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Fourth Century Manicheanism
& Augustine of Hippo
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Manicheanism
Manicheanism was (and is) a dualistic religion founded by Mani, a Persian sage, in the third century after Christ. Mani synthesised Christian, Buddhist and Zoroastian elements into his religion. He taught that there were two gods, one good, one evil.
The good god, YHWH, the God of Jews and Christians is spiritual and light; the bad god, called Satan in the New Testament, is material and darkness, but equally eternal and equally powerful. Manicheans consequently believed that the sun and the moon and the stars, "in heaven" were the residences of the good god. The good god is also responsible for human souls and minds, the bad god for human bodies, passions and emotions. Humans are the battleground between the two gods, since they blend mind and matter, the basic principles of the two gods. The reason that humans blend mind and matter is, at least according to one variant of Manichean teaching, that the bad god tore a hole in heaven and trapped the souls that fell through the hole into material bodies.
Life for fourth century Manichean devotees consisted of avoiding the material and passionate and emotional and striving to become fully spriritual and rational. Those who became fully spritual and rational could shed their bodies at death and return to heaven. Those who remained attatched to their material and passionate selves, who were evil and emotional were condemned to a continuing cycle of re-birth into physical bodies. In practice, Manichean adepts avoided meat, sex, and subsisted only on "light-bearing" vegetables, such as melons and radishes, not even participating in its preparation, since food preparation destroyed some of its light. The adepts therefore needed assistants, or "Hearers" who prepared their food and attended to their other needs. These Hearers (and Augustine was a Hearer during his Manichean phase) were free to live in the world, and even marry.
The Manicheanism that Augustine knew taught that Christ was not really human, but a divine being inhabiting an illusory body, and that the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete was really the "other self" of Mani. As such Mani was more or less the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, though in a less purely divine form than Christ. Manicheans rejected the Old Testament entirly and with it most of the New Testament, keeping only the book of Matthew. As such they rejected the Old Testament Law, embracing the New Testament idea of Grace and developing it to include the new post-Mani dispensation of the Holy Spirit, or dispensation of freedom.
Manicheanism developed a very straightforward explanation for the existence of evil, one that was at the heart of the religion. Evil existed because of the bad god, and existed in humans because the principles of light and darkness were unnaturally mixed in human beings. The ultimate goal of existence was to keep the light and the darkness finally separated.
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
WHC Frend, The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. pp. 661-72 http://www.ancient.mq.edu.au/ahist/DocCtr/manics/Corpus.html#top on the Manicheans themselves.
http://ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers/NPNF1-04/augustine/bk_mm/bk_mm.html on Augustine against the Manicheans: