the Old Testament, which they have next to no knowledge of, and of mocking
Book 1
Advised byfriends to eschew elaborate rhetoric, he intends to help ordinary unlearned Catholics meet the attacks of the Manichees on the Old Testament
1, 1. lfthe Manichees were to choose the sort of people they meant to deceive,
I too would also choose the appropriate words with which to answer them. But since they are hunting down both the well educated with their writings and the uneducated with their erroneous ways, and while promising them the truth are striving to turn them away from the truth, it is not with elegant and well-turned phrases that they are to be convicted of teaching nonsense, but with the evidence of reality. I fully agreed, in fact, with the opinion of some people who were genuine Christians and well versed in classical literature, who nonetheless saw clearly, on reading my other books1 which I had published against the Manichees, that they would not be understood by the less well educated, or only with difficulty. They advised me out of the goodness of their hearts not to turn my back on the usual common way oftalking, if l had it in mind to purge from the spirits of less educated people also such pernicious errors as these. The learned too, after all, can understand this ordinary and simple language, while the unlearned cannot understand that other sort.
2. So the Manichees then are in the habit of casting slurs on the scriptures of the Old Testament, which they have next to no knowledge of, and of mocking and deceiving with their gibes the weaker brethren and the little ones among us, who cannot then find any way of answering. There is no part of scripture, I mean to say, which it is not the easiest thing in the world to find fault with, to the dismay ofthose who do not understand it. But that is precisely why divine provi dence permits so many heretics to come along with various errors; it's so that when they taunt us and shower us with questions we do not know the answers to, we may at least in this way be shaken out of our mental sloth and start longing to become acquainted with the divine scriptures.
That is why the apostle too says: There have to be many heresies, so that those who prove reliable may stand out among you ( 1 Cor 11:19). Those who can
1 . See note 1 above, on the extract from the Revisions. But the work he is more likely to have had in mind here is The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life, which he lists before this one on Genesis in Revisions 1,7 as having been written in Rome while he was on his way back to Africa from Milan.