CHAPTER XVI

THE ERROR OF THE MANICHEANS CONCERNING THE

AFOREMENTIONED POINTS AND ITS REFUTATION

             86.--All the preceding errors were surpassed by the error of the Manicheans, who erred gravely in all the aforementioned points of doctrine.

             First of all, they reduced the origin of things not to one but to two principles of creation. They said that one of these was the author of good, while the other was the author of evils.

             Secondly, they erred concerning the condition of the nature of these principles. For they posited both principles to be corporeal, saying that the author of good things was a certain infinite corporeal light with a power of understanding. But they said that certain infinite corporeal darknesses were the author of evils.

             Thirdly, they erred as a consequence, in the government of things, in a manner establishing all things not under one dominion but under contraries.

             These notions which we have just set down, contain a manifest falsity as can be seen if we take them up one by one.

             87.--In the first place, it is completely irrational that something should be posited as the first principle of evils as contrary to the highest good. For nothing can be active except insofar as it is a being in act because each being produces something else like itself; and furthermore, a thing is produced in order to be actually.

             Now we call each thing "good" because it achieves act and its proper perfection; and it is evil because it is deprived of its due act and perfection. For example, life is a good of the body, for the body lives according to the soul, which is its perfection and its act. Hence, death, through which the body is deprived of the soul, is called an evil of the body. Nothing therefore acts or is done except insofar as it is good.

             However, insofar as anything is evil, to that extent it falls short of being done perfectly or of acting perfectly. For example, we say that a house is badly built if it is not brought through to its due perfection, and we call a builder "bad" if he falls short in the art of building. Therefore evil as such neither has an active principle nor can it be an active principle, but follows from a defect of some agent.

             88.--In the second place, it is impossible for any body to be intellective or to have an intellective power. For the intellect is neither a body nor is it the act of a body; otherwise, it would not know all things, as the Philosopher proves in the third book of On The Soul. Therefore if they admit that the First Principle has intellective power--which is held by all who speak of God--it is impossible for the First Principle to be something corporeal.

             89.--Thirdly, it is clear that the good has the nature of an end, for we call that thing good, towards which the appetite tends. All government however is according to an order to some end, and according to the nature of this order, the things that are directed to the end are ordered to it. Now all government is according to the nature of good. Therefore evil as evil cannot have a government or a dominion or rulership. In vain, therefore do they posit two kingdoms or governments, one of the good and the other of the evil.

             This error like those mentioned above seems to have come about because the Manicheans tried to transfer to the universal cause of things, what we find among particular causes. They saw particular contrary effects proceed from particular contrary causes, for example that fire heats and water causes cold. Hence, they believed that this process from contrary effects to contrary causes holds right up to the first principles of things. And because all contraries are seen to be contained under good and evil, insofar as one of two contraries is always deficient, for example, the black and the bitter, and the other is realized, as the sweet and the white, for this reason they thought that good and evil are the first active principles of all things.

             90.--But they manifestly failed in considering the nature of contraries. For contraries are not altogether diverse, but they agree in one respect and differ in another. For they agree in genus and they differ according to specific differences. Therefore, just as there are contrary proximate causes of contraries, so far as they differ by their specific differences, so they have one common cause of the whole genus in which they agree. A common cause, however, is prior to and higher than the proper causes. For the higher a cause is, by so much is its power greater and reaching out to more effects. It remains, therefore, that contraries are not the first active principles of things but that there is one active cause of all things.