For that viperous brood, terrified by civil and ecclesiastical penalties and accustomed to seek hiding-places for itself, never wholly departed from Africa, although later the Vandals laid waste that kingdom. Augustine's aim in speaking, therefore, was this: to hint that the poison of the Manichaeans had been crushed and consumed there by anathemas and proscriptions, and that all their diabolical enticements had been crushed and broken by the labours and writings of the Catholics, so that neither the unlearned nor the more learned could any longer be caught in such snares. These things which we have described belong to Augustine's age.
But if anything should occur to us that must be said about this same heresy ranging through Africa, we shall point it out at fitting places as this historical study proceeds, preserving as far as we can the order of the times. 1. Here we take up several questions to be examined which, once cleared up, not only shed very much light on our preceding remarks, but also utterly wrest away those arguments which Beausobre, all too injuriously, brought against Saints Leo the Great and Augustine, those vigorous opponents of the Manichaeans. First, then, he remarks how that wretched sect of the Manichaeans, after the Vandals occupied proconsular Africa, in which it had spread more widely, was forced to go into exile.
Of its followers, some came to Rome, while others took care to betake themselves to various places or cities. But those who came to Rome hoped to obtain comfort and support from their brethren, so as to live more safely. Yet soon this hope deceived them. For Saint Leo the Great, the Supreme Pontiff, being informed of their arrival and their stay, spared no zeal or labour to purge his Church of this plague. Nevertheless (says Beausobre) he employed such a mode and manner of dealing with them that he drove them rather to wrath and despair than roused them to repentance and the renouncing of their crimes. He maintains that Saint
Leo (the same Beausobre adds) convicted them of abominable ceremonies, of which he afterwards admonished the bishops of Italy in encyclical letters. This mode of acting, then, produced two pernicious effects. The first was to arouse in the people and the common folk a horror of the Manichaeans, and to move the magistrates to inflict upon them the penalties already established by the laws. But the other and more pernicious effect was that by which, little by little, a very great horror of the Catholic Church was inspired in these same Manichaeans, seeing the bishops become so grievously hostile to them, since they were pressed by these men rather with calumnies and most grievous persecutions.
For, he says, they were not guilty of those crimes with which they were charged. With these curses and reproaches, then, Beausobre harassed Saint Leo the Pontiff, in order the more to favour the Manichaeans and to clear them of their abominable crimes. Shall we, then, patiently endure so great an impudence of writing and audacity of reasoning—especially when the author boasts throughout his whole work that he is led by no prejudices, and has inquired into the sole truth of things in setting forth the history of the Manichaeans? But the following considerations will make plain that our writer has splendidly lied in all these matters. First, from where does he gather that the Manichaeans came to Rome after proconsular Africa had been laid waste by the Vandals?
For the men of this wicked sect had long before sought other hiding-places for themselves in the city of Rome, namely in the time of Saint Pope Siricius. Those who stubbornly and too obstinately clung to and defended their errors he ordered to be banished into exile; but those who were corrected and penitent he admitted to the sacrament of reconciliation, provided they should pass the remaining course of their life confined in monasteries. Therefore the manner of the Roman Pontiffs in dealing with the Manichaeans did not originate from Leo the Great; nor were they detected at Rome after the Vandal disaster inflicted on proconsular Africa, as Beausobre (carelessly, I believe) asserted; nor was the way to penance thereafter closed to them, so that they should be driven to wrath and despair;
but, with the rigour of the sacred laws set before them on the one hand, and on the other the peace and gentleness of the Church, they were able to bend themselves toward that to which their mind was more inclined. Saint Leo the Great's manner of dealing with the Manichaeans, therefore, is not to be judged so savage that, neglecting the statutes of his predecessors the Pontiffs Siricius and Anastasius, he did not first seek the conversion of the Manichaeans, and refused to receive the penitent to reconciliation. And if afterwards popular hatred against these men was aroused on account of the horrible outrages that had been discovered, so that even the magistrates were moved to torment them with the rigour of penalties, that ought by no means to be laid to Leo's fault.
Nay rather, with the highest praise must that zeal be crowned, by which he strove to purge the Roman Church, entrusted to him, from the defilements of such great wickednesses. And what if, moreover, the Manichaeans conceived the greatest horror toward the bishops and the fellowship of Catholics? For this is wont to be the ordinary condition of all the accused, that they fear their judges and shrink from the penalties with which they justly deserve to be visited. But the bishops did not on that account become their calumniators and persecutors, since they published, by word or in writing, nothing but the Manichaean crimes proved in the courts by solemn inquiry and laid open by the very confessions of those men.
