The Allure of Manichaeism

Editor’s Note: This is the thirteenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

The trouble with Manichaeism, some wag once wrote, is that it won’t let you eat a Big Mac. At least not without having to bear a load of guilt equal to the weight of the burger. Never mind, of course, that maybe even non-Manichees might not wish to eat one. In a world ruled by Manichees, there will be no meat on the menu. All forms of animal life are off the table, including even a soft-boiled egg. Leaving pretty much only lettuce and melons. Not a whole lot to commend there. On the upside, of course, taking a Manichee out for dinner can be a very cheap date.

So, what was Manichaeism, and why would Augustine want to spend nine years in thrall to it? I mean, besides all the lettuce and melons, what else is there? What’s in it for him? It certainly didn’t endear him to Monica, his long-suffering mother, who threw him out of the house the moment she found out he was a heretic. Fornication was one thing, she said, but heresy put her son quite beyond the pale. Peter Brown, in his biography of Augustine, reports:

Pagans regarded them with horror, orthodox Christians with fear and hatred. They were the ‘Bolsheviks’ of the fourth century: a fifth-column of foreign origin bent on infiltrating the Christian church, the bearers of a uniquely radical solution to the religious problem of their age. 

Of course, as a mere “auditor”—unlike, say, the “elect,” those truly fastidious folk, widely seen as the saints and mystics of the movement—Augustine occupied the lowest level of membership and was thus happily spared such rigors of diet and discipline. He could eat as he pleased, plus keep all of his old habits of sin. And while “avoidance of any intimate sense of guilt would later strike Augustine as the most conspicuous feature of his Manichaean phase,” writes Brown, a phase he would most bitterly regret, it certainly represented, at the time, a convenient excuse for a life of excess. 

Besides, no real evil could ever touch, much less defile, the pure spirit that Augustine aspired to become, owing to a body that was, through no fault of his own, fated to be bad. Courtesy, by the way, of the teachings of an obscure third-century Persian prophet by the name of Mani, who later got himself crucified because the authorities refused to believe he was the Holy Ghost. But for Augustine, who would remain a steadfast soldier in the struggle, “the need to save an oasis of perfection within himself formed, perhaps, the deepest strain of his adherence to the Manichees.”

Still, it is a bit of a puzzle that the flirtation should have lasted so long, especially given the stellar intelligence of someone like Augustine. Was there really a time when, as he recounts in Book III, he accepted as fact, “that a fig wept when it was plucked, and the tree which bore it shed tears of mother’s milk”? Or that, “if some sanctified member of the sect were to eat the fig—someone else, of course, would have committed the sin of plucking it—he would digest it and breathe it out again in the form of angels or even as particles of God, retching them up as he groaned in prayer”?  

Did he really credit such nonsense? A strange sort of anomaly, one might suppose in so bright a bulb as the Bishop of Hippo. But not so unusual among proud men who will often find themselves besotted by certain really dumb ideas. George Orwell, for instance, on seeing so many otherwise smart people falling for Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, shrewdly observed that there was scarcely an absurdity in circulation that would not find some so-called intellectual willing to defend it. 

All right. So, what was it about the temptation to Manichaeism, the allure it offered a young man like Augustine, that proved so powerful, so seductive that it nearly did him in? What was the motivation on which it all turned? I mean, besides the quite practical advantage of signing on with a set of ideas that would advance his career? 

Was it the dualism existing at the very heart of its metaphysical vision? A cosmos bifurcated between two principles of light and dark, good and evil? Was it the schizophrenia it induced in its victims, leaving them so dissociated in mind and body that neither part could ever quite find its way home? Because, if that were the case, this is beginning to look like a scene out of a Walker Percy novel, in which one the characters, 

has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the 
human condition like the Flying Dutchman.  

Is that the problem, the bedeviling issue facing Augustine—a state of such abstraction of self from self that his very integrity stands in peril of being lost, frittered away in search of truth untethered from the material world, the world Christ entered in order to redeem and sanctify? If so, the sequence here becomes very instructive. No sooner had his reading of Cicero led Augustine back to the Scriptures, which he had once loved under the tutelage of his mother, than he finds on closer inspection everything irksome and inelegant in it. 

So, not having found Christ in Cicero, he then goes looking for him in the Old Testament. But put off by its infelicities of style, he turns away in disgust. “To me,” he complains, “they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero.” And why is that? “Because,” he will confess in hindsight, “I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths…I was inflated with self-esteem, which made me think myself a great man.”

In fairness to Augustine, however, we should remember that, while possessed of a peerless grasp of Latin, he really did not know Greek very well, which left him to grapple with an altogether inadequate translation. And so, not wanting to abandon the search for truth, which had been the driving force of his life, he casts about for an alternative, one that would finally assuage his hunger, placing him at last before the only shrine in the world to which he might bend the knee. 

And it turns out to be Manichaeism? That’s right. He turns to the Manichees for good news about God, news that will not disappoint. Not realizing, of course, that he’s about to fall into the deepest of all traps, one which he will need nine long years to dig himself out of.   

What, exactly, had the Manichees told him? They told him not to worry his African head about the Scriptures, since none of the words were true anyway. Which instantly relieved him, of course. Think of all that dead weight, the accumulated guilt of a lifetime, vaporized in a flash. Thanks to the happy discovery that, at the end of the day, it was actually the devil who made him do it!

And hadn’t it been the Jews, who, in writing the Old Testament, actually invented guilt? And isn’t that the whole point of the Law, that no man can keep it? But liberation has come at last in the person of Mani, in the secret gnosis he and his disciples impart, assuring Augustine that, yes, there is evil in the world, and there are plenty of sinners who commit it, but the reason there are so many of us breaking bad, as it were, is due entirely to the machinations of the Demiurge, that wicked deity who fell out of the heavens and in a great spasm of rage and revenge against the good god, set about infecting all things material with his malice. 

Thus, it is the evil principle set loose in the world, whose poison has entered into the body, that accounts for whatever’s wrong with the world. “Something sins within me,” Augustine will claim, “but it is not I who sin.” Thus, he locates the source of evil—not in a will bent on doing it but in being itself, which implicates Augustine not at all in a fallen world, a world into which, by some tragic mischance, he too has fallen. 

It is the perfect solution. Of course, along the way you’ve got to jettison so many things that get in the way, like right reason, common sense, and, to be sure, the wise counsel of she who is both Mater et Magistra. Into whose sacred mysteries Augustine will need to be baptized…