Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Manichees 229 childish-minded, whatever their bodily age. But we who are the body of Christ recognize in the Psalm our own voice, and so let us say to them: "The unjust have told me of their delights; they are not like your law, Lord" (Ps 118:85). I wander and scour [the Old Testament], winded, sweating from humanity's condemnation, and Christ meets me and refreshes me everywhere in those books, everywhere in those Scriptures, whether out in the open or in hidden ways. He sets me on fire, sparked by the desire that comes from the difficulty in discovering Him, so that I may soak up what I avidly find and, by what's hidden in its marrow, reach journey's end in good health.38
The Reality of the Incarnation
Augustine challenged inconsistencies in Manichean Christology: its multiple Christs, its fears about the Incarnation, its claims that the "suffering Christ" was trapped in fruits and vegetables and liberated by the Elect, whose vegetarian eating habits free up light fragments. Against this, Augustine insisted on the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of the Gospels and on the reality of the Incarnation. From Against Faustus the Manichee, Books 20 and 26:
(20.11) You say that the earth—conceived by the Holy Spirit—brings forth "the suffering Jesus." This Jesus, you claim, hangs from every tree in the form of fruits and vegetables, and, besides this contamination, is further contaminated by the living bodies of innumerable animals who eat these fruits, and that this Jesus is purified only in a small portion to which your hunger comes to the rescue. We [on the other hand] believe in heart and confess in prayer that Christ, the Son of God, the Word of God, put on flesh without contamination because God's substance—what no thing can contaminate—cannot be contaminated by flesh. . . . Tell us then how many Christs you say that there are. Isn't one of them the suffering Jesus, whom earth conceives and brings forth, hanging not only from every tree but also sprouting up in the grass, and then a second one whom the Jews crucified under Pontius Pilate, and then a third one strung out between the sun and the moon? Or is it one and the same Christ: one part, tied up in the trees; the other, free, coming to the rescue of the tied-up and held-hostage? If this is so, and you concede that Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, although, as you tell it, he did so without flesh—I'm not yet asking how it's possible he could suffer such a death without flesh, but I am asking to whom he left those ships [of the sun and the moon] so that he might come down from there and suffer the sort of things
38. Contra Faustum 12.25–27 (CSEL 25.1:353–56); my trans.