To the lord deservedly honorable and praiseworthy and to be revered above all, Augustine, from Secundinus.

1. I have, and I give, thanks to the ineffable and most sacred Majesty, and to his firstborn, the king of all lights, Jesus Christ; I have thanks, and as a suppliant I render them, to the Holy Spirit, because they have given and provided the occasion on which I might safely greet your excellent Holiness, lord deservedly praiseworthy and to be revered above all. And no wonder, for they are most fit to bestow all good things and to ward off all evils, and they defend your good will with their bulwarks and snatch it away from that evil which is not nothing, nor is begotten by the doing and the suffering of mortals, but which stands ready to come. And woe to him who offers himself to it as an occasion.

For you are worthy to obtain such gifts from them, and they are made the nurturers of your truth—truly a lamp, which the right hand of truth has set upon the lampstand of your heart, lest at the coming of a thief (See Matt 6:19-22) the inheritance of your treasure be squandered; and they may command that house to stand without falling, which you have set not upon the sand of error but upon the rock of knowledge (See Matt 7:24-28); and may they drive away from us that savage spirit which casts fear and faithlessness upon men, so as to turn souls aside from the narrow path (See Matt 7:13-14) of the Savior—whose whole assault is poured out through those princes against whom the Apostle confesses, in the Letter to the Ephesians, that he has entered into combat.

For he says that his combat is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and the powers, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness, which are in the heavens (Eph 6:12). And rightly so; for who would take up arms against weapons, and not against the armed man, against the one who is moved to act? For just as the bodies of men are the weapons of sin, so the precepts of salvation are the weapons of justice (See Rom 6:13). This Paul attests, this Manichaeus himself attests.

2. It is not, then, a battle of weapons, but of spirits, who make use of those weapons. And they do battle for the sake of souls. In the midst of them is placed the soul, to which from the beginning its own nature gave the victory. If the soul acts together with the spirit of the virtues, it will have everlasting life with it and will possess that kingdom to which our Lord invites us; but if it begins to be drawn by the spirit of the vices, and consents, and after consenting does penance, it will have a fountain of pardon for these defilements. For it is led by the commingling of the flesh, not by its own will. But if, after it has come to know itself, it consents to evil and does not arm itself against the enemy, then it has sinned by its own will.

And if it is ashamed again of having erred, it will find ready the author of mercies. For it is punished not because it sinned, but because it did not grieve over its sin. But if it departs along with that same sin, without pardon, then it will be shut out, then it will be likened to the foolish virgin (See Matt 25:1-4), then it will be an heir of the left hand, then it will be driven by the Lord from the wedding feast (See Matt 22:1-15) on account of its black garments, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (See Matt 22:13-14; 25:31), and it will go with the devil to the fire (See Matt 25:41) of its own origin—a devil whom your remarkable prudence reports to have been made out of an archangel, or else admits to be nothing. Why, then, will the just reign? Why will the apostles and martyrs be crowned? All of it for this reason, that they conquered nothing? Oh, how much the power of the conqueror is brought to nothing, when the adversary is proclaimed to be of no strength at all! Change your view, I beg you, lay aside the faithlessness of the Punic race, and turn your withdrawal—made out of fear—back to the truth; do not excuse yourself with these lies.

3. For my own slight and ordinary talent, the talent of a Roman, has read a good deal of the writings of your reverend Worship, in which you are angry at the truth as Hortensius was at philosophy. And so, when with suspended mind and quick eye I had gone over them again and again, I found everywhere a consummate orator and almost a god of the whole of eloquence, but nowhere did I find a Christian: armed indeed against everything, yet affirming nothing—whereas you ought to have shown yourself skilled rather in knowledge than in speech. This indeed I cannot keep silent from your most patient Holiness: for it seemed to me, and most certainly it is so, that you never were a Manichean, and that you were never able to come to know the hidden things of its unknown secret, and that under the name of Manichaeus you are persecuting a Hannibal and a Mithridates. For I confess that the marbles of the house of the Anicii do not gleam with such care and such labor as your writings shine with eloquence. Had you been willing to bring this into accord with the truth, it would surely have stood as a great ornament for us. Do not, I beg, go against your own nature; do not be the lance of error, by which the side of the Savior is pierced.

For you see that he is crucified both in the whole world and in every soul, which soul never had a nature given to anger. And you, therefore, who are from that very soul, give up, I beg, these now empty accusations, leave aside these superfluous controversies. For so long a time, set in the midst of the darkness with your parent, you never mocked; in the midst of the sun and the moon you have been found an accuser. Who, then, will be your advocate before the just tribunal of the Judge, when you will begin to be convicted, by your own testimony, both of word and of deed? The Persian whom you have accused will not be there. This case apart, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Carthaginian? Or has it been amended in the Gospel, that the broad way does not lead down to destruction (See Matt 7:13)? Or is it false in Paul, that each will have to render an account of his own works (See Rom 14:12)?

Oh, that in withdrawing from Manichaeus you had sought the Academy, or had set yourself to expound the wars of the Romans, who conquered all things: how great, how excellent the things you would have found there! And then, a man wholly chaste in his modesty and his poverty, you would not have gone over to the nations of the Jews, barbarous in their morals—since you weave fables into your precepts, and bring forward, Take a wife of harlotry; and, You will beget children of a harlot; and, The land has committed great harlotry, departing from the Lord (Hos 1:2); and, You shall not wash your hands after intercourse with your wife; and, Put your hand under my thigh (Gen 24:2; 47:29); and, Kill and eat (Acts 10:13); and, Increase and multiply (Gen 1:28).

Or did the lions in the den please you (See Dan 6:16), because there were no cages? Or did the barrenness of Sarah grieve you, whose husband, the betrayer of her modesty, had stood forth pretending she was his sister (See Gen 12:13; 20:2)? But perhaps, after the contest of Dares and Entellus Virgil, Aeneid 5.362-484, you had wished to wait for the all-out wrestling match of Jacob himself (See Gen 32:24-25)? Or had you resolved to behold the multitude of the Amorites (See Josh 10:5), or the medley of beasts in Noah's ark (See Gen 7)? I know that you always held these things in hatred; I know that you always loved great things—things that would forsake the earth, that would seek the heavens, that would mortify bodies, that would give life to souls. Who, then, is the one who has so suddenly changed you?

4. And yet to say these things to your Holiness is quite absurd. For you yourself are not unaware how very evil he is, and how malign, and how with such cunning he makes war against the faithful and against the greatest of men, so that he compelled even Peter to deny the Lord three times in a single night, and did not permit Thomas to believe the same Lord when he had risen—wounds that nonetheless were healed by the medicine of pardon. But consider how boldly he contrived, when the Lord was sowing the best seed, to mingle in his weeds, and to snatch away the Iscariot from so great a shepherd; and, that it might come at last to the punishment of the cross, he inflamed the scribes and Pharisees to the Lord's destruction, so that they cried out for Barabbas to be released and Jesus to be crucified. We escaped, therefore, because we have followed the spiritual Savior. For his boldness broke out so far that, had our Lord been a creature of flesh, all our hope would have been cut off. And yet not even by the very reproach of the cross could he be satisfied; rather, raging, he forced him on the one hand to be crowned with thorns, on the other to be given vinegar to drink; here to be struck by a soldier's lance, there to be blasphemed by the mouth of the thief on the left (See Matt 26:27; Luke 22-23; John 18-20).

But afterward his iniquity grew so great that, when the Lord himself and his apostles had ascended on high, he framed various questions and, what is worse, divided up under their name the dignity of the catholic title among all the superstitious. For I pass over how he armed each one of the disciples against the masters, how he deceived Hymenaeus, how Alexander (See 1 Tim 1:20), what he did at Antioch, at Smyrna, at Iconium; I add now only the things that the present multitude is busy about—a multitude from which virtue is as far off as it is closed to the crowd. For virtue is not something the crowd attains, and a crowd especially of women. But I am afraid to make their secret doings public, lest crimes begun by others be doubled. And yet it is the part of the wise both to bear with each and to laugh at each, and to strive only after that which procures blessedness, which brings life to birth.

5. And yet, again and again, as a suppliant I beg, I pray, and yet again I beseech you—first of all, that you would deign to grant pardon if your golden breast has been stung by any word of mine; for I have done this out of too great an ardor, because I do not want you to be torn away from our flock, from which I myself, straying, very nearly perished, had I not quickly removed myself from the wicked nature of their communion. And next, that you would reconcile yourself to her against whom you have committed no offense; that you would return to her who, if you return, will not be angry at you on account of your fault. For she knows how to forgive not seven times only; rather, she has the power both to bind and to loose.

Do not pretend to flatter, you who long ago saw the truth; do not wish to learn, you who are able to teach. Let go the glory of men, if you wish to please Christ. In our times renew Paul, who, though he was a teacher of the Jewish law, having obtained from the Lord the grace of apostleship, counted the things he had thought advantages as dung, that he might gain Christ (See Phil 3:8). Come to the aid of your own soul, so full of light, for you do not know at what hour the thief will come. Do not adorn the dead, for you are the adornment of the living. Do not be a companion of the broad road, for it awaits the Amorite; but hasten to the narrow way, that you may obtain eternal life. Cease, I beg, to shut Christ up in a womb, lest you yourself be shut up again in a womb. Cease to make two natures into one, for the judgment of the Lord draws near. Woe to those who will receive it, who turn what is sweet into bitterness.

6. But if you are in doubt about the beginning, if you waver about the origin of the battle, an account can be rendered in a daytime discussion and a peaceful conversation. Yet this I make known to your most sagacious goodness, that there are certain matters which cannot be set forth in such a way that they are understood; for the divine reason exceeds the breasts of mortals—as, for instance, this very point: how there are two natures, or why he fought who could suffer nothing; and likewise concerning the new age, which the same man records, that it is to be built up once the very great upheavals of that earth have been cut short. But who would admit that there is any cutting short among divine things—unless, that is, you make it a figure on the part of one who interprets to a hearer, since the words are cut short by the one and composed in the other?

And although the expounder may have said many things which the hearer retains within himself, yet they have not departed from the expounder—unless you think in such a way both about that age, and that what is said is foolish enough and inept.

So too concerning the battle: unless you first conjecture that God is wholly justice, and that to invade what belongs to another is the ultimate crime; but when the contrary nature came against this, he indeed could suffer nothing, because he had foreknowledge, yet he would have seemed to have consented to the crime had he not fought.

And therefore he set a great strength against the one who came, so that his justice might be defiled by no consenting to sacrilege. For he was so defined by it as just, that he neither ever sins himself, nor ever consents to one who sins. This too: that God in his own kingdom was mighty in nature, as almighty and as judge.

These things, indeed, have been said in this way not as he came to be, but as I was not able to attain to it: as yet they do not satisfy faithlessness, nor has the sun risen for the blind, nor has the voice been heard by the deaf, nor have the banquets been prepared for the dead. But that places cannot be assigned to natures—this is what the human condition calls unutterable and ineffable. The Savior, however, for whom all things are easy, calls these two the right and the left, the within and the without: Come and Depart (Matt 25). But you turn it about and set your foot down, as it is: World, life, salvation, light, law, order, power; if you say a vowel and a mute, you call long what is short—things which by nature do not sound this way, yet for certain they signify two things, and things separated from one another.

7. But when such things are set forth by me to your admirable and lofty prudence, it is as if the Jordan should lend water to the Ocean, or a lamp light to the sun, or the people holiness to the bishop. For this reason one must bear with whatever this letter contains. For I too, had I not known your divine patience, which readily pardons anyone, would never have written in such a way—though you may see that I have touched the most excellent thoughts only in summary, and have taken great care not to seem long-winded to you. Therefore let these things find acceptance with your Holiness, and how we are to be saved; otherwise you will be able to generate thousands of volumes from this, lord deservedly praiseworthy and to be revered above all. Farewell.

1. The good will toward me that appears in your letter is welcome to me; but as much as you, who love me, ought to be loved in return by me, so much am I saddened that you have clung tenaciously to false suspicions, partly against me, partly against the very truth that cannot be changed. But that you think what is not true about my mind, I readily disregard; for what you think is something that, even if I do not recognize it in myself, can nonetheless exist in a human being. Therefore, even if you err about me, you do not err in such a way that your opinion removes me from the number of human beings; for what you believe about me is something that can exist in the human mind, even if it has not come to be in my mind. There is no need, then, for me to try very hard to remove this suspicion from you. For your hope does not depend on me, nor will you be unable to be good unless I have been good. Think of Augustine whatever you please; let only my conscience not accuse me in the eyes of God. For the Apostle says: To me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, or by any human day (1 Cor 4:3).

But I will not repay you in kind, so as to dare to form some judgment in a bad sense about your mind, which I am not able to look into. Nor do I say that you wished to wound me by guile; rather, I think of you only so much as you indicate of yourself by your words. And so, even though you have suspected things about me that are not good—that I left the heresy of the Manicheans out of a carnal fear of some harm that could come to me from your society, or out of a desire for the honor I have attained in the Catholic Church—nonetheless, not thinking ill of you in return, I believe your suspicion to be well meant; and I judge that you wrote this not for the sake of accusing but out of zeal for correcting. But if you would grant me the good will of belief, since you charge me with hidden things of my mind, which I certainly cannot bring forth and display before your eyes, you would readily change your view about that very mind, and would no longer rashly affirm what you do not know.

2. For I confess that I deserted the Manicheans out of fear, but out of fear of those words which were uttered through the apostle Paul: The Spirit, he says, expressly says that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceitful spirits and to doctrines of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars, who have their conscience seared, who forbid marriage and command abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving (1 Tim 4:1-4). By these words he described, briefly and openly, perhaps other heretics as well, but the Manicheans above all. With this fear, then, while I was still of a boyish understanding, I tore myself away from that society; I confess too that I burned with love of honor, that I might depart from it—but the honor of which the same Apostle speaks: But glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good (Rom 2:10).

But who will try to do good, if he thinks that evil lies not in a changeable will but in an unchangeable nature? Hence the Lord himself says to those who thought they spoke good things while they were evil: Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad (Matt 12:33). But to the evil who have now been changed into the good the Apostle says: For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord (Eph 5:8). But if you are unwilling to believe me about my own mind, judge as you please; only take care what you think about the truth itself. Let no temptation lay hold of you but such as is human (See 1 Cor 10:13). For it is a human error to believe that there has come to be in my mind something that could come to be, even if it has not come to be:

but when you suppose that a sacrilegious little Persian fable—not only utterly false but also utterly deceptive, woven together and fabricated out of the most contaminated lies, and that not about any random man but about the most high God—is the truth, this must not be passed over in such a way, nor is so great a death of the soul to be made light of. For there is something that can be dealt with between us: for it is not as with my mind, about which I can say nothing further except that you should believe me—and if you are unwilling, I do not find what to do; rather, so too, when about that very light of minds, which rational minds behold the more tranquilly the more pure they are, you suppose something false, it can be shown to you, if you listen patiently, how very far removed from the truth is what you think.

For just as I cannot perceive the seeing of your eye, nor you mine, but about this matter we can only believe or not believe one another, while the appearance that lies open to the eyes of us both we are able to show to each other in turn: so about the affections of our minds, which we have as our own, let us believe one another, if it please us; but if it does not please us, let us not believe; the reason of the truth, however, which is neither mine nor yours but set before us both for contemplation, let us together attend to with serene minds, without the fog of obstinacy.

3. Nor will I bring forward any other evidence by which the error of Manichaeus appears than what comes from your own letter. You write that you have, and give, thanks to the ineffable and most sacred Majesty, and to his firstborn, the king of all lights, Jesus Christ. Tell me, of which lights is Jesus Christ the king? Of those he made, or of those he begot? For we say that God the Father begot a Son equal to himself, but that he created through him—that is, that he founded and made an inferior creation, which surely is not what he is who made it and through whom he made it. And so, since through him he made the ages, he is rightly called by the Apostle the King of the ages (See 1 Tim 1:17), as a higher being of lower things, and powerful to rule, ruling the things that have need of ruling.

But when you call Jesus Christ the king of lights: if he begot them, why are they not equal to the one who begot them? But if you say they are equal, how is he their king, since a king must rule, and it can in no way come about that the things which are ruled are equal to the one by whom they are ruled? But if he did not beget but made these lights, I ask, out of what did he make them? If he propagated them out of himself, why then are they inferior? Why have they degenerated? But if not out of himself, tell me out of what? Or did he perhaps neither make nor beget the lights over which he reigns? Then they have an origin and a nature of their own—but assuredly a weaker one, so that from a more powerful neighbor they either suffer themselves to be ruled or desire it.

Do you not recognize that, if it is so, then—setting aside the race of darkness—there are now two natures, the one needing the help of the other, but neither depending on the other for its origin? This opinion you will surely repudiate, since it is especially opposed to Manichaeus, who tries to persuade us not of two natures, a king of lights and the lights that are ruled, but of two natures, a kingdom of lights and a kingdom of darkness. You will therefore flee back to saying that these lights are begotten; and there, when I have asked why they are weaker, you will perhaps try to maintain that they are equal. But when I have replied, What is the reason that they are ruled? you will deny that they are ruled.

Hence I will reply: Why do they have a king? And here I do not see what remains to your candor except that you should regret having placed such a door in your letter, a door through which you yourself cannot pass out. But even when you have come to regret it, and have said that Manichaeus ought not to be thought conquered for the reason that you placed something rather incautiously in your writing, I will read aloud from the books of Manichaeus, in countless places: that the kingdom of light is called by him what he establishes to be by nature contrary to the kingdom of darkness; and not "kingdom" but "kingdoms"—since in that very letter of the ruinous Foundation, when he was speaking about God the Father, he says: With nothing in his kingdoms established either as needy or as weak. But where there are kingdoms, who is so blind that he does not understand that the kings cannot at all be equal to those over whom they reign? What, then, is so close at hand, if you are willing to attend, and so suited to the honesty of your breast, as that you should not regret having placed that in your letter?

