Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 15 part 12/37

but rich one, is content with the goods of her own husband, and disdains the wealth of lowly lovers; the gifts of the Old Testament and of its author are foul to her, and, being the most diligent guardian of her own reputation, she receives no letters but her Bridegroom's. Let your Church, to be sure, appropriate the Old Testament — your Church which, like a wanton virgin forgetful of modesty, rejoices in the gifts and letters of a strange man. That lover of yours, in short, and corrupter of chastity, the God of the Hebrews, promises you in his stone diptych gold and silver, the filling of the belly, and the land of the Canaanites. These sordid gains have so delighted you that it pleases you to sin after Christ, so that you are ungrateful for his so immense endowments. These things allure you to perish in your love of the God of the Hebrews after your nuptials with Christ.

Learn therefore even now that you are being deceived and cheated by his false promises. He is poor, he is needy; he cannot even furnish the very things he promises: for if he furnishes none of these things which he holds out to his own proper wife — I mean the synagogue — and to her who complies with him in all things and serves him more submissively than a handmaid, what will he be able to furnish to you, who are strangers to him and who spurn the yoke of his commandments with a proud neck? But go on, then, to do as you have begun: patch a rough cloth onto an old garment, entrust new wine to worn-out skins, serve two husbands to please neither, and, in short, make of the Christian faith a Hippocentaur — neither a perfect horse nor a man;

but permit us to serve Christ alone, content with his immortal dowry alone, and imitating the Apostle who says: Our sufficiency is from God, who has proved us fit ministers of the New Testament. The condition of the God of the Hebrews and our own condition are utterly diverse, because he cannot fulfil what he promises, and we disdain to receive those things. The liberality of Christ has made us proud against that God's blandishments. And that you may not think I have made these comparisons unfittingly, Paul first applied this likeness of conjugal discipline to us, saying: The woman who is under a husband is bound by the law to her husband while he lives; but if her husband dies, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

Therefore, he says, while her husband lives she shall be called an adulteress if she is joined to another man; but if her husband dies, she shall not be an adulteress though joined to another — thereby showing that those commit adultery in spirit who, without first repudiating the author of the law and in a manner placing him among the dead, then at last join themselves to Christ. This saying looks especially to those who believed from among the Jews, namely that they themselves should be forgetful of their former superstition. But for us, what need is there of even a precept in this matter — for us who, converted from paganism to Christ, ought to regard the God of the Hebrews not as dead, but as not even born? Indeed to a Jew, if he believes, Adonai ought to seem deceased; to a pagan, an idol; and to each one, whatever he venerated before he came to know Christ.

For if, after divorcing the idolatry of the Hebrews, anyone worships God and Christ alike, he in no way differs from a woman of worn-out modesty, who after the death of one husband has married two. AUGUSTINE replied: Hear these things, you whose hearts Christ possesses, and see whether you can bear them — unless it be that he himself is your patience. Faustus, full of new honey, spat out the old vinegar, and Paul, full of old vinegar, poured out half of it in order to take in the infused new honey — not to be preserved, but to be corrupted. For you see what the Apostle Paul says: A servant of Christ Jesus, called an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God — this is from the new honey; but that which follows:

which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures concerning his Son, who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh — this is from the old vinegar. Who could bear to hear this, unless the same one consoles us, saying: There must be heresies, that those who are approved may be made manifest among you? But what need is there to repeat again what has been sufficiently said above? For the new cloth and the old garment, and the new wine and the old skins, do not signify two testaments, but two lives and two hopes; whereas for the understanding of the two testaments that likeness was given by the Lord:

Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of God is like a householder who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old. Let him who can, recall from those things we have said before, or at least let him review them who is willing. For if anyone should think that two hopes are to be held, so that he may serve God both for the sake of earthly happiness and for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, this hope does not contain that one; and when this one is disturbed by some tribulation, the man, failing, will lose the other also. Hence too is that saying: No one can serve two masters — which he expounded by saying: You cannot serve God and mammon. But the Old Testament, to those who rightly understand it, is a prophecy of the New Testament.

