Justified True Belief

(●) The Persian prophet who set out to found the one religion for the whole world, and whose account of evil the church had to answer before it could state its own. + Most founders of religions did not plan on being founders. Mani did. He looked at the faiths he knew, decided that each of them had been given to one nation in one language and had then been garbled by followers who wrote things down badly or not at all, and set out to fix both problems at once. He wrote his own scriptures in his own hand so that nobody could revise them after he was gone. He had them translated while he was still alive. He sent missionaries east and west in his own lifetime, with instructions to preach in the local tongue. And because many of the people he wanted to reach could not read, he painted a picture book of his teaching so that they could be shown it instead. It worked for a thousand years. Manichaean communities ran from the wheat farms of Roman North Africa to the trading cities of the Silk Road and on to the coast of China, and they outlasted the Sasanian empire that killed him and the Roman one that outlawed them. He matters to Christian readers for a simpler reason than that, though. Mani called himself an apostle of Jesus Christ, claimed to be the Helper that Jesus had promised, and offered the ancient world a solution to the problem of evil so clean that Augustine of Hippo, the man who would go on to shape Western theology more than anyone but Paul, spent nine years of his youth inside the movement. The doctrine of evil that Augustine eventually wrote, and that Christians have used ever since, was hammered out against Mani. There is an irony in all that care. Of the many books he wrote in Syriac, not one survives whole. What is known of him comes from fragments dug out of the sand at Turfan and Medinet Madi, from quotations preserved by his enemies, and from a Greek parchment codex, a codex being a book with pages sewn along a spine rather than a rolled scroll, about the size of a matchbox, 4.5 by 3.8 centimetres, the smallest ancient book anyone has found. It is a life of Mani, and it is titled On the Origin of His Body.

(●) 216 AD: Born on a canal in Babylonia and raised inside a sect that washed before every meal. + Mani gave his own birth date, and it is one of the few things about him that can be pinned down. In a chapter of his Persian book the Shâbuhragân he named the year by the reckoning the Babylonian astronomers used, and the Muslim scholar al-Biruni copied the figure out nearly eight centuries later along with the village: Mardinu, on the upper canal of Kutha, in the flat irrigated country of northern Babylonia, not far from Ctesiphon on the Tigris, which was the Parthian capital the year he was born and would be the Sasanian one within a decade. Converted to our calendar the date comes out at 14 April 216 AD. His father was Pattikios, a man from Ecbatana in the Iranian highlands who had moved west and then joined one of the many baptizing communities living along the canals: Jewish-Christian in temperament, ascetic, which is to say living hard on purpose and going without comforts other people took for granted, and preoccupied with ritual purity, which is cleanness of a religious kind rather than the kind that comes off with soap. Ancient writers call them Elchasaites, after a founder named Elchasai. Mani was brought into the community as a small boy and grew up in it, so the rules of the house were the only rules he knew. A later tradition makes his mother a woman named Maryam from the Armenian branch of the Parthian royal house, which may be family pride rather than fact. The washing is the detail to hold on to, because everything turns on it. These were people who bathed before prayer, bathed after contact with anything unclean, and washed their vegetables before eating them, on the conviction that holiness is something you can rinse yourself into. A boy raised among them saw the rite performed several times a day, every day, for years. And Persia itself was changing under his feet. In 224, when Mani was eight, the Parthian dynasty that had ruled for nearly five centuries fell to Ardashir, and the Sasanian empire that would decide his life was founded.

(●) c. 228 and c. 240 AD: Twice a companion he called his Twin told him the water was doing nothing. + The account comes from the tiny Greek codex now at the University of Cologne, which was bought from Egyptian dealers in 1969 as four decayed lumps of parchment, each about the size of a palm, and painstakingly separated back into leaves. It is a life of Mani assembled from the memoirs of his earliest disciples, each chunk labelled with the name of the man who told it, and it preserves sentences of Mani’s own. It covers his childhood and his years among the baptists and then breaks off, which is exactly the stretch of his life no other source could reach. What it describes is a boy of about twelve visited by a figure he called his Twin, and a young man of about twenty-four visited by the same figure again. The Greek word the codex uses is syzygos, which means a partner or a yokefellow, one of a matched pair: think of two oxen under a single yoke, no use at all on their own and made to pull together. That is the relation Mani thought he was in. He did not understand this companion as a stranger arriving from outside, then, so much as his own true self, sent on ahead of him and now come back to tell him who he was and what he was to say. Whatever a reader makes of that, it is worth noticing when the second visit came. It came at about the age when a young man in that community would have been expected to settle into it for good. The message both times was that the sect was wrong about the thing it cared most about. Purity is not something water does to a person. Purity is knowledge, on this account, and no amount of scrubbing will substitute for it. Say that in a house where the bathing is the whole point and you have said something that cannot be smoothed over. The codex records him arguing this out with the elders over their own practices, including their habit of washing vegetables before eating them, and the arguments have the ring of a real household quarrel: a young man who had been raised on their rules turning those rules over one at a time and finding nothing underneath.

