Augustine, Mani and Islam
OP - November 30, 2015, 09:16 AM
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qhlhvAugustine, Desire, Doing good
Start the Week
On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores goodness and its uneasy relationship with pleasure. The historian Robin Lane Fox looks to the work of Augustine and what is thought to be the first autobiography detailing the sinful excitement of youth before his anguished and hesitant conversion to Christianity. The philosopher Clare Carlisle explores Augustine's views on the link between desire and habit, while the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks why pleasure is more highly prized when it's perceived to be forbidden and guilty. Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to others and asks why do-gooders provoke deep suspicion in Western culture.
Robin Lane Fox states in this that Augustine for a few decades was a follower of Mani, and that he understood himself then to be a true xian. Mani is gnostic. Maniism was very successful and was in Japan in 1910.
Islam sounds likw an iteration of Maniism.
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
A.A. Milne,
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"