Manichees and goes along with them, as he had done himself not so very long before.
98 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees who is to be shunned in them. There are none, you see, who are more boastful and talkative than they are in promising knowledge of good and evil, and presumptuously assuming that they are going to demonstrate this distinction in the human person, as in the tree which was planted in the middle of paradise. And then as for the words, You shall be like gods (Gn 3:5), who else say it more often than these people, striving with their proud nonsense to lead others into the same kind of pride, and affirming that the soul is by nature what God is? And who more than these are responsible for the opening of the eyes of the flesh, forsaking as they do the inner light of wisdom, and imposing on their followers the worship of this sun which is reached by the eyes of the body? But as a matter of fact all heretics in general lead people astray with the promise of knowledge, and severely criticize those they find to be simple believers; and because the wares they are hawking are altogether the values of the world and the flesh, it's as if they are striving to bring people to the opening of the eyes of the flesh, in order to blind the inner eye of the heart.
26, But these people even find their own bodies displeasing, not because they bear the punishment ofmortality which we earned by sinning, but to the extent of denying that God is the maker of bodies, as if finding their nakedness displeasing when their eyes of flesh were opened.
The Manichees tell lies about Christ and also declare that he told lies himself
39. But nothing more inexorably points to these people and picks them out than the serpent saying: You will not die the death;for Godknew that on the day you eatyour eyes will be opened (Gn 3:4-5). You see, what these people believe about this bit is that the serpent was Christ, and the story they stick to is that it was some god or other of a race of darkness (that's their expression) who gave that command, as though he begrudged human beings the knowledge of good and evil. This opinion, l imagine, gave birth also to the snake people, whatever they are,55 who are said to worship the serpent as Christ, and who ignore what the apostle says: /am afraid thatjust as the serpent ledEve astray by his cunning, so your good sense too may be corrupted (2 Cor 1 1 :3). So these then are the ones who, I reckon, were prefigured in this prophecy. Now what is led astray by the words of this serpent is our fleshly desire, and through it Adam is deceived, not Christ but the Christian.
You see, if he were willing to keep God's command, and persevered in living by faith56 until he became capable of really understanding the truth, that is, if he
55. Ophites, a group of Gnostics who did identify Christ with the serpent of Genesis, and about whom Augustine would have learned, in all probability, from the handbook Heresies of the professional heresy detector of that age, Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. 56. See Rom 1:17. The Christian he has in mind, evidently, is the one who is taken in by the Manichees and goes along with them, as he had done himself not so very long before.