Article Sidebar
Published:
Apr 26, 2013Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
The few and the many: A motif of Augustine’s controversy with the Manichaeans
Abstract
ideal of a philosophical existence with Christianity, he decides to join the Manichaeans. As opposed to the ‘mainline church’ of the catholica in which ‘the many’ are gathered, the Manichaeans appear to him as a small, elitist Christian community meeting higher intellectual as well as ethical demands. This claim seems to be particularly and impressively confirmed
by the ‘pauci electi’. Their approach has apparently strengthened Augustine’s belief that true, higher Christianity is to be found amongst the Manichaeans. When he later devotes himself to the catholica and leads the fight against the Manichaeans, Augustine adheres to the conviction
of the ‘few wise’. Also within the catholica only few attain maximum insight and lead an appropriate life. At the same time, however, Augustine increasingly considers ‘the many’ as positive. These two aspects are combined in his epistemological concept of ‘auctoritas’: by means of their auctoritas, the few ‘wise’ within the Catholic Church are supposed to guide the many towards truth on their journey of faith and cause them to improve their moral conduct. Its big success is a major argument for the catholica, whilst the ‘paucitas’ of the Manichaeans (and all heretics) can be considered evidence of the groundlessness and absurdity of their doctrine.
