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ST. AUGUSTINE

REPLY TO FAUSTUS THE MANICHAEAN, Books XXIII-XXXIII
[CONTRA FAUSTUM MANICHAEUM.]

[Translated by Rev. Richard Stothert, M.A., Bombay.]


BOOK XXIII: FAUSTUS RECURS TO THE GENEALOGICAL DIFFICULTY AND INSISTS THAT
EVEN ACCORDING TO MATTHEW JESUS WAS NOT SON OF GOD UNTIL HIS BAPTISM.
AUGUSTIN SETS FORTH THE CATHOLIC VIEW OF THE RELATION OF THE DIVINE AND THE
HUMAN IN THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

   1. FAUSTUS said: On one occasion, when addressing a large audience, I
was asked by one of the crowd, Do you believe that Jesus was born of Mary?
I replied, Which Jesus do you mean? for in the Hebrew it is the name of
several people. One was the son of Nun, the follower of Moses;(1) another
was the son of Josedech the high priest;(2) again, another is spoken of as
the son of David;(3) and another is the Son of God.(4) Of which of these do
you ask whether I believe him to have been born of Mary? His answer was,
The Son of God, of course. On what evidence, said I, oral or written, am I
to believe this? He replied, On the authority of Matthew. What, said I, did
Matthew write? He replied, "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the
son of David, the son of Abraham "(Matt. i. 1). Then said I, I was afraid
you were going to say, The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son
of God; and I was prepared to correct you. Now that you have quoted the
verse accurately, you must nevertheless be advised to pay attention to the
words. Matthew does not profess to give an account of the generation of the
Son of God, but of the son of David.

   2. I will, for the present, suppose that this person was right in
saying that the son of David was born of Mary. It still remains true, that
in this whole passage of the generation no mention is made of the Son of
God till we come to the baptism; so that it is an injurious
misrepresentation on your part to speak of this writer as making the Son of
God the inmate of a womb. The writer, indeed, seems to cry out against such
an idea, and in the very title of his book to clear himself of such
blasphemy, asserting that the person whose birth he describes is the son of
David, not the Son of God. And if you attend to the writer's meaning and
purpose, you will see that what he wishes us to believe of Jesus the Son of
God is not so much that He was born of Mary, as that He became the Son of
God by baptism at the river Jordan. He tells us that the person of whom he
spoke at the outset as the son of David was baptized by John, and became
the Son of God on this particular occasion, when about thirty years old,
according to Luke, when also the voice was heard saying to Him, "Thou art
my Son; this day have I begotten Thee."(5) It appears from this, that what
was born, as is supposed,  of Mary thirty years before, was not the Son of
God, but what was afterwards made so by baptism at Jordan, that is, the new
man, the same as in us when we were converted from Gentile error, and
believe in God. This doctrine may or may not agree with what you call the
Catholic faith; at all events, it is what Matthew says, if Matthew is the
real author. The words, Thou art my Son, this day I have begotten Thee, or,
This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, do not occur in
connection with the story of Mary's motherhood, but with the putting away
of sin at Jordan. This is what is written; and if you believe this
doctrine, you must be called a Matthaean, for you will no longer be a
Catholic. The Catholic doctrine is well known; and it is as unlike
Matthew's representations as it is unlike the truth. In the words of your
creed, you declare that you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who
was born of the Virgin Mary. According to you, therefore, the Son of God
comes from Mary; according to Matthew, from the Jordan; while we believe
Him to come from God. Thus the doctrine of Matthew, if we are right in
assigning the authorship to him, is as different from yours as from ours;
only we acknowledge that he is more cautious than you in ascribing the
being born of a woman to the son of David, and not to the Son of God. As
for you, your only alternative is to deny that those statements were made,
as they appear to be, by Matthew, or to allow that you have abandoned the
faith of the apostles.

   3. For our part, while no one can alter our conviction that the Son of
God comes from God, we might indulge a credulous disposition, to the extent
of admitting the fiction, that Jesus became the Son of God at Jordan, but
not that the Son of God was born of a woman. Then, again, the son said to
have been born of Mary cannot properly be called the son of David, unless
it is ascertained that he was begotten by Joseph. You say he was not, and
therefore you must allow him not to have been the son of David, even though
he were the son of Mary. The genealogy proceeds in the line of Hebrew
fathers from Abraham to David, and from David to Joseph; and as we are told
that Joseph was not the real father of Jesus, Jesus cannot be said to be
the son of David. To begin with calling Jesus the son of David, and then to
go on to tell of his being born of Mary before the consummation of her
marriage with Joseph, is pure madness. And if the son of Mary cannot be
called the son of David, on account of his not being the son of Joseph,
still less can the name be given to the Son of God.

   4. Moreover, the Virgin herself appears to have belonged not to the
tribe of Judah, to which the Jewish kings belonged, and which all agree was
David's tribe, but to the priestly tribe of Levi. This appears from the
fact that the Virgin's father Joachim was a priest; and his name does not
occur in the genealogy. How, then, can Mary be brought within the pale of
relationship to David, when she has neither father nor husband belonging to
it? Consequently, Mary's son cannot possibly be the son of David, unless
you can bring the mother into some connection with Joseph, so as to be
either his wife or his daughter.

   5. AUGUSTIN replied: The Catholic, which is also the apostolic,
doctrine, is, that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is both the Son of God
in His divine nature, and the Son of David after the flesh. This we prove
from the writings of the evangelists and apostles, so that no one can
reject our proofs without also rejecting these writings. Faustus' plan is
to represent some one as saying a few words, without bringing forward any
evidence in answer to Faustus' fertile sophistry. But with all his
ingenuity, the proofs I have to give will leave Faustus no reply, but that
these passages are spurious interpolations in the sacred record,--a reply
which serves as a means of escaping, or of trying to escape, the force of
the plainest statements in Holy Scripture. We have already in this treatise
sufficiently exposed the irrational absurdity, as well as the daring
profanity, of such criticism; and not to exceed all limits, we must avoid
repetition. It cannot be necessary that we should bring together all the
passages scattered throughout Scripture, which show, in answer to Faustus,
that in the books of the highest and most sacred authority He who is called
the only-begotten Son of God, even God with God, is also called the Son of
David, on account of His taking the form of a servant from the Virgin Mary,
the wife of Joseph. To instance only Matthew, since Faustus' argument
refers to this Gospel, as the whole book cannot be quoted here, let whoever
choose read it, and see how Matthew carries on to the passion and the
resurrection the narrative of Him whom He calls the Son of David in the
introduction to the genealogy. Of this same Son of David he speaks as being
conceived and born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. He also applies to
this the declaration of the prophet, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and
shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which is being
interpreted, God with us."(1) Again, He who was called, even from the
Virgin's womb, God-with-us, is said to have heard, when He was baptized by
John, a voice from heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased."(2) Will Faustus say that to be called God is less than to be
called the Son of God? He seems to think so, for he tries to prove that
because this voice came from heaven at the time of the baptism, therefore,
according to Matthew, He must then have become the Son of God; whereas the
same evangelist, in a previous passage, quotes the sacred announcement made
by the prophet, in which the child horn of the Virgin is called God-with-
us.

   6. It is remarkable how, amid his wild irrelevancies, this wretched
trifler loses no available opportunity of darkening the declarations of
Scripture by the fabulous creations of his own fancy. Thus he says of
Abraham, that when he took his handmaid to wife he disbelieved God's
promise that he should have a child by Sarah; whereas, in fact, this
promise had not at that time been given. Then he accuses Abraham of
falsehood in calling Sarah his sister, not having read what may be learned
on the authority of Scripture about the family of Sarah. Abraham's son
Isaac also he accuses of falsely calling his wife his sister, though a
distinct account is given of her family. Then he accuses Jacob of there
being a daily quarrel among his four wives, which should be the first to
appropriate him on his return from the field, while nothing of this is said
in Scripture. And this is the man who pretends to hate the writers of the
sacred books for their falsehood, and who has the effrontery so to
misrepresent even the gospel record, though its authority is admitted by
all as possessing the most abundant confirmation, as to try to make it
appear, not indeed that Matthew himself,--for in that case he would have
been forced to yield to apostolic authority,--but that some one under the
name of Matthew, has written about Christ what he refuses to believe, and
attempts to refute with a contumelious ingenuity!

   7. The voice from heaven at the Jordan should be compared with the
voice heard on the Mount.(1) In neither case do the words, "This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," imply that He was not the Son of
God before; for He who from the Virgin's womb took the form of a servant
"was in the form of God, and thought it no robbery to be equal with
God."(2) And the same Apostle Paul himself says distinctly elsewhere," "But
in the fullness of time, God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the
law;"(3) that is, a woman in the Hebrew sense, not a wife, but one of the
female sex. The Son of God is both Lord of David in His divine nature, and
Son of David as being of the seed of David after the flesh. And if it were
not profitable for us to believe this, the same apostle would not have made
it so prominent as he does, when he says to Timothy, "Remember that Christ
Jesus, of the seed of David, rose from the dead, according to my
gospel."(4) And he carefully enjoins believers to regard as accursed
whoever preaches another gospel contrary to this.

   8. This assailant of the holy Gospel need find no difficulty in the
fact that Christ is called the Son of David, though He was born of a
virgin, and though Joseph was not His real father; while the genealogy is
brought down by the evangelist Matthew, not to Mary, but to Joseph. First
of all, the husband, as the man, is the more honorable; and Joseph was
Mary's husband, though she did not live with him, for Matthew himself
mentions that she was called Joseph's wife by the angel; as it is also from
Matthew that we learn that Mary conceived not by Joseph, but by the Holy
Spirit. But if this, instead of being a true narrative written by Matthew
the apostle, was a false narrative written by some one else under his name,
is it likely that he would have contradicted himself in such an apparent
manner, and in passages so immediately connected, as to speak of the Son of
David as born of Mary without conjugal intercourse, and then, in giving His
genealogy, to bring it down to the very man with whom the Virgin is
expressly said not to have had intercourse, unless he had some reason for
doing so? Even supposing there were two writers, one calling Christ the Son
of David, and giving an account of Christ's progenitors from David down to
Joseph; while the other does not call Christ the Son of David, and says
that He was born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse with any man; those
statements are not irreconcilable, so as to prove that one or both writers
must be false. It will appear on reflection that both accounts might be
true; for Joseph might be called the husband of Mary, though she was his
wife only in affection, and in the intercourse of the mind, which is more
intimate than that of the body. In this way it might be proper that the
husband of the virgin-mother of Christ should have a place in the list of
Christ's ancestors. It might also be the case that some of David's blood
flowed in Mary herself, so that the flesh of Christ, although produced from
a virgin, still owed its origin to David's seed. But as, in fact, both
statements are made by one and the same writer, who informs us both that
Joseph was the husband of Mary and that the mother of Christ was a virgin,
and that Christ was of the seed of David, and that Joseph is in the list of
Christ's progenitors in the line of David, those who prefer the authority
of the sacred Gospel to that of heretical fiction must conclude that Mary
was not unconnected with the family of David, and that she was properly
called the wife of Joseph, because being a woman she was in spiritual
alliance with him, though there was no bodily connection. Joseph, too, it
is plain, could not be omitted in the genealogy; for, from the superiority
of his sex, such an omission would be equivalent to a denial of his
relation to the woman with whom he was inwardly united; and believers in
Christ are taught not to think carnal connection the chief thing in
marriage, as if without this they could not be man and wife, but to imitate
in Christian wedlock as closely as possible the parents of Christ, that so
they may have the more intimate union with the members of Christ.

   9. We believe that Mary, as well as Joseph, was of the family of David,
because we believe the Scriptures, which assert both that Christ was of the
seed of David after the flesh, and that His mother was the Virgin Mary, He
having no human father. Therefore, whoever denies the relationship of Mary
to David, evidently opposes the pre-eminent authority of these passages of
Scripture; and to maintain this opposition he must bring evidence in
support of his statement from writings acknowledged by the Church as
canonical and catholic, not from any writings he pleases. In the matters of
which we are now treating, only the canonical writings have any weight with
us; for they only are received and acknowledged by the Church spread over
all the world, which is itself a fulfillment of the prophecies regarding it
contained in these writings. Accordingly, I am not bound to admit the
uncanonical account of Mary's birth which Faustus adopts, that her father
was a priest of the tribe of Levi, of the name of Joachim. But even were I
to admit this account, I should still contend that Joachim must have in
some way belonged to the family of David, and had somehow been adopted from
the tribe of Judah into that of Levi; or if not he, one of his ancestors;
or, at least, that while born in the tribe of Levi, he had still some
relation to the line of David; as Faustus himself acknowledges that Mary,
though belonging to the tribe of Levi, could be given to a husband of the
tribe of Judah; and he expressly says that if Mary were Joseph's daughter,
the name Son of David would be applicable to Christ. In this way, by the
marriage of Joseph's daughter in the tribe of Levi, her son, though born in
the tribe of Levi, might not improperly be called the Son of David. And so,
if the mother of that Joachim, who in the passage quoted by Faustus is
called the father of Mary, married in the tribe of Levi while she belonged
to the tribe of Judah and to the family of David, there would thus be a
sufficient reason for speaking of Joachim and Mary and Mary's son as
belonging to the seed of David. If I felt obliged to pay any regard to the
apocryphal scripture in which Joachim is called the father of Mary, I
should adopt some such explanation as the above, rather than admit any
falsehood in the Gospel, where it is written both that Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, and our Saviour, was of the seed of David after the flesh, and
that He was born of the Virgin Mary. It is enough for us that the enemies
of these Scriptures, which record these truths and which we believe, cannot
prove against them any charge of falsehood.

   10. Faustus cannot pretend then I am unable to prove that Mary was of
the family of David, as I have shown him unable to prove that she was not.
I produce the strongest evidence from Scriptures of established authority,
which declare that Christ was of the seed of David, and that He was born
without a father of the Virgin Mary. Faustus expresses what he considers a
most becoming indignation against impropriety when he says, It is an
injurious misrepresentation of the writer to make him speak of the Son of
God as the inmate of a womb. Of course, the Catholic doctrine which teaches
that Christ the Son of God was born in the flesh of a virgin, does not make
the Son of God the inmate of her womb in the sense of having no existence
beyond it, as if He had abandoned the government of heaven and earth, or as
if He had left the presence of the Father. The mistake is with the
Manichaeans, whose understanding is so incapable of forming a conception of
anything except what is material, that they cannot comprehend how the Word
of God, who is the virtue and wisdom of God, while remaining in Himself and
with the Father, and while governing the universe, reaches from end to end
in strength, and sweetly orders all things.(1) In the faultless procedure
of this adorable providence, He appointed for Himself an earthly mother;
and to free His servants from the bondage of corruption He took in this
mother the form of a servant, that is, a mortal body; and this body which
He took He showed openly, and when it had been exposed, even to suffering
and death, He raised it again from the dead, and built again the temple
which had been destroyed. You who shrink from this doctrine as blasphemous,
make the members of your god to be confined not in a virgin's womb, but in
the wombs of all female animals, from elephants down to flies. Perhaps you
think the less of the true Christ, because the Word is said so to have
become incarnate in the Virgin's womb as to provide a temple for Himself in
human nature, while His own nature continued unaltered in its integrity;
and, on the other hand, you think the more of your god, because in the
bonds and pollution of his confinement in flesh, in the part which is to be
made fast to the mass of darkness, he seeks for help to no purpose, or is
even rendered powerless to ask for help.

