The Ark

The Manichaeans of 4th century Egypt were one of many Gnostic groups that were considered heretical by the Christian church.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: Dust off your sandals, we're about to enter an Egyptian oasis town, west of Alexandria, called Kellis.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National. It's the 4th century, and Kellis is a thriving town with Pagans, Christians and Manichaeans. Recent discoveries show that some Manichaeans were businesswomen, who wrote letters in Coptic. They lived in relative harmony with their neighbours, despite being members of a heretical Christian sect. So who were the Manichaeans and what was their relation to Gnosticism?

Majella Franzmann, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of New England, explains.

Majella Franzmann: They're the followers of Mani, who was a Persian prophet during the 3rd century, who grew up, we think, in some kind of baptizing sect, perhaps an offshoot of Judaism, and then had two major enlightenment experiences, after which he then went off to preach his own brand of the practical way to move to such enlightenment, and also to teach about the worlds in which this enlightenment made sense.

So a very, very complex cosmology that dealt with forces of light and darkness, souls falling into darkness, of salvation, of redemption in great wars and so on. So it's the last - I would call the flowering and other people have called it this too - the flowering of the Gnostic movements, which are fairly piecemeal, but seem to come to some great climax and fruition in a very complicated system of teaching and ritual within what we call Manichaeaism.

Rachael Kohn: So Manichaeaism, to get this straight, is a manifestation of a general Gnostic movement, revolving around what we call the Levant or northern Egypt, the Middle East, Persia?

Majella Franzmann: Yes, they don't draw together other groups in general, although there may have been people from Gnostic groups who eventually moved into something much more organised, like Manichaeaism.

Grew up firstly of course in Persia, Mani was a great traveller; there are stories of him going down towards India and so on. He sent out missionaries very early with books, with pictures, he was a painter himself, a miniature painter. But of course in the West they flowered at a very difficult time, just as the mainstream Christian church was coming to some kind of public political power. And so they came under suspicion and under the persecution of that burgeoning political religion.

As they experienced difficulty, they moved eastwards, and of course that great, great trek of them across Central Asia, down into India. And when I say the great trek, it's not a great trek of groups of them going across, but they gradually made their way across, and of course by the 7th century they're in China, or on the edges of what we know today as China, and flourished there.

Came under difficulties of course too, with successive Chinese political movements, and we find them still there in the 14th century. As I think you've heard before in The Ark about these great communities in port cities of the Silk Road. So they were amazingly resilient, and of course they were a thorn in the side of the established Christian church, and so their name becomes synonymous with what it means to be a heretic.

Rachael Kohn: Well most famously, with Augustine I guess, and Jerome. Now Augustine, his life story involves some dalliance with the Manichaeans doesn't it?

Majella Franzmann: It does. Prior to his real conversion into mainstream Christianity, he was a Manichaean auditor, or hearer. It's sort of debated how much did he actually know about Manichaeism, and there's been a little bit of writing recently that suggests that what he talks about in the Manichaean cosmos, perhaps he didn't quite understand as much as earlier scholars thought he did, and he was only a Manichaean I think for about two years.

Rachael Kohn: So tell me, give me some idea of how he characterised the Manichaeans?

Majella Franzmann: Oh well, there are many dialogues between himself and the Manichaeans. And typical of that kind of apologetic, he sets up his Manichaean opponents in a way to fail. It's a ploy. For example, they argue about what various gospel passages mean, because the Manichaeans used what we know as the canonical gospels. So they argue a little bit about Jesus' genealogy, his early childhood, was he actually born of a woman or not?

You know, the Gnostics of course are uncomfortable with that, of a Saviour who has a completely fleshly beginning, and an end where the body dies and the Manichaeans have difficulty with that, as it says in some passages, 'How could the Saviour of the world have been so brought low as to have been born of a woman and to have been in the impurity of a woman's womb for nine months?' So there were various arguments between Augustine and his Manichaean opponents about these key matters of dogma.

Rachael Kohn: You've been working on some letters, and they're letters by women. What does it tell us about Manichaean women? What have you been able to discern from them?

Majella Franzmann: The letters found in Egypt on the Dakhleh Oasis in the old Roman town of Kellis, provide us with a marvellous archive of people's everyday life. Not the big teaching texts of the religion, not the big ritual texts of psalms and so on, but just the nitty gritty of everyday life, where women on the oasis, the menfolk are off in the Nile Valley, the women are into weaving and tailoring, they're worried about money matters, getting a good cloak to their son for the cooler months on the Nile Valley, all these sort of family concerns and business concerns.

But at the same time, the language of the letters, often in the greeting sections, are about 'These are the daughters of the light; these are really firm believers in Manichaeism'. You know, the women aren't just Manichaeans because their husbands are. The women themselves are built up and supported by people who write to them, family members, spiritual leaders. They also give their alms to the poor, they help support the inner members of the church.

So they're really very energetic, both in their business life, but also in their faith, they're energetic, fully engaged.

Rachael Kohn: Do they attain to any official roles in the Manichaean church?

Majella Franzmann: The women are catechumens. Now of course they can't be out in the world doing this business as inner members of the church. So the Elect really have a fairly rarefied life in the sense of chanting psalms, and reading, and teaching, and going about doing missionary work, so there's no time to go about everyday business. And not like Paul who's the tentmaker and a missionary at the same time.

So they're dependent on the catechumens, who go about the business of everyday life, make money and so on, in order to give goods and serve the elite, so that they can continue in this way of redeeming the light. That's the job of the Elect, if you like, not to be about worldly business.

So the women who are written to in these letters, and who write them themselves, are catechumens, so they're on that first rung. But even so, they're not characterised as being a lot less than this inner core, their work is also prized, and very often they're referred to as themselves really being engaged in the work of redeeming light. But here's the outer edge of the movement, in a way, and yet by their very energetic support they're almost like the inner core.

Rachael Kohn: Well today women in the church wouldn't be too happy with being just assigned to the periphery, and they've tried to become, and have achieved that inner status, or that status in the Elect. Is there any indication amongst the Manichaeans that women were amongst the Elect?

Majella Franzmann: Yes, quite clearly they were members of the Elect. They're referred to in the teaching text as the female Elect, along with the male Elect, and we've got wonderful, wonderful pictures from along the Silk Road, some in manuscripts, some as a sort of small frescoes, and they are depicted there, men and women, quite clearly segregated within ritual settings or teaching settings, but they're there nevertheless in their rows of women with distinctive headdress and garments, as the men have their own distinctive headdress and so on.

So quite clearly they were among that inner core. The only thing they couldn't be, they weren't in the higher hierarchal echelons of the movement. So while they were spiritually equivalent, and undertook the same work as the inner male core of the church, they weren't in the administrative higher echelons of the church. So that's the only real difference.

Rachael Kohn: Majella, there's been a strong theme in recent Gnostic scholarship, and in popular conceptions about Gnosticism, that women fared much better in Gnosticism than in the church, that they were not necessarily the object of such prejudices that were prevalent in the ancient world about women being impure and so forth. How do the Manichaeans square up?

Majella Franzmann: I think the Manichaeans are fairly much like the other Gnostics, and we have to be very careful here.

Many people romanticise the Gnostics, and suggest that women did extraordinarily well in Gnostic groups, and because of that they were a very great threat to mainstream Christianity. While it may be true that women had equivalent roles in Gnostic groups and were able to be in the inner circle of those who redeemed the light, at the same time, Gnosticism in general and Manichaeism, we can find within this same kind of general comment, Gnosticism was very ambivalent towards women as females.

So that while women had inner roles to play, individual women were given great status in Gnosticism, and within Manichaeism it has its heroines, its spiritual heroines, nevertheless Gnosticism in general and Manichaeism, is very suspicious of a fundamental role of being female, and that is in reproducing physical life, because the female is so involved in the reproduction of flesh, women then are caught up in the way in which the light is entangled more and more in the darkness of matter. So there's an ambivalence towards women.

There are texts which say, Beware femaleness, beware the works of femaleness. And Manichaeism treats women in general in the same way. Women are creatures who produce impurity in men, women are creatures of lust, as men are creatures of lust. So the ordinary men and women of the world are really the means by which the light is trapped, and they're lusting after each other is part of that evil. So to be a pure Manichaeism elect then meant a life of complete celibacy.

The catechumens of course, weren't at that stage, they had families, they had children, so the catechumens were still in the sense, caught in the world, but were striving to be beyond the world. And women are caught up in that.

Rachael Kohn: Is the archaeological dig at Kellis still operating? Are you still hoping to find some new documents, some new fragments of that culture?

Majella Franzmann: In the original dig that kind of aspect of work at Kellis has really reached the end. But you see the dig covers an enormous range of things from the Pharaonic temple to the local deity that was the centre of Pagan worship before the advent of Christianity or Manichaeism on the oasis.

So there are all sorts of interesting bits and pieces to the town, with people on the dig having uncovered Christian churches in the town, as well as this house where the Manicheisms lived. So I think those who control the dig have exhausted that aspect. But my colleague, Iain Gardner at Sydney University, who's been working on that dig on the Coptic documents for a long time, is quite convinced that there's a monastery close by, where the Elect would have lived, and if that's the case it would be wonderful to be able to dig there and perhaps find something of the women Elect in the monastery, as we found the women catechumens in the letters, in the actual town itself. So watch this space.

Rachael Kohn: Majella Franzmann works with scholars Sam Lieu and Iain Gardner on the Manichaean and Medieval Christian remains in South China. And she's Associate Dean at the University of New England.

It's been said that Vatican II barely touched Australian seminaries. Next week, dissent in the 1960s at Corpus Christi College, in Melbourne. That's on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Majella Franzmann
is a scholar of early Gnosticism and Associate Dean at the University of New England, New South Wales.