Bogomilism

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In the tenth century, in the villages of the First Bulgarian Empire, a priest began to teach that the world a Christian could see and touch was not God’s. The churches with their gilded crosses, the relics, the bread blessed at the altar, the body itself — all of it belonged to a lesser and hostile maker. He is remembered as Bogomil, a name that means “dear to God,” and beyond the name almost nothing of the man survives: no writing in his hand, no firm dates, not even certainty that a single founder rather than a slogan stands behind the word. What survives instead is the alarm he caused. The heresy took his name, spread out of Bulgaria through the Balkans and into the Byzantine world, and lasted, in one form or another, for the better part of five centuries.

Almost everything that can be said of what Bogomilism held at its origin comes from an opponent. Late in the tenth century, during or soon after the reign of Tsar Peter I, a Bulgarian priest named Cosmas wrote a long sermon to refute the new teaching — a homily against the newly appeared heresy, copied and re-excerpted for centuries afterward in the Slavonic churches. (It is not Cosmas of Maiuma the hymnographer, nor Cosmas Indicopleustes the cosmographer; this Cosmas is known only by his treatise.) He had heard the heretics preach. He describes their austerity, their contempt for the clergy, their refusal of the cross, and the cunning with which, he says, they hid behind a show of meekness. The treatise is hostile from its first line — its purpose is to arm the faithful against the sect, not to understand it — and yet it is the earliest and fullest witness to the movement, and most of what follows leans on it.

The two makers

At the center of the teaching stood a dualism, and the shape of that dualism is what set Bogomilism apart from the heresy it was condemned as. This was not the absolute, two-eternal-principles dualism of Manichaeism, where light and dark have warred from before time. It was a mitigated, genealogical dualism, and it took the form of a story about a family. God had two sons. The elder, Satanael, rebelled — and falling from heaven, he made for himself a second creation out of the matter he had wrested away: the visible world, the earth and the sky over it, the order of nature. He shaped the body of the first man from clay and water. But the body he made was dead; matter he could mold but not quicken. So the fallen son was forced to beg the Father for a soul to put in it, and God breathed life into the figure of clay. Man therefore is the work of two hands at once — a divine spark imprisoned in a thing the devil built. The whole apparatus of the seen world, on this account, is the dominion of the wrong principle, and the soul’s task is to recognize its true origin and get free of the flesh.

The narrative behind that doctrine is preserved in a remarkable Bogomil text, the Interrogatio Iohannis — the Book of the Secret Supper — which stages the cosmogony as a private dialogue between the apostle John and Christ at a meal in heaven. It is the one substantial document of the movement’s own that travels westward and surfaces in the hands of the Cathars, where it was attached to the church of Concorezzo. From the Bogomil side it is almost the only voice that is not an enemy’s, and even it survives only because copyists outside the movement preserved it.

The cascade of refusal

From the conviction that the visible church served the visible — and therefore the evil — creation, everything else followed as subtraction. The Bogomils refused the established church entire: its hierarchy of bishops and priests, its sacraments, its baptism in water (water being matter), the eucharist, the veneration of the cross — which they regarded not as the instrument of salvation but as the gibbet on which the Lord was killed, a thing to be hated rather than kissed — the cult of icons and relics and the Virgin and the saints, and the church buildings themselves, raised in stone to a God who did not dwell in them. They rejected much of the Old Testament as well, reading the God of Genesis and the prophets as the record of the evil creator’s rule over his own world; the Psalms and the Gospels they kept, the Lord’s Prayer they prized above all other words. In this radical paring-back of the canon they stand in a long line that runs through Marcion of Sinope, the second-century teacher who first cut the scriptures down to a God of love against a God of law, and through the Gnostic currents of late antiquity that read the maker of the world as a lesser power.

Because the flesh belonged to the wrong maker, the Bogomil ethic was a sustained withdrawal from it. They held marriage and procreation in suspicion — to beget a child was to lock another soul into the prison of a body — and abstained from meat, from wine, and from anything got by the union of the sexes, including the foods that came of it. This asceticism was not penance for sin so much as a refusal of complicity with creation. Their view of Christ leaned toward docetism: if matter is evil, the divine cannot truly have taken a material body, so the incarnation and the crucifixion were appearance rather than substance. And from the imprisonment of the soul in flesh some sources draw a doctrine of transmigration — the soul passing from body to body, even into animals, until it could be freed — though how systematically reincarnation was taught remains among the things the hostile record cannot settle.

A church without buildings

Against the sacramental priesthood of the great church, the Bogomils set something far thinner and more demanding: a small body of the perfected. The weight of the movement rested not on ordained men channeling grace through matter, but on those who had taken on the full discipline — the renunciation of property, sex, meat, and the world — and who alone were reckoned to embody the true church. Ordinary adherents lived in the world and looked to the perfected; authority was the authority of a life, not of an office or a rite. There were no altars because there was nothing to consecrate, no clergy because there was no matter to make holy. The true church, on this logic, could only be the one without buildings — a fellowship recognizable by its conduct rather than by any stone or sacrament, and for that reason almost invisible to the institutions that hunted it.

How far this amounted to a single organized doctrine, and how far it was a template imposed by the men who wrote it down, is a question the study of Bogomilism treats with care. The surviving testimony is overwhelmingly the testimony of enemies, and the heresiologists worked from a stock of inherited heresy — Manichaean, Gnostic, Paulician — onto which a new movement could be pressed until it looked more systematic, more ancient, and more lurid than it may have been on the ground. The label “Balkan neo-Manichaeism,” made famous by the standard modern study, is a historian’s convention of comparison, not a lineage the Bogomils claimed for themselves. The doctrine reconstructed above is real in the sources; how much of its tidiness belongs to the sect and how much to its accusers is not fully recoverable.

Upstream and downstream

What does seem secure is that Bogomilism stood in the middle of a chain of dualist movements rather than at its head. Behind it lay the Paulicians, the Armenian and Anatolian dualists whom the Byzantine state, across the eighth to tenth centuries, repeatedly deported and resettled in Thrace and the Balkans — planting in Bulgarian soil exactly the soil in which a movement like Bogomil’s could take root. The Bogomils are most plausibly read downstream of that transplanted dualism, though the inheritance was transformed rather than copied.

Downstream of the Bogomils, in turn, lay the Cathars of the Rhineland, Lombardy, and the Languedoc, who shared the dualist cosmology, the rejection of the material church, the division between the perfected and ordinary believers, and — by way of the Interrogatio Iohannis — at least one Bogomil text. The conventional account has a Bogomil bishop, Nicetas, presiding over a Cathar council at Saint-Félix in the twelfth century; but the document on which that account rests is of contested authenticity, and so the institutional link cannot be asserted as fact. Whether the Cathar movement descended directly from Balkan dualism or grew up in parallel from shared roots and Eastern contact is debated and not resolved: the maximalist case argues for a real Bogomil- derived counter-church reaching into the West, the skeptical case for largely local Western dissent onto which churchmen read an imported system. The cosmology is unmistakably kin in all three movements — Paulician, Bogomil, Cathar — but kinship is not the same as a single descent, and the documents that might fix the relation are the very documents whose reliability is in question.

§5b — The treatises and their editors

The historian of Bogomilism works almost entirely with hostile sources, and the critical apparatus that makes them usable is itself a small library, much of it now in the public domain.

The earliest witness, Cosmas the Priest’s sermon against the Bogomils, is preserved in twenty-five complete Slavonic copies and well over a hundred excerpts. Its standard twentieth-century critical edition with French translation is Henri-Charles Puech and André Vaillant, Le traité contre les Bogomiles de Cosmas le Prêtre (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1945); the work remains under copyright and is treated as a pointer, its scholarly record cataloged at Persée. The standard antecedent Slavonic editions are M. G. Popruzhenko’s (1907; Kozma Presviter, Sofia, 1936) and, later, Begunov’s of 1973.

The second great documentary source is Byzantine: Euthymius Zigabenus, the monk-theologian whom Emperor Alexios I commissioned to compile a compendium of heresies, the Panoplia Dogmatica — the full armory of doctrine — running from the apostolic age down to the Bogomils, some of whom Zigabenus examined in person. Its long chapter on the sect, printed in volume 130 of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (Paris, 1857–1866), is the principal account of Bogomil doctrine as the great church heard it, and the source for the synodal proceedings against the heresy. To it must be added the Alexiad of Anna Komnene, the emperor’s daughter, whose fifteenth book narrates the trial and burning of the Bogomil leader Basil — a partisan source, written to honor her father, and to be read with that in mind.

The movement’s own apocryphal literature was gathered by Jordan Ivanov in Bogomilski knigi i legendi (Sofia, 1925); the Interrogatio Iohannis itself was first printed from the Vienna manuscript by J. J. I. von Döllinger in his Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters (Munich, 1890), with a modern critical edition by Edina Bozóky (1980). The standard modern synthesis remains Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge, 1948), whose record and reissue are kept at Cambridge University Press; Steven Runciman’s The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge, 1947) set the long dualist genealogy out for the Anglophone reader, while the documentary corpus for the whole family of movements is assembled in translation in Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The continuing scholarly quarrel over how organized any of this truly was — and how much is the artifact of inquisitors and heresiologists — runs through the more recent literature, including R. I. Moore’s case for the local origins of medieval dissent.

The trial of Basil and the Bosnian question

Bogomilism reached Constantinople itself, and there it met the full weight of the imperial church. Early in the twelfth century, under Alexios I Komnenos, the authorities arrested a physician and monk named Basil, reputed to lead the Bogomils of the capital. (He is Basil the Physician, no relation to Basil of Caesarea or any saint of the name.) By the account in the Alexiad, the emperor drew out his confession by a ruse — receiving him as if a disciple, with a clerk concealed to record every word — then convened a synod under the patriarch, condemned him as a heretic, and had him burned in the Hippodrome. His followers were imprisoned. The execution by fire was rare in the Byzantine world, and the very rarity of it measures how seriously the Orthodox church and state took the threat of a creed that denied the holiness of their entire visible order.

It did not end the movement. Bogomilism persisted in the Second Bulgarian Empire, in Byzantine lands, and in the western Balkans, where it became entangled with a question that has divided scholars ever since: the medieval Bosnian Church. Older literature treated Bosnia as a Bogomil stronghold, its krstjani, the Christians, as dualists in all but name. That picture has been steadily revised. The Bosnian Church’s own surviving documents show little trace of dualism; the heretical portrait derives largely from hostile Latin and Orthodox polemic, and a strong line of scholarship now reads the krstjani as a schismatic but doctrinally Christian, even monastic, body rather than a dualist sect. The thoroughly dualist Bosnia of the older books is thinner than it once appeared.

This is the shape of the predicament that any account of the Bogomils must inhabit. The movement built nothing that outlasts it in stone, ordained no clergy whose succession can be traced, left scarcely a line written from inside except a cosmogony preserved by outsiders. To reconstruct a church that refused, on principle, every visible institution — buildings, hierarchy, sacrament — the historian is thrown back almost entirely on the testimony of the men who feared it and meant to destroy it: a Bulgarian priest’s sermon, a Byzantine compendium of heresies, a princess’s chronicle of her father’s reign. The teaching reaches us as the negative impression left in its enemies’ alarm, and the discipline of reading it lies in learning to see the doctrine through the polemic without mistaking the polemic for the doctrine.

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