(●) c. 240 AD: He broke with the baptists, took his father and two converts, and sailed for India. + The break was not amicable. The community that had raised him turned on him, and he left it with a very small following: his father, who seems to have gone over to his son, and two young men from the settlement. It is an unpromising start for a world religion, four men walking out of a village on a canal. He went straight to the least obvious place. Taking ship down the Persian Gulf, he crossed to the Indus valley and spent perhaps two years in the region the sources call Turan, the dry highland country west of the river in what is now western Pakistan. Manichaean tradition says he converted the local king, the Turan-shah, and while the tradition is naturally flattering to its founder, the visit itself is well enough attested. What Mani brought back from it shows in his vocabulary ever afterward. He had walked into a Buddhist country, and he came home speaking of the Buddha as a genuine messenger of God, using Indian words for his own institutions, and thinking of his mission in a way no Mediterranean teacher did: as something to be carried east as readily as west. That habit of mind is the single most original thing about him, and it is worth pausing on. No founder before him had made translation part of the plan and seen to it himself. Mani decided from the beginning that his message would not stay in the language it was born in, and instead of leaving the crossing to whoever came after him, he built it into the work.

(●) c. 242 AD: Shapur I received him at court, and for thirty years he preached under royal protection. + Mani came back from India to a new king. Shapur I, the Sasanian who would go on to capture a Roman emperor alive, had succeeded his father Ardashir, and Mani got himself an audience. He arrived with a gift, and the gift was a book: the Shâbuhragân, a summary of his teaching written in Middle Persian and named for the king. It is the only work he ever wrote in Persian rather than in his native Aramaic, which tells you what it was for. Shapur kept him. Manichaean sources say the king gave him letters of protection and freedom to preach anywhere in the empire, and the sources on the other side do not contradict it. For roughly thirty years, through Shapur’s long reign and the single year of his son Hormizd I, Mani travelled and organized without interference. Think about what that means. The Sasanian state was a Zoroastrian one, which is to say its kings kept the old Persian religion of Zoroaster and its priests were never far from the throne, and for thirty years a man teaching a brand new religion inside it was left alone. That is a remarkable stretch of good weather. He used it to build the machine. Missionaries went out with assignments: a disciple named Addâ west into the Roman provinces of Syria, Egypt and eventually Africa, in company with a Pattikios whom many scholars take to be Mani’s own father; Mar Ammo east into Khorasan and toward central Asia, carrying the texts to be put into Parthian. Communities were founded, letters went back and forth to keep them in line, and the scriptures were copied and translated as fast as scribes could work. By the time the protection ran out, the religion had a bloodstream of its own and no longer depended on him.

(●) c. 273 AD: A new king listened to a Zoroastrian priest instead, and Mani was summoned to Gundeshapur. + Hormizd I died after about a year, and his successor Bahram I had different friends. The most formidable of them was Kartir, a Zoroastrian priest who spent his career turning a loose national religion into an organized state church with himself near the top of it, and who left rock inscriptions saying so. In them he lists the groups he struck down: Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Nazarenes, Christians, Maktak, which is usually taken to mean the baptizing sects, and Zandiks. Manichaeans are nowhere named outright, and scholars still argue over which of those last two words covers Mani’s people, though translators commonly render Zandiks as Manichaeans. A priest with that programme could not leave a rival prophet walking around the empire with royal letters in his bag. Mani was summoned to court at Bēth Lapaṭ, the city the Greeks called Gundeshapur, in the province of Khuzistan. The audience is described in a Middle Persian fragment recovered at Turfan which reports the eyewitness account of Nūhzādag, Mani’s own interpreter, and the humiliation in it is very exactly observed: Mani was left waiting while the king sat at his dinner, and the king came out from the table to deal with him at last and put the question that settled it. What use was a man who went neither fighting nor hunting, and who could not even be relied on to heal the sick? There is a sting in the setting that is easy to miss. Gundeshapur was a city Shapur had built with Roman prisoners of war, and it would later hold one of the great medical schools of the ancient world. Mani had been welcome there under one king and was arrested there under the next, and nothing about his teaching had changed in between.

