Anti-Manichean musings

As a priest, and even later, as a bishop, Augustine was eager to answer theological problems suggested by his peers. One of these problems, presented by a fellow bishop, Simplician, concerned the question of how to read apostle Paul’s ideas about the relation of Jewish law and Christian grace. Augustine’s stance is that law did not make humans sinful, as his pet peeve, the Manicheans, had stated, but that law made us only aware of our sinful nature. While the humans could certainly will to do good, as prescribed by the law, the original sin prevented them from actually doing it. It is only divine grace, Augustine states, that enables good actions for human beings.

Augustine went even further, because even the will for good, he thinks, isn’t something that we humans can choose to have. Instead, he suggests, God has to first call us and thus awaken a desire for goodness. Problem is, of course, that God appears to call only some people. Augustine considers the possibility that this would be due to God’s foreknowledge of how different individuals would answer the call: grace would then be given to everyone who truly deserves it. Ultimately, Augustine rejects this explanation, because God is expressly said to have chosen, for instance, Jacob over his slightly older twin Esau, even when they were in their mother’s womb, without any reference to their possible future actions.

God’s choice, Augustine concludes, is then just a mystery for us, but should be accepted as good, because it is made by the perfectly good being. This is just one instance of how incomprehensible for human beings Augustine considers God to be. For example, we might speak of God knowing something beforehand - indeed, they should know everything beforehand. Problem is, Augustine notes, that this is something completely different than when we know things beforehand. When we know, say, that it will rain tomorrow, we will know this thing, as it were, twice: once, when it has not yet rained, but we just predict with complete certainty it will rain, and second time, when we actually perceive it rains. In fact, Augustine adds, there’s also a third way, which is in a sense present in all knowledge, when we know things as already established, e.g. through having perceived or deduced it, and thus in a sense past. With God, on the other hand, there is no change going on, but only an eternal, ineffable present, and therefore their knowledge is of a completely different sort from ours.

Despite not being able to know what God is like, Augustine continues, we do know that God is the source of all life and wisdom and that we should therefore try to get in contact with them. Indeed, he adds, God is the ultimate goal, while all the other things are merely means to reach them. The problem is, Augustine says, that we humans have been deceived by the devil to break away from God and to turn our attention toward the material world around us, which should have been just a vehicle in our journey toward God.

The way out from this conundrum, Augustine notes, is to subjugate our bodies, which are enamoured by the worldly things, by subjugating ourselves to the will of God. By doing so, he continues, we cleanse our soul and acquire the ability to see God. In order that we can do this cleansing, according to Augustine, the very wisdom of God must have embodied itself in the form of a human being and shown how this cleansing is possible. Furthermore, the embodied wisdom has shown that human beings can also conquer death and be resurrected, Augustine insists, and we must believe that this resurrection awaits all human beings, when they are to be evaluated according to their merits.

We should then love God above anything else, even ourselves and our bodies. This does not mean, Augustine explains, that we should hate ourselves or our bodies. Indeed, in a sense no one can do so, although some people have erroneously tried to wage war against their bodies. In addition to ourselves, Augustine adds, we should also love our fellow human beings, in order that they might also have the possibility to enjoy the delight of the divine. Indeed, he notes, every person should be loved equally, although in case of actual duties, we are obligated to help especially those closest to us in our life.

If anyone can figure out themselves the need to love God and fellow human beings and all that this entails, they do not require any other guidance to a good life. Yet, most people are in need of signs given by God to tell them what to do with their life. These signs are not natural signs, Augustine explains, like smoke is a sign of fire and smile a sign of happiness. Instead, God has used the conventional signs created by humans, that is, words of different languages and writing, which is meant to stabilise what is said by words.

Augustine is, of course, speaking of the Bible. He notes that in order to truly understand what is said in the Bible, one should try to learn some Greek and Hebrew, which were the original languages used in the Bible, because various translations contradict one another and looking at the original might suggest the correct reading of a certain passage. Then again, Augustine concedes, the variety of different translations might also be a blessing, because different translations have found different aspects of the same truth.

