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Articles
Augustine’s Choice: The Lord of Light or the Light of the Lord?
Charles Natoli considers whether St Augustine had any better reason to convert to Christianity than remain a Manichean.
“It was fortunate that St. Augustine, who was so well versed in all the arts of controversy, abandoned Manicheism; for he would have been well able to remove its grossest errors and to make the rest of it a system that, in his hands, would have left the orthodox at a loss.”
Pierre Bayle, Critical and Historical Dictionary, ‘Manicheans’
In On the Usefulness of Believing, his final work as a layman, we find Augustine still engaged with the Manichean faith he had left five years before. In an aside, he queries the critique of Manicheism he has just been making: “But why do I not reply to myself that these elegant and delightful similitudes, and censures of this kind, can be poured out wittily and smartly by any adversary against anyone who teaches anything?” Let’s therefore have done with metaphor-mongering and charge-flinging, he continues, so that “matter may clash with matter, cause with cause, and reason with reason.” (Ch 3.
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