The Religion of The Manichees: F. Crawford Burkitt University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

THE RELIGION OF THE MANICHEES
F. CRAWFORDBURKITT
Universityof Cambridge,Cambridge,England
nowextinct,wasa formidable
Manichaeism, rivalto Christianity
in thefourth
andfifthcenturies, inpartsof CentralAsiafora thousand
andwasa religionprofessed
forthe studyof it arethenewlydiscovered
years. Ourauthorities fragmentsof
ManicheeliteraturefromTurfan,in ChineseTurkestan,
and the polemicalwritings
of Mohammedansand Christians,includingthe Refutationsby S. Ephraim,lately
decipheredby C. W. Mitchell.
Manichaeism inthatthetwoprinciples
is dualistic, ofLightandDarkareregarded
as self-existent
andeternal, buttheyoughtto remain separate:thisworldof sense
originatedfroma disastrousmixtureof the two. It is, in fact, a Smudge. The
goodnessof God,theLordof the realmof Light,is shownnotin improvingtheworld
butin devising
meansforgettingridof it altogether,
forevilconsists
in themixture
of LightandDark.
Neitherthe fantastic of Mani,northe asceticorganization
mythology of the
Manichees, appearsto be derivedfromanythingeastof Babylonia.Noris it pessi-
misticin the senseof a beliefin the ultimatetriumphof evil; unregulated
desirewill
alwayscontinueto exist,but it willbe confinedto its ownappropriatesphere.
No champion of Manichaeism appeared at the Chicago

Congress of Religions, nor has one been seen at any similar
gathering, for the Manichees are extinct. It was on Sunday,
March 20, 242 A.D., that Mani first proclaimed his new
religion, and for about a thousand years men and women
professing his doctrines were to be found, mostly in Central
Asia, in the countries to the northeast of Persia and west of
Thibet. But now they have utterly disappeared. For cen-
turies they were persecuted and proscribed, by Christians,
by Zoroastrians, and by Mohammedans alike, and they seem
finally to have been swept out of existence in the calamities
which marked the age of Zenghis Khan and of the Mongol
dominion.
The century that saw the conversion of the Roman Empire
to Christianity and the final formulation of the Creeds was
marked also by a serious struggle between Christianity and
Manichaeism for mastery both in the East and in the West.
The religion of Mani was a missionary religion and its devoted
263
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264 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
emissarieswere to be found all over the Roman Empirewithin

a century of its first publication. And when we remember
that during the fourth century the most influential of all
Latin Christians, one of the greatest formative influences
upon medieval thought, Augustine, was for some nine years
himself a Manichee convert,' we shall realize that the danger
from Manichaeism was serious and that what the heathen
writer, Alexanderof Lycopolis,called the "New Christianity"
had once a chanceof becomingthe creedof the West.
Various oriental documents, chiefly Syriac and Arabic,
which throw considerable light on the Manichee religion,
have been published during the last fifty years, but undoubt-
edly the most sensationaldiscoveriesare those connectedwith
the name of Turfan, a district in ChineseTurkestan,northeast
of Kashgar,not far from the Siberianfrontier. It is a desolate
part of the world, which seems to be lapsing into sandy desert
after having been fertile in former ages. Various religions
had been professedthere a thousand years ago, including the
Christianity brought by Nestorian missionaries as well as
the religionof Mani, but in the end Buddhism seems to have
gained the upper hand, and great quantities of Christianand
Manichaean writings found their way into the libraries of
Buddhistmonasteriesin the region. Now they are all deserted,
the population has dispersed to better watered lands, and
European explorers have entered into possession of great
numbers of scraps of written material found buried among
the ruins. There are fragments in Syriac, fragments in
Sogdian(a sort of Middle-Persiandialect), fragmentsin various
Tatar languages, and fragments in Thibetan and Chinese.
Some are Christian, many are Buddhist, and quite a large
number belong to the Manichee literature. The expeditions
which collected them took place between 1902 and 1909, and
the results are even now hardly all published. Unfortunately
the publicationsthat have seen the light are to be looked for
' From 373-382 A.D.

