X. AGAINST SECUNDINUS, A BOOK. Your goodwill toward me, which appears in your letter, is pleasing to me. But even as it is fitting that you, who love me, should be loved in return by me, so am I saddened that you have clung tenaciously to false suspicions, partly against me and partly against Truth itself, which cannot be changed. Yet that you think what is untrue about my mind I readily disregard; for you think of me something which, even if I do not recognize it in myself, can nevertheless exist in a man. Therefore, even if you err concerning me, you do not so err that your opinion should remove me from the number of men, since you believe about me something that can occur in a human mind, even if it has not occurred in mine. There is no need, then, for me to strive greatly to take this suspicion away from you.
For your hope does not hang upon me, nor will you be unable to be good unless I am good. Think of Augustine whatever you please, only let not my conscience accuse me in the eyes of God alone. For what the Apostle says is a very small thing to me, that I should be judged by you or by any human day. But I will not repay you in kind, so as to dare to form any judgement of your mind in a bad sense concerning what I am not able to see. Nor do I say that you wished to wound me by stealth; but I think of you only so much as you disclose of yourself by your words.
Wherefore, even though you have suspected things not good about me—namely, that out of carnal fear of some inconvenience which might befall me from association with you, I forsook the heresy of the Manichaeans, or out of desire for the honour which I attained in the Catholic Church—nevertheless, not thinking ill of you in return, I believe your suspicion to be well-meaning, and I judge that you wrote this not to accuse but out of a zeal to correct. But if you would grant me the goodwill of believing me, since you find fault with the hidden recesses of my mind, which I certainly cannot bring forth and display before your eyes, you would easily change your opinion about that very thing and would be unwilling any longer rashly to affirm what you do not know.
For I confess that I forsook the Manichaeans out of fear—but out of fear of those words which were uttered through the Apostle Paul: The Spirit, he says, expressly declares that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars, having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected which is received with thanksgiving.
By these words, though he perhaps described also certain other heretics, yet most of all he briefly and plainly described the Manichaeans. By this fear, then, when in my boyish disposition I came somewhat late to wisdom, I tore myself away from that fellowship. I confess also that I burned with love of honour, that I might depart from thence—but of that honour of which the same Apostle says: Glory and honour and peace to everyone that worketh good. But who will endeavour to work good, if he holds evil to be not in a changeable will but in an unchangeable nature? Whence the Lord Himself said to those who thought they were speaking good things, when they were evil: Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree evil and its fruit evil. But of the evil now changed into good the Apostle says:
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. But if you will not believe me concerning my own mind, think as you please; only take heed what you think about Truth itself. Let no temptation lay hold of you but such as is human. For it is a human error to believe that to have been done in my mind which could have been done, even if it was not done. But when you suppose that a sacrilegious and not only most false but even most deceptive Persian fable—contrived and fabricated with most defiled lies not about any ordinary man, but about the most high God—is the truth, this is by no means to be passed over, nor is so great a death of the soul to be despised. For there is something that can be dealt with in your case, since—unlike concerning my own mind, about which I can say nothing further than that you should believe me;
which if you are unwilling to do, I find nothing that I can do. So too, even when you judge something false concerning that Light of minds itself, which rational minds behold the more tranquilly the purer they are, it cannot—if you would listen patiently—be demonstrated to you how utterly remote from truth is what you think. For just as I cannot perceive the sensation of your eye, nor you mine, but only can believe or not believe one another about this matter, while that appearance which lies visible before the eyes of us both we are able to show one another in turn: so concerning the affections of our minds, which we have as our own, let us believe one another, if it please; but if it does not please, let us not believe.
But the principle of truth, which is neither mine nor yours, but set before us both for contemplation, let us alike attend to, with the mists of obstinacy laid aside and our minds made clear. Nor shall I bring forth to you other proofs by which the Manichaean error is made manifest than from your own letter. You write that you have and render thanks to the ineffable and most holy Majesty and to its Firstborn, the King of all lights, Jesus Christ. Tell me, of what lights is Jesus Christ the King? Of those which He made, or of those which He begot? For we say that God the Father begot a Son equal to Himself, but through Him created—that is, established and made—an inferior creature, which is assuredly not that which He is who made it and through whom He made it.
And so, because through Him He made the ages, He is rightly called by the Apostle the King of ages, as being superior to inferior things and powerful to govern, ruling those things which stand in need of governance. But you, when you call King Christ the King of lights—if He begot them, why are they not equal to their begetter? But if you say they are equal, how is He King of them, since it is necessary that a king should rule, and it can in no way come to pass that the things which are ruled should be equal to Him by whom they are ruled? But if He did not beget but made these lights, I ask, out of what did He make them? If He propagated them out of Himself, why then are they inferior? Why have they degenerated? But if not out of Himself, tell me, out of what? Or perhaps He neither made nor begot the lights over which He reigns?
They have, then, an origin and nature of their own, but assuredly a weaker one, so that by a more powerful neighbour they either suffer themselves to be ruled or desire it. Do you not recognize, if this is so, that—apart from the race of darkness—there are now two natures, the one needing the aid of the other, yet neither depending on the other's principle? This opinion you will assuredly repudiate, since it is most opposed to Manichaeus, who strives to persuade us of not two natures, the King of lights and the lights which are ruled, but two natures, the kingdom of lights and the kingdom of darkness. You will therefore take refuge in this, that you may say these lights are begotten. And when I have asked why they are weaker, you will perhaps attempt to contend that they are equal. But when I have replied: what is the cause that they are ruled? you will deny that they are ruled.
Hereupon I will reply: why then have they a king? Here I do not see what remains to your candour, except that you should repent of having set such a door in your letter, through which you yourself cannot get out. But even when you have repented and have said that Manichaeus ought not for that reason to be thought vanquished, because you incautiously set down something in your writings, I will recite from Manichaeus's books, in innumerable places, that the kingdom of light is called by him that which he naturally establishes to be contrary to the kingdom of darkness—and not a kingdom, but kingdoms; seeing that in that very Epistle of the Ruinous Foundation, when he was speaking of God the Father, he says: with nothing in His kingdoms placed either as needy or as lowest.
But where there are kingdoms, who is so blind as not to understand that kings can by no means be equal to those over whom they reign? What, then, is so near at hand, if you would attend, and so befitting the integrity of your heart, as that you should not repent of having set down that in your letter? For most truly is Jesus Christ the King of lights—in no way equal to Himself, but of subjects—and the ruler of those blessed ones. But let you rather repent of having been a Manichaean, all of whose deceptive machinations the truthful opening of your letter overturns with one battering blow.
For because Christ is King of lights, and neither begot out of Himself inferior things over which He might be king, nor took to Himself, as neighbours, things over which He might reign, which He neither begot nor made—lest there be two kinds of good, of which neither is from the other, and yet neither one needing the other, which is foreign to the path of truth—it remains that those lights over which He reigns, which are assuredly good because they are inferior, He did not beget, because they are His own possession He did not usurp, but that God made and established them.
If you wish to ask out of what He made them, and begin to imagine the aids of matter which He Himself did not make, so that there He may seem not to be almighty in doing what He willed, unless something which He had not made assisted Him, you will again suffer the inexplicable darkness of error. But joining the prophetic words most fitly, with the sober stroke of understanding, to the sublime and ineffable Majesty, He Himself spoke, and they were made; He commanded, and they were created; thus you will see how it is said in the Catholic faith that God made all things very good out of nothing. For if He made them out of something, it was assuredly either out of Himself or not out of Himself; but if out of Himself, then He did not make but begat. Why then did He beget inferior things?
For unless they were inferior, He could not be their king. If not out of Himself, then assuredly not out of anything which He Himself did not make; otherwise He made out of something alien, and there already existed a good which He Himself had not made, out of which He might establish for Himself a kingdom. But if it is so, He begins not to be the Creator of good works, because there existed a good which He Himself had not created; for He would not fashion out of an alien evil the lights over which He might reign. It remains, therefore, that even if He made out of some thing, He made out of that which He Himself had already made.
Thus it comes about that we confess that God made the first origins of things to be established out of nothing—unless perhaps you have said that Jesus Christ is the Firstborn of the ineffable and most holy Majesty, not according to the assumption of manhood (in which, as the Apostle says and as the Catholic faith believes, He deigned by adoption to have as brethren those who were called, so that He might be their firstborn), but rather according to the very excellence of divinity you wish Him to be understood as Firstborn, so that those lights, over which He reigns, may be His brethren—not made by the Father through Him, but begotten by the Father after Him, so that they are the after-born, He the firstborn, yet all of the Father's own and self-same substance.
But if you believe thus, first you contradict the Gospel, where He is also called the Only-begotten—and we beheld, it says, His glory, as of the Only-begotten of the Father—which could in no way be truly said, if His everlasting power also and divinity, by which He is consubstantial with the Father and is before every creature, had brethren of the same substance. And so, since the divine oracles testify Him to be both Only-begotten and Firstborn—Only-begotten, because without brethren; Firstborn, because with brethren—you will not find how you may understand both of Him according to the same nature of divinity.
But the Catholic faith, which distinguishes between Creator and creature, suffers no difficulty of understanding in these two names, receiving Him as Only-begotten according to what is written: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; and as Firstborn of all creation according to what the Apostle says: That He might be the firstborn among many brethren, whom the Father begot unto brotherly fellowship, not by equality of substance, but by adoption of grace. Read therefore the Scriptures; nowhere will you find it said of Christ that He is the Son of God by adoption. But of us it is very often read: You have received the Spirit of adoption of sons; waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body;
that we might receive the adoption of sons; He predestined us unto the adoption of sons; a holy nation, a people unto adoption; He called you through our Gospel unto the adoption of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ—and if any such passages occur to one recalling or reading them. For it is one thing to be, through the Father's excellence, the only Son of God, and another, through merciful grace, to receive the power to become sons of God to those who believe in Him. He gave them, it says, power to become sons of God. They were not therefore sons by nature, when they received the power to become such by believing in Him, whom being the only-begotten He spared not, but delivered Him up for us all, that with Himself He might make Him Only-begotten, but toward us Firstborn.
From that, then, in which He is Only-begotten, He was born not of flesh, not of blood, not of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God; but from that in which He was made the Firstborn in the Church among brethren, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. We also, in so far as we were by nature children of wrath—that is, children of vengeance, bound by the chain of mortality, although by the creating and instituting of Him who without doubt disposes and forms all things, from the highest to the lowest, in measure and number and weight—yet were born of flesh and blood and of the will of the flesh;
but in so far as we received the power to become sons of God, we too are born not of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God—not indeed by a nature making us co-equal, but by an adopting grace. Then, if I should now grant that Christ Jesus is not the only Son to the Father according to the divinity of the same substance, but has brethren born after Him, to whom He is Firstborn, how can He be their king? I ask you, would you dare to say that He was born the stronger in proportion as He was born the earlier? You would surely be ashamed to think so. But you do not think so. What then do you think? Soften your mind and render yourself well-disposed to considering truth without obstinacy.
For this too I will ask of you: how do you understand Jesus Christ to be the Firstborn in that divine and most excellent and eternal substance—whether He is begotten first in time, so that we may understand those born at a later time in that kingdom, of whom He is the Firstborn (nor could we say by how many hours or days or months or years He is the greater who arose first, but yet we may conceive these generations to be separated by some interval and span of time)—or rather not in time, but by the very excellence of a loftier majesty, by which He deserved to be king even to His brethren the lights, do we receive Him as Firstborn, as begotten in a certain principate?
If you answer that He is prior and greater than the brethren in time, so as to contend that from this a kingdom over the brethren was conferred upon Him, because He preceded them in being born and at one time He Himself existed when those others did not yet exist, what do you say, brother? Will you thus hurl your heart into this abyss of impiety, so as to suppose that changeableness of time falls upon that divine and supreme nature, and to believe that something there comes into being which did not exist before? Or, because it was fitting that lights should proceed thence against the race of darkness, do you call those very processions generations, which you suppose to have been made in time, so that the war might be waged in time? Could not, then, one light suffice, which by divine power might carry through that whole warlike affair?
Or if many were needed, is this to be supposed of spiritual things—that we should judge the entrance to have been so narrow that they could not go out together, so that from the fact that one of the brethren had gone out first, he deserved both to be called firstborn and to be made king over the rest? I do not wish to pursue each point in detail, lest I be too burdensome to your keen wit, which from a few things can survey all. Lift up, therefore, the edge of your mind, wipe away the clouds of contention, and you will assuredly see that neither according to places nor according to times can motions, advances, risings, settings, or any turnings whatever come to pass except in changeable creation—which, however, unless it were from God the artificer and founder, the Apostle would not have said: and they worshipped and served,
the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. For in this sentence two things above all are necessary, which I ask you to consider with me: one, that if the creature were alien to God, God would not be called its Creator by the Apostle; the other, that if Creator and creature were of one and the same substance, they would not be reproved for having served the creature rather than the Creator, since to whomsoever they had served, they would not have departed from that same nature and substance. For just as no one can serve the Son who does not also serve the Father, because the substance of both is one, so no one could serve the creature save by serving the Creator, if the substance of both were one.
Hence, if you now discern and are wise, you should give the utmost heed to how great is the difference between Creator and creature, and you must understand that the offspring of the Creator is not a creature; for if it were, it would not be inferior, but equal and of the same substance, and thereby whoever worshipped and served it would at the same time offer worship and service to its Creator and Father. But when those who worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator are reproved by the Apostle and held detestable, it is sufficiently shown that the substances of the one and the other are diverse. For just as the Son cannot be seen—that is, understood—unless the Father be understood in Him (for He Himself says:
He who has seen me has seen the Father also)—so the Son cannot be worshipped unless in Him the Father also be worshipped. And therefore, if the Son were a creature, He would not be worshipped without the Creator, nor would those be condemned who worshipped the creature rather than the Creator.
You perceive therefore now, as I think, that it does not befit you to say that Jesus Christ is the Firstborn of the most secret and ineffable Majesty and the King of all lights, unless you cease to be a Manichaean, so that you may distinguish the creature from the Creator; so that Jesus Christ may be both Only-begotten according to that which is the Word of God, God with God, alike unchangeable and alike eternal, thinking it not robbery to be equal with God, and Firstborn of all creation according to that in which in Him were founded all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. For you recognize, I suppose, the words of the Apostle to the Colossians.
Wherefore, when I ask of you out of what the whole creation was made—though good in its own kind, yet inferior to the Creator and, while He remains unchangeable, itself changeable—you will find nothing to answer, unless you confess that it was made out of nothing. And therefore it can incline toward nothing, when that creature sins; and the portion which can sin does so, not so as to become nothing, but so as to be less vigorous and less firm. For to be less vigorous and less strong, if you carry it in mind to the utmost, leaves nothing. It therefore of its own accord loves vanity, when, forsaking the solidity of truth, it follows things opinable—that is, changeable. But when for that it pays the deserved penalties, it is subjected not of its own accord to vanity, as it is subjected in sinning man.
