“Manes, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the saints who are with me, and the virgins, to Marcellus, my beloved son; Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ; and may the right hand of light preserve you from the present evil world and from its calamities, and from the snares of the wicked one, Amen[[1105]].”
While in the Disputation which follows and which is certainly a later interpolation, or possibly a concoction of some later author, he is represented as saying “My brother, I am indeed a disciple of Christ, and, moreover, an apostle of Jesus.” Yet in spite of this and a few other passages of the same kind, it is plain that neither Manes, nor any of those who believed on his teaching, were Christians in any sense in which the term could not be applied to the followers of Mahommed or many another professedly anti-Christian teacher. Manes entirely rejected the account of the Incarnation given in the Gospels, alleging, as a modern critic might do, that it was not the account of eyewitnesses, but a mass of fables which had grown up after the memory of the events recorded had faded away[[1106]]. Jesus, he said, was not born of woman, but came forth from the Father or First Man, and descended from heaven in the form of a man about thirty years of age[[1107]]. But the body in which He appeared was an illusion only and was no more that of a real man than the dove which descended upon Him at the baptism in Jordan was a real dove, and it was not true to say that He was put to death by the Romans and suffered on the cross[[1108]]. So far from that being the case, he declared that Jesus, the mortal or suffering Jesus, was nothing but the universal soul diffused throughout Nature and thus tormented by its association with matter. Thus, he said, the Jesus patibilis may be said to be hanging from every tree[[1109]].
To say that such teaching was likely to alter in the course of a generation or two is merely to assert that it followed the course of evolution which can be traced in all religions, and it is possible that in what has been said in the last paragraph concerning Jesus, we have rather the opinions of the Manichaeans of the fourth century than those of Manes himself. Yet even in this we see exemplified the chameleon-like habit peculiar to the Manichaeans of modifying their tenets in outward appearance so as to make them coincide as nearly as possible with the views of those whom they wished to win over to them. Thus when the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, the Three Persons and One God, began to take shape under the pressure of the Arian controversy, the Manichaeans were not long in matching it with a Trinity of their own[[1110]]:
“We worship,” said Faustus the Manichaean Perfect, “under the triple appellation of Almighty God, the Father and His Son Christ and the Holy Spirit. While these are one and the same, we believe also that the Father properly dwells in the highest or chief light, which Paul calls ‘light inaccessible,’ and the Son in the second or visible light. And as the Son is himself two-fold according to the apostle, who speaks of Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God, so we believe that His power dwells in the Sun and His wisdom in the Moon[[1111]]. We also believe that the Holy Spirit, the third majesty, has His seat and His home in the whole circle of the atmosphere.[[1112]] By His influence and inpouring of the spirit, the Earth conceives and brings forth the suffering Jesus, who, as hanging from every tree, is the life and salvation of man[[1113]].”
In like manner, while not denying them in terms, the Manichaeans attempted to refine away all the significance of the Crucifixion and the Atonement, by representing them as merely symbolical. In one Apocryphal book called the Wanderings of the Apostles, which seems to be of Manichaean origin, Jesus appears to St John, who is sunk in grief at the supposed sufferings of his Master, and tells him that His Crucifixion was a mere phantasmagoria or miracle-play performed to impress the plebeian crowd at Jerusalem. Then He vanishes and in His stead appears a cross of pure light, surrounded by a multitude of other forms representing the same shape and image. From this cross comes a Divine voice saying sweetly:
“The cross of light is, for your sakes, sometimes called the Word, sometimes Christ; sometimes the Door, sometimes the Way; sometimes the Bread, sometimes the Sun; sometimes the Resurrection, sometimes Jesus; sometimes the Father, sometimes the Spirit; sometimes the Life, sometimes the Truth; sometimes Faith and sometimes Grace[[1114]].”
As will presently be seen, now that we have under our hands the writings of Manichaean communities domiciled in Persian and Chinese territory, we find in them similar compromises with the faiths of Zoroaster and Buddha.
