On the Profit of Believing 1–13

If, Honoratus, a heretic and a man who believes heretics seemed to me one and the same thing, I would think that I ought to keep silent in this matter, with tongue as well as pen. But in fact there is a very great difference between the two. For a heretic, in my opinion, is one who for the sake of some temporal advantage, and above all for the sake of his own glory and pre-eminence, either originates or follows false and new opinions; whereas the one who believes such men is a man deceived by a certain semblance of truth and piety. Since this is so, I have not thought that I ought to keep silent before you about what I think concerning the finding and holding of truth, for which, as you know, we have burned with great love from our early youth. But it is a matter far removed from the minds of vain men, who, having gone too far into these bodily things and slipped into them, think that nothing exists except what they perceive through those five well-known messengers of the body; and the impressions and images they have received from these they turn over within themselves even when they try to withdraw from the senses, and by the deadly and utterly deceptive rule of these images they think they measure most correctly the ineffable inner sanctuaries of truth. Nothing is easier, my dearest friend, than not only to say but even to believe that one has found the truth; but how very difficult it is in reality you will recognize, I trust, from this letter of mine. That it may benefit you, or at least do no harm to you or to anyone at all into whose hands it may chance to come, I have prayed God and I pray; and I hope that it will be so, if I am rightly conscious that I have taken up this pen with a pious and dutiful mind, not from desire of a vain name and of trifling display.

My purpose, then, is to prove to you, if I can, that the Manichaeans sacrilegiously and rashly attack those who, following the authority of the Catholic faith, are fortified by believing before they are able to behold that truth which is seen by a pure mind, and are prepared for God who will enlighten them. For you know, Honoratus, that we fell in with such men for no other reason than that they said that, setting aside fearful authority, they would lead those who were willing to listen to them to God by pure and simple reason, and free them from all error. For what else compelled me, for nearly nine years, spurning the religion that had been implanted in me as a little boy by my parents, to follow those men and listen to them diligently, except that they said we were terrified by superstition and that faith was imposed on us before reason, whereas they pressed no one to faith unless the truth had first been discussed and unravelled? Who would not be enticed by these promises, especially the mind of a young man eager for truth, and moreover proud and talkative from the disputations of certain learned men at school, such as they then found me: one who despised what seemed, of course, old wives’ tales, and longed to take hold of and drink in the open and pure truth they promised? But again, what reason held me back from clinging to them completely, so that I kept myself in that grade they call “Hearers” and did not give up the hope and business of this world, except that I noticed that they too were more eloquent and copious in refuting others than firm and sure in proving their own views? But what shall I say of myself, who was already a Catholic Christian? Those breasts, after a very long thirst, almost drained and parched, I have now sought again with all eagerness, and weeping and groaning I have shaken and pressed them more deeply, that they might yield what would suffice for my refreshment in such a state and for bringing back the hope of life and salvation. What, then, shall I say of myself? You, when you were not yet a Christian, and when you vehemently cursed them, were at my urging barely brought to think them worth hearing and examining: recall, I beg you, what else delighted you, I ask, except a certain great presumption and promise of reasons? But because they disputed long and much, at great length and with great vehemence, about the errors of the unlearned — which I learned late is very easy for anyone moderately educated — if they also instilled in us anything of their own, we thought it must of necessity be retained, since nothing else occurred to us in which we might rest. So they did to us what cunning fowlers usually do, who fix limed twigs near water to deceive thirsty birds. For they fill in and in some way cover the other waters round about, or else frighten the birds away from them by alarming contrivances, so that they fall into their snares not by choice but from want.

But why do I not answer myself that such elegant and pleasant comparisons, and reproaches of this kind, can be poured out very urbanely and wittily by any opponent whatever against all who teach anything? But I thought something of this kind ought to be put into my letter in order to warn them to stop acting in such ways, so that, as that writer says, with the trifles of commonplaces set aside, matter may contend with matter, cause with cause, reason with reason. Let them stop, therefore, saying what they always have on their lips as though it were necessary, whenever someone who had listened to them for a long time leaves them: “The light has passed through him.” For you see, you who are my chief concern — for I am not overly anxious about them — how empty this is and how very easy for anyone to refute. So I leave it to your good sense to examine. For I do not fear that you will think me to have been inhabited by the light when I was entangled in the life of this world, cherishing a dark hope of a beautiful wife, of the pomp of riches, of the emptiness of honours, and of other harmful and destructive pleasures. For all these things, as you well know, I did not stop desiring and hoping for while I listened to them eagerly. Nor do I attribute this to their teaching; for I admit that they too earnestly warn that these things be avoided. But to say that I am now deserted by the light, when I have turned away from all these shadows of things and have resolved to be content with only the food necessary for the health of the body, but that I was illuminated and shining when I loved those things and was held bound up in them, is the mark of a man — to put it most mildly — who does not consider very acutely the matters he loves to talk about a great deal. But let us come to the case, if you please.

