EQUIPOS DE PROTECCIÓN INDIVIDUAL

It has become something of a convention for modern studies of Manichaeism to contain at least one chapter entitled ‘The Life of Mani’ (or variations thereof).¹ Such biographical treatments share an almost identical template, their main concern being to particularise – by reconstructing on the basis of evidence offered by the ancient sources – the life of Mani from birth to death, with an emphasis on the emergence of Mani’s religious sensibilities, his travels and exploits in the cause of his message, and his relations with the powerful kings and princes of his day. The presence of a biographical component in Manichaean studies is certainly not inappropriate, as the evidence presented by the ancient sources indicates that Mani commonly resided at the very centre of his followers’

concerns. In a liturgical Bema text from the Medinet Madi collection of Psalms, performed during the commemoration of Mani’s life and death (styled by the Manichaean community as a martyrdom) at which his presence was symbolised by the placing of his portrait on a seat (Gk bēma) of judgement,² Manichaeans spoke aloud the following doxology:

Glory to thee, our father Manichaios, the glorious one, (the joy of) the gods . . ., the entire remission of sins,

the preaching of life, the ambassador of they that are on high;

glory to your bēma, your seat that gives . . .³

In theological terms, both Mani himself and later Manichaean writers dwelt on formulating an understanding of Mani’s centrality to the religion, in a manner which conveyed his identity relative to his place within the religion’s dominant model of prophetology (see below). Manichaeism would appear therefore to have been a religious tradition in which the role of prophetic personalities was essential to the overall meaning of the religion’s teachings.

Given this ancient concentration of interest in Mani’s life, the modern writer seeking to present a biography of the prophet from southern Mesopotamia is presented with an extensive range of ancient sources that seemingly offer a treasure-trove of information about Mani, his family, his childhood, his influ-ences and his activities and achievements. Within Manichaeism, there is a variety of largely fragmentary historical, homiletical and hagiographical materials that contain descriptions of Mani at various stages in his life, and that are of a varying historical character and quality. Accounts from non-Manichaean works,

1 See esp. Puech 1949, 15–57; Klíma 1962; Widengren 1965, 23–42; Ort 1967; Decret 1974, 44–71; Merkelbach 1986; Tardieu 2008, 1–30.

2 Klimkeit 1993, 145.

3 Psalms of the Bema 222. 30–33; trans. I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu 2004, 240; an earlier version of part of the same psalm was unearthed in Kellis, see Gardner 1996, 33–41.

Lives of Mani

frequently hostile to the religion, may also be of use for biographical purposes if handled appropriately. Furthermore, certain Manichaean works have also been received as if they were intended incontestably by their ancient authors to serve as biographies of Mani: notable in this regard is the modern reception of the CMC utilised as the foundational text for supplying all that is essential in drawing modern biographical portraits of Mani. In such treatments, Mani is most frequently referred to as the institutor of a brand-new religion, the founder of the faith carrying his eponym. Influenced by dominant patterns in modern approaches to life-writing, Mani’s biographers have also chosen to discuss this late-antique Mesopotamian by way of exposing his ‘personality’.⁴ However, should a modern biography of Mani make a claim to present a positivist account of its subject – i.e., the details of Mani’s life as being incontestable – we probably have reasonable grounds to think of such an account as being somewhat misjudged. Evidently there is no deliberate intention on the part of authors to mislead readers of such studies: disciplinary fashion has dictated that, in the study of ancient religions, at least some consideration should be given to providing a biographical account of those individuals regarded as being instrumental in the formation or reformation of ancient traditions. Indeed, this impulse has proved to be especially dominant in the study of Late Antiquity, where certainly since the late 1960s an increasing interest in the ancient lives of both pagan and Christian sainted men and women has become apparent, particularly in defining and ‘decoding’ the symbolism and significance of those lives for ancient writers and their audiences.⁵

Indeed, as such research has indicated, modern biographers seeking to write the lives of figures from antiquity must be mindful of the problems that are likely to arise when ancient sources are handled as if they are ‘treasure-troves’ of infor-mation. A starting point in identifying some of these issues, therefore, is the need to recognise the cultural and intellectual trends which have come to dominate the contemporary composition of biography. Both popular and academic instances of ‘life-writing’ combine a number of elements which frequently stand in contradiction to one another: for instance, the striving on the part of the author to achieve a degree of objectivity in the presentation of a subject; an attitude of impartiality in the treatment of the life in hand; and the desire to explore the formation of personality and its psychological development.⁶ It is in relation to these concerns that the aims and ambitions of modern biography begin to rub up against the concerns of ancient biography, which were really very different. Biography in its modern form is now very much a distinct genre in its own right, governed as we have seen by its own rules and conventions: in its ancient form, however, biography existed as a genre only in so far as it fulfilled a variety of literary and rhetorical functions, having been composed ‘for praise or blame . . . for exemplary, moral purposes . . . for didactic or information . . . to preserve the memory of a great man . . . or simply to entertain.’⁷ Such ambitions

4 For instance, Williams Jackson 1938; Ort 1967; also Widengren 1965, 135–44.

5 Cf. Dillon 2006.

6 See Baker-Brian 2007.

7 Burridge 2006, 38.

are indeed reducible to one basic observation: in ancient biography little else mattered other than the relationship which existed between the intention of the writer – i.e., the purpose which his work served – and the portrayal of his subject: thus, the intention of the ancient biographer is both discernable in and conveyed via the portrait of his subject’s life.

