International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Mirela Ivanova
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
Bogomils and Moral Instruction: 
Rethinking Kozmas’ Discourse against Heretics
The two major strands of scholarship on the Bogomil heresy have tended to focus either on the 
social, political and economic circumstances which affected the emergence of the heresy (Obolensky, 
1948; Runciman 1947; Denkova, 1993), or the theological tenets of the heresy in comparison with 
other dualisms like that of the Paulicians or the Manicheans (Stoyanov, 2002). There has been an 
insufficient amount of focus on the main and earliest source for the theology of ‘Bogomilism’, and 
its internal polemical and rhetorical limitations. 
The paper will seek to utilise some of the methodology first introduced in R. I. Moore’s 2011 
The War on Heresy which poses that the medieval resurfacing of the Cathars is best understood as 
a polemical invention for particular political and social purposes. In doing so, it will ask whether 
Kozmas’s Discourse is trying to reveal the theologically consistent set of ideas of the coherent movement 
of ‘Bogomils’. And further, whether the treatise is a useful source for establishing whether there were 
‘Bogomils’ in 10
th
century Bulgaria, let alone what they believed. This has three main tenets.
The paper will focus firstly on the text and its manuscript transmission. Retained in 25 full 
copies, the treatise is unusually consistent in its content. The most significant alterations across its 
MSS attestations are the appearances of headings and variations in titles of the treatise. Some of these 
introduce the word ‘Bogomilism’ otherwise absent from the text. Instead, the text briefly mentions a 
pop ‘Bogomil’ and notes it will return to his heresies. It is unclear whether that is to be done immediately, 
or later in the text but Bogomil is not mentioned again. Thus the treaty, although it certainly became 
an anti-Bogomil handbook, was not obviously aimed at a coherent Bogomil-ism in content.
Secondly, I will explore heretical ideas mentioned predominantly in the first half of the treatise. 
The paper will argue that these theological stances do not add up to a single coherent heretical 
movement, but rather to a conglomeration of heretical beliefs projected (only for the purpose of 
rhetoric) onto a universal, heretical ‘other.’ This is seen both in the fact that not all the beliefs listed 
are purely dualist in nature, and in the fact that the heretics being exposed seem to have ideas which 
are internally contradictory.
Finally, the paper will turn to the latter half of the text, which roughly half way through, sees 
a change in tone – from pure denouncement, to notably more dominant additions of didactic 

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instruction. Although the address remains in either the plural ‘you’ or in some cases, ‘we’, the 
addressees listed are priests, the wealthy, the book-owning, and the lesser men and women who 
work the land. These are addressed in turn, offering useful guidance on how to read the former half 
of the text – that is, also as a conglomeration of disparate groups and practices addressed in turn. In 
both cases however, there is as little specific historical reality to the wealthy man instructed to share 
his books, as there is to the heretic who performs fake miracles. 
The paper will seek to conclude that the Bogomil myth as a coherent movement was an 
invention emerging from existing heretical behaviours and the expansion of literacy, but also 
political necessity, polemical convention and, to an extent, a misunderstanding of the Discourse 
against the Bogomils.