For you know well that the Manichaeans, by censuring the Catholic faith and above all by tearing apart and mangling the Old Testament, stir up the unlearned, who certainly do not know how far those things are to be accepted and in what way, when drunk in, they may pass profitably into the veins and marrow of souls that are still, as it were, crying infants. And because there are some things there which somewhat offend minds that are ignorant and careless of themselves — and these are the great majority — they can be attacked in a way that pleases the crowd; but they cannot be defended in a way that pleases the crowd by very many, because of the mysteries contained in them. And the few who know how to do this do not love public and much-talked-of contests in debate, and for this reason are hardly known except to those who seek them out most earnestly. Concerning this rashness of the Manichaeans, then, by which they censure the Old Testament and the Catholic faith, hear, I beg you, what moves me. I wish and hope that you will receive it in the spirit in which I say it. For God, to whom the secrets of my conscience are known, knows that I do nothing with malice in this discourse, but, as I think it ought to be taken, for the sake of proving the truth — for which one thing we resolved long ago to live, and with incredible anxiety lest it should have been very easy for me to err with you, but very difficult, not to speak more harshly, to keep the right way with you. But I presume that in this hope, in which I hope you will attain the way of wisdom with me, he to whom I am consecrated will not desert me: him I try to behold day and night, and, carrying an eye of the soul wounded by my sins and by habit with the blows of long-standing opinions, I recognize, often with tears, that I am weak. And just as, after long blindness and darkness, eyes barely opened still refuse the light, blinking and turning away from it though they long for it, especially if someone tries to show them this sun, so it happens to me now: I do not deny that there is a certain ineffable and unique good of the soul which is seen by the mind, and I confess with weeping and groaning that I am not yet fit to contemplate it. He will not, then, desert me, if I feign nothing, if I am led by duty, if I love truth, if I cherish friendship, if I greatly fear that you may be deceived.

All the Scripture, then, that is called the Old Testament is handed down in four ways to those who diligently wish to know it: according to history, according to aetiology, according to analogy, according to allegory. Do not think me foolish for using Greek names. First, because this is how I received it, and I do not dare to convey it to you otherwise than I received it. Second, you yourself notice that we have no names in common use for these things: if I had coined them by translating, I would certainly be more foolish; and if I used circumlocution, I would be less ready in my discussion. I only ask you to believe that, however I may err, I do nothing from being puffed up and swollen. It is handed down according to history, then, when one is taught what was written or what was done, and what was not done but only written as though it had been done. According to aetiology, when it is shown for what cause something was done or said. According to analogy, when it is demonstrated that the two testaments, the Old and the New, are not opposed to each other. According to allegory, when one is taught that certain things that are written are not to be taken literally but are to be understood figuratively.

Our Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles used all these ways. For the following is taken from history, when it was objected that his disciples had plucked ears of grain on the Sabbath day: “Have you not read,” he said, “what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the loaves of the presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?” To aetiology belongs this: when Christ had forbidden a wife to be put away except for the cause of sexual immorality, and those questioning him replied that Moses had granted permission by giving a bill of divorce, he said, “Moses did this because of the hardness of your heart.” For here the cause is given why that was rightly permitted by Moses for the time, so that what Christ was commanding might show that other times had now come. But it would take long to explain how the succession and order of these times has been arranged and composed by a wonderful disposition of divine providence.

