Manichaeism

Mani was born in 216 at Mardinu, in southern Babylonia, under the Parthian Empire, to a noble father from Ecbatana and a mother of Arsacid lineage. Raised among the Elchasaites, a Judeo-Christian Baptist sect, he claimed to receive at twelve years old and then on 12 April 240 the revelations of his heavenly "Twin", the Syzygos, who ordered him to preach his own doctrine.^[5] Protected by the Sassanid king Shapur I, to whom he dedicated the Shabuhragan, he travelled as far as India, wrote seven canonical books, then fell from favour: arrested on the orders of Bahram I, he died in prison at Gundeshapur between 274 and 277.^[6]

His decisive claim rests on two titles: "Apostle of Jesus Christ" and "Seal of the Prophets" — the last in a line of divine messengers including Adam, Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus, come to complete and correct all the others.^[7] It is this claim to close Revelation that makes Manichaeism something other than a philosophical school: a universal substitute religion, which uses Christian vocabulary — Father, Son, Spirit, Jesus, apostles, Gospel — to say the opposite of the faith.^[8] For the full account of his life, travels and end, see Mani (216-274/277).

The Catholic witnesses: those who fought it

For more than a millennium, Manichaeism was known only through its adversaries. The oldest is the Acta Archelai, a fictitious disputation between Bishop Archelaus of Charcar and Mani himself, composed around 350 in the East: apocryphal as a narrative, it preserves authentic information about the doctrine and fixed the founder's image for centuries.^[9] Around 370, Bishop Titus of Bostra wrote four books Against the Manichaeans, and, around 300, the converted pagan philosopher Alexander of Lycopolis wrote his treatise Against the Opinions of the Manichaeans — proof that the sect worried cultivated pagans too.^[10]

The Latin dossier, the richest, comes from Epiphanius of Salamis (Panarion, heresy 66, around 375) and above all from Saint Augustine, who wrote against his former sect some forty books between 388 and 428 — the best-documented prosecution of Antiquity, because its author had seen everything from the inside.^[11] The New Catholic Dictionary (1910) sums up: Augustine, "pen in hand, at intervals between 394 and 420, wrote forty books of refutation, among which the thirty-three against Faustus are worthy of special note".^[12]

The rediscovered Manichaean books: a century of discoveries

Since 1900, the sect has spoken again through its own books. The German expeditions to Turfan (1902-1914) and then the Dunhuang manuscripts yielded thousands of fragments in Pahlavi, Sogdian, Uyghur and Chinese.^[13] In 1929-1930, peasants found at Medinet Madi, in Egypt, a 5th-century Coptic library — letters, psalms and Kephalaia ("Chapters") of the master.^[14] And in 1969, the acquisition of a tiny 5th-century Greek codex, the Cologne Mani Codex, revealed a Life of Mani written by his disciples, confirming from the inside the Baptist milieu of his childhood.^[15] These discoveries clarified the doctrine without changing the judgment: they show a richer and more coherent system than the caricature, but one still founded on the two principles and the phantom Christ that the Church had condemned.^[16]

Two eternal gods: the Father of Greatness and the Prince of Darkness

The heart of the system is an absolute dualism: there exist from all eternity two uncreated, independent and hostile principles. In the north, in the kingdom of Light, reigns the Father of Greatness (Pater Majestatis), surrounded by his aeons; in the south, in the kingdom of Darkness, reigns the Prince of Darkness, with his demons and his smoky matter.^[17] Evil is therefore neither a creature, nor a fall, nor a choice: it is an eternal substance, coeternal with God, which God did not make and cannot unmake.^[18]

This is exactly the opposite of the Catholic faith: one God, creator of all, and evil as the privation of good in a free creature — never as a being. Saint Augustine, who had believed the system, took ten years to free himself from it and made its refutation one of the foundations of the Western theology of evil.^[19]

The cosmic war in three times

One day, the Manichaean books tell, Darkness raised its eyes, glimpsed the Light, and invaded it out of lust. The Father of Greatness then emanated the Primal Man, who let himself be vanquished and devoured to halt the invasion: from this mixture of the two substances the visible world was born.^[20] Cosmic history henceforth unfolds in three times, summarised in the following table.