Although knowing languages is essential to understanding the Bible, this is not enough, Augustine notes. Indeed, one should make use of even non-Christian writings, if they can shed light on some biblical passages. Of course, Augustine warns, not all non-Christian writings are to be trusted. For instance, astrology he considers to be at best a worthless study, since people who have been born close together in time and place and who should then have identical lives according to the astrological charts usually live quite different lives. Even when astrologers or fortune tellers do seem to know the future, this is just due to evil demons revealing their information on the future events, in order to lure careless people, Augustine insists.

Otherwise, secular knowledge is often not dangerous, Augustine encourages us, and sometimes it is even necessary to know for the purposes of earthly life. Some learning of history, natural sciences and even mechanics might be even of use in reading the Bible, because the scriptures often refer to such details.

Augustine is particularly adamant of the importance of learning logic, rhetorics and mathematics, since they consist of supersensible truths not made by humans, but only discovered by them. Of course, he admits, they can be used for wrong purposes, since e.g. logic can be used in drawing false conclusions, if one just supplies false premisses. Furthermore, at least in the case of mathematics Augustine thinks that one could simply write down all the properties of numbers that are useful in order to understand what the Bible has to say. In case of logic this is not the case, he adds, since logic is interwoven with the whole of the Bible.

Even with all this external knowledge, interpreting the Bible requires effort, Augustine explains. Books of the Bible were originally written without any punctuation, so the reader must decide from the context or from comparison with the articles of faith what the correct reading must be. In some places even these cannot help and the decision must be made arbitrarily.

Augustine also notes that all of the Bible is not meant to be taken literally, and it requires considerable care to recognise when something is to be understood figuratively. A general rule Augustine notes that whenever some passage appears to say something against the articles of faith or against morality. Hence, for instance, although the Bible seems to speak for cannibalism in asking us to eat the flesh of Jesus, it actually is speaking of the communion.

Then again, passages meant to be taken literally, Augustine warns, should not be taken figuratively. A person endeavouring to live a particularly noble life of celibacy might make this error, when they find in the Bible commands about married life, if they do not remember that people of less noble stature also have their own rules of conduct. Furthermore, especially in case of the Old Testament, Augustine says, the people had different duties than those of later days. Thus, the Jewish patriarchs were commanded to have multiple wives, not because of satisfying their sexual desires, but because they were meant to conceive a number of children. Finally, even seemingly immoral actions of the supposed good people are to be understood literally, since such passages teach us a lesson about human imperfection.

In addition to interpreting the Bible, some people have also the duty to explain it to others, Augustine says. Such a teacher of Christianity need not be an eloquent speaker, and indeed, Augustine adds, it is better for them to be wise without being good speakers, instead of being good speakers without wisdom. Still, it doesn’t hurt if they brush up on rhetoric, since even writers of the Bible could use various styles effectively. Thus, the teachers should not just teach, but do it in a manner that pleases and persuades the listeners.

Augustine did not just teach others to interpret and explain the Bible, but he also applied his own teachings himself. Thus, we see him expounding all the hundred and fifty psalms. He sees many of these songs as predictions about Christ and also about his figurative body or church: for instance, tribulations, of which the makers of some psalms sing, tell of the passion of Christ and of the persecution of the church.

In addition to explaining the Bible, Augustine considers it important to evaluate and point out weaknesses in the ideas of opposing religious schools. A prominent example for Augustine is the Manichean religion, which he himself had earlier been intrigued by. A major fault in Manichaeism, as Augustine sees it, is that it regards God in very material terms, as a region of light distinct from, but connected to a similarly material region of darkness. Surely our soul already must be immaterial, he insists, because it can feel at the same time sensations from different parts of the body and it can even contain in itself a vast number of images and thoughts describing various entities – shouldn’t God as more perfect be even more certainly immaterial?

