For the formative period of his young adult life, from roughly ages 19 to 32, Augustine dedicated his religious allegiance—and his considerable persuasive skills—to promoting a criminalized Christian sect, the Manichees. This occasioned some awkwardness later, once he returned to North Africa, post-Milan (387). Preparing to scale the local ladder of catholic ecclesiastical success, Augustine was trailed by his past as a Manichaean spokesman, which lurked in broad daylight. Disaffected catholic colleagues no less than bemused Donatist onlookers questioned the bona fides of his new affiliation. For this reason, anti-Manichaean argument dominates much of Augustine’s early and relatively undistinguished literary production. By circa 400, however, Augustine had found his feet. (By this point, he had authored most of de doctrina Christiana, taken on Jerome’s interpretation of Galatians, responded to Simplicianus on Paul’s letter to the Romans, and composed the Confessiones.) It was only after this burst of self-confident creativity that Augustine issued his massive refutation of North African Manichaeism, which he himself characterized as a grande opus (Retr.2.7,1): the thirty-three books of contra Faustum Manichaeum.
This big, baggy, tendentious work, sandwiched chronologically between the Confessiones and de Genesi ad litteram, has until fairly recently been relatively neglected. No more. Scholars now recognize it for the gold mine that it is—for understanding Augustine’s theodicy, his biblical hermeneutics, his rhetoric both (surprisingly) pro as well as contra Iudaeos, his theology of history, his commitments to reading ad litteram as well as typologically, his theory of scriptural semiotics, his Christology, his understanding of Paul and of the gospels, and much much more. And this treatise stands as a premier source for reconstructing Western Latin Manichaean teachings, and the ways that these represent local African variations played on the doctrines of this widespread missionary church.
For all this we can thank the North African Manichaean electus and bishop, Faustus of Milev. In the 380s, Faustus had composed the Capitula, a guidebook to help Manichaean missionaries to persuade North African Nicene Christians (whether Caecilianist or Donatist) to turn to Mani’s revelation. But he did so not by teaching points of Manichaean doctrine, but by undermining the imputed Christian content of the churches’ double canon. In five books, Faustus dealt directly with New Testament texts (written, in his view, by “obscure half-Jews,” XXXIII.3); in another four, with the intellectual incoherence of pagan, Jewish, and Christian monotheism. Nine books attack the idea of Christ’s incarnation. But most of Faustus’s efforts—fully fourteen books—rake over Old Testament texts, traditions, personages, and themes. The prime problem with Nicene Christianity, Faustus urged, was that it was both too pagan and too Jewish (XX.3-4). And by so exhaustively criticizing the Old Testament, Faustus effectively undermined much of the catholic interpretation of the New.
Martine Dulaey and the superb team of scholars that she has assembled (I. Bochet, J.-D. Debois, A. Massie, P. Mattei, M.-Y. Perrin and G. Wurst) have now made Augustine’s grande opus elegantly available in the beautifully edited volumes of the Bibliothèque augustinienne. Volume 1, BA 18/A, which appeared in 2018 (not reviewed in BMCR), offered a magisterial introduction to the whole treatise (pp. 9-84, including bibliography), which is based primarily on Zycha’s CSEL text. A pellucid French translation faces the Latin of Books I-XII (86-385), while “Notes complémentaires” address particular issues arising, whether historical, textual, or theological.
Volume 2, BA 18/B, reviewed here, again gives facing Latin text with translation, treating Books XIII-XXI. Isabel Bochet’s substantial introduction considers the hermeneutical and theological points of principle that shape both Faustus’s reading of both testaments and Augustine response (13-74). Gregor Wurst considers the NT texts appealed to by the antagonists (74-82 with bibliography, noting p. 77 that Augustine nowhere challenges Faustus’s use of biblical texts, a reflection of how well the Manichee knows his “catholic” sources). Alban Massie wraps up these preludes with a comparative consideration of each theologian’s Christology (83-108, again with bibliography). The generous complimentary notes (597-641) by individuals on the editorial team again lift up wide-ranging points of interest, whether doctrinal, textual or historical, and include important suggestions for further reading in secondary sources. As with the first volume, BA 18/B concludes with four indices for internal citations to biblical texts, various ancient authors (both pagan and patristic), and Manichaean sources. A clearer roadmap to this work cannot be imagined.