(●) c. 274 AD: He died in chains after twenty-six days, and his followers called it his crucifixion. + He was put in irons and left there. Manichaean sources count the days, twenty-six of them, and say he died in the prison at Gundeshapur. Counted from the birth date he gave himself, that leaves him fifty-seven if the earlier of the two possible years is right and sixty if the later one is. The body was not returned to his people. Accounts of what was done to it differ, and al-Biruni gives two of them on the same page. The first is the famous one, that Bahram had him flayed and the skin stuffed with straw and hung up at the gate of Gundeshapur, which was still called the Mani gate seven centuries later when al-Biruni wrote. The second he took from a Christian writer who had it from a book by one of Mani’s own pupils, and it is plainer and probably closer to what happened: that Mani was chained hand and foot and died in his irons, and that his head was set up at the entrance of the royal tent while his body was thrown into the street as a warning to others. Mutilation after death is the common thread, and something like it is likely. The date is the one thing that will not come clear. The Manichaean records give the day by an Aramaic lunar calendar, and they never state the year in a form that can be carried across into ours, so the death lands either on 2 March 274 or on 26 February 277 depending on how the Sasanian regnal years are counted. A regnal year is a year numbered from a king’s accession rather than from a fixed era, the way an English document might be dated to the fourth year of a reign, and if you are unsure when the reign began you are unsure of every date inside it. Reference books print both. 274 is the more commonly printed of the two, and the "c." in front of it is doing real work. His followers named the event the Crucifixion, and told it in the shape of a passion narrative: the twenty-six days, the chains, the faithful disciples, the enemy priest. Some of them said that he had suffered as every righteous messenger before him had suffered. The parallel to Christ was deliberate and, on Mani’s own principles, strange, since he denied that Christ had a body that could be crucified at all.

(●) After 274 AD: Every empire that met his church tried to stamp it out, and it took a thousand years. + Persia kept killing Manichaeans after Mani, and Rome joined in fast. An imperial rescript from Diocletian to Julianus, the proconsul of Africa, dated 31 March in either 297 or 302, ordered the leaders burned along with their books, the rank and file beheaded, and men of standing stripped of their property and sent to the mines. A rescript was the emperor’s written answer to an official who had asked him what to do, and an answer of that kind carried the force of law wherever the same question came up again, which is how a reply addressed to one proconsul became a rule for a whole empire. It is one of the earliest Roman laws against a religion as such, and it came down before the great persecution of the Christians began in 303. The Christian emperors who followed kept the laws on the books and added to them. None of it worked quickly. Augustine was a Manichaean Hearer, a member of the outer and less demanding of the religion’s two ranks, in Roman Africa in the 370s, more than seventy years after Diocletian. In the east the religion did better than survive: in 763 the Uyghur ruler Bögü Qaghan adopted it, and for eighty years a steppe empire on China’s northern border had Manichaeism as its state religion, the only time that ever happened anywhere. Chinese Manichaean communities persisted for centuries after that, and a small stone temple at Cao’an in Fujian, with a carved figure of Mani on its back wall, is still standing. The texts came back in the twentieth century, from three directions at once. German expeditions to the Turfan oasis between 1902 and 1914 brought home thousands of fragments in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian and Uyghur. In 1929 a Coptic library turned up at Medinet Madi in Egypt, including the Kephalaia, a Psalm-Book and a book of Homilies. And in 1969 the little Greek codex reached Cologne. A religion that had been known almost entirely through the writings of the men who hated it could suddenly be heard in its own voice.

