Spirituals Masters - I need help with this question

[adrian91]

Manichaeism at one time was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Why do suppose this would have appealed of a young Augustine? What event eventually led Augustine to abandon Manichaeism?

 

[AveOTheotokos]

I highly recommend reading Augustine’s Confessions where he discusses this at length.

 

[AveOTheotokos]

There is far too much throughout this wonderful work of writing to post it all here, but if you go to this link or search for any of the other translation widely available online and just search for Manichean within the document, you should quickly be able to see how he fell in with and fell out of them.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf

Here is one brief section:

With what strong and bitter regret was I indignant at the Manicheans! Yet I also pitied them; for they were ignorant of those sacraments, those medicines --and raved insanely against the cure that might have made them sane!

I wished they could have been somewhere close by, and–without my knowledge–could have seen my face and heard my words when, in that time of leisure, I pored over the Fourth Psalm. And I wish they could have seen how that psalm affected me. “When I called upon thee, O God of my righteousness, thou didst hear me; thou didst enlarge me when I was in distress. Have mercy upon me and hear my prayer.”

I wish they might have heard what I said in comment on those words–without my knowing that they heard, lest they should think that I was speaking it just on their account. For, indeed, I should not have said quite the same things, nor quite in the same way, if I had known that I was heard and seen by them. And if I had so spoken, they would not have meant the same things to them as they did to me when I spoke by and for myself before thee, out of the private affections of my soul.

If you are interested in reading the whole work, I highly recommend the Frank Sheed translation.

 

[Jared2914]

Here’s a good link I found for why he became Manichean: AUGUSTINE AND MANICHAEISM

According to the text this comes from “Gillian Clark, from the introduction to her Cambridge Latin edition of Confessions, Books I-IV”

The relevant passage:

Manichaeism offered Augustine a way to accommodate his conflicts: he could pursue his career, and retain his partner, while purging his sins through his service to the pure Elect (4.1.1); and he could blame those sins on his lower, alien nature, which like the material world had been made by the power of evil, but which his true self would eventually shed (5.10.18). Manichaeism also responded to his need, instilled by his childhood, for the name of Christ, and his initial distaste for the Christian scriptures (3.4.8-6.10). He could regard the Bible as a crude and contaminated attempt at the truth, whereas the Manichaean scriptures offered both the name of Christ and what seemed to be a profound understanding of the universe and of human life (3.6.10).

The numbers in parenthesis refer to his Confessions. The number 4.1.1 is short for Book 4, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1.

As for why he left Manichaeism to return to Christianity, I don’t think there is any single event. I think it is most likely he found that Christianity had betters answers to his philosophical questions than Manichaeism. This is something that still happens today. Many people have studied religions and found Catholicism to have the best answers to basic questions like “who am I” and “why am I here?”

 

[AveOTheotokos]

As for why he left Manichaeism to return to Christianity, I don’t think there is any single event. I think it is most likely he found that Christianity had betters answers to his philosophical questions than Manichaeism.

Very true. Throughout his Confessions, Augustine explains how Catholicism was able to provide logically sound answers to questions that Manichaeism continually fell short on. He was resistant for a while, but eventually the evidence for Catholicism overwhelmed him.