But while the Paulicians thought of themselves as true Christians, the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Empire thought otherwise. Constantine of Manalis was eventually executed for heresy on the orders of Emperor Constantine IV (AD 668 – 685). Historians believe it most likely he was burnt at the stake, although the Paulicians themselves put about a story that he was stoned to death. It has been suggested that this was probably ‘to draw a parallel between their first martyr and the first Christian martyr Stephen’.21
The second Paulician didaskalos, who took the name Titus, was also executed for heresy, this time definitely by burning.22
During the eighth century the Paulicians enjoyed long periods of official tolerance, although John of Otzun, who became catholicos of Armenia in AD 717, described them as ‘that most wicked sect of obscene men who are called Paulicians.’23 What he objected to most was that they scorned the established clergy as ‘idolaters’ because of their ‘worship of the cross.’24 But he does not seem to have had the secular support to do anything about this.
It was not until the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael I (811 – 813) that the death penalty was reimposed for followers of the Paulician faith,25 There then followed a period of massive imperial persecution in which, according to the official chroniclers 100,000 of the heretics were killed26 – a scale of slaughter fully comparable with the holocaust of the Languedoc Cathars 400 years later. In the 840s, in response to the continuing persecutions, a faction of the Paulicians, including a fighting group 5,000 strong, retreated into Arab territories. By the 850s they had established their own independent mini-state based around the fortress city of Tefrice on the Byzantine frontier. It was to the court of the Paulician leader Chrysocheir at Tefrice that Peter of Sicily came on his embassy of 869 – 70. Two years later Chrysocheir was killed in battle with Byzantine forces and Tefrice finally surrendered in 878. 27
This was a setback, but certainly not the end of the Paulicians. Around 975 they were still causing enough trouble in the Byzantine Empire for the Church to insist that large numbers of them be deported from the Eastern provinces. They were sent to the Balkans, where there was already a long-established Paulician community28 and where the pop Bogomil had begun to spread his own heresy only a few years previously. The Paulicians almost certainly bequeathed to the Bogomils their belief in the state of opposition of the material and spiritual realms – of the God of Evil and the God of Good. Moreover the Paulicians identified this very aspect of their beliefsystem as the chief factor that distinguished them from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. They told Peter of Sicily: We say the heavenly father is one God who has no power in this world, but who has power in the world to come, and that there is another God who made the world and who has power over the present world. The Romans confess that the heavenly father and the creator of all the world are one and the same God .29
This doctrine of the two opposed Gods is precisely the position of the Bogomils and the Cathars. And they also shared with the Paulicians a view of the cosmos as a battleground between good and evil with the fate of humanity as its fulcrum.30
In other respects, however, there was much less of a resemblance. Most prominently, although they attributed the creation of the world and all material things to the God of Evil, the Paulicians did not practice any form of asceticism, were not vegetarians, and placed no special value on chastity and abstinence. They were also men of violence who often found themselves in battle and who were widely recognised by others as formidable warriors.31 In this sense we might regard them as an entire community of that grade of neophytes whom the Cathars called credentes (‘believers’) who were free to fight, marry and make love as they wished, to eat and to drink, and generally to live in the world and to affirm it. Consistent with this it seems that the Paulicians did not make use of any initiation ceremony and thus had no class of initiated adepts or perfecti as the Cathars and Bogomils did.32
The Praying People and the demon in the soul
Although there can be little doubt that the Paulicians were amongst the important influences on the emergence of the Bogomils, the differences between the two religions make it clear that other factors must also have been in play.
As one of these factors, and the next main link in the chain of transmission, Steven Runciman proposes a sect known as the Messalians (literally the ‘Praying People’).33 They were Christian Gnostics34 whose origins can be traced back to the city of Edessa in the mid-fourth century AD and who survived in coherent form until late enough in the seventh century to overlap with Constantine of Mananalis and the first Paulicians.35 They were said to have been the keepers of a secret tradition and of secret books which Runciman presumes to have been ‘heterodox Gnostic legends.’36 He argues that the riches of this esoteric literary tradition reached the Bogomils directly from communities of Messalians who survived in the Balkans beyond the seventh century and indeed until as late as the 11th century.
Runciman sees Bogomilism as a combination of Paulician and Messalian doctrines – ‘a new Christianity … based on early Christian legend and Eastern Dualism.’37 Probably the influence of Paulicianism came first: … but as time went on the new faith developed; the heretics came into touch with the Messalians, who gave them access to all the wealth of the Orientalised Gnostic tradition …38 The Bogomils … largely owed their mythology to these books that medieval Byzantium had inherited from the Christians of the first few centuries, when Christian doctrine was still imperfectly circumscribed and Gnostic tendencies were rife.39
Naturally in this contentious field, other scholars dispute that the Messalians ever came into contact with the Bogomils at all – on the grounds that the former had ceased to exist before the latter were founded. According to Bernard Hamilton, professor emeritus in crusading history at the University of Nottingham, it is all a matter of mislabelling: There is no evidence that organised Messalianism survived beyond the 7th century, even though the label continued to be used by Byzantine heresiologists to describe excesses in Orthodox monastic practice. There can therefore have been no possibility of contact between the Bogomils and a living Messalian tradition.40
Let's acknowledge these opposing points of view. Still the fact remains that many Orthodox churchmen of the period, highly skilled in exposing heresy, were convinced, like Runciman, that Messalianism was still alive and well in the Balkans as late as the 11th century – and thus did overlap with Bogomilism. The Bogomils themselves were often mislabelled ‘Messalians’, not, we would suggest, because of ignorance on the part of the heresiologists but because the Messalian and Bogomil religions were similar in many ways and do strongly suggest some form of influence of the former on the latter.