For most truly Jesus Christ is the king of lights—in no way equal to himself, but subject to him, and he is the ruler of those blessed ones. Rather, let it be your regret that you were a Manichean, all of whose deceptive contrivances the truthful front of your letter has overturned with a single battering blow. For since Christ is the king of lights, and neither begot out of himself the inferior beings of which he would be king, nor took to himself, as neighbors over which he would reign, things which he neither begot nor made—lest there be two kinds of good, neither of which is from the other; but neither one of them needing the other, which is foreign to the path of truth—it remains that those lights over which he reigns, which surely are good, since they are inferior, he did not beget; since they are his own, he did not usurp; rather, God made and founded them.

4. If you wish to ask out of what he made them, and begin to imagine the help of a matter that he himself did not make, so that he seems unable to make there what he willed unless some thing he had not made helped him, you will again suffer the inexplicable fogs of error. But by joining the prophetic sayings most fittingly to the sublime and ineffable majesty, with a sober stroke of the understanding—He himself spoke, and they were made; he himself commanded, and they were created (Ps 148:5)—so you will see how it is said in the catholic faith that God made out of nothing all things very good (See Gen 1:31).

For if he made them out of something, surely it was either out of himself or not out of himself; but if out of himself, then he did not make but beget: why then did he beget inferior things? For unless they were inferior, he could not be their king.

If not out of himself, then surely not out of something that he himself did not make; otherwise he made out of what was another's, and there was already a good thing that he himself had not made, out of which he might establish a kingdom for himself.

But if it is so, he begins not to be the Creator of good works, since there was a good thing that he himself had not created; for he would not make out of another's evil the lights over which he would reign. It remains, therefore, that if he made out of some thing, he made out of that which he himself had already made.

5. So it comes about that we confess that God made the first origins of the things to be founded out of nothing—unless, perhaps, you said that Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the ineffable and most sacred majesty not according to his assumption of the man, in which he deigned to have brothers, called by adoption, as the Apostle says and as the catholic faith believes, to whom he might be firstborn (See Rom 8:29); but rather you want him understood to be firstborn according to the very excellence of the divinity, so that those lights over which he reigns are his brothers—not made by the Father through him, but begotten by the Father after him, so that they are themselves born afterward and he is firstborn, all of them nonetheless of the Father's own and same substance.

But if you believe it so, you first contradict the Gospel, where he is also called only-begotten: And we have seen, it says, his glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the Father; which would in no way be said truly if his eternal power and divinity also—by which he is consubstantial with the Father and is before all creation—had brothers out of the same substance.

And so, since the divine words attest him to be both only-begotten and firstborn—only-begotten, because without brothers; firstborn, because with brothers—you will not find how to understand both of these things about him according to the same nature of divinity.

But the catholic faith, which distinguishes between the Creator and creation, suffers no difficulty of understanding in these two names, taking him as only-begotten according to what is written: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1); and as firstborn of all creation, according to what the Apostle says: That he himself might be the firstborn among many brothers (Col 1:18)—brothers whom the Father begot for him into a brotherly fellowship, not by equality of substance, but by the adoption of grace.

Read the Scriptures, then: nowhere will you find it said of Christ that he is the Son of God by adoption. But of us it is read very often: You have received the spirit of the adoption of sons; awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body (Rom 8:15, 23); That we might receive the adoption of sons (Gal 4:5); He predestined us unto the adoption of sons (Eph 1:5); A holy nation, a people unto adoption (1 Pet 2:9); He called you through our Gospel unto the adoption of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thess 2:12-13); and any such passages as may occur to one who recalls or reads. For it is one thing to be, through the Father's excellence, the only Son of God, and another, through merciful grace, to receive the power to become sons of God by believing in him. He gave them, it says, the power to become sons of God (John 1:12). They were not, then, sons by nature, since they received the power to become so by believing in him whom—his only Son—he did not spare, but handed him over for us all (Rom 8:32), so as to make him only-begotten with respect to himself, firstborn with respect to us.

From that, therefore, by which he is only-begotten, he was born not of flesh, not of blood, not of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God; while from that by which he was made firstborn among the brothers in the Church: The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). We too, insofar as we were by nature children of wrath (See Eph 2:3)—that is, children of vengeance—bound by the chain of mortality, although it was he who created and established us, who beyond doubt arranges and forms all things from the highest to the lowest in measure and number and weight (See Wis 11:21), nonetheless we were born of flesh and blood and of the will of the flesh; but insofar as we have received the power to become sons of God, we too are born neither of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God—not, indeed, by a nature making us equal, but by adopting grace.

6. Next, if I were now to grant that Jesus Christ is not the only Son to the Father according to the divinity of the same substance, but has brothers born after him to whom he is firstborn, how could he be their king? I ask you, would you dare to say that he was born the more powerful in being born the earlier? You would surely be ashamed to think so. But you do not think so: what, then, do you think? Soften your mind, and make yourself willing to consider the truth without obstinacy. For this too I will ask of you: how do you understand Jesus Christ to be firstborn in that divine and best and eternal substance? Whether he was begotten first in time, so that we are to understand those born later in that kingdom as the ones to whom he is firstborn—and we cannot say by how many hours or days, months or years he is the greater who arose earlier, yet we are to think these generations distinct by some interval and span of time; or whether, rather, we take him as firstborn not in time but by the very excellence of a loftier majesty—by which he merited even to be king to his brother lights—as one begotten into a certain primacy.

If you reply that he is earlier and greater than his brothers in time, so as now from this to maintain that the kingdom over the brothers was conferred on him because he preceded them in being born, and at one time he existed when they did not yet exist—what do you say, brother? Will you so hurl your heart down into this precipice of impiety as to suppose that the changeableness of time falls upon that divine and highest nature, and to believe that something exists there which did not exist before? Or because the lights had to go forth from there against the race of darkness, do you call the very goings-forth "generations," which you think were made in time, so that the war was waged in time? Then one light could not suffice, to carry through that whole business of war by divine power. Or if many were needed, is this to be thought of among spiritual beings—that we should suppose the entrance was so narrow that they could not go forth at once, so that from the fact that one of the brothers had gone forth first, he merited both to be called firstborn and to be made king over the rest?

I do not wish to pursue each point in detail, lest I be too burdensome to your vigorous talent, which can see the whole from a few things. Raise up, then, the keen edge of your mind; wipe away the mists of contention. I see plainly that neither according to places nor according to times can motions, advances, risings, settings, or any turnings come about except in a changeable creation—which nonetheless, unless it were from God the artificer and founder, the Apostle would not have said: And they worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever (Rom 1:25).

7. For in this matter two things especially are necessary, which I ask you to consider with me: one, that if creation were foreign to God, God would not be called its Creator by the Apostle; the other, that if Creator and creation were of one and the same substance, they would not be reproached because they served the creation rather than the Creator; since, whomever they had served, they would not have departed from the same nature and substance. For just as no one can serve the Son who does not also serve the Father, because the substance of both is one, so no one could serve the creation except by serving the Creator, if the substance of both were one. Hence, if you now discern and have understanding, you would attend most carefully to how great is the difference between Creator and creation; and you must understand that the offspring of the Creator is not creation: for if it were, it would not be inferior, but equal and of the same substance; and through this whoever worshiped and served it would at the same time render worship and service also to its Creator and Father. But since they are reproached by the Apostle, and held detestable, who worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, it is sufficiently shown that the substances of the one and the other are different.

For just as the Son cannot be seen—that is, understood—unless the Father too is understood in him (for he himself says: He who has seen me has seen the Father also (John 14:9)), so the Son cannot be worshiped unless the Father too is worshiped in him. And therefore, if the Son were creation, he would not be worshiped without the Creator, nor would those be condemned who worshiped the creation rather than the Creator.

And so you now see, I think, that it is not fitting for you to call Jesus Christ the firstborn of the most hidden and ineffable majesty, and the king of all lights, unless you have ceased to be a Manichean, so as to distinguish creation from the Creator;

so that Jesus Christ is both only-begotten according to that by which he is the Word of God, God with God (See John 1:1), equally unchangeable and equally eternal, not counting it robbery to be equal to God (See Phil 2:6); and firstborn of all creation according to that by which in him all things were founded, in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible. For you recognize, I suppose, the words of the Apostle to the Colossians (See Col 1:15-16).

8. Therefore, when I ask you whence the whole of creation was made—good, indeed, in its own kind, yet inferior to the Creator, and itself changeable while he remains unchangeable—you will not find what to answer, unless you confess that it was made out of nothing. And therefore it can incline toward nothing, when that creation sins, and the portion that can sin sins not so as to be nothing, but so as to flourish less and be less firm. For if you carry "to flourish less" and "to be of less strength" all the way to the utmost, there remains nothing. It loves vanity of its own accord, then, when, having forsaken the solidity of truth, it follows things merely opinable—that is, changeable things. But when it pays the deserved penalties for this, it is made subject to vanity not of its own accord, as it is made subject in a man who sins.