And so, even in that first people, the holy patriarchs and prophets, who understood what they were doing or what was being done through them, held in the New Testament this hope of eternal salvation; for they belonged to that which they understood and loved, since, although it was not yet revealed, it was nevertheless already being prefigured. But to the Old belonged those who there desired nothing more than the temporal promises they thought upon, in which they did not understand the eternal things prefigured and prophesied. But these things have now been said enough and more than enough in our earlier responses. But that is a marvellous impudence, when the sacrilegious and unclean society of the Manichaeans does not hesitate to boast itself even the chaste bride of Christ:

In this matter, what does he accomplish against the truly chaste members of the holy Church, except that there should come to mind, against such men, that apostolic admonition: 'I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so also your minds should be corrupted from the chastity that is in Christ'?

For what do these men do who preach to us a gospel besides that which we have received, except to corrupt us from the chastity which we keep for Christ, when they blame the law of God under the name of oldness and praise their own error under the name of newness — as if all that is old must be shunned or all that is new must be sought after, whereas the apostle John sets an old commandment among things praiseworthy, and the apostle Paul bids us avoid profane novelties of words? You therefore, O true bride of the true Christ, the Catholic Church, I too will address you according to my small measure, being in whatever manner a son and servant of yours, set within you to dispense food to my fellow servants: beware always, as you do beware, of the impious vanity of the Manichaeans, already tested by the peril of your own children and refuted by their deliverance.

That error once shook me out of your bosom; having tried it, I fled from what I ought not to have tried. But let even my perils profit you, whom now my deliverance serves; for unless your true and truthful Bridegroom, from whose side you were made, had established in his own true blood the remission of sins for me, the abyss of falsehood would have swallowed me up, and the serpent would have irreparably devoured me, made into earth. Do not be deceived by the name of truth; this you alone possess, both in your milk and in your bread; but among them there is only the name of it — the thing itself is not there. And concerning your grown ones you are indeed secure; but I appeal, within you, to your little ones.

To the brethren, the sons, my lords, whom you either cherish under anxious wings as eggs, or nourish with milk as infants — O fruitful virgin mother without corruption — these, your tender offspring, I appeal to within you: that they be not seduced away from you by garrulous curiosity, but rather let them anathematize anyone who should preach to them a gospel besides that which they received in you, and let them not forsake the true and truthful Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and the great multitude of his sweetness, which he has hidden for those who fear him, but has perfected for those who hope in him. There, indeed, how can there be truthful words in a preacher of a lying Christ?

Despise their insults, for you are well aware within yourself that you have set your love upon the promise of eternal life in the gifts of your Bridegroom — that is, upon your Bridegroom himself, for he himself is eternal life. You have not, as they in their folly imagine, been seduced to a strange god who promises fullness of belly and the land of the Canaanites. For you understand that in those very promises you had already then, in figure and in prophecy, brought forth the foreknowledge of the saints. Nor should you be moved when the stone diptych is reproached with pitiable railing, for you do not have a stony heart, which those tables signified in the former people. For you are the epistle of the apostles, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tables of stone but on the fleshly tables of the heart.

At these words those vain men rejoice, thinking that the apostle reproached the dispensation of the Old Testament suited to that time, not understanding that he said this from the prophet. For these very words, which they embrace so ignorantly, were foretold long before they were spoken and fulfilled by the apostles — foretold by the prophets whom they reject. For the prophet had said: 'I will take away from them the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.' Let them see whether this is not the same as 'not on tables of stone, but on the fleshly tables of the heart.' For neither there does 'a heart of flesh,' nor here do 'fleshly tables,' mean that we should be carnally minded.

But because, in comparison with stone, which is without sensation, flesh does perceive, therefore by the insensibility of stone was signified a heart that does not understand, and by the sensibility of flesh was signified a heart that understands. Do you rather mock those who say that both earth and wood and stones have sensation and live a more intelligent life, but that flesh lives a duller and more sluggish one. Whence not by truth but by their own vanity they are compelled to confess that the law written on tables of stone is cleaner than their own treasure in dead skins. Or is it perhaps that, since in their fable they even call stones the bones of the princes, they do not hesitate to prefer the hides of lambs to them?

Surely then that ark of the testament covered the stone tables more cleanly than a goat's skin covers the codex of these men. Mock these things mercifully, that you may commend them to them as things to be mocked and shunned; for in that stone diptych, now with no stony heart, you understand what was suited to that hardened people. And yet in it you recognize the rock, your very Bridegroom, him of whom Peter speaks: 'a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen of God and precious.' To them therefore he was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense; but to you, 'the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.' And all this the apostle Peter himself unfolds, and records that it was all foretold by the prophets, from whom these condemned men estrange themselves.

