I am orthodox, you are error strewn; they are deeply heretical. We have always striven for a way to mark ourselves as part of a different, yet exceptional group; to be able to either those not sharing the same outlook, clothes or beards. But in the deeply consumer society of the West, we tend to forget that belief in the Byzantine world wasn't just a fashion statement.
Byzantine history is largely 'top-down', the heretical movements such as Paulicianism and Bogomilism give us an idea of the 'bottom up' beliefs of society, where the Blues and the Greens and the Thessalonikan communes give us some glimmer of the political landscape.
Heresy mirrors their belief in the State’s internal struggle for Orthodox or 'right–thinking’ mirroring the ideas of One God, One Empire, One Church, created by the horrors of One Civil War after another. Outsiders by definition were all heretical (the West, past and present, Islam).
The history of Byzantine heresy focused more on the Sons relationship to the Father (including amongst others, Heraclius' rightist deviationism). Paulicianism/Bogomilism were uniquely apparent as they threatened the position of God the Father as Creator to his children mankind, and the nature of the possibility of Salvation (something they have in common with Calvin, Zwingli and extreme Protestantism, making the current American Protestant support of Trump fit into a pattern of 'elect' exclusion: social, economic and predestination to salvation').
Context in this case is everything. Like so much else in the East, their roots can ultimately be traced into alia, haloes, to Persia. I have no intention of regurgitating Crone, Ames or Runciman, being too much the amateur to do anything other than to urge reading their work for further details. (Keep a copy of Dan Brown handy, we all need something to look down on). The doctrines of Mani that influenced Saint Augustine were so successful in their proselytising, it led to Diocletian persecuting them, as well as anyone else who annoyed that dyspeptic old tyrant.
The eternal question of why does God allow evil to exist becomes the subject of an alternative cosmogony where we are trapped in a world created through the actions of an Evil One, but strive to be reunited with the Lord of Light. Now remember what those clever Greeks did with something simple like Christianity? Imagine thinking I wonder what would happen if you combined it with Zoroastrianism? You end up with Gnosticism, which owes more to Graeco-Roman philosophical navel-gazing and a desire to appear more clever and apart from the mainstream, an equivalent of modern 'youth' culture creating its own idiom to exclude others and reinforce group identity.
Paulicianism seems to fit into that strain of Christian Puritanism with some points of commonality with Monophysitism, rejection of the Theotokos and church hierarchy, but did, in common with the Manichaeanism believe this world was the creation of an evil demiurge from whom Christ had to come to liberate Man. They venerated the New, but not the Old Testament and referred to themselves as 'True Believers'. They came into their own in the mid-Byzantine period as occasional allies of the Emperor and the Caliph, in turn. In common with their Armenian brothers they were very effective soldiers, carving out territory for themselves. Occasional mass deportations led to settlements in Thrace and from thence, to the Balkans and the West.
Bogomilism can't be proven to follow an arc, but as part of the rejection of state and ecclesiastical stratification appears almost too convenient not to link. It arose in the 10th century in the Balkans and was dualist. It was puritanism as a resistance movement, more Manichaean than the Paulicians and more deeply influenced by Gnosticism, far less temporal, shunning not only the cross but churches. But they did set up an alternative ecclesiastical structure for the adept recognising that if all their beliefs were uniformly applied, it would be a very short-lived belief indeed. From there it spread to France, creating the Cathars and one of the biggest scans of pseudo-history, enriching one or two Americans and depriving many others of the cost of a book and their credulity.
Byzantine was at heart quite conservative, and by and large, the broad mass of population was comfortable in its Chalcedoniasm. Arianism, Monophysitism and Iconoclasm vied for mainstream control, but they were heresies that were more an attempt to reinforce political control by different power groups trying to enforce their orthodoxy then a form of the social engineering which Paulicianism or Bogomilism would have involved. There would be no Dualist Reformation because of that inability to successfully embed their views in elite court circles which led to their marginalisation, socially and geographically. And a 'bottom-up' religion with no high-status promoters or protectors can ultimately only lead to one thing.
Methodism.
Published in Issue Four of the Byzantine Times
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