Augustine in His Own Words
Against the Manichees 209 elect and by the sun and the moon; and whatever is left of that part of God which cannot be purified is bound with an everlasting and penal bond at the end of the world. As a consequence, they believe that God is not only subject to violation, corruption, and contamination, since it was possible for a part of Him to be brought to such an evil outcome, but the whole God cannot even be purified from such foulness and filthiness and misery even at the end of the world.
(3) That subdeacon, posing as a Catholic, not only believed those intolerable blasphemies as the Manichees do, but he taught them as vigorously as he could. He was discovered by his teaching when he trusted himself, so to speak, to his pupils. Indeed, he asked me, after he had confessed that he was a Manichean hearer, to lead him back to the way of truth of Catholic doctrine, but I confess I was horrified at his duplicity under his clerical guise and I took steps to have him confined and driven from the city. And I was not satisfied with that until I had notified your Holiness by letter that he should be known to all as a person to be shunned, having been degraded from his clerical rank with fitting ecclesiastical severity. If he seeks an opportunity for repentance, let him be believed only if he will make known to us the other Manichees whom he knows, not only at Malliana but in the whole province.16
Augustine Snared
In Confessions Augustine bitterly denounced his youthful self, how he had been snared by Manichean teaching. In the passage below, he describes how Manichean myth left him intellectually empty, hungry for the food of truth. Running under the surface is Augustine's self-portrait as the starving prodigal son of Jesus' parable. Augustine makes passing mention of Manichean veneration of the sun and moon and of the beauty of Manichean books. From Confessions, Book 3:
(6.10) Thus did I fall among men mad with pride, extremely carnal and talkative, in whose mouths were the snares of the devil, smeared with a sticky mixture of the syllables of Your name and that of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Paraclete our consoler, the Holy Spirit. These names never left their lips, but were empty sounds and the rattling of the tongue. As for the rest, their heart was void of truth. They kept saying: "Truth, truth," and they said it often to me, yet it was never in them. Rather, they continually spoke false things not only of You, who are truly the Truth, but also of the elements of
16. Ep. 236.1–3 (CSEL 57:523–25); trans. Parsons, FOTC 32:179–81 (slightly modified). A somewhat longer overview is found in De haeresibus 46 (CCL 46:312–20).