Against Faustus the Manichaean 29.1–32.1

Faustus said: “Then it was magic that he was seen and suffered, if he was not born.” The same argument is turned back on you in turn: that it was magic too that he was carried in the womb and brought forth, if he was not begotten. It is agreed that it is outside the law of nature for a virgin to give birth, and much more for her to be found a virgin even after giving birth. Why then do you not allow this too to have happened beyond nature: that he could suffer, when he willed, without the lot of birth? Believe me, as far as the matter is concerned, both of us profess on this point things contrary to nature. But there is this difference: we do so honourably, you shamefully; we give some reason for his passion, and a probable one; for his birth you offer either none or a false one. In short, we confess that he suffered in appearance only, and did not truly die; you believe that there was certainly a childbirth and that he was carried in a woman’s womb. Or if it is not so, confess too that this also was done in semblance, so that he seemed to be born, and our whole dispute will be at an end. For what you often like to affirm, that he must necessarily have been born because otherwise he could not have been seen by men or have spoken, is ridiculous, since angels are shown many times—as our people have already proved—both to have been seen by men and to have spoken.

Augustine said: It is not said to you that it is magic for one who was not born to die; for we have already mentioned above that this happened in Adam. But even if it had never happened, and the Lord Christ had willed to come in such a way that, appearing not in flesh taken from a virgin but yet in true flesh, he might redeem us by a true death, who would dare to say that he could not? But what he did was better: that he should also be born of a virgin, and deign to commend by his birth both sexes, for whose deliverance he had died, his male body being begotten of a woman—speaking by this very fact above all against you yourselves and overthrowing you, who proclaim that male and female are the work not of God but of the devil. But this is what you are said to assert that resembles magic: that you say his passion and death took place in appearance only and were deceitfully shadowed forth, so that he who was not dying seemed to die. From this it follows that you call his resurrection too shadowy, imaginary, and deceitful; for there can be no true resurrection of one who did not truly die. So it follows that he showed false scars to his doubting disciples, and that Thomas cried, “My Lord and my God,” not confirmed by truth but deceived by falsehood. And yet you try to persuade us that you speak the truth with your tongue, though you say that Christ lied with his whole body. These are the things objected to you, who have fashioned for yourselves a Christ of whom you could not be true disciples unless you too were liars. Nor can the flesh of a man born of a virgin seem to be magic because the flesh of Christ alone was so born, just as it is not magic that the flesh of Christ alone rose on the third day never to die again. Otherwise all the miracles of God will be magical, because they were done singularly; but they were done truly and showed what was true, and did not mock men’s eyes with deceitful illusions. They are indeed often called contrary to nature, not because they oppose nature, but because they exceed the measure of nature that is familiar to us. May the Lord, then, drive away from the minds of his little ones what Faustus, as if by way of advice, tried to persuade: that we too should profess an imaginary, not a true, birth of Christ, and so all dispute between us would end. Rather let there remain for us a contest against them for the truth than agreement with them in falsehood.

Yet I ask them: if our dispute ends when we say this, why do they not say it themselves? Why do they themselves affirm that Christ’s death was not true but imaginary, yet have chosen to say that his birth was not even of that kind, but nothing at all? If they were abashed by the weight of the gospel’s authority, and therefore did not dare to say that Christ did not suffer even in semblance, the same authority of the gospel also testifies to his birth. For although two evangelists narrated Mary’s childbirth itself, yet none of the evangelists was silent that Jesus had a mother. Or were they reluctant to proclaim this too as feigned because Matthew traces one line of generations and Luke another, so that they seem not to agree? But give a man who does not understand, and he will think that the evangelists also disagree in many things concerning Christ’s passion; give one who understands, and they agree everywhere. Or is it because it is honourable to feign death, but shameful even to feign birth? Why then does he urge us to confess this, so that our dispute may be ended? Why it seems to me that he chose to proclaim Christ’s birth not even as feigned like his death, but as nothing at all, will appear in the following discourse, when we answer the next question.

