Manichaeism (WAS predestination & the preterite)

[Monte Davis]

> Didn't Manichaeism feature a belief that the body and all its functions
were evil from the get-go, which in practice meant go ahead and do what you
want with it? <

Yes to the first part, no to the second part. That's a canard that has come
down, as Vaska points out, from Augustine's rejection of his own youth
(wouldn't you love to see *his* map with colored stars?), and through
centuries of Christian polemic against Marcion, Valentinus, Caelestius,
Cathars et al[bigensians].

Alexander of Lycopolis on Manichaean morality, quoted in Hans Jonas' "The
Gnostic Religion":

"Since the ruin of the Hyle [matter, AKA the intrinsically corrupt sensible
world] is decreed by God, one should abstain from all ensouled things and
eat only vegetables and whatever else is non-sentient, and abstain from
marriage, the delights of love and the begetting of children, so that the
divine Power may not through the succession of generations remain longer in
the Hyle. However, one must not, in order to effect the purification of
things, commit suicide."

Unless you consider that last line to be carte blanche for unlimited fun
and frolic, I'd call this a reasonably ascetic scheme. In practice, the lay
Manichees -- variously "soldiers," "hearers" or "auditors" (shades of
Dianetics!) -- seem to have partaken of the usual sins, while gaining merit
by supporting and revering the ascetic "elect" or "true," in a pattern that
Mani would have seen among Buddhists and Hindus (dharma now, karma later),
and that was certainly passed through to Christian monasticism. Likewise, I
imagine the more devout laymen made plans to give up their mindless
pleasures later in life.

CAVEAT LECTOR: I was last genuinely up on this stuff 25 years ago, when
studying with Joseph Campbell, where I picked up my elitist paternalistic
Eurocentric anti-Semitic etcetc-ism. Also, most of my library has been
"temporarily" stored at a vacation home in Maine since I moved from a
Brooklyn loft to this NJ house six years ago. (Anyone want to gain merit by
building the bookcases that have been on my to-do list ever since?)

Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Elaine Pagels' book on Gnosticism
(that one's very high on the list) touches on this, certainly with more
up-to-date scholarship behind it.

Anyway #2, while looking for Jonas I did run across this wonderful
Spenglerian-Toynbeean passage in Franz Cumont's "Oriental Religions in
Roman Paganism" (1909). He's been talking about the "close call" of the
eastern influences on Rome during the first few centuries AD:

"Never, not even during the Mohammedan invasions, had Europe a narrower
escape from becoming Asiatic than when Diocletian [284-305] officially
recognized Mithra as the protector of the reconstructed empire. The time
when that god seemed to be establishing his authority over the entire
civilized world was one of the critical phases in the moral history of
antiquity. An irresistible invasion of Semitic and Mazdaean
[Persian/Syrian, Ahura-Mazda etc] conceptions nearly succeeded in
overwhelming the Occidental spirit. Even after Mithra had been vanquished
and expelled from Christianized Rome, Persia did not disarm. The work of
conversion in which Mithraism had failed was taken up by Manicheism, the
heir to its cardinal doctrines, and until the Middle Ages, Persian dualism
continued to cause bloody struggles in the ancient Roman provinces."

Boy howdy, talk about yer yellow peril! They just don't make
world-historical bombast like that any more (unless they're named Fukuyama
or Huntington). Just think, foax, if it weren't for Constantine and his
flying KEZVH, we might be finding TRP's works shot through with *dualism*!

*Now* do you see why Desert Storm was so important?

-Monte <who has "abstention from the delights of love" on his to-do list,
ETA 2039 AD>