Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The syncretic, dualistic religious philosophy taught by the Persian prophet Mani, combining elements of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Gnostic thought and opposed by the imperial Roman government, Neo-Platonist philosophers, and orthodox Christians.
- noun A dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically evil and mind as intrinsically good.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun See
Manicheism .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The doctrines taught, or system of principles maintained, by the Manichæans.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun religion A
syncretic ,dualistic religion thatcombined elements ofZoroastrian ,Christian , andGnostic thought , founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in 3rd century AD. - proper noun philosophy A dualistic philosophy
dividing theworld betweengood andevil principles , or regardingmatter asintrinsically evil andmind as intrinsically good.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a religion founded by Manes in the third century; a synthesis of Zoroastrian dualism between light and dark and Babylonian folklore and Buddhist ethics and superficial elements of Christianity; spread widely in the Roman Empire but had largely died out by 1000
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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It was a vulgar form of the ancient ideology known as "Manichaeism" -- the idea that the movement of history is explained by an eternal struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
Robert D. Stolorow: The Perils of Ideology and the Virtue of Obama's Contextual Thinking 2009
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The seeds of the rhetoric of evil can be found in the ancient religious ideology, originating in Persia and pervasive in contemporary religious fundamentalism, known as Manichaeism--the idea that the movement of history is explained by an eternal struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
Robert D. Stolorow: The Meaning and the Rhetoric of Evil: Auschwitz and Bin Laden Robert D. Stolorow 2011
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The seeds of the rhetoric of evil can be found in the ancient religious ideology, originating in Persia and pervasive in contemporary religious fundamentalism, known as Manichaeism--the idea that the movement of history is explained by an eternal struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
Robert D. Stolorow: The Meaning and the Rhetoric of Evil: Auschwitz and Bin Laden Robert D. Stolorow 2011
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This assumed liberty, however is, as we apprehend, of the very essence of Rationalism; and it may be called the Manichaeism of interpretation.
Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts From The Edinburgh Review, October 1849, Volume 90, No. CLXXXII. (Pages 293-356) Henry Rogers 1841
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[Page 332] 'Manichaeism' I am ever guilty of, is in judging who is the right person to go to when I want a thing done.
Selections from the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle 1892
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The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).
Adventus 2008
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Catharist, that outcropping of ancient Manichaeism in medieval Provence; another, that she and her fellow captain, Gilles de Laval, Sire de Rais, were sorcerers, adept in Black Magic.
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But Daoism, Islam, Hinduism and Nestorian Christianity from Syria and Manichaeism from Persia also were practiced, and the Mongols showed deference for those different religions.
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But Daoism, Islam, Hinduism and Nestorian Christianity from Syria and Manichaeism from Persia also were practiced, and the Mongols showed deference for those different religions.
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In the rhetoric of evil, Manichaeism is harnessed for political purposes--one's own group is claimed to embody the forces of good, and the opposing group, the forces of evil.
Robert D. Stolorow: The Meaning and the Rhetoric of Evil: Auschwitz and Bin Laden Robert D. Stolorow 2011
chained_bear commented on the word Manichaeism
"Manichaeism, a religion founded in Iran by the prophet Mani (ca. 210-76), held that the forces of light and darkness were engaged in a perpetual battle for control of the universe. The Uighur kaghan adopted Manichaeism as the official religion of his people and recorded his decision in a trilingual inscription (in Sogdian, Uighur, and Chinese) on a stone tablet. This was the first--and only--time in world history that any state named Manichaeism its official religion."
--Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 108
This was around 762 CE, BTW.
January 3, 2017