Sermons & Letters 201 part 3/4

There had already come to Carthage a certain bishop of the Manichaeans, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil, and many were entangled in it through the enticements of his smooth speech… for report had spoken of him to me beforehand, that he was most skilled in all honorable branches of learning and exceedingly well versed in the liberal disciplines. Now the fame of this Faustus the Manichaean, widely spread among his own adherents, had long since aroused in Augustine a desire to hear him teaching and disputing. For if at any time, in the space of nine years during which, as with a wandering mind, the holy…

the Father seemed to cling to this sect, being reduced merely into the class of hearers, not of the elect, he ran up against difficult knots; and if there were questions which the other men of that profane religion knew not how to resolve, they awaited, with all too outstretched longing, the coming of that Faustus, by whose arrival (he himself says) and shared conversation these matters, and any perhaps greater ones I might seek, would most readily and most clearly be unraveled for me. This indeed the other Manichaeans, when they engaged with Augustine on matters of faith, kept promising — as though the mysteries of that abominable sect had been revealed to Faustus the bishop alone. In the end, the fame of the Manichaean people of this kind deceived Augustine.

Indeed, when he came, I found (he says) a man agreeable and pleasant in words, prattling far more sweetly the very things which they are wont to say. But what did the most graceful cupbearer of more precious cups avail against my thirst? Augustine's ears had already been sated with such things, nor for that reason did they seem better to him because they were better spoken, nor true because eloquently expressed, nor the soul wise because the countenance was becoming and the discourse comely.

But descending to the particular deeds of that same Faustus, to his capacity for knowledge, to his understanding of divine and human things — how great and in what measure that man, so highly esteemed by his own, might prevail in these matters — when Augustine himself had tested this in various familiar encounters, he pronounced this final judgment concerning him. For when he had withdrawn from the opinion of those to whom he seemed prudent and wise, because he delighted them by his speaking, he writes:

After various familiar trials, therefore, I found the man devoid of the liberal disciplines, except grammar, and that too in the ordinary manner; and because he had read some orations of Tully and very few books of Seneca and certain works of the poets, and such volumes of his own sect as were written in Latin and in orderly fashion; and because there was a daily exercise of conversation, thence he was supplied with an eloquence which became more acceptable and more seductive by the governance of his wit and by a certain natural charm. Such gifts, then, of mind and body, which the other Manichaeans admired in Faustus the bishop, could not even gently soothe or seduce the genius of Augustine.

For after he had appeared sufficiently unskilled in those arts in which he was reputed and vaunted by fame to excel — and which Augustine himself had supposed — Augustine at once began to despair that Faustus could open and unravel those questions in which, considering the fabulous first principles of the Manichaeans, his mind was tossed about all too greatly. He confesses that this happened to him especially when, turning his eyes upon their books stuffed with trifles, he desired to know and understand perfectly all the things which they affirmed concerning the motions and qualities of the heavens, the stars, the sun, and the moon. All these things Faustus, nowhere instructed in the mathematical disciplines, since he could by no means explain — as he did not scruple to confess —

straightway all Augustine's effort, by which he had resolved to make progress in that sect, once that man was known, utterly collapsed — not so that he might separate himself entirely from them, but as one finding nothing better than that into which he had somehow already plunged. When therefore this perverse desire of Augustine for learning all the Manichaean dogmas and mysteries had cooled, his mind, as though suddenly, began to waver. And although he did not at once acquiesce in or obey the movements of divine grace, nevertheless the hands of the Lord, in the hidden depth of His providence, did not forsake his soul; and, out of the blood of his mother's heart, through her tears offering sacrifice for her son by day and by night, they wrought upon him in wondrous ways.

These things, then, concerning the deeds of Faustus, his manner of study, his capacity in the sciences, his knowledge of divine and human things, and his writings, Augustine handed down; in weighing which we cannot linger any longer, lest we seem to wish to display the deeds of Augustine rather than those of this Manichaean bishop. This one thing at last we think must be added: namely, that Augustine, now loosed from the snares of the Manichaeans and raised to the order of the episcopate, drew his pen against this Faustus and harassed him in thirty-three books. This work he arranged so ingeniously that first, under the name of that Faustus, he set down the words, subjoining to each chapter just as many Catholic replies composed by himself.