THE RELIGION OF THE MANICHEES 265
in four different places, and the student who wishes to see

the original texts for himself has to find them in the Journal
Asiatique,' the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," the Sitz-
ungsberichte and Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy3 and
of the Petrograd Academy of Sciences.4
The great importance of the documents from Turfan is
that they exhibit Manichaeism as a living religion, not as a
controversial system. There are fragments of hymnbooks,
of forms for the confession of sins, of prayers, as well as of
regular treatises. But alas, it is a confused d6bris, a collection
of tattered scraps, and unless we knew something of the sub-
ject from other sources, it would add but little to our knowledge.
As I have said, there is every reason to believe that more
discoveries will be made in this region; it is possible even that
some day a more or less complete copy of one of Mani's works
may be unearthed. Meanwhile an admirable account of the
finds in their relation to what we otherwise know of the
Manichee literature is to be found in Professor Prosper Alfaric's
admirable volumes called Les Ecritures Manichkennes, which
form a quite indispensable guide to the student.5
Apart from these Turfan fragments our knowledge of the
Manichee religion is derived from accounts and refutations
written by opponents. These are all composed with preju-
dice, and some of them without adequate information, being
based upon other refutations, not upon a study of Manichee
documents themselves. Moreover, till about sixty years ago,
the sources were almost exclusively Greek or Latin. Mani
lived in Babylonia, where the native language was Syriac and
' E. Chavannes and P. Pelliot, Journ. Asiatique for 1911ii,pp. 499-621; for 1913,
pp. 99-I4, 0I5-16,378-83-
2
A. Von le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein, JRAS for pp. 277-314.
i9ii,
3 F. W. K. MUller, Sitz.,
pp. 348-52; Abhandl., 1904 and 1913; A. Von le
1904,
Coq, Sitz., igo8, pp. 398-414; ibid., 1909, pp. 1212-18; Abhandl., 1912.
4 C. Salemann, Memoires, 1904 and
90o8; Bulletin, 1907, pp. 175-84, 531-58;
1912, pp. 1-50.
s Prosper Alfaric, Les Acritures Manicheennes, I, I29-38; II,I26-36. Paris, I9I8.

the government was Persian. Most of his writings were com-

posed in Syriac, one at least was composed in Persian,' and
this helped to give his ideas a barbarous and exotic turn to the
Greeks and Romans, and so to us. During the nineteenth
century this was to a certain extent corrected by the publica-
tion of Mohammedan accounts, of which the most important
is the Fihrist of An-Nadim, edited by G. Fltigel in 1862. Pre-
viously to this our chief sources had been some polemical
treatises by Augustine, valuable because he himself had been
a Manichee for so long, and the work called the Acts of Arche-
laus. This last professes to give the story of a public dispu-
tation between Mani himself and a Christian bishop called
Archelaus, held somewhere in Mesopotamia about the year
280, in which of course Mani is decisively worsted. The story
is clearly a fiction, composed in Greek; it does not appear to
be even based on Syriac documents, nor does Archelaus seem
to be a historical personage, being quite unknown to native
Syriac literary tradition. But the work is early; it was used
by Cyril of Jerusalem in 347, and the author (said to be one
Hegemonius, of whom nothing else is known) was clearly well
acquainted with the outlines of the Manichaean system. He
hit upon the ingenious expedient of making a converted Mani-
chee explain at some length the tenets of Mani, in order that
the bishop, Archelaus, might more effectively attack the here-
siarch. This section of the work was for long the most system-
atic description of Manichaeism known, and Epiphanius
quoted it verbatim in his Panarion-a fortunate circumstance,
as only a Latin translation of the Acts of Archelaus survives.
The present century has added to our knowledge two works
of Christian controversy against the Manichees, which are
particularly noteworthy from being written in Syriac. It is
likely enough that the dialect used by Mani, who came from
Lower Babylonia, may have differed from what we call
classical Syriac, which is the dialect of Edessa in Northern
' The Shdparakdn, dedicated to the Sasanian king, Shapur.

