Cosmas distinguishes, however, two branches of the Bogomilian heretics.
According to the earlier sect, dualism in its most uncompromising form prevailed.[22] According to a later offshoot of the Bogomiles, the Spirit of Good had two sons, the elder of whom, Satanael, rebelled and created matter, and that to rescue the world thus created from the dominion of the Prince of Evil, God the Father sent down his younger son Christ to enable men to combat the Ruler of this world.[23] Both sects, however, were agreed in accepting the Phantastic theory of the Incarnation. The antagonism between spirit and matter was too great to admit of the union of the two. The body of Christ was a phantom, left in the clouds at his ascension; and the Virgin was an angel and not the mother of God.
Cosmas denies generally their belief in any of the books of the Old Testament or the Gospels; but this does not agree with the circumstantial account of Euthymius Zygabenus, who from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the tenets of his sect from the Bogomilian heresiarch Basil, is certainly one of the best authorities. Further, it is disproved by the whole conduct of the Bogomiles, which, as Cosmas himself shows, was based on a too literal interpretation of the Gospels. According to Euthymius,[24] the Bogomiles accepted seven holy books, which he enumerates as follows:—1, the Psalms; 2, the Sixteen Prophets; 3, 4, 5, and 6, the Gospels; 7, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse. So far, indeed, as the New Testament was concerned, they clung to the version of the orthodox Sclavic apostle, in which they altered not a word.[25]
Touching baptism again, accounts are contradictory. Harmenopulos says that the Bogomiles practised the rite, but did not attribute to it any perfecting[26] virtue. On the other hand, the most recent investigations into the observances of the Bogomiles of Bosnia show that strictly speaking the rite did not exist among them at all, though they observed something analogous to it. Only adults could be admitted into the communion of the faithful; and, after they had first qualified themselves for admission by prayer and fasting, the mystery of initiation was performed, not by water—for did not water itself appertain to the evil realm of matter?—but by the laying on of St. John’s Gospel. Thus Cosmas is technically right in saying that the Bogomiles rejected baptism altogether, though it is probable that he was merely calumniating them when he added as a reason, that ‘they are afraid of the children to be baptized; and if by chance they see small children, they turn away from them as from carrion, and spit, and call them children of mammon, as being creations of the Devil;’ still under the sway, that is, of the Evil Creator Spirit. As regards Bosnia, at any rate, this is a foul slander. So far were the Bosnian Bogomiles from spurning little children, that the instruction of the young was considered a work worthy of the most saintly of the sect.
They were staunch opponents of the prevailing Mariolatry. ‘They pay no honour to the Mother of God.’[27] ‘As to the cross,’ says the Presbyter, they say: ‘Wherefore should we bow to that which dishonoured God?’ and they ask further, ‘if any man slew the son of a king with a bit of wood, how could this bit of wood be dear to the king?’[28] They considered it idolatry to bow down before the icons of saints. ‘They further revile the ceremonies of the church and all church dignities, and they call orthodox priests blind Pharisees, and bay at them as dogs at horses.’[29] ‘As to the Lord’s Supper,’ continues the Bulgarian champion of orthodoxy, ‘they assert that it is not kept according to God’s commandment, and that it is not the body of God, but ordinary bread.’[30]
Their belief in the evilness of matter was productive, as such a belief always has been, of much asceticism; which, if the concurrent testimony of their enemies is to be believed, they carried at times to deplorable excesses. ‘They show themselves,’ says Cosmas, ‘strong ascetics, for they call the Devil the Creator of all things, and declare that it is his Commandment that men should take wives, eat flesh, and drink wine. Everything as it exists with us (the orthodox) is utterly rejected. They give themselves up to a celestial life, insomuch that they call married men and those living in the way of the world “Mammon’s Children.”’ The descriptions of Anna Comnena and the monk Cosmas bring before us the familiar Puritan type, as it has reproduced itself in all ages. They bowed their heads and groaned and pulled long faces, in the true Roundhead style. ‘You will see heretics,’ quoth Cosmas, ‘quiet and peaceful as lambs without, silent, and wan with hypocritical fasting, who do not speak much nor laugh loud, who let their beard grow, and leave their person incompt.’
These descriptions of their enemies must, however, be taken with this reserve: they apply, as a rule, only to a small minority of the sect. The Bogomiles, like most ascetic sects, were divided into two castes: the simple believers, the Credentes of the West, who formed the large majority; and ‘the perfect,’ or those who by a long course of asceticism had successfully mortified the flesh. In the thirteenth century, at the most blooming period of their history, among the millions of these sectaries were reckoned less than 4,000 of ‘the perfect.’[31] These ‘perfect’ called themselves in Bosnia Krstjani, dobri Bošniani, Svršiteli, ‘Christians,’ that is, ‘good Bosnians,’ or ‘the elect,’ terms which reappear in a Romance guise in Italy and the Languedoc. The ‘perfect’ were clad like monks in long black gowns; they condemned themselves to perpetual celibacy; they abjured wine, nor tasted aught but vegetables, fish, and oil; they forsook the ‘pomps and vanities of this wicked world,’ and gave themselves up to devotion and good works. The women (for this saintly minority included both sexes) taught children or tended the sick, while the men acted as the spiritual guides of their weaker brethren or preached the Gospel among unbelievers.