Far be it that there should be any shamefulness in the members of the saints, even the genital members. They are indeed called unseemly, because they do not have the kind of comeliness that the members placed in view have. But see what the apostle says when, from the very unity and joining of the members of our body, he urges love upon the Church: “Much rather,” he says, “those members of the body that seem to be weaker are necessary; and those that seem to be meaner parts of the body, on these we bestow more abundant honour; and our unseemly parts have more abundant seemliness, whereas our seemly parts have no need. But God has tempered the body, giving greater honour to the part that lacked, so that there might be no divisions in the body.” So it is the unlawful use of those members, not subject to the laws of self-control, that is shameful, not the members themselves; which not only the celibate and virgins keep in excellent integrity, but the holy married fathers and mothers themselves used, looking only to procreation, in such a way that that natural motion was in no way shameful, since it served not lust but reason. How much more, then, in the holy virgin Mary, who conceived the flesh of Christ by faith, had the members nothing shameful, since they served not a human, even lawful, conception, but only a divine childbirth? She was rightly so honoured that she might pass on to us Christ—whom we conceive by believing with undefiled hearts and in a sense bring forth by confessing—with her integrity preserved even in body. For in no way would Christ by being born make his mother worse, so as to take away the glory of virginity from her on whom he had conferred the gift of fruitfulness. These things were done truly, not deceitfully; but they are new, they are unusual, they are against the best-known course of nature—because they are great, because they are wonderful, because they are divine, and all the more true, certain, and firm. “And angels,” he says, “were seen and spoke, though they were not born.” As if we said that Christ, unless he were born of a woman, could neither be seen nor speak! He could, but he did not will it; and what he willed is better. And that he willed it is certain because he did it—he who did nothing out of necessity, as your god does, but everything by will. And that he did it we do not doubt, because we believe not some heretic but his gospel.

Faustus said: “Paul wrote of you long ago that some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, to doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful.” I will never agree with you that these words were spoken by the apostle unless you first confess yourself that Moses and the prophets brought doctrines of demons and were interpreters of a seducing and malignant spirit, since they carefully teach abstinence from pork and the other meats they call unclean. You must therefore first deliberate about these men, and think long and hard how these things ought to be taken: whether they seem to have spoken them in God or in a demon. For to this extent either Moses and the prophets will be condemned with us, or we shall be acquitted with them. For this verdict of yours is not just now: that we, who judge that only the priestly class of men among the people ought to abstain from meats, should seem to you followers of the doctrine of demons, while you think that your prophets, and Moses himself above all—who was the first to forbid, not to the priests only but indiscriminately to every class of men, the flesh of swine, hares, and hedgehogs, and cuttlefish and squid and all the other kinds of fish without scales—spoke this not in a seducing spirit or in the doctrine of demons, but rather in God and in the Holy Spirit. So, even if I grant you meanwhile that Paul said this, I shall not be beaten by you until you have condemned Moses and the prophets; so that what you would perhaps never have done when convinced by reason and truth, you may now be seen to do for your belly’s sake: blaspheme Moses.

There is also another passage among you, about the three young men in Daniel, by which you will be greatly confounded in the same way, if it is established that abstaining from foods is the religion of demons. For they are read to have abstained not only from what the law forbade but also from what it allowed; and you are accustomed to admire them greatly and to count them among the martyrs, though they too followed the doctrine of demons, if it is established that this testimony is the apostle’s. Besides this, Daniel himself relates that he fasted for three weeks of days and ate no meat and drank no wine while he prayed for his people. What then? Does he too glorify himself in the doctrine of demons and seek glory from the invention of a seducing spirit?

And what shall I say of you—that is, of the more Christian among you? Some of them abstain from pork, most from every four-footed beast, and others altogether from every animal; and for this the whole Church holds them in honour and, receiving them with the highest veneration, all but thinks them gods. And you do not see, slow learners, that if this testimony is true and was spoken by the apostle, they too have been deluded by the doctrines of demons. And what shall we say about that which no one would dare to evade or deny, since it is agreed among all and is celebrated equally throughout the world every year with all zeal in the Catholic assembly? I mean Lent. Whoever among you thinks it ought to be properly observed must abstain from all those things which this passage says God created for us to receive, and which it furthermore calls abstinence from them the doctrine of demons. What then of you, dearly beloved? Are you living by the rite of demons when you celebrate these mysteries of Christ’s passion, and are you caught by the deceit of a seducing spirit, and do you speak lies in hypocrisy, and have your conscience seared? But if none of this is true of you, then neither of us. What then does this passage mean, or by whom shall we think it was written, and against whom, since it confirms neither the traditions of the Old Testament nor the decrees of the New—seeing that the New, as appears from yourselves, teaches abstinence from all foods, and the Old from certain ones—yet both teach abstinence—whereas this verdict of yours wants all abstinence from fleshly foods whatever to be doctrines of demons? If you too believe it, I shall say the same thing again and again: condemn Moses, renounce the prophets, and pass the same sentence on yourselves too, since as they always abstained from some foods, so you sometimes abstain from all.

