Against Faustus the Manichaean 24.1–25.2

Faustus said: Why do you deny that man is made by God? We do not deny outright that man is made by God in every sense; but we ask who is made, and when, and in what way, since according to the apostle there are two men, one of whom he sometimes calls the outer man, more often the earthly, and now and then even the old man, while the other he calls the inner, the heavenly, and the new. We ask, then, which of these two is made by God, since there are also two times of our birth: one, that in which nature brought us forth into this light entangled in the bonds of the flesh; the other, when the truth, having turned us from error, regenerated us to itself, initiated into the faith. Signifying this time of the second birth, Jesus says in the gospel: “Unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And when Nicodemus, understanding too little, was perplexed and asked how this could happen—for an old man cannot enter his mother’s womb and be born again—Jesus answered him: “Unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And he goes on: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Therefore, if birth is not only that by which we are begotten in the body, but also that other by which we are reborn by the Spirit, it is no less a matter of concern to ask this very thing too: in which of them God makes us. The manner of being born is also twofold: one, proper to passion and intemperance, by which we were sown by our begetters shamefully and through lust; the other, of decency and holiness, by which in Christ Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, we have been made disciples for the faith under the teaching of good men. That is why every religion, and the Christian above all, calls the untaught to the sacrament as infants. Signifying this too, the apostle says: “My little children, with whom I am again in labour until Christ is formed in you.” So the question is no longer whether God makes man, but when, and whom, and in what way he makes him. For if it is when we are fashioned in the womb—as the gentiles generally hold, and the Jews, and you yourselves—that God forms us after his image, and makes us old, and creates us through passion and lust (and I hardly know whether that befits his divinity); but if it is when we believe and are converted to a better state of life that we are formed by God—as Christ holds, and his apostles, and we—then surely God makes us new, and makes us decently and purely. What could be more consistent with, or more befitting, his holy and venerable majesty? But if you too do not spurn the authority of Paul, we will show you from him whom, and when, and in what way God makes man. He says to the Ephesians: “That you put off, as regards your former way of life, the old man, which is corrupted through the desires of error; but be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which was created according to God in righteousness and holiness of truth.” You see, then, when man is created after the image of God; you see here that another man is shown, and another birth, and another manner of being born. For when he says “put off and put on,” he certainly signifies the time of believing; and when he testifies that the new man is created by God, he indicates that the old man is neither from him nor formed according to him. And when he continues, saying that the new man comes to be in holiness and righteousness and truth, he marks out and shows that other way of birth which I said is far unlike this one that sowed our bodies in the frenzied embraces of our parents; and he shows that this one is not from God, since he declared that the other alone is from God. Likewise he says the same thing again to the Colossians: “Strip off the old man with his deeds, and put on the new, which is renewed in the knowledge of God after the image of him who created him in you.” Here too, then, he shows not only that the new man is the one whom God makes, but he has taught also when and by what means he is formed: namely, “in the knowledge of God,” by which the time of believing is signified. And further: “after the image,” he says, “of him who created him,” so that it may be clear from this that the old man is neither the image of God nor formed by him. For what follows, when he says: “where there is not male and female, Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian,” shows more and more that this birth which made us male and female, Greeks and Jews, Scythians and barbarians, is not the one in which God is at work when he forms man, but that one which strips us of all the variety of nations, sex, and condition and renders us one, after the likeness of him who is one, that is, Christ; as the same apostle says again: “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ; there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, but all are one in Christ.” Therefore man is made by God when he becomes one out of many, not when out of one he is divided into many. Now the first origin, that is, the bodily one, divided us; the second, the intelligible and divine, unites us. And so we have most rightly thought that the former should be ascribed to the nature of the body, the latter to the majesty on high. That is why the same apostle says again to the Corinthians: “In Christ Jesus through the gospel I begot you”; and to the Galatians, of himself: “When it pleased him who set me apart from my mother’s womb to reveal his Son in me, so that I might proclaim him among the gentiles, I did not at once consult flesh and blood.” You see, then, that everywhere he affirms that we are formed by God in this second birth of ours, the spiritual one only, not in that first, obscene and shameful one, which conceived, formed, and brought us forth in the mother’s womb in no way more excellent or cleaner than the other animals. If you are willing to consider this, you will find that on this point we differ from you not so much in profession as in understanding, since you are pleased to grant to this old, outer, and earthly man that he was formed by God, whereas we, on the contrary, give this to the heavenly man and assign it to the inner and new man; and not rashly or presumptuously, but learning it from Christ and his apostles, who are shown to have been the first to teach these things in the world.