Read then also that diptych; do not be afraid. Plainly it belongs to your Bridegroom. To others that stone signified hard stupidity, but to you firm stability. Those tables were written with the finger of God; with the finger of God your Bridegroom cast out demons; with the finger of God do you drive out the doctrines of demons that speak lies through their hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron. From this diptych you repel the adulterer who calls himself the Paraclete, that under a holy name he may seduce you. For on the fiftieth day after the Passover those tables were given; and on the fiftieth day after the passion of your Bridegroom, which that Passover prefigured, was given the finger of God, the Holy Spirit, the promised Paraclete.

Do not therefore dread the diptych by which the things you now recognize were once sent written to you; only do not be under the law, lest through fear you fail to fulfill it, but under grace, so that in you the fullness of the law may be love. For it was no other diptych that the friend of your Bridegroom was reviewing when he said: 'For, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love works no evil to the neighbor. Love therefore is the fullness of the law.' For there are those two precepts, of the love of God and of the love of the neighbor, set forth on the separate tables.

This diptych, then, he sent before who, in coming, commended to you these two precepts, on which the whole law hangs and the prophets. In the first precept is the chastity of your marriage, in the second the unity of your members: by the one you embrace divinity, by the other you gather fellowship together. These two precepts are the very ten: three pertain to God and seven to the neighbor. O chaste diptych, in which, under an ancient figure, that lover of yours, and your beloved, foretold to you a new song, upon the ten-stringed psaltery, as one who would stretch out even his own sinews upon the wood, as it were on your behalf, that he might of sin condemn sin in the flesh, and that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in you. O conjugal diptych, which not without cause the adulteress hates!

For now my discourse is to you, O Manichaean assembly, deceitful and wrapped in deceits. Do you, thus wedded to so many elements — or rather a harlot prostituted to demons and impregnated by sacrilegious vanities — dare to tear the Catholic marriage of your Lord with the charge of unchastity? Show us your adulterers, the Splendor-holder the Weigher, and Atlas the Bearer. For the one you say holds the summits of the elements and suspends the world; the other, with knee fixed, supports so great a mass upon his stout shoulders, no doubt lest the former should fail. Where are these fellows? For if they truly existed, when would they come to you, being occupied with so great a task?

When would they enter in to you, that with your caressing hand, made delicate by idle bread, you might, after so great a labor, rub the fingers of the one and the shoulders of the other? But the evil demons deceive you, which fornicate with you, that you may conceive lies and bring forth phantasms.

Why then do you not spit out the diptych of the true God, hostile to your parchments — those parchments by which you have set your love, with wandering mind, upon so many false gods through the figments of your imaginings? Compared with them, all the lies of the poets will be found weightier and more honorable — or at least this: that among the poets the very profession of falsehood deceives no one, whereas in your books so great a throng of deceits corrupts with pitiable errors souls that are childish even in the aged, enticed under the name of truth, while, as the apostle says, having itching ears and turning away their hearing from the truth, they are turned aside to fables. How then could you bear the sound doctrine of those tables, where the first precept is: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God'?

— when you wallow, wholly delighted with the names of gods, in the fornication of a most foul heart? Do you not recall your amatory song, in which you describe the greatest reigning king, the everlasting scepter-bearer, girt with flowery crowns and glowing in countenance? If you loved him alone as such, you would have to blush; for even one man girt with flowery crowns would displease a chaste wife. Nor can you say that this was so spoken or so shown by some mystical signification, since Manichaeus is wont to be praised by you for no other reason than that, the coverings of figures removed, he himself spoke to you the naked and proper truth. Properly then you sing of a god who is a king, a scepter-bearer, crowned with flowers.

Let him at least lay down the scepter when he is girt with flowery crowns; that softness of luxury does not befit the severity of a royal rod. To this is added that he is not loved by you alone; for in your song you go on and add twelve ages clothed with flowers and full of songs, casting their flowers into the face of the father. There you also profess certain twelve great gods, three by each of the four quarters, by which that one is encircled. How you make him boundless whom you say to be thus encompassed, you have never been able to discover. You add also innumerable inhabitants of the kingdom and hosts of gods and cohorts of angels: all of which you say God did not create, but begot from his own substance.

