Chapter 61. The Dualist Dissent: Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars

Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries the eastern and western churches faced a run of movements that taught that the visible world was the work of an evil or lesser power, not of the good God. The Byzantine and Latin authorities called them all “Manichaeans” and treated them as the most dangerous of heresies. The library’s sources follow these movements as a chain: the Paulicians of Armenia and Asia Minor, the Bogomils of Bulgaria, Byzantium and Bosnia, and the Cathars of Languedoc and Lombardy. They disagree about how far the links in that chain were real. This chapter sets out the chain, the doctrine the Cathars held as reconstructed by Andrew Phillip Smith, Ioan Petru Culianu’s structural analysis, the Romanian folk-literature evidence studied by Nicolae Cartojan, and the war that destroyed Catharism in southern France, with the very different death tolls and verdicts the sources give.

The Paulicians: a warrior dualism on the Byzantine frontier

Smith dates the first Paulician religious leader to the seventh century: Constantine of Mananalis, who took the title didaskalos. Smith follows Yuri Stoyanov in giving him more weight than Peter of Sicily’s story of a Manichaean woman, Callinice, whose two sons spread her faith in eastern Anatolia. Smith calls that story “the frayed and slender thread that connects the Manichaeans to the Cathars” [Smith, The Lost Teachings of the Cathars, #64742, ch. 10 “The Paulicians”]. Smith says the Paulicians believed in two principles, good and evil, “or light and night”. They held the devil to be the demiurge and denied that Jesus had a material body; Mary was “merely a conduit”. They rejected marriage, the Mosaic law, the Old Testament, transubstantiation, baptism and the cross. They also rejected Peter as a false apostle, and Smith sees a possible Marcionite inheritance in their reduced canon [Smith, #64742, ch. 10]. “Unusually for Gnostics,” he writes, “the Paulicians were warriors”; during the First Crusade Paulician soldiers fought on the side of Islam, and crusaders on their way east burned a Paulician town in Macedonia [Smith, #64742, ch. 10].

Culianu gives the Byzantine side of the story in detail. The Paulicians were persecuted from the reign of the Empress Irene (797-802) to that of the Emperor Theophilus (829-842), and Culianu notes that “a reliable source” gives the year of one leader’s death as 835. After terrorist actions at Neocaesarea brought persecution on them, the Paulicians fled into Muslim territory, to the emir of Melitene, “who gives them the village of Argaoun”. After that, Culianu writes, the joint raids of Paulicians and Muslims became still more powerful [Culianu, Gnozele dualiste ale Occidentului, #44080, “Fragmente”, Paulicians]. Smith adds that the Paulicians allied with the Iconoclasts while Iconoclasm had imperial support, and were persecuted again when the Iconoclasts lost influence. He also records that the empire resettled some of them in Philippopolis in Thrace in 757, to repopulate a city emptied by plague [Smith, #64742, ch. 10]. This transfer to the Balkans is the point at which the eastern dualism meets the Slavic world.

Bogomil: the priest, the protest and Satanail

The Bulgarian movement takes its name from a priest called Bogomil. Lucian Blaga’s editorial gloss on the character BOGUMIL in Meșterul Manole sums up the Romanian scholarly view of him. He was the “presumed founder of a Christian sect that appeared in Bulgaria at the beginning of the tenth century as a protest against the feudalisation of the country”. His teaching spread “under the name of Bogomilism in Serbia, Byzantium, Bosnia etc.” His followers “believed in a dualism of good and evil, according to which Satanail created the world in its materiality, while God gave it the spirit, so that both principles are embodied in man”. The gloss adds that the sect’s ritual and church structure were very simple and widespread among the peasant masses, and that in Romania its influence shows in folklore [Blaga, Meșterul Manole, #19717, note “BOGUMIL”]. In the play itself Blaga’s Bogumil asks: “And what if in eternity the good God and the fierce Satanail are brothers?” [Blaga, #19717, “Manole”].

