1. 1. In other books I think we have dealt sufficiently with how we can meet the invectives of the Manicheans, by which they are carried, ignorantly and impiously, against the Law that is called the Old Testament, and how, amid the applause of the unlearned, they fan themselves with empty boasting; and this can also be briefly recalled here by me.

For who of moderately sound mind would not easily understand that the exposition of the Scriptures is to be sought from those who profess to be teachers of them, and that it can happen, indeed that it always happens, that many things seem absurd to the unlearned which, when they are expounded by the teachers, seem all the more worthy of praise the more abjectly they seemed worthy of scorn, and are received all the more sweetly when opened the more difficult they were to open when closed?

This is what generally happens with the holy books of the Old Testament, if only the one who is offended by them seeks out a devout teacher of them rather than an impious mangler, and is first steeped in the zeal of one who inquires rather than the rashness of one who finds fault. Nor, if in his desire to learn these things he should chance to fall in with certain bishops or presbyters or ministers and prelates of the Catholic Church of whatever sort who either everywhere take care not to lay bare the mysteries or, content with simple faith, have not cared to know deeper things, should he despair that the knowledge of the truth is there, where neither all of whom it is asked are able to teach nor all who ask are worthy to learn.

Both diligence and devotion, therefore, must be applied: by the one it will come about that we find those who know; by the other, that we deserve to know.

1. 2. But since there are two especially great enticements of the Manicheans, by which the incautious are deceived into wanting to have them as teachers—one when they find fault with the Scriptures, whether those they understand badly or those they want to be understood badly; the other when they hold out a semblance of a chaste and remarkable life of continence—this book will contain our view, in keeping with Catholic teaching, concerning life and morals, in which it will perhaps be understood both how easy it is to feign virtue and how difficult to have it.

I will indeed keep to this manner, if I can, that I will not inveigh against those diseases of theirs, which are very well known to me, so gravely as they inveigh against the things they do not know; for I wish them to be healed rather, if it can be done, than to be attacked. And I will take from the Scriptures those testimonies which they must of necessity believe, namely from the New Testament, from which, however, I will bring forward none of those things which they are accustomed to say have been interpolated when they are hard pressed in great straits; rather I will say those things which they are compelled both to approve and to praise. Nor will I leave any statement brought forward as a witness from the apostolic teaching for which I do not match a similar one from the Old Testament, so that, if at last, laying aside the stubbornness of their dreams, they should wish to wake up and aspire to the light of the Christian faith, they may notice both how the life they parade is not Christian and how the Scripture they mangle is Christ's.

2. 3. Where, then, shall I begin? From authority or from reason? The order of nature is indeed such that, when we learn something, authority comes before reason. For reason can seem weak which, once it has been given, afterward takes up an authority by which it may be confirmed. But because the minds of human beings, darkened by the habit of the shadows in which they are veiled in the night of sins and vices, cannot direct a fit gaze upon the clearness and purity of reason, it has been most wholesomely arranged that authority, shaded as it were by the branches of humanity, should lead the wavering vision into the light of truth. But since we are dealing with people who feel and speak and act in all things contrary to order, and who say nothing more insistently than that reason must be given first, I will indulge them and take up what I confess to be faulty in disputation. For it delights me to imitate, as far as I am able, the gentleness of my Lord Jesus Christ, who was even clothed in the evil of death itself, by which he willed to strip us of it.

3. 4. Let us inquire, then, by reason how a human being ought to live. Certainly we all wish to live happily, and there is no one in the human race who does not assent to this statement even before it has been fully uttered. But a person, in my estimation, can be called happy neither if he does not have what he loves, whatever it may be, nor if he has what he loves, if it is harmful, nor if he does not love what he has, even if it is the best. For the one who craves what he cannot obtain is tormented; the one who has obtained what ought not to be craved is deceived; and the one who does not crave what ought to be obtained is sick. Now none of these befalls the mind without misery; and misery and happiness are not accustomed to dwell together in one and the same person; therefore none of those is happy.

A fourth case remains, as I see it, where the happy life can be found: when what is the best for a human being is both loved and possessed. For what else is it that we call enjoying, if not having at hand what one loves? Nor is anyone happy who does not enjoy what is the best for a human being, nor is anyone who enjoys it not happy. Our best, therefore, ought to be at hand for us, if we mean to live happily.

3. 5. It follows that we should inquire what is the best for a human being, which surely cannot be worse than the human being himself. For whoever follows what is worse than himself becomes himself worse. But every human being ought to follow what is best. Therefore the best for a human being is not worse than the human being.

Perhaps it will be something such as the human being himself is? Let it be so, by all means, if there is nothing better than the human being that he could enjoy. But if we find something that is both more excellent than the human being and can be at hand for the human being who loves it, who would doubt that, in order to be happy, the human being must strive toward that which it is plain is more excellent than the very one who strives? For if to be happy is to have arrived at such a good than which there can be nothing greater—and this is what we call the best—how then can he be included in that definition who has not yet arrived at his highest good? Or how is it the highest, if there is something better that we can reach?

If, then, this is so, it must be such that one does not lose it unwillingly. For no one can have confidence in such a good which he perceives can be snatched from him, even if he should wish to hold and embrace it. But whoever has no confidence in the good he enjoys, how can he be happy amid so great a fear of losing it?

4. 6. Let us inquire, then, what is better than a human being. This is surely difficult to find unless we first consider and discuss what the human being himself is. Nor do I now think a definition of a human being should be demanded of me. What rather seems to me to need inquiry in this place is this: since it is agreed among almost everyone—or at any rate, what is enough, since it is agreed between me and those with whom I am now dealing—that we are composed of soul and body, what the human being himself is: both of these that I have named, or the body only, or the soul only. For although soul and body are two, and neither would be called a human being if the other did not exist—for the body would not be a human being if the soul did not exist, nor again would the soul be a human being if it did not animate a body—it can nevertheless happen that one of these is both held to be and called a human being.

What, then, do we call a human being? Soul and body, as a two-horse team or a centaur? Or the body only, which is in the use of the soul that governs it, just as we call a lamp not the fire and the earthenware together but the earthenware alone, yet on account of the fire? Or do we call a human being nothing other than the soul, but on account of the body it governs, just as we call a horseman not the horse and the man together but the man alone, yet from the fact that he is suited to governing the horse? It is difficult to decide this controversy, or, if it is easy by reason, it is long in the telling; and there is no need to take up and undergo that labor and delay. For whether both, or the body alone, or the soul alone holds the name of human being, the best for a human being is not what is best for the body, but what is best either for the body and the soul together or for the soul alone; that is the best for a human being.

5. 7. But if we ask what is best for the body, sure reason compels us to admit that it is that through which it comes about that the body is in the best condition. Now there is nothing among all the things that give vigor to the body better and more excellent than the soul. Therefore the highest good of the body is not its pleasure, not freedom from pain, not strength, not beauty, not swiftness, nor anything else that is wont to be counted among the goods of the body, but the soul altogether. For the soul also furnishes to the body, by its presence, those things that have been mentioned, and—what surpasses all of them—life. Hence it does not seem to me that the soul is the highest good of the human being, whether we call a human being soul and body together or the soul alone. For just as reason finds that the highest good of the body is what is better than the body and by which vigor and life are provided to it, so, whether a human being is body and soul or the soul itself by itself, it must be found whether something precedes the soul itself which, when the soul follows it, becomes, in its own kind, the best it can be. And if we can find this, it will surely be what, with all evasions removed, must by right and merit be named the highest good of the human being.

5. 8. But if the human being is body, I cannot refuse to admit that the best for the human being is the soul itself. Yet surely, when morals are at issue, when we inquire what manner of life must be kept in order that we may be able to attain happiness, precepts are not given to the body, nor is the discipline of the body to be investigated. In short, good morals will be the work of that part of us which inquires and learns, and these belong properly to the soul; therefore the question is not about the body when we are busy with the obtaining of virtue.

And if it is a consequence—as it is—that the body itself, when it is governed by a soul possessed of virtue, is governed much better and more honorably, and is in the best condition by the degree to which that soul is best which rules over it by a just law, then that will be the best for a human being which makes the soul best, even if we call the human being a body. Or indeed, if a charioteer who obeys me nourishes and governs most suitably the horses over which he is set, and himself, the more obedient he is to me, enjoys my generosity, can anyone deny that not only the charioteer's being in the best condition, but also the horses' being so, is owed to me? And so, whether the human being is the body only, or the soul only, or both, it does not seem to me that I must especially inquire into anything except what makes the soul best; for once that is grasped, the human being cannot but be in the best condition, or at any rate in a much better one than if this one thing had been lacking.

6. 9. No one, however, would doubt that virtue makes the soul best. But it can quite rightly be asked whether this virtue can exist even through itself or cannot exist except in a soul. There arises again a most profound question that needs a very long discourse, but perhaps I shall make good use of this shortcut. I hope God will be present, so that, as far as our weakness allows, we may teach about such great matters not only clearly but also briefly. For whichever it may be—whether virtue can exist even through itself without a soul, or whether it cannot exist except in a soul—without doubt the soul follows something in order to attain virtue; this will be either the soul itself, or virtue, or some third thing.

But if it follows itself in order to gain virtue, it follows something foolish, I know not what; for it is foolish before it has gained virtue. Now the highest wish of those who follow is to gain what we follow. Either, then, the soul will wish not to gain what it follows—than which nothing more absurd and perverse can be said—or, when, being foolish, it follows itself, it gains the very foolishness that it shuns.

But if it follows virtue in its desire to gain it, how does it follow what does not exist? Or how does it desire to gain what it has? Either, then, virtue exists apart from the soul, or, if it is not acceptable to call it virtue unless one means the very disposition and, as it were, the quality of a wise soul, which cannot exist except in a soul, then the soul must follow something else in order that virtue can be born in it, since neither by following nothing nor by following foolishness can it, as far as my reason carries me, arrive at wisdom.

6. 10. This other thing, then, by following which the soul becomes possessed of virtue and wisdom, is either a wise human being or God. But it was said above that it must be something such that we cannot lose it unwillingly. And who would think it should be doubted that a wise human being, if we should think it enough to follow him, can be taken from us not only when we are unwilling but even when we resist? God, therefore, remains, whom if we follow, we live well, and if we attain, we live not only well but also happily. And if any deny that he exists, what thought shall I conceive by which to persuade in speech those with whom I do not even know whether I should speak at all? But if it should seem right, a far different beginning, a different method, a different approach must be entered upon than the one we have taken up for the present. Now, therefore, I am dealing with those who do not deny that God exists, and not only that, but also confess that human affairs are not neglected by him. For I think that no one is held by any name of religion who does not at least believe that divine providence has care for our minds.

7. 11. But in what way do we follow him whom we do not see, or how do we see him, we who are not only human beings but even foolish human beings? For although he is discerned not by the eyes but by the mind, what mind, after all, can be found fit which, when it is covered over by the cloud of folly, has the strength to drink in, or even attempts to drink in, that light? We must take refuge, therefore, in the precepts of those whom it is probable to have been wise. Thus far reason could be led. For it was occupied with human affairs, not more certain through truth but more secure through habit. But when it has come to divine things, it turns itself away; it cannot gaze, it throbs, it burns, it gapes with love, it is beaten back by the light of truth, and it turns back to the familiarity of its own shadows not by choice but by exhaustion. How greatly here it is to be feared, how greatly to be dreaded, lest the soul, weary, conceive from that source a greater weakness where it seeks rest. Therefore, for those who desire to flee back into the shadows, let that shadiness of authority meet us through the dispensation of ineffable wisdom, and let it soothe us with the marvelous voices of things and of books as with the more temperate signs and shadows of truth.

7. 12. What more could have been done for our salvation? What more beneficent, what more generous can be said of divine providence, which did not utterly forsake the human being who had fallen from its laws and who, because of the desire for mortal things, by right and merit propagates mortal offspring? For that most just power has, in marvelous and incomprehensible ways, through certain most secret successions of the things that serve it, which it created, both the severity to punish and the clemency to set free. How beautiful this is, how great, how worthy of God, and finally how true is what is sought, we shall by no means be able to understand unless we begin from things human and near at hand. If, keeping the faith and the precepts of true religion, we do not forsake the way that God has fortified for us by the setting apart of the Patriarchs, by the bond of the Law, by the foretelling of the Prophets, by the mystery of the Man he took up, by the testimony of the Apostles, by the blood of the martyrs, and by the bringing in of the gentiles. Therefore let no one henceforth ask of me my own opinion; let us rather hear the oracles and submit our little reasonings to the divine utterances.

8. 13. Let us see how the Lord himself in the Gospel has commanded us to live, and how also the apostle Paul; for these Scriptures they do not dare to condemn. Let us hear, then, what end of goods you prescribe for us, O Christ; and there is no doubt that this will be the end toward which you bid us strive with the highest love. You shall love, he says, the Lord your God (Matt 22:37). Tell me also, I beg you, what is the measure of loving; for I fear lest I be inflamed with the desire and love of my Lord more or less than I ought. With your whole heart, he says. That is not enough. With your whole soul. Not even that is enough. With your whole mind. What more do you want? I would want it, perhaps, if I could see what more there could be.

What does Paul say to this? We know, he says, that for those who love God all things work toward good (Rom 8:28). Let him too state the measure of love. Who, then, he says, shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? Or distress? Or persecution? Or famine? Or nakedness? Or peril? Or the sword? (Rom 8:35) We have heard what we ought to love and how much we ought to love; toward that we must strive altogether, to that all our counsels must be referred. The sum of goods, for us, is God. The highest good, for us, is God. We must neither remain short of it nor seek beyond it; for the one is dangerous, the other is nothing.

9. 14. Come now, let us investigate, or rather let us notice—for it is ready at hand and most easily seen—whether the authority of the Old Testament also agrees with these statements brought forward from the Gospel and the Apostle. What shall I say about the former statement, since it is plain to all that it was drawn from the law that was given through Moses? For there it is written, You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind (Deut 6:5). But what I might match from the Old Testament to what was said by the Apostle, he himself, lest I should search any longer, has supplied. For when he had said that by no tribulation, no distress, no persecution, no necessity of bodily want, no peril, no sword are we separated from the love of Christ, he at once added, As it is written, For your sake we are afflicted all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter (Rom 8:36). These words they are accustomed to say have been interpolated by corrupters of the Scriptures; so utterly do they have nothing to say in reply that the wretches are compelled to give this answer. But who would not understand that there could have been no other final utterance of men who have been convicted?

9. 15. Yet I ask them whether they deny that this statement is in the Old Testament, or affirm that it does not agree with the apostolic statement. The former I will teach from the books; in the latter case I will either recall to peace these men who shuffle and flee over the cliffs, if they should be willing to look back a little and consider what was said, or I will assail them by the understanding of the rest, who judge without desire. For what can be more friendly than that these statements should accord with one another? For tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril gravely afflict a human being placed in this life. All these words, therefore, are summed up in that one testimony of the Old Law in which it was said, For your sake we are afflicted. The sword remained, which does not bring a wretched life but takes away the life it finds. To this, then, he responds, We are counted as sheep for the slaughter (Rom 8:36). But love itself could not have been signified more expressly than by the words, For your sake.

Suppose, then, that this testimony were not found in the apostle Paul, but had been brought forward by me. Surely there would be nothing for you to prove, heretic, except either that it is not written in the Old Law or that it does not agree with the Apostle? And if you dare to say neither of these—for you are pressed, since the manuscript is read by which it is plain that it is written, and people understand that nothing could agree more aptly with what the Apostle said—why, then, do you think it carries any weight that you dare to charge the Scriptures with being corrupted?

Finally, what will you reply to one who says to you: I understand it thus, I take it thus, I believe it thus, and I read those books for no other reason than that I see all things in them to be in harmony with the Christian faith? Rather say this, if you dare and intend to say it against me: that it is not to be believed that the Apostles and martyrs are said to have been afflicted with grave hardships for Christ's sake, that they were counted by persecutors as sheep for the slaughter. And if you cannot say this, why do you slander the book in which I should believe what you confess that I ought to believe?

10. 16. Or do you say this: that you grant indeed that God is to be loved, but not that God whom those worship who accept the authority of the Old Testament? So you say that the God who made heaven and earth is not to be worshiped. For he is proclaimed throughout every part of those volumes; but you confess that this whole world, which is signified by the name of heaven and earth, has God as its author and maker, and a good God. For one must speak with you with a reservation whenever God is named. For you assert that there are two gods, one good, the other evil. And if you say that you worship, and judge that one is to be worshiped, the God by whom the world was made, but not that he is the one whom the authority of the Old Testament commends, you act shamelessly, in that you try to interpret badly—and altogether in vain—another's mind and meaning, which we have received well and usefully.

For your foolish and impious disputations can in no way be compared with the discourses of devout and most learned men, through whom those Scriptures are opened in the Catholic Church to those who are willing and worthy. Far otherwise indeed, far otherwise than you suppose, are the Law and the Prophets understood by us. Cease to err: we do not worship a God who repents, who is envious, who is in need, who is cruel, who seeks pleasure from the blood of human beings or of cattle, who is pleased by outrages and crimes, who limits his possession to some little patch of earth. For against these and trifles of this kind you are accustomed to inveigh gravely and copiously. Therefore your invective does not touch us; rather, with all the more inept the more vehement your discourse, you tear at certain old-womanish or even childish opinions. And whoever is moved by it and crosses over to you does not condemn the teaching of our Church, but shows that he is ignorant of it.

10. 17. Therefore, if you carry anything human in your heart, if you yourselves are a care to yourselves, seek rather, diligently and devoutly, how those things are said. Seek, you wretches; for such a faith, by which something unbecoming to God is believed, we accuse more vehemently and more fully; for even in those things that were said, when they are understood as the letter sounds, we both correct the simplicity and deride the stubbornness.

And there are many other things, which you cannot understand, that Catholic teaching forbids those to believe who, advancing beyond a certain childhood of mind not in years but in zeal and understanding, are promoted to the gray hairs of wisdom. For it is taught how foolish it is to believe that God is contained in some place, however infinite, through any spaces whatever of quantity; and to judge that he himself, or any part of him, moves and passes from place to place is held to be a sacrilege. Indeed, if anyone should hold the opinion that anything of his substance and nature can in any way undergo change or alteration, he will be condemned for astonishing madness and impiety. So it comes about that among us there are found certain childish persons who think of God in human form and suspect that he is so—than which opinion nothing is more base; but there are likewise found many elders who behold by that very mind that his majesty remains inviolable and unchangeable not only above the human body but even above the mind itself. And it has already been said that these ages are to be distinguished not by time but by virtue and prudence.

Among you, however, no one indeed is found who describes the substance of God by the shape of a human body, but again no one who sets it apart from the taint of human error. And so those whom the Catholic Church sustains, as it were, wailing at her breasts, if they have not been despoiled by heretics, are each nourished according to his own capacity and strength, and are led—one in this way, another in that—first to the perfect man (See Eph 4:13), and then they arrive at the maturity and gray hairs of wisdom (See Wis 4:8; Sir 6:18), so that they may live as much as they wish, and live most happily.

11. 18. The following of God, then, is the desire for happiness; the attaining of him is happiness itself. But we follow him by loving, and we attain him not when we become altogether what he himself is, but when we are nearest to him and touch him in a marvelous and intelligible way and are inwardly illumined and grasped by his truth and holiness. For he is light itself, but it is granted to us to be illumined by him. The greatest, therefore, that leads to the happy life, and the first commandment is: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and mind. For those who love God, all things work toward good (Deut 6:5; Matt 22:37-38; Rom 8:28).

Hence, a little later, the same Paul says, I am certain that neither death nor life nor angel nor power nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39).

If, then, for those who love God all things work toward good, and no one doubts that the highest good, which is also called the best, must not only be loved but loved in such a way that we ought to love nothing more—and this is signified and expressed by what was said, With the whole heart and with the whole soul and with the whole mind—who, I ask, once all these things are established and most firmly believed, would doubt that there is nothing else best for us, toward the obtaining of which, with everything else set aside, we ought to hasten, except God? Likewise, if no thing separates us from his love, what can be not only better, but even more certain, than this good?

11. 19. But let us attend to the points one by one, briefly. No one separates us from him by threatening death. For that very thing by which we love God cannot die, except while it does not love God; since death itself is not to love God, which is nothing other than to prefer anything to him in loving and following.

No one separates us from him by promising life; for no one separates water from its own spring by making a promise.

An angel does not separate us; for an angel, when we cling to God, is not more powerful than our mind.

A power does not separate us; for if by "power" here is meant that which has some authority in this world, the mind clinging to God is altogether more sublime than the whole world. But if by "power" is meant that which is the most upright affection of our very mind, then, if it is in another, it favors our being joined to God; if it is in us, it itself joins us to him.

Present troubles do not separate us; for we feel them all the lighter the more closely we cling to him from whom they strive to separate us.

The promise of things to come does not separate us; for whatever good is to come, God promises more certainly, and there is nothing better than God himself, who is surely already present to those who cling well to him.

Neither height nor depth separates us; for if these words perhaps signify the height or depth of knowledge, I shall not be inquisitive, lest I be sundered from God, nor does anyone's teaching separate me from him so as to dispel, as it were, an error, from which no one at all would stray except one separated from him. But if by height and depth are signified the things above and below in this world, who would promise me heaven so that I should be sundered from the maker of heaven? Or what hell would terrify me, so that I should forsake God—whom, had I never forsaken him, I would not know the things of hell? Finally, what place will tear me away from his love, who would not be everywhere wholly present if he were contained by any place?

12. 20. No other creature, he says, separates us (See Rom 8:39). O the man of the most profound mysteries! He was not content to say creature, but he said other creature, reminding us that the very thing by which we love God and by which we cling to God—that is, the mind—is a creature. Another creature, then, is the body; and if the mind is a certain intelligible thing, that is, one that becomes known only by being understood, another creature is everything sensible, that is, what offers, as it were, a certain knowledge of itself through the eyes or ears or smell or taste or touch; and this must of necessity be lower than what is grasped by understanding alone.

Therefore, since even God can be known by worthy minds only through understanding, while nevertheless he is more excellent than the very mind by which he is understood—for he is its creator and author—it was to be feared lest the human mind, because it is numbered among invisible and intelligible things, should judge itself to be of the same nature as the one who created it, and so fall away through pride from him to whom it ought to be joined by love. For it is made like to God, as far as is granted, when it subjects itself to be enlightened and illumined by him. And if it most closely approaches him by that subjection by which it is made like to him, it must of necessity be made far from him by the audacity by which it wants to be more like him. This is the audacity by which it refuses to obey the laws of God, in its desire to be in its own power as God is.

12. 21. The farther, then, it departs from God—not in place but in affection and desire—toward things lower than itself, the more it is filled with foolishness and misery. By love, therefore, it returns to God, by which it strives not to set itself alongside him but to set itself beneath him. And the more insistently and zealously it does this, the happier and more sublime it will be, and, with him alone ruling, the most free. Therefore it ought to know that it is a creature. For it ought to believe that its creator as he is always remains in the inviolable and unchangeable nature of truth and wisdom, but to confess that into itself there can fall foolishness and falsity, on account of the errors of which it desires to be stripped. But again it ought to beware lest from the love of God himself, by which it is sanctified so that it may remain most happy, it be separated by the love of another creature, that is, of this sensible world. Therefore no other creature separates us—since we ourselves too are a creature—from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

13. 22. Let the same Paul tell us who this Christ Jesus our Lord is: To those who are called, he says, we preach Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24). What? Does not Christ himself say, I am the truth (John 14:6)? If, then, we ask what it is to live well, that is, by living to strive toward happiness, that will surely be to love virtue, to love wisdom, to love truth, and to love with the whole heart and with the whole soul and with the whole mind the virtue that is inviolable and unconquered, the wisdom that foolishness does not succeed, the truth that does not know how to be changed or to be otherwise than it always is. Through this, the Father himself is seen; for it was said, No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6). To him we cling through sanctification. For when we are sanctified we burn with full and entire love, by which alone it is brought about that we are not turned away from God and are conformed to him rather than to this world. For he predestined us, as the same Apostle says, to be conformed to the image of his Son (Rom 8:29).

13. 23. It will come about, then, through love, that we are conformed to God, and, conformed and shaped by him and circumcised from this world, we are not confounded with those things that ought to be subject to us. But this comes about through the Holy Spirit. For hope, he says, does not confound, because the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:5). But we could in no way be made whole again through the Holy Spirit unless he himself always remained whole and unchangeable. And this surely he could not do unless he were of the nature and substance of God, to whom alone unchangeability and, so to speak, unconvertibility always belong. For the creature—and this is not I but the same Paul who cries out—is subjected to vanity (Rom 8:20). And what is subjected to vanity cannot separate us from vanity and bind us to truth. And this the Holy Spirit furnishes us; therefore he is not a creature, for everything that exists is either God or a creature.

14. 24. We ought, then, to love God, a certain threefold unity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, which I shall say is nothing other than being itself. For he is truly and supremely God, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things; these are Paul's words. What did he then add? To him be glory (Rom 11:36). Most exactly indeed. For he does not say "to them," for there is one God. And what is to him be glory but to him be the best and highest and widely spread renown? For the better and more widely his fame is spread, the more ardently he is loved and cherished. And when this happens, the human race proceeds by nothing other than a sure and steady step into the best and most happy life.

I do not think that, when the question concerns morals and life, anything more need be sought as to what is the highest good of a human being, to which all things are to be referred. For it has appeared, both by reason as far as we were able and by the divine authority that surpasses our reason, that it is nothing other than God himself. For what else will be the best for a human being than that to which to cling is most happy? But this is God alone, to whom we surely cannot cling except by love, affection, charity.

15. 25. And if virtue leads us to the happy life, I would affirm that virtue is nothing whatever but the highest love of God. For that which is called fourfold virtue is so called, as far as I understand, from a certain varied affection of love itself. And so those four virtues—whose force I wish were as much in our minds as their names are on everyone's lips—I would not hesitate to define thus: that temperance is love offering itself whole to what is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of what is loved; justice is love serving the beloved alone and on that account ruling rightly; prudence is love sagaciously choosing the things by which it is helped from those by which it is hindered. But we have said that this love is the love not of just anything, but of God, that is, of the highest good, the highest wisdom, and the highest harmony. Therefore it is also permitted to define them thus: that we call temperance love keeping itself whole and uncorrupted for God; fortitude love readily enduring all things for the sake of God; justice love serving God alone and on this account ruling well over the other things that are subject to a human being; prudence love rightly discerning the things by which it is helped toward God from those by which it can be hindered.

16. 26. I will explain in a few words what manner of living is to be drawn from these virtues individually, if I first match from the Old Testament, as I promised, statements equal to the testimonies of the New Testament, which I have been using for a long time now. For does Paul alone say that we ought to be joined to God in such a way that there is nothing in between to separate us (See 1 Cor 15:28; Rom 8:35)? Does not the prophet too signify this most aptly and most briefly when he says, But for me it is good to cling to God (Ps 73:28 (72:28))? Is not what was said there most fully about love contained here in one word, when he says, To cling? Likewise, when he added, It is good, does he not look back to what was placed there, For those who love God all things work toward good (Rom 8:28)? So that in one little sentence and two words the prophet shows both the force and the fruit of love.

16. 27. And since it was said there that the Son of God is the power of God and the wisdom of God (See 1 Cor 1:24), and since virtue is understood to pertain to activity, while wisdom pertains to teaching—whence in the Gospel these two are marked when it is said, All things were made through him (John 1:3), for this belongs to activity and power, and then, as to what pertains to teaching and the knowledge of the true, and the life, he says, was the light of men (John 1:4) —, could anything be more in harmony with these testimonies of the New Testament than what was said in the Old concerning wisdom: It reaches mightily from end to end, and orders all things sweetly (Wis 8:1)? For to reach mightily signifies rather power, while to order sweetly signifies, as it were, the very art and reason.

But if this seems obscure, see what follows: And the Lord of all, he says, loved her; for she is the teacher of the knowledge of God, and the chooser of his works (Wis 8:3-4). Here nothing as yet seems said about activity; for to choose works is not the same as to work; therefore these things pertain to teaching; the work of virtue is owed, so that the statement we wish to demonstrate may be complete.

Read, then, next what is appended: And if a possession that is desired in life is honorable, he says, what is more honorable than wisdom, which works all things? (Wis 8:5) Can anything more splendid or more plain, or indeed even more full, be brought forward?

Hear another, if you think it too little, that has the same sound: For wisdom teaches sobriety and justice and virtue (Wis 8:7). Sobriety seems to me to pertain to the very knowledge of the true, that is, to teaching, while justice and virtue pertain to action and activity. With these two—that is, with effectiveness in acting and sobriety in contemplating—which the power of God and the wisdom of God, that is, the Son of God, bestows on those who love him, I do not know what is to be compared, since the prophet himself at once says how highly these are to be valued; for it is set down thus: For wisdom teaches sobriety and justice and virtue, than which nothing is more useful to human beings in life (Wis 8:7).

16. 28. Perhaps someone may think these things were not said of the Son of God. What else, then, does this show that was said, She magnifies her noble birth by having companionship with God (Wis 8:3)? Or does "noble birth" usually signify anything other than parents? And does not "companionship" cry out and assert equality with the Father himself? Then, since Paul says that the Son of God is the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), and the Lord himself says, No one knows the Father except the only-begotten Son (Matt 11:27), what could be said by the prophet more in keeping than what was said, And with you is Wisdom, who knows your works, who was present then when you made the world, and knew what would be pleasing in your eyes (Wis 9:9)? And as for Christ being the truth, the same is shown when he is called the splendor of the Father (Heb 1:3)—is there now anything around the sun but the very splendor it begets? What, then, could from the Old Testament accord with this statement more openly and clearly than what was said, Your truth is round about you (Ps 89:8 (88:9))? Finally, wisdom herself says in the Gospel, No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6); the prophet says, Who, then, knows your meaning, unless you give wisdom? And a little later, And the things that please you, men have learned and have been saved (Wis 9:17-18).

16. 29. Paul says, The love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:5); the prophet says, For the Holy Spirit of teaching will flee deceit (Wis 1:5). For where there is deceit, there is no love. Paul says, that we are made conformed to the image of the Son of God (Rom 8:29); the prophet says, The light of your countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord (Ps 4:6 (4:5)). Paul shows that the Holy Spirit is God and therefore is not a creature; the prophet says, And you sent your Holy Spirit from the highest (Wis 9:17). For God alone is the highest, than whom nothing is higher. Paul shows that this Trinity is one God when he says, To him be glory (Rom 11:36); it is said in the Old Testament, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God (Deut 6:4).

17. 30. What more do you want? Why do you rage, ignorantly and impiously? Why do you pervert untaught souls with harmful persuasion? The God of both Testaments is one. For just as the things we have set down from each agree with one another, so too do the rest, if you are willing to attend diligently and with fair judgment.

But because many things are said more humbly and more suited to souls creeping along the ground, that through things human they may rise up into things divine, and many things also figuratively, that the studious mind may be both more usefully exercised by what it seeks and more abundantly gladdened by what it finds, you, by a marvelous arrangement of the Holy Spirit, abuse these things to deceive and ensnare your hearers.

Why divine providence allows you to do this very thing, and how most truly the Apostle said, There must be many heresies, that those who are approved may be made manifest among you (1 Cor 11:19), it would take long to discuss; and what must be said to you, it is not for you to understand these things. You are not little known to me. You bring minds altogether gross, and sickened by the pestilent feeding on bodily images, to the judging of divine things, which are far higher than you suppose.

17. 31. Therefore we must not now deal with you in such a way that you should already understand these things—which cannot happen—but that you should at some time desire to understand. For this is brought about by the simple and pure love of God, which is chiefly seen in morals, of which we have already said much, and which, breathed in by the Holy Spirit, leads to the Son, that is, to the Wisdom of God, through whom the Father himself is known. For if wisdom and truth are not desired with all the strength of the mind, they can in no way be found. But if they are sought as is fitting, they cannot withdraw and hide themselves from those who love them.

Hence comes that saying which even you are accustomed to have on your lips, where he says, Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you (Matt 7:7). There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed (Matt 10:26). By love it is asked, by love it is sought, by love it is knocked at, by love it is revealed, and by love, finally, one remains in what has been revealed. From this love of wisdom and this diligence in seeking we are not deterred by the Old Testament, as you most falsely keep saying, but are most vehemently stirred up to these things.

17. 32. Hear, then, at last, and notice, I beg you, without stubbornness, what is said through the prophet: Wisdom is bright, he says, and never fades, and is easily seen by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her; she anticipates those who desire her, so as to show herself to them. Whoever has watched for her will not labor, for he will find her sitting at his doors. For to think about her is perfect understanding, and whoever has watched for her sake will soon be free of care; because she goes about seeking those worthy of herself, and shows herself to them cheerfully in their ways, and meets them in every thought. For the truest beginning of her is the desire for instruction. The care for instruction, then, is love, and love is the keeping of her laws; and the keeping of the laws is the assurance of incorruption; and incorruption makes one near to God. The desire for wisdom, therefore, leads to a kingdom (Wis 6:12-20). Will you then still bark against these things? Do not these words, set down thus and not yet understood, signify to anyone that they contain something deep and ineffable? Oh, that you could understand what has been said! At once you would cast away all the inanities of fables and the most empty imaginings of bodies, and would lodge your whole selves, with great eagerness, sincere love, and most firm faith, in the most holy bosom of the Catholic Church.

18. 33. I could, according to my mediocrity, examine each point and dig out and demonstrate what I have received—in the excellence and loftiness of which words for the most part fail—but so long as you bark, it must not be done. For it was not said in vain, Do not give what is holy to dogs (Matt 7:6). Do not be angry. I too barked and was a dog, when I was treated, rightly, not with the food of teaching but with the cudgels of refutation. But if there were in you the love of which we are now treating, or if there had ever been in you as much as the greatness of knowing the truth requires, God would be present, to show you that the Christian faith—which leads to the highest peak of wisdom and truth, to enjoy which is nothing other than to live most happily—is not among the Manicheans, and is nowhere except in Catholic teaching.

For what else does the apostle Paul seem to wish, when he says, For this reason I bend my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell through faith in your hearts, so that, rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the height and the length and the breadth and the depth, and to know also the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God (Eph 3:14-19)? Can anything be said more plainly?

18. 34. I beseech you, wake up a little; see the concord of both Testaments, sufficiently disclosing and teaching what is the measure of life in morals and to what all things are to be referred. The Gospels stir up the love of God, when it is said, Ask, seek, knock (Matt 7:7); Paul stirs it up by saying, that, rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend (Eph 3:17); the prophet too stirs it up, when he says that wisdom can be easily known by those who love her, seek her, desire her, watch, think, and care. The salvation of the mind and the way of happiness is shown by the harmony of both Scriptures, and you choose rather to bark against these things than to obey them. I will say briefly what I think: hear the learned men of the Catholic Church with as much peace of mind and with the same eager wish with which I heard you; there will be no need of the nine years in which you made sport of me. Far, far in a shorter time you will discern what difference there is between truth and emptiness.

19. 35. But it is time to return to those four virtues and to dig out and draw from each of them a manner of living. And so let us first look at temperance, which promises us a certain integrity and incorruption of that love by which we are bound to God. For its task is in restraining and quieting the desires by which we gape after the things that turn us away from the laws of God and from the fruit of his goodness, which is, to explain it briefly, the happy life. For there is the faith of the true, by enjoying the contemplation of which and inwardly clinging to it we are without doubt happy; but those who fall away from it are entangled in great errors and griefs. For, as the Apostle says, the root of all evils is desire, which some following have made shipwreck of the faith and entangled themselves in many griefs (1 Tim 6:10).

This sin of the soul is signified in the Old Testament plainly enough, to those who understand well, in the transgression of the very man who was in paradise. For in Adam indeed we all die, as the same Apostle says, and in Christ we shall all rise again (1 Cor 15:22). O the deep mysteries! But I shall restrain myself; for I have not undertaken now to teach you what is right, but to unteach you what is depraved, if I shall be able, that is, if God assents to my purpose toward you.

Paul says, then, that the root of all evils is desire, through which the Old Law too signifies the fall of the first man. Paul warns us to put off the old man and put on the new (See Col 3:9-10). And he wishes Adam, who sinned, to be understood as the old man, but the one whom the Son of God took up in the mystery to set us free, as the new man.

For he says in another place, The first man, of the earth, is earthly; the second man, from heaven, is heavenly. As is the earthly, such also are the earthly; as is the heavenly, such also are the heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly (1 Cor 15:47-49); that is, put off the old and put on the new. The whole office of temperance, therefore, is to put off the old man and be renewed in God; that is, to despise all bodily enticements and popular praise, and to direct one's whole love toward things invisible and divine.

Hence follows what was marvelously said, And though our outer man is corrupted, yet the inner is renewed from day to day (2 Cor 4:16). Hear too the prophet singing, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew an upright spirit within me (Ps 51:10 (50:12)). What can be said against this agreement except by blind barkers?

20. 37. The enticements of the body are situated in all those things that the bodily sense touches, which by some are also named sensible things; among which this common light especially excels, because among our very senses, which the soul uses through the body, nothing is to be preferred to the eyes; and therefore in the holy Scriptures all sensible things are denoted by the name of visible things.

And so in the New Testament we are forbidden the love of these things thus: Not looking, he says, at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal (2 Cor 4:18). From which it can be understood how far from Christian are those who think the sun and moon are not only to be loved but even to be worshiped. For what do we see, if we do not see the sun and moon? But we have been forbidden to turn to the things that are seen. Therefore even these things are not to be loved by one who intends to offer to God that incorrupt love.

But there will be another place for me where these things will be inquired into more diligently. For I have set out now to speak not of faith but of life, through which we deserve to know what we believe. God alone, therefore, is to be loved; but all this world, that is, all sensible things, are to be despised, though to be used for the necessity of this life.

21. 38. Popular glory is thus cast away and despised in the New Testament: If I wished, he says, to please men, I would not be the servant of Christ (Gal 1:10). There is likewise another thing that the soul conceives about bodies through certain imaginings, and calls it the knowledge of things. For which reason we are rightly forbidden also to be inquisitive, which is a great office of temperance. Hence comes that saying, Beware lest anyone lead you astray through philosophy. And because the very name of philosophy, if it be considered, signifies a great thing, to be desired with the whole mind—since philosophy is the love and pursuit of wisdom—the Apostle most cautiously, lest he seem to deter us from the love of wisdom, added, and the elements of this world (Col 2:8).

For there are those who, having deserted the virtues and not knowing what God is and how great is the majesty of the nature that always remains in the same way, think they are doing something great if they investigate, most curiously and most intently, this whole mass of body that we call the world. Whence is begotten so great a pride that they seem to themselves to dwell in the very heaven about which they often dispute. Let the soul, then, restrain itself from the desire of vain thinking of this kind, if it has resolved to keep itself chaste for God. For by such love it is for the most part deceived, so that either it thinks nothing exists but body, or, even if, moved by authority, it confesses that something incorporeal exists, it nevertheless cannot think about it except through bodily images, and believes it to be something such as the deceptive sense of the body forces upon it. To this also pertains what is enjoined, that we must beware of idols.

21. 39. To this authority of the New Testament, then, by which we are bidden to love nothing of this world (1 John 2:15), that statement especially belongs in which it was said, Do not be conformed to this world (Rom 12:2); for it must at the same time be shown that everyone is conformed to the thing he loves; to this authority, then, if I should seek what to match from the Old Testament, I find many things indeed, but one book of Solomon, that which is called Ecclesiastes, most copiously brings all these things into the utmost contempt. For it begins thus: Vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities, and all is vanity. What abundance has a man in all his labor with which he labors under the sun? (Eccl 1:2) If all these words are attended to, weighed, and examined, many things are found most necessary for those who desire to flee this world and to flee back to God; but it is long, and my discourse hastens to other things.

Yet, this beginning having been established, he goes on to set forth all of it: that those are vain who are deceived by things of this kind; and he calls the very thing by which they are deceived vanity, not because God did not create these things, but because human beings wish to subject themselves through sins to these things, which by the divine law were made subject to them through right deeds. For what else is it to be mocked and deceived by false goods than to judge that things lower than yourself are to be admired and desired?

The temperate man, then, has in mortal and fleeting things of this kind a rule of life confirmed by both Testaments: to love none of them, to think none of them to be desired for its own sake, but to make use of them, so far as is enough, for the necessity of this life and its offices, with the moderation of one who uses, not with the affection of one who loves. These things have been said about temperance briefly, considering the greatness of the matters, yet, considering the work undertaken, perhaps more copiously than was fitting.

22. 40. About fortitude, however, not much need be said. For that love of which we speak, which ought to be inflamed toward God with all holiness, is called temperance in not desiring these things, and fortitude in losing them. But among all the things that are possessed in this life, the body is for a human being, by the most just laws of God, the heaviest bond, because of the ancient sin, than which nothing is better known for proclaiming, nothing more hidden for understanding.

This bond, then, lest it be shaken and harassed, shakes the soul with the terror of toil and pain, and lest it be taken away and destroyed, with the terror of death. For the soul loves it by the force of habit, not understanding that, if it used the body well and knowingly, its resurrection and reformation would, by divine help and law, be subjected to the soul's authority without any trouble; but when, with this love, the soul has turned itself wholly to God, once these things are known it will not only despise death but even desire it.

22. 41. But there remains a great struggle with pain. Yet nothing is so hard and iron-like that it is not conquered by the fire of love. When the soul snatches itself up into God by this love, it will fly above all torture, free and admirable, on the most beautiful and most whole wings on which chaste love rests for the embrace of God—unless indeed God will allow lovers of gold, lovers of praise, lovers of women to be stronger than his own lovers, though that be called not love but, more fittingly, desire or lust. In which, nevertheless, it appears how great is the impulse of the mind that strives toward the things it loves, bending its course through all manner of monstrous things; and it is an argument to us how all things are to be endured, lest we forsake God, if men endure so much for those things, only to forsake him.

23. 42. Why, then, should I here gather together the authorities of the New Testament, where it was said, Tribulation works patience, patience proof, proof hope (Rom 5:3-4): and not only said, but also proved and confirmed by the examples of those who said it? Rather from the Old Testament, against which they rage madly, I will call up an example of patience.

Nor will I call to mind that man by whom, amid great torments of the body and a horrible wasting of the limbs, not only are human things borne but divine things are even discussed. In whose every utterance it shines out clearly enough, if anyone attend with a fair mind, how lightly those things are to be valued which, when men wish to hold them by mastery, they themselves are rather held by through desire, and become slaves of mortal things when, ignorantly, they desire to be their masters (See Job 1:9-14).

For he lost all his riches, and, made suddenly most poor, he kept a mind so unshaken and fixed in God that he sufficiently showed that those things had not been great to him, but he to them, while to him God was great. And if the men of our time could be of such a mind, we would not be greatly forbidden in the New Testament the possession of those things, in order that we might be perfect. For it is much more admirable not to cling to those things, although you possess them, than not to possess them at all.

23. 43. But since we are now treating of the bearing of pain and bodily torments, I leave that man, though great, though unconquered, a man nevertheless. For those Scriptures offer me a woman of astonishing fortitude, and now compel me to pass over to her. She, with her seven children, spent all her inward parts upon the tyrant and executioner sooner than one sacrilegious word, while by her exhortation her sons were strengthened, in whose limbs she herself was tortured—she, moreover, destined to die in her own turn, what she had bidden them to bear (See 2 Macc 7).

What, I ask, can be added to so great a patience? Yet what wonder if the love of God, conceived in her every marrow, resisted both tyrant and executioner and pain and body and sex and affection? Had she not heard, Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints (Ps 116:15 (115:15))? Had she not heard, Better is a patient man than the mightiest (Prov 16:32)? Had she not heard, Whatever is laid upon you, accept, and in pain endure, and in your humiliation have patience; for gold and silver are tested in fire (Sir 2:4-5)? Had she not heard, The furnace tests the potter's vessels, and the trial of tribulation just men (Sir 27:5)? Indeed she had taken in both these and many other things, which by the one Holy Spirit of God were written down—divine precepts of fortitude—in those books, which alone as yet existed, just as in these of the New Testament.

24. 44. What of justice, which pertains to God? Since both the Lord says, You cannot serve two masters (Matt 6:24; Luke 16:13), and the Apostle reproves those who serve the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25), was it not said before in the Old Testament, You shall adore the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve (Deut 6:13; 10:20)? But what need is there to say more on this point, since all things there are full of such statements? Justice, then, will give this rule of life to the lover of whom we are speaking: that he most willingly serve God, whom he loves, that is, the highest good, the highest wisdom, the highest peace; and that he govern all other things, partly as subject to himself, partly as to be made subject. This norm of living, as we have taught, is strengthened by the authority of both Testaments.

24. 45. Nor need we discuss prudence at any length, to which belongs the discerning of things to be desired and things to be avoided. If this is lacking, none of the things already spoken of can be accomplished. To it belong the watch and the most diligent vigilance, lest by an evil persuasion creeping up little by little we be deceived,

whence often the Lord cries out, Watch (Matt 24:42; 25:13; 26:38, 41; Mark 13:33, 35, 37; Luke 21:36), and, Walk, he says, lest the darkness overtake you (John 12:35). And likewise it is said, Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the whole lump? (1 Cor 5:6; Gal 5:9)

But what can be brought forward more plainly from the Old Testament against that drowsiness of the mind, through which it comes about that we do not perceive ruin creeping, as it were, by little bits, than what was said by the prophet, He who despises small things will fall away little by little (Sir 19:1)?

About which statement, if it were opportune for those who are hastening, I would discuss it most copiously, and the office now undertaken by us would demand it; perhaps we would demonstrate how deep are the mysteries which most ignorant and sacrilegious men, by deriding them, do not indeed fall away little by little, but go headlong with a great fall.

25. 46. What more should I discuss about morals? For if God is the highest good of a human being, which you cannot deny, it surely follows—since to desire the highest good is to live well—that to live well is nothing other than to love God with the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole mind, from whom it comes about that the love of him is kept incorrupt and entire, which belongs to temperance; that it be broken by no troubles, which belongs to fortitude; that it serve no other, which belongs to justice; that it watch in discerning things, lest deceit or guile creep up little by little, which belongs to prudence. This is the one perfection of a human being, by which alone he obtains that he may enjoy the sincerity of truth; this is sung to us by both Testaments; this is urged upon us on this side and on that. Why do you still weave slander against Scriptures that you do not know? With how great ignorance do you assail books which only those find fault with who do not understand, and which only those are unable to understand who find fault! For no enemy is allowed to know them, nor can anyone, except a friend, know them.

25. 47. Let us love God, then, with the whole heart, with the whole soul, with the whole mind, whoever of us have purposed to arrive at eternal life. For eternal life is the whole reward, in the promise of which we rejoice, nor can the reward precede the merits and be given to a person before he is worthy. For what is more unjust than this, and what more just than God? We ought not, then, to demand the reward before we deserve to receive it. Here perhaps it is not unfitting to ask what eternal life itself is. But let us rather hear its bestower: This is, he says, eternal life, that they know you the true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (John 17:3). Eternal life, therefore, is the very knowledge of truth. For which reason, see how perverse and preposterous are those who think they hand on the knowledge of God in order that we may be perfect, when it is itself the reward of the perfect. What, then, is to be done—what, I ask, except that we first love with full love the very one whom we wish to know? Whence arises that which we treated of sufficiently from the beginning, that nothing is done more wholesomely in the Catholic Church than that authority should precede reason.

26. 48. But let us look at the rest, for it seems that nothing has been treated about the human being himself, that is, about the lover himself; but whoever judges so understands too little clearly. For it cannot happen that one who loves God does not love himself; indeed, only the one who loves God knows how to love himself.

For he loves himself well enough who diligently acts so as to enjoy the highest and true good; and if this is nothing other than God, as the things that have been said have taught, who can doubt that the lover of God loves himself? What? Among human beings themselves, ought there to be no bond of love? Indeed there ought, so much so that no surer step toward the love of God is believed possible than the love of one human being toward another.

26. 49. Let the Lord himself, then, bring forth for us the second precept, when asked about the precepts of life; for he was not content with one, knowing that God is one thing and the human being another, and that there is as much difference as between him who created and that which was created to the likeness of the Creator. He says, then, that the second precept is, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:39). But you love yourself wholesomely if you love God more than yourself.

What, then, you do for yourself, that is to be done for your neighbor; that is, that he too may love God with perfect love. For you do not love him as yourself if you do not lead him to that good toward which you yourself strive. For that is the one good which does not become cramped for all who strive toward it with you. From this precept are born the offices of human society, in which it is difficult not to err. But we must act, above all, that we be benevolent, that is, that we use no malice, no evil guile against another. For what is nearer to a human being than a human being?

26. 50. Hear also what Paul says: The love of neighbor, he says, works no evil (Rom 13:10). I use the briefest testimonies, but, unless I am mistaken, fitting ones and such as satisfy the matter undertaken; for who does not know how many words, and of how great weight, are spread everywhere in those books concerning the love of neighbor? But since one sins against another in two ways—in one, if he harms him; in the other, if, when he can, he does not help him—and since these very things are those by which men are called evil, neither of which the one who loves does, this statement, I think, sufficiently demonstrates what we wish: The love of neighbor works no evil (Rom 13:10).

And if we cannot arrive at good things unless we cease to work evil, these are, as it were, the cradle of the love of God, by which we love our neighbor, so that, since the love of neighbor works no evil, from this we may ascend to what was said, We know that for those who love God all things work toward good (Rom 8:28).

26. 51. But somehow these either rise together into fullness and perfection, or the love of God is begun first and the love of neighbor perfected first. For to begin, perhaps the divine love snatches us more quickly into itself, but we more easily perfect the lesser things. However the matter stands, this above all must be held: that no one believe he will come to happiness, and to the God he loves, with his neighbor despised (See 1 John 3:14). And would that, as it is easy for a well-instructed and kindly person to love his neighbor, so it were easy either to look out for him or to do him no harm. For a good will is not enough for these things, but there is need of a certain great reason and prudence, which no one can use unless God, that fountain of all goods, has bestowed it. About which most difficult matter, as I judge, we have tried to say, in keeping with the work undertaken, only a few things, placing all our hope in him whose gifts alone these are.

27. 52. A human being, then, as he appears to a human being, is a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body. Partly to the body, then, and partly to the soul of a person does the one who loves his neighbor do good. What pertains to the body is named medicine, what to the soul, instruction. But by medicine I now mean whatever at all either guards or restores the health of the body. To this, then, pertain not only those things that the art of those properly called physicians provides, but also food and drink, clothing and shelter, and finally all defense and protection by which our body is preserved even against external blows and accidents; for hunger and thirst and cold and heat and whatever is gravely inflicted from outside do not allow the health of which we now speak to remain.

27. 53. Therefore all those who dutifully and humbly provide the things by which evils or troubles of this kind are resisted are called merciful, even if they should be so wise as to be no longer disturbed by any grief of mind. For who would not know that mercy is so named from the fact that it makes the heart wretched (miserum cor) in one who grieves over another's evil? And who would not grant that the wise person ought to be free from all wretchedness, when he comes to the aid of the needy, when he gives food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, when he clothes the naked, when he receives the stranger under his roof, when he frees the oppressed, when finally he extends his humanity even to the burial of the dead? Even if he does this with a tranquil mind, prompted by no stings of grief, but led by the office of goodness, he is nonetheless to be called merciful. For the name does him no harm, since wretchedness is absent.

27. 54. But the foolish, when they shun mercy as if it were a vice, because they cannot be sufficiently moved by duty if they are not also admonished by a disturbance of feeling, freeze over rather with the rigidity of inhumanity than are made serene by the tranquillity of reason. And so, much more prudently, even God himself is called merciful (See Deut 4:31; Neh 9:17; Ps 86:15 (85:15); Sir 2:13; Luke 6:36; Jas 5:11); in what way he is so called it remains for those to understand who have shown themselves fit by religion and zeal, lest, by using the words of the learned ineptly, we cause the souls of the unlearned to harden first by avoiding mercy rather than to grow gentle by seeking kindness. And as mercy bids us drive these troubles away from another person, so innocence forbids us to inflict them.

28. 55. But as for what pertains to instruction, through which health is restored to the soul itself—without which that health of the body avails nothing for driving away miseries—it is altogether a most difficult matter. And as we were saying in the case of the body, that it is one thing to cure diseases and wounds, which few people can do well, but another thing to relieve hunger and thirst and the rest, in which it is commonly and everywhere granted that one person help another, so in the soul there are certain things in which that excellent and rare expertise is not much needed, as when we exhort and admonish that these very things be provided to the needy which we said are to be provided to the body. For when we do these things, we help the body by our means; but when we teach that they be done, we help the soul by instruction.

But there are other things by which the manifold and varied diseases of souls are healed by a certain great and altogether ineffable method; which medicine, unless it were sent to the peoples from God, there would be no hope of health for those sinning with so unrestrained an advance—although even that medicine of the body, if you trace the origin of things more deeply, is not found to have been able to flow to human beings except from God, to whom the standing and health of all things is to be attributed.

28. 56. Yet this instruction of which we now treat, which is the medicine of the soul, is, so far as may be gathered from the divine Scriptures themselves, divided into two: restraint and teaching. Restraint is accomplished by fear, teaching by love—I mean the love of the one who is helped by the instruction; for the one who helps has none of these two except to love. In these two, God himself, by whose goodness and clemency it comes about that we are anything at all, has given us a rule of instruction in the two Testaments, the Old and the New. For although each is in each, fear nevertheless prevails in the Old, love in the New; what there is slavery, here is proclaimed by the Apostles as freedom.

Of the admirable order and divine harmony of these Testaments it would take very long to speak, and many religious and learned men have spoken of it. This matter demands many books, that it may be set forth and proclaimed according to its worth, so far as a human being can. The one, then, who loves his neighbor acts, as far as he can, that he may be sound in body and sound in soul; but the care of the body is to be referred to the health of the soul. He acts, then, by these steps, as to what pertains to the soul: that he first fear, then love, God. These are the best morals, through which there comes to us also that recognition of truth to which we are snatched by all our zeal.

28. 57. And in these two I agree with the Manicheans, that is, that we love God and neighbor; but they deny that this is contained in the Old Testament; and how greatly they err in this appears sufficiently, I think, from the statements concerning each that we brought forward above.

But to say something brief, yet such that to resist it would be astonishing madness: do they not notice that these very two things, which they are compelled to praise—although they deny that they were most aptly brought forward by the Lord in the Gospel from the Old Testament—are written there: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind (Deut 6:5; Matt 22:37), and that other, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18; Matt 19:19; 22:39)?

Or if they do not dare to deny these things—for they are pressed by the light of truth—let them dare to deny that these precepts are wholesome; let them deny, if they can, that the best morals are contained in them, and say that God ought not to be loved, that the neighbor ought not to be loved, and that for those who love God not all things work toward good (See Rom 8:28), and that the love of neighbor does not work no evil (See Rom 13:10); by which two things human life is most wholesomely and best ordered.

If they say these things, there is no reasoning to be had with them, not only as with Christians, but not even as with human beings. But if they do not dare to say these things and are compelled to confess that they are divine, why do they not cease, with wicked impiety, to assail and condemn the books from which these things were brought forward?

28. 58. Or will they say that it is not a consequence that all things there should be good, where we were able to find these? For this they are accustomed to say. To which evasion what I should reply, how I should meet it, I do not easily see. Should I examine the individual words of the Old Testament so as to demonstrate to the obstinate and unlearned that in them there is the highest concord with the Gospel? But when will that be? When will either I suffice or will they have the patience? What, then, shall I do? Shall I desert the cause and allow them to lie hidden in an opinion that, though wicked and false, is nevertheless difficult to refute? I will not do so; God himself, whose those precepts are, will be present from close at hand, and will not allow me, in such straits, to be helpless and forsaken.

29. 59. Therefore be present in mind, Manicheans, if any of you are perhaps so held by that superstition that you can at some time escape. Be present, I say, and without stubbornness, without zeal for resisting; for otherwise it is most ruinous for you to judge. For surely it is doubtful to no one—nor are you so turned away from the truth as not to understand—that, if to love God and neighbor is good, which no one can deny, whatever hangs upon these two precepts cannot rightly be blamed. And what hangs upon them, it is ridiculous if you think it should be asked of me; hear Christ himself, hear, I say, Christ, hear the Wisdom of God: On these two precepts, he says, the whole law hangs, and all the prophets (Matt 22:40).

29. 60. What can you say at this point, most shameless stubbornness? That Christ did not say this? In the Gospel these words of his are written down. That what is written is false? What more impious than this sacrilege can be found? What more shameless than this utterance? What more audacious? What more wicked? The worshipers of idols, who hate even the name of Christ, have never dared to say this against those Scriptures. For there will follow the utter overthrow of all literature and the abolition of all the books committed to memory, if what has been strengthened by so great a religion of peoples, confirmed by so great an agreement of men and ages, is brought into this doubt, so that it cannot retain even the credit and weight of common history. Finally, what will you be able to bring forward from any Scriptures, where I may not be allowed to use this utterance, if it is brought forward against my own reasoning and intention?

29. 61. But who could bear this, that they forbid us to believe books most well known and now in everyone's hands, and command us to believe the things they themselves bring forward?

If we must doubt about a writing, about which one more than about that which has not deserved to be defamed, which could truly have lied wholly under another name?

If you press that writing on me against my will, and by the reasoning of an exaggerated authority force me to faith, shall I, wretched, doubt about that Scripture which I see constantly and most widely spread abroad and fortified by the witness of the Churches scattered throughout the whole world—and, what is more wretched, shall I doubt at your instigation?

Whereas, if you were to bring forward other copies, I ought not to hold any but those that are commended by the agreement of the greater number; now, with you bringing forward nothing to compare except a most empty utterance, most full of rashness, will you think the human race so perverse and forsaken by the help of divine providence as to prefer to those Scriptures, not other ones brought forward by you by which they may be refuted, but your words alone?

For you must bring forward another manuscript containing the same things, but nevertheless uncorrupted and more accurate, in which there are lacking only those things that you charge to have been interpolated here. So that, if, for example, you contend that Paul's epistle written to the Romans is corrupted, you should bring forward another, uncorrupted, or rather another manuscript, in which the same epistle of the same Apostle is written down pure and uncorrupted. I will not do so, you say, lest I myself be believed to have corrupted it; for this you are accustomed to say, and you say it truly. Nothing else at all will even moderately sensible people suspect, if you do this.