For hence the Apostle says: Every creature is subjected to vanity, not willingly, since in man too is every creature. For there is in man both something invisible according to the mind and something visible according to the body; and every creature is partly visible, partly invisible—yet not wholly so in the beast, in which there is no intellectual mind. In hope, indeed, he says it is subjected, on account of the mercy of Him who delivers through the remission of sins and the adoption of grace.
But if you are unwilling to confess that the creature—good indeed, yet unequal to the Creator and changeable—was made out of nothing by the Father through the Son in the goodness of the Holy Spirit (which Trinity, consubstantial and eternal and unchangeable, always abides), you will assuredly be forced to speak sacrilegious things: either that God begot something out of Himself which is not equal to its begetter and can be subjected to vanity; or, if you say it is equal, both will be changeable. What greater impiety than to believe and say this—and to prefer, by a perverse opinion, that God should change into the worse, rather than that, by corrected reasoning, He Himself should change into the better? But if you should fear to call God changeable, because in truth that is a great and most manifest impiety,
and you should also say that the creature is unchangeable, so as to make it equal to the Creator and of one and the same substance, again your own letter will answer you. For whence is that soul which you place in the midst of the spirits, to which you say its nature from the beginning gave victory, and to which you set forth a law and a condition: that if it acts together with the spirit of virtues, it will have with it perpetual life and will possess that kingdom to which our Lord invites; but if it begins to be drawn by the spirit of vices and, after consent, feels penitence, it will have a fountain of pardon for these defilements? By these very words, recognized from your letter, you at the same time recognize that you have constituted the nature of the soul changeable.
For to consent at one time to the spirit of vices and again to feel penitence—what else is it than to be changed now into the better, now into the worse? And this the most manifest truth has compelled you to say. For your very soul, even if you wished to dissemble, would urge you to attend to its own changeableness, and, so many times changed since you were born through various volitions, teachings, forgettings, and consentings, would become a witness to itself and would seek no proofs from without. Unless perhaps you think you are helped by saying that the soul is unchangeable, because you subjoined, saying: for it did not sin by its own will, but by another's leading; for it is led by the commingling of the flesh, not by its own will.
In which statement perhaps you wish this to be understood: namely, that the soul is unchangeable in its own nature, but changeable in the commingling of another nature—as though the question were why it is so, and not that it is so. In this way even the bodies of Hector, of Ajax—nay, indeed, of all men and living things—would be called invulnerable, if there were absent the blow and the fall by which a wound could be inflicted on them. But doubtless for this reason the body of Achilles alone, whether by poetic fiction or by some more hidden force of things, was called invulnerable, because even when the weapons pressed upon it, it was not pierced; and in that part where it could be pierced, in that part assuredly it was not invulnerable.
So the soul, if it were unchangeable, would thus by the commingling of no thing be changed, just as a body which is invulnerable is wounded by the contact or assault of no thing. And so we, because we say that the Word of God is incontaminable, even when mortal and vulnerable flesh was assumed—that He might teach us to despise both death and any discomforts of the body—do not fear to believe Him born of a Virgin. But you, because with impious perversity you believe the Son of God to be contaminable, are afraid to commit Him to the flesh; yet asserting His substance to be the nature of the soul, you affirm it to be so commingled with the flesh that you do not hesitate to suppose it even changed into the worse. Choose, therefore, what you will:
whether to say or believe God to be changeable, so that you may equally believe that a changeable offspring was begotten out of the substance of a changeable Father—of which you assuredly perceive how great is the impiety; or to say God is unchangeable, but yet that out of His own substance He begot a changeable offspring—which nonetheless you see how impiously and absurdly it is said; or rather so to confess God unchangeable that even what He begot out of His own substance is equally not changed and is equally the highest and most excellent good, and holds by inviolable permanence in the same manner supremely to be, but that the other, inferior goods, which we call creation, He made—not out of Himself, for then they would be equal, but yet, because they are good, He Himself, because they are not equal, made them out of nothing:
which if you believe, you will not be impious, and you will forget the Persians and be ours. But indeed the Apostle says: We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, who—by declining, through an impious will, to the love of their own pride and honour—begrudge to pious souls their return. But this is the difference between your opinion and our faith: that you suppose those same princes to have arisen out of a certain nature of their own,
having arisen from a nature which God neither begot nor made, but which He had contiguous to Him by an eternal neighbourhood; and you judge that they made war against God and inflicted upon Him, before the commingling of good and evil, a first great evil of necessity—namely, that He was compelled to commingle His own substance with them, to be afflicted and disturbed, to be changed into error and utterly plunged into forgetfulness of itself, so that it needed a Liberator, a Corrector, an Amender, an Instructor. You see how foolishly and fabulously this is said, and with how great a crime of impiety it binds you. But to us, through the Christian faith, it is a matter of conviction that nothing is contrary to God, who supremely is, save that which in no way is at all;
Whatever exists in any way whatsoever derives from Him who exists in the highest degree the fact that it exists in some manner and is good within its own kind; yet some things exist more fully, others less. And so all good things, which were made by God the Creator, are ordered by fixed and distributed degrees: partly by intervals of place and station, as with all bodily things; partly by natural rank, as the soul is set above the body; partly by the deserts of rewards and punishments, as the soul is either lifted up to rest or subjected to sufferings. And on this account those princes, against whom the Apostle says we have to wrestle, being the first to suffer the punishment of their own sins, are permitted to do harm; for no envious being, in order to injure another, fails first to be itself in torment.
Now the stronger harm the weaker, for none overcomes another except in so far as he is more powerful. Yet these unjust princes are themselves weaker than they would be if they had remained in their pristine state and in righteousness. But it matters whence one is stronger than another: whether in body, as horses are stronger than men; or in the nature of the soul, as the rational than the irrational; or in disposition of mind, as the just than the unjust; or in the order of power, as an emperor over a soldier or a provincial. And power is believed to be given altogether from the supreme power of God — often even to the worse over the better, that is, to the unjust over those who either already hold righteousness or strive to attain to holding it.
For it is given to this end: that those who are approved through patience may be made manifest, either to themselves for hope, or to others for imitation. "Knowing," says the Apostle, "that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, probation; and probation, hope." Of this kind is the contest, when a faithful man wrestles against the principalities and powers of the transgressor angels and against spiritual wickedness, since they receive the power of tempting, and he receives the precepts of endurance; whence it comes about that in the lower thing they are overcome, in the more powerful they overcome: for the most part they overcome the weaker body, and are overcome by the firmer mind.
For against their violence one fights with patience, against their snares with prudence, so that they may neither bend us by compulsion nor deceive us by fraud into a ruinous consent. But since Christ is the power and wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, therefore in the things that were made, when the higher decline toward the lower — wherein lies all sin and all that is called evil — violence imitates power and fraud imitates wisdom; whereas when the things that had declined run back and return, then magnanimity imitates power and doctrine imitates wisdom. Even God the Father Himself sinners imitate by impious pride, the just by devout liberality. Finally the Holy Spirit the lust of the wicked imitates, the charity of the upright imitates:
yet both alike depart from the imitation of God — from whom and through whom and in whom the natures themselves were made — the one, however, in a vicious manner, the other in a praiseworthy manner. Nor is it any wonder if, whenever those who advance and those who fall away clash, the imitation of the falling is overcome by the imitation of the advancing; for the former are cast down by exaltation, the latter rise up by humility. But if it moves you why those who are stronger in mind should be weaker in body, it is no wonder that those set free by the remission of sins should be exercised by the mortality of the body, with whose immortality they shall be crowned. For punishment is not easily escaped, unless he who is released from it has conquered by his merits. Whence the Apostle:
"But if Christ be in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised up Christ from the dead dwell in you, He who raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in you." Therefore the mind, bearing a flesh made mortal because of the punishment of sin, if it be changed for the better, so that you live not according to the mortal flesh, both changes that flesh for the better and shall deserve to have an immortal body — yet this at the end, when death the last enemy shall be destroyed, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption; not by that fabulous globe of yours, but by that transformation of which he speaks:
"We shall all rise again, but we shall not all be changed." For when he had explained it, saying, "And the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed," then, weaving it together, he added, showing what kind of change he meant, and said: "For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality." For he was treating a question about the body of those who rise, which he had thus put: "But someone will say: How do the dead rise? and with what body do they come?" Read therefore that whole passage with devout care, attentive and not disturbed by obstinate contention; and, with God helping your understanding, without desiring any expositor, you will find nothing other than what I say:
And then recall your mind to that which we had set out to treat, and now see, if you can, that I do not say the just fight against nothing, but against those substances which have fallen away by not standing in the truth. But to fall away is not yet to be nothing, but to tend toward nothingness. For when those things that exist more decline toward those that exist less, it is not the things toward which they decline, but the things that decline, that fall away and begin to be less than they were — not indeed becoming that toward which they have declined, but becoming less according to their own kind. For when the mind declines toward the body, it does not become body; yet by a certain defective appetite it in some manner becomes bodily.
