Augustine Among the Hearers

The single best documented Hearer in history is also Manichaeism's most effective later critic. Augustine of Hippo affiliated with the Manichaean community at Carthage as a young man and remained a Hearer for close to nine years before his eventual conversion to Christianity, a period he later described at length and with considerable embarrassment in his Confessions. As a Hearer he was never required to keep the Elect's austerities, which by his own account suited a young man unwilling to give up ambition, a career or a long term relationship with a partner outside marriage, obligations the stricter rank would have foreclosed. His eventual disillusionment came less from the moral demands of the religion, which fell on the Elect rather than on him, than from its cosmology and its inability to answer his growing philosophical objections to a strict dualism between good and evil forces contending for control of the world.

Once converted, Augustine became Manichaeism's most influential Christian opponent, writing a series of anti-Manichaean treatises that drew directly on his insider knowledge of how the two ranks actually functioned in practice, including the specific mechanics of how Hearers served the Elect's meals. Much of what modern scholarship can reconstruct about the lived experience of being a Hearer, as opposed to what Manichaean scripture prescribed in the abstract, comes from Augustine's testimony, making a former adherent the tradition's most detailed surviving witness.