Manichaeism

As an ambitious young student and teacher from a marginal small-town family, Augustine had little trouble abandoning the primitive Catholicism of his devout mother for the fashionable Manichaeism of the provincial Carthaginian elite. And when he arrived in Rome and then in Milan and began to move in the company of the intellectuals of the senatorial aristocracy, he shifted easily to the Platonism fashionable among those men and then (not so easily, since it involved eschewing some pleasures and ambitions) to the Catholic Christianity championed by such leading lights as the senator-turned-bishop, Ambrose of Milan.

On the other hand, Augustine's god needed to be something very much more and different. The road he followed in his struggle to join the ruling class of Roman society did not involve pursuing military, political or administrative advancement. He became an intellectual and sought acceptance into those circles whose aristocratic patrons saw themselves as the keepers of ancient culture and wisdom. While in Carthage , he made himself a leader among young scholars, many of whom were themselves from provincial senatorial families, who gloried in pursuit of "wisdom," were contemptuous of the "primitive" religion of their African home towns and sometimes returned home to flaunt before their horrified elders the Manichaeism they had adopted as a higher truth.

Augustine himself was without the means to sustain himself as part of this rarified culture, but he had no difficulty finding provincial aristocrats happy to act as patrons and so gain at least indirect recognition as "lovers of wisdom." When he moved on to Rome and then to Milan , Augustine found himself in the far more heady company of gentlemen of the oldest aristocratic families, some of whom devoted their time to leisured contemplation, while others directed the spiritual life of the empire as Christian leaders of the new imperial church. And in this new context, Augustine had no trouble at all abandoning Manichaeism with the same disdain that he had rejected his childhood religion and identifying competely with the Platonism of his new mentors.

Augustine moved from his original Catholicism to Manichaeism and then to Platonism gradually but with relative ease, always searching for a cosmic myth that would allow him to combine his intuition of the omnipotent imperial deity with that of the enveloping source of being for which he had come to yearn. Among the Christian Platonists of Milan, he thought he had found what he sought. He converted again to Catholicism, and for a short time he seems to have believed that there was an unbroken truth that found its first expression in Plato and its ultimate realization in Christ.

Platonism had indeed enabled him to shake free of the limitations placed on God by Manichaeism and by the anthropomorphism of his childhood religion. And Platonism had pointed him in a direction that enabled him to see God not only as immaterial, but as both utterly omnipotent and absolutely good. In fact, as the dominant world-view of elite culture, Platonism always seemed to Augustine superior to all other philosophies and closer to Christianity than any other.

But at the same time, Manichaeism was above all a cult of redemption, and the Manichees of the western empire grounded themselves in the writings of St. Paul and saw themselves as the most pure and refined of Christians. They thus offered a powerful combination of seeming intellectual sophistication and redemptive hope. After only two years in Carthage , Augustine attached himself to the Manichaeans, and he remained with them for nine years.