Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 21 part 1/3

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.