But Faustus, convicted or rather confessing that he was a Manichaean, having been brought with certain others along with him before the proconsular tribunal, was — through the intercession of those very Christians to whom they had been led — with the lightest punishment (if indeed that is to be called a punishment) banished to an island: which the servants of God do daily of their own accord, desiring to withdraw themselves from the turbulent din of the peoples, and from which the public vows for earthly princes are wont, through indulgence, to release the condemned. Finally, not long afterward, they were all dismissed from there by the same customary lot. Confess, then, that those held a truer faith and a more righteous life who deserved to suffer for it far more atrocious things than you; or else cease to boast of this, that you are detestable to many.
But distinguish what it is to suffer persecution for blasphemy and to suffer persecution for righteousness; and for which of these you suffer. Attend diligently again and again to this in your own books. But how many in our communion truly perform those more sublime evangelical precepts, by the semblance of which you deceive the unlearned! How many men of either sex are pure and untouched by all intercourse; how many, having experienced it, are afterward continent; how many are distributors and forsakers of their goods; how many, by fastings frequent, or daily, or even incredibly continuous, subject their body to servitude!
How many fraternal congregations there are, having nothing of their own, but all things in common — and these only what is necessary for food and covering — fusing one soul and one heart into God by the fire of love! And in all these professions, how many false and lost ones are detected; how many also lie hidden; how many, at first walking rightly, quickly fall away through a perverse will! How many are found in temptations to have taken up such a life with another intent, under a feigned appearance; and how many, humbly and faithfully guarding their holy purpose, persevere unto the end and are saved! In whose society they appear, as it were, unequal;
but nevertheless they are joined by the same love — those who, for some necessity, according to the apostle's exhortation, have wives as though not having them, and buy as though not possessing, and use this world as though not using it. To these are joined, according to the abounding riches of God's mercy, even those to whom it is said: 'Defraud not one another, except by consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to prayer; and come together again, lest Satan tempt you for your incontinence. But this I say by way of concession, not by way of command.' To such the same apostle also says: 'Now indeed there is altogether a fault among you, because you have lawsuits one with another.' And bearing their infirmity, he says a little later:
'If then you have secular judgments, set them to judge who are of least esteem in the church.' For not only those who, that they may be perfect, sell or leave all their goods and follow the Lord, belong to the kingdom of heaven; but to this Christian warfare there is also joined, by a kind of commerce of love, a certain multitude that pays tribute, to whom it will be said at the end: 'I was hungry, and you gave me to eat,' and the rest. Otherwise those must be condemned whose household the apostle so carefully and anxiously orders, admonishing wives to be subject to their husbands, husbands to love their wives, children to obey their parents, parents to nurture their children in the discipline and correction of the Lord;
servants to obey their fleshly masters with fear, masters to render to their servants what is just and equitable. But far be it that he should judge these to be estranged from the evangelical commandments and to be separated from eternal life; for where the Lord says: 'If any man take not up his cross and follow me, he cannot be my disciple' — exhorting the stronger to perfection — there he immediately consoled these also, saying: 'He that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward; and he that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward.' Whence not only he who gives a little wine to Timothy for his stomach and his frequent infirmities,
but also he who has offered a cup of cold water to one healthier and stronger, only in the name of a disciple — as it follows there — shall not lose his reward. But why do you deceive your hearers, who with their wives and children and households and houses and fields serve you, telling them that unless a man forsakes all these things, he will not receive the Gospel? But since you promise them not resurrection, but a re-revolution into this mortality, that they may be born again and live the life of your elect — things as vain and foolish and sacrilegious as the life you yourselves live — when you are highly praised; or, if they are of better merit, that they may pass into melons and cucumbers or into some other foods which you are going to eat, that they may quickly be purged by your belchings:
deservedly you estrange them from the evangelical commandments; but you yourselves, who think and persuade such things, ought above all to separate yourselves from them on that account. For if this vanity pertained to evangelical faith, the Lord ought not to have said: 'I was hungry, and you gave me to eat,' but: 'You were hungry, and you ate me,' or: 'I was hungry, and I ate you.' For no one, according to your ravings, will be received into the kingdom of God from that merit of ministering, because he gave food to the saints, but because he either ate those for whom he panted, or was eaten by those who panted after him into heaven. Nor would they say: 'Lord, when did we see thee hungering, and gave thee to eat?' but they would say: 'When did we see thee hungering, and thou didst eat us?'
To whom he would not reply: 'When you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me,' but: 'When one of the least of mine ate you, I ate you.' Thinking and teaching such monstrous things, and living according to them, do you dare both to say that you keep the evangelical precepts and to disparage the catholic church, in which there are so many little ones together with the great — both of whom the Lord blesses, according to their degrees, as they keep the evangelical commandments and hope for the evangelical promises? But your malevolent error leads your eye only to the chaff of our harvest; for you would quickly see the wheat there too, if you were willing also to be it. But among you, both those who are feigned Manichaeans are evil, and those who are not feigned are vain.
For where the faith itself is feigned, both he who uses it in pretence deceives, and he who esteems it true is deceived; nor can a good life proceed from it, because each man lives by his own love, whether well or ill. But you, if you burned with love of the spiritual and intelligible good, and not with desire of corporeal phantasms, would not — to say quickly what is most notorious about you — worship this corporeal sun as if it were divine substance and the light of wisdom. BOOK SIX. FAUSTUS said: Do you accept the Old Testament? How, when I do not keep its precepts? I suppose that neither do you; for circumcision I spat upon as something shameful, and, if I am not mistaken, so did you; the cessation of the sabbaths I believe you count superfluous, as I do.
Sacrifices as idolatry, I do not doubt that you too reject. Swine's flesh certainly I am not alone in abstaining from, and you likewise do not eat it alone. I indeed, because I reckon all flesh unclean; you, however, because nothing is unclean: by both which reasons the Old Testament is destroyed by both of us. The weeks of unleavened bread, the feast of tabernacles — each of us has despised as useless and vain. Not to insert purples into linen garments, to lay a linsey-woolsey garment among adulteries, to yoke ox and ass together — to count these among sacrileges, if need be. Not to appoint a bald or shaggy man, or one of similar mark, as priest, because such men are unclean before God — each of us has despised, laughed at, held neither in second place nor in first:
all of which are precepts and ordinances of the Old Testament. What then you object to me is common to me with you, whether it is to be reckoned a crime or a right deed; for each of us has spurned the Old Testament. Therefore, if you ask what difference there is between my faith and yours, it is this: that it pleases you to lie and to act illiberally, so that what you hate in your mind you praise in word, whereas I have not learned to deceive; I speak what I think — I confess that I hate both the teachers of such base things as much as the precepts themselves. AUGUSTINE replied: In what manner and why the Old Testament is accepted by the heirs of the New Testament, we have already said above.
But since a little before Faustus dealt with its promises, and now has wished to treat of its precepts, I reply that these men are utterly ignorant of what difference there is between precepts of the life to be lived and precepts of the life to be signified. For example: 'Thou shalt not covet' is a precept of the life to be lived; 'Thou shalt circumcise every male on the eighth day' is a precept of the life to be signified.
By this ignorance, indeed, the Manichaeans and all to whom the writings of the Old Testament are displeasing, not understanding that whatever God commanded to the former people was for the celebrating of a shadow of things to come, and observing that these things are now not observed according to the custom of the present time, reprehend those things which certainly befitted that time, in which the things now made manifest were signified as about to come. But what will they say against the apostle, who says: 'All these things happened to them in figure; but they were written for our sakes, upon whom the ends of the ages have come'? Behold, he himself has opened why those writings are accepted by us, and why it is now not necessary that those signs of things be observed by us. For when he says:
'They were written for our sakes,' he doubtless shows with how great care they are to be read and understood by us, and with how great authority to be held, since they were written for our sakes. But when he says: 'They were our figures,' and 'they happened to them in figure,' he shows that it is now no longer needful that, when we do the very things made manifest, we should serve the celebration of the figures which foretold them. Whence he says in another place: 'Let no one therefore judge you in food, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day, or of a new moon, or of the sabbaths, which is a shadow of things to come.' Here, when he says: 'Let no one judge you in these things,' he declares how it is not necessary that these now be observed; but when he says:
'which is a shadow of things to come,' he shows how it behoved that they should be observed at that time, in which the things which have now shone forth manifest to us were foretold as future through such shadows of figures. Accordingly, if the Manichaeans were justified by the Lord's resurrection — whose resurrection day was indeed the third from the day of the passion, yet, after the sabbath day, that is, after the seventh, the eighth — they would surely be stripped of the carnal veil of mortal desires, and, rejoicing in the circumcision of the heart, would not deride that circumcision, shadowed and figured in the flesh, in the time of the Old Testament, although in the time of the New Testament they would not compel it to be done and observed.
