Manichaeism (also called Manicheism and Manicheanism) is not a Christian sect, but at times it’s been treated that way, and it was also a rival for Christianity, during the classical period. The two faiths were certainly aware of one another, and some adherents converted from one to the other (most famously, St Augustine had been a Manichaean but converted to Christianity).
This faith was founded by an Iranian from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) named Mani. We know of him from a number of sources, many written by later Manicheans which are legendary in nature. A recently-discovered codex, composed about 400 CE, is perhaps the most reliable source of information about him.
He was born around 215 CE and raised in the vicinity of Babylon by parents who belonged to the Elkasaites (or Elcesaites or other related names). This was a Judaic sect that acknowledged Jesus of Nazareth but was centered on John the Baptist; over time it acquired some Gnostic traits. As a young man, Mani felt called to break from the faith he’d been raised in. He reportedly traveled east for a few years and learned about Buddhism, but returned. Along the way he appears to have also learned from several different Christian sects, and also he investigated Zoroastrianism.
Upon his return, Mani collected his newfound ideas and reportedly presented himself to Shah Shapur I, giving the monarch a book of his teachings that he’d composed. As far as is known Shapur remained a Zoroastrian, but he indulged and even patronized Mani, whose career as a spiritual teacher got underway.
Mani’s time as a preacher lasted a few decades. His ideas were a combination of Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian notions, along with possible influences from Jainism. The faith he taught was predicated on dualism and was supposed to be a continuation of the work of Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus. Some much later Manichaeans would claim Mani had been the reincarnation of all three.
The dualism central to Manicheanism appears to have come from Zoroastrianism. In a manner similar to that religion, Mani taught the existence of two primal divine beings: God, and the Devil. They live in separate realms, of light and of darkness. The world was created as a kind of by-product from an ongoing struggle between beings of light and of darkness. This struggle erupted because creatures of the Darkness became aware of the Light and wanted to consume it.
The first humans, Adam and Eve, in fact had been spawned by creatures of Darkness who’d consumed huge amounts of Light. Thus, each was literally a mix of both Light and Dark. Almost every aspect of the world is a mixture of Light and Dark; of good and evil.
Thus, Manichaeism’s duality doesn’t take quite the same form as was found in Gnosticism or in earlier Hellenic dualist systems, which treated the physical as fundamentally evil and the spirit as fundamentally good. Everything physical was a mix of both, and nearly everything spiritual was, also.
The above is a very simple encapsulation of what Mani taught and his followers believed. A complex mythology was behind it all that involved three separate “creation” events spawned by the King of Light and reacted to by the forces of Darkness. This mythology also deals with a number of different beings spawned by, or who serve, the two cosmic Kings (Jesus is one of them, serving the Light).
In this regard, too, Manichaeism follows a model similar to that of a number of Gnostic sects.
Among the notions at the heart of Manichaeism is that humans are prone to “falling asleep” or losing a sense of their place in the world and the spiritual reality they live in. Prophets are sent by God (the King of Light) periodically to “awaken” them and teach what they must know. Jesus the Splendor was one of these, a being of Light in itself; so too were human prophets Zoroaster, the Buddha, and of course Mani himself (the last of them).
It was the knowledge the prophets brought that provided salvation. In this regard it was similar to Gnostic sects of Christianity. However, this knowledge was not quite the subjective gnōsis of the Divine encouraged by Gnosticism. Manichaeism taught that humans should also learn to know themselves as well as the Divine.
This faith was divided into two “wings” (for lack of a better term). On the one hand were the Elect who essentially took vows and were bound by “the Three Seals” (of the mouth, hands, and heart). On the other hand were the Hearers, who had learned about the faith and participated in it, but hadn’t taken any vows and weren’t bound by the Three Seals.
The Elect couldn’t eat meat or imbibe alcohol. They couldn’t destroy or injure anything containing Light (i.e. living things), which meant they were unable to harvest crops or cook anything. They also were strictly celibate.
This meant the religion depended on the work of the Hearers. They would provide meals (only one daily, comprised of vegetables, and a minimal amount, at that) to the Elect and attended to them in other ways. Male and female Elect were strictly separated and lived in monasteries. They also were to remain secluded in their seminaries; they could travel only for the purpose of evangelizing for the faith.
This split nature would later emerge in other faiths, such as medieval Catharism, divided as it was between the parfait (perfecti, or “perfect”) and credentes (“believers”).
Mani never had many converts within his own lifetime. It was largely a Mesopotamian phenomenon for most of his career, although with the assistance of the Shah, he did arrange for missionary expeditions, sending his faith both west and east.
Although Mani had thrived under the rule of Shah Shapur, his fortunes changed dramatically after his son Bahram I ascended the throne. He’d emerged from among his brothers and half-brothers as ruler, with the support of Zoroastrian priest Kartir. Only a few years into his reign, at Kartir’s urging, Mani was imprisoned, and either died while imprisoned or was executed, shortly after.
The faith was suppressed within the Shah’s realm. It also ran afoul of Roman authorities after it had seeped into some of the Empire’s larger cities. Emperor Diocletian famously ordered it purged from his empire (and about a year later he added Christianity to his religious hit-list). Manichaeism did linger within Persia, and also continued within the Roman Empire for another couple centuries, having survived Diocletian’s persecution (as had Christianity). But by the start of the 6th century CE it had more or less died out in Persia and had all but vanished from what was the Roman Empire by that century’s end.
