書信與論戰集（CSEL） 第 15 章

BOOK ONE. There was a certain Faustus, African by race, a citizen of Milevis, sweet in eloquence, cunning in mind, a Manichaean by sect and therefore perverted by an abominable error. I myself had known the man, as I have recalled him in the books of my Confessions. He published a certain volume against the right Christian faith and Catholic truth. When it had come into our hands and had been read by the brethren, they desired — and by the right of the charity by which we serve them, they earnestly demanded — that we should answer it. This I now undertake, in the name and with the help of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, so that all who read these things may understand how utterly nothing a sharp mind and a polished tongue are, unless a man's steps be directed by the Lord.

This has been granted, by the hidden equity of divine mercy, to many even slower and weaker persons, while many most keen and most eloquent men, abandoned by God's help, ran swiftly and obstinately toward this very end — that they should stray farther from the way of truth. I think it convenient to set down his words under his name, and my response under mine. FAUSTUS said:

The errors having now been more than sufficiently brought to light, and the falsehood both of the Jewish superstition and of the half-Christians abundantly exposed by that most learned Adimantus — the only one worthy of our study after our blessed father Manichaeus — it has seemed to me not out of place, dearest brethren, to write for you these brief and neat replies as well, on account of the cunning and crafty propositions of those who dispute with us; so that when they, after the manner of their father the serpent, wish to entrap you with captious little questions, you yourselves may be vigilantly equipped to answer them. For thus it will come about that, bound fast to the very things they have proposed, they can no longer wander this way and that.

And lest the minds of the readers be flooded by a diffuse or confused discourse, I have set out their words and ours over against each other, as briefly as distinctly. AUGUSTINE replied: You think the half-Christians are to be guarded against, which you say we are; but we guard against the pseudo-Christians, which we show you to be. For what is 'half' is in some part incomplete, yet false in no part. What then? If something is lacking to the faith of those whom you attempt to entrap, is that which is present in them therefore to be destroyed, and not rather that which is lacking to be built up? Just as the apostle, speaking to certain incomplete ones, says: 'rejoicing and beholding your good conduct and that which is lacking to your faith in Christ.'

He was surely discerning a kind of spiritual building, as he says elsewhere: 'You are God's building'; and in it he discerned both — both that from which he might rejoice and that about which he might be anxious. He rejoiced over what he already saw built up; he was anxious over what he perceived still needed to be built up, all the way to the summit of perfection. And so you persecute us who are truly Catholics — not yet perfect, but in a certain manner, as you put it, half-Christians — whom you may deceive and seduce by your perversity. But if any are still even such, if they come to understand that you are pseudo-Christians, then, although they cannot answer the captious propositions of your questions because of what is lacking to their faith, they nevertheless recognize that you are not to be followed but avoided.

As therefore your intention is to seek out the half-Christians whom you may deceive, so our intention is to show you to be pseudo-Christians, so that not only may the more skilled Christians expose you by convicting you, but even the less skilled may profit by guarding against you. But why did you call the serpent our father? Or has it slipped your mind how you are accustomed to blame God, who gave the commandment to man in paradise, and to praise the serpent, because by his counsel he opened man's eyes? I think it just that you should rather acknowledge that serpent — the devil praised by you — as your own parent; for even now, blamed though he is, he acknowledges you as his son. BOOK TWO. FAUSTUS said: Do you accept the gospel? Yes, most emphatically. Accordingly, then, do you also accept Christ as born?

It is not so. For it does not follow that, if I accept the gospel, I therefore accept Christ as born. Why? Because the gospel indeed both began to exist and to be named from the preaching of Christ, in which, however, He nowhere says that He was born of men. But the genealogy is so far from being the gospel that not even its own writer dared to call it a gospel. For what did he write? 'The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David.' Therefore not 'the book of the gospel of Jesus Christ,' but 'the book of the generation' — since there too a star is introduced, which confirms the horoscope, so that this may rightly be called a 'nativity-book' rather than a gospel.

And finally Mark, who did not trouble to write the generation, but only the preaching of the Son of God, which is the gospel — see how fittingly he began: 'The gospel,' he says, 'of Jesus Christ, the Son of God' — so that from this it may appear abundantly enough that the genealogy is not the gospel. For even in Matthew himself it is read that Jesus then began to preach the gospel of the kingdom, after John had been shut up in prison. Therefore whatever was narrated before this is agreed to be genealogy, not gospel. Otherwise, what prevented Matthew too from putting 'the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,' except that he thought it improper to call a genealogy a gospel?

Wherefore, if it is now sufficiently clear to you — what until now you did not know — that the gospel is something far other than the genealogy, know that I, as I said, accept the gospel, that is, the preaching of Christ. Concerning it, whatever you now wish to inquire further, ask, leaving the generations aside. Or if you have a mind to confer about these too, I for my part do not refuse, since I have a great store even about these for answering; but do you learn to ask what comes first. For you seem to me now to want to know, not whether I accept the gospel, but whether I accept the generations. AUGUSTINE replied: Certainly you questioned yourself, as it were in our person, whether you would accept the gospel, and you answered: most emphatically.