Smith notes that the name means “friend” or “beloved of God”, so it may have been a title rather than a personal name. He describes three Bogomil classes (Perfects or theotokoi, Believers and Listeners) and a two-stage initiation in which the Gospel of John was laid on the candidate’s head. After it the Perfect was bound to celibacy, to avoid all food “which derived from intercourse”, and to fast. In the Bogomil myth the angel Satanel rebels, loses the divine suffix -el and becomes Satan, who is identified with the God of the Old Testament; “both Jesus and the devil are considered, by some of the Bogomils, to be sons of God and therefore brothers” [Smith, #64742, ch. 10 “The Bogomil connection”]. Smith cites the priest Cosmas, author of the earliest extensive account of the Bogomils, for the polemical claim that they spat and turned away from children of baptismal age. He notes that such polemic is hard to verify [Smith, #64742, ch. 10].

Repression in Byzantium and the Balkan afterlife

Cartojan writes that the heresy was growing in the Balkans in the twelfth century, “when the Orthodox Church opens the struggle against it”: “in the year 1111 Alexios Komnenos begins the extermination of Bogomilism in the Byzantine empire by burning at the stake, in the hippodrome of Constantinople, the leader of the sect, the physician Basil, and his 12 apostles.” Cartojan then follows the heresy into Serbia, which it had entered early [Cartojan, Cărțile populare în literatura românească, vol. I, #46475, Bogomil chapter]. The sources give different dates. Smith tells the story through Anna Komnene’s tradition: Alexios and his brother Isaac pretended interest and had Basil’s teaching taken down by a stenographer hidden behind a curtain. The theologian Euthymius Zigabenus then interrogated him, “a foreshadowing of the Inquisition”, and Basil, refusing to recant, “was burnt in around 1100” [Smith, #64742, ch. 10]. The reference shelf dates Basil’s death to “c. 1111 or c. 1118” [Wikipedia: Basil the Physician]. Cartojan’s year is therefore one of several in circulation. According to Smith, the Bulgarian tsar anathematised and expelled the Bogomils in 1360 under Orthodox pressure, and Bogomilism collapsed with the Bulgarian Empire, although “the very last Bogomils are said to have been recorded in Bosnia in 1867” [Smith, #64742, ch. 10].

Cartojan’s main concern is the Bogomil apocrypha, the popular books long credited to the sect. He reports that B. P. Hasdeu classed a group of Slavonic texts as “Bogomil texts”. He then sets against this the objections of Prohaska, who argued that “the whole spirit of this sect” was against such fables. Cartojan adds that the apocrypha attributed to the Bogomils contain ideas that “come into evident contradiction with the fundamental dogmas of Bogomil beliefs”, and that “even the Bulgarian scholars have now abandoned the old point of view” [Cartojan, #46475, vol. I, Bogomil chapter]. The Romanian folk literature thus keeps dualist motifs, but whether the sect wrote it is disputed.

The road west: Philippopolis, crusaders and a bishop

Smith regards the Bogomil-Cathar link as “solid ground”. Both groups used only the Lord’s Prayer, rejected the cross, marriage and meat, called themselves Good Christians, allegorised the New Testament and used the Bogomil Secret Supper (Interrogatio Iohannis). Both also held Enoch to be a prophet of Satan [Smith, #64742, ch. 10]. He cites Anselm of Alessandria’s account of how the heresy came west: Frenchmen who had gone to Constantinople “intending to conquer the land” met merchants who had brought Bogomilism back from Bulgaria, “and the French took the heresy, along with a bishop, back to the Languedoc with them”. In Philippopolis, Smith adds, “Paulicians and Bogomils existed in the same city”; Anna Komnene claimed in 1114 that all its inhabitants were heretics [Smith, #64742, ch. 10 “Melting pots of ideas”]. In 1167 a Bogomil bishop, Papa Nicetas, came to Saint-Félix in Languedoc and reorganised the Cathar bishoprics, renewing an ordo that had been corrupted by a bishop who broke his vows [Smith, #64742, ch. 1]. Smith also records evidence that complicates this account: the earliest Cathars appear in the Rhineland and northern France, and those at Cologne already had a bishop [Smith, #64742, ch. 10].

