The Early Medieval Era · 10th c. onward · Bulgaria, Balkans
Bogomils
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
The Bogomils take their name from a Bulgarian priest of the mid-tenth century, and the earliest account of them — a long sermon written against them by another priest, Cosmas. Describes a movement of ascetics who rejected almost everything the visible church consisted of: church buildings, the cross, icons, the sacraments, infant baptism and the clergy who administered them. Behind that refusal, the sources report, lay a conviction that the material world and the human body were not made by God at all but by a fallen power, so that the whole apparatus of physical religion was a mistake. They spread from Bulgaria through the Balkans and into Byzantium, where around 1100 their most prominent teacher, a man called Basil, was burned in Constantinople. As with the Paulicians, none of their own writing survives: everything described here is the report of people arguing against them.
Sources
- Cosmas the Priest, Sermon (Discourse) Against the Heretics (late 10th c.) — trans. in Hamilton & Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World (1998) (primary) — HOSTILE SOURCE — the key near-contemporary account; a Bulgarian priest's polemic, incidentally preserving the movement's practices and social appeal. Dated after Tsar Peter's death (969). A standalone scholarly English translation also circulates on academia.edu.
- Letter of Patriarch Theophylact of Constantinople to Tsar Peter of Bulgaria (mid-10th c.) — in Hamilton & Hamilton (1998) (primary) — HOSTILE SOURCE — the earliest official notice of the heresy in Bulgaria, with prescribed anathemas. The Hamilton volume devotes 35 of its source-headings to the Bogomils.
- Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, ch. on the Bogomils (c. 1100) — in Hamilton & Hamilton (1998) (primary) — HOSTILE + LATER-ADJACENT (just past the era window) — the fullest doctrinal description, from the Constantinople trial of Basil the Bogomil.
- Dimitri Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge, 1948) (secondary) — The classic monograph, still the standard narrative. Its 'Neo-Manichaean' framing has faced newer skepticism about how organized and dualist the movement really was.
- Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (Yale, 2000) (secondary) — Modern synthesis of the dualist line including the claimed Bogomil-Cathar link. Stoyanov is also a co-translator of the Hamilton sourcebook.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 6: 'Slav Christianities, 800-1100' (Jonathan Shepard) (reference)