Although critical of Manichaeism, Augustine still understands people interested in it, since Augustine himself had been one of them. Indeed, he is eager to present his own life as an example of the errors a human being could fall to – and of the way God could still redeem a fallen person. He starts from the very beginning – the mystery of where any human being has come from, even before coming out of a womb – without any other answer but that all of us are created by God. From the first moment of life, Augustine says, like all babies, he was nourished by God, through the means of breast milk. Yet, even at this seemingly innocent age, Augustine thinks, he, like all small children, was guided by selfish desires and used things like crying to manipulate his elders to do his bidding.

Gradually, Augustine had transformed from an infant to a boy and learned to speak by imitating the sounds of people surrounding him, because he wished to have more certain ways to manipulate others. Having thus grown, Augustine was put to school to learn reading and writing, but he was still more interested in his own desires, like his wish to play ball, and was thus beaten regularly for failing to learn. Augustine’s attitude toward these punishments is ambiguous, because he sees that they rarely help anyone to learn anything, but admits he was still deserving of such punishments because of his selfishness. Indeed, he even suggests that God used these beatings as means to keep his selfish desires in check.

While not really inspired by basic reading and writing practice, young Augustine was enthusiastic about classic Latin literature, such as Virgil’s Aeneas. Mature Augustine considers this another of his failings, because although he did learn intricate vocabulary from these works, they led his curiosity to polytheistic mythology, where immoral deeds of pagan gods lured humans to follow their examples. Augustinus ridicules his former teachers who were more vigilant of his grammatical mistakes than of his moral upbringing.

With the coming of the teenage years arrived also sexual desire, which the mature Augustine considers as just one more distracting obstacle on his way to the true purpose of life. A further ingredient encouraging young Augustine to delve into these desires had been the example of his peers, whom he had wished to impress by doing things considered improper by the adults. Mature Augustine tells us that he had become so enamoured with the very idea of acting against norms that with his friend he stole, without any reason, all the fruits of someone else’s pear tree and then merely wasted most of them.

During his days of study in Carthage, Augustine was enamoured by tragic plays, but in his later years he regards this infatuation as a perverted love of the artificial feeling of pity, causing a desire to see more imitations of such acts of horror. Equally perverted he considers his very study of rhetoric, which consisted of disputations, where the main motivation was to ridicule the opponent. As a sort of salvation from these engagements he thinks was acquaintance with Cicero’s philosophy, which showed Augustine that there was something higher to strive for, that is, wisdom.

Augustine’s first instinct was to look for wisdom in the Bible, since he had learned of Christianity from her mother. Yet, he was at first not impressed with it, being more used to the eloquence of classic Latin writers. Instead, he decided to look for wisdom with the Manicheans. Young Augustine was especially impressed by their criticism of the Christians, for instance, when they noted down immoralities the supposed Biblical heroes had done. The old Augustine explains away these difficulties by suggesting that these acts were not immoral in those earlier circumstances of the world and points out that Manicheism has its share of ridiculous, such as the notion that a holy man can release angels entangled in the material world by eating food with imprisoned angels.

Augustine admits he wasn’t completely depraved, but even in the affairs he later regrets there was still a glimmer of hope for what he as old considers better life: he taught rhetorics with its skills to deceive people, but only to decent students, he pursued a sexual relationship without any intention of reproduction, but at least only with one person, and he was enamoured by false religion, but at least detested the sacrificial rites of the traditional polytheists. He was also open to criticism denouncing astrologers, although he was still unsure whether there might still be some truth in their predictions.

An important personal detail in young Augustine’s life was the death of a lifelong friend, who had followed him in turning to Manicheism, but just before dying had turned to Christianity. At the time, this tragic event caused sorrow and depression in Augustine, but now he takes it as a reminder that nothing earthly is permanent and that one should love human beings only insofar as they are supported by the divine power. Yet, when he was a Manicheian, he did not even have a proper understanding of what God was like, he says, because he thought of God as a material thing that could be described in terms of Aristotelian categories.

