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It was in this third century, critical in so many ways for
Christianity, that a new religion began to be preached which, although
proscribed everywhere from its very first appearance, did not cease to
trouble the peace of the world for another thousand years. This was
that famous Manicheeism which Christians and Mohammedans, Pagan
emperors of Rome and Chinese mandarins, all in their turn repressed
with all possible severity. It was a cult that very soon disappeared
from sight indeed, but it persisted as the strongest religious
undergrowth of all time; and it would be a bold assertion to say that
we have yet heard the last of it. There are few features of the general
history of the Church better known than its persistent struggle against
the Manichees -- the Bougres, Cathari, Albigenses of the Middle Ages --
and yet it is only within the last twelve years that we have had any
truly reliable information about the origins of the sect and about its
founder. [ ]
Mani, a Persian by birth, set himself to found a new religion which
should contain all the religious wisdom hitherto known. In this
conscious and ambitious syncretist, that long drawn out business comes
to its final perfection. Mani is the contemporary of those imperial
patrons of syncretism, Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus, and in the
years during which they enthroned the Syrian influences at Rome, Mani,
from the other side of Syria, made the long pilgrimage still further to
the East, in his search for yet more religious wisdom, to India and to
the Buddhists.
For Mani, there had been, in the career he had chosen, three great
practitioners already, Our Lord, Zoroaster, and Buddha, three
interpreters of a single wisdom. They had only preached: Mani would
also write, and so secure for "my religion" a world empire such as no
religion had so far known. The time was indeed to come when it would,
for a time, win over the great intelligence of St. Augustine in Africa,
and gain a real hold as far to the east as China. And the main arm of
its propaganda would be the book, and its illustrations.
There is something of Montanism in the new religion, for Mani declares
himself to be one body and spirit with the Paraclete, the spirit sent
by Jesus Christ. At the same time it embodies a mythological doctrine
about the origin of the universe which is akin to that of such Gnostics
of the previous century as Basilidie's and Valentine. And Mani owes
much to Marcion also.
In this new amalgam, the existence of two first principles of all
things -- the good and the bad -- is all important, for around the
unending struggle of the good god and the bad god everything else
turns. This the key to the whole system, as it is the key to Mani's
explanation of the universe.
The ascetic ideal was pitched high -- so high, indeed, that the sect
was divided into the Perfect, bound to practice what it was the
unforgiveable sin to fail in even once, and the Hearers, who accepted
the ideal indeed but, fearful of their ability to live up to it, put
off their reception until the last hour of life. The seeming simplicity
with which the theory of a dual first principle solved the torturing
riddle of the existence of evil, the stiff ascetic ideals, and the
spectacle of the life of the Perfect, fascinated thousands, in Mani's
time and for centuries afterwards. For these devotees the moral
horrors, and such repugnant practices as the ritual slow suicide, were
altogether obscured. Nothing availed, in the end, but to destroy the
Manichees, as so much noxious human vermin -- so, everywhere, said
those to whom it fell to undertake the work of destruction. Mani was
not only a cool headed prophet, but an organiser of genius. The new
religion was strongly built, and the prophet's first coadjutors were
well chosen. Mani's violent end -- he was crucified by the Persian king
Bahram in 272 -- did not appreciably halt the progress of his sect. It
gradually drew to itself the remains of the Marcionite church, and
established itself in the lands between Persia and China. It was the
last phase of organised Gnosticism, and the most successful of all.
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