Magistros reports the Thonraki as saying, “We love Paul
and excrecrate Peter.” But in the Key of Truth there is little
trace of extreme hostility to Peter. It merely warns us that
all the apostles constitute the Church universal and not Peter
alone; and in the rite of election, i.e. of laying on of hands and
reception of the Spirit, the reader who is being elected assumes
the ritual name of Peter. An identical rite existed among
the 12th century Cathars (q.v.), and in the Celtic church of
Gildas every presbyter was a Peter.
6. The monkish garb was revealed by Satan to Peter at the baptism, when it was the devil, the ruler of this world, who, so costumed, leaned forward and said. This is my beloved son. The same hatred of monkery characterized the Thonraki and inspires the Key of Truth. The other statements are nowhere echoed.
7. They called their meetings the Catholic Church, and the places they met in places of prayer, προσευχαί The Thonraki equally denied the name of church to buildings of wood or stone, and called themselves the Catholic Church.
8. They explained away baptisms as “words of the Holy Gospel,” citing the text “I am the living water.” So the Thonraki taught that the baptismal water of the Church was “mere bath-water,” i.e. they denied it the character of a reserved sacrament. But there is no evidence that they eschewed water baptism. The modern Thonraki baptize in rivers, and in the 11th century when Gregory asked them why they did not allow themselves to be baptized, they answered: “Ye do not understand the mystery of baptism; we are in no hurry to be baptized, for baptism is death.” They no doubt deferred the baptism which is death to sin, perhaps because, like the Cathars, they held post-baptismal sin to be unforgivable.
9. They permitted external conformity with the dominant Church, and held that Christ would forgive it. The same trait is reported of the Thonraki and of the real Manicheans.
10. They rejected the orders of the Church, and had only two grades of clergy, namely, associate itinerants (συνέκδημοι, Acts xix. 29) and copyists (νοτάριοι). A class of Astati (ἄστατοι) is also mentioned by Photius, i. 24, whom Neander regards as elect disciples of Sergius. They called their four original founders apostles and prophets—titles given also in the Key of Truth to the elect one. The Synecdemi and Notarii dressed like other people; the Thonraki also scorned priestly vestments.
11. Their canon included only the “Gospel and Apostle,” of which they respected the text, but distorted the meaning. Gregory Magistros, as we have seen, attests their predilection for the apostle Paul, and speaks of their perpetually “quoting the Gospel and the Apostolon.” These statements do not warrant us in supposing that they rejected 1 and 2 Peter, though other Greek sources allege it. The “Gospel and Apostle” was a comprehensive term for the whole of the New Testament (except perhaps Revelation), as read in church.
13. Their Christology was as follows: God out of love for mankind called up an angel and communicated to him his desire and counsel; then he bade him go down to earth and be born of woman. . . . And he bestowed on the angel so commissioned the title of Son, and foretold for him insults, blasphemies, sufferings and crucifixion. Then the angel undertook to do what was enjoined, but God added to the sufferings also death. However, the angel, on hearing of the resurrection, cast away fear and accepted death as well; and came down and was born of Mary, and named himself son of God according to the grace given him from God; and he fulfilled all the command, and was crucified and buried, rose again and was taken up into heaven. Christ was only a creature (κτίσμα), and obtained the title of Christ the Son of God in the reign of Octavius Caesar by way of grace and remuneration for fulfilment of the command.
The scheme of salvation here set forth recurs among the Latin Cathars. It resembles that of the Key of Truth, in so far as Jesus is Christ and Son of God by way of grace and reward for faithful fulfilment of God’s command. But the Key lays more stress on the baptism. “Then, it says, he became Saviour of us sinners, then he was filled with the Godhead; then he was sealed, then anointed; then was he called by the voice, then he became the loved one.” In this scheme therefore the Bai)tism occupies the same place which the Birth does in the oilier, but both are adoptionist.
The main difference then between the Greek and Armenian accounts of the Paulicians is that the former make more of their duahsm. Yet this did not probably go beyond the dualism of the New Testament itself. They made the most of Paul’s antithesis between law and grace, bondage to Satan and freedom of the Spirit. Jesus was a new Adam and a fresh beginning, in so far as he was made flesh in and not of his mother, to whom, as both Esc. and the Key insist, Jesus particularly denied blessedness and honour (Mark iii. 31-35), limiting true kinship with himself to those who shall do the will of God. The account of Christ’s flesh is torn out of the Key, but it is affirmed that it was at the baptism that “he put on that primal raiment of light which Adam lost in the garden.” And this view we also meet with in Armenian fathers accounted orthodox.
The Armenian fathers held that Jesus, unlike other men, possessed incorruptible flesh, made of ethereal fire, and so far they shared the main heresy of the Paulicians. In many of their homilies Christ’s baptism is also regarded as his regeneration by water and spirit, and this view almost transcends the modest adoptionism of the Thonraki as revealed in the Key of Truth.
What was the origin of the name Paulician? The word is of Armenian formation and signifies a son of Paulik or of little Paul; the termination -ik must here have originally expressed scorn and contempt. Who then was this Paul? “Paulicians from a certain Paul of Samosata,” says Esc. “Here then you see the Pauhcians, who got their poison from Paul of Samosata,” says Gregory Magistros. They were thus identified with the old party of the Pauliani, condemned at the first council of Nice in 325, and diffused in Syria a century later. They called themselves the Apostolic Catholic Church, but hearing themselves nicknamed Paulicians by their enemies, probably interpreted the name in the sense of “followers of St Paul.” Certain features of Pauhcianism noted by Photius and Petrus Siculus are omitted in Esc. One of these is the Christhood of the fully initiated, who as such ceased to be mere “hearers” (audientes) and themselves became vehicles of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus anointed by the Spirit became the Christ, so they became christs. So Gregory of Narck upbraids the Thonraki for their “anthropolatrous apostasy, their self-conferred contemptible priesthood which is a likening of themselves to Satan” (= Christ in Thonraki parlance). And he repeats the taunt which the Arab Emir addressed to Smbat their leader, as he led him to execution: “If Christ rose on the third day, then since you call yourself Christ, I will slay you and bury you; and if you shall come to life again after thirty days, then I will know you are Christ, even though you take so many days over your resurrection.” Similarly (in a 10th-century form of renunciation of Bogomil error preserved in a Vienna codex[1]) we hear of Peter "the founder of the heresy of the Messalians or Lycopetrians or Fundaitae and Bogomils who called himself Christ and promised to rise again after death." Of this Peter, Tychichus (? Sergius) is reported in the same document to have been fellow initiate and disciple.
Because they regarded their Perfect or Elect ones as Christs and anointed with the Spirit, the medieval Cathars regularly adored them. So it was with Celtic saints, and Adamnan. in his life of St Columba, i. 37, tells how the brethren after listening to St Baithene, “still kneeling, with joy unspeakable, and with hands spread out to heaven, venerated Christ in the holy and blessed man.” So in ch. 44 of the same book we read how a humble stranger “worshipped Christ in the holy man” (i.e. St Columba); but such veneration was due to every presbyter. In 1837 we read of how an elect one of the Thonraki sect in Russian Armenia addressed his followers thus: “Lo, I am the cross: on my two hands light tapers, and give me adoration. For I am able to give you salvation, as much as the
- ↑ Cod. theol. gr. 306, fol. 32, edited by Thallôczy, in Wissensch. Mittheil. aus Bosnien (Vienna, 1895).
