The fall of the Paulician free-state of Tephricé synchronizes with the rise of the first Bulgarian Empire, and we can well imagine that the refugees of vanquished Armenia found shelter among their Manichæan co-religionists in the dominions of Czar Simeon, the hero of the Achelous. From this period onwards the Paulician heresy may be said to change its nationality, and to become Sclavonic. According to the Bulgarian national traditions,[14] a certain priest named Bogomil spread the Manichæan doctrines among the subjects of the Bulgarian Czar who succeeded Simeon, Peter Simeonović. A more enlightened criticism will perhaps see in the name ‘Bogomil’ only another instance of that ‘eponymic’ tendency of barbarous minds which refers to individuals events and institutions which have really a more national character. In the same Bulgarian document which professes to give the origin of their name, they are connected with the Massalian heresy; by Harmenopulos and other Byzantine writers they are made almost or quite identical with these same Massalians, and with the Euchites, their Greek equivalent, and there seems to be no reasonable doubt that the name Bogomile is really nothing but a Sclavonic translation of the Greek and Syriac names for the sect. The name of Massalians is derived from a Syriac word, signifying ‘those who pray,’ and the Greek Euchites have of course the same derivation. The Byzantine writer Epiphanius[15] has the credit of giving the right etymology of the word Bogomile, in that he derives it from the Bulgarian words Bog z’milui, signifying ‘God have mercy,’ an etymology which fits in with that peculiar devotion to prayer which was characteristic of the Bogomilian religion, which harmonizes with that of the allied sectaries, the Massalians and Euchites, and which would be still intelligible to all Sclavonic peoples, from the White Sea to the Ægean.
We need not, however, go so far as to deny that the Bogomilian heresy took its characteristic shape under the direction of a Bulgarian heresiarch. The historic existence of the first Bogomilian pope seems sufficiently attested,[16] but the Bulgarian traditions name him indifferently Jeremias and Bogomil, and it is quite possible that the latter name was added at a later time by a confusion with the Sclavonic homonym for Massalians and Euchites.
Through all the varying phases of Bulgarian history the Bogomiles, as these Sclavonic Manichæans are now known, hold their own. It seems certain that the Bulgarian Czars, in their struggle with Byzantium, did not wish to alienate a powerful party at home, and we hear occasionally ominous whispers that Bulgarian Emperors themselves leaned towards the doctrine of the Two Principles.[17] The Bulgarian heresy was perpetually fed from its Oriental sources by new Byzantine transplantations, and in the tenth century the Emperor John Zimisces did much for the propagation of Gnosticism among the Sclaves by transporting a more powerful colony of Armenians than any that had gone before ‘from the Chalybian hills to the valleys of Mount Hæmus.’ It is now that the Bogomilian heresy begins to spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, among the kindred Serbian tribes to the west. Bulgaria, earlier civilized from her closer contact with Byzantium, was exercising during these centuries a predominating influence over the less cultured Serbs. From the Bulgarian missionaries Serbia first received the seeds of her orthodox Christianity, and there can be no doubt that proselytism was at work on the Manichæan side as well. Add to this that a large part of Serbia fell at different times under the Bulgarian dominion.
By the end of the tenth century the Bogomiles have taken firm root among the Serbs. In the legend of the Serbian prince, St. Vladimir,[18] one of his highest merits is that he was the zealous enemy of the Bogomiles. St. Vladimir certainly included in his dominions parts of what is now the Herzegovina, and, according to some accounts, Bosnia as well.
The events which now follow must have largely increased the number of Manichæans in these and the other Serbian lands. Basil, ‘the slayer of the Bulgarians,’ at the beginning of the eleventh century, finally overthrew the first Bulgarian Empire. Towards the end of the same century the Bulgarian heretics, now under Byzantine rule, were hunted down by the orthodox Emperor. The Princess Anna Comnena[19] has left us an account of the persecution of the Bogomiles by her father Alexius. The Byzantine princess unblushingly relates the trap which the Emperor condescended to set for the chief apostle of the sect, at that time a certain Basil; how he artfully led on the heresiarch by holding out hopes of conversion; how he invited him to the imperial table, and in his closet wormed out of him the secrets of his sect; and then, suddenly throwing aside the arras on the wall, revealed the scribe who had taken down the confession of his heresy, and beckoned to his apparitors to throw his victim into irons. The account which Anna Comnena gives of this sect is valuable in spite of its scurrility. The princess calls the Bogomiles ‘a mixture of Manichees and Massalians.’ She laughs at their uncombed hair, their low origin,[20] and their long faces, ‘which they hide to the nose, and walk bowed, attired like monks, muttering something between their lips.’ Basil himself was ‘a lanky man, with a sparse beard, tall and thin.’ From the account given of his confession we have intimations of a belief in the phantastic doctrine, and what was more shocking still, ‘He called the sacred churches—woe is me!—the sacred churches, fanes of demons!’ When he saw himself betrayed by the Emperor, he declared that he would be rescued from death by ‘angels and demons.’ Anna Comnena would like to say more of this cursed heresy, ‘but modesty keeps me from doing so, as beautiful Sappho says somewhere; for though I am an historian, I am also a woman, and the most honourable of the purple, and the first offshoot of Alexius.’ The ‘most honourable of the purple,’ however, feels no hesitation in describing the holocaust which her father made of all the Bogomiles he could catch, and more particularly the roasting of Basil. This delicately sensitive princess gloats over the preparations in the hippodrome, the crackling of the fire, the breaking out of poor human nature as the victim comes nearer to the scorching, the turning away of his eyes, and finally the quivering of his limbs. One asks, in amazement, whether any religion that has ever existed in the world has produced such monsters of humanity as Christianity calling itself orthodox!
It may readily be believed that these persecutions drove the Bogomiles to take refuge more and more in the Serbian regions, out of the way of the orthodox savagery of Byzantium. There were moreover reasons which diverted the current of heresy from that part of Serbia which became afterwards the nucleus of the Empire of the Némanjas. The Serbian princes who ruled over the territory now occupied by old Serbia and Montenegro were faithful sons of the orthodox church, and directed their utmost efforts to keep the shrine of St. Vladimir and the national patriarchate of Dioclea free from the contamination of Manichæism. Thus a variety of causes combined to direct the course of the new movement to the Serbian races of Western Illyricum; and in the twelfth century—the century immediately preceding the outbreak of Gnostic Puritanism in Western Europe—Bosnia had become the head-quarters of what we may now call the great Sclavonic Heresy.
Thanks to the publication of many South-Sclavonic archives, we are now in a position to arrive at the tenets of the Bogomiles, from native as well as from Byzantine sources; and, as I hope to show, both the Greek and Sclavonic accounts of the sect which now plays such an important part in Bosnian history harmonize to a very great extent. The best native account that we possess of the Bogomilian heretics is to be found in the works of a Bulgarian writer, one Presbyter Cosmas, who lived at the end of the tenth century, just at the period when the heresy was striking root among the Serbs and Bosniacs, and who wrote (in his native tongue) two of his most important works against the Bogomiles—whom he considers ‘worse and more horrible than demons!’[21]
One of the fundamental doctrines of the Bogomiles was, as has been already implied, the belief in two Principles of Good and Evil. ‘I hear,’ says the worthy Presbyter Cosmas, ‘many of our orthodox congregation ask, “Wherefore does God permit the Devil to exercise sway over man?” Verily this is the first question which prepares the weak in belief for the reception of the Manichæan heresy.’ The Bogomiles satisfied their reason by supposing two conflicting self-existent principles of Good and Evil. Matter and the visible world belong to the Spirit of Evil. ‘Everything,’ says Cosmas, ‘exists, according to the Bogomiles, of the will of the Devil. The sky, the sun, the earth, men, churches, crosses, and all that is God’s, they give over to the Devil.’ The evil in the world is thus accounted for by supposing the Creation to be the work of the Evil One, and it consequently followed that the Bogomiles looked on the book of Genesis and the other Mosaic writings as inspired by this evil God, or, as they knew him, Satanael. But beyond this visible world, of which they could see only the dark and melancholy side, there existed, according to the Bogomiles, another, invisible, heavenly and perfect, the creation of the Spirit of Goodness and Light—Himself a perfect triune Being, from whom proceeded nothing incomplete or temporary.