§ 29.2. The System.—The different sets of documents give very different accounts of the religious system of Manichæism. This is not occasioned so much by erroneous tradition or misconception as by the varying stages through which the doctrine of Manes passed. In Western and Christian lands it took on a richer Christian colouring than in Eastern and pagan countries. In all its forms, however, we meet with a groundwork of magical dualism. As in Parseeism, Ahriman and his Devas stand opposed to Ormuzd and his Ameshaspentas and Izeds, so also here from all eternity a luminous ether surrounding the realm of light, the Terra lucida, of the good God, with his twelve æons and countless beings of light, stands opposed to the realm of darkness, the Terra pestifera, with Satan and his demons. Each of the two kingdoms consists of five elements: the former of bright light, quickening fire, clear water, hot air, soft wind; the latter of lurid flame, scorching fire, grimy slime, dark clouds, raging tempest. In the one, perfect concord, goodness, happiness, and splendour prevail; in the other, wild, chaotic and destructive waves dash confusedly about. Clothing himself in a borrowed ray of light, Satan prepared himself for a robber campaign in the realm of light. In order to keep him off the Father of Lights caused to emanate from him the “Mother of Life,” and placed her as a watcher on the borders of his realm. She brought forth the first man (ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος), who armed with the five pure elements engaged in battle with the demons. When he sank before their furious onslaught, God sent a newly emanated æon for his deliverance, the “living spirit” (ζῶον πνεῦμα), who freed him and vanquished the demons. But a portion of the ethereal substance of the first man, his armour of light, had been already devoured by the demoniac Hyle, and as the Jesus patibilis, υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου ἐμπαθής, remains imprisoned in it. Out of the elements of light which he saved the living Spirit now forms the Sun and Moon, and settles there the first man as Jesus impatibilis, υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου ἀπαθής, while out of the Hyle impregnated with elements of light he constructs the present earthly world, in order gradually to deliver the fragments of light bound up in it, the Jesus patibilis or the soul of the world, and to fit them for restoration to their eternal home. The first man dwelling in the sun and the Holy Spirit enthroned in the luminous ether have to further and direct this process of purification. The sun and moon are the two light-ships, lucidæ naves, which the light particles wrenched out of the world further increase. The zodiac with its twelve signs operates in this direction like a revolving wheel with twelve buckets, while the smaller ship, as new moon, receives them, and as full moon empties them again into the sun, which introduces them into the realm of light. In order to check this process of purification Satan, out of the Hyle and the imprisoned particles of light, of which he still had possession, made Adam and Eve after his own image and that of the first man, and incited them to fleshly lusts and carnal intercourse, so that the light of their soul became dim and weak, and more and more the body became its gloomy prison. His demons, moreover, were continually busying themselves in fastening the chains of darkness more tightly about their descendants by means of the false religions of Judaism and paganism. Therefore at last the Jesus impatibilis, clothed with the appearance of a body, descended from the sun to the earth, to instruct men about their souls and the means and end of their redemption. The sufferings and death inflicted upon him by the Prince of Darkness were only in appearance. The death of the cross and the resurrection were only sensible representations of the overthrow and final victory of the Jesus patibilis. As in the macrocosm of the earthly world there is set forth the emancipation of this suffering Christ from the bonds of hylic matter, so also in the microcosm represented in each individual man, we have the dominion of the spirit over the flesh, the redemption of the soul of light from the prison of the body, and its return to the realm of light, conceived of as the end and aim of all endeavour. The method for attaining this consists in the greatest possible abstinence from all connection and intercourse with the world of sense; the Signaculum oris in particular demands absolute abstinence from all animal food and restriction in the use even of vegetable food, for in the slaughtering of the animal all elements of light are with the life withdrawn from its flesh, and only hylic elements remain, whereas in vegetable fare the substances of light there present contribute to the strengthening of the light in the man’s own soul. Wine and all intoxicating drinks as “Satan’s gall” are strictly forbidden, as well as animal food. The Signaculum manuum prohibits all injuring of animal or plant life, all avoidable contact with or work upon matter, because the material is thereby strengthened. The Signaculum sinus forbids all sensual pleasure and carnal intercourse. The souls of those men who have perfectly satisfied the threefold injunction, return at death immediately into the blessed home of light. Those who only partially observe them must, by transmigration of the soul into other bodies, of animals, plants or men, in proportion to the degree of purification attained unto, that is, by metempsychosis, have the purifying process carried to perfection. But all who have not entered upon the way of sanctification, are finally delivered over unreservedly to Satan and hell. The Apostles greatly misunderstood and falsified this doctrine of Christ; but in the person of Manes the promised Paraclete appeared, who taught it again in its original purity. For the most part Manes accepted the Pauline epistles in which the doctrines of the groaning creation and the opposition of flesh and spirit must have been peculiarly acceptable to him; all the more decidedly did he reject the Acts of the Apostles, and vigorously did he oppose the account which it gave of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as in conflict with his doctrine of the Paraclete. According to the Fihrist, Manes distinguished from the Jesus impatibilis who as true redeemer descended to earth in the appearance of a body, the historical Jesus as prophet of the Devil, and the false Messiah who for the punishment of his wickedness suffered actual death on the cross instead of the true Jesus. The Old Testament he wholly rejected. The god of the Jews was with him the Prince of Darkness; the prophets with Moses at their head were the messengers of the Devil. As his own true precursors—the precursors of the Paraclete—he named Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Buddha, and Zoroaster.