Liberation works through a cosmic mechanism: the captive light exhales from bodies, rises via the column of glory (the Milky Way) to the moon and then the sun, "vessels of light" which carry it to the Father's kingdom.^[21] Hence the Manichaean cult of the sun and moon — not worshipped as gods, but venerated as the ships of salvation, which earned the Manichaeans the persistent accusation of worshipping the stars.^[22]

The soul, a particle of captive light: freedom denied

Man is a battlefield: his soul is a particle consubstantial with God, fallen and imprisoned; his body is the work and prison of Darkness.^[23] From this follow two consequences which the Church judged monstrous. First, sin is not a free act but a nature: man does not do evil, he is the place where Evil fights; Augustine entitled one of his first treatises On Two Souls to dismantle this thesis, which abolishes responsibility.^[24] Second, flesh being evil by essence, marriage, procreation and all that keeps light within matter are condemned — at least for the perfect.^[25]

A Christ who neither suffered nor rose

The Manichaean "Jesus" bears Christ's name without his flesh. Mani teaches an impassible Jesus of light, who was not incarnate in Mary's womb, did not truly suffer under Pontius Pilate and did not rise in the flesh: the cross is but an appearance, a symbolic mystery reserved for initiates.^[26] The thesis is pure Docetism — the heresy already condemned by Saint John: "Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is of God; every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God" (1 Jn 4:2-3).^[27]

The following table sets face to face, point by point, the Manichaean thesis and the faith the Church opposes to it.

Elect and Hearers: a two-speed morality

Constraint follows doctrine: since all life retains captive light, the rules are impossible for ordinary men. Manichaeism therefore cuts its community in two. The Elect (Electi), a few hundred perfect ones, observe the three seals: the seal of the mouth (no meat, no wine, no impure speech, no lies), the seal of the hands (kill no life — neither animal nor plant: no reaping, no ploughing) and the seal of the breast (absolute continence).^[28] They live on alms, pray seven times a day facing the sun and moon, fast on Sundays and observe a great annual fast.^[29]

The Hearers (Auditores), the mass of the faithful — of whom Augustine was one for nine years — live in the world, marry, trade, farm: their function is to serve the Elect without defiling them, by bringing them the food whose digestion, says the doctrine, frees the captive light.^[30] An assumed double morality: for some, impossible perfection; for others, material support with the hope of being reborn Elect. Augustine would later note the reverse of the picture: perfect ones having themselves served like princes in the name of the light they digested.^[31]

Seven books and a parallel canon

Mani distinguished himself from all heresiarchs by writing his own canon himself: seven works — the Living Gospel, the Treasure of Life, the Treatise (Pragmateia), the Book of Mysteries, the Book of Giants, the Epistles and the Psalms and Prayers — plus, in Pahlavi, the Shabuhragan dedicated to Shapur I.^[32] Mani illustrated his own books with paintings himself, to the point that Persian tradition made him a legendary painter: the rival Church had its Scriptures, its images and its missionaries.^[33] Faced with this parallel canon, the Church tightened its own canon and rule of faith: a Scripture received from the apostles, read in the communion of bishops, against books fallen from a heavenly "Twin" with no witness.^[34]

Evil finally explained — with no guilty God

The first seduction is intellectual: Manichaeism exonerates God from evil in a single gesture. If evil is an eternal substance which God did not create, God remains perfectly good and the scandal of evil vanishes.^[35] For a suffering mind — and Augustine suffered — the solution is irresistible: it spares both God and man, since man too is not guilty, only inhabited.^[36] The Church would answer that God's goodness is saved only by destroying his omnipotence and man's freedom — and that the price is worse than the problem.^[37]

"By reason alone": the rationalist promise

The second seduction is the promise of understanding everything without believing. The New Catholic Dictionary (1910) notes that it was this boast which "blinded Saint Augustine for nine years, setting him thinking that Manichaeism would free us from all error, and bring us to God by pure reason alone".^[38]

"Manichaeism would free us from all error, and bring us to God by pure reason alone." — Augustine's expectation, according to the New Catholic Dictionary (1910)^[39]

No mystery to adore, no authority to follow: complete cosmic explanations, delivered as a science. When Faustus, the star bishop, proves unable to answer Augustine's astronomical questions, the whole promise collapses at once — see below.^[40]

The austerity that impresses

The third seduction is moral: the Elect fast, abstain, pray, do not even kill a plant — and their apparent morals shame lukewarm Christians.^[41] Augustine would admit he admired their displayed continence. The Catholic answer, forged in this debate, became a permanent criterion of discernment: asceticism is worth something only within communion — a fast founded on contempt for creation is not a virtue, it is the reverse of a heresy.^[42] Spanish Priscillianism, a century later, posed exactly the same problem to the bishops, with the same answer.^[43]

Carthage 373: the adherence of a nineteen-year-old student

Augustine joined the sect at nineteen, a student at Carthage, in 373: he remained there nine years, until 382, as a simple Hearer.^[44] What caught him was neither debauchery nor superstition, but the pride of intellect: the Manichaeans laughed with him at the "belly" of credulous Catholics, promised him answers instead of exhortations to believe, and flattered the young rhetorician by enrolling him among strong minds.^[45] He even dragged friends into the sect — including Alypius — and campaigned actively for years.^[46]

The detail matters for discernment: Augustine was not an ignorant man seduced by fables, but the sect's best pupil, the one who asked the questions the others dared not ask — about eclipses, solstices, the movements of the stars, which the Manichaean books described fabulously.^[47] It is this very superiority which lost him in the eyes of the leaders, then saved him: no one being able to answer him, he was sent from doctor to doctor up to the star bishop, Faustus of Milevis.^[48]

Faustus of Milevis: the great disappointment

Faustus arrived at Carthage in 383, the nine full years of Hearership (373-382) having elapsed: Augustine, then twenty-nine and still counted among the Hearers, had awaited for years this renowned Manichaean bishop — fine eloquence, reputation as a learned man — as the one who would resolve everything.^[49]

"For very nearly nine years, listening to the Manichaeans with a wandering mind, I waited with immense desire for the coming of this Faustus." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, V, 6, 10 (author's trans.)^[50]

The meeting was a cold shower: Faustus, amiable and fluent, knew nothing of what Augustine asked him — neither astronomy, nor physics, nor the knots of doctrine. Augustine noted it with cruel lucidity: the vessel of discourse was elegant, but there was nothing to drink.^[51] He himself summed up the lesson, which holds for all fine speakers of sects:

"I had already learned from you, my God, that a thing should not seem true because it is said eloquently, nor false because the signs of the lips utter it without grace." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, V, 6, 10 (author's trans.)^[52]

From then on, he writes, "the zeal with which I had plunged into the Manichaean system was broken": Faustus, the most famous of them, having answered so poorly the questions that troubled him, Augustine despaired of all the other doctors of the sect.^[53] He remained formally a Hearer for some time longer, but his mind had already left: bound for Milan, where Ambrose and the Neoplatonists awaited him.^[54]

Milan: evil as privation — the decisive break

At Milan (384-386), two encounters completed the break. The books of the Neoplatonists taught him that an incorporeal reality could be conceived — and thus a God who is spirit, which Manichaean materialism had made unthinkable.^[55] Then Saint Ambrose, by explaining the Old Testament in the spiritual sense, showed him that the passages the Manichaeans laughed at had a meaning — and that their mockery targeted a caricature.^[56]

The question that obsessed him — whence comes evil? — then found its answer, which he recounts in Book VII of the Confessions: seeking whence evil comes, he saw the Manichaeans "full of malice, in that they preferred to believe that your substance suffers evil, rather than their own commits it".^[57]

"I saw, seeking whence comes evil, men full of malice, in that they preferred to believe that your substance suffers evil, rather than their own commits it." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VII, 3, 4 (author's trans.)^[58]

The formula turns the accusation around: the system which exonerated man accused God — it made the divine substance a victim carved up by Darkness. Augustine now held both truths together: evil comes from the free will of the creature, and God remains good and omnipotent.^[59] Baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387, he devoted forty years to destroying what he had adored for nine.^[60]

The anti-Manichaean treatises: a forty-year arsenal

The following table lists the main pieces of the Augustinian dossier against Mani — the most complete prosecution Antiquity has left us against a heresy.

The disputation Against Fortunatus, in 392, is worth the detour: two days of public debate at Hippo, before notaries, against the Manichaean priest Fortunatus — who ended by admitting his embarrassment and asking for time to consult his superiors.^[61] And Against Faustus, thirty-three books around 398, remains the most massive systematic refutation: Augustine takes up one by one the objections of the opposing party, many of which still circulate today under other names.^[62]

The edict of Diocletian (302): striking a Persian religion

The first power to strike was pagan. On 31 March 302, Diocletian addressed to the proconsul of Africa an edict entitled De Maleficiis et Manichaeis, preserved in the Collation of Mosaic and Roman Laws: there he denounced a sect come from enemy Persia, which "infects" the provinces, and ordered the leaders to be burned alive with their books.^[63] The motive was political as much as religious: on the eve of the great persecution against Christians, the emperor tolerated no organised foreign religion — least of all a Persian religion in the midst of war against Persia.^[64] Irony of history: Manichaeism, persecuted by pagans as Oriental, would be persecuted by Christians as heretical, and by the Persians themselves as dissident — rejected by all the powers of late Antiquity, with none adopting it. Until the Uyghur khagan Bögü, in 762, the sole case of a power making it its religion (see below).^[65]

The Christian laws: Theodosius and legal infamy

Under the Christian emperors, repression became systematic. As early as 372, a constitution struck illicit meetings; then Theodosius, in 381, promulgated the decisive law (Theodosian Code, XVI, 5, 7): the Manichaeans were marked with a "note of perpetual infamy" and lost all right to make wills and to live under Roman law.^[66] The following laws (383 onwards) forbade them assemblies, donations, successions, and doomed them to exile and deportation.^[67] The arsenal stayed in force for a century: Manichaeism became the only cult expressly named in most constitutions against heretics.^[68]

Saint Leo the Great (443-445): the Roman inquiry

The great Western confrontation took place at Rome, under Pope Saint Leo the Great. Driven out of Africa by the Arian Vandals who persecuted all that was not Arian, Manichaeans flowed into Italy and organised secretly in Rome itself.^[69] Leo, informed around 443, opened a public inquiry: interrogations, confessions, seized and burned books, denunciation of initiates even within the ranks of the clergy.^[70]

He then preached against them a series of sermons that remained famous (sermons IX, XVI, XVII, XXIV, XXXV, XLII), warned his people against their deceitful Sunday fasts and false continence, and addressed to all the bishops of Italy a circular letter (letter VII) to publish their infamy and organise the hunt.^[71] Then he obtained from the civil power the decisive act: on 19 June 445, Emperor Valentinian III promulgated a constitution reprising all earlier laws — the Manichaeans were driven from the army and from Rome, deprived of their citizens' rights, and the impenitent banished in perpetuity.^[72] The Dictionary of Christian Biography (1911) notes that Leo's sermons and letter "seem to have stirred up other bishops, both in the East and West".^[73]

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

Nearly three centuries after the founder's death, the error was still alive enough to be named. The First Council of Braga, convened in 561 against the Priscillianist recurrences of Spain and Portugal, struck dualist theses with seventeen anathemas — and one of them explicitly named Mani alongside Marcion of Sinope and Cerdo, for their common denial of Christ's true flesh.^[74] The association is a historical judgment: in the eyes of the 6th-century bishops, these three names sum up three centuries of refusal of the Incarnation.^[75] The following table recapitulates four centuries of condemnations.

Under Justinian, in 527, repression reached its legal peak: obstinate Manichaeans incurred the death penalty, and the Eastern Empire was practically purged.^[76] In the West, the sect survived only in crumbs — but its themes survived: Spanish Priscillianism bears its mark, and the Middle Ages would see dualisms again which the Church judged by the same yardstick, from Bogomils to Cathars.^[77]

In the West: from Carthage to Spain

In Africa, the sect prospered in the 4th century even among lettered circles: it was at Carthage that Augustine knew it, and it was in Africa that it resisted longest, contemporary with Donatism (311-411) without merging with it — a rigorist schism on one side, a dualist religion on the other.^[78] In Gaul and Spain, it spread along trade routes and infiltrated even monasteries: Priscillianism gathered its dualist heritage — zodiac, heavenly body of Christ, contempt for matter — to the point that Saint Jerome and Saint Leo treated both errors in the same letters.^[79] The detailed history of this Western expansion is told in Mani (216-274/277).

Towards the East: Uyghurs and China

Driven from the West, Manichaeism became an Asian religion. It travelled up the Silk Roads, converted the Uyghur khagan Bögü in 762 — the only case in history where it became a state religion — then, the Uyghur Empire having collapsed, withdrew into China.^[80] Under the Song, the communities of Fujian survived disguised as popular Buddhism; the Cao'an temple, near Quanzhou, still houses today the only statue of Mani venerated as "Buddha of Light".^[81] In the 14th century, the imperial power proscribed the sect definitively: the world religion died out, leaving only stones and manuscripts.^[82]

Evil is not a god: the answer that still holds

Faced with any discourse that makes evil a fatality — determinism, astrology, "it's stronger than me" — the answer forged against Mani has not aged a day: evil is not a substance, it is a wound of freedom. God did not make evil, man is not evil, and the world, though damaged, remains the good work of a good God.^[83] That is why the Church never canonises despair: before the scandal of evil, she proposes neither the excuse of the "evil god" nor resignation, but the cross — where God, instead of explaining evil, comes to suffer it with us.^[84]

"Manichaean": a loaded word of everyday language

Today anyone who sees the world in black and white, without nuance, is called "Manichaean".^[85] The irony is that true Manichaeism was the very opposite of simplistic moralism: it was an immensely subtle system, which drowned responsibility in cosmology.^[86] The modern reproach — "you lack nuance" — and the ancient reproach — "you deny freedom and the Incarnation" — do not target the same thing. When the word comes under the pen, check what is being accused: most so-called contemporary "Manichaeisms" are mere rigorisms, foreign to the gnosis of the Two Principles.^[87]

• Mani (216-274/277) — the founder's life and the full history of the expansion, from India to China.
• Gnosticism — the matrix: Pleroma, demiurge, salvation through secret knowledge.
• Marcionism — the other great 2nd-century dualist, anathematised with Mani at Braga.
• Docetism — the error about Christ's body, which Manichaeism took over.
• Priscillianism (370-561) — the Spanish heir: same dualism, same zodiac, same conciliar end.
• Donatism (311-411) — the contemporary African schism at the time of the Manichaean implantation at Carthage.
• Saint Augustine of Hippo — the Hearer turned greatest refuter of the sect.
• The Heresies of the First Centuries — the panorama of crises that forged the Church's faith.