For hence the Apostle says: Every creation has been made subject to vanity, not of its own accord (Rom 8:20); because in man, too, the whole is present. For there is in man both something invisible according to the mind and something visible according to the body; but the whole of creation is partly visible, partly invisible—yet not the whole in a beast, in which there is no intellectual mind. He says, indeed, that it has been made subject in hope, on account of the mercy of him who frees it through the remission of sins and the adoption of grace.

But if you are unwilling to confess that creation—good, indeed, but yet unequal to the Creator and changeable—was made out of nothing by the Father through the Son in the goodness of the Holy Spirit (which Trinity, consubstantial and eternal and unchangeable, always remains), you will surely be compelled to speak sacrilegious things: that God begot something out of himself which is not equal to the one begetting it and can be made subject to vanity. Or if you say it is equal, both will be changeable. What greater impiety than to believe and say such things, and to prefer, by a perverse opinion, that God be changed for the worse, rather than, by corrected reason, that you yourself be changed for the better?

But if you are afraid to say that God is changeable—because that is truly a great and most open impiety—and so you also say that creation is unchangeable, in order to make it equal to the Creator and of one and the same substance, again your own letter will answer you. For whence is that soul which you place in the midst of the spirits, to which you say its own nature from the beginning gave the victory, and to which you set forth a law and a condition, namely that if it acts together with the spirit of the virtues, it will have everlasting life with it and will possess that kingdom to which our Lord invites us; but if it begins to be drawn by the spirit of the vices, and after consenting does penance, it will have a fountain of pardon for these defilements? When these words from your letter are recalled, you at the same time recognize that you have established the nature of the soul as changeable.

For sometimes to consent to the spirit of the vices, and again to do penance—what else is this than to be changed now for the better, now for the worse? And this the most manifest truth compelled you to say. For your own soul, if you wished to dissemble, would press you to attend to its changeableness, and—so often changed, from the time you were born, through various acts of will, through teachings, forgettings, and consentings—it would become a witness to itself, and would seek no evidence from outside.

9. Unless, perhaps, you think you are helped by saying that the soul is unchangeable, because you added, saying: For it did not sin by its own will, but by the leading of another; for it is led by the commingling of the flesh, not by its own will. In which statement perhaps you wish this to be understood: that the soul, namely, is in its own nature unchangeable, but changeable in the commingling of another nature—as though the question were why it is so, and not that it is so. By this manner of reasoning even the bodies of Hector and Ajax—indeed, of all men and animals—would be called invulnerable, if there were absent the blow and the chance by which a wound could be inflicted on them. But surely it is for this reason that the body of Achilles alone, whether by poetic fiction or by some more hidden force of things, is said to have been invulnerable: that even when the weapons rushed on, it was not penetrated; and in the part where it could be penetrated, in that part surely it was not invulnerable. So the soul, if it were unchangeable, would be changed by the mixture of no thing, just as a body that is invulnerable is wounded by the contact or onset of no thing. And so we, because we say that the Word of God is incontaminable, even with mortal and vulnerable flesh assumed—that he might teach us to make light of both death and any discomforts of the body—do not fear to believe him born of a virgin; but you, because by an impious perversity you believe the Son of God contaminable, are afraid to entrust him to flesh; yet, holding his substance to be the nature of the soul, you assert him to be so commingled with flesh that you do not even hesitate to suppose him changed for the worse.

Choose, therefore, what you will: whether to say or believe that God is changeable, so as to believe equally that out of the substance of a changeable Father a changeable offspring was begotten—how great an impiety this is, you surely perceive; or to say that God is unchangeable, but that nonetheless he begot out of his substance a changeable offspring—which no less you see how impiously and absurdly it is said; or, rather, so to confess God unchangeable that even what he begot out of his substance is equally unchanged, and is equally the highest and most excellent good, and itself supremely holds being-itself in the same manner by an inviolable permanence; while the other, inferior goods, which we call creation, he made—not out of himself, for then they would be equal, but yet, since they are good, made by him; since they are not equal, made out of nothing. And if you believe this, you will not be impious, and you will forget the Persians, and you will be ours.

10. 1. But the Apostle says: Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers (Eph 6:12)—those who, declining by an impious will toward the love of their own pride and honor, begrudge the return of pious souls. But this is the difference between your opinion and our faith: that you suppose those same princes, sprung from a certain nature of their own, which God neither begot nor made but had adjoining it by an eternal nearness, to have waged war against God, and to have brought it against him before the commingling of good and evil. A great evil, first of all, of necessity—that he was compelled to mingle his own substance, to be afflicted and disturbed, to be changed into error, and to be utterly submerged in forgetfulness of itself, so that it had need of a liberator, a corrector, an emender, an instructor. You see how foolishly and fabulously this is said, with how great a guilt of impiety it binds one.

But we are persuaded, through the Christian faith, that nothing is contrary to God who supremely is, except what altogether is not; but that whatever in any way is, has it from him who supremely is that it should in some way be, and that it should be good in its own kind; yet that some things are more, others less. And so all the good things that were made by God the founder are ordered in fixed and distributed degrees—partly by intervals and seats of place, as all corporeal things; partly by natural merits, as the soul is set before the body; partly by the merits of rewards and punishments, as the soul is either lifted up to rest or subjected to pains. And through this those princes, against whom the Apostle says we have our wrestling, are the first to suffer the punishment of their sins, that they may do harm. For no envious one, in order to injure another, is not first himself a torment to himself. But the stronger harm the weaker; for no one overcomes another except in that wherein he is more powerful: yet those unjust princes are themselves weaker at present than they would be if they remained in their pristine state and justice.

And it makes a difference whence each is stronger than another: whether in body, as horses than men; or in the nature of the soul, as the rational than the irrational;

or in the disposition of the mind, as the virtuous than the unjust; or in the order of power, as the emperor than the soldier or the provincial.

But power is believed to be given altogether by the supreme power of God—often even to worse beings over better, that is, to the unjust over those who either already hold justice or strive to attain to holding it: for it is given for this purpose, that those proved by patience may be made manifest (See 1 Cor 11:19), either to themselves for hope, or to others for imitation. Knowing, says the Apostle, that tribulation works patience, and patience proof, and proof hope (Rom 5:3-4).

Of which kind of contest it is when a faithful man wrestles against the principalities and powers of the prevaricating angels, and against the spiritual hosts of wickedness; when they receive the power of tempting, and he the precepts of enduring: from which it comes about that in the inferior thing they overcome, in the more powerful they are overcome; they generally overcome the weaker body, and are overcome by the firmer mind. For against their force one fights with patience, against their snares with prudence, so that they neither bend us to a ruinous consent by compelling, nor deceive us by tricking. Since it is truly the virtue and wisdom of God through whom all things were made, therefore in these things that were made, when higher things decline toward lower—where every sin is, and everything called evil—force imitates virtue, and deceit imitates wisdom; but when the things that had declined run back and return, magnanimity imitates virtue, and teaching imitates wisdom.

Even God the Father himself sinners imitate by impious pride, the just by pious liberality. The Holy Spirit, finally, the cupidity of the wicked imitates, the love of the upright imitates—yet both depart from the imitation of God, by whom and through whom and in whom the natures themselves were made; but the one departs in a vicious way, the other in a praiseworthy way. Nor is it any wonder if, when those who are advancing and those who are failing clash, the imitation of those failing is overcome by the imitation of those advancing: for the former are cast down by elation, the latter rise up by humility.

10. 2. But if it troubles you why those stronger in mind are weaker in body, it is no wonder that, freed by the remission of sins, they are exercised by the mortality of the body, by whose immortality they will be crowned. For punishment is not easily avoided, unless the one who is released from it has conquered by his merits. Hence the Apostle: But if Christ is in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of justice. But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you (Rom 8:10-11).

The mind, therefore, bearing flesh that is mortal because of the punishment of sin, if changed for the better, will not have lived according to mortal flesh, and changes the flesh too for the better, and will merit to have an immortal body—but this at the end, when death, the last enemy, will be destroyed, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption: not by that fabulous globe of yours, but by that change of which he says: We shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed. For when he had expressed it, saying: And the dead shall rise incorrupt, and we shall be changed, then, weaving on, he added, showing what kind of change he meant, and said: For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. For he was treating the question about the body of those who rise, which he had put thus: But someone will say: How do the dead rise? and with what body do they come? (1 Cor 15:26, 51-53, 35)

Read, therefore, that whole passage, intent with pious care, not disturbed by stubborn contention, and—with your talent and God's help, with no expositor needed—you will find nothing other than what I say: and then call your mind back to what we had set out to treat, and see now, if you can, that I do not say this, that the just fight against nothing, but against those substances which failed by not standing in the truth.

11. But to fail is not already to be nothing, but to tend toward nothing. For when the things that are more decline toward the things that are less, it is not those toward which they decline but those that decline that fail, and they begin to be less than they were—not, indeed, so as to be the things toward which they have declined, but, for their own kind, less. For when the mind declines toward the body, it is not made body; yet by a failing appetite it in a certain way becomes bodily: so too a certain angelic sublimity, when it was more delighted by its own lordship over itself, inclined its affection toward what is less, and began to be less than it was, and, in its degree, tended toward nothing. For the less each thing is, the nearer it is to nothing. But when these failings come about voluntarily, they are rightly reproached, and are named sins. But when there follow upon these voluntary failings discomforts, troubles, pains, adversities—all of which we suffer against our will—surely the sins are rightly either punished by chastisements or washed away by exercises.