What end Faustus himself truly met, Augustine narrates in Book Five, chapter eight, where the holy Father is wholly engaged in reproaching the audacity of the Manichaeans, by which they rashly and sacrilegiously contended that they endured persecutions and the hatreds of men for the sake of justice — when, namely, the proconsuls of Africa, taking action with the rigor of punishments against this wicked sect, and Faustus himself having been convicted, or having confessed, that he was a Manichaean, was banished to an island together with certain others brought with him to the proconsular tribunal. But of this kind of judgment we shall treat more fully and more conveniently in the following chapter.

It remains now that we should speak of a certain Secundinus, another defender and writer of the Manichaean sect, whom William Cave quite wrongly judged to have been an African by nation. He added moreover that this man had lived after Augustine's return to the Church and after the completion of the three books on Free Will; and that it seemed to him that Secundinus's letter to Augustine, and Augustine's replies to Secundinus, ought to be referred to the year of Christ 390. These two things surely could be affirmed only by a man too boldly divining, and reasoning falsely and from mere caprice about the writers of the Church.

And first, indeed, as regards his native land, his own writings indicate that Secundinus derived his origin not from the African nation but from the Roman people. For, discoursing about himself, he thus addresses Augustine: For your reverend dignity has read some slight thing and such-as-it-is talent of a Roman man's writings, in which you so rage against the truth as Hortensius against philosophy. Secundinus therefore calls himself a Roman, and appeals to those writings by which Augustine, long since converted to the Catholic faith, had harassed the Manichaeans. Again, that same Augustine addresses this very man as a Roman, thus mocking his talent, of which Secundinus seemed most of all to boast:

I ask of you, a keen and clever man, and of your Roman talent, as you boast, whence this nature of good has the power to suffer what it suffers, so that it consents to evil. Nor is William Cave's hallucination — or rather drowsiness — any less in defining the time at which either Secundinus assailed Augustine with his writings, or when Augustine, in a work composed against him, refuted all the arguments of that man's letter. For if we are willing to give credence to Prosper, Possidius, and other trustworthy writers, Augustine, having abjured Manichaeism, joined himself to the society of the Catholics in the year 387.

If, therefore, this exchange of letters between Secundinus and Augustine were to be thrown back into the years after the latter's return to the Church, as William Cave drowsily surmised, then from that very point this consequence would stand: namely, that around the year of Christ 390 writings of this kind had been published. But that alleged consequence would at once fall to the ground, if Secundinus in his writings had covertly taunted and attacked Augustine as already having attained the honor of the episcopate; and if Augustine himself, meeting the slanders of this man, had not concealed from the crafty fellow that he had obtained the episcopate of the Catholics. But Secundinus in truth accuses Augustine of having defected from the Manichaean, enticed by a certain fear and by desire of attaining honor.

And throughout his writing he constantly employed those phrases which it was customary to use only toward bishops, namely: your salutary and eminent holiness, O lord deservedly praiseworthy and to be highly honored; or this: yet that I cannot do to your most powerful holiness; or finally this other: although it would be too absurd to say these things to your holiness; and other titles of the same kind, by which bishops alone were then honored. What more? Augustine himself, in meeting Secundinus, affirms that he had already attained the honor of the episcopate.

Wherefore (he says) even though you may suspect nothing good of me — that from carnal fear of some inconvenience which might befall me from your society, I abandoned the heresy of the Manichaeans, or from desire of the honor which I attained in the Catholic Church. But why shall I dwell longer on these things? Augustine himself indeed left us some reckoning of the time of his own books in the two books of the Retractations. In reviewing these, since he follows the order of his own life, he retracts the book of which we are speaking among those which he had produced as a bishop. This surely Cave would have known, had he been willing to consult chapter 10 of Book Two of the Retractations, where he expressly mentions this book against Secundinus, as we shall observe hereafter.

Since therefore Augustine, having already been made a presbyter, did not attain the episcopal dignity until the year 394, it follows that before this time that exchange of letters between them could not have taken place. Yet the Fathers of the congregation of St. Maur, in the latest edition of the works of Augustine, scrutinized this truth more diligently. And, relying at last upon more probable conjectures, they judged that the writings both of Secundinus the Manichaean and of Augustine the Catholic bishop ought to be referred to the year 404 or the following one — which is the tenth or eleventh after Augustine attained the episcopate — writing thus:

In the Retractations there next follows the work On the Nature of the Good, which is appended to the books against Felix composed at the end of the year 404. This book (Against Secundinus) therefore belongs to about the year 405. Now, having noted the hallucinations of Cave — one of which pertains to the native land of Secundinus the Manichaean, the other to the time of that composed letter — we ought further to describe and forestall a third, which is graver than the rest. For concerning this same Secundinus he wrote thus: A great intimacy had existed between him and Augustine, while both were engaged in the heresy of the Manichaeans. That Cave prattles nonsense no one can be ignorant who consults Augustine.

