In The Manichaeans of the Roman East, Rea Matsangou takes a revisionist approach to a set of (mostly) Christian texts that have contributed little to the modern study of Manichaeanism. Nowadays, scholars with access to authentic Manichaean texts look askance at the work of Christian polemicists, heresiologists, and legislators whose religious biases give them every reason to want to represent Manichaeanism in as bad a light as possible. On top of that, Christian writers (with the major exception of Augustine) have been thought to be reconstructing Manichaeanism from second- or third-hand knowledge. Moreover, particularly in texts postdating the fifth century, “Manichaean” is used by orthodox writers as a slanderous codeword for the Monophysites and other groups with heterodox theology. Matsangou’s aim in the volume under review is to demonstrate that Christian writers of the Greek east usually do mean “Manichaean” literally, that they know what they’re talking about to a much greater extent than scholars have tended to think, and that, with due allowance for religious hostility, these Christian sources can guide us towards a new social history of Manichaeans in the eastern half of the Roman empire.
Matsangou makes a fairly compelling case that some Greek Christians writing against Manichaeanism did so with access to genuine Manichaean documents (mostly lost to us). She effectively punctures the myth that later writers in this tradition build their images of Manichaeanism mostly out of borrowings from the fourth-century Acta Archelai, and she also draws attention to the valuable evidence offered by the various abjuration statements to which Manichaeans were subject when they wanted to convert to Orthodoxy. Her careful and critical study of these texts is a real contribution to scholarship on Manichaeanism and makes the introduction and first chapter of The Manichaeans of the Roman East essential reading for anyone thinking about the rise and fall of Manichaeanism in the Roman empire.
Matsangou’s historical analysis begins in chapter two, “The Arrival and Spread of Manichaeism in the Roman East.” Here, too, the author usefully catalogs “first impressions” of Manichaeism in Roman sources, both pagan and Christian. Paranoia about Persian influence and religious innovation characterizes responses on both sides of that religious divide. But Matsangou’s reevaluation of these anti-Manichaean sources sometimes verges into advocacy, a problem that will recur in subsequent chapters too. For example, Matsangou seems to argue that Diocletian’s 297 edict against the Manichaeans is responding to a real threat of Persian infiltration in the Roman east, sponsored by the Sassanians (66-67). Yet Diocletian’s reference to the “damnable customs and perverse laws of the Persians” in this connection seems like so much legal rhetoric, and is certainly a thin reed on which to build an argument about what Manichaeanism really was at the beginning of its spread into the Roman world.
On the other hand, Matsangou’s close study of the abjuration formulae for Manichaean converts to orthodoxy suggests a real and effective interest on the part of Christians in gathering information about the Manichaeans and possibly even in studying their literature. Yet a conundrum arises here that raises doubts about how far the material gathered by Matsangou can generate new evidence about Manichaean religion. In that connection, as Matsangou suggests, the evidentiary value of texts like the Seven Chapters, an early abjuration formula, depends on its correspondence with authentic Manichaean-internal sources: if the two textual traditions match, then that shows that Christian writers hostile to Manichaeanism did to some extent know what they were talking about (102-113). In that case, though, a study of the Greek Christian sources adds nothing to our knowledge of Manichaean ritual practice beyond what we already know from sources internal to the Manichaean tradition. Where hostile sources diverge from that tradition, Matsangou is rightly hesitant to assign them much evidentiary weight, since it is always possible that writers interested in polemics—or even, like the composer of the abjuration formula Seven Chapters, in giving as capacious a definition of heterodoxy as possible—will mix many lies in with truth.
Chapter Three, which addresses the Roman legal response to Manichaeism, shows that the Manichaeans during their heyday were by a significant margin the most persecuted religious group in the Roman empire (159). The contours of that persecution may, after all, tell us something about how Manichaean communities were structured. On Matsangou’s analysis, they were cell-like structures, inclusive of women, that generally gathered in private houses—thus the interest of imperial legislation in confiscating the property of people found to have hosted or even participated in Manichaean worship (166-177). Matsangou also uses the legal evidence to try to reconstruct a history of persecution, leniency, and renewed persecution that would at least in part come as a response to the missionary successes of Manichaeans. As the author acknowledges, this effort is vitiated by the large chronological gaps and preservation biases of the surviving Roman law codes.
Matsangou is nonetheless right that we have much to learn from these sources about Roman responses to Manichaeism, and that becomes clear in Chapter Four, “Classifying Manichaeism.” The author makes a compelling argument that Christian sources consistently characterize Manichaeism as a distinct form of worship rather than a Christian heresy, even as they recognize that Manichaeans have a tactical interest in infiltrating church communities by pretending to follow a heterodox form of Christianity (215-224). The tendency of fourth- and fifth-century orthodox writers to lump Manichaeanism together with radical, pre-Nicene heresies like Marcionism and Valentinianism rather than with “contemporary” heresies arising from trinitarian disputes is also revealing, particularly in light of later polemicists’ tendency to deploy “Manichaean” as a term of slander precisely against Monophysites and other sects distinguished by nonstandard Christologies (238-239).