Syria. We do know that the Manichees had a special sort

of alphabet, which differs from that in which ancient Syriac
MSS are written about as much as gothic type differs from
roman. But though the dialects may have differed, both were
forms of Aramaic; the difference was certainly not more than
that of the speech of England from that of Scotland. These
Syriac works therefore are especially valuable, for when they
quote Manichaean works we have the actual terms used by
the Manichees themselves.
The two works are the account of Manichaean cosmogony
by Theodore bar Khoni (or Khonai) expounded by Franz
Cumont in 1908,' and the two volumes of S. Ephraim's Prose
Refutations of Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan, published by
C. W. Mitchell in 1912 and 1921.2 Ephraim's work is very
prolix and contains fewer direct quotations from his adversaries
than we should have liked, but his date and country make it a
document of the first importance. He died at Edessa in 373,
so that his Refutations, written in the language that Mani
also wrote in, date from less than a century after Mani was
killed. Theodore bar Khoni lived five hundred years later
(he became a bishop in 893), but his "scholia" are valuable
because he makes considerable extracts from one of the chief
Manichaean sacred books, a work concerned with the origin of
Adam and Eve, and known to Augustine as the Epistula
Fundamenti.
Every religion for purposes of study may be considered in
two ways. It has a mythology and a philosophy. Thus in
IFranz Cumont,Recherches surle Manichgisme: Pt. I, La Cosmogonie
Manicheenne.
Brussels, 19O8. Part II, containing an extract from Severus of Antioch, edited by
M. A. Kugener and F. Cumont, I912, is also important, but it has to do with a
document originally Greek, not a Syriac original.
2
C. W. Mitchell was a young Canadian scholar, who, after taking a brilliant
degree at Cambridge, England. had settled down in London, partly in order to be near
the British Museum, where the MS of S. Ephraim's Refutations (a palimpsest most
difficult to decipher) is preserved. He went out to the war as a chaplain and was
killed at the Front, near Arras, on May 3, 1917, leaving the second volume of his work
unfinished. It was completed by Professor A. A. Bevan and the present writer and
came out last year.

orthodox Christianity the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden

may be classed as mythology; on the other hand the story is
understood to teach that man was made by God and made
good, but that the first man disobeyed and that this dis-
obedience is the cause of pain and evil in human life. This
doctrine is a philosophy, which might have been founded on a
different story; the story may be historically true or false, the
doctrine may give a true account of life or a false account. My
point is, that the story and the doctrine, the mythology and
the philosophy, are separable in thought.
It is, I think, necessary to make this distinction in the case
of a strange and foreign religion, especially one that is separated
from us by long centuries, for otherwise we become so dis-
tracted by mere externals that we fail to be impressed by what
is really of permanent interest. Especially is this the case
with the Manichee religion: its mythology is so unfamiliar and
bizarre, so utterly out of touch with modern ideas about the
external world and cosmic history, that we may easily miss
the philosophy which this mythology was supposed to set
forth, and thereby make its appeal to so many generations of
men incomprehensible.
Of course this separation of the mythology and the philoso-
phy of a religion is merely a division made for convenience, to
help to keep our own minds clear. The word mythology has
with us Christians an unfavorable connotation: it suggests
false tales. The old-fashioned Christian would object to the
distinction drawn between the story of Adam and the doctrine
of human weakness and depravity, for in his mind the two
hang together. And it is certainly true that we cannot under-
stand the Christian philosophy about sin and evil without
having learned how this philosophy grew up in connection
with the story in Genesis. We must therefore make ourselves
acquainted with the Manichee mythology, if we are to under-
stand the terms in which the Manichee philosophy was ex-
pressed. It is only when we have done this that we can

restate their ideas on human nature and destiny in our

own terms.
The Manichees, then, began by teaching about the two
principles, or roots, and the three moments, that is to say, the
past, the present, and the future. The two principles are the
Light and the Dark. The Light is essentially Good, orderly,
reasonable, kindly. The Dark is Evil, disorderly, passionate,
harmful. Or rather it would be more accurate to say that
Evil arises by a mixture of the Dark with the Light, and that
when such a mixture has taken place, progress toward a better
state of things, redemption, salvation, deliverance, is only to
be obtained by straining out the Light from the Dark. As for
the three moments, in the past the Dark and the Light were
separate, but the Dark somehow conceived a passion for the
Light, its opposite, and made an assault upon it, whereby a
portion of the Light became mixed with the Dark, was in fact
swallowed by it. As a result of this mixture of Light with
Dark this present tangible world came into being, not being
wholly of the Light or of the Dark, but being essentially mixed
and therefore evil, i.e., incongruous. In the present the Intelli-
gence, which is an essential attribute of the Light, has con-
trived a mechanism, whereby the Light is being gradually
refined from the Dark and the Dark confined by a wall or
prison, so that never again can it overpass its boundary. In
the future when this refining process is completed, all the Parts
of the Light now imprisoned in men and animals and plants
will have been refined away; what is left will be burnt out,
so far as it is destructible, and the remainder, being wholly of
the Dark, will join the original powers of darkness in their
eternal prison.
The two principles of Light and Dark are thus alone
primitive; the ultimate cause not only of that which we see
around us, but even of the hierarchy of Light, has been the
attack made by the Dark upon the region of Light. Evil
began by Darkness desiring the Light; it conceived a passion

for Good and made an assault upon it, it "felt, touched, ate,
sucked, tasted, and swallowed it"; it "passionately desired
the Light and ate it, and sucked it in and swallowedit, and
imprisoned it and mixed it in its limbs."' Mani naturally
could not explain,any more than couldhis predecessor,Bardai-
san, who had a somewhat similar theory of the beginning of
things, how this first disturbance of the eternal order took
place, but he seems somewhereto have expressedit, that it
was as if the Dark froma far distancesmelt and perceivedthat
there was "something pleasant" beyond his region. So
Ephraim tells us,2 but he misses the point when he merely
seizes on it to ask how the Light was far distant from the Dark
when the two regions lay side by side; Mani's point is that
the beginningof Evil is unregulateddesire. It was the begin-
ning of Evil, and at the same time it was the beginningof this
worldof ours.
According to Mani, the ultimate Supreme Good Being,
whom he called "the Father of Greatness"had existed from
eternity in his five realms or manifestations of Intelligence,
Reason, Thought, Imagination, and Intention. With him is
associated a kind of Queen of Heaven, called "the Mother of
the Living,"3but Mani appears to be careful to avoid using
any phrase which would imply anything in the realms of
Light analogous to sexual generation. The Manichees were
strict ascetics, and they regardedthe destructionand the pro-
duction of that which has life as equal crimes. The Father
of Greatnessdoes not beget a son, but he calls and the Primal
Man is there. This Primal Man (not Adam, but a heavenly
being) had not existed from eternity; he is evoked for the pur-
pose of repelling the attack of the Dark upon the realm of
Light.
The first combat between Light and Dark ended in the
victory of the latter. The Dark struck the Primal Man sense-
SSo Ephraim, quoting Mani (Mitchell, I, xliv and lxxxv).
2
Mitchell, I, lx. 3 Or "the Mother of Life."

THE RELIGIONOF THE MANICHEES 271
less and swallowedhis bright panoply, consisting of the pure

elements of Light, Fire, Wind, and Water. Thus Light was
mixed with Dark, and so the substanceof this world came into
being. But this unaccustomed and unnatural nourishment
was representedby the Manichees as weakening the vehe-
mence of the Powers of Darkness, so that their victory did not
last long. The Primal Man recovered from his swoon; he
called for help to the Father of Greatness,who took pity on
him and aided him with fresh Light Powers: "the Friendof
the Lights," "the GreatBan," and "the Living Spirit."
Even in a generalaccount of Manichaeism,such as this is,
it is necessaryto bring in the names of this heavenly hierarchy
in order to give the general impressionof the world in which
the Manichaeanimaginationmoved. In a sense it is animis-
tic. The universe to Mani was not only a philosophical
dualism; rather, it was a great drama played by a crowd of
supernaturalactors, angelic and demonic, and we do not get
the right impressionof it, if we reduceit to its main principles
only.
The Primal Man, now reinforced,"hunted the sons of the
Dark and flayed them, and made this Sky from their skins,
and out of their excrement he compactedthe Earth, and of
their bones he forgedand raised and piled up the Mountains,'
and he did all this in order to strain out from them by rain
and dew the Parts of the Light that had been mingledin them.
Thus our world was constructed, composed of an amalgam
that never ought to have mixed. Theodore bar Khoni2tells
us that it is held in place by five heavenly Powers, evoked for
the purposeby the Father of Greatnessfrom his own intellec-
tual essence. They are also namedin Greekand Latin sources,
with barbaroushigh-soundingtitles, like so many of the beings
conjuredup by Mani. Therewerethe Splenditenens(in Greek,
Phengokatochos), the Rex Honoris, the Adamas Heros, the
GloriosusRex, and the Atlas Maximus(in Greek,Omophoros).
Mitchell, I, xxxiii. SCumont, p. 22.

