In Persia there was religious toleration until the death of Shapur I c. His death was commemorated in the festival of the Bema, which western Manichaeans celebrated rather than Easter. But when the spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth. Several religious leaders had convinced their followers that they had the truth, the gnosis knowledge , which most people could not see. Gnostics believed that the physical world is of no value: it is the temporary, illusory stage for a struggle of spiritual powers, and all that matters is the release of the divine spirit within us from the contamination of the material body and its return to its true home.
They produced complex mythologies of angels and demons to explain the workings of the universe. Consequently, they also refused to accept the Incarnation, the union of God and human in a human body, and taught that Christ was a divine spirit in the appearance of a human body, and that his death on the cross was an appearance of death. Gnosticism recurs through the history of Christianity, but Gnostic sects tended to fragment. Salvation therefore consists in the liberation of our Light and its return to the realm of the Lord of Light.
They were forbidden to engage in the cultivation and preparation even of such foods as were approved, eg figs, thought to contain a goodly part of the divine light entombed in matter everywhere. By , Augustine, now the newly-appointed professor of rhetoric in the imperial city of Milan, had become dissatisfied with Manicheism, and he became a catechumen [doctrine learner] in the Catholic Church.
There may have been a bit of policy in his becoming a catechumen, for a strain of Christianity had the vigorous patronage of the emperor. But by August of he had irrevocably converted to the Christian faith as he had learned to interpret it from Ambrose. What chiefly impelled him to quit the old faith for the new?
Augustine tells us that he originally became a Manichee, and persisted in the sect for nine years actually it was nearly eleven , because the Manichees promised him reasons in lieu of faith. But, as he says in On the Usefulness of Believing , it was also reason which kept him from committing himself completely to Manicheism. For example, Augustine was scandalized at the immorality of some of the Manichean perfecti. What are those who should be dead to lust and revolted at the mere thought of procreation doing whistling, or whinnying like stallions, at shapely women?
Is this how the true faith bears fruit in its elect? For example, in the Decameron , Boccaccio tells of a Jew visiting Rome who sees at first hand the flagrant immorality of the Church hierarchy and decides to convert! He infers that only divine providence could be responsible for preserving a Church whose holy ones were so unholy. Later Montaigne will tell a like story in the early pages of the Apology for Raymond Sebond : while on crusade St Louis King Louis IX of France , knowing too well the flagrant iniquities of the princes of the Church, powerfully discourages a newly converted Tartar king from visiting the Pope and his prelates.
But not to worry. When the Tartar king does visit Rome, he too concludes that nothing less than the miraculous power of God could have preserved the Christian sheepfold under such shepherds. We may fairly suppose that immorality among the Christian elite was also not unknown to Augustine. Augustine taxes the Manichees with characterizing God in a way unworthy of divinity. For the substance of God Light has become entangled with, and hence corrupted by, matter, the foul substance of evil Confessions 3.
But in the same work he will mention a special case of this very problem that would seem to tell against Christians. Did not their doctrine of the Incarnation mean that God, because born in the flesh, would be defiled by flesh 5. Though Christians, unlike Manichees, were not compelled to view matter as inherently foul, nonetheless for God to take on flesh is to stoop indeed. In fact, this will later be used to argue that His love and mercy must be without stint or limit.
Manichee dietary injunctions would have the faithful eat as much of the substance of the Lord of Light at their ritual meals as they could — for example, by consuming figs.
Augustine finds this not only an unworthy characterization of divinity but an absurd one. To understand how this would strike a pious Manichee, a Christian need only imagine similar witticisms at the expense of the Christian ritual meal in the communion, where the substance of the Lord is held to be consumed by the faithful. For example, how could some Old Testament patriarchs enjoy the highest divine favor notwithstanding their unbridled concupiscence?
Seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines indeed! For shame, Solomon! Their slogans still comforted Augustine that all the evil in his life was not his own fault. He would not easily break the grip of Manicheanism upon himself until in Milan he found a better framework for understanding his spiritual self. The Manichees still thought of him as one of their "hearers" as late as the year This was more than a decade after his first involvement with the sect.
