Why Was Augustine Of Hippo Attracted To Manichaeism

In Book III of Confessions, his range of “rotten…ulcerous” sins expands from teenage pranks to attending public spectacles and reading tragedies. Augustine suspects that seeking truth might be more important than worldly success. In Book III he also stumbles upon the Manichees faith, which is a heretical version of Christianity. In this section much of this book is dedicated to attacking the Manichee faith. Augustine’s first criticism of the Manichee doctrines he believed concerned their dependence on an elaborate mythology. The sun and the moon were seenas divine beings and they tended to picture divinity in terms of “physical images” or “bodily shapes”. These images plagued Augustines mind almost until his conversion, which kept him from recognizing God as a “spiritual substance” rather than some sort of enormous physical mass. Augustine has 3 main criticisms for the Manichee belief. The first being that it challenged the concerns of nature and the source of evil. Second, it challenged the nature of God as a being and the idea of God as omnipotent and omnipresent. And thirdly, the rejection of the book of Genesis and much of the Old Testament.. Augustine concludes with a story of how

As this man was inspired to learn the truth, he read a book called Hortensius and soon after joined the Manicheans. These people had elements of Christianity and elements of Buddhism but believed that all creations including flesh were evil. They believed all sex; even marriage including the birth of children was evil and sinful. Manicheans felt that the world was evil material full of darkness trying to find the spiritual world of light, as some would say, the power between good and evil. While being associated with the Manicheans, Augustine had the conception that evil was capable of being touched, like a material substance. But as he spoke with others and further looked into what evil means to exist, he abandoned the notion that evil is something tangible. He realized that evil does not exist in the physical world and therefore moved away from the Manichean religion.

We begin Augustine’s attraction to Manichaeism with his travels to Carthage. His initial reaction to Carthage was shock, due to the citizen’s audacious affinity towards things which distracted them from God’s benevolence. One prominent example of this was their affinity towards theatre acts which depicted scenes of enjoying things irrelevant to how one should love God. Although this struck Augustine as quite odd, he nonetheless enjoyed these theatrical acts, often positively remarking about scenes of immense sadness and depression. He came to question whether or not pity, as shared by the citizens of Carthage, was meant as an indication to what his life should represent.

It was a short time after his exposure to Classical philosophy that Augustine joined the Manicheans. The Manicheans believed that spiritual salvation and the grace of God could only be achieved through study and interpretation of the Bible and other works to find specialized, secret knowledge. The Manicheans held a certain appeal for Augustine. The belief that only through higher reasoning and study could one achieve grace, fit with Augustine's own perception of the value of reasoning, and classical rationalism. Augustine was a skilled rhetorician and orator, and had a great deal of confidence in his intellectual superiority. The Manicheans also felt themselves intellectually superior, and Augustine was drawn to this sect in part, because of his intellectual snobbery.

This want of something more concrete but metaphysical leads straight into the fifth chapter, “Manichaeism.”  This details the future bishop’s obsession with the mysteries and dualism of the Manichean teaching, as well as Augustine’s work at spreading the Manichee philosophy, as well as his love for what it made him, rather that what it actually taught.  “Friends,” the sixth chapter, details his life with his unnamed concubine among his celibate Manichee comrades.  Next, the seventh chapter, titled “Success,” outlines Augustine’s first taste of fame as a writer and as a public speaker.  Thus, Brown ends part I.

In the Confessions, Augustine writes that the Manichean religion has a duelist view of good and evil. He explains that the Manichees believe there to be two metaphysical forces, God and Satan. Subsequently, there are two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Light, created by the former, and the Kingdom of Darkness created by the latter.3 The Kingdom of Light, he says, is associated with spirit, and the Kingdom of Darkness with matter. The body, thus, is deemed to be evil in Manichean thought because it is matter fighting against the soul, which was understood to be a piece of the divine, broken off from the rest of God. The divine, as a result, is imprisoned in the material world.4 Augustine further comments that the Manichees find that humans beings are not responsible for their own actions since it is darkness, or a desperate evil will in them, rather than their own will that causes them to do evil.5 Because of all this, they believe that good and evil, spirit and matter, are two opposite, independent, and equal forces in constant conflict with each other. They believe evil is as powerful as

The theological issue that most perplexed Augustine in his youth was that his mother Monica was Christian. He had turned his back on Christianity in his days as a youth and always tried to hide his views about Christianity. His mother never give up and always prayed that one day he would return Christian. I believed his Mother prayers had a lot to with him converting to

