Against the Epistle of Manichæus, Called…
Chapter 1.—To Heal Heretics is Better Than to Destroy Them.
Chapter 2.—Why the Manichæans Should Be More Gently Dealt with.
Chapter 3.—Augustin Once a Manichæan.
Chapter 4.—Proofs of the Catholic Faith.
Chapter 5.—Against the Title of the Epistle of Manichæus.
Chapter 6.—Why Manichæus Called Himself an Apostle of Christ.
Chapter 7.—In What Sense the Followers of Manichæus Believe Him to Be the Holy Spirit.
Chapter 8.—The Festival of the Birth-Day of Manichæus.
Chapter 9.—When the Holy Spirit Was Sent.
Chapter 10.—The Holy Spirit Twice Given.
Chapter 11.—Manichæus Promises Truth, But Does Not Make Good His Word.
Chapter 12.—The Wild Fancies of Manichæus. The Battle Before the Constitution of the World.
Chapter 17.—The Memory Contains the Ideas of Places of the Greatest Size.
Chapter 18.—The Understanding Judges of the Truth of Things, and of Its Own Action.
Chapter 19.—If the Mind Has No Material Extension, Much Less Has God.
Chapter 20.—Refutation of the Absurd Idea of Two Territories.
Chapter 22.—The Form of the Region of Light the Worse of the Two.
Chapter 23.—The Anthropomorphites Not So Bad as the Manichæans.
Chapter 24.—Of the Number of Natures in the Manichæan Fiction.
Chapter 28.—Manichæus Places Five Natures in the Region of Darkness.
Chapter 29.—The Refutation of This Absurdity.
Chapter 31.—The Same Subject Continued.
Chapter 32.—Manichæus Got the Arrangement of His Fanciful Notions from Visible Objects.
Chapter 33.—Every Nature, as Nature, is Good.
Chapter 34.—Nature Cannot Be Without Some Good. The Manichæans Dwell Upon the Evils.
Chapter 36.—The Source of Evil or of Corruption of Good.
Chapter 37.—God Alone Perfectly Good.
Chapter 38.—Nature Made by God Corruption Comes from Nothing.
Chapter 39.—In What Sense Evils are from God.
Chapter 40.—Corruption Tends to Non-Existence.
Chapter 41.—Corruption is by God’s Permission, and Comes from Us.
Chapter 18.—The Understanding Judges of the Truth of Things, and of Its Own Action.
What, then, must be said of the power of perceiving truth, and of making a vigorous resistance against these very images which take their shape from impressions on the bodily senses, when they are opposed to the truth? This power discerns the difference between, to take a particular example, the true Carthage and its own imaginary one, which it changes as it pleases with perfect ease. It shows that the countless worlds of Epicurus, in which his fancy roamed without restraint, are due to the same power of imagination, and, not to multiply examples, that we get from the same source that land of light, with its boundless extent, and the five dens of the race of darkness, with their inmates, in which the fancies of Manichæus have dared to usurp for themselves the name of truth. What then is this power which discerns these things? Clearly, whatever its extent may be, it is greater than all these things, and is conceived of without any such material images. Find, if you can, space for this power; give it a material extension; provide it with a body of huge size. Assuredly if you think well, you cannot. For of everything of this corporeal nature your mind forms an opinion as to its divisibility, and you make of such things one part greater and another less, as much as you like; while that by which you form a judgment of these things you perceive to be above them, not in local loftiness of place, but in dignity of power.