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Updated: May 21, 2025
How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can see by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans. The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being goodness and of the other badness.
It is this that has led people to imagine the fault of the first father of us all, original sin, future rewards and punishments, the incarnation, immortality, the two principles of the Manicheans, the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the doctrine of emanations, the empire of light and darkness, metempsychosis, optimism, and other absurdities that have found credit among the different nations of the earth, where there is always to be found some hollow vision of a dream, by way of answer to a clear, precise, and definite fact.
From the Manicheans Augustine turned to the Academicians, who were a philosophical sect, and pretended that it was impossible for man to come to the possession of truth. Augustine had many conferences on this subject with his friends in his retreat at Cassiciacum: and the outcome was two books "On Order," and one on "The Blessed Life."
To discriminate between these things in practice is wisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them in theory. The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one power and what is bad to another.
As the body, being matter, was thought to be essentially evil, it was the aim of the Manicheans to set the soul free from matter; hence abstinence, and the various forms of asceticism which early entered into the pietism of the Oriental monks.
The Manicheans were, probably as much on this account as from the spirit of religious intolerance, early the objects of severe persecution; and the Code of Justinian itself denounces capital punishment against any of the sect, if found within the Roman dominions.
But his most withering denunciation of the Manicheans was directed against their pride of reason, against their darkened understanding, which led them not only to believe a lie, but to glory in it, the utter perverseness of the mind when in rebellion to divine authority, in view of which it is almost vain to argue, since truth will neither be admitted nor accepted.
And so by degrees I resolved to abandon forever the Manicheans, whose falsehoods I detested, and determined to be a catechumen of the Catholic Church." This was the great crisis of his life. He had renounced a false philosophy; he sought truth from a Christian bishop; he put himself under Christian influences.
For they were desirous to begin with these questions, as they held them for the strongest in their doctrines, all the Tuinians following the heresy of the Manicheans, believing in a good and a bad principle, and they all believe that souls pass from body to body.
Piles of fagots were set up, first at Orleans and then at Toulouse, for the punishment of heretics. The heretics of the day were Manicheans. King Robert and Queen Constance sanctioned by their presence this return to human sacrifices offered to God as a penalty inflicted on mental offenders against His word. At the same time a double portion of ire blazed forth against the Jews.
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