Slowly, young Augustine had come to understand that the writings of Mani, the instigator of Manicheism, contained many details contradicting astronomy, which raised a doubt whether they could then know anything about more intricate topics, like God. For a while, Augustine was even convinced that Academic scepticism, with its denial that anything could be known, was the only viable position for humans to take. Still, while holding a position of teacher of rhetorics in Milan, becoming acquainted with Ambrose had a great impact on Augustine, especially as Ambrose showed how to read the seemingly unacceptable passages of the Bible allegorically. This finally led Augustine to ask for more teaching about Christianity.

During this time, Augustine gathered around him a group of like-minded friends, keen on learning Catholic wisdom. The friends even pondered for a while whether to found a monastic community among themselves, but many of them, Augustine included, thought that they could not completely abandon relations to the other gender. Augustine himself at this point admired the celibacy of people like Ambrose, but couldn’t himself imagine living without any sexual relations. To make these relations at least respectable, he abandoned a long-time love interest and asked her mother to set up a marriage with a more respectable woman.

Yet, the most momentous upheaval, according to Augustine himself, was the contact with Platonic writings, where he learned, on the one hand, that many teaching of Christianity could be found in these writings, but on the other hand, that these philosophers were still not aware of everything that was to be found in the sacred writings. Reading the Platonists, Augustine became convinced that God was not a material being, like Manicheans had explained, but the immaterial source of all truth and existence and goodness, and because everything else was dependent for its existence on God, everything was also good, although bound to perish, if not sustained by God. Reading the Bible, he found out that this source of all existence could be reached by humans only through divine Logos, who had taken a human shape in order to reach us.

Although his theoretical understanding of God had changed from his Manichean times, Augustine still felt to be practically tied to the sexual desires of his body. Hearing tales of Christian ascetics, he had started to regret his decision to marry and dreamed of being able to live a monastic life, dedicated to nothing else but God. Yet, as he reminisces in his elder years, his will was in conflict, being controlled by two different inclinations. Then happened something Augustine considers a divine intervention: he was in a garden, when he heard a child singing of opening the book, and thinking this to be a sign, he read the first passage he would see in the Bible, and this passage commanded the reader to leave the fleshly delights and dedicate their life to Christ.

Augustine ends his recollection shortly after this point, merely adding the tale of the death of his mother. Yet, he continues his confession, because he wants to inspire his fellow Christians where to seek for God, even if the divine still remains beyond us in this life. He instructs us to turn our gaze away from the world around us, which, though full of beauty, is still just created. Even our own body with all its powers of living and sensing, Augustine thinks, should be ignored, since they are something shared by mere animals.

Indeed, Augustine leads us even above our capacity of memory, which he has just used in his memoirs and which has the ability to retain numerous events, impressions, ideas and skills in its recesses: even birds have memories, since they can return to the place where they have lived. Much higher than memory is the bliss we receive when we come in touch with God, Augustine says. Yet, he faces a problem here: how can we even search for this bliss, if we don’t remember it. Augustine suggests that we must have some inkling what this bliss will be like, since everyone desires it at least unconsciously. Thus, he concludes, God must lie somewhere in our memory, ready to open to us, whenever we are ready.

To come in contact with God, Augustine says, we must follow the divine instructions. For instance, we should abstain from the pleasures of the flesh, whether they pertain to sex, food and drink, music or beautiful shapes, Augustine thinks, because all of these keep us away from our true selves. Even curiosity, he emphasises, is something that can distract us from our real good, when even such frivolities as spiders in their webs can hold our attention. These and other advice on how to conduct oneself the divine shares with us through their mediator or wisdom, Augustine states.

Following the Bible, which Augustine considers to contain the divine instructions, he reads that God created the universe, which he takes to be obviously true, because the mutability of worldly things suggests they must have been made by something stabler and more permanent. The question is how God made them, and again following the Bible, Augustine concludes that it is this forementioned mediator or divine wisdom that did this in the beginning. This means, Augustine explains, that before this act of creation there simply wasn’t any time, which was created at the same time as the temporal world, since God and divine wisdom exist non-temporally. Time, on the other hand, is something intrinsic to the human mind, which measures its course by first anticipating what is to come, then perceiving what it anticipated as happening (or not happening, whatever the case) and then retaining a trace of what it perceived to happen in its memory. By contrast, God is instantly aware of everything that has and will happen in the created world, without experiencing worldly events as moving from future through present to past.

