Against Secundinus the Manichaean 19–26

But, you say, where did the evil that is called sin come from, if there is no nature of evil? Tell me where that evil consent comes from in the nature which you grant and proclaim to be good. For whatever it suffers so as to consent to evil, it certainly would not suffer unless it could suffer. So I ask where it gets the very capacity to suffer; for it would be better if it did not have it. So it is not the nature of the supreme good, than which something could be better. Next, if it has it in its power either to consent or not to consent, then it does not consent because it is conquered. So I ask where it gets this evil consent, when no contrary nature compels it. But if it is compelled to consent, so that it is not in its power to do otherwise, then it does not sin by will, as you said, since it does not consent by will. But I still ask where the capacity to be deceived is in it, if it is deceived. For before it was deceived, unless it had in it the capacity to suffer this, it would never have suffered it. Though it does not consent in any way except by will; and if it is compelled, it should be said rather to yield than to consent. But by whatever name you call it, I ask of you, a sharp and skillful man with a Roman mind, as you boast, where this nature of the good gets the capacity to suffer what it suffers, so as to consent to evil. For just as in wood, before it is broken, there is fragility, without which it could not be broken at all, and wood is no less fragile if no breaker comes along, so I ask where in this nature there comes a certain fragility or flexibility before it is either broken by force or bent by persuasion into evil consent. Or if the fragility was already there through the neighborhood of evil, as bodies are often corrupted by the exhalation of a nearby marsh, then it was already corruptible, if the pestilent contagion of that neighborhood could corrupt it. So I ask where that corruptibility came from. Please pay attention to what I say, and yield to plain truth. For I do not ask where corruption came from (for you will answer, “from the corrupter,” and you will maintain that this corrupter is some prince of the race of darkness, so wrapped in fabulous coverings that one can hardly unwrap and grasp him), but I ask where corruptibility came from, even before the corrupter came; for unless it existed, either no corrupter would exist, or the approach of any corrupter would do no harm. So when you have found where this corruptibility in the good nature came from before it was corrupted by the contrary nature; or, if you do not want to say it was corrupted, where at least this changeableness came from before it was changed by hostile opposition (for a nature that becomes foolish from wise and forgets itself is surely changed for the worse; and you yourself added these words, saying, “if, when it has come to know itself, it consents to evil”; so it is changed for the worse when it forgets itself, so that it may know itself again when reminded; and it could in no way have been changed unless it was changeable before it was changed): when, then, you have found where this changeableness came from in the substance of the supreme good, before any mingling of good and evil had taken place, you will surely stop asking me where evil comes from. Although in the nature of the supreme good, if you think of it rightly, no changeableness of time at all can be found, either from itself or from the approach of anything else; [whereas] in that nature which Mani imagines and thinks to be supremely good, or even persuades those who believe him that it is, look and answer, if you can, where this changeableness came from, which was not found but betrayed when [the enemy] approached. For it could not be changed even by an enemy if it could not be changed at all; but since it could, it showed that it had not made itself unchangeable. So when this changeableness is believed to be in the substance of the supreme good, that is, in the substance of God, you see, if you are not contentious, with how great folly blasphemy is uttered. But when something of the kind is said of a creature, which God neither begot nor brought forth from his substance but made out of nothing, it is not the supreme good that is in question; but yet a good such that it could not be established except by the supreme good, which is God. For God, supremely and unchangeably good, made all things good, not supremely or unchangeably good, but good nonetheless, from the angels of heaven down to the lowest beasts and plants of the earth, all ordered in fitting places according to the worth of each one's nature. Among these the rational creature, when it clings to God its Creator, that is, its maker and founder, with the obedience of love, keeps its nature in his eternity, truth, and love; but when it deserts him in stubborn disobedience, it entangles itself in sins through its free choice, and through his just judgment it is made wretched by punishment; and this is the whole of evil: partly what it does unjustly, partly what it suffers justly. Do not ask me where this comes from, since you have already answered yourself when you said that the soul, when it has come to know itself, if it consents to evil, sins by its own will. See where evil comes from: from one's own will. And this is not a nature, but a fault, and therefore even contrary to nature, which it certainly harms by depriving it of the good by which it could have been happy if it had not willed to sin. You think this will to sin is moved in the soul only by another evil, which you believe is a nature that God did not make, and you maintain that the soul is the nature of God; and thus, if this nature of evil, whatever it is, produces this will in the soul by persuading it to sin, God is conquered and cast down into sin.

