On the Faith against the Manichaeans 1–31

One God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, invisible, incomprehensible, ineffable, inviolable, incapable of defilement, "who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light." He is the true light, life and truth, good, supreme, and whatever human speech can utter concerning him; and even these words are given by him, so that he may be spoken of in some fashion. "From whom are all things, through whom are all things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; and all things were created through him and in him," as is made plain in both Testaments to the humble and to those who seek with reverence. To him be glory for ages of ages. Amen.

Mani says that this God has an adversary, some prince or other of the race of darkness, whom he also asserts to be unbegotten and to have no author by whom he was created. Now surely, if he is unbegotten and uncreated, he is immortal of himself. And if he is immortal of himself, God will not be the one "who alone has immortality," and then the apostle will be a liar, who says of God that he alone has immortality. But since the apostle is not a liar, God alone has immortality. And therefore he alone can bestow immortality on souls and on whatever bodies he wishes.

False, therefore, is Mani's assertion that some nature of evil, together with its prince, has no author but is unbegotten. Further, if God is unbegotten, and the race of darkness is likewise unbegotten, then unbegotten and unbegotten, seeing and seeing, reigning and reigning, living and living, eternal and eternal will not be contraries. And if evil is the contrary of good, the good will differ from evil in some respect, but in many respects it will be joined and in agreement with it; and evil will no longer be pure evil, since it has so many goods in common with God. If they say, "It is unbegotten in its own kind," they say nothing: for unbegotten and unbegotten, eternal and eternal, insofar as they are unbegotten and eternal, were never contraries. Just because an emperor is great in his power and a menial slave is contemptible in his work, is the slave therefore not a man, because the emperor is a man?

But if anyone asks what evil is, let him hear the apostle saying: "The root of all evils is desire; by craving it some have wandered from the faith and have entangled themselves in many pains."

Desire, however, is in each person not natural but voluntary; that is why he said, "by craving it some." For what is had by craving would not be had if it were not craved. The Lord too, showing that it lies in a person's power, says: "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad." In the Acts written by Leucius, which they themselves accept, it is written thus: "For the specious fictions and the feigned display and the compulsion of visible things do not proceed from one's own nature, but from the person who through seduction has made himself worse." Even Mani himself could not help admitting that souls, even those he says belong to God's substance, sin by their own will. For in the second book of the Thesaurus he says: "But those who through their own negligence did not allow themselves to be cleansed from the stain of the aforesaid spirits, and did not wholly obey the divine commands, and would not keep fully the law given them by their liberator, nor governed themselves as was fitting," and so on. Likewise in the Fundamental Epistle he says this of those souls: "Those which through love of the world have allowed themselves to stray from their former luminous nature, and have become enemies of the holy light, and have openly armed themselves for the destruction of the holy elements, and have obeyed the fiery spirit, and with their hostile persecution have afflicted the holy church and the elect established in it, the keepers of the heavenly precepts, are shut out from the blessedness and glory of the holy land. And because they allowed themselves to be overcome by evil, they will remain in that same stock of evil, that peaceful land and the immortal regions being forbidden to them. This will befall them because they so bound themselves to wicked works that they were estranged from the life and freedom of the holy light. They will therefore not be able to be received into those peaceful kingdoms, but will be fastened into the dreadful globe mentioned above, over which a guard must also be set. Hence these same souls will cling to the things they loved, left in that same globe of darkness, earning this for themselves by their own deserts. For they did not care to know these things to come, nor to separate themselves from them when time was given."

I ask you, when these words are heard, do you still doubt that Mani was forced to confess that there is sin of one's own will? For he did not say one word of it, but so many that they would rouse anyone from the heaviest sleep. He said, "through their own negligence"; he said, "did not allow"; he said, "did not obey"; he said, "would not keep"; again he said, "obeyed"; he said, "allowed themselves to be overcome"; he said, "bound themselves"; he said, "earning this for themselves by their own deserts"; he said, "For they did not care to know these things to come, nor to separate themselves from them when time was given." And do you hesitate to say that sin is committed by one's own will?

Again he says in the same epistle: "but the cut-off part of the light," that is, the sinful souls; and do you say that none sins but the race of darkness? But why speak of him, who, though in error, nevertheless tried to say this with the most evident truth, when you will not understand our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who says that fire has been prepared for sinners and for the devil and his angels, all of whom he meant to be understood as sinners? For there is no injustice with God, that he should condemn those who have committed no sin.

For what else is sinning but not standing in the precepts of truth, or in truth itself? If sinners do this not by will, they are judged unjustly. That angels too come under judgment the apostle shows, saying: "Do you not know that we shall judge angels?" But they would not come under the judgment by which they are judged unless they came under sin, by which they become guilty and can deservedly be judged. For righteous men will not judge righteous angels, whom they will be like, but surely sinners. Each person, then, is the author of his own evil deed through desire.

It is therefore in our power that desire exists, and so evil too is in our power. What ought not to be in the will, then, is in our power; for evil cannot be a nature or a substance or a life, since these are good insofar as they exist. And if we call some people evil by nature, we say it because of the origin of the ancient sin, in which our mortality is now born. Thus everything called evil in human beings is sin and punishment. Sin is committed by the rational soul, which has free choice of the will; and punishment is inflicted by the justice of God, which does nothing unjustly. Against this the Manichees bark with their usual blindness; and when they are shown that nature is not evil, but that it lies in a person's power to do good or evil, they say that the soul has no free will, and do not see their own blindness.

For who would not cry out that it is foolish to give commands to one who is not free to do what is commanded, and unjust to condemn one who had no power to fulfil what was ordered? And the wretches do not understand that they ascribe these injustices and iniquities to God. But what is true, except that the Lord gives commands, that souls have free will, that evil is not a nature but a turning away from God's commands, and that the judgment of God by which he condemns sinners is just?

Meanwhile, though this same Mani says that God abounds in all good things, with nothing lacking or set at the lowest in his glorious kingdoms, and that his most splendid ages are so firmly founded that they can never be shaken or moved by anyone, in another place a little later he adds: "But the Father of the most blessed light, knowing that a great ruin and devastation, arising from the darkness, threatened his holy ages, unless he set against it some excellent and illustrious deity, mighty in power, by which he might at once overcome and destroy the stock of darkness, so that when it was extinguished rest might be prepared for the inhabitants of light."

Surely, then, the kingdoms of Mani's god could never be shaken or moved by anyone. For if they could, he lied in saying that those kingdoms could not be shaken by anyone. And if they were shaken by necessity or fear, he will not be God who could be so shaken. For we see that Mani's god, according to the same Mani, pressed by the evil of necessity, when ruin and devastation threatened his ages and he had nothing else to do, gave a part of himself to the battle, so that by this means at least he might procure rest for the inhabitants of light. But that part of him, that is, light from light, good from good, holy from holy, eternal from eternal, god from god, almighty from almighty, has been corrupted, put to death, mixed through all the bodies of the world from the highest to the lowest, from heaven down to dung, so that even the harlots in the theatres, and the baser sort in baser places, have in themselves an oppressed god, who perhaps cannot be set free. For at the end of that same epistle, from which we have already quoted one passage, he says that this part of God which has been mixed cannot be recalled in its entirety to its former freedom.

Behold the victory, behold the triumph that Mani's god achieved! For after losing his part he is in mourning, as the same Mani says; he has a veil drawn before him to temper his grief, so that he may not see the corruption of his part. For today the divine substance he speaks of lies subject to the race of darkness like clay to the potter. This is written in the first book of their Thesaurus.

And what shamefulness he wrote in that same Thesaurus, among other shameful things, in the seventh book, saying: "Then that blessed Father, who has the luminous ships as lodgings and dwellings according to their magnitudes, out of his innate clemency brings help, by which his vital substance is stripped and freed from the impious bonds and straits and anguish. And so by his invisible nod he transforms those powers of his which are kept in this most brilliant ship, and makes them appear to the opposing powers that are ranged in each region of the heavens. Since these consist of both sexes, male and female, he orders the aforesaid powers to appear partly in the form of naked boys to the opposite sex, the females, and partly in the form of luminous virgins to the contrary sex, the males, knowing that all those hostile powers, because of the deadly and most filthy lust innate in them, are very easily captured and enslaved by these most beautiful forms which appear, and in this way dissolved. Know that this same blessed Father of ours is the same thing as his powers, which for a necessary cause he transforms into the undefiled likeness of boys and virgins. He uses them as his own weapons and through them fulfils his will."

"Of these divine powers, which are set against the infernal races as if in marriage, and which with eagerness and ease accomplish in the same moment whatever they have thought, the luminous ships are full. And so, when reason requires that these same holy powers appear to males, they immediately display their likeness in the guise of most beautiful virgins; again, when they come to females, they set aside the form of virgins and show the form of naked boys. By this comely sight the ardour and lust of those powers increases, and in this way the bond of their worst thoughts is loosed, and the living soul which was held in their members, released by this occasion, escapes and mingles with its own most pure air; and there the souls, thoroughly washed, ascend to the luminous ships, which are prepared for their conveyance and for their passage across to their homeland."