At a younger and earlier stage of his life, St. Augustine felt abandoned in some way by God and found no strong connection to a higher being as he developed into a materialist who could only grasp tangible concepts. Little did he see in his life that God was with him through his trials and tribulations as a man on a journey who fell into a life of sin through lust and stealing. Augustine writes, “But in my misery seethed and followed the driving force of my impulses, abandoning you. I exceeded all the bounds set by your law, and did not escape your chastisement-indeed no moral can do so” (Confessions 2:4 p. 25). This driving force was God’s providence. Augustine was spending time in sin, God was punishing him with a sense of emptiness that could not be filled. By turning to such pleasures, he turned away from God and needed such illicit things to realize that he needs a sense of something more in his life. He states, “Before you I lay my heart and my memory. At that time you were dealing with me in your hidden

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

It is obvious from The Confession that Augustine was a man who struggled endlessly to extricate himself from the bondage of sin, but the more he tried, the more he failed and sinks deeper into its abyss. And with every failure, comes a sense of disappointment and despondency, until he had a strange experience. In AD 386, while sitting in his garden, Augustine heard a voice from some children playing not far away urging “him” to pick the book—the Bible, and read. What he read from Apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman Christian in Chapter 13 transformed, not only his understanding of the hopelessness and despair man encounters in trying to solve the problem of sin on his own, but he saw the provision that God has made to remedy the consequences of sin and the grace he has graciously provided to live a life that is acceptable to God. That moment was the turning point in Augustine’s life and how he developed his sotoriological

St. Augustine was a theologian and philosopher born in Africa to St. Monica. Although he is now known as a an incredibly influential Christian writer and thinker, his early years were defined by rebellion and discord that did not, in the least, reflect Christianity or the values that he is now known for supporting. His early years were freckled with mindless disobedience, wretched behavior, and characterized godlessness that makes his conversion to the faith incredibly remarkable and one that is worth defining in Saint Augustine 's Confessions. His incredible turnaround from a faithless man to a devout supporter of Christianity is significant and is freckled with many major milestones that truly demonstrate his spiritual and internal growth into one of the biggest spiritual icons of the fifth century. These major milestones include his realization that his boyhood was defined by pointless rebellious behavior, even though he grew up in a Christian home, his new found appreciation for philosophy as well as God and his incredible mercy during his years as a student at Carthage,

One of the religions that Augustine primarily devoted himself to before his conversion was Manichaeism. Augustine was attracted to the teachings and values of Manichaeism because of the way they explained evil, saying there are two gods: one good and one evil. Throughout Augustine’s youth, Catholic teachings did not further answer his questions regarding the issue, as described when Augustine states: “Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by

This duelist sect believed in the Devine God who was the embodiment of everything good and an equal evil power. They also believed that the flesh was inherently evil. In the next few years after settling his beliefs with Manechaeism and realizing its faults, Augustine would fall into believing in several other non-Christian movements (Brown 31). After being encouraged to do so by many of his friends, he read many of the writings of the Greek philosophers known as neoplatonists. Along with the sermons of Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, these writings convinced Augustine to contemplate his return to the Christian faith. Eventually he overcame his numerous encounters with heresy, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in the year 387 (Brown 43).

Significantly, Manichaeism perceives of God and his evil antagonist, Satan, as being restricted to the world. This notion appealed to the young Augustine, as he struggled to comprehend how anything like evil could exist. He seek out Neoplatonic books only to conclude that it shares similar Manichean teaching where evil represents physical matters like the body. However, Neoplatonism helped him realize a new understanding of God existing in an intelligible realm.

He was profoundly influenced by the philosophical treatise Horentsius, written by the Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. When questioning his parents’ religion, he was particularly drawn to Manichaeism, also known as the Manichees. Manichaeism is a dualistic philosophical religion based on a God of Good and a God of Evil. This religion, at first, seemed to correspond to most of the plausible hypothesis’s Saint Augustine created to conclude a philosophical and ethical system. The Manichees claimed to have found contradictions in Holy Writ, also known as the Bible. He was so astonished by this he couldn’t help but dedicate his time and study’s to the book of the Manichees. The Manichees believed that there was contradiction in the scriptures of the Bible. They did not believe that the earth and the human race were created as it was written in Genesis. But when Saint Augustine questioned the Manichees concerning the movements of the stars, none of them could answer him. Disappointed, Saint Augustine turned skeptic about the religion and so he left the Manichees.