I perceive some of your pronouncements to be heretical and evil. Of sin, you said it was necessary for the perfection of the universe and to make good shine all the more brightly in contrast. You said God is not the cause of our doing evil but that free will is the cause. From God’s omniscience and foreknowledge He knows that men will sin. How then could free will exist?
– God has not foreknowledge. He is, and has knowledge.
– Man’s acts are all subject to predestination and he cannot therefore have free will. God created Judas. Saw to it that he was reared, educated, and should prosper in trade. He also ordained that Judas should betray His Divine Son. How then could Judas have guilt?
– God, in knowing the outcome of free will, did not thereby attenuate or extirpate free will.
– That light-and-shade gentleman you once admired so much, Mani, held that Cain and Abel were not the sons of Adam and Eve but the sons of Eve and Satan. However that may be, the sin in the garden of Eden was committed in an unimaginably remote age, eons of centuries ago, according to the mundane system of computing time. According to the same system the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Redemption is now not even two thousand years old. Are all the millions and millions of uncountable people born between the Creation and the Redemption to be accounted lost, dying in original sin though themselves personally guiltless, and to be considered condemned to hell?
– If you would know God, you must know time. God is time. God is the substance of eternity. God is not distinct from what we regard as years. God has no past, no future, no presence in the sense of man’s fugitive tenure. The interval you mention between the Creation and the Redemption was ineffably unexistent.
– That is the sort of disputation that I dub ‘flannel’ but granted that the soul of man is immortal, the geometry of a soul must be circular and, like God, it cannot have had a beginning. Do you agree with that?
– In piety it could thus be argued.
– Then our souls existed before joining our bodies?
– That could be said.
– Well, where were they.
– None but the Polyarch would say that.
– Are we to assume there is in existence somewhere a boundless reservoir of souls not yet encorpified?
– Time does not enter into an act of divine creation. God can create something which has the quality of having always existed.
– Is there any point in my questioning you on your one-time devotion to the works of Plotinus and Porphyry?
– No. But far preferable to the Manichœan dualism of light and darkness, good and evil, was Plotinus’s dualism of mind and matter. In his doctrine of emanation Plotinus was only slightly misled. Plotinus was a good man.
– About 372, when you were eighteen, you adopted Manichæanism and did not discard the strange creed until ten years later. What do you think now that jumble of Babylonian cosmology, Buddhism and ghostly theories about light and darkness, the Elect and the Hearers, the commands to abstain from fleshmeat, manual labour and intercourse with women? Or Mani’s own claim that he was himself the Paraclete?
– Why ask me now when you can read the treatise against this heresy which I wrote in 394? So far as Mani himself is concerned, my attitude maybe be likened to that of the King of Persia in 376. He had Mani skinned alive and then crucified.
– We must be going very soon.
– Yes. Your air is nearly gone.
– There is one more question on a matter that has always baffled me and on which nothing written about you by yourself or others gives any illumination. Are you a Nigger?
– I am a Roman.
– I suspect your Roman name is an affectation or a disguise. You are of Berber stock, born in Numidia. Those people were non-white. You are far more aligned with Carthage than Rome, and there are Punic corruptions even in your Latin.
– Civis Romanus sum.
– The people of your homeland today are called Arabs. Arabs are not white.
– Berbers were blond white people, with lovely blue eyes.
– All true Africans, notwithstanding the racial stew in that continent, are to some extent niggers. They are descendants of Noah’s son Ham.
– You must not overlook the African sun. I was a man that was very easily sunburnt.
– What does it feel like to be in heaven for all eternity?
– For all eternity? Do you then think there are fractional or temporary eternities?
– If I ask it, will you appear to me here tomorrow?
– I have no tomorrow. I am. I have only nowness.
– Then we shall wait. Thanks and goodbye.
– Goodbye. Mind the rocks. Go with God.
With clambering, Hackett in the lead, they soon found the water and made their way back to this world.
The morning was still there, bland as they had left it. Teague McGettigan was slumped in charge of his pipe and newspaper and gave them only a glance when, having discarded their masks, they proceeded without thought to brisk towelling.
– Well, De Selby called to Mick, what did you think of that? Mentally, Mick felt numb, confused; and almost surprised by ordinary day.
– That was … an astonishing apparition, he stammered. And I heard every word. A very shrewd and argumentative man whoever he was.
De Selby froze in his half-naked stance, his mouth falling a bit open in dismay.
– Great crucified Lord, he cried, don’t tell me you didn’t recognize Augustine?
Mick stared back, still benumbed.
– I thought it was Santa Claus, Hackett remarked. Yet his voice lacked the usual intonation of jeer.
– I suppose, De Selby mused, beginning to dress, that I do you two some injustice. I should have warned you. A first encounter with a man from heaven can be unnerving.
– Several of the references were familiar enough, Mick said, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint the personality. My goodness, the Bishop of Hippo!
– Yes. When you think of it, he did not part with much information.
– If I may say so, Hackett interposed, he didn’t seem too happy in heaven. Where was the glorious resurrection we’ve all been promised? That character underground wouldn’t get a job handing out toys in a store at Christmas. He seemed depressed.
– I must say that the antics of his companions seemed strange, Mick agreed. I mean, according to his account of them
De Selby stopped reflectively combing his sparse hair.
– One must reserve judgement on all such manifestations, he said. I am proceeding all the time on a theory. We should remember that that might not have been the genuine Augustine at all.
– But who, then?
The wise master stared out to sea.
– It could be even Beelzebub himself, he murmured softly. Hackett sat down abruptly, working at his tie.
– Have any of you gentlemen got a match? Teague McGettigan asked, painfully standing up. Hackett handed him a box.
– The way I see it, Teague continued, there will come an almighty clump of rain and wind out of Wickla about twelve o’clock. Them mountains down there has us all destroyed.