Federico Campagna | Manichaeism

Transcription 

Manuela Vasco Welcome to our podcast with Castello di Rivoli Philosopher-in-Residence Federico Campagna for the year 2022. Focusing on the rare books in the library of Francesco Federico Cerruti’s Collection and immersed in the Villa Cerruti with its extraordinary paintings and furnishings, Campagna is investigating—at the intersection between philosophy and visual art—the idea of ‘Creative Mediterranean imagination’ from the late antiquity to the beginnings of modernity. I’m your host Manuela Vasco from Castello di Rivoli – Cerruti Collection Communications Office. I welcome Federico Campagna, who today is going to expand on the notion of Manichaeism.

Federico Campagna Welcome to a new episode of the podcast series produced for Castello di Rivoli from the Tower Room in the Villa of the Cerruti Collection in Rivoli. I am Federico Campagna, and I will take you today to a new step of the road along my research on Mediterranean imagination throughout the centuries. As you might remember, in a previous episode, we began discussing the religion of Gnosticism, a broad intellectual movement that flourished in the time of late antiquity in the Mediterranean world. Around the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in a region that goes well from Europe to Africa to Asia. Last time we started discussing this religious movement and also intellectual movement by looking at one painting in the collection of Francesco, Federico Cerruti here in Rivoli. And every episode of this podcast is dedicated to one part of my research and one element in the collection and in the villa. Today, I would like to talk about another movement of the time of late antiquity closely related to Gnosticism, although different, much more important in a sense, also in terms of world history.

I would like to connect it with one element of the Cerruti collection, which is often overlooked by those who come to visit it, and yet which is absolutely fundamental. When you go into a museum, you might be concentrating closely on the art that you see around the world. So maybe the furniture if it is a home museum. And yet the most important thing that you have to consider is that you can see all that because there are the lights are on because somebody opened the door at the beginning of the day and turned on the lights and then closed the door at the end of the day and turned off the light. The people that look after the cleanliness of the building and the security of the building are very important to any experience of experience of a collection such as the Cerruti Collection. And it is to them that this episode is dedicated to those who turn on the lights at the beginning of the day and turn off the lights at the end of the day. Light and darkness. This is the essence of Manichaeism, the movement that we will discuss today. But let’s step back to begin. You might remember the previous episode on Gnosticism that we had left the late ancient Mediterranean world in a state of great distress. There were wars, pestilence, famine, violence, new powers coming up, and old powers dying. And the new powers coming up, like the Orthodox Christian Church, were quickly becoming as brutal as the old powers. They were fading away.

History seemed to have entered a state of frenzied destruction, and the people of that time and of that region of the world started to imagine that the idea of Gnosticism. The idea that the world is fundamentally a trap, that we are entrapped here, that this is an illusion, a place of evil and pain created by an evil God, while in fact we belong to a realm of goodness and light far beyond the world, and we need to escape this place and get there. Well, it was starting to gain traction at the time. The Gnostics were spreading like wildfire throughout the Mediterranean world of that time and the communities were flourishing, especially in the urban centers. They were different from the other religions. For example, they they had an important role dedicated to women within the religion who were priests and prophets and officials in the church. But they were also different in the fact that their church was not a hierarchical institution. And like the Christian church, for example, yes, they had rituals, they had offices, they had priests, for example, but they didn’t take any of this stuff too seriously. They thought that they had to use these worldly linguistic devices because they lived in the world, and the truth did not come into the world naked, as they say. But this reliance on the language of the world had to be done very, very carefully. All that stuff was demure. Belong to the evil God that created this trapped where we call the world. Some of them decided to rebel to the rule of the world by becoming ascetics. They wanted to take away themselves from the world and to. Right, themselves by way of subtraction. They didn’t engage in anything that was well, others were instead libertines. And they decided to transgress the rules of this world by breaking the law, because this world is ruled by the damage. And his authorities, the Archons, and thus the laws of this world and the laws of the damage, for example, the law of reproduction, which has to be avoided. Absolutely and destroyed, but also the laws of politics. You can see why the Gnostics had a very hard time. But this idea that every person is in a way a resistance fighter against a god and that every person is engaged in a cosmic war between two universal principles. Light and darkness. Ignorance and wisdom. Good and evil. This is a much older idea than Gnosticism. It stretches back to the seventh century BCE, when the Persian prophet Zarathustra created a new religion called Zoroastrianism. According to this message, the universe is traversed by an all-out war between almost the God of light, goodness and knowledge, and every man, the Lord of darkness, evil and ignorance. Every person has to take sides in this cosmic war, and the final outcome will be, well, not decided because it is fundamentally decided in advance, but will be there will be a progress towards the final outcome depending on our words, our deeds and our thoughts. This extreme dualist view of the universe as a as a battleground dualist means with two principles is typical of what was going to be the last and the longest lasting among the Gnostic religions of late antiquity.