And again you asked whether you would accept Christ as born, and you answered: it is not so — subjoining this reason, namely, that the generation of Christ does not pertain to the gospel. What then will you answer to the apostle when he says: 'Remember that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel'? You see surely how you do not know — or pretend not to know — what the gospel is, and how you name the gospel not from apostolic doctrine but from your error. But if you call 'gospel' that which the apostles called it, then you stray from the gospel, you who do not believe that Christ is of the seed of David — which the apostle testified is preached according to his gospel.

And what was the gospel of the apostle Paul, this too was the gospel of the other apostles and of all the faithful stewards of so great a mystery. For he says elsewhere: 'Whether therefore it be I or they, so we preach and so you believed.' For not all of them wrote the gospel, yet all of them preached the gospel. For the narrators of the origin, deeds, sayings, and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ were properly called evangelists. For if we ask what the very name means in Latin, 'euangelium' is called 'good message' or 'good announcement.' This indeed can always be said whenever anything good is announced, yet properly this word has come to belong to that announcement of the Saviour of which I spoke.

But if you announce something else, it is manifest that you are outside the gospel. Surely the little ones, whom you call half-Christians, are against you, if they hear the voice of mother charity resounding to them from the apostolic mouth: 'If anyone announce to you anything beyond what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.' Since therefore Paul himself, according to his gospel, announced Christ of the seed of David, you who deny this and announce something else — be anathema. But who does not see with how great blindness it is said that Christ nowhere calls Himself born of men, when He almost never keeps silent that He is the Son of man?

But of course, most learned men, you bring forth to us from your cupboard some sort of 'first man,' who descended from the race of light to make war on the race of darkness, armed with his own waters against the enemies' waters, and with his own fire against the enemies' fire, and with his own winds against the enemies' winds. Why then not also with his own smoke against the enemies' smoke, and with his own darkness against the enemies' darkness — but against smoke he was armed, as you say, with air, and against darkness with light? Or is it because smoke and darkness are evil that his goodness could not possess them? Then those three are good: water, wind, fire. Why then could the malice of the opposing race possess them? Here you answer:

'But that water of the race of darkness was evil, whereas the water which the first man brought was good; and that one's wind was evil, but this one's good; so too this one's good fire fought against that one's evil fire.' Why then could he not also bring good smoke against evil smoke? Or in the smoke do your lies, like smoke itself, vanish away and fail? Certainly your first man waged war against a contrary nature. Why, against those five elements which you fabricate in the contrary race, was only one contrary thing brought from the divine realms — light against darkness? For the other four are not contrary. For neither is air contrary to smoke, much less water to water, wind to wind, and fire to fire.

But now, who could listen to those sacrilegious ravings — that you say your first man, in accordance with the will of the enemies, in order to capture them, changed and altered the elements which he bore, so that the kingdom which you call the kingdom of falsehood, remaining in its own nature, fought without deceit, while the substance of truth appeared mutable, in order to deceive? You wish the Lord Jesus Christ to be believed the son of this first man. You call truth the daughter of this fabricated fable. This first man, whom you praise because he fought against the opposing race with changeable and lying forms — if you speak the truth, you do not imitate him; but if you do imitate him, then you too are lying.

Wherefore our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the true and truthful Son of God, the true and truthful Son of man — both of which He Himself testifies concerning Himself — drew from true God the eternity of divinity, and from true man the origin of flesh. Apostolic doctrine does not know your first man. Hear the apostle Paul: 'The first man,' he says, 'is of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly. As is the earthy, such also are they that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such also are they that are heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthy, let us bear also the image of Him who is from heaven.' The first man, therefore, of the earth, earthy, is that Adam formed from clay; but the second man, from heaven, heavenly, is the Lord Jesus Christ, who as the Son of God came to flesh.

This flesh being assumed, He became man outwardly and remained God inwardly, so that He was both the true Son of God, through whom we were made, and became the true Son of man, through whom we were remade. Why then do you produce your fabricated first man from I know not where, and are unwilling to acknowledge the first man whom apostolic doctrine teaches? Or is it that there may be fulfilled in you what the apostle himself says: 'turning away their hearing indeed from the truth, but being turned aside to fables'? Paul announces a first man of the earth, earthy; Manichaeus announces a first man not earthy, clothed with I know not what five deceptive elements. And Paul says: 'If anyone announce to you anything beyond what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.'

Therefore, lest Paul be a liar, let Manichaeus be anathema. But that you also calumniate the star, by which the magi were led to adore the infant Christ — you do not blush, since you place your fabricated Christ, the son of your fabricated first man, not under the testimony of a star, but say that he is bound up in all the stars; because, namely, you believe that he was mingled with the princes of darkness in that war in which your first man himself fought with the race of darkness, so that out of those very princes of darkness, thus mingled and captured, the world might be fashioned.

