Against the Manichees 1.35–2.14

What deeds, then, shall we reckon to evil? Those that seem evil, which are good when they are done with the intention of virtue? And what shall we ascribe to the good? Those that appear good, which become evil by the reasoning behind them? Then we shall not assign either strictly to either, but shall judge only the rational and most commanding part of the mind of the one who acts, whether it undertook what was done rightly or not. And that the most commanding part of human thought belongs entirely, by his account, to the better part of the soul, the madman’s followers would not deny even if they went mad ten thousand times over. So Mani has passed a wholly unjust sentence on the matter he himself invented, charging it with things that in no way belong to it, if indeed it were the cause of the things done among men; on the contrary, these would reasonably be thought to belong rather to the portion of the good, if indeed there are two opposite principles, according to his madness.

He says that God is anxious to take back to himself the swallowed power, which he calls the soul of all things, so that what is his own may not go on being bound to matter and punished endlessly for ever. Why, then, did he risk it in the first place, so that for so long an age it could not even draw breath, and suffered rather than acted? If the myth had held that God suffered no insult to his own substance and was not held fast by matter even for the briefest moment (which would be most unfitting), but that it was something else, utterly foreign to his nature, and that this too was at once rescued, so that he might seem to have carried out such a dealing as a figure rather than by submission, the fiction would have had at least some plausibility in its falsehood. But as it is, they say that a boundless age has passed and that this power, which is from God’s nature, remains shut in; so that he himself seems to be the one held fast, through the likeness of what is held fast and its being from his nature. That is why he longs with greater eagerness to gather it back to himself, while matter remains simple and unaffected, as one that acted rather than suffered. From this it is plain that everything the deceiver put together he composed as blasphemy against God, who did none of these things to himself.

He wishes, then, and is eager (he says) to take that power back to himself. And this is the salvation and blessedness they hope for: that what is God’s own should be given back to him. Does he then wait for the end for himself, hoping to receive a benefit, if he is to recover the freedom of what is from his nature, so as to build up what he destroyed and nothing more? And does he sit, fed on hope, enduring and looking to the end, so that he may in a way free himself from evil? If that is slow and does not come quickly, he himself would be the one punished by the delay. For plainly the speed of the end is not in his power either; otherwise he would long ago have used it and enjoyed what he hoped for.

For there is another ridiculous account of the madman’s: that the beings of matter, perceiving that they will perish miserably as the light is taken away little by little, devised in return the making of the flesh, the greatest bond for souls. So plainly, by his account, as long as they keep the flesh going, so long will the souls of the good be held fast; and it will be in their power that the world is not bounded in time, and its end will not be in the power of the good.

What might one say, seeing that the madman’s account never stands still, but, shifted this way and that, is refuted by itself? For while he says that God is the creator of the world, he then says that the beings of matter set up the flesh against him, as though God shared the work of creation with them, and in this suffered violence, and completed the universe by exchange with them, not by his own will. And as though the deceiver had forgotten his own hypothesis, he says that the removal of the power mixed with matter will be ruinous to matter, the power through which he supposed matter, disorderly at first, was chastened. For if by its presence it binds evil, by withdrawing it will let it loose again, and it will be very much according to the old …

… this is a cause of joy to matter too, the removal of this power, as of a pleasure taken away. If, then, even if not before the end, there is still hope for it to return to God, having been separated from him, why did he decide in the first place that it should undergo for a boundless age vain toil and evil filth, and set its being taken up again in place of the hope of blessedness? For matter has nowhere been shown to have been chastened at all; on the contrary, it has gained more power for devising wicked deeds. “But it had to be bound,” he says. When, then, the power held captive is drawn out little by little, what will happen? Evidently matter will return to its natural disorder. “No,” he says, “for at the end he will overcome it, and making it a clod he will cause it to be burned up by itself.” Why, then, did he not do this at the beginning? Did he not wish to, or was he not able? If he did not wish to, how will he wish to later? Having changed his mind, or having judged it better? And in any case it was not the part of a good being not to abolish evil wholly at the beginning, if he was able. But if he was not able, the danger of weakness rises up against the one who invented this; and how will he be able to later? By taking on a power he did not have, or by growing or increasing? For if both opposites are unbegotten, neither admits growth or diminution. So the barbarian’s whole fiction is incoherent. And why does he say that it has perceived the greater part, or at least the lesser part, of the power mixed with matter being drawn off, if indeed ever since the moon waxes and wanes God goes on recovering his own little by little? Yet so long an age has passed, and neither has the human race diminished in the number of the living, nor has any kind of four-footed animal undergone any decrease; but what comes to be comes to be and passes away as usual, and humanity has increased even more in number. Whence, then, does that raving man think that the power he invents, which he says was mixed with evil, is being removed little by little, if things in the world stay the same in the same way? The measure of the day is the same, and the same that of the night; neither has the light diminished nor the darkness increased; for the course of the sun and the moon is the same, and the one order established from the beginning remains.

We must also ask this: will the souls that have sinned and been carried into countless evils in this life pay the penalty for their wrongdoing or not? If they will pay it, as he himself admits when he says that they will be fixed in the clod together with evil, God will be found punishing his own nature; and what could be more absurd than that? But if they will go unpunished, sin will not only be painless and without loss, but would seem to have the advantage over righteousness, if in the present age it brings pleasure to the one who pursues it and in the age to come is no cause of punishment. And besides all this, wonder at this too in him, where he says that while evil is busy here, God meanwhile fills up with earth the deep from which matter emerged; in his most dreadful derangement he does not understand that, if what is thrown in is from the land of the good, how does it find room in the opposite place? And if it is from the parts of evil, it will not shut out what is its own, which started from there. And God sits, according to the madman, carrying earth through the age and little by little filling up certain depths. Oh, the irrational madness, to which in most points even to reply is laughable!

The discourse now leads us to serious discussion about God. For what has been said to overturn that man’s mythology was perhaps no different from play. So, lest we too incur laughter among sensible people by examining too curiously a fiction so incoherent, we shall not think worthy of discussion the many more mythical things the madman has invented (and they are very many), and shall now try to show that evil nowhere exists in substance, that no beginningless principle of matter is set against God, but that there is one principle of the universe and one God who made all things good and worthy of his wisdom. For when his followers have been refuted in argument about their incoherent principles, they fall back on this question, as hard to settle and as offering many handholds against the one who argues with them, saying, “Whence, then, come evils?”

We say boldly that, since there is one God who made all things, nothing in existing things is evil in substance, but all things are very good, good in different ways, and made for various uses; and nothing that has come into being has come into being without reason, but each existing thing, small and great, has in itself the reason for its being, whether in heaven, on earth or in the sea. And like a sound and complete body, God’s ineffable wisdom has framed this universe by the arrangement of its parts and members, so that whatever you remove in thought from created things as superfluous and foreign to use, the whole body seems to be mutilated; since what seems quite contemptible among existing things helps to complete the perfection of the body, and nothing among existing things is idle, or made in vain, or put in for superfluous display. Only the injustice of sinning men is reasonably and rightly superfluous, and truly evil; yet it does not come from a beginningless evil, which, though it does not exist, Mani imagined as existing, as the discourse has already sufficiently hinted in what came before and will show more clearly in what follows. So, having first dealt with this, we shall proceed in order, showing that nothing that exists is evil in substance, and that whatever God arranges in the course of generation he arranges fittingly for his wisdom and to the advantage of those for whom he does these things.

God, then, made a world, and on this those against whom the discourse is directed are not in dispute. For even if they turn the world, which is ordered, into disorder, yet they agree about the manner and the cause of its coming into being. In this world God set man, a part of the whole but a rational citizen of it; and the other things, which have no bearing on virtue or vice, he has kept for himself to govern, but virtue or vice alone he has made to lie in man’s power, having placed beforehand in his nature the knowledge of each, so that, carrying it with him like an eye, he may not only travel through life with perfect knowledge but also be himself the doer of virtue’s achievements. A man who does wrong, then, is justly charged with sinning. For if he commits sin without being able to keep from it, he incurs unjust blame; but if, being able not to do it, he does the opposite, he is reasonably charged as a wrongdoer. And sin is rightly called a charge when it is done against reason (which can be used everywhere), so that everything done against reason is sin, even if it takes its occasion from what is natural. For it is the irrational use of natural things that makes sin, and there is reason in us that tests natural things; so sin does not go unnoticed when it is done. If, then, we exercise the reason in us for the practice of virtue, as we exercise the body, we make it healthy and strong by well-measured movement; but if we do not think it worth exercise and care, it grows weak and dim and at last, neglected, is maimed. And it lies in our power everywhere to use the reason in us, as builders use the square, for the exactness of virtue, and to cultivate it like seeds sown in the earth, which perish when they are neglected.

Here the doubtful point of the inquiry arises. Why have we been exposed to so great a danger, having it in our own power to be earnest or not, so that we do not turn out wholly good, but mostly (not merely sometimes) evil? The danger is necessary, not merely useful, since otherwise we would miss everything. For if God had made us wholly unable to sin, we would not have become good. For among men the good man is the just and self-controlled man; and he becomes just by keeping from injustice, and is made self-controlled by fleeing licentiousness. So the power over opposites makes the acquisition possible, since if someone does not have the power to be licentious, he could not become self-controlled; for one might say, “Who is so able to act that he has not acted licentiously?” For inability to be licentious does not make self-control, nor does weakness toward injustice make justice; rather, to be able to act but to refrain by reason, this is the virtue of self-control and justice; and not only to be able, but to be provoked by nature, so that there may be true praise for choosing not to act. For this alone, and no other, can be found among men as virtue. God must not be called self-controlled or brave and the like (for he is above human virtue; and even if he is called just, it is in another sense, not as we are); but we are asking how man, as man, could become good. For to each created thing a measure of nature has been set, which it is impossible to exceed, and not to fall short of it is complete virtue. What measure, then, has been set for man for virtue and for becoming good? Self-control, justice and the rest; for it is impossible for a man to become good beyond these. And if self-control is mastery of pleasures, the opposites of self-control must lie in our power, against which mastery is exercised, the name and work of self-control. Not to have the pleasures in one’s power plainly deprives one of self-control; and the same holds for justice and the rest. And if someone objects that we ought to be incapable of the opposites (licentiousness and injustice), as God is, such a person says nothing else than that we ought not to be human; as if someone, watching an eagle flying high above, were annoyed at the nature of the horse and bitterly blamed it as not like the eagle’s, when he ought to examine a horse according to a horse’s nature.

God made man a man, that is, a soul with a body; for the inhabitant of the world is bodily. If, then, he becomes good as far as human nature allows, he would be found approved. So we must ask how man could become good, if God has made him. Then man would become good if he were self-controlled and just. For if it is possible for man to become good in a better way, the Creator is to be blamed for not making man good in that way. But if, as far as human nature goes, man could need nothing better than self-control and the rest, we must ask again how it is possible for man to be self-controlled and just; for his Creator wishes him to be these. Self-control, then, could not come about without the presence of its opposite, and likewise justice; otherwise there would be neither self-control nor justice. And if it were not possible in this way to become just and self-controlled, man could not become just and self-controlled in any other way; and then the Creator might reasonably be blamed for making it impossible for man to become good, I mean self-controlled and just, the only way, and no other, in which he would win good repute and be shown worthy of the wisdom of the one who made him.

And if the objector insists that man ought to have become self-controlled by nature and not by toil, he again abandons what self-control is and turns aside to an irrational choice: he grants that without self-control and justice it is impossible to be worthy of the Creator, but he is unwilling to examine the manner of acquiring them; namely, that what comes about by a bond of nature would not be self-control, which is known in no other way than by resistance to pleasures. … It needs, then, things that oppose it, so that by fighting and mastering them it may be called and become self-control. And so too with the rest.

So he has made man by nature neither good nor evil, but has entrusted to his reason the choice of the better. And if he is neither good nor evil, what he is remains to be asked. Consider the little child, known by the removal of the extremes, I mean neither good nor evil. Its substance is fair, but it has not yet acquired the good that comes by virtue. So too gold is fair by nature, but not good in the sense of virtue, since it is lifeless; and precious stones likewise, and all existing things, each according to the beauty proper to it to the eye. On this account man too is fair, very fair, in substance and in his very being, but the good, which comes only through virtue, he acquires by toil; and that is why God has made this lie in his power. If, then, he had given the power but had not placed beforehand in his nature the knowledge of virtue and vice, he would have seemed to set a blind charioteer over a very swift chariot. But since he joined both together, power for acquiring the better and knowledge for discerning and for safety in choosing, he made the mind a skilled charioteer as well, and it will drive the chariot of nature safely, unless it falls asleep on the course and is thrown off by pleasures.

In substance and nature man is fair, like gold, like a precious stone, as a work of God; but he is good, or on the contrary evil, by purpose. These lie before him as things that can be done; they are qualities that come upon him according to the upbringing he receives and the choice of his purpose, so that evil, which consists only in action, does not exist before it is done. Man does have power over evil, which can be done, not in order to do it, but so that by not doing it he may be shown to be excellent. For if he did not have the power to do it, he would have seemed to suffer envy from the Creator, to hinder his good repute and to deprive him of freedom, as not having it in his power to become good; so that what seems a disadvantage is most truly an advantage of nature. As it is, evil comes upon him by no means by force, since it does not exist in substance. But if he did not have power over it, he would not have it in his power to flee it. For he flees non-being not as existing, but as able to come to be by his doing. And how would he have acquired hatred of evil, which is most beautiful, unless, being able to do such things, he willingly refused them? For virtue among men is hardly anything other than refusal of evil: the self-controlled man is the one who is not licentious, the just man the one who is not unjust, and so with the rest. God is good not by not doing wrong, even though he is able, but only by doing good (that is why he alone is good); but among men the good first consists in fleeing the worse, the power over which must be present, so that it may be in the power of one who wishes to become good not to do it. For even if the perfect man is required also to do good deeds besides fleeing their opposites, still fleeing the worse counts for more toward good repute. So one would find no one among men who never stumbles, since that would be more highly esteemed because of the difficulty of keeping from sin, for virtue is characterized above all in this way; but a good deed we find even among the very wicked. It is plain, then, that man is benefited by the power to do wrong, by keeping from which (and in no other way) he wins good repute.

Man, therefore, has been honoured with freedom over virtue and vice, having by nature the knowledge of these, which can be done but do not exist before they are done. For where would the deed be, if the doer did not exist? So evil comes to be and ceases to be as it is done and not done. Indeed God too, being good and knowing only how to do good, does no evil; yet he neither keeps from evil through ignorance nor is wholly separated from it through inability. For how is he ignorant of it, he who teaches us not to do it? And how is it reasonable to think that God keeps from evil through inability? For the good one is good not by inability to do wrong, but by the perfect power of not willing it. And if we say that God cannot do anything unjust, we speak rightly.

Yet we do not take “cannot” to mean weakness, but the height of not willing and the unshakeable refusal of the worse. For being unchangeable in nature, he has an unchangeable not-willing to do any evil, so that he is able, but does not do it, by the unchangeable nature of his not willing. And so there is no evil with God, not only in that it does not exist, but in that it is not even done. But since among men the refusal of evil is in some way not unchangeable (even if someone has risen high in virtue), evil seems to exist only when it is done, and does not exist beforehand when it is not done.

In this way God has honoured man, making him in his own image, so that, as he himself is good by freedom of nature, so man too may be an emulator of God by freedom of purpose, keeping from sin not by an inability of nature, but honouring virtue in freedom. This is sufficiently indicated also by the fact that many changes toward virtue and vice are often found among men, in those in whom neither of these is fixed by long habit. For what we do by necessity of nature admits no change; but what we do by the reason of our purpose is now one way, now another in us, according to the inclinations that arise in our purpose. Sinning, then, is not natural and necessary for men; doing evil is a matter of choice. And the toil of virtue also indicates the free choice of those who have acquired it: if even a little negligence arises in them, the possession is in danger,

And if someone brings forward against the argument the man who sometimes wishes to keep from bad things but says that he is unable, let him learn that a long-standing bodily affliction too is not easily dislodged. So too a bad state of the soul, set hard by time, does not easily escape what it is long accustomed to, unless some greater and good emotion comes in and drives out the former one. For example, someone who has often rushed uncontrollably toward some bad deed, or who has set his mind on adultery, has been checked on seeing the woman’s husband, by fear of his desire being exposed or by remembering the laws; another, set on robbery, has punished his desire by dread of the penalty. So sins are the works of passions, not outgrowths of nature. And all of us who have a share of decency honour and love the laws, which punish evildoers without mercy. So by our deeds we declare by common consent that people are not forced by nature to do evil, but that by choosing it in their purpose they show themselves worthy of punishment.

And since the madman’s followers try in another way too to prove that there are two opposite natures in us, from the fact that we sometimes think of bad things and at other times of good, it must be pointed out that, since the knowledge of both is natural in us, we are necessarily moved to think of what we know, losing nothing at all, but gaining everything by preferring the better. For how could men’s voluntary movement toward the better have been attested, if our thought did not naturally reach out to both, injustice and justice? Knowledge is necessary for discernment; thought feels its way over what is known; and purpose inclines to what it wishes. These are not different parts of the soul, but its activities, as it were. Just as our eye naturally has the power to see one thing or another, it may be bad deeds and good, and would be the cause of neither (for the mind takes over from sight and judges what is seen), so too thought, like the eye, necessarily moves toward what can come to be, not forcing the soul toward it, but reaching out to it by natural knowledge. Indeed we can, if we wish, think of opposites at the same time, but we cannot do opposites at the same time. So action is defined by the choice of purpose, while thought bears witness to the natural knowledge of virtue and vice. For if we did not know these beforehand, we would neither have thought of them nor chosen the better … deprived of it by choosing the worse altogether, taken over beforehand by bad upbringing. That is why men should take more trouble over the upbringing of children than farmers over the growth of plants. To take our thinking, then, as evidence of two opposite natures would be like saying that sight is a mixture of all colours because it reaches out to them all.

That man, then, necessarily received the possibility of sinning, being so made that he could not otherwise acquire the ability to do right, which God, being good and without envy, placed in his nature; and that, so far at least, the wrongs among men give no reason to set a beginningless matter and evil against God, or to think that evil exists in substance at all, rather than having its existence in action: this has been demonstrated by what has been said.