The one that we are observing today, Manichaeism. Now the name Manichaeism might resound to you because it is an expression that is still used today. Usually disparagingly somebody is a Manichaean. If they simplify and see everything in terms of good and evil with nothing in between. But Manichaeism was much more than that. And you can see how it’s now used disparagingly, because once again belongs to the defeated religions of history. For one thing, Manichaeism was one of the four major universal religions, one of the only four that have ever appeared in history together with Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Like these other three Manichaeism preached a gospel of salvation addressed to all to all people, regardless of ethnicity, geography, or anything else. But unlike Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, Manichaeism didn’t have any desire to present itself as either a very original religion or as the final form of their religion. On the contrary, it blended with all the religions around itself, and as it started spreading throughout Eurasia and Africa, it started to combine also with the local religions. For example, the prophet of Manichaeism, a man called Mani, called himself a successor to Buddha Zoroaster. Zarathustra and Christ and His disciples described him as Maitreya. The Buddha of the future as the Son of Zarathustra and as the parakeet. The helper or the Advocate, the Holy Spirit of the Christians, the one that would come after Christ. Manichaeism is different from the other Gnostic cults. Yes, it sees the universe as a fight between light and darkness, but it is characterised by an optimistic view of the world. The universe is full of evil. Yes, and we are engaged in a Mortal Kombat against darkness. And we must ultimately escape the world. It doesn’t end here, but for money, the world is not the evil creation of an evil demiurge. It is something very different and something that, in the view of money, is not a cage, but is just the trampoline and the beginning of a wonderful adventure. Let’s have a look now at the world story told by Manny. It is incredible. It’s almost a fairy tale, both in its plot and in the way in which it turns around the objects of our everyday reality. And it is an incredible cosmology as well. So according to this story, let’s begin. In the beginning, the universe was divided between the realm of pure light and that of pure darkness. The two principles existed in total separation until one day the darkness, which is agitated by its own turbulent nature, decided to attack the realm of light. The God of light called Japan to defend itself, invoked the warrior to withstand the assault of the Lord of Darkness and his authorities. The arrogance. This is similar to Gnosticism. Zordon created a warrior of light, and this warrior of light called, or master was the archetype of the primeval man. And he was endowed with a special armor of light, composed of the five elements of his soul or. The warrior of light travelled to the borders of the realm of light, where he met the incoming force of darkness. The fight there was terrible. And it ended with the defeat of our midst and his capture by the Prince of Darkness. To remedy this defeat and to rescue his champion servant invoked another being Mithra and sent him to the place where Hermes was held prisoner. Mithra managed to rescue our midst, but he failed to take back also his light, which was fundamentally his soul. But Mithra didn’t lose heart. He started to create an enormous mechanism that would eventually allow him to recuperate the light that was still in the hands of darkness. This mechanism that is necessary to extract the light from the darkness is the universe, the cosmos, and especially the planets and the stars. When Mithra and or Mars return to the realm of light, Zordon then summoned a new being the third envoy, an androgynous being whom he sent to set in motion the mechanism built by Mithra, the planet and the stars. This third envoy took their home in the sun. Appointed their 12 daughters to preside the houses of the Zodiac. And then using the moon as a bucket in a well, began to draw back the light from the world. You can see it. Indeed, each month the moon slowly fills up with light and then pours it back into the sun, which sends it back to the realm of heaven until the moon is empty and ready for a new load of light. Meanwhile, overwhelmed by servant’s activism, the powers of darkness attempted to stop this haemorrhaging of light. But they weren’t fast enough because the third envoy, the androgynous being showed themselves to the Archons, the Archons of darkness in all their androgynous nakedness. And the Archons reacted to this vision of the beautiful nakedness of the third envoy by the male Archons by spilling their seed and the female Archons by producing abortions. And in so doing, they lost the light that they had stored within themselves. Their seeds became plants while their abortions became the animals, both of whom are receptacles of life and of light. So as a last resort, the Archons of darkness, the authorities of darkness created two new creatures to humans, Adam and Eve, whom they fashioned in the shape of the androgynous nakedness of the third and of light as they had seen them. The Archons stored all the remaining light into these new human creatures and sunk them in a condition of ignorance about the true nature to stop them from giving up their light to the to the third envoy. Now, we are getting to the conclusion of this story, because at this point, the servant played his last card and sent a final envoy called The Jesus of Splendor to teach the humans about the true state of the universe and their rightful place in the realm of light. And ever since that day, and until the inevitable final victory of servant, each person is entangled in a cosmic fight to escape the grip of the authorities of darkness. They are going to follow the exits to the world and to return home at last, when each of us will have purified themselves from the darkness that was imposed on us by the authorities, then the material world, this planet, and all the planets and the stars, which was always nothing more than a mechanism set in place for our liberation, where it will all finally vanish. And finally, the original state of separation, complete separation between pure light and pure darkness will be reconstituted. In the time that remains until this final conflagration and the end of the world, the Manichaean adepts were engaged in a silent warfare against darkness, and they did so at many different levels. Some of them dedicated their entire life to fighting the good fight. They were called the elect and they renounced all worldly attachment, including work, sexual intercourse. But also they refrained from causing any harm to any other living beings, whether animals or plants, since they were carriers of the light. But elect. How could they live without harming animals or plants? There were other manikins to say. The part time manikins called the hearers, and its hearers had a more moderate form of asceticism. But they made up for it by serving the elect. The elect would be served by the hearers, especially fed by the heroes. And the elect would forgive the hearers for the sins they had incurred by looking after them. But in exchange for all this, then the elect would do something very important. They would eat. And eating was very important because the elect was like starships heading towards the sun and then towards the realm of light inside themselves. They stored the light that they could filter from the world. Eating, eating plants. Of course not. Animals was a way for them to store the light of the plants within themselves, within their stomach. And then when they would die, they would re bring it back into the realm of light. Interestingly, among these hearers, so the servants of the elect of the Manichaean church, there was a certain guy called Augustine, Saint Augustine, who was a hero in the church for years before becoming a father of the Christian church and a saint in the Christian church. And indeed, the Manichaean religion became very popular in large parts of the Mediterranean world, especially in the east, because they had Persian origin, as we shall see, but also in other parts in North Africa, where Saint Augustine used to live, in Spain, in Italy, in Croatia, in France. Manichaeism was a religion that wanted to travel widely. There were missionaries that brought it around, but also it was appealing to people, for example, merchants who felt that something was wrong with the world, but they didn’t want to renounce to everything like the Gnostics used to say, and they didn’t want to take a very pessimistic view of the world. They wanted to have a part time engagement. And so they became hearers. To conclude this very brief look at Manichaeism. It is useful and important to understand also who was the person that invented it? The first messenger of the light. His name was Mani, and his story is also a little bit of a fairy tale.