Chapter Five, on “Manichaean Beliefs and Practices,” shows particularly clearly what Greek anti-Manichaean texts can and cannot tell us about Manichaeism in the Roman world. This is in fact the main positive conclusion of the chapter: that Christian polemicists were interested in, and somewhat informed about, Manichaean dogma while remaining largely ignorant of Manichaean ritual (286 ff.). Matsangou’s most significant attempt to reconstruct a Manichaean ritual from hostile sources surrounds an enigmatic reference by Cyril of Jerusalem to a “dried fig… baptized” in semen and menstrual blood (297). The chain of argument used by Matsangou (298-307) to support the reality of this ceremony is improbable in the extreme, and it gives an object lesson in the risks of relying on hostile sources—one is always in danger of taking a libelous polemic trope too literally.
Chapter Six is titled “Manichaeism in Society,” though a better title might have been “Manichaeism’s Missionary Appeal.” Matsangou shows that the Greek sources can tell us a lot about the audiences that responded to that appeal: since educated pagans and Christian catechumens are the addressees of a number of anti-Manichaean texts, it seems likely that Manichaean missionaries were able to find converts among these groups (348). We are on less firm ground with the various ascetic groups that appear associated with Manichaeans in Roman sources, particularly (to the extent that either existed as a coherent group rather than as a term of slander by the Orthodox) the Encratites and the Messalians. Matsangou writes that “it is logical to assume” that such ascetics were susceptible to Manichaean recruitment (380). They may well have been, but polemical texts by writers who were hostile to asceticism and ready to slander its practitioners by association with the hated Manichaeans hardly provides evidence of this.
In Chapter Seven, Matsangou turns to an account of “Manichaean Communities, Churches, and Individuals.” The communities in question are those of Antioch and Jerusalem, here reconstructed on the basis of the homilies of John Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem respectively. Cyril seems to expect that his parishioners will encounter Manichaeans on the street, and he speaks as though there may even be Manichaeans in his audience. That gives better evidence about Christian-Manichaean relations (and perhaps an overlap between the two groups) than does John Chrysostom’s habit of referring to Manichaeanism in abstract terms as a spiritual danger. Chrysostom might be thought to be using Manichaeanism as a stalking horse to steer his congregation away from other, more church-internal heresies, although there almost certainly were Manichaeans active in Antioch. Do these representational differences between Cyril and John Chrysostom speak to different patterns of Christian-Manichaean relations in the two cities, or only to the different rhetorical habits of the two preachers?
The first generation of Manichaean missionaries, already discussed in Chapter Three, are not recatalogued here, but Matsangou lists and investigates all other named and anonymous Manichaeans mentioned in the Greek anti-Manichaean literature from the fourth through the sixth century. On the early end of that chronology, we encounter an intriguing series of eclectics like Hierax, Heracleides, and Agapius who may have borrowed Manichaean ideas without identifying as Manichaean or fully committing to Manichaean dogma. These are “imaginary Manichaeans” in a different sense than some of the other individuals discussed in this chapter, particularly the various anonymous Manichaeans that seem to have been invented as background figures in stories about Christian hermits and saints. There are a number of politically powerful people on Matsangou’s list—for example Sebastian, the dux who persecuted Nicene Christians in Alexandria—who are called Manichaean by writers otherwise hostile to them. In those circumstances, it is hard to be sure whether the accusation is descriptive or just another way to demonize political adversaries.
Chapter Eight, “The Dissolution of Manichaeism in the Roman East,” offers an account of the waning of Manichaeanism as an organized group in the eastern empire that emphasizes conversion of Manichaeans in the face of Justinian’s persecutory laws over their physical elimination as a result of the capital punishment attached to those laws. That’s reasonable, though Matsangou’s claim that such converts remained crypto-Manichaeans with a persistent group identity will attract more controversy. The evidence she offers in favor of that claim is sometimes tendentious: for instance, do Manichaean sources really suggest a distaste for martyrdom despite their commemoration of Mani’s own martyrdom at the hands of Wahram I? Yet there is evidence in Christian and Manichaean sources for what Matsangou, borrowing Trotskyist vocabulary, calls “entryism,” a strategy of infiltrating and assimilating to existing religious identities and institutions. That certainly makes it conceivable that Manichaeanism continued a crypto-existence after the sixth century, and that, in turn, would help explain renewed anti-Manichaean persecutions under the ‘Abbasids two hundred years later. Positive evidence for institutional continuity here is lacking, but it makes for an intriguing hypothesis and a program of research.
As a coda to the book, “Conclusions” largely reemphasizes arguments made in earlier chapters. I think Matsangou is justified here in claiming that she has shown how Greek anti-Manichaean writers were sometimes talking about “real” Manichaeans as distinct from paranoid hallucinations or other heterodox groups deliberately misidentified in a polemic context. It should be apparent from the foregoing paragraphs that I also doubt whether Matsangou is right about this claim in every instance.
Something that stood out strongly for me after finishing this book is the remarkably detailed evidence about Manichaean ritual practice and community organization provided by Augustine in comparison with the Greek sources canvased by Matsangou. Much like internal Manichaean sources, Augustine usually appears in Manichaeans of the Roman East as confirming evidence for claims made by Greek writers. I hope that the author will return to this material in a way that uses both Augustine and Manichaean sources constructively alongside Greek anti-Manichaica to build a fuller picture of Christian-Manichaean interaction in the Roman world.
Manichaeans of the Roman East is a readable and well-produced book. It should certainly change the way that the sources it studies are read and used: Matsangou shows that historians ought to read them carefully for evidence about Manichaeanism rather than dismissing them as hostile polemic. Many of the positivist claims set forth in this volume should, however, be used with caution, since, whatever else they are, the texts reevaluated here are indeed hostile polemics with other aims and commitments than representing historical realities.