According to the Bible, in the beginning God made heaven and earth, and Augustine suggests that heaven refers here to the immaterial world of angelic beings, while the earth – also called abyss and waters – refers to unformed matter, which God then later fashioned into the visible universe. Augustine admits that there are other equally plausible readings, such as that heaven and earth simply refer to the different parts of the material universe. Indeed, he is ready to admit that both interpretations – and even any interpretation that accords with facts – was intended by the writer of these words, since God could use one text to serve many means.

Indeed, Augustine goes through the whole story of creation suggesting an allegorical reading where the different days of the creation refer to various stages in the redemption of humans. Thus, he says, God sends the spirit as a light to enlighten our moral darkness, they set up the scripture as a firmament reflecting the angelic to the earthly world, they gather the worldly worries like water into an ocean, setting a limit to these anxieties and thus letting the dry earth of the soul bring forth fruits of good work, they set up truth and all individual pieces of knowledge as lights to enlighten the humans, they let the water of baptism bring forth life, and finally, they make from the purified earth of the soul a newly born human being, fit again for ruling the material universe. After that, Augustine notes, begins the everlasting rest of the future world.

Augustine’s reading of the story of creation can be seen as a part of his project to defend the worth of Bible against Manicheans, who wanted to pick from it only parts they liked, such as certain pieces of the gospels, ignoring things like the genealogies, which suggested doctrines they disliked, such as the material nature of the body of Jesus and its deriving from material human beings. Augustine is ready to defend these parts of the Bible by explaining away seeming contradictions in these texts: the Bible appoints two different fathers to Joseph, husband of Mary, Augustine explains, because he had both a biological and an adopted father. He is also quick to point out passages of gospels where Jesus identifies himself as a child of a human being, to show that genealogies were not the only place in the New Testament where the human connection of Jesus was suggested.

Augustine defends the possibility of the birth of Jesus against Manicheans and determines as its reason the wish to show the worth of humans and especially of females, who have had a chance to carry the divinity within them. Yet, Augustine adds, the birth is certainly something Jesus as divinity had no need to do. Furthermore, Augustine insists, Jesus cannot have died in the sense of complete destruction, because this is something impossible for a divinity. Then again, Augustine explains, Jesus could die in the sense that his body stopped living.

Most importantly, Augustine wants to defend the inclusion of the Old Testament in the Bible against the Manicheans. His main line of defence is to emphasise the symbolism of such customs as Sabbath, circumcision and sacrifices. Thus, although these customs need not be followed by Christians, they should still be read about, in order to understand what they foretold. In addition, the moral precepts of the Old Testament, like the Ten Commandments, should still apply to Christians. The tales of the great figures of the Old Testament should bolster these moral teachings, either by giving examples to follow or then by showing that even the best of humans are wont to fall prey to the sin (some of the ways in which Augustine reads these tales will definitely raise some eyebrows today, for instance, when he applauds the biblical patriarchs for having intercourse with several women only for the sake of procreation or declares Hebrew wars with the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan justified because done by the command of God). The Old Testament, says Augustus, works then as a sort of a soil on which the New Testament grows.

Augustine also relies on the tradition of finding prophecies for the events of the New Testament in the Old Testament – admittedly, usually in a somewhat convoluted manner. No comparable prophecies are to be found in religious writings of other nations, Augustine thinks, suggesting this as a further reason to accept Old with the New Testament. Furthermore, he finds in the Bible predictions that appear to describe and warn about Manichean practices, casting doubt on their claim to be the true followers of Christ.