For in what member is the stripping off of carnal and mortal concupiscence more fittingly figured than in that from which the carnal and mortal offspring arises? But, as the apostle says, 'to the pure all things are pure; but to the unclean and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are polluted.' And so these men, who seem to themselves too pure, because they turn away from those members as unclean, or feign to turn away, have fallen into those uncleannesses of unbelief and error.
So that, while they detest the circumcision of the flesh — which the apostle called a seal of the righteousness of faith — yet in those very fleshly members they believe the divine members of their own god to be bound and defiled and held fast; so that, when they call the flesh unclean, they are compelled also to say that God is there made unclean in the part in which he is held there, seeing that they assert he must be cleansed: which, until it be done — as far as it can be done — they say that meanwhile he now endures all things that flesh suffers, not only in the labour and pain of afflictions, but also in the pleasure of corruptions. For they say that they spare him by not copulating, lest he be more tightly entangled and more foully defiled by the knots of flesh. Since therefore the apostle says:
'To the pure all things are pure' — namely, to men, who can be changed for the worse by the perversity of the will — how much more are all things pure to God, who ever remains unchangeable and incontaminable? Of whose wisdom it is divinely said, in those books by reproving which you the more vehemently defile yourselves, that 'nothing defiled falls into it,' and that it 'reaches everywhere by reason of its purity.'
Wherefore, O most unclean vanity, does it so displease you that in the human member, whence human generation is propagated, God — to whom all things are pure — commanded the sign of human regeneration to be established, and yet it pleases you that even in the shameful deeds which are perpetrated with that member by shameless men, your very god, to whom nothing is pure, is defiled and corrupted in part of his nature? For what does he suffer amid the various foul corruptions, whom you believe to be defiled even by conjugal intercourse? Dare now to say what you are wont to say: 'Was there then no place where God might prefigure the seal of the righteousness of faith, except in that member?' It is answered: Why not there too? First, because to the pure all things are pure — how much more to God.
Next, because the apostle said this seal was given to Abraham as of the righteousness of faith in such a circumcision. But you, be not ashamed, if you can, when it is said to you: 'Was there then wanting to your god something to do, lest he should entangle a part of his nature in those members which you thus spit upon?' These things indeed are called shameful to men on account of the corruptible and penal propagation of our mortality which subsists therefrom: to which the chaste apply modesty, the shameless wantonness, but God righteousness.
The cessation of the sabbaths we now indeed count superfluous to observe, since the hope of our eternal rest has been revealed — yet not superfluous to read and understand, because in the prophetic times, when those things which have now been laid open to us were to be prefigured and foretold not only by words but also by deeds, by that sign which we read this very thing was foreshadowed which we now hold. But I wish you to tell me why you are unwilling to fulfil your own cessation. For the Jews, on their sabbath — which they still savour carnally — not only pluck no fruit in the field, but neither cut nor cook anything in the house.
But you, while indeed you rest, wait for one of your hearers, on your behalf, to spring into the garden armed with a little knife or a small sickle for the feeding of you — a murderer of gourds, whose living corpses (strange to say) he may bring to you. For if he does not kill them, what did you fear in such a deed? But if they are killed when they are plucked, how is there life in them, to whose purging and restoring by eating and belching you assert that you come to the aid?
You receive, then, living gourds, which, if you could, you ought to swallow whole, so that after that one wound (in which your hearer, when he plucked them, became guilty, and must be freed by your indulgence) they might at least thereafter arrive uninjured and whole at the workshop of your belly, where you might reform your god, shattered in that battle. But now, before your teeth press upon them for grinding, they are cut small by you, bit by bit, if it pleases the palate; and by such frequent wounds of theirs, how are you not guilty? See how it would be expedient for you that what the Jews do one day in seven, you should do daily, and cease from even such domestic work.
