The course of western civilisation changed forever on 28 October 312, when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (306—37) achieved a decisive victory over his brother-in-law Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome. The two men had been engaged in a power struggle since Constantine’s accession, and at Milvian Bridge, matters came to a head. The night before the battle, however, things did not look good for Constantine. His men were outnumbered by 4:1, and defeat seemed likely. As evening drew on, Constantine saw the Greek letters X P (‘Chi-Rho’, the first two letters of the word ‘Christ’) suddenly appear on the setting sun together with a cross and the motto In Hoc SignoVinces — ‘in this sign you will conquer’. Constantine saw it as an omen, and ordered the cross be painted on his soldiers’ shields. When he won an outright victory the next day, Constantine put the success down to the god of the Christians, converted to the faith and issued the Edict of Milan, which ordered an end to religious persecution across the empire.23
As soon as Christianity began to flourish with its newfound status, there were problems. Arianism, in particular, was proving to be controversial, with its view that God the Father and Christ the Son were two distinct entities, with Christ being seen as inferior to God. To settle the matter, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, whose opening session began on 20 May 325. In the two months that the Council sat, the 300 or so Church fathers gathered at Nicaea debated a number of topics, including the fixing of the date of Easter, but by far the most important issue was Arianism. In an attempt to establish an orthodox position on Christ’s divine nature, the Nicene Creed was promulgated on 19 June, which drew the battle lines between the orthodox and everyone else. Belief in the tenets of the Creed were central to orthodoxy. They included belief in ‘God, the Father _ maker of heaven and earth’, in Christ ‘the only Son of God _ eternally begotten of the Father, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father’, who ‘was born of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfilment of the Scriptures.’ Christ’s flock was to be ministered unto solely by ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’24The key issue of Christ’s divinity, and his being ‘one in Being with the Father’ was settled by vote. The Arians lost and were declared heretics. The Church was sending out a clear message: they were the only means by which one could achieve salvation.
Interestingly, one of the lesser matters that the Council of Nicaea dealt with — alongside what to do with zealots who had castrated themselves — was whether to welcome a strongly ascetic group back to the Church who had proclaimed strongly against Christians whose faith had lapsed, sometimes under torture. This group was known as the Cathars, or pure ones, from the Greek katharoi. Although this sect was not dualist and almost certainly had nothing to do with the mediaeval Cathars,25 it is tempting to see their fate as an ominous precursor of what was to come: the Nicaean Cathars were denounced and declared heretics, and the cult died out altogether in the fifth century.
Manichaeism and Other Dualist Heresies
Although the religious ferment in the early centuries of the common era produced a welter of groups whose positions in relation to orthodoxy were to be defined, whether they liked it or not, by the Council of Nicaea, one new religion emerged during this time which was subsequently to put the Church into veritable palpitations at its very mention: Manichaeism. Manichaeism was founded by the Persian prophet Mani (216—275), who was brought up in Babylon as an Elchasaite, a Jewish-Christian sect which was, interestingly, also known as katharoi. After a series of revelations, Mani attempted to reform the Elchasaites, but was denounced and thrown out. Undeterred, he began a vigorous missionary campaign with three former Elchasaites (one of whom was his father) to proselytise what Mani called the Religion of Light. Mani claimed that he was of the same tradition as Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus, but that these earlier masters had not revealed the whole truth, the revelation of which was his mission and his alone. Mani’s doctrine was formulated to appeal to as many people as possible; it was, in effect, a cut-and-paste religion — taking ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism — whose aim was to unite and save humanity in one overarching faith. There were two distinct classes of Manichaean, the Elect and the Listeners. The Elect were the faith’s priesthood, and practised strict asceticism, abstaining from meat, wine, blasphemy and sex. The Listeners — the rank and file believers of Mani’s church — were also expected to observe certain rules, including contributing to the upkeep of the elect, and, while they were allowed to own property and marry, they were forbidden to have children. While Mani’s system is too complicated to go into here at length, it should be noted that Manichaeism is radically dualist, denying the validity of baptism, holding that Christ did not suffer on the cross, rejecting the body as irredeemable and maintaining that the evil principle is the equal of the good.
To the Church, Manichaeism was the deadliest of heresies, even worse than Marcionism. It enjoyed widespread popularity, and St Augustine of Hippo was a Listener of the sect for nine years. When the preaching of St Ambrose and an epiphany in a garden in Milan turned Augustine toward Christianity in 386, he denounced Manichaeism in De Manichaeis and De Heresibus, which were to become the Church’s standard reference books on all matters heretical, and were frequently used in order to identify suspected heretics when the Great Heresy began to emerge in the west from the end of the tenth century onwards. To Augustine, his former faith was a perversion of the truth of the Gospels, its missionaries and priests deceitful and cunning.