So too a certain angelic loftiness, when it was more delighted with its own dominion over itself, inclined its affection toward that which is less, and began to be less than it was, and according to its own degree tended toward nothingness. For the less each thing is, the nearer it is to nothing. But since these defections come about voluntarily, they are rightly reproved and named sins; and since there follow upon these voluntary defections certain inconveniences, troubles, sorrows, and adversities, all of which we suffer against our will, sin is rightly punished either by penalties or purged away by exercises. And if you are willing to look upon these things with a serene mind, you will surely cease to accuse natures and to arraign substances themselves as guilty.
But if you desire something more copious and more fully explained on this matter, read our three books which are entitled "On Free Will," which you will be able to find in Campania at Nola, in the keeping of Paulinus, that noble servant of God. Now, however, I ought to remember that I am replying to your letter — though with one much longer, yet a letter. For this reason I have not kept silent about certain other matters, lest I be compelled everywhere to say the same things. But I had promised to persuade you from your own letter how false are the things you have believed, and how true is the assertion of the catholic faith. For certainly the whole difference between us is not merely that you say a certain substance is evil. We, indeed, say that evil is not a substance, but an inclination away from that which exists more, toward that which exists less. Hear, then, this very point.
For you put in your letter and say concerning the soul, that it is led to sin by the commixture of the flesh, not by its own will; and there at once, I believe — when you saw that, if this were so, help must utterly be given by almighty God to every soul, and that absolutely none ought to be condemned, since it would not sin by will (which being established, that opinion would be overturned which Mani thunders forth so terribly concerning the punishments of souls, even of those coming from the part of light) — most vigilantly you added, saying: "But if, when it has come to know itself, it consents to evil and does not arm itself against the enemy, it has sinned by its own will." Well indeed, that you at some point confess it can come about that the soul sins by its own will; but to what evil, pray, is it that, if it consents, it sins by its own will?
Surely to that which you say is a substance. But I now see three things; you too, as I suppose, see them with me. For the soul consenting to evil, and the evil itself to which consent is given, are two. But the third is the consent itself; for you do not say that this also is a soul, but a soul's. Of these three, then — behold — the soul is a substance; that evil also, to which the soul by consenting voluntarily sins, is by your opinion a substance. I ask therefore what the consent itself is: whether you say it is itself a substance, or is in a substance. For if you say it is a substance, you will now suppose not two substances, but three. Or is it two, because the soul's consent, by which it consents to evil, is of the same substance as the soul itself?
Now then I ask, whether this consent is evil or good. If it is good, the soul certainly does not sin when it consents to evil. But not only does truth cry out, but you too write, that then the soul sins by will. This consent, therefore, is evil; and by this it is also a substance of the soul, if it is both a substance of the soul and both are one substance. Do you see to what you have been forced — that you must maintain the soul and that evil to be not now one substance good and another evil, but two evil substances? Here perhaps you will attempt to attribute the culpable consent not to the soul, which consents,
but to the evil itself to which it consents, so that in this way there may be two substances, one good, the other evil: since the soul is said to be of the part of good, while its consent by which it consented to evil, and the evil itself to which it consents, are together constituted on the other side, and both are reckoned to the evil substance. Who could rave more absurdly? For the soul does not consent, if the consent is not its own; but it does consent: therefore the consent is its own. Further, if the consent is its own, and this consent is evil, this evil is its own. For if this evil belongs to that evil to which the soul consents, then it had no need of this evil before the soul consented to it.
What kind of good, then, is the soul, by whose coming that evil is either doubled or — to put it more mildly — increased? Next, if this consent, which is agreed to be evil, is a substance, we find it to be within the soul's power that some evil substance either exists or does not exist, since this consent is within the soul's power. For if it is not, then it does not consent by its own will. But you have said that in place of this consent the soul sins by its own will. The soul therefore has, as I have said, in its power that some evil substance either exists or does not exist. But what else is substance than nature? There will therefore be some nature which is neither natural to the soul — since, if the soul be unwilling, it will not exist — nor to that evil to which the soul consents by will;
for you cannot say that it is the natural evil of the race of darkness, since it is there instituted by an alien will, that is, by the soul's will. To what nature, then, will this nature be assigned — that is, this consent, if it is a nature — which is natural neither to the soul nor to the race of darkness, unless, so that you may dispute against Mani, you say there are not two but three natures? For even if there were once two, yet now, after this consent has arisen, there have surely become three. This third, indeed, which was born from the consenting soul and from the evil to which it consents, you are compelled to call, as it were, the daughter of both;
but since it was born from two natures, one of which is good and the other evil, I ask why something neither of the two was not born. For just as that which is born from a horse and an ass is neither horse nor ass, so that which is born from a good and an evil nature, if it too is a nature, ought to be neither good nor evil. But you confess the consent to be evil; for you say that then the soul sins by its own will when it consents to evil. Or do you perhaps suppose the good nature and the evil nature to be like two sexes, masculine and feminine, so that, just as from a male and a female nothing neuter but either a male or a female is begotten,
so from good and evil you would contend that not some third thing, which would be neither good nor evil, but another evil, is born? But if it is so, where is that victorious nature of the soul? Is it so separated that another good was not rather born? Furthermore, do you not see that you are now speaking of diverse sexes, not of natures? For if between good and evil there were a diversity of natures, there would arise from the two nothing but some third thing, which could be neither good nor evil; or else the very commixture would be sterile, and no third substance would be brought forth thence. For if from those animals which I mentioned above, when they are mingled with one another, nothing else than a he-mule or she-mule is begotten,
which is neither the one nor the other, how much more ought it to have happened thus in so great and supreme a diversity of good and evil? Or if no new nature would arise from their commixture, it would not be evil, even though it could not be good. It remains, therefore, that we cannot avoid such incredible ravings unless we confess that consent, which is agreed to be evil and culpable, to be not a substance, but say that it is in some substance. Then let us most diligently inquire in what substance it is. And yet to whom is it not manifest that, just as persuasion does not come about except in one who persuades, so consent does not exist except in the consenting nature? When therefore the soul consents to evil, it is itself a substance, but its consent is not a substance.
Now you discern, as I think, in what substance it is — that is, you surely see that this consent is in the soul; and this consent you do not doubt to be sin, and by this to be evil. From which you now understand that it can come about that in a good substance, such as the soul is, there may be some evil which is not a substance, such as this consent is; and from this evil the soul too is called evil. For she is certainly evil as a sinner; but she sins when she consents to evil. One and the same thing, then — that is, the soul — in so far as it is a substance, is good; but in so far as it has something of evil which is not a substance, that is, this consent, so far it is evil. For it has this consent not from advancement, but from defection.