Let’s begin in the year 216 A.D. amid the collapse of the once great Parthian Empire, which was the Empire that rule Persia. At the time, a baby boy named Mani came to life in the region of Babylon. His parents belonged to the old defeated Persian aristocracy, but its father would have preferred to claim a different, more spiritual kind of nobility. So at the age of four, Mani went to live with his father in a community of Jewish Christian Baptists who had settled in a village near the river Tigris. He spent his early years in a daily routine of asceticism and mysticism, studying a syncretic combination of the teachings of the Jews, the Christians and the Zoroastrians. So this is how our story, The Life of Man, begins. Heaven felt very close to the Baptists, but particularly so Toumani, who at the age of 12 for the first time. So the Heavenly Vault gape open for him. An angel called the comrade descended from the heights and spoke to the boy and spoke to him of a world of light and of a secret treasure that lies hidden within each living being. Now, money was 12 years old, so was too young to grasp the full meaning of this revelation. But from that day onward, he was always vigilant, looking for any sign of the return of this other worldly teacher. Meanwhile, he was studying the scriptures of all the religious traditions he could find, and he was developing skills in any medium through which he could communicate what he might learn. He became an accomplished painter, musician, calligrapher, and even grammarian. The angel called. The comrade waited 12 years before visiting him again. But when he came, Mani’s life took an irreversible turn. The comrade ordered him to abandon the village of the Baptist and to gather around himself a new community of people who would accompany him in a pursuit of the light that is hidden in the world. Mani left behind the landscape of his youth, and with a small retinue of believers, he began to travel across the great territories of the Persian Empire. There was now ruled by a new dynasty called the Sassanian here. The time of travels begin. Mani and his little group, including his father, interestingly, who followed his son as a prophet, travelled east to the delta of the Indus River, then north to the Central Asian kingdom of TURAN, where Mani converted the local Buddhist king. It was the first major conversion. Then they continued to travel for two years, during which their religion grew together with them. They were learning new languages, and meanwhile they were perfecting their message to meet the sensitivities of different cultures. You see, Manichaeism here is a soft, watery religion is literally the religion of the light. If we understand light fundamentally is a liquid. Meanwhile, back in Persia, a new source of the rain had ascended to the Prussian throne, and rumors were that this new king was a rare kind of monarch, somebody interested in something more than wealth and power. At the beginning of the reign of this new king, king of Kings, actually, Shapur, the first coincided with the return of Mani and of his growing entourage to the Persian heartland. Money was confident. By then he had converted other people. He knew his message was strong. He has to be admitted to the presence of Shapur the first and to tell him his doctrine. And the king was enchanted by the visions that narrated by this still very young messenger of the light. And so Shapur, the first bestowed upon Mani the royal blessing and a full protection for his travels anywhere in his territories. This protection extended to anyone who would travel in the name of Mani and accompanied the first missionaries sent by the Prophet to the Western lands of Egypt, Syria and Armenia. The message of the light was spreading like wildfire, winning over the hearts of people and nobles of many a kingdom, including, for example, the heart of Princess Nafisa, the sister of the legendary queen of Palmyra, Zenobia, who was among the first converts to Manichaeism. Many told these missionaries to remain flexible in their doctrine and to always adapt their teaching to the existing cultures and beliefs of the local people. As long as the fundamental ideas of the revolution remained unaltered, there was no problem adapting the letter of his message to each different context. And Mani himself, for example, reformed the Aramaic alphabet to make sure that his own writing in Aramaic would be easily translatable in many other languages from the surrounding regions. And here, like in every fairy tale, something changes. The wheels of history spin forward one more round. The benevolent king, Shapur. The first died in the year 272. His immediate successor reigned for one year only, and by 273 A.D., the new king was ram. The first ascended to the throne of Persia. Money in cautiously paid little attention to what was happening at course. He wanted to continue his travel to go east, further east than had previously been. But just as he was about to leave for a new expedition, the Royal Police came to meet him. Money was ordered to reach the court of the king without delay because the king wanted to speak to him. Many felt somehow that this was not a friendly invitation, and so he bade farewell to the mass of his disciples. And in fact, once he reached the royal court, money immediately met an incredible hostility from the Zoroastrian priests. The priest of the Zoroastrian religion, which was the official religion of Persia, the priest accused him of spreading falsehood that threatened to erode the foundations of the tradition, and the king were harmed. The first asked money, how did he dare to present himself as a prophet? He said, literally. We found this in a text. How come God gave his revelation to you? While he did not reveal the same to me, who I am, the Lord over the whole country. So asked what happened? And Money replied. It is God who is the Lord? Dangerous reply. Attacking the Zoroastrian tradition was bad enough but belittling the authority of the King of Kings was nothing short of sedition. The Royal Police seized money and bound his hands and feet with chain, with metal chain. Then they continued, wrapping more and more chains around his body until the prophet was overwhelmed by their weight. Money was left on the floor, barely breathing, surrounded only by a few brave disciples who dared to show their allegiance to him.

It took Mani 26 days of agony and a crushed under a crushing load of metal to finally die in what had been to all affect his crucifixion. But as it happened with Jesus Christ, with the passion of Jesus, the death and passion of money did not stop the activities of this church. Messengers of the light turning on the light at the beginning of the day. Continue to travel widely, irradiating from the new Holy See of the religion in the City of Zion in Iraq. They established new strongholds in Egypt, and then from there to the westernmost frontier of Africa. Then they travelled up to the Iberian Peninsula and back through France, Rome, Dalmatia, Croatia, leading behind the trail of Adepts. Everywhere they went their success was counterbalanced by a growing opposition from the political authorities. In the Roman lands, they were opposed first by the pagan emperors who distrusted this Persian religion and then by the Christian emperors who saw them as heretics. Manichaean believers were arrested, sent to forced labor, deprived of their possessions, and if there were leaders in their community, they were burned together with the sacred scriptures. The Christians eventually succeeded where their pagan predecessors had failed. By the end of the sixth century, the Manichaean Church was virtually extinguished anywhere in Europe and North Africa. It would take centuries for it to flare again with the Boggabilla sect in Bulgaria and Southern France. Both times, the light of Manichaeism is extinguished by the official church in a blood bath. 

M.V. I thank you all for being with us. I’d also like to thank Regione Piemonte, Fondazione CRT, Città di Torino, Città di Rivoli and our partners Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Intesa Sanpaolo/Gallerie d’Italia, and Fondazione CRC.Our digital programs are also made possible thanks to Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. We look forward to welcoming you again next month for this exciting series of podcasts with the philosopher Federico Campagna.