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doi: 10.5840/augstudies2013431/25
Jason BeDuhn
Northern Arizona University
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BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans
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BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans
7. Util. cred. 1.2 (CSEL 25:4; trans. is that of J. H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings [Philadel-
phia: Westminster, 1953], 292.): “nosti enim, honorate, non aliam ob causam nos in tales homines
incidisse, nisi quod se dicebant terribili auctoritate separata mera et simplici ratione eos, qui se
audire uellent, introducturos ad deum et errore omni liberaturos.”
8. See Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 CE
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 99–100; Kato Takeshi, “Melodia interior.
Sur le traité De pulchro et apto,” RÉA 11 (1965): 229–239.
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9. See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Random House, 1986).
10. See, e,g, Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras.
11. On the work as a philosophical decoding of Manichaean myth, see Kam-lun Edwin Lee, Augus-
tine, Manichaeism, and the Good (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 23; Colin Starnes, Augustine’s
Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I–IX (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier, 1990),
102–106, 110–111n80; Johannes van Oort, “Augustine’s Critique of Manichaeism: The Case of
Confessions III 6,10 and Its Implications,” in Aspects of Religious Contact and Conflict in the An-
cient World, ed. P. W. Van der Horst (Utrecht: Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid, Universiteit Utrecht,
1995), 57–68, at 67; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 41.
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in our minds the exposure he had to Christ and Christianity as a child with his
later Nicene Christian faith, leaping over the approximately twenty years that lie
in between. It is true that Augustine himself is something of an accomplice in
this biographical conflation, suggesting in one passage in Confessions that his
choice of the Manichaeans was already in part determined by their commitment
to Christ (conf. 3.6.10). But this claim may be anachronistic. As we have seen,
he acknowledges that in his adolescent years, he was “not yet a Christian” (conf.
2.3.6). Indeed, his own teacher in Madaura, who knew him at close quarters for
some time, had observed no inclination to Christ, but had rather mistaken him as
a fellow pagan (ep. 16). Moreover, contrary to his claim that he could not follow
Cicero’s secular or pagan path to a life in philosophy merely because it did not
contain the name of Christ (conf. 3.4.8), there is no evidence that there was any
sort of philosophical community in operation in Carthage for him to reject as he
made his choice. In fact, he states repeatedly and in multiple works (including conf.,
except for 3.6.10) that it was the rational, philosophical nature of Manichaeism
that attracted him, rather than any affiliation with the Christian movement. Finally,
for someone supposedly predisposed to devotion to Christ, he relegated Christ to
a decidedly circumscribed role—almost a place-holder for the divine intellectus,
drained of all the redeeming drama at the center of the Christ story. As far as we
can tell, his one composition as a Manichaean did not refer to Christ at all (and
was not the sort of work that would have, cf. conf. 4.15.27); moreover, as he com-
posed his earliest post-Manichaean works, there was discussion whether explicitly
Christian references served any real purpose in what were primarily philosophical
dialogues (conf. 9.4.7).
Of course, we would like to know more about how Christ was presented to him
as a child. We know much more about how the Manichaeans would have presented
Christ to Augustine. Christ was for them, “the power and wisdom of God,” which
remained Augustine’s reflexive designation for him throughout his first decade as
a Catholic (Acad. 2.1.1–2; beata u. 4.34; an. quant. 33.76; mor. 1.13.22; 1.16.28;
etc.). For Manichaeans, Christ was an enlightener, an intellective force that inter-
vened in this world to awaken souls slumbering in ignorance of their true divine
nature, and reshape them morally and mentally. Correspondingly, Augustine’s early
writings tend to deal with Christ in much the same terms, when he appears at all.
