Heresy and popular religion

Abstract

When thinking of religion in the Middle Ages, most people have in mind a mixture of four resistant stereotypes: overzealous monks supported by the Church; equally zealous, but harshly condemned heretics; a Church hierarchy concerned with maintaining scrupulous purity of faith and worship; and the superstitious common folk. Unfortunately, the historical materials available to us do not allow to break this stereotypical image and the scope of this chapter may even strengthen it. Therefore, when reading these pages, it is especially important to remember that our view of the past is only partial. In what follows, “popular religion” refers to the behavior of the faithful that results from customs and specific needs, and not from the mandates or the doctrine of the Church. This phenomenon is poorly reflected in the available sources. To compensate for that, one should examine also the data provided by archeology, the results of ethnographic research and, to some extent, the comparative studies with the development of beliefs in societies that have been more recently Christianized. Despite the fact that heresy is defined as to deviation from dogma, historians do not have clear criteria to distinguish deviation from proper faith and therefore call heresy a religious movement condemned by the mainstream Church. This is true for the case study at the center of our chapter, Bogomilism. This was a dissident religion that appeared in 10th-century Bulgaria and then spread to Byzantium and other Balkan countries. Prior to 1300, this was in fact the only heresy of the Eastern Christianity outside Byzantium and inside Eastern Europe. 2 However, both Armenians and Paulicians were present in the region, and to Orthodox Christians, “Latins” appeared as heretics, while Catholics treated Orthodox Christians in much the same way. In fact, heresy had a much broader definition in the Middle Ages, and under certain circumstances, it applied to Jews and Muslims. 3