Against Faustus the Manichaean 32.18–32.22

How, then, will you be able to prove what is demanded of you: that he from whom you learned that the gospel writings are not the apostles’ is the Paraclete? For we, on our side, prove that the Paraclete is none other than the Holy Spirit who came soon after Jesus was glorified; for he had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. We prove also that he leads into all truth, because one does not enter into the truth except through love; and “the love of God,” says the apostle, “has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” We teach also that Paul did not say “when what is perfect has come” except of that perfection which is to be in the receiving of eternal life. For while he was saying this, he says: “For we see now through a mirror in a riddle, but then face to face.” Here certainly, unless you want to be openly mad, you will confess that you do not see God face to face. So that which is perfect has not come to you. In this way the apostle explained plainly enough what he thought on this matter. Nor will this come to the saints until there has come to pass what John also says: “We are children of God, and it has not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is”—then the Holy Spirit, whose pledge we have now received, leading us into all truth. And what was said, “The world cannot receive him,” was certainly said of those who are commonly called by the name of the world in the Scriptures: lovers of the world, whether ungodly or carnal; of such the apostle says: “But the animal man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God.” For they are said to be of this world as long as they can understand nothing more than these bodily things which they have perceived in this world; just as you too understand nothing else, who, admiring this light of the sun and moon, have fashioned for yourselves all divine things of that kind, at the prompting of that empty talker whom, deceived and deceiving, you call the Paraclete. Therefore, since you are in no way able to show how he is the Paraclete, you have nothing from which to teach that you have learned by some most firm authority how these gospel writings, of which you will not accept everything, are not by Christ’s apostles. It remains, then, for you to say that you have learned this by this reasoning: that there are things there which discolour the glory of Christ—namely, that he is narrated there to have been born of a virgin, to have been circumcised, that the sacrifice then customary was offered for him, that he was baptized, that he was tempted by the devil.

Apart from these, and the testimonies from the Old Testament, which are uncertain to them in those writings, you confess, according to what Faustus says, that you accept the rest, and above all “the mystic fixing of his cross, by which the wounds of the passion of your soul are shown.” Then, he says, “his saving precepts, and his parables, and all his divine discourse, which, especially as it sets forth the distinction of the two natures, is beyond doubt his own.” You see, then, that what you are doing is to remove all authority from the midst of the Scriptures, so that each man’s own mind is the authority for what he approves and disapproves in each Scripture; that is, so that he is not subjected to the authority of the Scriptures for faith, but subjects the Scriptures to himself—so that something pleases him not because he reads it written with sublime authority, but it seems rightly written because it has pleased him. To what are you committing yourself, wretched soul, weak, wrapped in carnal mists? To what are you committing yourself? Remove authority, then; let us see. Remove authority; give a reason. Does your reasoning lead to this: that unless the nature of God is believed violable and corruptible, that long fable of yours cannot find a theatrical ending? Finally, how do you know that there are eight earths and ten heavens, that Atlas carries the world and Splenditenens holds it suspended, and countless such things? How do you know these things? “Plainly,” you say, “Mani taught me.” But, unhappy soul, you believed; for you did not see. If, then, for thousands of fabulous phantoms with which you have been shamefully made pregnant, you subjected yourself to a most unknown and most frenzied authority, so as to believe all these things because they are written in those books which, by a pitiable error, you judged must be believed, though none of these things is demonstrated to you—why do you not rather subject yourself to the authority of the gospel, so founded, so established, spread abroad with such glory, and commended from the times of the apostles to our times by most certain successions, so that you may believe, so that you may live, so that you may learn that all those things that offend you offend you from a vain and perverse opinion, and that it is truer that the unchangeable nature of God took to itself something of a mortal creature, in which, remaining unchangeable, it might do and suffer, not deceitfully but truly, whatever it befitted that creature to do and suffer for the salvation of the human race from which it was taken—truer, I say, than to believe that God’s nature is violable and corruptible, and cannot be wholly freed and purified once defiled and oppressed, but is damned by God’s supreme necessity with the eternal penalty of the globe?

“But,” you say, “I believed what he did not show me because he showed me plainly two natures, namely of good and of evil, in this very world.” But this is the very thing by which you were deceived, unhappy soul: that, just as in that gospel Scripture, so in this world you could think nothing evil except what offended your carnal sense, such as a serpent, fire, poison, and the like, and nothing good except what soothed that same carnal sense of yours with some pleasure, such as the pleasantness of tastes, the sweetness of odours, the sight of this light, and anything else that may have similarly flattered your ears or eyes or nostrils or palate. But if you had first looked at the whole creation in such a way as to ascribe it to God as its author, as though reading a great book of the nature of things, and so, if anything there offended you, had believed it safer that the cause might be hidden from you, as a human being, than had dared to find fault with anything in the works of God, you would never have fallen into sacrilegious trifles and blasphemous fictions, with which, not understanding whence evil is, you try to fill God with all evils.

Here, if you ask us how we know that these writings are the apostles’, we answer you briefly that we know it in the same way that you know that those writings are Mani’s which you pitiably set above this authority. For if someone were to raise a question with you on this point too, and throw in the doubt of contradiction, saying that the books you bring forward as Mani’s are not Mani’s, what will you do? Will you not rather laugh at the ravings of a man who utters this impudent statement against a thing confirmed by so long a series of connection and succession? Just as it is certain, then, that those books are Mani’s, and that the man is altogether to be laughed at who, coming from the side and born so long afterwards, should press this dispute of contradiction against you, so it is certain that Mani, or the Manichaeans, are to be laughed at, or rather lamented, who dare to say anything of the kind against an authority so founded, kept and handed down by sure successions from the times of the apostles to these times.

Now, then, the authority of Mani must be compared with the authority of the apostles. For it is as certain that these writings are theirs as that those are his. But who compares Mani with the apostles, except one who separates himself from Christ, who sent the apostles? Or who ever discerned in the words of Christ two natures opposed to each other and from their own principles, except one who does not discern the words of Christ? So the apostles, as disciples of the truth, preach the birth of Christ and his true passion; but Mani boasts that he leads into all truth, and wants to lead into a Christ in whom he preaches the falsehood of the passion itself. They preach Christ circumcised in the flesh that he took from the seed of Abraham; he preaches God cut to pieces in his very nature by the race of darkness. They preach a sacrifice offered for the flesh of Christ, in imitation of the sacrifice that was then piously offered; he preaches a member not of flesh but of the divine substance itself, brought in to be sacrificed to all the demons of the hostile nature. They preach Christ baptized in the Jordan to give an example; he preaches God himself sunk by himself in the defilement of darkness, not to emerge wholly, but to be punished with eternal damnation in that part of him that could not be cleansed. They preach the flesh of Christ tempted by the prince of demons; he preaches a part of God possessed by the race of demons. And they preach that it was tempted to teach us to resist the tempter; he preaches that it was possessed so that it cannot be restored either to the Father or to the victor. Finally, Mani, out of the doctrine of demons, proclaims something else, so that he may seem more eminent; but the apostles, out of the doctrine of Christ, charge that whoever proclaims anything else, let him be anathema.