With Augustine its most vocal and authoritative opponent, Manichaeism began to go into decline. As early as 372, Manichaeans were forbidden from congregating, and the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great (379—95) — who made Christianity the state religion in 380 — passed legislation against them. The fifth and sixth centuries saw a concerted effort by Rome to wipe out Mani’s followers, while similar measures were enacted in the Byzantine Empire. Early in his reign, the Byzantine emperor, Justinian the Great (527—65) introduced the death penalty for Manichaeans, the favoured method of despatching adherents of the Religion of Light being by burning. So effective was the persecution under Justinian that, by the time of his death in 565, Manichaeism had been effectively wiped out altogether in the west. The Church was tightening its
Manichaeism might have been extinguished from Europe, but the name lived on as a byword for dualist, heretic or merely a political opponent. (Indeed, the word ‘maniac’ derives from a derogatory term for Manichaean.) Heresy moved east and Armenia, despite being the first Christian nation, was fast becoming a hotbed of heresy courtesy of refugees fleeing from persecution in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere. Two new dualist heresies emerged to take the place of Manichaeism: Massalianism and Paulicianism. The Massalians, who were also known as the Enthusiasts (from the Greek enthousiasmos, which comes from the word entheos, ‘having the God within’) were originally from north-east Mesopotamia, where they are thought to have originated in the late fourth century. As early as 447, Massalianism was already perceived as the biggest heretical threat in Armenia, and the Armenian church introduced measures against its followers. Their main tenet of faith seems to have been the belief that inside every person dwells a demon, who must be banished through a life of prayer (the name ‘massalian’ means ‘praying people’) and asceticism. Once the demon had been banished, the possibility of further sinning was deemed impossible and the believer could return to secular life. As a consequence, the Massalians were frequently accused of immorality and licentiousness. Their missionaries frequently targeted monasteries; any house suspected of being infected with their heresy risked being burnt to the ground.
The Paulicians were first noted in sixth-century Armenia. Whether the Manichaeans influenced them is debatable, as the Paulicians did not divide their number into Elect and Listeners, as the Manichaeans had done, and neither were they particularly ascetic. The exact date at which the Paulicians became dualists — they seem originally to have been Adoptionists, who believed that Christ was born human and did not become divine until his baptism — is likewise debatable, and it may not have happened until the ninth century.27 In a further deviation from Manichaeism, the Paulicians were fighters to be reckoned with. As the Cathars were pacifists, the Paulicians’ military prowess was something of an anomaly. Seven Paulician churches were founded in Armenia and Asia Minor, whose mother church at Corinth was supposedly founded by St Paul, after whom the sect was named.
The Bogomils
As the long night of the Dark Ages descended over Europe, the Church faced threats from two different sources: the rise of the new religion of Islam, which began to make rapid inroads into Christian kingdoms from the early eighth century, and the waves of nomadic invasions that began with the Huns in the fourth century. The Church’s position was further weakened by its constant struggles with the eastern Orthodox church, a situation that worsened until the dramatic schism of 1054 rent the eastern and western churches permanently asunder. The Balkans, falling midway between Rome and Constantinople, became a theological battleground, serving as home to numerous heterodox sects as much as Armenia had done a century or two before.
The decisive development that paved the way for the Cathars’ great predecessors, the Bogomils, was the establishment of the first Bulgarian empire (681—1118). Bulgaria immediately proved to be a thorn in Constantinople’s side, and the fact that it was pagan only exacerbated matters. In order to create a bulwark against Bulgaria, colonists from the Byzantine empire’s eastern edges were forcibly resettled in Thrace — an area roughly comprising north-eastern Greece, southern Bulgaria and European Turkey. Unfortunately, amongst those being repatriated were the Paulicians. Introducing heretics into an area that bordered on a pagan kingdom was simply asking for trouble, and trouble is precisely what Constantinople was to get.28
No one knows precisely where the Bogomils came from. They were first recorded during the reign of the Bulgarian tsar Peter (927—69), who was forced to write twice during the 940s to the patriarch of Constantinople, Theophylact Lecapenus, asking for help against the new heresy. Theophylact was known to be a man more at home in the stable than the cathedral, but he did have time enough to declare Bogomilism a mixture of Manichaeism and Paulicianism. A serious riding accident prevented him from giving Peter more help, and the new dualist faith continued to grow at an alarming rate, so much so that a Bulgarian priest known as Cosmas was forced to denounce the new sect in his Sermon Against the Heretics, which was written at the very end of Peter’s reign (it was certainly completed by 972).
