cease on the appearance of the things signified. The whole state was one great prophet, with its king and priest symbolically anointed, which was discontinued, not by the wish of the Jews themselves, who were in ignorance through unbelief, but only on the coming of Him who was God, anointed with spiritual grace above His fellows, the holy of holies, the true King who should govern us, the true Priest who should offer Himself for us. In a word, the predictions of heathen ingenuity regarding Christ's coming are as different from sacred prophecy as the confession of devils from the proclamation of angels.
16. By such arguments, which might be expanded if we were discussing with one brought up in heathenism, and might be supported by proofs in still greater number, the inquirer whom Faustus has brought before us would certainly be led to believe, unless he preferred his sins to his salvation. As a believer, he would be taken to be cherished in the bosom of the Catholic Church, and would be taught in due course the conduct required of him. He would see many who do not practise the required duties; but this would not shake his faith, even though these people should belong to the same Church and partake of the same sacraments as himself. He would understand that few share in the inheritance of God, while many partake in its outward signs; that few are united in holiness of life, and in the gift of love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us, which is a hidden spring that no stranger can approach; and that many join in the solemnity of the sacrament, which he that eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, while he who neglects to eat it shall not have life in him,' and so shall never reach eternal life. He will understand, too, that the good are called few as compared with the multitude of the evil, but that as scattered over the world there are very many growing among the tares, and mixed with the chaff, till the day of harvest and of purging. As this is taught in the Gospel, so is it foretold by the prophets. We read, "As a lily among thorns, so is my beloved among the daughters;"^ and again, " I have dwelt in the tabernacles of Kedar; peaceful among them that hated peace; "3 and again, " Mark in the forehead those who sigh and cry for the iniquities of my people, which are done in the midst of them."'* The inquirer would be confirmed by such passages; and being now a fellowcitizen with the saints and of the household of God, no longer an alien from Israel, but an Israelite indeed, in whom is mo guile, would learn to utter from a guileless heart the words which follow in the passage of Jeremiah already quoted, "O Lord, the patience of Israel: let all that forsake Thee be dismayed."
After speaking of the partridge that is clamorous, and gathers what it has not brought forth.; and after extolling the city set on an hill which cannot be hid, to prevent heretics from drawing men away from the Catholic Church; after the words, "A glorious high throne is our sanctuary," he seems to ask himself, What do we make of all those evil men who are found mixed with the Church, and who become more numerous as the Church extends, and as all nations are united in Christ? And then follow the w^ords, " O Lord, the patience of Israel." Patience is necessary to obey the command, " Suffer both to grow together till the harvest." 5 Impatience towards the evil might lead to forsaking the good, who in the strict sense are the body of Christ, and to forsake them would be to forsake Him. So the prophet goes on to say, " Let all that forsake Thee be dismayed; let those who have departed to the earth be confounded." The earth is man trusting in himself, and induc- • John vi. 54. 4 Ezck. ix. I.
2 Cant. li. 2. 5 Matt. xiii. 30.
3 Ps. cxx. 7.
2o6 [Book XIII.
ing others to trust in him. So the prophet adds: " Let them be overthrown, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of Ufe." This is the cry of the partridge, that it has got the fountain of life, and will give it; and so men are gathered to it, and depart from Christ, as if Christ, whose name they had professed, had not fulfilled His promise. The partridge gathers those whom it has not brought forth. And in order to do this, it declares. The salvation which Christ promises is with me; I will give it. In opposition to this the prophet says: " Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved." So we read in the apostle, " Let no man glory in men;" ' or in the words of the prophet, "Thou art my praise."^ Such is a specimen of instruction in apostolic and prophetic doctrine, by which a man may be built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.