BOOK XXIV: FAUSTUS EXPLAINS THE MANICHAEAN DENIAL THAT MAN WAS MADE BY GOD
AS APPLYING TO THE FLESHLY MAN NOT TO THE SPIRITUAL. AUGUSTIN ELUCIDATES
THE APOSTLE PAUL'S CONTRASTS BETWEEN FLESH AND SPIRIT SO AS TO EXCLUDE THE
MANICHAEAN VIEW.

   1. FAUSTUS said: We are asked the reason But we do not assert that man
is in no sense for our denial that man is made by God. made by God; we only
ask in what sense, and when, and how. For, according to the apostle, there
are two men, one of whom he calls sometimes the outer man, generally the
earthy, sometimes, too, the old man: the other he calls the inner or
heavenly or new man.(1) The question is, Which of these is made by God? For
there are likewise two times of our nativity; one when nature brought us
forth into this light, binding us in the bonds of flesh; and the other,
when the truth regenerated us on our conversion from error and our entrance
into the faith. It is this second birth of which Jesus speaks in the
Gospel, when He says, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God."(2) Nicodemus, not knowing what Christ meant, was at a
loss, and inquired how this could be, for an old man could not enter into
his mother's womb and be born a second time. Jesus said in reply, "Except a
man be born of water and of the Holy Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of
God." Then He adds, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Hence, as the birth in which our
bodies originate is not the only birth, but there is another in which we
are born again in spirit, an important question arises from this
distinction as to which of those births it is in which God makes us. The
manner of birth also is twofold. In the humiliating process of ordinary
generation, we spring from the heat of animal passion; but when we are
brought into the faith, we are formed under good instruction in honor and
purity in Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit. For this reason, in all
religion, and especially in the Christian religion, young children are
invited to membership. This is hinted at in the words of His apostle: "My
little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in
you."(3) The question, then, is not whether God makes man, but what man He
makes, and when, and how. For if it is when we are fashioned in the womb
that God forms us after His own image, which is the common belief of
Gentiles and Jews, and which is also your belief, then God makes the old
man, and produces us by means of sensual passion, which does not seem
suitable to His divine nature. But if it is when we are converted and
brought to a better life that we are formed by God, which is the general
doctrine of Christ and His apostles, and which is also our doctrine, in
this case God makes us new men, and produces us in honor and purity, which
would agree perfectly with His sacred and adorable majesty. If you do not
reject Paul's authority, we will prove to you from him what man God makes,
and when, and how. He says to the Ephesians, "That ye put off according to
your former conversation the old man, which is corrupt through deceitful
lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and put on the new man,
which after God is created in righteousness and holiness of truth."(4) This
shows that in the creation of man after the image of God, it is another man
that is spoken of, and another birth, and another manner of birth. The
putting off and putting on of which he speaks, point to the time of the
reception of the truth; and the assertion that the new man is created by
God implies that the old man is created neither by God nor after God. And
when he adds, that this new man is made in holiness and righteousness and
truth, he thus points to another manner of birth of which this is the
character, and which, as I have said, differs widely from the manner in
which bodily generation is effected. And as he declares that only the
former is of God, it follows that the latter is not. Again, writing to the
Colossians, he uses words to the same effect: "Put off the old man with his
deeds, and put on the new man, which is renewed in the knowledge of God
according to the image of Him who created Him in you." Here he not only
shows that iris the new man that God makes, but he declares the time and
manner of the formation, for the words in the knowledge of God point to the
time of believing. Then he adds, according to the image of Him who created
him, to make it clear that the old man is not the image of God, nor formed
by God. Moreover, the following words, "Where there is neither male nor
female, Jew nor Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian,''(5) show more plainly still
that the birth by which we are made male and female, Greeks and Jews,
Scythians and Barbarians, is not the birth in which God effects the
formation of man; but that the birth with which God has to do is that in
which we lose the difference of nation and sex and condition, and become
one like Him who is one, that is, Christ. So the same apostle says again,
"As many as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ: there is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither
bond nor free; but all are one in Christ."(6) Man, then, is made by God,
not when from one he is divided into many, but when from many he becomes
one. The division is in the first birth, or that of the body; union comes
by the second, which is immaterial and divine. This affords sufficient
ground for our opinion, that the birth of the body should be ascribed to
nature, and the second birth to the Supernal Majesty. So the same apostle
says again to the Corinthians, "I have begotten you in Christ Jesus by the
gospel;"(1) and, speaking of himself, to the Galatians, "When it pleased
Him, who separated me from my mother's womb, to reveal His Son in me, that
I might preach Him among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with
flesh and blood."(2) It is plain that everywhere he speaks of the second or
spiritual birth as that in which we are made by God, as distinct from the
indecency of the first birth, in which we are on a level with other animals
as regards dignity and purity, as we are conceived in the maternal womb,
and are formed, and brought forth. You may observe that in this matter the
dispute between us is not so much about a question of doctrine as of
interpretation. For you think that it is the old or outer or earthy man
that is said to have been made by God; while we apply this to the heavenly
man, giving the superiority to the inner or new man. And our opinion is not
rash or groundless, for we have learned it from Christ and His apostles,
who are proved to have been the first in the world who thus taught.

   2. AUGUSTIN replied: The Apostle Paul certainly uses the expression the
inner man for the spirit of the mind, and the outer man for the body and
for this mortal life; but we nowhere find him making these two different
men, but one, which is all made by God, both the inner and the outer.
However, it is made in the image of God only as regards the inner, which,
besides being immaterial, is rational, and is not possessed by the lower
animals. God, then, did not make one man after His own image, and another
man not after that image; but the one man, which includes both the inner
and the outer, He made after His own image, not as regards the possession
of a body and of mortal life, but as regards the rational mind with the
power of knowing God, and with the superiority as compared with all
irrational creatures which the possession of reason implies. Faustus allows
that the inner man is made by God, when, as he says, it is renewed in the
knowledge of God after the image of Him that created him. I readily admit
this on the apostle's authority. Why does not Faustus admit on the same
authority that "God has placed the members every one in the body, as it has
pleased Him"?(3) Here we learn from the same apostle that God is the framer
of the outer man too. Why does Faustus take only what he thinks to be in
his own favor, while he leaves out or rejects what upsets the follies of
the Manichaeans? Moreover, in treating of the earthy and the heavenly man,
and making the distinction between the mortal and the immortal, between
that which we are in Adam and that which we shall be in Christ, the apostle
quotes the declaration of the law regarding the earthy or natural body,
referring to the very book and the very passage where it is written that
God made the earthy man too. Speaking of the manner in which the dead shall
rise again, and of the body with which they shall come, after using the
similitude of the seeds of corn, that they are sown bare grain, and that
God gives them a body as it pleases Him, and to every seed his own body,--
thus, by the way, overthrowing the error of the Manichaeans, who say that
grains and plants, and all roots and shoots, are created by the race of
darkness, and not by God, who, according to them, instead of exerting power
in the production of these objects, is Himself subject to confinement in
them,--he goes on, after this refutation of Manichaean impieties, to
describe the different kinds of flesh. "All flesh," he says, "is not the
same flesh." Then he speaks of celestial and terrestrial bodies, and then
of the change of our body by which it will become spiritual and heavenly.
"It is sown," he says, "in dishonor, it shall rise in glory; it is sown in
weakness, it shall rise in power; it is sown a natural body, it shall rise
a spiritual body." Then, in order to show the origin of the animal body, he
says, "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body; as it is
written, The first man, Adam, was made a living soul."(4) Now this is
written in Genesis,(5) where it is related how God made man, and animated
the body which He had formed of the earth. By the old man the apostle
simply means the old life, which is a life in sin, and is after the manner
of Adam, of whom it is said, "By one man sin entered into the world, and
death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, in that all have
sinned."(6) Thus the whole of this man, both the inner and the outer part,
has become old because of sin, and liable to the punishment of mortality.
There is, however, a restoration of the inner man, when it is renewed after
the image of its Creator, in the putting off of unrighteousness--that is,
the old man, and putting on righteousness--that is, the new man. But when
that which is sown a natural body shall rise a spiritual body, the outer
man too shall attain the dignity of a celestial character; so that all that
has been created may be created anew, and all that has been made be remade
by the Creator and Maker Himself. This is briefly explained in the words:
"The body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of
righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised up Jesus from the dead
dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead will also quicken your
mortal bodies by His Spirit dwelling in you."(1) No one instructed in the
Catholic doctrine but knows that it is in the body that some are male and
some female, not in the spirit of the mind, in which we are renewed after
the image of God. But elsewhere the apostle teaches that God is the Maker
of both; for he says, "Neither is the woman without the man, nor the man
without the woman, in the Lord; for as the woman is of the man, so is the
man by the woman; but all things are of God."(2) The only reply given to
this, by the perverse stupidity of those who are alienated from the life of
God by the ignorance which is in them, on account of the blindness of their
heart, is, that whatever pleases them in the apostolic writings is true,
and whatever displeases them is false. This is the insanity of the
Manichaeans, who will be wise if they cease to be Manichaeans. As it is, if
they are asked whether it is He that remakes and renews the inner man
(which they acknowledge to be renewed after the image of God, and they
themselves quote the passage in support of this; and, according to Faustus,
God makes man when the inner man is renewed in the image of God), they will
answer, yes. And if we then go on to ask when God made what He now renews,
they must devise some subterfuge to prevent the exposure of their
absurdities. For, according to them, the inner man is not formed or created
or originated by God, but is part of His own substance sent against His
enemies; and instead of becoming old by sin, it is through necessity
captured and damaged by the enemy. Not to repeat all the nonsense they
talk, the first man they speak of is not the man of the earth earthy that
the apostle speaks of,(3) but an invention proceeding from their own
magazine of untruths. Faustus, though he chooses man as a subject for
discussion, says not a word of this first man; for he is afraid that his
opponents in the discussion might come to know something about him.

BOOK XXV: FAUSTUS SEEKS TO BRING INTO RIDICULE THE ORTHODOX CLAIM TO
BELIEVE IN THE INFINITY OF GOD BY CARICATURING THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. AUGUSTIN EXPRESSES HIS DESPAIR OF
BEING ABLE TO INDUCE THE MANICHAEANS TO ADOPT RIGHT VIEWS OF THE INFINITUDE
OF GOD SO LONG AS THEY CONTINUE TO REGARD THE SOUL AND GOD AS EXTENDED IN
SPACE.

   1. FAUSTUS said: Is God finite or infinite? He must be finite unless
you are mistaken in addressing Him as the God of Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob; unless, indeed, the being thus addressed is different from the God
you call infinite. In the case of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,
the mark of circumcision, which separated these men from fellowship with
other people, marked also the limit of God's power as extending only to
them. And a being whose power is finite cannot himself be infinite.
Moreover, in this address, you do not mention even the ancients before
Abraham, such as Enoch, Noah, and Shem, and others like them, whom you
allow to have been righteous though in uncircumcision; but because they
lacked this distinguishing mark, you will not call God their God, but only
of Abraham and his seed. Now, if God is one and infinite, what need of such
careful particularity in addressing Him, as if it was not enough to name
God, without adding whose God He is--Abraham's, namely, and Isaac's and
Jacob's; as if Abraham were a landmark to steer by in your invocation, to
escape shipwreck among a shoal of deities? The Jews, who are circumcised,
may very properly address this deity, as having a reason for it, because
they call God the God of circumcision, in contrast to the gods of
uncircumcision. But why you should do the same, it is difficult to
understand; for you do not pretend to have Abraham's sign, though you
invoke his God. If we understand the matter rightly, the Jews and their God
seem to have set marks upon one another for the purpose of recognition,
that they might not lose each ether. So God gave them the disgusting mark
of circumcision, that, in whatever land or among whatever people they might
be, they might by being circumcised be known to be His. They again marked
God by calling Him the God of their fathers, that, wherever He might be,
though among a crowd of gods, He might, on hearing the name God of Abraham,
God of Isaac, God of Jacob, know at once that He was addressed. So we often
see, in a number of people of the same name, that no one answers till
called by his surname. In the same way the shepherd or herdsman makes use
of a brand to prevent his property being taken by others. In thus marking
God by calling Him the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, you show not
only that He is finite, but also that you have no connection with Him,
because you have not the mark of circumcision by which He recognizes His
own. Therefore, if this is the God you worship, there can be no doubt of
His being finite. But if you say that God is infinite, you must first of
all give up this finite deity, and by altering your invocation, show your
penitence for your past errors. We have thus proved God to be finite,
taking you on your own ground. But to determine whether the supreme and
true God is infinite or not, we need only refer to the opposition between
good and evil. If evil does not exist, then certainly God is infinite;
otherwise He must be finite. Evil, however, undoubtedly exists; therefore
God is not infinite. It is where good stops that evil begins.

   2. AUGUSTIN replied: No one that knows you would dream of asking you
about the infinitude of God, or of discussing the matter with you. For,
before there can be any degree of spirituality in any of your conceptions,
you must first have your minds cleared by simple faith, and by some
elementary knowledge, from the illusions of carnal and material ideas. This
your our heresy prevents you from doing, for it invariably represents the
body and the soul and God as extended in space, either finite or infinite,
while the idea of space is applicable only to the body. As long as this is
the case, it will be better for you to leave this matter alone; for you can
teach no truth regarding it, any more than in other matters; and in this
you are unfit for learning, as you might do in other things, if you were
not proud and quarrelsome. For in such questions as how God can be finite,
when no space can contain Him; how He can be infinite, when the Son knows
Him perfectly; how He can be finite, and yet unbounded; how He can be
infinite, and yet perfect; how He can be finite, who is without measure;
how He can be infinite, who is the measure of all things--all carnal ideas
go for nothing; and if the carnality is to be removed, it must first become
ashamed of itself. Accordingly, your best way of ending the matter you have
brought forward of God as finite or infinite, is to say no more about it
till you cease going so far astray from Christ, who is the end of the law.
Of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob we have already said enough to
show why He who is the true God of all creatures wished to be familiarly
known by His people under this name. On circumcision, too, we have already
spoken in several places in answer to ignorant reproaches. The Manichaeans
would find nothing to ridicule in this sign if they would view it as
appointed by God, to be an appropriate symbol of the putting off of the
flesh. They ought thus to consider the rite with a Christian instead of a
heretical mind; as it is written, "To the pure all things are pure." But,
considering the truth of the following words, "To the unclean and
unbelieving nothing is pure, but even their mind and conscience are
defiled,"(1) we must remind our witty opponents, that if circumcision is
indecent, as they say it is, they should rather weep than laugh at it; for
their god is exposed to restraint and contamination in conjunction both
with the skin which is cut and with the blood which is shed.

BOOK XXVI: FAUSTUS INSISTS THAT JESUS MIGHT HAVE DIED THOUGH NOT BORN, BY
THE EXERCISE OF DIVINE POWER, YET HE REJECTS BIRTH AND DEATH ALIKE.
AUGUSTIN MAINTAINS THAT THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT EVEN GOD CANNOT DO, ONE
OF WHICH IS TO DIE. HE REFUTES THE DOCETISM OF THE MANICHAEANS.

