Chapter VII.—He Attacks the
Doctrine of the Manichæans Concerning Evil, God, and the
Righteousness of the Patriarchs.
12. For I was ignorant as to that which really is, and was, as it were, violently moved to give my support to foolish deceivers, when they asked me, “Whence is evil?”—and, “Is God limited by a bodily shape, and has He hairs and nails?”—and, “Are they to be esteemed righteous who had many wives at once and did kill men, and sacrificed living creatures?” At which things I, in my ignorance, was much disturbed, and, retreating from the truth, I appeared to myself to be going towards it; because as yet I knew not that evil was naught but a privation of good, until in the end it ceases altogether to be; which how should I see, the sight of whose eyes saw no further than bodies, and of my mind no further than a phantasm? And I knew not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, nor whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole, and, if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is limited by a certain space than in its infinity; and cannot be wholly everywhere, as Spirit, as God is. And what that should be in us, by which we were like unto God, and might rightly in Scripture be said to be after “the image of God,” I was entirely ignorant.
13. Nor had I knowledge of that true inner
righteousness, which doth not judge according to custom, but out of
the most perfect law of God Almighty, by which the manners of
places and times were adapted to those places and times—being
itself the while the same always and everywhere, not one thing in
one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, and all those commended by
the mouth of God were righteous, but were judged unrighteous by
foolish men, judging out of man’s judgment, and gauging by the petty standard
of their own manners the manners of the whole human race. Like as
if in an armoury, one knowing not what were adapted to the several
members should put greaves on his head, or boot himself with a
helmet, and then complain because they would not fit. Or as if, on
some day when in the afternoon business was forbidden, one were to
fume at not being allowed to sell as it was lawful to him in the
forenoon. Or when in some house he sees a servant take something in
his hand which the butler is not permitted to touch, or something
done behind a stable which would be prohibited in the dining-room, and should be indignant that in one house, and one family, the same thing is not distributed everywhere to all. Such are they who cannot endure to hear something to have been lawful for righteous men in former times which is not so now; or that God, for certain temporal reasons, commanded them one thing, and these another, but both obeying the same righteousness; though they see, in one man, one day, and one house, different things to be fit for different members, and a thing which was formerly lawful after a time unlawful—that permitted or commanded in one corner, which done in another is justly prohibited and punished. Is justice, then, various and changeable? Nay, but the times over which she presides are not all alike, because they are times. But men, whose days upon the earth are few, because by their own perception they cannot harmonize the causes of former ages and other nations, of which they had no experience, with these of which they have experience, though in one and the same body, day, or family, they can readily see what is suitable for each member, season, part, and person—to the one they take exception, to the other they submit.