His death has no redemptive function at all in the early Augustine, just as it has
none in Manichaeism. Manichaeans also placed Christ in company with other mes-
sengers of God, (including Pythagoras, Plato, and Hermes Trismegistus, as well as
Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Mani), even if he was in some sense the supreme and
most direct (least physical) manifestation of divine wisdom. We find much the same
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BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans
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BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans
in his polemical engagement with Christians (conf. 3.10.18; c. ep. Man. 3.3). It
would be one of his first tasks as a convert to the Catholic Church—as much for
himself as for anyone else—to revisit and, in some way, reverse or mitigate these
critiques. That is precisely what he set out to do in his first exegetical composition,
On Genesis against the Manichaeans.
Augustine did not take up the Genesis story as an outgrowth of his long-
standing astronomical interests, which find no expression in On Genesis against
the Manichaeans; nor did he do it as a contribution to Christian Hexaemeron
literature. Rather, he took up the task with an apologetical-polemical agenda
probably unique to the genre. His solution to Manichaean criticism of the biblical
creation story entailed the adoption of an entirely different exegetical approach
than the one they employed. Whereas the Manichaeans applied a literal reading of
the text, Augustine adopted an allegorical reading. Indeed, he acknowledged that,
read literally, the creation story has all sorts of problems. But this is the immature,
childish way to read a myth; through allegory its deeper, symbolic, true meaning
can be discerned (mor. 1.1.1; 1.17.30; util. cred. 3.9; Gn. adu. Man. 2.2.3). The
superiority of Nicene Christian myth lay precisely in the very possibility of its
philosophical decoding; the details of the decoded message scarcely mattered,
and Augustine showed remarkable freedom—as a mere Catholic novice—in
generating new, imaginative readings notoriously difficult to trace back to the
work of his predecessors.
In On Genesis against the Manichaeans, Augustine worked from memory, recall-
ing the Manichaean criticisms he had learned and finding allegorical solutions to the
problems they raised. Yet, famously, he could not leave the defense there, returning
again and again to the same verses, the same Manichaean criticisms, in the years
that followed. Either his allegorical approach had not satisfied his Catholic read-
ers—as it apparently did not—or he had not satisfied himself that he had genuinely
resolved the problems inherent in this narrative. He discovered new Manichaean
critiques (in the writings of Adimantius and Faustus) that required answering. He
attempted a more literal reading and defense, meeting the Manichaeans on their own
exegetical ground, and rather quickly abandoned it. Then he returned to allegory
with a vengeance in the last three books of Confessions. He then resumed his efforts
spending much time and energy trying to develop a literal interpretation that could
turn back Manichaean fault-finding. And so on. He knew different Christian inter-
pretations than his own, but these did not trouble him. The Church was not awaiting
the resolution of pressing problems with the creation story. It was the Manichaean
challenge to the biblical creation story that always shadowed his exegetical labors
on it and that prompted this characteristic hobby-horse of his literary career.
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12. See Jason BeDuhn, “Did Augustine Win His Debate with Fortunatus?,” in In Search of Truth.
Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism: Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty, ed. J. A.
van den Berg, A. Kotzé, T. Nicklas, and M. Scopello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 463–479.
13. See Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the
Retrospective Self,” JTS, n.s., 37 (1986): 3–34, at 22; Malcolm Alflatt, “The Development of the
Idea of Involuntary Sin in St. Augustine,” RÉA 20 (1974): 113–134, at 133.
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five years, he has fully embraced the implications for human agency that Fortunatus
had insisted inevitably follow from Paul’s words.
As strong as these correlations of stimulus and reaction are, it is just as telling
that, as the period of his most intense engagement with Manichaeism came to a
close in the first years of the fifth century, Augustine’s focus on Paul fades. It returns
to the foreground only with the Pelagian controversy, in which Augustine found
himself responding to a new stimulus, struggling to demonstrate that in his earlier
exegesis of Paul he had not been unduly influenced by Manichaean perspectives.
Other Nicene leaders wrote commentaries on Paul, alongside of the rest of scrip-
ture. But no Christian writer of Augustine’s age had Paul so much at the center of
his own distinctive thinking. As Patout Burns has observed, “Only in his Pauline
commentaries did the characteristically Augustinian themes begin to appear.”14
Augustine becomes the familiar Augustine of historical hindsight only when his
mode of discourse and repertoire of imagery becomes colored by Pauline tropes.