Thus you are convicted of worshipping innumerable gods, because you cannot bear the sound doctrine by which it is taught that there is one Son born of one God, and the Holy Spirit of both. Yet these it is not lawful to call not only innumerable, but even three gods: whose substance is not only one and the same, but whose operation also is one and the same, through that very proper, one and same substance — while through corporeal creation there is even a manifestation of each singly. These things you do not understand, you do not grasp: I know it, you are full, you are drunk, you are gorged with fabulous sacrilege. Digest at last what you belch forth, and cease now to overwhelm yourself with such things; meanwhile sing what you sing, and look, if you can, upon the disgrace of your fornication.

For the doctrine of demons that speak lies has invited you to the fictitious houses of angels, where a healthful breeze blows, and to the fields where aromatic spices teem, whose trees and mountains, seas and rivers flow sweet nectar throughout all ages. And you believed and fashioned these things in your heart, where, luxuriating and dissolute with vain recollections, you are tossed about. For when certain such things are said concerning the ineffable abundance of spiritual delights, they are surely said in a riddle — so that the mind which is exercised in such things may know that there is something else which is there to be sought and understood, whether by the bodily senses some such thing be shown in bodily reality, as fire in the bush and a serpent from the rod.

— concerning the serpent from the rod, and the tunic of the Lord not divided by the persecutors, and the anointing of his feet or head by the woman's service, and the branches of the multitude going before and following his ass: or whether, in the spirit, through images of bodies, they be shown figuratively, whether in a dream or in an ecstasy, as Jacob's ladder, and to Daniel the stone cut without hands and grown into a mountain, and to Peter that sheet, and to John so many things: or whether by mere speech they be figured in the same manner, as the Song of Songs, and what in the Gospel the head of the household did in making a marriage for his son, and 'a certain man had two sons,' the thrifty and the prodigal, and 'a certain man planted a vineyard and let it out to husbandmen.'

But you especially proclaim Manichaeus for this reason, that he came last, not to speak such things, but rather to resolve them, so that both by laying open the figures of the ancients and by bringing forth his own narrations and disputations in clear light, he concealed himself in no riddle. You add this cause of his presumption: namely that the ancients, in order to see or enact or speak figures of this kind, knew that this man would afterward come, through whom all things would be made manifest, while he, since he knew that after him no one would come, wove his opinions in no allegorical windings. What then does your affection, sordid with carnal desires, do in the fields and wooded mountains and flowery crowns and teeming spices?

If they are not riddles of reason, they are phantasms of imagination or the madness of frenzy; but if they are said to be riddles, why do you not flee the adulterer — the open truth, that he may allure you, promising even fabulous falsehood, mocking those whom he has allured? Do not his ministers, they too wretched, poisoned with such vanities, use to place on their hook this bait taken from the apostle Paul, where he says: 'For 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'; and 'we see now through a glass in a riddle, but then face to face'?

— so that, forsooth, the apostle Paul knew in part and prophesied in part, seeing through a glass and in a riddle, all of which is to be done away when Manichaeus comes bringing that which is perfect, where the truth is seen face to face. O wanton, unclean, shameless one, do you still chatter these things, do you still feed on the winds, do you still embrace the idols of your heart! Did you then see face to face the reigning king, the scepter-bearer girt with flowery crowns, and the hosts of gods, and the great Splendor-holder, bearing six faces and mouths and gleaming with light, and another king of honor surrounded by armies of angels; and another adamant hero, warlike, holding a spear in his right hand and a shield in his left;

and another glorious king driving three wheels, of fire, water, and wind; and the greatest Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, and another with bent knee propping it up with his arms on either side? Did you see these and a thousand other portents face to face, or does this doctrine of demons that speak lies sing them to you through the mouths of deceivers, and you do not know it? Woe to you, unhappy one!

Behold with what phantasms you are defiled, behold what vanities you lick up in place of truth, and, drunk with serpent-cups, you dare from the stone diptych to insult the matronly modesty of the wife of the only Son of God — because she now lives no longer under the tutelage of the law, but under the mastery of grace, neither proud in works nor broken by terrors, living by faith and hope and love, having been made Israel, in whom there is no guile, and hearing what is there written: 'The Lord your God is one God' — which you, not hearing, have poured out your fornication upon so many fictitious gods. How should those tables not be hostile to you, in which the second precept is:

'You shall not take in vain the name of the Lord your God' — inasmuch as you have placed even Christ himself, who, for the sake of cleansing the carnal from carnal vanity, truly arose in the truth of the flesh even before fleshly eyes, in the vanity of falsehood? How should the third precept, concerning the rest of the Sabbath, not be against you, whose soul, unquiet through the illusions of so many figments, is tossed about? These three precepts — how they pertain to the love of God, when will you comprehend, when will you have taste, when will you love? You are immoderate and foul and contentious: you have swelled up, you have vanished away, you have grown vile, you have exceeded your measure, you have befouled your beauty, you have disturbed your order. Such was I once with you; I know you.

By what means then should I now teach you that these three precepts pertain to the love of God, from whom and through whom and in whom are all things? Whence do you understand this, when you are not even permitted, through the detestable perversity of your error, to know and observe those seven which pertain to the love of the neighbor, by which the fellowship of human life is held together? Among which the first commandment is: 'Honor your father and your mother' — which Paul too records as the first commandment with a promise, and, likewise himself enjoining it. But you have learned, by demonic doctrine, to reckon your parents as enemies, because they bound you through intercourse in the flesh, and in this way, forsooth, laid unclean fetters upon your god. Hence also the following precept, which is:

'You shall not commit adultery' — this you so violate that you especially detest in marriage the very thing that children are procreated; and thus you make even your Hearers adulterers of their own wives, while they take care lest the women with whom they mingle should conceive. For they lead them home by the law of matrimony, the marriage tables proclaiming that it is for the sake of procreating children, yet, fearing by your law lest they defile a particle of their god with the filth of the flesh, they mingle with the women in an unchaste union merely to satisfy lust; but children they receive unwillingly — the one thing on account of which marriages ought to be joined. How then do you not forbid to marry, which the apostle so long ago foretold concerning you, when you attempt to take away from marriage that from which marriage exists?

Once that is taken away, husbands will basely be lovers, wives harlots, bridal chambers brothels, fathers-in-law procurers. And on account of this, that precept also which is: 'You shall not kill,' you do not keep, out of the perversity of the same error. For while you fear lest a member of your god be bound in the flesh, you do not give bread to the hungry, here dreading a false homicide, there perpetrating a true one. And so, if you should come upon a famished man who might die unless you help by holding out food to him — now you will be held a homicide, either by the law of God, if you do not give, or by the law of Manichaeus, if you do give. What then? The other precepts of the Decalogue, how will you keep them?

Would you abstain from theft — so that some man or other may devour in his own bowels bread or whatever food, to be slaughtered there, rather than that you, if you could, should snatch it from him and run off to the workshop of your Elect's belly, so that by your theft your god may not fall into a heavier bond, and may be rescued from that into which it had fallen? Furthermore, if you should be caught in the very theft, will you not swear by your very god that you did not take it away? For what will such a god do to you, to whom you say: 'I swore falsely by you, but for you' — unless you should wish that I should bring destruction upon you while I paid you honor? Thus also that commandment of the law, 'You shall not bear false witness,' you so despise, on account of the members of your god, that you would free them from their bonds not only by testimony but even by a false oath.

Now indeed as for what follows: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's wife' — this ought to be fulfilled by you, and this is the one thing I see that you are compelled by no necessity of your error to violate. But if it is unlawful to covet another's spouse, consider what it is to offer oneself to others to be coveted, and recall your handsome gods and beautiful goddesses, presenting themselves to be ardently coveted — the gods by the female princes of darkness, and the goddesses by the males: so that these, once aroused into enjoyment of lust and panting eagerly for their embraces, may rescue from them that god of yours, everywhere fettered and, through such foulness of his own, needy that he may be able to be loosed. For as to not coveting your neighbor's property, which is the last commandment of the Decalogue — how can you keep it, wretched one?

Does not your very god lyingly fashion for himself, in an alien land, new ages, where after a false victory you may swell with a false triumph? And since you now desire this with insane vanity, and believe that same land of the race of darkness to be joined to your substance in closest neighborhood, you certainly covet your neighbor's property. Deservedly is that diptych hostile to you, containing such good commandments, so very contrary to your error. For those three which pertain to the love of God you are utterly ignorant of, you utterly do not keep; but these seven, by which human fellowship is not harmed, if ever you observe them, either you are restrained by shame, lest you be put to confusion among men, or you are broken by fear, lest you be punished by the public laws, or —