Augustine vs the Manichaeans
A convert's sustained polemic against the dualism of his youth
Venue: Augustine, *De Genesi contra Manichaeos* (388), *De Libero Arbitrio* (388–395), *Confessions* (397–400), *Contra Faustum Manichaeum* (398–400), and many other anti-Manichaean works.
Augustine spent decades attacking the worldview he had once been one of its leading representatives.
Augustine was a Manichaean "hearer" — the outer rank of disciples — for nine years before his Christian conversion in 386. After his conversion he produced an enormous polemical literature against his former teachers: the Manichaean dualism of two eternal principles (light/spirit and dark/matter) is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of creation; evil is not a positive principle but a privation of good (*privatio boni*); matter is not evil but a created good; the human soul is not a fragment of light trapped in matter but a creature subject to its own free will. The Manichaean community Augustine left was an organised, hierarchical, multinational religion that competed seriously with Christianity for several centuries before being suppressed; Augustine's critique is the main reason historians know what they know about it. The exchange shaped the Christian doctrine of evil for the entire subsequent tradition.
Historical Context
Manichaeism, founded by Mani (c. 216–274 AD) in Sasanian Persia, spread rapidly through the late Roman Empire and into Central Asia; it was a major rival of Catholic Christianity in 3rd–4th century North Africa where Augustine encountered it. By the 8th century it had been substantially suppressed in the Roman world (Augustine's polemics played a role); it survived longer in Persia and Central Asia.
Parties
There is one God who created all things, and what He created is good. Evil is not a substance or principle but a privation of good (privatio boni). Free will is the means by which created goods turn from their proper end and produce moral evil.
Key arguments
- Monotheism: two eternal principles (light/dark) is incompatible with the supremacy of God; if light is the supreme being, dark must be subordinate or non-being.
- Privation theory: evil has no positive being; it is the absence of due good in creatures. Darkness is the absence of light, not a substance opposed to it.
- Free will: moral evil arises from the misuse of free will by creatures, not from an opposed principle of evil.
- Matter: matter is good as God's creation; the Manichaean denigration of matter contradicts the goodness of creation.
Two eternal principles — Light/Spirit (good) and Dark/Matter (evil) — coexisted in primordial separation; the present world is the result of a catastrophic mingling. Salvation consists in the gradual separation of light from matter through ascetic practice and esoteric knowledge.
Key arguments
- The reality of evil demands a positive principle to account for it; privation theory does not do justice to the experienced power of evil.
- Matter's tendency to disorder, corruption, and death suggests it is not the work of a good creator but the residue of the dark principle.
- Asceticism: separating the light within (the human soul) from its material entanglement is the path of salvation.
- Universal religion: Mani synthesised Christian, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist elements into a teaching valid for all humanity.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Matter
Matter · Ontological Status: is matter a good creation or the residue of a primordial dark principle?
Observer
Observer · Metaphysical Agency: is moral evil the misuse of free will (Augustine) or the operation of a substantive opposed principle (Manichaean dualism)?
Verdict in retrospect
Augustine's privation theory of evil and his account of free will became orthodox in Latin Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy alike; Manichaeism, though it survived as a religion for centuries, did not displace Christian theology in the Roman world. The substantive philosophical question — whether evil has positive being or is privation — has been re-raised periodically in modern theology and metaphysics; the Manichaean position (in more sophisticated form) had defenders among some 20th-century theologians of the Shoah (e.g., the demonic in Tillich), but the Augustinian privation account remains the majority position.
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Further reading
- Augustine, *Confessions* (397–400), Books III–V
- Augustine, *De Libero Arbitrio* (388–395)
- BeDuhn, *Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma*, 2 vols. (2010–2013)