the governor, thrown into disorder, into such a whirlpool of ruinous habit that either, believing they will go unpunished, he neglects the medicine of confession and repentance by which he might be corrected and emerge, or, by a worse death of the heart, he brings to them a blasphemous patronage of defence against that eternal law of providence, and so meets his last day, then that blameless law judges him worthy no longer of correction but of condemnation.

Consulting, then, the eternal law, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, let us see what father Abraham sinned in, that is, what he did against this law, in the things Faustus objected to as great crimes. “Burning,” he says, “with an insane desire to have offspring, and not believing God, who had already promised him this from his wife Sarah, he wallowed with a concubine.” But this Faustus, blinded by an insane desire to accuse, both betrayed the wickedness of his heresy and, without knowing it and in error, praised Abraham's intercourse. For just as that eternal law, that is, the will of God the creator of all creatures, providing for the preservation of the natural order, allows the delight of mortal flesh to be relaxed under the rule of reason in intercourse only for the propagation of offspring—not so that lust may be served and satisfied, but so that the welfare of the race may be provided for—so, on the contrary, the perverse law of the Manichaeans commands those who have intercourse to avoid offspring above all, lest their god, whom they lament as bound in all seeds, be bound more tightly in a woman's conception; so that their god may be poured out in a shameful fall rather than bound in a cruel tie. It was not Abraham, then, who burned with an insane desire to have offspring, but Mani who raved with an insane folly of avoiding offspring. Accordingly, the one, keeping the order of nature, sought nothing in human intercourse except that a human being should be born; the other, observing the perversity of his fable, feared nothing in any intercourse except that God should be taken captive.

And where Faustus blames, in Abraham's deed, as it were, his wife's knowledge, there indeed, with an evil mind and the intention of disparaging, yet unknowingly and unwillingly, he praises both. For she did not join her knowledge to a crime of her husband's, so that he might satisfy his lust with shameful and unlawful pleasure; rather she too, wanting children according to the natural order and knowing herself barren, claimed by lawful authority the fruitfulness of her maidservant's womb for the use of her own right, not yielding to a husband who lusted, but commanding one who obeyed. Nor was this disordered pride. For who does not know that a wife ought to serve her husband as her lord? But as regards the members of the body by which the sex itself is distinguished, the apostle says: “Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife”; so that, while in the other acts that concern human peace the woman owes service to the man, in this one thing, by which the two sexes are distinguished by their fleshly lot and joined by fleshly union, the husband has the same authority over the wife as the wife over the husband. The offspring, then, that Sarah could not have from herself she wished to have from her maidservant, yet from the same seed from which she ought to have had it from herself, if she could. A woman would never do this if she were held by fleshly desire for her husband's body; she would rather be jealous of a concubine than make her a mother. As it was, the will to propagate was godly precisely because the will to have intercourse was not lustful.

This certainly could not be defended, if Abraham, as Faustus objected, wished to have offspring by Hagar not believing God, who had already promised him offspring from Sarah. But it is most plainly false: God had not yet promised this. Let those who wish go over the earlier parts of that Scripture; they will find that the land and the abundance of a countless multitude had already been promised to Abraham's seed, but it had not yet been revealed how that seed was to be propagated—whether from Abraham's flesh, if he begot of himself, or by choice, if perhaps he adopted someone; and then, if from his own flesh, whether from Sarah or from another woman altogether, had not yet been made clear. Let those who wish read, I say, and they will find that Faustus either is deceived through imprudence or deceives through impudence. So Abraham, when he saw that sons were not born to him and yet held fast to the promise made to his seed, first thought of adoption. This is shown by his saying, when speaking with God, of his home-born servant: “This one will be my heir”; as though he said: since you have not given me seed from myself, fulfil in this one what you promised to my seed. For if only what was born of someone's flesh were called his seed, the apostle would not call us the seed of Abraham, who certainly do not derive the origin of our flesh from him, but have become his seed by imitating his faith, believing in Christ, whose flesh was propagated from his flesh. Then, therefore, Abraham heard from the Lord: “This one will not be your heir, but he who comes forth from your womb, he will be your heir.” Now that the thought of adoption was removed, since Abraham hoped for seed from himself, it remained uncertain whether it would be from Sarah or from another; which God wished to hide from him until the Old Testament should first be prefigured from the maidservant. What wonder, then, if Abraham, seeing that his barren wife wished offspring to come to her from her maidservant and from her husband, since she could not bear it herself, did not yield to his own fleshly desire but obeyed the authority of the marriage, believing that Sarah had wished this by God's prompting, who had already promised him an heir from himself, but had not foretold from which woman? In vain, then, did Faustus madly leap to make this accusation, faithlessly charging Abraham with faithlessness. The other things he could not understand through the blindness of unbelief; but this he neglected even to read, through the lust of slandering.

And as for his calling a righteous and faithful man a most infamous trafficker in his own marriage, and asserting that for the sake of greed and his belly he sold his wife Sarah for intercourse to two kings, Abimelech and Pharaoh, at different times, falsely calling her his sister because she was very beautiful—he does not, with truthful mouth, separate the honourable from the shameful, but with slandering mouth turns the whole into a crime. This deed of Abraham does seem like procuring, but only to those who cannot, by the light of that eternal law, distinguish right actions from sins: to whom constancy too can seem obstinacy, and the virtue of confidence is thought the vice of boldness, and whatever else of the kind is objected against those who act rightly, as though they did not, by those who do not see rightly. For Abraham did not consent to a crime of his wife's and sell her adultery; but just as she did not hand over her maidservant to her husband's lust, but of her own accord brought her to the duty of begetting, without at all disturbing the natural order, since that lay in her authority, commanding one who obeyed rather than yielding to one who lusted: so he too, of his chaste wife, who clung to him with a chaste heart, of whose mind, where the virtue of modesty dwelt, he had no doubt at all, kept silent that she was his wife and said she was his sister, lest, if he were killed, she should be held captive by foreigners and ungodly men; being sure of his God that he would not let her suffer anything shameful and wicked. Nor did his faith and hope deceive him; for Pharaoh, frightened by portents and afflicted with many evils on her account, when he learned by divine means that she was his wife, restored her unharmed and with honour; and Abimelech, warned and instructed in a dream, did the same.

Some indeed—not slanderous and abusive like Faustus, but paying due honour to the same books which he either finds fault with through not understanding or does not understand through finding fault—when they considered this deed of Abraham, thought that he fell somewhat short of firmness of faith and wavered, and that, from fear of death, he denied his wife as Peter denied the Lord. If it had to be understood so, I would acknowledge the man's sin; nor would I therefore judge all his merits blotted out and erased, any more than those of that apostle—although it is not an equal fault to deny one's wife and to deny the Saviour. But as it is, since I have a way of understanding it that does not require me to understand it so, I am under no compulsion to slip rashly into blaming one whom no one proves to have slipped through fear into lying. For he was not asked whether she was his wife and answered that she was not; but when he was asked what that woman was to him, he declared her his sister; he did not deny her as his wife. He kept silent some truth; he did not say anything false.