CATHAR LITERATURE 731
BOGOMIL DUALISM, DOCETISM,
AND POPULARISMBogomillian and later Catharist ideas go back to the grand confusion of many
earlier heretical sects, including the Marcionites, Borborites, Bardaisans, Mes-
salians, Montanists, Adoptionists, and Monarchians, and the later sect in Dio-
clea and Bosnia called the Patarenes (who after a migration to the west were
eventually the Cathars of northern Italy). Many of these sects shared with the
monophysites, and the Nestorians,^3 who still survive in large numbers in
Mesopotamia and India, the essential docetic notion of Christ and Jesus as
two figures, one divine and one human, and Christ as a phantom on the cross
who only seemed to be human.
Like earlier gnostics, the Bogomils held a dualistic view of soul and body,
and of good and evil deities as evinced in the struggle between the good god
of light and the demonic biblical god of darkness and error who created and
trapped our souls in material, perishable bodies. Christ was an angel messen-
ger of god. On earth, following the docetic interpretation of Jesus Christ, the
Christ was not real flesh but a phantasm, his sufferings an illusion. The man
Jesus was a prophet, the earthly counterpart of Christ the angel spirit. The
Bogomils replaced biblical myth, as did the earlier gnostics, with an elaborate
cosmogony and theogony of their own, and rejected much of the Old Testa-
ment, whose deity they considered to be Satan. They utterly opposed most of
the church structure, symbology, and doctrine—hierarchy, saints, sacra-
ments, relics, the cross, the trinity, and the divinity of Mary. They detested
the cross as the instrument of Christ's murder. They aimed early Christian
iconoclasm at Orthodox icons, which they called idols. As for their comport-
ment, they drank no wine, ate no meat, and were essentially pacifists practic-
ing passive resistance. And they took a politically populist view, denouncing
- The Nestorians, who believed that the human and divine natures remained distinct in Jesus,
hold a position that may be contrasted with the Catholic view pronounced by Saint Cyril of
Alexandria that Jesus was two natures inseparably joined in one person, and the monophysite
belief that Jesus Christ was composed of a single nature, a belief that, in certain expressions,
could tend toward docetism. Monophysite christologies are to be found in eastern churches of
the Levant to the present day. Docetic interpretations, such as those represented among some
of the gnostics discussed in this volume, suggest that the real Christ only seemed to be human.
At times docetists maintain that Jesus was human and represented a human being, while Christ
was a phantom, appearance, or illusion of Jesus, whom people mistook for Jesus, and whose
appearance represented god.