"But that which still bears the stains of the adverse race descends bit by bit through heats and warmth, and is mixed with trees and the other plants and all crops, and is dyed with various colours. And just as, out of that great and most brilliant ship, figures of boys and virgins appear to the contrary powers that dwell in the heavens and have a fiery nature, and by that comely sight the part of life held in their members is released and led down through the heats into the earth: in the same way also that highest power which dwells in the ship of the living waters appears through its angels in the likeness of boys and holy virgins to those powers whose nature is cold and moist and who are ranged in the heavens. And indeed to those of them that are female the form of boys appears, but to the males that of virgins. By this change and diversity of divine and most beautiful persons the princes, male or female, of the moist and cold stock are dissolved, and what is vital in them flees; but what remains is released and led down into the earth through the cold and mingled with all the kinds of earth."

Who would not laugh, or rather grieve and abhor, at this man who says such horrible and execrable things about the divine substance? So then, according to your error and your system, the substance of eternal light, the part of God, in captivity, in calamities, in hardships, in afflictions, in filth and uncleanness, could not be relieved daily in any other way than that the blessed Father who has the luminous ships as lodgings, whom you call the Third Envoy, and the highest power should change their powers into the nature of a different sex. These you call undefiled, and yet, after the manner of harlots, they are to kindle by their beauty the deadly and most filthy lust of the princes of darkness, who are thrown into confusion with one another. For you have found no true account by which you might ever speak more decently of such great shamefulness. And for what reason do they do this? So that, when these are stirred to lust, the divine substance may find an occasion of liberation. What else does this mean but that the divine majesty finds ways of escape even through the genitals of demons? Great God, help the minds that believe these shameful things and follow these abominations! Who would not shudder at this? I ask you, who is so blind as to believe it? I ask you.

But let those who follow Mani answer me this: if God is incorruptible, and the whole nature of the highest good is inviolable, unstainable, unapproachable, incapable of defilement, incomprehensible, what could the nature of evil have done to so great a nature if it had been unwilling to fight with it, so as not to be brought to such disgrace? This is what I said: what was the race of darkness going to do to God if he had been unwilling to fight with it? If I am told "Nothing," I ask why today his part, that is, the god of God, is placed in calamities, in afflictions, in captivity, in subjection, so that it is even set free so shamefully, and cannot be wholly set free even in this way, and the Father himself is in mourning because of that part of his, a mourning that Mani proclaims most openly in his books.

Someone says: "Nothing could happen to him; but he fought in order to show that he had foreknowledge of the thoughts of the princes of darkness, and to show that he feared nothing." I said to him: If he could see the thoughts of the princes of darkness and feared no one, why did he not see the mourning that awaited him from the misfortune of his part, which he suffers today? He will never receive that part of his back whole, because something of it remains, as he himself says, that cannot be cleansed and will be condemned for ever in the globe of darkness. A great foreknowledge, or rather ignorance and wretched weakness, is this whole matter of fearing no one! Surely, if he could not protect himself in any way, he should have pleaded to be spared, so that that integrity, the glory of all adornments, might not be brought to such disgrace.

Again, someone said: "The race of darkness could do nothing to him; but he would not tolerate an evil thing near his borders, and he sent someone to subdue it." I said to him: If it is as you say, he himself is rather found to be evil, since he wished to destroy a neighbouring thing that did him no harm. And as he was evil toward that thing, so he was cruel toward his own part, or ignorant of its future calamity. For while he thought he could accomplish a good thing by extending his own region into the kingdom of evil, which was doing him no harm, he did not first foresee the misfortune that daily oppresses his part; and further, he will never be able to receive it all back into its former freedom.

But since no answer at all can be given to this objection, they put forward their usual ignorant reply: "What were the Jews going to do to Christ if he had been unwilling to suffer at their hands?" O that they could see what they would easily see if they were not blinded by the fogs of contention: what it is to be pressed by the necessity of an impending evil, which they assert their god suffered; and what the most kindly office of mercy is, which our Lord Jesus Christ, the wisdom and power of God, by his will and ineffable power, deigned to show the human race through the man whom he took from the virgin, so as to give human beings, through a man, an example of patience. For it was fitting, and this was just, that human beings should overcome the difficulty of their weakness of flesh through the patience of humility, because they had fallen into it through the elation of pride, as our Scripture shows in Adam, the first man. Can you too say: "Because there were some people whom God wished to teach patience, he therefore wished to suffer such great evils from the race of darkness, just as the Lord did from the Jews"? Or can you say that God took on some passible nature in which he might suffer from the race of darkness whatever it could do to him, while he himself was in no way changed in his own substance, just as the Word of God, who is the Son of God, himself unchangeable like the Father, took on mortal man, so that with his deity whole and inviolate he might teach mortals in mortal flesh to conquer death through patience, and might show by the resurrection the future change of that weak flesh for the better?

