person of Mani, who was sent by the God of light to de- clare to all men the doctrine of salvation, without con- cealing any of its truths under the veil of metaphor, or under any other covering.
Mani, like Christ, surrounded himself with twelve apostles, and sent them into the world to teach and to preach his doctrine of salvation. To carry out his work more successfully, and to make converts also of the Christians, he rejected the authority of the Old Testa- ment, which, he said, was the work of the God of dark- ness, whom the Jews had worshipped in the place of light, and also a good part of the New Testament, upon the ground that many of the books had been grossly interpolated, and were not the productions of the per- sons whose names they bear. As strictly canonical, he admitted only his own writings, and such parts of the New Testament as answered his piu-pose. " Whatever," saysBaur {Afanich. Religionssi/stem, Tp.Slb), "in the writ- ings of the New Testament seemed to concur with the dualism set forth by Mani was accounted among the most genuine ingredients in the doctrines of Christian- ity, and Mani and his adherents were very glad to cite for the confirmation of their own doctrines and princi- ples passages like Matt, vii, 18; xiii, 24; John i, 5; viii, 44; xiv,30; 2 Cor.iv,4 (comp.Epiph. ^fpr.lxvi.67-G0); and especially those in which the apostle Paul speaks of the opposition between flesh and spirit. As they found, however, so much in the New Testament which not only did not confirm the Manicha?an doctrines, but stood in open opposition to them, they were obliged, in ac- cordance with the hj'pothesis that the original doctrines of Christianity did not differ from those of IManichaiism, to regard all passages of this kind as a distortion and falsification of Christianity. Accordingly, they laid down the rule that the written records of Christianity ought not to be received unconditionally, but must be subjected to a previous scrutinj-, with a view to ascer- tain how far they exhibited the genuine substance of Christianity; and this was limited to those portions which bore the character of Manichieism, so that, fol- lowing this criterion, whatever did not harmonize with their own doctrines was rejected without hesitation, be- cause original Christianity could not contradict itself."
Mani also taught that those souls which obeyed the laws delivered by Christ, as explained by himself, the Comforter, and struggled against the lusts and appetites of a corrupt nature, would, on their death, be delivered from their sinful bodies, and, after being purified by the sun and moon — " the two light-ships for conducting the imprisoned light into the eternal kingdom of light" — would ascend to the regions of light ; but that those souls which neglected to struggle against their corrupt natures would pass after death into the bodies of ani- mals or other beings, until they had expiated their guilt. Belief in the evil of matter led to a denial of the doc- trine of the resurrection. " These ideas," says Donaldson {Christian Orthodoxy, p. 143), " they [the Manichaeans] worked out in a manner peculiar to themselves, and with results decidedly unfavorable to the integrity and authenticity of the New Testament. They could accept neither the doctrine nor the facts of revelation, unless they could regard them as a reflex of their own dual- ism. Without wishing to reject Christianity, they made their own system the standard of measurement, and lop- ]ied off or stretched the religion of the Cross, wherever it did not fit the religion of light and darkness. The identification of Christ with Mithras led, of course, to a profession of Docetism, namely, to the assertion that our Lord's sufferings on the cross wore not real, but appar- ent only. Christ had no real human body, no double nature, but only a fantastic semblance of coqioreity, in which his essence, as the Son of Everlasting Light, was presented to the eyes of men, . . . Accordingly, Christ had no human birth, and his apparent sufferings were really inflicted on him by his enemy, the Prince of Dark- ness; and in thus resolving tlie life of Jesus into a series of illusory appearances, the Manichtcans take from Chris-
MANICH^ISM
708
MANICH^ISM
tianity all its historical foundation, and leave us nothing but the realistic apijlications of a few Christian meta- phors." " Christianity," says Dr. Schaif {Ch. History, i, 249) " is here resolved into a fantastic, diialistico-pan- theistic philosophy of nature; moral regeneration is identitied with a process of physical reliuement ; and the whole mystery of redemption is found in light, which was always worshipped in the East as the sym- bol of deity. Unquestionably there pervades the Jlan- ichaean system a kind of groaning of the creature for redemption, and a deep sympathy with nature, that hi- eroglyphic of spirit ; but all is distorted and confused. The suffering Jesus on the cross, Jesus patibilis, is here a mere illusion, a symbol of the world-soid still enchain- ed in matter, and is seen in every plant which works upwards from the dark bosom of the earth towards the light; towards bloom and fruit, yearning after freedom. Hence the class of the ' perfect' would not kill nor wound a beast, plucli a flower, nor break a blade of grass. The system, instead of being, as it' pretends, a liberation of light from darkness, is really a turning of light uito darkness."