For he sincerely confessed, without any stain of falsehood, that he had never seen this man, although both had once at Rome been ensnared in the Manichaean snares. For in the praised Book Two of the Retractations, chapter 10, Augustine has these words: A certain Secundinus, not of those whom the Manichaeans call the elect, but of those whom they call hearers, whom we had not even known by face, wrote to me as if a friend, honorably rebuking me for assailing that heresy with my writings, and admonishing me not to do so, and exhorting me rather to follow it, together with a defense of it and a censure of the Catholic faith. Would Cave, if he had expended any labor in inquiring from Augustine into the deeds, native land, character, and companions of Secundinus, have fallen into that opinion?

Would he, in the last place, have affirmed that a great intimacy had existed between these two men while both were engaged in the heresy of the Manichaeans, when Augustine asserts that he had not even seen that man by face? In the meantime, however, let us pass these things by, and let our discourse rather turn to the epistolary exchange which was carried on between Augustine and Secundinus the Manichaean, examining the arguments of those same letters. And first indeed Secundinus, feigning himself a friend of Augustine, here assails, plucks at, and carps at him with his letters because he had defected from the Manichaean sect. For which cause he imprecates upon Augustine the wrath and indignation of Manes the Persian, to be undergone especially on the day of judgment. Against him he brought two charges of his defection:

the one arising from fear, by which he feigns that Augustine dreaded all the bodily punishments of this world, unjustly decreed against the Manichaeans, or at times inflicted by the public power; the other arising from desire of honor, laboring under which Augustine had coveted that the rank of the episcopate in the Catholic Church be given to him. Against these calumnies, therefore, Augustine wished to make answer, and elaborated a certain celebrated work which he distributed into twenty-six chapters. And he strives above all to dissolve the two principal calumnies craftily and falsely aimed at him. First, he shows that his defection from the Manichaean sect is to be traced from no other fear than from the words of the Apostle to Timothy, chapter 4, verse 1, namely:

Now the Spirit manifestly says that in the last times certain men shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and to doctrines of demons — which all the ancients were abundantly persuaded fitted the Manichaeans. But turning his discourse to the latter cause of his defection, he appeals to the same Apostle Paul to the Romans, employing the following words: But glory and honor and peace to everyone who works good — so as to indicate, plainly and without any ambiguity whatever, that these gifts are derived not from the maker of evil whom the Manichaeans feigned, but from the supreme and unchangeable Good. Nor does Augustine dwell only upon refuting these two calumnies;

but bringing forth and pursuing each of the objections which Secundinus had raised from the school of the Manichaeans, with prosperous and happy pace he at length dissolves, rejects, and overturns all and singular the arguments of the adverse party. Finally, Augustine, disputing against the Donatists, recounted two men of the same name, of whom he called the one Secundinus of Cedias, the other Secundinus of Carpi; who, since they are very different from Secundinus the Manichaean, we have had to note here, lest anyone, confounding one with the other, should fall into error. Having written thus far, however, we ought to append the deeds of a certain Felix, a Manichaean presbyter, who held at least two or three public disputations with Augustine.

And this would have redounded to the great advantage of the reader, that we might not let him wander hither and thither, for the sake of viewing the things done in Africa in Augustine's age by the Manichaeans, and at the same time that we might lay open, under one single chapter, those things which we had promised in the beginnings of this chapter. But since the disputation of this Manichaean seemed to us to pertain not to the contention of private men but to the public cause of the Catholic Church; and since it was held at that time when the priests and the judges of the world had begun to take action against the Manichaeans with various kinds of penalties;

and since, moreover, Felix the presbyter himself, after the conferences held with Augustine, being convicted of error, first abjured the wicked heresy and endeavored to wipe away all defilement by associating himself with the communion of the Catholics — therefore, concerning both him and other Manichaeans of Africa especially, convicted by public judgment, we shall speak more opportunely with what brevity we can. The manner of acting of St. Leo the Great, Gelasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas, the Roman pontiffs, in destroying and burning up with fire the books of the Manichaeans, is vindicated against the notes of the critic Beausobre.

