Note 1067 — Chapter XIII · MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS

This Living Spirit is the most active agent of the Light in the Manichaean system, and seems to have held his place unaltered through all the changes of Manichaean teaching. Alexander of Lycopolis (contra Manich. c. III.) speaks of him as the Δημιουργός or Architect of the Universe. The earliest part of the Acta (Hegemonius, c. VII. p. 10, Beeson) says that he was put forth from the Father (or Supreme God of Light) in consequence of the prayers of the First Man after his defeat, that he delivered this last, crucified or bound the Archons in the firmament (as Jeû is said to have done in the Pistis Sophia), made the Sun and Moon and appointed their courses, and further made the eight earths. St Augustine, contra Faustum, Bk XX. c. 1, makes the Manichaean Faustus call him the “Third Majesty whom we acknowledge to have his seat and his lodging-place in the whole circle of the atmosphere. From whose powers and spiritual inpouring also, the earth conceived and brought forth the suffering Jesus who is the life and salvation of men and is hanging on every tree.” St Augustine further speaks (op. cit. Bk XX. c. 9) of “your mighty (potentem for viventem) Spirit, who constructs the world from the captive bodies of the race of darkness or rather from the members of your God held in subjection and bondage.” St Augustine (see contra Faustum, Bk XV. c. 6) also knows that the Living Spirit has, like the First Man, five sons, to whom we shall return later. The Mahommedan writers have much less to say on the subject. En Nadîm (Kessler, op. cit. p. 390; Flügel, op. cit. p. 88) says abruptly that “Joy [i.e. the Mother of Life] and the Spirit of Life went to the frontier, looked into the abyss of hell and saw there the First Man and his angels,” whereupon the Spirit of Life called the First Man with a voice of thunder and the latter “became a god.” This story is so without connection with the context that Kessler is probably right in attributing it to another source from that from which the Fihrist has drawn up to this point. The source in question was probably a late one; for Bar Khôni (op. cit. pp. 186-188) supplies many more details which will be given in the text. Bar Khôni also amplifies the story in the Fihrist into a description of how the Living Spirit, on seeing the First Man in the Darkness, spoke “a word which took the appearance of a pointed sword” (cf. Revelation i. 16), and how this word caused to appear the image of the First Man. A dialogue then ensues between apparently the sword and the image, which appear to be here identified with the Appellant and Respondent of later Manichaeism, and the pair are drawn up out of hell. See Cumont, Cosmog. Manich. p. 24, and note 5. Al Bîrûnî, Chronology, p. 190, also knows of the Spirit of Life and says that Manes “preached” of him. In the Turfan texts there is occasional mention of the “Spirit” together with the Father and the Son (Müller, Handschriften-Reste, pp. 26, 28), and also of the “commands” of the Holy Spirit to the Hearers, which are plainly allusions to the Living Spirit or Ζῶν Πνεῦμα of the Christian Fathers. In the Tun-huang treatise (Chavannes et Pelliot, op. cit. pp. 510, 556) he is repeatedly mentioned, and although nothing is said of his demiurgic or world-creating powers, the part which he and the Mother of Life play in the rescue of the First Man after his defeat is recognized, and he is spoken of as forming the third person of a Trinity of which the two other members are the Father or highest God of Light and the “Son of the Light.” Finally (op. cit. p. 557), he is said to be “a white dove,” whereby his likeness to the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity already noted by Faustus is emphasized (see Augustine, ubi cit. supra and Bk XX. c. 6).