Bogomilism (10th-15th century)

"Dear to God" — or "God, have mercy"?

The Slavic name bogomil breaks down simply: bogъ, "god", and milъ, "dear, beloved" — that is, "dear to God", the exact equivalent of the Greek Theophilos.^[4] One open question remains, which historians have never settled: does the movement take its name from its presumed founder, the priest Bogomil, or did the preacher adopt this nom de guerre after the sect had received it?^[5] The Catholic Encyclopedia article points to another lead: Bog milui, "God, have mercy", a prayer formula the adherents are said to have used so often that it became their nickname.^[6]

Their adversaries saddled them with many other names — babuni ("superstitious") in Slavonic Church documents, Messalians or Euchites in the Greek acts of the 12th-14th centuries^[7] — but they gave themselves only one title: Christians.^[8] Place-names still keep their trace: the Babuna river and mount, the Bogomila waterfall and village, in the Azot region of present-day North Macedonia, still draw on the map the area where the movement was most active.^[9]

How do we know the Bogomils? The five sources

Almost all of the Bogomils' own literature has been lost or destroyed, and what we know of them comes first from their adversaries — with the distortions that implies — then, fortunately, from a few of their apocryphal books that have come down to us.^[10] The table below presents the witnesses, in chronological order: the whole article rests on them.

To these five witnesses must be added the Bogomils' own books: the Book of the Secret Supper — also called the Interrogation of John —, the Vision of Isaiah, the History of the Tree of the Cross and Pope Jeremiah's Prayer against Fever, along with apocrypha reworked for propaganda such as the Apocalypse of Abraham or 2 Enoch.^[11] Their scriptural canon is significant: the four Gospels, fourteen epistles of Paul, three of John, James, Jude and an epistle to the Laodiceans — but of the Old Testament, almost nothing, except the Psalms and the Prophets.^[12]

A young state, a new Church, a language the people do not understand

When Bogomilism was born, Christian Bulgaria was not even a century old: Tsar Boris I had himself baptised in 864-865, and his son Simeon I (893-927) had brought the state to its territorial peak before exhausting it with incessant wars, notably against Byzantium in Thrace.^[13] Cosmas himself opens his indictment with the sentence that fixes the cradle of the movement:

"In the days of the orthodox czar Peter, there lived in Bulgaria a priest named Bogomil, who was the first to disseminate the heresy in the land of Bulgaria." — Cosmas the Priest, Sermon against the Bogomils, incipit^[14]

Under Peter I (927-969), the Byzantine peace brought prosperity back to the court but weighed down taxes, while the liturgy was still celebrated in Greek, a language only the elite understood: the recently converted peasant attended a religion he did not understand, served by a clergy whose new wealth scandalised him.^[15] Pope Nicholas I had already warned Boris against the danger of false teachings^[16]; it was the patriarch Theophylact of Constantinople who, answering a worried consultation from Peter I, gave the first written description of the Bogomils.^[17]

Misery, taxes and a rich clergy: the smouldering anger

Cosmas the Priest, our witness closest to the events, does not hide the social dimension of Bogomil success. The lands near the Byzantine frontier, ravaged by Simeon's wars, are ruined; Peter's taxes weigh on peasants without occupation; the corruption of the Church as an institution completes the disgust of a freshly converted flock.^[18] It is to these disinherited that the Bogomil preachers speak, and their discourse is of unheard-of violence against the established order:

"They teach their followers not to obey their masters; they scorn the rich, they hate the Tsars, they ridicule their superiors, they reproach the boyars, they believe that God looks in horror on those who labour for the Tsar, and advise every serf not to work for his master." — Cosmas the Priest, Sermon against the Bogomils^[19]

The transplanted Paulicians: the ferment from Armenia

The doctrinal ferment comes from the East. In 970, the Byzantine emperor John I Tzimiskes transplanted masses of Paulicians from Armenia to Thrace, around Philippopolis (present-day Plovdiv), to make frontier soldiers of them.^[20] These dissident Christians, themselves heirs of the old dualist currents of Armenia and of Manichaeism, assimilated linguistically to the Bulgarians — who called them pavlikiani — and their teaching directly irrigated the milieu in which Bogomil preached.^[21] On the Paulicians themselves, their Armenian history and their own doctrine, see Paulicianism: they are not to be confused with the Bogomils, who are an original Slavic creation, but without them Bogomilism is inexplicable.

Two sons in heaven: Satanael the elder and Michael the younger

The heart of the system is a dualism of Manichaean origin: the admission of two creative principles, one good, the other evil.^[22] In its first form, this dualism remains "moderate" — Satan, creator of matter, remains inferior to God, whose son he is — before hardening, with time, towards a clash of two eternal adversaries, as among the later Cathars.^[23] The most precise exposition comes from Zigabenus, summarised by the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"God the Father, according to them, had a human appearance but was incorporeal. He had two sons, the first-born, Satanael, and the younger, Jesus Christ or Michael. Satanael, though seated at the right hand of the Father and endowed with creative power, rebelled and was, with some of the angels, his followers, cast out of heaven." — N. A. Weber, "Bogomili", Catholic Encyclopedia^[24]

What follows in the narrative is of implacable logic. Eve, created in the same manner, is seduced by Satanael; as punishment, the latter loses his creative power but keeps dominion over his creation and works for the ruin of man.^[25] To save mankind, God sends His second son: Jesus enters through the right ear of Mary and clothes Himself from her in a mere appearance of a human body — everything material in Him is mere appearance.^[26] Victorious, He strips Satanael of his divine name El — henceforth mere Satan — and takes his place in heaven; the Holy Spirit is sent, but dwells only in the Bogomils; in the end, Jesus and the Spirit will be absorbed into the Father, the sole subsisting Person in God.^[27]

A Christ without flesh, a cross without wood

One may measure the abyss with the faith of Nicaea and Chalcedon: the Bogomil Christ is neither true God consubstantial with the Father, nor true man born of Mary — He is an angel, Michael, bearer of a phantom flesh, "chosen" by God after the baptism in the Jordan, when the Spirit descends in the form of a dove and gives Him the power to break the clay pact (hierographon) by which Adam had sold himself to Satanael.^[28] The crucifixion itself, a machination of Satan, reaches only an appearance; and it is Satan, they say, who originates the whole visible Orthodox community — churches, vestments, ceremonies, sacraments, fasts, monks and priests.^[29] As for the Logos, He is not for them the second Person of the Trinity made flesh, but the mere uttered word of God, manifested in the oral teaching of Christ^[30]; anathemas from around 1027 formally charge them with rejecting the Trinity.^[31]

No water baptism, no Mass, no marriage

From this cosmology flows a whole programme of refusal. The Old Testament is rejected almost wholesale — only the Psalms and the Prophets find favour^[32] —; instead of water baptism, the Bogomils admit only a spiritual baptism; they deny the Real Presence in the Eucharist, whose bread and wine would never be transformed^[33]; they condemn marriage, reject images, forbid meat^[34]; they refuse the Monday and Friday fasts, reject monasticism, pray in private houses and not in churches, and hold that ordination is conferred by the congregation, not by a specially designated minister.^[35] Cross and images are idols, the veneration of saints and relics idolatry; Christ is Son of God only by grace, like the other prophets; and the Last Judgement will be executed by God, not by Jesus.^[36] The following table summarises the confrontation, point by point:

The perfect and the simple believers

Like their Cathar heirs, the Bogomils distinguish two ranks: a minority of perfect — the "elect", men or women, for women may accede to this rank — and the mass of simple believers who listen to them and lodge them.^[37] Each community organises itself around twelve "apostles" in imitation of the apostolic college; the perfect wear garments like those of the mendicant friars and lead an itinerant life.^[38] They refuse every excess of worldly pleasures — this world being Satan's work — but without falling into frenzied asceticism: their mark is rather simplicity, fasting and professed purity.^[39]

Prayer, fasting and itinerant mission

Their piety is intense and recognisable: Cosmas notes that they pray four times by day and four times by night, armed above all with the Our Father, held to be the most powerful weapon against Satan, along with a whole arsenal of conjurations against evil spirits.^[40] Above all, they are enthusiastic missionaries: healing the sick, casting out demons, they travel through countries, spread their doctrines and sow everywhere their apocryphal literature — Storied Bibles, Letter Fallen from Heaven, Journeys to Heaven and Hell, legends of Adam and of the Cross — to the point that several of these popular narratives of East and West owe their diffusion to their activity.^[41] Thus does the heresy, born in a corner of Macedonia, become in a century a Balkan power.