Culianu’s typology and the “enigma of Catharism”

Culianu groups these movements under a single structural heading, “the dualisms of the West”, which directly or indirectly affected the religious and social history of the West. He separates their doctrine of “antecedent sin” from the Augustinian doctrine of original sin [Culianu, #44080, “Fragmente”, §4]. On the Bosnian question he writes: “If the Bosnians had been radicals in the twelfth century, the enigma of Catharism would have been solved. Since this is not the case, the enigma will continue to exist.” He divides the Cathars into two groups: “one which is purely and simply Bogomil, and another which preaches a radical dualism of intellectual origin, arising from a combination of late Origenism and Manichaeism, in unequal proportions (Manichaeism is present only in the doctrine of the two kingdoms)” [Culianu, #44080, “Fragmente”, Bosnians and Cathars]. Culianu therefore does not trace a single line of descent. He sees a mitigated dualism of Bogomil type alongside an absolute dualism rebuilt from learned sources.

Cathar teaching from the inside

Smith opens his book with an apocryphal saying of Jesus: “The world is a bridge. Pass over it, but build no house upon it.” He notes that logion 42 of the Gospel of Thomas echoes it, “Become passers-by”, and comments: “If the world is a bridge, then the Cathars crossed over it leaving very little behind” [Smith, #64742, Foreword]. According to Smith, the people of Languedoc said of the Perfects, “They save souls, they do not eat meat, they do not touch women” [Smith, #64742, ch. 1]. He gives the opening of the consolamentum: “Bless us; have mercy upon us. Amen. Let it be done unto us according to Thy word. May the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit forgive all your sins.” This was said three times, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and the prologue of John [Smith, #64742, ch. 6]. The reference shelf adds that the consolamentum was usually received near death and was sometimes followed by the endura fast. It reports the church’s charge that recovering recipients were smothered, and notes that there is “little evidence that it was common practice” [Wikipedia: Albigensian Crusade].

The Vatican-sourced volume presents the same doctrine as socially destructive, following the Italian historian Rino Cammilleri. It derives Catharism from “the Armenian Paulicians and Bulgarian Bogomils”. It states that Cathars held procreation “the gravest sin” and “permitted any form of intercourse, even the most perverse, so long as it was not fecund”, that the endura was “suicide by starvation”, that “mothers were reported to have starved their children to death”, and that doctors were seen “as enemies of the human race” [Unknown, Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 4 “Paradoxes of the Inquisition”]. On this reading, “the Inquisition was established to combat such heresy in a peaceful and orderly manner”, and, following Cammilleri, “kings and princes fought against the Cathars before the Inquisition was established” [Unknown, Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 4]. Tricia McCannon, writing from an esoteric-feminist position, credits the Cathars with a lasting popular effect. She argues that a “growing suspicion among the populace that the myths about the Garden of Eden, the fall of humankind, original sin, and the virgin birth were untrue” “may have been sparked by the teachings of the Cathars, whose name means ‘the pure ones'”, who, “like the Gnostics”, believed this world was ruled by a lesser power [McCannon, Return of the Divine Sophia, #62332, ch. 23].

From mission to crusade: Castelnau, Innocent III and Béziers

Smith describes the attempt at persuasion that came before the war. Bernard of Clairvaux preached in Languedoc in 1145 and read “the little foxes” of the Song of Songs as the Cathars. Dominic Guzmán, travelling with Bishop Diego of Osma from 1207, went barefoot and begged in order “to out-Cathar the Cathars” [Smith, #64742, ch. 1 “The Dominicans and the road to crusade”]. On 13 January 1208 the legate Peter of Castelnau was murdered beside the Rhône. “Innocent III was convinced that Raymond VI of Toulouse was behind the killing”, and on 10 March 1208 he called for a crusade against Christians “in the heart of Christendom” [Smith, #64742, ch. 1]. The Vatican volume states without qualification that Castelnau “was murdered due to the influence of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse”, that the crusade was named “for the city of Albi, the center of Catharism”, and that it lasted “two decades (1209-1229), ending in victory for the Christians” [Unknown, Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 4]. The reference shelf records the opposing contemporary view: William of Tudela blamed “an evil-hearted squire hoping to win the Count’s approval” [Wikipedia: Albigensian Crusade]. Brenda Ralph Lewis writes that Innocent “lost patience with the diplomatic approach”. She describes Raymond as seeing in the crusade “a chance to convince the Pope of his Catholic credentials”, and he did submit to being scourged on 18 June 1209 [Lewis, Dark History of the Popes, #62536, “Genocide: The Cathars, Part I”; Smith, #64742, ch. 1].

Béziers fell on 22 July 1209, the feast of Mary Magdalene. Helen Ellerbe writes that when the legate Arnaud was asked how to tell Catholic from Cathar, “he replied, ‘Kill them all, for God knows his own!'” She adds that “not a child was spared” and quotes a historian: “even the dead were not safe from dishonor, and the worst humiliations were heaped upon women”. By her account the papal legates reported 20,000 dead and other chroniclers 60,000 to 100,000, and “the Albigensian crusade killed an estimated one million people, not only Cathars but much of the population of southern France” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch. 5, nn. 77-79]. Smith counts 222 Cathars in a town of over 10,000, says Amaury was only “reputed” to have spoken the words, and estimates the toll at “possibly around 15,000” [Smith, #64742, ch. 1 “The butchering of Béziers”]. The reference shelf quotes the legates’ letter (“almost 20,000 people”), cites Strayer’s doubt that Amalric said the phrase, and gives an overall figure of “at least 200,000 Cathars killed”. It also notes that some scholars, including Raphael Lemkin, consider the crusade a genocide [Wikipedia: Albigensian Crusade]. Lewis’s chapter title, “Genocide: The Cathars”, takes the same position [Lewis, #62536].

Esoteric readings and the end of organised Catharism

The conspiracy literature links the dualists to the Templars. Nesta Webster writes that “the Dualist doctrines attributed to the Templars were not, however, confined to this Order in Europe, but had been… those professed by the Bogomils and also by the Luciferians”. She describes the Luciferians as worshipping Lucifer as creator of the material world [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, Part I]. Smith records the Templars’ sheltering of Cathars in Languedoc, Cathar burials on Templar ground, and the Cathar family of Grand Master Bertrand de Blancfort [Smith, #64742, ch. 1 “Crush the Templars”]. Grail, Priory of Sion and Merovingian theories built on these links are taken up in Part 11.

The military phase ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1229 [Wikipedia: Albigensian Crusade]. Lewis records that Raymond VII was publicly whipped in penance on the day it was signed, as his father had been at the crusade’s start [Lewis, #62536, “Genocide: The Cathars, Part I”]. The last organised stronghold, Montségur, fell after a siege. The Vatican volume dates its capitulation to 1242, while the reference shelf and Smith’s chapter “Thermopylae of the Gnostic Spirit” date it to 1244, Smith records the surrender on 2 March 1244, and on 16 March “225 Perfects were burnt to death on a pyre” at the foot of the rock [Unknown, Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 4; Wikipedia: Albigensian Crusade; Smith, #64742, ch. 8 “A murderous pyre”]. What remained of Catharism was then left to the Inquisition, the subject of the next chapter.

Key points

• Smith and Culianu trace a dualist chain from the Paulicians (persecuted 797-842; flight to the emir of Melitene and the village of Argaoun) through the Bogomils to the Cathars. Culianu leaves the “enigma of Catharism” unsolved.
• Blaga presents Bogomilism as a tenth-century Bulgarian protest against feudalisation, in which Satanail made the material world and God gave the spirit.
• The sources date Basil the Physician’s burning differently: Cartojan gives 1111, Smith c. 1100, and the reference shelf c. 1111 or c. 1118. Cartojan reports the scholarly retreat from crediting the Bogomils with the apocrypha.
• Smith documents the transmission west through Philippopolis, crusaders bringing back “the heresy, along with a bishop”, and Nicetas at Saint-Félix (1167).
• Culianu divides the Cathars into a Bogomil (mitigated) group and a radical dualism derived from late Origenism and Manichaeism.
• The Béziers toll ranges from c. 15,000 (Smith) through 20,000 (the legates) to 60,000-100,000 (chroniclers cited by Ellerbe). For the whole crusade, Ellerbe gives one million and the reference shelf at least 200,000 Cathars.
• The Vatican-sourced volume calls the crusade a victory and the Inquisition a “peaceful and orderly” remedy, while Lewis and Lemkin speak of genocide.
• Webster’s claim that Templar dualism was Bogomil doctrine opens the esoteric reading developed in Part 11.