Against the Manichees 1.1–1.18

Those who have made it their earnest concern to remove from God the causes of the sins committed among men have had in this a holy and true aim, provided that, without evading the truth that God provides for our affairs, they have reasonably and truthfully ascribed to men their own sins; for otherwise, in wishing to heal a small ailment, they fell into a greater and grievous disease of impiety, falling into a denial of God’s providence, which appears in everything. But Mani, who came from among the barbarians and is named after madness itself, used a drug still more harmful, toward impiety. For wishing to show God not responsible for evil, he set up against him an evil of equal rank: unbegotten (as he says) against unbegotten, living against living, always rising up and fighting and never ceasing to give him trouble, yet unable to be wholly destroyed by him, as being eternal, complete in its substance, and unbegotten. And fleeing the smoke (as the saying goes), he has fallen into the fire. For so that God may not seem to bear the responsibility for the evils among us, as he thinks, God himself has his full share of a whole and complete evil beside him. What then? Even if he handles it patiently and wisely (as he says), still on such a hypothesis he would not be free of war. And what could be more foreign to the reasoning that befits God? That it is pious to confess with all one’s strength that God is not responsible for the wrongs done among men, the teaching of the catholic church has been the first to champion. But when it is asked in what way we sin, though God does not will it, we do not accuse God of greater things while wishing to defend him in lesser ones, as that man does. Rather, holding the very road of truth from the holy Scriptures and from the common notions, we travel safely toward that inquiry, and we make the demonstration on God’s behalf a pious one by truthfully accusing ourselves. For it is not fitting, in order to escape by argument the charges for the wrongs we commit against one another, to be impious toward God, fabricating against him the most insulting things of all, things that do not exist at all. Moreover, since we consider the sins among men curable (for they do not flow upon us as from some principle, but are done by us in another way, which the discourse will explain clearly in due time), not only are we not impious toward God, since we do not dare to conjecture in him a grievous inability to withstand an evil that does not exist, but we also try to stop what we do in the manner of evil, by showing clearly to those who pay attention that what truly has its beginning of coming to be through us could also receive through us an end of no longer coming to be, even if not among all. For the whole is not in each person’s power, but it is in each of those who are earnest; yet what is possible in each case is a sample of what is possible for the whole.

But he who devised a barbarian impiety, fabricating a beginningless evil against the God who alone is truly without beginning, and madly defining it as a second principle, not only places evil in equal rank with God, as though honouring it, he who supposedly chose to hate it, but also, by saying that the evils flowing from the beginningless one are of necessity wholly incurable, treacherously makes those who believe him think that wrongdoing among men cannot be corrected. So, through their prior attachment to the pleasure of sins, they put forward despair instead of conversion, as though it were impossible to check the current of a beginningless evil; unless someone, out of a desire for glory (that of seeming to have the greater share from the good, as they tell their myths), should zealously succeed as far as possible in not sinning, so making plain by that very fact that it was not from elsewhere but from himself that he used to do wrong. Yet he would carry off a certain glory among them, as being better in his make-up than his nature, he who does this not by nature but by toil and sweat, and who would think himself praised while he is deprived of true praise. For abandoning the good repute that belongs to the toil of virtue (if it were achieved for the sake of piety toward God), he falsely treats the necessity of nature as a prize to be seized, turning the usefulness of industry into impiety against God. So neither is the man given to ease struck in his mind when he does evil, if he reckons what is done to the other principle, nor is the man who exerts himself worthy of admiration, though he toils by reasoning.

… so as to be led into the most grievous impiety of all against God. And his followers, not understanding the reason of God’s work of creation, not only went astray in the way described by examining the irrational actions of men, but also slandered most created things, or rather nearly all, which in truth admit no blame, and called them evil. Of some they falsely claimed that they are a mixture of opposites (as they say), of evil and good; others they denounced as evil of a single kind; and they confounded everything, as far as in them lay, by calling evil what is in no way evil. For if they had denounced as evil the injustice among men, which alone is injustice, they ought even so to have been careful about the name and about their view of it, as something that exists and does not exist according as it is done or not done, and least of all to introduce it as a principle against God; yet their error would then have been easily kept within bounds. But as it is, by calling nearly the whole creation evil, they have made their blasphemy against God enormous, and they bring forward as conceded in argument all the wild beasts and vermin, thinking that these cannot have been made by a good being, since they are not only useless (as they suppose) but also very harmful to men; and yet these can be shown to be more beneficial and useful than the things that really seem to profit men. They string together many other things too, to slander existing things and the governance of the universe; but the discourse will try to leave nothing undemonstrated of what has been said and will be said.

For imagining a mixture of two opposite natures in existing things, they distribute existing things between these as seems good to them, saying, “Whence come evils, unless these too come from some principle?” And if anyone asks, “What evils?”, they string together the sins of men and the works of God’s creation, and they decry the whole all-wise economy itself; since, if anyone should show that all things have come to be and come to be well and of necessity, their account of the opposite principle is necessarily gone. For not understanding how things below are, they made up fictions about the things above; and not grasping how the things seen are ordered, they slandered what is not seen; and in their eagerness to know, through not knowing they fell into greater ignorance. For as though seeking in darkness an understanding of the things that appear, they not only failed to find what they thought they were seeking, but made the darkness of their ignorance greater.

We, then, shall first deal with the two opposite principles they posit, and so come to the demonstration on behalf of the universe, that all things are good and necessary, and especially (as I said before) those against which they make the greatest attack as admittedly evil; and further concerning the governance of the universe, and the things for which they unfeelingly condemn its harshness, though it arranges what is more necessary; and moreover concerning the wrongs done among men, that not even because of these was it fitting to imagine a principle of evil against God. For it will be shown that these too display the goodness of him who made us, and that they are neither done by men by his will nor borne upon us from some cause or principle. So now let us come to the beginning of their mythical impiety, examining whether the natural notions admit two opposite principles of existing things at all. For if they would not admit even two principles in agreement, how much less warring ones?

That man himself, then, who was most grievously mad, begins everywhere in his writings: “There were God and matter, light and darkness, good and evil, in all things utterly opposed, so that neither shares anything with the other, and both unbegotten and living.”

Then either these will be separated from each other, or, if they are together, they will appear friendly and in no way opposed. But clearly he too says that these are apart from each other. Will each, then, be bounded in its substance by the other, and neither be unlimited? But to bound God in his substance, and not to know and confess him infinite, how is that not very impious? For he will seem not only to be bounded and circumscribed in substance, but also to suffer this from evil (as that man says); which is, first, outside the common notions, which lead us to know that he is everywhere and that his nature cannot be contained.

Further, if these necessarily stand apart from each other, God will seem, according to that man’s madness, not only to be bounded in nature but also to exist and remain in a place of his own, like his opposite. For things kept apart by each other are clearly circumscribed by places of their own. Then it must be examined. If both opposites are older than their places, as being unbegotten, there was a time, again, when they were previously both free of opposition. But if the separation is coeternal with the substance of each, the place is either older than the substance of each or co-unbegotten with it. If it is older, so that each seems to be an offshoot of its place, then these are neither unbegotten nor eternal (that will seem to belong rather to the places from which they come). If it is co-unbegotten, the unbegotten things will be more than two; for the things in which these exist, and without which they cannot exist, must necessarily be other than these.

Besides this, one must also demand a boundary between the two, which separates them and prevents each from communion with the other, lest by mixing with each other again at their borders they destroy the account of their opposition. What, then, will wall off and separate the two? For the fiction of their myth needs some third thing in substance. Will they tell us of the adamantine wall, then, or something else, in their raving? And by whose providence, when they say this, will it have been put in between? For to whichever of the opposites they choose to ascribe it, as put in between later at some time, their hypothesis will be found to lead nowhere. For the argument, going back to the earlier state, will again catch the opposites inseparable from each other, and so in no way opposed. But if they say that the boundary they speak of exists by the providence of neither, they necessarily confess that they are introducing another unbegotten thing, sharing in the substance of neither opposite, so that by differing entirely it may keep them apart; and they will be found positing a crowd of unbegotten things after saying that the unbegotten are two. And this separating boundary, whether a wall or uninhabited land or whatever they like, where does it have its base? Where its top? Clearly its base below (where, and how far?) and its top above (where, and to what height?). For “above” and “below” are names belonging to creation, used before creation. And the boundary must be deeper and higher than the substance of the things separated, lest, falling short below or above, it give the opposites passage to each other.

If they compare what they call the boundary to shadow and sun, they will think that the shadow has no communion with the sun, but they will be sharply refuted as deceived by the madman. For a shadow comes about through communion with the sun and its presence everywhere, when some bulk stands up in between and sends the shadow off to the other side. And a shadow would be nothing else than evidence of light hindered by some interposed body; since at night, when light is not present, not even a partial shadow would arise. Is it not so that where there is shadow, there is light? For what lies beyond the shadow is lit by the light, unless the thing casting the shadow far exceeds in height the thing giving light. And unless the most ridiculous wall is posited, against reason, evil will be seen dwelling in light, light within light. For how could a shadow arise, when the light is present throughout the whole, unless something standing up in between and shutting it out throughout produced it? If that is not put in between, standing up as high as can be, the light will be forever common to evil as well.

Again, by giving the southern part to evil they sketch, as in a dream, the plan of creation. For where was the south before there was a south? And no place in creation could be less honourable than another; for what is on the left of one looking west is found again on the right of one looking east. But the absurdity of this barbarian doctrine is very great. For how could there be two principles at all, or how could they be called principles? For a principle is that which is older than the whole and rules over all things, and neither of these could belong to either of them. For both, being contemporaneous and co-unbegotten, destroy the account of priority over each other. And how could these, being excluded from ruling power not only over each other (as opposites) but also fighting by nature, be thought to rule at all? If, then, the account of a principle is preserved for neither, how could they be called principles? And how would natural reasoning admit that two things exist opposite in substance? For, first, the name of substance is common to both. In that respect, then, in which each is first of all a substance, plainly they agree and are not opposite. Then both are living beings, and besides this they are equally unbegotten. And where the names are the same and the description is the same, how can the substance be at war and opposite? Yet names signify things, for they declare of each thing what it is, as far as possible. We recognize, then, that things are what the force of their names says.

So then, if each of the things the madman thinks opposites is named a living and unbegotten substance, is it not plain that, since such an error took its beginning from barbarians, the consistency of the common notions has been destroyed among them? For the description of each is entire and exactly the same: it not only banishes all suspicion of opposition, but does not even allow any difference to exist between the things so named.

Those who run with the madman say that one is good and the other evil, taking the qualities, as it were, before the substance. For since substance is named alike of each (both are living and unbegotten substance), the opposition of their so-called quality is superfluous. (For even if it is not fitting to name a quality in God, still in thought being in some way comes before being of such a kind; and being is signified by “living and unbegotten substance”.) Unless they say that the opposites came upon each as attributes, which is the most senseless thing of all; for nothing comes upon the unbegotten: to that upon which being did not come, neither does a being of such a kind come, which it was not. Opposition of qualities, then, can be found among existing things, but opposition of substance nowhere. White is opposite to black, but each is in a body, in its own substance. Yet they are opposed to each other in one respect and not in another. For, first, they fall under one genus (each is a colour); then, even if they seem opposite, they offer the eye a varied enjoyment, for neither of them pains it by disproportion. And again, virtue and vice in the soul, though these too are opposites, are said to be not only in the same substance but also in one genus (each is a state), and they are present in the soul as things that come upon it, so that they can also leave it, as the soul in which they are is disposed now one way and now another. So it is plain that the account of the substance is defined on its own, and the account of what comes upon it is another. And white and black are sometimes present inseparably in the things in which they are, and yet no one has ever named those things from them. No one wishing to signify milk has used the name of whiteness rather than the name established for the kind of substance, lest he seem to signify many things instead of one, namely all the things to which whiteness belongs. Nor do we signify a crow by “black”, but by the name of the animal and its kind. These, then, and such as these are inseparable qualities; but virtue and vice in the soul are among the qualities that come upon it, so that it is all the more fitting that the substance of man should in no way be named from them, but signified in its own right. No one, at any rate, has signified what man is from the vice present in some individual; rather, he first states the kind of substance, then adds the individual, and afterwards names the quality. Of qualities, then (as I said before), one may find opposition in lower things, some separable and some inseparable. But from God every quality is excluded, since nothing he is called is other than himself (for he is simple and uncompounded); yet in thought (as we said before) being comes before being of such a kind. Therefore, taking it up again, we say that if each of the things he says are opposite is a living and unbegotten substance (they would not deny it), then either both are good (so that, for reverent speech, the opposite they speak of may be held to be what does not exist at all, because of the one who is truly good; for we do not reverse this), or both are evil. But the unbegotten is wholly good. For example, since God is unbegotten, does he have this very not-having-been-begotten as an evil? By no means; plainly as a good. What allotment, then, makes this very thing and name fair and good in God, but its opposite, evil, in evil (as they say)? For in coming into being a difference might be found (a difference, though not an opposition); but what difference could one find in being unbegotten, much less an opposition? It is therefore wholly impossible for unbegotten to be opposite to unbegotten. For if anything were opposite, it ought neither to be nor to be called anything the same as its opposite, so as to have no communion in anything with it; for if it were not opposite in every way, in so far as it shares, it is not opposite. Opposite, however, is non-being to being; and perhaps not even this, for it does not fight. But being is not opposite to being. And if being wholly agrees with being, it is the one who alone truly is that gives being its beginning in all things.

They themselves also say that everything opposite to God must be ascribed to matter. For example, if we call God light, the opposite is darkness; if good, that is evil; and if we call God truth itself, plainly the opposite will be called falsehood. But how could what truly exists (as they suppose matter does) be falsehood? For what does not exist, if it were said to exist, would be a falsehood; but what exists, and truly exists, being true by its very existence, could not be a falsehood. For if someone says it exists, he speaks the truth; and if he does not say that it exists, so as not to speak the truth, still he could not say that it does not exist, so as to lie; and if he does say that it does not exist, he lies in his thought. So it is not itself falsehood, for it truly exists,

Then, if they call the good incorruption, they will name evil corruption. But what would corruption be the corruption of? Of the good it is impossible. And if it were the corruption of itself, in the many ages it would have corrupted itself, and they imagine in vain that it exists. And how could it be corruption? For corruption always destroys something else, not itself. If it destroyed itself, it would never have come to subsist at all; for it will be seen to be destroying itself rather than existing, since an incorruptible corruption cannot be conceived according to the common notions. And what is unbegotten and eternal is wholly incorruptible, and therefore also immortal; for to be unbegotten is above being incorruptible. If, then, never having come into being belongs to matter, which is the greater thing, how will the lesser not belong to it as well, not being destroyed? And if it is not destroyed, being eternal, it could not be a corruption of itself, and there would be no substance of corruption.

When those who set out from the madman hear such arguments, they are at a loss and say, “Whence, then, come evils? Whence the disorder that appears in things?” But it has often been said that through ignorance of the arrangement of things and of the divine governance they have produced for themselves an erroneous and blasphemous knowledge: through ignorance of the things they thought they knew, which they knew worse than when they were ignorant of them, losing what they sought more truly than before they sought it. But the discourse will in due time, God granting, show that what they regard as the disorder of things is the highest order, and will show that of the things they call evils some are evil only as deeds done, and others are in no way evil in substance.

“For there was once,” he says, “a time when matter was in disorder, and it begot and grew and went on putting forth many powers. Having grown, then, it was carried upward, not knowing that the good existed. And when, carried up further, it saw the land and the light of the good, it tried to set foot on what was not its own. But the good one sends a certain power, to which he gives the name he pleases, supposedly to guard the borders, but in truth to be a bait that would bring about the unwilling chastening of matter”; and that is what happened. For when matter saw the power that had been sent, it rushed toward it as though in love, and seizing it with greater force it swallowed it, and was bound in a way like a wild beast. For they use this illustration too: that by the incantation of the power that was sent it was put to sleep. In this way, he says, there came about a mixing and blending of the swallowed power of the good and of the matter that swallowed it, and so from both this universe was fashioned, by the good, clearly, for evil would not have planned the making of a world. Hence, they say, some things are good and others evil, since that blending and meeting of the two appears in the opposition of things here. He defines every soul as belonging to the portion of the good, and the body and the flesh as belonging to matter, which in one way holds the soul as in a prison and in another is held like a beast by the incantation. So, having outwitted matter, the good one became (he says) the creator of the world, not because he aspired to create it (for matter resists him), but because of the uprising of evil, which he intended to chasten. Yet it did not prove possible to remove the poison of evil from the visible world, and that it remains is shown, he says, by the disorder and (as he supposes) the inequality of our affairs: that one man is rich and another poor, one honoured and another without honour, and the like. And the good one’s concern is to free the soul from evil and in a way to draw it up out of matter; and this happens through the moon, as it waxes and wanes, as we think we see. For in truth (he says) the moon, like a water jar, is filled from the substance held captive and is emptied into the good of the same kind. Even if he does not say it in these words, this is what he means to say; it has been put by us much more decently, for in him the outlandishness and implausibility of the narrative is very great. The other things he tells like an old woman’s tales and writes in the Syrian tongue (how the earth is carried, where he does not escape the myth of the poets; how rains arise, that they are the sweat of the rulers of matter), these and such sideshows of his contests it would be superfluous to bring forward for refutation. What he writes in his raving about each subject should be made known to all, but we must by no means consent to stretch the discourse into endless prattle; it is enough to refute the main point of his irrational madness and to despise the rest. And if it did not happen that the discourse on providence necessarily includes this hypothesis (for through that discourse it is fitting to show that all things, being well and divinely ordered, proclaim the ineffable wisdom of God), it would be laughable to think the doctrines set out worthy even of a reply; for, heaped together outside the common notions, they carry their own refutation with sensible people. It would have been enough, having shown no less that two principles, and especially two opposite principles, could not exist, to treat at once of man and of the rest of creation; but nothing prevents us from seeing the implausibility of the doctrines set out as well.

For matter, he says, was once in disorder. What disorder? Being by itself? Or against whom? For no wrongdoing could be wrongdoing against itself; it needs someone else against whom it may be done. Against whom, then, was it disorderly, when it shared in nothing else? Or what is the meaning of its disorder? First, he says, as it went on it begot and grew. Then, being eternal, it begot eternally. For it must be one of two things: either it did this by reasoning and was master of its will, or it begot by necessity of nature and was compelled by its nature never not to beget. But they deny it reasoning and knowledge and introduce an irrational nature. If, then, it was carried eternally by necessity of nature toward its emissions, however long one may say the stretch of time is from when it was restrained until now, plainly the unbegotten one was begetting for ten thousand times as many ages before this, and what is eternal will have no room to begin anything new. For either it will begin something new by nature and never had ceased doing so (if this should even be called something new), so that the good one’s dealing with it has no beginning in time at all; or it did this by reasoning and has reason and knowledge, and the hypothesis of an irrational evil is overturned. Whether, then, it rose up by reasoning or by irrational impulse, what reason was there for it to let endless ages pass before such an uprising? For the time from when he says it was restrained until now would be a point of time compared with the infinite ages before it; for what has a beginning and an end is bounded, but those ages are altogether endless, eternal and unbegotten. Then, if it was stirred to evil by reasoning toward the uprising, how was the impossibility of the attempt not also cut short by reasoning, since it is impossible to overrun invincible wisdom? This is why they have avoided granting it reasoning and knowledge, so that the fiction of the uprising against God may have room. And necessarily, being drawn by ignorance and an irrational nature, it will not wait endless and infinite ages arming itself and surrounding itself with power, so as to become readier for its daring. For even if it became greater by what it begot, it did not increase the impulse of its nature, nor did its natural motion gain anything, nor would it have waited first to grow and then rise up; for that belongs to the purpose of a rational nature doing evil. And how could there be growth of evil, or addition through emissions? For if it is perfected in evil by what it begets, the evil was imperfect and not at the extreme of evil. But if each of the opposites is perfect and extreme by its own definition, evil will by no means seem to grow through its emissions, nor will it become bolder, since it is not rational, nor will it take them on to help itself; for evil will then seem to have been imperfect before it bore offspring, not only in evil but also in strength and might, which is foreign to the unbegotten.