Augustine replied: The apostle Paul wants the inner man to be understood as referring to the spirit of the mind, and the outer man to the body and this mortal life; yet nowhere in his letters do we read that he called these two together two men, but one man, whom God made whole, that is, both what is inward and what is outward. But he made him after his image only in respect of what is inward, which is not only incorporeal but also rational, something that cattle do not have. So he did not make one man after his image and make another not after his image; but because both of these, inner and outer, are together one man, he made this one man after his image—not in respect of his having a body and bodily life, but in respect of his having a rational mind, by which he may know God and be set above all irrational things by that same excellence of reason. Now Faustus grants that the inner man is made by God, since “he is renewed,” he says, “in the knowledge of God after the image of him who created him.” I fully acknowledge this saying of the apostle; why does he not acknowledge the other: “God arranged the members, each one of them, in the body as he willed”? See, God is proclaimed by the same apostle as the maker of the outer man too. Why does Faustus choose from him what he thinks is in his favour, and keep silent about or reject what cuts away the fables of Mani? Again, when the same Paul was discoursing on the earthly and the heavenly man, distinguishing between mortal and immortal, between what we are in Adam and what we shall be in Christ, he brought, from the very law, from the very book and the very place, the testimony concerning the earthly, that is, the animal body, where it is written that God made the earthly man as well. For when he was treating how the dead will rise and with what body they will come, he gave comparisons from the seeds of grain—that bare grains are sown and God gives them a body as he willed, to each seed its own body. (Here, by the way, he overturns the error of Mani, who says that grains and herbs and all roots and shrubs are created by the race of darkness, not by God, and who believes that God is bound in those forms and kinds of things rather than that he made any of them.) Having said these things, then, against Mani’s sacrilegious folly too, he came to the differences of flesh: “Not all flesh,” he says, “is the same flesh”; then to the differences of heavenly and earthly bodies; then to the change of our body by which it can become spiritual and heavenly: “It is sown,” he says, “in dishonour, it will rise in glory; it is sown in weakness, it will rise in power; it is sown an animal body, it will rise a spiritual body.” And then, wishing to show the origin of the animal body, he says: “If there is an animal body, there is also a spiritual one; so also it is written: The first man Adam became a living soul.” This is written in Genesis, where it is told how God made man and gave life to the body he had formed from the earth. As for the old man, the apostle means nothing else by it than the old life, which is in sin, in which one lives after Adam; of which he says: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed through to all men, in whom all have sinned.” So that whole man, that is, in both his inner and his outer part, grew old because of sin and was handed over to the penalty of mortality. But he is now renewed according to the inner man, where he is re-formed after the image of his creator, putting off unrighteousness, that is, the old man, and putting on righteousness, that is, the new man. And then, when the body that is sown an animal body rises a spiritual body, the outer man too will receive the dignity of a heavenly condition, so that the whole that was created may be re-created, and the whole that was made may be remade, by him re-creating who created, and remaking who made. He explains this briefly where he says: “The body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you.” For who, taught in the catholic truth, does not know that according to the body some human beings are male and others female, but not according to the spirit of the mind, in which we are renewed after the image of God? Yet that God made both, the same apostle again testifies, where he says: “Neither is woman without man nor man without woman in the Lord; for as woman is from man, so also man is through woman; but all things are from God.” What does the foolish deceit of men alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart say to this, except: “In the apostle’s letters, what we want is true, what we do not want is false”? Let the Manichaeans rave like this—and then come to their senses and cease to be Manichaeans. If they are asked—since they confess that the inner man is renewed after the image of God, and even bring forward this testimony of their own accord, and Faustus says that God makes man at the time when the inner man is renewed in the knowledge of God—whether the one who remakes him also made him, whether the one who renews him also founded him, they will answer, “The same.” If to this answer of theirs we add the question when he formed the one whom he now re-forms, they will look for a place to hide, so as not to be forced to lay bare the disgrace of their fable. For they do not say that he was formed or founded or established by God, but that he was a part of God’s substance, sent outright against the enemies; nor that he grew old through sin, but that he was taken captive by necessity and deformed by the enemies, and the rest, which it is tiresome to repeat. For there they also mention a first man—not the one whom the apostle calls earthly, from the earth, but some man of their own, leaping out of a chest of lies. About him Faustus is entirely silent, though he set himself a question about man, fearing that he might somehow become known to those against whom he is arguing.

Faustus said: Does God have limits, or is he infinite? If your prayer does not deceive, which says, “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” God has limits—unless perhaps the one you ask about is one God and the one you pray to is another. Otherwise the boundary of circumcision, which marks off Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from fellowship with all other nations, also bounds the power of God himself with respect to them; and one whose power is limited is not himself without limits. Indeed, in this prayer you do not even mention the men of old who lived before Abraham—I mean Enoch and Noah and Shem and the rest like them—whom you do not deny to have been righteous in uncircumcision; but because they lacked the badge of circumcision, you will not have God to be their God either, but only the God of Abraham and his seed. If, then, God is one and infinite, what is the meaning of this so careful and anxious precaution in your invocation, that, not content with naming God, you add whose God, namely Abraham’s and Isaac’s and Jacob’s—as though your prayer would go astray in some crowd of gods or suffer shipwreck unless it sailed toward the sign of Abraham? For the Jews to pray so, for a definite reason, is not absurd, since they are circumcised; for in this way they show that they invoke the God of circumcision, as against the gods of the foreskin. But why you do the same I hardly understand, since you do not bear the sign that Abraham had, whose God you call him. For truly, as one is given to understand, the Jews and the God of the Jews seem to have set marks of this kind on one another for the sake of mutual recognition, so that they might not stray from each other. He sealed them with the obscene brand of circumcision, so that wherever on earth they might be, among whatever nations, they might still be known as his through circumcision; and they in turn marked their God with the surname of their fathers, so that wherever he too might be, even in a great throng of gods, as soon as he heard “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” he would know that he was being called. This commonly happens among many who share one name, so that none of them answers when called unless he hears his surname. So too shepherds and herdsmen brand marks on their flocks, so that no one may take another’s beast as his own. Since you do the same, saying “God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob,” you show not only that God has limits but also that you are strangers to him, without his sign and sacrament, the mutilation of men’s members, by which he recognizes his own. Therefore, if this is the God you worship, it is perfectly clear from this that he has limits. But if you want God to be infinite, you must first renounce this one and, changing your prayer, show repentance for your past error. This has been said so that we may seem to have defeated you from your own premises. Otherwise, if it is asked whether the supreme and true God is infinite or not, on this the opposition of good and evil can briefly teach us. For if evil does not exist, God is surely infinite; but he has a limit if evil exists; and it is established that evil exists. Therefore God is not infinite; for evils take their beginning there where the good has its limit.

Augustine replied: Far be it that anyone who knows you should put this question to you, or argue with such people at all on this matter. For first you must be cleansed by devout faith and by some small measure of the reasoning of truth from the fabrication of carnal and bodily thoughts, so that you may be able in some way and in some degree to think of spiritual things. As long as you cannot do this—your heresy knows nothing else than to stretch out body and soul and God over spaces of place, whether finite or infinite, though only a body occupies such spaces or is occupied by them—you would act more wisely if you did not involve yourselves in this question, where you can neither teach anything true (as you cannot elsewhere either) nor are fit to learn, as perhaps you could elsewhere if you were not proud and quarrelsome. For when one begins to ask how God is finite, whom no place contains, and how infinite, whom the Son knows wholly—how finite, being immeasurable; how infinite, being perfect; how finite, having no measure; how infinite, being the measure of all things—every carnal thought vanishes; and if it wishes to become what it is not yet, it first blushes at what it is. Therefore this question you put to yourselves about God finite and infinite you would better finish by keeping silent, until you cease to stray so far from the end of the law, which is Christ. As for the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, why he, being the true God of every creature, wished to make himself known to his people by that name, we have already said as much as was enough. On circumcision too we have often replied in earlier parts of this work to ignorant slanders. If these men thought with a Christian, not a heretical, mind about the sense in which it was said, “To the clean all things are clean,” they would by no means mock a sign divinely given in a fitting part of the body, by which the stripping off of the flesh was figured. But because what follows is also true, “To the unclean and unbelieving nothing is clean, but both their mind and conscience are defiled,” we gently remind them, as they laugh and wittily insult, that if by their account circumcision is shameful, they have there nothing to laugh at, but something to weep over: because their God is bound up, defiled, and mixed both with that small part that is cut off and with that blood that drips from it.