Now as for analogy, by which the agreement of both testaments is perceived, why should I say that all whose authority they yield to have used it, when they can consider for themselves how many things they are accustomed to say were inserted into the divine Scriptures by some corrupters of the truth or other? That claim always seemed to me very weak, even when I was listening to them; and not to me alone, but also to you — for I remember well — and to all of us who tried to use a little more care in judging than the crowd of believers. But now, after many things have been explained and unravelled for me that used to move me most — those, namely, in which their discourse mostly boasts, and exults the more freely the more securely it runs on without an opponent — nothing seems to me to be said by them more shamelessly, or, to put it more mildly, more carelessly and feebly, than that the divine Scriptures have been corrupted, when they cannot prove it by any copies extant, though the matter is so recent in memory. For if they said that they had thought these Scriptures ought not to be accepted by them at all, because they were written by men whom they did not believe to have written the truth, their evasion would be in some way more straightforward, or their error more human. For this is what they did with that book entitled “Acts of the Apostles.” When I consider this plan of theirs, I cannot wonder enough. For in this matter I look not for human wisdom but for ordinary sense. For that book has so much that is like what they accept that it seems to me great foolishness not to accept this one too, and, if anything there offends them, to say that it is false and inserted. Or if such talk is shameless, as it is, why do they think those things have any force in the epistles of Paul and in the four books of the gospel, in which there are perhaps proportionately far more things that they wish to be believed inserted by corrupters than could have been in that book? But surely the reason is this, as it seems to me, and I ask you to consider it with me with a most calm and serene judgment. For you know that, trying to bring the person of their founder Mani into the number of the apostles, they say that the Holy Spirit, whom the Lord promised he would send to his disciples, came to us through him. So if they accepted those Acts of the Apostles, in which the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly proclaimed, they would find no way to say that this was inserted. For they would have it that there were some corrupters of the divine books before the time of Mani himself, and that those who corrupted them were men who wished to mix the law of the Jews with the gospel. This they cannot say about the Holy Spirit, unless perhaps they claim that those men foresaw it and put in their books something to be brought forward against a Mani who would one day come and say that the Holy Spirit had been sent through himself. But we will speak more plainly about the Holy Spirit elsewhere. Now let us return to what I had intended.

That the history of the Old Testament, and its aetiology and analogy, are found in the New Testament has, I think, been sufficiently shown; it remains to show this of allegory. Our Deliverer himself in the gospel uses allegory from the Old Testament. “This generation,” he says, “seeks a sign; and no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so also the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” And what shall I say of the apostle Paul, who in the first epistle to the Corinthians indicates that even the very history of Exodus was an allegory of the Christian people to come? “I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them; and the rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased; for they were laid low in the desert. Now these things were figures of us, that we should not be desirers of evil things, as they also desired. Nor let us worship idols, as some of them did, as it is written: ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.’ Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them committed sexual immorality, and twenty-three thousand men fell in one day. Nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted and perished by serpents. Nor let us murmur, as some of them murmured and perished by the destroyer. Now all these things happened to them in a figure; and they were written for our correction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” There is also in the apostle a certain allegory very relevant indeed to our case, because these same men are accustomed to bring it forward and display it in disputation. For the same Paul says to the Galatians: “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman; but he who was of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, while he who was of the free woman was born through the promise. These things are said by way of allegory. For these are the two testaments: one from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar. For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, which borders on the present Jerusalem, and she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.”

Here, then, these men — no bad men indeed! — while trying to make the law void, compel us to approve these Scriptures. For they fix on the saying that those who are under the law are in slavery, and above all they toss about that last saying: “You have been emptied of Christ, you who are justified in the law; you have fallen from grace.” We grant that all these things are true, and we say that that law is not necessary except for those to whom slavery is still useful; and that it was usefully given for this reason, that men who could not be recalled from sins by reason had to be restrained by such a law — that is, by the threats and terrors of those punishments which even fools can see. When the grace of Christ frees us from these, it does not condemn that law, but invites us at last to obey its love, not to be slaves to the fear of the law. This is grace, that is, a benefit, which those who still wish to be under the bonds of the law do not understand has come to them from God. Paul rightly rebukes them as unbelievers, because they do not believe that they have now been freed through our Lord Jesus from the slavery to which they had been subjected for a fixed time by God’s most just disposition. Hence this saying of the same apostle: “For the law was our pedagogue in Christ.” He therefore gave men a pedagogue whom they might fear, and afterwards a master whom they might love. Yet in these precepts and commands of the law, which it is not now lawful for Christians to keep — such as the Sabbath, or circumcision, or sacrifices, and anything of that kind — such great mysteries are contained that every pious person understands that nothing is more destructive than to take whatever is there literally, that is, word for word, and nothing more wholesome than to have it unveiled by the Spirit. Hence the saying: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Hence the saying: “That same veil remains in the reading of the Old Testament, which is not unveiled, because it is made void in Christ.” For what is made void in Christ is not the Old Testament but its veil, so that through Christ what is obscure and covered without Christ may be understood and, as it were, laid bare. For the same apostle immediately adds: “But when you have passed over to Christ, the veil will be taken away.” For he does not say, “the law will be taken away,” or “the Old Testament.” It is not, then, that through the Lord’s grace useless things that were hidden there have been taken away, but rather the covering by which useful things were hidden. This is how one deals with those who seek the meaning of those Scriptures earnestly and piously, not in a disorderly and wicked spirit; and one carefully demonstrates the order of events, the causes of deeds and sayings, and so great an agreement of the Old Testament with the New that not a jot is left that does not harmonize, and such great secrets of figures that everything drawn out by interpretation compels those who wish to condemn these things before learning them to confess themselves wretched.

