and understood whatever I could read?... For I had my back to the light, and my face to the
things enlightened; whence my face... itself was not enlightened." * At this time he believed
that God was a vast and bright body, and he himself a part of that body. One could wish that he
had told in detail the tenets of the Manichæans, instead of merely saying they were erroneous.
It is interesting that Saint Augustine's first reasons for rejecting the doctrines of Manichæus
were scientific. He remembered--so he tells us †--what he had learned of astronomy from the
writings of the best astronomers, "and I compared them with the sayings of Manichæus, who in
his crazy folly has written much and copiously upon these subjects; but none of his reasoning of
the solstices, nor equinoxes, nor eclipses, nor whatever of this kind I had learned in books of
secular philosophy, was satisfactory to me. But I was commanded to believe; and yet it
corresponded not with the reasonings obtained by calculations, and by my own observations,
but was quite contrary." He is careful to point out that scientific mistakes are not in themselves
a sign of errors as to the faith, but only become so when delivered with an air of authority as
known through divine inspiration. One wonders what he would have thought if he had lived in
the time of Galileo.
In the hope of resolving his doubts, a Manichæan bishop named Faustus, reputed the most
learned member of the sect, met him and reasoned with him. But "I found him first utterly
ignorant of liberal sciences, save grammar, and that but in an ordinary way. But because he had
read some of Tully's Orations, a very few books of Seneca, some things of the poets, and such
few volumes of his own sect, as were written in Latin and in logical order, and was daily
practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and
seductive, because under the control of his good sense, and with a certain natural grace." ‡
He found Faustus quite unable to solve his astronomical difficulties. The books of the
Manichæans, he tells us, "are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, and stars, sun, and moon,"
which do not agree with what has been discovered by astronomers; but when he questioned
Faustus on these matters, Faustus frankly confessed his ignorance. "Even for this I liked him the
better. For the modesty of a candid
* Confessions, Bk. IV, Ch. XVI.â
€ Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. III.â
€
¡Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. VI.