By the examples also of the ancient heathens it is shown that it was always judged a most grievous crime to permit the people to read those books from which, in matters pertaining to religion, one might depart even slightly from the institutions of the forefathers. Although I am not unaware how greatly that manner of acting of the Roman Church is hateful to certain persons — the manner by which it has perpetually been accustomed to destroy the codices and volumes of non-Catholic men and to burn them up with fire — nevertheless I must not for the present pass over discourse concerning it, having seized the occasion from Beausobre's aim of writing and refining.

Concerning the four Roman pontiffs who proscribed the reading of the Manichaean books and, with all diligence applied, handed them over to be burned with fire, Beausobre spoke more than once, scattering his various complaints hither and thither — that books of this kind, pertaining to the knowledge of the philosophy and theology of the ancients, had utterly perished, from which those dogmas and systems might be sincerely drawn which were defended by those same heretics. He likewise taxes, plucks at, and carps at this manner of acting as unjust; but imprudently and stupidly. For it greatly ill befits a man of such erudition as he vaunts himself to be, to be ignorant of those things which have obtained at every time and among every religion.

First, then, let him observe that that is called religion by the ancients which brings care and ceremony for a certain higher nature, which they call divine. That piety and holiness have as their companions those who preside over divine matters and administer the economy of civil affairs, Cicero himself confessed. For upon such men, on account of the preeminence of their office and the authority of their dignities, it necessarily falls to proscribe and forestall all those things which can either undermine the worship of the divine Godhead or lead it to ruin.

Therefore, whatever was at any time fictitiously devised, out of the opinions of the unlearned, to the detriment and defilement even of some profane religion, and was being anew and gradually introduced among sacred things, every nation with all effort cast out and shrank from as from its own downfall, coercing also with various kinds of penalties those who, the ancestral laws being changed, had dared to perform divine matters otherwise. Of which thing, although we could bring forth countless examples from Titus Livius, the writer of Roman affairs;

Yet, lest we should seem to wander beyond the prescribed bounds of the dispute, we bring forward into the midst this one point, from which we understand that the Romans condemned the introduction of a foreign and novel religion, and judged that it ought to be abolished as most pernicious to themselves, to their forefathers, and to their gods. When therefore, in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Titus Sempronius — that is, while Hannibal was spending his time in the territory of Tarentum, and the longer the war was drawn out, the more, among other things, matters of religion also began to vary, and chiefly on the side of foreign rites, so that either men or gods seemed suddenly to have become other than they were — Roman rites were now being done away with not only in secret nor within private walls,

but even in public, in the forum and on the Capitol, there was a throng of women neither sacrificing nor praying to the gods after the ancestral custom. When therefore the evil had grown so gravely and appeared more powerful than could be quelled by the lesser magistrates, the task was given by the Senate to Marcus Atilius, praetor of the City, to free the people from these superstitions. He accordingly both read out the decree of the Senate in the assembly and issued an edict: that whosoever had prophetic books or prayers, or a written art of sacrificing, should bring all those books and writings to him before the first of April, and that no one should sacrifice in a public or sacred place by a new or foreign rite.

3. That the Roman pontiffs and other pastors, as well as the Christian emperors, brought this zeal to bear for the fortification and defence of the Catholic religion, prompted by a sacred and divine counsel — this Beausobre does not deny. Yet he, taking no account whatever of the manner of acting and the economy of the magistrates and of the ancient heathen princes, has dared with a censorious pen to mark and to carp at whichever of the Catholic Fathers ordered the Manichaean books to be consumed by fire and destroyed.