Or if Moses and the prophets, when they distinguish foods, seem to you to be establishing the law of God and not of demons; if Daniel kept his three weeks in the Holy Spirit; if the young men Ananias, Azarias, and Misael chose to live on vegetables and pulse by the prompting of the divine mind; if, finally, all among you who abstain do so not driven by demons; if Lent without wine and meat is kept by you not superstitiously but by divine law—then see, I beg you, see that it is not the height of madness to think that Paul said that all abstinence from foods is a doctrine of demons, and “forbidding to marry”—any more than he said that dedicating virgins to Christ is a doctrine of demons. You read this, like the rest, without reflection, and keep looking round at us, and you do not see that by it your own virgins are marked as caught by the doctrine of demons, and that you are priests of demons, since you always vie with one another to urge them to this profession by your persuasions, so that in all your churches there is now almost a greater number of virgins than of married women. Why then do you not desist from such undertakings yourselves? Why do you lead the wretched daughters of men into fraud, if what is fulfilled in them is not the will of Christ but of demons? Yet I would like you first to answer us this: is it a doctrine of demons to make virgins at all, or only to make them by forbidding marriage? If by forbidding, it has nothing to do with us; for we too judge it as foolish to hold back someone who wishes to marry as it is wicked and impious to compel someone who does not. But if you think that to favour this purpose too, and not to resist one who wishes it, is also a doctrine of demons—I say nothing now of your danger—I fear for the apostle himself, lest he seem to have brought the doctrine of demons to Iconium when by his preaching he set Thecla, already pledged to the bridal chamber, on fire with love of perpetual virginity. And what shall we say of the Master himself and author of all holiness, Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom of this very profession of maidens, who in the gospel, ranking three kinds of eunuchs—one born, another made, the third voluntary—yet gave the palm to those “who,” he says, “have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,” signifying the virgins and young men who, having cut out of their hearts the very desire of marrying, live always in his Church, as in a royal house, in the place of eunuchs? What then? Does this too seem to you a doctrine of demons, and spoken in a seducing spirit? And who else will be speaking in God, if Paul and Christ are proved to have been priests of demons? I pass over the other apostles of the same Lord of ours—Peter and Andrew, Thomas, and among the rest that blessed John who never knew Venus—who in various places sang the possession of this good among virgins and young men with divine proclamation, leaving us, and you yourselves too, a pattern for making virgins. These, as I said, I pass over, because you have excluded them from the canon, and with your sacrilegious mind you can easily attach the doctrines of demons to them. But can you say the same of Christ, or of the apostle Paul, who, it is agreed, everywhere alike always preferred the unmarried to the married in word, and showed it also in deed towards the most holy Thecla? But if this was not the doctrine of demons that Paul proclaimed to Thecla and the other apostles to others, who can now believe that he said that even persuasion to holy chastity is the will and doctrine of demons? So there is no reason for you to think meanwhile that you make virgins by exhortation alone and not by forbidding marriage. For this very principle is ingrained in us too; and anyone must surely be thought not merely foolish but mad who thinks that what is granted by public law can be forbidden by a private one—I mean marriage itself. Therefore we too exhort those who are willing to persevere, but we do not compel the unwilling to come. For we know how strong the will is, and how strong the force of nature itself, even against public law, let alone against a private one, to which one is free to answer, “I will not.” If, then, it is without crime to make virgins in this way, we too are free of blame; but if to make virgins in any way at all is a crime, you too are guilty. So I do not see with what intention or purpose you bring this passage against us.

Augustine replied: Hear, then, what you confess you do not see: with what intention or purpose we bring this passage against you. It is not because you abstain from meats. For our first fathers too abstained from some, as you mention—yet not to condemn them, but to signify something, which you do not understand, and on which I have already spoken, as much as seemed sufficient, in earlier parts of this work. And Christians—not heretics but Catholics—abstain not only from meats but from some fruits of the earth too, to subdue the body for the sake of the soul, to humble it the more in prayer, not because they believe these things unclean; and they do so either always, as a few do, or on certain days and seasons, as almost all do in Lent, each more or less as he has wished or been able. But you deny that the creature itself is good and call it unclean, saying that the devil makes meats out of the dregs of the matter of evil; and for this reason you shudder at them and reject them as the more unclean and savage bonds of your god. To your hearers, however—whom you described as distinguished from the priestly class—you allow these to be eaten by way of pardon; just as the apostle allows to some, by way of pardon, not every conjugal intercourse, even that which takes place solely for the sake of procreation, but that which takes place through incontinence, yet with one’s spouse. For nothing is allowed by way of pardon except a sin. This is what you think of all eating of meat; this you yourselves have learned from your heresy and teach your hearers. But you allow it to them as something to be pardoned, because they supply you with what you need, as I said—not saying that it is not a sin, but granting pardon to those who sin; while you yourselves abstain from every such contagion as evil and unclean. And so what follows those words of the apostle with which you ended your citation of this passage is exactly what makes us bring this testimony against you. I think you knew this too, so that you did not quote those words at first, and at the end said to us, “I do not see with what intention or purpose you bring this passage against us,” since you preferred to keep silent about this very purpose of ours rather than mention it. For when the apostle had said, “abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful,” he went on to say, “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; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” This is what you deny. It is with this mind, this will, this opinion, that you refrain from foods of this kind: that they are evil and unclean not by signification but by nature. In this you without doubt blaspheme their creator; this is what belongs to the doctrine of demons. Do not be surprised, then, that this was prophesied of you by the Holy Spirit so long before.

