The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch Read Free Book Online Page B

so-called Dark Ages—a term coined by Petrarch to describe the isolation and ignorance of feudal Europe—were already coming to an end. Adventurers, merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders were beginning to explore the eastern reaches of Christendom and even more far-flung places in Africa and Asia. And when they returned to the cities of western Europe, they brought back a treasure trove of new ideas—arts and crafts, food and drink, texts and teachings. The emblematic example, which turns out to be wholly fanciful, is the tale of how a Venetian merchant-adventurer named Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in China in the thirteenth century and returned to Italy with the recipe for pasta. In fact, the phenomenon began a couple of centuries before Marco Polo, and the things that the travelers brought home were far more explosive than spaghetti.
    Perhaps the single most exotic import into western Europe during the High Middle Ages was a variant of Christianity that appears to have originated in the tenth century in Bulgaria, a kind of theological no-man’s-land that lay on the frontier between eastern and western Christendom. A Bulgarian village priest, whose adopted name was Bogomil (“worthy of the pity of God”), introduced his congregants, “newly and shakily converted from paganism,” to his own peculiar version of Christian belief and practice. According to the medieval chroniclers whose writings have come down to us from the era of the Crusades, a few knights from France and Italy on crusade in the Holy Land encountered the followers of Bogomil in Constantinople or Macedonia and carried their strange new ideas back to western Europe like tainted fruit in their baggage. 21
    At the core of the so-called Bogomils’ theology was a simple answer to the perennial question of why evil exists in a world supposedly created by a benign deity. The founder of Bogomilism taught that there were, in fact, two sources of divine power in the cosmos, one good and one evil. It’s an idea that historians of religion call dualism, and it can be traced back through the gnostics of the early Christian era to the even older apocalyptic texts of Judaism and Christianity, such as the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, and from these ancient texts all the way back to the earliest traditions of Zoroastrianism in far-off Persia. But, as often as the idea of dualism had been reworked over the millennia, it found a new and remarkable expression among the Bogomils.
    The world as we know it, according to the Bogomils, was created not by God but by the fallen angel called Satan and, as a result, everything on earth is purely and irretrievably evil. Only upon the death of the human body does the soul locked within its fleshly prison rise to the spiritual realm and reunite with God. In the meantime, the Bogomils aspired to distance themselves as much as possible from the things of the world that Satan had made, including the making of babies and the consumption of food derived from animals that engage in sexual procreation. For that reason, not only sex itself but also the consumption of meat, eggs, cheese, and milk were declared taboo.
    The Bogomils also understood that only a few devoted men and women were capable of such self-discipline while waiting to be liberated from earthly existence by their own deaths. So they expected the purest asceticism from only a small number of devotees who submitted to a ritual of initiation and then dedicated themselves to lives of rigorous self-denial. The rest of the rank-and-file of the Bogomils were free to live ordinary lives in the carnal world while supporting the initiates in their renunciations and devotions.
    Fasting and celibacy, of course, were familiar to the Christian world, and the principal prayer of the Bogomils was the Pater Noster (“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”), a commonplace of Christian practice. Other aspects of Bogomilism, however, pushed them