Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series I/Volume IV/Manichaean Controversy/On Two Souls/Chapter 1

Concerning Two Souls, Against the Manich&#230;ans.

[De Duabus Animabus Contra Manich&#230;os.] 391.

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Chapter 1.—By What Course of Reasoning the Error of the Manich&#230;ans Concerning Two Souls, One of Which is Not from God, is Refuted.&#160; Every Soul, Inasmuch as It is a Certain Life, Can Have Its Existence Only from God the Source of Life.

1.&#160; Through the assisting mercy of God, the snares of the Manich&#230;ans having been broken to pieces and left behind, having been restored at length to the bosom of the Catholic Church, I am disposed now at least to consider and to deplore my recent wretchedness.&#160; For there were many things that I ought to have done to prevent the seeds of the most true religion wholesomely implanted in me from boyhood, from being banished from my mind, having been uprooted by the error and fraud of false and deceitful men.&#160; For, in the first place, if I had soberly and diligently considered, with prayerful and pious mind, those two kinds of souls to which they attributed natures and properties so distinct that they wished one to be regarded as of the very substance of God, but were not even willing that God should be accepted as the author of the other; perhaps it would have appeared to me, intent on learning, that there is no life whatsoever, which, by the very fact of its being life and in so far as it is life at all, does not pertain to the supreme source and beginning of life, which we must acknowledge to be nothing else than the supreme and only and true God.&#160; Wherefore there is no reason why we should not confess, that those souls which the Manich&#230;ans call evil are either devoid of life and so not souls, neither will anything positively or negatively, neither follow after nor flee from anything; or, if they live so that they can be souls, and act as the Manich&#230;ans suppose, in no way do they live unless by life, and if it be an established fact, as it is, that Christ has said:&#160; "I am the life," that all souls seeing that they cannot be souls except by living were created and fashioned by Christ, that is, by the Life.