MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS
Contrast between Mithraism and Manichaeism—Life and Death of Manes—Ardeshîr, son of Sassan, finds religion necessary to State—Restores Zoroastrianism—Manichaeism a Zoroastrian heresy—Christian account of origin of Manichaeism too late—Manes’ cardinal doctrines Persian—Conflict between Light and Darkness—Satan and the First Man—Defeat of latter and creation of Universe—The Redemption of the Light—Birth and ancestry of Adam—Jesus sent as Saviour to Adam—Infidelity of Eve and its results—Likeness of these to Mandaite stories—Rôles of Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus in Manichaeism—The salvation and transmigration of souls—The death of the perfect righteous—Of the Hearer—Distinction between Perfect and Hearer peculiar to Manichaeism—Obligations of Hearers—Hatred of Manes for Jews—Manes aims at syncretic religion—MSS. found at Turfan prove chameleon-like character of Manichaeism—Manichaeans are Christians among Christians, Buddhists among Buddhists—Manichaean Cosmogony and Anthropogony in Bar Khôni and the Turkestan MSS.—-Organization of Manichaean Church—Ritual of Manichaeans confined to prayers and hymns—Manichaean prayers from Mahommedan sources—Khuastuanift or Manichaean Litany from Turkestan given with commentary—Perfect redeem Light by eating food—Hearers’ fasts help scheme of redemption—Sacrament among Manichaeans doubtful—Symbolical pictures in Manichaean Churches—Festivals of the Bema, Christmas, and Sunday—Manichaean Scriptures—Manichaean treatise found at Tunhuang—The two great archangels and the division of the sexes—History of Manichaeism [277]-357
End of Paganism—Supremacy of Christianity in West—Its borrowings from its defeated rivals—Triumph of Christianity survival of fittest [358]-361
[Index] 362-425
CHAPTER VII
POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS
It will be seen, from what has been said in the first volume, that, even at the beginning of the Christian era, there was no lack of αἵρεσις or choice of creeds offered to those peoples of the Levant who had outgrown their national religions; and it may be a surprise to many that more notice was not taken by the Christians of the Apostolic age of these early essays at a universal faith. Some writers, indeed, among whom Bishop Lightfoot is perhaps the most notable, have thought that they could detect allusions to them in the Canonical writings, and that by the “worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which man hath not seen, vainly puffed up by the understanding of his flesh[[1]]” which St Paul condemns in the Epistle to the Colossians, must be understood the teachings of Gnostic sects already in existence[[2]]. Others have gone further, and think that the Fourth Gospel was itself written under Gnostic influence[[3]], and that the Apocalypse attributed to the same author vituperates under the name of the Nicolaitans a Christian sect professing Gnostic tenets[[4]]. Even if this be so, however, the comparatively late date assigned to all these documents[[5]] must prevent their being received as evidence of what happened in the earliest stage of the Christian Church; and we find no proof that Gnosticism ever seriously competed for popular favour with orthodox Christianity until well into the IInd century[[6]]. That the first Christians would take little heed either of organized religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities, or of the speculations of the Orphic poets and of such sects as the Simonians is plain, when we consider the way in which their expectation of the Parusia or Second Coming dominated every moment of their lives[[7]]. They believed with the unquestioning faith of children that their dead Master would presently return to the earth, and that it would then be destroyed to make way for a new state of things in which, while the majority of mankind would be condemned to everlasting fire, His followers should taste all the joys of Paradise. With this before their eyes, they turned, as has been said, their possessions into a common fund[[8]], they bound themselves together in a strict association for mutual help and comfort, and they set to work to sweep their fellows into the Christian fold with an earnestness and an energy that was the fiercer because the time for its exercise was thought to be so short. “The Lord is at hand and His reward,” a saying which seems to have been a password among them[[9]], was an idea never absent from their minds, and the result was an outburst of proselytism such as the world till then had never seen.
“They saw,” says a writer who was under no temptation to exaggerate the charity and zeal of the primitive Church, “their fathers and mothers, their sisters and their dearest friends, hurrying onward to that fearful pit, laughing and singing, lured on by the fiends whom they called the gods. They felt as we should feel were we to see a blind man walking towards a river bank.... Who that could hope to save a soul by tears and supplications would remain quiescent as men do now?.... In that age every Christian was a missionary. The soldier sought to win recruits for the heavenly host; the prisoner of war discoursed to his Persian jailer; the slave girl whispered the gospel in the ears of her mistress as she built up the mass of towered hair; there stood men in cloak and beard at street corners who, when the people, according to the manners of the day, invited them to speak, preached, not the doctrines of the Painted Porch, but the words of a new and strange philosophy; the young wife threw her arms round her husband’s neck and made him agree to be baptised, that their souls might not be parted after death[[10]]....”
How could people thus preoccupied be expected to concern themselves with theories of the origin of a world about to perish, or with the philosophic belief that all the gods of the nations were but varying forms of one supreme and kindly power?