Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
Esoterically understood, his novel teaches a doctrine of mysticism, intuitionalism, and materialism combined. Plotinus, the Manicheans, and Swendenborg are borrowed from without reserve. Ordinary reason is despised. He believes himself for the nonce inspired, like the Pope when launching bulls.
The people of Schwyz were strengthened in their adherence to the authentic Word of God, as it was with the Apostles, without the use of pictures or the bones of saints; this Word they learned by heart, and made little of the additions of men; hence they got to be heretics, and were called Manicheans; but Catholicism conquered them at last.
The Nestorians, Eutychians, Jacobites, Iconoclasts, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Wickliffites, Osiandrians, Manicheans, Pietists, Adamites, the Contemplatives, the Quakers, the Weepers, and a hundred others, all of distinct parties, persecuting when strong, tolerant when weak, hating each other in the name of the God of peace, forming such an exclusive heaven in a religion of universal charity, damning each other to pains without end in a future state, and realizing in this world the imaginary hell of the other."
The Manicheans were not the most dangerous, but they were the most offensive. Their doctrines were too absurd to gain a lasting foothold in the West. But they made great pretensions to advanced thought, and engrafted on Christianity the speculations of the East as to the origin of evil and the nature of God.
Now it was not the Manicheans or Donatists who were the most dangerous people in the time of Augustine, nor were their doctrines likely to be embraced by the Christian schools, especially in the West; but it was the Pelagians who in high places were assailing the Pauline theology. And they advocated principles which lay at the root of most of the subsequent controversies of the Church.
"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."
That which gave the Manicheans a hold on the mind of Augustine, seeking after truth, was their arrogant claim to the solution of mysteries, especially the origin of evil, and their affectation of superior knowledge. Their watchwords were Reason, Science, Philosophy. Moreover, like the Sophists in the time of Socrates, they were assuming, specious, and rhetorical.
"Certainly most unquestionably," answered the Emperor, with a due affectation of gravity, notwithstanding he was internally conscious how often he had been compelled, by state necessities, to admit, not only Latin Christians, but Manicheans, and other heretics, nay, Mahomedan barbarians, into the number of his subjects, and that without experiencing opposition from the scruples of the Patriarch.
At the end of the twelfth century thousands of Albigenses were roasted for practising this doctrine. Of course, I can't say that the Manicheans didn't abuse their cult, mostly made up of devil worship, because we know very well they did. "On this point I am not with them," he went on slowly, after a silence. He was waiting till Mme.
By avoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to every one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to his practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to overlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its figments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking