Bogomilism

“ Each community had its own twelve “apostles,” and women could be raised to the rank of “elect.” The Bogomils wore garments like mendicant friars and were known as keen missionaries, travelling far and wide to propagate their doctrines. Healing the sick and conjuring the evil spirit, they traversed different countries and spread their apocryphal literature along with some of the books of the Old Testament, deeply influencing the religious spirit of the nations, and preparing them for the Reformation. They sowed the seeds of a rich religious popular literature in the East as well as in the West. ”

“ Cosmas distinguishes, however, two branches of the Bogomilian heretics.
According to the earlier sect, dualism in its most uncompromising form prevailed. [22] According to a later offshoot of the Bogomiles, the Spirit of Good had two sons, the elder of whom, Satanael, rebelled and created matter, and that to rescue the world thus created from the dominion of the Prince of Evil, God the Father sent down his younger son Christ to enable men to combat the Ruler of this world. ”

“ Verily this is the first question which prepares the weak in belief for the reception of the Manichæan heresy.’ The Bogomiles satisfied their reason by supposing two conflicting self-existent principles of Good and Evil. Matter and the visible world belong to the Spirit of Evil. ‘Everything,’ says Cosmas, ‘exists, according to the Bogomiles, of the will of the Devil. ”

“ The Bogomils taught that God had two sons, the elder Satanail and the younger Michael. The elder son rebelled against the father and became the evil spirit. After his fall he created the lower heavens and the earth and tried in vain to create man ”

“ Their usages being quite different from those amongst which they live, the name Bohemian came to be applied to painters, musicians, and such like generally, to whom, save by courtesy, no position has yet been accorded by society—so called."
"But why have they not yet vindicated for themselves a social position," I asked, "and that a high one?"
"Because they are generally poor, I suppose," he answered; "and society is generally stupid."
"May it not be because they are so often, like the gypsies, lawless in their behavior, as well as peculiar in their habits?" ”

“ It is not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender; parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has been said, it remains, not the picture of la vie de Bohème at its best and brightest, but the classic expression of the Bohemian spirit—a frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the poetry, and the gaiety of youth. ”

“ One may be sceptical as to the doctrines in which, according to their enemies, they believed. Apparently they were quietists, searchers after the Inner Light, who would have nothing to do with the worship of Eikons, were possibly Unitarians, and had a tendency in many directions towards what may be called reformation principles. Their teaching was imbued with the Slavic mysticism which is characteristic to-day of Russian literature.
The Bogomils became first noticeable in Bulgaria in the days of King Peter (927–968) . ”

“ But the history of the Bohemia of arts and letters—which rose to its greatest and most prophetic heights in the Paris of the nineteenth century—would no doubt prove to be as extensive a work as Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” though the recitation of tenets and principles of one would be the inevitable reverse of the other.
The intellectual Bohemian—the artist, or the man of letters—has something in his make-up of the gipsy’s love of the open road; the vagabond who instinctively rebels against the established rules of society, more because they are established than for any other reason. ”

“ Now, if we carefully consider the question we are discussing, we shall in all possibility find that all the gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism, emanate from this Bohemian class. Its members do not, we believe, penetrate far into life of any kind, but where they do penetrate they create the vices they perceive, and reflect phenomena in the distorted mirrors of their own moral consciousness. Possessing no religion, they imagine that English life is irreligious. Having no faith, they perceive no faith anywhere. ”

“ Concerning the Bogomils something can be gathered from the information collected by Euthymius Zygadenus in the 12th century, and from the polemic Against the Heretics written in Slavonic by St Kozma during the 10th century. The old Slavonic lists of forbidden books of the 15th and 16th centuries also give us a clue to the discovery of this heretical literature and of the means the Bogomils employed to carry on their propaganda. Much may also be learnt from the doctrines of the numerous heretical sects which arose in Russia after the 11th century. ”

“ The Anguish has in it two Wills, from the Original of the first Will out of the Liberty to the Manifestation of itself, viz. the first Will is to Nature, and the other reconceived Will is the Son of the first, which goes out of the Manifestation again into itself into the Liberty; for it is become an eternal Life in Nature, and yet possesses not Nature essentially, but dwells in itself, and pene-trates Nature as a transparent Shining, and the first Will goes outwards, for it is the Desire of Manifestation; it seeks itself out of itself, and yet amasses the Desire in itself ”

“ The merciless ridicule of Paris would have killed them in a week, without support as they were. Defiance of the bourgeois, an absolute essential of the true Bohemian creed, was, therefore, not appropriate to the first cénacle, who lived openly the life of ordinary, decent citizens, while secretly preparing the proclamations, the standards, and the weapons by which the cataclysmic victory of 1830 was to be won. In such a tense moment Bohemia could not be born. Their outlook, in the second place, was too lofty to comprehend the lower planes in which Bohemia made itself conspicuous. ”

“ The one book which has really done more harm to young people than any other is seldom remembered in this connection. That book is Scènes de la Vie de Bohême; and it is dangerous, not that it contains a line of obscenity or blasphemy, not that it teaches evil as higher than good, but because it founded a cult and taught [Pg 23] young people how to ruin their lives. Bohemianism has, of course, existed since the world began; rebels have always been; but it remained for Murger to find a name for it and make a cult of it. ”

“ I am inclined to believe that sociologists will investigate eventually the eternal antagonism between Belgravia and bohemia by strictly scientific methods. How large an infusion of genius can be safely sustained by a throng in search of social relaxation it would be well to know. ”

“ Sane young men, no matter what their fads, fancies, and enthusiasms may be, have no need and no possibility of making to-day that particular demonstration which resulted in Bohemia. The social forces drive them in other directions. It has long been admitted in France that Bohemia is dead, and that it has been or ever will be revived in England is a delusion resting upon the unintelligent use of a word. Even young Englishmen, as we now consider youth, are too old, far too old, to live the life of which they flatter themselves they are preserving the tradition. ”

“ Press laws were made doubly stringent, secret societies were prohibited, caricatures were exposed to a censorship, and the police was exceedingly vigilant. Above all, the bourgeoisie held firm. They were tasting prosperity and power, and had no desire to let political disturbance interfere with their enjoyment. Happy were those who could repent of youthful political excesses and return to comfortable homes and settled careers. Those who had no refuge but Bohemia came to know the chill of disappointment and repression. ”

“ Not only was it the sound-board from which in a lucky moment the struggling whisperer on the left bank might hear his utterances booming forth to a multitude eager for novelty, not only was it an unofficial academy to which every Bohemian might aspire to belong as soon as he had made his mark, but it was also, during the years following 1830, animated by such a spirit of revelry and reckless amusement that the riots of true Bohemia were as pale ghosts before its more notable orgies. ”

“ They have their writing rooms, all strewn with carefully disarranged paraphernalia; and they have their clubs, where they meet only each other and praise each other's work, and damn the work of the absent ones: and they go prowling about looking for a bohemia that never existed, and can never exist for them; for bohemia is simply youth and poverty and high aspirations, combined, and can't be found by search. ”

“ Into this world of feverish movement and poignant contrasts fits la Bohème, lighted by its double facets of fact and fiction. As the actual Bohemians from Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier to Baudelaire and Murger play their part in the world of fact, so the fictitious Bohemians from Raphael de Valentin and D'Arthez down to Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard play theirs in the world of fiction. ”

“ A chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of the Bohemian immigrant. Several causes operate to bring this about: his singularly harsh and unattractive language, which he can neither easily himself unlearn nor impart to others, his stubborn pride of race, and a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor. I greatly mistrust that the Bohemian on our shores is a much-abused man. ”

“ THE mental and moral characteristics of any social group are the product of a wide variety of complex influences of a preeminently psychological nature. The suggestions that come through tradition and history result in mental reactions that become so typical of the group that it is popular to call them inborn and racial. The easy assumption of this explanation hinders the more fundamental discovery of why certain characteristics prevail. The Bohemians illustrate this principle of the creative influence of definite ideas. ”

“ Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth, what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success and middle age. ”

“ The Bohemians, like all other people, have prejudices that make it difficult for them to see clearly values not measured by their own standard, but there can be no question but that their standard measures up well with any people in Europe. The important thing to civilization is whether they have any peculiar traits of mind or character that will be a contribution to progress. I think that the Bohemians have this in common with the other Slavs to a very marked degree and in a direction which has hitherto been entirely unrecognized, and this is the contribution to democracy. ”

“ To lose caste in Bohemia is like losing one’s “face” among the Chinese and results in ostracism quite as surely.
The customs and conventions of the Bohemians, as I shall presently show, are, in truth, very different from the customs and the conventions of what is known as “good society”; so that it is not surprising that those who have only, so to speak, touched upon the frontiers of this country of the imagination, should declare it to be a land of absolute freedom and of individualistic philosophy. ”

“ The effect of this change upon Bohemia is not difficult to imagine. La vie de Bohème implies youth, so that its generations change as rapidly as those of a university. The generation of 1830 had either disappeared or become famous—that is, potentially rich—in a few years. The struggle which had convulsed all Paris was a thing of the past, and Romanticism was so far accepted, swallowed, and digested that by 1843 the necessity was felt for reverting to the classical tradition again, for a change, with the so-called école de bon sens. ”

“ I put the classic period of la vie de Bohème between 1830 and 1848, the exact period of Louis Philippe's reign. At first sight the reign of this bourgeois prince would seem to have little enough connexion with the florescence and decadence of the very antitype of bourgeoisie, but this is only a further reason for not neglecting history. The Revolution of 1830 was of the highest importance for France: it was the inevitable explosion of dissatisfaction, both political and artistic, with the powers that ruled. ”

“ Men of letters, in whom the national consciousness had not died out, now began to work to awaken the same feelings in others, and in due time the fruits of their labors began to appear. Thus it was that the period of the greatest humiliation of the Bohemian language, proved to be the dawn of a new era, in which the nation may yet regain much of its former liberty and importance. ”