Diocletian's edict against the Manicheans

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The edict against the Manicheans is an addendum of the Emperor Diocletian to a proconsul of the Roman province of Africa , written around the turn of the 3rd to the 4th century AD .

In Rome during the early Roman Empire , astrology still enjoyed great popularity among all classes of society as a 'discipline' for attempts at ideological interpretation . This also applied to various emperors of the time, such as Augustus or Tiberius . While Christianity and its dogmas and beliefs developed in parallel, however, the attitude to all attempts at explanation that lay outside a divinely derived imperial monopoly of interpretation increasingly changed. With the beginning of late antiquity, Diocletian was the first emperor to turn by law against theories that he disliked in connection with the 'specialist fields' of astrology and rebellious Manichaeism . Diocletian dedicated his own edict to the latter, with the stipulation to emphasize the imperial interpretive sovereignty and to nip renegade explanations of the world of the threatening competition in the bud.

References

The rescript was first intake in Codex Gregorianus and later as full text besides preface in Mosaicarum et Romanarum legum collatio . It is thanks to the latter that posterity today has detailed knowledge of how the Roman authorities legally proceeded in the Diocletian era against the teachings of the novella secta ( e.g., new school ) of the founder of the religion Mani and the Manichaeism he founded .

The amendment to the law cannot be reliably dated. In research, on the one hand, the date of origin is assumed to be 297 AD, and on the other hand, the year 302 AD. Since the Codex Gregorianus was probably created in 291 (possibly only 292), both dates fit into the context. The law came into being around 25 years after the death of the Persian founder of the religion.

Content of the edict

Diocletian was directed against Christianity and Manichaeism alike; only the emperor's laws against Christians have not survived. The motives for taking action against them can at best be partially reconstructed from the Edict of Tolerance of 311, which in turn had been handed down by Eusebios and Laktanz . The edict against the Manichaeans, which has been preserved, is different. It makes clear that Diocletian primarily fought for the imperial monopoly of interpretation. He justified it by insisting on the preservation of ancient Roman traditions. He was of the opinion that the structures of human thought and belief fell under the imperial control. He saw these in turn threatened by magic and sorcery from astrologers and other apostate cults and customs. It is true that Mani preached a gnostic interpretation of the cosmos that was complex in itself, but based on fundamentally already existing ideas and convictions of “world”, “God” and “man” . On the other hand, Diocletian did not intervene in principle any more than he did against the view that, according to Mani, primitive man who was born into a comprehensive history of the origins of the world finds himself in the tense relationship of a strictly dualistically divided world of the realms of darkness and light, within which it is important to recapture parts of light only a select few ( electi ) succeed. In case of doubt, Diocletian is said not even to have known the doctrine, but defended himself against the strictly moral and unshakable associated moral and social norms of the Manicheans. The emperor defended himself against the new . Conversely, Diocletian was not concerned with showing the “right way” himself or even with missionizing. The purpose of its constitution was to define the claim of imperial power as good and true and to ward off intellectual attacks on it ( resistere, reprehendi, retractare ).

The edict is consistently directed against the Manicheans and expresses itself blatantly strict: maximi criminis est retractare, quae semel ab antiquis statuta et definita ( the greatest crime is the questioning of what has once and finally been established and defined ). Failures like the superstitio , the error , the doctrina , the secta or the arbitrium are confronted with the imperial power, reassured by ancient scholarly opinions. Diocletian even deduced from the perfection of power that the nature of man was subject to the will of the emperor and was to be defended by him as part of his legislative program ( modus humanae naturae ) so that it could not be infected with error or superstition. The penal sanctions ( pertinaciam pravae mentis nequissimorum hominium punire ingens nobis studium est - loosely translated: the punishment applies to the persistence of the wrong attitudes of the most worthless people ) did not apply to actions, but attitudes .

The legal consequences: From a political point of view, Diocletian classifies the warring Persians as criminals, by which the Persian empire of the Sassanids was meant. Their Manichaean writings about "obvious sorcery" were to be burned and the authors and rebels, ultimately also the mere sympathizers, were to be punished with death and their assets were to be incorporated into the treasury. Should dignitaries of Roman society have accepted the sect, their assets should also be confiscated, while their work in the mines of Prokonessos or Phaene flourished for them personally .

Later edict against the Manicheans

About seventy years later, the Manichaean worldview was again taken up and condemned in an imperial law. The constitution that Valentinian I decreed in 372 chose the sanction of the isolation of leaders and followers of Manichaeism ( a coetu hominum segregari ) , which was defused against death . The decree is contained in the Codex Theodosianus . According to this collection of laws, Manichaeans should be separated from the community of honorable Roman citizens and should have no part in their legal life ( testandi ac vivendi iure Romano ), branded as "flock" ( grex ), which should not only be driven out of Rome, but also from the whole world ( ex omni quidem orbe terrarum ).

literature

  • Marie Theres Fögen : The expropriation of fortune tellers. Studies on the imperial monopoly of knowledge in late antiquity. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-58155-4 , pp. 26–34 (translation of legal texts on pp. 28 and 29).
  • Kocku von Stuckrad : History of Astrology . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003. P. 122 ff .; 150 ff.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Iulianus is mentioned by name.
  2. ↑ Emperor Constantine later extended the prohibitions to the 'disciplines' of magic and the prophetic and divine haruspicin . His son Constantius no longer differentiated the assignments to the 'departments' and issued the prohibitions in a single constitution (compare: CTh. 9,16,4).
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Marie Theres Fögen : The expropriation of fortune tellers. Studies on the imperial monopoly of knowledge in late antiquity . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-58155-4 , p. 26 ff.
  4. ^ William Seston: De l'authenticité et de la date de l'édit de Dioclétien contre les Manichéens. In: Mélanges de philologie, de littérature et d'histoire anciennes offert à Alfred Ernout. C. Klincksieck, Paris 1940, pp. 345-354 (reprinted online from 1980 ).
  5. ↑ a b Joachim Molthagen : The Roman State and the Christians in the Second and Third Century (= Hypomnemata. Investigations into antiquity and their afterlife . Issue 28). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1970, p. 114 f.
  6. ↑ a b Erich-Hans Kaden : The edicts against the Manicheans from Diocletian to Justinian. In: Festschrift Hans Lewald . Upon completion of the fortieth year of office as a full professor in October 1953. Helbing and Lichtenhahn, Basel 1953, pp. 55–68.
  7. ↑ Timothy D. Barnes : Sossianus Hierocles and the Antecedents of the "Great Persecution". In: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. Volume 80, 1976, pp. 239-252, here p. 246 ff.
  8. ↑ Kocku von Stuckrad : History of Astrology . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003. P. 122 ff.
  9. ↑ Eusebius of Caesarea , Historia ecclesiastica 7.31.
  10. ^ Hans-Georg Beck : Actus fidei. Paths to the Autodafé (= Bavarian Academy of Sciences , Philosophical-Historical Class: Session Reports. Born 1987, Issue 3). Publishing house of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-7696-1545-X ( PDF ).
  11. ↑ CTh. 16.5.3.
  12. ↑ CTh. 16,5,7, anno 381; CTh. 16,5,9, anno 382; CTh. 16,5,11, anno 383.