at is physical (especially sexuality) as being on the side of evil.
This view of reality was more or less in line with the Greek cultural disdain for and mistrust of the physical that appears as a central thread in Plato, but its total rejection of the physical went far beyond what most Greeks would have found acceptable. According to Aquinas,
Photinus lessened the mystery of the Incarnation by denying Christ's divine nature; the Manichees did the same by denying his human nature. Fancying all bodily nature to be caused by the power of evil, and thinking how unfitting it would have been for the Son of God to assume a creature of the Devil, they therefore laid it down that Christ had flesh only in appearance, not in reality, and that the Gospel narratives about his humanity are pieces of imagination, not accounts of physical fact (Compendium Theologiae, 207; Gilby 515).
One may note wryly that the Manichees seem to have invented some of the basic principles of modern Biblical interpretation.
According to the descriptions of the Manichaeans by various Chur
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