Again, if you exhorted to virginity in the way the apostolic teaching exhorts—“He who gives in marriage does well, and he who does not give in marriage does better”—so as to say that marriage is good but virginity better, as the Church does which is truly the Church of Christ, the Holy Spirit would not have foretold you in this way, saying, “forbidding to marry.” For he forbids who says that this is evil, not he who sets something better above this good. In fact, you detest above all that intercourse which alone is honourable and conjugal, and which marriage contracts also declare—for the procreation of children. Hence you truly forbid not so much intercourse as marriage. For intercourse takes place also for the sake of lust, but marriage only for the sake of children. Nor should you say that you do not forbid it because you tolerate, without breaking friendship, many of your hearers who are unwilling or unable to obey you in this. For the one you hold in the doctrine of your error, the other in the necessity of your fellowship. This is what I put off saying a little earlier: why you thought Christ’s death should be preached as false and feigned, and not his birth too. For you preach and praise death as the separation of the soul—that is, of the nature of your god—from the body of his enemies, that is, from the handiwork of the devil. And so you believed it a thing worthy for Christ to commend, even if not by dying, then by feigning death. But since you believe that in birth your god is not set free but rather bound, you were unwilling to believe that Christ even deceptively imagined birth; so much so that Mary would not displease you so much if she had had intercourse and not conceived, as she displeases you because she did not have intercourse and yet gave birth. You see, then, that there is a great difference between those who exhort to virginity by setting a greater good above a lesser good, and those who forbid marriage by attacking more vehemently the intercourse of procreation, which alone is properly nuptial; a great difference between those who abstain from foods for the sake of a sacramental signification or for the chastening of the body, and those who abstain from foods that God created by saying that God did not create them. Accordingly, the former is the doctrine of the prophets and apostles; the latter that of lying demons.

Faustus said: “To the clean all things are clean, but to the unclean and defiled nothing is clean; but both their mind and conscience are defiled.” Whether it serves you to believe that this too was said by Paul must be considered. For thus far it has been established not only that Moses and the prophets were driven by demons, since they made such great laws about the differences of foods, but also that they themselves were unclean and defiled in their mind and conscience, so that what follows may also fitly fall on them: “They profess that they know God, but in their works they deny him.” And to whom does this apply better than to the prophets and Moses, who are proved to have lived far otherwise than befitted those who knew God? Up to now, however, I had thought that apart from adulteries, frauds, and murders there was nothing else from which Moses and the prophets might seem to have had polluted consciences; but now, as this passage shows, we are given to know that they were of defiled mind on this account too, because they thought something defiled. How then can you suppose that such men could have attained the vision of the divine majesty, since it is written that none but the pure in heart can see God? Indeed, even if they had been chaste from unlawful crimes, this superstition alone of abstaining from certain foods, if it contaminates the mind, could have denied them the sight of the divinity. So that boasting of Daniel and the three young men has vanished and is extinguished as well. Until this preaching, which holds that nothing is unclean, they were regarded in Judaism as most chaste young men of good mind, because, mindful of the traditions of their fathers, they kept themselves with all zeal untouched by the dainties of the gentiles, and especially by what was sacrificed. Now at last it has appeared that they too were contaminated in mind and conscience, and most of all when they kept their mouths from blood and from funereal foods.