A glance over at the Manichaean community reveals the distinctive emphasis on
Paul, whose texts Manichaeism had profoundly integrated from its foundations,
that found special emphasis in its North African branch15 and that set the condi-
tions for Augustine’s own unique take on Paul, even if it did not determine the
latter’s outcome.
Yet, Julian of Eclanum argued that Manichaeism had, in fact, determined the
outcome of Augustine’s ruminations on Paul, as well as of the entire ethos of his
system. Julian particularly suspected a Manichaean background to Augustine’s
abandonment of the well-established Nicene free will position for a soteriology based
in grace. To appreciate the plausibility of this charge, one must first acknowledge
two facts: (1) Nicene Christianity before Augustine held overwhelmingly to a free
will account of individual sinfulness and repentance leading to salvation; and (2)
the Manichaean position, often characterized as deterministic or fatalistic, actually
entailed the only non-free-will, grace-determined account of salvation within the
debate over human agency in Augustine’s time.
14. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace (Paris: Études Au-
gustiniennes, 1980), 49.
15. See François Decret, “L’utilisation des épitres de Paul chez les manichéens d’Afrique,” in Le
epistole paoline nei manichei i donatisti e il primo agostino, ed. Julien Ries, François Decret,
William Hugh Cecil Frend, Maria Grazia Mara et al. Sussidi Patristici 5 (Roma: Istituto Patristico
Augustinianum, 1980), 29–83; idem, “La figure de saint Paul et l’interprétation de sa doctrine
dans le manichéisme,” in Atti del I Simposio di Tarso su S. Paulo Apostolo, ed. L. Padovese
(Roma: Istituto Francescano di Spiritualità, Pontificio Ateneo Antoniano, 1993), 105–115.
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The Manichaean teaching of grace assumes, in the report of Ephrem Syrus in his
Fifth Discourse to Hypatius, that “the pollution of error is (too) great for them, unless
sweet floods have come from their (heavenly) home a second time, and lessened
the bitterness in which they were dwelling.”16 These “sweet floods” are constituted
of “a power whose nature cannot be overcome by the floods of evil.”17 Augustine
shows that he had grasped this aspect of Manichaean teaching. He explains that the
Manichaeans taught that the human soul, through mixture with evil in this world,
had been “so far corrupted and changed for the worse that . . . it could be rescued
and purified only with help . . . from [God’s] Word, which must necessarily be
free of the soul’s enslavement and pure of its contamination and unscathed by its
corruption if it is to help.”18 Either directly quoting or paraphrasing a Manichaean
text, Augustine explains:
The divine nature is dead and Christ resuscitates it. It is sick and he heals it. It
is forgetful and he brings it to remembrance. It is foolish and he teaches it. It is
disturbed and he makes it whole again. It is conquered and captive and he sets it
free. It is in poverty and need, and he aids it. It has lost feeling and he quickens
it. It is blinded and he illumines it. . . . It is unbridled and he imposes the restraint
of law. It is deformed and he reforms it. It is perverse and he puts it right.19
Both Fortunatus and Faustus cite Paul’s imagery of the Old and New Man—as
well as his rhetoric of powerlessness in Romans 7—in support of the Manichaean
teaching on grace. Free will and individual responsibility emerge only after grace
(c. Fort. 20–21), and perseverance remains the obligation of the individual soul (c.
Faust. 21.16).20
16. For this trans., see C. W. Mitchell, S. Ephraim’s Prose refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardai-
san, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 183, cxviii.
17. Ibid., 146, cii.
18. Conf. 7.2.3 (Augustine, Confessions, 3 vols., ed. James O’Donnell [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992], 1:74; trans. Boulding, WSA I/1, 160 with some modification): “corrumperetur et commu-
taretur in deterius ut a beatitudine in miseriam uerteretur et indigeret auxilio quo erui purgarique
posset, et hanc esse animam cui tuus sermo seruienti liber et contaminatae purus et corruptae
integer subueniret.”
19. Nat. b. 41 (CSEL 25:876; trans. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings, 340 (n.7)): “dei autem
naturam si non . . . mortuam, quid . . . suscitat christus? si non dicunt aegram, quid curat? si
non dicunt oblitam, quid commemorat? si non dicunt insipientem, quid docet? si non dicunt
perturbatam, quid redintegrat? si non uicta et capta est, quid liberat? si non eget, cui subuenit?
si non amisit sensum, quid uegetat? si non est excaecata, quid inluminat? . . . si non est im-
moderata, cui modum legis imponit? si non est deformis, quid reformat? si non est peruersa,
quid emendat?”
20. Cf. the quote from Mani’s Book of Mysteries reported by al-Biruni, India: “They asked Christ
about the fate of those souls who did not accept the truth. . . . He said, ‘Every infirm soul which
does not obey its summons from Truth will perish (and) have no repose’.” For this trans., see
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think that best explains why his development on this issue has usually been treated
as self-motivated and self-contained, a matter of his own self-reflection or, at most,
a product of his meditations on the text of Paul. The fact remains that no one within
the Catholic Church had ever discussed the human condition and the process of
salvation in these terms before. Augustine himself began the shift towards this novel
position only after his encounter with Fortunatus and with the latter’s challenge to
free will, which cited most of the Pauline passages on which Augustine later based
his own developed position. His critics within the Catholic Church pointed to these
re-readings of Paul and the doctrine of grace Augustine worked out in connection
with them as Manichaean in inspiration and as something he had learned from the
Manichaeans, however loath he was to admit it.
Of course, Augustine’s critics were not objective assessors of the antecedents of
his positions. But neither are we, if we simply dismiss their analysis without looking
into what they found compelling in the evidence. Julian was no facile polemicist;
he took the trouble to interview Manichaeans and obtain Manichaean texts from
abroad (Julian of Eclanum, Ad Florum 5.26; Augustine, c. Iul. imp. 166). He and
his associates had the further advantage of living at a time before the success of
Augustine obscured awareness of the extreme novelty of his positions against the
traditional free will stance of Nicene Christians. They saw clearly what modern
researchers at times overlook: that there is something that needs explaining in
Augustine’s deviation from the received soteriology of the Church he had joined.
As with his intense engagement with Paul, so the evolution of his thinking in the
direction of grace is a product of his anti-Manichaean period, a fact that is practi-
cally forgotten when his attention turns to other conversation-partners and that only
returns to the foreground in response to Pelagian criticism.
There are other things that Augustine may have learned from the Manichaeans,
including his first steps towards sexual self-restraint (both monogamy and periodic
abstinence, util. cred. 1.3; conf. 4.2.2; mor. 2.18.65; c. Faust. 15.7), and the veg-
etarianism that he retained to the end of his life, despite his vigorous theoretical
anti-Manichaean defense of eating meat (Possidius, Vita 22.2). Likewise, in his
rhetorical imagery, he repeatedly evoked Manichaean themes that he found useful
and rhetorically persuasive. At times, these served his desire to extend an inviting
hand to the Manichaeans, to find a formulation of truth within the bounds of Catholic
orthodoxy that would appeal to them. But once re-minted in a “Catholic” form,
they remained operative even when he was speaking only to fellow Catholics. It
took a long time for him to give up on the prospect of convincing his former Man-
ichaean friends to join him in the Catholic Church. A number of them did; many
more declined. Following one last bold effort in Confessions to lay out a path he
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thought they might allow themselves to follow, he turned to pure refutation and,
when he had said his piece, coercion. But that approximately thirty-year engage-
ment with Manichaeism, first as an allegiance and then as an impetus for defining
some of his most important positions as a Nicene Christian, left an indelible stamp
on Augustine’s identity. And that stamp was obvious to his detractors within the
Catholic Church. He may have died with Plotinus on his lips and the penitential
Psalms before his eyes, but he did so with one last defense of himself against the
suspicion of Manichaeism left unfinished on his desk.
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