The Messalians placed great emphasis on a ritual initiation that created a class of elect or adepts, called the pneumatics, directly comparable to the Cathar perfecti.41 The same term was also used by other sects of Christian Gnostics as early as the first and second centuries AD for their own initiated spiritual elites.42 So there's a sense of the Bogomils standing at one end of the first millennium, the early Christian Gnostics standing at the other, and the Messalians standing roughly in the middle and somehow connected to both ‘ends’.
Other shared characteristics add to this impression. For instance, like the Bogomils (and their offshoot the Cathars), the Messalians rejected the Old Testament and loathed the cross.43 So too did the early Christian Gnostics .44 The Bogomils and the Messalians regarded the world as an evil creation. So too did the Gnostics. And as part of this outlook, very similar creation stories were also told by all three groups. Indeed the Messalian version is a classic ‘moderate dualist’ myth of the kind the Bogomils and the Cathars favoured in their early days before becoming more absolute in their views. As such it does not propose polarised divinities of Good and Evil, one the creator of the spiritual and one of the material realm. Instead the Messalians envisaged the prior existence of a single deity, ‘God the first Principle’, whose domain was entirely spir
itual and good and filled with light. He produced two ‘Sons’ – emanations – of whom the elder was Satan and the younger Christ. Pride and envy caused Satan to rebel against the Father and led to his expulsion from the good and spiritual heaven:45 The material world was his creation after his Fall and as such was a wicked place.46
The Messalians, like the Bogomils after them, and the early Christian Gnostics before them, had a theory to explain how our souls had become trapped in matter. Though similar in general principle and outlook, these theories differ significantly from each other in terms of plot and detail. For the Bogomils, as we've seen in Chapter Three, the idea was that the souls of fallen angels had been encysted in our bodies, or that we carry within us, always seeking a way back to heaven, the spark of divine life breathed by God into the Devil's clumsy ‘Adam’ and his progeny. The Messalians, on the other hand, believed that every soul was possessed by a demon which bound it by force to the wicked material world. The only way to eject the demon and gain release for the imprisoned soul was through extreme asceticism sustained over a period years47 – a regime very similar to the extensive apprenticeships and mortification of the flesh that Bogomil and Cathar neophytes underwent before they could receive the consolamentum and be elevated to perfectus grade.
The Messalians also made use of emotional and dramatic prayer (hence their name ‘Praying People’) to help drive out the demons.48 However they had just one prayer in their repertoire – the Pater Noster (‘Our Father’), also known as the Lord's Prayer.49 Using prayer to drive out demons is not a custom that we find amongst the Bogomils and the Cathars. Nonetheless, like the Messalians, they too, used no other prayer but the Pater Noster. This was because it is the only prayer that the Bible attributes directly to Christ himself.
Described as ‘troop of vagabond preachers’,50 the Messalians first appeared in the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire around AD 350. This was less than 40 years after Constantine the Great had extended his official protection to the Christian Church. It was just 20 years after he had forsaken Rome to establish his new capital of Constantinople on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium (modern Istanbul).
With its principal bishoprics in Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople, the recently-empowered Catholic Church was by this time flexing its muscles, and in a sense defining itself, by the heresies it persecuted. After winning state sponsorship in AD 312 it had almost immediately taken a strong authoritarian and literalist turn (literalist in the sense of interpreting the scriptures in the most literal manner possible). This, inevitably made the rather free-thinking and creative anarchy of the Christian Gnostics, who had previously been allowed to co-exist with the literalists, a target for heresy hunters. In AD 390 the Messalians were condemned and added to the Church's growing list of banned sects, which, as we will see, already included several other much longer-established Christian Gnostic groups.51
Mani, Messenger of Light
The teachings and philosophy of another sect are also an important part of this jigsaw puzzle. Known as Manicheism after its founder Mani, it was younger than some of the Christian Gnostic movements but a century older than the Messalians. It too was viciously persecuted by the Church as a ‘heresy’, rather than as a pagan religion. Yet there is a dispute amongst scholars as to whether Manicheism was Christian in any meaningful sense at all.52 Certainly it was much less ‘Christian’ than the religion of the Bogomils and the Cathars, and that, as we've seen, cannot accurately be described as ‘Christianity’; it was really a completely different faith built up around many of the same New Testament texts and characters.
Perhaps the confusion comes in because Mani sometimes claimed to be the ‘Apostle of Christ’53 (later also one of the titles of the Paulician didaskaloi), and because surviving letters sent between communities of Manicheans in North Africa show that they saw themselves as Christians.54 It is also generally accepted that several of the strong central notions of Christianity, including the idea that there is ‘a redemptive meaning to things’, are found in Manicheism.55
On the other hand there is much in Manicheism that seems to be unmistakably non-Christian. For a start, it was an uncompromisingly dualistic religion in exactly the same way as the religion of the Cathars and Bogomils. It saw the human race, endlessly regenerated by the snare of reproduction, as the creation of an Evil God – an idea that we know Christianity rejects. Similarly, Manicheans made little or no use of New Testament texts. They offered worship to the Sun and the Moon as ‘vessels of the Light’ (in this very unlike the Cathars and the Bogomils). And despite sometimes calling himself the ‘Apostle of Christ’, it is notable that Mani also frequently used the broader term ‘Apostle of God’.56 He meant that he was an emissary or messenger and he placed himself as the successor to Christ at the end of a line of earlier, non-Christian, apostles.
Obviously the Church saw this as heresy. It involved Christ, but clearly devalued the unique quality of his mission by putting him on a par with the founders of well-known pagan religions. One of Mani's own surviving statements on the matter, in his Book for King Shapur (circa AD 250) makes this completely clear: From age to age the Apostles of God did not cease to bring here the wisdom and works of the spirit. Thus in one age their coming was into the countries of India through the Apostle that was the Buddha; into another age, into the land of Persia through Zoroaster; into another, into the land of the West through Jesus. After that, in this last age, this revelation came down, and this prophethood arrived through myself, Mani, the Apostle of the true God, into the land of Babel.57
In this fragment Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus and Mani are given as examples, not as a definitive list, of the apostles of God. In another surviving fragment Mani names two more such messengers: the Greek philosopher Plato (427 – 347 BC), and the Greek deity Hermes.58 In Mani's time the latter, who we will meet again in Part II, was generally equated with Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom.
Meetings with the Twin
Despite the extensive persecution of Manicheism by different regimes in different periods over hundreds of years, some of the details of Mani's biography, and of his claims to a sacred mission, seem to have come down to us fairly reliably.
He was born in or about AD 216 in a village called Mardinu to the south of the city of Ctesiphon near Babylon59 – a location some 32 kilometers southeast of Baghdad in the modern state of Iraq. In Mani's time Ctesiphon enjoyed great wealth, prominence and political power within Persia as the winter capital of the king. It had served this function for the Parthian Empire that ruled from 247 BC until AD 224 (when Mani was about eight years old), and it continued to do so with renewed grandeur under the Sassanian Empire (AD 224 – 642) that succeeded the Parthians.
The Sassanians were decidedly national and Persian in character. Their first king, Ardeshir I (AD 224 – 241) moved rapidly to install the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism as the official religion of the empire and gave enormous powers to its priesthood, the Magi. Living in the neighbourhood of Ctesiphon at this time, therefore, we can be sure that Mani would have been well acquainted with Zoroastrianism – although traditions that he was for some time a Magus himself are unlikely to be true .60 Since the region was a cultural crossroads of the ancient world, a young man like Mani, deeply interested in spiritual matters, would also have been exposed here to a wide range of other potential influences – amongst them Babylonian astrology, Judaism, Buddhism from India, and the philosophy of Greece.61
More directly, it is known that Mani was reared amongst an obscure sect of Jewish Christians called the Elchasaitans62 (considered to have been Gnostics,63 and linked by some scholars with the Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame).64 They were mystics and visionaries with strict purity laws and repetitive rituals that Mani rebelled against. But through them he was exposed to an additional vital influence on his thinking – the teachings of the Christian Gnostics.65 Although later to be persecuted as heresy, these teachings were still in free circulation in t
he first half of the third century and are generally agreed to have had a great impact on the construction of Mani's own distinctively Gnostic religion.66
Secret texts passed down within the Elchasaitans, or within his own family, may also have played a role. In this respect it is interesting that some accounts present Mani as the adopted son of an elderly widow. The story goes that on her death she entrusted him with a precious legacy of four books of sacred knowledge – from which, critics alleged, he derived many of the teachings that he later claimed as his own .67 The content of these books was said to have been gathered in Egypt ‘in the time of the apostles’ by a certain Scythianus who had learned the ‘wisdom of the Egyptians.’68 Scythianus dictated the books to his disciple Terebinthus. In due course Terebinthus brought the books to Babylonia and on his death they passed to his own disciple – the widow who would adopt Mani in her old age.69
Though legends say that he was a sickly child and lame in one leg,70 it seems that Mani grew up in prosperous circumstances.71 Later he would claim that throughout his childhood he had received revelations directly from Ahura Mazda, the ‘Father of the Light’ – the God of Goodness in the Zoroastrian faith.72 He also experienced strange and disturbing visitations of the type normally treated today with powerful anti-psychotic drugs. In one surviving text (the Cologne Mani-Codex) he tells us how he was: … guarded by the might of the Light-angels and the exceedingly strong powers. who had a command from Jesus the Splendour for my safekeeping …73 They nourished me with visions and signs which they made known to me, slight and quite brief, as far as I was able. For sometimes like a flash of lightening he came …74
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