What He Taught

(T1) Light and darkness are two kingdoms, and neither one made the other. + Anybody who has watched a decent person do something cruel, or read a newspaper on a bad morning, has felt the pull of the question Mani was answering. If one good God made everything, where did this come from? The usual answers are hard work. Mani’s answer took about a sentence: the cruelty comes from somewhere else, because there is somewhere else. This is dualism, which simply means holding that reality has two first principles instead of one: two starting points, with nothing behind either of them. Mani’s two were a kingdom of Light ruled by the Father of Greatness and a kingdom of Darkness ruled by its own prince, and the crucial word about them is unbegotten. Unbegotten means what it sounds like. Nothing fathered either kingdom, nothing produced it, and there is no earlier thing it came out of. So neither made the other, neither came first, and neither can be traced back to a single source, because if you could trace evil back to God you would be standing exactly where the question started. He arranged the whole story into three times, and Manichaeans learned them the way a catechism is learned, by question and answer and repetition, until the answers came without being reached for. In the former time the two kingdoms lay apart and each was whole. In the middle time, which is now, the darkness broke in and the two got mixed, which is why everything a person meets is a blend of the two and why nothing here is simply good. In the future time they will be separated again, permanently, and the darkness will be sealed off forever. Every Manichaean practice is aimed at that third time. It is a tidy scheme, and its tidiness is the problem. Genesis will not have it. Genesis has one Maker and calls the finished work very good (Genesis 1:31), and Isaiah has God saying that he forms light and creates darkness and that there is no second desk in the office (Isaiah 45:7). Christian theology has to do harder work on evil than Mani did, and it does that work because the alternative is a God who is only one of the two powers in the universe.

(Q) "In the beginning, then, these two substances were divided. The empire of light was held by God the Father, who is perpetual in holy origin, magnificent in virtue, true in His very nature, ever rejoicing in His own eternity, possessing in Himself wisdom and the vital senses, by which He also includes the twelve members of His light, which are the plentiful resources of his kingdom." + Source: Mani, the Fundamental Epistle, quoted in Augustine, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 13 (Stothert translation). The Fundamental Epistle was the letter Manichaeans put into the hands of new converts, and Augustine had been one of those converts. His book against it quotes the opening at length before taking it apart, which is why a paragraph of Mani’s own prose survives inside the work of the man who spent his life refuting him.

(T2) Evil is not a lack of anything. It is a country, with borders and princes and an army. + Ask most people what darkness is and they will say it is what you get when the light is off. Nothing has arrived in the room; something has gone out of it. Mani would have said that is a child’s answer. In his account the darkness is a place, and he described it the way a traveller describes a hostile country: five layers of it, each with its own inhabitants, smoke and fire and wind and water and darkness proper, and a prince at the centre of them commanding the rest. The story that follows is a war story. The princes of darkness, seeing the light across the border, wanted it, and attacked. The Father of Greatness sent out a champion, the Primal Man, armed with five elements of light, and the champion was defeated and his armour swallowed. Everything since is the aftermath of that defeat. The world we live in is not a creation but a battlefield after the battle, built out of the mixture, and the mess in it is not a moral failure on anyone’s part but the plain physics of two substances that got stirred together. It is worth seeing what a relief this was to people who heard it. On Mani’s account nobody has to explain why a good God permits an earthquake, or why an infant dies, or why you cannot keep your temper. None of that is God’s doing or, at bottom, yours. But look at what the relief costs. A God who has a border can be reached. A God who can be attacked can be surprised, and a God whose champion loses a battle is not the God of Isaiah or of the Psalms. Augustine, once he was out, went straight at that point and never left it alone: whatever else God is, God is not one power among two.

(Q) "In one direction on the border of this bright and holy land there was a land of darkness deep and vast in extent, where abode fiery bodies, destructive races. Here was boundless darkness, flowing from the same source in immeasurable abundance, with the productions properly belonging to it." + Source: Mani, the Fundamental Epistle, quoted in Augustine, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 15 (Stothert translation). The passage goes on through muddy waters, violent winds, a fiery region and a country of smoke and gloom where the chief prince lives, and Mani closes the survey by calling them "the five natures of the pestiferous land." Augustine’s reply seizes on the word border and will not let go: two countries with a shared frontier are two things of the same kind, and a God with a frontier is a God with a size.