For it falls away when it consents to evil, and now begins to be less, and therefore to be worth less than it was worth while, consenting to none, it stood firm in virtue: worse indeed by so much as it verges away from that which exists in the highest degree toward that which exists less, so that it too may exist less; and by so much as it exists less, by so much surely does it become nearer to nothing. For that which also becomes less tends to this, that it exist not at all: to which, although it does not arrive so as to be nothing by utterly perishing, it is nevertheless manifest that any defect whatsoever is the beginning of perishing. Open therefore now the eyes of your heart and behold, if you can, that any substance whatsoever is some good, and that therefore the defect of a substance is evil, because it is good to be a substance:
nor yet is every defect culpable, but only the voluntary, whereby the rational soul, having forsaken its Creator, declines its affection toward those things which are created below it; for this is what is called sin. But the other defects, which are not voluntary, are either penal — that sins may be punished by the supreme justice which governs and orders — or they occur by the measures of the lowest things, so that things preceding may give way to those succeeding, and thus all temporal beauty may be accomplished in its own turns and after its own kind.
For just as speech is accomplished by syllables, as it were dying and rising, which are drawn out through certain intervals of duration and, their spaces being fulfilled, pass away in an ordered succession of those that follow, until the whole discourse is brought to its end — and it is not in the running sounds themselves, but in the regulation of the speaker, that it is placed how far a syllable be lengthened or shortened, or by what form of letters each keep the measures of its own places, while the very art which makes speech neither resounds with sounds nor is rolled about and varied by times — so by the rising and setting, the passing and succeeding of temporal things, along fixed and defined courses, until it runs back to the appointed terminus, temporal beauty is woven together.
This beauty is not evil for the reason that in spiritual creatures we can understand and marvel at better things; but it has its own proper comeliness in its own kind, and it insinuates to those who live well the supreme wisdom of God, hidden in a lofty secret above all the bounds of times, its own fashioner and governor. Come now, attend to that which you were calling evil, to which the soul by consenting voluntarily sins — whether it be some substance, or whether not even there you can accuse a substance. For I ask what allures the consent of the soul, that it rushes into it headlong and is therefore said to consent. Doubtless it is moved by some delight in it toward enjoying it. But if this be so, it does not follow that it is therefore called evil because it is not rightly loved.
For if I show that something is loved wrongly, where the fault is held to lie not in the thing loved but in the one who loves, you will surely confess that the form of any thing is not therefore straightway vicious, because the consent of one desiring it slides viciously into it. How much this helps me will afterward appear. But that I may show what I have promised, what should I rather choose, when an abundance of things flows around me? What, I say, should I rather choose than that which we praise as a heavenly creature, but which you adore as a portion of the Creator Himself? What among all visible things is more resplendent than this sun? Yet if anyone should immoderately covet its light,
he brings upon his own eyes the wars of quarrels, if, having obtained some power by which he might fulfill what he craves, he demolishes the houses of neighbors set against his windows, so that the sun may flood his inner chambers with a more open sky. Is it then the sun's fault, because that man so loved this light that he dared to prefer it to the light of righteousness, and, willing more abundantly to admit the light of his carnal eyes into the dwelling of his body, closed the door of his heart and the gaze of his mind against the light of equity? You see therefore that a good thing can be loved with a love not good.
Wherefore, whereas you call that evil, by consenting to which the soul sins, I call it good in its own kind, but such a good to which it does not befit the soul — being better than it — to consent; for since the soul is itself superior to the body, and has God as its superior, although in its own order the nature of the body is good, yet the soul sins, and by sinning becomes evil, if it joins to the inferior body the consent of that love which it owes to the superior God. But if you say that you do not call it a culpable consent when that thing is loved which does not act so that it be consented to, but that the soul then consents when he to whom it consents persuades something or compels something, and that it is therefore evil because he persuades or urges that some evil be committed:
this is a second question, and in its own order now presently to be treated by itself. But let us here remember first the sin concerning which, as I think, enough has been disputed, and it has become clear that it can come about that some thing good in its own kind be loved wrongly, and that with the lover blamed the thing itself is not reproved. What then? For if the soul, already a sinner and vicious by such love, should persuade another to the same sin, is not she also, who consents to the persuader, depraved by such a vice as that by which she is depraved whom she follows? The first sin, then, is to prefer even a good creature to the Creator in love; the second is also this other, to attempt, either by persuading or by compelling, that another do the same.
For no one wishes to lead another into depravity who has not first himself been depraved. But those who sin wish to lead others to sin either by foolish benevolence or by malicious envy. For who but by loving perversely admonishes his own sons to consider no base gain shameful, but to acquire ample money from any source whatever? Surely he does not hate them, and yet he perniciously persuades them. For by love of such things he himself is already corrupted, since, although gold and silver are not evil — just as that sun of which we treated above — yet the disordered lover of a good thing is in fault. But by envy, when anyone wishes another to sin, he loves honor with immoderate pride, and desires to excel therein and to go before the rest;
and because he sees that man more amply and more truly honored for his virtues, lest he be surpassed in that, he desires that others be cast down from the citadel of equity into the abyss of iniquity. In this way the devil endeavors to persuade or compel to sins. But is honor itself in fault, because the devil, by loving it perversely and impiously, has become impious? Or is the very angelic substance of the same devil, which God created, therefore evil because it is a substance? But when, forsaking the love of Him and turning too much toward his own, he desired to appear equal to Him, he was cast down by the swelling of pride.
Not, therefore, in so far as it is a substance, but because, being made a substance, in so far as it loved itself more amply than Him by whom it was made, it is evil; and it is evil for this reason, that it is less than it would be if it had loved that which exists in the highest degree. A defect, therefore, is evil. Every defect, then, tends away from that which exists, so that it may not exist, just as every advancement tends away from that which exists less, so that it may exist more. For the supreme honor, such as the piety of the religious renders, is surely owed to God. He therefore who loves honor imitates God. But humble souls wish to be honored in Him, the proud before Him. Yet before God the humble become more exalted
above the unjust, while against God the exalted become more lowly than the just — by that dispensation, of course, of rewards and punishments, because the former loved God above themselves, the latter loved themselves in place of God. Now, I think, it is easy for you to understand, from the very words of your letter in which you said that the soul, when it consents to evil, sins by will, that no evil is an evil nature or the love of an evil nature, but, since all natures are good in their own kind, that evil is sin, which comes about by the will of the soul when it loves the creature in place of the Creator Himself — whether by its own impulse, when it is evil, or by another's persuasion, when it consents to evil.
And nonetheless it thus also becomes evil by the punishments that follow, so that all things may be disposed according to merits by the Creator, supremely good, in a creature that is good but not supremely good — because He did not beget it of Himself, but made it out of nothing. But you have set up two natures, one of which you would have to be good, the other evil, or rather one of good, the other of evil; for the evil nature comes to be from a good one even by sinning. Yet you confess that the nature which you say is good does evil by consenting to evil, that is, sins by will. But I assert that both are good, but that one of them does evil by persuading, the other does evil by consenting. And just as the consent of the one is not a nature, so neither is the persuasion of the other;
and just as the one, if it should not consent, will remain good, guarding the integrity of its own nature, so the other, if it should not persuade, will be more amended; but if it also does not itself commit the sin which it does not persuade, both would be equally whole and praiseworthy in their own kind. For even if the one sins twice, which both commits and persuades, and the other once, if only it consents to the doing of evil, yet they become evil by sins, they are not by nature evil. Or if this nature is evil on account of persuasion, so also is the other on account of consent. But if it seems to you worse to persuade than to consent, let this be evil, that one worse; yet let there not be so great a respecting of persons, so unjust a favoritism in judging, that, though both sin — one
more grievously, the other more lightly — the one be called a nature of evil, the other of good; and not rather that either both be good, but that one better which sins less, or both be evil, but that one worse which sins more. "But whence," you say, "came the evil deed that is called sin, if there is no nature of evil?" Tell me, whence comes that evil consent in that nature which you concede and proclaim to be good. For whatever suffers so as to consent to evil would surely not so suffer unless it could suffer. I ask therefore whence it has this very ability to suffer; for it would be better if it did not have it. It is not, then, from the nature of the supreme good, than which something could be better. Next, if it has in its power either to consent or not to consent, then it does not consent as one conquered.
