Augustinian Studies 43:1/2 (2012) 35–48

doi: 10.5840/augstudies2013431/25

What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

Jason BeDuhn
Northern Arizona University

Perhaps no historical figure has so successfully controlled his own story as

Augustine of Hippo. We have precious few contemporaneous observations and
impressions about him that have not been filtered through his careful editorial
hand. Yet it is the duty of the historian to try to crack through the controlling nar-
rative of Confessions by any opportunity Augustine may provide by either authorial
inconsistency in that work or flagging editorial diligence in other works where
other voices slip through. The last thing Augustine wished to admit, at least to his
Catholic readers, was any debt—intellectual, spiritual, or personal—owed to the
Manichaeans, with whom he associated for over a decade. Nevertheless, by noting
various clues and concessions strewn through his compositions, and thinking through
their implications for an Augustine who was not yet the fully formed theologian
of his later works, we can make a few suggestions of what he may have learned
from the Manichaeans, from his first contact with them up to the composition of
Confessions itself.
Augustine’s possible debts to the Manichaeans were not all of the same kind,
and saying that he learned things from them does not mean only in the time he was
a Manichaean Auditor, or only those sort of things that constituted Manichaean
“orthodoxy.” He also learned from his personal relationships with individual
Manichaeans, such as the bishop Faustus. And these friendships—for such they
were—motivated some of his continuing engagement with Manichaeism after his
conversion to Nicene Christianity as he sought to win over his former friends to his
new commitments. He learned further from his conflicts with them, as they probed
and critiqued areas of his later Nicene faith, challenges which prompted him to
explore and solve particular issues in order to respond to them.

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

Augustine’s modern biographers have had difficulty imagining a significant

role for Manichaeism in Augustine’s life and thought, shaped as they are in their
opinions by the later Augustine’s own caricaturing rhetoric about the religion. They
quite naturally emphasize those aspects of Manichaeism that Augustine himself
critiqued and ridiculed, a “farrago of myth and taboo,”1 “an obviously flawed world-
picture,”2 “contaminated by fancies so grossly absurd,”3 full of “obvious follies and
contradictions.”4 Indeed, Gerald Bonner has gone so far as to describe Manichaeism
as a faith that “must be reckoned among the strangest and most bizarre of the many
strange and bizarre fantasies which the human mind has conceived.”5 Yet Bonner
goes on to suggest that, “a faith which proclaimed the existence of evil in the world
but which offered the hope of liberation to myriads of men and women, which
inculcated a moral discipline and respect for life often sadly lacking in those who
denounced and persecuted it, and which could inspire its children to face torture and
martyrdom uncomplaining, deserves better at the hands of the Christian theologian
or Church historian than it sometimes receives.”6 Naturally, that which Augustine
brings up most in his criticism of the religion will tend to be those very elements
that he found easy to leave behind, to treat like ill-fitting clothes he is glad to be
rid of. That which had lasting importance and meaning for him, on the other hand,
will largely go unsaid, rationalized and recut to fit a Nicene context rather than a
Manichaean one. We must adjust our hearing accordingly.
One of the most basic things Augustine may have learned from the Manichaeans
and, hence, that he may owe to them is the fact that he was religious at all. To uncover
this possible debt, we need to cut through the entrenched psychological portrait of
him as someone born with a natural religious predisposition. And in this instance, at
least, we have his help in dispelling such a view. Whatever his momentary fears of
God and damnation as a child, Augustine makes it quite clear that as an adolescent
he had left religion completely behind. “I did not love you” he recalls to God (conf.
1.13.21), and “I was not yet a Christian” (conf. 2.3.6). His complete infatuation with
the Latin classics in his school days in Madaura led directly into a devotion to “philo-
sophical” literature in both its high and low forms during his years in Carthage. When

1. Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989), 60.

2. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 47.
3. Louis Bertrand, Saint Augustine, trans. Vincent O’Sullivan (London: Constable, 1914), 102.
4. Gerald Bonner, St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963),
60.
5. Ibid., 157.
6. Ibid., 158.

