Text Ticker: Manichaeism
At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee has an enjoyable review of Michel Tardieu’s Manichaeism. The review's a great read, but it doesn't make clear at all why anybody bothered to translate the thing into English.
Manicheaism regards the world as a battlefield occupied by the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, with combat headed fast towards a final reckoning. This outlook is alive and well along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan — not to mention certain holdouts in Thinktankistan, a province of Washington, D.C.
No such topical points are scored by Tardieu, who lectures on the religious syncretisms of late antiquity at the Collège de France.
I've been recently rereading Augustine's accounts of his Manichean period. It turns out that, at least in 4th century Carthage, the followers of this mystic visionary believed that all their doctrines could be arrived at by rational proof. Go figure. [go!]
March 10th, 2009 at 11:49 am
From your account, it doesn’t seem you have a very high opinion of Mani’s Religion of Light and of what it actually represented at the beginning of the new era: the greatest, if not the first, universal, syncretic, dualist religion ever known, the only religion capable of competing with the abrahamitic monotheistic religions. Maybe this would have been a better world if Mani’s doctrine had prevailed.