Mani (216 – between 274 and 277)

A child of Parthian Babylonia

Mani was born in 216 in the village of Mardinu, in southern Babylonia, not far from the twin city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then capital of the Parthian Empire^[2]. His father, Pattik (rendered in Greek as Patecius), was a nobleman from Ecbatana, in Media; his mother is said, according to biographical tradition, to have belonged to the royal Arsacid line^[3]. According to the dating retained by modern Manichaean scholarship from the chronological tradition preserved by the Muslim astronomer and historian al-Biruni (d. 1048) in his Âthâr al-Bâqiya ("Chronology of Ancient Nations"), Mani was born on a Sunday in mid-April 216^[4].

While Mani was still a child, his father Pattik, breaking with the traditional cults of Babylonia, joined a community of Elchasai baptists — a Judeo-Christian sect practising repeated ritual ablutions, born in the wake of the Jewish prophet Elchasai (2nd century) — and had his son raised there according to their observances^[5]. It was in this hybrid religious milieu, blending Jewish ritual purification, Christian elements and Gnostic speculation, that the young Mani received his first religious education.

Key dates

Among the Elchasai baptists: a Judeo-Christian sect

The Elchasai movement, named after its legendary founder Elchasai, imposed on its members frequent ritual washings before every meal and after any contact deemed impure, together with partial observance of the Mosaic Law combined with a particular veneration of Christ as a heavenly messenger^[14]. It is this religiosity of outward, repeated purification that Mani would come to judge insufficient — the seed of a critique that would become, in his case, the rejection of all ritual mediation in favour of direct knowledge of the soul's origin.

The heavenly Twin: two revelations that overturn a life

According to the autobiographical account preserved in the Cologne Mani Codex — a tiny 5th-century Greek manuscript discovered in Egypt in the 1960s, barely 4.5 by 3.8 centimetres, published by the papyrologists Albert Henrichs and Ludwig Koenen between 1975 and 1982^[15] — Mani received his first revelation at the age of twelve. A heavenly being whom he would call his "Twin" (Greek Syzygos, Syriac taw'am, Middle Persian Narjamîg) appeared to him and ordered him to renounce the Elchasai ritual ablutions in order to live in chastity and inward purity^[16]. Mani kept this revelation secret for more than a decade, outwardly continuing to live according to the observances of the community that had raised him.

A second revelation came on 12 April 240, according to the chronology established by Albert Henrichs and Ludwig Koenen from the internal evidence of the Cologne Codex^[17]. The Twin reappeared and solemnly entrusted Mani with his mission: he was to break publicly with the Elchasai baptists and proclaim, as prophet and apostle, an entirely new doctrine on the origin of the world, of evil and of salvation^[18]. It is this second episode that Manichaean tradition remembers as the true beginning of Mani's prophetic mission, when he was twenty-four years old.

The break with the baptists and the missionary departure

The break with the Elchasai community was painful and, according to later sources, dangerous: Mani and a handful of disciples had to leave their home milieu hastily, facing the hostility of their former co-religionists^[19]. With this nucleus of first faithful, Mani then undertook the long missionary journeys that would shape both his doctrine and his standing as an itinerant preacher on the scale of the entire ancient East.

A missionary journey to India and Turkestan

In the years following his break with the Elchasai, Mani undertakes a long journey to India and Turkestan, where he founds several Manichaean communities^[20]. Gherardo Gnoli notes, in the vocabulary and certain later ascetic practices of the movement, the imprint of real contact with the Buddhism of that region^[21] — Mani himself would later include the name of the Buddha, alongside those of Zoroaster and Jesus, in his hierarchy of prophets. This eastern journey, poorly documented in detail, nevertheless gives Mani a missionary experience and a network of communities that will make him, on his return to Persia, a preacher already skilled in organising an itinerant Church.

The favour of Shapur I and the Shabuhragan

Mani's return to Persia coincides with a turning point in Sasanian history: the accession of King Shapur I (reigned 240-270), one of the most powerful rulers of the dynasty, famous for his victories over the Roman emperors Gordian III, Philip the Arab and Valerian. On Sunday 20 March 242, the very day of the new king's coronation at his residence of Gundeshapur, Mani publicly proclaims his gospel before the royal court for the first time^[22].

The event proves decisive: Mani manages to convert Peroz, brother of King Shapur I, and through him gains a hearing and protection from the ruler himself^[23]. In honour of Shapur I, Mani composes, around 242-243, his only work written directly in Middle Persian — all his other works being written in Syriac — the Shabuhragan ("[Book] of Shapur"), which sets out in substance his cosmology, the history of salvation and the eschatology of the world to come^[24]. This diplomatic and theological gesture bears fruit: throughout the reign of Shapur I, Mani enjoys continuous royal protection, which allows him to develop his Church and send missionaries to the far reaches of the empire.

From Hormizd I to Bahram I: the fall

The death of Shapur I, around 270, opens a period of uncertainty. His son and successor Hormizd I, whose reign is very brief, remains favourable to Mani — the Catholic Encyclopedia even records the tradition that he personally freed him from imprisonment^[25]. But it is his brother and successor, Bahram I, who brutally ends this royal tolerance: shortly after his accession to the throne, he has Mani arrested and orders his execution^[26].

The ancient sources differ on the exact circumstances of Mani's death: better to present them as they are than to decide artificially between them. The oldest tradition collected by the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), drawing on Syriac and Armenian chroniclers, states that Bahram I "had Mani crucified, had the corpse flayed, the skin stuffed and hung at the city gate"^[27]. Gherardo Gnoli, in his Encyclopedia of Religion synthesis, retains only that Mani was executed, "probably early in the year 277"^[28], while other syntheses place his death as early as 274^[29]. The later Islamic tradition — notably as reported by the bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim in his Fihrist (Baghdad, c. 987)^[30] — holds that Mani died chained in prison, after several days of suffering, his body being flayed and exposed only afterwards. Whatever the exact manner, all traditions agree on the essential: Mani dies a violent death, willed and staged by Sasanian royal power as a public warning against his doctrine.

To understand why Manichaeism could win over, within a few generations, millions of adherents from the Atlantic to China, its inner coherence must first be set out before its flaws are shown. Mani's system claims to answer, in a total and rationally constructed way, the weightiest question of all theology: where does evil come from?

The Father of Greatness and the Prince of Darkness

At the heart of Mani's system lies the affirmation of two eternal, uncreated and opposed principles, existing "before heaven and earth came into being"^[31]. The first is the Kingdom of Light, ruled by the Father of Greatness — the good God, immaterial, surrounded by his divine emanations (the Mother of Life, the First Man and the other "aeons" of light)^[32]. The second is the Kingdom of Darkness, ruled by the Prince of Darkness, an evil and material principle, at the head of a chaotic world of demons and brute matter^[33].

According to Mani, these two kingdoms originally coexisted, separate, never mingling. It is the Prince of Darkness who, glimpsing the radiance of the Kingdom of Light and coveting its beauty, decides to invade its territory — thereby triggering the founding cosmic conflict of which the entire material universe is supposedly the result^[34].

The cosmogony in three times

Manichaean cosmology is classically organised, following Gherardo Gnoli's synthesis, in three times ("the three moments"): an initial time of pure separation between the two kingdoms, a middle time of catastrophic mixture following the invasion of Darkness, and a final time of restoration in which captive light is fully recovered and the two kingdoms are definitively separated again for eternity^[35].

This threefold scheme has a direct consequence for Manichaean anthropology: the human being is not willed for his own sake by a good Creator; he is the biological by-product of a cosmic battle between two adverse forces, a refined trap devised by the Prince of Darkness to keep prisoner the light he stole^[36].

The human soul, a particle of light captive to matter

Manichaean anthropology teaches that each human soul is a particle of divine Light, fallen and imprisoned in matter — the flesh itself being a creation of the Prince of Darkness designed to perpetuate this captivity^[37]. Salvation consists, in this framework, not in moral conversion or grace received from a personal God who loves his creature, but in knowledge (gnosis) of its true luminous origin, combined with rigorous ascetic practice meant to limit the spread of captivity — hence the rejection, among the strictest adherents, of procreation itself, judged complicit in the cosmic trap^[38].

"Apostle of Jesus Christ": Mani's claim to the title of Paraclete

Mani does not present himself as the founder of one religion among others: he proclaims himself the final link in a chain of revealers sent by God through history — Adam, Seth, Noah, Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus — each having brought a share of truth, limited by the region and age to which he was sent, while Mani brings the universal and definitive revelation, destined for all mankind and committed to writing so that it may never be corrupted by oral transmission^[39].

The very opening of his masterwork, the Fundamental Epistle (Epistula Fundamenti), now lost but preserved in quotation by Saint Augustine in his treatise Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, gives the measure of this claim:

"Manichaeus, apostle of Jesus Christ, by the providence of God the Father. These are wholesome words, from the living and eternal source." — Mani, Fundamental Epistle, quoted by Saint Augustine, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, chapter 5^[40]

Augustine replies at once, in the same chapter, that he does not believe Mani was an apostle of Christ and demands proofs rather than a bare assertion^[41]. The claim is indeed considerable: Mani presents himself as the fulfilment of Jesus' promise in the Gospel according to Saint John to send a Paraclete, an "Advocate" who would lead the disciples "into all truth" (Jn 16:13). That Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, truly sent at Pentecost — a historically dated event, attested by the Acts of the Apostles and received by the whole apostolic Church from the 1st century, nearly two centuries before Mani's birth. To declare oneself the definitive fulfilment of a promise already publicly kept nearly two centuries earlier is therefore not a legitimate extension of Revelation, but its implicit denial: the entire Church would have had to be mistaken about the Paraclete's identity for nearly two hundred years for Mani's claim to stand.

A phantom Christ: Manichaean Docetist Christology

Since matter is, for Mani, the work of the Prince of Darkness, the historical Jesus — born of a woman, with a real body, suffering and dying on a cross — poses an insoluble problem for his system: such a Jesus would himself be a prisoner of evil matter. Mani resolves the difficulty by distinguishing two figures: on the one hand Jesus the Splendour, a being of pure light and cosmic redeeming principle, on the other the historical crucified Jesus, whom he treats as a secondary, even deceptive figure^[42]. His Christology is thus radically Docetist — from the Greek dokein, "to seem": Christ's Passion was supposedly mere appearance, a staging affecting in no way a being of pure light incapable of truly suffering in flesh he never truly put on.

It is precisely this denial of Christ's true flesh that the first council of Braga, gathered in Portugal in 561 against Priscillianist revivals, would condemn by name, joining Mani's name to those of Cerdon and Marcion in a single anathema:

"If anyone does not honour the day of Christ's birth according to the flesh […] because he does not believe that Christ was born in the true nature of man, as Cerdon, Marcion, Mani and Priscillian said, let him be anathema." — First Council of Braga, canon 4, 1 May 561^[43]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church would recall, fourteen centuries later, the lasting scope of this error: "The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism)"^[44].

The Elect and the three seals

The Manichaean Church organised its members into two distinct categories, with very different obligations. The Elect (electi), the ascetic and priestly core of the movement, bound themselves to the strict observance of three seals — sigillum oris, manuum, sinus ("seal of the mouth, of the hands, of the breast") — which forbade them respectively all lying speech and all impure food (meat, wine), all manual labour likely to harm plant or animal life bearing particles of light, and all sexual relations, including within marriage^[45]. Marriage itself, insofar as it perpetuates the captivity of light in the flesh, was discouraged, even proscribed, for the most fervent^[46].

The Hearers: supporting without practising

The Hearers (auditores), a far larger category to which Augustine belonged during his nine Manichaean years, were not bound to this wholesale asceticism. They needed only to believe the doctrine, observe a lightened morality and materially feed the Elect, whose vegetarian diet was supposed to "liberate" through ritual digestion the particles of light contained in food^[47].

This two-speed structure was no organisational detail: it secured for the movement a large, little-constrained base of faithful — the Hearers — while reserving for a restricted circle of Elect the ascetic prestige that gave the whole system its religious credibility.

Mani, unlike most religious founders of antiquity, wrote his entire scriptural corpus himself, out of an explicit concern to escape the distortions he blamed on the oral transmission of earlier revelations. His canon comprised seven principal works — the Living Gospel, the Treasure of Life, the Book of Mysteries, the Treatise, the Book of Giants, the Epistles and the Psalms and Prayers — to which was added, outside the canonical corpus proper, the Shabuhragan written in Middle Persian for Shapur I^[48]. Mani also composed an Image (the Eikôn), a richly illuminated manuscript meant to expound his cosmology pictorially to illiterate faithful — a practice that would later earn Central Asian Manichaean manuscripts a reputation for calligraphic and pictorial excellence, praised even by Muslim authors hostile to their doctrine^[49].