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

he did compare a specifically religious text—the Bible—with a secular philosophical

one—Cicero’s Hortensius, there was no mistaking his preference for the latter (conf.
3.5.9). This orientation towards philosophical subjects that either were wholly secular
or religiously neutral or abstract persisted throughout his time as a Manichaean, and
for some time after his “conversion” to Nicene Christianity—as seen in the referenced
literature and themes of the Cassiciacum dialogues. In hindsight, we may overlook
the fact that his main literary project following his baptism was a set of handbooks
on the liberal arts (ord. 2.14.34ff.; sol. 2.34–35; retr. 1.6). Only gradually did these
interests yield ground to properly “religious” discourse and subject matter.
Place these apparent facts over against another: very shortly after confirming his
preference for Cicero over the Bible, he began his association with the Manichaeans
(conf. 3.7.12; cf. duab. an. 1.1). In other words, he joined what we rightly consider
to be a religious community. But he did so, it seems, for the very reason that they
approximated a philosophical group as much as anyone did in late-fourth-century
Carthage. Augustine makes it quite clear that it was their appeal to reason, and to
rational exploration and discernment of the truth, that appealed the most to him.
You know, Honoratus, that I fell among these people for no other reason than
that they declared that they would put aside all overawing authority, and by pure
and simple reason would bring to God those who were willing to listen to them,
and so deliver them from all error.7
The Manichaean community prided itself on attracting highly educated people (mor.
2.19.71, 2.20.74; util. cred. 16; s. dom. m. 2.24.78), and criticized as “superstition”
various religious practices found among pagans and either adopted in the observanc-
es of local Christians (e.g., feasts for the dead, c. Faust. 20.4) or celebrated in their
scriptures (e.g., animal sacrifice, conf 3.7.12). The Manichaeans Augustine knew
rejected and mocked the hallmark of religious thinking and discourse, namely, the
appeal to faith and authority (util. cred. 1.2; cf. beata u. 1.4). On the one hand, then,
Augustine found a kindred attitude in Manichaean critique of (other) religion(s),
and on the other hand, he found their quasi-philosophical approach to their own
teachings more palatable to his personal sensibilities.
As an admirer of Pythagoras (ord. 2.20.53–54),8 Augustine would be prepared
to see many aspects of Manichaean community life in terms of a philosophical life,

7. Util. cred. 1.2 (CSEL 25:4; trans. is that of J. H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings [Philadel-
phia: Westminster, 1953], 292.): “nosti enim, honorate, non aliam ob causam nos in tales homines
incidisse, nisi quod se dicebant terribili auctoritate separata mera et simplici ratione eos, qui se
audire uellent, introducturos ad deum et errore omni liberaturos.”
8. See Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 CE
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 99–100; Kato Takeshi, “Melodia interior.
Sur le traité De pulchro et apto,” RÉA 11 (1965): 229–239.

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

including regular self-scrutiny and confession,9 a daily cycle of prayers or medita-

tions, hymn-singing, and spiritual counseling.10 But other aspects of Manichaean
practice would have been unmistakable as religious ritual, such as the sacred meal
of the Elect, just as certain parts of Manichaean teaching would have the mytho-
logical quality of religious narrative. Augustine lets it be known that he expected
these myths to be decoded as philosophical allegory, perhaps once he had reached
higher status in the community (conf. 5.3.3; c. ep. Man. 23; c. Faust. 15.6; for his
similar expectations of Christian myth, see ord. 2.9.26). He made what appears to
have been his own amateur attempt at such a decoding, drawing on Pythagorean
categories, in his only composition from his Manichaean period, De pulchro et
apto (cf. conf. 4.15.27).11 It was a moment of crisis for him, though not yet quite a
deal-breaker, when the Manichaean bishop Faustus revealed to him that he could
expect no such deeper metaphysical meaning behind the myths. He began to lose
his commitment to Manichaeism through comparison to other philosophies, not
other religions (conf. 5.3.3; cf. 5.14.25).
By the time he broke his association with the Manichaean community, two things
had been achieved in Augustine that made him “religious.” The first was that, without
interest in being religious, he had been drawn to the Manichaean community by
its approximation of the sort of “life in philosophy” to which he had been attracted
by his readings in Cicero and other sources. No other religious option in his native
North Africa could offer this same appeal. The second was that a decade as a Man-
ichaean had conditioned him to a combination of “philosophical” and “religious”
components in his life, to the degree that, when he broke with Manichaeism, he
found that he could not simply be a Platonist without the complement of a moral
community, for which he turned to the Catholic Church.
The latter choice may have been determined in large part by a further condi-
tioning provided by his decade among the Manichaeans. Namely, he may have
learned from them and owed to them the fact that he formed a commitment to
the authority of Christ. Here again, we must shake off a tendency to run together

