Manichaeism

A prophet in third-century Persia set out to do something no one had quite tried before: to found, deliberately and from the start, a world religion — one that would absorb and complete Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus all at once, be translated into every language, and carry its truth in paintings so that even the illiterate could see it. For a few centuries it nearly worked: the religion of Mani stretched from Spain to China. Then it was hunted to extinction, and very nearly erased from memory.

The apostle of light

Mani (c. 216–274 CE) was born in Sasanian Mesopotamia and raised in a Jewish-Christian baptizing sect before, he said, a heavenly Twin revealed to him the true religion. He called himself the "Apostle of Light" and the final prophet in a great succession — Adam, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus had each brought the truth to one people in one tongue, and each revelation had been corrupted after its founder's death. Mani meant to be the seal who gathered them all into one universal, portable, deliberately designed faith. Uniquely among the founders of religions, he wrote his own scriptures, precisely so that his teaching could not be garbled by later disciples — and he painted, too, producing an illustrated book so that his cosmology could be seen as well as read. For a time he enjoyed the favor of the Sasanian shah; but under a later king, and the pressure of the Zoroastrian priesthood, he was arrested and died in chains, a martyr to his own church.

The two principles

At the heart of Manichaeism is the most thoroughgoing dualism in the history of religion. There are two eternal, uncreated principles: the Kingdom of Light (good, spirit) and the Kingdom of Darkness (evil, matter), and they are not — as in most religions — a creator and its creation, but two coequal, opposed realities. The whole of cosmic history is the story of their entanglement. The Darkness invaded the Light; in the ensuing war, particles of Light were captured and mixed into matter; and the material world was constructed, by the powers of Light, as an elaborate machine for separating the two again — straining the trapped Light out of matter and ferrying it back home. Every living thing holds imprisoned sparks of Light, and human beings above all. Salvation is therefore gnosis — the saving knowledge of this cosmic drama and of one's own nature as trapped Light — together with an ascetic life that releases the Light rather than binding it deeper into flesh. This dualism gave Manichaeism its great intellectual appeal: it took the problem of evil with total seriousness, explaining suffering not as the mysterious will of a good God but as the presence of a genuinely independent Dark.

The Elect and the Hearers

The Manichaean church was built in two tiers. The Elect (the "perfect") lived under severe discipline: strict celibacy, no property, and radical non-violence extended even to plants — for to harvest or cook was to wound the Light trapped in living things. They ate only food prepared for them by others, believing that their digestion itself helped liberate the Light within it, releasing it back toward the Kingdom. Supporting them were the far more numerous Hearers (auditors), the ordinary faithful who lived and worked in the world, kept a lighter rule, and earned merit — and a better rebirth — by feeding and sustaining the Elect. Manichaean ethics centered on the "three seals": the sealing of the mouth (from impure food and speech), the hands (from harming the Light in the world), and the breast (from lust).

The self-written scripture and the painted book

Mani's determination to fix his own canon produced a distinctive body of scripture: a set of works he wrote himself — including the Living Gospel, the Treasure of Life, the Shābuhragān (composed in Middle Persian for the shah), a book of Psalms and Prayers, and his Epistles — plus the Āržang, the Book of Pictures, a painted volume illustrating the cosmology. Almost none of it survives intact. What we have is fragments, recovered in the modern era from the sands of Central Asia (the Turfan texts, in many languages), from Egypt (the Coptic Kephalaia and Psalm-Book of Medinet Madi — the Kephalaia being a detailed secondary account of Mani's teaching), and the astonishing Cologne Mani-Codex, the smallest ancient book ever found, a parchment less than two inches tall recounting Mani's early life. Much of what was long known about the religion came, ironically, from the writings of its enemies.