Westward: Serbia, Bosnia and the Adriatic Sea

From the time of Tsar Samuel (976-1014) — under whose reign no persecution is attested, the ruler, revolted against Byzantium, leaning instead on the movement's popular support^[42] — Bogomilism won Serbia and Bosnia; the most active centre became western Bosnia, centred on the Bosna valley, with the province of Hum (present-day Herzegovina) and into the Dalmatian cities of Split and Trogir.^[43] At the end of the 12th century, the Serbian grand prince Stephen Nemanja, with his council, declared Bogomilism a heresy and expelled its adherents from the country: a 1290 fresco preserves the memory of this anti-Bogomil council.^[44] The expelled took refuge in Bosnia and Dalmatia, where they were called Patarenes; protecting these "heretics" henceforth became the recurring pretext of the kings of Hungary for launching crusades against Bosnia and extending their influence there.^[45]

Constantinople, Anatolia and Russia

Eastward, the heresy penetrated to the heart of the Empire: it is reported by name at Philippopolis as early as 1115^[46], and into the capital itself, where the emperor had to act in person. Synodal condemnations chart the official resistance: destruction of Bogomil writings ordered in 1140, deposition of two Cappadocian bishops won over to the sect in 1143, and even the fall of Patriarch Cosmas II, deposed in 1147 for favour shown to the adherent Niphon.^[47] Patriarch Germanus II carried on the fight in the 13th century, and further condemnations were issued by the synods of Constantinople in 1316 and 1325.^[48] To the north-east, variants of Bogomilism reached Kievan Russia as early as the 11th century; in the 14th century, Karp Strigolnik preached at Novgorod a doctrine of the same stock — election of "teachers" from among the simple faithful, refusal of a separate priesthood —, the root of the Russian Strigolniki.^[49]

Alexius Comnenus and Basil the Physician: the burning of 1118

The most famous episode is set in Constantinople. The sect's leader in the capital, Basil, a monk and physician surrounded by twelve apostles in the manner of the perfect, was summoned by Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), who skilfully obtained from him a frank exposition of the doctrine — the exact canvas of the refutation Zigabenus would write.^[50] Summoned to retract, some of the arrested adherents yielded and were released; the obstinate died in prison; Basil alone was condemned to death and burned in 1118, at the end of proceedings begun around 1110.^[51] Vigorous as it was, the repression did not extinguish the heresy: it was the only public execution of Bogomils in the Byzantine Empire, but the sect survived its leader.^[52]

Tirnovo, 11 February 1211: Tsar Boril's anathema

In restored Bulgaria, it was power itself that struck the great blow. On 11 February 1211, in the capital Tirnovo, Tsar Boril (1207-1218) personally presided over a council against the Bogomils: the doctrine was condemned there and the anathema pronounced against its founder, Pope Bogomil.^[53] The acts are preserved in the Book of Boril — the Synodikon of Orthodoxy translated and completed by order of the tsar —, which lines up the anti-Bogomil anathemas in the tradition of Cosmas's Discourse.^[54] Boril's policy continued that of Manuel I in Byzantium and of Nemanja in Serbia: everywhere in the 13th century, Bogomilism was eradicated from Bulgaria, Rascia and Byzantium as an organised force, even if remnants survived in Hum and Bosnia until the Ottoman conquest of 1463.^[55]