The east, however, was another story entirely. It slowly crept along trade routes through central Asia and eventually reached into China by the 7th century. It was subsequently bolstered by the conversion of the Sogdians and the Uyghur Khaganate to the west and north of China, both of which controlled parts of the most important trade route.
In some cities of central Asia, Manichaeism became the prevailing, or even dominant, religion. All of this helped it along and gave Manichaeism a kind of “base,” if you will, from which to operate.
In China, Manichaeans’ refusal to worship the Buddha caused problems and periodic waves of persecution. Still, it managed to linger on there, in ways that were impossible in Iran, northern Africa, or Europe.
Perhaps the most famous Manichaean adherent was none other than the Church Father, St Augustine. As a young man, he was a Manichaean for nine years. This distressed his Christian mother, however, it satisfied his intellect (at the time, he considered Christianity to be a simple-minded religion). Of note, being a Manichaean didn’t prevent him from “living in sin” with a lover, with whom he had a child.
He’d made a living as a teacher of rhetoric. As such, he happened to study Platonism in northern Italy. There, he met St Ambrose, who eventually converted him to Christianity.
Quite thoughtfully, Augustine provided an account of his time as a Manichaean, in his autobiography Confessions. It is from him that we know as much as we do, about the Manichean movement in the 5th century, at least in the West.
These two faiths are different religions, even if the founder of Christianity plays a part in Manichaeism. However, at times, Manichaeism was viewed as a heresy by Christians and Manichaeans sometimes referred to themselves as “true Christians” (since they claimed to have understood Jesus correctly).
Moreover, as noted originally, Mani himself had been an Elkasaite Gnostic who considered himself an apostle of Jesus, not unlike Paul aka Saul of Tarsus. Manichaeism did have something in common with Gnostic Christianity — even if it also had a lot other content from other religious traditions.
Within the Greco-Roman world, Manichaeans and Christians were sometimes mistaken for one another by outsiders. Christians opposed the faith in the strongest terms, some of them considering it a Christian “heresy,” while others recognized it as a different faith, but one that posed a threat to Christianity’s existence.
And that might be the most important pivot-point between the two. Manichaeanism and Christianity appealed to many of the same sorts of people: the urban lower and middle classes. Its teachings weren’t any more foreign to such people than Christianity was; and in some cases it had a more attractive pedigree, particularly in regions that bordered Persia and found anything related to Persia fascinating. It’s this traditional fascination with Persia that may explain the story of the Magi paying homage to the infant Jesus included in the gospel of Matthew.
Another religion that rivaled Christianity, Mithraism, had a similar Persian pedigree, at least ostensibly (its chief deity was the Persian god Mithra). But in short order it became the plaything of the Roman legions and some of the aristocratic classes, leaving out nearly all the urban lower and middle classes.
Manichaeism and Christianity had other commonalities. Both were by far minority religions in the Roman Empire; were generally frowned upon by larger Greco-Roman society; and for brief spells actively persecuted within the Roman Empire. This might have created the potential for them to be drawn together, but that doesn’t appear to have happened.
At any rate, Manichaeanism remained a rival for Christianity for a very long time, into the 6th century or so, within the Roman Empire.
In 382, Emperor Theodosius I issued an edict denouncing Manichaeanism and allowing officials to pursue them, explicitly allowing third-party reports to fuel prosecutions. This edict wasn’t an immediate death-knell for Manichaeanism within the Empire, since it wasn’t uniformly enforced (it’s quite possible this order was ignored by many governors, prefects and procurators). But it did help put the faith in decline within the Empire.
With Christianity free to blossom within the Empire and Manichaeanism discouraged and on occasion persecuted, it was inevitable that the latter would eventually die out in the Empire and in its successor kingdoms in the West.
Manichaeism had a very small presence in places such as its homeland (i.e. Mesopotamia) and in other parts of the Near East. As noted previously, it had a far larger one in central Asia, and continued there for centuries. It appears to have died out in central Asia by the 14th century or so, but it’s difficult to know why. Certainly the purges of Timur the Lame — a fanatical Sunni Muslim who targeted people of other faiths, including Manichaeans and Nestorian Christians — cannot have helped. But it appears already to have been in decline, even before his time.
In its homeland, Egypt, Syria, and Libya, Manichaeism was wiped out by the Islamic conquests. The Muslim conquerors didn’t generally accept it as being of Abrahamic origin, or a “religion of the Book.” Thus, for the most part it wasn’t tolerated under Islamic rule as Judaism and Christianity were.
If Manichaeanism exists anywhere in the world at this moment, it’s in remote parts of China, with very few followers. There may be anywhere from a couple dozen to a couple hundred, but not many more.
Also, at one time Manichaeanism had a sizeable body of sacred scripture, but today, little of it is extant. What there is, is often fragmented and incomplete. Some works are known only through quotations left behind by Christian heresy-hunters. The passage of history hasn’t been kind to Manichaeanism — even if it managed to survive into contemporary times (although with minuscule numbers of adherents).
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