Though he was invisible in himself, he appeared visible in the man whom he deigned to take from a woman, as we read in the Gospel. The apostle too says: "made of a woman." And these people say: "Why did he not say 'of a virgin'?" They do not understand that this was said in the customary way, according to the proper usage of the language of the Scriptures, as was said of Eve: "He formed her into a woman," before she was even shown to the man. Mary, however, is not unfittingly called a woman because of her giving birth, and a virgin because she knew no union with a man and her virginity was not corrupted by giving birth. As for the angel and Elizabeth saying to Mary, "Blessed are you among women," there is no difficulty, since the virgin truly is blessed among women. But do not say, "He had a body as the angels appeared, so as not to be born of a woman." What if you were asked: "Where have you read that Christ came in the flesh?" Will you not say, "In the Gospel"? The answer to you, then, is that it is written there that Christ was born of a virgin. But with your usual foulness you will say that the Scripture itself is false. And you do not see that someone blind like yourselves can do the same, calling false what you have called true, and true what you call false; and so you open the doors to every human error or crime, so that each person accepts the divine Scriptures themselves just as he pleases or as delights him, and rejects whatever he, not understanding and offended, has thought evil; and then no rule is to be found by which such errors of yours could be corrected.

Accept the canonical Scriptures whole, if you wish to be whole. For if you understood, or at least believed, what the apostle said, that our race was deceived through a woman (for he says: "I fear lest, as the serpent seduced Eve by his cunning, so your minds too may be corrupted"), you could understand that our race had to be set free through a woman, so that, since death came through a woman, life might be recovered through a woman, and so it might be shown that it is not the female creature itself that is to be blamed, whose maker is God, but the will by which Eve sinned. But they fear to believe that that undefilable and ineffable power of majesty was in a virginal womb, lest it be polluted by her blood, although it has dwelt and now dwells in the apostles and in many worthy women, who certainly have bodies and have blood. For if it could be defiled in Mary, it could be in all of them; but if it could not be in them, then surely it could not in Mary either, in whose womb the wisdom of God brought about the taking of a body.

Certainly they will not deny that Mani himself was born of a father and a mother, nor will they deny that his soul, according to their error, is almighty God. With astonishing pride he boasts that he was taken up by his twin, that is, the Holy Spirit. And surely, if he is the twin of the Holy Spirit, he too is the Holy Spirit, and he too is almighty God like the Holy Spirit. Yet this Mani had flesh. If the Holy Spirit, or his soul, the twin of the Holy Spirit, was defiled in it, they worship a god who can be defiled. But if God is nowhere defiled (since even the light of the heavenly bodies reaches the earth and is not defiled, since it is plain that this sun, to which they bend the knee, spreads its rays over all dung and stench and is nowhere defiled by them), let them stop blaspheming and pray God to free them from error. For an undefilable substance is not undefiled because it touches nothing, but because it remains in its own purity, whatever it may touch; just as with a body that cannot be wounded or pierced: do we say this of what is not struck by iron, and not rather of what is not pierced even when it is struck? And so it is all the more proved that the Son of God could not be defiled by a woman's blood, because he was born through a woman. Indeed, if he had not been born through a woman and had avoided those members, he would seem to have shown that he could be polluted by them, and we would call him undefilable with less confidence. Moreover, he consecrated virginity, because he willed to be born of a virgin, and only a mother on earth had to be chosen for him to take on manhood, since he already had a Father in heaven.