See with how great impiety, with what wicked and horrible blasphemies you are unwilling to strip yourself, by placing in a nature which God did not make life, sense, speech, measure, form, order, and countless other goods, and by placing in the very nature of God, before any mingling with evil, that changeableness by which he could be captured and because of which he was forced to fear, “seeing a great ruin and devastation threatening his holy realms unless he set against it some outstanding and illustrious deity, powerful in strength.” And to what end all this, except that that nature and substance of God should hold the enemy entangled and subdued in such a way that, sinning, it endures it, and, bound, does not wholly escape, and, once cleansed, keeps the conquered enemy shut in, and, condemned, keeps it enclosed? A fine excuse indeed you have found in your god, the necessity of war, against what is put to you for an answer: what was the race of darkness going to do to God if he had refused to fight it? If you say it would have done some harm, you will admit that God is corruptible and violable; but if you say that it could not harm him, you will be asked: why then did he fight? Why did he hand over his substance to enemies to be corrupted and violated and forced into every sin? Against this dilemma you have never been able to find a way out. You think you have found something great and safe when you answer by saying: it is a great iniquity to covet what belongs to others, and God would have given assent to this iniquity if he had refused to defeat the race that had dared it. This answer would have some color of justice if at least in that war the nature of your god had kept itself whole and unpolluted, and, mingled with hostile members, had done nothing wicked either under compulsion or by seduction. But since you say that, captured, it consents to such great crimes and outrages, and since finally you maintain that it cannot be wholly cleansed of that monstrous impiety, by which it even became an enemy to the holy light of which it is a portion, so that you believe the eternal punishments of that horrible globe are deservedly paid back to it: who does not see how much better it would have been to leave the hostile enemy in its iniquity, attempting empty things, than to hand over to it a part of God, whose strength it would drain, whose corrupted beauty it would join to its own iniquity? Who is blinded by such obstinacy as not to perceive, not to notice, with how much less iniquity the race of darkness would have tried in vain to invade a nature foreign to it, than God handed over his own nature to be invaded, forced into iniquity, and in some part even condemned to punishment? Is this, then, to have refused to consent to iniquity, and to have done so huge an iniquity without any necessity? Or was there a necessity, which Mani himself was not ashamed to say and you are ashamed to? For he says that God saw a great ruin and devastation threatening his holy realms unless he set against it some outstanding deity, powerful in strength; but you reason, of course, more sharply, as though if you said that God fought out of the necessity of preventing the race of darkness from harming him, you would be calling God violable and corruptible, able to be harmed by something if he had refused to fight. Drive away, then, and expel from your hearts and from your faith that very battle and the whole fable woven with the horror of ungodly and most unclean blasphemies, and at last anathematize and condemn it. For what kind of thing is it, I beg you, that, as was said before, you do not fear to call God a violable and corruptible nature, so that the nature of your god, if it could not exercise the strength by which it would not be captured, could not at least keep its justice as a captive, which Daniel could, whose lions you dared to mock? He did not consent to the iniquity of those by whom he had been led captive, but by his devotion, compelled by no terror, did not lose, in the condition of bodily slavery, the equity and freedom of a patient and wise mind. But the nature of God was led captive, was made wicked, cannot be wholly cleansed, is forced at the end to be condemned. If it knew from eternity that this evil would come upon it, no divinity was owed to it for itself. And if you said that the lands or regions of the kingdom of light and the race of darkness, adjoining each other as neighbors (which Mani recounts in a way that men of prudent understanding must laugh at), are indescribable, and that these are what Christ calls right and left, we know that Christ calls them right and left in such a way that he wants them understood not as bodily things, but as the happiness and misery of each one's desert. But your fleshly thinking does not withdraw from bodily places so far that you say this visible sun, and therefore bodily, which cannot be contained except in a bodily place, is both God and a part of God. But it is foolish to deal with you about these things. For what incorporeal thing will you be able to understand, who do not yet believe God incorruptible?