Now consider what they suffer in the fire, where certainly the life that is in them is not reformed. For a boiling pot cannot be compared to a holy belly; and yet you deride the sabbath cessation as though superfluous. How much more soundly would you not only refrain from reprehending it in the fathers, when it was not superfluous, but even now, when it is already superfluous, would rather hold to it than to that cessation of yours, acceptable not by any signification, but damnable by error — which, moreover, by not fulfilling it, you are guilty of, according to the opinion of your own vanity, and vain according to the judgement of truth. For you say that fruit feels pain when it is plucked from the tree, feels it when it is cut, when it is ground, when it is cooked, when it is eaten. You ought not, then, to have fed on any but those
which can be swallowed raw and uninjured, so that at least the one pain, when they are plucked, they might suffer not from you but from your hearers. But you say: How do we succour so great a life, if we consume only those things which, uncooked and soft, can be swallowed down? If, then, by this compensation you inflict so many pains upon your foods, why do you abstain from that one alone toward which this necessity most compels you? For fruit can also be eaten raw, as some of you have trained yourselves to do, so that they did this not only with tree-fruits, but even with all vegetables. But if it is not plucked or cut off or in any way removed from the earth or the tree, it can by no means come to be food.
This, then, ought easily to have been pardonable, since without it you could not succour it — not those so many tortures which you do not hesitate to inflict on the members of your god in preparing your food. But 'the tree weeps,' you say, 'when its fruit is plucked' — for this you are not ashamed to say. 'Certainly all the life that is there knows and foresees who comes to it.' Then, when the elect come and pluck the apples, it ought to have rejoiced, not to weep, compensating that transitory pain with such great felicity, and escaping so great a misery, had it fallen upon others. Why, then, do you not pluck the apple, when by plucking you inflict on it so many blows and pains? Answer, if you can. Nor do your very fasts befit you;
for the furnace ought not to stand idle, in which the spiritual gold is purified from the admixture of dung, and the divine members are loosed from their pitiable bonds. Wherefore he is the more merciful among you who can so exercise himself as to take raw foods often and consume much without harm to his health. But you both cruelly eat, by inflicting so many penalties upon your food, and cruelly fast, by ceasing from the purging of the divine members. And yet you dare even to execrate the sacrifices of the Old Testament, and to name them idolatry, and to associate us too in such sacrilege.
Hence on our own behalf we first answer that these things are indeed no longer present in our practices, yet that we embrace them within the mysteries of the divine Scriptures for the understanding of those things which were foretold by them; for they too were figures of ourselves, and all such things, in many and varied ways, signified the one sacrifice whose memorial we now celebrate. Therefore, once that sacrifice had been revealed and offered in its own time, those observances were removed as regards the frequency of their performance, but they remained in the authority of their signifying; for they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come. But in these matters, doubtless, it is the slaying of animals that disturbs you, when in fact all this creation serves the uses of men in a certain conditional manner.
But you, who do not hold out bread to a begging, hungry man, are full of mercy toward beasts, in which you believe human souls to dwell. Yet the Lord Jesus was cruel toward these, when He permitted the demons, at their own request, to enter into the herd of swine. He also, before His bodily sacrifice had yet been shown forth through His Passion, said to a certain leper whom He had cleansed: 'Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for yourself what Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.'
For all the more, since even through the prophets God often testifies that He has need of no such gift, and since it is easy to perceive by reason that He who lacks nothing does not lack this thing either, the human mind is compelled to inquire what He willed to teach us through these things — He who assuredly would not command that things He does not need be offered to Him without purpose, unless He were showing in them something which it would profit us to know and which it was fitting to prefigure by such signs. But how much better and more honourably would you submit yourselves to these sacrifices — which, though no longer necessary in our time, still signify and teach something — than command and believe that living victims of food be offered to you by your own hearers!
For when the Apostle Paul said most fittingly of certain men who preach the gospel for the sake of feasting, 'whose god is their belly,' with how much more arrogant impiety do you boast, you who do not fear to call your belly not indeed your god, but — which belongs to a more wicked audacity — the purifier of God! And of what madness is it to wish to be seen as pious because they abstain from the slaying of animals, when they say that all their foods possess the same souls, upon which — living, as they suppose — they inflict such great wounds both with hands and with teeth! But why, if you refuse to feed on flesh, do you not offer up the very animals
as sacrifice to your god, and slay them, so that those souls — which you not only suppose to be human, but so divine that you believe them to be very members of God — may be released from the prison of the flesh, and, that they may not return again, be commended by your prayers? Or do you help them more by belly than by mind? And is that nature of God rather saved which has deserved to be exhaled through your bowels, than that which is commended by your prayers?
