Características y tipos de coordinación

Mindful of the fact, therefore, that Manichaeans themselves probably did not apprehend their myth ‘as an orderly, synthetic account’ of the universe, it is nevertheless appropriate to ask what account of existence did the myth narrate?

Following the names and terms from Theodore bar Koni’s summary (trans.

J.C. Reeves 1992, 189–93), the beginning period witnessed the good nature, also called the Father of Greatness (i.e., God), residing in the Realm of Light with his five dwellings (or members),⁴⁵ mind, knowledge, intellect, thought and reflection. These five dwellings, denoting the presence of the Father, sensed that the corresponding principle of the good nature, the evil nature, or the King of Darkness, who with his five worlds (‘aeons’) of smoke, fire, wind, water and darkness, had been casting envious glimpses towards his realm. The separateness of these two co-eternal natures was thus undermined with evil’s ‘contemplation of ascent’ (cf. J.C. Reeves 1992, 190), an act which triggered the dramatic events of the middle period, in which the world would eventually be established.

The dwellings of the Father became unnerved by the attentions of their southern neighbour. Reluctant to send the good nature’s five attributes to counter the challenge from below, the five who had been ‘created . . . for tranquillity and peace’ (Theodore bar Koni; trans. J.C. Reeves 1992, 190), the evil nature was engaged by the Father himself. However, the Father could only do so through the act of ‘calling forth’ from his own essence an emanation, the Mother of Life;

the speech-act of calling thus leaving the Father’s immaculate divinity unsullied by masking any suggestion that the emergence of the emanation came about through reproduction, which in Mani’s mind had no place in his theogony, belonging properly to his demonology. The Mother of Life then called forth the First Man (also termed the Primal Man), who called forth his Five Sons, the elemental air, wind, water, light and fire. Wearing his Sons like a suit of armour, the First Man sacrificed himself and his Sons to the five Sons of Darkness, who

43 See Hunter 2005.

44 Der Manichäismus in der arabischen Überlieferung (Göttingen: 1954): Non vidi.

45 See Williams Jackson 1932, 223, nt. 6.

Manichaean Theology II: The Universe, its Rituals and its Community

consumed them, infecting their powers of reason, and sending them into a deadly torpor.

It is important to note the extent to which the account of the loss of the Sons to the darkness and their eventual recovery lay at the very heart of the myth, and also the extent to which this episode from the myth determined the essence of Manichaean anthropology and soteriology. The Sons of the First Man were understood by Manichaeans to be ‘the stuff of souls’,⁴⁶ not in any transferred sense, but as a genealogical statement of fact: each individual human soul derived from, and in its essence was, the armour of the First Man, i.e., the Living Soul (sometimes referred to as the Living Self). Thus the soul, whether constrained in the natural world, in foodstuffs, or in the human body, being composed of the five primary elements, was of a material, elemental quality, although of a different type of substance than that which constituted its antithetical rival (commonly referred to in modern accounts by the Greek word hyle – Matter; for an ancient precedent, see Faustus in Augustine, Answer to Faustus 20.3).

As a result of the ubiquity of light/soul in the material world, Manichaeans understood it to be constantly at risk of being damaged, even during seemingly mundane tasks such as harvesting crops and the production and consumption of foodstuffs. The latter formed an especially emotive concern for Manichaeans, since the organisational and ritual dimensions of the religion existed largely to facilitate the purification of light in the daily, ritual meal consumed by the Elect, the only members of the Manichaean church who were fit to consume food in the ‘right way’, i.e., in a way that would lead to the liberation of light contained within it, their fitness determined by their commitment to a carefully prescribed series of ascetic and ethical commandments (see below). The meal itself was a ritual occurrence which, in its central concern with the purification of the divine in the material world, appears to have shared some of the rationales evident in the liturgies of Zoroastrianism (e.g., yasna) – certainly at least sharing fewer with the Christian Eucharist; however, Manichaeism’s emphasis on the realisation of the ritual through the acts of eating and meditation performed by the Elect alone meant that the ritual apparatuses necessary for the performance of the meal were very different from those in Zoroastrianism.⁴⁷

