On the Catholic Way of Life and On the Manichaean Way of Life 2.4–2.12

So, since you cannot extricate yourselves, see how clear is the view of the catholic teaching, which says that one good is good supremely and through itself, not by participation in some good but by its own nature and essence; another good is good by participating and by having; it has from that highest good that it is good, while that good remains in itself and loses nothing. This good that we mentioned second it calls the creature, which can be harmed through falling short; and of this falling short God is not the author, because he is the author of existing and, so to speak, of being. So it is also shown how evil is spoken of: for it is most truly spoken of not according to essence but according to privation; and it is clear what nature can be harmed. For the nature that is deprived of good when it is harmed is not the highest evil; nor is it the highest good, since it can fall away from good for this reason, that it is called good not by being good but by having good. Nor is a thing good by nature when, since it is said to have been made, it certainly received being good. So God is the highest good, and the things he has made are all good, though they are not as good as he who made them. For who is so mad as to demand that the works be equal to the craftsman and the things founded to their founder? What more do you want? Or do you want something plainer still?

I will ask a third time, then, what evil is. You will perhaps answer, “Corruption.” Who would deny that this too is evil in general? For this is against nature, this is what harms. But corruption is not in itself, but in some substance which it corrupts: for corruption itself is not a substance. So the thing which it corrupts is not corruption, is not evil. For what is corrupted is deprived of integrity and purity. So what has no purity of which it may be deprived cannot be corrupted; and what has it is certainly good by participation in purity. Again, what is corrupted is certainly perverted; and what is perverted is deprived of order; and order is good. So what is corrupted is not without good: for it can be robbed, while it is being corrupted, of the very thing it is not without. That race of darkness, then, if it lacked all good, as you say, could not be corrupted: for it had nothing that corruption could take from it; and if corruption takes nothing away, it does not corrupt. Dare now to say, if you can, that God and the kingdom of God could be corrupted, when you cannot find how the kingdom of the devil, such as you describe it, could be corrupted.

What then does the catholic light say on this? What do you suppose, but what the truth holds: that a made substance can be corrupted, for the unmade one, which is the highest good, is incorruptible, and corruption itself, which is the highest evil, cannot be corrupted, but is not a substance? And if you ask what it is, see where it tries to lead the things it corrupts; for it affects the things corrupted from its own character. Now all things through corruption fall away from what they were, and are forced not to remain, forced not to be. For being has to do with remaining. So what is said to be supremely and most of all is said to be by remaining in itself. For what is changed for the better is changed not because it was remaining but because it was being perverted for the worse, that is, was falling away from essence; and of this falling away the author of essence is not the author. Some things, then, are changed for the better, and therefore tend toward being; and they are said by this change not to be perverted but to be reverted and converted. For perversion is contrary to ordering. And these things that tend toward being tend toward order; and when they have attained it, they attain being itself, as far as a creature can attain it. For order brings what it orders into a certain agreement. And to be is nothing other than to be one. So in so far as each thing attains unity, in so far it is. For agreement and harmony are the work of unity, and by them composite things are in so far as they are: for simple things are through themselves, because they are one; but things that are not simple imitate unity by the harmony of their parts, and are in so far as they attain it. Therefore ordering compels being, and disorder not being; and disorder is also called perversion and corruption. Whatever is corrupted, then, tends toward not being. It is now for you to consider where corruption drives things, so that you can find the highest evil: for that is where corruption strives to lead.

But the goodness of God does not allow a thing to be brought to that point, and so orders all things that fall short that they are where they can most fittingly be, until by ordered movements they return to that from which they fell away. So even rational souls, in whom free choice is most powerful, when they fall away from him, he orders in the lower ranks of creation, where it is fitting for such to be. They become wretched, then, by divine judgment, while they are ordered fittingly according to their deserts. Hence that saying, which you usually attack most of all, is very well said: “I make good things and create evil things.” For to create means to found and to order. So in many copies it is written, “I make good things and found evil things.” For to make is to make what did not exist at all; but to found is to order what already existed in some way, so that it may be better and more. For God founds, that is, orders, when he says, “I found evil things,” the things that are falling short, that is, tending not to be; not things that have reached that toward which they tend. For it has been said: nothing is permitted by divine providence to reach the point of not being. These things are treated more widely and more fully elsewhere; but in dealing with you this is enough. For the door had to be shown you which you despair of, and make the ignorant despair of. For no one brings you in but good will, which the divine mercy makes peaceful, as is sung in the Gospel: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.” It is enough, I say, that you see that there is no outcome of a religious discussion of good and evil unless whatever is, in so far as it is, is from God; but in so far as it falls away from essence, it is not from God, and yet it is always ordered by divine providence as befits the whole. If you do not yet see this, I do not know what more I can do now except to treat even more minutely the things that have been said. For nothing but devotion and purity leads the mind to greater things.

For what else will you answer, when I ask what evil is, except either that it is what is against nature, or what harms, or corruption, or something of this kind? But I have shown your shipwreck in these, unless perhaps, as you usually do in dealing childishly with children, you answer that evil is fire, poison, a wild beast, and the like. For indeed, about someone who said that no substance is evil, one of the leaders of this heresy, whom we used to hear quite familiarly and often, would say: “I would like to put a scorpion in the man's hand and see whether he would not pull his hand away; and if he did, he would be convinced not by words but by the thing itself that some substance is evil, since he would not deny that that animal is a substance.” And he said this not in that man's presence, but when we, troubled, reported to him what the man had said: so he answered, as I said, childishly to children. For who with even a little training and learning does not see that these things harm through an unsuitable mixture with the body's temper, and again through a suitable one do not harm, and often even confer no small benefits? For if that poison were evil in itself, it would kill the scorpion itself sooner and more. But on the contrary, if it were somehow wholly taken from it, it would die without doubt. So for its body it is evil to lose what it is evil for ours to receive; and likewise it is good for it to have what it is good for us to lack. Will the same thing, then, be both good and evil? By no means; but evil is what is against nature: for this is evil both to that beast and to us, that is, the unsuitability itself, which beyond doubt is not a substance, but rather hostile to substance. Where then does it come from? Notice where it drives, and you will learn, if any inner light still lives in you. For it drives everything it destroys toward not being. But God is the author of essence; and nothing can be thought to be an essence which forces whatever it is in not to be. So it is said where unsuitability does not come from; for where it comes from nothing can be said.

A certain criminal woman of Athens, as history relates, by drinking little by little brought it about that she could drink, without even slight harm to her health, the poison which the condemned drank in a fixed measure in order to die. So when she was once condemned, she received that lawful quantity of poison, which she had overcome by habit, like the rest, and was not killed like the rest. Since this was a great marvel, she was sent into exile. What are we to think, if poison is evil: that she made it not evil for herself? What is more absurd than this? But because unsuitability is evil, she rather brought it about by moderate habituation that that substance became suitable to her body. For by what cunning could she ever have brought it about that unsuitability should not harm her? Why so? Because what is truly and generally evil harms always and everyone. Oil is good for our bodies, but very harmful to many animals that have six feet. Is not hellebore in one way food, in another medicine, in another poison? Who would not cry out that salt taken immoderately is poison? Yet who can count how many and how great are the benefits it gives the body? Sea water, when drunk by land animals, is harmful; but for the bodies of many, when they are bathed in it, it is most suitable and useful; and to fish it is both health and pleasure in both ways. Bread nourishes a man and kills a hawk. Does not mud itself, which offends and harms grievously when swallowed or smelled, both cool when touched in summer and serve as a remedy for burns? What is more despicable than dung? What more worthless than ash? Yet these bring such benefits to the fields that the Romans thought divine honors should be given to their inventor, Stercutius, from whom dung (stercus) also got its name. But why gather small things, which are countless? Who doubts that the four elements themselves, which are at hand, are beneficial through suitability, but when applied unsuitably are violently opposed to nature? We who live in air are killed when buried in earth or water; yet countless creatures creep about alive in sand and loose earth, and fish die in this air of ours. Fire destroys our bodies, but applied suitably it both restores from cold and drives away countless diseases. This sun, to which you bend the knee, than which truly nothing more beautiful is found among visible things, strengthens the eyes of eagles, while it wounds and darkens ours when looked at; yet by habit it comes about that we too can fix our gaze on it without harm. Will you then allow us to compare it with that poison which habit made harmless to the Athenian woman? Look back at last and consider that, if any substance is evil because it harms someone, the light which you worship cannot be defended from this charge. Consider rather that this unsuitability is universal evil, through which a ray of the sun makes the eyes go dark, though nothing is more pleasant to them than light.

I have said these things so that, if possible, you may at last stop saying that evil is a land immensely deep and long; that evil is a mind wandering through the land; that evil is the five caverns of the elements, one full of darkness, another of waters, another of winds, another of fire, another of smoke; that evil is the animals born in each of those elements, creeping things in the darkness, swimming things in the waters, flying things in the winds, four-footed things in the fire, two-footed things in the smoke. For these things, as you describe them, can in no way be so; since whatever is such, in so far as it is, must be from the highest God, since in so far as it is, it is certainly good. For if pain and weakness are evil, the animals there had such strength of body that you say their aborted offspring, after the world was made from them according to your sect, fell from heaven to earth and could not die. If blindness is evil, they saw; if deafness, they heard. If to be silent or dumb is evil, their voices there were so clear and distinct that, as you assert, they decided in an assembly, persuaded by one speaker, to wage war against God. If barrenness is evil, there was great fruitfulness there in begetting children. If exile is evil, they were in their own land and inhabited their own regions. If slavery is evil, there were also some there who ruled. If death is evil, they lived, and lived in such a way that, as you proclaim, the mind itself could never die in any way, not even after God's victory.

Why, I ask, do I find in the highest evil so many goods contrary to those evils I have listed? Or if these are not evils, will any substance at all, in so far as it is a substance, be evil? If weakness is not evil, will a weak body be evil? If blindness is not evil, will darkness be evil? If deafness is not evil, will a deaf person be evil? If being dumb is not evil, will a fish be evil? If barrenness is not evil, how is a barren animal evil? If exile is not evil, how is an animal in exile evil, or an animal sending someone into exile? If slavery is not evil, how is an animal that serves evil, or one that forces someone to serve? If death is not evil, how is an animal that is mortal evil, or one that inflicts death? But if these are evils, how will strength of body, sight, hearing, persuasive speech, fruitfulness, a native land, freedom, and life not be goods, all of which you declare to have existed in that kingdom of evil, while you dare to assert that it is the highest evil?

Finally, if (as no one has ever denied) unsuitability is evil, what is more suitable than those elements to their respective animals: darkness to creeping things, waters to swimming things, winds to flying things, fire to the more voracious, smoke to the more lofty? Such harmony you describe in the race of discord, such order in the seat of perversity. If what harms is evil, I pass over that very strong point made above, that no harm could be done where there was no good; but if that is obscure, this at least stands out and is plain to all, since, as I said and as all agree, what harms is evil: in that race the smoke did not harm the two-footed animals; it begot them, and nourished and sustained them, as they were born, grew, and ruled without harm. But now, after good has been mixed with evil, the smoke has become more harmful, so that it cannot be endured by us, who are certainly two-footed: it blinds, chokes, kills. Did such savagery come upon evil elements by the mixture of good? Such perversity under God's rule? Why, surely, do we see in the other cases that suitability which deceived your founder and enticed him to compose his lies? Why, I say, do darkness suit creeping things, waters swimming things, winds flying things, while fire burns the four-footed and smoke chokes us? What of the fact that serpents too see very sharply, rejoice in the presence of the sun, and are more abundant where the clearer air gathers cloud less readily and less often? What is more absurd than that the inhabitants and lovers of darkness should be more at home and more fitted where the clearness of light is enjoyed? And if you say that they delight rather in heat than in light, you would say with much more consistency that the lively serpents were born in fire than the slow ass; and yet who would deny that the asp is a friend to this light, since its eyes are compared to the eyes of an eagle? But I will leave the beasts. Let us consider ourselves, I beg you, without obstinacy, and at last strip our minds of empty and ruinous fables. For who could bear such perversity as to say that in the race of darkness, with which no light was mixed, two-footed animals had such firm, such vigorous, such incredible power of eyesight that even in their darkness they saw the most pure light of God's kingdoms, which you extol (since you want it to have been visible even to such beings), and looked at it, and considered it, and delighted in it, and desired it; but that our eyes, by the mixture of light, the mixture of the highest good, indeed the mixture of God, have been made so feeble and so weak that we neither see anything in darkness nor can bear the sight of the sun at all, and, turning away from it, even look for the things we were seeing?

These things can be said also if corruption is evil, which likewise no one doubts: for the smoke did not then corrupt the kinds of animals which it now corrupts. And not to go through every point, which is long and unnecessary, the animals you invent as having been there were so much less liable to corruption that their aborted offspring, not yet fit to be born, cast down from heaven to earth, could live, beget, and conspire again, having of course their original strength, because they were already conceived before the mixture of good and evil: for after that mingling, the things born of them you say are those animals which we now see very weak and easily yielding to corruption. Who could endure this error any longer, except one who either does not see these things or has become hardened against all the weight of reason by some incredible habit and familiarity with you?

But since I have shown, I think, in what great darkness and falsehood you move concerning goods and evils in general, let us now look at those three seals which you boast of in your morals with great praise and proclamation. What, then, are these seals? Those of the mouth, of course, of the hands, and of the breast. What does this mean? That a person, he says, should be chaste and innocent in mouth, hands, and breast. What if he sins with the eyes, ears, or nostrils? What if he strikes a man with his heels, or even kills him? How shall we hold this man guilty, who has sinned neither with mouth, nor hands, nor breast? “But when I name the mouth,” he says, “I want all the senses in the head to be understood; when the hand, all action; when the breast, all sexual lust.” To which, then, do you want blasphemies to belong? To the mouth or to the hand? For this is an action performed by the tongue. So if you include all action under one heading, why do you join the action of the feet to the hands and separate that of the tongue? Or, because the tongue signifies something by words, do you want to separate it from the action that is not done for the sake of signifying, so that the seal of the hands is defined as abstaining from evil action not done for the sake of signifying? But what will you do if someone sins by signifying something with the hands, as happens when we write, or show something by a gesture to be understood? For you cannot assign this to the mouth and tongue, because it is done with the hands. For what is more absurd than that, when three seals are named, of the mouth, the hands, and the breast, some sins detected in the hands should be assigned to the mouth? But if action in general is given to the hands, what reason is there to add the action of the feet to it and not that of the tongue? Do you see how the desire for novelty, with error as its companion, is led into great straits? For you cannot find how to include the cleansing of all sins in those three seals, which you proclaim by a new kind of division.

But divide as you wish, pass over whatever you wish: let us examine what you usually commend most. You say that it belongs to the seal of the mouth to abstain from all blasphemy. Now blasphemy is when evil things are said of good things. So now in common usage blasphemy means only speaking evil words about God: for about human beings there can be doubt, but God is beyond dispute good. If, then, reason proves that no one says worse things of God than you, where will your memorable seal of the mouth be? For reason teaches, and not a hidden reason, but one lying open and set out for everyone's understanding, yet invincible, and the more invincible because no one is allowed not to know it, that God is incorruptible, unchangeable, inviolable, that no want, no weakness, no misery can befall him. And every rational soul feels this in common so much that even you nod assent when it is said.

But when you begin to tell your fables, you, possessed by a strange blindness, try to persuade people that God is corruptible, changeable, violable, liable to want, admitting weakness, and not safe from misery; and you persuade those possessed by a strange blindness. And this is not enough: for you say not only that God is corruptible, but corrupted; not only changeable, but changed; not only violable, but violated; not one who could suffer want, but in want; not one on whom weakness might fall, but on whom it has fallen; not one who could be wretched, but wretched. For you say that the soul is God or a part of God. And I do not see how what is called a part of God is not God: for a part of gold is gold, of silver silver, of stone stone; and, to come to greater things, a part of earth is earth, a part of water water, of air air; and if you take something from fire you will not deny that it is fire; and any part of light can be nothing but light. Why then will a part of God not be God? Or does God have a jointed form, like a man and the other animals? For a part of a man is not a man.