Yet after the Mahommedan conquest of Asia, and in regions where they were free, as it would seem, from the pressure of their Zoroastrian and Christian competitors, the Manichaeans appear to have evolved a theology as formal and as detailed as any of the Gnostic systems which we have examined. This is in the main set out by Theodore Bar Khôni, the Nestorian Bishop of Kashgar, in his Book of Scholia written in Syriac and Mandaean which has been in part translated by the scholarly care of M. Pognon, late Consul of France at Aleppo, and has lately been commentated by M. Cumont. M. Pognon at first identified Bar Khôni with the nephew of the Nestorian Patriarch Iwannis (Johannes or John), whose reign began in 893 A.D., and he quoted Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis in his support[[1115]]. Later, however, he withdrew this, and put him a century earlier[[1116]]. M. Cumont, on the other hand, thinks that Bar Khôni lived at the end of the VIth century or the beginning of the VIIth, and therefore before the Mahommedan invasion[[1117]]. In any event, the Scholia describe a body of Manichaean doctrine considerably later in date than any of the Christian sources hitherto referred to, and probably formed in an atmosphere where the necessity for outward conformity to either the Zoroastrian or the Christian faith was a good deal less cogent than it was further west. Its agreement with the Mahommedan tradition drawn from above is also well marked, and it derives much support from the Manichaean MSS. lately recovered from the oasis of Turfan in Turkestan, and in that of Tun-huang in China. It is possible, although no proofs are yet forthcoming, that it was this Neo-Manichaeism, as it has been called, that inspired the Manichaean sectaries who were imported in the IXth and Xth centuries into Bulgaria, whence their missionaries found their way later into Italy, France, and other countries of Southern Europe.
The system disclosed in these documents begins, as does nearly every Manichaean writing, with the assertion of the existence of two gods, that is to say, the God of Light and the God of Darkness. As the Kingdom of Darkness, whenever and wherever described, is the exact opposite and counterpart of that of the Light, we shall not return to it again, but assume that in describing the one we are mutatis mutandis describing the other. The God of Light has one substance of which all the powers of light were made, but three forms or hypostases, called in the Greek Formula of abjuration “faces” or persons, which added to his own personality make a supreme tetrad. These three hypostases are his wisdom, power, and goodness, by which is probably meant that he operates in the lower powers through these qualities, while remaining himself remote in the “inaccessible light[[1118]].” He possesses also five houses or dwellings, which are also called his worlds and even his members. Their names according to Bar Khôni are Intelligence, Knowledge, Thought, Reflexion, and Feeling[[1119]]. These seem to be ranged in this order below the dwelling of the inaccessible light, so as to cut off all approach to it by a fivefold wall. On the attack of the powers of darkness before mentioned, the God of Light, called by Bar Khôni the Father of Greatness, that is to say, the Very Great or Greatest[[1120]], creates by his word the Mother of Life, who in her turn evokes the First Man as already described. Thus is constituted, if M. Cumont be right, the First Triad of Father, Mother, and Son[[1121]]. From the Turfan documents, we know that the Father was called, in Turkestan at any rate, by the name of Azrua or Zervan, and the Son Khormizta or Ormuzd[[1122]]. As for the appellation of the Mother we are still in ignorance[[1123]].
When the First Man or Ormuzd marched against his enemy, he also evoked five elements called sometimes his sons and sometimes his members. These are the Ether, the Wind, the Light, the Water, and the Fire before mentioned, which together compose the soul of the world, and hence of man, who is in every respect its image. When he was conquered by Satan and dragged down to the lowest pit of hell, he prayed, says Bar Khôni, seven times to the Very Great Father, and he in compassion created, again by his word, the Friend of the Lights[[1124]], who evoked the Great Ban[[1125]], who evoked the Living Spirit. Here we have the second triad or “second creation,” of which, as has been said, only the last member takes any active part in what follows. As we have already seen, the Living Spirit speaks a word like a sharp sword, and the image of the First Man answers[[1126]] and is drawn up out of hell. These two, the sword or Appellant and the image or Respondent, together mount towards the Mother of Life and the Living Spirit, and the Mother of Life “clothes” the Image—no doubt with a form or “nature,”—while the Living Spirit does the same with the compelling word[[1127]]. Then they return to the earth of darkness where remains the soul of the First Man in the shape of his five sons.