   1. FAUSTUS said: You ask, If Jesus was not born, how did He die? Well
this is a probability, such as one makes use of in want of proofs. We will,
however, answer the question by examples taken from what you generally
believe. If they are true, they will prove our case; if they are false,
they will help you no more than they will us. You say then, How could Jesus
die, if He were not man? In return, I ask you, How did Elias not die,
though he was a man? Could a mortal encroach upon the limits of
immortality, and could not Christ add to His immortality whatever
experience of death was required? If Elias, contrary to nature, lives for
ever, why not allow that Jesus, with no greater contrariety to nature,
could remain in death for three days? Besides that, it is not only Elias,
but Moses and Enoch you believe to be immortal, and to have been taken up
with their bodies to heaven. Accordingly, if it is a good argument that
Jesus was a man because He died, it is an equally good argument that Elias
was not a man because he did not die. But as it is false that Elias was not
a man, notwithstanding his supposed immortality, so it is false that Jesus
was a man, though He is considered to have died. The truth is, if you will
believe it, that the Hebrews were in a mistake regarding both the death of
Jesus and the immortality of Elias. For it is equally untrue that Jesus
died and that Elias did not die. But you believe whatever you please; and
for the rest, you appeal to nature. And, allowing this appeal, nature is
against both the death of the immortal and the immortality of the mortal.
And if we refer to the power of effecting their purpose as possessed by God
and by man, it seems more possible for Jesus to die than for Elias not to
die; for the power of Jesus is greater than that of Elias. But if you exalt
the weaker to heaven, though nature is against it, and, forgetting his
condition as a mortal, endow him with eternal felicity, why should I not
admit that Jesus could die if He pleased, even though I were to grant His
death to have been real, and not a mere semblance? For, as from the outset
of His taking the likeness of man He underwent in appearance all the
experiences of humanity, it was quite consistent that He should complete
the system by appearing to die.

   2. Moreover, it is to be remembered that this reference to what nature
grants as possible, should be made in connection with all the history of
Jesus, and not only with His death. According to nature, it is impossible
that a man blind from his birth should see the light; and yet Jesus appears
to have performed a miracle of this kind, so that the Jews themselves
exclaimed that from the beginning of the world it was not seen that one
opened the eyes of a man born blind.(1) So also healing a withered hand,
giving the power of utterance and expression to those born dumb, restoring
animation to the dead, with the recovery of their bodily frame after
dissolution had begun, produce a feeling of amazement, and must seem
utterly incredible in view of what is naturally possible and impossible.
And yet, as Christians, we believe all the things to have been done by the
same person; for we regard not the law of nature, but the powerful
operation of God. There is a story, too, of Jesus having been cast from the
brow of a hill, and having escaped unhurt. If, then, when thrown down from
a height He did not die, simply because He chose not to die, why should He
not have had the power to die when He pleased? We take this way of
answering you because you have a fancy for discussion, and affect to use
logical weapons not properly belonging to you. As regards our own belief,
it is no more true that Jesus died than that Elias is immortal.

   3. AUGUSTIN replied: As to Enoch and Elias and Moses, our belief is
determined not by Faustus' suppositions, but by the declarations of
Scripture, resting as they do on foundations of the strongest and surest
evidence. People in error, as you are, are unfit to decide what is natural,
and what contrary to nature. We admit that what is contrary to the ordinary
course of human experience is commonly spoken of as contrary to nature.
Thus the apostle uses the words, "If thou art cut out of the wild olive,
and engrafted contrary to nature in the good olive."(2) Contrary to nature
is here used in the sense of contrary to human experience of the course of
nature; as that a wild olive engrafted in a good olive should bring forth
the fatness of the olive instead of wild berries. But God, the Author and
Creator of all natures, does nothing contrary to nature; for whatever is
done by Him who appoints all natural order and measure and proportion must
be natural in every case. And man himself acts contrary to nature only when
he sins; and then by punishment he is brought back to nature again. The
natural order of justice requires either that sin should not be committed
or that it should not go unpunished. In either case, the natural order is
preserved, if not by the soul, at least by God. For sin pains the
conscience, and brings grief on the mind of the sinner, by the loss of the
light of justice, even should no physical sufferings follow, which are
inflicted for correction, or are reserved for the incorrigible. There is,
however, no impropriety in saying that God does a thing contrary to nature,
when it is contrary to what we know of nature. For we give the name nature
to the usual common course of nature; and whatever God does contrary to
this, we call a prodigy, or a miracle. But against the supreme law of
nature, which is beyond the knowledge both of the ungodly and of weak
believers, God never acts, any more than He acts against Himself. As
regards spiritual and rational beings, to which class the human soul
belongs, the more they partake of this unchangeable law and light, the more
clearly they see what is possible, and what impossible; and again, the
greater their distance from it, the less their perception of the future,
and the more frequent their surprise at strange occurrences.

   4. Thus of what happened to Elias we are ignorant; but still we believe
the truthful declarations of Scripture regarding him. Of one thing we are
certain, that what God willed happened, and that except by God s will
nothing can happen to any one. So, if I am told that it is possible that
the flesh of a certain man shall be changed into a celestial body, I allow
the possibility, but I cannot tell whether it will be done; and the reason
of my ignorance is, that I am not acquainted with the will of God in the
matter. That it will be done if it is God's will, is perfectly clear and
indubitable. Again, if I am told that something would happen if God did not
prevent it from happening, I reply confidently that what is to happen is
the action of God, not the event which might otherwise have happened. For
God knows His own future action, and therefore He knows also the effect of
that action in preventing the happening of what would otherwise have
happened; and, beyond all question, what God knows is more certain than
what man thinks. Hence it is as impossible for what is future not to
happen, as for what is past not to have happened; for it can never be God's
will that anything should, in the same sense, be both true and false.
Therefore all that is properly future cannot but happen; what does not
happen never was future; even as all things which are properly in the past
did indubitably take place.

   5. Accordingly, to say, if God is almighty, let Him make what has been
done to be undone, is in fact to say, if God is almighty, let Him make a
thing to be in the same sense both true and false. God can put an end to
the existence of anything, when the thing to be put an end to has a present
existence; as when He puts an end by death to the existence of any one who
has been brought into existence in birth; for in this case there is an
actual existence which may be put a stop to. But when a thing does not
exist, the existence cannot be put a stop to. Now, what is past no longer
exists and whatever has an existence which can be put an end to cannot be
past. What is truly past is no longer present; and the truth of its past
existence is in our judgment, not in the thing itself which no longer
exists. The proposition asserting anything to be past is true when the
thing no longer exists. God cannot make such a proposition false, because
He cannot contradict the truth. The truth in this case, or the true
judgment, is first of all in our own mind, when we know and give expression
to it. But should it disappear from our minds by our forgetting it, it
would still remain as truth. It will always be true that the past thing
which is no longer present had an existence; and the truth of its past
existence after it has stopped is the same as the truth of its future
existence before it began to be. This truth cannot be contradicted by God,
in whom abides the supreme and unchangeable truth, and whose illumination
is the source of all the truth to be found in any mind or understanding.
Now God is not omnipotent in the sense of being able to die; nor does this
inability prevent His being omnipotent. True omnipotence belongs to Him who
truly exists, and who alone is the source of all existence, both spiritual
and corporeal. The Creator makes what use He pleases of all His creatures;
and His pleasure is in harmony with true and unchangeable justice, by
which, as by His own nature, He, Himself unchangeable, brings to pass the
changes of all changeable things according to the desert of their natures
or of their actions. No one, therefore, would be so foolish as to deny that
Elias being a creature of God could be changed either for the worse or for
the better; or that by the will of the omnipotent God he could be changed
in a manner unusual among men. So we can have no reason for doubting what
on the high authority of Scripture is related of him, unless we limit the
power of God to things which we are familiar with.

   6. Faustus' argument is, If Elias who was a man could escape death, why
might not Christ have the power of dying, since He was more than man? This
is the same as to say, If human nature can be changed for the better, why
should not the divine nature be changed for the worse?--a weak argument,
seeing that human nature is changeable, while the divine nature is not.
Such a method of inference would lead to the glaring absurdity, that if God
can bestow eternal glory on man, He must also have the power of consigning
Himself to eternal misery. Faustus will reply that his argument refers only
to three days of death for God, as compared with eternal life for man.
Well, if you understood the three days of death in the sense of the death
of the flesh which God took as a part of our mortal nature, you would be
quite correct; for the truth of the gospel makes known that the death of
Christ for three days was for the eternal life of men. But in arguing that
there is no impropriety in asserting a death of three days of the divine
nature itself, without any assumption of mortality, because human nature
can be endowed with immortality, you display the folly of one who knows
neither God nor the gifts of God. And indeed, since you make part of your
god to be fastened to the mass of darkness for ever, how can you escape the
absurd conclusion already mentioned, that God consigns Himself to eternal
misery,? You will then require to prove that part of light is light, while
part of God is not God. To give you in a word, without argument, the true
reason of our faith, as regards Elias having been caught up to heaven from
the earth, though only a man, and as regards Christ being truly born of a
virgin, and truly dying on the cross, our belief in both cases is grounded
on the declaration of Holy Scripture,(1) which it is piety to believe, and
impiety to disbelieve. What is said of Elias you pretend to deny, for you
will pretend anything. Regarding Christ, although even you do not go the
length of saying that He could not die, though He could be born, still you
deny His birth from a virgin, and assert His death on the cross to have
been feigned, which is equivalent to denying it too, except as a mockery
for the delusion of men; and you allow so much merely to obtain indulgence
for your own falsehoods from the believers in these fictions.

   7. The question which Faustus makes it appear that he is asked by a
Catholic, If Jesus was not born, how could He die? could be asked only by
one who overlooked the fact that Adam died, though he was not born. Who
will venture to say that the Son of God could not, if He had pleased, have
made for Himself a true human body in the same way as He did for Adam; for
all things were made by Him?(2) or who will deny that He who is the
Almighty Son of the Almighty could, if He had chosen, have taken a body
from a heavenly substance, or from air or vapor, and have so changed it
into the precise character of a human body, as that He might have lived as
a man, and have died in it? Or, once more, if He had chosen to take a body
of none of the material substances which He had made, but to create for
Himself from nothing real flesh, as all things were created by Him from
nothing, none of us will oppose this by saying that He could not have done
it. The reason of our believing Him to have been born of the Virgin Mary,
is not that He could not otherwise have appeared among men in a true body,
but because it is so written in the Scripture, which we must believe in
order to be Christians, or to be saved. We believe, then, that Christ was
born of the Virgin Mary, because it is so written in the Gospel; we believe
that He died on the cross, because it is so written in the Gospel; we
believe that both His birth and death were real, because the Gospel is no
fiction. Why He chose to suffer all these things in a body taken from a
woman is a matter known only to Himself. Perhaps He took this way of giving
importance and honor to both the sexes which He had created, taking the
form of a man, and being born of a woman; or there may have been some other
reason, we cannot tell. But this may be confidently affirmed, that what
took place was exactly as we are told in the Gospel narrative, and that
what the wisdom of God determined upon was exactly what ought to have
happened. We place the authority of the Gospel above all heretical
discussions; and we admire the counsel of divine wisdom more than any
counsel of any creature.

   8. Faustus calls upon us to believe him, and says, The truth is, if you
will believe it, that the Hebrews were in a mistake regarding both the
death of Jesus and the immortality of Elias. And a little after he adds, As
from the outset of His taking the likeness of man He underwent in
appearance all the experiences of humanity, it was quite consistent that He
should seal the dispensation by appearing to die. How can this infamous
liar, who declares that Christ feigned death, expect to be believed? Did
Christ utter falsehood when He said, "It behoves the Son of man to be
killed, and to rise the third day?"(3) And do you tell us to believe what
you say, as if you utter no falsehoods? In that case, Peter was more
truthful than Christ when he said to Him, "Be it far from Thee, Lord; this
shall not be unto Thee;" for which it was said to him, "Get thee behind me,
Satan."(4) This rebuke was not lost upon Peter, for, after his correction
and full preparation, he preached even to his own death the truth of the
death of Christ. But if Peter deserved to be called Satan for thinking that
Christ would not die, what should you be called, when you not only deny
that Christ died, but assert that He reigned death? You give, as a reason
for Christ's appearing to die, that He underwent in appearance all the
experiences of humanity. But that He reigned all the experiences of
humanity is only your opinion in opposition to the Gospel. In reality, when
the evangelist says that Jesus slept,(1) that He was hungry,(2) that He was
thirsty,(3) that He was sorrowful,(4) or glad, and so on,--these things are
all true in the sense  of not being feigned, but actual experiences; only
that they were undergone, not from a  mere natural necessity, but in the
exercise of a controlling will, and of divine power. In the case of a man,
anger, sorrow, sleeping, being hungry and thirst, are often involuntary; in
Christ they were acts of His own will. So also men are born without any act
of their own will, and suffer against their will; while Christ was born and
suffered by His own will. Still, the things are true; and the accurate
narrative of them is intended to instruct whoever believes in Christ's
gospel in the truth, not to delude him with falsehoods.

BOOK XXVII: FAUSTUS WARNS AGAINST PRESSING TOO FAR THE ARGUMENT, THAT IF
JESUS WAS NOT BORN HE CANNOT HAVE SUFFERED. AUGUSTIN ACCEPTS THE BIRTH AND
DEATH ALIKE ON THE TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL NARRATIVE, WHICH IS HIGHER
AUTHORITY THAN THE FALSEHOOD OF MANICHAEUS.

   1. FAUSTUS said: If Jesus was not born, He cannot have suffered; but
since He did suffer, He must have been born. I advise you not to have
recourse to logical inference in these matters, or else your whole faith
will be shaken. For, even according to you, Jesus was born miraculously of
a virgin; which the argument from consequents to antecedents shows to be
false. For your argument might thus be turned against you: If Jesus was
born of a woman, He must have been begotten by a man; but He was not
begotten by a man, therefore He was not born of a woman. If, as you
believe, He could be born without being begotten, why could He not also
suffer without being brought forth?

   2. AUGUSTIN replied: The argument which you here reply to is one which
could be used only by such ignorant people as you succeed in misleading,
not by those who know enough to refute you. Jesus could both be born
without being begotten and suffer without being brought forth. His being
one and not the other was the effect of His own will. He chose to be born
without being begotten, and not to suffer without being brought forth. And
if you ask how I know that He was brought forth, and that He suffered, I
read this in the faithful Gospel narrative. If I ask how you know what you
state, you bring forward the authority of Manichaeus, and charge the Gospel
with falsehood. Even if Manichaeus did not set forth falsehood as an
excellence in Christ, I should not believe his statements. His praise of
falsehood comes from nothing that he found in Christ, but from his own
moral character.

BOOK XXVIII: FAUSTUS RECURS TO THE GENEALOGY AND INSISTS UPON EXAMINING IT
AS REGARDS ITS CONSISTENCY WITH ITSELF. AUGUSTIN TAKES HIS STAND ON
SCRIPTURE AUTHORITY AND MAINTAINS THAT MATTHEW'S STATEMENTS AS TO THE BIRTH
OF CHRIST MUST BE ACCEPTED AS FINAL.

   1. FAUSTUS said: Christ, you say, could not have died, had He not been
born. I reply, If He was born, He cannot have been God; or if He could both
be God and be born, why could He not both be born and die? Plainly,
arguments and necessary consequences are not applicable to those matters,
where the question is of the account to be given of Jesus. The answer must
be obtained from His own statements, or from the statements of His apostles
regarding Him. The genealogy must be examined as regards its consistency
with itself, instead Of arguing from the supposition of Christ's death to
the fact of His birth; for He might have suffered without having been born,
or He might have been born, and yet never have suffered; for you yourselves
acknowledge that with God nothing is impossible, which is inconsistent with
the denial that Christ could have suffered without having been born.

   2. AUGUSTIN replied: You are always answering arguments which no one
uses, instead of our real arguments, which you cannot answer. No one says
that Christ could not die if He had not been born; for Adam died though he
had not been born. What we say is, Christ was born, because this is said
not by this or that heretic, but in the holy Gospel; and He died, for this
too is written, not in some heretical production, but in the holy Gospel.
You set aside argument on the question of the true account to be given of
Jesus, and refer to what He says of Himself, and what His apostles say of
Him; and yet, when I begin to quote the Gospel of His apostle Matthew,
where we have the whole narrative of Christ's birth, you forthwith deny
that Matthew wrote the narrative, though this is affirmed by the continuous
testimony of the whole Church, from the days of apostolic presidency to the
bishops of our own time. What authority will you quote against this?
Perhaps some book of Manichaeus, where it is denied that Jesus was born of
a virgin. As, then, I believe your book to be the production of Manichaeus,
since it has been kept and handed down among the disciples of Manichaeus,
from the time when he lived to the present time, by a regular succession of
your presidents, so I ask you to believe the book which I quote to have
been written by Matthew, since it has been handed down from the days of
Matthew in the Church, without any break in the connection between that
time and the present. The question then is, whether we are to believe the
statements of an apostle who was in the company of Christ while He was on
earth, or of a man away in Persia, born long after Christ. But perhaps you
will quote some other book bearing the name of an apostle known to have
been chosen by Christ; and you will find there that Christ was not born of
Mary. Since, then, one of the books must be false, the question in this
case is, whether we are to yield our belief to a book acknowledged and
approved as handed down from the beginning in the Church founded by Christ
Himself, and maintained through the apostles and their successors in an
unbroken connection all over the world to the present day; or to a book
which this Church condemns as unknown, and which, moreover, is brought
forward by men who prove their veracity by praising Christ for falsehood.

   3. Here you will say, Examine the genealogy as given in the two
Gospels, and see if it is consistent with itself. The answer to this has
been given already.(1) Your difficulty is how Joseph could have two
fathers. But even if you could not have thought of the explanation, that
one was his own father, and the other adopted, you should not have been so
ready to put yourself in opposition to such high authority. Now that this
explanation has been given you, I call upon you to acknowledge the truth of
the Gospel, and above all to cease your mischievous and unreasonable
attacks upon the truth.

   4. Faustus most plausibly refers to what Jesus said of Himself. But how
is this to be known except from the narratives of His disciples? And if we
do not believe them when they tell us that Christ was born of a virgin, how
shall we believe what they record as said by Christ of Himself? For, as
regards any writing professing to come immediately from Christ Himself, if
it were really His, how is it not read and acknowledged and regarded as of
supreme authority in the Church, which, beginning with Christ Himself, and
continued by His apostles, who were succeeded by the bishops, has been
maintained and extended to our own day, and in which is found the
fulfillment of many former predictions. while those concerning the last
days are sure to be accomplished in the future? In regard to the appearance
of such a writing, it would require to be considered from what quarter it
issued. Supposing it to have issued from Christ Himself, those in immediate
connection with Him might very well have received it, and have transmitted
it to others. In this case, the authority of the writing would be fully
established by the traditions of various communities, and of their
presidents, as I have already  said. Who, then, is so infatuated as in our
day to believe that the Epistle of Christ issued by Manichaeus is genuine,
or to disbelieve Matthew's narrative of Christ's words and actions? Or, if
the question is of Matthew being the real author, who would not, in this
also, believe what he finds in the Church, which has a distinct history in
unbroken connection from the days of Matthew to the present time, rather
than a Persian interloper, who comes more than two hundred years after, and
wishes us to believe his account of Christ's words and actions rather than
that of Matthew; whereas, even in the case of the Apostle Paul, who was
called from heaven after the Lord's ascension, the Church would not have
believed him, had there not been apostles in life with whom he might
communicate, and compare his gospel with theirs, so as to be recognized as
belonging to the same society? When it was ascertained that Paul preached
what the apostles preached, and that he lived in fellowship and harmony
with them, and when God's testimony was added by Paul's working miracles
like those done by the apostles, his authority became so great, that his
words are now received in the Church, as if, to use his own appropriate
words, Christ were speaking in him.(1) Manichaeus, on the other hand,
thinks that the Church of Christ should believe what he says in opposition
to the Scriptures, which are supported by such strong and continuous
evidence, and in which the Church finds an emphatic injunction, that
whoever preaches to her differently from what she has received must be
anathema.(2)

   5. Faustus tells us that he has good grounds for concluding that these
Scriptures are unworthy of credit. And yet he speaks of not using
arguments. But the argument too shall be refuted. The end of the whole
argument is to bring the soul to believe that the reason of its misery in
this world is, that it is the means of preventing God from being deprived
of His kingdom, and that God's substance and nature is so exposed to
change, corruption, injury, and contamination, that part of it is
incurably defiled, and is consigned by Him self to eternal punishment in
the mass of darkness, though, when it was in harmless union with Himself,
and guilty of no crime, He knowingly sent it where it was to suffer
defilement. This is the end of all your arguments and fictions; and would
that there were an end of them as regards your heart and your lips, that
you might sometime desist from believing and uttering those execrable
blasphemies! But, says Faustus, I prove from the writings themselves that
they cannot be in all points trustworthy, for they contradict one another.
Why not say, then, that they are wholly untrustworthy, if their testimony
is inconsistent and self-contradictory? But, says Faustus, I say what I
think to be in accordance with truth. With what truth? The truth is only
your own fiction, which begins with God's battle, goes on to His
contamination, and ends with His damnation. No one, says Faustus, believes
writings which contradict themselves. But if you think they do this, it is
because you do not understand them; for your ignorance has been manifested
in regard to the passages you have quoted in support of your opinion, and
the same will appear in regard to any quotations you may still make. So
there is no reason for our not believing these writings, supported as they
are by such weighty testimony; and this is itself the best reason for
pronouncing accursed those whose preaching differs from what is there
written.

BOOK XXIX: FAUSTUS SEEKS TO JUSTIFY THE DOCETISM OF THE MANICHAEANS.
AUGUSTIN INSISTS THAT THERE IS NOTHING DISGRACEFUL IN BEING BORN.

   1. FAUSTUS said: If Christ was visible, and suffered without having
been born, this was sorcery. This argument of yours may be turned against
you, by replying that it was sorcery if He was conceived or brought forth
without being begotten. It is not in accordance with the law of nature that
a virgin should bring forth, and still less that she should still be a
virgin after bringing forth. Why, then, do you refuse to admit that Christ,
in a preternatural manner, suffered without submitting to the condition of
birth? Believe me: in substance, both our beliefs are contrary to nature;
but our belief is decent, and yours is not. We give an explanation of
Christ's passion which is at least probable, while the only explanation you
give of His birth is false. In fine, we hold that He suffered in
appearance, and did not really die; you believe in an actual birth, and
conception in the womb. If it is not so, you have only to acknowledge that
the birth too was a delusion, and our whole dispute will be at an end. As
to what you frequently allege, that Christ could not have appeared or
spoken to men without having been born, it is absurd; for, as our teachers
have shown, angels have often appeared and spoken to men.

   2. AUGUSTIN replied: We do not say that to die without having been born
is sorcery; for, as we have said already, this happened in the case of
Adam. But, though it had never happened, who will venture to say that
Christ could not, if He had so pleased, have come without taking His body
from a virgin, and yet appearing in a true booty to redeem us by a true
death? However, it was better that He should be, as He actually was, born
of a virgin, and, by His condescension, do honor to both sexes, for whose
deliverance He was to die, by taking a man's body born of a woman. In this
He testifies emphatically against you, and refutes your doctrine, which
makes the sexes the work of the devil. What we call sorcery in your
doctrine is your making Christ's passion and death to have been only in
appearance, so that, by a spectral illusion, He seemed to die when He did
not. Hence you must also make His resurrection spectral and illusory and
false; for if there was no true death, there could not be a real
resurrection. Hence also the marks which He showed to His doubting
disciples must have been false; and Thomas was not assured by truth, but
cheated by a lie, when he exclaimed, "My Lord, and my God."(1) And yet you
would have us believe that your tongue utters truth, though Christ's whole
body was a falsehood. Our argument against you is, that the Christ you make
is such that you cannot be His true disciples unless you too practise
deceit. The fact that Christ's body was the only one born of a virgin does
not prove that there was sorcery in His birth, any more than there is
sorcery in its being the only body to rise again on the third day, never to
die any more. Will you say that there was sorcery in all the Lord's
miracles because they were unusual? They really happened, and their
appearance, as seen by men, was true, and not an illusion; and when they
are said to be contrary to nature, it is not that they oppose nature, but
that they transcend the method of nature to which we are accustomed. May
God keep the minds of His people who are still babes in Christ from being
influenced by Faustus, when he recommends as a duty that we should
acknowledge Christ's birth to have been illusory and not real, that so we
may end our dispute Nay, verily, rather let us continue to contend for the
truth against them, than agree with them in falsehood.

   3. But if we are to end the controversy by saying this, why do not our
opponents themselves say it? While they assert the death of Christ to have
been not real but feigned, why do they make out that He had no birth at
all, not even of the same kind as His death? If they had so much regard for
the authority of the evangelist as to oblige them to admit that Christ
suffered, at least in appearance, it is the same authority which testifies
to His birth. Two evangelists, indeed, give the story of the birth;(2) but
in all we read of Jesus having a mother.(3) Perhaps Faustus was unwilling
to make the birth an illusion, because the difference of the genealogies
given in Matthew and Luke causes an apparent discrepancy. But, supposing a
man ignorant, there are many things also relating to the passion of Christ
in which he will think the evangelists disagree; suppose him instructed, he
finds entire agreement. Can it be right to feign death, and wrong to feign
birth? And yet Faustus will have us acknowledge the birth to be feigned, in
order to put an end to the dispute. It will appear presently in our reply
to another objection what we think to be the reason why Faustus will not
admit of any birth, even a feigned one.

   4. We deny that there is anything disgraceful in the bodies of saints.
Some members, indeed, are called uncomely, because they have not so
pleasing an appearance as those constantly in view.(4) But attend to what
the apostle says, when from the unity and harmony of the body he enjoins
charity on the Church: "Much more those members of the body, which seem to
be feeble, are necessary: and those members of the body, which we think to
be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our
uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. For our comely parts have no
need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant
honor to that part which lacked: that there should be no schism in the
body."(5) The licentious and intemperate use of those members is
disgraceful, but not the members themselves; for they are preserved in
purity not only by the unmarried, but also by wedded fathers and mothers of
holy life, in whose case the natural appetite, as serving not lust, but an
intelligent purpose in the production of children, is in no way
disgraceful. Still more, in the holy Virgin Mary, who by faith conceived
the body of Christ, there was nothing disgraceful in the members which
served not for a common natural conception, but for a miraculous birth. In
order that we might conceive Christ in sincere hearts, and, as it were,
produce Him in confession, it was meet that His body should come from the
substance of His mother without injury to her bodily purity. We cannot
suppose that the mother of Christ suffered loss by His birth, or that the
gift of productiveness displaced the grace of virginity. If these
occurrences, which were real and no illusion, are new and strange, and
contrary to the common course of nature, the reason is, that they are
great, and amazing, and divine; and all the more on this account are they
true, and firm, and sure. Angels, says Faustus, appeared and spoke without
having been born. As if we held that Christ could not have appeared or
spoken without having been born of a woman! He could, but He chose not; and
what He chose was best. And that He chose to do what He did is plain,
because He acted, not like your god, from necessity, but voluntarily. That
He was born we know, because we put faith not in a heretic, but in Christ's
gospel.

BOOK XXX: FAUSTUS REPELS THE INSINUATION THAT THE PROPHECY OF PAUL WITH
REFERENCE TO THOSE THAT SHOULD FORBID TO MARRY, ABSTAIN FROM MEATS, ETC.,
APPLIES TO THE MANICHAEANS MORE THAN TO THE CATHOLIC ASCETICS, WHO ARE HELD
IN THE HIGHEST ESTEEM IN THE CHURCH. AUGUSTIN JUSTIFIES THIS APPLICATION OF
THE PROPHECY, AND SHOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MANICHAEAN AND CHRISTIAN
ASCETICISM.

   1. FAUSTUS said: You apply to us the words of Paul: "Some shall depart
from the faith, giving heed to lying spirits, and doctrines of devils;
speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their consciences seared as with a hot
iron; forbidding to marry, abstaining from meats, which God has created to
be received with thanksgiving by believers."(1) I refuse to admit that the
apostle said this, unless you first acknowledge that Moses and the prophets
taught doctrines of devils, and were the interpreters of a lying and
malignant spirit; since they enjoin with great emphasis abstinence from
swine's flesh and other meats, which they call unclean. This case must
first be settled; and you must consider long and carefully how their
teaching is to be viewed: whether they said these things from God, or from
the devil. As regards these matters, either Moses and the prophets must be
condemned along with us; or we must be acquitted along with them. You are
unjust in condemning us, as you do now, as followers of the doctrine of
devils, because we require the priestly class to abstain from animal food;
for we limit the prohibition to the priesthood, while you hold that your
prophets, and Moses himself, who forbade all classes of men to eat the
flesh of swine, and hares, and conies, besides all varieties of cuttle-
fish, and all fish wanting scales, said this not in a lying spirit, nor in
the doctrine of devils, but from God, and in the Holy Spirit. Even
supposing, then, that Paul said these words, you can convince me only by
condemning Moses and the prophets; and so, though you will not do it for
reason or truth, you will contradict Moses for the sake of your belly.

   2. Besides, you have in your Book of Daniel the account of the three
youths, which you will find it difficult to reconcile with the opinion that
to abstain from meats is the doctrine of devils. For we are told that they
abstained not only from what the law forbade, but even from what it
allowed;(2) and you are wont to praise them, and count them as martyrs;
though they too followed the doctrine of devils, if this is to be taken as
the apostle's opinion. And Daniel himself declares that he fasted for three
weeks, not eating flesh or drinking wine, while he prayed for his
people.(3) How is it that he boasts of this doctrine of devils, and glories
in the falsehood of a lying spirit?

   3. Again, what are we to think of you, or of the better class of
Christians among you, some of whom abstain from swine's flesh, some from
the flesh of quadrupeds, and some from all animal food, while-all the
Church admires them for it, and regards them with profound veneration, as
only not gods? You obstinately refuse to consider that if the words quoted
from the apostle are true and genuine, these people too are misled by
doctrines of devils. And there is another observance which no one will
venture to explain away or to deny, for it is known to all, and is
practised yearly with particular attention in the congregation of Catholics
all over the world--I mean the fast of forty days, in the due observance of
which a man must abstain from all the things which, according to this
verse, were created by God that we might receive them, while at the same
time he calls this abstinence a doctrine of devils. So, my dear friends,
shall we say that you too, during this fast, while celebrating the
mysteries of Christ's passion, live after the manner of devils, and are
deluded by a seducing spirit, and speak lies in hypocrisy, and have your
conscience seared with a hot iron? If this does not apply to you, neither
does it apply to us. What is to be thought of this verse, or its author; or
to whom does it apply, since it agrees neither with the traditions of the
Old Testament, nor with the institutions of the New? As regards the New
Testament, the proof is from your own practice; and though the Old requires
abstinence only from certain things, still it requires abstinence. On the
other hand, this opinion of yours makes all abstinence from animal food a
doctrine of devils. If this is your belief, once more I say it, you must
condemn Moses, and reject the prophets, and pass the same sentence on
yourselves; for, as they always abstained from certain kinds of food, so
you sometimes abstain from all food.