If you are willing to look upon these things with a serene mind, you will surely cease to accuse natures and to call substances themselves into the charge. But if you desire something more copious and more fully unfolded on this matter, read our three books that are entitled On Free Will, which you will be able to find in Campania, at Nola, with Paulinus, that noble servant of God.

12. But now I ought to remember that I am answering your letter, even if with a much longer letter. For this is why I did not keep silent on other matters, lest I be compelled to say the same things everywhere. But I had promised to persuade you, out of your own letter, how false are the things you have believed, and how true is the assertion of the catholic faith. For surely the whole difference between us is this, that you say a certain substance is evil; but we say that evil is not a substance, but an inclination from what is more toward what is less.

Hear, then, this very thing. For you set down in your letter, and say of the soul, that it is led to sin by the commingling of the flesh, not by its own will; and there at once—because, I believe, you saw that, if it is so, help would have to come from almighty God to absolutely every soul, and no soul at all ought to be condemned, since it would not sin by its will, and once that was established, the view would be overturned which Manichaeus terribly sounds forth about the punishments of souls, even of those coming from the portion of light—most vigilantly you added, saying: But if, after it has come to know itself, it consents to evil and does not arm itself against the enemy, it has sinned by its own will. It is well, indeed, that you at last confess that it can come about that the soul sins by its own will: but to what evil, pray, does it sin by its own will if it consents? Surely to that which you say is a substance.

But I now see three things; you too, I think, see them with me. For the soul consenting to evil, and the evil itself to which it consents, are two things; and the third is the consent itself: for you do not say that this too is a soul, but that it is of the soul. Of these three, then—behold, the soul is a substance; that evil too, to which the soul, by consenting, voluntarily sins, is, in your opinion, a substance: I ask, therefore, what the consent itself is, whether you say it is a substance, or is in a substance. For if you say it is a substance, you will now suppose not two substances, but three. Or is it two for this reason, that the soul's consent, by which it consents to evil, is of the same substance as the soul itself? Then I now ask whether that consent is evil or good. If it is good, then surely the soul does not sin when it consents to evil. But not only does the truth cry out, but you yourself write, that it then sins by its will. The consent, then, is evil, and through this also the soul's substance—if it is both the soul's substance and both are one substance. Do you see to what you have been forced—to declare the soul and that evil to be no longer one good substance and the other evil, but two evil substances?

Here perhaps you will try to assign the culpable consent not to the soul that consents to evil, but to the evil itself to which it consents, so that in this way there can be two substances, one good, the other evil: since the soul is said to be from the portion of good, while its consent, by which it consents to evil, and the evil itself to which it consents, are placed together on the other side, and both are reckoned to the evil substance, not the soul. Who could rave more absurdly? For the soul does not consent if the consent is not its own; but it does consent; the consent, therefore, is its own. Further, if the consent is its own, and that consent is evil, this evil is its own. For if this evil too belonged to that evil to which the soul consents, this evil would not have needed to exist before the soul consented to it. What kind of good, then, is the soul, by whose coming that evil is either doubled or, to put it more mildly, increased?

14. Next, if that consent is a substance—which is agreed to be evil—we find that it lies in the soul's power that some evil substance either exists or does not exist; since that consent is in the soul's power. For if it is not, then it does not consent by its own will. But you said that, in place of this consent, it sins by its own will. The soul has it, then, as I said, in its power that a certain evil substance either exists or does not exist. And what is a substance other than a nature? There will be, then, a certain nature that is neither natural to the soul—since, if it is unwilling, it will not exist—nor to that evil to which the soul consents by its will: for you cannot say that the evil of the race of darkness is natural, since it is established there by another's will, that is, by the soul's will. To what nature, then, will that nature be reckoned—that is, that consent—if it is a nature that is natural neither to the soul nor to the race of darkness, except that, against Manichaeus, you argue that there are not two natures but three? For even if there were once two, yet now, after that consent has arisen, surely three have come to be. And this third—born from the consenting soul and from the evil to which it consents—you will be compelled to call, as it were, the daughter of both: but since it is born from two natures, of which one is good, the other evil, I ask why something neither one nor the other was not born. For just as what is born from a horse and an ass is neither horse nor ass, so what is born from a good nature and an evil one, if it too is a nature, ought to be neither good nor evil. But you confess that the consent is evil: for you say that the soul then sins by its own will, while it consents to evil.

Or do you perhaps think the good nature and the evil nature are, as it were, two sexes, male and female, so that, just as from a male and a female not something neither one nor the other but either a male or a female is begotten, so from good and evil you maintain that not some third thing, which would be neither good nor evil, but the one—the evil—was born? But if it is so, where is that victorious nature of the soul? Has it been so separated that not rather the other, the good, was born? Next, do you not see that you are now speaking of different sexes, not natures? For if there were a diversity of natures between good and evil, there would arise from the two nothing but some third thing, which could be neither good nor evil; or else the commingling itself would be sterile, and from it no third substance would be brought forth. For if from those animals which I mentioned above, when they mate with each other, nothing else than a mule, male or female, is begotten, which is neither this nor that—how much more ought it to be so in so great and supreme a diversity of good and evil? Or if no new nature came to exist from their commingling, it would not be evil, even if it could not be good. It remains, then, that we cannot avoid such incredible ravings, unless we confess that that consent, which is agreed to be evil and culpable, is not a substance, but say that it is in some substance.

15. Next, let us inquire most carefully in what substance it is. And yet, to whom is it not manifest that, just as persuasion does not come about except in one persuading, so consent is not except in the consenting nature? The soul, then, when it consents to evil, is itself the substance, but its consent is not a substance. You now discern, I think, in what substance it is; that is, you surely see that this consent is in the soul—a consent which you do not doubt to be sin, and through this to be evil. From which you now understand that it can come about that in a good substance, such as the soul is, there is some evil that is not a substance, such as that consent is, from which evil the soul too is called evil. For a sinning soul is surely evil; but it sins when it consents to evil. One and the same thing, then—that is, the soul—insofar as it is a substance, is good; but insofar as it has something evil that is not a substance, that is, that consent, to that extent it is evil. For it has this consent not from advance, but from failure. For it fails when it consents to evil, and now begins to be less, and therefore to be of less strength, than it was when, consenting to nothing, it stood firm in virtue—worse, surely, in proportion as it inclines from what supremely is toward what is less, so that it too may itself be less. And the less it is, the nearer surely it becomes to nothing. For what is made less also tends toward not being at all: and although it does not reach the point of being nothing by utterly perishing, it is nonetheless manifest that any failing whatever is the beginning of perishing.

Open, then, now the eyes of your heart, and behold, if you can, that any substance whatever is some good; and that therefore evil is a failing of substance, because it is good to be a substance. Yet not every failing is culpable, but only the voluntary—by which the rational soul, having forsaken its Creator, declines its affection toward the things that were founded beneath it: for this is what is called sin. But the other failings, which are not voluntary, are either penal, so that sins are punished by the supreme justice that governs and orders; or they intervene by the measures of the lowest things, so that the preceding give way to the succeeding, and thus all temporal beauty is carried through in its own turns and in its own kind. For just as speech is carried through by syllables, as it were, dying and being born, which are stretched out through fixed intervals of pauses, and, their spans being filled, depart in the ordered succession of those that follow, until the whole discourse is brought to its end—and it is set, not in the running sounds themselves, but in the moderation of the speaker, how far a syllable is drawn out or shortened, or by what form of letters the individual ones keep the moments of their own places, while the art itself that makes the speech neither rings with sounds nor is rolled along and varied by times—so, by the rising and setting, the departure and succession of temporal things, in fixed and definite courses, until it runs back to the appointed term, temporal beauty is woven together. And it is not evil for the reason that in spiritual creatures we can understand and admire better things: but it has its proper grace in its own kind, and it instills into those who live well the supreme wisdom of God, hidden in the heights, above all the bounds of times, its own maker and governor.

16. Come now, attend to that which you called evil, to which the soul, by consenting, voluntarily sins—whether it is some substance, or whether there too you cannot accuse a substance. For I ask, what allures the soul's consent? Does it rush in headlong, and is it therefore said to consent because it is moved by some delight of it toward enjoying it? But if it is so, it does not follow that it should therefore be called evil, because it is not rightly loved. For if I show that something is loved badly, where the fault is held to be not of the thing loved but of the one loving, you will surely confess that the form of any thing is not on that account vicious, because the consent of the one desiring it slips viciously into it. How much this helps me will appear later.

