Theopedia

Manicheanism

Definition

Manicheanism (also spelled Manichaeism or Manichaeanism) is a dualistic religion, originating in third-century Persia, that taught two co-eternal and opposing gods: a good god of light and an evil god of matter, locked in a struggle from which the material world itself emerged.1 It absorbed enough Christian language and figures, including Christ, to present itself as a form of Christianity, but Reformed theologians have classed it not as an internal Christian heresy but as a rival, “anti-church” religious system in its own right.2

Historical Origin

Mani founded the religion in the third century, around AD 275, drawing on “the fanatical books of Scythianus and of his disciple Terebinthus.”1 Petrus van Mastricht groups Mani’s teaching with an earlier two-gods heresy, that of Marcion, a disciple of Cerdo active around AD 145 who likewise “talked of two gods: an evil god, the author of the world and the law, and a good god, the author of the gospel and redemption.”1 Mani’s own version named the two gods Phos (“light”) and Hyle (“matter”), and, like Marcion, attributed the Christian gospel to the good god, Phos.1

Manicheanism spread widely enough in the Roman world to draw in a young Augustine, who joined it in AD 373, “drawn by its account of evil as an eternal struggle between co-equal principles of light and darkness,” before abandoning it for philosophical skepticism about a decade later.3 Augustine’s mature doctrine that evil is not a substance but a privation of good arose directly “from his controversy with the Manicheans.”4 Strong classes Manicheanism as a development out of Gnosticism, citing other scholars’ verdicts that it was “a compound of Gnosticism and Parseeism” or “the fruit, acme, and completion of Gnosticism,” while marking a difference in kind between the two: “Gnosticism was a heresy in the church; Manichæanism, like New Platonism, was an anti-church.”2

Core Tenets

Manicheanism’s central claim is that two gods, not one, stand behind reality: Phos, the good god of light, and Hyle, an evil god equal in power to Phos, from whom “the evil soul, the body, sexual intercourse, commands, and all evil things had their origin.”1 This dualism extended to the Christian Scriptures themselves: Bavinck traces the same move in “the gnostics and the Manicheans, who for that reason distinguished the God of the Old Testament from the Father of Christ.”5 Matter, on this view, is not simply imperfect or incomplete; Strong describes the Manichean position as holding that matter “is either the work or the instrument of a personal and positively malignant intelligence, who wages war against all good.”2 Because the evil principle was held to be genuinely equal in power to the good one, Manicheanism denied that the good god is omnipotent or sovereign over evil: the two remain in unresolved conflict, neither one subordinate to the other.2

Manes, as Charles Hodge reports the Manichean position, held that evil itself “was a substance,” a real thing in its own right rather than a defect or lack in something otherwise good.4

Confessional and Biblical Response

Scripture presents one sovereign God, not two competing powers: “for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers” (Col. 1:16), and Satan and his angels appear throughout Scripture not as an equal, opposing deity but as God’s own creatures, subject to his judgment (2 Pet. 2:4; Rev. 20:2, 10; Eph. 6:12).2 The Second London Baptist Confession states the same doctrine of God’s unity and sovereignty directly:

The Lord our God is but one only living and true God…working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory.6

Against the claim that matter itself is an evil substance, the same confession states that God made “the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.”7

Augustine’s own answer to the Manichean claim that evil is a substance was to deny it outright: since “every being is good” (“omne esse bonum est”), evil cannot itself be a positive substance, but must be a privation, a want of the good a thing ought to have, not a created thing in its own right.4 Bavinck states the same conclusion from the Reformed side:

The insistence on sin as privation…is a repudiation of all Manichean notions that evil exists as an independent power over against God.8

On this account, evil has no independent existence to rival God’s; it is corruption within what God made good, not a second, competing creation.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 8, “The Unity of God,” 212-213. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 382. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 2, 20-76. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 156-157. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 1. ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