Saint Augustine's Manichee Religion

Saint Augustine Augustine, in his early years as a young man, raised his first question, how can one seek God without yet knowing what he is or where he came from? Augustine was unsure on how he should call upon his god. He had many concerning questions such as, “For when I call on him I ask him to come into me. And what place is there in me into which my god can come?” and “Do even the heaven and the earth, which you have made, and in which you made me, contain you?”(Confessions p.3) Augustine was very determined to believe wholly in God, but he had many questions as to why and how God was the one and only God of all creations. He had a hard time grasping the fact that one can seek God without yet knowing what he is and how he could look

The Manichee religion basically made their beliefs from physical images or bodily shapes. This drew Augustine away from recognizing God in a spiritual and faithful way rather than a literal, physical appearance. The three primary Manichee criticisms of the Catholic belief pulled Augustine further away from God. The First, Manichee wondered how evil can exist if God is the all-powerful, eternal, and cause of all existence. Where does evil even come from if God has nothing to do with it, and why doesn’t he end evil? The Manichees vowed that God is indefinitely not the all-powerful god and claims that he is the reason for evil in the world. The second challenge is the all-around nature of God as a being. They believed that God is inadequate to controlling everything and that he is not everywhere as the bible preaches. The third and final challenge of the Manichee is the rejection of the book of Genesis and most of the Old Testament. Augustine eventually realized that the Manichee challenges toward God were condescending and contradicting. He quickly returned to the Manichee with his rebuttal to the first challenge. Augustine used Heaven as a main example. Heaven is the closest to God which has the maximum existence of his Being. Human, souls and minds are further step down, and bodies and other material things are at the bottom of the pile. He argues that these images serve only as a metaphor because for one to believe in them literally would be a big mistake. (SparkNote on Confessions) The argument on the question of evil, Augustine argues that evil is just a name for a lack of true existence, a label for how far a thing or person has wandered from unity with God. Evil is not exactly a dark malicious existence that goes against God, but rather something in God’s creation that has