The Manichaean Church: Elect Organisation

Abstract

This chapter continues the investigation of Manichaean social institutions begun in the previous chapter. Whereas the focus there was on Elect-Auditor practices, we here turn our attention to Elect peer interaction. The dominant scholarly view of the Elect in the Roman Empire is that they largely constituted a disorganised body, characterised by absent institutions and weak cohesion, an interpretation that the present chapter seeks to challenge. As we have seen, Manichaean communities have generally been taken as organised in intimate, domestic groups, or ‘cells’, in which Auditors received Elect in their houses. This organisation has been considered both a necessity and a liability to the movement. On the one hand, cells allowed for closely-knit groups between which itinerant Elect could move in relative safety. Thus, they provided a measure of protection against persecution. On the other, they have also been seen as weakening or excluding a church organisation. Jason D. BeDuhn has recently pointed out how adherents may have suffered from being constrained to the private sphere, unable to perform public acts of worship to affirm private self-definition.1 A stronger dismissal was put forth by Peter Brown, who ascribed the decline of Manichaeism in part to Elect itinerancy: ‘Manichaeism was out of date.... It represents a more primitive strand of asceticism [than Christian monasticism]: it continued the radical isolation from the world, the obligatory vagrancy of its Syriac homeland.’2 The combination of isolation and vagrancy led to the Elect being out-competed by the better-organised Christian monastic movement. This argument has been more fully articulated by Richard Lim with regards to Manichaeans in the Latin west. The Elect regime itself, he maintains, was not conductive to the organisation of a ‘Church’: