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Updated: May 18, 2025
I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from the teaching of my garden experiences. Like other boys in the country, I had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I entrusted the seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and glorification in the better world of summer.
The new archbishop was accused of being a Manichean; but this seems to mean nothing but that he was too much of the Egyptian party, and that, though he was the imperial patriarch, and not acknowledged by the Koptic church, yet his opinions were disliked by the Greeks.
Although in all his writings he speaks of "the holy Bishop of Milan" with feelings of sincere respect and admiration, he lets it be understood that his expectations were not realized. If the Manichean bishop of Rome had offended him by his rough manners, Ambrose disconcerted him alike by his politeness, his kindliness, and by the reserve, perhaps involuntarily haughty, of his reception.
Again, Satan was pictured as a demon leading the unwary astray by the desires of this world. Ethics was an affair of external fighting for the souls of men. The whole setting was mythical and supernaturalistic and full of picture-thinking. We have already referred to the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine was taken up by St. Augustine who had been a Manichean.
Lombardy, and most probably the south of France, Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies, pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself.
He lodged with a Manichean, and still frequented the meetings of the sect; convinced, indeed, that the truth was not with them, but despairing to find it elsewhere.
The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is, "Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus.
Generally your intellectual worries very little about squaring his conduct with his principles, and does not bother about the practical part. No; what was much worse in his eyes is that the Manichean physical science, a congeries of fables more or less symbolical, suddenly struck him as ruinous.
The Scholastics, the mediaeval writers of every school, except a few of that Manichean brood of sects, admitted the necessity of almsgiving. They looked on it from a moral point of view as a high virtue, and from an economic standpoint as a correlative to their individualistic ideas on private property. The one without the other would be unjust.
"But you, Mr. Martin," said he to the philosopher, "what do you think of all this? what are your ideas on moral and natural evil?" "Sir," answered Martin, "our priests accused me of being a Socinian, but the real fact is I am a Manichean." "You jest," said Candide; "there are no longer Manicheans in the world." "I am one," said Martin. "I cannot help it; I know not how to think otherwise."
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