9. See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Random House, 1986).
10. See, e,g, Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras.
11. On the work as a philosophical decoding of Manichaean myth, see Kam-lun Edwin Lee, Augus-
tine, Manichaeism, and the Good (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 23; Colin Starnes, Augustine’s
Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I–IX (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier, 1990),
102–106, 110–111n80; Johannes van Oort, “Augustine’s Critique of Manichaeism: The Case of
Confessions III 6,10 and Its Implications,” in Aspects of Religious Contact and Conflict in the An-
cient World, ed. P. W. Van der Horst (Utrecht: Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid, Universiteit Utrecht,
1995), 57–68, at 67; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 41.

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

in our minds the exposure he had to Christ and Christianity as a child with his
later Nicene Christian faith, leaping over the approximately twenty years that lie
in between. It is true that Augustine himself is something of an accomplice in
this biographical conflation, suggesting in one passage in Confessions that his
choice of the Manichaeans was already in part determined by their commitment
to Christ (conf. 3.6.10). But this claim may be anachronistic. As we have seen,
he acknowledges that in his adolescent years, he was “not yet a Christian” (conf.
2.3.6). Indeed, his own teacher in Madaura, who knew him at close quarters for
some time, had observed no inclination to Christ, but had rather mistaken him as
a fellow pagan (ep. 16). Moreover, contrary to his claim that he could not follow
Cicero’s secular or pagan path to a life in philosophy merely because it did not
contain the name of Christ (conf. 3.4.8), there is no evidence that there was any
sort of philosophical community in operation in Carthage for him to reject as he
made his choice. In fact, he states repeatedly and in multiple works (including conf.,
except for 3.6.10) that it was the rational, philosophical nature of Manichaeism
that attracted him, rather than any affiliation with the Christian movement. Finally,
for someone supposedly predisposed to devotion to Christ, he relegated Christ to
a decidedly circumscribed role—almost a place-holder for the divine intellectus,
drained of all the redeeming drama at the center of the Christ story. As far as we
can tell, his one composition as a Manichaean did not refer to Christ at all (and
was not the sort of work that would have, cf. conf. 4.15.27); moreover, as he com-
posed his earliest post-Manichaean works, there was discussion whether explicitly
Christian references served any real purpose in what were primarily philosophical
dialogues (conf. 9.4.7).
Of course, we would like to know more about how Christ was presented to him
as a child. We know much more about how the Manichaeans would have presented
Christ to Augustine. Christ was for them, “the power and wisdom of God,” which
remained Augustine’s reflexive designation for him throughout his first decade as
a Catholic (Acad. 2.1.1–2; beata u. 4.34; an. quant. 33.76; mor. 1.13.22; 1.16.28;
etc.). For Manichaeans, Christ was an enlightener, an intellective force that inter-
vened in this world to awaken souls slumbering in ignorance of their true divine
nature, and reshape them morally and mentally. Correspondingly, Augustine’s early
writings tend to deal with Christ in much the same terms, when he appears at all.
His death has no redemptive function at all in the early Augustine, just as it has
none in Manichaeism. Manichaeans also placed Christ in company with other mes-
sengers of God, (including Pythagoras, Plato, and Hermes Trismegistus, as well as
Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Mani), even if he was in some sense the supreme and
most direct (least physical) manifestation of divine wisdom. We find much the same

