Psaumes des errants: Ecrits manicheens du Fayyum (review)

The Psalmoi Sarakun form a complete unit within the Manichean Psalm-Book discovered in Egypt in the Fayyum. They, together with many of the other psalms, were first edited and translated by C. R. C. Allberry, A Manichaean Psalm-Book, Part II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1938), but here is presented for the first time a study devoted entirely to them. André Villey, who has already shown his knowledge of the Manichees in his study of Alexander of Lycopolis’ Against the Teaching of Mani, here provides an excellent commentary on this collection.

First, the title. It is a combination of a Greek genitive plural ending on a Coptic base, “to wander.” They are therefore the Songs of the Wayfarers. Villey nicely shows how this collection is not a whimsical one, but that these songs reflect a two-fold sense of wandering, an existential and an ethical wandering of the soul in this world. The first reference is to the involuntary exile of the soul, which has been driven away from its first glorious existence in the realm of light to its imprisonment in this world. The soul now wanders in this body and the psalms contrast the realm of the light and its splendid divinities with the distress of the soul in this world until it finds its way back by accepting the commandments of Jesus and Mani, the apostles of the Light. But Villey also shows that the wandering refers to the ideal life espoused by the Mani and his first missionaries, who preferred poverty to riches, who abstained from sexual intercourse, and who were not to acquire possessions beyond necessary nourishment. Villey quotes in support the statement of Faustus, who claimed that he and his followers were the true Christians (Augustine, Contra Faustum V.1). To quote from the Songs of the Wayfarers:

“I left father and mother and brother and sister. I became a stranger for your name’s sake.”

Villey recognized that individual psalms may have a liturgical setting, as some have the same brief phrases repeated again and again while others are like a litany. However, he cannot isolate a specific liturgical function for the collection as a whole, but does suggest that they may have been sung at meeting-places of these wandering missionaries. He rejects the term “monasteries” for these places as too grandiose and prefers something more like “relay-stations”. The psalms as we have them now are in Coptic, but this is a translation from Greek. One is not forced to assume a Syriac original behind the Greek. In fact, Villey proposes that the psalms were composed in Greek in Egypt. Earlier C. Schmidt had shown that the extant text was written in the second half of the fourth century C.E. and this provides a terminus ad quem. Manicheism was already in place in Egypt between 275 and 300 C.E., and Alexander of Lycopolis wrote against them between 277 and 297. Since the psalms are written in a subachmimic dialect, the area of Lycopolis would have been the center of translation of these Manichean psalms. The frequent reference to the martyrs Mary, Theona, Cleopatra, Pshai, Jmnoute, Panai, and Plousiane further leads Villey to date the collection to a time of persecution, soon after the decree of Diocletian in 297 C.E. For Villey, the author of this collection was most likely one of the first Manichean missionaries in Egypt, zealous for his faith and ready to undergo persecution as his masters Jesus and Mani had before him.

There are thirty-eight psalms in this collection. They are unnumbered, but an interval always separates them and each is concluded by a doxology. Villey has provided titles for each psalm, but notes that these are not in the original. Villey uses the text of Allberry, and uses the same system of pagination that Allberry provided. His translation does not differ significantly from that of Allberry. What is excellent, however, is his commentary. He...