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| He Attacks the Doctrine of the Manichæans Concerning Evil, God, and the Righteousness of the Patriarchs.
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Chapter VII.—He Attacks the
Doctrine of the Manichæans Concerning Evil, God, and the
Righteousness of the Patriarchs.
12. For I was ignorant as to that which really is,
and was, as it were, violently moved to give
my support to foolish deceivers,
when they asked me, “Whence is evil?”241
| 241 The strange mixture of the pensive philosophy of
Persia with Gnosticism and Christianity, propounded by Manichæus,
attempted to solve this question, which was “the great object of
heretical inquiry” (Mansel’s Gnostics, lec. i.). It was
Augustin’s desire for knowledge concerning it that united him to
this sect, and which also led him to forsake it, when he found
therein nothing but empty fables (De Lib. Arb. i. sec. 4).
Manichæus taught that evil and good were primeval, and had
independent existences. Augustin, on the other hand, maintains that
it was not possible for evil so to exist (De Civ. Dei, xi.
sec. 22) but, as he here states, evil is “a privation of good.”
The evil will has a causa deficiens, but not a causa
efficiens (ibid. xii. 6), as is exemplified in the fall
of the angels. | —and, “Is God limited by a
bodily shape, and has He hairs and nails?”—and, “Are they to
be esteemed righteous who had many wives at once and did kill men,
and sacrificed living creatures?”242
At which things I, in my ignorance,
was much disturbed, and, retreating from the truth, I appeared to
myself to be going towards it; because as yet I knew not that evil
was naught but a privation of good, until in the end it ceases
altogether to be; which how should I see, the sight of whose eyes
saw no further than bodies, and of my mind no further than a
phantasm? And I knew not God to be a Spirit,243
not one who hath parts extended in
length and breadth, nor whose being was bulk; for every bulk is
less in a part than in the whole, and, if it be infinite, it must
be less in such part as is limited by a certain space than in its
infinity; and cannot be wholly everywhere, as Spirit, as God is.
And what that should be in us, by which we were like unto God, and
might rightly in Scripture be said to be after “the image of
God,”244
I was
entirely ignorant.
13. Nor had I knowledge of that true inner
righteousness, which doth not judge according to custom, but out of
the most perfect law of God Almighty, by which the manners of
places and times were adapted to those places and times—being
itself the while the same always and everywhere, not one thing in
one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, and all those commended by
the mouth of God were righteous,245
but were judged unrighteous by
foolish men, judging out of man’s judgment,246
and gauging by the petty standard
of their own manners the manners of the whole human race. Like as
if in an armoury, one knowing not what were adapted to the several
members should put greaves on his head, or boot himself with a
helmet, and then complain because they would not fit. Or as if, on
some day when in the afternoon business was forbidden, one were to
fume at not being allowed to sell as it was lawful to him in the
forenoon. Or when in some house he sees a servant take something in
his hand which the butler is not permitted to touch, or something
done behind a stable which would be prohibited in the dining-room,
and should be indignant that in one house, and one family, the same
thing is not distributed everywhere to all. Such are they who
cannot endure to hear something to have been lawful for righteous
men in former times which is not so now; or that God, for certain
temporal reasons, commanded them one thing, and these another, but
both obeying the same righteousness; though they see, in one man,
one day, and one house, different things to be fit for different
members, and a thing which was formerly lawful after a time
unlawful—that permitted or commanded in one corner, which done in
another is justly prohibited and punished. Is justice, then,
various and changeable? Nay, but the times over which she presides
are not all alike, because they are times.247
| 247 The law of the development of revelation implied in
the above passage is one to which Augustin frequently resorts in
confutation of objections such as those to which he refers in the
previous and following sections. It may likewise be effectively
used when similar objections are raised by modern sceptics. In the
Rabbinical books there is a tradition of the wanderings of the
children of Israel, that not only did their clothes not wax old
(Deut. xxix. 5) during those forty years, but
that they grew with their growth. The written word is as it
were the swaddling-clothes of the holy child Jesus; and as the
revelation concerning Him—the Word Incarnate—grew, did the
written word grow. God spoke in sundry parts [πολυέμρως]
and in divers manners unto the fathers by the prophets (Heb. i.
1); but when the
“fulness of the time was come” (Gal. iv. 4), He completed the revelation
in His Son. Our Lord indicates this principle when He speaks of
divorce in Matt. xix. 8. “Moses,” he says,
“because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away
your wives; but from the beginning it was not so.” (See Con.
Faust. xix. 26, 29.) When objections, then, as to obsolete
ritual usages, or the sins committed by Old Testament worthies are
urged, the answer is plain: the ritual has become obsolete, because
only intended for the infancy of revelation, and the sins, while
recorded in, are not approved by Scripture, and those who committed
them will be judged according to the measure of revelation they
received. See also De Ver. Relig. xvii.; in Ps.
lxxiii. 1, liv. 22; Con. Faust. xxii. 25; Trench, Hulsean
Lecs. iv., v. (1845); and Candlish’s Reason and
Revelation, pp. 58–75. | But men, whose days upon the earth
are few,248
because by
their own perception they cannot harmonize the causes of former
ages and other nations, of which they had no experience, with these
of which they have experience, though in one and the same body,
day, or family, they can readily see what is suitable for each
member, season, part, and person—to the one they take exception,
to the other they submit.
14. These things I then knew not, nor observed. They
met my eyes on every side, and I saw them not. I composed poems, in
which it was not permitted me to place every foot everywhere, but
in one metre one way, and in another, nor even in any one verse the
same foot in all places. Yet the art itself by which I composed had
not different principles for these different cases, but comprised
all in one. Still I saw not how that righteousness, which good and
holy men submitted to, far more excellently and sublimely
comprehended in one all those things which God commanded, and in no part varied,
though in varying times it did not prescribe all things at once,
but distributed and enjoined what was proper for each. And I, being
blind, blamed those pious fathers, not only for making use of
present things as God commanded and inspired them to do, but also
for foreshowing things to come as God was revealing them.249
| 249 Here, as at the end of sec. 17, he alludes to the
typical and allegorical character of Old Testament histories.
Though he does not with Origen go so far as to disparage the letter
of Scripture (see De Civ. Dei, xiii. 21), but upholds it, he
constantly employs the allegorical principle. He (alluding to the
patriarchs) goes so far, indeed, as to say (Con.
Faust., xxii. 24), that “not only the speech but the life of
these men was prophetic; and the whole kingdom of the Hebrews was
like a great prophet;” and again: “We may discover a prophecy
of the coming of Christ and of the Church both in what they said
and what they did”. This method of interpretation he first
learned from Ambrose. See note on “the letter killeth,” etc.
(below, vi. sec. 6), for the danger attending it. On the general
subject, reference may also be made to his in Ps. cxxxvi. 3;
Serm. 2; De Tentat. Abr. sec. 7; and De Civ.
Dei, xvii. 3. |
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