Latin original · 39 verses · some words can be tapped for a gloss · long chapter, split into parts; this part covers 15:1154–15:1192 (1391 verses in all)
And is not he to be condemned all the more severely, the more he has chosen to abuse for wounding or slaying himself that which was written for healing and delivering? For because men fallen into sin either through pride neglect the remedy of penance, or through distrust of recovering salvation and of meriting pardon utterly perish, an example was set forth from so great a man, whereby the sick might be healed, not whereby those who are whole might be wounded. For it is no fault of medicine, if either the insane destroy themselves or the malicious destroy others with medical instruments.
But nevertheless our fathers the patriarchs and prophets, to whom that Scripture bears so illustrious a testimony of holiness and piety—which it does not deny was divinely dispensed for the salvation of the human race, unless someone either does not know it or has lost all sense of rational consideration—even if they had been lustful and cruel, as the Manichaean error, or rather frenzy, accuses them: would they not even so be shown to be better, I do not say than their Elect, but than that very god of theirs? Is it not better for a man to wallow with a concubine, a man with a woman, than to be the most sincere light and to be defiled by mingling itself with darkness? Behold, a man, for the sake of avarice and his belly, having lied that his wife was his sister, sold her into the embraces of others:
how much worse and more execrable is he who, feigning his nature adapted to the lust of those desiring it, subjected it to them to be freely polluted and corrupted! And one who even knowingly lay with his daughters—does he not perpetrate less evil than he who mingles his members with the lusts of all such and even fouler basenesses? For what such thing is committed by the unclean and the vile, wherein your god, O Manichaeans, is not polluted by all their basenesses? Finally, if Jacob truly, as Faustus says, wandered among four wives in foul concupiscence like a he-goat, taking no care for offspring but only for wanton pleasure:
how much less wretched would he be than your god, who not only in Jacob himself and in his four wives would suffer all that disgrace of lust, being concreted with all their bodies and motions, but even in that very he-goat, which the filthy fellow has compared to that man, endures all that generative motion and heat, and everywhere mingled in a shameful condition is inflamed in the buck, is sown in the she-goat, is begotten in the kid! And by reason of this, even if Judah existed not only as a fornicator but even as a wicked and knowing defiler of his daughter-in-law's incest, in that incest's lust too your god would cling, would be befouled, would burn. But David repented of iniquity, in that he had lusted after another man's wife and had ordered her husband to be slain;
but when will your god ever repent, that, being lusted after by the male and female tartarean race of the princes of darkness, he yielded his own members to their lust, and slew not the husband whose wife he had lusted after, but his own sons in the members of demons—by which very demons he himself had been lusted after? But even if David had not repented, nor received the health of righteousness by such medicine, even so he would have stood forth better than this god of the Manichaeans. For this man, let us suppose by that one very deed and by any number of other such deeds, how many things could one man commit; but the other, in all such deeds of all men, by that mingling of his members, is convicted of being fouled and polluted. And the prophet Hosea is accused by Faustus:
who, if captivated by foul concupiscence he had lusted after a harlot and taken her to wife—since you certainly proclaim the souls of both, of the wanton lover and of the obscene harlot, to be parts and members and the nature of your god—that harlot, then—for why should I go about in words and not speak plainly?—that harlot would be your god. For you cannot say that, his holy nature being preserved and uncorrupted, he fell in not bound to that harlot's body but presented to it; but you confess both that these members of your god are most defiled and that on this account they need a great purgation. That harlot, then, over whom you dare to accuse the man of God, would be your god, even had she not been changed for the better into chaste wedlock;
or, if you will not have it so, you at least do not deny that soul of the harlot to be a particle of your god, however small. Herein, then, he is already better than your god, since she would be one single harlot, but the other, by the condition of that mingling of his, is prostituted throughout the whole race of darkness in all harlots, and finally in all males and females fornicating far and wide and in various ways and corrupting themselves is he rolled about, is loosed, is bound, again to be rolled about, loosed, and bound in their offspring, until at last the most unclean part of your god is led away to the final lump like an inexpiable harlot.
These evils, forsooth, these basenesses, these disgraces your god could not remove from his own members, and, compelled by the necessity of a monstrous enemy, he came to these things; for he could not slay the injurious and violent enemy while his own citizens or parts were safe. How much better, then, is he who, having slain the Egyptian, defended his brother unharmed—whom Faustus with wondrous vanity accuses, and with still more wondrous blindness regards not his own god! How much better that he should himself have carried off the vessels of gold and silver from the nation of the Egyptians, than that the nation of darkness should plunder his own members!
And yet, though your god himself waged so wretched a war, his worshippers cast it in the teeth of the servant of our God, that he waged wars—wars in which he always, with all his own, triumphed as victor over his enemies, wherein captive men or women could be led away by warring Moses from the people of Israel: which your god too, if he could have, would assuredly have done. This, then, is not to accuse the wicked, but to envy the more fortunate. But what cruelty was there in Moses, in that against a people which had grievously sinned against God he took vengeance with the sword? Yet of that sin he besought pardon for them, offering even himself on their behalf against the divine vengeance. But truly, even had he done this not mercifully but cruelly, even so he would be better than your god.
For he would in no way afterward condemn any of his own innocent and obedient ones, if he had been sent to break up an enemy's battle-line and had been taken captive—if he had afterward conquered, David would not himself condemn him: which this god of yours is about to do concerning his own part, which he will fix in the lump, because it obeyed him who commanded, because for the safety of his kingdom it went forth against the enemy's ranks with its own death set before it. "But," he says, "in this series of the ages, now mingled and concreted with evils, it did not obey the precepts." Let us ask, why. If by its own will, there is true fault and just punishment; but if the will is already guilty, there is no nature contrary to it for sinning, and thus the whole deceit of the Manichaeans is convicted and overthrown.
But if, overwhelmed by the enemy to which it was sent, if overcome by another's evil which it had not been able to resist, then the punishment is unjust and the cruelty great. But the necessity of god is put forward as an excuse. Let those who will not worship God worship such a god. Certainly—which must be confessed—even his very worshippers, though by worshipping such a god they are most wicked, are nevertheless better than he, because at least they exist; but he is nothing except a fiction of falsehood and a figment of vanity. But now let us look at the rest of Faustus's clever ravings. BOOK TWENTY-THREE. FAUSTUS said: As I was once disputing, a certain man from the numerous crowd, answering me, said: Do you accept Jesus born of Mary? To whom I said: Which Jesus do you mean? For there were several men named Jesus among the Hebrews:
one indeed the son of Nun, Moses's disciple; another the son of Josedech the high priest; likewise another, who was called the son of David; but yet another the Son of God. Which of these, then, do you ask me whether I accept as born of Mary? "Assuredly," he said, "the Son of God." To whom I said: And on whose authority, or by whose teaching, am I to accept this? And he said, "Matthew's." To whom again I said: What then did Matthew write? And he: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham," and the rest. Then I: I had thought, I said, that you were going to say "the book of the generations of Jesus Christ the Son of God," and I had prepared myself to write in reply; but since now you have faithfully recited the chapter, you have only to be admonished to consider what you have recited.
For Matthew here does not confess that he has undertaken to write the generation of the Son of God, but of the son of David. Therefore, that I may for the time being believe this man who says it, the son of David will be for me the one born of Mary; but as yet, in this whole text of the generation, no mention is made of the Son of God, right up to the baptism, that is; and in vain do you heap calumny upon the writer, as though he had enclosed the Son of God in a woman's womb. But truly this man cries aloud, as it seems, and by his very title vindicates himself utterly from this sacrilege, declaring that he wrote of a son of David, sprung from that stock, not of the Son of God. For he indeed calls Him Jesus,
He who is the Son of God—if you consider the mind and purpose of this writer—he does not so much wish us to accept as begotten of the Virgin Mary as made at some time, through baptism, at the streams of Jordan. For there he says that He was baptized by John—He whom David at the outset designated a son—and was made at some time the Son of God, after about thirty years at least, according to Luke's account, where too the voice was then heard saying to Him: "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee." You see, then, that that which thirty years before, as it seems to this man, was born of Mary, is not itself the Son of God, but that which was afterward made from the baptism at the Jordan—that is, a new man, just as in us, whom we believe to have been converted to God from the error of heathenism:
which very thing, however, I know not whether he does sufficiently in accord with that faith which you call catholic; but for the present so it seems to Matthew, if these are his own words. For nowhere in the birth-narratives of Mary is that read as spoken: "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee," or: "This is my most beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," but in His expiation at the Jordan. But if you too believe it thus, as it is written, you will indeed already be a Matthaean—for so must I put it—but by no means catholic. For we know the catholic faith, which is as far removed from this profession of Matthew as it is far from the truth, if indeed your creed be thus:
that you believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary. It is yours, then, to receive the Son of God from Mary, Matthew's to receive him from the Jordan, ours from God. And by reason of this, Matthew—if these are for certain his words—is as contrary to you in this profession of his as he is to us, except that he is found a little more prudent than you, in that he ascribed the origin from the female sex rather to a son of David than to the Son of God. Wherefore, of these two things you must confess one: either that this is not Matthew who seems to assert these things, or that you do not hold the apostolic faith.
But we indeed, although no one should at all cast us down from this opinion of receiving the Son of God from God, yet—that we may concede much to imprudence, that we may even be driven to believe falsehoods—Jesus will have been made the Son of God for us from the Jordan rather than born from a woman's womb. And yet not even that one himself whom Mary bore, if there was any such, could rightly be called a son of David, unless it be established that he was begotten of his father Joseph. And since you deny this, you must needs confess also that he is not even a son of David, since indeed the generation is drawn from Abraham down to David, and from David down to Joseph—through all the fathers of the Hebrews, of course.
And since from Joseph Jesus was not conceived, as it is read, neither will he be a son of David; and utterly mad is he who, being about to say that this one was born without intercourse of Joseph, of Mary, has set him down at the beginning as being a son of David. Since, then, not even he who was born of Mary could rightly be called a son of David, because he was not born of Joseph, how much less the Son of God! Accordingly, neither is the origin of the Virgin herself shown to have been of that tribe from which David is established to be—I mean Judah, of whom the Jews' kings sprang—but of the tribe of Levi, whence the priests: which is itself plain, because she had for father a certain priest by name Joachim, of whom nevertheless in this generation no mention anywhere is made.
How, then, will Mary be said to pertain to this Davidic kinship's lineage, in which you can see her to have neither father nor husband? And by reason of this, neither will whoever is born of her be a son of David, unless you so bring Joseph near to her as her parent, that he be proved either her father or her husband. AUGUSTINE replied: The catholic and likewise apostolic faith is that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is both the Son of God according to His divinity and the son of David according to the flesh:
which we so prove from the evangelical and apostolic writings that no one can contradict our proofs, save he who contradicts those very writings—not as this Faustus set himself to do, alleging that some unknown person spoke a few words and afterward brought forward no testimonies against the same Faustus's crafty subtleties. When I shall have done this, nothing will remain for him to answer, except that whereby he tries expressly to mock and evade the force of the most manifest truth in the Holy Scriptures, so that he may answer that those things are false and foisted into the divine books. This madness and frenzied presumption and audacity I have already, earlier in this work, refuted as far as seemed sufficient; nor need I repeat the same things, that we may also consider the measure of our discourse.
What need, then, is there to seek out and gather testimonies scattered through all the Scriptures, whereby we may prove against this man, from the books of greatest and divine authority, that the same one is called the only-begotten Son of God, ever God with God, who is also called son of David because of the form of a servant received from the Virgin Mary, Joseph's spouse? Now for the present, since he wished to dispute about Matthew, and not by me—the whole book of Matthew can be inserted into this discourse; let him who will read and see how Matthew conducts Him, whom he says His parents were about to enumerate as son of David, by his narration right up to the Passion and Resurrection, and calls none other than this same one conceived and born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit.
To which matter he also applies a testimony from the prophet: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel," which is interpreted "God with us"; and that this same one, baptized by John, heard from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"—of whom it had already been said, from the Virgin's birth-giving, "God with us." Unless perhaps it seemed to Faustus a lesser thing that He was called God than that He was called the Son of God. For from this he tried to conjecture that it did not seem to Matthew that He was made the Son of God except from the baptism, because there the voice was made from heaven:
"This is my Son," though the same evangelist had also earlier applied the divine testimony from the prophet, where the Virgin's very offspring was called "God with us." This wretched raving babbler, indeed, we ought to observe and mark, as one who does not fail, wherever he could, to spread over the reader clouds of falsehood from his empty talk, even out of the testimonies of the Scriptures. As when he said of Abraham that he had not believed God when He promised him a son by Sarah, when he lay with the handmaid—whereas Scripture testifies that the birth of Sarah had not yet been promised to him; or that he lied that his wife was his sister, whereas he has nowhere read Sarah's lineage in those writings which are to be trusted concerning this matter;
and of his son Isaac, that he too falsely called Rebecca his sister, whereas her lineage is there openly written; and of Jacob, that daily there was a contest among his four wives, as to which of them should first seize him, coming from the field, for intercourse: which he is convicted of having read nowhere at all there. Behold what manner of man is this, who boasts that he hates the lying writers of the divine books, who dares thus to lie even about the Gospel—that summit of so great an authority, known to all—so that he would have it thought that not Matthew (lest he be crushed by the weight of the apostolic name), but some other unknown person under Matthew's name, wrote concerning Christ what he is unwilling to believe and what he tries by calumnious cunning to refute.
So then, from heaven it was said over the water of Jordan: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," just as it was said also on the mountain. For not because there too the voice itself sounded from heaven was He not the Son of God before, seeing that from the Virgin's womb He received the form of a servant—He who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. Finally, the Apostle Paul himself in another place most manifestly says: "But when the fullness of time was come, God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the law"—calling the woman, of course, according to the manner of Hebrew speech, a female. He, then, is the Son of God, who is also David's Lord according to His divinity, and the same one is the son of David, of the seed of David according to the flesh.
But if it profited us nothing to believe this, the same Apostle would not so attentively commend it to Timothy, saying: "Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel." Against which gospel, whosoever shall announce another, that he be anathema, he warned the faithful with great care. What, then, should now trouble a follower of the holy Gospel, that Christ, born of the Virgin without the intercourse of Joseph, is nevertheless called son of David, since the evangelist Matthew draws the series of the generations not down to Mary but down to Joseph? First, because, for the sake of the male sex, the person of her husband was rather to be honoured;
for not because he was not mingled in intercourse was he therefore not a husband, since Matthew himself narrates that by the angel Mary was called his spouse—the very one who narrates that she had conceived not by his intercourse but of the Holy Spirit. But if the Apostle Matthew did not write these things as true, but someone else under his name, as the Manichaeans suppose, wrote them false—would he thus even contradict himself in matters most manifest and so closely connected, that, whereas he said He was a son of David, born of the Virgin Mary without the intercourse of any man, enumerating His parents step by step, he would draw them down without any reason to that man whom he himself had said was not mingled with Mary?
For if one person enumerated the forefathers of Christ from David down to Joseph, calling him a son of David, and another said that He was born of the Virgin Mary without the intercourse of any man and did not call Him a son of David, not even so ought we forthwith to think that they had spoken these things contrary to one another, so that either both or one of them should be convicted of falsehood. For we ought to consider that it could have come to pass that both spoke the truth—that both Joseph should be called the husband of Mary, having her as spouse continently, not by intercourse but by affection.
not by the mingling of bodies, but by the union—which is dearer—of minds; and therefore the husband of the Virgin, the mother of Christ, ought not to be separated from the series of Christ's parents; and that Mary herself drew some vein of blood from the stock of David, so that the flesh of Christ, even though procreated of a virgin, could not be without the seed of David. But when one and the same narrator says both, commends both—both that Joseph was the husband of Mary and that the Virgin was the mother of Christ, and that Christ was of the seed of David, and that Joseph was in the series of Christ's forefathers from David:
what remains for him to believe, who prefers to believe the divine Gospel rather than the fables of heretics, save both that Mary was not a stranger to the kinship of David, and that she was not called Joseph's spouse in vain, on account of the order of the sexes and the confederation of minds, although he was not mingled with her in the flesh, and that Joseph rather, on account of the dignity of the male, was not to be separated from the order of those generations.
lest by this very thing he should seem separated from that woman to whom the affection of mind joined him; and lest the faithful of Christ should reckon that whereby spouses are mingled in the flesh to be so great a thing in marriage that they should not believe them to be spouses without it, but should rather say that faithful marriages cleave much more intimately to the members of Christ, the more they could imitate the parents of Christ. We therefore believe that Mary too was in the kinship of David, because we believe those Scriptures which say both—both that Christ was of the seed of David according to the flesh, and that His mother Mary was not by lying with a man, but a virgin.
Whosoever, therefore, says that Mary did not pertain to the consanguinity of David, it is manifest that he strives against the so excellent authority of these Scriptures. Let him, then, prove that she did not pertain to the seed of David, and let him show this not from any writings whatever, but from ecclesiastical, canonical, catholic ones. For others among us have no weight of authority in these matters; for those are the very ones which the Church, spread throughout the whole world, receives and holds—the Church which was through them both prophesied and, as it was promised, so rendered. And by reason of this, that which Faustus set down concerning the generation of Mary, that she had for father a certain priest of the tribe of Levi named Joachim, is not canonical, it does not bind me.
But even if I believed this, I would rather say that Joachim himself in some way pertained to the blood of David, and that in some way he — or one of his forebears — was adopted from the tribe of Judah into the tribe of Levi, or at any rate was so born in the tribe of Levi that he traced some blood-kinship from the stock of David; just as Faustus himself admits it could have come about that Mary was of the tribe of Levi, though it is agreed that she was given to a husband who was of the stock of David, that is, of the tribe of Judah, and he says that Christ could thus have been reckoned the son of David, if Mary had been the daughter of Joseph. Accordingly, if the daughter of Joseph had married into the tribe of Levi, it would not be absurd to call whoever was born of her, even in the tribe of Levi, likewise a son of David.
Thus, if the mother of that Joachim, whom Faustus mentions as the father of Mary, married from the tribe of Judah and the lineage of David into the tribe of Levi, then not unfittingly are Joachim, and Mary, and Mary's son truly said, even in this way, to be of the seed of David. This, then, or something of this kind, I would rather believe, if I were held bound by the authority of that apocryphal writing in which Joachim is read to be the father of Mary, than that the Gospel should lie — the Gospel in which it is written and read that Christ, the Son of God, our Saviour, was begotten of the seed of David according to the flesh and through the Virgin Mary. It is enough for us, then, that the Scriptures which say this, and in which we believe, can be convicted by their enemies of no falsehood. Let him not, then, say to me in turn:
«Even though I do not show that Mary was not of David's kindred, you must show that she was of it.» For this I do show, by a plain, most clear and most forceful proof: that a Scripture of the most firmly established authority both says that Christ is of the seed of David, and that his mother is the Virgin Mary, without any man's embrace. And how modest a detester of a certain supposed indecency did Faustus seem to himself to be, when he said: «In vain do you heap up a slander against the writer, as though he had shut up the Son of God in the womb of a woman!»
By no means does the catholic faith — which believes that Christ, the Son of God, was born according to the flesh of a virgin — in any way so shut up that same Son of God in the womb of a woman as though he were not also outside it, as though he had abandoned the governance of heaven and earth, as though he had withdrawn from the Father. But you, Manichees, with that heart of yours by which you can conceive nothing but corporeal phantasms, in no way grasp these things: how the Word of God, the Power and Wisdom of God, both abiding in himself and with the Father and ruling the whole creation, reaches mightily from end to end and orders all things sweetly.
In the wondrous and ineffable ease of this ordering, he also ordained for himself a mother upon earth, and for the sake of setting his servants free from the bondage of corruption, he took in her the form of a servant, that is, a mortal body; and having taken it, he displayed it, and having displayed it and laid it low in death, he raised it up on high by the resurrection, and rebuilt again, as it were, a temple that had been dissolved. Yet you, who dread to believe these things as though they were sacrilegious, enclose the members of your god — not in the womb of a virgin, but in the wombs of all carnal females, from elephants down to flies.
Or does the true Christ seem more contemptible to you for this reason, that we say the Word was made flesh in the virginal womb in such a way that, with no change of himself, remaining inviolably in his own nature, he fitted to himself a man as a temple? And is your god dear to you for this reason, that, bound and defiled by so many chains of flesh in that part where he is also to be fixed into the globe, he begs for succour without cause, or rather, being utterly crushed, is not even permitted to beg? BOOK TWENTY-FOUR. FAUSTUS said: Why do you thus deny that man is made by God? We do not indeed altogether deny that man is made by God;
but who, and when, and in what manner he is made — this is what we inquire, seeing that, according to the Apostle, there are two men, one of whom he sometimes calls the outer man, but more often the earthly, and sometimes also the old man; while the other he calls the inner and heavenly and new. Which of these, then, is made by God, we ask; seeing that there are also two times of our nativity: the one, that in which nature brought us forth into this light, ensnared in carnal bonds; but the other, when the Truth, having turned us from error back to itself, regenerated us, initiated into the faith. This time of the second nativity Jesus signifies in the Gospel when he says: «Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.»