I ask therefore whence it has this evil consent, with no contrary nature compelling it. But if it is compelled to consent, so that it is not in its power to do otherwise, then it does not, as you were saying, sin by will, since it does not consent by will. But I still ask further whence there is in it the possibility of being deceived, if it is deceived. For before it was deceived, unless it were in it that it could suffer this, it would surely never suffer it. And yet in no way does it consent except by will: but if it is compelled, it must be said to yield rather than to consent. But by whatever name you call this, I ask of you — a sharp and skillful man, and, as you boast, of Roman genius — whence this good nature has the ability to suffer what it suffers, so as to consent to evil.
For just as in wood, before it is broken, there is inherent a fragility which, if it were not inherent, it could not be broken at all — and yet the wood is not therefore not fragile, if no breaker approaches — so I ask whence in this nature there is a certain fragility or flexibility, before it is either broken to an evil consent by force or bent by persuasion. Or if, by the nearness of evil, there was already a fragility — just as bodies are wont to be corrupted by the exhalation of a nearby marsh — then it was already corruptible, if the pestilential contagion of that nearness could corrupt it. I ask therefore whence that corruptibility. I pray you, attend to what I say, and yield to the perspicuous truth.
For I do not ask whence comes corruption — for you will answer "from a corruptor," and you will contend that this same corruptor is some prince, I know not what, of the race of darkness, so wrapped in fabulous coverings that you can scarcely unwrap and hold him — but I ask whence comes corruptibility, even before the corruptor approached: which, unless it existed, either no corruptor would exist, or the approach of any corruptor whatsoever would do no harm. When therefore you have found whence in a good nature there is this corruptibility, before the contrary nature corrupts it — or, if you are unwilling to say it is corrupted, whence certainly this mutability, before it were changed by that hostile adversity — for a nature is indeed changed for the worse which becomes foolish from wise and which forgets itself;
for you yourself set down these words, saying: "if, when it has come to know itself, it consents to evil"; it is therefore changed for the worse when it forgets itself, so that it may again come to know itself when reminded: but in no wise could it have been changed unless, before it were changed, it were mutable. When therefore you have found whence this mutability is in the substance of the supreme good, before there was made any commixture of good and evil, you will assuredly cease to ask of me whence evil is. And yet in the nature of the supreme good, if you rightly consider it, no mutability of time whatever can be found, neither from itself nor by the approach of any other thing — as in that nature which Mani feigns and reckons to be supremely good, and even persuades those who believe him.
Seek and answer, if you can, whence this mutability, which was not found but betrayed, when delay approached? For it could not be changed even by an enemy, if it could not be changed at all: but since it could, it showed that it had not made itself unchangeable. When therefore this mutability is believed to be in the substance of the supreme good — that is, in the substance of God — if you are not contentious, you see with how great folly it is blasphemed. But when something of this kind is said of a creature, which God neither begot nor brought forth of His own substance, but made out of nothing, it is not the supreme good that is dealt with; yet it is such a good as could not have been established except by the supreme good, who is God.
For God, who is supremely good and unchangeably good, made all things good — not supremely nor unchangeably good, yet good nonetheless — from the angels of heaven down to the least beasts and grasses of the earth, all of them set in their fitting places according to the dignity proper to each one's nature. But among these creatures, when the rational creature clings by the obedience of love to its Creator — that is, to God its maker and founder — it preserves its own nature in His eternity, His truth, His love; whereas when it forsakes Him by stubborn disobedience, it entangles itself in sins through its own free choice, and by His just judgment is made wretched through punishment. And this is the whole of evil: partly what it does unjustly, partly what it justly suffers.
Do not ask this of me — where evil comes from — since you have already answered yourself, you who said that «when the soul has come to know itself, if it consents to evil, it sins by its own will.» Behold whence evil comes: namely, from one's own will. But this is not a nature, but a fault, and thereby also contrary to nature, which it certainly harms by depriving it of the good by which it could have been blessed, had it been unwilling to sin. Yet you suppose that this will to sin cannot be stirred in the soul except from some other evil, which you believe to be a nature that God did not make, and you contend that this same soul is the nature of God. And thereby, if this evil — some nature or other — produces this will to sin in the soul by persuading it, then God is cast down, conquered, into sin. Behold with how great impiety!
From what wicked and horrible blasphemies you refuse to strip yourself, by placing in a nature that God did not make life, sensation, speech, measure, form, order, and countless other goods; and by placing in the very nature of God, before any commingling with evil, that very mutability by which it could be captured and on account of which it was compelled to fear, «seeing that a great ruin and devastation was hanging over its holy realms, unless it should set against it some surpassing and glorious deity, mighty in power.» And to what end is all this, except that this nature and substance of God should so hold the enemy bound in subjection that it endures him even in sinning, holds him bound yet does not wholly escape him, though already purged of the conquered part, and keeps him shut up even when condemned?
A splendid excuse of the necessity of war you have found in your god against the objection put to you, so that you might answer: what harm would the race of darkness have done to God, if He had been unwilling to fight with it? If you say it would have done Him some harm, you will confess God to be corruptible and violable; but if you say that it could do Him no harm, then it will be asked of you: why then did He fight? Why did He hand over His own substance to the enemy to be corrupted and violated and driven to every sin? Against this dilemma you have never been able to escape. You seem to yourselves to have found something great and safe, so as to answer by saying:
«It is a great iniquity to covet what belongs to another» — to which iniquity God would have given His assent, had He been unwilling to overcome that race which had dared this. This answer would have some semblance of justice, if at least in the war itself the nature of your god had kept itself whole and unpolluted, and, mingled with the enemy's members, had done nothing of iniquity, whether under compulsion or seduction. But since you say that it, taken captive, consents to such great crimes and outrages — since, in short, out of that monstrous impiety it even became an enemy to the holy light of which it is a portion, and you assert that it cannot wholly be purged, whence you believe there is deservedly rendered to it the eternal punishments of that horrible clod:
How much better it would have been to leave the hostile enemy in its own iniquity, vainly scheming empty things, than to hand over to it a part of God whose strength it would drain, whose beauty, once corrupted, it would ally to its own iniquity — who does not see this? Who is so blinded by such obstinacy that he does not perceive, does not notice, with how much less iniquity the race of darkness would vainly attempt to invade a nature belonging to another, than God would hand over His own nature to be invaded, to be forced into iniquity, and even in some part to be condemned to punishment? Is this, then, to have been unwilling to consent to iniquity — and to have committed so vast an iniquity with no necessity at all? Or was there necessity? Which very thing Manichaeus was not ashamed to say, though you are ashamed of it. For he indeed says:
«God saw that a great ruin and devastation was hanging over His holy realms, unless He should set against it some surpassing deity, mighty in power.» But you, forsooth, reason more subtly than if you had said that God fought under this necessity, lest the race of darkness harm Him — calling God violable and corruptible, one whom something could harm, had He been unwilling to fight. Drive out, then, and expel from your hearts and from your faith that very battle too, and that whole fable woven from the horror of impious and most unclean blasphemies; at last, at some point, condemn it with an anathema. For what a thing it is, I beseech you, that, as was said before, you are not afraid to call that nature violable and God corruptible, as being the nature of your god!