Augustine left Carthage for Rome in the year The office of professor of oratory in Milan soon fell vacant, and Augustine won the appointment. At Milan he moved from Manichaeism into an universal scepticism , and for a while doubted that there was a truth that could be found.
His nine years as a follower of Mani were effectively at an end. During the time he had been a faithful Manichee, Augustine had had three basic problems with the Christian religion: Firstly, his materialism prevented him from conceiving of God as a non-physical immaterial , transcendent reality, not detected by the senses.
Secondly, Augustine had questions about the so-called "problem of evil," especially the relationship between God and evil. He asked: "Where is evil? What is its origin? How did it come into the world? Where then does evil come from, if God made all things and, because he is good, made things to be good? Thirdly, Augustine believed that while the Christian faith was based on faith, Manicheanism was based on reason, and thus provided the truth.
Finding the truth was, after all, the main goal of Augustine. Furthermore, the view of Manicheanism concerning cosmic evil and strife in the world a type of fatalism allowed Augustine to justify his own sinful tendencies especially sexual ones as actions beyond his personal control. In his Confessions, which he wrote in his very early years as Bishop of Hippo, Augustine is critical about himself for his willing entrapment by the Manichees.
Augustine had always considered Christianity intellectually lacking, but Ambrose's application of Neo-Platonic ideas to the interpretation of Christian scripture, presented with Ambrose's famous eloquence, captured Augustine's interest. Augustine had been growing steadily dissatisfied with Manichaeism, and Ambrose's influence encouraged him to make a break with the Manichees.
Augustine read the works of the Neo-Platonists himself, and this reading revolutionized his understanding of Christianity. Meanwhile, Augustine's career was flourishing, and his worldly prospects were bright. His mother had followed him to Milan, and she arranged an advantageous marriage to a Christian girl from a good family, requiring Augustine to send his concubine away. In the fall of , he had a conversion experience that convinced him to renounce his career and his marriage prospects in order to dedicate his life to God.
He spent the winter with a group of like-minded friends, withdrawn from the world, reading and discussing Christianity. At Easter , he was finally baptized by Bishop Ambrose. On their way back to Africa, his group of friends and family was delayed at the coastal city of Ostia, where Monica fell ill and died.
The account of Augustine's life as set out in the Confessions ends there, when Augustine was about 35 years old, but his life's work was only beginning. In , Augustine returned to Thagaste, where he lived on his family estate in a small, quasi-monastic community. But Augustine's talents continued to attract attention. In , he visited the city of Hippo Regius, about 60 miles from Thagaste, in order to start a monastery, but he ended up being drafted into the priesthood by a Christian congregation there.
In , he became the bishop of Hippo. He spent the next 35 years preaching, celebrating mass, resolving local disputes, and ministering to his congregation. He continued to write, and he became famous throughout the Christian world for his role in several controversies. During this period, the Christian church in north Africa was divided into two opposing factions, the Donatists and the Catholics.
In the early s, the African church had suffered Imperial persecutions, and some Christians had publicly renounced their beliefs to escape torture and execution, while others accepted martyrdom for their faith. After the persecutions ended, the Catholics re-admitted those Christians who made public repentance for having renounced their faith. But the Donatists insisted that anyone wanting to rejoin the church would have to rebaptized. Furthermore, they refused to recognize any priests or bishops except their own, believing that the Catholic bishops had been ordained by traitors.
By the s, the conflict had erupted into violence, with Donatist outlaws attacking Catholic travelers in the countryside. At first, Augustine tried diplomacy with the Donatists, but they refused his overtures, and he came to support the use of force against them. The Roman government banned Donatism in , but conflict continued until , when hundreds of Donatist and Catholic bishops met for a hearing in Carthage before the imperial commissioner Marcellinus, Augustine's friend and a Catholic.
Augustine, the former rhetor, eloquently argued the position of the Catholics, and Marcellinus decided in their favor.
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