Of these it was the function of the Splenditenensto hold the

world suspendedlike a chandelier,while the Atlas bears it on
his shoulders. This last figure was no doubt borrowed by
Mani from the commonstock of ancient mythologicalnations,
but the Splenditenensseems to be his own invention.,
The Sons of the Dark (or the Archons, as they also are
called)being thus chainedup, a certainamountof the absorbed
Light was refinedout of them, and fromit were made the Sun
and Moon and the Stars. But much yet remained in the
Archons,and so a new personagewas evoked, the Messenger,
called also the Virgin of Light, who "manifests her beauty to
the Archons,so that they long to run after her.""2As a result
plants and animalswereproducedon the Earth by the Archons,
who at last, fearingthat they would lose all the Light they had
absorbed,joined together to form a new being, Adam, made
in the image of God, i.e., in the image of the Divine Primal
Man. Once again their design fails, for Jesus the Brilliant
(ziwand)-his precise relationshipto the Father of Greatness
and the Primal Man is not explained-comes to Adam as he
lies inert upon the ground. Adam looks at himself and recog-
nizes what he is, i.e., that he is a being at least partly made of
the Light. "Jesus made him stand up and gave him to eat
of the Tree of Life. Then Adam looked and wept, he lifted
up his voice like a roaring lion, he tore his hair, he beat his
breast, and said 'Woe, woe, to the creator of my body, to
him who has bound my soul to it, and to the rebels who have
enslavedme!' "3
So much for the past. In the present, accordingto Mani,
a great mechanismhas been contrived for refiningout of the
world what is left of the Parts of the Light that had been
'Mani called the Atlas Sabbald, "the Supporter." The Splenditenens is called
$Sfith-Ziwd by Theodore. I venture to think this meant "Tongs of Brilliance."
2
Mitchell, I, lxi.
3 Cumont, pp. 46 f. Cumont himself (p. 49) regards this striking passage, which he
quotes from Theodore bar Khoni, as the actual peroration of the Epistula Fundamenti,
one of Mani's most widely read works.

THE RELIGIONOF THE MANICHEES 273
absorbed; the arrangementof this mechanismwas in fact the

salvation broughtby Jesus, when he came on earth and those
that saw him supposederroneouslythat he was really a man.'
By this mechanismor arrangementthe Light that is separated
out is conveyedto the Moon, wherebyit waxes for fifteendays,
and then when full dischargesits load of Light for another
fifteendays into the Sun.
Mani seems to have taken over the notion, originallyStoic,
that the spirits of the just live on in the Milky Way. Their
name for it was the Pillar of Glory (Estfn Shubhd)." It is
also called in the Acts of Archelausthe Perfect Man, alluding
to Eph. 4:13; the redeemedsouls are collected in the Pillar
of Gloryuntil all the particlesof the absorbedLight have been
refined out of the substance of the Archons and the Primal
Man is perfectagain.
The most potent agents in refining out the Light are, of
course, the fully initiated disciples of Mani, the Zaddiks, as
they were called, i.e., the righteous.3 The Manichee com-
munity, like the Buddhists, consisted of monks and laymen,
in Manicheephraseologythe Righteousand the Hearers. The
righteous Zaddiks were the only true Manichees, just as the
monks are the only true Buddhists. But as I gather from the
documents the number of the Zaddilkswas small, and the
highest initiates of all, whom Ephraimcalls JKephalpals,4seem
to have been a mere handful. Certainly they were able to
give all their time to their mysteriouswork, for therewas very
little else that it was permitted to a fully initiated Manichee
to do. They might neither take life nor produce it, whether
animal or vegetable, so that agricultureand cooking were as
much taboo as murderand adultery. A Zaddikcouldonly eat
what had been preparedfor him by his disciple; to eat that
was not sin, for it would go bad if the Zaddikdid not consume
SSo Acta Archelai viii.
2
The original Syriac term occurs in Mitchell, Vol. II, p. 208, 1.37.
3 In Arabic, Zindik. 4 Mitchell, II, xcvii f.

it! It is interesting to notice that women also were permitted

to become fully initiate Manichees.'
It should be mentioned that there is practically nothing to
connect the origins of the religion of Mani with Buddhism.
The organization of the Marcionite church, owing to their re-
jection of "holy" matrimony, was similar to that of the Mani-
chees, and something like it seems to have prevailed even
among orthodox churchmen in the Euphrates Valley before
the Roman Empire became Christian. In general, the lives
of the Manichaean devotees must have been spent in a manner
not unlike that of other Christian ascetics in the East; "their
works are like our works, as their fast is like our fast," as
Ephraim confesses. No doubt they spent much of their time
in transcribing and ornamenting their sacred writings, as may
be gathered from Augustine and from the remains of very
handsome manuscripts recovered from Central Asia. In this
they were followers of Mani himself, who "painted in colours
on a scroll the likenesses of the wickednesses which he created
out of his mind."2
As to the future, the Manichees, like the Christians, looked
forward to a victorious end of the present state of things.
When all the Parts of the Light have been refined out of the
base material, Evil, which is the result of the mixture of Light
and Dark, will have disappeared. The Earth of Light, in
which God dwells and which is itself divine, will be complete
and inviolate, and the Powers of the Dark will be confined
within their own domain, round which Ban, the heavenly
builder, has now built a wall and fence, to be the Grave of the
Dark forever, so that never again will it invade the realms
of Light and produce another Smudge, such as our present
world is, according to the Manichaean view.
'Mitchell, I, xciii. In the Life of Porphyry, bishop of Gaza, written by his con-
temporary, Mark the Deacon, there is a lifelike account of a Manichee woman mission-
ary, named Julia, who came to Gaza soon after 400 A.D.
2
Mitchell, I, xciii.

