Manichaeism This page intentionally left blank Manichaeism An Ancient Faith Rediscovered Nicholas J. Baker-Brian Published by T&T Clark International A Continuum Imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © Nicholas J. Baker-Brian, 2011 Nicholas J. Baker-Brian has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. Translations from I. Gardner and S.N.C. Lieu (eds.), Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), reproduced with permission. Translations from H. Klimkeit (ed.), Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), reproduced with permission. Map of The Sasanian Empire from M. Maas, Readings in Late Antiquity: A Source Book 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2009), reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-567-03166-2 (Hardback) 978-0-567-03167-9 (Paperback) Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain Contents Introduction vii Chapter 1 The Rediscovery of Manichaeism: Controversies and Sources 1 Chapter 2 Lives of Mani 33 Chapter 3 Manichaean Theology I: Theology and Text 61 Chapter 4 Manichaean Theology II: The Universe, its Rituals and its Community 96 Conclusion 134 Bibliography 140 Index 154 v This page intentionally left blank Introduction My own modest area of expertise makes me rather unqualified to take on a phenomenon as vast as Manichaeism, and expert readers of this book will notice that I have largely stayed away from many of the linguistic and historical complexities of a religion which, during its lifetime, had a presence in the worlds of the Roman Mediterranean, Sasanian Persia, and imperial-era and early modern China. Whilst my interest in Manichaeism ranges across all periods of its prolific existence, this book emerges from a number of years of teaching Manichaeism in its late-antique guise to undergraduate students. In the process of turning a series of lectures into an introductory work, I wish to thank the students who first took my module on Gnostic Religions in the autumn of 2007 at Cardiff University. Any ambitions I may have harboured to go beyond what I could confidently discuss were quickly tempered by the students’ entirely reasonable demand for clarity on the part of their teacher. This book aims to provide an introduction to Manichaeism, employing a religious studies-based approach to this ancient religion across four chapters. In Chapter 1, the creation and manipulation of religious identities are examined: the various taxonomies which prior traditions and their commentators have used to talk about Manichaeism’s ‘essence’ are discussed, followed by a survey of recently discovered writings composed by Manichaeans themselves, which have enabled scholars to overturn many established ideas about the religion by bringing to light Manichaeism’s complex religious character. Chapter 2 considers the role of religious biography in Manichaeism: the way in which Manichaeans reflected on the achievements of Mani (d. ad 276), the visionary whose teachings supplied the foundations for the practices and beliefs of Manichaeism, played a crucial part in shaping perceptions of their own community in relational terms, as a church of exceptional significance, in comparison with other ‘competitor’ religions in Late Antiquity and beyond. The opponents of Manichaeism also took advantage of the fact that the religion was indeed ‘personality-centred’ in terms of its devotional focus on Mani, by creating their own biographical portraits of Mani, which in turn assisted in the formation of their own ideas about orthodox religious identity. Chapter 3 investigates the influence of texts in the development of Mani’s ideas about God and the world: the importance placed by Mani himself on the role of writing as an extension of memory became a central feature of Mani’s own sense of prophetic identity. Developing the idea of the nineteenth-century philologist Max Müller, Guy Stroumsa has recently noted that Manichaeism is the most likely immediate influence on the emphasis placed by Islam on a revealed book, as a formative influence in the notion of ‘Religions of the Book’:1 Mani’s emphasis on text as the most suitable medium 1 See Stroumsa 2009, 34–8. vii Introduction for the communication of religious truth was developed by his later followers into a canon of his writings, which was an additional influence on the way in which other religions since Manichaeism have fixed the teachings of their founders in an authoritative body of scripture. Chapter 4 considers the relationship between the myth of Manichaeism and the ritual practices of the Manichaean church, an association that has traditionally received little attention in Manichaean studies, where the emphasis continues to fall on analyses of the infamous myth alone, the very thing which has influenced the popular characterisation of Manichaeism as a dualistic religion which taught an account of the universe where Good battled Evil. However, whilst it certainly qualifies as a ‘gnostic’ religion, Manichaeism was also once a living faith with its own detailed liturgical traditions and rituals; both aspects informed the distinctive identity and ethics of the Manichaean church throughout its long history. The history of Manichaeism and the history of the study of Manichaeism involve the study of texts, i.e., the sacred writings of Manichaean communities stretching all the way back to the literary endeavours of Mani himself during the third century ad. The task of modern readers approaching this bewildering array of writings has been made immeasurably easier by the availability of English translations of key primary sources for Manichaeism, of which two source collec- tions in particular are accessible to general, undergraduate and postgraduate readers. The impressive achievement of Hans Joachim Klimkeit’s Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia from 1993, has supplied English- language students of Manichaeism with a vast quantity of translated Iranian and Turkic texts from Turfan and Dunhuang, which have helped throw light on the so-called ‘Sogdian face’ of the religion. Nearly all of these texts survive in badly damaged states of repair, and the patience and expertise of scholars from the 1900s onwards have ensured their continued survival. Klimkeit’s source-volume brings very many of them together for the first time, along with a useful series of critical notes. Alongside the discoveries of Manichaean writings from central Asia at the beginning of the last century, the emergence of Manichaean psalms, homilies, treatises, histories and letters from Roman Egypt represents the other remarkable development that has contributed to the meteoric rise of Manichaean studies of recent times. The source-collection of Iain Gardner and Samuel Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire from 2004, is a judicious selection of those Manichaean writings which illuminate Manichaeism’s origins in the late- antique Mesopotamian and Roman worlds, including a complete translation of the famous ‘Mani Biography’, otherwise known as the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC), one of the smallest parchment codices surviving from antiquity. Where appropriate I have employed both Klimkeit’s and Gardner and Lieu’s collections, for the ease which they offer in consulting some of Manichaeism’s most sacred writings. For readers with training in languages other than English, additional important collections of sources for Manichaeism include: Alfred Adam’s Texte zum Manichäismus and Alexander Böhlig’s Der Manichäismus (see bibliography for full details). As a result of the constraints of time and space, I have not devoted a great deal of attention to the historical study of Manichaeism. Besides, this has been viii Introduction done before, and in much greater detail than I could possibly hope to offer in a book of this kind. Whilst I make reference to historical treatments of the religion throughout the work, I would like at this point to highlight a number of studies that will be indispensible to readers seeking detailed narrative treat- ments of Manichaeism’s history. Noteworthy among the more detailed works is the ‘trilogy’ of historical studies of Manichaeism by Samuel Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (1992), Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East (1994), and Manichaeism in Central Asia and China (1998), all of which are ‘treasure-troves’ of dates, facts, texts and person- alities in Manichaeism’s long history, and should be consulted as a matter of routine by any serious student. For those students who have come to the study of Mani via work on Patristics, Church History and Augustine in particular, François Decret’s two-volume French-language work L’Afrique manichéenne (IVe–Ve siècles) from 1978 will provide an excellent starting point for appreci- ating the deep associations which existed between ancient Catholic Christianity and Manichaean Christianity in Late Antiquity. Valuable