Manichaeism

An Ancient Faith Rediscovered

Nicholas J. Baker-Brian

• Éditeur: T&T Clark
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780567110411
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Theology

This is the first general comprehensive introduction to Manichaeism aimed at a non-specialist and undergraduate readership. This study will be a historical and theological introduction to Manichaeism. It will comprise a biographical treatment of the founder Mani, situating his personality, his writings and his ideas within the Aramaic Christian tradition of third century (CE) Mesopotamia. It will provide a historical treatment of the Manichaean church in late antiquity (250-700 CE), detailing the emergence of Manichaeism in the late Roman and Byzantine empires, in addition to examining the continuation of Manichaean traditions in the eastern world (China) up to the thirteenth century and beyond. The book will consider the theology of Mani's system, with the aim of providing a clear-eyed treatment of the cosmogonic, scriptural and ecclesiological ideas forming its foundations. The study will base its analysis on original Manichaean literary sources, together with rehabilitating the representation of Manichaeism in those writings that polemicised against the religion. The study will aim to demonstrate the highly syncretic nature of Manichaeism, and will look to move forward 'traditional' perceptions of the religion as being simply a form of Christian Gnostic Dualism.

Chapter 1

The Rediscovery of Mnichaeism: Controversies and Sources

1. Introduction: Controversies Old and New

What is Manichaeism? Traditionally characterised as having taught an elaborate myth describing a cosmic war between two co-eternal powers of Light and Darkness, the name of this ancient religion is presently more likely to be invoked in order to describe a seemingly transparent, ‘simplistic’ state of affairs, in which two opposing agendas are set against one another. Indeed, it seems that in recent times the term ‘Manichaean’ has been making something of a comeback, not least in the media coverage of political events during the period when both the Republican party in the United States and New Labour in the United Kingdom were in power, during the first years of the present century. The ‘political dualism’ widely regarded as characteristic of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s approach to foreign policy was often described as being ‘Manichaean’: as one commentator for the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2002: ‘President Bush is serious about his Manichaean formulation of the war on terror – “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.’3

The assured use of the term ‘Manichaean’ in modern political commentary corresponds neatly with the appearance of the same term in ancient religious dialogue whenever discussions arose of the dualist religion whose origins lay in the world of late-antique Persian Mesopotamia at its southernmost end bordering Babylonia. In this context, ‘Manichaean’ denoted the followers of the Mesopotamian prophet Mani (ad 216–76), the ‘founder’ of a religion characterised by its opponents as an aberrant form of Christianity. These opponents portrayed Mani as a heresiarch, and Manichaeans were regarded as heretical Christians of a particularly opportunistic kind. Yet ‘Manichaean’ was an identity imposed on a type of Christian belief, the origins of which lay in a culture that was significantly different from the one which shaped the attitudes of its late-antique opponents.

With these preliminary considerations in mind, this chapter will prioritise two concerns. In the first place, it will consider the taxonomic presentation of Manichaeism in both ancient and modern treatments of the religion. Whilst the polemical intentions of Mani’s ancient Catholic Christian opponents4 are absent in the context of modern studies of Manichaeism, it will be evident that the tenacity of the ancient challenge to Manichaeism has continued to influence the conceptual language used by modern commentators to discuss the origins, beliefs and ambitions of Mani and his followers, the result of which is a distortion in the way that modern commentators think about the religion in their treatments of Manichaeism. The chapter will then move on to introduce a handful of recently discovered Manichaean writings – literary works written by late-antique and central Asian Manichaeans (including Mani himself), composed in the service of the theological and liturgical life of the Manichaean church – in order to expose to a little more daylight the religious identity of the Manichaeans.

2. Manichaeism as ‘The Other’

The visionary prophet Mani, whose teachings formed the basis of the Manichaean religion, lived nearly all his life within the territory of the last great Persian empire of antiquity. Growing to maturity under Ardashir I (ruling 224–40), the founder of the Sasanian dynasty and the architect of a revived Iranian imperialism, and operating for a lengthy period of his life under the patronage of his son and successor Shapur I (ruling 240–72), Mani lived during a time of considerable change in Iranian society, a transformation driven by an imperial ideology which sought to reclaim the ascendant status of a united Persian Empire among the world’s powers, founded on the notion of the Sasanian monarchy as the successors of the ancient Achaemenids.5 One of the apparent hallmarks of Mani’s religious teachings was his striving to achieve a universalism for his message,6 an ambition that mirrored the territorial expansionism of the kings Ardashir and Shapur. Aspirations of cultural conquest are, by and large, only possible in a society which has already made its presence known militarily and politically to other nations, and has relayed details of its contacts with them to its own population. Mani was certainly aware of Persia’s rediscovered ascendancy in the world, and undoubtedly demonstrated a degree of worldly acumen in this regard by placing himself in a position to take advantage of it, not least in terms of the initial organisation of his church.7 However, in the case of Mani’s universalism, it was the cultural as much as the physical frontier separating this newly resurgent Persian Empire from the territory of the Roman world – the other great ancient superpower of the time – which tempered the nature of those ambitions and influenced their ultimate form.

The physical limit of both Persian and Roman military power ran along the natural boundary of the Euphrates river, with eastern Syria and northern Mesopotamia becoming ‘a repeated battleground’8 between the two empires for the best part of the third century and beyond.9 However, natural boundaries are one thing, whilst imperially-imposed frontiers that influence the reception of cultures are another.10 The early history of Mani’s religion and its historical legacy can only be properly discussed in relation to the influence which the imperial-cultural divide between Rome and Persia brought to bear on the teachings of the prophet from southern Mesopotamia. However, this divide is opaque, and reduction of the divide’s significance to the concerns raised by imperial and national agendas alone is misleading, despite the fact that the rhetoric of many late-antique sources against Manichaeism often drew upon such crude lines of demarcation. Fear, ignorance, entrenched tradition and open hostility greeted the arrival of Mani’s followers in the Roman Empire from the late third century onwards, not least in the Christian communities of the West. These reactions were in part inspired by the assumed ‘Persian’ origins of Mani and his message,11 which thereby helped shape the memorialisation of Manichaeism in the historical memory of the occidental world by imposing a particular stamp on the identity of the Manichaean church, turning it into something far removed from the original intentions of its supposed ‘founder’, Mani.

This is the Manichaeism of patristic culture. Writing in their role as heresiologists, patristic authors forged a normative Christian identity during Late Antiquity through the creation and refinement of a boundary that introduced a form of theological absolutism in the guise of a religious orthodoxy. This strategic process simultaneously defined and subsequently isolated those ‘other’ Christian parties who chose – for a wide spectrum of reasons influenced by a range of geo-political and intellectual influences – a different way of formulating and expressing their Christian beliefs. Under these conditions, Mani’s teachings fell on the ‘wrong side’ of the divide, and the heresiologists – largely on the Western side of the frontier – sought to emphasise Manichaeism’s fundamental distinctiveness by exploiting the perceived foreignness and inherent wrongness of Mani’s beliefs, which shadowed a standard of Christian belief that itself was still struggling to achieve an orthodox definition of faith. In the processes of labelling and categorising Mani’s ideas and the activities of his church, patristic authors called upon a series of longstanding typologies according to which normative Christian identity could be defined and measured, but which also in turn created a number of new typologies that appeared especially applicable to Manichaeism. In this way, the follower of Mani became ‘the Other’ – the theological and societal outcast – an identity based on a series of misleading, perverted and often contradictory labels: for example, the Manichaean as the Christian heretic, the deviant, sex-crazed, pale ascetic who consumed semen during ritualised orgies,12 and who followed a theology based on a determinism that ruled out any possibility of hope or liberation from suffering for the majority of humankind (see Chapter 4).

However, by far the most enduring contribution made by Roman heresiological discourse to the reputation of Manichaeism was its challenge to the Christian identity which Mani and his followers claimed for themselves in the exposition of their faith. The presence of the orthodox counter-claim challenging this identity amounted to a concerted strategy on the part of the heresiologists who wrote against Mani’s religion, and played a fundamental role in widening the gap between orthodox Christians and Manichaean Christians during the fourth and fifth centuries. In this regard, the orthodox strike against Manichaeism utilised the full conceptual and linguistic range of tools employed in the process of early Christian identity formation, a process which had been in development since the transformation of the meaning of the Greek word ‘heresy’ (hairesis) from ‘sect’ or ‘school’ by Christian writers into a word denoting a pejorative separation between ‘true’ and ‘false’ Christians, i.e., between orthodoxy and heresy.13

The heart of the orthodox challenge to Manichaeism’s Christian roots lay in the success which patristic authors achieved in convincing their audiences that Manichaeism was a simulacrum of Christianity as the ‘true religion’. Although variations existed in the way that this was achieved, nearly all anti-Manichaean works from Late Antiquity adopted a near-identical strategy in their presentation of Manichaeism’s Christian persona. Reducible to four main points, heresiologists sought to portray Manichaeism as:

1. determined by a worldly expediency, manifest in a desire to attract followers, simply for the sake of winning converts; or, influenced by the Devil, to lead souls into error (e.g., Acts of Archelaus 65.2 (see Chap...

Table des matières

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Conclusion
• Bibliography