But I come down to each of these opinions and consider them one at a time. If you want God to be like light, you cannot refuse to admit that any part of God is God. So when you say that the soul is a part of God, which you do not deny is both corrupted, since it is foolish; and changed, since it was wise; and violated, since it lacks its proper perfection; and in want, since it asks for help; and weak, since it needs medicine; and wretched, since it desires to be happy: you ascribe all these things to God by a sacrilegious opinion. Or if you do not grant these things of the soul, then neither is the Spirit needed to lead the soul into truth, since it is not foolish; nor is the soul renewed by the true religion, since it has not grown old; nor is it perfected by your seals, since it is perfect; nor does God bring it help, since it is not in want; nor is Christ its physician, since it is healthy; nor is a happy life rightly promised it. What of the fact that Jesus is called a deliverer, as he himself cries out in the Gospel: “If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free”? And the apostle Paul says: “You were called to freedom.” The soul, then, that has not yet attained this freedom is a slave. So, on your authority, since a part of God is God, God is both corrupted by folly, and changed by falling, and violated by the loss of perfection, and in need of help, and enfeebled by disease, and crushed by misery, and disfigured by slavery. And if a part of God is not God, still he cannot be incorrupt in whose part there is corruption; nor unchanged, who is changed in some part; nor inviolate, who is not perfect in every part; nor free from want, who works diligently to restore his part to himself; nor wholly healthy, who is weak in some part; nor most happy, who has some part subject to misery; nor wholly free, some part of whom is held down by slavery. You are forced to say all these things when you declare that the soul, which you see overwhelmed by such calamities, is a part of God. If you can take these and many such things out of your sect, then at last say that your mouth is free of blasphemies. Rather, abandon that sect: for if you cease to believe and say what he wrote, you will certainly not be Manichaeans.

God must be understood or believed to be the highest good altogether, than which nothing better can be or be thought, if we intend to be free of blasphemies. A law of numbers can in no way be violated or changed, nor could any nature by any violence bring it about that the number that follows one is not in the ratio of double to it. This can in no way be changed, and God is called changeable by you! This law keeps its inviolable integrity, and you will not have God even equal to it! Let any race of darkness bring it about that the intelligible number three, in which one is so truly one that it has no parts, let that race of darkness, then, bring it about that this number three is divided into two equal parts. Your mind surely sees that no one's malice can make this happen. So that which could not violate the law of number could violate God! But if it could not, what necessity was there, I beg you, that a part of him should be mixed with evil and thrust into such great miseries?

For now there arose that question which, even when we were listening to you eagerly, pressed us hard; and we found no way out when we asked what the race of darkness would have done to God if he had refused to fight with it at the cost of such calamity to a part of himself. For if it would not have harmed him had he stayed at rest, we complained that we had been treated cruelly in being sent into these hardships; but if it would have harmed him, then his nature was not incorruptible, as the nature of God ought to be. On this question there was someone who said that God did not wish to be rid of evil or take care that he not be harmed, but by his natural goodness wished to benefit a restless and perverse nature, so that it might be ordered. That is not what the books of the Manichaeans say: there it is very often indicated, very often said, that God took care not to be invaded by his enemies. But let us grant that Mani thought this, as that man said who could find nothing else to say; is God defended from cruelty or weakness by this argument? For this goodness of his toward the hostile race proved a great ruin to his own. Add to this that if his nature could not be corrupted and changed, no plague would change and corrupt us either; and the order that was to be given to the alien nature could have been given without our perversion. And what I heard lately at Carthage had not yet been said. For when someone, whom I very much wish to be freed from that error, was driven by this question into the same straits, he dared to say that the kingdom of God had certain borders of its own which could be invaded by the contrary race, but that God himself could in no way have been violated. But he said what not even that founder of yours would be forced in any way to say: for he would perhaps see that the ruin of his sect follows much more easily from this view than from the other. And indeed it is so, that if anyone of moderate intelligence hears that in that nature one part was violable and another inviolable, he readily understands that there are no longer two natures but three: one inviolable, another violable, a third that violates.