732 CATHAR LITERATURE
the wealth and opulence of the Byzantine Church and seeking to liberate the
Slavic serfs from serfdom.THE BOGOMILS SPREAD TO THE WEST
In the eleventh century the Bogomils sent missionaries to spread their re-
form—or heresy, in the eyes of the established church—into northern Italy
and France, where the new orders retained the essential Bogomil theology
and personal practice. The Cathars, however, extended the more restrictive
reading of the Bogomils to include Paul, the gospels, and the Hebrew Bible,
to which, in the manner of the earlier Alexandrian exegetes, they gave their
own distinctive interpretation. In 1167 the Bogomils sent to Toulouse a major
bishop, Nicetas, who instructed and gave prestige to the developing Cathar
movement. And Bogomil scriptures appeared in Latin, one of which survives
today: the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or John's Interrogation. This key and
influential book came into hands of the French and Italian Cathars in Latin
translation, probably from Byzantine Greek (the original was lost). It exists
in two slightly different versions, one preserved in the archives of the Office
of the Inquisition at Carcassonne and the second in the National Library of
Vienna.
CATHAR BRANDS OF DUALISM
The Cathars of France and Italy are normally divided into two sects: absolute
dualism and mitigated dualism.^4 Absolute dualism is more purely Manichaean,
varying less from its Bogomil roots and using the traditional terms of
Manichaean cosmogony. Mitigated dualism was dominant among the
Cathars, however. Even the present form of the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or
John's Interrogation, the major Bogomil text imported into France and used
by the Cathars, the dualism is decisively mitigated, and the usual terms and
personages of Manichaean dualism—aeons, archons, Sophia—are not used.
Not even the name of Mani appears in it. Instead, the text is based on the
gospels and a gnostic interpretation of them, and especially of the Gospel of
- Normally the term Albigensians, the geographical epithet of the Cathars, is used inter-
changeably with Cathars. Rene Nelli, however, distinguishes philosophically between the Albi-
gensians, who had a more absolutist form of dualism that was closer to Manichaean roots, and
the Cathars, whose dualism evolved toward their own interpretation and tends to be mitigated.