Cathar Beliefs 1
Abstract
Paulician Beliefs
In the middle of the eighth century, the emperor Constantine Copronymus settled Armenian Paulicians—noted heretics persecuted by the Greek Church with fire and sword—in Thracia. In the tenth century, the emperor John Tzimisces (969-976), himself of Armenian origin, transported 200,000 Armenian Paulicians to Europe and settled them in the neighbourhood of Philippopolis, which henceforth became the centre of the heresy. Settled along the Balkans as a kind of bulwark against the invading Bulgars, the Armenians soon fraternized with the invaders, whom they converted to their own views. Even a prince of the Bulgarians adopted their teaching. The empress Theodora killed, drowned or hanged 100,000.
The details of the beliefs of the Paulicians and Bogomils are obscure, the sources mainly being their enemies. The Paulicians, Bogomils, Albigensians and so on were slandered by the orthodox, who said these heretics declared “God is a tyrant”. What were the Paulicians’ real beliefs? They derived their ideas from the Persian religion via the Essenes. The Zoroastrians had believed that the evil principle had created evil to pollute the good creation, and this idea evolved into a belief that the evil principle had created matter which was the evil that polluted the good creation of the spirit.
These Essene inspired sects certainly seemed to continue with the attitude of the original Essenes—a rebellion against sacerdotalism and authority—and consequently the authorities regarded them all as subversive, just as Pagan Romans had the Christians before Constantine made them respectable. It is because the popes saw Catharism as subversive that they determined to eliminate it at all costs. They took to the same methods as they claimed the Pagans used against them, but with a resolve to make it work. Here is a summary of Paulician ideas.
- Critics call them Manichæans but they hated Mani! They considered him as an anathema, so they were obviously not Manichæans at all. They were dualists with a heavenly father who ruled the world to come. The ruler of this world, though was a wicked lesser god. Angels were the good inhabitants of God’s good world.
- The virgin was an allegory of the heavenly Jerusalem. That was where Christ had come from. So, there was no actual virgin birth.
- The Eucharist was not the body and blood of Christ because material things are the creation of the wicked god, and Christ is a spiritual creature.
- They had no respect for the cross which was cursed rather than holy. They annoyed traditional Christians by breaking crosses when they saw them.
- They repudiated Peter for denying Christ but otherwise treat all the apostles as having an equal role in building Christianity.
- Peter heard the ruler of this material world say, “This is my beloved son”.
- They considered themselves as the true Catholic church, believing that the whole of humanity would be saved by the grace of God, but they did not build churches and used the Greek word, proseuxai, usually translated as synagogue, for the places where they met—not a specific building. The word “Church” only applied to the whole body of believers.
- They had a baptism only at the age of 30, like Jesus, but it was not a sacrament. They considered it “mere bath water”, denying it any magic purifying effect. In other words it was simply a symbolic outward purification meant to accompany the inner purification that commitment to Cathar belief was. Infant baptism they rejected as impure and unscriptural. Trapped souls had to chose baptism for themselves.
- They permitted outward conformity to the dominant Church, holding that Christ would forgive it, in view of persecution.
- They rejected the orders of the Church and had only two or three grades of clergy, and scorned priestly vestments.
- Their canon was the gospel (John) and the Apostle (Paul’s main epistles).
Much of this looks genuinely early, and traceable to Essene beliefs before Christianity. The last looks almost Marcionite, except that Marcion’s gospel was Luke, not John. Perhaps, though, Marcion got his ideas from the Paulicians. Marcion came from Asia Minor, but spread his ideas in Rome, and feedback from Rome to Anatolia looks less likely.
Paulician Christology was that Christ was an angel sent by God to earth out of his love of humanity. He gave him the honorific title, “Son”, warning him of his coming suffering and crucifixion. The good angel agreed to these sufferings and even death, knowing he would be resurrected. He undertook his tasks dutifully, and was taken again into heaven where God gave him the additional title “Christ” for obedience. This makes “Christ” equal to the Greek for “good”, “chrestos”, the name given to good slaves, rather than the supposed translation of the Hebrew, “messiah”. This ties in with a title of Cathar priests which was “Good Men”.
Bogomil Beliefs
The Goddess Heresy. A Eisenhoit 1580. The donkey skin head dress with its ears seems to denote her as a Cathar “Hearer” as well as simple or stubborn like a donkey, but she also has a bull’s head and a dragon’s head, and all three of her heads face left—the sinister side. She is bare breasted, is pierced through the heart by an arrow, holds a large and a small bag in her left hand, has a frog or even a phallus between her left index finger and middle finger, crosses her middle and wedding finger, wears a girdle with what seem to be rosary beads hanging down, and has a neck of bricks, perhaps meaning she is “stiff necked”.
What we know of the Bogomils comes from S Kozma (Cosmas) in the tenth century (c 970 AD) writing Against the Heretics and Euthymius Zygademus in the twelfth century. Certain heretical sects in Russia carried on their tradition. Bogomil is a translation into Slavonic of “Massaliani”, the Syrian name of the sect corresponding to the Greek Euchites. Bogomils and Massaliani are equated in thirteenth century Slavonic documents. Another name was Pavlikeni (Paulicians). The Cathars and Patarenes, the Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and, in Russia, the Strigolniki, Molokani and Dukhobortsi, have all been identified with the Bogomils or connected with them. The teaching of the heretical sects in fourteenth century Russia, related with the Bogomils, show they denied the divine birth of Christ, the Trinity, and the validity of sacraments and ceremonies. Carp Strigolnik, who in the fourteenth century preached this doctrine in Novgorod, explained that S Paul had taught that simple minded men should instruct one another, so they elected their teachers from among themselves to be their spiritual guides, and had no special priests.
The founder of the Bogomils was supposed to have been one Bogumil, a “Manichæan” of the time of the Bulgarian emperor, Peter (927-968). The Slavonic sources say the sect was founded by one Bogumil or Jeremiah, that he was a Manichæan, and had six apostles, all with Slavonic names. It is transparent Slavic mythologizing, unless Bogomil took his name from the sect, rather than the reverse. If the founder was Jeremiah, the notion might take the religion back to the Essenes who were fond of Jeremiah because he spoke of putting the covenant in men’s hearts. Bogomils liked to use the Zoroastrian expression “good thoughts, good words, good deeds”.
Bulgarian Tsar Boril’s arranged a synod in 1211 AD directed against the Bogomils. The document which came out of it, Boril’s Synodicon, replaced the original Greek anathemas against them, in the synodal resolution ending iconoclasm in 843 AD, by sixteen updated articles. The original of the Synodicon consisted of 24 articles against the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire, who had been active for the previous century, as well as Arianism, Manichaeism, Nestorianism, Neoplatonism and the Armenian heresy—meaning Paulicianism.
Boril calls the Bogomils “our very sly enemy”, describing them as “Manichaeans” founded by Bogomil, the priest. They considered the nativity and the crucifixion were illusions. Boril speaks of “their nocturnal gatherings and mysteries”. Their holy day was 24 June, the birthday of John the Baptist (really the midsummer solstice), when they plucked fruit and told fortunes, and then in the night performed “certain foul mysteries similar to Hellenic ritual”. Despite this, article 47 said they reviled John the Baptist because he was from Satan, as was baptism with water, indicating that they did not revere Satan at all. Their only prayer was the Pater Noster.
They believed Satan was “the creator of the visible world”, and Adam and Eve, and was “the master of rain, hail and of everything that crawls out of the ground”. They rejected Moses the Godseer, Elijah the Tishbite, the holy prophets, the patriarchs, and their sacred writings incongruously as creatures and creations of Satan, and for that reason they rejected the Old Testament. The conception of children in a woman’s womb was Satan’s work, the Devil dweliing alongside the child in the womb until the child was born. Nor did baptism drive him off, but only prayer and fasting. The heretics rejected the buildings of the church, and all singing in them. They rejected and reviled the liturgy and the whole episcopal organization, saying that they were the Devil’s inventions. Equally they reviled the holy communion, and rejected veneration of the “life-giving cross”, and the holy and sacred icons. So said Boril.
The doctrine was spread far and wide by peripatetic mendicant preachers. The religion spread along the mountain chains of central Europe, starting from the Balkans and continuing along the Carpathian Mountains, the Alps and the Pyrenees. In 1004, Bogomil beliefs were being taught in Russia by a man called Adrian. Leontie, bishop of Kiev imprisoned him. In 1125, the Church in the south of Russia had to combat another heresiarch named Dmitri. The Church in Bulgaria also tried to extirpate Bogomilism. When Innocent III called for the attack on the Albigenses, he tried to persuade the eastern churches to do the same against the Bogomils, so he clearly saw a connexion. They had spread to Serbia but Stephen Nemanya, king of Serbia expelled them, and they sought refuge in Bosnia. At the end of the twelfth century, Kulin, the civil ruler of Bosnia (1168-1204) embraced the heresy, and 10,000 of his subjects converted.
Some went to Italy, where they were called Patarenes, “Rag-pickers”. A street in Milan was called Via Patari. It was the rag market, and the industrious Cathars collected waste rags to make paper and to weave shoddy fabrics—both weaving and papermaking were crafts they were associated with. They influenced Gregory VII in his attempts at reforming the Church. Later popes thought it a better policy to get rid of its critics.
In the fifteenth century, the Bosnian king, Thomas, was converted to the Catholic Faith, but the severe edicts which he issued against his former coreligionists were powerless against the faith. The Cathari, 40,000 in number, left Bosnia and passed into Herzegovina (1446). The Patarenes were persecuted for centuries by the Hungarian emperors until the Moslem Turks put a stop to it in the second half of the fifteenth century. The Bogomils opted then to convert to the gentler religion of Islam. That is why modern Bosnians are Moslems. Once they were Bogomils, called by the fifteenth century Turks, Christians!
Bogomils denied the divine birth of Christ and the Trinity, and denounced the use of sacraments and vestments. Marriage was not a sacrament. The miracles of Jesus were not real but spiritual events. Christ was the Son of God only through grace like other prophets, and the bread and wine of the eucharist were not transformed into flesh and blood. The last judgment would be executed by God and not by Jesus. The images and the cross were idols and the worship of saints and relics idolatry.
They chose their teachers from their own number to guide them, and had no paid priests or built churches, but met in private homes like the first Christians. Prayers were to be said in private houses. The Church was a human church of the interior spirituality of its members. Only adults should be baptised, and neither water nor oil mattered but asceticism and prayer did. Each member could obtain the perfection of Christ and become a Christ. Ordination was by the “elect” of the congregation who had reached the perfection of Christ, and were called literally Christs and Perfects.
Their cosmogony was interesting because it is close to what one would deduce the Essenes believed from the Dead Sea Scrolls. They taught God had two sons, Satanael and Michael. The suffix “-el” showed they were sons of God. The older son rebelled and became the evil spirit. He then made the lower heavens and the earth and tried to make humanity. He could not give him life, though, and had to get God to do it, perhaps by a trick. Adam thus received the breath or spiritus of life, which invested him with a potentially good soul, but was coerced into a covenant in which he was allowed to till the soil in the wicked world as a slave to Satanael.
Then God sent his younger son, Michael, into the form of a man called Jesus “elected” by God to be the Saviour, after baptism in the Jordan. Michael appeared as a dove and Jesus became Christ, with the power to break Adam’s covenant, in the form of a clay tablet (hierographon), with Satanael. Thus the evil spirit was vanquished and lost his “-el”, and his equal power, becoming Satan, no longer a son of God but a fallen angel. Even so, with the power that remained, he plotted to have Jesus Christ crucified to begin the whole evil religion of Christianity with its gaudy and meretricious grand objects and churches, vestments and raiments, icons and images, sacraments and ceremonies, and monks and priests to impress simple humans as if God was an earthly king. This world being the work of Satan, the perfect must eschew any and every excess of its pleasure. They held the “Lord´s Prayer” in high respect, as the most potent weapon against Satan, and had a number of conjurations against “evil spirits”.
Each community had its own twelve “apostles”, and women could be raised to the rank of “elect”. The Bogomils wore garments like mendicant friars and were renowned as missionaries, travelling far and wide to propagate their doctrines. Healing the sick and conjuring the evil spirit, they travelled the world and spread their apocryphal literature along with some of the books of the Old Testament, deeply influencing the religious spirit of the nations, and preparing them for the Reformation.
They sowed the seeds of a rich religious popular literature in the east as well as in the west. The Historiated Bible, the Letter from Heaven, the Wanderings through Heaven and Hell, the numerous Adam and Cross legends, the religious poems of the “Kalfliki perehozhie” and other similar productions owe their dissemination to a large extent to the activity of the Bogomils of Bulgaria, and their successors in other lands. The Ritual in Slavonic written by the Bosnian Radoslavov, and published by the South Slavonic Academy at Agram, shows great resemblance to the Cathar ritual published by Cunitz, 1853.
Practica Inquisitionis Haereticae Pravitatis
Moreover they talk to the laity of the evil lives of the clerks and prelates of the Roman Church, pointing out and setting forth their pride, cupidity, avarice, and uncleanness of life, and such other evils as they know. They invoke with their own interpretation and according to their abilities the authority of the Gospels and the Epistles against the condition of the prelates, churchmen, and monks, whom they call Pharisees and false prophets, who say, but do not.
Then they attack and vituperate, in turn, all the sacraments of the Church, especially the sacrament of the eucharist, saying that it cannot contain the body of Christ, for had this been as great as the largest mountain Christians would have entirely consumed it before this. They assert that the host comes from straw, that it passes through the tails of horses, to wit, when the flour is cleaned by a sieve (of horse hair); that, moreover, it passes through the body and comes to a vile end, which, they say, could not happen if God were in it.
Of baptism, they assert that the water is material and corruptible and is therefore the creation of the evil power, and cannot sanctify the soul, but that the churchmen sell this water out of avarice, just as they sell earth for the burial of the dead, and oil to the sick when they anoint them, and as: they sell the confession of sins as made to the priests.
Hence they claim that confession made to the priests of, the Roman Church is useless, and that, since the priests may be sinners, they cannot loose nor bind, and, being unclean in themselves, cannot make others clean. They assert, moreover, that the cross of Christ should not be adored or venerated, because, as they urge, no one would venerate or adore the gallows upon which a father, relative, or friend had been hung. They urge, further, that they who adore the cross ought, for similar reasons, to worship all thorns and lances, because as Christ’s body was on the cross during the passion, so was the crown of thorns on his head and the soldier’s lance in his side, They proclaim many other scandalous things in regard to the sacraments.
Moreover they read from the Gospels and the Epistles in the vulgar tongue, applying and expounding them in their favor and against the condition of the Roman Church in a manner which it would take too long to describe in detail; but all that relates to this subject may be read more fully in the books they have written and infected, and may be learned from the confessions of such of their followers as have been converted.