(T3) Your soul is a fragment of God, swallowed by the darkness, and the whole of history is the work of getting it back. + Think of a bottle of ink knocked into a bucket of clean water. Nothing has been destroyed, but nothing can simply be picked out either, and getting the ink back would take a patient machine running a very long time. That is Mani’s universe. The light the darkness swallowed is not a symbol; it is God’s own substance, and it is now distributed through everything: in the sun, in a tree, in a melon, in you. What Mani called the soul is a particle of that light. The body around it was built by the powers of darkness for the specific purpose of keeping it in, the way a cage is built around a bird. So the world is a machine for extraction. The sun and moon are ships, ferrying rescued light back up in stages; the band of the Milky Way is the column it travels by. And human beings are part of the mechanism, which is where the religion stopped being a picture of the universe and turned into a way of life. Manichaeans came in two ranks, and the difference between the ranks ran through everything. The Elect were the full members, and they kept what Mani called three seals: of the mouth, of the hands, and of the breast. The seal of the mouth meant no meat and no wine and no blasphemy. The seal of the hands meant no farming, no harvesting, no killing of any living thing, since a cut of that kind releases no light at all and only causes pain to the light already inside. The seal of the breast meant no sex, because a child is one more cage. The Hearers were everyone else, and their lives looked perfectly ordinary from outside. They farmed, married, worked, and brought food to the Elect, and the Elect ate it, and in their digestion the light in the food was set free and sent home. That meal was the central rite of the religion. The arrangement made the Hearers permanent second-class citizens of their own faith, saved eventually by being reborn as Elect, and it produced results that an outsider found comic. Augustine, who had spent nine years watching it from the Hearers’ bench, needled his old teachers that they would sooner see a man ruined by a moneylender than see a melon bruised: "you feel so much more for melons than for men."

(Q) "Then the blessed Father, who has bright ships, little apartments, dwelling-places, or magnitudes, according to his indwelling clemency, brings the help by which he is drawn out and liberated from the impious bonds, straits, and torments of his vital substance." + Source: Mani, the Treasure, book VII, quoted in Augustine, Concerning the Nature of Good 44 (Newman translation). Read the grammar slowly and the doctrine is unmistakable. It is the Father himself who is "drawn out and liberated," because the light in bonds is his own vital substance and not a creature of his. Everything the religion asked of the Elect follows from that sentence.

(T4) Christ came down out of the Father and was never any woman’s son. + Mani was not being difficult here; he was being consistent. If flesh is the enemy’s handiwork, built to imprison light, then a saviour made of it is a contradiction. So the Christ of the Manichaeans appeared, taught, seemed to suffer, and left, without ever having been conceived, carried, or born. The technical name for that position is docetism, from the Greek dokein, to seem: the view that Christ’s humanity was an appearance rather than a fact. It was already old when Mani took it up, and the apostle John had written against a version of it a century and a half earlier. Manichaeans in fact had more than one Jesus. There was Jesus the Splendour, a shining messenger who wakes Adam out of his stupor and tells him what he is. There was the historical figure who taught in Galilee, understood as that same messenger putting in an appearance. And there was the Suffering Jesus, Jesus patibilis, which was their name for the light itself as it hangs crucified in every tree and every field, dying a little at each harvest. That last idea is genuinely moving, and it is the reason a Manichaean would not pull up a weed. But notice what has quietly gone. If Christ was never born, he had no mother, no genealogy, no death; and if the cross was an appearance, nothing was accomplished on it. Christian faith cannot follow him a step down this road, and it did not take the church long to say so. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and John made confessing that the test of a true spirit (1 John 4:2-3).

(Q) "Yea, would that even this had been all the length to which they had gone with their silly efforts, and that they had not declared that the only-begotten Christ, who has descended from the bosom of the Father, is the son of a certain woman, Mary, and born of blood and flesh and the varied impurities proper to women!" + Source: Mani, letter to Marcellus, quoted in the Acts of the Disputation with Manes 5 (Salmond translation). The letter is Mani writing to a wealthy and charitable Christian named Marcellus, in the friendliest possible terms, to explain where his church has gone wrong. The complaint in this sentence is not against a fringe opinion; it is against the plain content of Matthew and Luke, and Mani states it as an obvious absurdity that ordinary Christians have somehow failed to notice. The disgust in the last clause is not decoration. On his account a body is the enemy’s handiwork, so a birth is the last thing a saviour could be put through.