But that I may show what I promised, what rather should I choose, when an abundance of things flows around me? What, I say, should I rather choose than that which we praise as a heavenly creation, but which you adore as a portion of the Creator himself? For among all visible things, what is more splendid than this sun? But if anyone desires its light too immoderately, he brings upon his own eyes the wars of quarrels, if, having obtained some power by which he can fulfill what he craves, he looks upon the houses set opposite his open windows, that the sun may the less flood his inmost rooms with a more open sky. Is it, then, the sun's fault, because that man so loved this light that he dared to set it before the light of justice, and, willing to receive more abundantly the light of the carnal eyes into the dwelling of the body, closed the door of his heart and the keen edge of his mind against the light of equity? You see, then, that a good thing can be loved with a love that is not good. Therefore, when you call evil that to which the soul, by consenting, sins, I call it good in its own kind—but such a good that it is not fitting for the soul, which is better, to consent to it. For since the soul is itself superior to the body, and has God superior to itself, although in its own order the nature of the body is good, the soul nonetheless sins, and by sinning becomes evil, if it joins to the inferior body the consent of love which it owes to the superior, to God.

17. But if you say that you do not call that consent culpable when a thing is loved which does not act so as to be consented to, but that the soul consents only when the thing to which it consents persuades it to something or compels it to something, and that it is therefore evil because it persuades or urges that something evil be committed—this is a second question, and one to be treated in its own order presently. But let us here remember the first sin, about which enough, I think, has been argued; and it has become clear that it can come about that some thing good in its own kind is loved badly, and that, the lover being at fault, the thing itself is not reproached. For what if a soul already a sinner and vicious by such love persuades the same sin to another—does not she too who consents to the one persuading become depraved by such a vice as that by which the one she follows was depraved? The first sin, then, is to set a creation, however good, before the Creator in love; the second, to try, whether by persuading or by compelling, to make another do this also. For no one wishes to lead another into depravity who has not first himself been depraved.

And they sin by their will who desire to lead others into sin, whether by a foolish good will or by a malicious envy. For who but one loving them perversely admonishes his children to think no gain shameful, but to acquire ample money from any source whatever? Surely he does not hate them, and yet he persuades them ruinously. For by the love of such things he himself is already corrupted, though gold and silver are not evil—just as that sun too, of which we treated above; yet the disordered lover of a good thing is at fault.

But by envy, when anyone wishes another to sin, he loves honor with an immoderate pride, and desires to excel in it and to go before the rest; and seeing it more amply and more truly accorded to virtues, lest he be surpassed in it, he desires others to be cast down from the citadel of equity into the abyss of iniquity. In this way the devil tries to persuade or to compel to sins. But is honor itself at fault, because the devil, by loving it perversely and impiously, was made impious?

Or is the angelic substance itself of that same devil, which God created, evil for the reason that it is a substance? But when, forsaking the love of God and turned excessively to his own, he desired to seem equal to him, he was cast down by the swelling of pride. Not, then, insofar as he is a substance, but since he was made a substance, insofar as he loved himself more than the one by whom he was made, is he evil; and evil for this reason, that he is less than he would be if he had loved that which supremely is: the failing, therefore, is evil.

Every failing, then, from what is, tends toward not being: just as every advance, from what is less, tends toward being more. For the highest honor, such as the piety of the religious offers, is surely owed to God. He, then, who loves honor imitates God. But humble souls wish to be honored in him; the proud, before him.

But those humble toward God become more exalted than the unjust; those exalted against God, however, become more lowly than the just: by that dispensation, namely, of rewards and punishments, because the former loved God above themselves, the latter loved themselves in place of God.

18. Now, I think, it is easy for you to understand, from the very words of your letter in which you said that the soul, when it consents to evil, sins by its will, that no evil is an evil nature, or the love of an evil nature: but that, since all natures in their own kind are good, evil is the sin which comes about by the will of the soul when it loves a creation in place of the Creator himself—whether by its own inclination, when it is evil, or by another's persuasion, when it consents to evil. And nonetheless it is made evil in this way too, with chastisements following, so that all things are arranged according to merits by the Creator, who is supremely good, in a creation that is good—but not supremely good, because he did not beget it out of himself, but made it out of nothing.

But you have set up two natures, of which you want one to be good, the other evil; or rather one of good, the other of evil: for the evil nature comes to be, even by sinning, out of the good. Yet you confess that the nature which you say is good does evil by consenting to evil—that is, sins by its will.

But I assert that both are good, but that one of them does evil by persuading, the other does evil by consenting. And just as the consent of the one is not a nature, so neither is the persuasion of the other: just as the former, if it does not consent, will remain good, keeping the integrity of its nature, so the latter, if it does not persuade, will be more amended. But if it does not even commit the sin which it does not persuade, both will be equally whole, and praiseworthy in their own kind.

For even if the one that both commits and persuades sins twice, while the other sins but once, if it only consents to doing evil, yet they are made evil by sins, they are not evil by nature. Or if that nature is evil on account of its persuading, so too is the other on account of its consenting.

But if it seems to you worse to persuade than to consent, let the one be evil, the other worse: yet let there not be so great a partiality of persons, and so unjust a favoritism in judging, that, when both sin—though one more gravely, the other more lightly—the one is called a nature of evil, the other of good; rather, let either both be good, but the one that sins less the better; or both be evil, but the one that sins more the worse.

19. 1. But whence has the evil come to be that is called sin, if there is no nature of evil? Tell me whence is that evil consent in the nature which you concede and proclaim to be good. For whatever undergoes consenting to evil surely would not undergo it unless it could undergo it. I ask, then, whence it has this very capacity to undergo. For it would be better if it did not have it. It is not, then, the nature of the highest good, than which something could be better. Next, if it has it in its power either to consent or not to consent, then it does not consent as one conquered.

I ask, then, whence it has that evil consent, with no contrary nature compelling it. But if it is compelled to consent, in such a way that it is not in its power to do otherwise, then it does not, as you said, sin by its will, since it does not consent by its will. But I still ask whence there is in it the capacity to be deceived, if it is deceived. For before it was deceived, unless there were in it the capacity to undergo this, it surely would never undergo it. And yet in no way does it consent except by its will: but if it is compelled, it is to be said rather to yield than to consent. But by whatever name you call this, I ask of you—a keen and clever man, and one who boasts of his Roman talent—whence this good nature has the capacity to undergo what it undergoes, so as to consent to evil.

For just as in wood, before it is broken, there is a fragility, which, unless it were present, it could not be broken at all—nor is the wood any the less fragile if no breaker comes upon it—so I ask, in that nature, whence is a certain fragility or flexibility, before it is either broken by force or bent by persuasion into the evil consent. Or if, by the nearness of evil, there was already a fragility—as bodies are wont to be corrupted by the exhalation of a neighboring marsh—then it was already corruptible, if the pestilential contagion of that nearness could corrupt it. I ask, then, whence that corruptibility.

19. 2. I beg you, attend to what I say, and yield to the clear truth: for I do not ask whence the corruption; for you will answer: From a corruptor; and you maintain that this same corruptor is some prince or other of the race of darkness, so wrapped in fabulous coverings that you can scarcely unwrap and hold him: but I ask whence the corruptibility, even before the corruptor came upon it; which, unless it existed, either no corruptor would exist, or the coming of any corruptor would do no harm.

When, therefore, you have found whence in the good nature is that corruptibility, before it is corrupted by the contrary nature—or, if you do not wish to say that it is corrupted, whence at least is that changeableness, before it was changed by hostile adversity: for a nature is indeed changed for the worse which from wise becomes foolish, and which forgets itself; for you yourself added these words, saying: If, after it has come to know itself, it consents to evil: it is changed, then, for the worse when it forgets, in such a way that, reminded again, it comes to know itself; but in no way could it have been changed unless, before it was changed, it were changeable: when, therefore, you have found whence is that changeableness in the substance of the highest good, before there was any commingling made of good and evil, you will surely cease to ask me whence is evil.

And yet in the nature of the highest good, if you think rightly of it, no changeableness of time at all can be found—neither from itself, nor by the coming of any other—such as can be found in that nature which Manichaeus invents and supposes to be supremely good, and even persuades those who believe him to be so. Ask, and answer, if you can, whence is that changeableness, which was not found, but disclosed, when a delay came upon it. For it could not be changed even by an enemy, if it could not be changed at all. But since it could, it showed that it had not been unchangeable.

This changeableness, then, when it is believed to be in the substance of the highest good—that is, in the substance of God—you see, if you are not contentious, with how great a folly it is blasphemed. But when something of the kind is said of a creation, which God neither begot nor brought forth out of his substance, but made out of nothing, it is not the highest good that is dealt with, but yet such a good that it could not be established except by the highest, who is God. For God, supremely and unchangeably good, made all things—not supremely nor unchangeably good, but yet good—from the angels of the heavens down to the lowest beasts and the herbs of the earth, all of them ordered in fitting places according to the dignity of each one's nature.

But among these the rational creation, when by the obedience of love it cleaves to its Creator—that is, to God its maker and establisher—keeps its nature in his eternity, truth, and love; but when by a stubborn disobedience it forsakes him, through its own free choice it entangles itself in sins, and through his just judgment it is wretchedly afflicted with chastisement; and this is the whole of evil, partly what it does unjustly, partly what it suffers justly.