But, as a good friend, you kindly rebuke me for having left the Manichaeans and betaken myself to the books of the Jews. It is they that choke your error and deceit; for in them Christ was prophesied as the truth of God presented him, not as the emptiness of Mani invented him. But, most urbane man, you attack the ancient Scripture because it is written in the prophet: “And make children of fornication, for the land will commit fornication away from the Lord,” although you hear in the gospel: “Prostitutes and tax collectors will go before you into the kingdom of heaven.” I know where your indignation comes from: for it is not so much the fornicating woman in her fornication that displeases you, as that she was changed into marriage and turned to conjugal chastity, where you believe your god is bound by the tighter chains of flesh in the procreation of children; you think prostitutes spare him, because they take care not to conceive, so that, freed from the duty of childbearing, they may serve lust. For among you a woman's conception is a prison and chain of God. Hence you are also displeased by “The two will be in one flesh,” although the apostle commends this as a great mystery in Christ and the holy Church. Hence you are displeased by “Increase and multiply,” lest the prison houses of your god be multiplied. But I confess that I learned in the catholic Church that, just as the soul and the body, one of which is set over and the other subject, so the good of the soul and the goods of the body are only from the supreme good, from whom are all good things, whether great or small, whether heavenly or earthly, whether spiritual or bodily, whether temporal or eternal; and that these are not to be blamed because those are to be preferred.

And what you place among the things to be blamed, “Kill and eat,” is also set down spiritually in the Acts of the Apostles. Yet even bodily, it is not food that is blamed but luxury. Above all, to you who abstain even carnally from meat this saying ought to have been welcome, so that you might kill the animals and thus, its prisons broken, your god might escape from his wretched custody, and if any remnants of him remained there, you might purge them by eating them in the workshop of your belly. You mock that I grieved over Sarah's barrenness. I certainly did not grieve over it, because it too was prophetic. But it fits your fabulous sacrileges to grieve not over Sarah's barrenness but over her fruitfulness, because every woman's fruitfulness is a hard calamity for God. So it is no wonder that what was foretold of such people is fulfilled most of all in you: “forbidding marriage.” For you do not detest intercourse so much as marriage, since in marriage intercourse for the sake of propagation is not a vice but a duty; from which the continence of holy men and women is free, not because they avoided it as an evil, but because they chose something better. Although the very conjugal duty of fathers and mothers such as Abraham and Sarah were must be weighed not by human companionship but by divine arrangement. For since Christ was to come in the flesh, Sarah's marriage served the propagation of that flesh, as Mary's virginity did.

Hence too what you mentioned with praiseworthy ignorance, mocking it: “Put your hand under my thigh,” which Abraham said to his servant, asking for the pledge of an oath. “Put,” he says, “your hand under my thigh and swear by the God of heaven.” The servant swore by obeying, but Abraham prophesied by commanding, namely that the God of heaven would come in that flesh which would be propagated from that thigh. You spurn this, detest it, abominate it, chaste and clean men, who dread for the Son of God, whom no contact with flesh could change, a single womb of a virgin; and you entangle the nature of your god, changed and polluted, in the wombs of all females, not of human beings only but of beasts too. And so you who shudder at the one thigh of a patriarch, what thighs, I ask, will you find, I do not say of prophets, but of any prostitutes whatever, where you should not swear by your god, so shamefully fettered there? Unless perhaps you are ashamed not, indeed, to touch a member of the human body chastely, but to swear by a god so shamefully bound, a captive in such deformity there. By the name pancarpus, the show that is usually put on at public games, you attack Noah's ark because of the beasts of all kinds that were in it, the ark which, through every kind of animal, figured the future Church from all nations. There, whether without noticing or without knowing, I congratulate you on having used a fitting word; for πάγκαρπος is “all fruit,” which is spiritually true in the Church. And you do not notice how much happier Noah was with his family among those wild beasts, among whom he entered unharmed and from whom he came out unharmed, than your god, who was torn apart and devoured by the savage rage of the race of darkness. So he was made not a pancarpus but plainly a camparcus, torn apart by every savagery. You mock Jacob's wrestling with the angel, in which the future struggle of the people of Israel with the flesh of Christ was prophetically figured. But however you understand it, how much better would your god wrestle with a man than, conquered and captured, be torn to pieces by the race of demons! You falsely accuse Abraham of having sold his wife's chastity: there he did not lie that she was his sister, but by human caution kept silent that she was his wife, entrusting the preservation of her chastity to his God; for if he had not done what he could do, he would be judged not to trust God but to tempt God. And yet you do not look at your god, who did not sell his wife but gave his own members to enemies, for nothing, to be polluted, corrupted, and disgraced. You would certainly wish, if it were possible, that the illustrious nature of your god might return from its enemies as untouched as Sarah was returned untouched to her husband.