If it could not exercise the strength by which it would not be captured, could it not at least preserve justice while captive — as Daniel could, whose lions you have dared to mock? For he did not, out of any piety of his own, consent to the iniquity of those by whom he had been led captive, compelled by no terror; nor, in the condition of bodily servitude, did he lose the equity and liberty of a patient and wise spirit. But the nature of God, so you say, was led captive, was made iniquitous, cannot be wholly purged, and is compelled in the end to be condemned. And if it knew from eternity that this evil would befall it, then no divinity was owed to it on its own account.
But if you said that the lands or regions of the kingdom of light and of the race of darkness, contiguous to each other by their nearness — which things Manichaeus recounts as fit to be laughed at by men who understand prudently — are indescribable, and that these are called by Christ «the right hand» and «the left hand,» we know that Christ so calls the right hand and the left hand as to intend not such bodily things, but the blessedness and the misery of each one's own desert. But your carnal thinking so far fails to withdraw from bodily places that you say this visible sun — and therefore corporeal, which cannot be contained except in a bodily place — is both God and a part of God. Yet it is foolish to deal with you about these things.
For what incorporeal thing will you be able to understand, you who do not yet believe God to be incorruptible? But, forsooth, as a good friend you kindly chide me for having left the Manichaeans and betaken myself to the books of the Jews. It is these very books that stifle your error and your deceit: for in them Christ was prophesied, such as the truth of God has rendered Him, not such as the vanity of the Manichaeans has feigned Him. But, most urbane man, you assail the ancient Scripture because it is written in the prophet: «And beget sons of fornication, for the land shall commit fornication, departing from the Lord,» while you hear in the Gospel: «Harlots and publicans shall go before you into the kingdom of heaven.» I know whence your indignation comes:
For it is not so much the fornicating woman in her fornication that displeases you, as that she is changed into marriage and converted to conjugal chastity — where you believe that your god, in the begetting of children, is bound with tighter fetters of the flesh; whom you think harlots spare, because they take care not to conceive, so that, freed from the office of childbearing, they may serve their lust. For with you a woman's conception is a prison and a fetter of God. Hence this too displeases you: «They shall be two in one flesh,» though the Apostle commends this as a great mystery in Christ and the holy Church. Hence this displeases you: «Increase and multiply,» lest the workhouses of your god be multiplied.
But I confess that in the Catholic Church I have learned that, just as the soul, so also the body — of which the one is endowed with rule, the other is subject — and thus that the good of the soul and the goods of the body are from nothing but the highest good, from which come all goods, whether great or small, whether heavenly or earthly, whether spiritual or corporeal, whether temporal or everlasting; nor are these latter things therefore to be censured, because those former ones are to be preferred. But that saying which you place among the things to be blamed, «Kill and eat,» was set down even in the Acts of the Apostles in a spiritual sense.
Nevertheless, even in a bodily sense it is not food that is under reproach, but excess — especially since to you, who abstain from flesh even carnally, this received maxim ought to have been pleasing: that you should kill flesh and thus, the prisons being broken, your god might escape from wretched custody; and if any remnants of him remained there, by eating them you might purge them in the workshop of the belly. You mock that the barrenness of Sara grieved me. I certainly did not grieve at this, since she too was a prophetess. But it accords with your fabulous sacrileges to grieve not at Sara's barrenness but at fruitfulness, since every woman's fruitfulness is a hard calamity for your god: whence it is no wonder that in you is fulfilled above all what was foretold of such men: «forbidding to marry.»
For it is not so much intercourse as marriage that you detest, since in marriage intercourse for the sake of propagation is not a vice but a duty — from which the continence of holy men and women is exempt, not because they shunned it as an evil, but because they chose a better thing. And yet, in the case of fathers and mothers such as Abraham and Sara were, the conjugal duty itself is to be weighed not from human society but from the divine dispensation. For because it behoved Christ to come in the flesh, the marriage of Sara rendered service to the propagating of that flesh — to which the virginity of Mary rendered service. Hence also that which you have recalled, mocking it with laudable ignorance: «Put your hand under my thigh,» Abraham said to his servant, demanding the pledge of an oath: «Put,» he says,
your hand under my thigh, and swear by the God of heaven.» That servant indeed, by obeying, was swearing; but Abraham, by commanding, was prophesying — namely, that the God of heaven was to come into that flesh which would be propagated from that thigh. This you spurn, detest, abominate — you chaste and clean men, who dread for the Son of God, whom no contact of flesh could have changed, a single virgin's womb; while you entangle the nature of your god, changed and polluted, in the wombs of all females — not of humans only, but of beasts as well. And thereby, you who shudder at a single thigh of a patriarch, what thighs at last do you find — I do not say of prophets, but of any prostitutes whatever — where you are not bound to swear by your god so shamefully shackled there?
unless perhaps it is not chaste to touch a member of the human body, but you are ashamed to swear by a god so shamefully bound? With such great deformity there, under the captive name «pancarpus» — which is wont to be produced in the shows put on for public games, on account of the beasts of every kind that were in it — you harry Noah's ark, which through every kind of animal prefigured the Church that was to come from all nations. Here I congratulate you that, whether unawares or in ignorance, you have set down a fitting word; for «pancarpus» means all-fruit — which in the Church is spiritually true. And you do not notice how much happier Noah, who entered unharmed among those wild beasts and went out from them unharmed, was than your god, who was torn to pieces and devoured by the beastly rage of the race of darkness.
And so he was made not «pancarpus» (all-fruit) but plainly «camparpus» (all-torn), being rent by every ferocity. You mock the wrestling of Jacob with the angel, in which was prophetically figured the coming wrestling of the people of Israel with the flesh of Christ. But however you understand it, how much better it was for your god to wrestle with a man than to be torn apart, conquered and captive, by a race of demons! You falsely charge Abraham with having sold the chastity of his wife — where he did not lie in calling her his sister, but by human caution kept silent that she was his wife, entrusting to his God the preservation of her chastity; and had he not done what he could do, he would have been judged not to trust in God, but to tempt God.
And yet you do not consider your god, who did not sell but freely gave over — not his wife, but his own members — to enemies, to be polluted, corrupted, and defiled; to whom, if it were possible, you would surely wish that the glorious nature of your god might return from its enemies as inviolate as Sara was restored inviolate to her husband. You praise my former character and pursuits, and ask who suddenly changed me; then, speaking indirectly, you make mention of the ancient enemy of all the faithful and holy, and of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself — by whom you certainly wish the devil to be understood. What answer should I give you concerning my own change, which, unless I believed it were being made for the better in that very way, I would surely not — having detested and condemned your error — pass over to the Catholic Church and faith?
Whether I have done rightly in this — that is, whether I have been changed from evil to good — you yourself solve the question for me in that very word which you have used, «my change.» For my soul, if — as you say — it were the nature of God, could in no way be changed at all, whether for the better, as I trust, or for the worse, as you charge, neither by itself nor by the impulse of anyone else. Hence, since I have left that error and have chosen the faith in which the nature of God is piously believed to be altogether unchangeable — so that it may be wisely understood — my change displeases none but those to whom the unchangeable God is displeasing.