Do not ask me whence this is, since you have already answered yourself, you who said that when the soul has come to know itself, if it consents to evil, it sins by its own will. Behold whence evil is—namely, from one's own will. But this is not a nature, but a fault; and through this, contrary even to the nature, which it surely harms by depriving it of the good by which it could be blessed, had it been unwilling to sin. This will to sin you think is not moved in the soul except from another evil, which you believe to be a nature that God did not make, and which soul you maintain to be the nature of God: and through this, that evil nature of yours, whatever it is, if it produces this in the soul by persuading it to sin, then God, conquered, is cast down into sin.

20. 1. Behold with how great an impiety, with what nefarious and horrible blasphemies, you are unwilling to strip yourself, by placing in a nature which God did not make life, sense, speech, measure, form, order, and other innumerable goods; and by placing in the very nature of God, before any commingling of evil, that changeableness by which he could be taken captive, and on account of which he was compelled to fear, seeing a great ruin and devastation impending against his holy realms, unless he set against it some choice and excellent deity, mighty in power.

And to what end is all this, except that that nature and substance of God may hold the enemy so entangled and subjected that, as it sins, it endures him bound as well, and—now purified—does not wholly escape the conquered enemy, and, as condemned, keeps him shut in? A splendid excuse, indeed, for the necessity of war you have found in your God, against what is put to you, so that you may answer what the race of darkness was going to do to God if he had been unwilling to fight with it: for if you say it was going to harm him in some way, you will confess that God is corruptible and violable; but if you say that it could do him no harm, it will be asked of you: Why, then, did he fight? Why did he hand over his own substance to the enemy to be corrupted and violated and forced to all sins? Out of this dilemma, then, you have never been able to escape.

20. 2. You seem to yourselves to have found something great and safe, so that you answer, saying: It is a great iniquity to covet what belongs to another, to which iniquity God would have given his assent if he had been unwilling to overcome that race which had dared this.

This answer would have some color of justice, if at least in the war itself the nature of your God had kept itself whole and unpolluted, and, mingled with hostile members, had done nothing of iniquity, whether compelled or seduced: but since you say that it consented, as a captive, to such great crimes and outrages; since, finally, from that impiety so monstrous, by which it stood forth an enemy even to the holy light of which it is a portion, you declare that it cannot be wholly purified,

whence you believe that the eternal punishments of that horrible globe are deservedly requited to it—how much better it would have been to leave the hostile enemy in his iniquity, contriving empty things, than to hand over to him a part of God, whose strength he would drain, whose beauty, once corrupted, he would join to his own iniquity, who does not see?

Who would be blinded by such obstinacy that he does not perceive, does not attend, with how much less iniquity the race of darkness would have tried in vain to invade another's nature, than that with which God would hand over his own to be invaded and forced to iniquity and condemned, in some part at least, to punishment? Is this, then, to have been unwilling to consent to iniquity, and to have done so enormous an iniquity without any necessity? Or was there a necessity—which Manichaeus himself was not ashamed to say, and you are ashamed? For he says that God saw a great ruin and devastation impending against his holy realms, unless he set against it some choice deity, mighty in power. But you reason, it seems, more keenly than if you had said that God fought of that necessity, lest the race of darkness harm him—calling God violable and corruptible, since something could harm him if he had been unwilling to fight. Drive away, then, and expel from your hearts and from your faith even the battle itself; and that whole fable, woven together with the horror of impious and most unclean blasphemies, at last anathematize and condemn. For what kind of thing is it, I beg you, that—as was said before—you are not afraid to call that nature violable, and God corruptible: so that the nature of your God, if it could not exercise a strength by which it would not be taken captive, could not at least keep its justice as a captive—which Daniel was able to do, who dared to mock the lions, who, compelled by no terror, did not by his piety consent to the iniquity of those by whom he had been led captive, and in the condition of bodily servitude did not lose the equity and freedom of a patient and wise mind (See Dan 6; 14).

But the nature of God was led captive, was made iniquitous; it cannot be wholly purified, it is compelled in the end to be condemned. If it knew from eternity that this evil would befall it, then no divinity was owed to it from itself. But if you have said that the lands or regions adjoining one another by nearness—the kingdom of light and the race of darkness, which Manichaeus narrates as things to be laughed at by men who understand prudently—are unutterable, and that these are called by Christ the right and the left, we know that Christ so calls the right and the left that he wishes understood not corporeal places, but the blessedness and the misery of each one's own merit. But your carnal thinking so does not depart from corporeal places that you say this visible sun—and therefore corporeal, which cannot be contained except in a corporeal place—is both God and a part of God. But it is foolish to deal with you about these things: for what incorporeal thing will you be able to understand, you who do not yet believe God to be incorruptible?

21. But, of course, as a good friend you kindly reproach me, because I left the Manicheans and betook myself to the Books of the Jews. It is these very Books that stifle your error and deceit: for in them Christ was prophesied, such as the truth of God presented him, not such as the vanity of Manichaeus invented him. But, a most urbane man, you assail the ancient Scripture, because it is written in the prophet: And beget children of harlotry, for the land will commit harlotry, departing from the Lord (Hos 1:2)—when you hear in the Gospel: The harlots and the tax collectors will go before you into the kingdom of heaven (Matt 21:31).

I know whence your indignation comes: for the harlot does not so much displease you in her harlotry as because she has been changed into matrimony and turned to conjugal chastity—where you believe your God, in the procreation of children, to be bound by the tighter chains of the flesh; whom you think harlots spare, because they take pains not to conceive, so that, free from the office of bearing children, they may serve lust.

For a woman's conception is, in your view, a prison and a chain of God. Hence that too displeases you: They shall be two in one flesh; when the Apostle commends this in Christ and the holy Church as a great mystery (See Gen 2:24; Eph 5:31-32). Hence this displeases you: Increase and multiply (Gen 1:28); lest the workhouses of your God be multiplied.

But I confess that I learned in the Catholic Church that, as the soul, so also the body—of which the one is endowed with command, the other set under it—and so the good of the soul and the goods of the body, are from nothing but the highest good, from which are all goods, whether great or small, whether heavenly or earthly, whether spiritual or corporeal, whether temporal or everlasting; nor are these to be reproached, for the reason that those are to be preferred.

22. But that which you place among the things to be blamed, Kill and eat (Acts 10:13), is set down even in the Acts of the Apostles spiritually. And yet, even bodily, it is not food that is under reproach, but excess: especially for you—who even carnally abstain from flesh—this saying, once received, ought to have pleased, so that you would kill the flesh, and thus, the prisons broken, your god might flee from his wretched custody, and, if any remnants of him had remained there, you might purify them by eating them in the workshop of the belly.

You mock that the barrenness of Sarah grieved me. I plainly did not grieve over this, since it too was prophetic. But it accords with your fabulous sacrileges to grieve not over the barrenness of Sarah, but over her fecundity; because every woman's fecundity is, for you, a harsh calamity of God: whence it is no wonder that in you especially is fulfilled what was foretold about such men: Forbidding marriage (1 Tim 4:3). For you detest not intercourse so much as marriage: since in marriage intercourse for the sake of propagation is not a fault but a duty—from which the continence of holy men and women is exempt; not because they avoided it as that evil, but because they chose what is better. And yet the very conjugal office of fathers and mothers, such as Abraham and Sarah were, is to be weighed not from human society but from divine dispensation. For because Christ had to come in the flesh, the marriage of Sarah served to propagate that flesh, as did the virginity of Mary.

23. Hence that too which, with a laudable ignorance, you recalled by deriding: Put your hand under my thigh, Abraham said to his servant, demanding the pledge of an oath. Put, he says, your hand under my thigh, and swear by the God of heaven (Gen 24:2-3). That servant indeed, by obeying, swore: but Abraham, by commanding, prophesied—namely, that the God of heaven would come into that flesh which would have been propagated from that thigh. You spurn this, detest it, abominate it, chaste and clean men:

you who dread one womb of a virgin for the Son of God, whom no contact of flesh could have changed; and who entangle the changed and polluted nature of the living God in the wombs of all females—not only of men, but of beasts as well: and through this, you who shudder at one thigh of the patriarch, what thighs at last—I do not say of the prophets, but of any prostitutes whatever—do you find, where you would not have to swear by your god so basely fettered there? Unless, perhaps, it is not that you chastely touch a member of the human body, but that you are ashamed to swear by a God so basely bound.

With so great a deformity—captive under the name of a "pancarp" (the medley of fruits that is wont to be served at the public games), on account of the beasts of all kinds that were in it—you assail Noah's ark (See Gen 7), which by every kind of animal prefigured the Church that was to be from all nations.

Here I congratulate you—whether not noticing or not knowing—for having used a fitting word:
for every fruit is what is spiritually true in the Church: and you do not attend to how much happier Noah, with his own, was among those beasts, into which he entered unharmed and out of which he came unharmed, than your god, who was torn to pieces and devoured by the beastly rage of the race of darkness.

And so he was made not a "pancarp" but plainly a "camparc," who was rent by every ferocity. You deride the wrestling of Jacob with the angel (See Gen 32:24-25), where the future wrestling of the people of Israel with the flesh of Christ was prophetically prefigured. But however you understand it, how much better that your god should wrestle with a man, than that, conquered and captive, he should be torn apart by a race of demons.

