Manichaeans Sentence Examples

The genesis of Mandaeis.m and the older gnosis from the old and elaborate BabylonioChaldaean religion is clearly seen also in the fact that the names of the old pantheon (as for example those of the planetary divinities) are retained, but their holders degraded to the position of demons - a conclusion confirmed by the fact that the Mandaeans, like the allied Ophites, Peratae and Manichaeans, certainly have their original seat in Mesopotamia and Babylonia.

Honorius was equally severe on heretics, such as the Donatists and Manichaeans.

And it is interesting to observe how, e.g., St Augustine, though desperately combating the dualism of the Manichaeans, yet afterwards introduced a number of dualistic ideas into Christianity, which are distinguishable from those of Manichaeism only by a very keen eye, and even then with difficulty.

In this alphabet the sacred books of the Manichaeans were written, even at a later period.

It was this work which the Manichaeans set up in opposition to the Gospels.

The later Western Manichaeans termed those portions of light which are scattered throughout the world - in its elements and organisms - awaiting their deliverance, the Jesus patibilis.

According to the teaching of some Manichaeans, it was the primal man who disseminated the true gnosis in the character of Christ.

It is erroneous, however, to ascribe, as has been done, a doctrine of transmigration to the Manichaeans.

The worshipper turned towards the sun, or the moon, or the north, as the seat of light; but it is erroneous to conclude from this, as has been done, that in Manichaeism the sun and moon were themselves objects of worship. Forms of prayer used by the Manichaeans have been preserved to us in the Fihrist.

A distinction was made in the community between the electi (perfecti), the perfect Manichaeans, and the catechumeni (auditores), the secular Manichaeans.

At least Augustine speaks of such a personage, and the Fihrist also has knowledge of a chief of all Manichaeans.

The worship of the Manichaeans must have been very simple, and must have essentially consisted of prayers, hymns and ceremonies of adoration.

The Manichaeans too, at least in the West, appear to have adapted themselves to the Church's system of festivals.

It may be held as undoubted that the later Manichaeans celebrated mysteries analogous to Christian baptism and the Lord's Supper, which may have rested upon ancient consecration rites and other ceremonies instituted by Mani himself and having their origin in nature worship.

The Manichaeans of Chinese Turkestan also used a version of the Shepherd of Hermas.

The fragments are Boo in number, both on paper and vellum, written and adorned with the pious care and good taste which the Manichaeans are known to have bestowed on their manuscripts.

The Western Manichaeans of the 4th and 5th centuries are much more like Christians than their Eastern brethren.

Towards the close of the 10th century, at the time the Fihirst was written, the Manichaeans in Mesopotamia and Persia had already been in large measure ousted from the towns, and had withdrawn to the villages.

If we may take the edict of Diocletian against the Manichaeans as genuine, the system must have gained a firm footing in the West by the beginning of the 4th century, but we know that as late as about the year 325 Eusebius had not any accurate knowledge of the sect.

The Christian Byzantine and Roman emperors, from Valens onwards, enacted strict laws against the Manichaeans.

The struggle with the Paulicians and the Bogomiles, who were often simply identified with the Manichaeans, again directed attention to the latter.

In particular he persecuted mercilessly the Manichaeans and all kinds of freethinkers.

The Manichaeans held that in every act of begetting, human or otherwise, a soul is condemned afresh to a cycle of misery by imprisonment in flesh - a thoroughly Indian notion, under the influence of which their perfect or elect ones scrupulously abstained from flesh.

Other similar works are his treatise in four books against the Manichaeans and Paulicians, and his controversy with the Latins on the Procession of the Holy Spirit.

In the East also many Marcionites went over to the Manichaeans; but there they survived much longer.

Among the Gnostics and Manichaeans it existed in its most developed type, and in a milder form it is to be found even in the writings of the orthodox teachers.

To this class belonged Dositheus, Saturninus, Cerdo, Marcion and their followers, the Ophites, Manichaeans and others.

To the same class belong the treatise To Ablavius, against the tritheists; On Faith, against the Arians; On Common Notions, in explanation of the terms in current employment with regard to the Trinity; Ten Syllogisms, against the Manichaeans; To Theophilus, against the Apollinarians; an Antirrhetic against the same; Against Fate, a disputation with a heathen philosopher; De anima et resurrectione, a dialogue with his dying sister Macrina; and the Oratio catechetica magna, an argument for the incarnation as the best possible form of redemption, intended to convince educated pagans and Jews.

Their belief made them, like the Manichaeans, hostile to material portraiture of Christ, especially of his sufferings on the cross.

Manichaeans, again, holding their spiritual being to be unaffected by the action of matter, regarded carnal sins as being, at worst, forms of bodily disease.

But even in the 15th century there were Manichaeans living beside the Thomas-Christians on the coast of Malabar in India (see Germann, Die Thomas-Christen, 1875).

In its rejection of this doctrine Manichaeism agreed with Neo-Platonism; but, while the latter, notwithstanding all its attempts to conform itself to Christianity, could find no formula by which to inaugurate within its own limits the special veneration of Christ, the Western Manichaeans succeeded in giving their teaching a Christian tinge.

The Manichaeans were therefore, by reason of their dualism, arch-enemies no less of Christian art than of relics and cross-worship; the Monophysites were equally so by reason of their belief that the divine nature in Christ entirely absorbed and sublated the human; they shaded off into the party of the aphthartodoketes, who held that his human body was incorruptible and made of ethereal fire, and that his divine nature was impassible.