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Updated: May 28, 2025
M. Bayle, in the article entitled 'Paulicians' inserted by him in his Dictionary, follows up the pronouncements he made in the article on the Manichaeans.
Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Albigensians, and kindred sects, all started from the principle of dualism, and even at the time were openly accused of Manicheistic ideas. They all involved more or less immoral principles, and rejected, or at least strove to weaken, the commonly-received ideas upon which society, civil and religious, is founded.
He says that this philosopher does not get out of the bog, since the cylinder is regular or uneven according to what the craftsman has made it; and thus God, providence, fate will be the causes of evil in such a way as to render it necessary. Justus Lipsius answers that, according to the Stoics, evil came from matter. 'Paulicians', lit. G. But this refutation does not amount to very much.
A creed thus simple and spiritual was not adapted to the genius of the times; and the rational Christian, who might have been contented with the light yoke and easy burden of Jesus and his apostles, was justly offended, that the Paulicians should dare to violate the unity of God, the first article of natural and revealed religion.
These important events will justify some inquiry into the doctrine and story of the Paulicians; and, as they cannot plead for themselves, our candid criticism will magnify the good, and abate or suspect the evil, that is reported by their adversaries. The Gnostics, who had distracted the infancy, were oppressed by the greatness and authority, of the church.
Such have been the Hussites of Bohemia and the Calvinists of France, and such, in the ninth century, were the Paulicians of Armenia and the adjacent provinces. They were first awakened to the massacre of a governor and bishop, who exercised the Imperial mandate of converting or destroying the heretics; and the deepest recesses of Mount Argæus protected their independence and revenge.
Thus, he wrote his long treatises against the Talmud and the Koran, so much had the Crusades already contributed to introducing into Western Europe the seeds of Asiatic errors. All historians agree in giving an Eastern origin to the Paulicians, Bulgarians, Albigenses, and others of those times. Manicheism indeed had infested Europe long before.
St. Augustine has already put forward this idea, and St. 'Paulicians', lit. Basil for not being willing to admit that God is the author of physical evil. Doubtless God is its author, when the moral evil is assumed to be already in existence; but speaking generally, one might assert that God permitted physical evil by implication, in permitting moral evil which is its source.
Their exile in a distant land was softened by a free toleration: the Paulicians held the city of Philippopolis and the keys of Thrace; the Catholics were their subjects; the Jacobite emigrants their associates: they occupied a line of villages and castles in Macedonia and Epirus; and many native Bulgarians were associated to the communion of arms and heresy.
The crushing out of the Arians and of the Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human voice.
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