(T5) Every nation was sent a messenger, and he is the last of them. + Here is where Mani stops looking like a Gnostic teacher and starts looking like something new. A Gnostic teacher, from the Greek gnosis, knowledge, held that people are saved by coming to know a secret about their own origin, and there is a great deal of that in Mani. What comes next is not Gnostic at all. He did not claim that other religions were false. He claimed they were true, locally and temporarily: the Buddha had been sent to India, Zoroaster to Persia, Jesus to the West, and each had told his own people the truth in the form they could take. What went wrong was afterwards. None of those three wrote a book. Their disciples remembered imperfectly, wrote late, argued, and split, and within a generation or two the message was in pieces. Mani’s remedy was as practical as a builder’s, and you can see him working through the failure point by point. He would write the scriptures himself, in his own hand, and seal the list, which is to say fix which books were in and which were not, so that nothing could be added to it or taken away. He would have those books translated during his own lifetime and under his own supervision, rather than trusting the job to strangers in another century. And for the many who could not read at all he made a book of paintings, the Ārdahang, so that the cosmology, meaning the whole picture of how the universe is put together and what happened to it, could be looked at instead of read. This is why Manichaeism travelled as far as it did: it was the first religion in history designed from the start to cross languages. The claim on top of it was the one Christians could not let pass. Jesus had promised his disciples a Helper, the Holy Spirit, who would teach them everything (John 14:26). Mani said that promise was about him. He called himself an apostle of Jesus Christ in the salutation of every letter, and he described himself as the seal of the prophets, meaning the last of them, a phrase in use here some three and a half centuries before Islam applied it to Muhammad. Paul had already written down the church’s answer to any later apostle bearing a fuller gospel, and the answer is not a soft one (Galatians 1:8).

(Q) "Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God. So in one age they have been brought by the messenger, called Buddha, to India, in another by Zarâdusht to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereupon this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age through me, Mânî, the messenger of the God of truth to Babylonia." + Source: Mani, the Shâbuhragân, opening, quoted in al-Biruni, The Chronology of Ancient Nations, p. 190 (Sachau translation). Al-Biruni was a Muslim scholar from Khwarezm who wrote the book at the court of Jurjan around AD 1000, and he read Manichaean books directly rather than taking them at second hand: Mani’s own gospel was in front of him, and he quotes it. On the same page he reports that in his gospel, which Mani arranged by the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, Mani "says that he is the Paraclete announced by Messiah, and that he is the seal of the prophets." Paraclete is the Greek word standing behind the Helper of John 14:26, the one Jesus told his disciples would come after him, so the sentence is a claim laid directly on that promise.

(Q) "Manichæus, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the providence of God the Father. These are wholesome words from the perennial and living fountain." + Source: Mani, the Fundamental Epistle, opening, quoted in Augustine, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 5 (Stothert translation). Two sentences, and both of them are the whole quarrel in miniature: a claim to apostolic authority, and a promise that what follows is not merely to be believed but to be known. A young man in Carthage read them and joined, and remembered decades later what reading them had felt like, "in that unhappy time when we read it we were in your opinion enlightened." The church’s reply to Mani begins here, with a convert who got out.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The first answers came from men who had argued with Manichaeans in the street. + Mani’s missionaries reached Egypt while he was still alive, and the replies started almost at once. The earliest that survives is not even Christian: Alexander of Lycopolis, a pagan philosopher in Egypt writing around AD 300, took the trouble to set out the Manichaean system fairly and then object to it on Greek philosophical grounds, which tells you the movement was being taken seriously by serious people very early. The Christian answers came in a rush behind him. Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the same Syriac Mani had written in and living in the same border country, produced prose refutations that quote Manichaean books directly. Titus, bishop of Bostra in Arabia, wrote four books against them in the 360s that are still the fullest systematic reply from the Greek church. Serapion of Thmuis wrote a shorter one; Epiphanius devoted a long section of his catalogue of heresies to them; and a Greek work called the Acts of the Disputation with Manes, put together in the first half of the fourth century, staged the whole quarrel as a debate before judges and preserved Mani’s letter to Marcellus in the process. They converge on one objection, and it is instructive that the pagan makes it too. If God has a neighbour, God is not God. A being with a border on one side, who can be invaded, whose champion can be beaten, and part of whose own substance can be held prisoner by somebody else, is a very large and very good thing inside the universe rather than the source of it. Mani had bought his clean answer about evil by making God smaller, and everyone who thought carefully noticed the price.

(†) Augustine spent nine years inside the movement, and the rest of his life explaining what it got wrong. + Augustine of Hippo counted the time himself: "During this space of nine years, then, from my nineteenth to my eight and twentieth year, we went on seduced and seducing." He was never one of the Elect. He was a Hearer, the outer rank (T3), which suited a young professor of rhetoric with a mistress and a career. It is worth being honest about why it appealed to him, because the reasons were not silly. Manichaeans promised understanding rather than obedience, and jeered at the Catholics for asking a man to believe first. They had an answer to the problem of evil that did not require him to blame God or, more importantly, himself. And they let him off the Old Testament, whose patriarchs he found embarrassing and whose God he thought crude, since on their account those books belonged to the other side altogether. What broke the spell was ordinary disappointment. For years Augustine was told that his questions would be answered when Faustus of Milevis came, the movement’s celebrated bishop and its best mind. Faustus came, and turned out to be a charming man who did not know the answers either and was honest enough to say so. From there the exit took a while. Augustine came out the other side and then spent twenty years writing against his old church: a treatise on its morals, another on the two souls, debates staged in public against Fortunatus in 392 and Felix in 404, a long book against Faustus, another on the nature of good, and the unfinished attack on the Fundamental Epistle that preserves so much of Mani’s own prose. What came out of that argument is one of the load-bearing pieces of Western theology. Evil, Augustine concluded, is not a substance at all and not a kingdom, but a privation: a good thing gone wrong, the way blindness is not a thing but the absence of sight in an eye that ought to see. Everything that exists is good so far as it exists. Which means evil in a person is not contamination by foreign matter, it is a will that has turned, and the person is responsible. Mani’s system had been built to spare people exactly that conclusion, and it is the conclusion the church took away from the fight.

(†) He built the first religion designed to be translated, and Christian missionaries would later do the same thing better. + Set the theology aside for a moment and look at what the man actually accomplished, because it is remarkable and it is not what he is usually remembered for. Mani fixed his own canon, meaning the list of books that count as scripture and are not to be added to, and no founder before him had done that. He did not leave the translating to the next century either, but commissioned it in his own lifetime. He made a picture book for the people who could not read. He organized a two-tier community that could live quietly inside any host society, since the Hearers looked like everyone else and only the Elect were conspicuous. And when he sent men out, he sent them out with territories assigned, the way a general assigns ground. The result is that Manichaean texts have been dug up in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Old Turkic and Chinese. A hymn composed in Aramaic in Babylonia in the third century was being sung in Chinese in the eighth. In 763 the Uyghur ruler Bögü Qaghan made it the state religion of a steppe empire, and Manichaean communities in south China were still there when the Mongols arrived. No other religion of late antiquity crossed that much ground. The church received all this the way a besieged city receives a battering ram, which is to say by studying it. Christian missionary practice would eventually do the same things Mani had done, and do them better, because the gospel actually invites translation in a way his system did not. But the name became a curse word in Christian Latin long before that, and "Manichaean" is still thrown at anyone who divides the world too neatly into light and dark. Mani would have taken it as a fair description.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: one Creator, a real body, and forgiveness instead of extraction. + The disagreements are not matters of emphasis, and every one of them comes from something Mani himself wrote rather than from anything later followers made of him. - Two first principles. Mani began with two unbegotten kingdoms (T1). Scripture begins with one God who makes everything there is, visible and invisible (Colossians 1:16), calls the finished work very good (Genesis 1:31), and puts the words "I form light and create darkness" in God’s own mouth (Isaiah 45:7). A God with a rival is not the God of Israel. - Matter as the enemy’s work. On Mani’s account bodies are cages and food is contaminated, which is why the Elect could not farm, marry, or eat what an ordinary family ate (T3). Paul had already met that teaching in another form and named it plainly: forbidding marriage and requiring abstinence from foods "that God created to be received with thanksgiving," since "everything created by God is good" (1 Timothy 4:1-4). - A Christ who only seemed to have flesh. Mani denied that Christ was born of Mary or made of blood and flesh (T4). The New Testament makes the opposite claim the boundary line of the faith: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, while the spirit that will not is the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2-3). - Salvation as extraction rather than rescue. If the soul is a piece of God that got captured, then salvation is repatriation, and what is wrong with you is where you are rather than what you have done. Sin becomes contamination and the remedy becomes diet. The gospel says the trouble is a will that has turned and the remedy is forgiveness, offered to people who cannot clean themselves, and it promises not escape from the body but "the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). - A newer apostle with a fuller message. Mani presented himself as the Helper Jesus promised and the last of the prophets (T5). Paul had ruled on that case in advance, and included himself and the angels in the ruling (Galatians 1:8). Mani is worth reading anyway, and not only as a cautionary tale. He saw how bad the problem of evil is, refused to be fobbed off, and paid for his answer with his life in a prison at Gundeshapur. The church owes part of its own answer to the seriousness of his.