Furthermore, in line with other late-antique religious approaches to ritualised meals,⁴⁸ the vegetarian Elect did not consume sacralised animal meat, on account of the Manichaean belief that cooked animal flesh carried a preponderance of matter, containing very little in the way of light.⁴⁹ However, a concern with the conceptual role and language of sacrifice was transposed by Manichaeism into the realm of its mythology – primarily in the sacrifice of the First Man, as a representation of an archetypal act of violent suffering, an offering-up of life for protection rather than propitiation. The purposeful ‘sacrificial’ injury to something divine was further transposed into the realm of ritual, where the food brought as alms by Hearers to the Elect was seen to undergo both harm

46 BeDuhn 2005, 12.

47 For what appears here, see BeDuhn 2000.

48 See esp. Stroumsa 2009 and Petropoulou 2008.

49 See Augustine, On Heresies 46.11; trans. I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu 2004, 189.

– in being harvested – but also redemption, as the living substance of the ritual meal.⁵⁰

The sacrifice of the First Man and his Sons tended to be intentionally misrepresented in the responses of heresiologists to the myth, who instead sought to characterise the act not as a sacrifice but as a tumultuous defeat for the good nature. The thinking behind their intention was to suggest that Mani’s conception of God was inherently flawed, since the First Man’s ‘defeat’ indicated that God was not impervious, but was capable of being attacked and corrupted by the contrary nature. For instance, the Acts of Archelaus describes the descent of the First Man in the following manner:

Equipped with these [his Five Sons], as if in readiness for war, he came down to fight against the Darkness. However, the Prince of Darkness fought back and devoured part of his armoury, namely the soul. Then the First Original Man was severely beaten down by the Darkness (Acts of Archelaus 7.3–4; trans. M. Vermes 2001, 47).

However, as Jason BeDuhn has noted, the sacrifice of the First Man and his Sons,

‘the collective soul’, was an ‘act of good will’⁵¹ on the part of these figures, since through their voluntary ‘leap’ into the realm of evil they were endeavouring not only to distract but also to placate the colonial desire for territorial expansion on the part of the evil nature who had already moved uncomfortably close to the Realm of Light. The sacrifice achieved its aim of stopping this advance, ‘throwing a spanner into the works’ of the ambitions of the evil nature. The biblical origin of this idea of divine self-sacrifice was revealed by Fortunatus, a Manichaean from North Africa challenged by Augustine at the end of the fourth century, who quoted Paul from Philippians 2.5–8 as a way of comparing the willingness of the soul to humble itself for the cause of defeating the sin of the evil nature, with the readiness of Jesus to ‘empty himself’ (Gk kenoō; hence, Kenotic Christology) in order to overcome death.⁵²

As BeDuhn notes, the significance of this aspect of the myth has continued to escape many commentators who have perhaps followed patristic charac-terisations of the narrative a little too closely. Indeed, the significance of this aspect may indeed have informed other areas of Manichaean theology, such as Christology. It is a widely held view among commentators that the Manichaeans regarded the historical Jesus (i.e., Jesus the Apostle) as only appearing to become incarnate and to experience bodily suffering during the Passion, because he remained fundamentally a spiritual being – an idea that arose primarily from the Manichaeans’ association of the human form with matter, as something not befitting a divine being. This has given rise to the common assumption that Manichaean Christology concerning Jesus the Apostle was docetic (from Gk dokeō, ‘appearing to be something’), meaning that the appearance of Jesus as

50 See BeDuhn 2002, 165–208.

51 BeDuhn 2005, 12.

52 Augustine, A Debate with Fortunatus 7; trans. R.J. Teske 2006, 147. See BeDuhn 2005, 13–14.

Manichaean Theology II: The Universe, its Rituals and its Community

having a real, physical body was in fact illusory. Whilst this assumption about what the Manichaeans may have thought about the historical Jesus has been challenged of late,⁵³ there may have been no need for Mani and his followers to insist on Jesus having endured real suffering during the Passion, precisely because there was already an archetypal figure belonging to their narrative tradition – the First Man – who not only suffered tremendous hardship at the hands of the evil nature, but who also did so willingly.