Listening to heretics and heresy hunters
Whatever the personal stance of individual scholars may be on the problem of origins, we've observed a curious phenomenon in reviewing the literature. Very few of the attempts made to trace the history of ideas behind medieval dualism (whether they support or contradict the idea of an ancient tradition) have been willing to pay serious attention to what the dualists themselves – or their opponents in the Church – had to say on the matter.
For example when heresy hunters in Western Europe referred to the Cathars as ‘Manichees’ it is automatically assumed that they must have been mistaken because Manicheism had been suppressed centuries previously.
In the East, Theophylact, patriarch of Constantinople from AD 933 – 956, was one of the first to warn of the stirrings of the heresy that soon become known as Bogomilism (although he did not know of Bogomil by name). Writing to Tsar Peter of Bulgaria he was just as quick as his counterparts in the West to link the heresy to Manicheism (and also to the pre-existing dualist religion known as Paulicianism, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter). ‘Let the leaders and teachers of this ancient heresy which has newly reappeared be anathema,’102 he pronounced firmly at the end of his letter. Yet scholars are reluctant to pursue the possibility that the heresy thus anathematised could have been anywhere near as ‘ancient’ as Theophylact clearly believed.
The same academic scepticism also inhibits research into the implications of the heretics’ own statements about their origins – all of which have come down to us through the work of the heresy hunters and thus seethe with hostile comments and interpretations. As early as 1143 or 1144 for example, when Catharism was first beginning to be recognised in Western Europe, the monk Everwin of Steinfeld (near Cologne in Germany) wrote a worried letter to Bernard of Clairvaux appealing for his assistance in the struggle against the heretics: … who everywhere in almost all churches boil up from the pit of hell as though already their prince were about to be loosed and the day of the Lord were at hand.103
Everwin frankly observed that the heresy was gaining ground because of the apparent piety of its missionaries who possessed: … no house, or lands, or anything of their own, even as Christ had no property nor allowed his disciples the right of possession.104
Equally potent, and apparently extremely convincing, was the heretics’ insistence that theirs was Christ's original Church – the primitive church itself, reawakened after being forced to lie low ‘in Greece and certain other lands … from the time of the martyrs … ’105 Though Evil powers had made every effort to destroy the church of the Good God: We and our fathers of apostolic descent, have continued in the grace of Christ and shall so remain until the end of time.106
Martin Lambert's comment is that one of the reasons the Cathar perfecti were so convincing was because they: … honestly thought that they were the only true Christians, that the clergy were the servants of Satan's Church; and that Cathar teaching presented a stream of pure underground Christianity, often persecuted, but always surviving and reaching back to the days of the apostles.107
Whether they were right or not is another matter, but we know what the heretics believed. They believed that their faith was meant to guide the world. This was what was destined. This had been the plan of the Good God to fetch the lost souls back to heaven and he had sent Christ to earth to set it in motion.
All had proceeded as it should until the reign of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Then, at the very moment when Christianity triumphed over multiple competitors to become the state religion of the Roman Empire, the Devil pulled off his most cunning trick. A clique within the Church that insisted on literal interpretation of the scriptures – rather than the more allegorical approach favoured by Gnostic Christians – seized control and rapidly began to persecute as heretics all those who disagreed with them. Under interrogation the Bogomil evangelist Basil explicitly mentioned the church father John Chrysostom (AD 347 – 407), who is indeed known for his ‘literalist’ views,108 as a ringleader of this clique of early heresy hunters.109
It was such purges between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, said the Cathars and the Bogomils, that had forced their true Church underground. Only now, after the sleep of years, was it was emerging once more from the shadows. In the 10th century it had seemed no more than the rantings of a lone vegetarian in Bulgaria. By the 11th century it had become a cult that had spread throughout the Balkans and to Constantinople. By the mid-12th century it was firmly established in Italy and Occitania and could also claim to have won many followers elsewhere ‘scattered throughout the world’.110
Though the scholars have paid scant attention, it seemed to us that what the heretics were claiming was dynamite – not only that their forefathers in the dualist Church were the true descendants of the apostles but also that an ancient conspiracy had denied them their rightful role in shaping the destiny of the West. Perhaps even more explosive was the way they clearly saw themselves as part of a long-delayed ‘counter-conspiracy’ that had begun in the last 50 years of the first millennium and that had grown steadily, one might almost say remorselessly, in the two centuries that followed.
As we continued to explore the strange phenomenon of medieval heresy we could not shake off the feeling that something ancient and hidden, with a profound purpose for mankind, had briefly shown its face a thousand years ago, tried to change the world, and failed.
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAIN OF THE GREAT HERESY
In its Manichean form Gnosticism was once a real worldwide religion,
i.e. a worldwide and separate Gnostic community or church (ekklesia)
with its many thousands and, later on, even millions of adherents; its
own leader, bishops and priests; its own canonical scriptures; and even
its own very attractive art. Once Manichaeism spread from southern
Mesopotamia as far as the Atlantic in the West and the Pacific in the Far
East. It had its adherents in Egypt, in Roman North Africa, in Spain, Gaul,
Italy and the Balkans, and in the end even in the regions on the South
China Coast. Its history covers the period from the beginning of the
third century to modern times. Even in our century [i.e. the 20th century]
Manichaeism was still forbidden by law in Vietnam.
Johannes Van Oort, Lecturer in the History of Christianity at the Utrecht University1
Christianity in the 21st century is enshrined in the law of many lands, and even where it is not practiced it has worked its way both overtly and subliminally into virtually every sphere of life – marriage patterns, child rearing, education, social and political relationships, ethics, philosophy and so on. Subsumed into Western capitalism, it has also had a huge impact, built up over centuries, on our relationship with the material world.
Consider the account of Creation given in the Old Testament book of Genesis (a text that the Church views as inspired and that fundamentalist Christians to this day teach as fact.)2 The creator is Jehovah, whom the Bogomils and Cathars equated with the Devil. In Chapter One we read how he makes heaven and earth, night and day, the oceans, dry land, grass, herbs, trees, fruit. To fill the oceans: ‘God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly.’ Land animals come next. Then, on the sixth day: ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’ Finally Jehovah invites the first couple to ‘subdue’ the whole earth and gives them: … dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.3
This is a code of subjugation and domination, even if it includes some common-sense ‘replenishing’ as well.4 In the West it set the moral agenda for the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. And even in the secular modern world it continues, through force of ancient habit and in many subtle ways, to underwrite the environmental i
rresponsibility of the big economies and the vast multinational corporations they have spawned.
You can see the effects of the Old Testament's righteous sense of dominion everywhere. The fowl of the air are now battery chickens; many species of those great whales that Jehovah made have been hunted to extinction; fishstocks in the oceans have never been lower; there is a continent-sized hole in the Ozone Layer; and the rainforests of the Amazon – the very lungs of the world – are being logged out or burnt at a terrifying rate to make way for cattle ranches. Of course we do not claim that the Christian Church is solely responsible for all this; but neither should its part in the matter be underestimated. Though fewer and fewer Westerners study the scriptures today, or would claim to be much influenced by them, all the structures, wealth and international power inherited from the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution were built up by people who did.
There are other matters for which the Church and its leaders have been much more completely responsible. In Chapters Six and Seven we will tell the story of the Albigensian Crusades that destroyed the Cathars in the 13th century. No one acquainted with these terrible events could doubt the absolute disregard of the Christian leadership in Europe for the spiritual rights of others or its willingness to use lethal force. The same arrogance and blood-lust also showed themselves in the brutal Crusades between the 11th and the 13th centuries mounted by European Christian armies to recapture the Holy Land.
The faith was therefore only running true to type when it continued to be imposed forcefully by Europeans wherever they went during the Age of Discovery – witness the activities of the Jesuits and other missionaries in Africa, Asia and the Americas, from the 15th century onwards. Indigenous religions and their cultural treasures were systematically demolished and replaced by Christianity – at incalculable cost to the diversity of human ideas. Where this could not be achieved, notably in the disruptive 1,000-year conflict with Islam, massive trauma and lasting damage were inflicted on those societies that would not accept conversion. The suffering, chaos and violence that still continue in the Middle East today result directly from this ancient legacy of pain – and since 11 September 2001 the war has been carried to the West's own front door. In the eyes of Muslim fundamentalists, contemporary Western geopolitics in the Middle East are a continuation of the Crusades by modern means and so must be resisted to the death. The result is a flashpoint, built on a millennium of hatred, that could yet set the whole world in flames.
All in all then it seems reasonable to conclude that established Christianity has been amongst the great determinative forces of history and that the baleful global conditions we confront in the 21st century have much to do with its long-term influence. A moment can be pinpointed when that influence first began to be felt – in the early fourth century AD following the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Emperor Constantine. That was the moment when Christianity first strapped itself to the engine of secular power and (almost immediately, as we shall see) became a persecuting bureaucracy. In its first 300 years, however, it had possessed no unified Church, nor any agreed body of fundamental dogma that it might wish to impose on others, nor the ability to impose it on them. Far from persecuting, Christianity itself had been a despised and persecuted agglomeration of sects with a very wide range of ideas centred around the figure and mission of Christ.
What was smashed?
The heretical churches of the Bogomils and the Cathars that flourished for a few brief centuries in the Middle Ages also centred their ideas around the figure and mission of Christ. How does the impact of their thinking compare with the giant presence and powers of the established Christian Church? The question is asked specifically with reference to their influence on the world stage and their overall importance in the history of mankind.
There are scholars who give what seems to be the obvious answer. They argue that the Bogomil and Cathar movements are best understood as strictly local responses to temporary social and economic circumstances in various parts of Europe between the 10th and the 14th centuries.5 If their view is correct then to know the whole life story of the heresy we need only examine the immediate conditions surrounding its rise and fall. With no past – and of course no future – its place in history would be small and its impact on the development of Western civilisation negligible or nonexistent.
We've seen that other scholars like Hans Soderberg and Sir Steven Runciman oppose this view, arguing that ‘an uninterrupted traditional chain’ connects the Cathars and the Bogomils to the religion known as Christian Gnosticism that flourished in Egypt and the Middle East a thousand years earlier. If they are correct then whatever it was that the Church smashed with the Albigensian Crusades in the 13th century can hardly be described as a short-lived social movement. If the links in the chain can be traced back a thousand years, then doesn't the Cathar phenomenon look much more like a bid for power after a millennium of silence by a parallel persecuted religion, secretive, shadowy, and as old as established Christianity itself?
‘That most wicked sect of obscene men who are called Paulicians …’
Working back from the Cathars, for whom there are no unambiguous reports prior to the mid-12th century, we come to the Bogomils. They are first heard of in the 10th century and survived in some isolated communities in Eastern Europe until the 15th century. Not only did they predate and outlive the Cathars, therefore, but also there is consensus amongst the scholars that Catharism in the West did arise as a direct result of Bogomil missionary activity.
The next link in the proposed ‘chain of the great heresy’ overlaps in time with the Bogomils in a similar way, and again with a significantly earlier origin. The link is formed by a strange and uniquely warlike dualist sect known as the Paulicians. They co-existed with the Bogomils and are thought to have played a significant part in shaping the ideas of the pop Bogomil himself in the 10th century.6
As with most heretical movements, much that we know about them comes from their opponents in the Christian Church. One of these was the monk Peter of Sicily whose History of the Manicheans who are also called Paulicians contains valuable contemporary information on the sect. Peter learned about them at first hand in AD 869 – 70 when Emperor Basil I of Constantinople sent him as an ambassador to the Paulician leader Chrysocheir – who had recently established an independent principality on the Arab-Byzantine frontier.7
As we can see from the title of his tract, Peter assumed that the Paulician religion was merely a disguised form of Manicheism. This is understandable. The Paulicians and the followers of Mani were dualists, exactly like the later Bogomils and Cathars. But the Paulicians’ account of their own origins, which Peter of Sicily also helpfully preserved for us, makes no claim of descent from Mani. Instead it traces the sect's beliefs back to a certain Constantine of Mananalis who had lived in what is now Armenia during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Constans I (AD 641 – 648).8 Constantine of Mananalis, in his turn, is said to have been influenced by a mysterious ‘deacon’ who stayed at his home ‘after returning from prison in Syria’ and gave him a number of books including a ‘Gospel book and a book of the Epistles of St. Paul, on which he … based his teaching.’9
So clearly there must have been something ‘Christian’ about these Paulicians if the teachings of their founder were based on Christian texts. Indeed it turns out that Christ was the central figure in their religion but that just like the Cathars and Bogomils they refused utterly to accept that he had ever been born ‘in the flesh’ or that Mary was his mother.10 Since he did not possess a physical body how could he have had a mother? Like the Cathars and the Bogomils they believed him to have been a non-physical emanation of the God of Good, an emissary from the spiritual realms. 11 Like the Cathars and the Bogomils they rejected the cross and all the material sacraments of established Christianity, as well as the cults of saints and of icons. 12 Like the Cathars and the Bogomils they entirely rejected the Old Testament and did not accept every part of the New Testam
ent. 13 And again like the Cathars and the Bogomils they claimed that theirs was the only true Church, descended directly from the first Christian communities, and that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches were imposters. 14
The supreme leader of the Paulicians, wielding absolute spiritual and secular power, was known as the didaskalos. His followers regarded him, says Peter of Sicily as ‘the apostle of Christ’.15 Constantine of Mananalis in the seventh century was revered as the first didaskalos, but all his successors held the same title and each was considered ‘the authoritative teacher of the Christian revelation in his own generation.’16
Although we do not know the exact date that Constantine of Mananalis began his ministry, historians generally set it around AD 655.17 He acted from the beginning, say historians Janet and Bernard Hamilton, as though he were: … restoring the true Church that had been founded by Saint Paul … Later didaskaloi followed Constantine's example and took the names of Paul's disciples, and also called their churches after places visited by Paul. The implication was that they were restoring the true apostolic Church.18
Understandably these heretics referred to themselves simply as ‘Christians’ (again something they have in common with the Bogomils and the Cathars who likewise called themselves ‘Good Christians’).19 The name Paulicians apparently had nothing to do with their attachment to Saint Paul but came into general usage long after the sect was formed and was bestowed on them by others. It is most plausibly explained as a derivation from the didaskalos Paul, who led the semi-nomadic sect back to Armenia in the eighth century.20
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