birds, but the pure hearts of people who trust and believe God, and turn from a
Extract from Revisions (1, 10, 1-3)
1 . Settled now back in Africa, l wrote the two books ofOn Genesis: A Refuta tion of the Manichees. It is true, of course, that I had had the Manichees in mind in those earlier books, 1 in whatever arguments l used in order to show that God is supremely good and unchangeable, and yet the creator of al 1 changeable natures, and that no nature or substance is evil precisely as a nature or substance. These two books, however, were published expressly against them in defense of the old law, which they attack with all the zeal and fanaticism of their crazy delusion. The first book runs from where it says, ln the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1 : 1), as far as the completion of the seven days, where we read that God rested on the seventh day; while the second goes from where it says This is the book of the creating ofheaven and earth (Gn 2:4) up to where Adam and his wife were sent away from paradise, and a guard was set over the tree of life. Finally at the end of that book I set the truth of the Catholic faith2 over against the error of the Manichees, briefly and clearly intertwining what they say and what we in turn say in reply.
2. As for my saying: "That other light1 however does not feed the eyes of birds, but the pure hearts of people who trust and believe God, and turn from a love of visible and time-bound things to the fulfillment of his commands, which is something all people can do, if they wish" (1,3,6): these new heretics, the Pelagians, must not think it is said in their way. It is, you see, absolutely true that all people can do this if they wish; but the will is prepared by God (Prv 8:35, LXX), and is so enlarged by the endowment of charity that they really can. The reason this was not added at this point is that it was not relevant to the question in hand there.
As for what you can read there (1, 19,30), that we should take God's blessing them and saying lncrease and multiply (Gn 1 :28) to refer to their having children in the flesh after they sinned: if this cannot be taken in any other way but as
1 . From the three books Answer to the Academics to the three Free Will written between his conversion in 387 in Milan and his return to Africa in 389. 2. He actually writes, with the curious idiom of what 1 call an inverted genitive, "the faith of Catholic truth." For the brief "intertwining" of what the Manichees say and what the Catholics say, see 11,28,42—29,43. 3. The text used in the 1talian edition omits the word "light," lumen: very possibly just a printers error.