The son has become a snob who prides himself on his “enlightenment,” an intellectual and spiritual snobbery that only intensified when he joined the Manicheans who took themselves to be the “Brights” of their day—the rational, enlightened ones who saw through the myths that everyone around them had been suckered into believing.11 It was the enlightened Manicheans who wove Augustine into the networks of power that got him his posts in Rome and Milan, not Monica’s backward “brothers and sisters” in the church.