But it stood to reason that the great bulk of the Bogomilian flock could never attain to this higher standard. In the abstract, no doubt, the simple ‘believer’ accepted the doctrine which his spiritual guides were careful to instil into him, that his soul was an angel fallen from above and fettered in the prison-house of his body, and that only by perpetual mortification of the flesh could he hope to set the celestial captive free at last. But the laws of nature and society are perpetually holding back religious extravagance from its logical consequences, and the simple ‘believer’ was content to govern himself by the more ordinary standard of mankind. As in Provence and Italy, so in Bosnia, he dispensed himself from the prohibition against drinking wine; and though the ‘perfect’ refused to bear arms and preached against war as devilish, the mass of the heretics, Sclavonic as well as Romance, showed that on occasion they could measure swords with the most orthodox. Though marriage was contrary to their tenets, the Bogomiles took wives, the man, however, in Bosnia only taking the woman on the condition that she was good and true to him, reserving the right of dismissing her if he thought her conduct unsatisfactory; an arrangement productive of laxity, and giving occasion to the orthodox adversary of which he was not slow to take advantage.[32] Yet, though in his manner of life falling short of the extreme asceticism of ‘the perfect,’ the ordinary Bogomile, on the showing of his enemies themselves, distinguished himself by his superior industry and thrift, and put to shame the saintly idleness of more orthodox professors by refusing to neglect his work on feast-days. Among the Bogomiles, beggars were looked on with contempt.[33] The ‘perfect’ themselves abhorred what was slothful in a monastic life, and the ‘heresiarch’ Basil set a good example by earning his living as a doctor. The simple believer devoted part of the worldly goods thus acquired to the relief of sick and indigent brothers, and also to the support of Gospellers among unbelievers, but neither his industry nor his good works could satisfy his conscience. The higher life of the ‘perfect’ was a perpetual reproach to him. His soul seemed clotted with the contagion of a too sensual existence, nor did his theology allow him a purgatory for the imbodied and imbruted spirit. Standing on the threshold of another world, and forced to choose between heaven and hell, the simple ‘believer’ considered it essential to his salvation that he should be admitted into the ranks of the ‘perfect’ by a death-bed ceremony of initiation, which reappears as la Convenenza among the more Western Patarenes of Italy and Provence.
The Bogomiles, in spite of their hatred of orthodox priests and temples, possessed ministers and even conventicles of their own. In the earliest accounts that have reached us we find at the head of the sect an elder or teacher surrounded by twelve disciples, answering to Christ and the Apostles. The half legendary accounts of the ‘pope’ Bogomil surround him with such disciples; and Basil ‘the heresiarch’ has his twelve. But as the Bogomiles spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, each new province, if we may so term it, added to the dominion of the faithful, required a new elder or bishop. At the head of the Bogomilian flock in Bosnia stood a Djed or elder, answering to the Episcopus or Senior of the Albigensians, and under him came the Apostles, the Strojniks (Western Magistri), of which there were two grades, the Gosti and the Starci, who again reappear as the Filii and Diaconi of Italy. But there was no hierarchy, and nothing at all answering to a papacy; ‘the ecclesiastical officers were simply the representatives of the congregation, and were chosen by their votes.’[34] Every one who ranked among the ‘perfect,’ whether a man or woman, had the right of preaching.
Although in some parts the Bogomiles seem to have had no recognized place of worship, and performed their devotions in their own huts, or on some lonely heath beneath the open canopy of heaven, we have yet sufficient evidence, both Byzantine and Sclavonic, that they often possessed meeting-houses of their own. Their churches, according to Epiphanius, were like boats turned keel uppermost, but some were of a more ecclesiastical form. It appears that in Bosnia, as in the Languedoc, their prayer-houses were plain sheds without tower, or bells, which they called the trumpets of demons,—devoid of ornament or icons, containing neither chancel nor altar, but a simple table covered with a clean white linen cloth, on which was laid a copy of the Gospels.[35] Here they assembled by torchlight and sang hymns of their own, called by the Greek writer ‘Euphemies.’ Their service chiefly consisted of prayer, which according to their creed was the only means of resisting the demon within them, or of attaining salvation. The Lord’s Prayer was the only form used by them, and this they repeated in their own house with closed doors, five times every day and five times every night.[36]