You praise my former character and pursuits and ask who suddenly changed me. Then, by circumlocution, you mention the ancient enemy of all the faithful and the saints and of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, by whom you certainly mean the devil to be understood. What shall I answer you about my change? Unless I believed it was made for the better in this way, I certainly would not have detested and condemned your error and betaken myself to the catholic Church and faith. Whether I did this rightly, that is, whether I was changed from evil to good, you yourself solve the question for me in the very word you used, my change. For my soul, if, as you say, it were the nature of God, could not be changed at all, whether for the better, as I trust, or for the worse, as you charge, either by itself or by the impulse of anyone else. So when I left that error and chose the faith in which the nature of God is devoutly believed to be wholly unchangeable, so that it may be wisely understood, my change displeases only those whom an unchangeable God displeases. And the devil is the adversary of the saints, not because he rises against them as an enemy from a contrary principle of another nature, but because he envies them the heavenly honor from which he himself was cast down. For, changed himself, he strives to change others. For as he is described by you in the long-windedness of that Persian fable, if he changes others without being changed, he is surely greater and the victor; but if, as you assert, he [is a lover] of the holy light, he is not an enemy of God but a friend; and is he better than those whom he deceives, he who makes them enemies of the holy light of which he himself is a friend? For Mani says that souls are to be condemned to eternal punishment in that horrible globe because they allowed themselves to stray from their former shining nature and then became enemies of the light; while he maintains that the very mind of the race of darkness, burning with love of keeping the light with it, created the bodies of animals. So take care to rescue yourself from these most empty and sacrilegious fictions, to be changed for the better with the help of him who is changed neither for the better nor for the worse.

“We have escaped,” he says, “because we followed a spiritual Savior. For so great was the boldness [of the enemy] that, if our Lord had been fleshly, all our hope would have been cut off.” If you say this because you do not believe that Christ had flesh, you ought not to place hope in Mani, whom you grant was begotten of male and female like other human beings and was in the flesh. Why then do you place so much hope in him? For in this very letter of yours, when you were trying to frighten me, you said yourself: “Who then will be your advocate before the just tribunal of the judge, when you begin to be convicted, with yourself as witness, of both word and deed? The Persian, whom you accused, will not be present. Apart from him, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Punic man?” So you said that there can be no consoler and savior apart from Mani. How then, when you were dealing with Christ's sufferings, did you say that you escaped because you followed a spiritual Savior, namely so that the enemy could not kill him established in the flesh? So if the enemy killed your Mani, in whom he found flesh, so that he could no longer be your savior, how do you say, “Apart from him, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Punic man?” You see what it is to be in heresy and in doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars. You want Mani to be truthful by making Christ deceitful: so that if Christ, in showing his flesh, death, resurrection, and finally the places of the wounds and nails which he showed to the doubting disciples, did everything deceitfully and falsely, then Mani spoke the truth about Christ; but if Christ showed true flesh, and therefore a true death, a true resurrection, true scars, then Mani lied about Christ. And so the difference between me and you in this case is that you chose to believe Mani truthful by believing Christ deceitful, while I chose to believe that Mani lied, about Christ as about other things, rather than that Christ lied about anything, how much more about that on which he placed the hope of believers most of all, that is, his passion and resurrection! For whoever says that when Christ, after what was thought to be his death, appeared to the hesitating disciples who thought they were seeing a spirit, when he said, “Touch my hands and feet and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have,” when he said to one of them who did not believe, “Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing,” he was showing all this not truthfully but falsely: whoever, I say, says this is not a preacher but an accuser of Christ. But, you say, Mani preaches Christ and calls himself his apostle. That is all the more reason to detest and flee him. For if he said these things as an accuser, he could at least boast himself a lover of truth by exposing another's falsehood; but as it is, unknowingly and incautiously he betrays himself, and shows clearly enough to those who look carefully what he himself does and what he loves, by praising and preaching one who lies. So flee, friend, so great a plague, lest Mani, by deceiving you, want to make you a believer (which cannot happen) of the kind he wants that disciple to seem to have been made by Christ, to whom he said, “Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing.” For as the sweetest truth understands it, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: touch what I bear, touch what I have borne, touch true flesh, touch the marks of true wounds, touch the true places of the nails, and by believing true things do not be unbelieving but believing? But as the sacrilegious emptiness of Mani understands it, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: touch what I feign, touch my deceit, touch false flesh, touch the deceitful places of false wounds, and do not be unbelieving toward my lying members, so that by believing falsehoods you may be a believer? Such are the believers that Mani, with his whole doctrine of lying demons, has.