You falsely charge that Abraham sold the chastity of his wife: where he did not lie in calling her his sister, but by a human caution kept silent that she was his wife (See Gen 12:20), committing her chastity to his God to be preserved; who, unless he did what he could do, would be judged not to trust in God, but to tempt God. Yet you do not look upon your god, who not his wife but his own members—to be polluted, corrupted, befouled by enemies—not sold, but gave for free. To whom, if it could be, you would surely wish that the splendid nature of your god might return so undefiled from its enemies, as Sarah was restored undefiled to her husband.

24. You praise my former character and pursuits, and ask who suddenly changed me. Then, by a circumlocution, you recall the ancient enemy of all the faithful and the saints, and of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, whom you surely wish to be understood as the devil. What shall I answer you about my change—a change which, unless I believed it to be made for the better in that way, I surely would not have betaken myself, with your error detested and condemned, to the Catholic Church and faith? And whether I did this rightly—that is, whether I was changed from evil to good—you yourself resolve the question for me in the very word "change" that you used. For my soul, if (as you say) it were the nature of God, could not be changed at all, whether for the better, as I trust, or for the worse, as you charge—neither by itself, nor by the impulse of anyone or anything else.

Hence, when I left that error and chose that faith in which the nature of God is piously believed, so that it may be wisely understood, to be utterly unchangeable, my change displeases none but those whom an unchangeable God displeases. But the devil is the adversary of the saints, not because he rises up against them as an enemy from the contrary principle of another nature, but because he begrudges them the heavenly honor from which he himself was cast down.

For, changed himself, he contrives to change others. For just as he is described by you, with the prolixity of that Persian fable, if, unchanged, he changes others, then surely he is the greater and the conqueror; but if, as you affirm, he is of the holy light, then he is not the enemy of God, but a friend, and better than those whom he deceives, since he makes them enemies of the holy light, to which he is himself a friend?

For Manichaeus says, indeed, that souls are to be condemned to eternal punishment in that horrible globe, because they suffered themselves to err from their prior luminous nature, and then stood forth as enemies of the light; while he maintains that the very mind of the race of darkness, burning with love of keeping the light with itself, creates the bodies of animals. From these, then, most empty and sacrilegious fictions, take care to snatch yourself away, to be changed for the better by the help of him who is changed neither for the better nor for the worse.

25. We escaped, you say, because we followed the spiritual Savior. For his boldness broke out so far that, had our Lord been a creature of flesh, all our hope would have been cut off. If you say this because you do not believe that Christ had flesh, you ought not to place your hope in Manichaeus, whom you concede to have had flesh, begotten of male and female like other men. Why, then, do you place such great hope in him? For in this very letter of yours, when you would frighten me, you yourself said: Who, then, will be your advocate before the just tribunal of the Judge, when you will begin to be convicted, by your own testimony, both of word and of deed? The Persian whom you have accused will not be there. This case apart, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Carthaginian? A consoler, then, and a savior—Manichaeus apart—you said there could be none. How, then, when you were treating of the sufferings of Christ, did you say that you escaped, because you followed the spiritual Savior—lest, namely, the enemy could kill him while set in the flesh? Then, if the enemy killed your Manichaeus, in whom he found flesh, so that he could now be your savior—how do you say: This case apart, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Carthaginian? You see what is in heresy and the doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars (See 1 Tim 4:1-2). You want Manichaeus truthful about a deceptive Christ; so that, if Christ in showing his flesh, his death, his resurrection, and finally the places of the wounds and nails, which he displayed to his doubting disciples (See John 20:20), did all of it deceptively and falsely, then Manichaeus told the truth about Christ: but if Christ showed true flesh, and therefore true death, true resurrection, true scars, then Manichaeus lied about Christ.

And through this, the difference between me and you in this matter is that you chose to believe Manichaeus truthful, by believing Christ deceptive; but I rather to believe that Manichaeus lied, both about other things and so about Christ, rather than that Christ lied about anything (how much more about that in which he placed the hope of believers above all, that is, about his own passion and resurrection?). For he who says: When Christ, after that which was thought to be his death, appeared to the disciples as they hesitated and supposed they saw a spirit; when he said: Touch my hands and my feet; and see that a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see me to have (Luke 24:39); when to one of them, by no means believing, he said: Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing (John 20:27)—he showed all this not truthfully but falsely: he who, I say, says this, is not a herald, but an accuser of Christ. But, you say: Manichaeus heralds Christ, and says he is his apostle.

For this very reason he is rather to be detested and fled. For, were he saying these things by accusing, he would at least boast himself a lover of truth by convicting another's falsehood: but now, not knowing and incautious, he betrays himself, and shows sufficiently to those who look diligently what he himself does, what he loves, by praising and heralding a liar.

Flee, then, friend, so great a pestilence, lest Manichaeus wish to make you faithful by deceiving you—which cannot be done: such as he wishes that disciple to seem to have been made by Christ, to whom he said: Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing. For as the most sweet truth has it, what else did Christ say to the disciple than: Touch what I bear, touch what I bore, touch true flesh, touch the traces of true wounds, touch the true places of the nails, and, by believing what is true, do not be unbelieving, but believing?

But as the sacrilegious vanity of Manichaeus has it, what else did Christ say to the disciple than: Touch what I feign, touch what I deceive; or rather: Touch false flesh, touch the places of false wounds, deceptive ones, and do not be unbelieving toward my lying members, so that by believing what is false you may be believing. Such believers does Manichaeus have, he of every doctrine of the lying demons.

26. 1. Flee these things, I beg; let not the appearance of fewness deceive you, since the Lord himself said that the narrow way is of the few (See Matt 7:14). You wish to be among the few, but the worst. For it is true that few are in every way innocent, but among the guilty themselves murderers are fewer than thieves, those guilty of incest are fewer than adulterers: finally, even the fables or histories of the ancients themselves have fewer Medeas and Phaedras than women guilty of other crimes and outrages; fewer Ochuses and Busirises than men guilty of other impieties and crimes.

See, then, lest perhaps among you an excessive horror of impiety make a merit of fewness. For such things are there read, said, believed, that it is to be wondered at that any—rather than few—rush into that error, or remain there. But the fewness of the saints, whose way is narrow, is set in comparison with the multitude of sinners: which fewness, indeed, lies hidden in a far greater number of chaff; but it is now to be gathered and threshed on the very floor of the Catholic Church, and in the end to be winnowed and purified (See Matt 3:12): to which it behooves you to betake yourself, if you faithfully desire to be faithful, lest, by trusting in false things, you—as it is written—feed on the winds (See Hos 12:1), that is, become food for unclean spirits.

For if the apostle Paul, whom you recall, reckoned as losses and dung—not the Scriptures of the wise men of the Old Testament and all that prophetic dispensation of sayings and deeds, but the carnal excellence of the Jewish stock, and, on behalf of the synagogues of his fathers' race, which were erring and not recognizing Christ, the zeal for persecuting Christians, by which, as by something praiseworthy, he was inflamed, and the justice which is from the Law, in which the Jews, the grace of God not being understood there, proudly glory—that he might gain Christ (See Phil 3:8):

how much more ought you to cast off those scriptures, most full of nefarious blasphemies, where the nature of truth, the nature of the highest good, the nature of God is described as so often changeable, so often conquered, so often corrupted, and in part inexplicably defiled and to be condemned in the end by the truth itself—not as dung, but as poisons—and, contention being ended, to cross over to the Catholic Church and faith, which, as it was prophesied so long before, so in its own time has been revealed?

26. 2. I say this to you for this reason, because your mind is neither a nature of evil, which is altogether nothing; nor the nature of God, for otherwise I would speak in vain to one unchangeable: but since it was changed by forsaking God, and that change of it is itself evil; let it be changed by being turned to the unchangeable good, with the help of that unchangeable good itself; and such a change of it will be a liberation from evil.

If you spurn this admonition, still believing that there are two natures—one changeable, of good, which, mingled with evil, was able to consent to injustice; the other unchangeable, of evil, which, not even mingled with good, was able to consent to justice—you prate that shameful fable so near at hand, sowing execrable and base blasphemies into the harlotry of itching ears, so as to be in the flock of those of whom it was foretold that there will be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but, according to their own desires, will heap up for themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn their hearing away from the truth, and turn aside to fables (2 Tim 4:3-4).

But if you receive this admonition prudently, turned to the unchangeable God, by a praiseworthy change you will become one of those of whom the Apostle says: You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord (Eph 5:8). This could be said neither of the nature of God, because it was never evil and worthy of that name of darkness; nor of a nature of evil, which, if it existed, could never be changed, nor become light: but rightly and truly was this said to that nature which is not unchangeable, but, having forsaken the unchangeable light by which it was made, is darkened in itself; and, turned to that light, becomes light, not in itself, but in the Lord.

For not of itself, since it is not the true light, but, illumined, it shines, from him of whom it was said: It was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world (John 1:9). Believe this, understand this, hold this, if you wish to be good by participation in the unchangeable good, which you cannot be of yourself: which you could neither lose, if you were this unchangeably; nor receive, if you were not this unchangeably.