The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine's Confessions by Conybeare Catherine;

Author:Conybeare, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

But the thought behind this was thorough, and it convinced Augustine for a long time. Although Manicheans believed in a wholly material world of good and bad substances – the belief is often referred to as ‘ontological dualism’ – which laid them open to the derisive imagery that Augustine uses here, they also believed in a degree of sentience in all living things: hence the weeping fig tree. (Figs do, of course, exude a milky juice from their stems when they are picked.) Again, this will have been appealing to the young author of The Beautiful and the Harmonious; and, as Jason BeDuhn has recently pointed out, it may provide another reason why the episode of the callous theft of pears imprinted itself so deeply on Augustine’s memory.

Augustine, as far as we can tell, never became one of the fig-eating ‘saints’, or ‘elect’, himself. He remained at the level of the ‘hearers’, committed adherents to Manicheism whose task it was – in part – to gather the food for the elect to eat, thereby releasing the trapped particles of light. He also studied Manichean writings with typically focused attention, though he tells us of this only in the context of their defeat. He is much impressed by the calculations of those who can accurately predict the date and duration of lunar and solar eclipses (5.3.4), a topic not unnaturally of great concern to Manicheism, and one on which Mani himself had written. When Faustus comes to Carthage, this is one of the principal topics on which Augustine wants to question him:

Their books are full of interminable myths concerning sky, stars, sun and moon, and it had been my earnest wish that by comparing these with the numerical calculations I had read elsewhere he [Faustus] would demonstrate to me that the phenomena in question could be more plausibly explained by the account given in Mani’s books

(5.7.12)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.