Augustine relies heavily on the claim in gospels that Christ did not reject the Jewish law, but fulfilled it. Manicheans were forced to explain this passage away, for instance, by suggesting it referred to the natural law and not the specific instructions of the Old Testament. Augustine can then point out, again, to the symbolic reading of the precepts of the Mosaic law, but also to certain passages in the Old Testament that bear similarities with the ethical teachings of the New Testament.

Against Manicheans, Augustine upholds that everything is created by God and thus good in the sense that it has measure, shape and order. This still does not mean that goods couldn’t be arranged in order, Augustine explains, so that e.g. an irrational animal can still be a good entity, although not as good as a rational human being. Even mere matter is good, he says, because it can be shaped in various good forms.

Furthermore, Augustine dislikes the Manichean notion of evil existing independently of God. If it existed independently, he emphasises, it would have something positive in itself, namely, this independent existence. Indeed, Augustine points out, the physical nature the Manicheans consider to be wholly evil has many positive things about it, just like ferocious beasts are also healthy. Indeed, he insists, evil is more like corruption of original created goodness, made possible by God creating things out of nothing – if things tend too far away from divinity, they begin to be corrupted. Thus, even a corrupted thing is good in some fashion, because completely without measure, shape and order it could not exist at all. Furthermore, a corrupted thing might even be better than an uncorrupted thing, if the former still has more measure, shape and order than the latter.

This corruption lies in the nature of things other than God, since they are only made by and not made out of God, but indeed, made out of nothing and thus have a tendency to return to nothing. Furthermore, Augustine adds, a corruption of material things even works for the overall beauty of the world, just like the sounds must end in order to produce harmony, as this destruction shows beings of lower perfection yielding to beings of higher perfection.

Now, according to Augustine, conscious beings are protected from this corruption by God, if they just obey God’s commands. If they do not do this and thus sin, God removes this protection as a punishment and lets the inevitable corruption inflict the sinner. Augustine thinks this arrangement is good, because in it God shares just deserts for all actions. Furthermore, he adds, the pain felt by the conscious being as a part of this punishment is good in that it guides the conscious being toward better actions.

As for Manichean teachings, Augustine paints them as in some sense even worse than traditional polytheism. The polytheists, he says, at least admitted that behind their many gods there was a single principle, from which these gods derived, and worshipped only things that were known to exist, such as the Sun. In comparison, Manicheans, Augustine thinks, had to assume the existence of two principles – light and matter – and worship something that is merely their own fiction. Augustine explicitly ridicules as a mere fanciful story the supposedly trinitarian idea of the Manicheans that the divine light exists in three forms: as Father in a light beyond the world, as Christ in the Sun and the Moon and as Spirit in the atmosphere.

Manicheans had argued that their material principle was not to be described as god in the same sense as light was god. Augustine notes that the Manichean matter does resemble god more than philosophers’ matter, which was supposed to be completely passive and without any characteristics of its own. The Manichean objection that the material principle is purely evil and thus no god Augustine answers by pointing out that even the Manichean matter appears to have some good qualities: it cares for the well-being of its parts or material things and has made them fit enough to live and sustain themselves and it desires for the light.

On the other hand, Augustine points out, the Manichean light falls short of what god should be like, for instance, because it did not foresee the attack of the matter and even now fails to release all light from the clutches of the matter. Indeed, Augustine disparages the Manicheans for describing divinity as extended in space, like matter, when the ultimate source of everything should be immaterial and thus not spatial.

Augustine’s attacks against Manicheaism did not go unnoticed, and his former co-champions of that religion accused him of turning to the evil side due to want of fame. These opponents especially dismissed the Augustinian notion that evil was generated by a turn away from God and toward nothing: the battle against evil is a real battle against true, spiritual enemies, not against mere emptiness.

Augustine is ready to answer these accusations. He especially underlines that his theory of evil is not in contradiction with the possibility of spiritual adversaries. Yet, he says, these adversaries are not by their nature evil, but have just used their capacities badly, loving themselves more than the divinity. The battle against such adversaries is then not a battle against something evil as such, but only against misguided beings wishing to guide others to imitate their own depravity, either because of envy or because of false understanding of what is good.