Whence these sacrilegious ravings compel you to say that Christ is fastened, bound, and congealed not only in heaven and in all the stars, but also on the earth and in all the things that are born from it — no longer your saviour, but one to be saved by you, when you eat those things and belch them up. For, seduced by this impious vanity, you also seduce your hearers into bringing you foods, whereby Christ, bound in them, may be succoured through your teeth and bellies. For by such aids you preach that he is loosed and set free;

nor even the whole of him, for you contend that still — albeit tiny and filthy — remnants of him remain in the excrements, so that in one form after another of corporeal things they are held again and again, entangled and enfolded; and if, while the world stands, they cannot be loosed and purged, then in that final fire, in which the world itself will burn, they may be loosed and purged. Nor yet even then do you say that the whole Christ can be liberated, but that the last and residual particles of his good and divine nature, which are so befouled that they can in no way be washed clean, are damned for eternity, fastened to the horrid globe of darkness.

Behold those who feign indignation that an injury is done to the Son of God because a star is said to have shown Him born — as though His nativity were set under a fatal constellation — while they themselves set Him not only under the connection of the stars, but in the bonds of all earthly things, in the juices of all herbs, in the rottenness of all flesh, and in the corruption of all foods — so bound and polluted that he cannot be loosed and purged from a great part, though not from the whole, unless he be belched up even by men — namely, the Elect of the Manichaeans — even in leeks and little roots.

And we indeed place the nativity of no man under the fate of the stars, so that, on account of the just judgment of God, we may vindicate the free choice of the will — by which one lives either well or ill — from every bond of necessity: how much less do we believe that the temporal generation of Him was made under the condition of the stars, who is the eternal creator and Lord of all things. And so that star which the magi saw did not rule over Christ, born according to the flesh, so as to decree, but served Him so as to bear witness; nor did it subject Him to its command, but pointed Him out by its homage.

Accordingly, this star was not one of those which, from the beginning of creation, keep the order of their courses under the creator's law; rather, at the new birth of a virgin a new star appeared, which rendered the ministry of its office even to the magi themselves as they sought Christ — going before their face — until, by going ahead, it led them all the way to the very place where the Word of God was an infant. What astrologers ever established the fates of men being born under the stars in such a way that they would assert that one of the stars, at some man's birth, forsook the order of its circuit and made its way to him who was born? For they suppose that the lot of one being born is bound to the order of the stars, not that the order of the stars can be changed for the day of a man's birth.

Wherefore, if that star was one of those which perform their courses in the heaven, how could it decree what the born Christ was going to do, when at Christ's birth it was bidden to leave off what it was doing? But if, as is more probably believed, it arose in order to point out Christ — which it was not before — then Christ was not born because it came into being, but rather it came into being because Christ was born. Whence, if one had to speak in such terms, we would say that the star was not the fate of Christ, but rather Christ the fate of the star. For He indeed brought to it, not it to Him, the cause of coming into being.

If therefore there are 'fates,' which are named from 'fando,' that is, from 'speaking' — since Christ is the Word of God, in whom, before they existed, all things were spoken — then the fellowship of the stars is not the fate of Christ, but Christ is the fate even of the stars: He who assumed that very flesh, created beneath the heaven, by that same will by which He also created the heaven, and laid it down and took it up again by that same power by which He also commanded the stars. Why then should that which is narrated concerning this generation not be a gospel, since it is announced to us as so good that through it our infirmity is healed? Or is it because Matthew did not begin so as to say 'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,' as Mark says, but 'the book of the generation of Jesus Christ'?

By this reasoning let it be denied that John too wrote a Gospel, since he himself does not say 'the beginning of the Gospel' or 'the book of the Gospel,' but 'In the beginning was the Word.' Unless perhaps Faustus was so elegant a fabricator of words that he would have named this opening of John's a 'verbidium' on account of the 'Word' (verbum), just as he dared to call that other one a 'genesidium' on account of the 'genesis.' But why do you not rather consider with how great shamelessness you call those long-winded and impious fables of yours a Gospel?

For what good is announced there, where it is said that God, against some rebellious, hostile, and alien nature—I know not what—could in no other way provide for and safeguard his own kingdom, except by sending a part of his own nature into that nature's greedy jaws to be devoured and thus defiled, so that after such great toils and torments it could not even be wholly purified? Is such a bad message a Gospel? Surely all who know Greek, even slightly, interpret 'Gospel' as 'good news' or 'good announcement.' But how is this good news, seeing that God himself is announced to you as mourning behind a veil set before him, until his members are restored and cleansed from that devastation and contamination?

And if he ever ends his mourning, he will be cruel. For what evil did that part of him deserve, which is to be bound in the clod? which is surely to be mourned forever, because it is to be condemned forever. But we have escaped, because whoever attends diligently to this message is compelled not to mourn—for it is bad—but to laugh, for it is false. BOOK THREE. FAUSTUS said: Do you then accept the generation? Indeed I long tried to persuade myself of this very thing, whatever it is, that God was born; but, offended above all by the disagreement of two evangelists, Luke and Matthew, who write his genealogy, I hung back uncertain which of them I should most follow.

For I thought it might be that, since I am no foreknower to judge which was lying, the one might be speaking truth, and the one I judged to speak truth might perhaps be lying. So, passing over their boundless and endless dispute, I betook myself to John and Mark—not unequally, from two to two, and from evangelists to professors of the same name. Their beginnings for the time pleased me, not without reason, because they bring in neither David nor Mary nor Joseph; but John indeed says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God—signifying Christ; while Mark says, 'The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,' as if reproaching Matthew, who had set down 'the son of David.'