See, then, you yourself, what you have judged about your own authority, and understand whether they ought to believe your words against those Scriptures, if to believe a manuscript merely because it is brought forward by you is the mark of great rashness.

30. 62. But why more on this point? For who would not see that those who dare to say these things against the Christian Scriptures, even if they are not what people suspect, are certainly at any rate not Christians? For to Christians this form of living has been given: that we love the Lord our God with our whole heart, with our whole soul, with our whole mind (Deut 6:5), and then our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 19:19; 22:39). For on these two precepts the whole law hangs, and all the prophets (Matt 22:40). Rightly, O Catholic Church, most true mother of Christians, do you proclaim that not only God himself, the attaining of whom is the most happy life, is to be worshiped most purely and chastely, bringing in no creature to be adored by us, to whom we should be bidden to be in servitude—and excluding from that incorrupt and inviolable eternity, to which alone a human being is to be made subject, to which alone the rational soul by cleaving is not wretched, everything that has been made, that is liable to change, that is subject to time; neither confounding what eternity, what truth, what finally peace itself distinguishes, nor again separating what the one majesty joins—but also do you embrace the love and charity of neighbor in such a way that with you there prevails every medicine for the varied diseases by which souls are sick for their sins.

30. 63. You train and teach children childishly, young people strongly, the old quietly, according to the age not only of each one's body but of his soul.

You make wives subject to their husbands, by a chaste and faithful obedience, not for the satisfying of lust but for the propagating of offspring and for the fellowship of the household.

You set husbands over their wives, by the laws of sincere love, not for mocking the weaker sex (See Gen 39:14; Judg 19:25; 2 Sam 13:14).

You join children to their parents by a certain free servitude, and set parents over their children by a devoted rule.

You bind brother to brother by the bond of religion, stronger and tighter than that of blood.

You bind together every nearness of kindred and bond of affinity, with the ties of nature and of will preserved, by mutual love.

You teach servants to cling to their masters not so much by the necessity of their condition as by the delight of duty.

You make masters gentle toward their servants, by consideration of the most high God, their common Lord, and more inclined to look out for them than to coerce them.

You join citizens to citizens, nations to nations, and human beings to human beings altogether—by the remembrance of our first parents—not only in fellowship but in a certain brotherhood as well.

You teach kings to provide for their peoples; you admonish peoples to submit to their kings. To whom honor is owed, to whom affection, to whom reverence, to whom fear, to whom consolation, to whom admonition, to whom exhortation, to whom instruction, to whom rebuke, to whom punishment, you diligently teach, showing how not all things are owed to all, but love to all, and injury to none.

30. 64. But now, when this human love has nourished and strengthened the soul that clings to your breasts, and it has been made fit to follow God, when his majesty has begun to disclose itself so far as suffices for a human being while he dwells on this earth, there is born so great an ardor of love and there rises so great a blaze of divine love that, with all the vices burned away and the person purified and sanctified, it appears well enough how divinely it was said, I am a consuming fire, and, I came to cast fire upon the world (Luke 12:49).

These two utterances of the one God, marked in the two Testaments, declare by their concordant witness the sanctification of the soul, so that at some time that may come to pass which likewise was taken up into the New Scripture from the Old: Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your striving? (1 Cor 15:54-55) If only these heretics had the strength to understand this one thing, they would surely nowhere venerate God except with you and in your bosom, not at all proud and well at peace.

Rightly with you are the divine precepts kept widely and broadly.

Rightly with you is it well understood how much graver it is to sin against a known than against an unknown law. For the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law (1 Cor 15:56), by how much more gravely the consciousness of a despised precept strikes and slays.

Rightly with you has it been seen how vain is action under the law, when lust lays waste the soul and is held in check by the fear of punishment, not overwhelmed by the love of virtue.

Rightly with you are there so many hospitable, many merciful, many dutiful, many learned, many chaste, many holy, many so burning with the love of God that even solitude delights them, in the highest continence and an incredible contempt of this world.

31. 65. What is it, I ask, that those see who cannot help loving a human being and yet can help seeing a human being? Surely, whatever that is, it is more excellent than human things, by the contemplation of which a human being can live without a human being. For now hear, Manicheans, the morals and singular continence of perfect Christians, to whom the highest chastity has seemed not only to be praised but even to be taken up, lest you dare to boast shamelessly before the minds of the unlearned, as of an abstinence most difficult of all things, if there is any shame in you. Nor will I tell the things you do not know, but the things you hide from us. For who does not know that the multitude of Christian men of the highest continence is spread day by day more and more throughout the whole world, and especially in the East and in Egypt, which can in no way be hidden from you?

31. 66. I will say nothing about those whom I mentioned a little before, who, most secluded, utterly removed from all sight of human beings, content with bread alone—which is brought to them at spaced intervals of time—and with water, inhabit the most deserted lands, enjoying the conversation of God, to whom they have clung with pure minds, and most happy in the contemplation of his beauty, which can be perceived only by the understanding of the holy. Nothing, I say, will I speak about these; for to some they seem to have deserted human affairs more than they ought, not understanding how much their mind profits us in their prayers and their life as an example, though we are not permitted to see their bodies.

But to discuss this I think long and superfluous; for who can make this so excellent height of holiness, which to anyone seems of its own accord worthy of wonder and honor, seem so by our discourse? Only these men are to be admonished, who vainly boast of themselves, that the temperance and continence of the most holy Christians of the Catholic faith has advanced so far that it seems to some to need restraining and, as it were, to be recalled to human limits; so far have those men's souls escaped above the level of human beings that they are so judged even by those to whom this is displeasing.

31. 67. But if this exceeds our endurance, who would not admire and proclaim those who, having despised and deserted the enticements of this world, gathered into a common life most holy and most chaste, spend their time together, living in prayers, in readings, in discussions, swollen by no pride, troubled by no obstinacy, made livid by no envy, but modest, reverent, peaceable, offering a most concordant life, most intent upon God, as a most welcome gift to him from whom they have deserved to be able to do these things? No one possesses anything of his own; no one is a burden to anyone. They work with their hands at things by which the body can be fed and the mind not hindered from God.

They hand over their work to those whom they call deans, because they are set over ten, so that the care of his own body may touch none of them, neither in food nor in clothing nor if anything else is needed either for daily necessity or for changed health, as happens. But those deans, arranging all things with great solicitude and providing at hand whatever that life requires on account of the weakness of the body, themselves nevertheless also render account to one, whom they call father. These fathers, however, not only most holy in morals but also most excellent in divine doctrine, lofty in all things, look out with no pride for those whom they call sons, with great authority of their own in commanding, with great willingness of the others in obeying. At the end of the day they come together, each from his own dwelling, while still fasting, to hear that father; and there gather to each father at least three thousand men, for there are even far more numerous ones living under one. They listen with incredible zeal, in the deepest silence, signifying the affections of their minds, as the discourse of the speaker has moved them, by groaning or by weeping or by a modest joy free of all clamor.

Then the body is refreshed, as much as is enough for soundness and health, each one restraining his desire lest he pour himself out even on the very things at hand, which are sparing and most cheap. Thus they abstain not only from flesh and from wine, for the sufficient taming of lusts, but also from those things that the more keenly provoke the appetite of belly and throat the cleaner they seem to some; under which name the base craving for choice foods, which is foreign to flesh meats, is wont to be ridiculously and basely defended.

Indeed whatever is left over from necessary sustenance—for very much is left over from the works of their hands and from the restriction of meals—is distributed to the needy with greater care than it was acquired by those who distribute it. For in no way do they busy themselves that these things should abound for them, but in every way they act that nothing of what has been left over should remain with them, so much so that they even send laden ships to those places that needy people inhabit. There is no need to say more about a most well-known matter.

31. 68. This too is the life of women serving God solicitously and chastely, who, separated in their dwellings and removed from men as far as is fitting, are joined to them only by devout love and by the imitation of virtue; to whom there is no access of young men, nor even of the gravest and most approved old men, except as far as the vestibule, for the sake of providing the necessities they need. For by wool-working they exercise and sustain the body, and hand over the very garments to the brothers, taking from them in turn what is needed for sustenance. These morals, this life, this order, this institution, if I should wish to praise it, I am not worthily able to, and I fear lest I should seem to judge that what is set forth merely by itself cannot please, if I should think that, beyond the simplicity of the narrator, the buskin of the praiser too must be added. These things, Manicheans, find fault with, if you can. Do not parade our weeds before blind men, unable to discern.

32. 69. Yet the best morals of the Catholic Church are not so narrowly confined that I should think only the life of those whom I have mentioned is to be praised. For how many bishops, most excellent and most holy men, have I known; how many presbyters, how many deacons and ministers of every kind of the divine sacraments, whose virtue seems to me the more admirable and worthy of greater proclamation the more difficult it is to preserve it in the manifold kind of human beings and in this more turbulent life. For they preside over people not so much already healed as still to be healed. The vices of the multitude must be borne with, that they may be cured, and the pestilence must be tolerated before it is quieted. It is most difficult here to keep the best measure of life and a mind peaceable and tranquil. For, to put it briefly, these act where life is learned, those where it is lived.

33. 70. Nor for that reason, however, would I despise that praiseworthy kind of Christians, namely those who dwell in cities most removed from the common way of life. I myself saw at Milan a lodging of saints, of not a few men, over whom one presbyter presided, a man most excellent and most learned. At Rome too I knew several, in which individuals excelling in gravity and prudence and divine knowledge preside over the rest dwelling with them, who live in Christian love, holiness, and freedom; nor are they themselves a burden to anyone, but, after the manner of the East and by the authority of the apostle Paul, they support themselves by their own hands. I have learned too that many practice fasts altogether incredible—not refreshing the body once daily toward nightfall, which is everywhere most customary, but very often passing a continuous three days or more without food and drink. And this not only among men but even among women; over whom likewise, many widows and virgins living together and seeking their living by wool and weaving, individual women preside, most grave and most approved, skilled and ready not only in instructing and ordering morals but also in instructing minds.

33. 71. And amid these things no one is pressed into harsh things that he cannot bear, nothing he refuses is imposed on him, nor is he for that reason condemned by the rest because he confesses himself unable to imitate them in these things; for they remember how greatly love is commended in all the Scriptures; they remember, All things are clean to the clean (Titus 1:15) and, Not what enters into your mouth defiles you, but what comes out (Matt 15:11). And so all their industry watches not over the rejecting of kinds of food as if polluted, but over the thorough taming of desire and the keeping of the love of the brothers.

They remember, Food is for the belly and the belly for food; but God will destroy both this and these (1 Cor 6:13); and elsewhere, Neither if we eat shall we abound, nor if we do not eat shall we be in want (1 Cor 8:8); and that above the rest, It is good, brothers, not to eat flesh nor to drink wine nor anything by which your brother is offended (Rom 14:21).

For here he shows how all these things are to be directed to the end of love. For one believes he may eat all things; but he who is weak, he says, let him eat vegetables. Let him who eats not despise him who does not eat; and let him who does not eat not judge him who eats, for God receives him. Who are you to judge another's servant? To his own Lord he stands or falls; but he will stand, for God is able to make him stand (Rom 14:2-4).

And a little later, He who eats, eats unto the Lord and gives thanks to God; and he who does not eat, does not eat unto the Lord, and gives thanks to God (Rom 14:6).

And likewise, in what follows, So then each one of us will render account for himself. Let us therefore no longer judge one another; but judge this rather, that you place no offense or stumbling block before a brother. I know and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is common of itself; but to him who reckons anything to be common, to him it is common (Rom 14:12-14).

Could he have shown more clearly that there is a certain power, not in the very things we eat, but in the mind, which avails to defile it; and that therefore, even to those who are fit to despise these things and know for certain that they are not polluted if they take any foods without base craving, with loftiness of mind, love must nevertheless be kept in view?

See what follows: For if your brother is grieved on account of food, you no longer walk according to love (Rom 14:15).

33. 72. Read the rest—for it is long to insert it all—and you will find a precept that those who can despise these things, that is, the stronger and more secure, ought nevertheless to be temperate, lest those be offended who, on account of their own weakness, still need temperance of this kind. These things those of whom I was speaking know and hold, for they are Christians, not heretics; they understand the Scriptures according to the apostolic teaching, not according to a proud and fabricated name of an apostle.

No one despises the one who does not eat, no one judges the one who eats; he who is weak eats vegetables. Yet many of the strong do the same thing for the sake of the weak; for many there is not this reason for doing it, but that it pleases them to live on a cheaper diet and to pass a most tranquil time with the least costly sustenance of the body. For all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Cor 6:12). So many neither eat flesh nor yet think it unclean by superstition. And so these same who, when well, are temperate, if a reason of health compels, when sick accept it without any dread.

Many do not drink wine, nor yet think themselves defiled by it; for they cause it to be provided, most humanely and most modestly, to certain feebler persons and to all who cannot without it obtain the health of the body. And they fraternally admonish some who foolishly refuse it, lest by a vain superstition they become weaker rather than holier. They read to them the Apostle enjoining his disciple to take a little wine on account of his various infirmities (See 1 Tim 5:23). So they diligently practice piety, but they know that bodily exercise, as the same Apostle says, pertains to a brief time (See 1 Tim 4:8).

33. 73. Those, then, who can—and they are innumerable—restrain themselves both from flesh and from wine for two reasons: either on account of the weakness of the brothers or on account of their own freedom. Love above all is kept; to love is the food fitted, to love the speech, to love the dress, to love the countenance; they come together into one love and conspire toward it; to violate this is held a sacrilege, like violating God; if anything resists it, it is overcome and cast out; if anything offends it, it is not allowed to last a single day. They know that this was commended by Christ and the Apostles, so that if this one thing is lacking, all things are empty, and if this is present, all things are full.

34. 74. Withstand these men, Manicheans, if you can; look upon them; name them, if you dare, without lying and with reproach; compare your fasts with their fasts, chastity with their chastity, your clothing with their clothing, your meals with their meals, modesty with their modesty, love finally with their love, and—what the matter most demands—precepts with their precepts. Now you will see what difference there is between ostentation and sincerity, between the right way and error, between faith and deceit, between strength and swelling, between happiness and misery, between unity and division, finally between the sirens of superstition and the harbor of religion.

34. 75. Do not gather up for me professors of the Christian name who neither know nor display the force of their profession. Do not pursue the crowds of the unlearned, who either are superstitious even in true religion or are so given to lusts that they have forgotten what they promised to God. I know there are many worshipers of tombs and of pictures. I know there are many who drink most luxuriously over the dead, and, offering banquets to corpses, bury themselves over the buried, and credit their gluttonies and drunkennesses to religion. I know there are many who have renounced this world in words and yet wish to be weighed down by all the masses of this world, and rejoice to be weighed down.

Nor is it any wonder, in so great an abundance of peoples, that there are not lacking those by whose blamed life you deceive the incautious and turn them away from Catholic salvation, since in your fewness you suffer great straits when even one of those whom you call the elect is demanded of you, who keeps those very precepts that you defend with irrational superstition. But how vain those precepts are, how harmful, how sacrilegious, and how they are not observed by a great part of you, and indeed almost by all of you, I have set out to show in another volume.

34. 76. Now I admonish you this: that you at last cease to revile the Catholic Church by blaming the morals of people whom she herself also condemns, and whom she daily strives to correct as bad sons. But whoever of them are corrected by a good will and by the help of God recover, by repenting, what they had lost by sinning. But those who, by an evil will, persevere in their former vices, or even add graver ones to the former, are indeed allowed to be in the field of the Lord and to grow with the good seed, but a time will come when the weeds are separated. Or if, on account of the Christian name itself, they are now to be judged to be rather among the chaff than among the thorns, there will also come one who cleanses the threshing floor, and separates the chaff from the grain, and distributes to each part, with the highest fairness, what is fitting according to each one's merit (See Matt 3:12; 13:24-43).

35. 77. Meanwhile, why do you rage, why are you blinded by partisan zeal? Why are you entangled in the long defense of so great an error? Seek the fruits in the field, the grain on the threshing floor; they will easily appear and offer themselves to those who seek. Why do you fix your eye too much upon the refuse? Why do you frighten away unlearned people, by the roughness of the hedges, from the richness of a fertile garden? There is a sure entrance, though known to fewer, by which one can enter, which you either do not believe to exist or do not wish to find.

There are in the Catholic Church innumerable faithful who do not use this world, there are those who use it as though not using it (See 1 Cor 7:31), as is said by the Apostle; and this was already proved in those times in which Christians were forced to the worship of idols. For how many moneyed men then, how many heads of country households, how many merchants, how many soldiers, how many leading men of their own cities, how many senators finally, of both sexes, leaving all these vain and temporal things—by which, although they used them, they were not held fast—underwent death for the sake of a wholesome faith and religion, and showed unbelievers that all those things were possessed by them rather than that they were possessed by them.

35. 78. Why do you slanderously charge that the faithful, now renewed by baptism, ought not to beget children and possess fields and houses and any money? Paul permits this. For—and this cannot be denied—he wrote to the faithful; indeed, after the enumeration of many vicious persons who will not possess the kingdom of God, he says, And these things indeed you were, but you have been washed, but you have been sanctified, but you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God (1 Cor 6:11). No one will dare to understand the washed and sanctified to be any but the faithful, and those who have renounced this world. But since he has shown to whom he wrote, let us see whether he permits them those things.

For it follows thus: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient; all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Food is for the belly and the belly for food; but God will destroy both these and this. But the body is not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? God forbid. Do you not know that he who clings to a harlot becomes one body? For the two, he says, shall be in one flesh. But he who clings to the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body. Do you not know that your members are a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body (1 Cor 6:12-20).

But concerning the things about which you wrote to me: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but on account of incontinence let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render the debt to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The woman does not have power over her own body, but the husband. And likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the wife. Do not defraud one another, except perhaps by consent for a time, that you may be free for prayer; and again return to the same, lest Satan tempt you on account of your incontinence. But this I say by way of indulgence, not by way of command. I wish that all men were as I myself; but each one has his own gift from God, one in this way, another in that (1 Cor 7:1-7).

35. 79. Does the Apostle seem to you to have sufficiently both shown the strong what is highest and permitted the weaker what is next to it? For not to touch a woman, he shows to be highest, when he says, I would that all men were as I myself. But next to this highest is conjugal chastity, lest a man be laid waste by fornication. Did he therefore say that these are not yet faithful, because they use their spouses? Since by this chastity of marriage he says that even those who are joined are sanctified by each other, if one of them be an unbeliever, and that the offspring born of it is sanctified: For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through the believing husband; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy (1 Cor 7:14). Why do you clamor with stubbornness against so great a truth? Why do you try to cloud the light of the Scriptures with empty shadows?

35. 80. Do not say any longer that it is lawful for catechumens to use their spouses, but not lawful for the faithful; that it is lawful for catechumens to have money, but not lawful for the faithful. For there are many too who use as though not using. And by that sacrosanct bath the renewal of the new man is begun, so that, by making progress, it is brought to completion in some more quickly, in others more slowly; yet by many the advance into the new life is made, if anyone attends not with hostility but diligently.

For the Apostle himself says thus: Though our outer man is corrupted, yet the inner is renewed from day to day (2 Cor 4:16). The Apostle says that the inner man is renewed from day to day so that he may be brought to completion, and you want him to begin from completion. Would that you wished this; but you seek rather, not whence to raise up the weak, but whence to deceive the incautious. For you ought not to have said these things with such audacity, not even if it were established that you yourselves are perfect in those very trifling commandments of yours.

But since your conscience knows that those whom you introduce into your sect, when they have begun to be more familiarly joined to you, will find many things which, while you were accusing others, no one suspected to be in you—what so great shamelessness is this, to seek perfection in the weaker Catholics, in order to turn the unlearned away from there, and in no way to display it, with you, to those whom you have turned away? But lest we now seem to pour anything out against you rashly, let this be the limit of this volume, that we may at last come to setting forth the precepts of your life and your memorable morals.

1. 1. I think it is doubtful to no one that, when the question concerns goods and evils, this kind of question pertains to the moral discipline in which we are engaged in this discourse. For which reason I would indeed wish that people should bring to the investigating of these things a mental gaze so serene that they could see that highest good, than which there is nothing better and higher, to which the rational soul, pure and perfect, is made subject. For once this is understood and discerned, they would at the same time see that it is what is most rightly said to be in the highest degree and primordially. For that is to be said to be in the highest degree which always holds itself in the same way, which is in every way like itself, which can in no part be corrupted and changed, which is not subject to time, which cannot hold itself otherwise now than it held itself before. For that is what is most truly said to be. For there underlies this word the signification of a nature remaining in itself and holding itself unchangeably. This we can call nothing other than God, to whom, if you rightly seek a contrary, there is nothing at all. For being has no contrary except not-being. There is therefore no nature contrary to God.

But since to the contemplating of these things we bring a gaze of mind wounded and dulled by trifling opinions and by the depravity of the will, let us try as much as we can to arrive at some sort of knowledge of so great a matter, step by step and cautiously, seeking not as those who see are wont, but as those who grope.

2. 2. Often, and indeed almost always, Manicheans, you ask of those to whom you strive to persuade your heresy whence evil is. Suppose that I have now fallen in with you for the first time; let me obtain something from you, if you please: that you too, laying aside for a little while the opinion by which you suppose yourselves to know these things, should try, like beginners, to track down so great a matter with me.

You ask me whence evil is; but I in turn ask you what evil is. Whose inquiry is the juster? That of those who ask whence is the thing of which they do not know what it is, or that of one who thinks it must first be asked what it is, lest the origin of an unknown thing be sought—which is absurd? Most truly, you say; for who is so blind in mind as not to see that to each kind that is evil which is contrary to its nature? But once this is established, your heresy is overturned; for no nature is evil, if that which is contrary to nature is evil. But you assert that a certain nature and substance is evil. There is added also this, that whatever is contrary to nature certainly opposes nature and strives to destroy it. It tends, then, to make what exists not to exist. For nature itself is nothing other than that which is understood to be something in its own kind. And so, just as we, by a new word, from that which is to be (esse), call essence—which we for the most part also name substance—so the ancients, who did not have these words, called nature in place of essence and substance. The very evil itself, then—if, apart from stubbornness, you are willing to attend—is to fall away from essence and to tend toward not-being.

2. 3. For which reason, when in the Catholic Church it is said that God is the author of all natures and substances, it is at the same time understood, by those who can understand these things, that God is not the author of evil. For how can he who is the cause that all things which exist do exist, be in turn the cause that they do not exist, that is, that they fall away from essence and tend toward not-being? For most true reason cries out that this is evil in general. But that race of evil of yours, which you wish to be the highest evil, how will it be contrary to nature, that is, contrary to substance, when you say that it is itself a nature and substance? For if it acts against itself, it takes away its own being from itself; and if it should accomplish this, then at last it would arrive at the highest evil. But it will not accomplish it, because you wish it not only to exist but even to be everlasting. The highest evil, therefore, cannot be that which is declared to be a substance.

2. 4. But what shall I do? I know that there are many among you who are altogether unable to understand these things. I know again that there are certain ones who, although by a good natural ability they see these things somehow, nevertheless, by an evil will—by which they are also going to lose that very natural ability—act stubbornly and seek rather what they may say against these things, something that is easily persuasive to the slow and weak, than consent that they are true. Yet I will not regret having written, since either someone among you will at last, by no unfair judgment, consider it and leave your error, or, when those who are gifted and subject to God and as yet untouched by your pursuit have read it, they will not be able to be deceived by your discourses.

3. 5. Let us therefore inquire into these things more diligently and, as far as can be done, more plainly. I ask you again what evil is. If you say that it is that which harms, here too you will not be lying. But I beg you, notice; I beg you, be watchful; I beg you, lay aside partisan zeal, and seek the truth for the sake not of conquering but of finding. For whatever harms deprives the thing it harms of some good; for if it takes away no good, it does no harm at all. What is plainer than this, I beseech you? What more obvious? What so open to any moderate intellect, provided it is not stubborn?

But once this is laid down, it is now seen, I think, what follows. For in that race which you suspect to be the highest evil, no thing can be harmed, where there is nothing of good. But if there are two natures, as you affirm, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness—since you confess that the kingdom of light is God, to whom you grant a certain simple nature, such that in him there is not one thing worse than another—you must of necessity confess (which is indeed strongly against you, but nevertheless you must of necessity confess) that this nature, which you not only do not deny to be the highest good but even strongly try to persuade us is so, is unchangeable and impenetrable and incorruptible and inviolable; for otherwise it will not be the highest good, since that is the highest good than which there is nothing better; but to such a nature harm can in no way be done. But if to harm is to deprive of good, as I have shown, the kingdom of darkness cannot be harmed, because there is nothing of good there; the kingdom of light cannot be harmed, because it is inviolable. Whom, then, will what you call evil harm?

4. 6. For which reason, since you cannot extricate yourselves, see how unencumbered is the position of Catholic teaching, which says that one thing is the good that is good in the highest degree and of itself, not by participation in any good, but by its own nature and essence; and another the good that is good by participating and by having; and it has from that highest good its being good, while that highest good nevertheless remains in itself and loses nothing. But this good that we spoke of afterward, it calls a creature, which can be harmed through defect; of whose defect God is not the author, because he is the author of existing and, so to speak, of being.

Thus it is also shown in what way evil is spoken of; for it is most truly spoken of not according to essence but according to privation; and the nature that can be harmed appears. For neither is it itself the highest evil, that from which good is taken away when it is harmed, nor the highest good, that which can fall away from good precisely because it is called good not by existing as good but by having good. Nor is a thing good by nature which, when it is said to have been made, certainly received that it might be good. Thus both God is the highest good, and the things he made are all good, although they are not so good as he himself who made them is. For who is so insane as to demand that the works be equal to the craftsman, and the things founded to the founder? What more do you want? Or do you want something even plainer?

5. 7. I will ask, then, a third time, what evil is. You will perhaps answer: corruption. Who would deny that this too is evil in general? For this is contrary to nature, this is what harms. But corruption is not in itself but in some substance that it corrupts; for corruption is not itself a substance. The thing, then, that corruption corrupts is not evil; for what is corrupted is deprived of integrity and purity. What therefore has no purity of which it may be deprived cannot be corrupted; but what has it is surely good by participation in purity. Likewise, what is corrupted is surely perverted; but what is perverted is deprived of order; and order is good. Therefore what is corrupted is not lacking in good; for by the very thing it is not lacking in, it can be widowed when it is corrupted. That race of darkness, then, if it lacked all good, as you say, could not be corrupted; for it had nothing that corruption could take from it, and if corruption takes away nothing, it does not corrupt. Now dare to say, if you can, that God and the kingdom of God could be corrupted, since you cannot find how the kingdom of the devil, such as you describe it, could be corrupted.

6. 8. What, then, does the Catholic light say on this point? What do you think, except what the truth holds—that he made a substance that can be corrupted, but that the unmade substance, which is the highest good, is incorruptible, and that corruption itself, which is the highest evil, cannot be corrupted, but that this is not a substance?

But if you ask what it is, see whither it tries to lead the things it corrupts. For from itself it affects the things that are corrupted. But all things, through corruption, fall away from what they were and are forced not to remain, are forced not to be. For being is referred to remaining. And so what is said to be in the highest and greatest degree is so said by remaining in itself. For what is changed for the better is changed not because it was remaining, but because it was being perverted toward the worse, that is, was falling away from essence; of which falling-away he is not the author who is the author of essence. Certain things, then, are changed toward the better and therefore tend to be, and by this change are said not to be perverted but to be turned back and converted. For perversion is contrary to ordering. But these things that tend to be tend toward order; and when they have attained it, they attain being itself, as far as a creature can attain it. For ordering brings what it orders back to a certain fittingness.

But to be is nothing other than to be one. And so, insofar as anything attains unity, to that extent it is. For fittingness and concord are the work of unity, by which those things that are composite are, insofar as they are; for simple things are of themselves, because they are one; but the things that are not simple imitate unity by the concord of their parts, and are to the extent that they attain it. For which reason ordering forces being, disordering therefore not-being; and disordering is also named perversion and corruption. Whatever, then, is corrupted tends toward not-being. Now it is for you to consider whither corruption forces, that you may be able to find the highest evil; for that is what corruption strives to lead to.

7. 9. But the goodness of God does not allow a thing to be led to that point, and it so orders all defective things that they may be where they can most fittingly be, until by ordered motions they return to that from which they fell away. And so it also orders the rational souls, in which free choice is most powerful, when they fall away from him, in the lower grades of creation, where it befits such to be. They become wretched, then, by the divine judgment, while they are fittingly ordered according to their merits.

From which that was most excellently said, which you are especially accustomed to attack: I make good things and create evils (Isa 45:7). For "to create" is said for "to found" and "to order." And so in very many copies it is written thus: I make good things and found evils. For "to make" is, altogether, what was not; but "to found" is to order what already was in some way, so that it may be better and more fully. For God founds, that is, orders, these things when he says, I found evils—those that are defective, that is, that tend toward not-being—not those that have arrived at that toward which they tend. For it has been said: Nothing is permitted by divine providence to arrive at the point of not-being.

7. 10. These things are treated more broadly and more fully, but while we are dealing with you, it is enough. For the door had to be shown you, of which you despair and which you make others despair of. For no one introduces you except a good will, which the divine clemency makes peaceable, as it is sung in the Gospel: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will (Luke 2:14). It is enough, I say, that you may see that there is no exit from a religious discussion about good and evil, except that whatever is, insofar as it is, is from God, but insofar as it falls away from essence, is not from God, and yet is always ordered by divine providence, as befits the universe. But if you do not yet see this, what more I should now do I do not know, except to treat even more minutely the things that have been said. For nothing but piety and purity leads the mind to greater things.

8. 11. For what else, when I ask what evil is, will you answer except either what is contrary to nature, or what harms, or corruption, or something of this kind? But in these I have shown your shipwrecks—unless perhaps, as you are accustomed to deal childishly with children, you will answer that evil is fire, poison, a wild beast, and other things of this kind. For even about someone who said that no substance is evil, one of the leading men of this heresy, whom we used to hear more familiarly and more often, would say: I would like to put a scorpion in a man's hand and see whether he would not draw his hand back; and if he did, he would be convinced, not by words but by the thing itself, that some substance is evil, since he would not deny that that animal is a substance.

And he said these things not in the man's presence, but when we, moved, reported to him what the other had said; he answered, then, as I said, childishly to children. For who, even moderately instructed and educated, would not see that these things harm through the disagreement of bodily temperament, and again through agreement do not harm, and often even confer no small advantages? For if that poison were evil through itself, it would kill that same scorpion more, and sooner. But on the contrary, if it were somehow entirely drawn out of it, it would without doubt perish. Therefore it is evil for that creature's body to lose what it is evil for our body to receive; likewise it is good for that creature to have what it is good for us to lack.

Will the same thing, then, be both good and evil? By no means; but evil is what is contrary to nature; for this is evil both to that beast and to us, that is, the very disagreement, which without doubt is not a substance, but rather is hostile to substance. Whence, then, is it? Attend to whither it forces, and you will learn, if indeed something of the inner light lives in you. For everything that destroys forces toward not-being. But God is the author of essence, nor can anything be seen to be an essence which, in whatever it has been, forces it not to be. Therefore something can be said as to whence disagreement is not, for as to whence it is, nothing can be said.

8. 12. A certain criminal Athenian woman, as history relates, by gradually drinking the poison that the condemned drank in a fixed measure in order to die, brought it about that she could drink it without any harm, even the slightest, to her health. And so, when she had at some time been condemned, she received that lawful quantity of poison which she had overcome by habit, but was not, like the rest, killed by it. And since this was a great marvel, she was sent into exile. What do we suppose? If poison is evil, did she bring it about that it was not evil to her? What is more absurd than this? But because disagreement is evil, she brought it about, rather, that through moderate habit that body agreed with her body. For when could she, by any cunning whatever, bring it about that disagreement should not harm her?

Why so? Because what is truly and generally evil harms always and all. Oil is suitable to our bodies, but vehemently hostile to many animals that have six feet. Is not hellebore in one way food, in another a medicine, in another a poison? Salt taken too immoderately, who would not cry out that it is poison? But how many and how great advantages to the body come from it, who can count? Seawater, when drunk, is harmful to land animals, but to the bodies of many it is, when they are moistened by it, most suitable and useful; and to fishes, in both respects, it is health and pleasure. Bread nourishes a human being, kills a hawk. Mud itself, which both swallowed and smelled gravely offends and harms, does it not both, touched in summer, cool, and serve as a medicine for wounds that have come from fire? What is more contemptible than dung? What more abject than ashes? Yet these bring such great advantages to fields that the Romans thought divine honors should be paid to their discoverer, Stercutius, from whom indeed dung (stercus) received its name.

8. 13. But why should I gather up small things, which are innumerable? Who would doubt that the four elements themselves, which are at hand, profit through agreement, but, applied unsuitably, are vehemently hostile to nature? We who live by air are killed when buried by earth and water, but innumerable animals creep vitally through sand and looser earth, while fishes die in this air of ours. Fire corrupts our bodies, but, suitably applied, both restores us from cold and drives away innumerable diseases. That sun to which you bend the knee, than which nothing more beautiful is indeed found among visible things, strengthens the eyes of eagles, but wounds and darkens our gaze; yet it comes about through habit that we too may fix our gaze on it without harm. Will you, then, allow us to compare it to that poison which habit made harmless to the Athenian woman? Look back, then, at last, and notice: if any substance is evil because it harms someone, the light you worship cannot be defended from this charge. Consider rather that this disagreement is the universal evil, through which a ray of the sun makes the eyes darken, though nothing is more pleasant to them than light.

9. 14. I have said these things so that, if it can be done, you may at last cease to say that the earth, immeasurably deep and long, is evil; that the mind wandering through the earth is evil; that the five caverns of the elements—one full of darkness, another of waters, another of winds, another of fire, another of smoke—are evil; that the animals born in those several elements—creeping things in the darkness, swimming things in the waters, flying things in the winds, four-footed things in the fire, two-footed things in the smoke—are evil. For these things, as they are described by you, can in no way exist; since whatever is such, insofar as it is, must of necessity be from the most high God, because insofar as it is, it is certainly good. For if pain and weakness are evil, there were there animals of such firmness of body that you say their miscarried offspring, after the world was fashioned out of them according to your sect, fell from heaven to earth and could not die. If blindness is evil, they saw; if deafness, they heard. If to become dumb or to be mute is evil, voices were there so distinct and articulate that, as you assert, they resolved in an assembly, at the persuasion of one, to wage war against God. If barrenness is evil, there was there a great fecundity for begetting children. If exile is evil, they were in their own land and inhabited their own regions. If slavery is evil, there were there even those who reigned. If death is evil, they lived, and lived in such a way that you proclaim that the mind itself can in no way ever die, not even after the victory of God.

9. 15. Why, I ask, do I find in the highest evil such great goods, contrary to those evils which I have mentioned? Or, if these are not evils, will any substance at all, insofar as it is a substance, be evil? If weakness is not evil, will an infirm body be evil? If blindness is not evil, will darkness be evil? If deafness is not evil, will a deaf creature be evil? If to be mute is not evil, will a fish be evil? If barrenness is not evil, how is a barren animal evil? If exile is not evil, how is an exiled animal evil, or an animal sending someone into exile? If slavery is not evil, how is a serving animal evil, or one forcing someone to serve? If death is not evil, how is a mortal animal evil, or one bringing death? But if these are evils, how will not firmness of body, sight, hearing, persuasive speech, fecundity, native soil, freedom, life be goods—all of which you declare to have been in that kingdom of evil, and dare to assert it to be the highest evil?

9. 16. Finally, if—which no one at all has ever denied—disagreement is evil, what is more agreeable than those elements to their several animals: darkness to creeping things, waters to swimming things, winds to flying things, fire to the more voracious, smoke to the loftier? For so great a concord is described by you in the race of discord, and so great an order in the seat of perversity. If what harms is evil, I leave aside that most powerful point made above, that no harm could be done where there was no good; but if that is obscure, this at least stands out and appears to all, that, as I said and as all agree, what harms is evil; smoke in that race did not harm the two-footed animals, it begot them and nourished them and sustained them without ruin as they were born, grew, and reigned. But now, after good was mingled with evil, smoke has been made more harmful; it cannot be endured by us, who are certainly two-footed; it blinds, oppresses, kills. Did so great a monstrousness come to evil elements by the mingling of good? So great a perversity, with God reigning?

9. 17. Surely, why in the rest do we see that congruity which deceived your author and lured him into composing lies? Why, I say, do darkness suit creeping things, waters swimming things, winds flying things, but fire burns the four-footed, and smoke suffocates us? What of the fact that serpents too see most sharply and exult in the presence of the sun, and are more abundant where the calmer air more difficultly and rarely gathers a cloud? What is more absurd than that the dwellers in and lovers of darkness should be more suited and fitted there where the clearness of light is enjoyed? But if you say that they are delighted rather by heat than by light, you would say far more agreeably that lively serpents were born in fire than a sluggish ass; and yet who would deny that the asp is a friend to this light, since its eyes are compared to the eyes of the eagle? But about beasts I shall see later. Let us consider ourselves, I beseech you, without stubbornness, and let us at last strip our mind of vain and ruinous fables. For who would bear so great a perversity, by which it is said that in the race of darkness, to which nothing of light was mingled, two-footed animals had so firm, so vigorous, so finally incredible a force in the keenness of their eyes that they both saw in their own darkness and beheld and considered and were delighted with and desired that most pure light of the kingdoms of God which is commended by you (since indeed you wish it to have been visible even to such creatures); but that our eyes, by the mingling of light, by the mingling of the highest good, by the mingling, finally, of God, have been rendered so infirm and weak that we neither see anything in darkness nor can in any way bear the sight of the sun, and, turned away from it, seek even the things that were being seen by us?

9. 18. These things can be said even if corruption is evil, which equally no one doubts; for then smoke did not corrupt the kind of animals that it now corrupts. And, not to go through each point, which is long and unnecessary, the living creatures that you pretend were there were so much less liable to corruption that their miscarried offspring, not yet fit for being born, when hurled headlong from heaven to earth, were able both to live and to beget, and again to conspire, having of course their former firmness, because they were already conceived before the mingling of good and evil; for after that combining, the things born of them, you say, are the animals which we now see most infirm and easily yielding to corruption. Who could endure this error any longer, except one who either does not see these things, or has, by some incredible habit and familiarity with you, hardened himself against all the weight of reason?

10. 19. But since I have shown, as I judge, in how great darkness and in how great falsity you are engaged concerning goods and evils in general, now let us look at those three seals which you boast of in your morals with great praise and proclamation. What, after all, are these seals? Of the mouth, certainly, and of the hands, and of the breast. What is this? That, he says, a man may be chaste and innocent in mouth and hands and breast.

What if he sins with eyes, ears, nostrils? What if he afflicts a man with his heels, or even kills him? How shall we hold him guilty, who has sinned neither with mouth nor with hands nor with breast?

But when I name the mouth, he says, I wish all the senses that are in the head to be understood; when I name the hand, all activity; when the breast, all seminal lust.

To which, then, do you want blasphemies to pertain? To the mouth or to the hand? For that activity is through the tongue. And so, if you include all activity under one head, why do you join the activity of the feet to the hands, but separate it from the tongue?

Or, because the tongue signifies something by words, do you want to set it apart from that activity which is not done for the sake of signifying, so that the seal of the hands may thus be defined as continence from evil activity which is not for the sake of signifying? But what will you do if someone sins by signifying something with the hands, as happens when we write, or show by a gesture something that is understood? For this you cannot attribute to the mouth and tongue, because it is done with the hands. For what is more absurd than that, although three seals are spoken of—of the mouth, of the hands, and of the breast—certain sins detected in the hands should be attributed to the mouth? But if general activity is given to the hands, what reason, after all, is there for adding the activity of the feet to this, but not adding that of the tongue?

Do you see how the appetite for novelty, with error as its companion, is led into great straits? For with those three seals, which you proclaim by a certain new division, you cannot find how to include the purgation of all sins.

11. 20. But divide as you wish, pass over whatever you wish; let us treat the things you are especially accustomed to commend. For you say that to the seal of the mouth it pertains to refrain from all blasphemy. But there is blasphemy when some evil things are said about good things. And so now, in common usage, blasphemy is taken to be nothing other than to say evil words about God; for about human beings there can be doubt, but God without controversy is good. If, then, reason convinces us that no one says worse things about God than you, where will that memorable seal of the mouth be? For reason teaches—not indeed a hidden reason, but one set at hand and open to the understanding of all, yet unconquered, and the more unconquered because no one is permitted to be ignorant of it—that God is incorruptible, unchangeable, inviolable, into whom no neediness, no weakness, no misery can fall. And so far does every rational soul commonly perceive this, that even you nod assent when these things are said.

11. 21. But when you begin to tell your fables, you, possessed by an astonishing blindness, persuade—and to others possessed by an astonishing blindness you even persuade—that God is corruptible and changeable and violable and liable to neediness and admitting weakness and not safe from misery. And this is too little; for you say not only that God is corruptible but that he is corrupted; not changeable but changed; not violable but violated; not one who can suffer neediness but needy; not one into whom weakness may fall but into whom it has fallen; not one who can be wretched but wretched.

For you say that the soul is God, or a part of God. Nor do I see how that is not God which is said to be a part of God; for a part of gold is gold, and of silver silver, and of stone stone; and, to come to greater things, a part of earth is earth, and a part of water water, and of air air; and if you take anything from fire, you will not deny that it is fire; and any part whatever of light can be nothing other than light. Why, then, will a part of God not be God? Or has God an articulated shape, as a human being and the other living creatures have? For a part of a human being is not a human being.

11. 22. But I come down to either of these opinions and consider each separately. For if you want God to be as light is, you cannot refuse that a part of God is some God. For which reason, since you say that the soul is a part of God, which you do not deny to have been both corrupted (it which was foolish) and changed (it which was wise) and violated (in that it does not have its proper perfection) and needy (it which begs for help) and weak (it which needs medicine) and wretched (it which desires to be happy), all these things you heap upon God by a sacrilegious opinion. Or, if you do not grant these things about the soul, then neither is an apostle necessary to lead the soul into truth, because it is not foolish; nor is the soul renewed through true religion, because it is not changed; nor is it perfected by your seals, because it is perfect; nor does God bring it help, because it is not needy; nor is Christ a physician, because it is sound; nor is the happy life rightly promised to it. What of the fact that Jesus is called liberator, which he himself cries out in the Gospel, If the Son frees you, then you will be truly free (John 8:36)? And the apostle Paul says, You have been called to freedom (Gal 5:13). Therefore the soul that has not yet attained this freedom is in servitude. God, then, on your authority—since a part of God is God—is corrupted by foolishness, and by falling is changed, and by the loss of perfection is violated, and is in need of help, and is feeble with disease, and oppressed with misery, and disgraced with servitude.

11. 23. But if a part of God is not God, then neither can he be uncorrupted in whose part there is corruption, nor unchanged who has been changed in some part, nor unviolated who is not in every part perfect, nor not needy who diligently acts to restore his part to himself, nor altogether sound who is in some part weak, nor most happy who has some part subjected to misery, nor altogether free a part of whom is pressed by servitude. All these things you are forced to say, when you declare that the soul, which you behold overwhelmed by such great calamities, is a part of God. Remove these and many things of this kind from your sect, if you can; then at last say that your mouth is free from blasphemies. Rather, desert that sect; for if you cease to believe and say what that man wrote, you will certainly not be Manicheans.

11. 24. God is altogether to be understood or believed to be the highest good, than which nothing better can be or be thought, if we mean to be free from blasphemies. A certain ratio of numbers can in no way be violated and changed, nor could any nature, by any violence whatever, bring it about that, after one, the number that follows should not accord with it in double. This can in no way be changed, and yet God is called by you changeable. This ratio keeps its inviolable integrity, and you do not wish God to be even equal to it. Let any race of darkness whatever bring it about that the intelligible number three, in which there is a one that is so one that it lacks parts—let that race of darkness, then, bring it about that this number three be divided into two equal parts. Your mind surely sees that this can come about by no one's ill will. What, then, could not violate the ratio of number—could it violate God? But if it could not, what, I beseech you, was the necessity that a part of him should be mingled with evil and thrust into such great miseries?

12. 25. For from this arose that which, even when we were zealously hearing you, used to press us with great straits, nor did we find any exit, asking what the race of darkness was going to do to God if he had been unwilling to fight with it at so great a calamity to his own part. For if it was not going to harm him while he was at rest, we complained that we had been cruelly treated, we who were sent to these hardships; but if it was going to harm him, then that nature was not incorruptible, such as the nature of God ought to be.

On this question there was no lack of one who said that God had not wished to be free of evil, nor taken care lest he be harmed, but had, on account of his natural goodness, wished to be of profit to the restless and perverse nature, that it might be ordered. The books of Mani do not so sound; that God took care lest he be invaded by enemies is very often signified there, very often said. But let us grant that Mani thought these things, as that man said who could find nothing else to say: is God, by this reasoning, defended from cruelty or from weakness? For this goodness of his toward the hostile race turned out to be great destruction to his own. To this is added that, if his nature could not be corrupted and changed, neither would any plague change and corrupt us; and that order which had to be furnished to the foreign nature could be furnished without our perversion.

12. 26. But that had not yet been said which I recently heard at Carthage. For when a certain man, whom I especially desire to be freed from that error, was being driven by this question into the same straits, he dared to say, namely, that the kingdom had certain borders of its own, which could be invaded by the contrary race, but that God himself could in no way be violated. But he said what not even that author of yours would in any way be forced to say; for perhaps he saw the consequent ruins of his sect to be much easier through this opinion than through the other. And in truth it is so; for if anyone of moderate heart hears that in that nature there was one part violable, another inviolable, he easily understands that there are now not two but three natures: one inviolable, the second violable, the third the violator.

13. 27. Since, then, these blasphemies, having proceeded from the heart, dwell daily in your mouth, cease at last to proclaim the seal of your mouth, as something great, for the enticement of the unlearned. Unless perhaps, because you do not eat flesh and do not drink wine, you think the seal of the mouth is to be wondered at and praised. About which I ask you with what end you do it. For the end to which the things we do are referred, that is, the purpose for which we do whatever we do, if it is not only blameless but even praiseworthy, then at last our deeds too are worthy of some praise; but if that which we look to and regard, when we are engaged in some action, is rightly and deservedly blamed, no one would doubt that that action too is to be disapproved and blamed.

13. 28. Of Catiline it has been handed down to memory that he could bear cold, thirst, hunger (See Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae 5.3; Augustine, Letter 167.7). These things were common to him even with our Apostles. Whence, then, is this parricide distinguished from the Apostles, except by that end which he pursued, most different from theirs? For he endured these things in order to satisfy most immoderate and most monstrous desires; they, on the contrary, in order to restrain them and force them to serve ruling reason. You too are accustomed, when the multitude of Catholic virgins is proclaimed to you, to say: A she-mule too is a virgin. Rashly indeed, on account of ignorance of Catholic teaching, but yet signifying that this continence is vain unless it is referred, by sure reason, to some most upright end. Catholic Christians too can compare your abstinence from wine and flesh (See Ps 49:12, 20 (48:13, 21)) to beasts of burden and to many sparrows (See Matt 10:31; Luke 12:7), and finally to innumerable kinds of worms (See Job 17:14; 25:6).

But lest I fall into your rashness, I will not do this too hastily, but will first examine with what end you do these things. For it is now agreed, I think, between us, that nothing else is to be sought in morals of this kind. If, then, you abstain for the sake of frugality and of restraining the lust by which we are delighted and captivated by such foods and drink, I hear you and approve; but it is not so.

13. 29. For I ask you: suppose there exists—as can happen—a man so sparing and frugal that, moderating the appetite of belly and throat, he does not feast twice in one day, and to him as he dines there are set little vegetables with a bit of bacon, smeared and seasoned with that same bacon, as much as is enough to suppress hunger, and he waters his thirst, for the sake of attending to his health, with two or three draughts that are by no means undiluted, and this is his daily fare;

but another, on the other side, tasting nothing of flesh, nothing of wine, gladly takes at the ninth hour choice and exotic produce, varied in many dishes and sprinkled with abundant pepper, and is going to dine on such things even at the beginning of the night; and he drinks honeyed wine, boiled-down must, raisin wine, and the juices of certain pressed fruits, sufficiently imitating the appearance of wine and even surpassing it in sweetness; and he drinks not as much as he thirsts but as much as he pleases, and takes care to have this provided for him daily, and enjoys such fare and delicacies, with no necessity but with great pleasure.

Which, then, of these two do you judge to lead a more abstinent life, as regards eating and drinking? I do not think you are so blind as not to prefer that man of the sparing bacon and wine to this glutton.

13. 30. So indeed the truth compels; but your error sings far otherwise. For your elect, distinguished by three seals, if he lives daily like this man whom we described later, can perhaps be reproved by one or two of the graver sort, but cannot at all be condemned as a violator of the seal. But if he should once dine with that former man, and anoint his lips with a morsel of ham, even rancid, and wet them with flat wine, he will be judged, by the sentence of your author, a breaker of the seal and at once destined for Gehenna, with you wondering but nevertheless consenting.

I beg you, leave your error; I beg you, attend to reason; I beg you, resist habit a little. For what is more perverse than this depravity? What more deranged? What, moreover, can be said or thought more insane than that a man belching with gratification, his belly distended with mushrooms, rice, truffles, cakes, boiled-down must, pepper, laserwort, and daily craving such things, is found in no way to have fallen away from the three seals, that is, from the rule of holiness; but that another, seasoning the cheapest produce with smoky sauce and taking only so much from it as suffices for the refreshment of the body, and sipping three cups of wine for the sake of sustaining his health, and passing from that fare to this one, is prepared for sure punishment?

14. 31. But the Apostle says, It is good, brothers, not to eat flesh nor to drink wine (Rom 14:21). As if indeed any of us denied that this is good; but either for that end which I mentioned above, according to which it is said, And make no provision for the flesh in its desires (Rom 13:14), or for those ends which the same Paul again shows: that is, either for the sake of bridling gluttony, which is wont to be more madly and immoderately carried away by these things, or lest a brother be offended, or lest there be communion in an idol's offering on the part of the weak.

For at the time when the Apostle wrote these things, much sacrificial flesh was sold in the market. And because wine too was poured out as a libation to the gods of the gentiles, many weaker brothers, who also used these things that were for sale, preferred to restrain themselves entirely from flesh and wine rather than to fall, even unknowingly, into that which they thought was communion with idols.

But on account of these, even those who were stronger and had judged that these things were to be despised with greater faith, knowing that nothing is unclean except through an evil conscience, and holding that statement of the Lord, Not what enters into your mouth defiles you, but what comes out (Matt 15:11), nevertheless ought, on account of these weaker ones, lest they be offended, to abstain from these things.

Nor is this gathered by surmise, but is plainly found in the Apostle's own epistles. For you are accustomed to say to us only this: It is good, brothers, not to eat flesh nor to drink wine, but not to add what follows: nor anything by which your brother is offended or scandalized or made weak. For from this it shines out with what end the Apostle enjoined these things.

14. 32. The preceding and following words indicate this more plainly, which it is indeed long to recount, but on account of those who are lazy at reading and handling the divine Scriptures, we are compelled to set forth this whole passage.

Receive the one weak in faith, he says, not in disputes over thoughts. For one believes he may eat all things; but he who is weak, let him eat vegetables. Let him who eats not despise him who does not eat, and let him who does not eat not judge him who eats; for God has received him. Who are you to judge another's servant? To his own Lord he stands or falls; but he will stand, for God is able to make him stand. For one judges between day and day, another judges every day; let each abound in his own understanding. He who regards the day, regards it unto the Lord; and he who eats, eats unto the Lord, for he gives thanks to God. And he who does not eat, does not eat unto the Lord, and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself, and none dies to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord, or whether we die, we die unto the Lord. For whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ both lived and died and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the living and of the dead.

But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you despise your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written: As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God (Isa 45:23). So then each one of us will render account for himself to God. Let us therefore no longer judge one another; but judge this rather, that you place no offense or stumbling block before a brother. I know and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is common of itself; but to him who reckons anything to be common, to him it is common. For if your brother is grieved on account of food, you no longer walk according to love. Do not by your food destroy him for whom Christ died. Let not our good then be blasphemed. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who in this serves Christ is pleasing to God and approved by men.

So then let us pursue the things that are of peace and the things that are of mutual edification. Do not, on account of food, destroy the work of God. All things indeed are clean, but it is evil for a man who eats through giving offense. It is good not to eat flesh and not to drink wine, nor anything by which your brother is offended or scandalized or made weak. You have faith; keep it to yourself before God. Blessed is he who does not judge himself in what he approves. But he who discerns, if he eats, is condemned, because it is not of faith. And everything that is not of faith is sin. But we who are stronger ought to bear the weaknesses of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor unto good edification. For Christ did not please himself (Rom 14:1-15:3).

14. 33. Does it appear plainly enough that the Apostle enjoined those who were stronger not to eat flesh nor drink wine, because they were offending the weak by not according with them, and were making them suppose that those who in faith judged all things clean were unwilling, in deference to the idols, to abstain from such feasts and drink?

This he signifies also when he writes to the Corinthians in this way: But concerning the foods of sacrifices that are offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but one. For although there are those that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, yet for us there is one God the Father, from whom are all things and we in him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him. But not in all is there knowledge. But some, in their conscience, even until now eat it as a thing offered to an idol in the idol's temple, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. But food does not commend us to God; for neither if we eat shall we abound, nor if we do not eat shall we fall short. But see lest perhaps this liberty of yours become an offense to the weak. For if anyone sees one who has knowledge reclining at table in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, being weak, be built up to eat things offered to idols, and the weak brother, for whom Christ died, will perish in your knowledge? But sinning thus against the brothers and striking their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Wherefore, if food scandalizes my brother, I will not eat flesh forever, lest I scandalize my brother (1 Cor 8:4-13).

14. 34. Likewise in another place: What then? That a thing offered to idols is anything? Or that an idol is anything? But the things that the gentiles offer, they offer to demons and not to God. But I do not wish you to become partners of demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot share in the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? All things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient; all things are lawful for me, but not all things build up.

Whether, then, you eat or drink or do anything, do all to the glory of God. Be without offense to Jews and Greeks and to the Church of God, just as I too please all in all things, not seeking what is useful to me but what is useful to many, that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I too am of Christ (1 Cor 10:19-33; 11:1).

14. 35. It appears, then, I think, with what end one must abstain from flesh and wine. That end is threefold. To suppress the delight that is wont to be had especially in these foods and, in such drink, to reach even to drunkenness. To guard against weakness, on account of the things that are sacrificed and poured out as libation. And—what is especially to be commended—on account of love, lest the weakness of those who are weaker than those who abstain from these things be offended.

But you say that sauces are unclean, although the Apostle says that all things are clean, but that it is evil for the one who eats through giving offense (Rom 14:20; Titus 1:15). And indeed I believe that you are defiled by these feasts by the very fact that you judge them to be unclean. For he says, I believe and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is common of itself; but to him who reckons anything to be common, to him it is common (Rom 14:14). And to whom is it doubtful that he called the common unclean and defiled? But it is foolish to deal with you about the Scriptures, since you both deceive by promising reason and say that those books, in which there is the great authority of religion, are corrupted by false headings inserted into them. Persuade me, then, by reason how flesh defiles the one who eats it, if it is taken without any offense, without any weak opinion, without any lust.

15. 36. It is worth the trouble to know the whole rationale of this superstitious abstinence, which is given thus: since, they say, a member of God was mingled with the substance of evils in order to bridle it and restrain it from its utmost frenzy—for so you say—out of both natures mingled, that is, of good and evil, the world was fashioned. But that divine part is daily purged out of every part of the world and taken back into its own kingdoms; but it, exhaling through the earth and tending toward heaven, runs into the plants, since they are fixed by their roots to the earth, and so makes fruitful and vivifies all herbs and all shrubs.

From these the animals take food, which, if they couple, bind in the flesh that divine member, and, turned away from its sure path and hindered, entangle it in errors and hardships. And so the foods that are prepared from produce and fruits, if they come to the saints, that is, to the Manicheans, through their chastity and prayers and psalms, whatever in them is bright and divine is purged, that is, is in every part perfected, so that it may be carried back to its own kingdoms without any difficulty of filth. Hence it is that you forbid giving to a begging man who is not a Manichean bread or anything of produce or even water itself, which is cheap to all, lest the member of God which is mingled with these things, soiled by his sins, be hindered from its return.

15. 37. But flesh you say is now congealed from the very filth. For something of that divine part flees, as you declare, while produce and fruits are gathered; it flees when they are crushed by grinding or milling or cooking or even by biting and chewing. It flees too in all the motions of animals, whether when they frolic or when they exercise or when they labor or when they do anything at all. It flees too in our very rest, while in the body that which is called digestion is accomplished by inner heat. And so, with the divine nature fleeing on so many occasions, something most filthy remains, from which by coupling flesh is formed, while the soul, of the good kind—since, though it is for the most part good, it is yet not wholly good—flies away by those motions mentioned. For which reason, when the soul has also deserted the flesh, the remaining filth becomes excessive, and therefore the soul of those who eat flesh is defiled.

16. 38. O obscurity of the nature of things, how great a covering it is for falsity! Who, hearing these things—one who has not learned the causes of things, who, not yet sprinkled with even the slightest light of truth, is deceived by bodily images—would not, by the very fact that these things by no means appear and are thought of through certain likenesses of visible things and can be spoken eloquently, judge them to be true? But great throngs and herds of such people wander about, whom a religious fear, rather than reason, keeps safe from these deceits. For which reason I will try to refute these things, as far as God will deign to help me, in such a way that it may shine out sufficiently, not only to the judgment of the prudent, by which they are disapproved as soon as they are said, but even to common understanding itself, how false and absurd they are.

16. 39. For first I ask, whence you teach that there is in grains and pulse and vegetables and flowers and fruits that part of God, whatever it is. From the very brightness of color, they say, and the pleasantness of smell and the sweetness of taste it is manifest; and when these things do not have these qualities, by being rotten, they signify that they have been deserted by that same good. Are you not ashamed to think God is found by nose and palate? But I leave this aside. For I will speak Latin to you, and, as is wont to be said, it is much for you. This rather had to be understood by any mind whatever: if the presence of good appears in bodies by color, then the dung of animals, which is also the refuse of those very flesh meats, shines with various colors—now white, often golden, and others of this kind, which in fruits and flowers you take as witnesses of God being present and inhering.

What, after all, is the reason that you declare the redness in a rose to be an index of abundant good, and condemn the same in blood? Why do you embrace the same color in a violet that you spurn in bile, in the disease of the jaundiced, and finally in an infant's excrement? Why do you think the brightness and gleam of oil cries out an abundance of mingled good, and prepare your throat and belly to purge it, yet dread to touch your lips with drops of a most similar gleam dripping from fat flesh? Why do you think a melon to be golden, from the treasures of God, and not the rancid fat of a ham or the yolk of an egg? Why does whiteness in lettuces proclaim God to you, but in milk does not proclaim him? For I am still speaking of colors, in which—to leave the rest aside—you can compare no meadows clothed with flowers to the feathers and plumage of a single peacock, which surely are born of coupling and flesh.

16. 40. For if this good is also found by smell, ointments of wondrous smell are made from the flesh of certain animals. Finally, the very foods that are wont to be cooked with somewhat better flesh smell far more pleasantly than if the flesh had been lacking to them. Lastly, if you judge the sweeter-smelling things to be cleaner, you ought to have eaten a certain mud more eagerly than to drink cistern water; because earth, somewhat drier, drenched by a shower, strokes the nostrils with a wondrous smell, and such mud smells better than if a purer rainwater were caught. But if taste must bear witness, that we may know that something of God dwells in a body, it dwells more in dates and honey than in pork, but more in pork than in a bean, more in a fig than in a fig-fed liver—behold, I grant it; but you too grant that it is more in the fig-fed liver than in a beet. What of the fact that by this reasoning you are forced to confess that certain plants, which you certainly want all to be cleaner than flesh, receive God from flesh itself, if God mingled in is recognized by taste? For vegetables too become more savory cooked with flesh, and the herbs on which cattle feed we cannot taste; but turned into the juice of milk, we judge them more excellent in color and most suitable in taste.

16. 41. Or do you think that where three goods are present together, that is, good color and smell and taste, there is the greater part of good? Do not, then, so greatly admire and praise flowers, which you cannot admit to be judged at the tribunal of the palate. Do not prefer even purslane to flesh, which is surpassed by it, when cooked, in color and smell and taste. A roast suckling pig—for you compel us to discuss good and evil with you, not with writers and scribes, but rather with cooks and confectioners' servants—a roast suckling pig, then, is bright in color, soft in smell, pleasant in taste; you have a perfect index of the divine substance dwelling within; by a threefold testimony it invites you and desires to be purged by your holiness. Fall upon it; why do you delay? Why do you prepare to contradict?

In color alone an infant's dung surpasses a lentil; in smell alone a roast morsel surpasses a mild and green fig; in taste alone a slain kid surpasses the grass it fed on while alive; flesh has even been found whose cause is helped by all three of these witnesses together. What more do you seek? Or what will you say?

Why does the pulp of flesh make you unclean when you feast, but these monstrosities do not make you unclean when you discuss them—especially since the ray of this sun, which you certainly prefer to all flesh and all produce, neither smells nor tastes, but only stands out among other bodies by the excellence of its most gleaming color, which greatly exhorts you, and indeed forces you against your will, to prefer nothing, among the proofs of mingled good, to brightness of color?

16. 42. You will therefore be brought back to those straits, so as to confess that a part of God dwells more in blood, and in those things that, most foul but brightly colored, are voided from the flesh of animals in the streets, than in the pale leaves of an olive. But if you say—for you say this too—that the leaves of an olive, when burned, emit a fire in which the presence of light appears, but that flesh when burned does not do the same, what will you answer about fat, which lights nearly all the lamps of Italy? What about ox dung, which is certainly more filthy than the flesh of an ox, which, when dried, country people so use for the hearth that nothing is easier to kindle by its fire and nothing more purified by its smoke? What of the fact that, if brightness and gleam show the greater presence of the divine part, you do not purge it, do not seal it, do not free it? Since it is especially in flowers—to leave aside blood and the innumerable most similar things in flesh or from flesh—which flowers you certainly cannot have at your feasts; just as, even if you did eat flesh, you would certainly not add to your dishes the scales of fishes and certain little worms and flies, all of which sparkle even in darkness with their own light.

16. 43. What, then, remains except that you cease to say that you have fit indices—eyes, nostrils, palate—by which you may prove the presence of the divine part in bodies? But once these are removed, whence will you teach not only that a greater part of God is in plants than in flesh, but that there is anything of him at all in plants? Or does beauty move you—not that which is in the sweetness of color, but that which is in the congruence of parts? Would that it were so! For when would you dare to compare twisted logs to the bodies of living creatures, in whose form like members answer to like? But if you are delighted by the testimonies of the bodily senses, which is necessary for those who cannot see by the mind the force of essence, how do you prove that, through lapse of time and through certain crushings, the substance of good flees from bodies, except that thence God departs, as you assert, and migrates from place to place?

It is full of madness. Yet no signs and indices, as far as I can estimate, led you to this opinion. For many things, plucked from trees or pulled from the earth, before they come to our food, are rendered better by some interval of time, as leeks and endives, lettuces, grapes, apples, figs, and certain pears, and many things besides, which both are better colored when they are not consumed at once after being picked, and are taken into the body more healthfully, and taste more savory in the mouth; which so great suitability and sweetness ought by no means to be in these things, according to your opinion, if they became the more deserted by good the longer they are stored, after they have been separated from the earth as from a mother. The flesh itself of animals slain the day before is surely more pleasant and more suitable; but it ought not to be so, if, as you assert, it had more good on the day the living creature was killed than on the day after, when a greater flight of the divine substance had been made.

16. 44. But who would not know that wine becomes purer and better with age? And not, as you suppose, more fragrant for perverting the senses, but more useful for invigorating the body, provided there be a measure, which it befits to be master in every matter. For with newer must perversion of the senses is wont to happen sooner, so that if it has sometimes remained in the vat and fermented a little, it strikes the brain of those looking down on it and drives them headlong, and unless help is somehow given, kills them. Now as to what pertains to health, who would deny that bodies are inflated by it and ruinously distended? Are so great inconveniences present, then, because it has more good, while these are not present in aged wine, because a great part of the divine substance has departed?

It is absurd to say—especially for you who indicate the presence of a part of God by eyes, nostrils, palate, when these senses are well affected. And now, what so great perversity is it to think wine is the gall of the princes of darkness and yet not to spare grapes for eating? Will that gall be more present when it has been in the cask, or when it has been in the berries? But if, with the good departing, the evil remains as it were more undiluted, and this happens through lapse of time, then those same grapes, hung up and preserved, ought not to become milder, sweeter, more healthful; nor ought the wine itself, which was spoken of above, to become both clearer and brighter with the loss of light, and more healthful with the departure of the health-giving substance.

16. 45. What shall I say of wood and leaves, which dry up over time and yet cannot for that reason be said by you to become worse? For they lose that from which smoke is begotten, but retain that from which a bright flame rises, and by that brightness which you greatly love, it bears witness that the good is purer in the drier than in the greener. From which it comes about that either you deny that the part of God is greater in pure than in smoky light, and so throw all your proofs into confusion, or you confess that it can happen that from plants cut or pulled up, if they are laid by for a longer time, the nature of evil flees more copiously than that of good. And once this is confessed, we shall hold that from gathered produce a greater evil can depart, and thus in flesh a greater good can remain. And let this be said about time.

16. 46. For if that divine nature finds occasion for flight by the agitation and kneading and rubbing of these things, many similar cases refute you, which become better by being moved. Some imitate wine with the juice of barley, which by being moved becomes excellent. Indeed—what is by no means to be passed over—this kind of drink most quickly intoxicates, and yet you have never said that the juice of barley is the gall of the princes. Flour is skillfully drawn together with sparer water, a little harder, so that by kneading it becomes better and—than which nothing more perverse can be said—whiter as the light flees. The pastry-maker kneads honey a long time, so that it may reach that whiteness and a less harmful and milder sweetness; explain how this comes about with the good departing.

But if it pleases you to prove the presence of God not by sight and smell and taste but by the hearing too being delighted, flesh furnishes strings for harps and bones for flutes, which, dried and rubbed and twisted, are rendered sonorous. So the sweetness of music, which you contend has come from the divine kingdoms, is furnished to us by the filth of dead flesh, both dried by time and thinned by rubbing and stretched by twisting—by which afflictions you proclaim that the divine substance flees even from living things, which you say also happens by their being boiled. Why, then, do boiled thistles by no means harm the health? Is it, then, to be supposed that from them, while they are thus cooked, God departs, or the plague?

16. 47. Why should I pursue the rest, all of which it is neither easy nor necessary to say? For to whom does it not occur how many things are more pleasant and more healthful when cooked? Which ought not to be so, if, as you suppose, by agitations of this kind they are deserted by good. I think you can find nothing at all by which to prove, by these bodily senses, that flesh is therefore unclean and defiles the souls of those who eat it because gathered produce, after many agitations, is turned into flesh; especially since you think the age and corruption of vinegar to be cleaner than wine, and we see that the boiled-down must you drink is nothing other than cooked wine, which ought to be more filthy than wine, if by motions and cookings the divine members depart from corporeal things. But if it is not so, there is no reason why you should suppose that produce, when it is gathered, stored, handled, cooked, digested, is deserted by good fleeing, and therefore furnishes a most filthy matter for the creating of bodies.

16. 48. But if you are not led by color and form and smell and taste to judge that good is in these things, what else can you bring forward? Or is a certain firmness and vigor an argument to you, which seems to be taken away from these things while they are separated from the earth and handled? But if this moved you—although it can quickly be noticed that it is false, on account of the increased firmness of some after they are taken from the earth, as has already been mentioned about wine, which becomes stronger with age—yet if this firmness moved you, as I said, you would prove that in no food is the part of God more copious than in flesh. For athletes, to whom that strength and vigor are especially necessary, do not feed on vegetables and fruits and not on flesh.

16. 49. Or, because flesh is nourished by trees, but trees are not nourished by flesh, do you therefore judge that their bodies are better than ours? You do not consider a matter so much at hand: that shrubs grow more luxuriant and fruitful, and crops fatter, by the nourishment of dung, while you, in your accusation of flesh, seem to say nothing graver of it than when you say that it is the home of dung. From this, then, are nourished the things that are clean to you, which you proclaim to be much more unclean in that thing which is unclean to you. But if you spurn flesh because it is born after coupling, let the flesh of worms delight you, which are born so many and so great in fruits, in wood, in the earth itself, without any coupling. But this is some pretense, I know not what. For if flesh displeased you for this reason, that it is formed by the mingling of father and mother, you would not say that those princes of darkness were born from the fruits of their trees—princes whom you certainly spurn more than the flesh you are unwilling to taste.

16. 50. For as for your opinion that all the souls of animals indeed come from the food of their parents, and that you glory in freeing from these prisons the divine substance that is held in your foods, this very much presses you against yourselves and most urgently impels you to eat flesh. For why do you not free the souls which those who feast on flesh are going to bind to a body, by anticipating them and eating? But, one says, nothing of the good part is bound by them from flesh, but from the produce that they take with the flesh. What, then, must be answered about the souls of lions, whose food is flesh alone? They drink, he says, and therefore that soul has been drawn from the water and entangled in the flesh. What can be said about the innumerable birds? What about eagles themselves, which are fed on nothing but flesh and need no drink? Here surely you fail, and find nothing that can be answered. For if the soul comes from food, and there are animals that beget offspring whose only food is flesh and which have no drink, then there is in flesh a soul which, that it may be purged, you ought, after your manner, to help by eating flesh. Unless perhaps you think the pig, which is fed on produce and drinks water, has a soul of light, but you maintain that in the eagle, to which the sun is especially congenial, a soul of darkness dwells, because it lives on flesh alone.

16. 51. O the straits of the matter, O the incredible absurdities! Into which you would surely not have fallen, if, being strangers to most empty fables, you followed, as to the abstinence of foods, what truth approves: that you should judge delicious foods to be rejected for the sake of restraining desire, not of avoiding an uncleanness that does not exist. For if anyone, even less attentive to the nature of things and to the force of soul and body, should grant you that the soul is defiled by sauce, you nevertheless grant that it is made far more unclean by lust.

What reason, then—or rather what madness—is it to expel from the number of the elect a man who has perhaps tasted flesh for the sake of his health, with no lust, but, if he has desired to eat peppered truffles greedily, to detect perhaps only intemperance and not to condemn him as a corrupter of the seal? So it comes about that one cannot be among your elect who has been betrayed as having dined on some part of a hen, not out of lust but for the sake of healing, but one can be among them who has himself betrayed that he vehemently desired pastries and other things lacking flesh.

You hold guilty, then, the one whom lust plunges into filth; but the one whom the food itself, as you suppose, defiles, you do not hold guilty—although you confess that the defilement from desire is far greater than that from sauce—yet punishing the one who hovers, gaping, over most sweetly seasoned produce and does not restrain himself, but acquitting the one who, for the sake of suppressing hunger, prepared to take and prepared to lose whatever human foods, takes them indifferently, without any lust. Behold marvelous morals, behold a distinguished discipline, behold a memorable temperance!

16. 52. Now, as to the fact that you think it a sacrilege if anyone besides the elect touches for eating the things offered to you, as it were, to be purged at your feasts—of how great baseness, and sometimes of crime, is this full? Since often so many things are given that they cannot easily be consumed by a few. And because it is thought a sacrilege either to give to others what is left over or certainly to throw it away, you are thrust into great surfeits, desiring to purge, as it were, all that has been given. And now, distended and almost bursting, you compel the children who are under your discipline to devour the remainder by a cruel domination, so that it was charged against a certain man at Rome that, by forcing wretched little ones to eat, he killed them by such superstition. Which I would not believe, did I not know how great a sacrilege you judge it either to give these things to others who are not elect or certainly to see to their being thrown away. Whence there remains that necessity of eating, which can come almost daily to a most base surfeit, and sometimes even to homicide.

16. 53. Since these things are so, you even forbid giving bread to a beggar, yet you judge that money should be given, out of mercy, or rather out of envy. What shall I here first reprove—cruelty or madness? For what if the matter takes place where purchasable food cannot be found? That needy man is going to die of hunger, while you, a wise and kindly man, pity a cucumber more than a man. This is surely—for what could I say more fittingly and plainly?—false mercy and true cruelty. Now let us look at the madness. For what if with that money you give him he buys himself bread? Will not that divine part of yours, in the man who takes it from the seller, suffer in this what it was going to suffer if he had taken it from your giving? That sinful beggar, then, has wrapped in filth the part of God that desired to fly back, helped to so great a crime by your money; and yet you most prudent men think it makes a difference if you do not give a man to be killed to one about to commit murder, but, knowing it, do give money from which he may procure the one to be killed.

What can be added to this insanity? For so it comes about that either a man dies, if he does not find purchasable food, or the food itself dies, if he finds it; of which the one is true homicide, the other yours, but to be so attributed to you as if both were true. For as to the fact that you do not forbid your hearers to eat flesh, but forbid them to kill animals, what more foolish and perverse can be done? For if such food does not contaminate, take it yourselves; if it contaminates, what madness, after all, is it to think it a greater sacrilege to loose a pig's soul from the body than to defile a human soul with a pig's body?

17. 54. But let us now come to considering and treating the seal of the hands. And first indeed, that you abstain from the killing of animals and the tearing of plants, Christ showed to be most superstitious; for, indicating that we have no fellowship of right with beasts and trees, he both sent demons into a herd of swine (See Matt 8:31-32) and made a tree, on which he had found no fruit, dry by a curse (See Matt 21:18-19). Certainly the swine had sinned in nothing, the tree in nothing. For we are not so mad as to think that a tree is fruitful or barren of its own accord. Nor is it to be said by you here that by these deeds our Lord wished to signify certain other things—for who would not know it? But surely a sign should not have been given by the Son of God through homicide, if to kill a tree, as you say, is homicide, or to kill animals. For of human beings too, with whom we are certainly joined in a fellowship of right, he gave certain signs, but by healing people, not by killing them (See Matt 4:23). Which he would have done with beasts and trees too, if he had judged us to be joined to them by the same fellowship that you suppose.

17. 55. At this point it seemed to me that authority should be brought in, for this reason: that about the soul of cattle and about a certain life by which trees are said to live, it cannot be subtly disputed with you. But since you protect yourselves by a certain privilege, so as not to be overcome from the Scriptures, by saying that they have been falsified—although those things I mentioned about the tree (See Matt 21:18-19) and about the herd of swine (See Matt 8:31-32) you have never said were interpolated by corrupters—yet, lest, considering how much it is against you, you should at some time wish to say this same thing even about these, I will keep to my proposal, so as to ask of you, who are altogether great promisers of reason and truth, first what harm is done to a tree—I do not say if you pluck a fruit or leaf from it, which indeed, among you, if anyone do it not by imprudence but knowingly, he will without any doubt be condemned as a corrupter of the seal—but altogether if you uproot it from the root. For that soul which you judge to be rationally present in trees is, when the tree is cut down, loosed from a bond—for you say this—and indeed from that bond in which it was held with great misery and no advantage. For it is known to you that your own author is wont to threaten the transmigration of a man into a tree as a huge punishment, though not the highest; and a soul cannot become wiser in a tree, as in a man. For the most certain reason for not killing a man is lest you either kill one whose wisdom and virtue profit others most, or one who could perhaps have arrived at wisdom, whether admonished from outside by someone or divinely illumined by inner thoughts.

But the soul of a man, the wiser it is when it leaves the body, the more usefully it leaves it—truth teaches this, both by most subtle reason and by an authority most widely spread. For which reason, the one who fells a tree frees from that body a soul making no progress in wisdom. And so you holy men, you especially, ought to be cutting down trees and leading their souls, stripped of that bond, by prayers and psalms to better things. Or can this be done for those souls, not which you have helped with your mind, but which you have received into your belly?

17. 56. Although this very thing—that the souls of trees, so long as they are in trees, make no progress toward wisdom—the greatest straits, as I judge, compel you to confess, when you are asked why an apostle teacher is not sent to trees too, or why the one who is sent to human beings does not preach the truth to trees as well. Here you are forced to answer that those souls cannot receive the divine precepts in such bodies. But you are more vehemently pressed from the other side, since you declare that they both hear our voices and understand our words and behold bodies and the motions of bodies, and finally discern our very thoughts. If these things are true, why can they learn nothing from the apostle of light? Or why can they not even much more easily than we, since they look even into the inner things of the mind? For thus that teacher who, as you say, scarcely teaches you by speaking, could instruct by thinking those souls which would discern his thoughts in his mind before his speech. But if these things are false, see at last in what error you lie.

17. 57. Now as to the fact that you yourselves do not pluck fruits and do not pull up grass, but nevertheless bid your hearers to pluck and pull up and offer them to you, so that you may be able to profit not only those who bring them but even the things that are brought—who, considering it well, would in any way tolerate it?

First, because it makes no difference whether you yourself commit a crime or wish it to be committed by another on your account. You say you do not wish it. How, then, is that divine part helped, which lies in lettuces and in leeks, if no one pulls them up and brings them to the saints to be purged?

Then, you yourself, passing through a field in which, by the right of friendship, you are given power to pluck whatever you please, if you see a crow hovering over a fig, what will you do? Does it not, by your opinion, seem that the fig itself speaks with you and pitiably begs that you yourself pluck it and bury it to be purified and revived by your holy belly, rather than that that crow, having devoured it, mingle it with its deadly body and pass it on to be bound and tortured in other forms? What is crueler than you, if it is true? What more inept, if it is false? What more contrary to your discipline, if you loose the seal? What more hostile to you, O member of God, if you keep it?

17. 58. But this follows from your false and trifling opinion; for a sure and manifest cruelty is proved to be in you, flowing from that same error. For if anyone, his body dissolved by disease, weary from a journey and half-alive from a plague, lie on the road, able to do no more than somehow utter words, and to him it would profit, for binding his body together, to be given a pear, and he should beg you as you pass that you help, and beseech you to bring the man a fruit from the nearest tree—from which you are forbidden by no human, no, finally, true right—the man being about to die after a little while unless you do it: will you, a Christian and holy man, rather pass by and desert a man so afflicted and begging, lest the tree weep while its fruit is taken down and you, a loosener of the seal, be destined for Manichean punishments? O morals and singular innocence!

17. 59. But now, about the killing of animals, I will inquire what moves you, and many things indeed of this kind can be said in this matter too. For what harm will be done to the soul of a wolf by one who kills a wolf, when that wolf, as long as it lives, is going to be a wolf and obeys no preacher so as to refrain a little from the blood of sheep, and the rational soul, according to you, is, when the beast is killed, freed from that bond of the body? And from this killing too you forbid even your hearers, for it seems greater than that in trees.

Here I do not much disapprove of your senses, the bodily ones, that is. For we both see and perceive by their cries that living creatures die with pain, which indeed a human being disregards in a beast, with which—since it does not have a rational soul—he is coupled by no fellowship of law. But I inquire after these same senses of yours in beholding trees, and I find you altogether blind. For, to leave aside that no sense of pain appears in wood by any motions, what is more manifest than that a tree is then in the best condition when it flourishes, when it is leafy, when it is glad with flowers, rich with fruits? But this is for the most part, and especially, furnished to it by pruning. And if iron felt it, as you wish, the tree would rather waste away, afflicted by so many and so great wounds, than, sprouting from those very places, grow green again with so sure an exultation.

17. 60. Yet why do you think it a greater sacrilege to cut down animals than plants, since the latter seem to you to have a purer soul than flesh? There is made, one says, a certain compensation, when some part of the things that are taken from the fields is given to the elect and the saints to be purged. These things have already been frustrated above, and it has been sufficiently shown, as I judge, that by no reason can it be said that there is more of that good part in produce than in flesh. But if anyone supports his living by selling flesh and spends all the profit of such trade in buying foods for your elect, and this man brings more foods to the saints than a farmer and rustic, will he not cry out that by the same compensation it is lawful for him to kill living creatures? There is, one says, a certain other most secret reason. For a clever man does not lack a refuge against the unlearned in the obscurity of nature. For the heavenly princes, he says, who, captured and bound from the race of darkness, were ordered by the founder of the world in those places, each possess their own animals on their own earth, coming, namely, from their own kind and stock; and they hold the killers of these guilty and do not permit them to go out of this world, and wear them down with such punishments and tortures as they can. Who among the unlearned would not dread these things, and who, seeing nothing in such great obscurity, would not suppose that it is as it is said? But I will not leave my proposal, in which God will be present to me, that obscure lies may be refuted by the most open truth.

17. 61. For I ask: if the animals that are on land and in the waters come from that race of princes through the succession of offspring and the activity of coupling, since the origin of those being born is traced back to those miscarried fetuses—I ask, I say, if it is so, is it not a sacrilege to kill bees and frogs and many other things that are begotten without coupling? You say it is a sacrilege. Therefore it is not on account of the kinship of certain princes, whoever they are, that you forbid your hearers from the killing of animals. Or if you say that there is a general kinship of all bodies, then trees too will without doubt pertain to that same offense of the princes, which trees the hearers are not commanded to spare. We return, then, to that weak point: that the things in plants that the hearers harm are expiated through the fruits that they bring to your church. For it was said in this way that those who in the market butcher animals and sell flesh, if they are your hearers and bring their profits to you in produce that has been bought, can, by the same reckoning, hold that daily occupation of theirs lawful for themselves, and that whatever of sin is in it is abolished by your feasts.

17. 62. But if you say that, just as in the case of fruits and vegetables there had to be a contribution that that killing might deserve pardon—which, because it cannot be done (for the elect do not eat flesh), the hearers must abstain from the killing of animals—what will you answer about thorns and useless weeds, which farmers, by pulling them up in clearing the fields, kill, and from which they can furnish you no foods? How will so great a devastation, from which there is no food for the saints, pertain to pardon? Or do you perhaps dissolve whatever sin there was that produce and fruits might thrive, by eating something of those very produce and fruits? What, then, if locusts or mice and shrews devastate the fields, which it is manifest often happens? Will they be killed with impunity by your hearer the farmer, because he sins to the end that the fruits may thrive? Here certainly you are pressed. For either you grant the hearers the killing of animals which your author was unwilling to grant, or you will forbid them even the cultivation of the field, which he granted. Although you often even dare to say that a moneylender is more innocent than a peasant, so much more friendly are you to melons than to men. Since, lest they be harmed, you judge it better that a man be slaughtered by usury. Is this a justice to be desired and proclaimed, or rather a deceit to be execrated and condemned? Is this a memorable mercy, or rather an execrable monstrousness?

17. 63. What of the fact that from the killing of animals not even you yourselves abstain in the case of lice and fleas and bedbugs? And you think this a great defense of the matter, that you say these are the filth of our bodies. Which first is plainly false as said of the flea and the bedbug. For to whom is it not manifest that these animals do not come into existence from our body? Then, if you execrate coupling more vehemently, which you wish to seem excessive, why do those animals not seem cleaner to you which are born from our flesh without coupling? For although they afterward give birth by mating, they are not, when we mate, first born from our body. But now, if whatever things are begotten of living bodies are to be thought most filthy, much more whatever are begotten of dead ones. With more impunity, then, is a shrew or a snake or a scorpion killed, which especially we are wont to hear from you are born of human corpses.

But I leave aside obscure and uncertain things. About bees there is certainly a more celebrated report (See Varro, De re rustica 3.16.4), that they arise from the carcasses of oxen. Therefore they are killed with impunity. But if this too is doubtful, scarcely anyone doubts about beetles that they come into existence from dung rolled into a ball by them and buried (See Pliny, Naturalis historia 11.34.98). These living creatures, then, and others which it is long to pursue, you ought certainly to think more filthy than your lice; and yet to kill those seems to you a sacrilege, but to spare these foolish—unless perhaps you despise these animals because they are small. Indeed, if it is so, that an animal ought to be the more contemptible the smaller it is, you must of necessity prefer a camel to a human being.

17. 64. To this is added that gradation which, when I heard you, often troubled us. For there is no reason why, on account of a small measure of body, a flea should be killed, but not also a fly that is begotten in a bean. And if this one, why not also that one a little larger, whose offspring is certainly smaller than the fly? Now this follows: that a bee too is killed without fault, whose young is scarcely equal to this fly. Thence to the young of a locust and a locust, thence to the young of a mouse and a mouse. And, not to make it long, do you not see that by these steps one arrives at an elephant, so that whoever thinks the killing of a flea is not a sin on account of its tiny body cannot at all refuse to kill that huge beast without fault? But I think enough has now been said even about trifles of this kind.

18. 65. There remains the seal of the breast, in which your chastity is much unchaste. For you forbid not coupling, but, as was long ago said by the Apostle (See 1 Tim 4:3), truly marriage, which is the one honorable defense of such a work. Here I do not doubt that you will cry out and stir up resentment by saying that you vehemently commend and praise perfect chastity, but do not forbid marriage; since your hearers, whose grade among you is the second, are not forbidden to take and have wives. And when you have said this with a loud voice and great indignation, I will ask you more gently in this way: Are you not the ones who think that to beget children, because souls are bound in the flesh, is a graver sin than coupling itself? Are you not the ones who are accustomed to admonish us to observe, as far as could be done, the time at which a woman is, after the purgation of her genital inward parts, fit for conception, and at that time to abstain from coupling, lest a soul be entangled in flesh? From which it follows that you judge one should have a spouse not for the sake of procreating children but of satisfying lust. But marriage, as the very marriage tablets cry out, joins male and female for the sake of procreating children; whoever, then, says that to procreate children is a graver sin than to couple, certainly forbids marriage, and makes the woman no longer a wife but a harlot, who, with certain things given to her, is joined to a man to satisfy his lust. For if she is a wife, it is matrimony. But it is not matrimony where care is taken that she not be a mother; therefore she is not a wife. For which reason you forbid marriage, nor do you by any reason defend yourselves from this charge, which was long ago foretold of you by the Holy Spirit.

18. 66. Now, when you vehemently busy yourselves that a soul not be bound in the flesh through coupling, and vehemently assert that through the food of the saints the soul is freed from seeds, do you not confirm, O wretches, what people suspect about you? For why is it believed that you wish to free the soul from wheat and bean and lentil and other seeds, when you eat them, but not believed concerning the seed of animals? For just as you say that the very flesh of a dead living creature is unclean because it does not have a soul, you cannot say the same of the seed of a living creature, in which you judge that the soul which will appear in the offspring is bound, and in which you confess that the soul of Mani himself was entangled. And because such seeds cannot be brought to you by your hearers to be purged, who would not suspect that a secret purgation of this kind takes place among you about yourselves, and is therefore hidden from them, lest they desert you? If you do not do these things—which I would it were so—you see nevertheless to how great a suspicion your superstition lies open, and how people are not to be blamed for supposing what is gathered from your profession, since you proclaim that you free souls from bodies and senses through food and drink. I do not wish to dwell here longer; you see how great is the occasion for invective. But because the matter is such that discourse dreads rather than assails it, and because that proposal of mine can be noticed throughout my whole discourse, by which I resolved to exaggerate nothing but to deal, as it were, with bare facts and reasons, let us pass to another matter.

19. 67. For it now appears sufficiently of what sort your three seals are. These are your morals, this is the end of your admirable precepts, where there is nothing certain, nothing constant, nothing reasonable, nothing blameless, but all things doubtful, indeed without doubt most false, all things conflicting, all things absurd.

In short, so many and so grave sins are detected in these morals that, if anyone wished to accuse them all, a man of some ability could treat each one, at the least, in a single volume. If, then, you kept these and fulfilled your profession, nothing would be more inept than you, nothing more foolish, nothing more ignorant; but since you praise and teach these things and do not do them, what more deceitful, what more treacherous, what more malicious can be said or found than you?

19. 68. For nine whole years I heard you with great care and diligence; no one of the elect could become known to me who, according to these precepts, was not either caught in sin or certainly subject to suspicion. Many were found amid wine and flesh, many bathing in the baths. But these things we only heard. Some were proved to have seduced other men's wives, so that on this point I plainly cannot doubt.

But let even this be report rather than truth. I myself saw—not alone, but with those who have partly already been freed from that superstition, and whom I partly still wish to be freed—we saw, then, at a crossroads of Carthage, in a most frequented square, not one but more than three of the elect together, behind some women passing by, neighing with so wanton a gesture that they surpassed the lewdness and shamelessness of all the loungers of the streets.

That this came from a great habit, and that they so lived among themselves, was sufficiently evident, since no one, fearing the presence of his companion, indicated that all, or certainly almost all, were held by the same plague. For these were not from one house, but dwelling quite separately; they had perhaps come down together from the place where the assembly of all had been held. But we, gravely moved, gravely also complained. Who, after all, thought this should be punished—I do not say by separation from the church, but, considering the greatness of the outrage, by at least a vehement rebuke?

19. 69. And this was the whole excuse for their impunity: that, at the time when their conventicles were forbidden by public law, it was feared lest some, being injured, should betray them. Where, then, is what they proclaim, that a perpetual persecution will be theirs in this world, and on this account wish themselves to be held more commendable, interpreting from this that this world hates them (See John 15:18), and asserting that therefore the truth is to be sought with them, because in the promise of the Holy Spirit the Paraclete it was said that this world cannot receive him (See John 14:17)? About which matter this is not the place to discuss. But certainly, if a perpetual persecution is to be yours, even unto the end of the age, perpetual also will be this dissolution and the unpunished contagion of so great a baseness, while you dread to injure such men.

19. 70. This too was answered us, when we had reported to the leading men themselves that a woman had complained to us that, in a chamber where she was with other women—secure, namely, in the holiness of those men—when several of the elect had entered and the lamp had been put out by one of them, it was uncertain by which of them in the darkness she had been assailed with an embrace and forced into outrage, had she not escaped by the help of her outcry. This sacrilege too, most well known to us, from how great a habit must it be supposed to have come? And this was done on that night when the festal vigils are celebrated among you. But truly, even if there were no fear of betrayal, who could offer to the bishop one to be condemned, who had so taken precaution lest he be recognized? As if indeed the same crime did not hold guilty all who had entered together. For all of them, jesting wantonly, had been pleased that the lamp be put out.

19. 71. But how great doors were opened to suspicions, when we found them envious, when avaricious, when most greedy for choice feasts, when most frequent in quarrels, when most easily stirred over trifling matters? We did not at all suppose that those could restrain themselves from things they professed to restrain themselves from, when they should find hiding places and darkness.

There were two of fairly good reputation, of ready ability and leaders in those disputations of theirs, joined to us more and more familiarly than the rest. One of them, who clung to us more closely on account of liberal studies too, is now said to be a presbyter there. These two gravely envied each other, and the one charged the other—not by an open accusation, but by talk among those he could and by whispers—with having violently assailed the wife of a certain hearer.

But that man, clearing himself, meanwhile accused before us another elect of the same crime, who dwelt with that same hearer as a most faithful friend; and because, suddenly entering, he had caught him with the woman, he said that counsel had been given to the woman and the adulterer by that hostile and envious man, that this slander should be forged against him, lest, if he should betray anything, he be believed. We were anguished and bore it most grievously that, although about the woman who was assailed it was uncertain, yet the spite in those two, than whom we found none better there, appeared most keen and forced us to conjecture such things.

19. 72. Finally, in the theaters we very often found elect grave both in age and, as it seemed, in morals, together with an old presbyter. I leave aside the young men, whom we used to catch even brawling on behalf of stage-players and charioteers—which thing is no slight argument of how they can restrain themselves from hidden things, when they cannot overcome that desire which displays and offers them to the eyes of their own hearers, blushing and fleeing. Or indeed would that great outrage of even that holy man, to whose disputations we used to come in the street of the fig-sellers, have been betrayed, had he been able only to make a consecrated virgin a woman, and not also pregnant?

But the hidden and incredible evil, as the womb grew, did not allow itself to lie hidden. And when the mother had betrayed this to her young brother, grieving most keenly, he was nevertheless, by the name of religion, recalled from a public accusation; and he brought it about that the man—for no one could bear this—was driven out of that church; and lest the matter go altogether unpunished, he took counsel, with friends joined to him, to beat the man down with fists and heels. But that man, while he was being gravely beaten, cried out that he should be spared on the authority of Mani, that Adam, the first hero, had sinned, and after his sin had been holier (See Wis 9:19; 10:2).

19. 73. For such is the opinion among you about Adam and Eve; it is a long fable, but from it I will touch on what suffices for the present. You say that Adam was so begotten by his parents, those miscarried princes of darkness, that he had the greatest part of light in his soul and a very small part of the hostile race. And although he lived holily on account of the surpassing abundance of good, yet that hostile part was stirred in him, so that he was bent toward coupling; thus he fell and sinned, but afterward lived holier.

Here I do not so much complain of a wicked man, who by abominable defilement led another's household, under the dress of an elect and holy man, into so great disgrace and infamy. I do not charge this to you. Let this have been the deed of a most abandoned man rather than of your habit. I do not, then, charge so great an outrage to you but to him. Yet that one thing, how it can be borne and tolerated in all of you, I do not know: that, although you say the soul is a part of God, you nevertheless assert that even by a small admixture of evil its greater abundance and richness is overcome. For who, having believed this, when lust has assailed him, would not flee to such a defense rather than to the bridling and suppressing of that lust?

20. 74. What more shall I say about your morals? I have said the things I myself learned, when I was in that city where these things were committed. But what was done at Rome in my absence, it is long to set forth in full. Yet I will say it briefly.

For the matter broke out to such a point that it could not be hidden from those absent; and I myself, afterward, when I was at Rome, confirmed that I had heard all to be true; although one so familiar and approved by me, who was present, had reported the matter to me, that I could not doubt it at all.

For a certain hearer of yours, in no way yielding to the elect in that memorable abstinence, who had also been liberally educated and was both willing and accustomed to defend your sect copiously, bore it most grievously that, when he often disputed, the most abandoned morals of elect who lived wandering, most wickedly, and lived everywhere at random, were cast in his teeth. He desired, therefore, if it could be done, to gather into his house all who were prepared to lead a life according to those precepts, and to support them at his own expense. For he was both no slight despiser of money and not slightly moneyed. But he complained that his so great efforts were hindered by the dissoluteness of the bishops, by whose help he ought to have fulfilled them.

Meanwhile a certain bishop of yours, a man plainly, as I myself experienced, rustic and unpolished, but somehow, by that very harshness, seeming more severe in keeping good morals—this man, very long desired and at length present, that hearer seizes upon; he sets forth his wish to the man: the bishop praises it and consents; it is agreed that the bishop himself should first begin to dwell in his house. When this was done, all the elect who could be at Rome were gathered there. A rule of living was set forth from Mani's epistle; to many it seemed intolerable, and they went away; yet not a few remained out of shame. They began to live as had been agreed, and as so great an authority prescribed, while meanwhile that hearer vehemently forced all to all things, yet no one to anything that he himself did not first undertake.

Meanwhile most frequent quarrels arose among the elect; crimes were cast at one another, all of which that hearer heard with groaning, and he took pains that they should, in quarreling, most incautiously betray themselves; they betrayed abominable and monstrous things. There it was learned what sort they were who nevertheless, among the rest, had thought that the force of those precepts must be undergone by them. Now about the rest, what was to be suspected, or rather what to be judged? Why more? At length, being compelled, they murmured that those commandments could not be borne; thence into sedition.

The hearer was pleading his cause with a most brief summary: either all those things must be kept, or the one who had enjoined such things under such a condition, which no one could fulfill, must be thought most foolish. Yet the most unbridled clamor of the many overcame the opinion of one—for it could not be otherwise. Afterward the bishop himself too gave way and fled with great disgrace; whose foods, indeed, taken secretly contrary to the rule and often found, were reported, although abundant money was supplied to him from his own little purse, carefully hidden.

20. 75. If you say these things are false, you withstand things too open and widely spread. But would that you would say it. For since these things are manifest and most easy to learn for those who have wished to know, it is understood how truly those are wont to speak who have denied that these things are true. But you use other defenses, which I do not disapprove. For you either say that there are some who keep your precepts and that they ought not to be drenched with the crimes of others, or that one ought not at all to ask of what sort the people are who profess your sect, but of what sort the profession itself is.

Both of which, although I grant them—although you can neither show those to be faithful observers of the commandments nor purge the heresy itself from so many and so great trifles and crimes—yet this I will especially ask of you: why you assail with curses Christians of the Catholic name, looking at the abandoned life of certain ones, while concerning your own people you either shamelessly refuse that a question be raised, or more shamelessly do not refuse, and wish it to be understood that in your so great fewness there lie hidden certain ones, whoever they are, who keep their precepts, but in so great a multitude of Catholics are unwilling to have it understood?