For that our Leo kept this economy, whether in the public sermons delivered to the people or when he directed his letters to all the bishops of Italy, that they might guard themselves and their flocks against the dogmas of the Manichaeans (men who had recently been expelled from the city of Rome), we ourselves show more clearly when treating of Leo's Roman inquisition against the Manichaeans. From that discussion, indeed, the reader will more abundantly find whereby to refute Beausobre's reproaches and curses against Saint Leo the Great. 2. Nor did Beausobre think it enough to censure and to tear apart with reproaches Saint Leo the Great's manner of dealing with the Manichaeans, as we have seen thus far; but proceeding to the same Saint's
Pontiff's Letters and Sermons, he affirms that these contain no description whatever of Manichaean doctrine, but says that all this man's writings are taken up with invectives against the Priscillianists and Manichaeans, while he continually tries to confound these two distinct sects and subjects both to the same penalties. He grants that Leo's zeal deserves some praise, but says that a greater moderation of mind ought to have been sought in him, since he was above all one of those chief bishops who approved the punishments of heretics as valid and just. Finally Beausobre closes his discourse by saying that he has sought the cause of so great a commotion in Leo, and pondered with himself the character of this holy Pontiff.
'His character (he says) was that of a man carried away by ambition, less thinking to win a soul by teachableness and persuasion, but rather to crush it by violence.' Yet Beausobre did not think it enough to have written thus; but, in order to vent his fury the more against the holy Pontiff and the Apostolic See, he appeals in his notes to certain words of this same Saint Leo, spoken on the occasion of the execution of Priscillian and others of that sect, carried out at Trier by the emperor Maximus through his public officers—words by which the same Pontiff seems to approve that prince's bloody design; and then he adds: 'Quesnel's note upon this passage is worthy to be transcribed here:'
'But neither this man (Sulpicius Severus), nor that one (Jerome), nor any of the holy Fathers who lived in that age of Priscillian, approved such bloody counsels'—as Leo, that is, did. 3. But to wrest away all these things and to turn back upon the unjust calumniators each of the reproaches by which the fame and sanctity of Saint Leo are torn to pieces will be neither burdensome nor difficult enough for us. For some of the objections he raised are so weak and insipid that, to refute them, it suffices to cast one's eyes upon the Works of Saint Leo the Great, and the assailant's lies will be caught out.
Wherefore I press him: whence did he draw that Leo, in his Letters and Sermons, did not describe the chief errors of the Manichaeans, but was engaged only in declamations, after the manner of rhetoricians? This assuredly he did not draw from the notes and writings of Quesnel, whom—as we saw from the preceding narrative—he took as a master to be followed. For Quesnel at least recounted various errors of the Manichaeans out of the holy Pontiff, as is clear from chapter 10 of this book. And besides, he mentions here and there yet others, which the same Quesnel, only through excessive carelessness, omitted to note.
Moreover, what need had Leo, in the sermons delivered to the people, to enumerate and set forth one by one the whole doctrine of Manichaean philosophy and theology, all the superstitious and profane rites, all the diabolical mysteries in which that sect was engaged? For he had not taken upon himself the task of composing treatises on the dogmas of faith to combat those heretics; but he only desired to admonish the Roman people to guard themselves against their practice and institutions. This he was accustomed to do especially on the more solemn days of the year, while the more sacred mysteries of our faith were being celebrated in church. Therefore it was enough to indicate summarily to the people the chief errors of these men, that they might abhor them;
But that in the letters written against these same Manichaeans he followed a different method, both the text of those letters and the order of the matters written make plain. 4. And in the first place, as regards the letter given to the bishops of Italy, it must be judged that Beausobre scarcely surveyed it with his own eyes. For if he had even touched its text only cursorily, he would have understood that Leo proposed to himself no other aim than to forewarn the bishops concerning what had been done at Rome in the solemn trial held against the Manichaeans; lest, that is, in ignorance, the seeds of vices which had been extinguished and had perished at Rome should be secretly sown again by the roots, through new offshoots, in their dioceses.
In a word, there he discoursed only in a general way about the Manichaean heresy, and he calls the other bishops into a partnership of his solicitude, informing them: that by his investigation he had found in the City very many followers and teachers of Manichaean impiety, had exposed them by his vigilance, and had restrained them by his authority and censure. But since in restraining these same men he kept the solemn form and rules of the courts, the crimes having been recorded in the public registers and proved by the confessions of those very defendants, he transmitted, together with this letter, copies of all the proceedings, that they might be more fully instructed. 'As (he says) the series of the proceedings will be able to instruct you.'