Unless perhaps this one announces one Jesus and that one another. This, then, is the reason why I do not accept that Christ was born. But you, if you are so great as to remove this stumbling-block from me, bring it about that they agree among themselves, and I will somehow yield—although even so it will not be worthy to believe that God was born from a womb, and the God of the Christians at that. AUGUSTINE replied: O, if you had read the Gospel with pious zeal, and had chosen diligently to inquire into, rather than rashly to condemn, those things in the evangelists which moved you as if contradictory—that at least, on account of the very thing which as it were meets one at first sight,

you would consider that most obvious contradiction, and would reflect that, unless something great lay hidden there, it could scarcely have come about that so great an authority was granted them throughout the world, by which they subdued to themselves the minds of so many most learned men. For what is so great in seeing what you have seen—that some of Christ's forefathers according to the flesh are recorded by Luke, others by Matthew, since both set down Joseph, Matthew as the one at whom he ends, Luke as the one from whom he begins: who, on account of a certain holy and virginal marriage with his mother, himself also deserved to be called the parent of Christ, so that on account of the male dignity the generations should be woven either from him or up to him? What then is so great in what you have seen—that according to Matthew Joseph has one father,

according to Luke another, and according to the one grandfather another, according to the other another; and thereafter upward all the way to David, through so many generations, other forebears of his are enumerated by the one, others by the other? Would so many acute and learned men, most diligent expositors of the divine Scriptures, not have seen so plain and manifest a diversity?—men who indeed are very few in the Latin tongue, but who could count them in the Greek? They saw it plainly. For what is easier? Or who, looking even a little at these things, does not see it?

But thinking piously, on account of the eminence of so great an authority, they believed that something lay hidden there which would be given to those who ask, denied to those who bark against it, found by those who seek, withdrawn from those who carp, opened to those who knock, closed to those who assail: they asked, they sought, they knocked, they received, they found, they entered. Truly the whole question in this matter is how Joseph could have had two fathers. For if it is shown that this could have happened, there is no cause whatever why any of these evangelists should be believed to have spoken falsely in enumerating diverse generations.

For from two fathers it will no longer be strange or contradictory that there could also be two grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers, and whatever is above, all the way up to David, whose sons both were—Solomon, who belongs to the line which Matthew followed, and Nathan, who is in the series which Luke set forth. For some attend to these things and see that a man cannot be begotten by two men through the mingling of flesh, and therefore think this question cannot be resolved. And they do not observe what is most usual and most easy: that anyone's father is called not only he by whom he was begotten, but also he by whom he was adopted.

For the bond of adoption was not foreign to the customs of the ancients, since we find that even women adopted for themselves sons not born of their own womb—as Sarah did from Hagar, and Leah from her handmaid, and Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses. Jacob himself adopted his grandsons, the sons of Joseph. And that the very name of adoption has the greatest force in the mystery of our faith, the apostolic teaching bears witness. Whence the apostle Paul, when he was speaking of the merits of the Jews, says: 'whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law; whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever.' Likewise he says:

'And we ourselves also groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body'; and again in another place: 'But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.' How great a mystery this adoption is, is sufficiently apparent from these and similar testimonies. For God has one only Son, whom he begot of his own substance, of whom it is said: 'Being in the form of God, he thought it not robbery to be equal with God.' But us he did not beget of his own substance; for we are a creature, which he did not beget but made; and therefore, to make us brethren of Christ according to our own manner, he adopted us.

This manner, therefore, by which God—when we already existed, not born of him but created and established by him—begot us by his Word and by his grace, that we might be his sons, is called adoption. Whence John says: 'He gave them power to become the sons of God.' Since, then, the right of adopting sons was customary among our fathers and in the holy Scriptures, what madness of impiety hurls you headlong first to charge the evangelists with falsehood because they recorded diverse generations—as though both could not be true—rather than to consider and attend to and see, which is most easy, how by the very frequent practice of the human race one man could have two fathers: one by whose flesh the man was begotten, and another

by whose will he was adopted as a son when he was already a man? And if such a one is not rightly called father, then neither do we rightly say, 'Our Father, who art in heaven,' to him of whose substance we were not born, but by whose grace and most merciful will we were adopted, according to the apostolic teaching and the most faithful truth. For we have him as our God, and Lord, and Father: God, because by him we were also created out of human parents; Lord, because we are subject to him; Father, because by his adoption we were reborn.

It was therefore easy for religious searchers of the divine writings to consider a little and to see, in the diverse generations of Christ recorded by the two evangelists, how Joseph could have had two fathers, whose forebears are enumerated differently. This you too, if the zeal of contention did not blind you, could easily see. But by those men other things also were sought out and found, when they examined thoroughly all the parts of these narratives; these things, however, are very far removed from your understanding.