But perhaps ignorance excuses them; for since this Christian faith, which taught that to the clean all things are clean, had not yet appeared, they too may have thought some things not clean. But what excuse do you use now, if, while Paul cries out that nothing is unclean, and calls abstinence from foods doctrines of demons, and calls those who have thought anything defiled polluted in mind, you not only abstain, as we said, but even seek glory from it, and believe yourselves the more acceptable to Christ the more abstinent you are from foods—that is, according to this saying, the more defiled you are in mind and the more and more polluted in your conscience? What of this, that, though there are three religions in the world which equally place the purification of the mind in chastity and abstinence, though with very different rites—I mean the Jews, the Christians, and the gentiles—it cannot be found from which of these religions this saying comes, which teaches that nothing is not holy? Certainly not at all from Judaism; nor likewise from paganism, since it too distinguishes foods; and there is no difference except that the Hebrew disagrees with the pagan about certain animals. There remains the Christian faith; and if you think it proper to it to consider nothing polluted, you must first confess that there is no Christian among you. For all among you, to say nothing of other things, consider at least carrion and things sacrificed no small defilement; or if you too do this by right of Christianity, then this saying, which removes all abstinence from unclean things whatever, does not belong even to this religion. How then could Paul have said what suits no religion? For the apostle did not so much put off religion as change its rite when from a Jew he became a Christian. But whoever wrote this passage seems to me to have rested on no religion at all.

Therefore, if in future, searching the Scriptures, you find anything to injure our faith, remember to set it against us only when you have made quite sure that it is not contrary to you. So too with what you are accustomed to bring up about Peter: that he once saw a vessel let down from heaven, in which were all kinds of animals and serpents; and as he was astonished and amazed, a voice was heard saying to him, “Peter, whatever you see in the vessel, kill and eat.” And he answered, “Lord, I will not touch anything common and unclean.” And again the voice said to him, “What I have sanctified, do not call unclean.” Although this itself may seem, by allegory, to signify something else and not indifference of foods, yet, since you like to understand it so, you must then feed indiscriminately on all beasts, and on vipers and snakes and all the rest of the serpent kind, according to Peter’s vision. In this way you will prove that you truly obey the voice he is said to have heard. And yet remember this too always: that Moses and the prophets are condemned by it, since they thought many of the things that God has sanctified, according to the sense of this voice, to be polluted.

Augustine replied: When the apostle says, “To the clean all things are clean,” he wanted the natures themselves that God created to be understood, according to what Moses wrote in Genesis, “And God made all things, and behold, they were very good”—not the significations according to which God, through the same Moses, distinguished the clean from the unclean. Since we have already said much on this in many places, it will be enough now to have given a brief reminder. Accordingly, those who, already in the time of the revelation of the New Testament, thought those shadows of things to come were still to be kept in such a way as to contend that without them the gentiles could not receive the salvation that is in Christ—these the apostle calls unclean, because they thought carnally, and unbelieving, because they did not distinguish the time of grace from the time of the law. To them he says that nothing is clean, because they used neither the things they rejected nor the things they took in a holy or just way—as indeed is true of all unbelievers, but of you above all, Manichaeans, to whom nothing at all is clean. For not even the food you take, though you separate it with great care, as it were, from the contagion of flesh, is clean to you, since you say it was created by none but the devil. In it you even claim that by eating you purify your god, bound and polluted. You might at least seem clean to yourselves, since it is in your bellies that he deserves to be purified. But you also contend that your bodies are of the nature and workmanship of the race of darkness, and that your souls are still defiled by those very bodies. What then is clean to you? Not what you take, not where you put what you take, not you yourselves, who purify what you have taken. You see, then, on account of whom the apostle spoke this saying at that time; yet he spoke it in such a way that it would hold all the unbelieving and unclean, but convict you most of all. So to the clean all things are clean according to the nature in which they were created, though not all things were clean according to signification to the first people, the Jews; nor are all things suitable for us, whether for the health of the body or for the custom of human society; but when each thing is given its due and keeps its natural order, to the clean all things are clean, while to the unclean and unbelieving, such as you are above all, nothing is clean. The rest of the apostle’s words, which follow, you would say to yourselves to your own health, if you wished your seared conscience to be healed. For it follows: “But both their mind and conscience are defiled.”

Faustus said: “If you accept the gospel, you must believe everything written in it.” What about you, then? Because you accept the Old Testament, do you therefore believe indiscriminately everything written in it? Surely you pick out from it only the prophecies that signified that a king would come to the Jews, because you think he is Jesus, and a few common precepts of civil conduct, such as “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery”; the rest you pass over, and you think them no less than what Paul thought dung. What is strange, then, or what is surprising, if I too, reading from the New Testament all that is purest and suited to my salvation, pass over those things that were deceitfully brought in by your forefathers and discolour both its majesty and its grace?