From a modern biographer’s perspective, this consideration is therefore likely to seem both foreign and unsettling. In the case of Mani the obvious implication is that the ‘historical Mani’ becomes unknowable, since following this line of interpretation the ‘personality’ we encounter in the ancient literature is the medium through which the writer’s intentions were realised. Often this may be overcome in those exceptional instances when we have an ancient person who is able ‘to speak for himself’ through the survival of some sort of textual artefact, be it an inscription, a collection of aphorisms, a selection of letters, or an ‘autobi-ography’: however with regard to the latter, historians should be mindful that ancient ‘autobiography’ is no more likely to reveal the author as he actually was – what he thought and did – than ancient life-writing may be expected to convey an impartial treatment of its subject.⁸ Nevertheless, this has not prevented modern biographers from handling ancient ‘autobiography’ as if it provided a window onto the private thoughts and actions of the individual: by far the best example in this instance is the Confessions of Augustine (d. 430), the Catholic bishop of Hippo in North Africa, which exerts a considerable influence on the shape taken by modern biographies of this apostate Manichaean, in addition to the material provided by his other writings which are quite astonishing with regard to both the quantity and the variety of material. The adoption of such material, however, is not problem-free.⁹

Indeed, Mani himself, in certain writings, disclosed ‘personal details’. Alongside statements in the Šābuhragān and the Living Gospel, which shed light on Mani’s own sense of identity as an apostle charged with the task of propagating divine teachings, Mani also imparted details about himself in the remains of his other works. In a recently edited letter written by Mani, surviving in Coptic trans-lation, Mani recounts to the letter’s addressee an ongoing bodily illness:

I was very sick in the body. I did not find the way to spend a single hour to sit and hear it; nor also was I able to straighten out (?), because I was greatly pained. Indeed, further, when I listened to the words that you wrote for me in that letter, all my limbs slackened and worsened with me painfully in the anguish of my body (P.Kell.Copt. 53.31 – the Epistle of the Ten Words; trans. I. Gardner 2007a, 74; see also 74–83).

However, from the contents of the epistle it is apparent that Mani was attending to a pastoral problem that had lately beset his followers, and that in the letter he was purposefully drawing attention to his own physical fragility in order to console the sufferings of a nascent community of followers. Thus, what we take as being an instance of personal disclosure was in fact being put to the service of

8 Baker-Brian 2007.

9 Most recently, see O’Donnell 2005; cf. Chadwick 2009.

Lives of Mani

his community: an example of the sharing of personal information not unusual in the ancient world.

Nevertheless, there are evidently moments and incidents in the accounts of Mani’s life which are historically transparent, disclosing his actual experiences and achievements: that Mani travelled, undertook missionary work, and met with and persuaded kings and dignitaries of high rank about the veracity of his ideas, are events in the history of early Manichaeism which should not be contested as actually having happened. Rather, what we should be scrutinising is whether those things occurred in precisely the way that we are told they did. Indeed, it is these very same events that were likely to become idealised in the service of later attempts to develop legendary narratives of Mani and Manichaeism. In this regard, we find ourselves in the complex world of the problems and issues thrown up by the Iranian Manichaean materials unearthed in Central Asia, over which Werner Sundermann has cast such a commanding presence; whilst many of Sundermann’s specific findings about the legendary and historiographical habits of Manichaean writers remain largely unknown to English-language students of Mani, his overarching contribution to the historical treatment of Manichaean literature is nevertheless evident across the study of Manichaeism in the awareness that great care needs to be paid in the way that historians handle the historicity of biographical traditions about Mani and the early history of the church.¹⁰

With this in mind, it is necessary to note that, when approaching biographies of Mani as narrated in ancient Manichaean literature, fairly soon after his death we encounter a tendency to idealise all aspects of his life, but in particular of his childhood and early adulthood. The literary idealisation of a holy man’s life is termed hagiography (‘an account of a sainted one’), and Manichaean works recounting the life of Mani are replete with hagiographical themes and motifs.

Evidence of this early idealisation is present throughout the CMC, where a central preoccupation of the text is to present Mani as being under the constant guidance of heavenly powers from a very early age, and to relate accounts of the revelations granted to Mani by a specific heavenly figure referred to as Mani’s

‘Twin’ (Gk syzygos) who, appearing to Mani notably on two occasions at 12-year cycles of 12 and 24 years of age, instructs the young man not simply about his role as a teacher of profound spiritual truths, but also about his ‘real identity’ as a spiritual being granted an earthly existence in order to fulfil the will of God.