The world, a Smudge; that is the essence of the philosophy

which we are considering. It is not that God's good world
has been smudged, as the Christians say, whether by the envy
of the devil or the weakness of man. The Manichee philosophy
is more radical than this; it declares that the world we live in is
itself a smudge, the result of a regrettable accident, like the
spilling of an ink-pot, and that God's good kindness has been
shown not in making the world, but in contriving means for
erasing the blot without damaging the original fabric. I ven-
ture to think that this uncompromising idea has still a certain
appeal, and that it gives the Manichee religion a curious fasci-
nation, notwithstanding its fantastic barbarian mythology.
There must indeed have been something vital in the preaching
of Mani. The missionary impulse, so well maintained for two
hundred years, the notable steadfastness in danger and perse-
cution which characterizes the Manichees, prove that their
theology, unscientific and bizarre as it is, was yet to them in
some respects a satisfaction of their needs, a way of salvation
from the perplexities of this painful world. And Mani, too,
must have counted for something. If history has any lesson
to teach us about new religions, it is that they arise when a
system or view of the world, which is not too far away from
popular aspiration, is combined with a forceful and attractive
personality.
To us Manichaeism is so encumbered with its mythology
that we can easily miss those features in it which constitute its
real strength. The religion of Mani did explain the presence
of Evil in the world we live in, and it did combine practical
pessimism with ultimate optimism-perhaps the most favor-
able atmosphere for the religious sentiment. It is true that
the Manichees regarded this tangible world as the result of a
regrettable accident, so that no true improvement is possible
until it is altogether abolished. As regards this world they
were frankly pessimistic; it was bad to begin with and it
would go from bad to worse. But they believed that the

Light was really greater and stronger than the Dark, that in
the end all that was good in their essence would be collected
together in the domain of Light, a realm altogether swayed by
Intelligence, Reason, Mind, Good Imagination, and Good
Intention; and though at the same time there would always
exist another region, dark and dominated by unregulated
Desire, it would only be peopled by beings for whom such a
region was appropriate, and they would be separated off for-
ever from invading the region of Light.
Such was the religion of the Manichees, a religion that with
all the fervor of new convictions challenged Christianity at
the very moment of its triumph over paganism. The challenger
did not make good its claim, and indeed, whatever faults
we may see in fourth- and fifth-century Christianity, we may
be thankful that it did not do so. But I venture to think that
the Manichaean philosophy is by no means contemptible;
it has a permanent claim to our respect. In the future, when
more documents have been recovered and deciphered from
the deserts of Turfan, we are likely to have our acquaintance
with the Manichee literature considerably extended. It will
add to the interest of these documents if we have some sympa-
thetic understanding of the ideas which animate them, ideas
which sustained so many generations of pious souls in endeavor-
ing, so far as they knew how, to choose light rather than dark-
ness.


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THE RELIGION OF THE MANICHEES

No champion of Manichaeism appeared at the Chicago

This content downloaded from 094.204.240.241 on June 23, 2020 01:34:19 AM

emissarieswere to be found all over the Roman Empirewithin

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in four different places, and the student who wishes to see

s Prosper Alfaric, Les Acritures Manicheennes, I, I29-38; II,I26-36. Paris, I9I8.

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the government was Persian. Most of his writings were com-

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Syria. We do know that the Manichees had a special sort

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orthodox Christianity the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden

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restate their ideas on human nature and destiny in our

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less and swallowedhis bright panoply, consisting of the pure

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Of these it was the function of the Splenditenensto hold the

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absorbed; the arrangementof this mechanismwas in fact the

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it! It is interesting to notice that women also were permitted

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The world, a Smudge; that is the essence of the philosophy

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