This he noted not only in the earlier part of his History, but expounded more fully in the prefatory discourse to the second part, which he begins by affirming and laying down that it is a very difficult thing, or almost impossible, in our day to set forth a just and complete idea pertaining to the philosophy and theology of the Manichaeans, because their written volumes no longer exist. He says afterward that he does not know whether, among the ancients, Leo the Great was the first who ordered the Manichaean books to be destroyed and burned; yet that he knows this man to have been imitated by his successor Gelasius, who commanded these codices to be burned before the church of St. Mary. This custom Pope Symmachus followed a little later. For from Anastasius

the Librarian we have it that he burned in flames all the images of the Manichaeans, or their codices, before the doors of the Constantinian basilica. He contends first that the images of the Manichaeans could not have been consumed by fire; both because the Magi, whose religion the Manichaeans followed, according to Epiphanius, had no idols; and finally because the Manichaeans worshipped fire, the sun and the moon, of which things idols could by no means be burned. Lastly he concludes that Pope Hormisdas, in the case of these heretics, followed the example of his predecessors. From what has been described thus far, nothing occurs that would gravely injure the manner of acting of the Roman prelates.

We stumble only upon that most feeble assertion by which he contends that Pope Symmachus could not have burned the images of the Manichaeans, because they represented fire, the sun and the moon — as though the same force and nature inhered in such images as exists in the very things represented. For the substance of fire, like that of the sun and moon, cannot be consumed by burning. But who will deny that images of these things, made of wood, of clay, or cast of metal, can indeed be burned?

4. After this the author Beausobre seeks gradually to insinuate himself into the reader's mind; and, under the pretext of a certain ignorance, he discusses here and there whether the zeal of the ancient bishops ought to be praised — the zeal by which the minds of the Christian emperors were moved to decree that the books of the heretics should be handed over to the fire, and to pronounce a capital sentence against those who had dared to read such books or to keep them in their possession. He persuades himself that the aim and end of these laws was good;

but he brands a similar example as very pernicious, condemned even by the Christians themselves as unjust and violent. In order to prove this futile and venom-sprinkled conjecture (which all the smatterers of our age follow), or to add force to it, he appeals to another apology of Justin Martyr, in which he bitterly laments the Roman law passed against those who consulted the Sibylline and Hystaspine books, which the Christians used to confirm their doctrines. But who does not perceive how most just was St.

Justin the martyr's complaint was? For the Sibylline books were in use among the heathen. For in undertaking or dispatching difficult matters the Romans themselves used to appeal to these books, that they might draw help from them. Why then, when in the affairs of the empire they placed such trust in the aforesaid books, did they, in hatred of the Christian religion — which those books, obscurely at least, foretold — so blaze up against them as to destroy them? Justin therefore judged that these books could furnish aid even to the heathen themselves, so that they might more easily be led to the name of Christ. Indeed they had such confidence in them, on the authority of your own Livy, that by a decree of the Senate, when no end could be found to a deadly pestilence, the Sibylline books were consulted. Justin's complaint, then, was not in this:

it was not that sacred monuments apt and fit for confirming the Catholic faith had been destroyed; but that the heathen had deprived themselves of certain aids from which they might have drawn at least some slender light of our Christian faith. Moreover, who could ever affirm that the Sibylline books were either necessary or fit for confirming Catholics in their faith? They were instructed by the Scriptures of both Testaments, they heard the apostolic preaching, they were enlightened by the perpetual proofs of miracles and signs — to say nothing of the supreme care and solicitude of the pastors in instructing the first Christians and strengthening them in the faith. For them, then, there was no need at all to appeal to the Sibylline books.

But if Justin and others of the ancient Fathers appealed to them in order to press the heathen hard, we judge that this was done only upon a certain supposition. Namely, because they knew that these books had been held in veneration by their forefathers, priests, pontiffs, and magistrates. Therefore Beausobre's argument, drawn from the complaint of Justin the martyr, falls utterly to the ground; and for that reason let us return to the aim of our writing, from which we have digressed a little. And indeed, what usefulness or what sort of aid could Catholics have drawn from the Manichaean books, so that, led by any reasoning, they might have been able to complain of the decrees of the Roman pontiffs? What besides?

The Manichaeans, in order to claim faith and authority for their own codices, falsely imposed upon them the gravest and most holy names of piety — namely, of Gospels, of Mysteries, of Revelations, of Treasures, and the like; and, boasting that these contained divine knowledge, they inscribed them as sacred and canonical books under the names of the apostles, understanding perfectly well that they could not easily deceive simple, rude, and unwary men, unless they first smeared their poisoned doctrine with a certain appearance of honey. "How" (says St. Leo the Great) "could they more easily deceive the simple, unless they smeared the poisoned cups over with a certain honey, so that what was to prove deadly should not be felt to be unpleasant on every side?"