He (the Syzygos) drew (me away to one side) . . . and (showed me) who I am and what my body is, in what way I came and how my coming into this world happened, and who I have become among those who are most distinguished in pre-eminence, and how I was born into this fleshly body, or through what woman I was brought to birth and delivered into this flesh, and by whom I was begotten (CMC 20.16-21.16; trans. J.M. Lieu and S.N.C. Lieu, in I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu 2004, 50).

Thus the Twin discloses to Mani that they are in fact one and the same, with the Syzygos serving as Mani’s alter ego, the residue of his spiritual personality which

10 See Sundermann 2009a, for a concise explanation of his ideas.

had become separated from Mani at the time of his fleshly embodiment: the inference emerging from such a description is that Mani had an earlier, spiritual existence before his incarnation in the body of the Mesopotamian teacher.¹¹ With the appearance of the Twin, the two sides of the same personality are now reunited – Mani finally recalling who he is as if coming round from the stupor of drunkenness (CMC 22.14) – and his apostolic mission can now begin. The CMC serves as an important witness to what we can imagine was the reasonably early transformation of Mani into something other than a human prophet and teacher in terms of how his followers thought and spoke about him, a transfor-mation evidently suggested to Mani’s later follows by Mani’s own earlier claims of having received a divine commission for his teachings. For instance, cited within the CMC is the opening portion of Mani’s work the Living Gospel, which provides clear evidence of Mani’s own sense of self:

I, Mannichaeus, apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God, the Father of Truth, from whom I also came into being. He lives and abides for all eternity. Before everything he is, and he remains after everything.

Everything which has happened and will happen, is established through his power. From him I have my being, and I exist also according to his will.

And from him all that is true was revealed to me and from (his) truth I exist (CMC 66.4-20; trans. J.M. Lieu and S.N.C. Lieu, in I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu 2004, 156–7).

In another section from the Living Gospel, also preserved in the CMC, Mani announced the appearance of his Twin, and the nature of the teachings which the Syzygos disclosed to him:

When my father showed favour and treated me with pity and solicitude, he sent from there my never-failing Syzygos, the complete fruit of immortality, who might ransom and redeem me from the error of those that rule. He came to (me and) brought to me (the) noblest hope, the (redemption) of immortality, true instructions and the laying on of hands from my father. He came and chose me in preference to others and set me aside, drawing me away from the midst of those of that rule in which I was brought up (CMC 69.9-70.9; trans. J.M. Lieu and S.N.C. Lieu, in I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu 2004, 158–9).

Mani’s own sense of divine election, the account of his revelatory experiences with his divine companion, and the resulting decision to withdraw from the religious rule (Gk nomos = Law) of the community in which he had been raised, provided inspiration for the development of advanced theological speculation about the actual person of Mani, and which, in one sense, is the distinguishing feature of the CMC. The Codex should therefore be regarded as something more than a biography of Mani: rather, it is the literary expression of his followers’

convictions about the significance of Mani’s person, a significance that moved

11 See Sundermann 2009a.

Lives of Mani

beyond his historical appearance to account for his role in the wider, cosmic reality which he had expostulated during his lifetime.

Even after these brief remarks about the nature of ancient biography, it should be apparent that the possibility of composing a positivist account of Mani’s life – one which judges the variety of source material to hand in an empirical fashion as if its main role is to offer up facts about Mani’s life and times – seems (at least in the opinion of this writer) remote. This is not to suggest, however, that we do not glimpse some fixed details of Mani’s life and personality, but any discussion needs to recognise the limitations of the available ancient source material, and to identify the aims and ambitions of writers in their portrayals of Mani. This chapter will therefore be mainly interested in examining the ways in which portraits of Mani were constructed during Late Antiquity within both Manichaean and anti-Manichaean literature, and in particular during the period following the death of Mani and his immediate disciples at the end of the third century and into the 300s, the time when Mani’s teachings began to achieve a wider geographical distribution beyond the religion’s Babylonian

‘homeland’. Thus the Manichaean church was developing both institutionally and doctrinally in this period, and was witness to the production of many of its great creative monuments, among them theological treatises, biographies and histories, homilies and liturgical texts which together reflected on the phenomenon of Mani (see Chapter 1) in such a fashion that not only did he become a focal point for his followers’ devotions but he was also transformed from a historical apostle to a legendary and quasi-divine figure. At the same time, Manichaeism’s opponents were undertaking a concerted response to this newly emergent tradition and, because of the increasing importance placed on the person of Mani by Manichaeans in the formation of the religion’s historical memory, Mani became the straw man of Christian heresiology, attacked on the one hand for his ideas and teachings, and utilised on the other as a foil in the determination of orthodox Christian identities. The reputation of Mani as a teacher, author, apostle and Christian, therefore, took centre stage in this clash of Christianities.