'For your instruction we have also sent these very things (namely the proceedings), on reading which you can know all that has been detected by us.' It is indeed to be lamented that a series of such Acts has been lost through the injury of the times. But it is more to be lamented that Beausobre neglected to survey this letter, so that he might inveigh with mere calumnies and reproaches against the holy Pontiff. 5. But as regards the other letter, which is the fifteenth, I cannot at all deny that it is wholly taken up with the questions proposed to the same holy Pontiff by Turribius, bishop of Astorga, when he consulted him, that is, in the cause of the Priscillianists.
But neither on this occasion was it becoming or necessary for Leo to describe at length the spectacle of this or of the Manichaean heresy, for he would have wandered ineptly beyond the limits of the questions set before him. Nor does it matter that in the letter cited he discoursed indiscriminately both of the practices of the Priscillianists and of the Manichaeans; for those two heresies were too closely akin, since the Priscillianist borrowed many false dogmas from the Manichaean, and both imbibed the poison of the ancient Gnostics. Nor yet on that account is Leo, the holy Pontiff, to be charged with error, if he sometimes called the Priscillianists Manichaeans.
Indeed Idatius too relates that Manichaeans lurking in the city of Astorga, detected by episcopal proceedings, dragged to judgment and condemned, were publicly exposed throughout Spain. Yet it is well established that in that very passage he was speaking of the Priscillianists. From which manner of writing not even Jerome shrank, as Quesnel too has noted. 6. But that he wished to persecute Saint Leo yet more vehemently, the last objection he raised plainly shows, namely when he describes the holy Pontiff as, led by ambition and fury, having approved the bloody design of the tyrant Maximus executed against the Priscillianists at Trier. Whoever wishes to convict Beausobre as a liar and impostor, let him send him to the text of Leo's letter.
From which he will have enough to see that he could not have devised a more unjust reproach nor a more audacious insult. For Saint Leo relates, in the first chapter of that letter, how the bishops under whose times that abominable heresy broke out acted urgently throughout the whole world, that the impious madness might be driven from the universal Church. What evil counsel is there in this? Those Fathers did nothing at all to the disgrace of episcopal dignity or to the detriment of ecclesiastical gentleness, who, having pronounced anathema upon Priscillian and his associates, ordered that these men, expelled either from their episcopal sees or from ecclesiastical communion, be held as heathens and publicans. Nor does that other, bloody kind of judgment, of which Saint Leo makes mention immediately after, avail Beausobre.
Leo makes mention of it, writing: 'When even the princes of the world so detested this sacrilegious madness that they laid low its author, along with most of his disciples, by the sword of the public laws.' For he adjudges the cause of this bloody judgment not to the bishops, but to the character and gravity of the crimes. For he adds: 'For they (the princes) saw that all care for decency was being taken away, every bond of marriage dissolved, and at once both divine and human law overturned, if it had been permitted for men of this kind anywhere to live with such a profession.' For if the Priscillianists had opposed only the dogmas of the faith, if they had not likewise overturned all the laws of decency and both divine and human right, the princes of the age would have passed no bloody sentence against them.
But because they broke out into such crimes as brought the whole of civil life to ruin, therefore the princes deemed it necessary to lay low the authors of such madness by the sword of the public laws. For this reason the same holy Pontiff, lest anyone should dare to twist his preceding words into a malicious interpretation, at once distinguishes those two kinds of judgment, explaining how ecclesiastical gentleness, content with priestly judgment, shrinks from bloody vengeances. If it shrinks from them, it does not approve them. But he adds: 'Yet it is aided by the severe constitutions of Christian princes, since those who fear bodily punishment sometimes have recourse to a spiritual remedy.' Whence, then, does Beausobre get that Leo approved bloody counsels?
Perhaps because he said that ecclesiastical gentleness, content with priestly judgment, is aided by the constitutions of Christian princes? But in what sense did Leo affirm this? Namely, because those ensnared in such graver crimes, seized by fear of bodily punishment, sometimes have recourse to a spiritual remedy, by execrating their former impieties and crimes. How vain and futile, then, are Beausobre's calumnies against Saint Leo the Great, this our foregoing manner and method of discussion shows. From which the reader also has whereby to refute the crafty fourth note of Quesnel, who nevertheless did not fabricate so audaciously as Beausobre did. 7. But now I had determined to lift my hand from the tablet, and, leaving for a little while the vindication of Saint
Leo the Great's vindication, and to proceed to plead the cause of Augustine, that I might clear him too of the unjust accusations of Beausobre. But since, in perusing the writings of this non-Catholic man, I have met with yet other things which seem to wound Leo's piety and sincere faith, I judged it necessary to dwell longer on the examination of these, lest I should be judged altogether negligent by envious and critical adversaries. Again, therefore, he brings the holy Pontiff onto the stage, not only to make sport by discoursing on the dogmas of the Manichaeans, but to harass him with new curses and reproaches. He first feigns that Saint Leo followed the opinion of Cyril of Jerusalem, by which he says that Manes blasphemed by repeatedly calling himself the Holy Spirit; he says:
'At least an accusation of this kind is more plausible; and Leo would have done better to transcribe it rather than to extend it, and to explain more broadly, with inexcusable liberty, the aforesaid words:' 'The Manichaeans (says Leo) adore, under the name of the Holy Spirit, Manichaeus himself, the master of such impieties.' And again: 'They believed that the Holy Spirit had appeared in their master Manichaeus…but that Manichaeus himself was nothing other than the Spirit.' 'Assuredly, if this had been true (Beausobre adds), pride and blasphemy would have dragged our heretic to the utmost degree of malice. But if Leo is no more faithful in his narratives than he is just in his discourses, we shall plainly be excused if we place no trust in his words.'
'Especially since, wishing to refute in a few words the presumed pride of Manichaeus, he burst out into the following words:' 'Since he too came from that part of the world which cannot receive the Spirit of truth.' 'As if he were hinting that the Holy Spirit is confined within narrow bounds, and that the people of the East are more wretched than all others.' 'Never indeed (Beausobre adds) should I have believed that a single bishop who obtained the surname of the Great could have said such an absurdity in a sermon that passes down to posterity. So that he himself forgot that the first among the Gentiles who came to adore the Messiah were the Magi, philosophers of the Persians, and, as it were, the forefathers of Manes.'
'Likewise he forgot that he himself said in another sermon that the Magi did not come to know from the starry sign that Christ was born in Judaea, but by the divine inspiration doubtless working in their hearts.' 8. Behold the whole Beausobrian game, which convicts the author's impudence and lies, if we look into the Leonine context from which the three cited passages were torn away. In the first of these, nothing at all occurs that is foreign to faith and truth, and that the holy Pontiff had not detected the Manichaeans to profess.
For in that fourth sermon on the Epiphany, having recalled to the people's memory the mystery of the Incarnation, and having more fully explained what pertained to the solemnity of the day, to the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, to the gifts offered, and to that starry sign which had brought them from the far regions of the East, he sets about to harass the Manichaeans whom he had lately detected lurking in the City, reporting summarily to the people the sacrilegious fabrications and fabulous lies by which they were subverting the truth of the Incarnation. And what then? Lest he should detain the people too long, he reduced to a kind of summary the chief points of all their errors:
namely, how they rejected the Mosaic Scriptures, corrupted the Gospels, despised the apostolic truth of the Creed, and, denying that the living and the dead were to be judged by Christ, taught that Christ was to be worshipped in the sun and the moon, and that, under the name of the Holy Spirit, they adored Manichaeus himself, the master of such impieties. But who does not see that those two things differ greatly from each other?—namely, that Manichaeus called himself the Holy Spirit, and that his disciples adored Manichaeus under the name of the Holy Spirit. This latter alone Saint Leo the Great affirmed concerning the Manichaeans. And this in precisely the same way in which the sacrilegious men also maintained that Christ was worshipped in the sun and the moon; and yet they did not blurt out that the sun and the moon were Christ.
Nor did our Leo reason in any other way in another sermon on Pentecost, when he set out to refute the Manichaeans of his own age, who claimed to follow a certain great and lofty founder, and who believed that the Holy Spirit had appeared in Manes, their teacher, and that the Paraclete promised by the Lord had not come before this deceiver of the wretched arose, in whom the Holy Spirit so remained that Manes himself was nothing other than the Spirit of God. If, then, we attend to these words of Leo, put forth according to the opinion of the Manichaeans, we understand nothing whatever by which Beausobre could have called St. Leo unfaithful and unjust. For it was established to St. [pontiff...]
...that such depraved doctrines were professed by the Manichaeans; he proved all this not from any false report of men, nor from the testimony of others, but from the very confession of these Manichaeans and their execration of their crimes. Wherefore all ought to be persuaded that Beausobre, that uncatholic man, always sought a knot in a bulrush, contriving fraudulent interpretations. 9. But at least it will be true that the holy pontiff did injury to the Holy Spirit, when he confined Him within narrow bounds and declared that the Easterners were deprived of His aid and protection. Away with the fabrication! For St. Leo relates how Manes appeared, to be condemned throughout the world, in the consulship of Probus and Paulinus.
From this epoch of time he clearly demonstrates that already, from the death of Christ down to the consulship of Probus and Paulinus, the eighth persecution had raged against the Christians, and that innumerable martyrs had arisen, to whom, according to the divine promises in Matthew 19, the Holy Spirit had been given: 'Take no thought how or what you shall speak,' etc. God therefore could not have restrained the abundance of His own gifts so as to defraud so many generations of the Church of His inspiration, until the prodigious standard-bearer of foul lies should be born. Leo, insisting as it were upon the arguments of Archelaus, affirms this, and at once adds concerning Manes:
'To him not even this can be granted, that he received even a small portion of divine inspiration, since he arose from that part of the world which cannot receive the Spirit of truth.' But these latter words are not to be referred either to Persia or to the whole East, as Beausobre interpreted them, whether through hallucination or through malice, but to the devil, the father of lies, whose role and offices Manes was performing by teaching his doctrine. For the holy pontiff soon explained himself, adding: 'For, filled with the spirit of the devil, he resists the Spirit of Christ; and though he has compared this with the teaching of the Paraclete among the saints of God,' etc.
Since, therefore, it is a manifest matter, proclaimed even in the divine Scriptures, that the world is divided into two parts, over one of which God and truth rule, and over the other the devil and lies, I do not see why Leo's praised sermon, filled with divine instructions, ought not to have been handed down to posterity. That Christ the Lord indeed said the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because it does not see Him nor know Him, the evangelist John is witness. But who on that account will affirm that the Holy Spirit is confined within narrow bounds? Once this game of Beausobrian ambiguity is removed, the other objections which the censor had raised fall away entirely; and therefore let us take a step toward overthrowing the other calumnies brought forth against Augustine.
Whoever should suppose that these matters could be set forth by me briefly would be gravely mistaken, since the malicious interpretations scattered here and there throughout the whole work of Beausobre are almost countless, which assail the holy bishop and tear him apart with slanders. Nor is it our purpose here to pursue, to indicate, and to refute each one. For our work would be drawn out to an almost immense length, nor would we take up anything more laborious or troublesome. 148. 10. In a few words, therefore, I shall first sample only some things from those which he has in the preliminary discourse to the second part of his History.
And so, being about to speak of Augustine, he begins his discourse with certain words of Leontius of Byzantium, who writes that no one could describe the Manichaean heresy more felicitously unless he had long before been a Manichaean by profession. This saying would fit Augustine most excellently, who from the nineteenth year of his age until his twenty-eighth had given his name to this sect, and had manfully and successfully championed its errors against the Catholics in many contests. But Beausobre asserts in the same place that this must be attributed to the fervor of Augustine's eloquence and genius. For Secundinus reproaches him for not having understood the Manichaean mysteries:
'For it seemed to me, and it is assuredly so, that you were never a Manichaean, nor could you have known the unknown mysteries of its secret, and that under the name of a Manichaean you were persecuting Hannibal and Mithridates.' Beausobre ironically asserts that this paradox suffers many contradictions. First, it was uttered by a heretic. Second, the preconceived opinion of the world stands against one who thus objects — namely of those who are more powerful in knowledge and authority. What? Augustine, more learned and more penetrating in mind than the rest of the Latin Fathers, the oracle of the Western Church, lived among the Manichaeans for the space of nine years without penetrating the Manichaean system? Could Secundinus have brought forth anything more rash or absurd?
'One of two things, therefore,' he says, 'must be said: either that Augustine did not sufficiently understand their system; or that St. Augustine changed it' — which he thinks cannot be affirmed by anyone without the mark of heresy. 'I' (he adds) 'above all others make much of this Father's excellent qualities; not without admiration do I weigh his genius and wisdom; I honor his memory and esteem his long labors; but the best rules of logic and experience have taught me that one must not rely upon his sayings and testimonies. The ancients never claimed infallibility, which only later ages granted them. They were men, as we are.' And after a few words interposed he has: 'I do not wish to defend St.