The sources consulted include, in addition to Durrell's own works and Professor Gordon Bowker's biography, The Medieval
Manichee (Runciman), Enthusiasm (Fr Ronald Knox), L'Eglise des Apotres et des Martyrs and L'Eglise des temps Barhares (Daniel-Rops), Cavafy (Liddell), Pharos and Pharillon (Forster), Cairo in the War (Artemis Cooper), Darwin's Plots (Gillian Beer).
Taken seriously, his statement would imply that the apostles never should have followed Jesus, Saint Augustine should have remained a
Manichee, and all the Christians Mitt converted to Mormonism, including his wife, Ann, should have remained Christians.
bodhisattva, becomes by turns a
Manichee, a Muslim, a Jewish prince, and
Aquinas referred to the Cathars as Manicheans, because he saw in their teachings basically the same heresy that Augustine had faced in the fourth century when he himself converted from being a
Manichee to being a Catholic.
Augustine was a dualistic
Manichee. As late as the twelfth century, another Gnostic group, the Cathars or Albigensians, became so powerful in France that a genocidal crusade against them was launched by the church for nearly 50 years followed by an Inquisition that all but wiped them out.
There is, Auden went on to observe, something of the
Manichee about Kierkegaard: not intellectually but in feeling, in sensibility.
And Graham Greene's
Manichee romances--in which a point of dogma can stop an impassioned lover as fast as a revolver--bear about as much relevance to actual Catholic practices as do the James Bond novels.
L'eroe e tornato, soprattutto nei film di impegno civile, nella figura dell'avvocato e del magistrato, o del cittadino socialmente responsabile, ma la sua figura e piu sfumata, a tratti contraddittoria: non esistono distinzioni
manichee, come nel cinema americano sia classico che contemporaneo, tra i buoni e i cattivi, ma un'umanita piu complessa, meno ideologicamente motivata e piu articolata su un piano psicologico.
Burkitt, The Religion of the
Manichee (Cambridge, 1925); Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 2 vols.
His world is typically a "
manichee hell of twilight" (351), a middle state in which one must keep a "difficult balance" between opposing ideals (234).