And so, even though established in the error of Manichaeus, you could, by thinking, have seen that which is wont to happen in human affairs—that one man begets a son by the flesh, another adopts him by will, and thus one man has two fathers—if you did not read with a hostile mind. But why Matthew began from Abraham, descending down to Joseph, while Luke began from Joseph, ascending not to Abraham but to God, who made man and, by giving a commandment, gave him the power that, by believing, he might become a son of God; and why the one enumerated the generations themselves at the head of his book, while the other did so after the Lord the Savior had been baptized by John;

and what is meant by the number of generations according to Matthew, that they are arranged in three fourteens, which when summed up appear as one less; while the number of generations according to Luke, which is recorded at the Lord's baptism, reaches seventy-seven—which number the Lord himself commends in the remission of sins, saying, 'Not only seven times, but even seventy times seven'—: all this you could in no way track down, unless you either heard it from some catholic, not just anyone, but one who was a student of the divine Scriptures and, so far as he could, skilled; or, corrected yourselves from error, sought it with catholic piety, that you might receive; sought, that you might find; knocked, that you might enter. Wherefore, since that

which moved Faustus concerning the diversity of the generations—because in understanding the two fathers lay this knot—has been loosed by understanding nature and adoption, in vain did he wish to betake himself to the two evangelists and to withdraw from the other two, being more likely to offend those to whom he betook himself than those from whom he withdrew. For the saints do not love their choosers, if they find them deserters of their fellows. For they rejoice in unity, and in Christ they are one; and though one says one thing and another another, or one thing in one way and another in another way, yet they all speak the truth, and in no way contradictory to themselves, if the pious reader approach—if he read gently, not with a heretical mind whence he may quarrel, but with a faithful heart whence he may be edified, let him inquire.

Now therefore, since we have believed that the several evangelists undertook to relate the generations of the several fathers, such that one man should have two fathers—which is not foreign to the human race—our faith is not foreign to the truth. Wherefore, the evangelists now agreeing among themselves, as Faustus promised, yield somehow. Or does that which he added still move you? Yet not even so. 'It will not,' he says, 'be worthy to believe that God, even the God of the Christians, was born from a womb'—as though we believed that the divine nature itself came forth from a woman's womb. Did I not just now recall the apostle's testimony, where he says of the Jews: 'whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever'?

Christ therefore, our Lord and Savior, the true Son of God according to his divinity, and the true Son of Man according to the flesh, was born of a woman not from that which is 'over all, God blessed forever,' but from that weakness which he took from us, that in it he might die for us and heal it in us; not from the form of God, in which being he thought it not robbery to be equal with God, was he born of a woman, but from the form of a servant, which by taking he emptied himself. For he is not said to have emptied himself for any other reason than by taking the form of a servant, not by losing the form of God.

For that nature, by which in the form of God he is equal to the Father, remaining unchangeably, took our changeable nature, through which he might be born of a virgin. But you, though you shudder to commit the flesh of Christ to a virginal womb, have committed the very divinity of God not only to the wombs of men, but also to those of dogs and swine; you refuse to believe the flesh of Christ, once conceived in the womb of the virgin, in which God was not only not bound but not even changed—and yet you preach that the very part of God and the divine nature is, in the male seeds and female wombs of all men and beasts, in all conceptions throughout all lands and all waters and all breezes, bound, oppressed, defiled, and cannot afterward even be wholly set free!

BOOK FOUR. FAUSTUS said: Do you accept the Old Testament? If there is an inheritance for me in it, I accept it; if there is not, I do not accept it. For this indeed is excessive impudence—to lay claim to a will which testifies that one is disinherited. Or do you not know that the Old Testament promises the land of the Canaanites, but nevertheless to the Jews, that is, to the circumcised, and to those who sacrifice, and abstain from pork and the other meats which Moses calls unclean, who observe the sabbaths and the solemnity of unleavened bread and the rest of such things, which its testator himself commanded them to observe? Since these things have pleased none of the Christians—for none of us keeps them—it is fitting that, having refused the inheritance, we should give back the will also.

This, then, is the reason why I think the Old Testament should be cast aside, unless you teach me something more prudent. But the second reason is that its inheritance is so wretched and corporeal, and so far from the goods of the soul, that after that blessed promise of the New Testament, which promises me the kingdom of heaven and everlasting life, even if its testator were to press it upon me for free, I would have disdained it. AUGUSTINE replied: That promises of temporal things are contained in the Old Testament, and that it is therefore called Old, none of us doubts; and that the promise of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven pertains to the New Testament:

but that in those temporal things there were figures of things to come, which were to be fulfilled in us, upon whom the end of the ages has come, is not my conjecture but the apostolic understanding, since Paul, when he was speaking of such matters, said: 'All these things were figures of us,' and again: 'All these things happened to them in a figure; but they were written for our sake, upon whom the end of the ages has come.' We therefore accept the Old Testament not for the sake of obtaining those promises, but for the sake of understanding in them the foretellings of the New Testament; for the testimony of the Old wins faith for the New.

Whence the Lord, after he rose from the dead and offered himself not only to be beheld by the disciples' eyes but also to be handled by their hands—lest, however, they should think anything was being done deceptively with their mortal and carnal senses—confirmed them rather from the testimony of the ancient books, saying: 'It behooved all things to be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the psalms concerning me.' Our hope, therefore, is not fixed in the promise of temporal things, seeing that we do not believe that even the holy and spiritual men of that time, the patriarchs and prophets, were devoted to these earthly things; for they understood, by the Spirit of God revealing it to them, what was fitting for that time, and by what ways God

had determined, through all those deeds done and words spoken, to prefigure and foretell things to come; and their desire concerning the New Testament was greater; but the present corporeal function was furnished, by the old promises, for signifying the new things to come. Thus the tongue of those men was prophetic, and not only their tongue but their very life. The carnal people, however, clung to the promises of the present life. Concerning which people, nonetheless, things to come were being signified. But you do not understand these things, because, as the prophet said, 'Unless you believe, you will not understand.' For you are not instructed in the kingdom of heaven, that is, in the true catholic Church of Christ;

for if you were, you would bring forth from the riches of the holy Scriptures not only new things but also old. For the Lord himself says: 'Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like a man who is a householder, bringing forth from his treasure new things and old.' And therefore, while you suppose that you hold only the new promises of God, you have remained in the oldness of the flesh and have brought in the newness of error. Of which newness the apostle says: 'But shun profane novelties of words; for they profit much toward impiety, and their speech creeps like a canker. Of whom are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have erred concerning the truth, saying that the resurrection has already taken place, and have overthrown the faith of some.'

Recognize that you flow forth from this same vein of falsehood, you who say that there is now only a resurrection of souls through the preaching of the truth, but deny that the resurrection of bodies, which the apostles preached, is to come. But what can you conceive spiritually, according to the inner man who is renewed in the knowledge of God, when, through the oldness of the flesh and through the images of carnal things in which your whole error is wrapped up, you do not hold corporeal things in possession but savor them as a phantasm? For you glory in despising and disdaining the land of the Canaanites, which was manifest and manifestly given to that people.

As though you did not so describe the land of light, cut off on one side from the land of the race of darkness as if by a wedge driven in and cleaving it, that it is neither found in the reality of things nor believed in the falsity of your imaginings; and therefore neither does that which is given sustain your life, nor does that which is desired corrupt your mind. BOOK FIVE. FAUSTUS said: Do you accept the Gospel? You ask me whether I accept it, in whom it appears that I accept this very thing, since I observe what it commands. Or ought I to inquire of you whether you accept it, in whom no marks of one accepting the Gospel are seen? I have left father and mother, wife, children, and the rest, which the Gospel commands—and you ask whether I accept the Gospel?

unless you still do not know what that is which is called the Gospel. For it is nothing other than the preaching and commandment of Christ. I have cast away gold and silver, and have ceased to keep brass in my belts, content with daily food, neither taking thought for the morrow nor bearing any anxiety about whence the belly may be filled or the body clothed. And you ask me whether I accept the Gospel? You see in me those beatitudes of Christ which make the Gospel, and you ask whether I accept it? You see one poor, you see one meek, you see one peacemaking, pure of heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, enduring persecutions and hatred for the sake of righteousness—and you doubt whether I accept the Gospel?

It is no wonder, then, that John the Baptist, having seen Jesus and likewise heard of his works, still asked whether he himself was the Christ—to whom Jesus did not even deign fittingly and deservedly to reply that he was himself, but sent back to him again those same works which he had long since heard: 'the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead rise again,' and the rest. Which I too might not undeservedly do concerning you, if, when you repeatedly ask whether I accept the Gospel, I were to say: I have left all my possessions—father, mother, wife, children, gold, silver, eating, drinking, delights, pleasures. Consider this a sufficient answer to your inquiries, and that you will be blessed if you are not scandalized in me.

But, he says, to accept the Gospel is not this alone—that you do what it commands—but also that you believe all the things which are written in it, of which the first is that Jesus was born. But neither, again, is it this alone to accept the Gospel—that you believe Jesus was born—but also that you do what it commands. And if you therefore think I do not accept the Gospel because I pass over the generation, then neither do you accept it, and much more do you not accept it, because you despise the precepts. And by this, in the meantime, we are equal, until we examine even the parts; or if that contempt of the precepts does not prejudice you against professing that you accept the Gospel, why should the condemned genealogy prejudice me toward this?

But if to accept the Gospel consists in these two things, as you say—to believe the genealogies and to keep the commandments—why then do you, being imperfect, judge me imperfect? Each of us needs the other. But if, which is more certain, to accept the Gospel consists in the observance of the heavenly commandments alone, you are in a double way base, who, as it is commonly said, being a deserter, accuse a soldier. And yet, come, let us grant, since you so wish, that these two are parts of the perfect faith, one of which consists indeed in word, that is, to confess Christ born, the other in work, which is the observance of the precepts. You see, then, how arduous and more difficult a part I have chosen for myself; do you see how very light and easier a part. And not without cause does the crowd flee to you,

and flee from me, not knowing indeed that the kingdom of God is not in word but in power. What is it, then, that you provoke me, if, having undertaken the more difficult part of the faith, I have left you, as to one weak, the easier? But I, he says, think this part of the faith more efficacious and more suitable for bestowing salvation on souls—the part which you have left, that is, to confess Christ born. Come then, let us ask Christ himself, and from his own mouth let us learn from what the occasion of our salvation may best arise for us. Which of men shall enter into your kingdom, O Christ? 'He who does,' he says, 'the will of my Father who is in heaven.' He did not say: he who confesses me to have been born. And elsewhere to the disciples:

'Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you'—he did not say: teaching them that I was born, but that they should keep the commandments. Likewise elsewhere: 'You shall be my friends, if you do the things which I command you'—he did not say: if you believe me to have been born. Again: 'If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love,' and many other things. And also on the mount, when he taught, saying, 'Blessed are the poor,' 'Blessed are the meek,' 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' 'Blessed are the pure in heart,' 'Blessed are those who mourn,' 'Blessed are those who hunger,' 'Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake,' nowhere did he say: 'Blessed are those who confess me to have been born.'

And in the separation of the sheep from the goats at the judgment, he says he will say to those who are at the right hand: 'I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink,' and the rest; 'therefore receive the kingdom.' He did not say: because you believed me to have been born, receive the kingdom. And also to the rich man seeking eternal life he says: 'Go, sell all that you have, and follow me'; he did not say: believe me to have been born, that you may live forever. Behold, therefore, to my portion, which I have chosen for myself out of the twofold faith, as you will have it, everywhere the kingdom, life, blessedness is promised; but to yours nowhere. Either show me where it is written that he is blessed, or shall receive the kingdom, or shall have eternal life, who confesses that he was born of a woman.

In the meantime, however, if even this is a part of the faith, it does not have blessedness. But when we shall have proved that it is not even a part of the faith, what will happen? Surely you will be empty—which itself will certainly be demonstrated. But for the present this is enough for our purpose, that this portion of ours is crowned with the beatitudes. To which, nevertheless, there accrues also that other blessedness from the confession of speech as well, in that we confess Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God—which Jesus himself equally testifies with his own mouth, saying to Peter: 'Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.'

Wherefore we hold, not one part of the faith as you supposed, but two, and both alike valid, and in both alike we are called blessed by Christ, because, exercising one of them by works, we proclaim the other without blasphemy. AUGUSTINE replied: I have already noted above how often the Lord Jesus Christ calls himself the Son of Man, and with how great vanity the Manichaeans bring in a fable of their abominable error concerning some fictitious first man, whom they preach to be not earthly but clothed with deceitful elements, against the apostle who says, 'The first man is of the earth, earthly'; and with how great care the same apostle warned us, saying, 'If anyone announce to you anything besides what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.'

Wherefore it remains that we should believe Christ to be the Son of Man just as he is proclaimed by apostolic truth, not as he is fabricated by the falsehood of the Manichaeans. Since, then, the evangelists announce him born of a woman of the house of David, that is, of the family of David, and Paul writes to Timothy, saying, 'Be mindful that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David according to my Gospel,' it is sufficiently apparent in what manner we ought to believe Christ to be the Son of Man—who, being the Son of God, through whom we were made, was also made the Son of Man through the assumption of flesh, that he might die for our offenses and rise again for our justification. And therefore he calls himself both, the Son of God and the Son of Man.

Whence, that I may not go through very many passages, in one place in the Gospel according to John it is thus written: 'Amen, amen I say to you, that the hour comes, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear shall live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son also to have life in himself; and he has given him power also to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.' He said: they shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and he said: because he is the Son of Man. For according to that which he said, 'he is the Son of Man,' he received power to execute judgment, because in that very form he is to come to judgment, so that he may be seen by both the good and the wicked. In which form he also ascended into heaven, and that voice sounded to the disciples:

'He shall come in like manner as you have seen him going into heaven.' For according to that which the Son of God, being God, is equal to the Father and is one with the Father, he shall not be seen by the wicked; for 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' Since, therefore, he promises eternal life to those who believe in him, and to believe in him is nothing other than to believe in the true Christ, such as he himself proclaims and is proclaimed by the apostles—that is, both the true Son of God and the true Son of Man:

You Manichaeans, who believe in one who is false and deceitful, in the son of a false and deceitful man — since you teach that even the god of the opposing race, terrified by the tumult, sent his own members to be tortured, and afterward could not wholly purify them — see how estranged you are from the eternal life which Christ promises to those who believe in him. But he said to Peter, who confessed him to be the Son of God: 'Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona.' Did he therefore promise nothing to those who would believe in him as the Son of Man, since he himself is both the Son of God and the Son of Man? Indeed, you have eternal life plainly promised to those who believe in the Son of Man.

'As Moses,' he says, 'lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.' What more do you want? Believe then in the Son of Man, that you may have eternal life, for he himself is also the Son of God, who is able to give eternal life, because he himself is true God and eternal life, as the same John says in his epistle, where he also declares that he is antichrist who denies that Christ has come in the flesh. Why then do you boast, as of the fulfilment of his commandments, that you perform what is prescribed in the Gospel? For what would those things profit, where there is no true faith, even if they were truly fulfilled by you? Have you not heard the apostle saying:

'If I distribute all my goods to the poor, and give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing'? Why then do you boast, as of Christian poverty, when you lack Christian love? For even robbers have among themselves what they call love, owing to one another a criminal and shameful complicity — yet not the love which the apostle commends. And in order to distinguish it from all that is to be condemned and rejected, he says in another place: 'The end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned.' Whence then can you have true love, arising from a feigned faith?

