joke someone is said to have made: 'He was getting hell ready for people who inquisitively
40 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees teach well are the ones who prove reliable in God's eyes. But they can only stand out among people when they teach; and they are unwilling to teach those who do not want to be taught. But many people are too lazy to want to be taught, unless they are sort of awakened from their slumbers by heretics making a nuisance of themselves with their taunts, so that then they start feeling ashamed of their ignorance, and begin to realize that they are being put in a dangerous position by this ignorance of theirs.
lf they are people of sound faith, they do not give in to the heretics, but earnestly start inquiring what answer they can make to them. God, of course, does not abandon them; and so when they ask they receive, and when they seek they find, and when they knock the door is opened to them.2 Those on the other hand who despair of being able to find what they seek in Catholic teaching are practically rubbed out by errors of all sorts; and if they still, nonetheless, go on persevering with their inquiries, they eventually return, tired out and thirsty after enormous toil, and almost dead, to the very springs from which they strayed away.
Answers to difficulties made by the Manichees about "ln the beginning..., "
Genesis 1:1
2, 3. So then, this is how the Manichees are in the habit of finding fault with the book of the Old Testament which is called Genesis. On its first words, ln the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1), they ask, "In what beginning?" and go on to say: "IfGod made heaven and earth in some beginning oftime, what was he doing before he made heaven and earth?3 And why did it suddenly take his fancy to make what he had never made previously through eternal times?" Our reply to these questions is that God made heaven and earth in the beginning, not in the beginning of time but in Christ, since he was "the Word with the Father, through which and in which all things were made."4 Our Lord Jesus Christ, you see, on being questioned by the Jews about who he really was, answered: The beginning, as which l am also speaking to you (Jn 8:25).
But even if we believe it was in the beginning of time that God made heaven and earth, we should of course understand that before the beginning oftime there was no time. God, after all, also made times, and that is why there were no times before he made any. We cannot therefore say that there was any time when God had not yet made anything. How, l mean to say, could there be a time which God
2. See Lk 11:10. 3. Augustine says in The Confessions X1, 1 2, 14, that to this question "1 will not respond with that joke someone is said to have made: 'He was getting hell ready for people who inquisitively peer into deep matters'; for this is to evade the force of the question." But no doubt he was tempted to do so on more than one occasion. 4. SeeJn 1:1-3.