FAUSTO di MILEVI. - African Manichaean bishop of the fourth century. Born in Africa, at Milevi, although his education was almost exclusively literary and very limited even in that field, he acquired a certain eloquence that made him willingly heard. Having become a bishop, he became one of the most prominent men of the sect. He lived for a long time in Rome.
In 383, at Carthage, Augustine had with him a conversation which he had eagerly awaited for nine years, but submitted to him his doubts, to which F. declared himself unable to reply (Conf., V, 3, 3; 6, 10-12). Augustine must nevertheless have retained a good memory of him, since later, in Milan, he would still hope for light from F. (Conf., VI, 11). Because he was a Manichaean, he was for some time relegated to an island. He wrote an apologetic-polemical work in which, popularizing Manichaeism, he repudiated the Old Testament and the Incarnation and, as regards the New Testament, maintained that the passages contrary to his doctrines had been corrupted. Around 400, when his adversary was already dead, St. Augustine countered him with the 33 books of the Contra Faustum Manicheanum, in which he reports Faustus’s work step by step—thus preserving it almost in its entirety—and refutes it at length.