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 31.—The Same Subject Continued.
34. And even in the prince of smoke himself, instead of mentioning only his ferocity as a bad quality, ought you not to have taken notice of the other things in his nature which you must allow to be commendable? For he had a soul and a body; the soul life-giving, and the body endowed with life. Since the soul governed and the body obeyed, the soul took the lead and the body followed; the soul gave consistency, the body was not dissolved; the soul gave harmonious motion, and the body was constructed of a well-proportioned framework of members. In this single prince are you not induced to express approval of the orderly peace or the peaceful order? And what applies to one applies to all the rest. You say he was fierce and cruel to others. This is not what I commend, but the other important things which you will not take notice of. Those things, when perceived and considered,—after advice by any one who has without consideration put faith in Manichæus,—lead him to a clear conviction that, in speaking of those natures, he speaks of things good in a sense, not perfect and un-created, like God the one Trinity, nor of the higher rank of created things, like the holy angels and the ever-blessed powers; but of the lowest class, and ranked according to the small measure of their endowments. These things are thought to be blameworthy by the uninstructed when they compare them with higher things; and in view of their want of some good, the good they have gets the name of evil, because it is defective. My reason also for thus discussing the natures enumerated by Manichæus is that the things named are things familiar to us in this world. We are familiar with darkness, waters, winds, fire, smoke; we are familiar, too, with animals, creeping, swimming, flying; with quadrupeds and biped. With the exception of darkness (which, as I have said already, is nothing but the absence of light, and the perception of it is only the absence of sight, as the perception of silence is the absence of hearing; not that darkness is anything, but that light is not, as neither that silence is anything, but that sound is not), all the other things are natural qualities and are familiar to all; and the form of those natures, which is commendable and good as far as it exists, no wise man attributes to any other author than God, the author of all good things.22 [This portion of the argument is conducted with great adroitness. Augustin takes the inhabitants of the region of darkness, as Mani describes them, and proves that they possess so much of good that they can have no other author than God.—A.H.N.]