Bogomilism

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Bogomilism was a dualist Christian heresy that arose in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century and spread through the Balkans and into the Byzantine world over the following centuries. Its name is traditionally traced to a Bulgarian priest called Bogomil — a name meaning “dear to God” — though almost nothing about the man can be recovered. The earliest detailed account comes from an opponent: the treatise of the priest Cosmas, written in Bulgaria late in the tenth century to refute the new teaching, which remains the chief source for what the movement held at its origin.

At the center of that teaching was a dualism. The Bogomils held that the material, visible world was not the good creation of God but the work of an evil power — in most accounts Satan, sometimes described as God’s elder and fallen son — so that the flesh, the institutions of the earth, and the order of nature belonged to the wrong principle. From this followed a sweeping refusal. They rejected the established church and its clergy, the sacraments, the veneration of the cross and of icons, the church buildings, and much of the Old Testament, which they read as the record of the evil creator’s dominion. They lived austerely, holding marriage and the eating of meat in suspicion, and organized themselves around a small body of the perfected rather than a sacramental priesthood.

How far this was a genuinely organized doctrine and how far it was a label imposed by hostile chroniclers is a question scholarship treats with care; much of the surviving testimony is polemic, and the heresiologists had reasons to make the movement look more systematic and more lurid than it may have been. What does seem secure is a line of transmission. Most historians place Bogomilism downstream of the earlier Paulicians, dualists resettled in the Balkans by the Byzantine state, and upstream of the Cathars of southern France and Italy, who shared its cosmology and some of its forms — though whether this was direct descent or parallel growth from common roots is debated. The movement was condemned at Constantinople, where the emperor had its reputed leader Basil burned in the early twelfth century, and it was pressed hard across the medieval Balkans without being quickly extinguished.

The relation between Bogomilism and the medieval Bosnian church, long described in older literature as a Bogomil stronghold, is now treated more cautiously; the evidence for a fully dualist Bosnian heresy is thinner than once assumed. What the Bogomils left behind is mostly the shape of their enemies’ alarm: a recurring suspicion that the world itself might be the work of the wrong hand, and that the true church was the one without buildings. That suspicion did not begin with them and did not end with them; for a few centuries in the Balkans, it had a name.

→ Related: Catharism · Paulicians · Bosnian Church · Dualism · Gnosticism · Heresy