Now the devil is the adversary of the saints, not because he rises up against them as an enemy from a contrary principle of another nature, but because he envies them the heavenly honour from which he himself was cast down. For, being himself changed, he strives to change others. For as it is described by you, in the prolixity of that Persian fable, if being unchanged he changes others, then surely he is greater and the victor; but if, as you affirm, he is of the holy light, then he is not an enemy of God but a friend — and better than those whom he deceives, since he makes them enemies of the holy light, to which he himself is a friend? For this reason indeed Manichaeus says that souls are to be condemned to eternal punishment in that horrible clod, because they suffered themselves to stray from their former luminous nature and then stood forth as enemies of the light,
since he contends that the very mind of the race of darkness, burning with love of keeping the light with itself, strives to create the bodies of animals. From these most empty and sacrilegious fabrications, then, take care to rescue yourself, being changed for the better by the help of Him who is changed neither for the better nor for the worse. «We have escaped,» he says, «because we have followed the spiritual Saviour. For his (the enemy's) audacity burst forth only so far, that had our Lord been carnal, all our hope would have been cut off.» If you say this because you do not believe that Christ had flesh, you ought not to place your hope in Manichaeus, whom you grant to have been begotten of male and female, and to have been conceived into the flesh like other men. Why then do you place such great hope in him?
For in this very letter of yours, when you were trying to frighten me, you yourself said: «Who then will be your patron before the just tribunal of the Judge, when you shall begin to be convicted by your own witness both of word and of deed? The Persian, whom you have accused, will not be present. This one excepted, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Punic man?» You said, then, that apart from Manichaeus there could be no consoler and no saviour. How then, when you were treating of the sufferings of Christ, did you say that you had escaped, because you had followed the spiritual Saviour, so that the enemy might not be able to kill Him, established in flesh? If, then, the enemy killed your Manichaeus, in whom he found flesh — so that he might already be your saviour — how do you say, «This one excepted, who will console you as you weep?»
«Who will save the Punic man?» You see what it is to be in heresy and in the doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars. You want the truthful Manichaeus to speak of a deceitful Christ, so that, if Christ, in showing His flesh, His death, His resurrection, and finally the places of the wounds and of the nails which He displayed to the doubting disciples, did the whole thing deceitfully and mendaciously, then Manichaeus spoke the truth about Christ; but if Christ showed true flesh, and therefore true death, true resurrection, true scars, then Manichaeus lied about Christ.
And thereby the difference in this matter between me and you is this: that you have chosen to believe Manichaeus truthful by believing Christ deceitful, while I have chosen rather to believe that Manichaeus, as about other things so about Christ, lied — rather than that Christ lied about anything, and how much more about that in which He chiefly placed the hope of believers, namely His own passion and resurrection! For he who says: When Christ, after that which was thought to be His death, appeared to the disciples who were hesitating and thinking they saw a spirit, when He said:
'Touch my hands and feet and see, that a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see me to have,' when to one of them who least believed He said, 'Put your fingers into my side, and be not unbelieving, but believing' — He showed all this not truthfully but mendaciously»: he who says this, I say, is not a preacher but an accuser of Christ. «But,» you say, «Manichaeus preaches Christ and calls himself His apostle.» For this very reason he is the more to be detested and shunned. For were he to say these things by way of accusation, at least he would boast himself a lover of truth by exposing another's falsehood; but as it is, unknowing and incautious, he betrays himself and sufficiently shows to those who look carefully what he himself is doing and what he loves, by praising and proclaiming one who lies.
Flee therefore, my friend, so great a plague, lest Manichaeus wish — by deceiving you, which cannot be done — to make you faithful, such as he wishes that disciple to seem to have been made faithful by Christ, to whom He said: «Put your fingers into my side, and be not unbelieving, but believing.» For as the sweetest truth teaches, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: Touch what I bear, touch what I have borne, touch true flesh, touch the traces of true wounds, touch the true places of the nails, and by believing true things, be not unbelieving, but believing? But as the sacrilegious vanity of Manichaeus raves, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: Touch what I feign, touch what I falsify — that is:
touch false flesh, touch the places of the fallacy of false wounds, and be not unbelieving toward my lying members, so that by believing false things you may be able to be faithful. Such faithful ones does Manichaeus have — the faithful of every doctrine of lying demons. Flee these things, I beseech you; let not the appearance of fewness deceive you, since the Lord Himself said that the narrow way is the way of few. You wish to be among the few — but the worst. For it is true that few are in every way innocent; but even among the guilty themselves, murderers are fewer than thieves, those who commit incest are fewer than adulterers;
finally, even the very fables or histories of the ancients have fewer Medeas and Phaedras than women of other crimes and outrages, fewer Ochuses and Busirises than men of other impieties and wickednesses. See therefore lest perchance among you the excessive horror of impiety earns the merit of fewness. For such things are there read, said, and believed, that it is to be wondered at that any — rather than few — rush into that error or remain in it. But the fewness of the saints, whose way is narrow, is set in comparison with the multitude of sinners; and this fewness indeed lies hidden in the far greater number of chaff — but in the very threshing-floor of the Catholic Church it is now to be gathered and threshed;
and at the end it is to be winnowed and purged. To this Church it behoves you to betake yourself, if you desire faithfully to be faithful, lest, by trusting in false things, you — as it is written — «feed the winds,» that is, become food for unclean spirits. For if the Apostle Paul, whom you mention, counted as loss and dung — not as the wise do, the Scriptures of the Old Testament and that whole prophetic dispensation of words and deeds, but the carnal excellence of the Jewish stock, and, on behalf of the synagogues of his father's people erring and not acknowledging Christ, that zeal for persecuting Christians by which he was inflamed as though it were praiseworthy, and the righteousness which is of the law, in which the Jews, not understanding therein the grace of God, proudly boast — that he might gain Christ:
how much more ought you to cast away those writings of yours, most full of unspeakable blasphemies, where the nature of truth, the nature of the highest good, the nature of God is described as so often mutable, so often conquered, so often corrupted and in part inexplicably defiled, and as to be condemned in the end by truth itself — cast them away not as dung but as poison, and, the contention finished, pass over to the Catholic Church and faith, which, just as it was prophesied so long before, so in its own time was revealed! And this I say to you for this reason: because your mind is neither the nature of evil, which is altogether nothing, nor the nature of God — for otherwise I would speak in vain to the unchangeable;
but since it has been changed by forsaking God, and its very change is its evil, let it be changed — turned toward the unchangeable good, by the help of that same unchangeable good — and such a change of it will be a liberation from evil. If you spurn this admonition,
still believing there to be two natures — one mutable, of good, which, mingled with evil, could consent to injustice; the other immutable, of evil, which, though mixed with good, could not consent to justice — you will keep prattling that shameful fable near at hand, sowing execrable and foul blasphemies in the fornication of itching ears, so as to be in the flock of those of whom it was foretold that «there shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires they will heap up to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn away their hearing from the truth, and will be turned unto fables.» But if you prudently receive this admonition, being turned toward the unchangeable God, you will by a laudable change become one of those of whom the Apostle says:
«You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord.» This could not be said of the nature of God, because it was never evil and worthy of that name «darkness»; nor of the nature of evil, which, if it existed, could never be changed nor become light; but rightly and truly it was said of that nature which is not unchangeable, but which, having forsaken the unchangeable light by which it was made, is darkened in itself; yet, turned toward that light, becomes light — not in itself but in the Lord. For it does not shine of itself, since it is not the true light, but, illumined, shines from Him of whom it was said: «That was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world.»
This believe, this understand, this hold fast, if you wish to be good by participation in the unchangeable good, which you cannot be of yourself: which you could neither lose, if you were this unchangeably, nor receive, if you were not this unchangeably.