From Rome to China, and out

Manichaeism spread with remarkable speed in both directions along the roads of empire. Westward it reached North Africa, Italy, Gaul, and Spain — and there it caught, for nearly a decade, the young Augustine of Hippo (ch16, ch22), who was a Manichaean Hearer before his conversion to Christianity and then became one of its most formidable opponents, so that much of our Western knowledge of the sect comes through his attacks on it. Eastward it traveled the Silk Road into Central Asia and China, where it was tolerated under the Tang and, uniquely, became for a time the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate — the only empire ever to adopt it. But everywhere it was eventually crushed: persecuted by the Sasanians as a rival, outlawed by Christian Rome, and later suppressed under Islam and in China. Its organized communities faded by around the 10th century in Central Asia, with scattered remnants surviving far longer in coastal China. A religion that had spanned a continent was extinguished so completely that "Manichaean" survives today mainly as a word for seeing the world in stark black and white.

The believer's lens

To a Manichaean, Mani (c. 216–274 CE) was the last of a line of apostles of light, completing what Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus had each taught in part. His message explained the world's suffering plainly: there are two principles, Light and Darkness, which were once separate, and our world is the result of their mixing. Particles of light are trapped in matter, in plants and in human bodies, and the whole religious life is the work of freeing that light. The Elect, who kept strict vows and ate only certain foods, were believed to release the light in them; the Hearers, the lay majority, supported them and hoped for a better rebirth. Because Mani wrote his own scriptures and illustrated his teaching in a picture-book, the Āržang, believers held that his church, unlike its predecessors, possessed the truth in an uncorrupted form, fit to be translated into every language and carried across the world.

The skeptical lens

The historian can confirm Mani's life in Sasanian Mesopotamia, the structure of his church, its striking spread from the Roman West to Tang China, its adoption by the Uyghurs, and its eventual near-total suppression. Augustine was a Hearer for years before turning against it. But much of Mani's own writing is lost, known only in fragments and in the summaries of hostile opponents, so reconstructions of the original doctrine are provisional, even with the texts recovered from Turfan, the Coptic Kephalaia and Psalm-Book, and the Cologne Mani-Codex. The popular idea that the medieval Cathars and Bogomils descend directly from Manichaeism is contested; most scholars now see a resemblance of dualist thought reinvented independently rather than an underground chain of transmission. How much of Mani's revelations and his heavenly "Twin" reflects his own teaching rather than later elaboration is also open.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Light and darkness are the master-symbols, and unusually literal ones: Manichaeism did not use light as a metaphor for good so much as identify the good with light as a substance to be gathered and freed. This is the purest light-dark encoding in any religion.
• The painted book. Mani's Āržang made Manichaeism perhaps the only major religion to place painting at the center of its scripture — the cosmic drama encoded in images precisely so it could cross language barriers, an ancient recognition that a picture could carry doctrine where words could not.
• The sun and moon as vessels. In Manichaean cosmology the sun and moon are luminous ships that ferry the rescued Light upward; the waxing and waning moon is the vessel filling with Light and then discharging its cargo toward the Kingdom — the sky itself read as the machinery of salvation, with the Milky Way (the "Column of Glory") as the great column of ascending Light.
• The three seals (mouth, hands, breast) encode the whole ascetic ethic on the body itself — each a guarded gate against re-imprisoning the Light.

Connections

Manichaeism is the great synthesizer of late antiquity, deliberately fusing Zoroastrian dualism (ch06), Gnostic cosmic drama and the trapped divine spark (ch17), Christian figures and scripture (ch16), and Buddhist ideas of rebirth and the two-tier monastic/lay community (ch11, ch20) into one designed religion. Its most famous convert-then-enemy, Augustine, carried a lifelong preoccupation with the problem of evil out of it and into the mainstream of Western Christianity (ch16, ch22). And its radical dualism is the ancestor — typologically if not by direct descent — of the later medieval dualist movements (the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars) so often labeled "neo-Manichaean." It stands as the great might-have-been of religious history: a world religion that failed.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch55.html · a comparative library of the sacred.