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| Clearly Seeing the Fallacies of the Manichæans, He Retires from Them, Being Remarkably Aided by God. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter VII.—Clearly Seeing the
Fallacies of the Manichæans, He Retires from Them, Being
Remarkably Aided by God.
12. For when it became plain to me that he was
ignorant of those arts in which I had believed him to excel, I
began to despair of his clearing up and explaining all the
perplexities which harassed me: though ignorant of these, however,
he might still have held the truth of piety, had he not been a
Manichæan. For their books are full of lengthy fables392
392 We have referred in the note on iii. sec. 10,
above, to the way in which the Manichæans parodied Scripture
names. In these “fables” this is remarkably evidenced. “To
these filthy rags of yours,” says Augustin (Con. Faust.
xx. 6), “you would unite the mystery of the Trinity; for you say
that the Father dwells in a secret light, the power of the Son in
the sun, and His wisdom in the moon, and the Holy Spirit in the
air.” The Manichæan doctrine as to the mixture of the divine
nature with the substance of evil, and the way in which that nature
was released by the “elect,” has already been pointed out (see
note iii. sec. 18, above). The part of sun and moon, also, in
accomplishing this release, is alluded to in his De Mor.
Manich. “This part of God,” he says (c. xxxvi.), “is
daily being set free in all parts of the world, and restored to its
own domain. But in its passage upwards as vapour from earth to
heaven, it enters plants, because their roots are fixed in the
earth, and so gives fertility and strength to all herbs and
shrubs.” These parts of God, arrested in their rise by the
vegetable world, were released, as above stated, by the
“elect”. All that escaped from them in the act of eating, as
well as what was set free by evaporation, passed into the sun and
moon, as into a kind of purgatorial state—they being purer light
than the only recently emancipated good nature. In his letter to
Januarius (Ep. lv. 6), he tells us that the moon’s waxing
and waning were said by the Manichæans to be caused by its
receiving souls from matter as it were into a ship, and
transferring them “into the sun as into another ship.” The sun
was called Christ, and was worshipped; and accordingly we find
Augustin, after alluding to these monstrous doctrines, saying
(Con. Faust. v. 11): “If your affections were set upon
spiritual and intellectual good instead of material forms, you
would not pay homage to the material sun as a divine substance and
as the light of wisdom.” Many other interesting quotations might
be added, but we must content ourselves with the following. In his
Reply to Faustus (xx. 6), he says: “You call the sun a
ship, so that you are not only astray worlds off, as the saying is,
but adrift. Next, while every one sees that the sun is round, which
is the form corresponding from its perfection to his position among
the heavenly bodies, you maintain that he is triangular [perhaps in
allusion to the early symbol of the Trinity]; that is, that his
light shines on the earth through a triangular window in heaven.
Hence it is that you bend and bow your heads to the sun, while you
worship not this visible sun, but some imaginary ship, which you
suppose to be shining through a triangular opening.” | concerning
the heaven and stars, the sun and moon, and I had ceased to think
him able to decide in a satisfactory manner what I ardently
desired,—whether, on comparing these things with the calculations
I had read elsewhere, the explanations contained in the works of
Manichæus were preferable, or at any rate equally sound? But when
I proposed that these subjects should be deliberated upon and
reasoned out, he very modestly did not dare to endure the burden.
For he was aware that he had no knowledge of these things, and was
not ashamed to confess it. For he was not one of those loquacious
persons, many of whom I had been troubled with, who covenanted to
teach me these things, and said nothing; but this man possessed a
heart, which, though not right towards Thee, yet was not altogether
false towards himself. For he was not altogether ignorant of his
own ignorance, nor would he without due consideration be inveigled
in a controversy, from which he could neither draw back nor
extricate himself fairly. And for that I was even more pleased with
him, for more beautiful is the modesty of an ingenuous mind than
the acquisition of the knowledge I desired,—and such I found him
to be in all the more abstruse and subtle questions.
13. My eagerness after the writings of
Manichæus having thus received a check, and despairing even more
of their other teachers,—seeing that in sundry things which
puzzled me, he, so famous amongst them, had thus turned out,—I
began to occupy myself with him in the study of that literature
which he also much affected, and which I, as Professor of Rhetoric,
was then engaged in teaching the young Carthaginian students, and
in reading with him either what he expressed a wish to hear, or I
deemed suited to his bent of mind. But all my endeavours by which I
had concluded to improve in that sect, by acquaintance with that
man, came completely to an end: not that I separated myself
altogether from them, but, as one who could find nothing better, I
determined in the meantime upon contenting myself with what I had
in any way lighted upon, unless, by chance, something more
desirable should present itself. Thus that Faustus, who had
entrapped so many to their death,—neither willing nor witting
it,—now began to loosen the snare in which I had been taken. For
Thy hands, O my God, in the hidden design of Thy Providence, did
not desert my soul; and out of the blood of my mother’s heart,
through the tears that she poured out by day and by night, was a
sacrifice offered unto Thee for me; and by marvellous ways didst
Thou deal with me.393 It was Thou, O my God, who didst
it, for the steps of a man are ordered by the Lord, and He shall
dispose his way.394 Or how can
we procure salvation but from Thy hand, remaking what it hath
made?
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