The Eclipse of Moral Agency

The Manicheans are a religious group that is largely unknown to us today. There are no Manichean churches or congregations that survive. Universities devote no attention to Manichean studies. If they are mentioned at all, it is in the context of the forgotten and esoteric religions that once dominated antiquity. However, at its zenith during the 5th century, the Manichean church was one of the largest religions in the world, its influence stretching from the river valleys of China to the far western shores of Spain. While they have almost entirely dropped from public consciousness, much of the apparatus of the Manichean church has only been rediscovered recently through the scholarship of academics and theologians. The Manichean scriptures and some of its liturgies were previously known only in fragmentary form to the African church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, who was once an acolyte of the Manicheans before his conversion to Catholicism.

For the unfamiliar, Manichean teaching centered upon a cosmic dualism in which two opposing deities, representing light and darkness, were in perpetual opposition. This primordial conflict has existed from eternity and manifests itself in materiality. The Manicheans believed the material world and the human body result from a catastrophic mingling of evil into all things corporeal, trapping the divine light within the realm of evil matter. While the soul is itself a fragment of this divine light longing for release, it holds a submissive position to the evil of materiality. Salvation for the Manichean is achieved not through an act of faith or through the phenomenon of grace, but through revealed knowledge and strict ethical practices that weaken the corporeal power of darkness. Soterologically, Christ, Buddha, and Zoroaster were all presented as separate prophets of a type of hidden knowledge, rather than unique religious figures in their own right. Manicheanism’s ancient progenitor, Mani, was presented as the final prophet who effectively delivers the definitive account of this cosmic moral drama.

Distinctive to the formal teachings of the Manicheans was their perspective on human morality. They believed in a limited sense of personal agency, holding that no one was truly responsible for their own behaviors, as the evil influence of materialism impaired all acts of free will. Human nature was ultimately subject to the uncontainable evil within their own natural constitution, and was thus helpless to act otherwise. This philosophical pessimism produced a distinctive and perverse internal moral logic. Because evil was embedded in the very fabric of material existence, moral failure was less a matter of personal culpability than of psychical captivity. Sin did not originate in the free choice of an individual so much as in the body’s coercive influence over the constitution of the soul. St. Augustine rejected this displacement of moral responsibility, insisting that “sin…cannot exist apart from will.” (Against the Manichaeans, 10–11) In this respect, St. Augustine is echoing the  older Aristotelian distinction between the voluntary and involuntary (Nicomachean Ethics III.1). That is to say, the  concept of morality is intelligible only insofar as the act is correctly imputable to the agent who produces it.

As a result of this, Manichean ethics aimed not at cultivating virtue, but at minimizing one’s complicity with the material world. Those who subscribed to its tenets often developed ascetic lifestyles that parodied the more familiar practices of Christian monasticism, rejecting temporal comforts for the pursuit of personal liberation. They fasted and denied the psychical desires of their own flesh. However, this was not for the sake of moral or spiritual contemplation, but for the rejection of all things earthly and fleshly.  Manicheans saw little moral achievement in the proposition of personal restraint, deeds, or the cultivation of studied virtue. For the Manichean, it was the degree to which the believer withdrew from the material economy of the world and sought to form an indifferent detachment to all things somatic.

Even for the casual observer, it is easy to criticize the beliefs of the Manicheans as being absurdly charged with a high degree of moral irresponsibility. The body of its teachings removed all human agency and rendered moral conversion largely as a cosmetic act, a matter of attaining the right kind of knowledge rather than undergoing personal transformation. For its part, this is a common critique of Gnostic thought generally, and not specific to Manicheanism. It forms a simple, if not seemingly predatory, solution for the problem of evil. It does not matter what you do, what you think, or what you believe. All of these are subject to the materiality of your body. The proposition of sin is displaced from the soul and posited safely in the substantiation of the cosmos. Man is not a sinner in need of repentance, but a victim of celestial happenstance in need of enlightenment.

There is no clear death certificate for Manicheanism. While it was once prevalent in the late Roman Empire, the strength of its influence was short-lived. Historically, Manichaeism did not vanish from our religious landscape so much as it recurred, often independently and under different intellectual forms, throughout Western thought. In time, its philosophical claims were defeated by the rise of intellectual orthodoxy, particularly with the adoption of the Augustinian conceptions of the will and grace. However, its perverse moral posture survived, reconstituted largely in secular, psychological, and political forms. Particularly in its postmodern avatar, Manichean dualism no longer names two cosmic gods but a struggle between two impersonal forces in perpetual conflict: victimhood and power, purity and corruption, system and self. Evil is no longer a metaphysical substance, but it is still imagined as something definitively external to the will. These Manichaean precepts have embedded themselves in our sundry institutions. However, its presence is not limited to just civic thought. It can be found in our reading of history, our medical directives, and unconscious drives that precede and overwhelm individual choice. Moral failure, accordingly, is framed less as a lapse in character than as the inevitable expression of forces beyond our own ability to choose, and which cannot be meaningfully resisted. Taken to its fullest extent, this is the contemporary legal doctrine of ‘insanity’, that is, a person is not responsible for their actions due to external forces limiting their own free agency.

The world of Classical antiquity was hardly unaware that individual human freedom operated within certain limits. The Greek Stoic, Epictetus, famously began his sentinel work Enchiridion with an act of discernment which remains fundamental to moral responsibility: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” This is the acid test of moral agency  because it acknowledges the natural forces in our world that do in fact constrain human behavior. However, recognizing limitations is quite different from denying the existence of that agency altogether.

This strange re-emergence of Manichean philosophical precepts is most visible in the contemporary suspicion of moral responsibility itself. Much like the ancient Manicheans, postmodern moral psychology often treats agency as being inherently compromised. That is to say, the will is said to be impaired by various external agents which make individual responsibility impossible. The litany of potential agents of impairment is seemingly endless- trauma, social location, economics, linguistic and historical inheritance, or neurochemical determinism. Responsibility is softened into being less about individual action and more a question of explanation. Even the idea of individual guilt is transmuted into the language of clinical diagnosis. To the postmodern mind, what matters is not interior change or reform, but the passive role of awareness. That is to say, it is the correct interpretive framework that is valuable, the recognition that hidden forces are acting through the individual and guiding their volition. While this is something that has been associated with psychoanalysis and its chief doctrine of ‘the unconscious’, it is also present in various other schools of psychotherapy. Here again, just as with the Manicheans, the attainment of knowledge becomes salvific. Taken to its fullest deterministic conclusion, to see oneself as being ecologically conditioned by biological, psychological, and social forces is to be absolved of all wrongdoing. The mythological trappings of Manicheanism may have fallen away, but its metaphysical underpinning is alive and well in a world desperate for dispensation.

What makes this type of postmodern Manichaeism especially resilient, and all the more pernicious, is its veneer of compassion. By denying full agency, it portrays itself as being humane, as being more sensitive and loving. However, by relocating evil into systems, it promises justice without the utility of judgment. For various reasons, this is an extraordinarily dangerous proposition. St. Augustine perceived this in his own break with the cult of Manichee, the cost of this mercy is the erosion of moral freedom itself. St. Augustine reduced this to the proposition: “If it be not free, it is not will.” (Against the Manichaeans, 11) A world in which no one is truly responsible for themselves is also a world in which no one can truly change, forgive, or be transformed. In rejecting the goodness of the material world, ancient Manichaeism rendered virtue and transformational change impossible. In rejecting the freedom of the will, its modern heirs risk doing just the same, leaving us perpetually aggrieved and strangely incapable of becoming better than we are.

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