Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Manichees 207
(Mk 1:1), as though correcting Matthew, who calls him 'Son of David.' Maybe the Jesus that Matthew proclaims is not the same Jesus that Mark does. This, therefore, is the reason that I do not accept a Christ who is born. You: Make them agree with one another, if you can; remove this stumbling block for me, and I, somehow or another, will give ground. In any case, it will certainly not be worthy to believe that out of some womb God was born—the God of the Christians. . . .
(20.2) "We believe that the Father dwells in the highest or principal light, which [the Apostle] Paul calls 'inaccessible' (1 Tm 6:16). The Son takes His stand in this second or visible light. The Son is twin-like, as the Apostle knew him, speaking of Christ being God's power and God's wisdom. So we believe that His power dwells in the sun, but His wisdom, in the moon. And, further, we confess that the Holy Spirit, who is third in majesty, takes up residence within the whole ambit of the air, and from His powers or spiritual outpouring, the earth conceives and bears forth the suffering Jesus, who, hanging from every tree, is the life and salvation of humankind. . . . This is our faith."14
(iii) Manichean Rejection of the Old Testament
The Manichees rejected the Old Testament. Here Faustus lists stock reasons for that rejection. From Faustus, Chapters, quoted in Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichee, Book 4:
(1) Faustus said: "Do I accept the Old Testament? If it's my inheritance, I accept it; if not, I don't accept it. Now it's the height of unscrupulousness to seize and lay claim to a will that testifies to one's own disinheritance. Or are you oblivious to the fact that the Old Testament promises the land of the Canaanites to the Jews, that is, to the circumcised and to sacrificers and to abstainers from pigs and the rest of the meats which Moses labeled unclean; to observers of Sabbaths and feasts of unleavened breads and the rest of that sort of stuff—which Moses himself as testator mandated them to observe? No Christian has agreed to these things, and not one of us keeps up these practices. It is only right that in refusing the inheritance we should also hand back the legal documents. This, therefore, is the first reason, I believe, why we should reject the Old Testament—unless you can teach me some more prudential way of seeing it. The second reason is that this inheritance is so miserable, so bodily, and so far off from what profits the soul that, after seeing the blessed promise of the New Testament—which promises me the kingdom of heaven and eternal life—I would turn up my nose at it even if the testator foisted it on me free of charge."15
14. Contra Faustum 2.1–20.2 (CSEL 25.1:253–536); my trans. Augustine discusses these in Contra Faustum 20.11 (CSEL 25.1:548–51), cited below. See Julien Ries, "Jésus le Splendeur, Jesus patibilis, Jésus historique dans les textes manichéens occidentaux," in Gnosisforschung und Religiongeschichte: Festschrift für Kurt Rudolph zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. H. Preißler and H. Seiwert (Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 1994), 235–45; Majella Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichean Writings (London: T&T Clark, 2003).
15. Contra Faustum 4.1 (CSEL 25.1:268); my trans. On Faustus's anti-Jewish rhetoric and Augustine's
Manichees in Disguise
We turn now to Augustine's viewpoint. One thing that frightened orthodox Christians was the way that certain Manichees led double lives, cloaking themselves as practicing Christians while carrying on underground as Manichees. Augustine describes the case of a Manichean hearer named Victorinus who posed as a member of the Christian clergy in his day job, but continued to work behind the scenes as a Manichean evangelist. Here Augustine writes Deuterius, bishop of Caesarea in Mauretania Caesariensis, to alert him to Victorinus. In paragraph 2, Augustine offers Deuterius a quick overview of Manichean beliefs and practices. This is the complete Letter 236:
(1) I think the best thing I can do is to write directly to your Holiness, so that my negligence may not allow the Enemy to lay waste to the flock of Jesus Christ in your province, for he never ceases to lay snares to destroy the souls bought at so dear a price. It has come to my knowledge that a certain Victorinus, a subdeacon of Malliana, is a Manichee, and that he hides his sacrilegious error under the name of cleric. He is also a man of advanced age. He was so well known that I questioned him before he could be arraigned by witnesses. He could not deny the accusation, for he knew that there were many to whom he had incautiously given himself away. He would have appeared altogether too bold, not to say out of his mind, if he had tried to deny it. He admitted that he was indeed a Manichean hearer but not an elect.
(2) Those who are called "hearers" among them eat flesh meat, till the soil, and, if they wish, have wives, but those called "elect" do none of these things. The hearers kneel before the elect that these may lay a hand on the suppliant, and this is done not only toward their presbyters or bishops or deacons, but toward any of the elect. Like these, they adore and pray to the sun and moon. Like them, they fast on Sunday; like them, they believe all the blasphemies for which the heresy of the Manichees is to be abominated: denying, for example, that Christ was born of a virgin, claiming that His body was not real but only appeared so, and that there was no resurrection. They revile the patriarchs and prophets. They say that the Law given through Moses, the servant of God, did not come from the true God, but from the Prince of darkness. They think that the souls of human beings as well as of beasts are of the substance of God and are, in fact, pieces of God. Finally, they say that the good and true God fought with the tribe of darkness and let a part of Himself be mingled with the princes of darkness, and they assert that this part, spread over the world, defiled and bound, is purified by the food of the response, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), esp. 213–89.