The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (review)

Jason David BeDuhn. The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 354. $42.50.

Western thought continues to struggle with its understanding of Manichaean practices. Take, for example, Pope John Paul's condemnation of what he calls a "New Manichaeism." In working out his brilliant theology of the body, the Holy Father coined this term to describe modern culture's tendency to reduce the human body to nothing more than an object to be exploited for a time and later discarded. While this may be an accurate critique of much of contemporary secularism, it is not, according to BeDuhn's latest study, an accurate portrayal of the Manichaean view of the body. Worried that most of Western scholarship has lumped the Manichaeans too quickly alongside Gnostic groups when it came to their understanding of the role of human flesh, BeDuhn here aims "to save the Manichaeans for history by recovering how they proposed to save themselves." It is thus his primary aim to illustrate how the Manichaeans were not anti-incarnational, but how they instead built an entire soteriology around the human body as the workshop where they would manufacture salvation. By centering their eternal liberation around the daily cultic meal, the Manichaeans focused on a ritual, as BeDuhn rightly points out, performed not only by the body, but in the body.

After an initial retelling of the history of Manichaean studies, especially as they were revived by this century's Turfan and Fayum discoveries, BeDuhn continues (chaps. 2 and 3) by examining the nature of Manichaean discipline. It is discipline and the specific tasks demanded therein which divided Manichaean communities into the Righteous (electi) and the Hearers (auditores). BeDuhn sides with Julien Ries' work in arguing that these two divisions shared in the Three Seals: the seal of the mouth which required attention to food type and amount, the seal of the hand, concerning the procurement of food, and the seal of the breast, dictating sexual practices. The difference between the Elect and the Hearers, of course, was in the degree to which one was required to fast, how one could touch food, and how one would conduct one's sexual life. All this so as to foster bodily purity and a space in which salvation for all could be attained: "the Elect were required to meet more stringent criteria so that their bodies could be not only agents in salvational rituals, but also the instruments and arenas of such rituals." BeDuhn concludes this section by examining the Kephalia's paralleling the human body with the world. Like many Church Fathers, Mani sees in the human person a microcosm of the structures of the universe: Manichaean discipline thus acts to bring about bodies which are not only personally purified but which mirror for the community the cosmos as a place of sacred ceremony.

The alimentary emphases (chaps. 4 and 5) of Mani and his followers are taken up next. We know that Mani himself saw the ritual meal as a combination of the donative principles of Greek temple service, the liturgical movements of Zoroastrianism, and the alms of Buddhist mendicancy (e.g., Kephalaion 87), but very little is known about the precise workings of the daily ritual meal itself. BeDuhn therefore attempts to reconstruct its major components: the meal was conducted daily, at what time seems to differ according to region, the Auditors were clearly present for the first part of the ceremony for common hymns and prayers, but were set apart when the benediction over the food began. There is also widespread testimony to an after-meal liturgy, including hymns, prayers, and anointings. Perhaps then the Auditors would reappear to ask for intercessory prayers from the Elect, "as the latter now stood imbued with the divine substance liberated from the meal." What was the point of this elaborate and extensive meal? This metabolic soteriology was grounded in...