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Bogomilism: the Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy”

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Bogomilism: the Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy” Gra¿yna Szwat-Gy³ybowa Bogomilism: The Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy” 5 MONOGRAPHS Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences Bogomilism: The Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy” Gra¿yna Szwat-Gy³ybowa Bogomilism: The Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy” Translated by Piotr Szymczak 5 MONOGRAPHS Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences WARSAW 2017 Editorial review Prof. dr hab. Maria Dąbrowska-Partyka, Jagiellonian University, Cracow & Prof. dr hab. Krzysztof Wrocławski, University of Warsaw Originally published in 2005 as Haeresis bulgarica w bułgarskiej świadomości kulturowej XIX i XX wieku , Warszawa: Slawistyczny Ośrodek Wydawniczy (IS PAN). Praca naukowa finansowana w ramach programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego pod nazwą „Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki” w latach 2014–2017. This academic publication was financed within the “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” of the Minister of Science and Higher Education in 2014–2017. NATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITIES Quotations cited from Bulgarian sources are translated into English by Marina Ognyanova­ ­ Simeonova. Editorial supervision JakubISS PAS Ozimek MONOGRAPHS SERIES Cover and title page design Barbara Grunwald-Hajdasz Editing Jan Szelągiewicz Jerzy Michał Pieńkowski Typesetting and page makeup This is an Open Access book distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non commercial, provided that the book is properly cited. © Copyright by Grażyna Szwat­Gyłybowa © Copyright for the English translation by Piotr Szymczak, 2017 ISBN: 978-83-64031-67-0 Instytut Slawistyki Polskiej Akademii Nauk ul. Bartoszewicza 1b/17 00­337 Warszawa tel./fax 22/ 826 76 88 [email protected], www.ispan.waw.pl To my Children, Husband, and Friends with thanks CONTENTS 9 INTRODUCTION . Bogomilism – the Basic Narrative ............................. 16 Bogomil Cosmogony . 24 1. BOGOMILISM AS A SUBJECT OF HISTORICAL NARRATIVES (1762–1944) .................................................. 35 Problems of Identity .......................................... 35 An Obstacle to Progress . 48 Precursors of Progress . 58 Zagorchin’s “Utopia of the Order”? . 78 2. OCCULTIST ATTEMPTS TO REVITALISE BOGOMILISM ........ 3 8 The Theosophic Version: the Magi . 5 8 A Rediscovered Book of the Magi: Glogov’s Forgery . 7 9 The Teacher Version: Peter Deunov . 101 3. TheBOGOMIL Marxist FASCINATIONS Variant IN COMMUNIST BULGARIA: THE BUL­ TheGARIAN Occultist QUEST Quasi-Marxist FOR A MODERN Variant IDENTITY ................... 117 Stefan Tsanev’s Hylics .and . .Pneumatics . 117 Богомилката ............................ 121 .......................... 0 13 The Paradigms of a Heretic. by Blaga Dimitrova ... 137 AristocratThe Sun’s Bride and Plebeian............................................. 2 14 The Spiritual Biography of Emilian Stanev . 153 . 154 The“Puritans” Antichrist in (the the Mystic Trap of – Hedonism the Agnostic....................... – the Gnostic) 154 A Skeptic in the World of Ideas ............................ 3 16 . 8 16 TheHesychia Ideologue . 9 16 In a World of Chaos ....................................... 176 ............................................. 178 4. TRANSPOSITIONS OF BOGOMILISM IN NEW AGE AND POST­ MODERNIST LITERATURE ....................................The Secret Book 5 18 A Newin Europe Turn Towards the Utopia of Progress . 7 18 Post-ModernA New Age Version Doubt About of the the Peregrinations Axiological Centre? of 202 In the Gnostic Hell. 5 19 ............... ............................................. 217 CONCLUSIONS . 231 REFERENCES ................................................... 243 INTRODUCTIONLooking for the Barbarians: The Illusions of Cultural Universalism In a well­known essay entitled , the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski looked at the root causes of Europe’s cultural specificity, involving the ability to question itself and to move beyond the constraints of its own civili­ sation. Among other things, Kołakowski attributed this spiritual vigour to the Christian tradition’s unending struggles with the temptation of Manichaeism on the one hand, and the opposed temptation of panthe­ ism on the other. Taken to an extreme, each might lead to stagnation: the former as a result of its contempt for the world of matter and its indifference to history and time, the latter through its unquestioning affirmation of this world. As Christian thought moved between those two poles, Kołakowski argued, it came up with no ultimate solutions, but provided us with a measure that steers clear of the false dilemma of “optimism” vs. “pessimism,” or the choice between belief in ultimate solutions and despair. [I]t is the tradition of Christian teaching to shield us from both these perils: from the wild certainty of our infinite capacity for perfection on the one hand and from suicide on the other. […] Christianity said, “The philosopher’s stone, the elixir of immortality, these are superstitions of alchemists; nor is there a recipe for a society without evil, without sin or conflict; such ideals are the aberrations of a mind convinced of its omnipotence, they are the fruits of pride.” But to admit all this is not to give way to despair. The choice between total perfection and total self­destruction is not ours; cares without end, incompleteness without end, these are our lot [Koła­ kowski 1997: 30–31]. There is no telling what course European history might have taken had Christianity succumbed to the Manichaean temptation and upset this fragile balance, but gnostic dualism is one of those ideological currents that have accompanied Christianity since its very beginning, Bogomilism: The Afterlife of the “Bulgarian Heresy” 10 continuing to shape 1European culture over the centuries [Myszor 1988; see Stoyanov 1994]. 2 The long and complex history of gnostic systems that developed within the Judaeo­Christian tradition has led to many misconceptions. For centuries, the associative, pictorial language of gnosis and its esoteric character have stirred interest, but also produced misrepresentations which, as it were, perpetuated the failures of reason, often standing helpless before the quasi­rational logic of things hidden from the unini­ tiated. Serious research into the history of gnostic influence began in the twentieth century. It can be traced in various ways and has varying forms: on the one hand, the acceptance of its problems and even the retention of gnostic positions in Christian theology, on the other hand, a kind of transformation (meta­ morphosis) of gnostic ideas and traditions, including their reformulation in view of the changed historical and social situation, and finally the more or less conscious, sometimes even amateurish, reception of gnostic ideas and fragments of systems in modern syncretistic­theosophic sects. It is difficult to prove continuity in any detail, as the connecting links often are “subter­ ranean” channels, or else the relationships are based on reconstructions of the history of ideas which have been undertaken especially in the realm of the history of philosophy [Rudolph 1983: 368]. As a result, our scholarly understanding of the impact of gnostic formations on the history of European culture is fragmentary, focusing on individual writers, artistic movements or historical periods, but 1 Unless indicated otherwise, quotations cited from Polish sources are translated into English2 by Piotr Szymczak and those from Bulgarian sources are translated into English by Marina Ognyanova Simeonova. In this book, I use the terms “gnosis” and “gnosticism” in the sense adoptedgnosticism at the Congress on the Origins of Gnosticism in Messina in 1966. In the interest of terminond­ logicalrd consistency,centuries, and the gnosis participants in that congress agreed to use the term in the historical and typological sense to denote the group of gnostic systems of the 2 and 3 to denote “a knowledge of divine secrets which is reserved to an elite.” Gnosticism is characterised by an anti­cosmic dualism and the idea (expressed here in the broadest terms possible) that humans carry a divine spark trapped in the material world, which (when excited by a divine messenger) can return to God. The gnosis sought in gnosticism is conditioned ontologically, theologically and anthropologically: “Not every form of gnosis is a gnosticism; this term only applies to those that contain the notion that the spark to be revived and restored to its original condition has a divine nature equal to the nature of God; in gnosticism, this gnosis also presupposes a relationshipPropozycje of identity and divinity shared by the knower (the gnostic), that which is known (the divine substance of the knower’s transcendent self) and the knowing itself (gnosis) […]” [ 1996: 6–8], see also Stoyanov 1994: 87–103. Introduction 11 still no synthesis has been produced other than the various exercises appraisalsin myth­making represented made in in the that interest debate of indicates various ideologies. that the esoteric The debate tra is taking place at a number of levels, and the wide range of views and ­ dition has been harnessed for a number of purposes. It can be approv­ ingly portrayed as the original source of the European Enlightenment, [Cegielski 1994] or it can be dismissed as the mother of all conspiracy theories. Speaking at the Frankfurt book fair in 1987, Umberto Eco literaryunambiguously historian, argued
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