Bosnia: crusades, Kulin's abjuration and the Bosnian Church

The Bosnian case deserves to be distinguished with care. In 1203, Pope Innocent III, backed by the king of Hungary, wrung from Ban Kulin a public abjuration and recognition of Roman authority — largely ignored in practice.^[56] On Kulin's death in 1216, a mission of conversion failed; in 1234, Pope Gregory IX deposed the Catholic bishop of Bosnia for tolerating heretical practices and had the crusade preached to Prince Coloman of Slavonia, whose expedition was repulsed by the Bosnian nobles.^[57] In 1252, Innocent IV's decision to subject the Bosnian bishopric to the Hungarian archbishopric of Kalocsa caused the schism: the Bosnian Christians refused and broke with Rome, giving birth to the autonomous Bosnian Church.^[58] Yet — and modern historians insist on this — no trace of Bogomilism, Catharism or dualism is found in the original documents of the Bosnian krstjani, as they called themselves: to identify the Bosnian Church flatly with the Bogomils is a confusion born of the scarcity of documents after the Ottoman conquest.^[59] The Dominican Inquisition, imposed in 1291 by Nicholas IV's bull Prae cunctis, did still report a dualist sect in Bosnia at the end of the 15th century, but it was very probably no longer the same reality as the Bosnian Church.^[60]

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the West knew the dualists under the name of "Bulgarians": in 1207 the heresy of the Bulgarians is mentioned, in 1223 the Albigenses are called local bougres, and there is talk of an Albigensian "pope" residing on the confines of Bulgaria.^[61] The Slavonic Ritual of the Bosnian Radoslav closely resembles the Cathar ritual published by Cunitz in 1853^[62]; and it is a French word born of that encounter — bougre, from the Latin Bulgarus — which gives English buggery, attested as early as 1330 in the sense of "abominable heresy".^[63] The classical thesis, magisterially formulated by Dimitri Obolensky in The Bogomils (1948), makes the Bogomils the hyphen between the dualist sects of East and West, and the sect's itinerant missionaries the agents of that transmission into Italy — Piedmont — and France.^[64]

It must honestly be said that the scholarly debate remains open: some medievalists stress that the 13th-century inquisitors had a quick trigger for filiations, attaching every dualism to Manichaeism as readily as they would have lent Apollo and Mercury to the pagans of the Baltic, and that movements may have arisen independently in several places.^[65] What is certain is the circulation of men, of books — the Secret Supper becomes a Cathar scripture — and of the name; the rest belongs to historical discussion, which the articles Catharism and the Albigenses will take up for the West.

The world is good, because God made it

Against the Bogomil contempt for matter, the Church has never ceased to confess with Scripture that all that God created is good: "God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31), and "for by him all things were created" (Colossians 1:16).^[66] The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) — convened precisely as Catharism was ravaging the West — defined against all dualism that there is but one true God, Creator of all things visible and invisible, and that the devil himself, created good by God, became evil by his own fault.^[67] Evil is therefore not a second coeternal divinity: it is the free refusal of the creature.

True God and true man: the Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon

Against the Bogomils' docetic phantom, the Church holds the integral Christ of the councils: consubstantial with the Father in divinity since Nicaea (325), consubstantial with us in humanity since Chalcedon (451) — true God born of the Father before all ages, true man born of the Virgin Mary.^[68] The apostle St John had warned in advance against the nascent gnosis:

"By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit who does not confess Jesus is not of God." — St John, First Epistle, 4:2-3^[69]

The Church, her sacraments and her priests

Against the refusal of the sacraments, the Church answers that Christ entrusted to men of flesh efficacious signs of grace: the water of baptism that regenerates, the bread and wine of the Eucharist become truly His Body and His Blood, the covenant of marriage raised to the rank of sacrament.^[70] And against the thesis of a Church reserved to the pure, with no priests and no hierarchy, she recalls that the sacraments act by Christ's power and not by the minister's worthiness — a doctrine set out in the validity of the sacraments — and that the Church, holy through her Spouse, gathers wheat and tares together until the end of time.^[71] The twin rigorisms of Roman Novatianism and Phrygian Montanism had already tried, centuries earlier, to reduce the Church to the saints alone: the answer is the same, from Cyprian to Augustine down to the councils that struck the Bogomils.

• Paulicianism
• Manichaeism
• Catharism
• The Albigenses
• Arianism
• Montanism
• Novatianism
• The dogma of the Trinity
• The Real Eucharistic Presence
• The validity of the sacraments
• The First Council of Nicaea (325)
• Pope Innocent III (1160-1216)
• Pope Gregory IX (c. 1170-1241)