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characterization in Augustine’s early writings, where he mentions Pythagoras, Plato,

and Plotinus alongside of Christ as his intellectual “masters” and as conveyors of
truth. In fact, Augustine apparently even held back from fully embracing the exalted
status Manichaeans gave to Christ as a divine being, or quickly shed it upon his exit
from that faith; he later confessed that as he moved towards becoming a Nicene
Christian, he thought of Christ as “no more than a man, though a man of excellent
wisdom and without peer”(conf. 7.19.25).
When Augustine says that he is determined “not to depart from Christ” as he
adopts Platonism as his primary intellectual allegiance (Acad. 3.20.43), he draws
attention to the fact that his previous Manichaeism entailed such a commitment
to Christ—as revealer and mediator between God and humankind, and as moral
authority. All of the Manichaean voices from North Africa—Faustus, Fortunatus,
Felix—confirm this prioritization of Christ as ultimate spiritual preceptor. This
authority, inculcated in him by Manichaeism, continued unchanged for Augustine
even as he replaced Manichaean myth with Platonic philosophy as his guide to the
nature of reality. In Augustine’s earliest post-conversion writings, Christ supplies
through his teachings the foundational moral discipline for intellectual ascent that
“philosophy” promises. Philosophers may rightly conceive of the goal of spiritual
ascent, but they do not know how to attain it. Specifically, Platonism did not have
a system of moral practice such as the one that Christ taught by which the mind
might be trained in detachment from the world in preparation for mental ascent.
Hence, in giving up the specifically Manichaean connection to Christ, Augustine
necessarily turned to the Christians of Milan to provide a comparable moral system
rooted in the authority of Christ. This is why Augustine’s first composition with
an expressly religious (rather than philosophical) subject is also the one in which
Christ’s authority is actually put to work, rather than just rotely acknowledged. In
The Morals of the Catholic Church and the Morals of the Manichaeans, Augustine
justifies his substitution of the Catholic Christ for the Manichaean one by a com-
parison of the two alternative moral systems each community claimed to derive
from Christ’s teachings.
Reconsidering the role of Manichaeism in shaping the life and thought of
Augustine means taking seriously where he stood before and after his decade as
a Manichaean with respect to religion in general and to being committed to the
authority of Christ in particular. It means letting go of the hindsight fantasy, which
he himself promoted later in his life, that he had deeply imbibed the Christian faith
as a child from his mother. Not only were there other vibrant secular and religious
options in his immediate environment as a young man, but it is also the case that
much of what he tells us, or others tell us about him, suggests that Augustine

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had become “unchurched” before Manichaeism opened up a new perspective for

him on what religion could be. Far from being a detour that interrupted a natural
progression of his faith, then, Manichaeism intervened at a critical moment of
Augustine’s life, when “philosophy” of a decidedly un-Christian kind beckoned.
The sense of inevitability in the course of his life is illusion. Even Manichaeism in
the abstract cannot claim all that much; rather, the credit should go to the particular
attitudes and circumstances of the Manichaeans in Augustine’s part of the world:
their philosophy-friendly emphasis on reason as an initial attractor (not necessarily
a universal Manichaean value), the distinctive approach of their leader Faustus in
identifying moral outcome as the center and measure of religion, the conditions of
persecution that drove Augustine from Carthage, and his Manichaean connections
that secured him a position in Milan. Historical accidents, all; and, without them,
no Augustine of Hippo as he came to be.
Similarly, after his conversion, Augustine continued to be shaped by particular
concerns brought to him through the Manichaean challenge. Three areas of particular
focus and concern characteristic of Augustine, and even defining of his place in
Christian theology, may not have occupied such a prominent place in his work had
it not been for the Manichaeans: the Nicene Christian creation myth in Genesis,
the prominence of Paul, and the concept of grace. In each of these three cases,
Manichaeans brought to Augustine’s attention particular interests or problems that
had no comparable attention within his own Catholic Church.
No instinctive curiosity or interpretive problem with the Catholic Church
accounts for the degree to which Augustine grappled throughout his career to justify
and make sense of the biblical creation account. Now it may well be that, as a boy
first exposed to this narrative, he asked the sort of obvious questions that must have
annoyed catechetical instructors then and continue to annoy Sunday School teachers
in our day. But it also may be that he reports this childhood curiosity in order to
tag the similar questions Manichaeans raised as childish, while at the same time
regretting the inability of many Christian leaders to tackle them constructively, as
he attempted to do. In any case, by his own account, his first direct exposure to the
biblical text as a reader came when he was already an adult, and he was disinclined
to be very patient with its apparent absurdities (conf. 3.5.9). And I can think of no
good reason to doubt that he tried to read the Bible as most amateurs do: from the
beginning. The Manichaeans, then, furthered his negative reaction to the Genesis
creation story, and added sophistication to it through their systematic critique of
it in terms of narrative coherence, metaphysical sense, and moral value (conf.
3.7.12–13; Gn. adu. Man., passim; c. Adim, passim). Augustine makes quite clear
that he learned this set of critiques and practiced them regularly as a Manichaean

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in his polemical engagement with Christians (conf. 3.10.18; c. ep. Man. 3.3). It
would be one of his first tasks as a convert to the Catholic Church—as much for
himself as for anyone else—to revisit and, in some way, reverse or mitigate these
critiques. That is precisely what he set out to do in his first exegetical composition,
On Genesis against the Manichaeans.
Augustine did not take up the Genesis story as an outgrowth of his long-
standing astronomical interests, which find no expression in On Genesis against
the Manichaeans; nor did he do it as a contribution to Christian Hexaemeron
literature. Rather, he took up the task with an apologetical-polemical agenda
probably unique to the genre. His solution to Manichaean criticism of the biblical
creation story entailed the adoption of an entirely different exegetical approach
than the one they employed. Whereas the Manichaeans applied a literal reading of
the text, Augustine adopted an allegorical reading. Indeed, he acknowledged that,
read literally, the creation story has all sorts of problems. But this is the immature,
childish way to read a myth; through allegory its deeper, symbolic, true meaning
can be discerned (mor. 1.1.1; 1.17.30; util. cred. 3.9; Gn. adu. Man. 2.2.3). The
superiority of Nicene Christian myth lay precisely in the very possibility of its
philosophical decoding; the details of the decoded message scarcely mattered,
and Augustine showed remarkable freedom—as a mere Catholic novice—in
generating new, imaginative readings notoriously difficult to trace back to the
work of his predecessors.
In On Genesis against the Manichaeans, Augustine worked from memory, recall-
ing the Manichaean criticisms he had learned and finding allegorical solutions to the
problems they raised. Yet, famously, he could not leave the defense there, returning
again and again to the same verses, the same Manichaean criticisms, in the years
that followed. Either his allegorical approach had not satisfied his Catholic read-
ers—as it apparently did not—or he had not satisfied himself that he had genuinely
resolved the problems inherent in this narrative. He discovered new Manichaean
critiques (in the writings of Adimantius and Faustus) that required answering. He
attempted a more literal reading and defense, meeting the Manichaeans on their own
exegetical ground, and rather quickly abandoned it. Then he returned to allegory
with a vengeance in the last three books of Confessions. He then resumed his efforts
spending much time and energy trying to develop a literal interpretation that could
turn back Manichaean fault-finding. And so on. He knew different Christian inter-
pretations than his own, but these did not trouble him. The Church was not awaiting
the resolution of pressing problems with the creation story. It was the Manichaean
challenge to the biblical creation story that always shadowed his exegetical labors
on it and that prompted this characteristic hobby-horse of his literary career.

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We must also look to Manichaeans, and Augustine’s ongoing concern with

refuting and converting them, to explain the fact that he gave such importance and
attention to the writings of Paul. He had been introduced to Paul by the Manichaeans,
and he attests to the facts that they placed special emphasis on the Apostle and were
fond of citing him in support of both their ethical and metaphysical teachings (e.g.,
mor. 1.19.36; c. Faust. 24.1). To the degree that he had been an attentive Manichaean,
then, Augustine would have learned a great deal of Paul, and been conditioned
to reference him frequently. Indeed, it appears that he turned to the Epistles of
Paul with the vague recollection that they contained something comparable to the
Platonist tracts he had begun reading in Milan (Acad. 2.2.5; conf. 7.21.27). For all
that, Augustine profoundly neglected Paul in his early Catholic writings, except
when polemic against Manichaeism necessitated some reference to their favorite
apostle (as in The Morals of the Catholic Church). He much preferred the Psalms
and the Wisdom books, with their generic piety and quasi-philosophical rumina-
tions, whenever he bothered to cite Christian scripture at all. Paul merits only the
occasional mention for the first five years of Augustine’s Catholic period—until,
that is, for all intents and purposes, Paul was forced upon him in his debate with
the Manichaean Fortunatus in 392 CE (c. Fort).12
Both Fortunatus’s cogent use of Paul, and the embarrassingly public way in
which he exposed Augustine’s lack of facility with Pauline texts, seem to have
shocked Augustine into much more diligent study of the Apostle.13 He urgently
collected Pauline commentaries from every quarter, and we can follow his efforts
to master this material in several works that followed his encounter with Fortunatus
(exp. prop. Rm.; ep. Rm. inch.; diu. qu., 66–70; Simpl.; conf., books 7–8). He set
his exegetical agenda in clearly anti-Manichaean terms (“so that the Apostle seems
neither to condemn the Law nor to take away the free exercise of human will,”
exp. prop. Rm. 13–18.1). We can observe him addressing, explicitly or implicitly,
the interpretations of Fortunatus, as he gravitates towards those very passages of
Paul that Fortunatus had cited in their debate. More stunningly, we discover him
rapidly yielding ground to Fortunatus’s interpretations, however much he reworked
them within Nicene presuppositions. The free will reading of Paul that he vainly
attempted during the debate is progressively qualified out of existence and, within

12. See Jason BeDuhn, “Did Augustine Win His Debate with Fortunatus?,” in In Search of Truth.
Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism: Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty, ed. J. A.
van den Berg, A. Kotzé, T. Nicklas, and M. Scopello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 463–479.
13. See Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the
Retrospective Self,” JTS, n.s., 37 (1986): 3–34, at 22; Malcolm Alflatt, “The Development of the
Idea of Involuntary Sin in St. Augustine,” RÉA 20 (1974): 113–134, at 133.

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five years, he has fully embraced the implications for human agency that Fortunatus
had insisted inevitably follow from Paul’s words.
As strong as these correlations of stimulus and reaction are, it is just as telling
that, as the period of his most intense engagement with Manichaeism came to a
close in the first years of the fifth century, Augustine’s focus on Paul fades. It returns
to the foreground only with the Pelagian controversy, in which Augustine found
himself responding to a new stimulus, struggling to demonstrate that in his earlier
exegesis of Paul he had not been unduly influenced by Manichaean perspectives.
Other Nicene leaders wrote commentaries on Paul, alongside of the rest of scrip-
ture. But no Christian writer of Augustine’s age had Paul so much at the center of
his own distinctive thinking. As Patout Burns has observed, “Only in his Pauline
commentaries did the characteristically Augustinian themes begin to appear.”14
Augustine becomes the familiar Augustine of historical hindsight only when his
mode of discourse and repertoire of imagery becomes colored by Pauline tropes.
A glance over at the Manichaean community reveals the distinctive emphasis on
Paul, whose texts Manichaeism had profoundly integrated from its foundations,
that found special emphasis in its North African branch15 and that set the condi-
tions for Augustine’s own unique take on Paul, even if it did not determine the
latter’s outcome.
Yet, Julian of Eclanum argued that Manichaeism had, in fact, determined the
outcome of Augustine’s ruminations on Paul, as well as of the entire ethos of his
system. Julian particularly suspected a Manichaean background to Augustine’s
abandonment of the well-established Nicene free will position for a soteriology based
in grace. To appreciate the plausibility of this charge, one must first acknowledge
two facts: (1) Nicene Christianity before Augustine held overwhelmingly to a free
will account of individual sinfulness and repentance leading to salvation; and (2)
the Manichaean position, often characterized as deterministic or fatalistic, actually
entailed the only non-free-will, grace-determined account of salvation within the
debate over human agency in Augustine’s time.

14. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace (Paris: Études Au-
gustiniennes, 1980), 49.
15. See François Decret, “L’utilisation des épitres de Paul chez les manichéens d’Afrique,” in Le
epistole paoline nei manichei i donatisti e il primo agostino, ed. Julien Ries, François Decret,
William Hugh Cecil Frend, Maria Grazia Mara et al. Sussidi Patristici 5 (Roma: Istituto Patristico
Augustinianum, 1980), 29–83; idem, “La figure de saint Paul et l’interprétation de sa doctrine
dans le manichéisme,” in Atti del I Simposio di Tarso su S. Paulo Apostolo, ed. L. Padovese
(Roma: Istituto Francescano di Spiritualità, Pontificio Ateneo Antoniano, 1993), 105–115.

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The Manichaean teaching of grace assumes, in the report of Ephrem Syrus in his
Fifth Discourse to Hypatius, that “the pollution of error is (too) great for them, unless
sweet floods have come from their (heavenly) home a second time, and lessened
the bitterness in which they were dwelling.”16 These “sweet floods” are constituted
of “a power whose nature cannot be overcome by the floods of evil.”17 Augustine
shows that he had grasped this aspect of Manichaean teaching. He explains that the
Manichaeans taught that the human soul, through mixture with evil in this world,
had been “so far corrupted and changed for the worse that . . . it could be rescued
and purified only with help . . . from [God’s] Word, which must necessarily be
free of the soul’s enslavement and pure of its contamination and unscathed by its
corruption if it is to help.”18 Either directly quoting or paraphrasing a Manichaean
text, Augustine explains:
The divine nature is dead and Christ resuscitates it. It is sick and he heals it. It
is forgetful and he brings it to remembrance. It is foolish and he teaches it. It is
disturbed and he makes it whole again. It is conquered and captive and he sets it
free. It is in poverty and need, and he aids it. It has lost feeling and he quickens
it. It is blinded and he illumines it. . . . It is unbridled and he imposes the restraint
of law. It is deformed and he reforms it. It is perverse and he puts it right.19
Both Fortunatus and Faustus cite Paul’s imagery of the Old and New Man—as
well as his rhetoric of powerlessness in Romans 7—in support of the Manichaean
teaching on grace. Free will and individual responsibility emerge only after grace
(c. Fort. 20–21), and perseverance remains the obligation of the individual soul (c.
Faust. 21.16).20

16. For this trans., see C. W. Mitchell, S. Ephraim’s Prose refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardai-
san, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 183, cxviii.
17. Ibid., 146, cii.
18. Conf. 7.2.3 (Augustine, Confessions, 3 vols., ed. James O’Donnell [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992], 1:74; trans. Boulding, WSA I/1, 160 with some modification): “corrumperetur et commu-
taretur in deterius ut a beatitudine in miseriam uerteretur et indigeret auxilio quo erui purgarique
posset, et hanc esse animam cui tuus sermo seruienti liber et contaminatae purus et corruptae
integer subueniret.”
19. Nat. b. 41 (CSEL 25:876; trans. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings, 340 (n.7)): “dei autem
naturam si non . . . mortuam, quid . . . suscitat christus? si non dicunt aegram, quid curat? si
non dicunt oblitam, quid commemorat? si non dicunt insipientem, quid docet? si non dicunt
perturbatam, quid redintegrat? si non uicta et capta est, quid liberat? si non eget, cui subuenit?
si non amisit sensum, quid uegetat? si non est excaecata, quid inluminat? . . . si non est im-
moderata, cui modum legis imponit? si non est deformis, quid reformat? si non est peruersa,
quid emendat?”
20. Cf. the quote from Mani’s Book of Mysteries reported by al-Biruni, India: “They asked Christ
about the fate of those souls who did not accept the truth. . . . He said, ‘Every infirm soul which
does not obey its summons from Truth will perish (and) have no repose’.” For this trans., see

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

Augustine’s own migration from a free will to a grace-based account of salva-

tion can be traced very precisely across a ten-year period in compositions ranging
from the first book of Free Choice (in 387–388 CE) to the second part of the first
book of To Simplician (a decade later in 397 CE). Once we filter out his notices
of mortality and the impediments of the body, we can isolate his shifting views on
the degree of liberty possessed by the soul or mind in choosing to sin or repent,
will evil or will good, disdain God or initiate faith in him. Heuristically, we can
segment his trajectory from free will to grace into three periods, acknowledging
a certain amount of bleed-through from one phase to another. First, from his con-
version to his debate with Fortunatus, Augustine learns, explores, and maintains a
free will position in line with that of his Nicene Christian predecessors. The soul
or mind has free choice over how to direct its will. Circumstances or the body’s
recalcitrance may limit putting this will to action. But the will is free, both to sin
and to repent. In the second period, Fortunatus impressed on Augustine certain
passages of Paul that seem to suggest something decidedly less than a completely
free will. Augustine could well have interpreted away these Manichaean readings of
Paul, as his predecessors had, and find ways to understand the Apostle in line with
a free will position, as he initially tried to do during the debate with Fortunatus.
But, for whatever reason, he adjusted his position to one he could better defend
in light of Paul’s wording, and developed the position that the soul or mind had
become habituated to sinning and willing evil, so much so that it could not fully
and freely form a will to good on its own, with the exception of a will to faith in
God’s help. Faith elicits God’s grace, which empowers the individual to will the
good wholeheartedly and moral progress thereafter increases facility to act on
the good will. Augustine articulated this adjusted position in the years following
his encounter with Fortunatus, and its echoes can even be found in Confessions.
Yet, before the latter work reached its final form, Augustine moved on to the third
stage of development, expressed in To Simplician 1.2. Here, even faith must be
bestowed on the individual at God’s initiative and by God’s action, in a wholly
predetermined manner. And with this modification of view Augustine arrived in
very close proximity to the Manichaean position, albeit shorn of the latter’s dual-
istic metaphysical context.
Now in each of the two prior phases of development there are antecedents to
the later position—raw material, as it were, that Augustine developed. Similarly,
Augustine re-used earlier ways of expressing himself with new meanings and im-
plications, helping to accentuate the appearance of continuity and consistency. I

John Reeves, Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011),

107–108.

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 BeDuhn: What Augustine (May Have) Learned from the Manichaeans

think that best explains why his development on this issue has usually been treated
as self-motivated and self-contained, a matter of his own self-reflection or, at most,
a product of his meditations on the text of Paul. The fact remains that no one within
the Catholic Church had ever discussed the human condition and the process of
salvation in these terms before. Augustine himself began the shift towards this novel
position only after his encounter with Fortunatus and with the latter’s challenge to
free will, which cited most of the Pauline passages on which Augustine later based
his own developed position. His critics within the Catholic Church pointed to these
re-readings of Paul and the doctrine of grace Augustine worked out in connection
with them as Manichaean in inspiration and as something he had learned from the
Manichaeans, however loath he was to admit it.
Of course, Augustine’s critics were not objective assessors of the antecedents of
his positions. But neither are we, if we simply dismiss their analysis without looking
into what they found compelling in the evidence. Julian was no facile polemicist;
he took the trouble to interview Manichaeans and obtain Manichaean texts from
abroad (Julian of Eclanum, Ad Florum 5.26; Augustine, c. Iul. imp. 166). He and
his associates had the further advantage of living at a time before the success of
Augustine obscured awareness of the extreme novelty of his positions against the
traditional free will stance of Nicene Christians. They saw clearly what modern
researchers at times overlook: that there is something that needs explaining in
Augustine’s deviation from the received soteriology of the Church he had joined.
As with his intense engagement with Paul, so the evolution of his thinking in the
direction of grace is a product of his anti-Manichaean period, a fact that is practi-
cally forgotten when his attention turns to other conversation-partners and that only
returns to the foreground in response to Pelagian criticism.
There are other things that Augustine may have learned from the Manichaeans,
including his first steps towards sexual self-restraint (both monogamy and periodic
abstinence, util. cred. 1.3; conf. 4.2.2; mor. 2.18.65; c. Faust. 15.7), and the veg-
etarianism that he retained to the end of his life, despite his vigorous theoretical
anti-Manichaean defense of eating meat (Possidius, Vita 22.2). Likewise, in his
rhetorical imagery, he repeatedly evoked Manichaean themes that he found useful
and rhetorically persuasive. At times, these served his desire to extend an inviting
hand to the Manichaeans, to find a formulation of truth within the bounds of Catholic
orthodoxy that would appeal to them. But once re-minted in a “Catholic” form,
they remained operative even when he was speaking only to fellow Catholics. It
took a long time for him to give up on the prospect of convincing his former Man-
ichaean friends to join him in the Catholic Church. A number of them did; many
more declined. Following one last bold effort in Confessions to lay out a path he

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thought they might allow themselves to follow, he turned to pure refutation and,
when he had said his piece, coercion. But that approximately thirty-year engage-
ment with Manichaeism, first as an allegiance and then as an impetus for defining
some of his most important positions as a Nicene Christian, left an indelible stamp
on Augustine’s identity. And that stamp was obvious to his detractors within the
Catholic Church. He may have died with Plotinus on his lips and the penitential
Psalms before his eyes, but he did so with one last defense of himself against the
suspicion of Manichaeism left unfinished on his desk.

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