Paulicianism

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The name came from outside, and it has never stopped being argued over. The people it was fixed on called themselves simply Christians — followers of the gospel and the apostle — and left no statement of their own to set against it. Three derivations contend. The plainest takes “Paulician” from the apostle Paul, whose letters the movement prized above all other scripture and after whose churches it named its own congregations. A second, favored by the movement’s accusers, traced it to Paul of Samosata, the third-century bishop of Antioch condemned for denying the full divinity of Christ — a pedigree that made the group a relapse into an old, named heresy. A third pointed to an obscure leader called Paul, a son of the Armenian Callinice whom one hostile account makes a founder. The dispute over the word is not incidental. To settle which Paul gave the name is already to decide what kind of thing the movement was: a Pauline reform reading the New Testament against the institutional Church, or a recurrence of a dualism the heresiologists had cataloged long before.

What the hostile record says they held

Almost everything recorded about the teaching comes from men writing to refute it — Byzantine churchmen and officials, chief among them the patriarch Photius in his treatise against the Manichaeans and the longer polemic that travels under the name of Peter of Sicily, both preserved in the great nineteenth-century edition of the Greek fathers. These sources describe a dualist faith built on two principles: a good God who governs the world to come, and an evil maker, the lord and craftsman of the present age, responsible for the visible cosmos and the human body. The two are not the early and late of one story but powers of different orders, the one heavenly and the other set over matter.

From that division the whole of the reported doctrine follows with a hard logic. If the visible world is the work of the lesser power, then the God who made it — the creator of Genesis — cannot be the Father of Jesus, and the Old Testament that tells of him is not scripture but the record of the wrong god. The Paulicians of the sources kept the New Testament, and especially the Pauline letters, and rejected the Hebrew Bible and its deity. They denied that Christ took real flesh — a body drawn from the evil maker’s world would defile him — so his humanity was apparent rather than substantial, a position the heresiologists recognized as the old docetism. They refused the cross, honoring no instrument of execution as holy. They rejected the veneration of images, the sacraments of bread and water as the Church administered them, the cult of the Virgin and the saints, and the consecrated buildings, the hierarchy, and the property of the established Church — the whole material apparatus by which salvation was thought to be mediated. A true church, on this account, needed none of it.

How far this portrait reports the Paulicians and how far it imports a template is the central question of the modern study of them. The polemicists reached at once for the labels nearest to hand. They called the movement Manichaean, and they read into it the demoted creator of Marcion of Sinope and the cosmic war of light and matter of Manichaeism. But heresiography worked by assimilation: an unfamiliar group was made legible by being filed under a heresy already condemned, and the resemblance the sources draw may be as much the filing system as the thing filed. The “neo-Manichaean” label, in particular, is a Byzantine charge before it is a finding, and the convergence with Marcion — the prized Paul, the rejected Hebrew God, the seeming-flesh — is the kind of parallel an educated churchman would produce whether or not the Paulicians had ever heard of either teacher. There is a further complication the dossier of sources almost buries: the Armenian material on the group, weighed against the Greek, presents something far closer to an ordinary, if austere, Pauline Christianity, and the gap between the two bodies of evidence is itself a finding.

From frontier sect to fortress-state

The doctrine is contested; the political history is firmer. Tradition places the movement’s beginning in seventh-century Armenia with Constantine of Mananali, who took the name Silvanus after a companion of Paul — a doubling of names that later leaders repeated, each adopting the name of a Pauline associate. His congregations, founded across Armenia and Pontus, were given the names of the churches Paul had written to. For two centuries the Paulicians lived under intermittent imperial persecution on the eastern frontier, where Byzantine and Arab power met and neither held the ground securely.

In the ninth century the movement took up arms. Under leaders such as Karbeas and, after him, his kinsman Chrysocheir, the Paulicians built a fortified principality in the borderlands centered on Tephrike, allied with the Arab emirate of Melitene, and raided deep into Byzantine territory, reaching the western coast of Asia Minor and striking at major cities. For a generation a heresy condemned at the capital ran a state on the frontier. The emperor Basil I moved to break it: in a campaign that culminated around 872 his forces destroyed the Paulician army at the battle of Bathys Ryax, where Chrysocheir was killed and beheaded, and the fall of Tephrike and the annexation of its territory followed. The militant polity did not survive its defeat.

Imperial policy toward the survivors alternated, as it had earlier, between persecution and forced resettlement. Already in the eighth century, and again after the fall of Tephrike, large numbers of Paulicians were moved westward into Thrace and the Balkan frontier of the Byzantine Empire, planted there as a military colony to hold the line against Bulgaria and the steppe. A community describing itself as Paulician persisted in the Bulgarian lands into modern times; most of it eventually entered the Catholic Church, carrying the old name into a wholly orthodox communion.

The question of descent

That transplantation is the reason the movement matters beyond its own region. Historians have long argued that the Paulicians resettled in the Balkans helped shape Bogomilism, the dualist movement that spread from tenth-century Bulgaria, and a further and more contested line traces a current of influence onward to the Cathars of the medieval West. The geography is suggestive — Paulician colonists settled in exactly the lands where Bogomilism would later appear — and the chain has been drawn often and confidently, with the Paulicians cast as the eastern source of a single transmitted dualism running from late antiquity to the Languedoc.

But each link in that chain rests on thin and hostile evidence, and the same caution that applies to the doctrine applies to the descent. A continuation within Armenia itself is conventionally traced to the Tondrakians, and the late manuscript published as the Key of Truth was argued to preserve a Paulician rite — an identification that is itself disputed. To call the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars one movement is partly to repeat the heresiologists’ own move of assimilation across the centuries, gathering distinct groups under a single name because each was charged with the same sin. The continuity is an inference built on the testimony of the prosecution, not a documented succession; the resemblances are the resemblances the accusers needed to see.

Sources and the modern reassessment

Everything turns on a small and one-sided archive. The two Greek texts that govern the picture — Photius’s Narratio de Manichaeis and the Historia Manichaeorum under the name of Peter of Sicily — are accessible in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volumes 102 and 104, with the Greek and a facing Latin, long in the public domain and freely digitized. The decisive shift in interpretation came when the Armenian evidence was set against the Greek. F. C. Conybeare’s The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898) edited and translated a late Armenian manuscript that he identified as a Paulician service-book — an identification that put a putative voice of the movement, for once, beside the polemic, though modern scholars accept a Paulician-derived milieu while dating the surviving text much later.

The standard critical study remains Nina G. Garsoïan’s The Paulician Heresy: A Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the Eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire (Paris: Mouton, 1967), which separated the Armenian sources from the Greek and concluded that much of the dualism ascribed to the group repeats the anti-Paulician propaganda of the Byzantine authors and has little to do with what the movement actually taught; the edition is the point from which later work departs. That argument has been pressed furthest by Carl Dixon, The Paulicians: Heresy, Persecution and Warfare on the Byzantine Frontier, c. 750–880 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), which disavows the traditional portrayal of the Paulicians as the progenitors of medieval Christian dualism and recasts them as broadly conventional Christians inspired by the apostle Paul, reading their militant phase as a frontier society’s response to persecution and Byzantine-Arab warfare rather than the expression of a dualist theology. Where the older synthesis — Steven Runciman’s The Medieval Manichee (1947) — made the Paulicians one stage in a continuous dualist tradition, the recent reassessment treats that continuity, and the dualism on which it rests, as a construction of the heresy-hunters’ own categories.

Whether they were dualists at all now divides along the sources: the Greek heresiologists who filed them with the creator-denying sects against the Armenian witnesses that show an austere, image-rejecting, but not plainly two-principle church — the split on which Garsoïan’s and Dixon’s reassessments turn. What is not in question is the sequel: deported by Byzantine emperors to Thrace to hold the frontier, the community carried its name and its refusal of the visible church into the Balkans, where it ran into the Bogomils and, through them, into the dualist history of the medieval West.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Patristic Heresiology · Paulicians · Bogomilism · Catharism · Marcion Of Sinope · Manichaeism Religion Of Light · Old Testament · New Testament · Thrace · Byzantine Empire · Dualism · Tondrakians · Docetism · Heresy