Cosmas writes that the sect was founded by a priest named Bogomil, but there is both controversy over what his name means and whether it was his real name at all. Some interpret Bogomil as meaning ‘beloved of God’, while others opt for ‘worthy of God’s mercy’ and ‘one who entreats God’. Cosmas describes the Bogomils as rejecting the Old Testament and Church sacraments; the only prayer they used was the Lord’s Prayer. They did not venerate icons or relics, while the cross was denounced as the instrument of Christ’s torture. The Church itself was seen as being in league with the devil, whom the Bogomils regarded as not only the creator of the visible world, but also as Christ’s brother. Their priests were strict ascetics, and they abstained from meat, wine and marriage. The Bogomils were — at least initially — mitigated dualists, regarding the devil as a fallen angel who was inferior to God. They knew the scriptures inside out, but what puzzled Cosmas was the way in which they interpreted them. For instance, in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11—32), they saw the elder, stay-at-home, son as being Christ, while the younger, prodigal, son was Satan. The
Bogomil take on the Crucifixion was Docetic.
The Bogomil church was divided into two main classes, the Perfect and the Believers, similar to the Manichaean Elect and Listeners, although the Bogomils apparently did have a Listener class as well, who were below the Believers. According to the monk Euthymius of Constantinople, who was writing in about 1050, the Bogomil Listener became a Believer by way of a baptism that included placing the gospel on the initiate’s head, while the actual baptism itself was done not by water, but by the laying-on of hands. As far as Euthymius was concerned, this erased the Christian baptism, and put the new Believer firmly under the sway of the Evil One.
The road from Believer to Perfect was a long and arduous one, with intensive teachings, ascetic practices and study, which took two years or more to complete. The ceremony in which a Believer became a Perfect was similar to that which made a Listener a Believer, and was known as the consolamentum (the consoling), or baptisma. For Euthymius, it was ‘whole heresy and madness’ and ‘unholy service to the devil and his mysteries’,29 yet the Bogomils regarded themselves as being the heirs to true, apostolic Christianity. Modelling themselves on Christ and the Apostles, Bogomil leaders had 12 disciples and lived lives of simplicity and poverty, in reaction to what they saw as the irredeemable corruption and false teachings of the Church.
What further worried Euthymius was that the Bogomils seemed to be a fully developed counter-church, one whose missionaries were active in spreading the word of the heretical faith. How, when and where the Bogomils organised is still a matter of debate, but it seems that, right from the time when they were noted during Tsar Peter’s reign, they were already a distinct group, with their own teachings. Again, whether they were influenced by the Paulicians, Manichaeism or Zoroastrianism is a matter of conjecture. Amongst the Bogomils whose names have survived are Jeremiah (thought by some to be the pseudonym of Bogomil himself), who wrote the widely circulated tract The Legend of the Cross, and two extremely obscure individuals called Sydor Fryazin and Jacob Tsentsal, who brought heretical books with them into Bulgaria. Interestingly, both men were described as being Franks (the name ‘Fryazin’ means ‘Frank’), which raises the possibility that there were heretical groups active in the west around the time that Bogomilism first became known. In Asia Minor, John Tzurillas and Raheas were active Bogomil proselytisers during the eleventh century who, like the Massalians before them, specialised in infiltrating monasteries.
Perhaps the most notable Bogomil after the movement’s founder was the heresiarch Basil the Physician, who was active in the latter part of the eleventh century. It is said that his ministry lasted for 52 years before he was unmasked during the anti-heretical campaigns of the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus (1081—1118). Heresy was much on the emperor’s mind by the late eleventh century: northern Thrace in particular had become an epicentre of Paulicianism, and Alexius resolved to bring its followers back into the fold of orthodoxy by whatever means necessary. This resulted in a number of armed confrontations with the Paulicians, whose reputation for being fierce warriors preceded them. Sometimes, though, the means by which the heretics were brought back to the fold took the form of protracted debates in which the emperor indulged his enthusiasm for religious disputation. Such a dispute duly occurred sometime around the year 1100, with Basil being invited to the palace to explain his faith to Alexius and his brother Isaac. Basil duly outlined the main tenets of Bogomilism, before Alexius drew aside a curtain to reveal a stenographer who had transcribed Basil’s testimony verbatim. The heresiarch was placed under house arrest in order that Alexius could try to win him back to the Church, but Basil refused to recant. During their talks, the house was afflicted with Fortean phenomena: it was subject to a rain of stones and an earthquake. Alexius’s daughter, the historian Anna, took this as a sign that the devil was angry that his secrets were being revealed and that his children — the Bogomils — were being persecuted. Still refusing to recant, Basil was burnt at the stake.
Despite Alexius’s efforts, the Bogomils continued to preach and win new converts, and the persecution against them in Byzantium would have almost certainly driven some of them west. In doing do, the Bogomils seemed to be fulfilling an old Persian prophecy, which stated that, on the 1,500th anniversary of Zoroaster’s death — which was interpreted as being the year 928 — Zoroastrianism would be restored. While the matter of the Good Religion’s influence on the Bogomils is conjectural, the two religions did share one thing in common: Dualism, and by 928, Bogomil and his followers were starting their mission. As the twelfth century dawned, the prophecy seemed to have been well and truly fulfilled.
World History