But they say: "Why then did he deny his mother, when he said to her, 'What have I to do with you, woman?' and when, on being told that she wished to see him, he answered, 'Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?' and reckoned rather those who did the will of his Father as belonging to that affection?" Because by his own example he was already teaching that earthly parents must be renounced for God's sake; for earthly affection ought not to interfere with one doing divine works. For if he had no mother because he denied his mother, then neither did Peter and the other apostles have fathers, because he warned them, saying: "And call no one on earth your father; for you have one Father, who is in heaven." What he warned them of concerning an earthly father, he himself did first concerning his mother. This, then, is what we say: the wisdom of God, in taking on manhood, was not defiled, but in mercy took on manhood for the salvation of humankind, so that there might be, as the apostle says, "one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ." For he who said "I am the truth" could not lie to his doubting disciple when he offered him the scars of his wounds, even to touch them with his hand. For how could we have confidence in him in anything, if he had lied so to his disciple? Far be such blasphemy, and may it not hold those who dare to assert or believe it guilty for ever; but may they wake at last and understand with what wicked perversity these things are believed.

We, however, believe that Christ the Lord took on a true man, and that in him the invisible appeared visibly to human beings, in him lived among human beings, in him endured human things from human beings, in him taught human beings what to withdraw from, what to endure, and where to strive. All this he did under no necessity. Hence he himself says: "For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again." So he did not lose it under the necessity of evil. For he willed that all that was done in his passion should be done to teach human nature, not to protect his own. For just as we, who consist of soul and body, being invisible in the soul and visible in the body, must refer everything we receive visibly, whether honours and benefits or insults and injuries, to the soul, which is invisible, as to the ruler, since it rules the body (for even though we are immortal in the soul, when we have died in the body we are said to be dead), so too the Lord is shown to have suffered insults and chains and scourges and to have died according to the flesh and the form of a servant which he deigned to take. Thus the Truth is believed to have done all things truthfully and nothing falsely, because by power and will the Word became flesh, and was born and suffered and died and rose again, by no necessity of his own, but by will and power. No part of him was ever plundered, and none is captive up to now, not only of his divinity but not even of the mortal nature he took; nor can he ever be captured except by those who wish to be joined to him through faith with a pure heart. He is not like the god of Mani, who, pressed by the evil of necessity, today rolls here in part (as they cannot deny) in miseries and calamities.

Understand, if you can, how great the difference is, even among human beings, between necessity and will. If, for example, someone is sent to prison at the order of justice for the guilt of his sin, and another, a holy man, is present, who enters the same prison to console or set him free, are both in prison for the same reason? The one was sent, the other entered; the one suffers punishment, the other performs mercy; the one entered when he wished and left when he wished, the other cannot by any right be set free unless pardon intervenes. And human beings can do this, and they freely confer a benefit, sometimes desiring nothing in return. Consider then whether God can suffer any necessity, when human beings can do good by their will, hired by no reward and compelled by no necessity. God, therefore, suffers no necessity, nor does he do what he does by necessity, but by supreme and ineffable will and power.

And yet you above all, according to your error, ought not to have raised this objection, in which you say, "What were the Jews going to do to Christ if he had been unwilling to suffer at their hands?" For according to the blasphemies of that same Mani, Christ did not have flesh and suffered nothing at the hands of the Jews. For in the Fundamental Epistle he says this: "For the enemy, who hoped that he had crucified the same Saviour, the Father of the righteous, was himself crucified; at that time one thing was done and another shown. So the prince of darkness was fastened to the cross, and he with his companions wore the crown of thorns and had the scarlet robe; he also drank the vinegar and gall which some have thought the Lord drank. And all that he seemed to endure here was inflicted on the leaders of darkness, who were also wounded by the nails and the spear."

Why then do you object, saying, "What were the Jews going to do to Christ if he had been unwilling to suffer at their hands?", when you think of his passion in this way, so that you believe not that God himself suffered anything in his body, but that the prince of darkness suffered all those things? How then do you raise this against our faith?

For we believe, as it is written in the Gospel, that Christ willed to suffer, and suffered when he willed; for the Jews did not bring about the passion itself when they willed. They did indeed wish to seize him and kill him, and according to their will they had already accomplished the crime they were attempting, and were already guilty of a most monstrous sin, because they willed it, even if they had done nothing. Yet he who had power to lay down his life permitted them to act when he willed, he who could have commanded legions of angels to destroy the Jews, or could have slain them all by a single word.

So Christ the Lord suffered according to the man whom he took, and no member of his, not even of the mortal body he had taken, is held by the Jews today, as we said above. But your god, O Manichees, was oppressed when ruin and devastation threatened; he did not go out to battle by free will but was compelled by necessity; nor did he wish to confer anything, but was trying to resist. He was devoured and mixed even in his own substance, not in a mortal body taken on; he is held in part today, and in part will be held in the globe for ever. And yet who could bear such incredible blasphemies as these people do not hesitate to utter about the Lord's passion itself?