Flee these things, I beg you; let not the appearance of being few deceive you, since the Lord himself said that the narrow way belongs to few. You want to be among the few, but the worst. For it is true that few are wholly innocent; but among the guilty themselves there are fewer murderers than thieves, fewer committers of incest than adulterers; and indeed the very fables or histories of the ancients have fewer Medeas and Phaedras than women of other crimes and outrages, fewer men like Ochus and Busiris than men of other impieties and crimes. See, then, that among you it is not the excessive horror of impiety that makes the merit of fewness. For such things are read, said, and believed there that it is a wonder that any, rather than few, rush into that error or remain in it. But the fewness of the saints, whose way is narrow, is set in comparison with the multitude of sinners; this fewness lies hidden among a much greater number of chaff, but on the very threshing floor of the catholic Church it is now to be gathered and threshed, and at the end to be winnowed and cleansed. To it you must betake yourself, if you desire to be faithfully a believer, lest, trusting in falsehoods, as it is written, you feed the winds, that is, become food for unclean spirits. For if the apostle Paul, whom you mention, counted as loss and dung, in order to gain Christ, not, as the wise do, the Scriptures of the Old Testament and that whole prophetic arrangement of words and deeds, but the fleshly excellence of Jewish descent, and the zeal to persecute Christians on behalf of the synagogues of his ancestral nation, which were straying and did not recognize Christ (a zeal by which he was inflamed as if it were praiseworthy), and the righteousness which is from the law, in which the Jews, not understanding God's grace there, proudly boast: how much more ought you to cast away, not as dung but as poison, those scriptures most full of abominable blasphemies, in which the nature of truth, the nature of the supreme good, the nature of God is described as so often changeable, so often conquered, so often corrupted, and in part inextricably defiled and at the end to be condemned by the truth itself; and, contention ended, pass over to the catholic Church and faith, which, as it was prophesied so long before, so was revealed in its own time! I say this to you because your mind is neither the nature of evil, which is nothing at all, nor the nature of God, otherwise I would speak in vain to something unchangeable; but since it has been changed by deserting God, and that change of it is evil, let it be changed, turned to the unchangeable good, with the help of that unchangeable good itself, and such a change of it will be deliverance from evil. If you spurn this admonition, still believing that there are two natures, one, a changeable nature of good, which, mingled with evil, could consent to injustice, the other, an unchangeable nature of evil, which, though mingled with good, could not consent to justice, then you are babbling that shameful fable just mentioned, which sows execrable and foul blasphemies in the fornication of itching ears, so that you may be in the flock of those of whom it was foretold that “the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires will heap up for themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside to fables.” But if you receive this admonition wisely, turned to the unchangeable God, by a praiseworthy change you will be among those of whom the apostle says: “For you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord.” This could not be said of the nature of God, because it was never evil and deserving of the name of darkness, nor of the nature of evil, which, if it existed, could never be changed and become light; but it was rightly and truly said of that nature which is not unchangeable, but, having deserted the unchangeable light by which it was made, is darkened in itself, and, turned back to it, becomes light not in itself but in the Lord. For it does not shine of itself, since it is not the true light, but shines illuminated by him of whom it was said: “He was the true light, which illuminates every man coming into this world.” Believe this, understand this, hold this, if you wish to be good by participation in the unchangeable good, which you cannot be by yourself; which you could neither lose, if you were it unchangeably, nor receive again, if you were not it unchangeably.