In terms of the thirty-three books of Augustine’s entire treatise, the nine treated in this volume are like the cabling of a suspension bridge, its two supporting pillars being Books XII (from volume one) and XXII (to appear in volume three). Book XII, which had concluded the BA’s 18/A, enunciated a theological novum, Augustine’s original—and surprisingly irenic—so-called “doctrine of Jewish witness.” Augustine argued there that God gave Jews the law as the mark divinely protecting them from religious harassment by any monarch whether Christian or pagan; that Jews, associated with Cain, wander widely for the benefit of the church, everywhere carrying the ancient books they think are theirs—book-slaves, an embodiment of Noah’s son Ham—which in turn validates the church’s claim to those books; that the Jewish practice of Jewish tradition secundum carnem (contra, e.g., Justin, Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostom, et al.) had always been what God had wanted Jews to do. BA 18/C will open with Book XXII, the longest by far of the entire work—98 chapters!—which refutes Faustus’s attacks on the character and morals of Old Testament figures, inter alia repurposing an approach to biblical hermeneutics spelled out in de doctrina Christiana that historical context necessarily informs any assessment of human behaviors. (Just because something like animal sacrifice is not rightly done now is not to say that it was anything less than entirely appropriate—indeed, divinely mandated—back then.) Representations of Jews and of Judaism, in short, anchor books XII and XXII, and are thus key to Augustine’s defense.
Books XIII through XXI, suspended between these two pillars of Augustine’s opus, continue to defend the unity of the catholic church’s double canon (XIII-XIX) while presenting, and refuting, the specifically Manichaean teaching of two contesting cosmic and cosmological/ethnical principles (XX-XXI). The first effort draws upon typology as well as ‘historical’ contextualization, in that way affirming biblical unity as expressing a single salvific divine revelation in two modalities, pre-Incarnation (thus, Jewish) and post (thus, Christian), while also accounting for the Jews’ continuing culpability for unbelief, despite God’s being the ultimate reason for that unbelief (XIII.11: Jews have been divinely blinded on account of “autres péchés secrets [Ro 1.24, 28], connus de Dieu” for which Jewish blindness is “le juste châtiment.”) The second engagement of the last two books proceeds by insinuation and insult, Augustine suggesting that dualist Manichaean cosmology/theology is not true religion. (Here, Augustine’s mastery of his old sectarian allegiance serves him well.) The complementary notes focus on intriguing subthemes (the status of pagan prophecies of Christ; the relation of law to grace; the resonance between ancient Jewish and current catholic sacramenta), again providing ample secondary bibliography in pagan, patristic, and Manichaean subjects, and detailed indices. And again like BA 18/A, this volume is a pleasure to read and to hold.
Faustus’s mastery of catholic texts and exegetical traditions (especially those adversus Iudaeos) had evidently touched a nerve, prompting Augustine’s catholic colleagues to implore him to respond. The sheer size of the work that Faustus’s Capitula summoned from Augustine measures the force and coherence of Faustus’s own arguments. In his contra Faustum Manichaeum, Augustine exegetically carpet-bombed Faustus’s Capitula, dramatically presenting his own views as if he and the by-then deceased Faustus were engaged in an active disputatio. (How much his riposte preserved of Faustus’s text remains a question, but scholars incline toward optimism.) The intelligence and the rhetorical panache of these two well-matched opponents backlights the whole, though Augustine qua “editor” unsurprisingly emerges the clear victor. Overlooked no more, the contra Faustum can now take its rightful place alongside Augustine’s other mature theological master works. One can only look forward to BA 18/C with great anticipation.