review by Garry Wills
Augustine: Conversions to Confessions
by Robin Lane FoxBasic Books
...It is worth looking at this best example of his
daisy-chaining of flimsily connected guesses, along with a virtuoso
indulgence in mind reading. This, as perhaps the flimsiest as well as
the most sensational of his arguments, should be looked at in detail.
Lane Fox connects and confuses three different things.
1. Semen bread. The story begins when Augustine, as a Manichee, may have heard (must have heard according Lane Fox) an anti-Manichaean slander that the cult’s Elect, at their secret meals, had sex on top of flour spread on the floor. Their joint juices were spilled on the flour, and the male like some unknown Onan spilled his seed upon the ground, making the flour a carrier of the particles of light from the Elect, as the members of the Manichee sect were called. Bread was then made of the flour for the Elect to consume. Like most attacks of bigotry, this slur was illogical. What good would it do for the Elect to recycle light out into bread and then back into the source of the light in the first place? There is no way to know how widely this crude attack was known to people, much less to know how many credited its nonsense...link
