Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
chapter 6
Controversies (I)
Against the Manichees
Augustine has often been thought of as a systematic theologian. That is not accurate. He was, by training and by temperament, a controversialist, a debater. Four great debates shaped his career and have come to define his theological legacy. The earliest of these was his debate against his onetime coreligionists, the Manichees.
Mani (216–277), Manicheism's founder, was a Persian prophet and visionary who believed himself called to preach a final definitive revelation, to complete what previous religious founders—Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus—had left incomplete.1 He was born in southern Babylonia, then part of the Persian Empire. His family seems to have belonged to the Elchasaites, a Jewish-Christian baptismal sect. At age 24, he experienced a series of visions and began proclaiming his "Religion of Life." He spoke of himself as "the apostle of Jesus Christ," while followers went further, calling him "the Paraclete," the "Spirit of Truth" prophesied by Jesus. He eventually converted members of the Persian royal court and won the favor of the king, Shapur I, who supported his missionary efforts for some 30 years. When Shapur died in 273, Mani fell from favor and in 277 was arrested, tortured, and died in prison.
The religion of Mani owed much to gnosticism. Mani claimed to reveal a secret mystical knowledge of God and of the universe, its origin and its des-
1. On Mani and Manicheism, see Iain Gardner and Samuel N. C. Lieu, "Introduction," Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–45; Samuel N. C. Lieu, "Manichaeism," in Harvey and Hunter, Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, 221–36. On Manicheism as Augustine knew it, see François Decret, L'Afrique manichéenne (IVe–Ve siècles): Étude historique et doctrinale, CEASA 74–75 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1978); Johannes Van Oort, Otto Wermelinger, and Gregor Wurst, eds., Augustine and Manicheism in the Latin West, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 49 (Leiden: Brill, 2001).