17. Faustus has not told us how he would prove the divinity of Christ to the heathen, whom he makes to say: I believe neither the prophets in support of Christ, nor Christ in support of the prophets. It would be absurd to suppose that such a man would believe what Christ says of Himself, when he disbelieves what He says of others. For if he thinks Him unworthy of credit in one case, he must think Him so in all, or at least more so when speaking of Himself than when speaking of others. Perhaps, failing this, Faustus would read to him the Sibyls and Orpheus, and any heathen prophecies about Christ that he could find. But how could he do this, when he confesses that he knows none? His words are: " If, as is said, any prophecies of Christ are to be found in the Sibyl, or in Hermes, called Trismegistus, or Orpheus, or any heathen poet. " How could he read writings of which he knows nothing, and which he supposes to exist only from report, to one who will not believe either the prophets or Christ? What, then, would he do? AVould he bring forward Manichseus as a witness to Christ? The opposite of this is what the Manichseans do. They take advantage of the widespread fragrance of the name of Christ to gain acceptance for Manichaeus, that the edge of their poisoned cup may be sweetened with this honey. Taking hold of the promises of Christ to His disciples that He would send the Paraclete, that is, the Comforter or Advocate, they 3ay that this Paraclete is Manichccus, or in Manicheeus, and so steal an entrance into the minds of men who do not know when He who was promised by Christ really came. Those ' I Cor. iii. 21.
2 Jer. xvii. 14, who have read the canonical book called the Acts of the Apostles find a reference to Christ's promise, and an account of its fulfillment. Faustus, then, has no proof to give to the inquirer. It is not likely that any one will be so infatuated as to take the authority of Manichaeus when he rejects that of Christ. Would he not reply in derision, if not in anger. Why do you ask me to believe Persian books, when you forbid me to believe Hebrew books? The Manichcean has no hold on the inquirer, unless he is already in some way convinced of the truth of Christianity. When he finds him willing to believe Christ, then he deludes him with the representation of Christ given by Manichreus. So the partridge gathers what it has not brought forth. When will you whom he gathers leave him? When will you see him to be a fool, who tells you that Hebrew testimony is worthless in the case of unbelievers, and superfluous to believers?
18. If believers are to throw away all the books which have led them to believe, I see no reason why they should continue reading the Gospel itself. The Gospel, too, must be worthless to this inquirer, who, according to Faustus' pitiful supposition, rejects with ridicule the authority of Christ. And to the believer it must be superfluous, if true notices of Christ are superfluous to believers. And if the Gospel should be read by the believer, that he may not forget what lie has believed, so should the prophets, that he may not forget why he believed. For if he forgets this his faith cannot be firm. By this principle, you should throw away the books of Manichaeus, on the authority of which you already believe that light — that is, God — -fought with darkness, and that, in order to bind darkness, the light was first swallowed up and bound, and polluted and mangled by darkness, to be restored, and liberated, and purified, and healed by your eating, for which you are rewarded by not being condemned to the mass of darkness for ever, along with that part of the light which cannot be extricated. This fiction is sufficiently published by your practice and your words. Why do you seek for the testimony of books, and add to the embarrassment of your God by the consumption of strength in the needless task of writing manuscripts? Burn all your parchments, with their finely-ornamented binding; so you will be rid of a useless burden, and your God who suffers confinement in the volume will be set free.
What a mercy it would be to the members of your God, if you could boil your books and eat them! There might be a difiiculty, however, from the prohibition of animal food.
Then the writing must share in the impurity rsooK XIV.]
lo: of the sheepskin. Indeed, you are to blame for this, for, like what you say was done in the first war between light and darkness, you l)rought what was clean in the pen in contact with the uncleanness of the parchment. Or ]:)erhaps, for the sake of the colors, we may put it the other way; and so the darkness would be yours, in the ink which you brought against the light of the white pages. If these remarks irritate you, you should rather be angry with yourselves for believing doctrines of which these are the necessary consequences. As for the books of the apostles and prophets, we read them as a record of our faith, to encourage our hope and animate our love. These books are in perfect harmony with one another; and their harmony, li,<e the music of a heavenly trumpet, wakens us from the torpor of worldliness, and urges us on to the prize of our high calling. The apostle, after quoting from the prophets the words, " The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell on me," goes on to speak of the benefit of reading the prophets: " For whatsoever things were written beforetime were written for our learning; that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope.'' ' If Faustus denies this, we can only say with Paul, " If any one shall preach to you another doctrine than that ye have received, let him be accursed." ^ I Rom. XV. 4.
2 Gal. i. 9.
BOOK XIV.
FAUSTUS ABHORS MOSES FOR THE AWFUL CURSE HE HAS PRONOUNCED UPON CHRIST. AUGUSTIN EXPOUNDS THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE SUFFERING SAVIOUR BY COMPARING OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES.
I. Faustus said: If you ask why we do not believe INIoses, it is on account of our love and reverence for Christ. The most reckless man cannot regard with pleasure a [lerson who has cursed his ifather. So we abhor Moses, not so much for his blasphemy 'jf everything human and divine, as for the awful curse he has pronounced upon Christ the Son of God, who for our salvation hung on the tree. Whether Moses did this intentionally or not is your concern. Either way, he cannot be excused, or considered worthy of belief. His words are, "Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree."' You tell me to believe this man, though, if he was inspired, he must have cursed Christ knowingly and intentionally; and if he did it in ignorance, he cannot have been divine. Take cither alternative. Moses was no prophet, and while cursing in his usual manner, he fell ignorantly into the sin of blasphemy against God. Or he was indeed divine, and foresaw the future; and from ill-will to our salvation, he directs the venom of his malediction against Him who was to accomplish that salvation on a tree. He who thus injures the Son cannot surely have seen or known the Father. He who knew nothing of the final ascension of the Son, cannot surely have foretold His advent. Moreover, the extent of the injury inflicted by this curse is to be considered. For it denounces all the righteous men and martyrs, and sufferers of every kind, who have died in this way, as Peter and ' Deut. xxi. 23.
Andrew, and the rest. Such a cruel denunciation could never have come from Moses if he had been a prophet, unless he was a bitter enemy of these sufferers. For he pronounces them cursed not only of men but of God. What hope, then, of blessing remains to Christ, or his apostles, or to us if we happen to be crucified for Christ's sake? It indicates great thoughtlessness in Moses, and the want of all divine inspiration, that he overlooked the fact that men are hung on a tree for very different reasons, some for their crimes, and others who suffer in the cause of God and of righteousness. In this thoughtless way he heaps all together without distinction under the same curse; whereas if he had had any sense, not to say inspiration, if he wished to single out the punishment of the cross from all others as specially detestable, he would have said. Cursed is every guilty and impious person that hangeth on a tree. This would have made a distinction between the guilty and the innocent. And yet even this would have been incorrect, for Christ took the malefactor from the cross along with himself into the Paradise of his Father. What becomes of the curse on every one that hangeth on a tree? Was Barabbas, the notorious robber, who certainly was not hung on a tree, but was set free from prison at the request of the Jews, more blessed than the thief who accompanied Christ from the cross to heaven?
Again, there is a curse on the man that worships the sun or the moon. Now if under a heathen monarch I am forced to worship the sun, and if from fear of this curse 1 refuse, [Book XI shall I incur this other curse by suffering the punishment of crucifixion? Perhaps Moses was in the habit of cursing everything good. We think no more of his denunciation than of an old wife's scolding. So we find him pronouncing a curse on all youths of both sexes, when he says: "Cursed is everyone that raiseth not up a seed in Israel."' This is aimed directly at Jesus, who, according to you, was born among the Jews, and raised up no seed to continue his family. It points too at his disciples, some of whom he took from the wives they had married, and some who were unmarried he forbade to take wives. We have good reason, you see, for expressing our abhorrence of the daring style in which Moses hurls his maledictions against Christ, against light, against chastity, against everything divine. You cannot make much of the distinction between hanging on a tree and being crucified, as you often try to do by way of apology; for Paul repudiates such a distinction when he says, "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; as it is written. Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree. ' ' - 2. AuGUSTiN replied: The pious Faustus is pained because Christ is cursed by Moses. His love for Christ makes him hate Moses. Before explaining the sacred import and the piety of the words, " Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree," I would ask these pious people wh}^ they are angry with Moses, since his curse does not affect their Christ. If Christ hung on the tree. He must have been fastened to it with nails, the marks of which He showed to His doubting disciple after His resurrection. Accordingly He must have had a vulnerable and mortal body, which the Manichaeans deny. Call the wounds and the marks false, and it follows that His hanging on the tree was false. This Christ is not affected by the curse, and there is no occasion for this indignation against the person uttering the curse. If they pretend to be angry with Moses for cursing what they call the false death of Christ, what are we to think of themselves, who do not curse Christ, but, what is much worse, make Him a liar? If it is wrong to curse mortality, it is a much more heinous offense to sully the purity of truth. But let us make these heretical cavils an occasion for explaining this mystery to believers.
3. Death comes upon man as the punishment of sin, and so is itself called sin; not that a man sins in dying, but because sin is the cause of his death. So the word tongue, which properly means the fleshy substance I Deut. XXV. 5-10.
2 Gal. iii. 10.
between the teeth and the palate, is applied in a secondary sense to the result of the tongue's action. In this sense we speak of a Latin tongue and a Greek tongue. The word hand, too, means both the members of the body we use in working, and the writing whi( h is done with the hand. In this sense we speak of writing as being proved to be the hand of a certain person, or of recognizing the hand of a friend. The writing is certainly not a member of the body, but the name hand is given to it because it is the hand that does it. So sin means both a bad action deserving punishment, and death the consequence of sin. Christ has no sin in the sense of deserving death, but He bore for our sakes sin in the sense of death as brought on human nature by sin. This is what hung on the tree; this is what was cursed by Moses. Thus was death condemned that its reign might cease, and cursed that it might be destroyed. By Christ's taking our sin in this sense, its condemnation is our deliverance, while to remain in subjection to sin is to be condemned.
4. What does Faustus find strange in the curse pronounced on sin, on death, and on human mortality, which Christ had on account of man's sin, though He Himself was sinless? Christ's body was derived from Adam., for His mother the Virgin Mary was a child of Adam. But God said in Paradise, " On the day that ye eat, ye shall surely die." This is the curse which hung on the tree. A man may deny that Christ was cursed who denies that He died. But the man who believes that Christ died, and acknowledges that death, is the fruit of sin, and is itself called sin, will understand who it is that is cursed by Moses, when he hears the apostle saying " For ourl old man is crucified with Him." ^ The apostle boldly says of Christ, " He was made aj curse for us;" for he could also venture to say, "He died for all." "He died," and' " He was cursed," are the same. Death is the effect of the curse; and all sin is cursed, whether it means the action which merits punishment, or the punishment which follows. Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment, that He might cancel our guilt, and do away with our punishment.
5. These things are not my conjectures, but are affirmed constantly by the apostle, with an emphasis sufficient to rouse the careless and to silence the gainsayers. "God," he says, " sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, that by sin He might condemn sin in the flesh." '• Christ's flesh was not sin- 3 Rom. vi. 6.
4 Rom. viii. 3.
Book XIV.]
fill, because it was not born of Mary by ordinary generation; but because death is tlie effect of sin, this flesh, in being mortal, had the likeness of sinful flesh. This is called sin in the following words, "that by sin He might condemn sin in the flesh.'' Again he says: " He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."' Wliy should not Moses call accursed what Paul calls sin? In this prediction the prophet claims a share with tlie apostle in the reproach of the heretics. For whoever finds fault with the word cursed in the prophet, must find fault with the word sin in the apostle; for curse and sin go together. 6. If we read, "Cursed of God is every ■ iiie that hangeth on a tree,'' the addition of Ae words " of God " creates no difficulty. For had not God hated sin and our death. He would not have sent His Son to bear and to.ibolisii it. And there is nothing strange in Cod's cursing what He hates. For His readiness to give us the immortality which will be had at the coming of Christ, is in proportion to the compassion with which He hated our death when it hung on the cross at the death of Christ. And if Moses curses everv one that hangeth on a tree, it is certainly not because he did not foresee that righteous men would be crucified, but rather tiecause He foresaw that heretics would deny:ie death of the Lord to be real, and would try to disprove the application of this curse to ''hrist, in order that they might disprove the reality of His death. For if Christ's death was not real, nothing cursed hung on the cross when He was crucified, for the crucifixion cannot have been real. Moses cries from the distant past to these heretics: Your evasion in denying the reality of the death of Christ is useless. Cursed is every one that hangeth fin a tree; not this one or that, but absolutely every one. What! the Son of God? Yes, assuredly. This is the very thing you object to, and that you are so anxious to evade. Vou will not allow that He was cursed for us, because you will not allow that He died for us. Exemption from Adam's curse implies I exemption from his death. But as Christ endured death as man, and for man; so also. Son of God as He was, ever living in His own rigliteousness, but dying for on r oflences. He submitted as man, and for man, to bear the jcurse which accompanies death. And as He 'died in the flesh which He took in bearing iiiir punishment, so also, while ever blessed in His own righteousness. He was cursed for jOur offences, in the death which He suffered ' 2 Cor. V. 21.
in bearing our punishment. And these words "everyone" are intended to check the ignorant officiousness which would deny the reference of the curse to Christ, and so, because the curse goes along with death, would lead to the denial of the true death of Christ.
7. The believer in the true doctrine of the gospel will understand that Christ is not reproached by Moses when he speaks of Him as cursed, not in His divine majesty, but as hanging on the tree as our substitute, bearing our punishment, any more than He is praised by the Manichaeans when they deny that He had a mortal body, so as to suffer real death. In the curse of the prophet there is praise of Christ's humility, while in the pretended regard of the heretics there is a charge of falsehood. If, then, you deny that Christ was cursed, you must deny that He died; and then you have to meet, not Moses, but the apostles. Confess that He died, and you may also confess that He, without taking our sin, took its punishment. Now the punishment of sin cannot be blessed, or else it would be a thing to be desired. The curse is pronounced by divine justice, and it will be well for us if we are redeemed from it. Confess then that Christ died, and you may confess that He bore the curse for us; and that when Moses said, " Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree," he said in fact. To hang on a tree is to be mortal, or actually to die. He might have said, " Cursed is every one that is mortal," or " Cursed is every one dying;" but the prophet knew that Christ would suffer on the cross, and that heretics would say that He hung on the tree only in appearance, with- ' out really dying. So he exclaims. Cursed; meaning that He really died. He knew that the death of sinful man, which Christ though sinless bore, came from that curse, " If ye touch it, ye shall surely die." Thus also, the serpent hung on the pole was intended to show that Christ did not feign death, but that the real deatli into which the serpent by his fatal counsel cast mankind was huuir on the cross of Christ's passion. The Manichaeans turn away from the view of this real death, and so they are not healed of the poison of the serpent, as we read that in the wilderness as many as looked were b.ealed.
8. It is true, some ignorantly distinguisli between hanging on a tree and being crucified. So some explain this passage as referring to Judas. But how do they know whether he hung himself from wood or from stone? Faustus is right in saying that the apostle obliges us to refer tlie words to Christ, Such ignorant Catholics are the prey of the Manichieans. Such they get hold of and entangle 2IO [Book XIV.
in their sopiiistry. Such were we when we fell into this heresy, and adhered to it. Such were we, when, not by our own strength, but by the mercy of God, we were rescued.
9. What attacks on divine things does Faustus speak of when he charges Moses with sparing nothing human or divine? He makes the charge without stopping to prove it. We know, on the contrary, that Moses gave due praise to everything really divine,