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chapter four Faustus In the face of Augustine’s difficulty in committing wholeheartedly to the Manichaean faith, and his inability to make progress toward fully identifying his self as a Manichaean one, others repeatedly commended Faustus to him as an authority. Implicitly, such a completely informed and fully realized Manichaean self could resolve all of Augustine’s issues with Manichaeism, because he had effected a total integration of the system in his own person, and understood how it all fit together and functioned in the path of life Manichaeism proposed and promoted. Hearing this, Augustine looked forward to meeting this paragon and paradigm, and adopting him as his personal mentor in making progress as a Manichaean. In the event, Faustus defied Augustine’s expectations, and forced—rather than resolved—the issue of Augustine’s dissatisfaction with Manichaeism. What we know of Faustus comes from three principal sources. The first is Augustine’s carefully crafted characterization of his time among the Manichaeans in Confessions, composed in the closing years of the fourth century. The second is Faustus’s own composition, the Capitula,1 embedded as disarticulated passages in Augustine’s refutation of it, Against Faustus (Contra Faustum ). The latter constitutes our third source, containing a number of further reminiscences. Augustine apparently composed it in the first years of the fifth century, after the Confessions had been completed and circulated.2 It is noteworthy that, although Augustine alludes to Faustus several times in earlier works, he consistently avoids mentioning him by name before the Confessions, using various circumlocutions instead in The Morals of the Manichaeans, The Faustus 107 Usefulness of Belief, and elsewhere. Most likely he did not wish to be perceived as naming names in the role of a delator, regardless of his differences with the illegal Manichaean community. By the time he names Faustus in the Confessions , he appears to have known that his former mentor was dead. In Against Faustus, Augustine introduces Faustus as a native African (gente Afer) from the city of Milevis in westernmost Numidia (Faust 1.1), born to a poor family (Faust 5.5). Faustus himself relates that his family was pagan, as was he before being converted to Manichaeism (Faust 9.1; 13.1; 15.1). The fact that he, Honoratus (UC 1.2), and Nebridius (Conf 9.3.6) had all been pagans before conversion weakens the common assumption that Manichaeism found most of its converts among the already Christianized. Titus of Bostra states emphatically that Manichaeans actively proselytized among pagans as well as Christians (Titus of Bostra 3.1). Peter Brown has noted the degree to which Faustus seeks to appeal to a pagan audience, offering Manichaeism as the “Church of the Gentiles,” consciously drawing on the Classical tradition and decrying the semi-Judaism of the Donatists and Nicene Christians3 —a stance that could well appeal to someone like Augustine who identified himself most with Classical culture. Faustus says in his Capitula that he was attracted to Manichaeism from paganism “solely by the fame, and the virtues, and the wisdom of our liberator Jesus Christ” (Faust 13.1), which he saw authentically represented only among the Manichaeans. He provides no indication at what stage of his life his conversion occurred; although he speaks rhetorically of having given up family, we simply do not know if he means that he had actually left a wife and child behind in taking up the life of a Manichaean Elect, or merely had foregone a family life.4 Like Augustine, his language skills were limited to Latin, and his schooling evidently fell short in comparison with Augustine’s (Conf 5.6.11). He was familiar with the works of Cicero and Seneca,5 reportedly fond of poetry, and “began late in life to learn oratory, that he might discourse eloquently on these absurdities; and with all his cleverness, after ruining his health by study, his preaching has gained a mere handful of followers” (Faust 21.10). This remark would seem to make Faustus older than Augustine by at least a decade and possibly two. It also suggests that when Augustine knew him, his health was frail, which may account for his use of a horse (Faust 21.10) and of a down mattress (Faust 5.5), for both of which Augustine chides him as falling short of the standards of some more rigorist Manichaean Elect. Faustus apparently had already been a bishop for more than a decade 108 chapter four when Augustine met...

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