Manichee

For most of Augustine's youth and early manhood he was a Manichee.

In fact about the only complaint I heard was that the Manichee didn't make much sense either...

Augustine's Manichee past had a huge influence on the formation of his Christian theology.

An adherent of Manichaeism is called, especially in older sources a Manichee.

Off to hell, a Manichee?

The Manichee fruit-eater would 'breathe out angels' or 'bring up bits of God'.

Augustine was the product of a Carthaginian environment as well as Manichee formation.

You no longer fear Amantius the Manichee!

His rejection of Manichee dualism and the Neoplatonist view of God at 31.

Cast out Severus the Manichee!

Augustine himself went to Rome, and later Milan, on the Manichee 'net', a freemasonry which provided him with contacts and jobs.

Augustine retained certain strong African characteristics, which merged with his Manichee strain: severity, lack of compromise, intolerance, courage, profound faith.

Only that year, the Emperor had hanged Manichee heretics in Goslar, so Isleifr had told him.

The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (1947)

Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1947.

For instance, he had to be very careful to show that his idea of 'original sin' did not derive from the pessimistic Manichee conviction that flesh and matter were evil.

Like Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo was a convert to Christianity, having previously been a Manichee and then a Neoplatonist like Plotinus.

As a Manichee, Augustine had held that evil has substantial being and that God is made of matter; when he became a Neoplatonist, he changed his views on these things.

Granted all the grandeur of Augustine's contribution to Christianity, there was in a sense a more subtle danger in Augustine the Platonist than even in Augustine the Manichee.

Tracing the origins of his work and beliefs, he said: "I was brought up a Catholic, became an agnostic, flirted with Islam and now hold a position which may be termed Manichee.

He could not deny that a good God had created the normal and natural world; he could not say that the devil had made the world; because he was not a Manichee.

The fact that Manichee beliefs included Christian elements was particularly vexing for the church, and also explains why some notable Christians began their religious journey in the Manichee sect.

Both Zoroastrianism and Manicheanismhave profoundly influenced the extreme warrior visions of Islamic and Judao-Christian thought - Saint Augustine, for example, was a Manichee in his youth and its philosophy colored his deep commitment to the notion of original evil.

For various reasons these details and the orange boiler-suits also suggested in the stage directions were dropped, but the play still finished with a mad Manichee berating all three bickerers, calling the Jew, Christian and Muslim respectively arrogant, stupid and cowardly and explaining these labels as, paradoxically, symptomatic of their various beliefs.