Bogomils

Bogomils , members of Europe's first great dualist church, which flourished in Bulgaria and the Balkans from the 10th to the 15th cent. Their creed, adapted from the Paulicians and modified by other Gnostic and Manichaean sources, is attributed to Theophilus or Bogomil, a Bulgarian priest of the 10th cent. The movement was intensely nationalistic and political, as well as religious, and reflected resentment of Byzantine culture, Slavic serfdom, and imperial authority. They vanished due to persecution and the expansion of Islam, but bits of their ideas and folklore persisted for centuries in Slavic lands.

Bibliography: See M. Loos, Dualist Heresy in the Middle Ages (1974).

Bogomils. A dualist Christian sect which flourished in Bulgaria from the 10th to as late as the 17th cent., and more widely in the Byzantine Empire in the 11th–12th cents. The name comes from their founder, a priest who took the name Bogomil (= Gk., Theophilos). They espoused the dualist and neo-gnostic doctrines of the Paulicians (e.g. belief in the devil as the creator of humanity and the world, docetic ideas of Christ, rejection of the Old Testament). They were also strongly ascetic, rejecting sex, marriage, and possessions, and not eating meat, believing that the soul must be freed from evil and thus the body. Bogomil influence can be discerned in the later Catharism of W. Europe.

Bogomils. A medieval Balkan sect of Manichaean origin. They taught that the world and the human body were the work of Satan, only the soul being created by God. The ideals of abstinence from marriage, meat, and wine, and renunciation of all possessions, were practised only by the ‘Perfect’; the ordinary faithful might sin but were obliged to obey the Perfect and would receive ‘spiritual baptism’ on their deathbeds. They held that Christ did not have a human body, but only the appearance of one. They rejected the Sacraments, churches, and relics, but retained a hierarchy of their own.

In the 11th cent. Bogomilism spread rapidly in the Balkans and Asia Minor, and from the mid-12th cent. it exerted a formative influence on the Cathari in France and Italy. In the 13th cent. its adherents secured a notable success in Dalmatia and especially in Bosnia, where under the name of Patarines they later became the dominant religious group. After the Turkish conquests, many people adopted Islam; practically no trace of the heresy remains in the Balkans.