From Logos to Christos: Essays on Christology in Honour of Joanne McWilliam

4 Jesus in Augustine’s Anti-Manichaean Writings

4 Jesus in Augustine’s Anti-Manichaean Writings    J. KEVIN COYLE THERE ARE more studies on Augustine of Hippo and his thought than anyone could easily count; yet the examiners of his Christology , whose number happily includes Joanne McWilliam,1 have been relatively few.2 This deficit may be due to Augustine’s having left us no treatise on Christology per se3—not an exceptional omission in the Latin world at his time: before him, only Tertullian had come near to producing a christological treatise, and that in the very precise context of anti-Gnostic (docetic) polemic.4 There have also been more or less recent studies on Manichaean Christology ,5 including some that bring Augustine and that Christology together. Even without a specific treatise, Augustine does have a lot to say about Jesus Christ, and we may suppose that firm convictions about him lie behind Augustine’s remarks on what is wrong with Manichaean Christology . In terms of Manichaean studies, Augustine has always been considered of major significance, for two reasons: before his conversion to Catholicism, he spent nearly a decade as a follower of Manichaeism; and he supplies more information about it—including citations from Manichaean sources—than anyone else in Latin literature. It is doubtful, in fact, that Manichaeism would hold quite the same fascination for Western scholars had Augustine not once been one of its subscribers.6 Here, in a way similar to what I did in the case of the God-language of his anti-Manichaean polemic,7 I wish to examine the way Augustine speaks 67 of Christ in the same polemical context. This could be of some help in further determining not only Augustine’s own appropriation of the topic, but also how Manichaeism itself approached Jesus. Though some work has been done on this point, very little of it has pertained to the Western Roman Empire. We do find, though, liberally spread across the past seventy years, some rather forceful expressions of confidence in the Augustinian authority when Manichaeism is the point of reference. For instance, in 1938 Francis Crawford Burkitt said that “the main result of the wonderful finds at Turfan and elsewhere has been to confirm the presentation of Augustine, and to exhibit the religion of Mani as something heretical indeed, judged by catholic standards, but nevertheless a form of Christianity. Central to it is the worship of ‘Jesus.’ Without Jesus, no Manichaean religion.”8 Gilles Quispel was only slightly less expansive when in 1972 he declared, with reference to the attribution to Mani of the title “Apostle of Jesus Christ,” that “the Western Manichaeism he [Augustine] was familiar with had better preserved the original doctrine of its founder than the Eastern documents found at Turfan.”9 Augustine’s Perspective Now, if one difficulty with theories of Manichaean christocentricity lies in the reliability of sources (and, of course, their interpretation), another emanates from the way in which Augustine is called on to support such theories . This became clear to me from something Julien Ries wrote in 1964: Augustine, a former disciple of Mani, knew the central place of Jesus in the doctrine he was contesting. When we read his treatises, however, we sometimes have the impression that his polemic aims more at refuting the two principles, exegesis which would destroy the Scriptures, false conceptions of the soul, sin, and God’s immutability. An able debater, deeply informed on Manichaean doctrine, did he not lead his adversaries to positions more vulnerable than those of christology? This problem deserves research.10 Hermeneutical doors begin to unlock with that last sentence, but perhaps not in ways Ries intended. There is a christological question that merits research; but the inquiry deserves to be extended to some of the premises whereon Ries’s own statement rests: How much doctrine had Augustine himself learned as a Hearer, and therefore how much did he know when he disputed with his former religion?11 Did he in fact recognize “the central place of Jesus” in Manichaean doctrine? And did he deem that place to be so unassailable that he avoided targeting it in his anti-Manichaean 68 CHRISTOLOGY AND TRADITION polemic? What I present here claims to be no more than a simple prolegomenon to broaching those questions. The focus will be on Augustine’s debates with Fortunatus, Felix, and Faustus, with some reference to other Augustinian works that engage Manichaeism and that afford some data...