Contra Faustum Manichaeum: A New Primary Source

One of the hardest parts of doing a research paper is accumulating enough primary sources to act as the basic scaffolding on which to place the rest of your research and your arguments upon. For many, the topic is so obscure and so hidden that simply finding what primary sources to use is difficult enough, let alone actually finding said primary sources.

Fortunately, this is not the case for St. Augustine. Since he is considered one of the founders of Catholic orthodoxy, the Catholic Church and academia in general have done wonders to continuously update and disseminate his works, which combined with the easy familiarity researchers have with his work in their publications, makes getting some basic scaffolding much easier for me than it would be for perhaps some others. In this case, what I've found is Contra Faustum Manichaeum (Answer to Faustus a Manichean), which is essentially Augustine at his most Augustinian-the book is a long polemic against the leader of the religion he spent the most time with before his conversion, going point-by-point in each doctrine of the Manichean faith to show how "faithless" they can be.

What's of interest here, though, is where Augustine critiques the Manichean critique of Moses's killing of an Egyptian who was beating a Jewish slave. Through the course of the critique, Augustine tries to show that, for instance, while Moses did indeed kill a man, he was nontheless chosen by God for being of exceptional religious potential, and that the problem with Moses (and other religious figures, such as St. Paul, or as he was known in his wilder years, Saul of Tarsus) was not his violence, but rather the hatred that accompanied it. It is not war in and of itself that is to be feared and loathed, but instead all of the accompanying vice that war tends to bring out in us. Furthermore, Moses was not a bad man for going to war-after all, he was following God's commands, and you wouldn't dare criticize God simply because His wrath makes you tremble, would you Faustus?

This is where you really get the sense that Augustine's Just War is primarily a divinely-ordained one, because later on Augustine goes on for a few pages to say that-had Moses not been commanded by God-then the nature of the wars he waged would have certainly warranted him going to Hell. However, given that he was commanded by God to wage war, it seems that all other concerns ad bellum seem to be secondary: God's will is Supreme, and it shall not be resisted.

This vaguely theocratic view, when combined with the view from last week in The City of God, seems to hint at a view of a Just War as thus: a war in defense of the common Order and Peace such that the pilgrims of the City of God may continue on their journey, justified by the awesome commands of God Himself. Now, of course, as we will learn, that is not the entirety of Augustine's views on the Just War, but that will have to come from another source than just these two, and as such we will return to the topic next week.

St. Augustine of Hippo. Answer to Faustus the Manichean, translated by Jacob Glutten. New York: New City Press, 2007, 631-648.