The Bogomils Predecessors of the reformation

The quite a few wars waged by Simeon, nonetheless, and his bold constructing programme had drained the assets of the nation and proved a burden which the folks had been unable to help. On the identical time, the event of feudal relations had turned nearly all of the Bulgarian peasants from impartial landowners into cruelly exploited serfs. Discontent was seething amongst them. On the time when the Bulgarians had been transformed to Christianity, the Christian Church already had a biography which was 5 centuries outdated, which had led it away from the humane and democratic rules of Early Christianity and had turned it lastingly into a strong ideological and political establishment whose whole exercise was geared toward preserving and consolidating the present feudal social order. What’s extra, the Church itself was a giant feudal landowner with particular administrative and juridical features, and the supreme clergy was a compo-nent of the ruling feudal class. In such situations and in view of the predominant non secular world outlook among the many folks, the favored discontent inevitably acquired a non secular type.

Because of the epoch making work of Cyril and Methodius

Because of the epoch-making work of Cyril and Methodius, there was a well-liked rural intelligentsia in Bulgaria of a scope inconceivable for the ‘new’ west- European states, the place literary language and vernacular had been divorced. The literate folks, who had learn non secular books, weren’t gradual in perceiving the hole separating the social order sanctioned by the church and the rules embodied within the Bible, in order that lots of them grew to become ideologists of the folks’s discontent. Thus, within the 920s the Bogomil motion got here into being, which was often known as ‘the Bulgarian heresy’ – one of the highly effective heretic actions of the early Center Ages. It was non secular in type and profoundly social in content material: it was the motion of the dependent peasantry and concrete poor in opposition to the feudal social system.

Priest Bogomil. Like different mediaeval Christian heresies, similar to these of the Paulicians and Massalians which had existed earlier than the Bogomil motion, it was primarily based on the twin precept of excellent and evil which had been in fixed opposition. The Bogomils preached that the world man lives in was the creation of the evil forces, and for that cause the rulers on earth – tsars, boyars, superior clergy, and so forth. — had been servants of the satan and to struggle them meant to struggle Devil and to serve God. The best of the Bogomils was the early Christian neighborhood, such because it was described within the New Testomony they usually constructed their communes after its sample.