Therefore, then, you do not sacrifice beasts to your belly, because you cannot consume them living, so as to liberate their souls by the intercession of your stomach. O blessed vegetables, which — though plucked out by hand, cut with iron, tormented with fire, and ground by tooth — are nevertheless granted to reach living unto the altars of your intestines; while the wretched beasts, since they depart from their own body too swiftly, cannot enter into your bodies! Thus, still raving, you suppose that we are for this reason enemies of the Old Testament — because we call no flesh unclean, holding the sentence of the Apostle who says, 'All things are clean to the clean,' and that saying where the Lord declares: 'Not what enters into your mouth defiles you, but what comes out.'
This the Lord did not say to the crowds alone — as your Adimantus, whom Faustus especially praises after Manichaeus, wished it to be understood, when he was slandering the Old Testament — but even when withdrawn from the crowds He spoke this same thing to His disciples more evidently and expressly. For when Adimantus had set this sentence of the Lord against the Old Testament, because in it certain unclean things concerning flesh are written, from which that people was ordered to abstain, he was afraid lest it should be said to him:
'Why then do you consider not merely certain kinds of flesh, but all flesh, to be unclean, and abstain from eating all of it, when you yourself bring forward the gospel testimony that a man is not defiled by those things which enter into the mouth and pass into the belly and are cast out into the privy?' And so, attempting to escape these most narrow straits — which choke his own deception with most manifest truth — he says that the Lord spoke this to the crowds, as though He spoke true things to a few in secret, but hurled false things at the crowds; whereas to believe even this of the Lord is sacrilegious, and all who read know that He said this more plainly to the disciples even when the crowds had been withdrawn. Wherefore, since at the very outset of these writings of his Faustus so admires Adimantus
so as to prefer only Manichaeus to him, I ask by way of summary whether this sentence of the Lord, in which He said that a man is not defiled by those things which enter into his mouth, is true or false. If they say it is false, why did so great a teacher of theirs, Adimantus, declaring it to have been uttered by Christ, cast it forth to overthrow the Old Testament? But if it is true, why do they believe themselves to be defiled if they feed on any kind of flesh? Unless perhaps they should wish to answer truly and say that the Apostle did not say, 'All things are clean to heretics,' but 'All things are clean to the clean.' For why these things are not clean to such men, the same Apostle goes on to say: 'But to the unclean and unbelieving nothing is clean; but both their mind and their conscience are polluted.'
Whence in truth to the Manichaeans nothing at all is clean, seeing that they contend that even the very substance or nature of God could not only be defiled but was even in part defiled — and not only defiled, but also that it can in no part be recovered and cleansed. Hence it is astonishing that they say they consider all flesh unclean and for that reason abstain from it, as though they consider anything to be clean — not only of foods, but of all creatures. For they declare that the very vegetables and fruits and all the crops and the whole earth and heaven are polluted by the commingling of the race of darkness.
Would then that they were consistent with their own error in the case of other foods as well, and, by abstaining from all those things which they call unclean, would rather die of hunger than obstinately utter such blasphemies! For who does not understand that this would be more profitable for those who are unwilling to correct and amend themselves? But as for the Old Testament, where certain foods of flesh are forbidden, let them understand — if they can — why that sentence is not contrary to it, in which the Apostle says: 'All things are clean to the clean,' and 'Every creature of God is good'; that the Apostle said this of the natures themselves, whereas those Scriptures called certain animals unclean, not by nature but by signification, on account of certain prefigurations suited to the time.
And so, for example, if inquiry be made concerning the pig and the lamb, each is by nature clean, because every creature of God is good; but by a certain signification the lamb is clean, the pig unclean. It is as if you were to speak of a fool and a wise man: each of these words is, by the nature of its sound, letters, and syllables of which it is composed, assuredly clean; but by signification one of these words — the one that is called 'fool' — can be called unclean, not by its own nature, but because it signifies something unclean. And perhaps what the pig is among the figures of things, that the fool is in the class of things; and both that animal and these two syllables which are called 'fool' signify one and the same thing.