   4. But if you think that in making a distinction in food, Moses and the
prophets established a divine ordinance, and not a doctrine of devils; if
Daniel in the Holy Spirit observed a fast of three weeks; if the youths
Ananias, Azarias, and Mishael, under divine guidance, chose to live on
cabbage or pulse; if, again, those among you who abstain, do it not at the
instigation of devils; if your abstinence from wine and flesh for forty
days is not superstitious, but by divine command,-consider, I beseech you,
if it is not perfect madness to suppose these words to be Paul's that
abstinence from food and forbidding to marry are doctrines of devils. Paul
cannot have said that to dedicate virgins to Christ is a doctrine of
devils. But you read the words, and inconsiderately, as usual, apply them
to us, without seeing that this stamps your virgins too as led away by the
doctrine of devils, and that you are the functionaries of the devils in
your constant endeavors to induce virgins to make this profession, so that
in all your churches the virgins nearly outnumber the married women. Why do
you still adhere to such practises? Why do you ensnare wretched young
women, if it is the will of devils, and not of Christ, that they fulfill?
But, first of all, I wish to know if making virgins is, in all cases, the
doctrine of devils, or only the prohibition of marriage. If it is the
prohibition, it does not apply to us, for we too hold it equally foolish to
prevent one who wishes, as it is criminal and impious to force one who has
some reluctance. But if you say that to encourage the proposal, and not to
resist such a desire, is all the doctrine of devils, to say nothing of the
consequence as regards you, the apostle himself will be thus brought into
danger, if he must be considered as having introduced the doctrines of
devils into Iconium, when Thecla, after having been betrothed, was by his
discourse inflamed with the desire of perpetual virginity.(1) And what
shall we say of Jesus, the Master Himself, and the source of all sanctity,
who is the unwedded spouse of the virgins who make this profession, and
who, when specifying in the Gospel three kinds of eunuchs, natural,
artificial, and voluntary, gives the palm to those who have "made
themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,"(2) meaning the youths of
both sexes who have extirpated from their hearts the desire of marriage,
and who in the Church act as eunuchs of the King's palace? Is this also the
doctrine of devils? Are those words, too, spoken in a seducing spirit? And
if Paul and Christ are proved to be priests of devils, is not their spirit
the same that speaks in God? I do not mention the other apostles of our
Lord, Peter, Andrew, Thomas, and the example of celibacy, the blessed John,
who in various ways commended to young men and maidens the excellence of
this profession, leaving to us, and to you too, the form for making
virgins. I do not mention them, because you do not admit them into the
canon, and so you will not scruple impiously to impute to them doctrines of
devils. But will you say the same of Christ, or of the Apostle Paul, who,
we know, everywhere expressed the same preference for unmarried women to
the married, and gave an example of it in the case of the saintly Thecla?
But if the doctrine preached by Paul to Thecla, and which the other
apostles also preached, was not the doctrine of devils, how can we believe
that Paul left on record his opinion, that the very exhortation to sanctity
is the injunction and the doctrine of devils? To make virgins simply by
exhortation, without forbidding to marry, is not peculiar to you. That is
our principle too; and he must be not only a fool, but a madman, who thinks
that a private law can forbid what the public law allows. As regards
marriage, therefore, we too encourage virgins to remain as they are when
they are willing to do so; we do not make them virgins against their will.
For we know the force of will and of natural appetite when opposed by
public law; much more when the law is only private, and every one is at
liberty to disobey it. If, then, it is no crime to make virgins in this
manner, we are guiltless as well as you. If it is wrong to make virgins in
any way, you are guilty as well as we. So that what you mean, or intend, by
quoting this verse against us, it is impossible to say.

   5. AUGUSTIN replied: Listen, and you shall hear what we mean and intend
by quoting this verse against you, since you say that you do not know. It
is not that you abstain from animal food; for, as you observe, our ancient
fathers abstained from some kinds of food, not, however, as condemning
them, but with a typical meaning, which you do not understand, and of which
I have said already in this work all that appeared necessary. Besides,
Christians, not heretics, but Catholics, in order to subdue the body, that
the soul may be more humbled in prayer, abstain not only from animal food,
but also from some vegetable productions, without, however, believing them
to be unclean. A few do this always; and at certain seasons or days, as in
Lent, almost all, more or less, according to the choice or ability of
individuals. You, on the other hand, deny that the creature is good, and
call it unclean, saying that animals are made by the devil of the worst
impurities in the substance of evil and so you reject them with horror, as
being the most cruel and loathsome places of confinement of your god. You,
as a concession, allow your followers, as distinct from the priests, to eat
animal food; as the apostle allows, in certain cases, not marriage in the
general sense, but the indulgence of passion m marriage.(1) It is only sin
which is thus made allowance for. This is the feeling you have toward all
animal food; you have learned it from your heresy, and you teach it to your
followers. You make allowance for your followers, because, as I said
before, they supply you with necessaries; but you grant them indulgence
without saying that it is not sinful. For yourselves, you shun contact with
this evil and impurity; and hence our reason for quoting this verse against
you is found in the words of the apostle which follow those with which you
end the quotation. Perhaps it was for this reason that you left out the
words, and then say that you do not know what we mean or intend by the
quotation; for it suited you better to omit the account of our intention
than to express it. For, after speaking of abstaining from meats, which God
has created to be received with thanksgiving by believers, the apostle goes
on, "And by them who know the truth; for every creature of God is good, and
nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is
sanctified by the word of God and prayer."(2) This you deny; for your idea,
and motive, and belief in abstaining from such food is, that they are not
typically, but naturally, evil and impure. In this assuredly you blaspheme
the Creator; and in this is the doctrine of devils. You need not be
surprised that, so long before the event, this prediction regarding you was
made by the Holy Spirit.

   6. So, again, if your exhortations to virginity resembled the teaching
of the apostle, "He who giveth in marriage doeth well, and he who giveth
not in marriage doeth better;"(3) if you taught that marriage is good, and
virginity better, as the Church teaches which is truly Christ's Church, you
would not have been described in the Spirit's prediction as forbidding to
marry. What a man forbids he makes evil; but a good thing may be placed
second to a better thing without being forbidden. Moreover, the only
honorable kind of marriage, or marriage entered into for its proper and
legitimate purpose, is precisely that you hate most. So, though you may not
forbid sexual intercourse, you forbid marriage; for the peculiarity of
marriage is, that it is not merely for the gratification of passion, but,
as is written in the contract, for the procreation of children. And, though
you allow many of your followers to retain their connection with you in
spite of their refusal, or their inability, to obey you, you cannot deny
that you make the prohibition. The prohibition is part of your false
doctrine, while the toleration is only for the interests of the society.
And here we see the reason, which I have delayed till now to mention, for
your making not the birth but only the death of Christ reigned and
illusory. Death being the separation of the soul, that is, of the nature of
your god, from the body which belongs to his enemies, for it is the work of
the devil, you uphold and approve of it; and thus, according to your creed,
it was meet that Christ, though He did not die, should commend death by
appearing to die. In birth, again, you believe your god to be bound instead
of released; and so you will not allow that Christ was born even in this
illusory fashion. You would have thought better of Mary had she ceased to
be a virgin without being a mother, than as being a mother without ceasing
to be a virgin. You see, then, that there is a great difference between
exhorting to virginity as the better of two good things, and forbidding to
marry by denouncing the true purpose of marriage; between abstaining from
food as a symbolic observance, or for the mortification of the body, and
abstaining from food which God has created for the reason that God did not
create it. In one case, we have the doctrine of the prophets and apostles;
in the other, the doctrine of lying devils.

BOOK XXXI: THE SCRIPTURE PASSAGE: "TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE, BUT TO
THE IMPURE AND DEFILED IS NOTHING PURE; BUT EVEN THEIR MIND AND CONSCIENCE
ARE DEFILED," IS DISCUSSED FROM BOTH THE MANICHAEAN AND THE CATHOLIC POINTS
OF VIEW, FAUSTUS OBJECTING TO ITS APPLICATION TO HIS PARTY AND AUGUSTIN
INSISTING ON ITS APPLICATION.

   1. FAUSTUS said: "To the pure all things are pure. But to the impure
and defiled is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience are
defiled." As regards this verse, too, it is very doubtful whether, for your
own sake, you should believe it to have been written by Paul. For it would
follow that Moses and the prophets were not only influenced by devils in
making so much in their laws of the distinctions in food, but also that
they themselves were impure and defiled in their mind and conscience, so
that the following words also might properly be applied to them: "They
profess to know God, but in works deny Him."(1) This is applicable to no
one more than to Moses and the prophets, who are known to have lived very
differently from what was becoming in men knowing God. Up to this time I
have thought only of adulteries and frauds and murders as defiling the
conscience of Moses and the prophets; but now, from what this verse says,
it is plain that they were also defiled, because they looked upon something
as defiled. How, then, can you persist in thinking that the vision of the
divine majesty can have been bestowed on such men, when it is written that
only the pure in heart can see God? Even supposing that they had been pure
from unlawful crimes, this superstitious abstinence from certain kinds of
food, if it defiles the mind, is enough to debar them from the sight of
deity. Gone for ever, too, is the boast of Daniel, and of the three youths,
who, till now that we are told that nothing is unclean, have been regarded
among the Jews as persons of great purity and excellence of character,
because, in observance of hereditary customs, they carefully avoided
defiling themselves with Gentile food, especially that of sacrifices.(2)
Now it appears that they were defiled in mind and conscience most of all
when they were closing their mouth against blood and idol-feasts.

   2. But perhaps their ignorance may excuse them; for, as this Christian
doctrine of all things being pure to the pure had not then appeared, they
may have thought some things impure. But there can be no excuse for you in
the face of Paul's announcement, that there is nothing which is not pure,
and that abstinence from certain food is the doctrine of devils, and that
those who think anything defiled are polluted in their mind, if you not
only abstain, as we have said, but make a merit of it, and believe that you
become more acceptable to Christ in proportion as you are more abstemious,
or, according to this new doctrine, as your minds are defiled and your
conscience polluted. It should also be observed that, while there are three
religions in the world which, though in a very different manner, appoint
chastity and abstinence as the means of purification of the mind, the
religions, namely, of the Jews, the Gentiles, and the Christians, the
opinion that everything is pure cannot have come from any one of the three.
It is certainly not from Judaism, nor from Paganism, which also makes a
distinction of food; the only difference being, that the Hebrew
classification of animals does not harmonize with the Pagan. Then as to the
Christian faith, if you think it peculiar to Christianity to consider
nothing defiled, you must first of all confess that there are no Christians
among you. For things offered to idols, and what dies of itself, to mention
nothing else, are regarded by you all as great defilement. If, again, this
is a Christian practice, on your part, the doctrine which is opposed to all
abstinence from impurities cannot be traced to Christianity either. How,
then, could Paul have said what is not in keeping with any religion? In
fact, when the apostle from a Jew became a Christian, it was a change of
customs more than of religion. As for the writer of this verse, there seems
to be no religion which favors his opinion.

   3. Be sure, then, whenever you discover anything else in Scripture to
assail our faith with, to see, in the first place, that it is not against
you, before you commence your attack on us. For instance, there is the
passage you continually quote about Peter, that he once saw a vessel let
down from heaven in which were all kinds of animals and serpents, and that,
when he was surprised and astonished, a voice was heard, saying to him,
Peter, kill and eat whatsoever thou seest in the vessel, and that he
replied, Lord I will not touch what is common or unclean. On this the voice
spoke again, What I have cleansed, call not unclean.(1) This, indeed, seems
to have an allegorical meaning, and not to refer to the absence of
distinction in food. But as you choose to give it this meaning, you are
bound to feed upon all wild animals, and scorpions, and snakes, and
reptiles in general, in compliance with this vision of Peter's. In this
way, you will show that you are really obedient to the voice which Peter is
said to have heard. But you must never forget that you at the same time
condemn Moses and the prophets, who considered many things polluted which,
according to this utterance, God has sanctified.

   4. AUGUSTIN replied: When the apostle says, "To the pure all things are
pure," he refers to the natures which God had created,--as it is written by
Moses in Genesis, "And God made all things; and behold they were very
good,"(2)--not to the typical meanings, according to which God, by the same
Moses, distinguished the clean from the unclean. Of this we have already
spoken at length more than once, and need not dwell on it here. It is clear
that the apostle called those impure who, after the revelation of the New
Testament, still advocated the observance of the shadows of things to come,
as if without them the Gentiles could not obtain the salvation which is in
Christ, because in this they were carnally minded; and he called them
unbelieving, because they did not distinguish between the time of the law
and the time of grace. To them, he says, nothing is pure, because they made
an erroneous and sinful use both of what they received and of what they
rejected; which is true of all unbelievers, but especially of you
Manichaeans, for to you nothing whatever is pure. For, although you take
great care to keep the food which you use separate from the contamination
of flesh, still it is not pure to you, for the only creator of it you allow
is the devil. And you hold, that, by eating it, you release your god, who
suffers confinement and pollution in it. One would think you might consider
yourselves pure, since your stomach is the proper place for purifying your
god. But even your own bodies, in your opinion, are of the nature and
handiwork of the race of darkness; while your souls are still affected by
the pollution of your bodies. What, then, is pure to you? Not the things
you eat; not the receptacle of your food; not yourselves, by whom it is
purified. Thus you see against whom the words of the apostle are directed;
he expresses himself so as to include all who are impure and unbelieving,
but first and chiefly to condemn you. To the pure, therefore, all things
are pure, in the nature in which they were created; but to the ancient
Jewish people all things were not pure in their typical significance; and,
as regards bodily health, or the customs of society, all things are not
suitable to us. But when things are in their proper places, and the order
of nature is preserved, to the pure all things are pure; but to the impure
and unbelieving, among whom you stand first, nothing is pure. You might
make a wholesome application to yourselves of the following words of the
apostle, if you desired a cure for your seared consciences. The words are:
"Their very mind and conscience are defiled."

BOOK XXXII: FAUSTUS FAILS TO UNDERSTAND WHY HE SHOULD BE REQUIRED EITHER TO
ACCEPT OR REJECT THE NEW TESTAMENT AS A WHOLE, WHILE THE CATHOLICS ACCEPT
OR REJECT THE VARIOUS PARTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AT PLEASURE. AUGUSTIN
DENIES THAT THE CATHOLICS TREAT THE OLD TESTAMENT ARBITRARILY, AND EXPLAINS
THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARDS IT.

   1. FAUSTUS said: You say, that if we believe the Gospel, we must
believe everything that is written in it. Why, then, since you believe the
Old Testament, do you not believe all that is found in any part of it?
Instead of that, you cull out only the prophecies telling of a future King
of the Jews, for you suppose this to be Jesus, along with a few precepts of
common morality, such as, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit
adultery; and all the rest you pass over, thinking of the other things as
Paul thought of the things which he held to be dung.(1) Why, then, should
it seem strange or singular in me that I select from the New Testament
whatever is purest, and helpful for my salvation, while I set aside the
interpolations of your predecessors, which impair its dignity and grace?

    2. If there are parts of the Testament of the Father which we are not
bound to observe (for you attribute the Jewish law to the Father, and it is
well known that many things in it shock you, and make you ashamed, so that
in heart you no longer regard it as free from corruption, though, as you
believe, the Father Himself partly wrote it for you with His own finger
while part was written by Moses, who was faithful and trustworthy), the
Testament of the Son must be equally liable to corruption, and may equally
well contain objectionable things; especially as it is allowed not to have
been written by the Son Himself, nor by His apostles, but long after, by
some unknown men, who, lest they should be suspected of writing of things
they knew nothing of, gave to their books the names of the apostles, or of
those who were thought to have followed the apostles, declaring the
contents to be according to these originals. In this, I think, they do
grievous wrong to the disciples of Christ, by quoting their authority for
the discordant and contradictory statements in these writings, saying that
it was according to them that they wrote the Gospels, which are so full of
errors and discrepancies, both in facts and in opinions, that they can be
harmonized neither with themselves nor with one another. This is nothing
else than to slander good men, and to bring the charge of dissension on the
brotherhood of the disciples. In reading the Gospels, the clear intention
of our heart perceives the errors, and, to avoid all injustice, we accept
whatever is useful, in the way of building up our faith, and promoting the
glory of the Lord Christ, and of the Almighty God, His Father, while we
reject the rest as unbecoming the majesty of God and Christ, and
inconsistent with our belief.

   3. To return to what I said of your not accepting everything in the Old
Testament. You do not admit carnal circumcision, though that is what is
written;(1) nor resting from all occupation on the Sabbath, though that is
enjoined;(2) and instead of propitiating God, as Moses recommends, by
offerings and sacrifices, you cast these things aside as utterly out of
keeping with Christian worship, and as having nothing at all to recommend
them. In some cases, however, you make a division, and while you accept one
part, you reject the other. Thus, in the Passover, which is also the annual
feast of the Old Testament, while it is written that in this observance you
must slay a lamb to be eaten in the evening, and that you must abstain from
leaven for seven days, and be content with unleavened bread and bitter
herbs,(3) you accept the feast, but pay no attention to the rules for its
observance. It is the same with the feast of Pentecost, or seven weeks, and
the accompaniment of a certain kind and number of sacrifices which Moses
enjoins:(4) you observe the feast, but you condemn the propitiatory rites,
which are part of it, because they are not in harmony with Christianity. As
regards the command to abstain from Gentile food, you are zealous believers
in the uncleanness of things offered to idols, and of what has died of
itself; but you are not so ready to believe the prohibition of swine's
flesh, and hares, and conies, and mullets, and cuttle-fish, and all the
fish that you have a relish for, although Moses pronounces them all
unclean.

   4. I do not suppose. that you will consent, or even listen, to such
things as that a father-in-law should lie with his daughter-in-law, as
Judah did; or a father with his daughters, like Lot; or prophets with
harlots, like Hosea; or that a husband should sell his wife for a night to
her lover, like Abraham; or that a man should marry two sisters, like
Jacob; or that the rulers of the people and the men you consider as most
inspired should keep their mistresses by hundreds and thousands; or,
according to the provision made in Deuteronomy about wives, that the wife
of one brother, if he dies without children, should marry the surviving
brother, and that he should raise up seed from her instead of his brother;
and that if the man refuses to do this, the fair plaintiff should bring her
case before the elders, that the brother may be called and admonished to
perform this religious duty; and that, if he persists in his refusal, he
must not go unpunished, but the woman must loose his shoe from his right
foot, and strike him in the face, and send him away, spat upon and
accursed, to perpetuate the reproach in his family.(5) These, and such as
these, are the examples and precepts of the Old Testament. If they are
good, why do you not practise them? If they are bad, why do you not condemn
the Old Testament, in which they are found? But if you think that these are
spurious interpolations, that is precisely what we think of the New
Testament. You have no right to claim from us an acknowledgment for the New
Testament which you yourselves do not make for the Old.

   5. Since you hold to the divine authorship of the Old as well as of the
New Testament, it would surely be more consistent and more becoming, as you
do not obey its precepts, to confess that it has been corrupted by improper
additions, than to treat it so contemptuously, if it is genuine and
uncorrupted. Accordingly, my explanation of your neglect of the
requirements of the Old Testament has always been, and still is, that you
are either wise enough to reject them as spurious, or that you have the
boldness and irreverence to disregard them if they are true. At any rate,
when you would oblige me to believe everything contained in the documents
of the New Testament because I receive the Testament itself, you should
consider that, though you profess to receive the Old Testament, you in your
heart disbelieve many things in it. Thus, you do not admit as true or
authoritative the declaration of the Old Testament, that every one that
hangeth on a tree is accursed,(1) for this would apply to Jesus; or that
every man is accursed who does not raise up seed in Israel,(2) for that
would include all of both sexes devoted to God; or that whoever is not
circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin will be cut off from among his
people,(3) for that would apply to all Christians; or that whoever breaks
the Sabbath must be stoned to death;(4) or that no mercy should be shown to
the man who breaks a single precept of the Old Testament. If you really
believe these things as certainly enjoined by God, you would, in the time
of Christ, have been the first to assail Him, and you would now have no
quarrel with the Jews, who, in persecuting Christ with heart and soul,
acted in obedience to their own God.

   6. I am aware that instead of boldly pronouncing these passages
spurious, you make out that these things were required of the Jews till the
coming of Jesus; and that now that He is come, according, as you say, to
the predictions of this Old Testament, He Himself teaches what we should
receive, and what we should set aside as obsolete. Whether the prophets
predicted the coming of Jesus we shall see presently. Meanwhile, I need say
no more than that if Jesus, after being predicted in the Old Testament, now
subjects it to this sweeping criticism, and teaches us to receive a few
things and to throw over many things, in the same way the Paraclete who is
promised in the New Testament teaches us what part of it to receive, and
what to reject; as Jesus Himself says in the Gospel, when promising the
Paraclete, "He shall guide you into all truth, and shall teach you all
things, and bring all things to your remembrance."(5) So then, with the
help of the Paraclete, we may take the same liberties with the New
Testament as Jesus enables you to take with the Old, unless you suppose
that the Testament of the Son is of greater value than that of the Father,
if it is really the Father's; so that while many parts of the one are to be
condemned, the other must be exempted from all disapproval; and that, too,
when we know, as I said before, that it was not written by Christ or by His
apostles.

   7. Hence, as you receive nothing in the Old Testament except the
prophecies and the common precepts of practical morality, which we quoted
above, while you set aside circumcision, and sacrifices, and the Sabbath
and its observance, and the feast of unleavened bread, why should not we
receive nothing in the New Testament but what we find said in honor and
praise of the majesty of the Son, either by Himself or by His apostles,
with the proviso, in the case of the apostles, that it was said by them
after reaching perfection, and when no longer in unbelief; while we take no
notice of the rest, which, if said at the time, was the utterance of
ignorance or inexperience, or, if not, was added by crafty opponents with a
malicious intention, or was stated by the writers without due
consideration, and so handed down as authentic? Take as examples, the
shameful birth of Jesus from a woman, His being circumcised like the Jews,
His offering sacrifice like the Gentiles, His being baptized in a
humiliating manner, His being led about by the devil in the wilderness, and
His being tempted by him in the most distressing way. With these
exceptions, besides whatever has been inserted under the pretence of being
a quotation from the Old Testament, we believe the whole, especially the
mystic nailing to the cross, emblematic of the wounds of the soul in its
passion; as also the sound moral precepts of Jesus, and His parables, and
the whole of His immortal discourse, which sets forth especially the
distinction of the two natures, and therefore must undoubtedly be His.
There is, then, no reason for your thinking it obligatory in me to believe
all the contents of the Gospels; for you, as has been proved, take so
dainty a sip from the Old Testament, that you hardly, so to speak, wet your
lips with it.

   8. AUGUSTIN replied: We give to the whole Old Testament Scriptures
their due praise as true and divine; you impugn the Scriptures of the New
Testament as having been tampered with and corrupted. Those things in the
Old Testament which we do not observe we hold to have been suitable
appointments for the time and the people of that dispensation, besides
being symbolical to us of truths in which they have still a spiritual use,
though the outward observance is abolished; and this opinion is proved to
be the doctrine of the apostolic writings. You, on the other hand, find
fault with everything in the New Testament which you do not receive, and
assert that these passages were not spoken or written by Christ or His
apostles. In these respects there is a manifest difference between us.
When, therefore, you are asked why you do not receive all the contents of
the New Testament, but, while you approve of some things, reject a great
many in the very same books as false and spurious interpolations, you must
not pretend to imitate us in the distinction which we make, reverently and
in faith, but must give account of your own presumption.

   9. If we are asked why we do not worship God as the Hebrew fathers of
the Old Testament worshipped Him, we reply that God has taught us
differently by the New Testament fathers, and yet in no opposition to the
Old Testament, but as that Testament itself predicted. For it is thus
foretold by the prophet: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I
will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of
Judah; not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers when I
took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt."(9) Thus it
was foretold that that covenant would not continue, but that there would be
a new one. And to the objection that we do not belong to the house of
Israel or to the house of Judah, we answer according to the teaching of the
apostle, who calls Christ the seed of Abraham, and says to us, as belonging
to Christ's body, "Therefore ye are Abraham's seed."(2) Again, if we are
asked why we regard that Testament as authoritative when we do not observe
its ordinances, we find the answer to this also in the apostolic writings;
for the apostle says, "Let no man judge you in meat or drink, or in respect
of a holiday, or a new moon, or of Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things
to come."(3) Here we learn both that we ought to read of these observances,
and ackowledge them to be of divine institution, in order to preserve the
memory of the prophecy, for they were shadows of things to come; and also
that we need pay no regard to those who would judge us for not continuing
the outward observance; as the apostle says elsewhere to the same purpose,
"These things happened to them for an example; and they are written for our
admonition, on whom the end of the ages are come."(4) So, when we read
anything in the books of the Old Testament which we are not required to
observe in the New Testament, or which is even forbidden, instead of
finding fault with it, we should ask what it means; for the very
discontinuance of the observance proves it to be, not condemned, but
fulfilled. On this head we have already spoken repeatedly.

   10. To take, for example, this requirement on which Faustus ignorantly
grounds his charge against the Old Testament, that a man should take his
brother's wife to raise up seed for his brother, to be called by his name;
what does this prefigure, but that every preacher of the gospel should so
labor in the Church as to raise up seed to his deceased brother, that is,
Christ, who died for us, and that this seed should bear His name? Moreover,
the apostle fulfills this requirement not now in the typical observance,
but in the spiritual reality, when he reproves those of whom he says that
he had begotten them in Christ Jesus by the gospel,(5) and points out to
them their error in wishing to be of Paul. "Was Paul," he says, "crucified
for you? Or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?"(6) As if he should say,
I have begotten you for my deceased brother; your name is Christian, not
Paulian. Then, too, whoever refuses the ministry of the gospel when chosen
by the Church, justly deserves the contempt of the Church. So we see that
the spitting in the face is accompanied with a sign of reproach in loosing
a shoe from one foot, to exclude the man from the company of those to whom
the apostle says, "Let your feet be shod with the preparation of the gospel
of peace;"(9) and of whom the prophet thus speaks "How beautiful are the
feet of them who publish peace, who bring good tidings of  good!"(8) The
man who holds the faith of  the gospel so as both to profit himself and to
be ready when called to serve the Church, is properly represented as shod
on both feet. But the man who thinks it enough to secure his own safety by
believing, and shirks the duty of benefiting others, has the reproach of
being unshod, not in type, but in reality.

   11. Faustus needlessly objects to our observance of the passover,
taunting us with differing from the Jewish observance: for in the gospel we
have the true Lamb, not in shadow, but in substance; and instead of
prefiguring the death, we commemorate it daily, and especially in the
yearly festival. Thus also the day of our paschal feast does not correspond
with the Jewish observance, for we take in the Lord's day, on which Christ
rose. And as to the feast of unleavened bread, all Christians sound in the
faith keep it, not in the leaven of the old life, that is, of wickedness,
but in the truth and sincerity of the faith; not for seven days, but
always, as was typified by the number seven, for days are always counted by
sevens. And if this observance is somewhat difficult in this world since
the way which leads to life is strait and narrow,(2) the future reward is
sure; and this difficulty is typified in the bitter herbs, which are a
little distasteful.

   12. The Pentecost, too, we observe, that is, the fiftieth day from the
passion and resurrection of the Lord, for on that day He sent to us the
Holy Paraclete whom He had promised; as was prefigured in the Jewish
passover, for on the fiftieth day after the slaying of the lamb, Moses on
the mount received the law written with the finger of God.(3) If you read
the Gospel, you will see that the Spirit is there called the finger of
God.(4) Remarkable events which happened on certain days are annually
commemorated in the Church, that the recurrence of this festival may
preserve the recollection of things so important and salutary. If you ask,
then, why we keep the passover, it is because Christ was then sacrificed
for us. If you ask why we do not retain the Jewish ceremonies, it is
because they prefigured future realities which we commemorate as past; and
the difference between the future and the past is seen in the different
words we use for them. Of this we have already said enough.

   13. Again, if you ask why, of all the kinds of food prohibited in the
former typical dispensation, we abstain only from food offered to idols and
from what dies of itself, you shall hear, if for once you will prefer the
truth to idle calumnies. The reason why it is not expedient for a Christian
to eat food offered to idols is given by the apostle: "I would not," he
says, "that ye should have fellowship with demons." Not that he finds fault
with sacrifice itself, as offered by the fathers to typify the blood of the
sacrifice with which Christ has redeemed us. For he first says, "The things
which the Gentiles offer, they offer to demons, and not to God;" and then
adds these words: "I would not that ye should have fellowship with
demons."(5) If the uncleanness were in the nature of sacrificial flesh. it
would necessarily pollute even when eaten in ignorance. But the reason for
not partaking knowingly is not in the nature of the food, but, for
conscience sake, not to seem to have fellowship with demons. As regards
what dies of itself, I suppose the reason why such food was prohibited was
that the flesh of animals which have died of themselves is diseased, and is
not likely to be wholesome, which is the chief thing in food. The
observance of pouring out the blood which was enjoined in ancient times
upon Noah  himself after the deluge,(6) the meaning of which we have
already explained, is thought by many to be what is meant in the Acts of
the Apostles, where we read that the Gentiles were required to abstain from
fornication, and from things sacrificed, and from blood,(7) that is, from
flesh of which the blood has not been poured out. Others give a different
meaning to the words, and think that to abstain from blood means not to be
polluted with the crime of murder. It would take too long to settle this
question, and it is not necessary. For, allowing that the apostles did on
that occasion require Christians to abstain from the blood of animals, and
not to eat of things strangled, they seem to me to have consulted the time
in choosing an easy observance that could not be burdensome to any one, and
which the Gentiles might have in common with the Israelities, for the sake
of the Corner-stone, who makes both one in Himself;(8) while at the same
time they would be reminded how the Church of all nations was prefigured by
the ark of Noah, when God gave this command,--a type which began to be
fulfilled in the time of the apostles by the accession of the Gentiles to
the faith. But since the close of that period during which the two walls of
the circumcision and the uncircumcision, although united in the Corner-
stone, still retained some distinctive peculiarities, and now that the
Church has become so entirely Gentile that none who are Outwardly
Israelites are to be found in it, no Christian feels bound to abstain from
thrushes or small birds because their blood has not been poured out, or
from hares because they are killed by a stroke on the neck without shedding
their blood. Any who still are afraid to touch these things are laughed at
by the rest: so general is the conviction of the truth, that "not what
entereth into the mouth defileth you, but what cometh out of it;"(9) that
evil lies in the commission of sin, and not in the nature of any food in
ordinary use.

   14. As regards the deeds of the ancients, both those which seem sinful
to foolish and ignorant people, when they are not so, and those which
really are sinful, we have already explained why they have been written,
and how this rather adds to than impairs the dignity of Scripture. So, too,
about the curse on him who hangeth on a tree, and on him who raises not up
seed in Israel, our reply has already been given in the proper place, when
meeting Faustus' objections.(1) And in reply to all objections whatsoever,
whether we have already answered them separately, or whether they are
contained in the remarks of Faustus which we are now considering, we appeal
to our established principles, on which we maintain the authority of sacred
Scripture. The principle is this, that all things written in the books of
the Old Testament are to be received with approval and admiration, as most
true and most profitable to eternal life; and that those precepts which are
no longer observed outwardly are to be understood as having been most
suitable in those times, and are to be viewed as having been shadows of
things to come, of which we may now perceive the fulfillments. Accordingly,
whoever in those times neglected the observance of these symbolical
precepts was righteously condemned to suffer the punishment required by the
divine statute, as any one would be now if he were impiously to profane the
sacraments of the New Testament, which differ from the old observances only
as this time differs from that. For as praise is due to the righteous men
of old who refused not to die for the Old Testament sacraments, so it is
due to the martyrs of the New Testament. And as a sick man should not find
fault with the medical treatment, because one thing is prescribed to-day
and another to-morrow, and what was at first required is afterwards
forbidden, since the method of cure depends on this; so the human race,
sick and sore as it is from Adam to the end of the world, as long as the
corrupted body weighs down the mind,(2) should not find fault with the
divine prescriptions, if sometimes the same observances are enjoined, and
sometimes an old observance is exchanged for one of a different kind;
especially as there was a promise of a change in the appointments.