Or when will it ever weary you to defend your faith with lies? — when you both proclaim that your first man fought with his enemies (who remained in the truth of their own nature) by a mutable deceit, and persuade men that this Christ, who says 'I am the truth,' lied about the appearance of his flesh, the death of the cross, the wounds of his passion, the scars of his resurrection. Accordingly, you wish to be set above your own Christ, if, while he lies, you announce the truth. But if you wish to follow your Christ, who among you would not beware of falsehood, so that even in these commandments which you say you fulfil, there is nothing but sheer deceit?

For when Faustus dared to say that you do not carry bronze in your belts — unless perhaps he spoke truly for this reason, that you keep not bronze in your belts but even gold in little chests and in purses — these things would not be censured in you, were it not that you profess one thing and live otherwise. There is still living among men that Constantius, who is now already our brother, a catholic Christian, who had gathered many of you together at Rome into his own house for the fulfilment of the precepts of Manichaeus — precepts quite vain and foolish indeed, yet which you esteem great: and when your weakness gave way before them, you were scattered, each into his own way.

Whence those who wished to persevere in them made a schism from your society, and because they sleep on mats (mattae), they are called Mattarii; from whose bedding the feathers of Faustus and his goatskin coverlets were far different — with which abundance of luxuries he not only disdained the Mattarii, but even the house of his own father, a poor man of Mileum. Away, then, with your ruinous pretence — if not in your morals, at least in your writings — lest your tongue seem to strive with your life, like that first man with the race of darkness, fighting not with lying elements but with lying words. But lest anyone censure me for saying these things against men who do not fulfil what is prescribed to them, rather than against the very sect of this most vain error, I say this:

The very precepts of Manichaeus are such that, if you do not keep them, you are deceivers; but if you do keep them, you are deceived. For Christ did not command you not to pluck up an herb lest you commit murder — he who did not forbid his disciples, when passing through the cornfield and hungry, to pluck the ears on the sabbath, whereby he confuted both the Jews then present and the Manichaeans to come: the former, because it was done on the sabbath; the latter, because it was done at all. But Manichaeus, forsooth, commanded that with your idle hands you should live off the murders of others. And those indeed are false murders, but yours are true, when with such a doctrine of demons you slaughter wretched souls. Yet there is present in him that heretical bombast and intolerable pride.

'You see in me,' he says, 'those beatitudes of Christ which make up the Gospel, and you ask whether I accept it? You see one who is poor, you see one who is meek, one who is peaceable, pure in heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, enduring persecutions and hatred for righteousness' sake — and you doubt whether I accept the Gospel?' If to be righteous were this — to justify oneself — this man would have flown into heaven by his own words, while he was uttering these things. But I do not inveigh against the delicacies of Faustus, known to all hearers of the Manichaeans, and especially to those who are at Rome: I set forth such a Manichaean as Constantius required, when he demanded that those precepts be fulfilled — not such a one as he did not wish to appear.

And yet how do I see even that one to be poor in spirit, who is so proud that he believes his own soul to be God, and, a captive, is not ashamed of it? How meek, who prefers to insult so great an evangelical authority rather than believe it? How peaceable, who does not think that the divine nature itself — by which God is whatever he is, who alone truly is — could ever have possessed perpetual peace? How pure in heart, in which so many sacrilegious fabrications are in tumult? How mourning — unless mourning his God, taken captive and bound, until he be released and escape, yet in some part cut short, which shall be bound by the Father in the globe of darkness and shall not be mourned?

How hungering and thirsting for righteousness — which Faustus did not add in his writings, I suppose, lest he should seem to himself to lack it, if he confessed that he still hungered and thirsted for it? But what righteousness do these hunger and thirst for, whose perfect righteousness will be to triumph, moreover, over their brothers condemned in the globe — brothers who sinned by no fault of their own, but were inexpiably infected by the hostile corruption into which the Father sent them? How do you endure persecutions and hatred for righteousness' sake, you for whom to preach and persuade these sacrileges is righteousness? For which impious perversity, how little and almost nothing you suffer, thanks to the gentleness of Christian times — why do you not consider this?

But as though you were speaking to the blind and the foolish, you wish it to be as it were a great token of your righteousness that you endure reproaches and suffer persecution. Moreover, if each man is the more righteous the more grievous the things he undergoes — I forbear to say what is very easy to see, how much more grievous the sufferings borne by others polluted with all manner of crimes and shameful deeds — this I say:

If, under the name of Christ, however usurped and assumed, whoever suffers persecution is to be said even now to hold the true faith and righteousness, then grant that he be of truer faith and greater righteousness whom we can show to have endured far more grievous things than you; and now let thousands of our martyrs meet you, and Cyprian especially, by whose very letters it is taught that he believed in Christ born to him of the Virgin Mary. For this faith, which you detest, he came even to the sword and to death, together with flocks of Christians who then believed thus and thus, and even more grievously, died.

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: