The Catholic & Manichaean Ways of Life

by Augustine of Hippo, Donald Arthur Gallagher (translator), Idella J. Gallagher (translator)

Aged 17, thru the generosity of fellow citizen Romanianus, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his education in rhetoric. His mother, Monica, was a devout Xian, his father, Patricius, a pagan. Altho raised Xian, he left the church to follow the Manichaeans. During 373/4, he taught grammar at Thagaste. The next year, he moved to Carthage to conduct a school of rhetoric, remaining there 9 years. Disturbed by the behavior of students in Carthage, in 383 he moved to establish a school in Rome, where he thought the best rhetoricians practiced. He was disappointed with the Roman schools. Once time came to pay fees students fled. Manichaean friends introduced him to Rome's prefect, Symmachus, who'd been asked to provide a rhetoric professor for the imperial court at Milan. He won the job & headed north in late 384. At age 30, he'd won the most visible academic chair in the Latin world, at a time when such posts gave access to political careers. During this time, tho he showed some fervor for Manichaeism, he was never an initiate but remained an "auditor", the lowest level in the hierarchy. While in Milan, his life changed. While still at Carthage, he'd begun to move away from Manichaeism, in part because of a disappointing meeting with Bishop Faustus of Mileve, a key exponent of their theology. In Rome, he's reported to have completely turned away from Manichaeanism, instead embracing the skepticism of the New Academy movement.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Catholic, Teaching, Philosophy

155 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 395

About the author

Early church father and philosopher Saint Augustine served from 396 as the bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria and through such writings as the autobiographical Confessions in 397 and the voluminous City of God from 413 to 426 profoundly influenced Christianity, argued against Manichaeism and Donatism, and helped to establish the doctrine of original sin.

An Augustinian follows the principles and doctrines of Saint Augustine.

People also know Aurelius Augustinus in English of Regius (Annaba). From the Africa province of the Roman Empire, people generally consider this Latin theologian of the greatest thinkers of all times. He very developed the west. According to Jerome, a contemporary, Augustine renewed "the ancient Faith."

The Neo-Platonism of Plotinus afterward heavily weighed his years. After conversion and his baptism in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to theology and accommodated a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed in the indispensable grace to human freedom and framed the concept of just war. When the Western Roman Empire started to disintegrate from the material earth, Augustine developed the concept of the distinct Catholic spirituality in a book of the same name. He thought the medieval worldview. Augustine closely identified with the community that worshiped the Trinity. The Catholics and the Anglican communion revere this preeminent doctor. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider his due teaching on salvation and divine grace of the theology of the Reformation. The Eastern Orthodox also consider him. He carries the additional title of blessed. The Orthodox call him "Blessed Augustine" or "Saint Augustine the Blessed."

Santo Agostinho

Reviews

[Maxime N. Georgel]

Une présentation glorieuse de l’éthique de l’amour de Dieu et du prochain et des mœurs chrétiennes, en réponse aux mœurs des manichéens.

Réflexion profonde sur le lien entre le souverain bien de l’homme, Dieu, l’amour que nous lui devons et l’amour que nous devons au prochain.

[Brian Eshleman]

No, really. My experience with a lot of Augustine involves breathing my way through brambles of contemporary issues to get a quote or two that is more broadly applicable. This little book seems like Clickbait, replete with apt phrases with timeless application.

[Zachary]

On the Morals of the Catholic Church is a treatise written merely two years after Augustine converted to Christianity. Polemical in tone, its audience ostensibly consists of Manichaeans who reject the authority of the Old Testament on the premise that its God is evil, the creator of material evil in the universe. In response to this heresy, Augustine articulates the Christian conception of the happy life, demonstrates the harmony between the Old and New Testaments, and converts the four cardinal virtues of non-Christian philosophy into forms of caritas, or Christian love. In the first part of the text, Augustine defends, with rational proofs alone, the Christian proposition that happiness consists exclusively in a life of love for God. While Augustine ultimately maintains that one should submit to the authority of the Catholic Church before one can learn by means of reason, he reverses his method here insofar as the Manichaeans reject this authority—his aim, in other words, is to convert Manichaeans to the Catholic faith with rational proofs even they must accept. To justify Christian claims about happiness, Augustine stipulates that a happy life is one in which one’s summum bonum is possessed and cannot be lost. God is the only good whom we can enjoy eternally and cannot lose, since God is eternal and immutable, and so God must be the summum bonum. To deny the existence of God, then, is to deny the possibility of a happy life.

With this formal conclusion in hand, Augustine confronts an aporia: if the happy person must pursue the summum bonum, but the summum bonum is invisible and in some sense beyond comprehension, how can the happy person be united with the summum bonum? Augustine therefore turns to the scriptures to demonstrate not only that God must be the summum bonum, but also that we attain the summum bonum by love, that we must love the summum bonum more than any other object of our desires, and that, because no obstacle can separate us from His love (as Paul testifies), God is “surer as well as better than any other good.” While, for Augustine, the scriptures confirm that God is the summum bonum and, more importantly, explain how we are to be united with God, much nevertheless rests here on the (Neoplatonic) insistence that God is immutable and eternal. Were it not for these attributes of the divine, God would not be the summum bonum per the stipulated definition of the happy life Augustine offers.

In the second part of the treatise, Augustine claims that virtue is simply the perfect love of God. The four cardinal virtues are thereby forms of love: temperance is love that offers itself entirely to God without corruption; fortitude is love that readily bears all that it must for the sake of God; justice is love that serves God only and rules well over all else (we have here an early distinction between use (uti) and enjoyment (frui) in relation to well-ordered love); and prudence is love that wisely differentiates between what helps and hinders love of God. Augustine then strives to show that both testaments articulate these virtues as forms of caritas and so harmonize with each other.

In the third part of the treatise, Augustine expands on what Christian love entails vis-à-vis other persons. For Augustine, love of God must accompany proper love of neighbor, since true neighbor-love consists in the attempt to draw the neighbor to that good which one should seek oneself—namely, God. If one does not love God first and foremost as one’s summum bonum, then one can neither love oneself nor the neighbor properly. Moreover, only God can provide the grace needed to love the neighbor well. Augustine writes: “Would that it were as easy to seek the good of our neighbor, or to avoid hurting him, as it is for one well-trained and kind-hearted to love his neighbor! These things require more than mere good-will, and can be done only by a high degree of thoughtfulness and prudence, which belongs only to those to whom it is given by God, the source of all good.” In this way, Augustine unites the two-fold commandment to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matthew 22:37-40).

In the final part of the treatise, Augustine focuses on the more practical aspects of Christian life. He first defends the various vocations to which Christians are called: the monastic life (both cenobitic and anchoritic), the priesthood, communal urban life, and married life. With reference to Manichaean hostility toward sexuality, he explicitly defends married life as permitted by Paul and as a relation within which both husband and wife can be sanctified. Finally, with an eye toward Manichaean dietary restrictions, Augustine cites Paul’s claim that whether one chooses to abide by the Old Law’s dietary restrictions or not, one’s choice must not be an obstacle to the sanctification of one’s fellow Christians. In this, as in all else, “charity is principally attended to. There is charity in [Christians’] choice of diet, charity in their speech, charity in their dress, charity in their looks. Charity is the point where they meet, and the plan by which they act.”

[Kristina]

I want to have some idea what the various heresies are like in contrast to Catholicism. Manicheism seems like a precursor to Veganism and Environmentalism that seeks to put a soul in animals and trees, and pleasure becomes the M.O. for someone who spends all day fasting.

[Erik Graff]

In 1981 I was studying at Loyola University Chicago with the intention of writing a dissertation about the intellectual influences upon and presuppositions of the work of C.G. Jung. On the one hand this meant being on top of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and, especially, Kant. On the other hand this meant studying the theologians he, the son of a pastor, had studied. Indeed, I had obtained a privately printed book listing all the titles in his library at the time of his death from his son, the occupant of the home in Kusnacht, and was sedulously reading the books Jung had owned or had cited in his publications. This effort, an effort which had begun during the first half of college, took me down some strange paths, one of them being what most moderns term "gnosticism".

Very few gnostic texts had been rediscovered and published during Jung's lifetime. Most of what he knew of the subject, most of what we still "know", came from their opponents in what became the Catholic Church. One of the few patristic sources who had actually participated in one of the gnostic sects was Augustine. Thus my interest in this volume which contains his essays on Manichaeism. Thus, too, my enrolling in a course on Augustine in order to obtain some academic credit for the work which I'd have done in any case.

[Mac]

This is an early work of Augustine's, and it's primarily written against the Manichees. This makes it somewhat tedious reading for modern audiences in places, but other sections of it are wonderfully applicable to Christians of any age. This is the first time that Augustine talks about the virtues as various manifestations of love, and that's worth thinking about. As is usually the case with Augustine, there are some great quotes in here. A few of my favorites are:

"There is nothing, though of iron hardness, which the fire of love cannot subdue."

"For if wisdom and truth are not sought for with the whole strength of the mind, it cannot possibly be found. But when it is sought as it deserves to be, it cannot withdraw or hide itself from its lovers. Hence its words, ‘Ask and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ ‘Nothing is hidden which shall not be revealed.’ It is love that asks, love that seeks, love that knocks, love that reveals, love, too, that gives continuance in what is revealed.”

"The mind cleaving to God is stronger than angels."