Postmodern Manicheanism

In his published conversation with Zygmunt Bauman about Liquid Evil, Leonidas Donskis observes that “Optimism is, above all, a Christian construction – it’s based on the faith that good can overcome evil and that unexplored possibilities and alternatives can always be found.”

As Christianity’s influence has declined in the West, so has optimism. “We live in an age of pessimism,” one ripe with ancient beliefs about the irradicable nature of evil. Donskis points out that “the twentieth century was excellent proof evil was alive and well,” and that has led to a revival of manicheanism, the ancient dualism that treats good and evil, light and dark, as equally powerful principles of the world. Many in the past century have concluded that the “world . . . could be temporarily abandoned by God, but not by Satan.”

Eastern Europe in particular is awash in Manicheanism: “Bulgakov’s enduring work The Master and Margarita—written in 1928–41 and published, severely censored, in 1966–7—is imbued with a Manichaean spirit: the novel makes numerous mentions of the concepts of ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ developed by the Persian prophet and eponymous architect of this belief system. . . . interpretation of evil in this great twentieth-century East European novel (Kafka’s The Trial is in my eyes the great Central European novel of the twentieth century) is one that asserts the self-sufficiency of evil. This interpretation of Christianity is close to that of Ernest Renan in his Life of Jesus, a study with which Bulgakov was quite familiar.”

He generalizes: “All of the great East Europeans were Manichaeans to some degree—from Russia’s Bulgakov through to George Orwell (who was an East European by choice).”