   15. Hence there is no force in the analogy which Faustus institutes
between Christ's pointing out to us what to believe and what to reject in
the Old Testament, in which He Himself is predicted, and the Paraclete's
doing the same to you as regards the New Testament, where there is a
similar prediction of Him. There might have been some plausibility in this,
had there been anything in the Old Testament which we denounced as a
mistake, or as not of divine authority, or as untrue. We do nothing of the
kind; we receive everything, both what we observe as rules of conduct, and
what we no longer observe, but still recognize as having been prophetical
observances, once enjoined and now fulfilled. And besides, the promise of
the Paraclete is found in those books, all the contents of which you do not
accept; and His mission is recorded in the book which you shrink from even
naming. For, as is stated above, and has been said repeatedly, there is a
distinct narrative in the Acts of the Apostles of the mission of the Spirit
on the day of Pentecost, and the effect produced showed who it was. For all
who first received Him spoke with tongues;(3) and in this sign there was a
promise that in all tongues, or in all nations, the Church of after times
would faithfully proclaim the doctrine of the Spirit as well as of the
Father and of the Son.

   16. Why, then, do you not accept everything in the New Testament? Is it
because the books have not the authority of Christ's apostles, or because
the apostles taught what was wrong? You reply that the books have not the
authority of the apostles. That the apostles were wrong in their teaching
is what Pagans say. But what can you say to prove that the publication of
these books cannot be traced to the apostles? You reply that in many things
they contradict themselves and one another. Nothing could be more untrue;
the fact is, you do not understand. In every case where Faustus has brought
forward what you think a discrepancy, we have shown that there was none;
and we will do the same in every other case. It is intolerable that the
reader or learner should dare to lay the blame on Scriptures of such high
authority, instead of confessing his own stupidity. Did the Paraclete teach
you that these writings are not of the apostles' authorship, but written by
others under their names? But where is the proof that it was the Paraclete
from whom you learned this? If you say that the Paraclete was promised and
sent by Christ, we reply that your Paraclete was neither promised nor sent
by Christ; and we also show you when He sent the Paraclete whom He
promised. What proof have you that Christ sent your Paraclete? Where do you
get the evidence in support of your informant, or rather misinformant? You
reply that you find the proof in the Gospel. In what Gospel? You do not
accept all the Gospel, and you say that it has been tampered with. Will you
first accuse your witness of corruption, and then call for his evidence? To
believe him when you wish it, and then disbelieve him when you wish it, is
to believe nobody but yourself. If we were prepared to believe you, there
would be no need of a witness at all. Moreover, in the promise of the Holy
Spirit as the Paraclete, it is said, "He shall lead you into all truth;"(1)
but how can you be led into all truth by one who teaches you that Christ
was a deceiver? And again, if you were to prove that all that is said in
the Gospel of the promise of the Paraclete could apply to no one but
Manichaeus, as the predictions of the prophets are applicable to Christ;
and if you quoted passages from those manuscripts which you say are
genuine, we might say that on this very point, as proving Manichaeus to be
the only person intended, the passages have been altered in the interest of
your sect. Your only answer to this would be, that you could not possibly
alter documents already in the possession of all Christians; for at the
very outset of such an attempt, it would be met by an appeal to older
copies. But if this proves that the books could not be corrupted by you, it
also proves that they could not be corrupted by any one. The first person
who ventured to do such a thing would be convicted by a comparison of older
manuscripts; especially as the Scripture is to be found not in one language
only, but in many. As it is, false readings are sometimes corrected by
comparing older copies or the original language. Hence you must either
acknowledge these documents as genuine, and then your heresy cannot stand a
moment; or if they are spurious, you cannot use their authority in support
of your doctrine of the Paraclete, and so you refute yourselves.

   17. Further, what is said in the promise of the Paraclete shows that it
cannot possibly refer to Manichaeus, who came so many years after. For it
is distinctly said by John, that the Holy Spirit was to come immediately
after the resurrection and ascension of the Lord: "For the Spirit was not
yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified."(2) Now, if the reason
why the Spirit was not given was, that Jesus was not glorified, He would
necessarily be given immediately on the glorification of Jesus. In the same
way, the Cataphrygians(3) said that they had received the promised
Paraclete; and so they fell away from the Catholic faith, forbidding what
Paul allowed, and condemning second marriages, which he made lawful. They
turned to their own use the words spoken of the Spirit, "He shall lead you
into all truth," as if, forsooth, Paul and the other apostles had not
taught all the truth, but had left room for the Paraclete of the
Cataphrygians. The same meaning they forced from the words of Paul: "We
know in part, and we prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect is
come, then that which is in part shall be done away;"(4) making out that
the apostle knew and prophesied in part, when he said, "Let him do what he
will; if he marries. he sinneth not,"(5) and that this is done away by the
perfection of the Phrygian Paraclete.(6) And if they are told that they are
condemned by the authority of the Church, which is the subject of such
ancient promises, and is spread all over the world, they reply that this is
in exact fulfillment of what is said of the Paraclete, that the world
cannot receive Him.(7) And are not those passages, "He shall lead you into
all truth," and, "When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part
shall be done away," and, "The world cannot receive Him," precisely those
in which you find a prediction of Manichaeus? And so every heresy arising
under the name of the Paraclete will have the boldness to make an equally
plausible application to itself of such texts. For there is no heresy but
will call itself the truth; and the prouder it is, the more likely it will
be to call itself perfect truth: and so it will profess to lead into all
truth; and since that which is perfect has come by it, it will try to do
away with the doctrine of the apostles, to which its own errors are
opposed. And as the Church holds by the earnest admonition of the apostle,
that "whoever preaches another gospel to you than that which ye have
received, let him be accursed;"(8) when the heretical preacher begins to be
pronounced accursed by all the world, will he not forthwith exclaim, This
is what is written, "The world cannot receive Him"?

   18. Where, then, will you find the proof required to show that it is
from the Paraclete that you have learned that the Gospels were not written
by the apostles? On the other hand, we have proof that the Holy Spirit, the
Paraclete, came immediately after the glorification of Jesus. For "He was
not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified." We have proof
also that He leads into all truth, for the only way to truth is by love,
and "the love of God," says the apostle, "is shed abroad in our hearts by
the Holy Ghost who is given unto us."(9) We show, too, that in the words,
"when that which is perfect is come," Paul spoke of the perfection in the
enjoyment of eternal life. For in the same place he says: "Now we see
through a glass darkly, but then face to face."(10) You cannot reasonably
maintain that we see God face to face here. Therefore that which is perfect
has not come to you. It is thus clear what the apostle thought on this
subject. This perfection will not come to the saints till the
accomplishment of what John speaks of: "Now we are the sons of God, and it
doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when it shall appear
we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."(1) Then we shall be
led into all truth by the Holy Spirit, of which we have now received the
pledge. Again, the words, "The world cannot receive Him," plainly point to
those who are usually called the world in Scripture--the lovers of the
world, the wicked, or carnal; of whom the apostle says: "The natural man
perceiveth not the things which are of the Spirit of God."(2) Those are
said to be of this world who can understand nothing beyond material things,
which are the objects of sense in this world; as is the case with you,
when, in your admiration of the sun and moon, you suppose all divine things
to resemble them. Deceivers. and being deceived, you call the author of
this silly theory the Paraclete. But as you have no proof of his being the
Paraclete, you have no reliable ground for the statement that the Gospel
writings, which you receive only in part, are not of apostolic authorship.
Thus your only remaining argument is, that these writings contain things
disparaging to the glory of Christ; such as, that He was born of a virgin,
that He was circumcised, that the customary sacrifice was offered for Him,
that He was baptized, that He was tempted of the devil.

   19. With those exceptions, including also the testimonies quoted from
the Old Testament, you profess, to use the words of Faustus, to receive all
the rest, especially the mystic nailing to the cross, emblematic of the
wounds of the soul in its passion; as also the sound moral precepts of
Jesus, and the whole of His immortal discourse, which sets forth especially
the distinction of the two natures, and therefore must undoubtedly be His.
Your design clearly is to deprive Scripture of all authority, and to make
every man's mind the judge what passage of Scripture he is to approve of,
and what to disapprove of. This is not to be subject to Scripture in
matters of faith, but to make Scripture subject to you. Instead of making
the high authority of Scripture the reason of approval, every man makes his
approval the reason for thinking a passage correct. If, then, you discard
authority, to what, poor feeble soul, darkened by the mists of carnality,
to what, I beseech you, will you betake yourself? Set aside authority, and
let us hear the reason of your beliefs. Is it by a logical process that
your long story about the nature of God concludes necessarily with this
startling announcement, that this nature is subject to injury and
corruption? And how do you know that there are eight continents and ten
heavens, and that Atlas bears up the world, and that it hangs from the
great world-holder, and innumerable things of the same kind? Who is  your
authority? Manichaeus, of course, you will say. But, unhappy being, this is
not sight, but faith. If, then, you submit to receive a load of endless
fictions at the bidding of an obscure and irrational authority, so that you
believe all those things because they are written in the books which your
misguided judgment pronounces trustworthy, though there is no evidence of
their truth, why not rather submit to the authority of the Gospel, which is
so well founded, so confirmed, so generally acknowledged and admired, and
which has an unbroken series of testimonies from the apostles down to our
own day, that so you may have an intelligent belief, and may come to know
that all your objections are the fruit of folly and perversity; and that
there is more truth in the opinion that the unchangeable nature of God
should take part of mortality, so as, without injury to itself from this
union, to do and to suffer not feignedly, but really, whatever it behoved
the mortal nature to do and to suffer for the salvation of the human race
from which it was taken, than in the belief that the nature of God is
subject to injury and corruption, and that, after suffering pollution and
captivity, it cannot be wholly freed and purified, but is condemned by a
supreme divine necessity to eternal punishment in the mass of darkness?

   20. You say, in reply, that you believe in what Manichaeus has not
proved, because he has so clearly proved the existence of two natures, good
and evil, in this world. But here is the very source of your unhappy
delusion; for as in the Gospels, so in the world, your idea of what is evil
is derived entirely from the effect on your senses of such disagreeable
things as serpents, fire, poison, and so on; and the only good you know of
is what has an agreeable effect on your senses, as pleasant flavors, and
sweet smells, and sunlight, and whatever else recommends itself strongly to
your eyes, or your nostrils, or your palate, or any other organ of
sensation. But had you begun with looking on the book of nature as the
production of the Creator of all, and had you believed that your own finite
understanding might be at fault wherever anything seemed to be amiss,
instead of venturing to find fault with the works of God, you would not
have been led into these impious follies and blasphemous fancies with
which, in your ignorance of what evil really is, you heap all evils upon
God.

   21. We can now answer the question, how we know that these books were
written by the apostles. In a word, we know this in the same way that you
know that the books whose authority you are so deluded as to prefer were
written by Manichaeus. For, suppose some one should raise a question on
this point, and should contend, in arguing with you, that the books which
you attribute to Manichaeus are not of his authorship; your only reply
would be, to ridicule the absurdity of thus gratuitously calling in
question a matter confirmed by successive testimonies of such wide extent.
As, then, it is certain that these books are the production of Manichaeus,
and as it is ridiculous in one born so many years after to start objections
of his own, and so raise a discussion on the point; with equal certainty
may we pronounce it absurd, or rather pitiable, in Manichaeus or his
followers to bring such objections against writings originally well
authenticated, and carefully handed down from the times of the apostles to
our own day through a constant succession of custodians.

   22. We have now only to compare the authority of Manichaeus with that
of the apostles. The genuineness of the writings is equally certain in both
cases. But no one will compare Manichaeus to the apostles, unless he ceases
to be a follower of Christ, who sent the apostles. Who that did not
misunderstand Christ's words ever found in them the doctrine of two natures
opposed to one another, and having each its own principle? Again, the
apostles, as becomes the disciples of truth, declare the birth and passion
of Christ to have been real events; while Manichaeus, who boasts that he
leads into all truth, would lead us to a Christ whose very passion he
declares to have been an illusion. The apostles say that Christ was
circumcised in the flesh which He took of the seed of Abraham; Manichaeus
says that God, in his own nature, was cut in pieces by the race of
darkness. The apostles say that a sacrifice was offered for Christ as an
infant in our nature, according to the institutions of the time;
Manichaeus, that a member, not of humanity, but of the divine substance
itself, must be sacrificed to the whole host of demons by being introduced
into the nature of the hostile race. The apostles say that Christ, to set
us an example, was baptized in the Jordan; Manichaeus, that God immersed
himself in the pollution of darkness, and that he will never wholly emerge,
but that the part which cannot be purified will be condemned to eternal
punishment. The apostles say that Christ, in our nature, was tempted by the
chief of the demons; Manichaeus, that part of God was taken captive by the
race of demons. And in the temptation of Christ He resists the tempter;
while in the captivity of God, the part taken captive cannot be restored to
its origin even after victory. To conclude, Manichaeus, under the guise of
an improvement, preaches another gospel, which is the doctrine of devils;
and the apostles, after the doctrine of Christ, enjoin that whoever
preaches another gospel shall be accursed.(1)

BOOK XXXIII: FAUSTUS DOES NOT THINK IT WOULD BE A GREAT HONOR TO SIT DOWN
WITH ABRAHAM, ISAAC AND JACOB, WHOSE MORAL CHARACTERS AS SET FORTH IN THE
OLD TESTAMENT HE DETESTS. HE JUSTIFIES HIS SUBJECTIVE CRITICISM OF
SCRIPTURE. AUGUSTIN SUMS UP THE ARGUMENT, CLAIMS THE VICTORY, AND EXHORTS
THE MANICHAEANS TO ABANDON THEIR OPPOSITION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT
NOTWITHSTANDING THE DIFFICULTIES THAT IT PRESENTS, AND TO RECOGNIZE THE
AUTHORITY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

   1. FAUSTUS said: You quote from the Gospel the words, "Many shall come
from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and
Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven,"(1) and ask why we do not acknowledge the
patriarchs. Now, we should be the last to grudge to any human being that
God should have compassion on him, and bring him out of perdition to
salvation. At the same time, we should acknowledge in such a case the
clemency shown in this act of compassion, and not the merit of the person
whose life is undeniably blameworthy. Thus, in the case of the Jewish
fathers, Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, who are mentioned by Christ in this
verse, supposing it to be genuine, although they led wicked lives, as we
may learn from their descendant Moses, or whoever was the author of the
history called Genesis, which describes their conduct as having been most
shocking and detestable we are ready to allow that they may, after all, be
in the kingdom of heaven, in the place which they neither believed in, nor
hoped for, as is plain enough from their books. But then it must be kept in
mind that, as you yourselves confess, if they did attain to what is spoken
of in this verse, it was something very different from the nether dungeons
of woe to which their own deserts consigned them, and that their
deliverance was the work of our Lord Christ, and the result of His mystic
passion. Who would grudge to the thief on the cross that deliverance was
granted to him by the same Lord, and that Christ said that on that very day
he should be with Him in the paradise of His Father?(1) Who is so hard-
hearted as to disapprove of this act of benevolence? Still, it does not
follow that, because Jesus pardoned a thief, we must approve of the habits
and practices of thieves; any more than of the publicans and harlots, whose
faults Jesus pardoned, declaring that they would go into the kingdom of
heaven before those who behaved proudly.(2) For, when He acquitted the
woman accused by the Jews as sinful, and as having been caught in adultery,
He told her to sin no more.(3) If, then, He has done something of the same
kind in the case of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, all the praise is His;
for such actions towards souls are becoming in Him who maketh His sun to
rise upon the evil and upon the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on
the unjust.(4) One thing perplexes me in your doctrine: why you limit your
statements to the fathers of the Jews, and are not of opinion that the
Gentile patriarchs had also a share in this grace of our Redeemer;
especially as the Christian Church consists of their children more than of
the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You will say that the Gentiles
worshipped idols, and the Jews the Almighty God, and that therefore Jesus
had regard only to the Jews. It would seem from this that the worship of
the Almighty God is the sure way to hell, and that the Son must come to the
aid of the worshipper of the Father. That is as you please. For my part, I
am ready to join you in the belief that the fathers reached heaven, not by
any merit of their own, but by that divine mercy which is stronger than
sin.

   2. However, there is a difficulty in deciding as regards this verse
too, whether the words were really spoken to Christ, for there is a
discrepancy in the narratives. For while two evangelists, Matthew and Luke,
both alike tell of the centurion whose servant was sick, and to whom these
words of Jesus are supposed to have applied, that He had not seen so great
faith, no, not in Israel, as in this man, though a Gentile and a Pagan,
because he said that he was not worthy that Jesus should come under his
roof, but wished Him only to speak the word, and his servant should be
healed; Matthew alone adds that Jesus went on to say, "Verily I say unto
you, that many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit
down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven; but the
children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness." By the many who
should come are meant the Pagans, on account of the centurion, in whom,
although he was a Gentile, so great faith was found; and the children of
the kingdom are the Jews, in whom there was no faith found. Luke, again,
though he too mentions the occurrence in his Gospel as part of the
narrative of the miracles of Christ, says nothing of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. If it is said that he omitted it because it had been already said by
Matthew, why does he tell the story at all of the centurion and his
servant, since that, too, has the advantage of being recorded at length in
Matthew's ingenious narrative? But the passage is corrupt. For, in
describing the centurion's application to Jesus, Matthew says that he came
himself to ask for a cure; while Luke says he did not, but sent elders of
the Jews, and that they, in case Jesus should despise the centurion as a
Gentile (for they will have Jesus to be a thorough Jew), set about
persuading Him, by saying that he was worthy for whom He should do this,
because he loved their nation, and had built them a synagogue;(5) here
again taking for granted that the Son of God was concerned in a pagan
centurion having thought it proper to build a synagogue for the Jews. The
words in question are, indeed, found in Luke also, perhaps because on
reflection he thought they might be genuine; but they are found in another
place, and in a connection altogether different. The passage is where Jesus
says to His disciples, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate; for many
shall come seeking to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the Master
of the house has entered in, and has shut to the door, ye shall begin to
stand without, and to knock, saying Lord, open to us. And He shall answer
and say, I know you not. Then ye shall begin to say, We have eaten and
drunk in Thy presence, and Thou hast taught in our streets and synagogues;
but He shall say unto you, I know not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye
workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye
shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, entering
into the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out. And they shall come
from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south,
and shall sit down in the kingdom of God."(1) The part where it is said
that many shall be shut out of the kingdom of God, who have only borne the
name of Christ, without doing His works, is not left out by Matthew; but he
makes no mention here of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. In the same way,
Luke mentions the centurion and his servant, without alluding in that
connection to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. Since it is uncertain when the
words were spoken, we are at liberty to doubt whether they were spoken at
all.

   3. It is not without reason that we bring a critical judgment to the
study of Scriptures where there are such discrepancies and contradictions.
By thus examining everything, and comparing one passage with another, we
determine which contains Christ's actual words, and what may or may not be
genuine. For your predecessors have made many interpolations in the words
of our Lord, which thus appear under His name, while they disagree with His
doctrine. Besides, as we have proved again and again, the writings are not
the production of Christ or of His apostles, but a compilation of rumors
and beliefs, made, long after their departure, by some obscure semi-Jews,
not in harmony even with one another, and published by them under the name
of the apostles, or of those considered the followers of the apostles, so
as to give the appearance of apostolic authority to all these blunders and
falsehoods. But whatever you make of that, as regards this verse, I repeat
that I do not insist on rejecting it. It is enough for my position, that,
as I said before, and as you are obliged to confess, before the coming of
our Lord all the patriarchs and prophets of Israel lay in infernal darkness
for their sins. Even though they may have been restored to light and
liberty by Christ, that has nothing to do with the hateful character of
their lives. We hate and eschew not their persons, but their characters;
not as they are now, when they are purified, but as they were, when impure.
So, whatever you think of this verse, it does not affect us: for if it is
genuine, it only illustrates Christ's goodness and compassion; and if it is
spurious, those who wrote it are to blame. Our cause is as safe as it
always is.

   4. AUGUSTIN replied: Poor safety, indeed! when you contradict yourself
by hating the patriarchs as impure, at the same time that you grieve for
your impure god. You allow that, since the advent of the Saviour, the
patriarchs have had purity restored, and have enjoyed the rest of the
blessed; while your god, even after the Saviour's advent, still lies in
darkness, is still sunk in the ocean of iniquity, still wallows in the mire
of all uncleanness. These men, therefore, were not only better than your
god in their lives, but also happier in their death. Where was the abode of
the just who departed from this life before Christ's coming in the flesh,
and whether their condition also was improved by the passion of Christ, in
whom they had believed as to come, and to suffer, and to rise again, and
had, moreover, foretold this in suitable language under the guidance of the
Spirit of prophecy, is to be discovered from the Holy Scriptures, if any
clear discovery in this matter is possible; we are not called on to adopt
the crude notions of all and sundry, still less the heretical opinions of
men who have gone astray into such egregious error. There is a vain attempt
here on the part of Faustus to introduce by a side-door the idea that we
may obtain something after this life besides the due reward of our conduct
in this life. It will be better for you to abandon your error while you are
still alive, and to embrace and hold the truths of the Catholic faith.
Otherwise the expectations of the unrighteous will be sadly disappointed
when God begins to fulfill His threatenings to the unrighteous.

   5. I have already given what I considered a sufficient answer to
Faustus' calumnies of the lives of the patriarchs. That they were punished
at their death, or that they were justified after the Lord's passion, is
not what we learn from His commendation of them, when He admonished the
Jews that, if they were Abraham's children, they should do the works of
Abraham, and said that Abraham desired to see His day, and was glad when he
saw it;(2) and that it was into his bosom, that is, some deep recess of
blissful repose, that the angels carried the poor sufferer who was despised
by the proud rich man.(1) And what are we to make of the Apostle Paul? Is
there any idea of justification after death in his praise of Abraham, when
he says that before he was circumcised he believed God, and that it was
counted to him for righteousness?(2) And so much importance does he attach
to this, that the single ground which he specifies for our becoming
Abraham's children, though not descended from him in the flesh, is, that we
follow the footsteps of his faith.

   6. You are so hardened in your errors against the testimonies of
Scripture, that nothing can be made of you; for whenever anything is quoted
against you, you have the boldness to say that it is written not by the
apostle, but by some pretender under his name. The doctrine of demons which
you preach is so opposed to Christian doctrine, that you could not
continue, as professing Christians, to maintain it, unless you denied the
truth of the apostolic writings. How can you thus do injury to your own
souls? Where will you find any authority, if not in the Gospel and
apostolic writings? How can we be sure of the authorship of any book, if we
doubt the apostolic origin of those books which are attributed to the
apostles by the Church which the apostles themselves rounded, and which
occupies so conspicuous a place in all lands, and if at the same time we
acknowledge as the undoubted production of the apostles what is brought
forward by heretics in opposition to the Church, whose authors, from whom
they derive their name, lived long after the apostles? And do we not see in
profane literature that there are well-known authors under whose names many
things have been published after their time which have been rejected,
either from inconsistency with their ascertained writings, or from their
not having been known in the lifetime of the authors, so as to be banded
down with the confirmatory statement of the authors themselves, or of their
friends? To give a single example, were not some books published lately
under the name of the distinguished physician Hippocrates, which were not
received as authoritative by physicians? And this decision remained
unaltered in spite of some similarity in style and matter: for, when
compared to the genuine writings of Hippocrates, these books were found to
be inferior; besides that they were not recognized as his at the time when
his authorship of his genuine productions was ascertained. Those books,
again, from a comparison with which the productions of questionable origin
were rejected, are with certainty attributed to Hippocrates; and any one
who denies their authorship is answered only by ridicule, simply because
there is a succession of testimonies to the books from the time of
Hippocrates to the present day, which makes it unreasonable either now or
hereafter to have any doubt on the subject. How do we know the authorship
of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and other similar writers,
but by the unbroken chain of evidence? So also with the numerous
commentaries on the ecclesiastical books, which have no canonical
authority, and yet show a desire of usefulness and a spirit of inquiry. How
is the authorship ascertained in each case, except by the author's having
brought his work into public notice as much as possible in his own
lifetime. and, by the transmission of the information from one to another
in continuous order, the belief becoming more certain as it becomes more
general, up to our own day; so that, when we are questioned as to the
authorship of any book, we have no difficulty in answering? But why speak
of old books? Take the books now before us: should any one, after some
years, deny that this book was written by me, or that Faustus' was written
by him, where is evidence for the fact to be found but in the information
possessed by some at the present time, and transmitted by them through
successive generations even to distant times? From all this it follows,
that no one who has not yielded to the malicious and deceitful suggestions
of lying devils, can be so blinded by passion as to deny the ability of the
Church of the apostles--a community of brethren as numerous as they were
faithful--to transmit their writings unaltered to posterity, as the
original seats of the apostles have been occupied by a continuous
succession of bishops to the present day, especially when we are accustomed
to see this happen in the case of ordinary writings both in the Church and
out of it.

   7. But Faustus finds contradictions in the Gospels. Say, rather, that
Faustus reads the Gospels in a wrong spirit, that he is too foolish to
understand, and too blind to see. If you were animated with piety instead
of being misled by party spirit, you might easily, by examining these
passages, discover a wonderful and most instructive harmony among the
writers. Who, in reading two narratives of the same event, would think of
charging one or both of the authors with error or falsehood, because one
omits what the other mentions, or one tells concisely, but with substantial
agreement, what the other relates in detail, so as to indicate not only
what was done, but also how it was done? This is what Faustus does in his
attempt to impeach the truth of the Gospels; as if Luke's omitting some
saying of Christ recorded in Matthew implied a denial on the part of Luke
of Matthew's statement. There is no real difficulty in the case; and to
make a difficulty shows want of thought, or of the ability to think. There
is, indeed, a point in the narrative of the centurion which is discussed
among believers, and on which objections are raised by unbelievers of no
great learning, who prove their quarrelsomeness, when, after being
instructed, they do not give up their errors. The point is, that Matthew
says that the centurion came to Jesus "beseeching Him, and saying;" while
Luke says that he sent to Jesus the elders of the Jews with this same
request, that He would heal his servant who was sick; and that when He came
near the house he sent others, through whom he said that he was not worthy
that Jesus should come into his house, and that he was not worthy to come
himself to Jesus. How, then, do we read in Matthew, "He came to Him,
beseeching Him, and saying, My servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, and
grievously tormented?"(1) The explanation is, that Matthew's narrative is
correct, but brief, mentioning the centurion's coming to Jesus, without
saying whether he came himself or by others, or whether the words about his
servant were spoken by himself or through others. But is it not common to
speak of a person as coming near to a thing, although he may not reach it?
And even the word reach, which is the strongest form of expression, is
frequently used in cases where the person spoken of acts through others, as
when we say he took his case to court, he reached the presence of the
judge; or, again, he reached the presence of some man in power, although it
may probably have been through his friends, and the person may not have
seen him whose presence he is said to have reached. And from the word for
to reach we give the name of Perventors to those who by ambitious arts gain
access, either personally or through friends, to the, so to speak,
inaccessible minds of the great. Are we, then, in reading to forget the
common usage of speech? Or must the sacred Scripture have a language of its
own? The cavils of forward critics are thus met by a reference to the usual
forms of speech.

    8. Those who examine this matter not in a disputatious but in a calm
believing spirit are invited to come to Jesus, not outwardly but in heart,
not in bodily presence but in the power of faith, as the centurion did, and
then they will better understand Matthew's narrative. To such it is said in
the Psalm "Come unto Him, and be enlightened; and your faces shall not be
ashamed."(2) Hence we learn that the centurion, whose faith was so highly
spoken of, came to Christ more truly than the people who carried his
message. We find an analogous case in the woman with the issue of blood,
who was healed by touching the hem of Christ's garment. when Christ said,
"Some one hath touched me." The disciples wondered what Christ meant by
saying, "Who hath touched me?" "Some one hath touched me," when the crowd
was thronging Him. In fact, they made this reply: "The crowd throngeth
Thee, and sayest Thou, Who hath touched me?"(3) Now, as the people thronged
Christ while the woman touched Him, so the messengers were sent to Christ,
but the centurion really came to Him. In Matthew we have a not infrequent
form of expression, and at the same time a symbolical import; while in Luke
there is a simple narrative of the whole event, such as to draw our
attention to the manner in which Matthew has recorded it. I wish one of
those people who found their silly objections to the Gospels on such
trifling difficulties would himself tell a story twice over, honestly
giving a true account of what happened, and that his words were written
down and read over to him. We should then see whether he would not say more
or less at one time than at another; and whether the order would not be
changed, not only of words, but of things; and whether he would not put
some opinion of his own into the mouth of another, because, though he never
heard him say it, he knew it perfectly well to be in his mind; and whether
he would not sometimes put in a few words what he had before related at
length. In these and other ways, which might perhaps be reduced to rule,
the narratives of the same thing by two persons, or two narratives by the
same person, might differ in many things without being opposed, might be
unlike without being contradictory. Thus are undone all the bandages with
which poor Manichaeans stifle themselves to keep in the spirit of error,
and to keep out all that might lead to their salvation.

   9. Now that all Faustus' calumnies have been refuted, those at least on
the subjects here treated of at large and explained fully as the Lord has
enabled me, I close with a word of counsel to you who are implicated in
those shocking and damnable errors, that, if you acknowledge the supreme
authority of Scripture, you should recognise that authority which from the
time of Christ Himself, through the ministry of His apostles, and through a
regular succession of bishops in the seats of the apostles, has been
preserved to our own day throughout the whole world, with a reputation
known to all. There the Old Testament too has its difficulties solved, and
its predictions fulfilled. If you ask for demonstration, consider first
what you are, how unfit for comprehending the nature of your own soul, not
to speak of God; I mean an intelligent comprehension, such as you profess
to desire, or to have once desired, and not the notions of a credulous
fancy. Admitting this incompetency, which must continue while you remain as
you are, you may at least be referred to the natural conviction of every
human mind, unless it is corrupted by error, of the perfect
unchangeableness and incorruptibility of the nature and substance of God.
Admit this, or believe it, and you will no longer be Manichaeans, so that
in course of time you may become Catholics.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland, beginning in
1867. (LNPF I/IV, Schaff). The digital version is by The Electronic Bible
Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

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