Hearers

Manichaeism divided its entire membership into two ranks with sharply different obligations, and the Hearers were the larger of the two by a wide margin. The Elect kept a severe discipline modeled on what Mani himself was believed to practice: strict vegetarianism confined to fruits, vegetables and bread, no wine, no sexual activity, no owning property, no farming, harvesting or preparing their own food, and near constant itinerant preaching and prayer.

Hearers kept none of these restrictions. They married, ran households and businesses, farmed and traded, and ate an ordinary diet, but in exchange for that freedom they owed the Elect material support: Hearers grew and prepared the food the Elect were forbidden to prepare for themselves, housed traveling missionaries, and funded the community's religious life. This division was theologically load-bearing rather than merely administrative, because Manichaean cosmology held that particles of divine light were trapped throughout the physical world, especially concentrated in certain foods, and that only an Elect member's body, purified by the required austerities, could properly liberate that light when eating; a Hearer's body could not perform this liberation, which is why growing and serving the food, rather than eating it under the same restrictions, was the Hearer's religious contribution. A Hearer who kept the lesser precepts faithfully across a lifetime was taught to expect rebirth as an Elect member in a future life, with full liberation reserved, in the end, for the Elect alone.

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.