§ 29.3. Constitution, Worship, and Missionarizing.—Manes was still regarded after his death as the invisibly present head (Princeps) of the church. At the head of the hierarchical order as his visible representative stood an Imam or Pope, who resided at Babylon. The first of these, appointed by Manes himself before his death, was named Sis or Sisinius. The Manichæan ministry was distributed under him into twelve Magistri and seventy-two Bishops, with presbyters and deacons in numbers as required. The congregations consisted of Catechumens (Auditores) and Elect (Electi, Perfecti). The latter were strictly bound to observe the threefold Signaculum. The Auditores brought them the food necessary for the support of their life and out of the abundance of their holiness they procured pardon to these imperfect ones for their unavoidable violation of mineral and vegetable life in making this provision. The Auditores were also allowed to marry and even to eat animal food; but by voluntary renunciation of this permission they could secure entrance into the ranks of the Electi. The worship of the Manichæans was simple, but orderly. They addressed their prayers to the sun and moon. The Sunday was hallowed by absolute fasting, and the day of common worship was dedicated to the honour of the spirit of the sun; but on Monday the Electi by themselves celebrated a secret service. At their annual chief festival, that of the Pulpit (βῆμα), on the day of their founder’s death, they threw themselves down upon the ground in oriental fashion before a beautifully adorned chair of state, the symbol of their departed master. The five steps leading up to it represented the five hierarchical decrees of the Electi, Diaconi, Presbyteri, Episcopi and Magistri. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the former with oil, the latter with bread without wine, belonged to the secret worship of the Perfect. Oil and bread were regarded as the most luminous bearers of the universal soul in the vegetable world.—Notwithstanding the violent persecution which after the execution of Manes was raised against the adherents of his doctrine throughout the whole Persian empire, their number increased rapidly in all quarters, especially in the East, but also in the West, in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc. Proconsular Africa became the centre of its Western propaganda; and thence it spread into Italy and Spain. In A.D. 290 Diocletian issued an edict by which the Proconsul of Africa was required to burn the leaders of this sect, doubly dangerous as springing from the hostile Persian empire, along with their books, to execute with the sword its persistent adherents, or send them to work in the quarries, and confiscate their goods.—Continuation at § [54, 1].
III. THE DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT AND APOLOGETICAL ACTIVITY OF THE CHURCH.[52]
§ 30. The Theological Literature of the Post-Apostolic Age, A.D. 70-170.[53]
The literary remains of the so-called Apostolic Fathers constitute the first fruits of Patristic-Christian literature. These are in respect of number and scope insignificant, and, inasmuch as they had their origin, from the special individual circumstances of their writers, they were composed for the most part in the form of epistles. The old traditional view that the authors of these treatises had enjoyed the immediate fellowship and instruction of the Apostles is at once too narrow and too wide. Among these writings must be included first of all the recently discovered “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” About A.D. 130, when Christianity was making its way among the ranks of the cultured, Christian writers began to feel themselves called upon to engage with paganism in a literary warfare defensive and offensive, in order to repel the charges and calumnies raised against their religion and to demonstrate its inner worth in opposition to the moral and religious degradation of heathenism. These writings had a more theological and scientific character than those of the Apostolic Fathers, which had more of a practical and hortatory tendency. The works of these Apologists still extant afford interesting and significant glimpses of the life, doctrine, and thinking of the Christians of that age, which but for these writings would have been almost unknown.
§ 30.1. The Beginnings of Patristic Literature.—According to the established rule of the church we have to distinguish between New Testament and Patristic literature in this way: to the former belongs those writings to which, as composed by Apostles or at least under Apostolic authority, the ancient church assigned an objectively fundamental and regulative significance for further ecclesiastical development; while in the latter we have represented the subjective conception and estimation which the Church Fathers made of the Christian message of salvation and the structure they reared upon this foundation. The so-called Apostolic Fathers may be regarded as occupying a position midway between the two and forming a transition from the one to the other, or as themselves constituting the first fruits of Patristic literature.Indeed as regards the New Testament writings themselves the ancient church was long uncertain and undecided as to the selection of them from the multitude of contemporary writings;[54] and Eusebius still designated several of the books that were subsequently definitely recognised ἀντιλεγόμενα; while modern criticism has not only repeated such doubts as to the genuineness of these writings but has extended these doubts to other books of the New Testament. But even this criticism cannot deny the historical significance assigned above to those New Testament books contested by it, even though it may feel obliged to reject the account of them given by the ancient church, and to assign their composition to the Post-Apostolic Age.—When we turn to the so-called Apostolic Fathers, on closer examination the usual designation as well as the customary enumeration of seven names as belonging to the group will be found too narrow because excluding the New Testament writings composed by disciples of the Apostles, and too wide because including names which have no claim to be regarded as disciples or contemporaries of the Apostles, and embracing writings of which the authenticity is in some cases clearly disproved, in other cases doubtful or at least only problematical. We come upon firm ground when we proceed to deal with the Apologists of the age of Hadrian. It was not, however, till the period of the Old Catholic Church, about A.D. 170, that the literary compositions of the Christians became broadened, deepened and universalized by a fuller appropriation and appreciation of the elements of Græco-Latin culture, so as to form an all-sided universal Christian literature representative of Christianity as a universal religion.
§ 30.2. The Theology of the Post-Apostolic Age.—By far the greater number of the ecclesiastical writers of this period belong to the Gentile Christian party. Hence we might suppose that it would reflect the Pauline type of doctrine, if not in its full depth and completeness, yet at least in its more significant and characteristic features. This expectation, however, is not altogether realised. Among the Church Fathers of this age we rather find an unconscious deterioration of the original doctrine of Paul revealing itself as a smoothing down and belittling or as an ignoring of the genuine Paulinism, which, therefore, as the result of the struggle against the Gnostic tendency, only in part overcome, was for the first time fully recognised and proved finally victorious in the Reformation of the 16th century. On the one hand, we see that these writers, if they do not completely ignore the position and task assigned to Israel as the chosen people of God, minimise their importance and often fail to appreciate the pædagogical significance of the Mosaic law (Gal. iii. 24), so that its ceremonial parts are referred to misunderstanding, want of sense, and folly, or are attributed even to demoniacal suggestion. But on the other hand, even the gospel itself is regarded again as a new and higher law, purified from that ceremonial taint, and hence the task of the ante-mundane Son of God, begotten for the purpose of creating the world, but now also manifest in the flesh, from whose influence upon Old Testament prophets as well as upon the sages of paganism all revelations of pre-Christian Judaism as well as all σπέρματα of true knowledge in paganism have sprung, is pre-eminently conceived of as that of a divine teacher and lawgiver. In this way there was impressed upon the Old Catholic Church as it grew up out of Pauline Gentile Christianity a legalistic moral tendency that was quite foreign to the original Paulinism, and the righteousness of faith taught by the Apostle when represented as obedience to the “new law” passed over again unobserved into a righteousness of works. Redemption and reconciliation are indeed still always admitted to be conditioned by the death of Christ and their appropriation to be by the faith of the individual; but this faith is at bottom nothing more than the conviction of the divinity of the person and doctrine of the new lawgiver evidencing itself in repentance and rendering of practical obedience, and in confident expectation of the second coming of Christ, and in a sure confidence of a share in the life everlasting.—The introduction of this legalistic tendency into the Gentile Christian Church was not occasioned by the influence of Jewish Christian legalism, nor can it be explained as the result of a compromise effected between Jewish Christian Petrinism and Gentile Christian Paulinism, which were supposed by Baur, Schwegler, etc., to have been, during the Apostolic Age, irreconcilably hostile to one another. This has been already proved by Ritschl, who charges its intrusion rather upon the inability of Gentile Christianity fully to understand the Old Testament bases of the Pauline doctrine. By means of a careful analysis of the undisputed writings of Justin Martyr and by a comparison of these with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Engelhardt has proved that anything extra-, un-, or anti-Pauline in the Christianity of these Fathers has not so much an Ebionitic-Jewish Christian, but rather a pagan-philosophic, source. He shows that the prevalent religio-moral mode of thought of the cultured paganism of that age reappears in that form of Christianity not only as an inability to reach a profound understanding of the Old Testament, but also just as much as a minimising and depreciating, or disdaining of so many characteristic features of the Pauline doctrinal resting on Old Testament foundations.
§ 30.3. The so-called Apostolic Fathers.[55]—
- Clement of Rome was one of the first Roman bishops, probably the third (§ [16, 1]). The opinion that he is to be identified with the Clement named in Phil. iv. 3 is absolutely unsupported. The sameness of age and residence in some small measure favours the identifying him with Tit. Flav. Clemens [Clement], the consul, and cousin of the Emperor, who on account of his Christianity (?) was executed in A.D. 95 (§ [22, 1]). Besides a multitude of other writings which subsequently assumed his well-known name (§ [28, 3]; [43, 4]), there are ascribed to him two so-called Epistles to the Corinthians, of which however, the second certainly is not his. The First Epistle which in the ancient church was considered worthy to be used in public worship, was afterwards lost, but fragments of it were recovered in A.D. 1628 in the so-called Codex Alexandrinus (§ [152, 2]), together with a portion of the so-called “Second Epistle.”Recently however both writings were found in a complete form by Bryennius, Metropolitan of Serrä in Macedonia, in a Jerusalem Codex of A.D. 1056 discovered at Constantinople and published by him.[56][ ]In the following year a Codex of the Syrian New Testament at Cambridge was more closely examined,[57] and in it there was found a complete Syriac translation of both writings inserted between the Catholic and the Pauline Epistles, while in Codex Alexandrinus they are placed after the Apocalypse. The “First” Epistle, the date of which is generally given as A.D. 93-95, does not give the author’s name, but is assigned to Clement of Rome by Dionysius of Corinth in A.D. 170, as quoted in Eusebius, and by Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, and described as written from Rome in name of the church of that place to the church of Corinth, counselling peace and unity. In the passage c. 58-63, formerly wanting but now restored, the exhortation passes into a long prayer with intercessions for those in authority and for the church according to what was perhaps already the customary form of public prayer in Rome. Both churches, those of Rome and Corinth, are admitted without dispute to have been Gentile Christian churches, which had accepted the Pauline type of doctrine, without however fully fathoming or understanding it. But Peter also occupies a position of equal honour alongside of Paul, and nowhere does any trace appear of a consciousness of any opposition between the two apostles. The divine sonship of the Redeemer and His consequent universal sovereignty are the basis of the Christian confession, but no sort of developed doctrine of the divinity of Christ is here found, and even His pre-existence is affirmed only as the presupposition of the view that He was already operative in the prophets by His spirit. The Old Testament, allegorically and typically interpreted, is therefore the source and proof of Christian doctrine. Of a particular election of Israel the author knows nothing. Christians as such, whether descended from Gentiles or from Jews, are the chosen people of God; Abraham by reason of his faith is their father; and it is only by faith in the Almighty God that men of all ages have been justified before God.—In the so-called Second “Epistle” the completed form of the second half proves what the less complete form rendered probable, that it is no Epistle but a sermon, and indeed the oldest specimen of a sermon, that we here possess. The author, who delivered it somewhere about A.D. 144-150, wrote it out first for his own use, and then for the church. As it has in its theological views many points of contact with the Shepherd of Hermas (§ [30, 4]), Harnack thinks it probable that a younger Clement of Rome mentioned by Hermas may be the author; while Hilgenfeld is inclined to regard it as a youthful work of Clement of Alexandria (§ [31, 4]). It contains a forcible exhortation to thorough repentance and conversion in accordance with the command of Christ, with a reference to the judgment and the future glory. This shows in a remarkable way what rapid progress had been made from the religio-moral mode of thought of cultured paganism toward moralizing legalism, and the smoothing down of Christianity thereby introduced into the Gentile-Christian Catholic Church, during the half century between the composition of the Epistle of Clement and this Clementine discourse. For in the latter already the gospel is represented as a new law, a higher divine doctrine of virtue and reward, in which alms, fasts, and prayer appear as specially meritorious works. The righteousness that avails with God is still indeed derived from faith, but this faith is reduced to a belief in the future recompense of eternal life. Christ as Son of God is conceived of by the author as a pneumatical heavenly being, created before the world, who, sent by God into the world for man’s redemption, took upon Him human σάρξ. But besides Him, he also knows a second pneumatical hypostasis created before the world, “before sun and moon,” the ἐκκλησία ζῶσα, which, as the heavenly body of Christ, is at the same time the presupposition for the making of the world restored by His work of salvation. For the creation of this divine pair of æons, that is, of Christ as the ἄνθρωπος ἐπουράνιος and of the church as His heavenly σύζυγος, the author refers to the account of the creation in Gen. i. 27. Of passages quoted as sayings of Christ several are not to be found in our Gospels.