Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 21 part 3/3

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.