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 (4) History after Death of Manes.—(i) In the East, where they originated, the Manicheans made rapid progress, spreading, as an-Nadîm (Flügel's Mani, p. 105, cf. p 394) tells us, into various lands. During their persecution upon the death of Manes, they fled into Transoxania, whence they maintained a constant communication with Babylon, their original seat, as the head of the sect always remained there till the Mohammedan invasion. They spread into S. Armenia and Cappadocia, where they found material ready to their hand in the of that region (Matter, Gnosticism, ii. 392), whence they came into immediate contact with Europe. A proof of their activity in Armenia is found in the work of Eznig, one of the leading writers of Armenia in the 5th cent., pub. by the Mekhitarite monks at Venice in 1826 under the title Refutatio Errorum Persarum et Manichaeorum. Their progress seems to have been intensified by the Mazdakite movement in the 5th cent., which was only a revival of Manicheism. It displayed the same missionary activity which manifested itself in an aggression upon the orthodox of Armenia, 590, noted by the Armenian historian Samuel of Ani. He gives us a list of Manichean works which they introduced into Armenia, including the Penitence or Apocalypse of Adam (pub. by Renan in the Jour. Asiat. 1853, t. ii. p. 431), the Explanation of the Gospel of Manes, the Gospel of the Infancy, the Vision of St. Paul, and the Testament of Adam.

(ii) In the West the first notice of an advance is found in an edict (given in Gieseler, H. E. i. 228) of Diocletian, directed to Julian, proconsul of Africa, dated prid. kal. Apr. 287, wherein Manichean leaders are condemned to the stake, and their adherents punished with decapitation and confiscation of all their goods, as following "a new and unheard-of monster, which has come to us from the Persians, a hostile people, and has perpetrated many misdeeds." The genuineness of this edict has been challenged, but is defended by Neander, H. E. ii. 195, n. The chief ground for disputing it is the silence of the Fathers, specially of Eusebius. But the argument e silentio is never a safe one, and Ambrosiaster mentions it when commenting upon II. Tim. iii. 7. It is addressed to the proconsul of Africa, where the Manicheans were making great progress. This coincides with the fact, known independently, that Manes sent a special envoy to Africa, where, during the 4th cent., Manicheism flourished, both among the monks and clergy of Egypt and in proconsular Africa, ensnaring souls like St. Augustine; and where they must have been very numerous and powerful, since, notwithstanding the severe and bloody laws enacted against them by Valentinian, 372, and Theodosius,  381, they assembled, taught, and debated in public in Augustine's time. Yet in some places these laws were not empty threats, for the heathen rhetorician Libanius appealed in behalf of the Manicheans of Palestine (Ep. 1344) Probably, as in the case of the pagan persecutions, the vigour with which they were enforced varied with the dispositions of local magistrates. From Africa the sect spread into Spain, Gaul, and Aquitaine (Philast. Haer. c. 61, 84), where it may have originated Priscillianism (Muratori, Anecd. ex Ambros. Biblioth. Codic. ii. 113, ed. 1698). Later we find the Arian king Hunneric persecuting it in Africa, together with the orthodox, 477 (Vict. Vit. Hist. Persec. Wand. ii. init.). We of course find the sect at Constantinople and at Rome. Constantine the Great commissioned a certain Strategius—who, under the name of Musonianus, rose to be praetorian prefect of the East—to report upon it (Ammian. Marcell. xv. 13); while again, 200 years later, in the end of the 5th and beginning of the 6th cent., Manicheism in the Mazdakite movement made an imperial convert in Anastasius I. At Rome they were found from ancient times. Lipsius in ''Jahrb. Prot. Theol.'' 1879, art. on ''Neue Stud. zur Papst-Chronologie'', p. 438, discusses a constitution of pope Anastasius I. 398, enacted on account of their recent immigration from beyond the seas. After the barbarian invasion of Africa they fled to Rome in great numbers, and pope Leo I. was active in their repression. Leo says that the Manicheans, whom, with the aid of the civil magistrates, he arrested, acknowledged their dissolute practices; whereupon Valentinian III. published a very severe law against them. Notwithstanding all the papal efforts, renewed from age to age, we still find the sect at Rome in 7th cent., under Gregory the Great (cf. Greg. Mag. lib. ii. Ep. 37; Gieseler, H. E. t. ii. p. 491, Clark's ed.).

(5) Remains of the Sect and of its Literature.—In the Yezedees, or Devil-worshippers of Mosul, and the Ansairees of Syria, we have their direct representatives; while mingled with the doctrines of the Sabians or Hemerobaptistae, who still linger in the neighbourhood of Harran, we have a large Manichean element. See Badger's Nestorians, t. i. cc. ix. x.; Lyde's Asian Mystery, and Layard's Nineveh, c. ix., as confirming this view by several interesting facts, cf. also Notes sur les sectes de Kurdistan, par T. Gilbert, in ''Jour. Asiat''. 1873, t. ii. p. 393. Cahier maintained, in ''Mel. archéol.'' i. 148, that the Bogomili and the Massalians, branches of the same sect, still existed (1888) in Russia. We still possess some specimens of their literature, and a critical examination of Mohammedan MSS. and a complete investigation of the interior state of Western and Central Asia would probably reveal them in still larger abundance (Beausob. Hist. Man. t. i. p. 366, and n. 4). Renan published in 1883, in the ''Jour. Asiat.'' a Syriac document called the Apocalypse of Adam, which he shewed to be one of those brought by the Manicheans into Armenia in 590 and condemned in the celebrated Gelasian decree. See Harnack, Dogmengesch. vol. ii. (4th ed. 1922), pp. 513–527. [.]

[G.T.S.]

Mar Aba or Mar-Abas. [NESTORIAN CHURCH; THOMAS (8).]

Marana and Cyra, two ladies of birth and education of Beroea in Syria, who in their youth devoted themselves to a solitary life of the extremest austerity, which they had persevered in for 42 years when Theodoret wrote his Religiosa Historia. According to Theodoret they left home with some female servants whom they had inspired with the same ascetic fervour and built a small stone en-