Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001)

THE BOGOMILS

PREFACE

The Bogomil movement has come to be recognized as one of the
major problems of south Slavonic and Byzantine history. The
influence it has exercised on the history of the Balkan peoples-on
their church and state, on their society and literature, on their
religion and folk-lore-make the study of Bogomilism essential for
Byzantinist and Slavist alike. To scholars and students in other
fields Bogomilism still offers many unexplored, or half-explored,
possibilities. The theologian and the philosopher can find in
Bogomilism one of the most interesting examples of the growth on
European soil in the Middle Ages of a pattern of thought and a way
of life which may be termed 'dualistic'. A detailed study of
Bogomilism should help Western medievalists to shed new light
on the still somewhat obscure problem of the historical connections
between Asiatic Manichaeism and the dualistic movements of
western Europe, particularly of the Italian Patarenes and of the
Cathars or Albigenses of southern France. This connection, if
successfully established, would in its turn enable Church historians
to regard the Bogomil sect as the first European link in the
thousand-year-long chain leading from Mani's teaching in
Mesopotamia in the third century to the Albigensian Crusade
in southern France in the thirteenth. Moreover, the study of the Bogomil
movement has its own, and by no means negligible, part to play
the investigation of the cultural and religious links between
eastern and western Europe, the importance of which is increasingly
perceived at the present time.

The study of Bogomilism has a fairly long, but not uniformly
successful, history. In the eighteenth century Bogomilism began
to attract the attention of German scholars. Some, like J. C. Wolf
regarded the Bogomils as heretics, while others, like J. L. Oeder,
tried to prove that they were the bearers of a ‘pure' Christianity
and were unjustly persecuted by a corrupt Byzantine Church.
Their investigations were necessarily limited by their ignorance
of the non-Byzantine sources, which led them to take a view of...… (meer)