Most of these original texts are now lost; what is known of them comes either from polemical quotations in anti-Manichaean authors (Augustine first among them) or from modern archaeological discoveries — Coptic fragments from the Fayum (Egypt, 4th century), Turfan manuscripts in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian and Old Turkic (Central Asia, 9th-10th century), and the Cologne Codex already cited^[50].

Manichaeism is not a mere variant of Christianity: it is an autonomous, deliberately syncretic system, borrowing from Zoroastrianism its dualist cosmology, from Buddhism certain ascetic practices and the idea of reincarnation for Hearers not yet saved, from Mediterranean Gnosis its vocabulary of light and knowledge, and from Christianity the name of Christ, apostolic vocabulary and part of the New Testament canon — of which it retains only what serves its thesis, wholly rejecting the Old Testament and the Acts of the Apostles, the latter precisely recounting the Pentecost which renders its claim to the title of Paraclete void^[51]. This syncretic skill largely explains its missionary success: Mani presented his doctrine, according to the cultural context of each region evangelised, in vocabulary and references familiar to his audience — Buddhist in Asia, Zoroastrian in Persia, Christian in the Roman Empire^[52].

It is precisely this adaptability that made Manichaeism dangerous for the early Church: it did not present itself as an outward enemy of Christianity, but as its superior fulfilment, claiming the name of Christ while emptying of content the essentials of the apostolic faith — the unity of God as creator and saviour, the reality of the Incarnation, the goodness of creation.

No opponent of Manichaeism has carried, in Church history, a weight comparable to that of Saint Augustine, who was himself a Manichaean Hearer for nine years, from age nineteen to twenty-eight, before his conversion to Catholicism.

Nine years during which the promised reason never came

In his Confessions, Augustine recounts how, at nineteen, reading Cicero's Hortensius inflamed him with a love of wisdom — but he regretted the absence of Christ's name in it^[53]. Put off by the style of Scripture, which he judged crude beside Cicero's eloquence, he let himself be seduced by the Manichaeans^[54]. Their appeal lay precisely in their promise to explain everything by reason alone, without recourse to the authority of a faith they deemed obscure, asking questions Augustine then found formidable: "Whence comes evil? […] Is God confined within a bodily form?"^[55].

"I fell among men proudly delirious, too carnal and too talkative, in whose mouth were the snares of the devil." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, book III, chapter 6^[56]

The disappointment of Faustus of Milevis

After years of adherence, Augustine placed all his intellectual hopes in the coming to Carthage of a Manichaean bishop famed for his eloquence and learning, Faustus of Milevis — "a great snare of the devil", as Augustine would call him afterwards^[57]. The encounter ended in disillusion: Augustine discovered a man of pleasing style, but with no real training in the liberal sciences beyond ordinary grammar, unable to resolve the astronomical and philosophical objections he had been putting to him for years without answer^[58].

"I found him a man of pleasing speech, who spoke of the same things as they did, but more fluently and with better words. […] I discovered that he knew, of the liberal sciences, only grammar, and that in but ordinary fashion." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, book V, chapter 6^[59]

This missed encounter with the sect's most prestigious intellectual authority marks, by Augustine's own account, the beginning of the detachment that would lead him, a few years later, out of Manichaeism^[60].

Evil as privation of good: the decisive break

Augustine's definitive break with Manichaeism comes, on the intellectual plane, when he discovers — nourished notably by reading the "books of the Platonists" — that evil is not a substance, contrary to Mani's teaching, but a privation of good, a corruption or perversion of a nature good in itself:

"That evil, then, which I sought whence it came, is no substance; for if it were a substance, it would be good. […] I perceived, therefore, and it was made manifest to me, that thou madest all things good, and that there is absolutely no substance which thou didst not make." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, book VII, chapter 12^[61]

This philosophical insight dissolves from within the fundamental postulate of Manichaean dualism: if evil is not a positive reality opposed to good on equal terms, but only the absence or corruption of a good that ought to exist, then it becomes needless — indeed incoherent — to posit a second eternal, evil principle to explain it. A single God, supremely good and almighty, may have created an entirely good universe, in which moral evil arises not from matter itself, but from the misuse of creatures' freedom:

"I sought what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but a perversion of the will, turned aside from thee, O God, the supreme substance." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, book VII, chapter 16^[62]

Augustine's great anti-Manichaean treatises

From the years following his baptism (387), then as priest and as bishop of Hippo, Augustine devoted a considerable share of his work to the systematic refutation of the doctrine he had himself professed for nearly a decade: On Genesis Against the Manichaeans, On Two Souls, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, Against Faustus the Manichaean (in thirty-three books, a point-by-point reply to the objections of Faustus of Milevis) and many other treatises and sermons^[63]. This considerable anti-Manichaean output makes Augustine the privileged witness — as a former insider — to the movement's inward doctrine, and its most influential refuter in the history of Western theology.

Manichaeism was condemned both by Roman civil power, from its arrival in the Empire, and by ecclesial authority, over more than a millennium.

The edict of Diocletian (302): the first civil persecution

The oldest official trace of the Roman reaction to Manichaeism is a rescript of Emperor Diocletian, dated 31 March, c. 302, addressed to Julianus, proconsul of Africa, and preserved in the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum ("Comparison of Mosaic and Roman Laws")^[64]. The text orders punishments of extreme severity:

"We order that the founders and leaders of these sects be subjected to severe punishment and, together with their abominable writings, delivered to the flames." — Diocletian's rescript against the Manichaeans, c. 302, Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, XV, 3^[65]

Recalcitrant adherents faced the death penalty and confiscation of their property for the imperial treasury; persons of rank or official function who converted to Manichaeism saw their estates confiscated and were sent to the mines^[66]. This persecution, purely civil and barely a year before the great Diocletianic persecution of Christians themselves (edict of February 303), shows that Roman power already perceived Manichaeism as a threat of a different order from the other Eastern cults tolerated in the Empire — presumably because of its Persian origin, Sasanian Persia being Rome's principal military enemy at the time.

Saint Leo the Great and the edict of Valentinian III (445)

A century and a half later, Manichaeism resurfaces in Rome itself, in clandestine form, probably carried by refugees fleeing Vandal Africa. Pope Saint Leo the Great (pontificate 440-461) personally leads the inquiry: in 443, with senators and priests, he himself interrogates the leaders of Rome's Manichaean community^[67], and preaches several sermons to warn the faithful:

In several sermons, Leo urgently warns the Christians of Rome against this heresy and calls on them to report its adherents, their dwellings and their meeting places^[68].

This campaign yields concrete results: several Manichaeans convert and are admitted to confession, while others, remaining inflexible, are banished from Rome by the civil magistrates under the imperial decrees^[69]. On 19 June 445, Emperor Valentinian III promulgates, no doubt at the pope's instigation, a severe edict establishing seven distinct penalties against the Manichaeans^[70] — striking testimony to the close collaboration between pontifical authority and imperial power to eradicate a specific heresy.

The Council of Braga (561): Mani alongside Marcion and Cerdon

Nearly three centuries after Mani's death, the first Council of Braga, gathered in Portugal in 561 against Priscillianist revivals in Spain and Portugal, formulates an anathema explicitly naming Mani alongside two other great dualist heresiarchs of antiquity, Marcion of Sinope and Cerdon, for their shared denial of Christ's true flesh — quoted above^[71]. This conciliar association shows that 6th-century bishops still judged it necessary to name the Manichaean error explicitly, alongside the Priscillianism they were directly combating.

Lateran IV (1215): one single principle against medieval dualist revivals

Nearly a thousand years after Mani's death, the Fourth Lateran Council, gathered in Rome in 1215 under Pope Innocent III chiefly to answer the Cathar crisis in southern France, opens its canons with a Trinitarian profession of faith, the constitution Firmiter, solemnly affirming the unity of the creative principle of all things:

"We firmly believe and simply confess that there is one true God […], sole principle of the universe [unum universorum principium], creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal." — Fourth Lateran Council, constitution Firmiter, canon 1, 1215^[72]

Although the text does not name Mani, its very wording — "one single principle of the universe" — directly targets the cosmological dualism of which the Cathars of the Midi were suspected heirs, in a form largely transformed by centuries of Balkan Bogomil mediation. The very name "Manichaeans" would moreover be applied, by medieval chroniclers themselves, to Cathars and Bogomils, even though direct historical continuity between ancient Manichaeism and these medieval movements remains, to this day, a matter of scholarly debate rather than a demonstrated filiation^[73].

Lightning expansion, from West to Far East

Unlike many ancient sects confined to their region of origin, Manichaeism spread in truly transcontinental fashion. Westward, it reached Egypt, North Africa (where Augustine encountered it), Spain, Gaul, northern Italy and the Balkans, where it maintained a sporadic existence for nearly a millennium^[82]. Eastward, it spread through Central Asia along the Silk Roads, until becoming, in 763, the official state religion of the Turkic Uyghur Empire^[83] — one of the very rare cases in history in which Manichaeism obtained so high a political status.

In China, which the movement entered from the 7th century, the Tang dynasty ended up proscribing and persecuting it from 843, as part of a wider repression of foreign religions^[84]. Manichaeism nevertheless survived, in marginal and clandestine form, in certain Chinese coastal provinces — notably around Quanzhou, in Fujian — until the 14th century, the endpoint retained by Gherardo Gnoli in his Encyclopedia of Religion synthesis^[85].

Bogomils and Cathars: a cautious historiographical debate

Whether the medieval dualist movements — the Armenian Paulicians, the 10th-century Bulgarian Bogomils, then the Cathars of Languedoc in the 12th-13th centuries — directly descend from ancient Manichaeism remains debated among specialist historians. Gherardo Gnoli's synthesis recalls that these movements share with Manichaeism a dualist cosmology, a moralising asceticism and antinomian tendencies, but that proof of direct genealogical filiation is still lacking; he speaks rather of diffuse influence than of continuous, organised transmission^[86]. The term "Manichaean" applied to Cathars by medieval polemicists themselves must therefore be understood, most of the time, as a theological category — denoting a comparable dualist system — rather than as a claim of direct, documented historical inheritance.

Manichaeism's lightning success, from Babylonia to China within a few centuries, cannot be explained by Mani's missionary skill alone. Like Marcionism before it, it answered an authentic and permanent anxiety of the human condition: how to explain the massive, often absurd presence of evil in a world believed to be the work of a good and almighty God? Manichaean dualism offers a reassuring-looking answer — evil exists because a second principle, originally independent of God, is directly responsible for it — at the price, however, of two considerable sacrifices: the unity of God, now rivalled by an eternal competitor, and the goodness of matter and the body, now suspect by nature.

What the Catechism says

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in presenting the "different answers" mankind has given to the question of origins, names Manichaeism among the dead ends to avoid, alongside pantheism, deism, materialism and Gnosis:

"Others have affirmed the existence of two eternal principles, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, in permanent struggle (dualism, Manichaeism); according to some of these conceptions, the world (at least the material world) is evil, the product of a fall, and therefore to be rejected or surpassed (Gnosis)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 285^[87]

The answer forged by Saint Augustine

The Catholic answer, worked out largely by Saint Augustine himself from his personal experience of Manichaean doctrine, holds in three interlocking affirmations: one single God, supremely good and almighty, is the sole creator of all that exists, including matter and the body, which he declares "very good" (Gen 1:31); evil is not a rival substance, but a privation — a corruption of good in a creature that ought to possess it; and this corruption originates, not in matter itself, but in the misuse of freedom by rational creatures, angels and men. This solution is intellectually more demanding than Manichaean dualism — it requires facing the problem of moral evil and freedom head-on rather than offloading it onto a second cosmic principle — but it alone preserves, at once, God's unity, creation's goodness and man's real responsibility.

The Manichaean reflex never fully disappears from the religious imagination: it resurfaces whenever a spirituality crudely opposes spirit to matter, body to soul, or presents evil as an autonomous cosmic force equalling the Creator himself in power — a pattern the Catholic faith, forged partly in combat against Mani, has always refused to endorse.

There remains the good news, the one that brought Augustine out of Manichaeism: evil is not a rival god; it will not have the last word. One single God, infinitely good, created all things good, and it is he who leads history — with its detours and wounds — toward a happy end in which all captive light will be freed. Before the scandal of evil, the Christian need neither close his eyes nor despair: he can look at the cross, where God himself entered suffering to conquer it from within.

• Marcion of Sinope (c. 85-c. 160) — another dualist heresiarch, a century before Mani, whose name the Council of Braga would join to his in a single anathema.
• The heresies of the early centuries — the overall picture of the great doctrinal crises of Christian antiquity, of which Manichaeism is but one chapter.
• Arius (c. 256-336) — another great doctrinal crisis of late antiquity, over Christ's full divinity rather than God's unity.
• Nestorius (c. 386-c. 451) — a major later Christological crisis, over the union of the two natures in Christ.
• Muhammad (c. 570-632) — another prophetic claim to close revelation definitively, three centuries after Mani's.