But, setting aside for the moment the depth of knowledge, let me deal with you as I think one should deal with a close friend, that is, as I am able, not as I have admired very learned men as able. There are three kinds of error by which men err when they read something. I will speak of each. The first kind is that in which what is false is thought true, when the writer thought otherwise. The second, though not so widespread, is no less harmful: when what is false is thought true, but what is thought is also what the writer thought. The third is when from another’s writing something true is understood, though the writer did not understand it. In this kind there is no little profit; indeed, if you consider it more carefully, the whole fruit of reading is intact in it. An example of the first kind would be if someone, for instance, were to say and believe that Rhadamanthus hears and judges the cases of the dead in the underworld, because he had read it in Maro’s poem. For he errs in two ways: he believes something that is not to be believed, and the one he read is not to be thought to have believed it. The second kind can be seen thus: if someone, because Lucretius writes that the soul is made of atoms and that after death it is dissolved into those same atoms and perishes, should think this true and something he must believe. For this man too is no less wretched, if on so great a matter he has persuaded himself for certain of what is false, even though Lucretius, by whose books he was deceived, held that opinion. For what does it profit him to be certain of the author’s view, when he has chosen him not as one through whom he erred, but as one with whom he erred? To the third kind this is suited: if someone, having read in Epicurus’s books a passage where he praises self-control, should assert that he placed the highest good in virtue and therefore is not to be blamed. For what harm does Epicurus’s error do to this man, if Epicurus believes the highest good of man to be bodily pleasure, since this man has not given himself to so shameful and harmful an opinion, and Epicurus pleases him for no other reason than that he thinks he did not hold what ought not to be held? This error is not only human but often most worthy of a man. For what if it were reported to me about someone I loved that, when he was a grown, bearded man, he had said in the hearing of many that childhood and infancy so pleased him that he even swore he wished to live in the same way, and this were so proved to me that I would be shameless to deny it? Would I seem blameworthy to anyone if I thought that when he said this he wished to indicate that innocence pleased him, and that his mind was estranged from the desires in which the human race is entangled, and on that account loved him more and more than I loved him before — even if perhaps he had foolishly come to love a certain freedom in playing and eating, and idle leisure, in the years of boyhood? For suppose that he died after this was reported to me, and that I could not ask him anything so that he might disclose his meaning: would anyone be so wicked as to be angry with me for praising the man’s intention and will through the very words I had received? Indeed, a just judge of things would perhaps not hesitate even to praise my opinion and will, since innocence pleased me and I, a man, thought well of a man in a doubtful matter, when I might also have thought ill.

This being so, hear also as many conditions and differences of these same writings; for there must necessarily be as many. Either someone has written profitably and is understood unprofitably by someone; or both are done unprofitably; or the reader understands profitably, though the one who is read wrote the contrary. Of these three, I do not disapprove of the first, and the last does not concern me. For I cannot blame a man who has been misunderstood through no fault of his own, nor can I be troubled that someone is read who did not see the truth, when I see that it does the readers no harm. One kind, then, is most approved and, as it were, most purified: when good things have been written and are taken in a good sense by the readers. Yet this too is further divided into two, for it does not entirely exclude error. For it often happens that when the writer has thought rightly, the reader also thinks rightly, but something other than the writer thought, sometimes better, sometimes worse, yet profitably. But when we also think what the one we read thought — and this is most suited to living well — truth is present in the fullest measure, and no place for falsehood opens from any side. This kind, when the reading concerns very obscure matters, is altogether very rare, and in my opinion it cannot be clearly known, but only believed. For by what arguments shall I gather the will of an absent or dead man so as to be able to swear to it, when even if he were present and questioned there might be many things which, if he were not a bad man, he would most dutifully conceal? But I think it of no use for knowing the matter what sort of man the writer was; yet he is most honourably believed good whose writings have served the human race and posterity.

So I wish these men would tell me in which kind they place what they consider the error of the Catholic church. If in the first, it is a grave charge indeed, but it requires no long defence; for it is enough to deny that we understand in the way they suppose when they attack us. If in the second, it is no less grave, but they will be refuted by the same reply. If in the third, it is no charge at all. Come, then, and consider the Scriptures themselves. What do they object to the books of what is called the Old Testament? Is it that they are good but are badly understood by us? But they themselves do not accept them. Or that they are neither good nor well understood? But the defence above sufficiently overthrows this. Or will they say: “Although you understand them well, they are nevertheless bad”? What is this but to acquit the living opponents with whom the dispute is carried on and to accuse men long dead with whom there is no contention? I for my part believe that those men both committed everything to memory profitably and were great and divine, and that that law was promulgated and established by God’s command and will; and although I know very few books of that kind, I can nevertheless easily persuade anyone of this, if a fair and not at all obstinate mind is brought to it. And I will do so when I am granted the opportunity of well-disposed ears and of your mind; but that when I can. For now, is it not enough for me, however this matter stands, not to have been deceived?

I call to witness, Honoratus, my conscience and God who dwells in pure souls that I consider nothing wiser, purer, or more religious than all those Scriptures which the Catholic church keeps under the name of the Old Testament. You are surprised, I know. For I cannot pretend that we were once persuaded far otherwise. But surely nothing is more full of rashness — and such rashness was in us then as boys — than to forsake the expositors of any books whatever, who profess that they hold them and can teach them to their pupils, and to seek their meaning from those who, for some reason or other, have declared most bitter war on the men who composed and wrote them. For who ever thought that the abstruse and obscure books of Aristotle should be expounded to him by an enemy of Aristotle — to speak of those disciplines in which a reader may perhaps slip without sacrilege? Or who ever wished to read or learn the geometrical writings of Archimedes with Epicurus as his teacher, against which Epicurus argued very obstinately, understanding nothing of them, as I think? Or are these Scriptures of the law so very plain that these men attack them in vain and emptily, as though they were set forth for the common crowd? They seem to me like that silly woman whom they themselves are accustomed to mock: angry that this sun was being praised to her and commended by a certain Manichaean woman as an object of worship, simple and religious as she was, she leapt up in agitation and, stamping again and again on the spot which the sun had lit through the window, began to cry: “Look, I am trampling on the sun and your god!” Utterly foolish and womanish — who denies it? But do not these men seem to you just like her, who, tearing with great violence of speech and with abuse at things they do not understand — neither why they are so, nor at all what they are, things which look like common things lying about, yet are subtle and divine to those who understand — think they are making some progress because the unlearned applaud them? Believe me, whatever is in those Scriptures is lofty and divine: there is truth in them altogether, and a teaching most suited to refreshing and renewing souls, and plainly so measured out that there is no one who cannot draw from it what is enough for himself, if only he comes to draw devoutly and piously, as true religion requires. To prove this to you requires many reasons and a longer discourse. For I must first work with you so that you do not hate the authors themselves, and then so that you love them; and this must be done in any other way rather than by expounding their meanings and writings. For if we had hated Virgil — or rather, if we had not loved him, before he was understood, on the commendation of our elders — we would never be satisfied about those countless questions of his by which the grammarians are commonly troubled and perplexed; nor would we listen gladly to one who resolved them with praise of Virgil, but we would favour the one who tried to show through them that he had erred and raved. But as it is, when many try to explain them in various ways, each according to his capacity, those are applauded most through whose exposition the poet is found better — the poet who is believed, even by those who do not understand him, not only to have made no mistake but to have sung nothing that is not praiseworthy. So in some small question, when the teacher fails and has no answer, we are angry with him rather than thinking him silent through a fault of Maro. And if in his own defence he tried to assert a fault in so great an author, his pupils would hardly stay with him even if they were paid. How great a thing would it have been to show a like good will to those through whom, as has been confirmed by so long an antiquity, the Holy Spirit spoke? But of course we, most intelligent young men and wonderful examiners of reasons, without so much as unrolling those writings, without seeking teachers, without blaming our own slowness a little, and finally without granting even ordinary sense to those who wished such writings to be read, preserved, and studied throughout the whole world for so long, thought that nothing in them was to be believed, moved by the voice of those who are hostile and inimical to them, among whom, by a false promise of reason, we were made to believe and revere thousands of unheard-of fables.