In his HTR article "Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses" David L. Paulsen attempts to show that Christians as late as the fourth century "commonly (and perhaps generally) believed God to be corporeal." ¹ In his very brief discussion of the material from Augustine, I believe that Paulsen is mistaken with regard to Augustine's development, and especially with what exactly the Manichaean alternative to Christianity offered to Augustine. This brief note seeks to correct these errors. ²

Especially problematic is Paulsen's depiction of the Manichaean alternative: "At first, unable to accept Christianity because of (what he took to be) its doctrine of a corporeal deity, Augustine was much attracted to the Manichaean sect." ³ This would seem to imply that the alternative before the young Augustine was between a corporeal, Christian God, and an incorporeal, Manichaean God; Paulsen's selective quotations from the Confessions reinforce this impression. Of course, the Manichaean concept of God was highly material/corporeal, as the full quotation from the Confessions will show:

I postulated two masses opposed to one another, each of them infinite, but

the evil one on a narrower scale, the good one larger.... I thought myself

to be more truly religious if I believed you to be infinite in other parts,

even though I was forced to admit that you are finite in that part where the

evil mass stands in opposition to you.... Our Savior himself, your Only-begotten,

I so thought of as being something extruded out of the mass of your pellucid substance for our salvation. ⁴

The Manichees, with their abhorrence of flesh and of the Incarnation, offered Augustine a corporeal, and indeed a limited God, but at least a non-anthropomorphic one. (Further, it should be noted that an incorporeal God could be just as distastefully anthropomorphic as a corporeal one: an incorporeal God who changed his/her mind and had human emotions would be much more problematic to the Manichees and to Augustine than a God composed of fine, luminous matter, but who maintained an appropriately divine impassivity.) That it is the anthropomorphism of God, especially in the Incarnation, that Augustine and the Manichees found problematic, is clear in their mocking question, "Does he [God] have hair and nails?" ⁵ and in that Augustine is unable at this point to accept the Incarnation: "So I feared to believe that he was born in the flesh, lest I be forced to believe him defiled by the flesh." ⁶ So, ironically, Paulsen is correct in that Augustine believed in a corporeal deity, but he did so most fully and explicitly under Manichaean and not Christian influence.

Further, Paulsen seems too quick to take Manichaean polemic and Augustine's own philosophical doubts as an accurate and literal description of Christian doctrine at the time. Nowhere does Augustine say that any Christian told him that God is corporeal, and Paulsen's idea that Monica could be depended on to teach her son current Christian doctrine seems a rather over-intellectualized portrait of her. ⁷ Rather, Augustine presents himself as incapable of conceiving of a purely incorporeal being: "I wished to meditate upon my God, but I did not know how to think of him except as a vast corporeal mass, for I thought that anything not a body was nothing whatsoever." ⁸ Augustine could not conceive of a purely incorporeal reality, a philosophical problem shared by many, and therefore found himself thinking of God as corporeal, not because he had been taught it by Christianity, but because it was the only position he could personally accept. ⁹

It does not seem that anything in Augustine's writings would allow us to speculate that Christianity in the fourth century taught that God is corporeal. Rather, Augustine was unable at this point to conceive of a completely incorporeal, spiritual being, and therefore found the corporeal but non-anthropomorphic God of the Manichees quite attractive.

¹ HTR 83:2 (1990) 105 - 116, quote from 105.

² Besides these theoretical errors, there are the practical shortcomings of Paulsen using the Pusey translation of Augustine, more than 150 years old, and not citing Augustine quotations with the standard book and section numbers.

³ Paulsen, "Coporeal Deity," 114.

⁴ Confessions 5, 20 (trans. by J. K. Ryan, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960); emphasis added.

⁵ Confessions 3, 12.

⁶ Confessions 5, 20.

⁷ Cf. Paulsen, "Corporeal Deity," 115.

⁸ Confessions 5, 19.

⁹ Cf. G. Watson, Saint Augustine. Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1990) 12: "He [Augustine] had been told as a child that God was a spirit and therefore did not act as we with our bodies act.... Was there any reality other than body of some sort? It seemed the more honest course to go along with the Manichaean view that God is in some sense a body composed of fine and luminous matter.... It seemed to him more honest to think that 'anything not a body is nothing whatsoever.' This was the position which the Stoics and Epicureans had felt themselves forced to take against the 'spiritualism' of Plato and Aristotle six hundred years before."